my copy is filled with handwritten notes by some past owner, and i only just realized that the numbers next to the names in the geneaological table are the page numbers of their deaths
It is a combination of his first two collections which are apparently Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
Oh, "The Frolic"? That's a good one, although it's worth noting that Ligotti has gone on record that it was his attempt to write a "normal" horror story. Most of his early work is less... grounded.
That one should be particularly up your alley, given the structural games at work, but pretty much any of the later stories in Songs and a good chunk of Grimscribe are pure, unvarnished surreality with the occasional dash of Lovecraftian cosmicism and wry character observation.
Finished. That was better than I thought it would be.
I'm glad that previous reader put in some notes, because it seems like a book you want a wiki for. Not least because it's the same people like eight different times.
Shitty old copy I got from Melquíades still has a ridiculous cover though.
I mean I don't know what to say about it. Loved the concept, once it started happening, which is like... a while after the colonel goes off to kill fuckers I guess. I wonder if Homestuck is based on it at all.
Oh, oh yeah, and I wanted to say everything about Fernanda was really really really sad. Like damn.
The town of Macondo is the namesake of the Macondo Prospect, an oil and gas prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Deepwater Horizon oil spill began in April 2010.
Hm I guess I have to burn society to the ground until the ash so ruins the dirt that nothing will grow for seventy years. Darn shame.
I guess it's like, I expected magical realism to be a lot more fanciful? Maybe like urban fantasy, which I have read some of, and which is usually incredibly boring. Like, Wikipedia says about a counter movement:
McOndo is a Latin American literary movement that breaks from the Magical Realism (Realismo mágico) mode of narration, and counters it with the strong, ideologic associations of the cultural and narrative languages of the mass communications media,[1] and with the modernity of urban living; the experience of town versus country, of McOndo vs. Macondo.[2] The literature of McOndo presents urban Latin (American) life in “the City”, an experience the opposite of the rural, “natural world” of Macondo, the archetypal “Latin American Country” presented in the literature of Magical Realism.[2] Philosophically, the McOndo vs. Macondo intellectual opposition is to the latter's literary perpetuation of Latin America as an exotic place of exotic people, which presents the reader with “reductionist essential-isms that everyone in Latin America wears a sombrero and lives on trees”. Because not everyone wears huaraches and sports a machete in contemporary Latinoamėrica, McOndo literature shows it to be a place of many countries, peoples, and cultures, not the monolithic, “Spanish-speaking worlds” of the 19th-century dictator novel and the banana republic which preceded 20th-century modernization.[3]
But that's not what Solitude depicts at all. Macondo is a hick town in the middle of nowhere but it's quite clear that in so being it is pretty unique in whatever country this is (e: Colombia. Doy.). The country after all has a government, it has huge civil wars, foreign capitalists, I mean it's not some mystical sombrero land. Macondo is more mystical because it's this backwards hick town. There's a nearby town in the swamp that's more modern, and presumably cities etc. farther out, it's just not a focus of the narrative.
Macondo's also pretty diverse. There's Melquíades and the "gypsies" of course, wherever they're actually from, and Arabs and Italian piano repairmen and "Indians" and so on and so forth. And this is just this tiny backwards-ass town. And I don't think a single sombrero is mentioned.
So I mean either McOndo is full of shit, Wikipedia's description is full of shit, or (probably the most likely?) later magical realism was full of shit.
Seriously. This is a book where a banana company slaughters hundreds of protestors and then gets out of trouble by legal shenanigans. It's not some untouched natural world or whatever the fuck. Actually the town is planned, now that I think about it. Streets laid out by a dude, originally. It's totally artificial.
Obviously that's different from urban life, but just... sombreros in trees... no way.
Anyway, so I guess what I didn't get about magical realism was the realism? The book isn't esoteric, and doesn't have wizards interfering or some shit. Most of it's a pretty straightforward series of happenings. People act like people, and get in fights for ridiculous reasons, or get assassinated or killed by disease. Sometimes somebody lives to be 150, or it rains for two years, but that just gives it a fairy-tale overlay while fundamentally getting across the feeling of real events.
the idea i think is that the magical elements add to the realism, in that it can express ideas and concepts that concretely real fiction couldn't touch
Macondo is simultaneously a backwards town, a booming city, and an entire country in and of itself, because it's a microcosm, a distillation of the entire history of latin america, growing and shrinking as needed to accommodate what needs to happen. it's like a dream, reality, but associative?
forgive me, it has been literally years since i last read this book, but it's one of my faves. hence the blathering.
I haven't read this book, but my general assumption is that magical elements ought to add something that realism alone can't, instead of merely detracting from realism.
i guess like, in high school I was to read "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings", which is basically some wacky shit interrupting the lives of regular people, and I was told this was magical realism.
i guess like, in high school I was to read "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings", which is basically some wacky shit interrupting the lives of regular people, and I was told this was magical realism.
Read The Devil in the White City over the weekend. It's strange, and not in a way the author intended, I think. It's a novelistic history book with two plot threads: one about Daniel Burnham, the head architect for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and how dangerously close the whole 1893 World's Fair came to being an artistic failure and a financial disaster. And the other plot thread is about Dr. H. H. Holmes, a con man and serial killer who was "working" in Chicago just before and after the World's Fair. In spite of these sequences of events both happening at the same general time and place, they never really coalesce into one story. It comes across like Erik Larson wrote two separate books and mashed them together after the fact.
Still, both storylines are well-written and full of interesting historical tidbits. Well worth reading, I think.
embassytown disappointed me a bit. about a hundred pages in one of the characters goes off on a little tirade about colonial narratives, in particular the trope of the "explorer" saying something innocuous that so offends the indigenous that it ends in spearings. "Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops, we said the wrong thing, but they're really all about how ridiculous natives overreact." cool, i think to myself. i am glad that the author of this book about explorer colonists among indigenuous aliens is socially conscious/marxist/whatever enough to keep this sort of thing in mind.
And then what happens? Exactly fucking that. An ambassador says "hello" and the aliens lose their goddamn minds to the point of bringing on the apocalypse. It's because of absurd pointedly invented biology instead of absurd pointedly invented religion, but who cares? How am I supposed to read this? "The metaphor fails because they're aliens instead of people"? "The metaphor fails because it's biology implying a certain form of belief system instead of just a belief system"? I don't understand if I'm missing something or a smart dude like mieville missed something or what.
and the stuff other than plot, well... all that jargon i was talking about there was kind of pointless. I mean, some of it meant things. "monthling" didn't, that's just in there to make it feel weirder, fine. the important stuff is explained in infodumps. here's what an ambassador is. here's what the immer is. here is a scientist to explain the foundational issues of the language that is a central mysteriousness to a naïve audience stand-in/narrator. I think the only important term that never got an explicit or easy-to-infer definition was "floak", and it's not important enough that you can't go through the whole book without knowing what that means besides some sort of (non)occupation.
unfortunate metaphor and exposition: in short, it's science fiction. i guess i expected otherwise. i mean, it's not bad by any means, but I can only read it if I ignore what seem like obvious parallels to real life, in favor of the rather explicit "moral" about maps not being territories.
You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
I wanted to try some of Roald Dahl's fiction for grown-ups so I checked out a couple books from the library
Anyone familiar with any of these titles? Does anything stick out as stuff Centie Must Read?
I read The Fifth Head of Cerberus (the novela not the whole collection), most of it was really really really good but the denoument left me feeling unsatisfied
I would def recommend Roald Dahl's "Poison" and "The Sound Machine".
I haven't read very many of his other stories, unfortunately. I've got a big collection of his short stories for adults which has sadly been sitting in my "stuff to read" pile for years, now.
embassytown disappointed me a bit. about a hundred pages in one of the characters goes off on a little tirade about colonial narratives, in particular the trope of the "explorer" saying something innocuous that so offends the indigenous that it ends in spearings. "Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops, we said the wrong thing, but they're really all about how ridiculous natives overreact." cool, i think to myself. i am glad that the author of this book about explorer colonists among indigenuous aliens is socially conscious/marxist/whatever enough to keep this sort of thing in mind.
And then what happens? Exactly fucking that. An ambassador says "hello" and the aliens lose their goddamn minds to the point of bringing on the apocalypse. It's because of absurd pointedly invented biology instead of absurd pointedly invented religion, but who cares? How am I supposed to read this? "The metaphor fails because they're aliens instead of people"? "The metaphor fails because it's biology implying a certain form of belief system instead of just a belief system"? I don't understand if I'm missing something or a smart dude like mieville missed something or what.
and the stuff other than plot, well... all that jargon i was talking about there was kind of pointless. I mean, some of it meant things. "monthling" didn't, that's just in there to make it feel weirder, fine. the important stuff is explained in infodumps. here's what an ambassador is. here's what the immer is. here is a scientist to explain the foundational issues of the language that is a central mysteriousness to a naïve audience stand-in/narrator. I think the only important term that never got an explicit or easy-to-infer definition was "floak", and it's not important enough that you can't go through the whole book without knowing what that means besides some sort of (non)occupation.
unfortunate metaphor and exposition: in short, it's science fiction. i guess i expected otherwise. i mean, it's not bad by any means, but I can only read it if I ignore what seem like obvious parallels to real life, in favor of the rather explicit "moral" about maps not being territories.
Mieville's endings are eternally unsatisfying, which is odd because of how much the genre and subject matter differs.
Now go read Perdido Street Station and find yet another way to be unsatisfyed after finishing a good book
I'm reading Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer and it's really quite great. Spoilerz, though, do not read this if you ever plan on reading it because it has an excellent build up that would be sad to waste.
Spoiler:
It's kind of insane when your narrator initially seems like a pretty decent guy. It's revealed early on that he's a fairly serious criminal - in our utopian world, everyone has a tracker that keeps their location reported. Our narrator found a way around that. So he's basically a spy or something, right? Used it to probably to do super illegal things! but whatever, that just makes him interesting, right? We find out about a quarter of the way through that he murdered people. And I mean, okay, murder is bad and you shouldn't do that, but it's not the first murderer I've had as a book narrator.
Spoiler:
THEN we find out that he murdered an entire family of people who adopted him as their own son after his family was killed in an accident. He murdered them brutally, flaying them alive, raping them repeatedly, raping their corpses, that he chopped people's limbs off and ATE THEM in a cannibalistic sense in front of their very eyes. That he asks, in the present day when he is supposedly "reformed," his lover (who lives off the grid and is the one who first got him into cannibalistic violence/sex) to kill and brutally torture the final remaining member of the family that he systematically murdered.
Spoiler:
And then the story just continues like this is all no big deal.
Also keep in mind this is primarily a story about politics and a little boy who can perform miracles. Also about religion, gender, et cetera. And it IS a utopian novel, not a dystopian.
Yeah, sort of. This is an almost oddly casual reveal, though, whereas Perdido Street Stations was written to be a real punch. This was... almost an anti-punch, in some ways, which made it stand out even more. The tone of the story is consistent throughout, and doesn't particularly change even for this. It's presented in the same pleasant just-relating-history sort of way, as though the only reason he didn't say anything sooner was because he didn't find it relevant. In Perdido Street Station, it was obviously relevant since a large chunk of the book was about helping Yagharek out. It was almost offhand, in an "Ah, yes, dear reader. Let's go on this quick tangent now that it's come up, nbd," kind of manner.
to me it felt very much like a Terry Pratchett story, but i am less familiar with Gaiman
i am now about a fifth of the way into Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
I feel like Pratchett has more of a "style" of writing than Gaiman. Gaiman has more of set of recurring themes and tropes he comes back to.
Also the American edition has a 700 word segment about what became of Warlock, the diplomat's son. Also footnotes explaining aspects of British culture that might not be familiar to American audiences.
i got the 2006 Corgi edition, it had a lot of footnotes but idk if they're the same?
it was kind of funny actually, there's a bit in the back where they talk about who wrote what bit - "The Agnes Nutter scenes and the kids mostly originated with Terry, the Four Horsemen and anything that involved maggots started with Neil" - and actually that was pretty evident when reading it, i felt
like, the scenes with the kids felt very strongly reminiscent of Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell series, to me
Comments
It is a combination of his first two collections which are apparently Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
it got interesting
ha ha, time is going in a circle
I'm glad that previous reader put in some notes, because it seems like a book you want a wiki for. Not least because it's the same people like eight different times.
Shitty old copy I got from Melquíades still has a ridiculous cover though.
Oh, oh yeah, and I wanted to say everything about Fernanda was really really really sad. Like damn. Hm I guess I have to burn society to the ground until the ash so ruins the dirt that nothing will grow for seventy years. Darn shame.
Macondo's also pretty diverse. There's Melquíades and the "gypsies" of course, wherever they're actually from, and Arabs and Italian piano repairmen and "Indians" and so on and so forth. And this is just this tiny backwards-ass town. And I don't think a single sombrero is mentioned.
So I mean either McOndo is full of shit, Wikipedia's description is full of shit, or (probably the most likely?) later magical realism was full of shit.
Seriously. This is a book where a banana company slaughters hundreds of protestors and then gets out of trouble by legal shenanigans. It's not some untouched natural world or whatever the fuck. Actually the town is planned, now that I think about it. Streets laid out by a dude, originally. It's totally artificial.
Obviously that's different from urban life, but just... sombreros in trees... no way.
Anyway, so I guess what I didn't get about magical realism was the realism? The book isn't esoteric, and doesn't have wizards interfering or some shit. Most of it's a pretty straightforward series of happenings. People act like people, and get in fights for ridiculous reasons, or get assassinated or killed by disease. Sometimes somebody lives to be 150, or it rains for two years, but that just gives it a fairy-tale overlay while fundamentally getting across the feeling of real events.
or something like that
I was a bad cow then
Same author, too.
enjoying it so far
I mean it's shaping up to be about bizarre communications, so it makes sense, but like... "Second monthling of December"? Argh
One of the blurbs says "it has the feeling of a word-puzzle" and I shoulda taken that more seriously
(The other Jane)
And then what happens? Exactly fucking that. An ambassador says "hello" and the aliens lose their goddamn minds to the point of bringing on the apocalypse. It's because of absurd pointedly invented biology instead of absurd pointedly invented religion, but who cares? How am I supposed to read this? "The metaphor fails because they're aliens instead of people"? "The metaphor fails because it's biology implying a certain form of belief system instead of just a belief system"? I don't understand if I'm missing something or a smart dude like mieville missed something or what.
and the stuff other than plot, well... all that jargon i was talking about there was kind of pointless. I mean, some of it meant things. "monthling" didn't, that's just in there to make it feel weirder, fine. the important stuff is explained in infodumps. here's what an ambassador is. here's what the immer is. here is a scientist to explain the foundational issues of the language that is a central mysteriousness to a naïve audience stand-in/narrator. I think the only important term that never got an explicit or easy-to-infer definition was "floak", and it's not important enough that you can't go through the whole book without knowing what that means besides some sort of (non)occupation.
unfortunate metaphor and exposition: in short, it's science fiction. i guess i expected otherwise. i mean, it's not bad by any means, but I can only read it if I ignore what seem like obvious parallels to real life, in favor of the rather explicit "moral" about maps not being territories.
alt. as of yet i have a name (it's maru) (hi i'm a cat)
it was ok, enjoyable enough
i prefer the novels
to me it felt very much like a Terry Pratchett story, but i am less familiar with Gaiman
i am now about a fifth of the way into Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
I can't put this down.
This should be required (and delightfully required) reading for everyone who lives in South Florida.
Schools do a pitiful job of teaching us about our local history.
This book might as well be titled "How the fuck we got to where we are today: The Misadventures of the History of South Florida".
it was kind of funny actually, there's a bit in the back where they talk about who wrote what bit - "The Agnes Nutter scenes and the kids mostly originated with Terry, the Four Horsemen and anything that involved maggots started with Neil" - and actually that was pretty evident when reading it, i felt
like, the scenes with the kids felt very strongly reminiscent of Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell series, to me
at the moment i'm finding the book witty, but also sort of depressing? it's quite dark really