What are you reading?

secretlettermkr

Waiting Room
Apr 12, 2022
315
437
Providence is incredible. I highly recommend the annotations after. It made me do a whole re-read of the book:

I was reading this site with annotations and comments!, actually only read the entry for chapter 6. I just finished chapter 7.
I'm also reading two books of short stories of HPL in between, So some links between original and Moore take i make them after reading the Providence chapter and thinking "oh this came from that story!.." and some backwards, I read a Providence chapter, an then I read an H.P.L short story and go... "Ah, so this is where that bit came from.."
The whole Dream Realm concept reminded me so much of the Black Lodge and the different worlds on THE RETURN
 

saturn's child

RR Diner
Apr 17, 2022
43
66
Will definitely have to check out Providence! & Moore in general. I grew up on Lovecraft but it has been awhile since I've gotten eldritch...

I recently read William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy, something that's been on my radar for years. Totally loved them. I'm going to get his short story collection Burning Chrome next, just so I can delve a little more into that world. I've heard some more 'hard SF' fans critique Gibson, but I've never cared a whole lot for hard SF I guess. Just gimme a great mood to get lost in.

Currently dipping into the Poetic Edda (Jackson Crawford translation) & TechGnosis by Erik Davis.
& started working at a cool local book store (new & second hand); I've already seen a bunch of amazing titles passing through, so I'll no doubt update this thread semi-regularly!
 

Dom

White Lodge
Jul 10, 2022
654
667
I recently read William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy, something that's been on my radar for years. Totally loved them. I'm going to get his short story collection Burning Chrome next, just so I can delve a little more into that world.
You'd probably have been better reading Burning Chrome first, given stories such as Johnny Mnemonic are set before Neuromancer and are followed up on in the novel! Good books. It took me years to read them all I blow hot and cold with Gibson's prose style. During the lockdowns I bought the trilogy and Burning Chrome and read the lot. in a few days!

I've heard some more 'hard SF' fans critique Gibson, but I've never cared a whole lot for hard SF I guess. Just gimme a great mood to get lost in.
It depends on how you classify 'hard SF.' The Sprawl Trilogy is compatible with the 'Hard SF' genre, but Gibson's gradually pushed more in the direction of 'contemporary literary fiction' as the years have gone by, showing more interest in politics. I've found his more recent stuff pretty weak. That first trilogy is a joy, though.

Currently dipping into the Poetic Edda (Jackson Crawford translation)

That's great! I think our society is suffering because we're not being taught our ancient myths and legends anymore and those of us who are interested have to find it out. For me, it's currently Graeco-Roman myths and Celtic myths. They teach us a great deal about the ideas, hopes and dreams of the people who founded our civilisations and are a crucial foundation-stone in knowing who we are and where we come from. The level of sophistication in hundreds-to-thousands-of-years-old tales is astonishing. There's a 'literal' history we can learn - dates and so on - but there's something about reading our mythology that gives us a connection to a cultural history we can only find within ourselves. I feel enriched by reading it, connected to my ancestors.
 
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saturn's child

RR Diner
Apr 17, 2022
43
66
It depends on how you classify 'hard SF.' The Sprawl Trilogy is compatible with the 'Hard SF' genre, but Gibson's gradually pushed more in the direction of 'contemporary literary fiction' as the years have gone by, showing more interest in politics. I've found his more recent stuff pretty weak. That first trilogy is a joy, though.

Ah, I see! I don't really know what I'm talking about re: SF genres (😅), I just read something that implied a bunch of people thought the Neuromancer trilogy wasn't Hard SF enough? Regardless, not a term I should be throwing about without knowing its definition!, haha. I too burned though them nice & quick, kind of feel like reading them again soon actually.

That's great! I think our society is suffering because we're not being taught our ancient myths and legends anymore and those of us who are interested have to find it out. For me, it's currently Graeco-Roman myths and Celtic myths. They teach us a great deal about the ideas, hopes and dreams of the people who founded our civilisations and are a crucial foundation-stone in knowing who we are and where we come from. The level of sophistication in hundreds-to-thousands-of-years-old tales is astonishing. There's a 'literal' history we can learn - dates and so on - but there's something about reading our mythology that gives us a connection to a cultural history we can only find within ourselves. I feel enriched by reading it, connected to my ancestors.

Glad to see you're another fan of early myth(ology)! I'd imagine there are a few of us on this forum. I studied a bunch of it in my undergrad, but I've always been interested. The first books I read (& reread) as a young child were collected Arthurian tales & another volume of Robin Hood stories; would love to get my hands on those editions now that I think about it. I feel such a resonance with so much of it, including many cultures I have no ancestral connection to (although I do have Norse/Celtic blood in me). Go figure that I'm also a fan of Jung, Joseph Campbell, Eliade, etc.

Actually, it'd be interesting to know what first books you & others read (or if not literal first book, then an early one that made an impact)
 

Dom

White Lodge
Jul 10, 2022
654
667
Ah, I see! I don't really know what I'm talking about re: SF genres (😅), I just read something that implied a bunch of people thought the Neuromancer trilogy wasn't Hard SF enough? Regardless, not a term I should be throwing about without knowing its definition!, haha. I too burned though them nice & quick, kind of feel like reading them again soon actually.
It gets decidedly confusing!! I've got into trouble for mixing up 'sci-fi', 'SF' and 'science fiction' on more than one occasion'! :D I know 'sci-fi' is the pulp stuff - tough guys riding in flying cars, saving scantily-clad damsels in distress, while shooting baddies with zap guns - but the delineation between 'SF' and 'science fiction seems pretty obscure to me!

At the end of the day, I love the Sprawl Trilogy, so that's all that matters. It blends pulp detective fiction and pulp sci-fi with harder science fiction ideas. Walter Jon Williams's books Hardwired, Solip: System, and Voice of the Whirlwind are also worth checking out if you like the Sprawl novels.

Glad to see you're another fan of early myth(ology)! I'd imagine there are a few of us on this forum. I studied a bunch of it in my undergrad, but I've always been interested. The first books I read (& reread) as a young child were collected Arthurian tales & another volume of Robin Hood stories; would love to get my hands on those editions now that I think about it. I feel such a resonance with so much of it, including many cultures I have no ancestral connection to (although I do have Norse/Celtic blood in me). Go figure that I'm also a fan of Jung, Joseph Campbell, Eliade, etc.
Yes, it's why I've enjoyed Stephen Lawhead's books so much. I like that his King Raven trilogy delves into the original Welsh myths that Robin Hood comes from, for example. I've got the Welsh Celtic blood - the Welsh branch of my family has a strong bloodline. I met up with some distant family - cousins twice removed, so my grandfather's brother's grandchildren - whom I hadn't seen for many years and we all recognised each other as soon as I walked into the bar! My cousin-thrice-removed, who was five at the time, looks exactly like I did at that age.

Actually, it'd be interesting to know what first books you & others read (or if not literal first book, then an early one that made an impact)
For me, it's a mix. I remember the BBC serial 'The Legend of King Arthur' from when I was very little (four years old in 1979) but I found two wonderful little hardbacks on my Dad's bookshelves, one on myths and legends of Devon and one on Cornwall (I live in Devon, on the border of Cornwall.)

From there, I learnt about the origins of the Rivers Tamar, Taw and Tavy (I see the Tavy's mist out of the back of my house in the morning) and how the church on nearby Brentor (referred to as Brent Tor in the old book) came to be on the top of the tor. The books feature the Devil and likes of St Michael, so there's a strong Celtic Christian background to many of the myths, dating the most recent versions to the last 1800 years.

I've got a hardback I picked up as a child (in 1981) called Folktales andLlegends. It's actually a translation of a Czechoslovakian book by Michaela Tvrdíková, translated by Vera Gissing. (and has myths from across Europe. There's a retelling of Gilgamesh, Osiris, various Greek legends, the founding of Rome (Romulus and Remus) Beowulf, King Arthur (the sword is called 'Escalibur' here), Germanic tales such as Siegfried and Kriemhild, Robin Hood, other tales from all over the world - from Russia, Serbia, China, New Zealand (Maori) - to Hiawatha (Iroquois).

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This is an image from eBay of a copy someone is selling. The book had a huge impact on me. The other was Grimm's Fairy Tales. My Mum had a toned down, illustrated version from her childhood - early 1950s - and I loved that. I later (not that much later) read the unexpurgated versions. Obviously I loved all the movies like Jason and the Argonauts!

Where 'grown up' texts are concerned, Robert Graves did a terrific translation of The Iliad called 'The Anger of Achilles.' Graves was particularly keen on bringing the classics to general readers, so there was none of the stodgy, academic language that dogs many allegedly 'readable' translations. EV Rieu's Penguin Classics translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey are also very good, especially in the latest revisions of the texts (overseen in part by Rieu's son.) I've also read Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese Ghost Stories, published by Penguin.

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I loved these. Hearn's books are hugely popular and influential in Japan, translated back into Japanese. Huge amounts of the J-Horror film genre owes its existence to these stories. And it goes without saying that everyone should watch Masaki Kobayashi's colourful 1964 portmanteau film, Kwaidan, which adapts several of Hearn's collected stories.

I've also enjoyed the likes of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf.

Given the storytelling style of ancient tales is very different - many were from the oral tradition - I have no issues with people finding good retellings that keep the essence of the stories, but tell them in modern English. You have to watch out for authors who change them, unfortunately: you get writers who take out the love potion from Tristan and Iseult, for example. Peter Ackroyd wrote excellent modern English versions of Le Morte d'Arthur (under the title 'The Death of King Arthur') and The Canterbury Tales, which is an absolute riot of a book!

The oral tradition stories from 3,000+ years ago can be a lot of work. I mean, the latter half of the Book of Exodus, where God tells Moses how to build the Tabernacle involves God giving him incredibly detailed measurements, then Moses goes down from the mountain and recites everything God just told him, word for word, then the book describes how the Israelites build the Tabernacle, repeating the measurements, word for word, for a third time. In my mind, I imagine a bunch of children sitting around a storyteller and, by the third time, all the children are chanting the measurements along with the storyteller. That was the genius of the oral tradition before writing was common - using rhythm and repetition to make the stories stick in the mind.

Having read Stephen Lawhead's books, I'm going to pick up The Mabinogion and a couple of other books of Celtic tales, as they really resonate with me. I've grown up around old Celtic crosses on the moors and the like, so I want to delve into it more deeply. Dartmoor is a place I hate leaving. There's a wildness there that no amount of industrialisation can bury.

And it goes without saying that my Dad being a classical music devotee led to me watching and loving Wagner's Ring saga and Parsifal. I've got some decent stagings too. I hate the modern 'Eurotrash' interpretations where you have things like the Rhine staged as a corporate boardroom or knights dressed as schoolboys riding bicycles instead of horses! I love the New York Met/James Levine staging of The Ring from the 1990s.

Yeah, I suspect a lot of us have an interest in the mythology that underlies our culture. I think there's a balance between studying it and a section of postmodernists who like to 'deconstruct' (aka 'destroy') it. I've had arguments with academic types online who think it's great that the old tales are dying out and aren't taught anymore, that they full of '-isms' and '-phobias' and that they'd rather kids were into Marvel superheroes instead. Needless to say, to me, they're part of a problem!! :D
 

AXX°N N.

Waiting Room
Apr 14, 2022
270
619
My earliest memory of being fascinated with something was being in my school library in maybe 2nd grade and pulling a huge book about Greek mythology off the shelf. Suddenly the entire existence of the weird building that is school was justified ... although it ended up being far more interesting than anything that was required reading!

I too really dislike the deconstructionist view of literary canonicity. I think it's a shame that there's no sense of tradition or lineage. To say we shouldn't read Schopenhauer (to use a recent example I came across) because of his social views is fallacious, because it's ignorant of how his views have had foundational impact on the continuity of thought that even allows us to have that view; whether we like it or not, our knowledge compounds and owes a great deal to the past, even if there are disagreeable elements.

I think even if your motivations as a reader or writer are to eschew the classic, it almost always requires understanding those things to meaningfully depart. I admire a great deal of fiction that gets labeled postmodern (I'm always running into instances of writers disagreeing with how their work is termed...) but really dislike this notion of erasing the past, especially because those things being offered as replacements aren't very good ones. I'll take a weird old fable any day over another vaguely autobiographic MFA graduate narrative that isn't daring in any way and becomes, if you squint, a barely fictionalized dressing-down of the same old grievances that already get plent of airtime on social media.
 

Dom

White Lodge
Jul 10, 2022
654
667
My earliest memory of being fascinated with something was being in my school library in maybe 2nd grade and pulling a huge book about Greek mythology off the shelf. Suddenly the entire existence of the weird building that is school was justified ... although it ended up being far more interesting than anything that was required reading!
I was always getting in trouble for reading during lessons at primary school. To this day I feel a greater attachment to a sort of metaphysical realm that ties into ours. I feel like a sort of 'magic' infuses our everyday realm. When I'm out on the moors, I feel it profoundly. Urban environments squash it. I appreciate the work done by authors and artists to create an 'romance' about certain cities, but I just don't find it there.

I too really dislike the deconstructionist view of literary canonicity. I think it's a shame that there's no sense of tradition or lineage. To say we shouldn't read Schopenhauer (to use a recent example I came across) because of his social views is fallacious, because it's ignorant of how his views have had foundational impact on the continuity of thought that even allows us to have that view; whether we like it or not, our knowledge compounds and owes a great deal to the past, even if there are disagreeable elements.
I agree. The past is the past. Hang a lantern on it and move forward accepting that things are different now: that was the path the human race beat its way through to make it this far. We had some utterly fascinating - often horrible - adventures getting here, but the power of the stories we created and our ancestors experienced is still astonishing. I remember reading a section of The Iliad where Hector and Andromache are talking together and finding it deeply moving. It struck me that it's a story from the better part of 3,000 years ago. That's almost overwhelming to think about. Would some storyteller 2,500 years ago have imagined that his words would be resonating thousands of years later?

With regards tomany of the people who seek to deconstruct, the whole 'year zero' mentality that accompanying it is rather frightening. King Arthur might not have existed technically, but he's also really existed in some form in our collective cultural consciousness for as much as 1700 years. Certainly, he's been around since the later part of the early mediaeval period. And the legends that have grown around him - ideas of chivalry and personal conduct in the West, for example - have impacted the way people behave towards each other throughout that time.

I think even if your motivations as a reader or writer are to eschew the classic, it almost always requires understanding those things to meaningfully depart.
Bingo! Look at someone like David Lynch, Pierre Boulez or Luciano Berio. All can fall into the 'avante-garde' or 'postmodern' types at some point, but Lynch has shown time and again that he's a master of 'orthodox' filmmaking. One or two of his episodes of Twin Peaks episodes and much of The Elephant Man show an absolute mastery of filmic technique. From there, he's moved into more experimental territory. Berio and Boulez, similarly, understood music and could master Romantic music and experiment wildly. Berio - sanctioned by the Puccini estate to do so - wrote a completion of Turandot, yet also wrote the insanity that is Outis! In order to depart from the norms, at some point one has to understand the orthodox.

People who seek to destroy the orthodox are destroying a part of our language. After all, in the English language, our months are named after Roman gods (plus Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus!) our weekends the Sun and Saturn and Monday the Moon, then after Norse Gods. Our society is built on references to our cultural myths. Sadly, I think that's part of the intention. It's a low level version of Pol Pot's extreme version.

I admire a great deal of fiction that gets labeled postmodern (I'm always running into instances of writers disagreeing with how their work is termed...) but really dislike this notion of erasing the past, especially because those things being offered as replacements aren't very good ones.
Yes - and there's some that is worthwhile as a study of how we tell stories and can enhance our understanding. The Name of the Rose is a famous example.

I'll take a weird old fable any day over another vaguely autobiographic MFA graduate narrative that isn't daring in any way and becomes, if you squint, a barely fictionalized dressing-down of the same old grievances that already get plent of airtime on social media.
Yes, the worst thing is when we get the cliché of wanting to 'start a conversation' about a subject, which is when someone does something grossly stupid or offensive.

The Celts believed the 'Otherworld' and the 'real' world existed indivisibly. I like that idea: that a world of myth underscoring our reality exists all around us. It enriches everything we see, knowing that every name we trot out so casually has a deeper cultural reference. One of the most poetic demonstrations of this that I ever saw was in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Darmok, where Picard had to learn a culture's mythology in order to communicate. The West has been particularly aggressive in the last century about stripping away its founding myths. I think our world is infinitely greyer and lacking in beauty for that. I'd much rather look at a Pre-Raphaelite painting than a washing up liquid bottle with stickers around it, as I once saw in a modern art gallery in Bristol!! :D

And we see so much in our culture that develops even in our era if we let it. Look at the Xenomorph Queen in Aliens, then look at the Jabberwocky!

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How many people see the similarity nowadays, because Lewis Carroll has long fallen out of favour? I wonder whether the Queen was an intentional homage or an unconscious cultural reference!!
 
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