Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Ah yes, another surprisingly enjoyable epic dealing at great length with an enormous-dicked (some kind of obsession with Clavell it seems) English hero and his battles with cunning eastern schemers.
See also Taipan, Noble House etc and to a lesser extent King Rat.

Haha, yeah, that's cropped up several times already.
Reminds me of the episode of South Park where some sort of Japanese consortium tries to buy out the whole town, or whatever, and whenever the locals try and stop them the Japenese guys just say "You Amelicans have vely big penis!", and the locals get so flattered and smug they forget what they were just talking about.

The power-politics-and-high-adventure-in-a-brutal-feudal-society theme reminds me strongly of Dune.
 

petergunn

plywood violin
Sorry, in my enthusiasm i forgot.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

the soft focus version of "The Stand" by Stephen King...

i quite liked it when i read it, but dunno if i'll ever reread it...

it seems like apocalytic fiction is the new thing now... some semi-famous British writer whose name escapes me just wrote a similar book and i recently read a review about a series of novellas about manhattan after a nuclear attack...
 

adruu

This Is It
if there was one thing i wish people would stop selling it would be the idea of an apocalypse. its a collective mental illness...
 

robin

Well-known member
anyone reading the black swan by nassum nicholas taleb?

its fascinating so far,i don't know enough about the philosophy and so on that it deals with to fully form an opinion about it but its really interesting so far and has given me a lot to think about.

also reading first love and other stories by beckett again,its every bit as good as i remembered.
 

Noah Baby Food

Well-known member
Indeed, that's where they got it from. There's a fair few of the crab books...some of them are quite rare. They are well worth a punt, you can read one in half an hour easily...he also has books about werewolves and bats, amongst other things. None of them are approaching literature.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
reading, for the first time (not sure why), the Picture of Dorian Grey. it's funny that some of the inversions of common sense in classic lines such as "beauty is shallow, but at least it's not as shallow as thought" remind me of Zizek's inversions (not the best example but there are countless others).

and in one curious passage Wilde seems to say something about quantum physics, or rather the "new age-y" pseudo scientific / spiritual side of it:

(talking about how the change of expression on the portrait after the girl kills herself)

Might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all? if thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not ghought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? nay, withoutthought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom insecret love or strange affinity?

right out of that movie "what the ****" isn't it?
 

spooky girlfriend

Wild Horses
just finished a collection of H.P Lovecraft horror stories. some have dated worse than others as the themes have since been turned into horror cliche but on the whole quite spine-chilling stuff. a particular favourite is 'under the pyramids', written by Lovecraft as a diary narrative by Harry Houdini. the build-up to the nameless horrors he encounters is brilliant, Lovecraft was a very articulate and well read man with a twisted imagination.

currently reading graham greene's 'the quiet american'. seems good, but the only graham greene i've got to go on thus far is the film version of Brighton Rock- it's like the British 'Scarface' with an immortal portrayal of sinister main character Pinky by Richard Attenborough
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"the only graham greene i've got to go on thus far is the film version of Brighton Rock- it's like the British 'Scarface' with an immortal portrayal of sinister main character Pinky by Richard Attenborough"
I love GG and would recommend most of his books - the film of Brighton Rock is strange in that they change the ending so it's definitely worth reading as well. I would say it's a cop-out in the film although someone I spoke to suggested that in its own way it was actually darker.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
just finished a collection of H.P Lovecraft horror stories. some have dated worse than others as the themes have since been turned into horror cliche but on the whole quite spine-chilling stuff. a particular favourite is 'under the pyramids', written by Lovecraft as a diary narrative by Harry Houdini. the build-up to the nameless horrors he encounters is brilliant, Lovecraft was a very articulate and well read man with a twisted imagination.

Yeah, that's a good one - I think it's actually called 'Imprisoned With The Pharoahs'.
For my money, his spookiest story ever is 'The Colour Out Of Space'. I was pleased to later learn that he actually regarded this as his most effective story. 'At The Mountains Of Madness' is great too.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
what's interesting about HPL is how effective the work is, and still is, considering the corniness, and by now contrived corniness of the cliche ridden, non-descript, absolutely trite language --- sentences like "... filled with an unspeakable horror at the terrifying image of a monstrous, ancient evil..." (not real quote)

i mean it's like a beginner's guide of what NOT to do in creative writing - you are supposed to evoke the feeling of terror and NOT ever use the word "terror"...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, he's either overly descriptive ("...rugose and partly squamous...") or cops out completely and describes things as "indescribable".

Rather than the stuff that's meant to provoke either horror or disgust, I prefer his "dizzying vistas of undimensioned night..." kind of prose, all the mystical, cosmic force beyond the ken of mortals kind of stuff.
It's interesting that HPL had a keen amateur interest in science and was writing at a time when general relativity was a big new idea; GR is also said to have been a big influence on some of the cubists at the time, and also M.C.Escher. Hmm, that would have been a good topic for the 'Sciences and Humanities' thread.
 
Last edited:

Noah Baby Food

Well-known member
Never read much Lovecraft, which is a bit of an oversight on my part. It's on my 'to do' list definitely. Never read much (any?) Poe either. Have been neglecting the horror classics...

I am currently struggling my way through 'Terrace Terrors' by Richard Allen. Not one of his best, not that his best are actually 'good' anyway, really. He is such a terrible writer...but you cannot overstate his importance...hundreds of thousands, even millions, read these books.

I've got a massive pile of pulp fiction to work my way through...I am obsessed. Books in my pile include 'Frenzy' and 'Slob' by Rex Miller, 'Bats Out Of Hell, by Guy N Smith, 'The Hiss' by Andrew Laurance, some Shaun Hutson, a Herne The Hunter 'adult western', an Edge 'adult western', one of the Fontana horror anthologies, 'Confessions From A Luxury Liner', some Graham Masterton book, 'Great Apes' by Will Self (which I started reading but it annoyed me too much). Many more too. Can't stop buying the bloody things but never get round to reading 'em.
 

Octopus?

Well-known member
'Frenzy' and 'Slob' by Rex Miller

Love those books...reading them back to back certain portions repeat themselves, but that's natural for a pulp series. The constant obsessive details of his massive food consumption, sickening girth and preparations for his killing sprees are incredibly eerie and repellent. Great stuff :D
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Finished a Gunter Grass novel and I'm now reading Maldoror as recommended in this very place and also at the surrealism exhibition in London. Went to the Dali exhibition at the Tate Modern on Friday and saw it referenced there as well so it's good timing.
So far very readable and funny - can't imagine it will take me too long to get through (unlike Gunter Grass which took aaaaggggges)
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
WOw! Guybrush is reading Simone de Beauvoir. Next you should try Irigaray.
 
Top