tigersgogrrr wrote:

ShabbyMcCrabby wrote:

3. Annihilation
Remembered I'd never read the others in the series so I went back to the first. It really is pretty much a perfect book. Such an eerie and evocatively told story.

Loved this. Wish it had been standalone. The follow ups were enjoyable but the first is, for me, a classic.

I think that is why I didn't jump into the others after reading this one last time. It's just so great that I didn't want to sully it by filling in some of the blanks with more books.
I'm happy to do it this time though. Will probably rewatch the movie too. Knowing it's quite different from the book will help with a second watch I think

Sounds like my kind of thing

20. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender

A collection of short and truly bizarre stories. A housewife is frustrated when her husband comes home from war with no lips and so can no longer kiss her. A woman gives birth to her mother. There’s one about two girls; one with a hand made of fire, the other with a hand made of ice. They’re dreamlike, nonsensical, and I was often reminded of David Lynch, although these stories don’t have his sinister flavour. Not all the stories land, and the best of them are loaded into the first half of the book. Overall I enjoyed it, but these stories are so strange that it definitely won’t be for everyone.

21. The Damnation Game by Clive Barker

Clive Barker’s first ever novel is a Faustian tale where a man just out of prison finds himself employed by a reclusive businessman as his bodyguard. It quickly becomes apparent that his new boss is reclusive for a reason, as someone (or something) is coming to collect his death in payment for a deal they made a long time ago.

It’s been at least thirty years since I first read it, and it’s been a real treat going through this again as I’d forgotten so much. Most importantly, I’d forgotten the story’s principle villain Mamoulian. No one creates villains quite like Barker. Shadwell and Immocalata from Weaveworld, the Jaffe from The Great and Secret Show, but Mamoulian might just be his best. Who or what he is is what propelled me so quickly through this book. He’s so interesting to me because he’s riddled with frailties and full of secrets, and Barker expertly doles out fresh morsels of info throughout the story. He alone is worth reading this book for. It’s just an added bonus that Barker’s prose here is brilliant.

22. Roverandom by J. R. R. Tolkien

Once upon a time Professor Tolkien took his family on holiday to Filey, a town on the Yorkshire coast. At the time one of his boys was fixated on a small toy dog, and insisted on taking it everywhere he went. But one day the boy lost that little toy dog on a beach, and for as long as he looked for it, the professor never once found it.

And so was born the story Roverandom. about a real dog who is one day rude to an irritable wizard, turned into a toy, sold in a shop to a little boy who loses him on a beach and then goes off and has all sorts of wonderful adventures. Tolkien wrote the story primarily to make his son feel better about losing his favourite toy, which I thought was really charming. The written version actually took him something like four years to complete, and was never published in his lifetime. There’s something very Baron Munchausenian about it; there are trips to the moon and the bottom of the sea, and the oceans fall off the edge of a flat earth and sprinkle into space. It’s all very whimsical. I liked it very much.

3. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

A bit of a slog this one, ruining my 3 week goal in the process. Only the second McCarthy book I've read after The Road, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but in BM the pace was painful at times. McCarthy can describe the hell out of a scene but sometimes that rambles on for so long, I realise nothing has actually happened for pages and my mind has started to wander.

The lack of punctuation and expected grammar also took it's toll, having to re-read sentences or paragraphs and mentally insert commas, etc to understand what he's even trying to say. There were a few times where it genuinely felt like he's trolling the reader with the length of a sentence continually extended by 'and' until finally you're blessed with a full stop.

Despite all of that, there were some fantastic sections that kept me coming back to it. Key characters are still well realised and the sheer brutality of the time and actions of those involved is genuinely hard to take at points. The final quarter or so was easily the best as it felt like it kicked into another gear suddenly, there were flurries of activity and real tension that left me glad I'd read it but wished it had been a bit more consistent in that style.

I read Blood Meridian last year. I too found it a bit of a slog. There’s some beautiful bits of prose in there, but by fuck is it soulless.

25. Beren and Lúthien by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien

This is the first of Tolkien’s three Great Tales of his grand mythology. All of them occur during the First Age of Middle-earth and so are included in The Silmarillion, but as with everything in that volume, the story is told there at a macroscopic scale. In Beren and Lúthien Christopher Tolkien attempts to show the genesis and evolution of the story (which Tolkien began during his service in the First World War) as well as a more detailed look at the events within it. I’d held off on this one for a while because I knew this was going to be a slightly more scholarly approach to the story (Tolkien never finished the long form of the story unfortunately) and I figured it’s something you’ve just got to be in the mood for. What took me so long! I loved it!

The story concerns the love affair between the Man Beren and the Elf Lúthien. There has never been a union between Man and Elf before, and so when Beren is presented to Lúthien’s father he is scornful and sets him the seemingly impossible task of retrieving one of the three Silmaril jewels from the iron crown of Morgoth, the chief villain of the First Age. It’s a fabulous story, and beautifully written, even in its first incarnation. One of the most interesting and amusing parts of the original version is that we get to meet Sauron as he was first imagined, as Tevildo, Prince of Cats. He was basically I giant cat, evil, of course, and also described as an ‘evil fay in beast form’. I thought this was such great fun.

Years later and Tolkien would begin composing The Lay of Leithian, which retells the story—though much now has changed as he continues to flesh out other parts of his mythology (Tevildo is now the shapeshifting necromancer Thû)—in epic poem form. There’s that scene in The Fellowship of the Ring film where the hobbits are asleep and Aragorn is singing softly, and waking up Frodo asks him who he’s singing about, and Aragorn tells him it’s The Lay of Leithian. And there’s absolutely a reason for that, because it’s the story of the first ever union between an Elf and a Man, and up until that point there have only been two such unions. In Tolkien’s entire legendarium there were only ever three, with Aragorn and Arwen being the last. These unions are rare, world-changing events in the history of Middle-earth. I imagine that a lot of fans are pissed that Amazon are casually throwing in another one of these romances in The Rings of Power show. Anyway, The Lay of Leithian is absolutely massive, and though he got close, he never managed to finish it. Here’s a snippet I particularly liked:

Farewell now here, ye leaves of trees,
your music in the morning-breeze!
Farewell now blade and bloom and grass
that see the changing seasons pass;
ye waters murmuring over stone,
and meres that silent stand alone!
Farewell now mountain, vale, and plain!
Farewell now wind and frost and rain,
and mist and cloud, and heaven’s air;
ye star and moon so blinding-fair

When Tolkien’s wife died he had the name Lúthien carved onto her headstone, and when he died just a year afterwards he had Beren carved on his own. There’s a joy I get from reading Tolkien’s prose that I don’t get anywhere else, and the depth of the mythology he created is always amazing to me.

Probably fair.

1. The Midnight Library - Matt Haig. Nice concept, all of the sliding doors moments in one. Would’ve been a good short(er) story but found it went on a bit and I kind of stopped caring by the predictable end.

2. The Hogfather - Terry Pratchett (newly re-recorded audiobook). First read this around the time of release. Had a great time back in Discworld. Peter Serafinowicz is great as Death. Equal Rites is out at the end of this month, can’t wait!

3. The Rithmatist - Brandon Sanderson. Reasonably entertain YA fair from Sanderson. Not sure I’ll persevere with the series though.

I'm ploughing through a book about the Suez Crisis. A big fat book and some parts are very dense due to the machinations of the politicians and following the double meanings and misleading statements made between a large cast of people involved. It's enjoyable but it's taking me a while to get through it.

Re Tolkien, there is something very pleasant about his writing. The way he talks about the land and its features, and the way light, wind and water move across the land is restful and gives a feeling of real age and spiritual comfort. Hard to define. It conveys feelings of a love of a simple life - of open fires on dark nights, simple food and drink, and a pastoral low technological, but lyrical and poetic life.  Makes me want to lie down in a field or deep in a forest and hear it breathe.

Pretty sure I read Trouble with Lichen during my Wyndham binge in the late 80s.... No memory of the story though.

I think I have The Kraken Wakes and The Seeds of Time ready to go on my Kindle.

I sought The Jaunt out because it just keeps coming up again and again as one of his best and most terrifying stories. I still consider myself pretty green on King. I’ve read It, which blew my fucking mind as a teenager, and then The Dark Half (I was meh on this one), and the entire Dark Tower series. I have at least Pet Semetary (and maybe even Salem’s Lot) pencilled in for this October. I also like the sound of Revival.

Looking to read more King, so noted.