What are you reading?

Hello, Urthlings. What are you reading these days? I haven't been reading much Wolfe lately, so nothing is fresh enough in my mind to participate in some of the other ongoing discussions. I am working my way through the Harvard Classics. I just finished the fourth volume, the complete poems in English by John Milton. *Paradise Lost *was a treat, as was Franklin's autobiography in the first volume and the *New Atlantis *by Bacon in the third, which is an old favorite of mine from my philosophy major days. I've also recently read The Sea, the Sea *by Iris Murdoch, which was excellent, and *The City of Dreaming Books *by Moers, which was great, silly fun.* I also read the first 50 pages of Lookout Cartridge by McElroy and decided to put it back on the shelf for the time being. It wasn't particularly *bad, *it was just entirely unsuccessful in grabbing my attention within a reasonable amount of time, together with being written in a very disjointed, unique style. I will probably get back to it in the near future. Anyway, I am getting back on a Wolfe kick today by finishing the latter half of The Island of Doctor Death, and Other Stories, and Other Stories. Looking forward to it!

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Haven't read much lately but in the middle of Musil's Man of No Qualities, in about the fifth volume of Sturgeon's collected stories, Mishima's Forbidden Colors (Mishima's philosophy always interested me), Bolano's 2666 which seems to me at its heart kind of a Twin Peaks urban fantasy. Surprised it got any literary attention. McElroy has always been one of those authors I feel I should like but in execution he seems rather boring. At least you have to pay attention when you read him. My Peace write up is "done" but it is missing a connection I know that is lurking, between the devils of hell with misplaced limbs who are one with their victims and the carnival people and the dog boy whom Weer's father will take hunting in a dream and languishes across Weer's leg as he thinks of his picnic with Margeret Lorn, so I am waiting on that final edit to post it. After that I will be on Forleson. I have not abandoned my project but I have to be in the right frame of mind to do quality work on it. Clearly island of doctor death and other stories is Wolfe's best collection.

Just finished R. A. Lafferty's late novel Serpent's Egg (1987) last week - mad brilliance as always. (Read John Williams's Butcher's Crossing just before that - existential buffalo hunting, ya can't beat that.) Reading the stories in the new Centipede Press volume 1 of Lafferty's complete short stories - whenever I have the chance to sit down and carefully handle the book (as I usually have books thrust in a backpack getting bent up as I read them all over the place in between everything). Have already read all those stories, but hugely enjoying revisiting them, especially in a quality physical format worthy of them. Realised I hadn't finished the last 30 or so pages of King's Salem's Lot, so gonna round that out. Recently read a 200 page poem from the Middle Ages called Piers Plowman(14th c.) - it was for a course I'm in. Paradise Lost is one of my all time fave long poems and Piers *has probably shot right up there with it. The latter actually makes a very interesting contrast to the former in just about every respect. (And to be reductively categorical, I'd say Wolfe is more Milton while Lafferty is more *Piers - the former 'high' and the latter 'low', both genius and both all-encompassing and stretching imagination to its limits, each in its respective way). Really torn about what novel to get into next. Thinking of another King just for simple fun. Maybe Wolfe's The Sorcerer's House - that's the next one up for me in the post-2000 novels I haven't read. Maybe McCarthy, maybe Michael Bishop, maybe Dan Simmons... I dunno. -DOJP

"Bolano's 2666 which seems to me at its heart kind of a Twin Peaks urban fantasy." Well, now I kind of want to read it! "McElroy has always been one of those authors I feel I should like but in execution he seems rather boring. At least you have to pay attention when you read him." Have you read Lookout Cartridge? I also lucked out and found a copy of Women and Men for $3 a few months ago, I would be willing to try that one if it is better. I adore Pynchon, Gaddis, and Barth (with whom McElroy is so often mentioned) so I was surprised to be so turned off right away. "Clearly island of doctor death and other stories is Wolfe's best collection." "The Hero as Werewolf" and "Alien Stones" are really outstanding stories. So far I am enjoying the collection at least as much as Endangered Species.

Have THE LAND ACROSS on hold at the local library, so hope to start that soon. In the meantime, I've been posting reviews of what I'm reading to my blog at http://stephenrcase.wordpress.com. Search "Wolfe" to view recent reviews of PEACE, FIFTH HEAD, and SHADOWS OF THE NEW SUN. (Also, I tend to view a lot of what I read through a Wolfean lens, so he gets mentioned quite a bit.) -S

I found it hard to enjoy poetry for a long time, but a few things recently have swayed me. Paradise Lost, and the poems scattered throughout the Gormenghast books, of all things. "Maybe Wolfe's The Sorcerer's House" Yes! This is my absolute favorite of Wolfe's post-Long Sun novels. It is great.

I like this in your review of The Fifth Head of Cerberus: "I can't keep beginning reviews of Gene Wolfe's work with "one of the best books I've ever read" or "one of my favorite books of all time," I started off by reading The Book of the New Sun, Peace, and The Fifth Head of Cerberus and was shocked at what masterpieces they were, then proceeded to buy up 40-odd volumes of his work right away. I definitely understand your sentiment!

Just finished the new Lafferty collection as well. Good to revisit old masters. :) I can't recommend Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation highly enough. It's part of a new "trilogy" (the others will be out by September), but each book is going to be quite different. It's the smartest, most entertaining, and most effective continuation of the "weird" tradition I've read in years. He learned everything you're supposed to learn from Bierce, Blackwood, Machen, Lovecraft, C.A. Smith, and the others, and turned it into something fresh. Poetry: Edith Sodergran, a Finnish poet (translated, don't worry), and I think Wolfe fans would appreciate her sensibilities. I also read Chambers' The King in Yellow based on all the True Detective buzz. Fun, but not mind blowing. And my new discovery is Michael Cisco. I don't know how to describe what he writes, so I'll just leave it at that. Hello, Urthlings. What are you reading these days? I haven't been reading much Wolfe lately, so nothing is fresh enough in my mind to participate in some of the other ongoing discussions. I am working my way through the Harvard Classics. I just finished the fourth volume, the complete poems in English by John Milton. Paradise Lost was a treat, as was Franklin's autobiography in the first volume and the New Atlantis by Bacon in the third, which is an old favorite of mine from my philosophy major days. I've also recently read The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, which was excellent, and The City of Dreaming Books by Moers, which was great, silly fun. I also read the first 50 pages of Lookout Cartridge by McElroy and decided to put it back on the shelf for the time being. It wasn't particularly bad, it was just entirely unsuccessful in grabbing my attention within a reasonable amount of time, together with being written in a very disjointed, unique style. I will probably get back to it in the near future. Anyway, I am getting back on a Wolfe kick today by finishing the latter half of The Island of Doctor Death, and Other Stories, and Other Stories. Looking forward to it!

De-lurking to say that I, too, am on a bit of a Lafferty drive at the moment, having just acquired Fourth Mansions and the collection Does Anyone Else Have Something to Add? I really enjoyed Past Master a couple of years back and I'm looking forward to reading more Lafferty. Hard to get hold of in the UK though. DOJP has written a few great reviews of his Lafferty explorations on his blog recently, which I note that he's too modest to mention here :) [1]http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.co.uk/ Cheers, Mark On Wed, Mar 12, 2014, at 01:58 PM, Daniel Otto Jack Petersen wrote: Just finished R. A. Lafferty's late novel Serpent's Egg (1987) last week - mad brilliance as always. (Read John Williams's Butcher's Crossing just before that - existential buffalo hunting, ya can't beat that.) Reading the stories in the new Centipede Press volume 1 of Lafferty's complete short stories - whenever I have the chance to sit down and carefully handle the book (as I usually have books thrust in a backpack getting bent up as I read them all over the place in between everything). Have already read all those stories, but hugely enjoying revisiting them, especially in a quality physical format worthy of them. Realised I hadn't finished the last 30 or so pages of King's Salem's Lot, so gonna round that out. Recently read a 200 page poem from the Middle Ages called Piers Plowman (14th c.) - it was for a course I'm in. Paradise Lost is one of my all time fave long poems and Piers has probably shot right up there with it. The latter actually makes a very interesting contrast to the former in just about every respect. (And to be reductively categorical, I'd say Wolfe is more Milton while Lafferty is more Piers - the former 'high' and the latter 'low', both genius and both all-encompassing and stretching imagination to its limits, each in its respective way). Really torn about what novel to get into next. Thinking of another King just for simple fun. Maybe Wolfe's The Sorcerer's House - that's the next one up for me in the post-2000 novels I haven't read. Maybe McCarthy, maybe Michael Bishop, maybe Dan Simmons... I dunno. -DOJP On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 1:26 PM, Antonin Scriabin <[2]kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> wrote: Hello, Urthlings. What are you reading these days? I haven't been reading much Wolfe lately, so nothing is fresh enough in my mind to participate in some of the other ongoing discussions. I am working my way through the Harvard Classics. I just finished the fourth volume, the complete poems in English by John Milton. Paradise Lost was a treat, as was Franklin's autobiography in the first volume and the New Atlantis by Bacon in the third, which is an old favorite of mine from my philosophy major days. I've also recently read The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, which was excellent, and The City of Dreaming Books by Moers, which was great, silly fun. I also read the first 50 pages of Lookout Cartridge by McElroy and decided to put it back on the shelf for the time being. It wasn't particularly bad, it was just entirely unsuccessful in grabbing my attention within a reasonable amount of time, together with being written in a very disjointed, unique style. I will probably get back to it in the near future. Anyway, I am getting back on a Wolfe kick today by finishing the latter half of The Island of Doctor Death, and Other Stories, and Other Stories. Looking forward to it! _______________________________________________ Urth Mailing List To post, write [3]urth at urth.net Subscription/information: [4]http://www.urth.net

Just read your review and end notes on fifth head. I have a long long write up which has been submitted to Ultan's Library for about eight months on Fifth Head- It does a pretty decent job delineating at exactly which point the cat bite infects Marsch with the parasitic Shadow Children and allows the death of the boy to be "true"- he falls. I don't think the shadow children are the remains of humanity , but I do think the inutile hand we should look for is port mimizon itself with its fingers and all the girls with stick like legs are abos (in a story the walk of the Abos is bird or stork like) Making number five human, the society a bad imitation of degenerating utility and no new buildings, and Marsch something different altogether. I hope the write up is put up sometimes soon. I guess I really don't enjoy reading reviews of Shadows of the New Sun though heh heh heh. Sent from my iPhone

Currently reading the Oxford Anthology of Victorian Ghost Stories. Couple of comments on what some others have reported: Piers Plowman starts off promisingly enough, but so quickly devolves into "and then I saw Mister Blabbermouth and Miss Gossip, then I met Mister Miser and Master Crap-head" Ho-Hum Finished Mishima's Sea of Fertility recently. Liked everything but the end. Totally a letdown. Certainly not cosmically earthshattering or whatever the publisher's blurb said.

What am I reading? Right now, the last "Wicked Years" book, OUT OF OZ, which is the best since the original WICKED. Before that, an okay urban fantasy.

Like Stephen, I review (sometimes very briefly) everything I read at my blog, sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com

DOJP has written a few great reviews of his Lafferty explorations on his blog recently, which I note that he's too modest to mention here :) *http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.co.uk/*<http://antsofgodarequeerfish.blogspot.co.uk/> Cheers, Mark Ha, thanks, Mark - for once in my life I'm too modest! It's great to hear of all these other book review bloggers lurking about on this Wolfe forum. I'll be checking out your stuffs! -DOJP

I bump Craigs recommendation!, great start for "Southern Reach" trilogy. "Jagannath" by Karin Tidbeck is a short story collection, in summary it's new weird in nordic countries setting (mostly, not all), very fresh, disturbing, and yet sweet sometimes. Also the stories originally written in swedish Karin translated herself, that impressed me very much. After that I wanted some very light reading, so I picked up the Dresden Files, I just started book four, and it's pretty fun, reads very fast, and it have a rare tendency - the latter the book in series the better (story wise, style wise, all-around improvement). As for Wolfe, I read his story "Forleseen", and it was hauting me for a week or so, made me very sad, but it is a great story. Anybody read "No Return" by Zachary Jeningan? Many people compare this to the book of the new sun, Elizabeth Hand wrote : "It has the sweep of Frank Herbert's Dune and the intoxicatingly strange grandeur of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, with a decadent, beautifully rendered vision all its own." 2014-03-12 15:35 GMT+01:00 Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>:

Yeah, let's do this. I'm halfway through The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff, which splices a modern murder mystery set in a polygamous Mormon-spinoff community with the story of Ann Eliza Young, infamous 19th wife of Brigham Young. I'm enjoying it, especially the historical sections, but it's disappointingly lightweight. Before that it was Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. I didn't find it better than Wolf Hall, as a lot of people said, just more of the same. But since 'more of the same' in this case means 'an electrifyingly vivid and original reinvention of the historical novel', that's fine by me. There's a lovely passage about torture that immediately reminded me of the Guild: The faces of your torturers loom up like giants or they become impossibly distant, small, like dots. Words are spoken: bring him here, seat him, now it is time. They were words attached to other and common meanings, but if you survive this they will only ever have one meaning and the meaning is pain. The iron hisses as it is lifted from the flame. The rope doubles like a serpent, loops itself, and waits. It is too late for you. You will not speak now, because your tongue has swelled and filled your mouth and language has eaten itself. Later you will speak, when you are carried away from the machinery and set down on straw. I have endured it, you will say. I have come through. And pity and self-love will crack open your heart, so that at the first gesture of kindness - let us say, a blanket or a sip of wine - your heart will overflow, your tongue unstop. Out flow the words. You were not brought to this room to think, but to feel. And in the end you have felt too much for yourself.

I forgot to mention I also just finished A Maggot by John Fowles. This was a fantastic book, and an easy recommendation for Wolfe fans. It is a genre-bending puzzle of a book, very expertly constructed, with a proper balance of mystery and information. I also quite liked The Magus by the same author, but A Maggot struck me as the more clever work.

Thanks for the Vandermeer recommendation. I picked up Annihilation yesterday and it was quite good. Sort of a blend of the investigative horror of Lovecraft, the detached (but still eerie) narration of House of Leaves, and natural wonder of something like The Lost World. Really looking forward to the other two novels in the trilogy, and knowing they will both be released in 2014 is a great bonus!

I can't do much reading these days, so I've been supplementing it with audiobooks whenever possible. Currently meandering through All Creatures Great and Small as well as Titus Groan.

I'm currently enjoying the first of Iain M Banks' Culture books, Consider Phlebas. No great mental effort required on the part of the reader, just good, imaginative space opera. I'm having a blast. I've also just completed a selection of short stories entitled The New Uncanny. Having got rather bored of horror/supernatural tales in recent years, this was a rather brave purchase, but one that paid off. It's a great collection with some really original, off-the-wall stories, by a mixture of genre authors such as Christoper Priest and Ramsay Campbell, and "literary" types like AS Byatt and Hanif Kureishi. Next up: "Home Fires". Mark On Wed, Apr 2, 2014, at 05:05 AM, Dan Harris wrote: I can't do much reading these days, so I've been supplementing it with audiobooks whenever possible. Currently meandering through All Creatures Great and Small as well as Titus Groan. On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 6:19 PM, Antonin Scriabin <[1]kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> wrote: Thanks for the Vandermeer recommendation. I picked up Annihilation yesterday and it was quite good. Sort of a blend of the investigative horror of Lovecraft, the detached (but still eerie) narration of House of Leaves, and natural wonder of something like The Lost World. Really looking forward to the other two novels in the trilogy, and knowing they will both be released in 2014 is a great bonus! On Mar 12, 2014 2:38 PM, "Piotr Szcz?sny" <[2]neternalz at gmail.com> wrote: I bump Craigs recommendation!, great start for "Southern Reach" trilogy. "Jagannath" by Karin Tidbeck is a short story collection, in summary it's new weird in nordic countries setting (mostly, not all), very fresh, disturbing, and yet sweet sometimes. Also the stories originally written in swedish Karin translated herself, that impressed me very much. After that I wanted some very light reading, so I picked up the Dresden Files, I just started book four, and it's pretty fun, reads very fast, and it have a rare tendency - the latter the book in series the better (story wise, style wise, all-around improvement). As for Wolfe, I read his story "Forleseen", and it was hauting me for a week or so, made me very sad, but it is a great story. Anybody read "No Return" by Zachary Jeningan? Many people compare this to the book of the new sun, Elizabeth Hand wrote : "It has the sweep of Frank Herbert's Dune and the intoxicatingly strange grandeur of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, with a decadent, beautifully rendered vision all its own." 2014-03-12 15:35 GMT+01:00 Craig Brewer <[3]cnbrewer at yahoo.com>: I can't recommend Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation highly enough. It's part of a new "trilogy" (the others will be out by September), but each book is going to be quite different. It's the smartest, most entertaining, and most effective continuation of the "weird" tradition I've read in years. He learned everything you're supposed to learn from Bierce, Blackwood, Machen, Lovecraft, C.A. Smith, and the others, and turned it into something fresh. __________________________________________________________________ From: Antonin Scriabin <[4]kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> To: The Urth Mailing List <[5]urth at lists.urth.net> Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2014 7:26 AM Subject: (urth) What are you reading? Hello, Urthlings. What are you reading these days? I haven't been reading much Wolfe lately, so nothing is fresh enough in my mind to participate in some of the other ongoing discussions. I am working my way through the Harvard Classics. I just finished the fourth volume, the complete poems in English by John Milton. Paradise Lost was a treat, as was Franklin's autobiography in the first volume and the New Atlantis by Bacon in the third, which is an old favorite of mine from my philosophy major days. I've also recently read The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, which was excellent, and The City of Dreaming Books by Moers, which was great, silly fun. I also read the first 50 pages of Lookout Cartridge by McElroy and decided to put it back on the shelf for the time being. It wasn't particularly bad, it was just entirely unsuccessful in grabbing my attention within a reasonable amount of time, together with being written in a very disjointed, unique style. I will probably get back to it in the near future. Anyway, I am getting back on a Wolfe kick today by finishing the latter half of The Island of Doctor Death, and Other Stories, and Other Stories. Looking forward to it! Urth Mailing List To post, write [8]urth at urth.net Subscription/information: [9]http://www.urth.net Urth Mailing List To post, write [10]urth at urth.net Subscription/information: [11]http://www.urth.net Urth Mailing List To post, write [12]urth at urth.net Subscription/information: [13]http://www.urth.net

I just finished Apocalypses, I think it is my favorite Lafferty. Loved it from start to finish. Small world, I picked up the third Culture novel, Use of Weapons, right after. It isn't bad, but it isn't particularly good either. There are some interesting ideas dotted throughout, but the prose itself is very simple and straightforward, while the plot is a fairly generic adventure story. I'm sure the cumulative effect of multiple stories set in the Culture universe is better than the small view you get in an individual novel, however.

"I just finished Apocalypses, I think it is my favorite Lafferty. Loved it from start to finish." So glad to hear you say that bout that book, Antonin! I think I've heard a fair number of Lafferty fans say they liked the second novel in the omnibus, but rarely heard anybody say a word negative or positive about the first novel. I loved the book right off too. It definitely contains some of his greatest passages and ideas and should be more highly regarded in his body of work. To keep things Wolfean (heh), has anybody ever heard what stories or novels Wolfe may have liked in particular from Lafferty? -DOJP

I thought the first novella was fantastic. I was actually a bit worried as I came to the end that the second wouldn't be as good, but it was. It was wickedly funny ... a forger so good his works are worth more as forgeries than as originals, a film director who is more convinced of the cinematic brilliance (and falseness) of Quiche's torture the more grotesque and real it seemed, etc*. *The account of the filming of the thirteen "crucifixions" is a masterpiece on its own. On Wolfe, I imagine he quite liked East of Laughter, didn't he write a forward or something specifically for it?

Yes, he wrote a brilliant afterword to it. But I always suspected he was handed that one to read and write an afterword for - I'm sure he sincerely liked it, but he'd already been a long time fan of Lafferty by then (1987), so I'd be interested to know what else he liked. The account of the filming of the thirteen "crucifixions" is a masterpiece on its own. Yes! I've often thought it should be excerpted and anthologised. -DOJP

"Yes! I've often thought it should be excerpted and anthologised." Yeah that would be neat. I guess the problem is that there there is so much pay off when Quiche meets the Five-O'Clock Man again.

Yeah, ha ha, I've often looked at it and thought 'well, can't stop there, oh and you can't stop there', etc.

Were these two novellas ever published / printed separately?

My favorite Lafferty too. Unfortunately, it was the first I read and the others I've read simply haven't worked as well for me.

I'm pretty sure they were published nowhere else but as this omnibus. A slightly strange little publishing venture.

My favorite Lafferty too. Unfortunately, it was the first I read and the others I've read simply haven't worked as well for me. That's cool to hear about liking Apocalypses, Dan'l, but unfortunate that nothing else has worked for you. Have you tried* Fourth Mansions*, Arrive At Easterwine, or any of Lafferty's later novels? (Not To Mention Camels, Aurelia, Annals of Klepsis, Serpent's Egg,* East of Laughter*.) And none of the short stories do anything for you? -DOJP

Yeah that is a very strange publication decision. I wonder if it was Lafferty's intent. The two novellas do go together vary well, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were written separately and turned into one volume down the road.

I didn't say they didn't work for me at all, just not as well. Some of the short stories in 900 Grandmothers are delightful indeed. I haven't read any of the later novels, though Klepsis is on my seemingly-transfinite to-read pile.

I've been reading 'The Emperor of all Things' by Paul Witcover, which is .... interesting. The Grandmaster of the Clockmakers' Company is called Thaddeus Wolfe, and is known as 'the Old Wolf' - which might be a coincidence, did he not have an enforcer called Master Malrubius. (There is also a group of people known as the Morecockneyans, one of whom is called Cornelius. There may well be other science/fiction fantasy references which I have missed.)

Pardon my ignorance on Lafferty (to me, that name always evokes 'Winding your way down on Baker Street...'). What omnibus are you talking about and what are the 900 Grandmothers?

The omnibus is Apocalypses, which is made up of two novellas, "Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?" and "The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny." Nine Hundred Grandmothers is a collection of Lafferty's short stories, arguably the best such collection.

Spasibo. No dia 03/04/2014, ?s 00:40, Antonin Scriabin <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> escreveu:

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I just finished "Empire Star" by Samuel R. Delany. It was kinda Wolfean style story, unreliable narrator, needs re-reading and has a woman character that feels like taken out from Wolfe book also her name is San Severina, but that's just a coincidence (or not?) :). Maybe this is a long shot, so anyone had similar feeling? This is a short book, but definitely fun, I was looking for some classic SF light reading and got a light mind bender ;). 2014-03-12 14:26 GMT+01:00 Antonin Scriabin <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com>:

Empire Star is old enough that SRD may have influenced Wolfe as much as Wolfe influenced SRD. It was pretty early on in both their careers, when they were both showing up as Nebula winners, appearing in Orbit (Damon Knight) and the like.

Yeah, I posted on this back in 2005 and mentioned in 2008 - http://lists.urth.net/htdig.cgi/urth-urth.net/2005-April/005034.html http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/2008-July/009588.html Part of the mash-up of ideas I think being played with Cheers, David Duffy.