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Postby velvet anus » Thu Aug 20, 2020 10:27 am

Big fan of Old Masters, too

Started reading Lincoln in the Bardo and just kept thinking sheeeeit Tony Soprano already did this.
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Postby abs » Fri Aug 21, 2020 11:02 am

in my ongoing quest to read this series:

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reading this out loud to the baby and it's unexpectedly pretty funny. dmitry & I were both lol-ing through bedtime last night:

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& just because I love linguistics:

Image
☽ ☾ ● ◯ ● ☽ ☾
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Postby speakers » Fri Aug 21, 2020 12:10 pm

abs wrote:& just because I love linguistics:

Image


pretty sure the author was on an episode of the allusionist podcast, check it out if you don't already love it!
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Postby Kenny » Fri Aug 21, 2020 12:14 pm

i really need a page turner and some sort of fun "goal" so I decided to read all the Vampire Chronicles books no matter how bad they get (I've read the first two before and loved em though I've heard plenty how they get really overwrought)

anyways, I had the don don in a similar way of "time travel is only cool for white people" that being a Vampire was only cool once like good lighting for night time was invented. Imagine being a vampire in the middle ages, there was fucking NOTHING to DO at night!!
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Postby j-ol » Fri Aug 21, 2020 12:25 pm

started exhalation by chiang, first time reading him. the first couple of stories had me a lil concerned that he was just doing philosophical thought experiments in a more literary form, but i'm onto the longer-form life cycle of software objects (the digients) and i'm definitely enjoying the lean, brisk prose.
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Postby velvet anus » Fri Aug 21, 2020 12:25 pm

velvet anus wrote:Big fan of Old Masters, too

Started reading Lincoln in the Bardo and just kept thinking sheeeeit Tony Soprano already did this.


OK at first I just kept thinking "Tony Soprano in the Bardo", but now that I'm a 1/3rd of the way through it's more like the experimental version of Spoon River Anthology, for better or worse. I just wanted to correct that point.
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Postby Finicums Wake » Fri Aug 21, 2020 10:20 pm

lincoln on the bardo was good, but it revealed just how much saunders flourishes in the short fiction format. when he tried to take a cool premise but spend several hundred pages on it, rather than like 30, he eventually started to wear thin, is my opinion
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Postby rushedbehind » Sat Aug 22, 2020 3:48 am

is the dispossessed a board favourite or am I misremembering? loving it
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Postby tarantula » Sat Aug 22, 2020 3:54 am

the poetics of space, gaston bachelard

after david berman recommended it in final interviews. it's amazing to see the principles operating behind the writing of 'actual air' when you read it. there's a chapter called "the dialectics of outside and inside" and you understand where berman was coming from when he writes "when it snows the outdoors seem like a room"

"I myself consider literary documents as realities of the imagination, pure products of the imagination. And why should the actions of the imagination not be as real those of perception?" (Bachelard, Poetics of Space, pp. 176-177)
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Postby velvet anus » Sat Aug 22, 2020 8:45 am

Finicums Wake wrote:lincoln on the bardo was good, but it revealed just how much saunders flourishes in the short fiction format. when he tried to take a cool premise but spend several hundred pages on it, rather than like 30, he eventually started to wear thin, is my opinion


About half way through now and I can get behind this sentiment, kind of dragging with just like laundry lists of spirit life. Beginning got me good because I have a son and am highly susceptible to that kind of stuff. Even if I don’t really see the point of it I like how it’s written, though how it’s marketed as an “experimental” novel seems a little pretentious.
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Postby mudd » Sat Aug 22, 2020 10:00 am

rushedbehind wrote:is the dispossessed a board favourite or am I misremembering? loving it


It is well-liked, though I don’t think it’s most people’s favorites UKL.

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Postby reversemigraine » Sat Aug 22, 2020 10:03 am

It's definitely my favorite non-Earthsea Le Guin.
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Postby mudd » Sat Aug 22, 2020 11:16 am

How far into earthsea do you rate so high? I loved the first two (and most of the stories) but did not proceed.

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Postby reversemigraine » Sat Aug 22, 2020 11:24 am

mudd wrote:How far into earthsea do you rate so high? I loved the first two (and most of the stories) but did not proceed.

m


2, 3, and 4 are pretty much perfect IMO
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Postby Sweet Gregory Pectin » Sat Aug 22, 2020 2:13 pm

velvet anus wrote:
Finicums Wake wrote:lincoln on the bardo was good, but it revealed just how much saunders flourishes in the short fiction format. when he tried to take a cool premise but spend several hundred pages on it, rather than like 30, he eventually started to wear thin, is my opinion


About half way through now and I can get behind this sentiment, kind of dragging with just like laundry lists of spirit life. Beginning got me good because I have a son and am highly susceptible to that kind of stuff. Even if I don’t really see the point of it I like how it’s written, though how it’s marketed as an “experimental” novel seems a little pretentious.


i didn't enjoy it that much either didn't finish it and was pretty stunned when it instantly entered the canon

cool title tho
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Postby echo » Sat Aug 22, 2020 3:10 pm

Tombs of Atuan is on a completely different level from the others, I think
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Postby rushedbehind » Sat Aug 22, 2020 6:54 pm

i'll have to read earthsea next. i've had the collection for a while now. also have always coming home coming in the mail after hearing gary snyder praise it
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Postby shizaam » Sat Aug 22, 2020 8:16 pm

just started Solaris
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Postby water, sunbeams » Sat Aug 22, 2020 10:53 pm

Image

like a manual for survival passed down for this very moment
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Postby alaska » Sat Aug 22, 2020 10:55 pm

Tombs of atuan is wonderful
Best part of Lincoln in the Bardo is the title imo
On Hipinion, posters taxed their bonds and brotherhood, pushing themselves to the brink as a board and as buds.
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Postby Kenny » Sun Aug 23, 2020 6:11 pm

Finally got the last book in Jeffrey E Barlough's criminally underrated scifi/horror/Dicken's pastiche series Western Lights:

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These are probably the most obscure books I own, just in the sense that only the first three were published by a publisher and he self-published the rest himself, nobody talks about these books anywhere except a couple scifi blogs that introduceed me to him:
https://www.blackgate.com/2016/07/26/dark-sleeper-by-jeffrey-e-barlough/
http://swordssorcery.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-western-lights-series-by-jeffrey-e.html

I think there are like hardly any copies in the wild. I bought the third book (I have them in order here) and it came with the author's signature in it thanking someone as a friend. There are no e-books available so I think when this guy dies these books are just done. But they are really really good if the pitch of the series seems far fetched:

In Barlough’s fictional world the Ice Age never fully ended. With much of its north covered by ice and snow, medieval England sent its ships out around the world looking for new lands. Some of the most successful colonies were planted on the west coast of what we call North America. Devoid of people, it is instead home to great megafauna such as smilodons, megatheres, teratorns, and mammoths.

With great cities such as Salthead and Foghampton (located around the same places as Seattle and San Francisco), the western colonies flourished and expanded. Then, in 1839, terror struck from the heavens: “Then it was a great disaster struck, a tragedy of near-incomprehensible proportions.” Something crashed into the Earth, and almost instantly, all life except in the western colonies, was obliterated and the Ice Age intensified. Now, one hundred and fifty years later, the “the sole place on earth where lights still shine at night is in the west.


But somehow it really works. They are reallllllly cozy books but then they can have real shocking twists. The end of the second book was legitimately shocking and moving.

The author's website is delightlyfully web 1.0:
http://www.westernlightsbooks.com/
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Postby art vandelay » Sun Aug 23, 2020 8:15 pm

tarantula wrote:the poetics of space, gaston bachelard

after david berman recommended it in final interviews. it's amazing to see the principles operating behind the writing of 'actual air' when you read it. there's a chapter called "the dialectics of outside and inside" and you understand where berman was coming from when he writes "when it snows the outdoors seem like a room"

"I myself consider literary documents as realities of the imagination, pure products of the imagination. And why should the actions of the imagination not be as real those of perception?" (Bachelard, Poetics of Space, pp. 176-177)


i started this book a few days ago - i had no idea Berman had recommended it!! it’s my first time reading anything in the realm of philosophy (really my first time venturing into anything outside of fiction/poetry) but it’s beautifully written. i’m not too far into it but the descriptions/references to one’s childhood home make me ache
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Postby trigross » Sun Aug 23, 2020 10:45 pm

petty you mentioned those books before and they seem totally up my alley so i ordered the first three

which ones are yr faves?
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Postby Kenny » Mon Aug 24, 2020 4:20 am

I think they are worth reading in order, though I've only read the first 4. I think the second one is my favorite, but the first one does a good job setting up the world and why it's weird/interesting. The world building isn't as important to the 2nd book, aside from flavor, which is a weird thing about the series because the world building sort of ebbs and flows as being Important.

The only thing I'll say is that don't get attached to characters because each story is pretty self-contained and isn't about building up an overarching narrative (though I guess that slightly changes in the later books!) and is kind of just like different stories from the world rather than 1 story
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Postby adam sampler » Mon Aug 24, 2020 5:33 pm

Image
really terrific, super heavy, does a good job of capturing his self-consciousness / contradictions + his general process

Image
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Postby galactagogue » Mon Aug 24, 2020 6:03 pm

adam sampler wrote:Image
really terrific, super heavy, does a good job of capturing his self-consciousness / contradictions + his general process


i read close to the knives and really loved it. would like to read this one too
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Postby Kenny » Mon Aug 24, 2020 6:08 pm

I finished The Interview with a Vampire today. I'm gonna read the whole series I think, I don't care how crazy and weird it gets. (I've read this and Vampire Lestate before)

But now I'm gonna read Voss which came in the mail recently
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You are a sacred being of light projected into reality for a purpose. Demand the right to your moment in this holographic gift with no rules, no borders, except for those you choose to accept and live by.

Without Labour there is no Rest; nor without Fighting can the Victory be Won ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ

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Postby transmaniacon » Mon Aug 24, 2020 6:10 pm

adam sampler wrote:Image


what’s up with this?
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Postby manvstrees » Mon Aug 24, 2020 6:17 pm

covid ennui has me rereading old shit instead of being capable of experiencing anything new
BUT
continuing though the complete jg ballard short stories is the most rewarding shit
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Postby chowder julius » Mon Aug 24, 2020 6:46 pm

Kenny wrote:I finished The Interview with a Vampire today. I'm gonna read the whole series I think, I don't care how crazy and weird it gets. (I've read this and Vampire Lestate before)

But now I'm gonna read Voss which came in the mail recently

lol I legit wanted to reread this last summer but I didn't like how corny all of the paperbacks I found were (v much judge a book by its cover). actually almost bought a copy at an expat bookstore in berlin while pretty day drunk but instead I lost a 50€ note somewhere on the sidewalk nearby
Image
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