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  • imagei will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch
    ooh, cool

    i finished Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman the other day, the first time i've read through a collection of his short stories

    i liked it enough that i bought a copy of Fragile Things but i'm putting it to one side for the moment to concentrate on the innumerable non-fiction books i've started and then not finished.

    So, currently i'm re-tackling The Exact Sciences in Antiquity by Otto Neugebauer.
  • i just read Bluets by Maggie Nelson

    it was

    quite something
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    a lyric essay
  • Goethe wrote Theory of Colours in a period of his life
    described by one critic as "a long interval, marked by
    nothing of distinguished note." Goethe himself describes
    the period as one in which "a quiet, collected state
    of mind was out of the question." Goethe is not alone in
    turning to color at a particularly fraught moment. Think
    of filmmaker Derek Jarman, who wrote his book Chroma
    as he was going blind and dying of AIDS , a death he also
    forecast on film as disappearing into a "blue screen." Or
    of Wittgenstein, who wrote his Remarks on Colour during
    the last eighteen months of his life, while dying of
    stomach cancer. He knew he was dying; he could have
    chosen to work on any philosophical problem under the
    sun. He chose to write about color. About color and pain.
    Much of this writing is urgent, opaque, and uncharacteristically
    boring. "That which I am writing about so tediously,
    may be obvious to someone whose mind is less
    decrepit," he wrote.
  • I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god
    Expanding my kindle library. Anyone have any good scifi/fantasy suggestions? 
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    The 5th Head of Cerberus
  • I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god
    Own and enjoyed! 
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    Ubik
  • I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god
    I have

    a lot of books >_>

    (and and enjoyed, along with quite a few other K Dicks)
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    ever read Dhalgren?
  • I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god
    Ah, I have not. It was on my radar a while back but somehow fell off. It is now on my Kindle!
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    ah, good times!
  • “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”
    William S. Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night. Bizarre, perverted, outlandish, anarchic, joyous, sardonic, exhausting, fascinating.
  • For once, or maybe twice, I was in my prime.
    I'd recommend Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories, if there's a complete collection available on Kindle. They start off pretty pulpy, but get better, especially in the ones with less focus on Manse Everard. I particularly liked "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth".
  • I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god
    Thank you both! 
  • kill living beings
    reading the big sleep, of a genre i've only before seen in parodies. observations:
    • i thought maybe the non parody version would take itself too seriously, but no, private dicks are wiseguys with some pretty good cracks
    • every woman has her legs described in fetishistic detail
    • "I get twenty five a day and expenses - if I'm lucky" is an actual line
    so basically parodies have completely prepared me for this.
  • edited 2017-12-20 16:06:05
    kill living beings
    slep said:

    She giggled. That gave me a nasty feeling. If she had screeched or wept or even nosedived to the floor in a dead faint, that would have been all right. She just giggled. It was suddenly a lot of fun. She had had her photo taken at Isis and somebody had swiped it and somebody had bumped Geiger off in front of her and she was drunker than a Legion convention, and it was suddenly a lot of nice clean fun. So she giggled. Very cute. The giggles got louder and ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting.

    this i like

    She started to go hysterical. I slid off the desk and stepped up close to her and gave her a smack on the side of the face.

    this is stereotyped
  • extremely not so but maybe just a tad yes
    welcome to the male id
  • For once, or maybe twice, I was in my prime.
    Perhaps Dashiel Hammet's take on the genre would be more to your liking? His protagonists are still gruff and to the point, but less alpha-male about it, IMO.
  • kill living beings
    It's not even that I dislike it. It's certainly #problematic but that's fairly inevitable with books written like, at all, let alone in the 30s, and it was entirely expected. It's just like, wow, Tracer Bullet basically nailed it?
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    I suggest The Postman Always Rings Twice
  • edited 2017-12-21 00:22:12
    kill living beings
    yeah i think that's it for me and chandler

    dude had issues
  • edited 2017-12-23 23:45:01
    kill living beings
    Crime and Punishment: I can definitely see why Dostoevsky is universally understood as a great author. The characters are all pretty amazingly uh, characterized. I feel these people.

    Buuuut it's unpleasant to read because everything sucks. I mean, everyone's poor, in just-freed-the-serfs Russia, so of course it sucks, but it really sucks.

    And the characters... suck. I mean that they're almost all unpleasant people. I'm actually wondering if part of the point of this book isn't that everything sucks so much that Raskolnikov, a pretty unrepentant murderer (spoiler!!) and proto-Redditor, still comes off pretty well compared to some. Luzhin is evil, and in such a petty and incompetent way i just want to give him a wedgie. The leftists are all morons. The detective manages to be as vicious and frightening as someone can possibly be while, at least so far, being an actual upright law enforcement officer.

    And speaking of leftists being idiots, I knew Dostoevsky was opposed to the Nihilists and so on, and I kind of figured he was some variety of conservative, but I'm not sure if there are any positive politics here? Like a vision of how things should work. Like, Luzhin gives this little Gekko speech (which is pretty good, btw)
    Luzhin said:

    "You must admit," he went on, addressing Razumihin with a shade of triumph and superciliousness - he almost added "young man" - "that there is an advance, or as they say now, progress in the name of science and economic truth..."

    "A commonplace."

    "No, not a commonplace! Hitherto, for instance, if I were told, 'love thy neighbour'; what came of it?" Pyotr Petrovitch went on, perhaps with excessive haste. "It came to my tearing my coat in half to share with my neighbour and we both were left half naked. As a Russian proverb has it, 'Catch several hares and you won't catch one.' Science now tells us, love yourself before all men, for everything in the world rests on self-interest. You love yourself and manage your own affairs properly and your coat remains whole. Economic truth adds that the better private affairs are organised in society - the more whole coats, so to say - the firmer are its foundations and the better is the common welfare organised too. Therefore, in acquiring wealth solely and exclusively for myself, I am acquiring, so to speak, for all, and helping to bring to pass my neighbour's getting a little more than a torn coat; and that not from private, personal liberality, but as a consequence of the general advance. The idea is simple, but unhappily it has been a long time reaching us, being hindered by idealism and sentimentality. And yet it would seem to want very little wit to perceive it..."

    now reading that again i'm noticing you could subsume this satire with the leftists by conceiving of them both as a reaction to uh, a particular thing I'm not sure I could name, but a kind of theory of how society should be organized that leans greatly on its supposedly scientific nature. That still leaves me kind of clueless as to how Dostoevsky thinks things should go, though.
  • For once, or maybe twice, I was in my prime.
    I kinda get the impression that Dostoevsky believed that if everyone just followed "Love your neighbor as yourself" hard enough, then everything would work out for the best. And that any sort of purely secular political movement would inevitably fail—or if it did succeed, still wouldn't significantly improve life for the lower classes.

    Dostoevsky also seemed to believe that people are redeemed from their sins by their own suffering on Earth, so the creation of a political utopia would be counterproductive anyway.
  • My dreams exceed my real life

    Crime and Punishment: I can definitely see why Dostoevsky is universally understood as a great author. The characters are all pretty amazingly uh, characterized. I feel these people.


    Buuuut it's unpleasant to read because everything sucks. I mean, everyone's poor, in just-freed-the-serfs Russia, so of course it sucks, but it really sucks.

    And the characters... suck. I mean that they're almost all unpleasant people. I'm actually wondering if part of the point of this book isn't that everything sucks so much that Raskolnikov, a pretty unrepentant murderer (spoiler!!) and proto-Redditor, still comes off pretty well compared to some. Luzhin is evil, and in such a petty and incompetent way i just want to give him a wedgie. The leftists are all morons. The detective manages to be as vicious and frightening as someone can possibly be while, at least so far, being an actual upright law enforcement officer.

    And speaking of leftists being idiots, I knew Dostoevsky was opposed to the Nihilists and so on, and I kind of figured he was some variety of conservative, but I'm not sure if there are any positive politics here? Like a vision of how things should work. Like, Luzhin gives this little Gekko speech (which is pretty good, btw)
    Luzhin said:

    "You must admit," he went on, addressing Razumihin with a shade of triumph and superciliousness - he almost added "young man" - "that there is an advance, or as they say now, progress in the name of science and economic truth..."

    "A commonplace."

    "No, not a commonplace! Hitherto, for instance, if I were told, 'love thy neighbour'; what came of it?" Pyotr Petrovitch went on, perhaps with excessive haste. "It came to my tearing my coat in half to share with my neighbour and we both were left half naked. As a Russian proverb has it, 'Catch several hares and you won't catch one.' Science now tells us, love yourself before all men, for everything in the world rests on self-interest. You love yourself and manage your own affairs properly and your coat remains whole. Economic truth adds that the better private affairs are organised in society - the more whole coats, so to say - the firmer are its foundations and the better is the common welfare organised too. Therefore, in acquiring wealth solely and exclusively for myself, I am acquiring, so to speak, for all, and helping to bring to pass my neighbour's getting a little more than a torn coat; and that not from private, personal liberality, but as a consequence of the general advance. The idea is simple, but unhappily it has been a long time reaching us, being hindered by idealism and sentimentality. And yet it would seem to want very little wit to perceive it..."

    now reading that again i'm noticing you could subsume this satire with the leftists by conceiving of them both as a reaction to uh, a particular thing I'm not sure I could name, but a kind of theory of how society should be organized that leans greatly on its supposedly scientific nature. That still leaves me kind of clueless as to how Dostoevsky thinks things should go, though.
    Opposition to system-building was a big part of early existentialism see: Kierkegaard vs Hegel
  • edited 2017-12-31 06:27:45

    so, for christmas i got:

    Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts

    and

    Brian Evenson's A Collapse of Horses

    thoughts:

    Maggie is great! i like this book... less than Bluets, but im still fond. as with... most? all? of her writing, it's a very distinctive form of semi-poetic theory memoir (this is less peculiar than it sounds), in this case it's her talking about her relationship with actor/sculptor/artist Harry Dodge, along with becoming a stepmother and having a baby of her own, and on the relationship between queerness and rebellion, queerness and family, between parent and child, and, in one memorable passage the exact nature of the relationship between taking a dump, being in labor, and being fucked in the ass, which terminates with relating an anecdote of her listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross. so, it's very self-interested, funny, smart, and all over the place. Good fun!

    A Collapse of Horses ive read before, and probably posted about in this thread. here to report, it's still good! i will note that, having now back-to-backed the first and last stories in the collection, their weird interrelationship... still really doesn't quite make sense! and this time, the effect was... genuinely vaguely upsetting...
  • also i was wrong on my first readthrough of the last story, for some reason i thought it was set in some sort of medieval era but

    he knows what a gun is, and his boots have rubber soles

    but he and his companion are also grievously injured when people in a fort? encampment?... throw rocks at him...?

    Brian has a real knack for giving you absolutely just the wrong level of detail to easily suss out what/where/when the fuck his stories are happening
  • kill living beings
    Titus Groan was real strange

    I don't know what I was expecting - some kind of dark fantasy thing I guess - it is not that. It's superficially similar but alien under the hood. I don't think I've read a book like that before.

    For one, it's hilarious when it tries to be. At first I was actually annoyed, thinking it was going overboard with the ridiculousness of everything, but in several hundred pages it managed to make me care about a very absurd place and the people in it. Somehow the setting and characters are both ridiculous and not. Like, take Prunesquallor. He's named "Prunesquallor". He laughs stupidly at everything, he's basically a wacky doctor character, and yet he manages to be interesting, even sympathetic, while remaining that same parodic shambles. I don't know how it's even possible.

    Also Peake just constantly rolls out these amazing little nuggets of description, something I've only really seen in Pratchett or Chandleriguess. Because he was a poet I suppose.

    The introduction claims this first book in the trilogy is more popular than the sequels but I really can't get that. The whole thing is a prequel. Hell, it's like a prelude in the musical sense, one of those later ones where they just mean "prelude" to be a particular more improvisational form expressing a mood, regardless of whether it actually presages anything (but the book does).

    I dunno. It's hard to describe. It wasn't a joke despite being a joke. It wasn't fantasy despite its fantastic nature.

    The jacket tells me Anthony Burgess said "There is really no close relative to it in all our prose literature. It is uniquely brilliant and we are right to call it a modern classic." so I'll go with that.
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    The second book, Gormenghast, is essentially more of the same mood although with more action, at least in the second half.

    The third, Titus Alone, is waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy different and you may or may not appreciate it.

    Prunesquallor is awesome btw
  • kill living beings
    i'm dying to know how this could possibly be different from itself

    guess i'll find out when i get the next books

    also here's part of the author's kids book

    image
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    Captain Slaughterboard?
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    oh yes
  • kill living beings
    Finished Crime and Punishment. After checking Wikipedia it does seem as though it was intended as antirationalist, in opposition to systems, as Myrmidon said. Given that that is against most of my basic beliefs it's neat that the book was still engaging.
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    So I have now gotten to the Dying Earth stories that focus on Cugel the Clever
    Which I would describe as either "If there was dark souls gaiden adventure game starring Patches" or "Conan the Barbarian, but instead of Conan it's Dennis from Always Sunny In Philadelphia Daffy Ducking his way through adventures"
  • i picked up the complete short stories by saki. on the basis of Sredni naming himself after his favourite saki story i’d now like you all to refer to me as Reginald’s Christmas Revel
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    Okay Reginald's Christmas Revel
  • thank you, odradek,
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    sunn wolf said:

    thank you, odradek,


  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    sunn wolf, long time no see
  • “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”
    sunn wolf said:

    i picked up the complete short stories by saki. on the basis of Sredni naming himself after his favourite saki story i’d now like you all to refer to me as Reginald’s Christmas Revel

    Oh my god, I need to read more of the Reginald stories.
  • I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god
    Anyone who enjoys new weird style books or just books that are odd, surreal, and atmospheric absolutely MUST read The Gray House by Miryam Petrosyan. It is utterly fantastic. It's fun, bizarre, violent, and endearing. The atmosphere is amazingly well done - for example, it perfectly communicates the feeling of walking (or wheeling if you are in a wheelchair as are these particular characters) into a dark hallway at night not knowing what you will find prowling the halls. That touch of apprehension when the known has become unknown. The fantastical elements are uncertain and unconfirmed. Is the House really alive? Did that kid actually turn into a cat or was it just a bad trip? Is the Forest real, and if so, what about the beings within it?

    Constantly this book raises more questions than it answers. I love the characters, too. Tabaqui is a strange little dear, Blind is ruthless, Mermaid just wants happiness, Rat views the world through mirrors, Humback has an entire chapter with list of things he likes and dislikes.

    It's so good.
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    Noted.
  • edited 2019-03-16 03:15:55
    I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god
    Heyo! If anyone is interested in joining a small, close-knit Discord server about science fiction and fantasy novels, pester me. It's currently about ten people and we all chatter quite a lot; it's very active for the small user group.
  • I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god
    The Luminous Dead is the best terrifying sci-fi horror lesbian romance with eldritch cave tunneling monsters and a constant threat of death novel I've ever read
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    that seems rather specific.
  • I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god
    Heh, perhaps a tad bit. But it IS utterly excellent. :D   It absolutely blew me out of the water, especially what with it being a debut novel. It was spooky and filled with creeping terror in all the right ways. The main character is an absolute bad ass, and has darn near set the new standard for me on bad ass ladies in horrible situations. She's utterly human while also utterly amazing. Full review is long, but you can read it here if anyone is interested. 

    HIGHLY recommended if you enjoy scifi, horror, or books like The Martian by Andy Weir where characters are few and have limited resources!

    I have been shamelessly shilling this book ever since I finished it, so may as well do a bit of that here as well :D
  • I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god
    I really need to read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I've been told it's basically adorable space spiders?!?!?? Need.
  • I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god
    Also do not read The Path Keeper by N J Simmons. It's BAD. It's aggressively mediocre and bland. I get that's it's YA, but that's no excuse. Shadowfrost was YA and at least pretty good and had interesting and often funny characters. This one... Does not.

    I would have given it two stars if it at least managed to stay at Twilight levels of bland, but it's definitely going downhill from there. They aren't even using the whole time mythology thing that's the premise!

    And I actually still have no idea whatsoever what the time premise thing IS because they haven't even talked about it over a third of the way in!

    If this weren't an ARC I'd stop reading now. This is going to be a one star for sure.
  • Touch the cow. Do it now.
    ouch.
  • edited 2019-04-06 16:12:25
    So, what were your favorite children's books growing up?
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