What Did You Read Today?

[SRN]

Perhaps we need to look to fantasy fiction written before Tolkein just to prove it's easily done, but again, not really my area.

Gormenghast was originally published some ten years before Lord of the Rings. Well, the first book was.

[Skummy]

Perhaps we need to look to fantasy fiction written before Tolkein just to prove it's easily done, but again, not really my area.

Gormenghast was originally published some ten years before Lord of the Rings. Well, the first book was.

True - and that kind of supports my idea that you're more likely to find seemingly "fresh" ideas in pre-Tolkein fantasy than post-Tolkein, if just because not everything will have been done to death.

Incidentally, Mervyn Peake is one of my absolute favourite people ever, and he lived in fucking Sark of all places. I bloody love Sark.

[RoyWill Rumble]

I forgot that I read The Ascent of Rum Doodle a while back. That's a fucking hilarious book. And it's a really quick read.

[Timmoru Suzuki]

I read The Postman Always Rings Twice and really enjoyed it.

I've also read the first 100 pages of Pillars of the Earth as I really liked the TV mini-series and its another book that mum's been harping on about for years; and I'm not entirely sure about it. It could be a problem with seeing the show first as what's happened to far takes up about the first two minutes of the series so I feel like nothing is happening, but I am finding it slightly less than gripping so far. It's doing something I don't like which is stopping to give a 5-10 page info dump on a characters life shortly after they are introduced rather than weening in scraps of information when it becomes relevant.

I'll stick with it a while longer, but I might move onto something else soon.

[Ace]

All this discussion of Fantasy without the lengthy setup, and no-one mentions Eddings? EWB, for shame

Both Belegriad/Mallorean and Elenium/Tamuli may be similar in a lot of ways, but their still all great series'. And if you want just a one-off book, read The Redemption of Althalus. Absolutely brilliant.

[Skummy]

I'm currently reading the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Omnibus Edition, and it's absolute gold. I haven't read League in probably close to ten years, and there's so much to it I never got the first time round that just seems like absolute gold to me now - so many literary references, and characters or concepts popping up from different works, the way it's all been worked together is - while at times a little corny - an absolute work of genius, especially as it spends a lot of time dealing with characters from books I'm not familiar with (and I'm sure for some other comic book readers, that'll pop up even more frequently than it has with me), yet manages to never feel alienating.

Currently finished the first main story, and into one of the non-comic book bits, which is about Alan Quartermain, Randolph Carter, John Carter and H.G. Wells' Time Traveller stuck in dreamspace to battle Lovecraftian monsters. Amazing.

Really looking forward to working my way through the remainder of the series in time for the two new ones next month.

[Liam]

Can someone recommend me a good collection of Lovecraft stories?

[Skummy]

"Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales Of H.P. Lovecraft" is the obvious choice - it's pretty much every major story in one very pretty massive volume. Aside from that, there's generally a few collections available, something along the lines of "The Call Of Cthulu & Other Weird Tales", but when you can get pretty much the lot for £12/£13, you may as well.

[StevenRichardsRules]

If I had to recommend one, "Rats in the Walls" would be my choice. And maybe "That Thing on the Doorstep", my personal favourite, as a close second. "Call of Cthulu" is pretty good too.

(just read all of them )

I have the Necronomicon and it has basically everything, minus a few minor stories here and there. Cost me around thirty bucks, I think.

[KONGO]

Does anyone know of a good non-fiction book about the occult? Specifically thinking about Crowley-an ritualism, A*A, Golden Dawn, etc. I've read a few Crowley biographies, a couple Freemason books, but nothing in-depth and exploratory.

[Skummy]

Does anyone know of a good non-fiction book about the occult? Specifically thinking about Crowley-an ritualism, A*A, Golden Dawn, etc. I've read a few Crowley biographies, a couple Freemason books, but nothing in-depth and exploratory.

It depends really...it's obviously an extremely broad topic, and obscure and contradictory pretty much by design, and cluttered with "101 Wiccan Spells!" teenage witch bullshit (not that the vast majority of occultism isn't bullshit, it's just a classier breed of bullshit). Generally, biographies of key individuals are the best bet for a quick overview, unless you can get hold of actual occult books from back in the day, though those tend to come at a pretty hefty price as the majority are out of print.

A lot of Crowley's stuff is actually worth a read - 777 and Magick: Liber ABA in particular - he also wrote a pretty cool book on Tarot and Thoth and whatnot, published under a pseudonym, though I believe that more recent re-prints have his name on them now.

I had a flick through a John Dee book in an esoteric book shop in London a while back, and it was fantastic, and beautifully bound and all that stuff too (one of my main attractions to the occult is just the aesthetics of it all), but again, doesn't come cheap.

Can't go wrong with anything by Manly Hall, either. You get a good overview from him - look for something like his "The Secret Teachings Of All Ages" to start off with. Dion Fortune's work on the Qabalah is definitely worth a look, too.

Also - because it's Skummy in the reading thread, so I need to namedrop Alan Moore - he and Steve Moore are working on a book called The Moon & Serpent Bumper Book Of Magic, which sounds like it'll be definitely worth checking out whenever it surfaces. Any of the two Moores' work on the occult is worth at least a cursory glance.

If you could let me know a few specific areas you're interested in, I might be able to help a bit more.

[KONGO]

The fact that I know so little about the subject is part of what is difficult to pinpoint about it. I suppose I'm not interested in any specific group, I'm more interested in ritual and how belief inspires and makes codes out of ritual. All rituals are symbols for something else and I want to know more about how people decide this magick or religious effect means you have to use these symbols in this order, etc. I'm also interested in the hierarchy of these different groups for much the same reason. There's sort of a missing step there that I want to figure out more about. The Crowleyan stuff attracts me because it is modern and elaborate.

[Skummy]

That's a trickier one...symbology's not really my strongest area, though I'm sure there must be a ton of books on the subject, probably of varying degrees of reliability and whatnot. I'll have a look if I can find anything. I've not actually read it, but have intended to for years, maybe Carl Jung's "Psychology Of The Occult" might give you some help?

Hierarchies and that kind of thing would be one of the harder aspects to really discover - by their nature, information about the kind of groups involved with the occult and so on are very secretive, and a lot of the information that is available about them is either speculation, or just outright fiction - especially when it comes to stuff like the freemasons, when you're basically wading through a mess of fictions, either misinformation from their end, or from people opposed to them, or just people who like to bullshit about secret societies.

[Christain#1]

Read lord sugars biography. Very good read. A long read but just a fascinating account of his life. And read the hunger games trilogy which I couldn't put down.

[Hagen]

So I finished Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis. Amis' characters are seriously fantastic stuff and the high point of the novel by miles. At times it could feel rather long because the characters are constantly linking past events with the events that take place in the book, and that paired with the post-modernist style of Amis' writing can make it rather confusing at times and make it seem like the novel isn't really moving forward. Really good book nonetheless. Even though I was kinda expecting a bigger blow-off, I think the ending fit the John Self character quite well.

I am currently in the process of reading through everything prose by Bukowski. Allthough I usually spread it out between other authors so I won't get burned out reading the same thing all the time. I finished Notes of a Dirty Old Man which was great. Classic Bukowski.

I finally pulled myself together and read The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger which I have been meaning to do for a long time. I get the whole thing about teenage rebellion and alienation and I see how it could have been very shocking in the 50's. But with all the hype that still surrounds the book to this day I really didn't think it lived up to the expectations and I was rather disappointed.

Finally, today I finished Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Really great book. It started of rather slow, but once I really got into the story I almost couldn't put it down again. I think Vonnegut did a great job of weaving the science-fiction plot into the war-theme of the book. All in all really well done.

Edited May 30, 2012 by Hagen

[Meacon Keaton]

Read the first Hunger Games book yesterday. Easy, simple, quick read. Wasn't written incredibly well, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. First book I can remember reading after seeing the movie, but in this case, I think it helped.

[MNM X Koofi e R-Truth]

I also read the first Hunger Games book recently. Enjoyed it well enough, however, I just can't get into Catching Fire. I'd say I'm about a third into it and can't get any further.

[Summers]

Power through.

[AnnIQ Edison]

"Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales Of H.P. Lovecraft" is the obvious choice - it's pretty much every major story in one very pretty massive volume.

Was about to go buy this for Kindle but then...

How does that make any sense?

[KONGO]

Comes with a blowjob.