Funnily enough, Ligotti said the same thing after revisiting the story during his long writing hiatus. The story lives or dies on personal resonance because its basic logical foundations just aren't there, like how a dream frequently relies on intensely personal symbolism rather than actual causality, and if you can't create that emotional and tonal bridge, it just collapses in on itself.
I mostly remember the story for its mood myself. I'm not even sure if I've actually read it in full, let alone more than once, because what I remember of the story is like a series of ambiguous moods and images and subtextual implications rather than actual events and characters.
I think maybe part of it is that Roderick Usher is one of those Poe characters who's trying to escape from remembering/feeling something, but what he remembers and feels isn't very clear. Even when he has something to feel guilty about, his reasons for not acting on it are unclear. Largely because he isn't the viewpoint character, so at most you just get some descriptions of how his degenerating mental state is exhibiting itself to the narrator, and how it affects his art.
Tatsuya Hamasaki - .hack//AI Buster - the first part of a prequel to the .hack//SIGN anime series Michael Grunwald - The Swamp - basically a history of south Florida, with a focus on how people have dealt with the issue of the Everglades and how that's changed over time.
Finished Breakfast of Champions. It was, uh, quite the trip.
It was kind of an uncomfortable read at times. It contains a lot of racist language and stereotypes, although these are juxtaposed with these bluntly matter-of-fact statements of the injustices of poverty and discrimination, which are found throughout the book.
Towards the end it got ludicrously metafictional.
All in all, i'm glad to have read it, and would recommend it.
Currently, i'm reading Economics Made Simple by Geoffrey Whitehead. It's a bit dated, but i've been wishing i better understood the subject for a while now and felt it'd be helpful to start with the basics.
I feel like Vonnegut's point in using slurs and the like in the way that he does is because it can allow him to illustrate a mindstate or collective perception and then brutally undercut it. Which makes it doubly uncomfortable, really, because he's trying to make you uncomfortable whether you are a bigot or another right-minded person.
Although I lost some sleep due to rommates being #loud last night, I can't be too mad, because I also discovered an EXCELLENT new book.
Sredni, I'm looking at you on this one - I think you'd quite enjoy it.
Senlin Ascends is a pretty wild romp. The best way to describe it, I think, is as a mix between City of Saints and Madmen and Alice in Wonderland. Our protagonist, Senlin, is something of a nerdork bookie. He's had aspirations to visit and climb the Tower of Babel for years. Now that he's married, it seemed like a perfect spot for honeymooning! The guidebooks and histories he's read have him fully prepared for the glamours of the Tower, which he's painted as the veritable center of civilization and academia.
Unfortunately, the reality of the Tower is... a bit different from what he anticipated. The markets are ever-changing, the crowds are predatory, and he loses his new wife in the throng. He hasn't even entered the Tower itself, yet, he's only in the Skirts below it.
After a couple days of searching futilely for his wife, he decides that she must have headed for the Tower. They'd intended to stay on the third level, the Baths. Each ring of the Tower is its own ringdom, a small, independently run city-state. The lowest level, the basement, is primarily made up of those who have been thrown out of the upper levels. It's... quite something, featuring "attractions" such as beer-me-go-rounds, which I can only assume power the upper levels. The second level, the Parlor, is the theater district. To get through it to the next level, you must take part in the play - you are both an actor and a spectator. Unfortunately, some people take it a little too seriously and may, y'know, attempt to murder you during the play.
The book has a deeply unsettling and uncanny vibe to it. It's surreal while being rooted in the present - it's not quite dreamlike, given how immediate each event is, but it's bizarre and a little disturbing. It's very much up my alley.
Another thing that sticks out to me is how fleshed out the minor characters feel. Even the characters who are only briefly introduced have a very solid feel to them; their backstories are implied, but not outright stated. Some pieces of their backstory only fall into place as Senlin learns more about the Tower.
The writing is downright poetic in some parts, as well. While in the Skirts, Senlin witnesses an airship crash to the ground, only to be looted within minutes by the crowds. “Their deaths [in stories] were boastful and lyrical and always, always more romantic than real. Death was not an end. It was an ellipsis. There was no romance in the scene before him. There were no ellipses here. The bodies lay upon the ground like broken exclamation points.”
Perhaps the most impressive part? Bancroft is self-published. It's tough finding great indie works, but this is one that deserves as much success as it can grab, in my opinion.
So in high school I read a historical fiction book called The Conspiracy by John Hershey about the Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate Nero and partially it's an engaging spy thriller set in ancient Rome, but it's also a portrayal of people trying to live good just lives under the thumb of a demented self-obsessed manchild king.
I think I'm going to have to buy it off Amazon and read it again now.
Revelation Space was okay. I think I've changed. I can't just read scifi now. When i read a book i usually, like, read it. Just engross myself in reading. It doesn't have to be complicated. But with Revelation Space i was comparing, and comparing the pointless in world things. How does the grizzled lady soldier compare to Murtaugh? The plot to a Star Control sequel, or the ending to 2001? Maybe it's more like reading history now, or something. How do these facts hold up?
I did like the relationships between Khouri and Volyova, and Pascale and Sylvestre (really glad for creepily described sex scenes there, additionally)
I read "King Dragon", which is apparently tied into that story. It was bleak and brutal and the scene of the dragon bonding with its new "pilot" was... I'm not sure how Swanwick made me feel like I was reading a horribly accurate depiction of child sexual abuse when nothing overtly perverted was happening, but wow.
Great story. Would recommend to people not easily triggered.
Worm is pretty awesome! The writing is rough in the beginning, but it gets better and better as it goes. It's nifty how it all ties together at the end.
I would recommend Twig over Worm, though - it is also by Wildbow, and is currently in progress, but he's really hit his writing stride on this one in my opinion. It's a biopunk serial about heavily genetically engineered assassin kids, basically.
I would not bother with Pact, personally, but there is a cute little sparrow that used to a ghost in it.
If Sunless Sea didn't take a lot of influence from this book, I will be surprised. And you can tell Hodgson is a sailor, because he's always hyper-interested in where someone's food and water is coming from in both this and The Night Land
I just started Hunters and Collectors by M. Suddain.
It's an odd novel, for certain. It has a rather... Shimmery or ethereal feel, honestly. The core conceit of the book is that it's written as a travel diary. It's all rather disjointed in an extremely impressionistic manner - it gives the sense that it really was written "for the writer" of the journal rather than to be read by a reader. It follows the main character as he travels across the galaxy seeking the most amazing restaurants, as he is an (in)famous food critic.
The writing style is very different between the two authors (M Suddain is much more accessible thus far), but I'd almost compare him to David Foster Wallace in how the book seems to be focused more on the experience of reading it than it is on the actual plot or characters.
Mmhmm! I've read Infinite Jest (though it took a few false starts and I kind of gave up on doing it "properly" - I read it in chunks across a longer time than I generally prefer to with books), and I started but have not finished The Pale King.
Been meaning to read some of his essays and shorts, but haven't gotten around to it.
I would say that even if you don't care for DFW, though, M Suddain might still be enjoyable for you. Again, it's a lot more accessible even if it has that "read to experience reading the book" vibe.
Do you enjoy dense, impressionistic, rambling writing with a complete disregard for structure and surreal stream-of-conscience prose? And then, are you willing to sit through 1000+ pages of this? If so, Infinite Jest is for you. Even if the answer to the "are you willing to sit through it" question is no, it might still be worthwhile to check out. You can get a good experience without reading the whole thing, honestly.
I just finished The Fifth Season and it MURDERED me and I loved every second it. It's one of the few things that uses the whole superpowers as an allegory for oppression and actually does it WELL. Apparently N. K. Jemisin also wrote the Inheritance Trilogy, which is a thing I've heard of in passing but never really paid much mind to because I don't really have the time to invest myself in series? But obviously I should because this woman deserves like, all my money.
I just finished The Fifth Season and it MURDERED me and I loved every second it. It's one of the few things that uses the whole superpowers as an allegory for oppression and actually does it WELL. Apparently N. K. Jemisin also wrote the Inheritance Trilogy, which is a thing I've heard of in passing but never really paid much mind to because I don't really have the time to invest myself in series? But obviously I should because this woman deserves like, all my money.
NK JEMISIN IS LOVELY
go read The Obelisk Gate :)
Also, the Inheritance Trilogy is much happier than The Fifth Season, by the by. Each of the trilogy is stand-alone, albeit interconnected, and fairly short. Don't feel too intimidated. It's easy to read one and feel closure, then read the others far later.
OK so I've read most of my book of Icelandic sagas now - several years after buying it - and I gotta say: it's awesome and it needs a rap opera. Multiple rap operas.
Like, I think I mentioned this before, but I picked up this book because somewhere in Nonfictions Borges mentions that Icelandic sagas are a notable precursor to the modern novel. Which is correct: it's basically all prose. It's really dry prose, in a way that I think is not just a product of translation, but since I'm a dry person that works out pretty well. Plus, it forms kind of a... stylistic contrast with the content? Here's an example:
Not being able to ignore her upbraiding any longer, he told the men to get up as quickly as they could and arm themselves. Having done so, they went at once to the longhouse of the brothers, entered while those inside were still asleep and took them, tied them up and, once bound, led them outside. Freydis, however, had each one of the men who was brought out killed.
Soon all the men had been killed and only the women were left, as no one would kill them.
Freydis then spoke: 'Hand me an axe.'
This was done, and she then attacked the five women there and killed them all.
They returned to their house after this wicked deed, and it was clear that Freydis was highly pleased with what she had accomplished. She spoke to her companions: 'If we are fortunate enough to make it back to Greenland,' she said, 'I will have anyone who tells of these events killed. We will say that they remained behind here when we took our leave.'
Early in the spring they loaded the ship, which the brothers had owned, with all the produce they could gather and the ship would hold. They then set sail and had a good voyage, sailing their ship into Eiriksfjord in early summer. Karlsefni was there already, with his ship all set to sail and only waiting for a favourable wind. It was said that no ship sailing from Greenland had been loaded with a more valuable cargo than the one he commanded.
like, this is pretty brutal events even by Viking standards: Freydis lies to her husband (before this quotation) to get him and his men to slaughter their innocent compatriots, then she personally murders the women, and then threatens to kill anyone who talks about this. And then the next paragraph is just like, yeah on the way back the weather was awesome. Got some great cargo. It's clumsy, I guess I'd say? But not in a way that makes it worse to read. I wouldn't be happy if all novels were like this but it lends a kind of objective, just telling you what happened feel to it.
As for the opera part, that's all cos of the content. There are several characters in these sagas who will murder someone and then come up with a poem on the spot. Like a rap battle in reverse, see. And the backdrop of all of them is the Old Commonwealth of Iceland, lending my book its subtitle, True Stories of Anarcho-Capitalism. There's a "government" in the form of the Althing, but it's purely legislative and judicial. There's no enforcement of anything unless you do it yourself, which means you mean buds aka kinsmen aka brothers from another mother. An example plot summary.
It would be great, I'm telling you. Egil rapping about his feud with the king of Norway. maybe that miranda guy can get on this
Oh also it's pretty educational about history. For example: England was a raging shithole, and the Viking settlement in Newfoundland failed because of ghosts and Freydis.
I just finished The Fifth Season and it MURDERED me and I loved every second it. It's one of the few things that uses the whole superpowers as an allegory for oppression and actually does it WELL. Apparently N. K. Jemisin also wrote the Inheritance Trilogy, which is a thing I've heard of in passing but never really paid much mind to because I don't really have the time to invest myself in series? But obviously I should because this woman deserves like, all my money.
NK JEMISIN IS LOVELY
go read The Obelisk Gate :)
Also, the Inheritance Trilogy is much happier than The Fifth Season, by the by. Each of the trilogy is stand-alone, albeit interconnected, and fairly short. Don't feel too intimidated. It's easy to read one and feel closure, then read the others far later.
AAAA I TOTALLY MISSED THIS OOPS
I'll take your comment in the Inheritance trilogy into consideration. I've been reading through a collection of Angela Carter's short stories for the exact reason of having something standalone and easily digestible to feed to my brainmeats (and also the fact that they're like, enjoyable, duh).
You were the one I got the recommendation from in the first place! ...like, a year ago, BUT STILL. It's Burning Your Boats, which I believe is actually all of her short stories, including the ones that were uncollected. Is good.
OK so I've read most of my book of Icelandic sagas now - several years after buying it - and I gotta say: it's awesome and it needs a rap opera. Multiple rap operas.
Like, I think I mentioned this before, but I picked up this book because somewhere in Nonfictions Borges mentions that Icelandic sagas are a notable precursor to the modern novel. Which is correct: it's basically all prose. It's really dry prose, in a way that I think is not just a product of translation, but since I'm a dry person that works out pretty well. Plus, it forms kind of a... stylistic contrast with the content? Here's an example:
Not being able to ignore her upbraiding any longer, he told the men to get up as quickly as they could and arm themselves. Having done so, they went at once to the longhouse of the brothers, entered while those inside were still asleep and took them, tied them up and, once bound, led them outside. Freydis, however, had each one of the men who was brought out killed.
Soon all the men had been killed and only the women were left, as no one would kill them.
Freydis then spoke: 'Hand me an axe.'
This was done, and she then attacked the five women there and killed them all.
They returned to their house after this wicked deed, and it was clear that Freydis was highly pleased with what she had accomplished. She spoke to her companions: 'If we are fortunate enough to make it back to Greenland,' she said, 'I will have anyone who tells of these events killed. We will say that they remained behind here when we took our leave.'
Early in the spring they loaded the ship, which the brothers had owned, with all the produce they could gather and the ship would hold. They then set sail and had a good voyage, sailing their ship into Eiriksfjord in early summer. Karlsefni was there already, with his ship all set to sail and only waiting for a favourable wind. It was said that no ship sailing from Greenland had been loaded with a more valuable cargo than the one he commanded.
like, this is pretty brutal events even by Viking standards: Freydis lies to her husband (before this quotation) to get him and his men to slaughter their innocent compatriots, then she personally murders the women, and then threatens to kill anyone who talks about this. And then the next paragraph is just like, yeah on the way back the weather was awesome. Got some great cargo. It's clumsy, I guess I'd say? But not in a way that makes it worse to read. I wouldn't be happy if all novels were like this but it lends a kind of objective, just telling you what happened feel to it.
As for the opera part, that's all cos of the content. There are several characters in these sagas who will murder someone and then come up with a poem on the spot. Like a rap battle in reverse, see. And the backdrop of all of them is the Old Commonwealth of Iceland, lending my book its subtitle, True Stories of Anarcho-Capitalism. There's a "government" in the form of the Althing, but it's purely legislative and judicial. There's no enforcement of anything unless you do it yourself, which means you mean buds aka kinsmen aka brothers from another mother. An example plot summary.
It would be great, I'm telling you. Egil rapping about his feud with the king of Norway. maybe that miranda guy can get on this
Oh also it's pretty educational about history. For example: England was a raging shithole, and the Viking settlement in Newfoundland failed because of ghosts and Freydis.
This is really just putting the entirety of King of Dragon Pass in context
You were the one I got the recommendation from in the first place! ...like, a year ago, BUT STILL. It's Burning Your Boats, which I believe is actually all of her short stories, including the ones that were uncollected. Is good.
OK so I've read most of my book of Icelandic sagas now - several years after buying it - and I gotta say: it's awesome and it needs a rap opera. Multiple rap operas.
Like, I think I mentioned this before, but I picked up this book because somewhere in Nonfictions Borges mentions that Icelandic sagas are a notable precursor to the modern novel. Which is correct: it's basically all prose. It's really dry prose, in a way that I think is not just a product of translation, but since I'm a dry person that works out pretty well. Plus, it forms kind of a... stylistic contrast with the content? Here's an example:
Not being able to ignore her upbraiding any longer, he told the men to get up as quickly as they could and arm themselves. Having done so, they went at once to the longhouse of the brothers, entered while those inside were still asleep and took them, tied them up and, once bound, led them outside. Freydis, however, had each one of the men who was brought out killed.
Soon all the men had been killed and only the women were left, as no one would kill them.
Freydis then spoke: 'Hand me an axe.'
This was done, and she then attacked the five women there and killed them all.
They returned to their house after this wicked deed, and it was clear that Freydis was highly pleased with what she had accomplished. She spoke to her companions: 'If we are fortunate enough to make it back to Greenland,' she said, 'I will have anyone who tells of these events killed. We will say that they remained behind here when we took our leave.'
Early in the spring they loaded the ship, which the brothers had owned, with all the produce they could gather and the ship would hold. They then set sail and had a good voyage, sailing their ship into Eiriksfjord in early summer. Karlsefni was there already, with his ship all set to sail and only waiting for a favourable wind. It was said that no ship sailing from Greenland had been loaded with a more valuable cargo than the one he commanded.
like, this is pretty brutal events even by Viking standards: Freydis lies to her husband (before this quotation) to get him and his men to slaughter their innocent compatriots, then she personally murders the women, and then threatens to kill anyone who talks about this. And then the next paragraph is just like, yeah on the way back the weather was awesome. Got some great cargo. It's clumsy, I guess I'd say? But not in a way that makes it worse to read. I wouldn't be happy if all novels were like this but it lends a kind of objective, just telling you what happened feel to it.
As for the opera part, that's all cos of the content. There are several characters in these sagas who will murder someone and then come up with a poem on the spot. Like a rap battle in reverse, see. And the backdrop of all of them is the Old Commonwealth of Iceland, lending my book its subtitle, True Stories of Anarcho-Capitalism. There's a "government" in the form of the Althing, but it's purely legislative and judicial. There's no enforcement of anything unless you do it yourself, which means you mean buds aka kinsmen aka brothers from another mother. An example plot summary.
It would be great, I'm telling you. Egil rapping about his feud with the king of Norway. maybe that miranda guy can get on this
Oh also it's pretty educational about history. For example: England was a raging shithole, and the Viking settlement in Newfoundland failed because of ghosts and Freydis.
This is really just putting the entirety of King of Dragon Pass in context
yeah it's also interesting because it's, um, i can only contextualize it as "low fantasy". there are kings but they're mostly just assholes who get mad at farmers. Harald Fairhair went some way to making Norway more... courtly? But all the characters in the sagas don't want anything to do with that. Everything is on the level of family feuds. And, while so far no ghosts have been sued or called as witnesses, there have been plenty of ghosts and plenty of trials, so I can imagine it occurring.
actually i take back the comment about freydis. what actually stops the settlement is they get in a couple fights with the natives and they're like, well, this place is pretty sweet, but people already live here and they will fuck us up. so then they left america forever.
kind of sets up a good contrast with conquistadors, really
You were the one I got the recommendation from in the first place! ...like, a year ago, BUT STILL. It's Burning Your Boats, which I believe is actually all of her short stories, including the ones that were uncollected. Is good.
Aye, it is.
Where are you in it, or are you skipping around?
Iiii don't have the book with me right now so I don't know exactly but I'm still pretty early on, somewhere in Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces. I'll give you my thoughts later, though!
I didn't read that one, and instead read The Bone Clocks (also got through a fair bit of Don Quijote but that's neither here nor there). I would call it pretty weird. See it's a fairly hefty book, 600pp ish. It's organized as six I think short stories or really novellas. They take place over the course of... 70 years, the main character's life, and she's more or less involved in all of them (and the POV for two). But they're all about different characters and so on, she's just the universal. So that's a neat structure.
The first four of these - i think more than half the book - are about people in various echelons of British society. Mainly naturalistic, but with an obvious undercurrent of what the book calls "weird shit", essentially psychedelic urban fantasy. The fantasy is largely unexplained so there's the sense that these are just normal people who are tangentially involved in some deep secret bullshit they (and you) don't understand.
...and then you hit the fifth and suddenly it's infodumps and jargon jargon babble and fantasy battle. Honestly, I thought it was pretty awkward. Sort of how I felt about The City and The City come think. It's just hard to shift gears like that. It'd hit a fight and I'd just skim through until it returned to something sensible like a short story of Tsarist Russia.
But I'd rate it as quite a good book. Other than the aforementioned all the stories are very good, and I really like that thing of tying stories together in varyingly subtle ways. The fantasy and sci-fi components serve to reflect the center themes of socioeconomic inequality, as the Anchorites are privileged people who are real shitty about it while the Horologists are more chill, and the Sheep's Head situation parallels the earlier sections in Iraq in such a way that you're more forced to confront the former situation, but there's, well, literal inequality as well. Not some "in this strange future world people are sorted by their hair color" kind of dystopian shit, you understand.
Other minor things: no idea what the deal with Soleil Moore was supposed to be - she just kind of drops out? - and the titular bone clocks aren't literal.
What is it you want? Coalhouse said. Younger Brother had prepared himself for this question. He had composed an impassioned statement about justice, civilization and the right of every human being to a dignified life. He remembered none of it. I can make bombs, he said. I know how to blow things up.
Thus did Younger Brother commence his career as an outlaw and revolutionary.
truly a remarkable novel
the bit with emma goldman and evelyn nesbit (yes) is crazier but works less out of context
Comments
I mostly remember the story for its mood myself. I'm not even sure if I've actually read it in full, let alone more than once, because what I remember of the story is like a series of ambiguous moods and images and subtextual implications rather than actual events and characters.
Tatsuya Hamasaki - .hack//AI Buster - the first part of a prequel to the .hack//SIGN anime series
Michael Grunwald - The Swamp - basically a history of south Florida, with a focus on how people have dealt with the issue of the Everglades and how that's changed over time.
It was kind of an uncomfortable read at times. It contains a lot of racist language and stereotypes, although these are juxtaposed with these bluntly matter-of-fact statements of the injustices of poverty and discrimination, which are found throughout the book.
Towards the end it got ludicrously metafictional.
All in all, i'm glad to have read it, and would recommend it.
Currently, i'm reading Economics Made Simple by Geoffrey Whitehead. It's a bit dated, but i've been wishing i better understood the subject for a while now and felt it'd be helpful to start with the basics.
Thanks!
I did like the relationships between Khouri and Volyova, and Pascale and Sylvestre (really glad for creepily described sex scenes there, additionally)
But it just wasn't different enough, maybe.
Great story. Would recommend to people not easily triggered.
It's an odd novel, for certain. It has a rather... Shimmery or ethereal feel, honestly. The core conceit of the book is that it's written as a travel diary. It's all rather disjointed in an extremely impressionistic manner - it gives the sense that it really was written "for the writer" of the journal rather than to be read by a reader. It follows the main character as he travels across the galaxy seeking the most amazing restaurants, as he is an (in)famous food critic.
The writing style is very different between the two authors (M Suddain is much more accessible thus far), but I'd almost compare him to David Foster Wallace in how the book seems to be focused more on the experience of reading it than it is on the actual plot or characters.
Definitely worth picking up.
1,000 pages is a lot, though
I'll take your comment in the Inheritance trilogy into consideration. I've been reading through a collection of Angela Carter's short stories for the exact reason of having something standalone and easily digestible to feed to my brainmeats (and also the fact that they're like, enjoyable, duh).
Which collection? 83
Where are you in it, or are you skipping around?
Don't forget to page Central Avenue when you've finished "Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest". :P
curse you, law
I've had a physical copy of that book for over a year and still haven't read it, oops
The first four of these - i think more than half the book - are about people in various echelons of British society. Mainly naturalistic, but with an obvious undercurrent of what the book calls "weird shit", essentially psychedelic urban fantasy. The fantasy is largely unexplained so there's the sense that these are just normal people who are tangentially involved in some deep secret bullshit they (and you) don't understand.
...and then you hit the fifth and suddenly it's infodumps and jargon jargon babble and fantasy battle. Honestly, I thought it was pretty awkward. Sort of how I felt about The City and The City come think. It's just hard to shift gears like that. It'd hit a fight and I'd just skim through until it returned to something sensible like a short story of Tsarist Russia.
But I'd rate it as quite a good book. Other than the aforementioned all the stories are very good, and I really like that thing of tying stories together in varyingly subtle ways. The fantasy and sci-fi components serve to reflect the center themes of socioeconomic inequality, as the Anchorites are privileged people who are real shitty about it while the Horologists are more chill, and the Sheep's Head situation parallels the earlier sections in Iraq in such a way that you're more forced to confront the former situation, but there's, well, literal inequality as well. Not some "in this strange future world people are sorted by their hair color" kind of dystopian shit, you understand.
Other minor things: no idea what the deal with Soleil Moore was supposed to be - she just kind of drops out? - and the titular bone clocks aren't literal.
Link here for those interested: https://www.sevenstories.com/books/4028-complete-stories