What book are you currently reading?

[Lord of the Drunk Penguin]

Is there any romance in Nightflyers?

Yes, but being George R.R. Martin things get... complicated.
You lose even when you win, you know?



The best Batman comic to date.
For me, at least.

And there's hardly any Batman in it.

[G. Ward]

I read Arthur Machen's "The Red Hand". Only because someone in some webpage claimed it is among the best works of Machen.
No, it is not. I found it to be quite problematic structure-wise. It does have some of the signature Machen atmosphere, but isn't as refined as his best stories.

Ah, interesting. I confess. I'd never heard of Machen until now. Having Googled him, apparently he was a good horror writer. Are you a real fan of horror?

Yes, but being George R.R. Martin things get... complicated.
You lose even when you win, you know?



The best Batman comic to date.
For me, at least.

And there's hardly any Batman in it.

Ah.
Well it's good there's romance. I'll add it to my list.

[Kyriakos]

Well, I like some "horror", including a few of Machen's works. But most "horror" literature is of low value and hardly literary. Some stories by (eg) Lovecraft were decent, but most are very problematic, although Lovecraft (perhaps less than Machen) wasn't a hack, he still had various writing issues...

[Cyclops]

I just finished "Devil's Grip" about a multiple murder in the Australian countryside in the early 1990's. I find I have two separate links to the crime (it wasn't me, I just know someone who knew someone...). Its a sad story about gay men having to hide their sexual identities. The survivors are happy now and I feel like I understand a few of my gay friends and relatives a bit better. Didn't need the gritty details about the prostate, but it was good to have a moderately notorious story told maturely after the lurid (and wrong) headlines like "farmer shot after giving his employee AIDS".

Well, I like some "horror", including a few of Machen's works. But most "horror" literature is of low value and hardly literary. Some stories by (eg) Lovecraft were decent, but most are very problematic, although Lovecraft (perhaps less than Machen) wasn't a hack, he still had various writing issues...

I'm a big Lovecraft fan, but I'd never claim he was a talented writer: he was imaginative, racist, sexist and three parts crazy. I have an annotated edition of his collected works, people are actually trying to promote his stories as literature but Lovecraft himself bemoaned the fact he wasn't a very good writer and aped the styles of Machen (a reasonable writer) and Dunsany (an imaginative if slightly flippant amateur).

"Horror" writing is about making the reader feel unpleasant. At best its middle brow, its mostly lowbrow crap. Dracula is shoddy (I mean 50 Shades of Grey shoddy, the idea of vampires fascinates us more than the writing), Frankenstein is gothic science fiction more than horror and the rest isn't that good.

Like Tolkien (and I'm noting rating them together, Lovecraft's ouevre and imaginary worlds are only a fraction of Tolkien's) he has the strength of a his own strongly imagined internal world. Unlike Tolkien his command of language is not strong.

[Kyriakos]

Tolkien isn't a good writer either, though (imo). Though, granted, I have only read the Hobbit, which afaik was intended for a child to read.
Lovecraft had no style to speak of - Machen certainly is more literary. Dunsany has some very nice short stories My favorite of those would be "The Workman".

Lovecraft did try to ape Poe and Dunsany, and aped Dunsany worse than he aped Poe, but Lovecraft's imagination indeed was potent and different, and to his added defense he wasn't an utter hack (like, say, S. King*).

*who also has some talent, but let's be honest: not that much, and he isn't literary at all (though aspires to be at times).

[Kyriakos]

Ajax, by Sophocles.

It was pretty good

Odysseus had some great lines. For example: "You (still) win, when defeated by your friends".

Also a nice foreshadowing for the disastrous defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian war, when it is noted that while a city may enjoy an extended period of friendly currents to rise upon, it shall fall if it becomes arrogant.

[Kyriakos]

Faust (by Goethe).

I didn't like it at all.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Faust is pretty good. Maybe I liked the poetry more than the story itself.

[Kyriakos]

Maybe it is good in the original german, but in english it seemed pretty forgettable :/

[Lord of the Drunk Penguin]

I found the protagonist really annoying.
Then again, he's just an entitled rich white teenager.
Pretty good backstory (about mythical creatures & heroes fighting for survival)
Shame we're stuck with the side characters...

[Morifea]

Maybe it is good in the original german, but in english it seemed pretty forgettable :/

Never bothered to read it in English....
The Faust Part I is very dear to us Germans, there are alot sayings in our Lanquage that originate from the Faust.
Furthermore, the rhymescheme makes it really easy to memorize whole passages of the text.

Seems like I`m gonna read it again... at least part I, Part II is hard work

[Kyriakos]

Comparing it to other books from notable german romanticists, eg ETA Hoffmann, the story is just pretty lame, in my view. I only found some interest in the descriptions in the Walpurgian night festival. I think that Nietzsche commented on that too (not sure if he mentioned it specifically, but he referred to a lot of german books of that period and later) when he said that in Germany the devil in literature is presented in a way which would make french readers laugh and think that the author was "from some village"

I haven't read many works by Goethe, but Faust (part I) was certainly the more forgettable one, though I also had issues with Werther. Maybe Goethe was just better as a poet (eg the Erlkoenig is pretty interesting).

Anyway, I also read Aristophanes' The Frogs. It was quite funny. Dionysos (the god) goes to Hades to resurrect a tragic poet, cause there is no good one left. A contest takes place between Aescylos and Euripides.
A memorable line (about Dionysos) : "how can he not be a gentleman? All he knows is how to drink and have sex"

[DaVinci]

Wolfskrieg, by Bernard Cornwell



Book 11, War of the Wolf, from the Uhtred saga. Also known as Saxon Stories.

[Kyriakos]

I read JP Dixxon's "The surgeon's tale".
My review:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The tipping point - A review of the story “A Surgeon’s Tale”, by J.P. Dixon


Regarding its theme, “A Surgeon’s Tale” is alluding to the literature of the Grand Guignol, the french 19th century horror theatre. Dixon consciously constructs this tie, by both referring to the Grand Guignol as well as meticulously describing a bleak neighborhood in London where an obscure theatrical venue for such acts aspires to maintain an audience of horror-enthusiasts.

Form-wise, the story is essentially written in a third-person limited narrative. We do get to read of how some other characters feel, but only in relation to the long narration by the protagonist, the surgeon Tobin. Tobin is addressing some of his colleagues, decades after the main events. The narration itself has the typical dynamic of first-person narrative, which in this case creates a very powerful effect, due to Tobin’s guilt about the part he played in the strange and sinister case of Paulette – the female actress in that out-of-the-way theater's macabre show.

As far as the personalities of those two are concerned we, again, see a very familiar, and potent, dynamic: Tobin is the observer, a scientifically-oriented personality who in the process gets more and more involved with the object he observes, up until he becomes the facilitator of Paulette’s final descend to annihilation. Paulette, on the other hand, is the centerpiece of the story, given she initiates the tragic events and seems to be happy to continue destroying herself. At this point, we should – of course – present what exactly it is that Paulette does in her show, and why she does indeed seem to be both a person and an object.

She was originally was hired by the theater's manager because of her lack of ability to feel any pain whatsoever, and consequently was paid for a while to – merely – sink needles inside her body, or make a few not so deep cuts. However, the popularity of her act waned, and the loss of interest by the public lead to a tipping point: One night, as the show was ending, someone from the audience yelled at Paulette that anyone could do what she does. Paulette – having already been relegated to the last supporting act – instinctively reacted... Using the knife in her hand, she chopped off one of her fingers, and then reproachfully asked the spectator if that too was something everyone could do. Her unexpected, gruesome, but perhaps more poignantly irreversible action, instantly caused a frenzy. Paulette had just acquired a loyal fan-base.

For nine more shows she could enjoy this effect, by cutting off the rest of her fingers. Then she had to decide what would come next.

Surgeon Tobin meets Paulette for the first time in a small pub. Already Paulette has lost large parts of her hands. Tobin at first assumes the girl had a series of terrible accidents, but later he visits the theatre during one of her shows and gets to see her fully amputate the last remnants of her hand. By that time, her legs already are partly gone as well. A discussion in her dressing room follows, and during their talk it is revealed that Paulette wishes to establish how much of her body she can lose without dying.

The final part of the story is certainly far less realistic. After Tobin finishes the amputation of both legs, he is implored by Paulette to try to take away a bit of her torso. A number of procedures follow. At some point Paulette is resembling the bust of a statue, but soon she requests more operations, and her face is erased as well. By the end she resembles a small box of flesh and has no ability to do anything other than breathe and – we are to assume – think. Briefly afterwards, Tobin discovers that the box of flesh is cold: Paulette has died.

I think that the story contains some very memorable images. A problem is that its final part doesn’t come across as convincing, and given that the writer was reliant on both historic and medical information to build up his narrative, I sense that the epilogue likely diminished the overall effectiveness of his work. Perhaps a fault was that Dixon attempted to present a great many focal points: apart from the core focus (Paulette’s progressive transformation into an amorphous bit of flesh), we also are told of Tobin’s erotic inclinations towards the girl (they even have sex just before Paulette’s genitals are removed), his ever-present aspirations to be a notable scientist (we are told that this is why he keeps operating on her, completing procedures which are surely unheard of) and, lastly, his guilt about his own role in the story. Those concurrent focal points are, in my view, not adequately examined:

Tobin feels remorse, yet we don’t read any elaboration; Tobin is proud of being a cutting-edge surgeon, but nothing becomes of his work and even the loss there is to be merely inferred, though analyzing it might have helped the final part of the story acquire a more believable tone.

In conclusion, I do think that the first part of the story was very elegantly crafted. There we had to follow Tobin in his quest to understand – first understand what exactly was happening to Paulette, then understand why she was doing this to herself. This first part concludes with his personal involvement in the last ever operation on the stage of the theatre of the macabre. The second, and final part, seems to be a fusion of unrealistic events and inferred shame. Tobin continues his work on Paulette, yet the reader is in a way, I feel, robbed of a much needed intervening passage where Tobin’s progression from an obsessed fan of Paulette to a sadistic enabler of her final destruction would have become available. Perhaps such a passage would satisfy another type of audience: not Tobin or the other fans in the Grand-Guignol-like theatre, not someone interested in observing the cut, but someone wishing to learn more about the tipping point...

[Gaidin]

It's been 18 years(release date) since Glen Cook has released anything for the Black Company. He's been teasing stuff and has been in fact releasing novella's for well...a while. This is the first novel in two decades.

Let me assure you.

It's just as good.

[G. Ward]

It's been 18 years(release date) since Glen Cook has released anything for the Black Company. He's been teasing stuff and has been in fact releasing novella's for well...a while. This is the first novel in two decades.

Let me assure you.

It's just as good.

Thanks a damned lot for posting. The Black Company looks like a very good series. I'll have to check them out. Is there any romance at all?

[Lord of the Drunk Penguin]

This book is about flatulence and stupid aliens.

Possibly the worst book I ever read.
Towards the end, I was struggling to finish it.
Bland characters, bland action, infantile feces humor, you name it.

@G.Ward: No romance.




This one is fun.
Recommend 10/10.



Some truths should never be forgotten.
How ironic to have citizens of the French Republic fighting for freedom while at the same time selling slaves in South America.

[Kyriakos]

Nearly finished reading Clarke's Childhood's End. Had to, for a seminar on fantasy literature that I am preparing.

Can't say I liked the writing. I had already seen the - quite different - HBO series on this novel, so there was no reveal, but still I felt the actual reveal (or both of them) in the book was done pretty poorly.

[z3n]

Thanks a damned lot for posting. The Black Company looks like a very good series. I'll have to check them out. Is there any romance at all?

From what I recall, a little. But it would be a spoiler to describe it.



________________

Currently suffering from a lack of good books, I have been reading using Kindle Unlimited (the app). There are a few decent books available that I've come across from relatively unknown authors. Nothing worth mentioning however .

[Lord of the Drunk Penguin]

Only Black Library author I read.