2012 reading goals

[Stephen Palmer]

I've put the forthcoming Edward O. Wilson on my amazon wish list...

[Extollager]

Originally Posted by GOLLUM

Could I possibly suggest a few more names you may wish to investigate (assuming you have not already read them) in 2012/13?

Lud in the Mist - Hope Mirlees *a single stand alone novel
King of Elfland's Daughter - Lord Dunsany * " "
Little, Big - John Crowley * " "
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino * " "
Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe * " "available in 2 volume set
Riddle Master of Hed - Patricia McKillip *trilogy available in single volume
Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz *single collection
Labyrinths -Jorge Luis Borges * " "
Flowers For Algernon - Daniel Keyes *a single stand alone novel
Worm Ouroboros - E.R. Eddison *a single stand alone novel
Books of Lankhmar -Fritz Leiber *2 volume set
Emperor of Dreams - Clark Ashton Smith *single Fantasy Masterwork collection
Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury *a single stand alone novel
Conan Chronicles - Robert E Howard *collection

A fairly reasonable cross-section of very good fiction (mainly SFF) and whilst not all necessarily to your taste I've no doubt you'll learn something more about the art of writing.

Cheers.

Yeowww! What a list. I've read very few of them.

I have owned a copy of the Mirlees for many years but never read it -- apparently I should.

[j. d. worthington]

Dale: Yes, you should. It's a lovely novel, not quite like anything else I've ever come across, yet having echoes of many... and I don't think you will regret the time spent on it at all.....

My reading program? Difficult to explain without it sounding dull and repetitive (when it is, in reality, anything but); however....

To get about half of what is left of my reading of the materials mentioned in HPL's Supernatural Horror in Literature read (I am currently reading Oliver Wendell Holmes' Elsie Venner, for those who'd like to see just how much I have to go)

To get through at least the first few years' worth of writings by those who comprised the original "Lovecraft Circle" and other writers who were connected with them

To catch up on some of the volumes by or about HPL which have been released lately that I've not yet had a chance to read

And to catch up on some of the latest Lovecraft-related fiction (novels, collections, anthologies), to get a wider understanding of this burgeoning (and increasingly unclassifiable) sub-genre

There are other things I want to get on with, as well, but I have my doubts I can actually accomplish what I've outlined above... but I certainly want to increase my progress in these areas....

[Fried Egg]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

My reading program? Difficult to explain...

Please allow me to summarise: Basically read anything in any way shape or form connected with H. P. Lovecraft.

[thatollie]

Gollum, that's a fantastic list. Five and a half are in my collection (I don't have The Second Book of Lankhmar) and another five and a half have been on my to get list for a while, and I've heard good things about the rest. Great list; I already intended to read If on a winter's night, Something Wicked, Worm Ouroboros and Conan this year but thanks for the reminder.

[GOLLUM]

Originally Posted by thatollie

Gollum, that's a fantastic list. Five and a half are in my collection (I don't have The Second Book of Lankhmar) and another five and a half have been on my to get list for a while, and I've heard good things about the rest. Great list; I already intended to read If on a winter's night, Something Wicked, Worm Ouroboros and Conan this year but thanks for the reminder.

No problem. That was basically just a snapshot 'off the top of the head' but I confess I knew it to contain some of the best works of predominantly Fantasy that I've come across. I've no doubt if Coragem were to read those that it would prove a valuable insight into the art of the written word.

@Extollager: JD is right. Lud-in-the-Mist is well worth your while. One of the greatest works of Fantasy written in the last 100 years.

[Fried Egg]

Originally Posted by GOLLUM

@Extollager: JD is right. Lud-in-the-Mist is well worth your while. One of the greatest works of Fantasy written in the last 100 years.

I've just read it a few days ago and it was very good. Not sure I'd rate it quite as highly as GOLLUM but still recommended.

[Extollager]

So my reading plan for 2012 now includes:

Mirlees, Lud-in-the-Mist -- at least give it a good start

Tolkien-related:

At least 200 pages from the 12-volume History of Middle-earth (I have begun this and with what a pay-off! -- the wonderful Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, which I'd never read, but how sad if I had missed it -- This is in Volume 10, Morgoth's Ring)

Significant reading in The History of The Hobbit, by John Rateliff

Scull and Hammond's The Art of The Hobbit

Flieger's Interrupted Music -- I'm past p. 100 already; interesting tracing of, and speculation about, the development of Tolkien's presentation of his mythic worlds

Fisher (ed.) Tolkien and the Study of His Literary Influences -- includes generous essays on Haggard and Buchan, two of my favorite storytellers


Schwartz, C.S. Lewis on the Final Frontier -- A study of the wonderful space trilogy

Delvings into German Romanticisms -- Goethe, Novalis, Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann

McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow







Lots of other things are likely, too, but these are some that I think may take a little more effort than others such as reading that Soviet-era police procedural The Holy Thief, which has been recommended to me by a colleague who writes reviews of mystery novels for Publishers' Weekly. I expect to read more by Ian Frazier and Phil Dick.

[Extollager]

A review of McGilchrist's book. The book may challenge folks (hello, JD!) who regard Lovecraft's way of perceiving reality and the human cognition thereof as adequate.


The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist reviewed by Mary Midgley
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/02/1

This is a very remarkable book. It is not (as some reviewers seem to think) just one more glorification of feeling at the expense of thought. Rather, it points out the complexity, the divided nature of thought itself and asks about its connection with the structure of the brain.
McGilchrist, who is both an experienced psychiatrist and a shrewd philo–sopher, looks at the relation between our two brain-hemispheres in a new light, not just as an interesting neurological problem but as a crucial shaping factor in our culture. He questions the accepted doctrine that the left hemisphere (Left henceforward) is necessarily dominant, the practical partner, while the right more or less sits around writing poetry. He points out that this "left-hemisphere chauvinism" cannot be correct because it is always Right's business to envisage what is going on as a whole, while Left provides precision on particular issues. Moreover, it is Right that is responsible for surveying the whole scene and channelling incoming data, so it is more directly in touch with the world. This means that Right usually knows what Left is doing, but Left may know nothing about concerns outside its own enclave and may even refuse to admit their existence.
Thus patients with right-brain strokes – but not with left-brain ones – tend to deny flatly that there is anything wrong with them. And even over language, which is Left's speciality, Right is not helpless. It usually has quite adequate understanding of what is said, but Left (on its own) misses many crucial aspects of linguistic meaning. It cannot, for instance, grasp metaphors, jokes or unspoken implications, all of which are Right's business. In fact, in today's parlance, Left is decidedly autistic. And, since Left's characteristics are increasingly encouraged in our culture, this (he suggests) is something that really calls for our attention.
The book's title comes from the legend of a wise ruler whose domains grew so large that he had to train emissaries to visit them instead of going himself. One of these, however, grew so cocky that he thought he was wiser than his master, and eventually deposed him. And this, says McGilchrist, is what the Left hemisphere tends to do. In fact, the balance between these two halves is, like so many things in evolution, a somewhat rough, practical arrangement, quite capable of going wrong. The bifurcation seems to have become necessary in the first place because these two main functions – comprehensiveness and precision – are both necessary, but are too distinct to be combined. The normal sequence, then, is that the comprehensive partner first sees the whole prospect – picks out something that needs investigating – and hands it over to the specialist, who processes it. Thus the thrush's Left is called in to deal with the snail-shell; the banker's Left calculates the percentage. But, once those pieces of work are done, it is necessary for the wider vision to take over again and decide what to do next.
Much of the time this is indeed what happens and it is what has enabled brains of this kind to work so well, both for us and for other animals. But sometimes there is difficulty about the second transaction. Since it is the nature of precision not to look outward – not to bother about what is around it – the specialist partner does not always know when it ought to hand its project back to headquarters for further processing. Being something of a success-junkie, it often prefers to hang on to it itself. And since we do have some control over this shift between detailed and general thinking, that tendency can be helped or hindered by the ethic that prevails in the culture around it.
McGilchrist's suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato's time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path. (Thus, as a shocked nurse lately told me, it is proposed that all nurses must have university degrees. Who, she asked, will actually do the nursing?) And the ideal of objectivity has developed in a way that would have surprised those sages still more.
This notion, which now involves seeing everything natural as an object, inert, senseless and detached from us, arose as part of the dualist vision of a split between body and soul. It was designed to glorify God by removing all competing spiritual forces from the realm of nature. It therefore showed matter itself as dead, a mere set of billiard-ball particles bouncing mechanically off each other, always best represented by the imagery of machines. For that age, life and all the ideals relevant to humanity lay elsewhere, in our real home – in the zone of spirit. (That, of course, was why Newton, to the disgust of later scholars, was far more interested in theology than he was in physics.) But the survival of this approach today, when physicists have told us that matter does not actually consist of billiard balls, when we all supposedly believe that we are parts of the natural biosphere, not colonists from spiritual realms – when indeed many of us deny that such realms even exist – seems rather surprising.
Why do we still think like this? Why can't we be more realistic? McGilchrist's explanation of such oddities in terms of our divided nature is clear, penetrating, lively, thorough and fascinating. Though neurologists may well not welcome it because it asks them new questions, the rest of us will surely find it splendidly thought-provoking. And I do have to say that, fat though it is, I couldn't put it down.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Fried Egg

Please allow me to summarise: Basically read anything in any way shape or form connected with H. P. Lovecraft.

LOL. Not quite, though... after all, I have a copy of Lovecraft's Library: A Catalogue, which would add rather a lot to that list....

Seriously, though, there is a great deal of truth to that; largely because I'm doing a lot of research and writing connected to HPL. But this also catches me up on a lot of influential things in the weird/horror field I've not yet read, as well as giving me a better understanding of the historical development of said field; so though HPL is sort of the hub around which it all revolves, it's a multi-pronged approach to a lot of different things as well... if that makes any sense.....

[Valko]

I plan on a Malazan re-read at some point as I stopped at the begining of Reaper's Gale, a couple of years ago. Also looking forward to Feist's A Crown Imperilled at the end of the month. I'm currently cheating with Martin's A Song of Ice & Fire, as I'm listening to the books on Audible while commuting to work

[Michael J Sullivan]

Originally Posted by elvet

I want to do a Malazan reread and finally get to Dust of Dreams and Crippled God, both of which I've been saving.
This year I hope to get to the Riyria series by Michael Sullivan, Wars of Light and Shadow by Jany Wurts, and listen to the ASoIaF audio books.

elvet...Thanks for putting the Riyria Revelations on your goal list for this year. The last book of the series Heir of Novron/Percepliquis just came out last week in paperback and the ebook is due at the end of the month.

Intial readers who had already gone through book 5 received Percepliquis starting last week and so far the reviews seem to indicate that the series ends positively.

I hope you do enjoy the books when you get to them.

[dlsevern]

First I want to finally finish Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Then get caught up with WoT, I'm on Knife of Dreams now.

Get my Stephen King reading caught up, I still have about six of his books that I haven't read.

Get some more fantasy under my belt.

Read the last three books of Skipp & Spector that I have

Read the rest of the Peter Straub books that I have.

From there, who knows.

[dask]

No year long reading plan here. Just want to read good books by good authors and get that feeling I'm spending my time wisely.

[Jeni]

I still haven't read anything by Wolfe, Weeks, Brett, Abercrombie, Tchaikovsky, Le Guin, McMaster Bujold, Sanderson, Erikson, Jordan, Leiber, McCaffrey, Brooks ..... and more that I can't think of right now, so I hope to read books by some of these authors this year.

I am also going to try and read more sci-fi too, hopefully at least one book a month.

Also, I got three kindle anthologies over christmas - short stories by E A Poe, a selection of novels by Andre Norton, and the complete works of H P Lovecraft, which I intend to dip into randomly during the year.

Any suggestions as to which of the 60+ Lovecraft stories I should start with would be appreciated!