April's Anticipated Ascent of Aspiringly Artful Words

[J-Sun]

Finished Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust. I have two quibbles: there's a brief digression on the past regarding Australian aborigines that is irrelevant in the context of the book and broke the mood and a longer digression on saucer nuts that is both irrelevant and misplaced. Cut those elements and it would tighten the pace and streamline the story. but the other 200-some pages of the 215 page novel were damned near perfect. This should have beaten either of Stranger in a Strange Land (1961 copyright, like Fall) or The Man in the High Castle (what won, the year Fall was actually nominated). (And that's not to knock those works.) Prior to reading it and during much of it I was thinking this was an awfully thin story for a novel-length work and wondering how he'd pull it off but I was happy all but those two steps of the way and it worked.

A sort of tourist bus falls in a sort of sinkhole in the moon and various engineers spend a few days trying to rescue the 22 trapped passengers.

That's it.

But it was great! His moon is not our moon and his future is not our future (more's the pity) but it's an absolutely convincing and riveting tale of life and death struggle set against a not-quite-utopian but plausible and invitingly optimistic future. This was a blast to read now but not without a sense of loss for what hasn't come to be - on release it must have been read with unalloyed pleasure when it would have seemed like a future that had to happen. A lot of it can be read almost like a mystery and he presents scientific and engineering problems and solutions and lets the reader have time to figure them out for themselves. But, lest anyone be put off by what might sound like an abstract engineering puzzle, there's also an array of characters, from the likeable to unlikeable, sane and crazy, brave and timid. These are the people who are trying to do the saving and being saved, after all. Also, one of my few complaints about Clarke might be that his general style or more specifically his sense of humor (if present) can be a bit dry but this was a reasonably warm book with several bits of outright humor - there are a couple of pieces of embedded metafiction that are quite interesting (real Westerns and imaginary (I hope!) romances) and the "romance novel" concerning Isaac Newton was very funny. ("'Call me Ike,' said the sage huskily".)

Anyway - A Fall of Moondust is definitive "this is what I read it for" science fiction.

It's just really dismaying to me that it's likely my last new Clarke novel - or at least the last new Clarke novel I particularly looked forward to. I have a few stories to read from The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke now that it's replaced my other collections but no more novels aside from the non-SF Glide Path, the YA Dolphin Island, and the late (in a range of lesser novels) and unappealingly "topical" The Ghost from the Grand Banks and The Hammer of God. But I guess it's okay - it's way past time to start in on re-reading Rendezvous with Rama and many more.

[Connavar]

I finally read Carmilla after having enjoyed Le Fanu's ghost,weird stories for few years. His prose in this story was finer than in his other stories, the way he build the supernatural,creepy mood was near perfect. Carmilla,Laura,the schloss(palace), the gothic country side etc was really well done. The kind of horror story, vampire horror i rate highly when its well written.

Carmilla was more of a freaky ruthless monster which is a nice surprise. I liked how naturally her being lesbian was written. She wanted to love her girls before she feeded on them. It could have been tamer,less important part of the story for a story written in 1872

[Extollager]

I'm expecting to start Bernard Malamud's The Fixer before long. Anyone here read that? I don't know his writing at all well; aboutthe only thing I'm sure of is a short short story called "The Model."
Have a number of nonfiction books going, including an 1887 one about Mt. Athos, the famous Eastern Orthodox monastic "nation" on a Greek peninsula. And I'm slowly rereading Tolkien's Adventures of Tom Bombadil, published 50 years ago this November (in England that is, US ed. was 1963). This is an underrated book, in my opinion.

[j. d. worthington]

I have a copy of The Tolkien Reader which uses that same artwork (Pauline Baynes, yes?), but I've never seen a separate paperback edition of "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil"... which I agree is terribly underrated and even overlooked in most cases. It really does add some nice elements to the entire mythos of Middle-earth, as well as being a charming collection of verses in its own right....

[Extollager]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

I have a copy of The Tolkien Reader which uses that same artwork (Pauline Baynes, yes?), but I've never seen a separate paperback edition of "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil".

Yes, that's Pauline Baynes's work. The book pictured is a hardcover edition; I don't know of a paperbacking of just The Adventures.

[j. d. worthington]

Ah... it looked on first glance like a paperback.... Wonder if I could come across a copy of that for a reasonable price.....

[Vertigo]

I guess it depends on what you consider reasonable.

http://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/Se...ts=t&x=23&y=18

Think I searched the right ISBN: 0048210196

[j. d. worthington]

Tryin' to tempt me there, Vertigo? Shame.... At the moment, I don't think I'm going to be buying anything beyond necessities for a bit....

As I've said before, I'm tending toward reading things I'm familiar with, or are which are very short, given my limited time for reading period, let alone outside my research*; the latest is a reread of Ellison's first novel, Web of the City (which was also his first published book, originally as Rumble). As I grow older, I am of course more easily able to see the flaws... but the strengths continue to stand far above these and, for all the crudities here and there (largely marks of a young writer with his first novel), it is not at all a bad performance, and there are passages which are simply beautiful. It is, not surprisingly, a very stark and grim story, but by no means without either hope or compassion....

[nomadman]

I've been dipping into the Cthulhu 2000 anthology at work recently. A surprising number of these stories are pretty good, capturing the spirit of Lovecraft without slavishly imitating his style or plotlines. TED Klein's Black Man With a Horn is one of the premier pieces of Lovecraftian literature ever written, and a classic in its own right. The horror is wonderfully introduced in bits and pieces (an old folk tale, a police report, a crackly audio interview, strange marks on the narrator's house...) the Lovecraftian element is subtly and naturally introduced, and the pacing is just compelling. The Barrens by F Paul Wilson is a rather good piece set in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey which weaves local folklore and Lovecraftian mythology into a rather seamless and well developed whole. Fat Face by Michael Shea is a very creepy take on what the Shoggoths might be like in an urban setting, again very well written with a fine eye for what makes for truly unsettling horror. Thomas Ligotti's The Last Feast of Harlequin is a nightmarish tale of clowns and their roles in society set in a small town reminiscent of something from Twin Peaks. It's a little too overtly Lovecraftian for my taste (Ligotti wrote better stuff later on in his career) but wonderfully eerie and written in that trademark poetic style.

[Connavar]

Im multi tasking the little free time i have to read. Im re-reading The Continental OP collection by Hammett. Which is more impressive second read since i know now the writer best stories and weaker stories.

Im also reading a slim Collected Poems book by Chinua Achebe. I felt for poetry and thankfully his poetry language,prose is very fine,more stylised than his novel prose style. Quality poetry is much more effective than prose to me, a single line can say so much,so powerfully that would take many pages in a novel.

Also fun to read african fruits, culture elements you wouldnt see in poetry by a western author.

[Diggler]

I'm reading The Unteleported Man by PKD. Which, just like all other PKD works, I'm thoroughly enjoying!

Other books I read this month were:

Vampire Apocalypse: A World Torn Asunder by Derek Gunn

Pulpy but enjoyable vampire apocalypse actioner.

Monster Island by David Wellington

Surprisingly good zombie apocalypse novel set on Manhattan Island

Night of Power by Spider Robinson

I had really high hopes for this one. A future America where race relations have strained to the point of breaking. With Manhattan as the setting, I was left wanting as the book was not only badly dated, but quite dull as well.

[Extollager]

I've been home yesterday and today with a cold and not feeling up to any terribly challenging reading. This 1887 travelogue about Mt. Athos has been just right. It has quite a few nice engravings from photographs, it's chatty about meals (often spoiled by rancis oil or butter), bedbugs/fleas, and so on, with glimpses of rare manuscripts, beautiful vistas and church interiors, etc. I wanted to read about Mt. Athos in connection with Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, which mentions it and has a strong theme relating to Orthodox monasticism. The travelogue gives an English traveler's perspective on Russian shenanigans: the Russian monks "colonizing" Athos are real monks, and there are more devout Russian pilgrims to Athos than Greek ones, but the Russian government is also playing a political game there having to do with extending its influence in the Mediterranean. The author is a bit of a reactionary, seeing the tsarist government as, in theory, the best in Europe! (images not from the book) He ponders the ossuaries...

[nomadman]

Originally Posted by Connavar

Im also reading a slim Collected Poems book by Chinua Achebe. I felt for poetry and thankfully his poetry language,prose is very fine,more stylised than his novel prose style. Quality poetry is much more effective than prose to me, a single line can say so much,so powerfully that would take many pages in a novel.

Also fun to read african fruits, culture elements you wouldnt see in poetry by a western author.

That sounds good. I've only read Achebe's House of Hunger collection, which was some pretty harrowing and powerful stuff, cut very close to the bone.

[Talysia]

Just picked up Toby Frost's God Emperor of Didcot. I've been looking forward to reading this one for a while!

[Connavar]

Originally Posted by nomadman

That sounds good. I've only read Achebe's House of Hunger collection, which was some pretty harrowing and powerful stuff, cut very close to the bone.

I dont see a collection named like that by Achebe. Did you mix the title or the author ?