Book Hauls!

[Allegra]

Last bought two of King's:
Under the Dome
11.22.63.

Only problem is when I'll have time to read these massive books!

[Spade]

Originally Posted by Allegra

Only problem is when I'll have time to read these massive books!

You'll be staying up all night to finish 11/22/63 if you enjoyed it as much as I did.

I picked up:

The Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Jeff Vandermeer & Ann Vandermeer
Year's Best SF 17 (2012) edited by Gardner Dozois

[J-Sun]

Originally Posted by Spade

Year's Best SF 17 (2012) edited by Gardner Dozois

Hartwell? Dozois' 2012 The Year's Best Science Fiction will be #29 but that hasn't quite come out yet.

[Spade]

Originally Posted by J-Sun

Hartwell? Dozois' 2012 The Year's Best Science Fiction will be #29 but that hasn't quite come out yet.

Yeah... Hartwell & Cramer. My bad.

[GOLLUM]

Part of a rare Internet order (for me) that is arriving in drips and drabs...

Dickens on France *The only 'travelogue' or key featured collection of Dickens I don't have. Blurb: Dickens on France brings together short stories, extracts from novels and travel writing. Among its journalistic highlights are accounts of a train journey from London to Paris, a rough Channel crossing, the pleasures of Boulogne, and Parisian life in the 1850s and 1860s. The selected short stories include "His Boots", a section of "Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy" and "The Boy at Mugby" in addition to some specific extracts from his novels

Tomorrow's Eve- Villliers de L'Isle-Adam *One of the key decadent novels written in 1886 featuring an SF theme. This is something of a recognised if little known masterpiece. Blurb: Take one inventive genius indebted to the friend who saved his life; add an English aristocrat hopelessly consumed with a selfish and spiritually bankrupt woman; stir together with a Faustian pact to create the perfect woman-and voil! "Tomorrow's Eve" is served. Robert Martin Adams's graceful translation is the first to bring to English readers this captivating fable of a Thomas Edison-like inventor and his creation, the radiant and tragic android Hadaly. Adams's introduction sketches the uncompromising idealism of the proud but penurious aristocrat Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste, Count Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a friend and admired colleague of Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Malarme, and Richard Wagner. Villiers dazzles us with a gallery of electronic wonders while unsettling us with the implications of his (and our) increasingly mechanized and mechanical society. A witty and acerbic tale in which human nature, spiritual values, and scientific possibilities collide, "Tomorrow's Eve" retains an enduring freshness and edge.

The Youngest Doll - Rosario Ferre *A classic Latin American collection of dark tales by one of Puerto Rican's best known writers and poets. Anyone who admires the great Horacio Quiroga's classically dark collection The Decapitated Chicken is likely to enjoy this. Blurb: A gentle maiden aunt who has been victimized for years unexpectedly retaliates through her talent for making life-sized dolls filled with honey. “The Youngest Doll,” based on a family anecdote, is a stunning literary expression of Rosario Ferré’s feminist and social concerns. It is the premier story in a collection that was originally published in Spanish in 1976 as Papeles de Pandora and is now translated into English by the author. The remaining stories, as radiant as they are disturbing, are animated by ferocious river prawns, trees that weep and a 'town with beaches of white gunpowder which thundered at dusk when the tide began to rush in.' In masterly prose, Ferre conveys a world in which stories hide within stories, the personal is always political, mystery is as common and sudden as tenderness and endings are violent but where anger takes a creative rather than polemical form. The daughter of a former governor of Puerto Rico, Ferré portrays women loosening the constraints that have bound them to a patriarchal culture. in a collection of stories that started Ferré on her way to becoming a leading woman writer in Latin America

[Randy M.]

Rasputin's Bastards by David Nickle. CZP looks to be putting out some very interesting, edgy books. I have Nickle's Eutopia as one of my next reads.


Randy M.

[Spade]

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter
Across the Universe by Beth Revis

done picking up books for a while...

[j. d. worthington]

Just received a small booklet of writings by one of the more obscure contributors to Weird Tales in the 1930s, Robert Nelson's Sable Revery: Poems, Sketches, Letters. He was apparently a quite young man who was just beginning to make his mark with his weird poetry, when he died as the result of a nervous breakdown. He was just one day short of being twenty-three.

The item is the first of the "Nodens Chapbooks", a project by noted Tolkien and Lovecraft scholar Douglas Anderson, and the contents include all the existing writings by Nelson (including letters to the magazines), as well as five letters by Lovecraft; four to Nelson himself, one to his mother following her son's death. I've only had a chance to look at a couple of the poems, and one of the letters, but -- though showing the marks of a young writer's hand -- they are really rather impressive in an imagistic, moody way; whilst HPL's letter to his mother is a touching document itself, and shows the latter's seldom remarked deeply human sympathies.

[Anathem]

Originally Posted by rune

Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen by Garth Nix

This was a great series.

This one is a bit old ... but if you love short Sci-Fi stories, this book is awesome:

Will the Last Person To Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun?
by Mike Resnick

[nomadman]

I've already bought and read a lot of Graham Greene's work but, partly I guess because of its very popularity, I've never got round to buying Brighton Rock yet. Finally decided to pick up the beautiful Everyman's Library edition, along with a couple of crime/thriller classics: Dirty Snow by Simenon, The Thin Man by Hammett, and Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler.

[ines]

Just finished reading 'Mythz-TheBeginning' by TY. It was published 4 years ago but i just now heard of it. It's surprisingly unusual and really amazing. I just devoured the story. Now i'm trying to find more books by that author. Has anyone read something else by this author?

[GOLLUM]

I picked up.....

The Devil Delivered and other tales- Steven Erikson *Erikson of course is author of the Malazan series, the best EPIC fantasy series I am yet to come across. Stories covered here are: The Devil Delivered, Revolvo and Fishin' with Grandma Matchie.

League of Extraordinary Gentleman Century: 2009 - Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neil. *Latest offering in Moore's highly entertaining comic series.

[GOLLUM]

Originally Posted by nomadman

I've already bought and read a lot of Graham Greene's work but, partly I guess because of its very popularity, I've never got round to buying Brighton Rock yet. Finally decided to pick up the beautiful Everyman's Library edition, along with a couple of crime/thriller classics: Dirty Snow by Simenon, The Thin Man by Hammett, and Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler.

Amber's Journey into Fear is a classic amongst Spy novels and Dirty Snow, is generally regarded as the best of Simenon's 'psychological' novels. I have an attractive NYRB edn. of the latter but have only dipped into it and not yet read it in its entirety. J.P. spoke highly of it. That Hammett I have similarly not read, the best books I've read by Hammett being The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest. It will be interesting to read your comments on these.

I will also be interested to read your impressions of Greene's Brighton Rock. It's not one of his that I have. Are you more a fan of his short fiction or longer works? I have a penguin edn. of his short stories, I think we may have discussed this previously along with some of Greene's novels? ..anyway of what I've so far read of these stories I feel he was one of the best 'British' short story writers I've so far come across, along with the likes of Dickens, Kipling, Woolf, Conrad, Maugham, Waugh, Angela Carter and Muriel Spark.

[nomadman]

Originally Posted by GOLLUM

Amber's Journey into Fear is a classic amongst Spy novels and Dirty Snow, is generally regarded as the best of Simenon's 'psychological' novels. I have an attractive NYRB edn. of the latter but have only dipped into it and not yet read it in its entirety. J.P. spoke highly of it. That Hammett I have similarly not read, the best books I've read by Hammett being The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest. It will be interesting to read your comments on these.

My edition of the Simenon is the same one you have; I plan to read it sometime this month, along with the Ambler. I'm already quite a bit of the way through the Hammett; it's brisk and colorful and very evocative of the time in which it's set, without seeming 'period'. Rather complex and knotty plot though, and a large cast of characters which the reader must pay attention to, to avoid becoming lost.

Originally Posted by GOLLUM

I will also be interested to read your impressions of Greene's Brighton Rock. It's not one of his that I have. Are you more a fan of his short fiction or longer works? I have a penguin edn. of his short stories, I think we may have discussed this previously along with some of Greene's novels? ..anyway of what I've so far read of these stories I feel he was one of the best 'British' short story writers I've so far come across, along with the likes of Dickens, Kipling, Woolf, Defoe, Conrad, Maugham, Waugh, Angela Carter and Muriel Spark.

Graham Greene is one of my favorite authors and I've enjoyed pretty much all of his writing, including his short fiction, which can be very good, though IMO it's in the novel form at which he truly excels. The Quiet American, The Human Factor, Monsignor Quixote, Travels With My Aunt and A Burnt Out Case are all superlative works, gripping, morally complex, thought-provoking and, in the case of Monsignor and Travels, marvelously funny and enjoyable.

Green's spare prose lends itself very well to the short form, but a lot of the slow-burning tensions and sense of mounting oppressive dread that characterize the best of his more serious works are naturally reduced or not present. Likewise much of the immersion that comes from his sharply painted cultural backdrops is lost, though his journalistic eye for detail is, if anything, heightened.

[GOLLUM]

Originally Posted by nomadman

Graham Greene is one of my favorite authors and I've enjoyed pretty much all of his writing, including his short fiction, which can be very good, though IMO it's in the novel form at which he truly excels. The Quiet American, The Human Factor, Monsignor Quixote, Travels With My Aunt and A Burnt Out Case are all superlative works, gripping, morally complex, thought-provoking and, in the case of Monsignor and Travels, marvelously funny and enjoyable.

OH I don't disagree with that assessment. I think the novel, as you say, was best suited to his style of writing...Having said that I feel his short fiction (of what I've so far read of that collection) is still good enough to rank with many of the finest 'British' writers (who successfully wrote in both the short and longer formats it must be said) I've specifically read, certainly of the 20th Century and earlier including Dickens. I'll need to revisit that collection (and finish it) to provide a more complete response as to why I am taken with his approach to the short form. One thing that particularly impressed me was the sheer variety of different human emotions Greene is able to encapsulate and modes he adopts with obvious technical skill not to mention insight and still, in the stories I have read, to significant 'effect', even in the shorter form....

I should also have added H.E. Bates, Elizabeth Bowen and V.S Pritchett to that list before, Pritchett in particular as you are probably aware having a high opinion of Greene as a writer and vice versa. Have you read much of their work? All three are VERY worth reading, although I rate Pritchett as the best of that particular triumvirate.