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Empyreal
The Final Frontier

Joined: Thu Nov 30, 2006 6:58 pm
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Location: Where the dead rule the night
PostPosted: Sat Mar 27, 2021 3:08 pm 
 

Spent the morning reading Cynan Jones "The Dig" over breakfast then at the beach. This is going to be one of those books that makes me envious of somebody else's writing skills. Dude can make scenes of a guy just farming and taking care of chores seem literary and profound. That's how you know you found an intriguing read.
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~Guest 361478
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Joined: Tue May 19, 2015 4:55 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 28, 2021 10:37 am 
 

Recently read -

Amor Towles - A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)
This is an excellent novel - a fictional character study & drama that starts in newly Bolshevik Moscow. A minor nobleman, living in an hotel, is the author's avatar living through the takeover of Russia by the Bolsheviks. It's lighthearted in places, laugh-out-loud funny at times, romantic in others, sharply observant and critical in others. It's one of those novels where 'nothing happens' - lots of narrative, conversations, small interactions that really show the author's research into the minutiae of all sorts of lives and how they where changed by the revolution. Politics, while omnipresent as a theme, aren't the point of the novel - there are no polemics or story-stopping harangues as with much other modern fiction - it's a human interest story, and told very, very well.


Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb (1938)

Roth to me is a kind of Tolstoy analogue; this novel has more than a whiff of Evelyn Waugh's later work too. The second half of the Trotta family's lives in Austria-Hungary, this one covers the tipping point of that imperial history (and the family history) via the First World War, the deprivations that follow, and the seediness of 20th century political extremists; communists and national socialists are looked down on quite equally. The book is a pretty unsubtle meditation on the last days of Austria-Hungry; Roth had seen his country from it's last Habsburg peak to it's lowest ebb, and his characters live that decline. Roth died in Paris shortly after this book was published, not long prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Reading 'Radetzky March' first helps with some of the context and background winks in this book, but it's not necessary.

Currently reading -

Philip Hughes: The Church in Crisis (1961)
A pre-Vatican II summary of the major ecumenical councils of the Catholic Church, from Nicea in AD 325, to Vatican I in 1869. Fascinating both for the older style of language (a pleasure to read vs. many modern historians), and for the story itself - at Nicea, Ephesus, Chalcedon, a Roman emperor presides over the early theological questions. We see the shift from East to West; we see the barbarian invasions, the fall of Rome, the long Islamic conquest of Byzantium, and the 19 century-long stalagmite of doctrine built up from the earliest doctrinal heresies to the problems of German nationalism.

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PETERG
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Joined: Sat Jun 20, 2015 1:48 pm
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Location: Greece
PostPosted: Sun Mar 28, 2021 12:17 pm 
 

Coastliner wrote:
PETERG wrote:
[...] The never-ending story by Michael Ende [...] The book was written in the 1950s and both Ende and Tolkien seem to have influenced each other.


That's impossible. "The Never-Ending Story" was written between 1977 and 1979 (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_unendliche_Geschichte) and was first published in 1979
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neverending_Story), six years after Tolkien's death. "The Lord of the Rings" was written between 1937 and the late 40s and was first published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings).

Both great in their respective ways and recommended. Although it's doubtful that Tolkien would have liked Ende. He wasn't keen on 20th century literature in general. One of the few contemporary novels he accepted was David Lindsay's science fiction classic "Voyage to Arcturus" (1920) (cf. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter # 26) but, on the whole, he was more into age-old stuff with cobwebs and a beard :old: .



Wow I have made a fool of myself. I never bothered to look the actual release of the book and my teacher told me that the date was around the '50s. Sorry for that.
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Coastliner
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Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:49 am
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Location: beyond the blue on some ancient, tattered Fates Warning cover
PostPosted: Sun Mar 28, 2021 2:14 pm 
 

PETERG wrote:
Wow I have made a fool of myself. I never bothered to look the actual release of the book and my teacher told me that the date was around the '50s. Sorry for that.


No problem! I think at some point I, too, had the impression it was from the 50s. Don't know why... I read it in the early 80s (when the movie was made), and the only fantasy novels I knew at that time were The Neverending Story and... The Lord of the Rings. I probably confused one with the other. :scratch:

Inspired by this thread, I dusted it off yesterday. Don't know if I'll make it through the whole book but there seem to be some interesting occult concepts that I missed the first time round, e.g. 'Ygramul, the Many.' Not exactly typical children's stuff...

@ Topic:

Now reading:

- Stephen King / Peter Straub: The Talisman: When I first read it in the 80s, I was fascinated by the mashup of the two worlds, and the same fascination returned after only a couple of pages. A real page-turner.

- Alfred Döblin: Berge Meere und Giganten (Mountains Seas and Giants): Experimental dystopian novel from 1924. Ghastly. Hideous. I've never read anything by Döblin that I liked. The problem is: It seems to be one of those novels that you shouldn't judge before you've read all of it but I'm not sure whether I can stomach another couple of hundred pages of condescending language and racist stereotypes...
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PETERG
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PostPosted: Mon Mar 29, 2021 11:17 am 
 

Coastliner wrote:
e.g. 'Ygramul, the Many.' Not exactly typical children's stuff...


My God was I terrified when I first read this... :ugh: :ugh:
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~Guest 58624
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Joined: Sun Jan 29, 2006 4:33 am
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 24, 2021 4:19 pm 
 

I've had the worst luck with bookcases. I try to limit my spending to $100-150 or so (anything cheaper is asking for trouble, as I learned the hard way). Most recently I tried a six-shelf Hemnes from IKEA, and it lasted a few years, but just last night while I was sleeping, the back gave out and the shelves collapsed.

I'm not sure where to find a good one without spending a bunch. Recommendations?

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~Guest 361478
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Joined: Tue May 19, 2015 4:55 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 25, 2021 2:53 am 
 

megalowho wrote:
I've had the worst luck with bookcases. I try to limit my spending to $100-150 or so (anything cheaper is asking for trouble, as I learned the hard way). Most recently I tried a six-shelf Hemnes from IKEA, and it lasted a few years, but just last night while I was sleeping, the back gave out and the shelves collapsed.

I'm not sure where to find a good one without spending a bunch. Recommendations?


This is going to sound like a total cliche - but find a local business that does house clearances, tell them what you need. We bought a lot of solidly built old furniture that way, from the time before everything became cheap plastic crap. These people aren't retailers either - they're usually just binning it or selling it wholesale, so you get much better prices. You might have to wait a bit depending on your area, but it's worth it - much better than yet-another-wood-pulp-hack-job. (and I started off with Ikea stuff, too, it never lasts unfortunately).

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InnesI
The Goat Fucker

Joined: Sat Jun 01, 2013 3:19 pm
Posts: 2187
PostPosted: Sun Apr 25, 2021 8:55 am 
 

Methuen wrote:
This is going to sound like a total cliche - but find a local business that does house clearances, tell them what you need. We bought a lot of solidly built old furniture that way, from the time before everything became cheap plastic crap. These people aren't retailers either - they're usually just binning it or selling it wholesale, so you get much better prices. You might have to wait a bit depending on your area, but it's worth it - much better than yet-another-wood-pulp-hack-job. (and I started off with Ikea stuff, too, it never lasts unfortunately).


Yeah. I have a second hand store close-by. They sell all kinds of things, furniture being one. You can find really good, old school, properly built wood book shelves for better prices than any plastic IKEA bookshelf.
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PostPosted: Fri May 14, 2021 12:09 pm 
 

Recently finished -

Norman Davies - The Vanished Kingdoms - A history book looking at a selection of 'vanished' European states; Burgundy, USSR (via Estonia), Byzantium, Galicia, and so on - fifteen of them all in. Each chapter covers a travelouge style view of the modern area, a discussion of historiography, and potted history of the vanished kingdom. Davies is famous as an historian of Poland (see: God's Kingdom), and the sections on Eastern Europe, on Galicia, Estonia, and so on are very good; he's obviously got a great passion for these peoples and their history - the details are brilliant, local insights abound, and the history is top notch. Where this book falls down is in both the dry death-by-list history (eg: Burgundy) and the "I'm going to rant about academica" chapter (Byzantium). Two very interesting polities are left as lists and polemics in this book, which is a great shame. The segment on Ireland (referring to post-civil war, pre-Republic 'Southern Ireland') is fascinating. I'd always thought that using 'Southern Ireland' rather than 'the Republic of' was an English bigory - no, it turns out it's just one of those hangovers from a forgotten country name, like Czechoslovakia, or the Ukraine. He does go a bit overboard on the songs, but interesting to see the Irish/Gaelic side by side with the English.

Reccommended if you want a potted history of some interesting dead states, but just beware that the quality of the essays varies enormously.

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~Guest 361478
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PostPosted: Tue May 18, 2021 8:24 am 
 

Started after I finished the above -

Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories - This is the Penguin Classics edition that has seven short stories of very lengths, all of them meditations or parables on death and dying. Cheerful ! So far I've read the first group; The Raid, Three Deaths, Woodfelling, Polikuska, and The Death of Ivan Ilych. The first group look at how people die in otherwise perfectly routine circumstances, human bravery, how greed drives a lot of pain, how we're often totally ignorant of death when it doesn't impact us directly. The 'title track' however, is a complicated look at how someone percieves their world as they die; how their previous worldview is warped by their dying, how they relate to and want to be related to by, others. It's a meditation in the classical sense; Tolstoy isn't giving you a lesson, or telling you something, he's presenting a set of thoughts for you to take in and discuss. All of the stories do have a very Tolstoyan golden thread - the Russian peasant as exemplar of unsullied purity, not trodden down by war / greed / sophistication / godlessness; War and Peace has a very famous iteration of this trope. Reading these stories I can see how Tolstoy eventually arrived at the point of running off into the woods to live with the peasants and aim for a simpler life, and started his own theology of ascetiscism.

Reccommended if anyone enjoys these kinds of meditations, or if someone is a bit too cheerful at the moment and wants to read a lot of quite grim Russian storytelling :)

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Mystic_Stylez
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Joined: Thu May 13, 2021 2:22 pm
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Location: Philippines
PostPosted: Thu May 20, 2021 1:17 pm 
 

I haven’t read a lot lately but before I used to read lot when I get locked up or put to rehab and I will say that at those times I love reading good books.

Here’s some favorites of mine:

Shogun - James Clavell - A very good book about 1600s samurais. Very descriptive and informative and I love the graphic parts like the murders and battles. A must read for anybody really. Read this when I was in prison serving a 1yr sentence. Suggested to me by this drug lord looking at a federal conspiracy charge for 10years. He’s pretty cool. Love this book and it made me obsessed by the samurai code of honor and duty and the way they are as a warrior. Greatest killers of the old times I think.

Godfather - Mario Puzo - Everybody knows the movie trilogy and it was iconic and epic. But reading this book you’ll have a better idea of how Sonny was a vicious but forceful character. And Vito Corleone has some great moments specially on the Five Families meeting it was well portrayed and just give you more details. I read this so many times and still I can’t seem to remember the great lines and words. Gotta read it again.

The Family Corloenne - Edward Falco (based on a screenplay by Mario Puzo) - This book is just excellent. Honestly I read this book even before I read or watched The Godfather and it was awesome I was so amazed by the story of Vito Corleone’s rise from a poor Italian immigrant to a big mafia boss and a big oil business buff. Very well detailed of how Sonny was a kid idolizing his father and doing petty crimes with his buddies and his way into his father’s gang. And also this gives you some stories and describes how Luca Brasi was a real monster to be feared back in the day. And how Vito made him his best soldier. To all Godfather fanatics you should all read this it will give you a good idea of the times before The Godfather era of the Corleone family.

The Last Don - Mario Puzo - Another gangster novel. This one about a Casino owner/runner that made his own moves outside of the organization that owns him. It has some really nice kills and murder plots and I just love how in the story he wasn’t really a ruthless gangster but with his need to get the business done he made some seriously interesting plots of murder hits. It has a nice love story angle to it as well and it’s a pretty interesting read. This is Mario Puzo’s last novel. Omertà is also a good book and it’s more murder induced but I forgot the whole book already so I went with this one.

Dante’s Inferno - Dante Alighieri - I don’t really remember all the details or even the story of this book but I just remember reading it and I was fascinated by the details and the whole feeling of how Dante describes his journey thru hell. Some great characters like Virgil who’s like the devil himself trying to push Dante to keep going and some monsters and beast in the way. It’s a weird book for me really since I’m not really good with English but I kept reading and I must say it’s an interesting read but really weird and thought provoking specially thinking this was written way back in the 14th Century. I might read it again to better understand it I just mentioned it so I can maybe get some replies to others that read this and make me remember the book.

Thanks guys. I’ll post more if I can think of more.

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Empyreal
The Final Frontier

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 01, 2021 9:38 am 
 

Reading Roberto Bolano "2666" for the first time in several years. This is a massive and vital piece of work. It's several stories all tenuously connected around a series of murders in Mexico and a mysterious German author. Very hard to describe. But the breadth of it is so vast and the writing has all these insights and a real connection to something mystical and odd and inexplicable. It starts out innocuous but man does it get dark later. It's really a genuine piece of art.
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CoconutBackwards
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Joined: Thu Dec 01, 2016 2:02 pm
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 01, 2021 10:25 am 
 

^I read The Savage Detective after all the massive hype for that book.

I should say I didn't finish it. Whatever it was that everyone got out of that book must've went way over my head, because it was a real chore reading that book, imo.
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Empyreal
The Final Frontier

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 01, 2021 10:30 am 
 

I don't remember much about that one. I liked it and will probably revisit it at some point, but 2666 was always the one that stuck with me more.
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InnesI
The Goat Fucker

Joined: Sat Jun 01, 2013 3:19 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 3:48 am 
 

I usually only read non-fiction but since I love the film Under the Tuscan Sun I decided to read the book as well (and perhaps it can be argued it is non-fiction as well). How this is a classic I do not know. There is very little in regards to getting to know the characters. The beginning is ok but it is basically a diary of how they repair the Tuscan house. It turns worse however with the middle part basically becoming a cook book (and everything tastes "amazing"!!!) and then goes on to become a travel book akin to those small pocket guides. Perhaps I went into this with the wrong expectations (a story like the film, or it actually being a novel) but this is one of the worst books I've read (and I didn't quite finish it either). The film is a thousand times better!

Methuen wrote:
Started after I finished the above -

Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories -


I just read the Georg Henrik von Wrights essay on the philosophy of Tolstoy. It was very good and really dived quite deep into the thoughts of Tolstoy. Really quite interesting how he tried to combine the a strong focus on living in the here and now with (a radical rereading of) Christianity and left wing anarchism!

Mystic_Stylez wrote:
Shogun - James Clavell - A very good book about 1600s samurais. Very descriptive and informative and I love the graphic parts like the murders and battles. A must read for anybody really. Read this when I was in prison serving a 1yr sentence. Suggested to me by this drug lord looking at a federal conspiracy charge for 10years. He’s pretty cool. Love this book and it made me obsessed by the samurai code of honor and duty and the way they are as a warrior. Greatest killers of the old times I think.


Made me realize I have only seen half of the film (which was pretty great). I also have the book on a shelf but haven't read it.
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~Guest 361478
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Joined: Tue May 19, 2015 4:55 pm
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 18, 2021 11:59 am 
 

InnesI wrote:
Methuen wrote:
Started after I finished the above -

Tolstoy - The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories -


I just read the Georg Henrik von Wrights essay on the philosophy of Tolstoy. It was very good and really dived quite deep into the thoughts of Tolstoy. Really quite interesting how he tried to combine the a strong focus on living in the here and now with (a radical rereading of) Christianity and left wing anarchism!


Tolstoy is up there in my personal pantheon if only for originality alone. The last Tolstoyan commune in Britain only died out relatively recently (alas, those in Russia were 'liquidated' relatively early on). His 'A Confession' is worth a read if you're interested in his philosophy, and some versions of War and Peace come properly appended with a massive set of essays. To begin to get (and after ten years I'm still at that stage) Tolstoy, you should also read some Schopenhauer and definitely the Sermon on the Mount.


Currently just finished -

Helen Castor - Joan of Arc

I like biographies of this kind, where the biographer takes the time to properly site their subject in their own context. In this case, to start, Castor gives us a short but detailed history of the Hundred Years' War, highlighting the key events, men and women that directed things, and the religious environment of the time. She then gives us the story of Joan, her battles, her trials and examinations, and her ultimate demise. She frames the rehabilitation trial in the political context of that time, too - the reader must decide on the fidelity of the judges at both trials using the evidence provided.. We're given detailed excerpts from the (still surviving) Inquisitorial trial notes. I learned a lot - it goes miles further into the medieval psyche than any other material on this topic I've read (which vary between 'English politics' and 'burned for crossdressing') - Castor uses the primary sources to tell us what happened, and leaves it up to us to make up our minds. She also brings to life a system that interrogated Joan on whether she could discern between the true nature of angels or not. This is something that modern authors oftene miss; the supernatural was legalistically real to these people. Bringing it to life brings the sources to life, and makes for a much better history. I like that a lot.

NB - being introduced to Yolande of Aragon was fascinating - she was a properly Francis Urquhart style figure manipulating the men around her into various wars / alliances / treates - a recent revisionist school of history credits her with the end of the Hundred Years' War and the French victory.

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InnesI
The Goat Fucker

Joined: Sat Jun 01, 2013 3:19 pm
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 24, 2021 4:28 am 
 

I'm currently reading the autobiography of Göran Persson (Sweden's social democratic prime minister from 1996-2006). So far it's quite good. The best parts are about his personal life but unfortunately there is very little of that. This seems to be more of a political history than a personal one. The politics are interesting as well but the personal parts are just far more fun to hear about. I'm actually listening to this as an audiobook with Göran Persson himself narrating it. It heightens the enjoyment for sure.
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Rottir
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Joined: Sat Aug 01, 2015 6:48 pm
Posts: 95
PostPosted: Tue Aug 31, 2021 9:02 pm 
 

It took me three months with a newborn at home, but I finally finished Thomas Pynchon's Against The Day.

I wanted so badly to love this book, and indeed at one-third the way through I wondered if it would be my first 'five star' rating in a long time. But alas, for all of the interesting ideas he introduces, the vast majority of them go nowhere, and even what could be thought of as the main narrative goes unfulfilled.

Thus, I am left with nearly 1200 pages of disappointment. I really need to stop reading post-modern fiction.

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Coastliner
Metalhead

Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:49 am
Posts: 667
Location: beyond the blue on some ancient, tattered Fates Warning cover
PostPosted: Wed Sep 01, 2021 11:26 am 
 

Rottir wrote:
Thomas Pynchon's Against The Day. [...] Thus, I am left with nearly 1200 pages of disappointment. I really need to stop reading post-modern fiction.


When I held "Gravity's Rainbow" in front of my face I gave up on page 12...

Currently:
- stuck somewhere in the middle of Kafka's diaries but will make it through some day; I think his travel diaries and letters were a bit more enlightening,
- began reading "The Odyssey" in prose - but do you really have to memorise all those names just to familiarise yourself with the roots of Western thought?
- began reading "The Plague" by Camus but got bored after a couple of rats, I mean, chapters,
- second attempt to read Mary Shelley's "The Last Man" - aborted for fear of the whole pile of pages being worse than the last page (which I read first, of course :tongue: ).
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Empyreal
The Final Frontier

Joined: Thu Nov 30, 2006 6:58 pm
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Location: Where the dead rule the night
PostPosted: Fri Sep 10, 2021 7:43 pm 
 

In the final 100 pages of 2666. Don't know what I'm gonna do when this is over. The book is it's own universe and contains multitudes. The innumerable dead and the general wideness of the world and experiences. This has been just part of my DNA for almost a decade.
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twistedknife
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Joined: Fri Feb 05, 2016 2:01 pm
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 13, 2021 9:54 pm 
 

Just started getting into splatterpunk!

I'm a big fan of Clive Barker, so I've been checking out this entire sub genre of horror.

I have Exquisite Corpse from Poppy Z. Brite coming in the mail. Apparently it took awhile to publish:

Quote:
The work bounced from publisher to publisher, who praised the novel's writing but ultimately rejected it, calling its subject matter "too nihilistic, too extreme, a bloodbath without justification".

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PETERG
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Joined: Sat Jun 20, 2015 1:48 pm
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Location: Greece
PostPosted: Tue Sep 14, 2021 7:38 am 
 

Mystic_Stylez wrote:
Dante’s Inferno - Dante Alighieri - I don’t really remember all the details or even the story of this book but I just remember reading it and I was fascinated by the details and the whole feeling of how Dante describes his journey thru hell. Some great characters like Virgil who’s like the devil himself trying to push Dante to keep going and some monsters and beast in the way. It’s a weird book for me really since I’m not really good with English but I kept reading and I must say it’s an interesting read but really weird and thought provoking specially thinking this was written way back in the 14th Century. I might read it again to better understand it I just mentioned it so I can maybe get some replies to others that read this and make me remember the book.


It got to read this man. It's significance in literature and development of the Italian language is beyond measure. I have heard that Dante wrote the whole Divine Comedy to keep himself sane because in real life Beatrice left him for another man.
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PETERG
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 14, 2021 7:46 am 
 

Recently read :


The handmaid's tale :
Really good book. Its themes are really gruesome and dark and it perfectly captures the inhuman practices of the most brutally sexist regime possible. Its characters are written great although their development is not that big - it could not be in only 300 or so pages. The only thing that I did not like was the pacing which could be better and the many pages devoted to the protagonist's thoughts.
I have heard that the show is also really good should I give it a try?


Currently reading :

Mapuche :
Could be a movie starring Collin Farrell. It is written like a movie. The characters, the dialogues and the setting are like a movie. Basically it is a story about the murder of transgender, the disappearance of a wealthy teenager and the connections of both crimes to the atrocities of the Argentinian dictatorship.
Be aware that the book contains really explicit descriptions of strong themes like rape, prostitution, drugs, swearing, racism, torture etc. It is really good though.
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InnesI
The Goat Fucker

Joined: Sat Jun 01, 2013 3:19 pm
Posts: 2187
PostPosted: Tue Sep 14, 2021 10:31 am 
 

PETERG wrote:
The handmaid's tale :
Really good book. Its themes are really gruesome and dark and it perfectly captures the inhuman practices of the most brutally sexist regime possible. Its characters are written great although their development is not that big - it could not be in only 300 or so pages. The only thing that I did not like was the pacing which could be better and the many pages devoted to the protagonist's thoughts.
I have heard that the show is also really good should I give it a try?



I also loved the book. The tv-show was really quite good the first season (which was based on the book). I then saw maybe 4 episodes of season 2 but I lost interest. But season 1 can be seen as a stand alone.
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PETERG
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2021 5:10 am 
 

On the topic of literature what is your opinion on book related Youtube channels? I only watch James Tullos for his amazing reviewing of awful books.
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InnesI
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2021 1:24 pm 
 

PETERG wrote:
On the topic of literature what is your opinion on book related Youtube channels? I only watch James Tullos for his amazing reviewing of awful books.


I only watch Better Than Food: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrY6MK ... ISvM2zEgoQ
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PETERG
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 16, 2021 10:51 am 
 

InnesI wrote:
PETERG wrote:
On the topic of literature what is your opinion on book related Youtube channels? I only watch James Tullos for his amazing reviewing of awful books.


I only watch Better Than Food: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrY6MK ... ISvM2zEgoQ



I watched a couple of his videos. He is very good!
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PETERG
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 21, 2021 3:30 am 
 

So after a long time of waiting I am doing myself the deed to finally read Iliad and The Odyssey.
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Coastliner
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 24, 2022 8:52 am 
 

Finished reading Lolita by Nabokov for the umpteenth time. Language-wise probably the best fiction of the 20th century. I never get bored of it. However, the older I get the more the gap between the how and the what gets visible, i.e. is it ok to be thoroughly entertained by a raving child molester (the narrator, not the author of course!)?

Nevertheless, it's compulsive reading for anyone who… for anyone.

Currently: Martin Amis – Lionel Asbo. For the second time because I want to find out if it's really that bad. The contents – the lives of criminal chavs in the fictional London borough of Diston (=> Dalston) where every object hates every other object, where you get pregnant at twelve and where your 15 year old offspring regularly rolls in the hay with his own granny – are Amis's typical playground. There's lots of potential but it's all very flat, the characters are still way too nice, and Amis's characteristic near-plotlessness, that is usually counterbalanced by the laugh-out-loud jokes, pushes the reader onwards into nowhere in particular since, here, most of the jokes are either thin air or over my head.

If anyone wants to know what this author is usually capable of, try one of his older – witty and caustic, partly post-modern – works, e.g. "London Fields", "The Information", "Money", "Other People" (from the point of view of an amnesiac girl) or "Time's Arrow" (the life of a Nazi criminal told backwards, from death to birth, feat. crematory smokestacks sucking souls from the air to create… Jews.).
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LongHairIsSoFuckingCool
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 9:39 am 
 

Recently I read this essay about J.R.R Tolkien called "Epic Pooh" critiquing his work, and I gotta say, it made me proud of that I've never read any of it.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source= ... CUazX5dB5i
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Razakel
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 11:41 am 
 

As someone who loves both Michael Moorcock and Tolkien, I can tell you that you're doing yourself a dire disservice by ignoring the latter. It is a solid, influential essay though, and does raise some worthwhile points.

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Hexenmacht46290
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 3:05 pm 
 

Tolkien wasn't that serious about writing. He wrote a bunch of outlines, and lots of world building backstory, but only a few books. He started writing the first story in his universe, in 1916, while on leave from the battle of the Somme. He never finished it, and it was the last thing published by his son, in 2019, shortly before his death. His world is, very much the escapist fantasy, of someone trying to escape the world. The world he wanted to escape to didn't ever exist.

The Lord of the Rings is a fun read, but it starts way too slow, and only gets really exciting near the end. The truth is, he was like some power metal dork, who wanted to live in the middle ages. It's not cringeworthy, like C.S. Lewis, but it's close. It's cumbersome prose is the only claim to highbrow it has. The best parts are when the hobbits are talking about everyday life, because they act like real people. You don't get an explanation of who, or what Gandalf is, unless you read other mythology explanations, published after his death. And for such a black-and-white good and evil world, there are almost no references to religion. Evil isn't defined well, or even given much of a description. It's harder to take the "evil" seriously, when we don't really get to see it doing much evil. It all comes across, as a more primitive, crude form of storytelling. It's like he went so traditional, that he went pre-literate. Before books, there was theater, before that, there was someone telling a story. Usually with just the hero's perspective, and little complexity. Tolkien is that. He also spent too much time world building trivial things. He'd rather give you in-universe songs, poems, and obscure references, than a believable world.

Modern critics are valid to point out the racism in his pro-British Empire worldview, but he said that he hated Westerns, because of the negative portrayals of natives, and that he wanted the natives to defeat the cowboys. He was actually serious, about idealizing the rural, or the ancient. He seems like someone who was really traumatized by World War I, stayed depressed the rest of his life, and wrote stories for himself and his kids.

He wasn't as bad, about bringing characters back from the dead, as Dragonball.
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LongHairIsSoFuckingCool
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 4:07 pm 
 

God, he sounds so fucking pathetic. I would spit at him.
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~Guest 171512
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 5:13 pm 
 

If Tolkien sounds pathetic, just imagine how you sound.

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Empyreal
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 5:24 pm 
 

LongHairIsSoFuckingCool wrote:
God, he sounds so fucking pathetic. I would spit at him.


I don't care about a lot of fantasy shit, but man what a dumb thing to say.

Reading Kerouac ON THE ROAD. Starting to like it more - it takes a while to get into the headspinningly fast prose but it's got that old Americana charm I like.
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Hexenmacht46290
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 29, 2022 5:53 pm 
 

LongHairIsSoFuckingCool wrote:
God, he sounds so fucking pathetic. I would spit at him.

I think he had good ideas, but he needed some editors, to give him guidance. There wasn't much like it, at the time, so audiences weren't too critical. I like some Star Wars, but the first 3 movies would be as bad as the prequels, if George Lucas hadn't had competent people editing, directing, and designing. With the prequels, he micromanaged everything, and it was bad.

Tolkien's world has some interesting ideas, he just wasn't competent at writing, and he didn't know that(similar to music) what you leave out can be as important as what you put in. I didn't read The Lord of the Rings all the way through, until I was in my 20s, so I was an adult, and was better able to take it as entertainment, rather than idealizing it.
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~Guest 1452000
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 30, 2022 12:18 pm 
 

How is he an incompetent writer?

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LongHairIsSoFuckingCool
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 30, 2022 1:00 pm 
 

Spiral Architect wrote:
How is he an incompetent writer?

The essay lists multiple examples of bad prose from him, putting in entire paragraphs verbatim to prove the point.
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~Guest 171512
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 30, 2022 1:37 pm 
 

Hemingway made an entire career out of bad prose, so Tolkien is not so bad.

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Empyreal
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 30, 2022 1:38 pm 
 

Man I love Hemingway's simple as fuck prose. He really did a lot with that.
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