.
Frozen Hell by John W Campbell Jr. Written in the 30s and never released in it’s full, unedited form until recently. A cutback version saw publication as Who Goes There which was the inspiration for movies The Thing From Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’ve been on a serious early/mid 20th century sci fi kick for some time and I’m a massive fan of The Thing so this should hopefully be right up my street.
I read that in Sean Beans voice, just for the kicks.
One does not simply… read in Sean Bean’s voice just for the kicks.
Well, you could, but you’d probably die at the end.
I shall now proceed to read you all the entirety of Ulysses in Anders Samwise voice especially for David.
It only takes 24 hrs.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came…
Read the second of CS Lewis’s “space trilogy” books Voyage To Venus.
The first book, Out Of The Silent Planet, was more engaging as in stuff happened and there were some half decent ideas in. This one was about preventing the fall of man (the biblical one) happening on Venus and Christ it was a slog. Loads of talking. About 150 pages of talking. Then a fight followed by a bit of adventuring. Then a bunch more talking. Then it ended.
Hopefully the third one has a bit more oompf to it.
I thought that book was a failure on so many levels. Earth man confronts Satan and has to stop him corrupting Adam-and-Eve analogues on Venus. How does he do this? By superior moral arguments? Nope. By literally punching the heck out of Satan until he gives up. If Lewis was trying to write a Christian parable, this was an epic fail.
By literally punching the heck out of Satan until he gives up.
Fer christ sakes, use a gun!
Crazy motherfucker threw the only gun on the planet into the sea at the start of the book.
Books subsequently adapted are only one possible adaptation whereas you have a firmly set vision of something like Red Dwarf?
In Greek, I hope 
In Greek, I hope
I’m learning Modern Greek. Homeric Greek is beyond me. Maybe I’ll learn Ancient Greek once I’m more fluent in the modern language.
You’ve not read the Iliad until you’ve read it in the original Klingon
In Greek, I hope
I’m learning Modern Greek. Homeric Greek is beyond me. Maybe I’ll learn Ancient Greek once I’m more fluent in the modern language.
I know someone who studied ancient Greek, went to Greece and couldn’t speak to anyone except a group of monks. So you’re probably better off with modern Greek.
I tried starting the third CS Lewis space trilogy book and had to walk away after 25 pages. A bunch of college professor types sitting about talking about selling off some campus woodland is not my idea of a good time. Made a start to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and it’s off to a much more promising start (in that stuff is actually happening, it’s making an attempt to do some world building, and it’s holding my interest).
In Greek, I hope
I’m learning Modern Greek. Homeric Greek is beyond me. Maybe I’ll learn Ancient Greek once I’m more fluent in the modern language.
I know someone who studied ancient Greek, went to Greece and couldn’t speak to anyone except a group of monks. So you’re probably better off with modern Greek.
There are a lot of Greeks in Queens, and the languages I’m learning are based on the ones I heard on my college campus, so I can speak them when I go back to college.
Also, that makes sense, as Ancient Greek pronunciation is very different from Modern Greek, and while it can be read with a modern pronunciation, grammatically, it’s like trying to read Chaucer, even native speakers have trouble, even if a lot of words are familiar. There was a time when the modern Greek Government promoted a literary language as the version to be taught in schools that made it more like trying to read Shakespeare, (which is sort of the relationship between Modern and Biblical Hebrew), but they changed it, since it was so different from the spoken language. Even common words have changed: “House” in Modern Greek is “Spiti”, while in Ancient Greek it was “Oikos”; the former comes from Byzantine Greek “Ospition”, borrowed from Latin “Hospitium” “Guest-room”.
Some prose is just what I would call (probably incorrectly) “poetic”, more so than a lot of so-called poetry. Sometimes words just fit together in pleasing ways, regardless of what they are saying. I am completely incapable of defining what makes that happen though, and I think it must be completely subjective.
Oh, I think you can call a lot of prose quite correctly poetic. And while the effect is probably subjective to some extent, I think it is fair to say that a style can be ojectively more poetic or more prosaic.
I am currently reading a novel by Sibylle Berg called “Der Mann schläft” (“The Man Sleeps”) and what I like about this one is mainly the lyrical quality of the prose. Cormac McCarthy’s style of writing prose is breathtakingly beautiful. And recent one that I very much felt had a lyrical quality to it that really enthralled me was “Milkman” by Anna Burns.
Der Mann schläft
Who’s der mann that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about?
Cormac McCarthy’s style of writing prose is breathtakingly beautiful.
I’m going to dive into a book I’ve had in my read pile for years tonight.
NLP – The New Technology of Achievement by Charles Faulkner.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming have a bad rep in my head, from when I read about it in The Game. But my aim has nothing to do with the practices of the latter book, and all to do with just wanting to give my personal development (which could just as well be called personal devolution if I just look at the last couple of years) a twist.
By the way, for people who have not read The Game: read it. It’s one of my favourite books. I don’t at all read it as a “guide to pick up girls by being an asshole” but rather like “why you shouldn’t practice the shit we did in this book plus you can learn how to connect with strangers in different ways”.
The moral of the story in the book is 100% “Don’t do this shit.” but I’m not too stupid to see Strauss has included the “tricks” they use and what they use them for as a selling point for just that. Still a good book.
After reading the parts where Courtney Love inserts herself in to Strauss’ life I became convinced Cobain and Epstein have the fact that they did not kill themselves in common.
Didn’t he write a follow up where he disavowed all the shit in the Game? I think it was even called Game Over.
He already sort of disavows it by the end of the first book but yes. He tried washing his hands of what people did inspired by the first one, IIRC. Haven’t read it though.
Yep. I try to keep up with the Booker winners; not that I always manage to. But they really know what they’re doing, with the Man Booker.
I read the new David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue, about an up-and-coming band in the late 1960s.
It’s mostly a much more traditional novel than his last few, with the exception of one segment which goes fully into The Bone Clocks territory while also being a direct follow-up to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. That whole bit feel like it would be impenetrable to anyone who hasn’t read The Bone Clocks.
Outside of that, the book has a bit too much of the thing that happens in novels like this where the characters keep interacting with real-world musicians of the time. It mostly makes sense in context, but it feels a bit self-indulgent to have real musicians keep talking about how much they like and admire these fake musicians. It just happens too often, and it starts to lose its impact fairly quickly.
Being a David Mitchell book, there’s also a lot of interactions and appearances by characters from his other books. Some of these are obvious, like a main character being a de Zoet, the leads from The Bone Clocks showing up, or having one of the band members date Luisa Rey, but we also get Bat Secundo, the talk radio host from Ghostwritten, a name check of Felix Finch, the critic killed in Cloud Atlas, or a brief appearance by Aphra Booth, a minor Bone Clocks character.
Like the real world celebrity stuff, it sometimes gets a bit too self-indulgent and unnecessary, where it occasionally feels like a character shows up just to say their name for recognition’s sake without impacting the story at all, but it mostly worked for me.
It’s not my favourite of his books, but I was extremely happy to have another David Mitchell novel to read, and look forward to re-reading it already.
This is sort of a big one, but I hope people will be willing to understand my reasons. After The Brothers Kamarazov, I am going to read The Satanic Verses. I was watching a retrospective on the controversy, and I saw an argument about whether Rushdie “brought it on himself”, but I saw someone comment that to form an opinion on that, one needs to read the book; even though it is thirty years later, I am a proponent of Free Speech, so I want to form an opinion of my own on this issue. Also, the book is “magical realism” and that genre was created in Cuba. My father is Cuban, so I want to read Cuban literature, but magical realism seems to be a hard genre, so I want to read an untranslated book, written in English originally, from the genre, before reading translated books from Cuba and the rest of Latin America, so for the above reason, I have chosen The Satanic Verses. I hope people understand that I’m not reading it out of hate of Muslims, but to understand, and to see if I would like the genre.
This is sort of a big one, but I hope people will be willing to understand my reasons. After The Brothers Kamarazov, I am going to read The Satanic Verses. I was watching a retrospective on the controversy, and I saw an argument about whether Rushdie “brought it on himself”, but I saw someone comment that to form an opinion on that, one needs to read the book; even though it is thirty years later, I am a proponent of Free Speech, so I want to form an opinion of my own on this issue. Also, the book is “magical realism” and that genre was created in Cuba. My father is Cuban, so I want to read Cuban literature, but magical realism seems to be a hard genre, so I want to read an untranslated book, written in English originally, from the genre, before reading translated books from Cuba and the rest of Latin America, so for the above reason, I have chosen The Satanic Verses. I hope people understand that I’m not reading it out of hate of Muslims, but to understand, and to see if I would like the genre.
I have seen the “brought it on themselves”-argument also about the danish cartoonists and Charlie Hebdo. There is no difference between that argument and “she deserved to be raped because she was wearing a short skirt” and proponents of both those arguments should be treated with the same contempt.
And I have read The Satanic Verses (a long time ago), but don’t think it’s required to reach that conclusion.
and also some say that his “lo real maravilloso” was the precedent to South American authors such as Garcia Marquez.
Yeah that’s the one I was refering to… but he himself differentiates his style from “magical realism”, so you know… 
I’ve been reading bad ghost stories.
The Men in the Turnip Field: There was two fellows out working in a field, hoeing turnips they was, and the one he stop and he lean on his hoe, and he mop his vace and he say, “Yur — I don’t believe in these yur ghosties!”
And t’other man he say, “Don’t ‘ee?”
And he VANISHED!
he lean on his hoe
Bad erotica too.
Yesterday, an anonymous irish geezer sent me a series of videos by Des Bishop, where he works minimum wage jobs and reports on it with comedy. While he wasn’t undercover per se, and didn’t deal with xenophobia in any way as far as I’ve watched, watching it made me really want to re-read Lowest of the Low (Ganz Unten) by Günther Walraff. So I ordered it, found a used copy for 15 SEK (~1.5€/$).
Anyone here read it? I do recommend that book for everyone who hasn’t. Hardcore journalist misery porn at its finest.
The first book in The Expanse series is 99p today on Kindle UK so I picked it up. It’s a few back on my ‘to read’ pile but just in case anyone else was looking for a bargain.
It’s very good, but the second is where it gets really good – so if they have that on discount too I would say snap it up!
They are like heroin dealers Lorcan, only the first episode in any series gets the 99p treatment. 😂
the 99p treatment.
Silly me, trying to figure out what GGP stands for….
The first book in The Expanse series is 99p today on Kindle UK so I picked it up. It’s a few back on my ‘to read’ pile but just in case anyone else was looking for a bargain.
It’s very good, but the second is where it gets really good – so if they have that on discount too I would say snap it up!
They are like heroin dealers Lorcan, only the first episode in any series gets the 99p treatment. 😂
Then you shall be without the glory that is adding Bobbie Draper and Chrisjen Avasarala to the story.
Unless you’re watched the show, I guess.
Read a recent Ian McEwan, “Nutshell”. As the title suggests, this novel plays with Hamlet motifs, but in this case the protagonist hasn’t been born yet. Which isn’t stopping him from narrating what’s going on around him from the womb, and what’s happening is that his mother is plotting to kill his father, with the help of her lover who turns out to be the father’s brother. So, you know, Hamlet, but told from the view of an unborn baby and set in modern-day London, with the kingdom replaced with a decrepit but extremely valuable property in a posh part of the city.
Quick read, and a lot of fun. I mean, this is clearly a kind of literary exercise – retelling this old Shakespearean story and combining it with the voice of a narrator who is stuck in the womb – but it’s very effective as the crime novel where the narrator is powerless to stop the hapless would-be murderers from developing and executing their crazy plans. Good read.
There’s no point in me reading it now, Christian.
I is joking. I read it at the time
The Colour of Magic or Equal Rites.
TCM is the first discworld novel, it’s as good a place as any to start. Introduction of Rincewind.
Equal Rites is very early too, maybe the third or fourth, and it’s about a girl that wants to become a wizard, but can’t… because men.
The Wee Free Men – the first of the Tiffany Aching books. Then, following that series, everything Discworld. She’ll see a lot of Eske in Equal Rites filtering through in Tiffany if she reads it that way round. When other characters from the Aching series appear throughout the world she’ll greet them like familiar friends. I either read The Colour of Magic or Moving Pictures first.
The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost.
What a gig that would be.
Equal Rites is very early too, maybe the third or fourth, and it’s about a girl that wants to become a wizard, but can’t… because men.
My choice too. Equal Rites is the third, and his writing is a big leap up from the first two books. The first two are great for a jaded fantasy reader who will get all the tropes Pratchett is poking fun at. Equal Rites would be a great book for anyone who’s never read fantasy before, because it’s just a great story. And has a good message.
You can both read the first chapter of The Wee Free Men here, Dave:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/children/2017/the-wee-free-men-extract-by-terry-pratchett/
The first two Discworld are a fun read. There’s the double act of Rincewind and Twoflower. Also, the Luggage.
My choice too. Equal Rites is the third, and his writing is a big leap up from the first two books.
Yup. I met Pratchett back in the late 80s (my mother was in charge of a sci-fi and fantasy section of a literary festival and invited him, so we saw his talk and panel and then went to dinner) and he’d only just quit his job at the gas board after the first two books and he was writing Equal Rites. There is a significant leap in quality.
It reminds me a little of Alan Davis of all things. There’s a point around the 6th or 7th episode of his Captain Britain run with Alan Moore where he was earning enough to go full time and there’s an instant video game style level up in the quality.
I suspect that probably plays less into novel writing really because time isn’t of the essence too much but either way the first two Discworld books are full of good ideas but quite clunky and with lots of faults.
Elif Shafak on the value of literature, “We need storyhood against bigotry…There is a direct relation between coexistence, inclusion, democracy in a society and how well supported its creative industries are.”
Oh, that sounds good. Equal Rites and The Wee Free Men go on the list first then.
Just a quick note, like Bernadette said, I’d probably go through the other Tiffany Aching books first (The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd’s Crown). They’re all young adult readers, and offer a great arc for kids and their first experiences with Discworld. You also get to know the core characters that’ll be in Equal Rites, too.
If you’re both enjoying Equal Rites, finish it first.
I still haven’t read The Shepherd’s Crown. It’s the last one so it’s a book about Terry as well as Tiffany and Discworld and endings and letting go as much as anything. 
Now I’m a bit teary and I’d been doing so well so far today.
Cuddles to Christian.
I finished reading this tonight.
Also known as “the book Hickman ripped off for the Moira stuff in HoXPoX”.
I enjoyed it anyway. I thought the central time-loop premise was really engaging and the plot was interesting, with some neat “what ifs” as history warps around the events of the book.
It wrapped up a little bit suddenly for my liking (and there were a few characters and plot points that I thought would become more prominent again later, but never did) but other than that I quite liked it.
Also, aside from the basic central premise of characters that relive their lives over and over, like Groundhog Day, it doesn’t bear much resemblance to HoXPoX, despite all the fuss.
I’m reading this.
The whole experience of reading it can be suummed up by this image.
There’s three disembodied (?) astronauts, a fox and a duck (both of which may or may not be evil), maybe time travel or dimensional travel, and a City and a Company (both ominously capitalised).
It’s not bad. I don’t know if I’d recomend it though. It’s taking an absolute age to get through as I stop and put the book down after each chapter to scratch my head and go “What the fuck is happening?!”
