Community Book club - What are you reading and what have you read recently

[lashman]

Glad to be here too mate.
I hear you started Miniature painting. Nice.

me? nah ... but Li Kao made a thread for it check it out:

|OT| - This is a miniature painting thread

Introducing miniature painting may be a bit difficult. Where to start ? In the beginning there were pigments. And man's love to put those on every sort of shit, because ! Who doesn't like colors ? Then there were those damn teenagers and their inextinguishable lust for power fantasy, thinking...

metacouncil.com

 

[Tizoc]

 

[Swenhir]

I've started reading The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis and it's really starting strong. I can't say for sure, having gone through it just yet but it seems like a very powerful exposition of just how Africa has been exploited and striped of its resources systematically by both its governments and associated industries.

 

[toxicitizen]

Speaking of Hyperion, that was an insanely great book. The Priest story blew me away at the start and i was hooked. Still haven't gotten to the other books in the series even though i already own "Fall of Hyperion" and "Endymion".

If you liked Hyperion then get on Fall of Hyperion asap. It's so freaking good! It's less of a sequel and more like the second half of the book. I haven't touched the Endymion books yet either, though. Fall of Hyperion has a satisfying enough ending that it makes for a good spot to take a break and I wanted to get to other books before getting into them. Working my way through the last few Dark Tower books right now.

 

[Pranooy]

So finished "Project Hail Mary", this past weekend. It is basically a really good sci-fi novel in the same vein as his first book "The Martian".
Starts off with a lot of similarity to The Martian, but branches of to do some really cool stuff. I think this is a better book than The Martian, mainly coz we have no idea about the circumstance that lead to the current situation and that is slowly revealed in parallel to the current happenings that make up the main storyline.

Really enjoyed it overall and folks who liked The Martian should love it too IMO.
Even folks who enjoy grounded sci-fi (lots of explanation of the scientific reasoning) should check it out.

If you liked Hyperion then get on Fall of Hyperion asap. It's so freaking good! It's less of a sequel and more like the second half of the book. I haven't touched the Endymion books yet either, though. Fall of Hyperion has a satisfying enough ending that it makes for a good spot to take a break and I wanted to get to other books before getting into them. Working my way through the last few Dark Tower books right now.

Wanted to start "Fall of Hyperion", but instead started "The Shadow of Gods" by John Gwynne. It is a Norse-inspired fantasy with some interesting protagonists - a mother, an ex-slave and a warrior.

Check out this cool cover!!

 

[Li Kao]

The desire to read something was building up inside me for some weeks now, and I was a little fed up with only reading my Lovecraft / The Weird anthologies, so I started I short read, 'We have always lived in the castle' by Shirley Jackson.
I reserve full judgement for when I hypothetically finish it, but I can say for the time being that while I can respect the intent, it's fucking god-awfully boring to read.

I'm at page 80/151, and should really read a little bit of it today before my usual bedtime reading session, because I sure won't bear to read 80 other pages in one go if things keep the same.

- Moral of the story -
You may have reading OCD and can't see yourself reading mammoth 800 pages books, but short isn't always the answer

 

[FunnyJay]

So, I finished the novelization of Metal Gear Solid 4 - Guns of the Patriots.

In the words of Krusty the clown:

What a mess of a story. I really enjoyed the story of (the games) MGS 1-3. MGS 1 was really good, and while MGS 2 could get fairly convoluted it was still enjoyable. MGS 3 was more simple in it's story compared to 2 but had some really nice twists.

But MGS 4? I don't really know what to say. I don't think I liked the direction the story took at all, especially walking back and retconning some pieces from the earlier games.

And don't get me started on the meme-fest that was Drebin...

 

[Dandy]

I'm currently reading(and re-reading) the short stories in the Dead Djinn series by P. Djèlí Clark. The full length novel came out, and I want it all fresh in my mind.

The story takes place in an early 1900s alternate Cairo a few years after a famous mystic broke the barrier between this world and magical realm. Djinn and other magical things were now able to enter the world which lead to a cultural/technological boom, and now Cairo is the worlds most modern city. There is steam/clockwork/magic tech like tram cars, and steam automatons. There are various types of djinn, sorcerers, ethereal beings who claim to be angels that inhabit clockwork bodies so they can interact with the world, flesh-eating undead ghuls, and lots of other stuff.

The stories mainly focus on agents of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities... so like detectives that investigate supernatural incidents.

The first short story, A Dead Djinn in Cairo is available to read for free on the publisher's site, as is the second, The Angel of Khan el-Khalili. There is also the novella, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 and the first full-length novel, A Master of Djinn.

I love this series so far because it is unlike anything I've read before. The world is very fresh and interesting. If nothing else, read A Dead Djinn in Cairo, as it features the same protagonist as A Master of Djinn, a badass, suit wearing, female detective named Fatma el-Sha’arawi.

Anyway, here is the gorgeous cover for the first full-length novel.

 

[Pranooy]

Started two books yesterday and really enjoying both.
As a huge fan of First law series, i doubt The Heroes can disappoint me. About Mort, i've heard good stuff and kinda expect to have a good time.

 

[Mivey]

Started two books yesterday and really enjoying both.
As a huge fan of First law series, i doubt The Heroes can disappoint me. About Mort, i've heard good stuff and kinda expect to have a good time.

Mort is a really great book, and the start of a small subseries in the Diskwork novels. You're in for a treat.

 

[Li Kao]

Helped by insomnia, and the lack of will to do anything else, I finished 'We have always lived in the castle' by Shirley Jackson. Small miracle of sorts as I had all but dropped it. Unfortunately my opinion hasn't changed. It's not shit, there is skill, there are elements that could reasonably be studied and thought about (the sister POV is interesting for sure, a little haunting, even), but it was painfully bland to read. Be it pacing, tired situations (the cousin) and genre (it's a drama, plain and simple).
When I read people on Goodreads writing it was too weird for them... I mean, there is a particular angle, but it's quite vanilla overall.

Not even sure finishing it was a good thing, I need to learn to drop things. It just annoyed the hell out of me that the first book of Shirley Jackson I tried would be a miss.

So we are back at square one. Do I want to start a book that interests me but is too big for my lack of drive and possible bout of reading OCD, or read a small 100-150 page book that will bore the shit out of me.

 

[Mivey]

Helped by insomnia, and the lack of will to do anything else, I finished 'We have always lived in the castle' by Shirley Jackson. Small miracle of sorts as I had all but dropped it. Unfortunately my opinion hasn't changed. It's not shit, there is skill, there are elements that could reasonably be studied and thought about (the sister POV is interesting for sure, a little haunting, even), but it was painfully bland to read. Be it pacing, tired situations (the cousin) and genre (it's a drama, plain and simple).
When I read people on Goodreads writing it was too weird for them... I mean, there is a particular angle, but it's quite vanilla overall.

Not even sure finishing it was a good thing, I need to learn to drop things. It just annoyed the hell out of me that the first book of Shirley Jackson I tried would be a miss.

So we are back at square one. Do I want to start a book that interests me but is too big for my lack of drive and possible bout of reading OCD, or read a small 100-150 page book that will bore the shit out of me.

Have you ever read anything by Ursula K. Le Guin? If you are looking for shorter stories that are still very interesting, I'd recommend her "Hainish cycle", a collection of science fiction books set loosely in the same universe. Each of the stories is essentially speculative fiction, and concerned with how fictional societies, not bound to the rules here on Earth, could work.

Hainish Cycle - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Gateway is publishing the individual stories, also easy to find digitally on Kobo or Kindle.

 

[Li Kao]

Beyond the Threshold (1941) by August Derleth

Didn't know what to read next and wasn't brave enough to tackle a big book, so I let nostalgia lure me back to my Lovecraft complete work.
Now, it wouldn't be bad if I hadn't already read the Cthulhu and Dream cycle, which means I'm in the part of the book with short stories from Lovecraft's friends, which are definitely hit or miss.
And it wouldn't even be that bad if I wasn't at the point where the book wants me to read some August Derleth... Now, I know of his Mythos work being seen as subpar at best, and I swear I tried to go in without prejudice, but this is just not good enough. While the majority of the shorts are nearing pastiche territory, with a lot of disposable texts by Howard for example, there are small gems, Clark Ashton Smith being a big one. But Derleth, here, I don't know in what measure it's the bland translation or the original text, it's just NOT good enough.

Descriptions are boring, plot is already read dozens of times, at 30 pages of length it even achieves to feel long. It feels like you asked an AI to write you a Mythos story and it did deliver exactly that, a random Mythos story.

Next story in line is another Derleth, The Dweller in the Darkness (1944), which looks easily twice as long. I'm shitting bricks for all the wrong reasons.

 

[Li Kao]

Still slowly going at The Weird anthology by Jeff Vandermeer.

The Long Sheet by William Sansom (1944)
Having been relocated to small steel cubicles, a group of prisoners is put through a most peculiar ordeal. Their warders tell them that they will be free once they squeeze every last bit of humidity from a long sheet of wet fabric passing through the room.

Nah. Didn't like. The intro didn't do it any service by comparing it to In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka, tall fucking order. Narrative structure is mundane, here is what group A did, then B, then C, then D and finally yep, the end. A little too brainy, in that each prisoner's behavior is a pretext to draw observations on human nature when faced with an absurd and well defined task. The somber ending is also weakened by that whole interrogation of the nature of freedom.
Putting it another way, the whole thing is clearly a thinly veiled reflection about this, characters are not important, they are just here to make a point.

The result felt too artificial to me. If I didn't fear using harsh words toward a text I may have simply misunderstood, I would say that it's simply pretentious.


Reading The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges now. It's hard. Language, long sentences, foreign context, pacing, I feared it would be another failure, but its charm is slowly getting its grip on me. This is just not an easy read for a 2021 shmuck who isn't 100% bilingual, isn't familiar with Argentina, and is more used to the simplistic prose used everywhere now.
It has potential, but we will see.

 

[Li Kao]

Fuuu… Stop everything and read Borges ?

 

[Panda Pedinte]

Since I started working from home because the pandemic I haven't read much like the past years where I used to read a book per month. I recently bought the Foundation trilogy from Asimov.

I had already read them many year ago, though the translation was a bit strange as they were older versions. The package is pretty cool and the book covers are amazing so I hope they republish the other books in the series.

 

[ZKenir]

There'll be some book bundles for warhammer 40k and warhammer age of sigmar on fanatical this weekend

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/08/18/six-incredible-black-library-collections-are-available-for-this-weekend-only/

 

[ZKenir]

bundles up on fanatical

Fanatical

www.fanatical.com

 

[Li Kao]

The Dweller in the Darkness (1944) by August Derleth
Two teachers agree on spending some time in a far off cabin near a lake and a dark forest. So in the boonies from hell. To search for their disappeared colleague.

Hey, a Lovecraft Mythos short by Derleth which is not shit. Much surprise, so unexpect.
The issue with that short could mostly be situated in the difference of treatment of the Mythos by Derleth in comparison with Lovecraft. While the danger is still very much present, the characters feel a bit less out of their league. The menace of the Mythos feels closer too, not as distant as in Lovecraft stories.
Not a bad read, overall, but minor.


The Shadow from the Steeple (1950) by Robert Bloch
A follow up on a Lovecraft story whose title I forgot and I'm lazy. A dear friend of a young man who died years ago has been spending decades searching for the truth behind this death. All point to a very specific house. Hilarity ensues.

A convoluted way of delivering the story, like, this is the tale of this man, but in order to understand it we have to go years back, oh and let's talk about this man first, and this one. Didn't care for this text, once you get the original out of it, relatively few meat is left on that bone. Nice ending though.
Interesting update of the Mythos to the worries of the time. Feels like a logical follow up to Lovecraft.
Also a text featuring some major player more prominently than in the original Mythos.


Notebook Found in a Deserted House (1951) by Robert Bloch
A young orphan who has been living with his grand mother for years, is sent to live on his uncle farm at the death of the old lady. The farm is in the woods. In the mountains. Double boonies. So much LOL, big ROFL time.

Nice story, pretty nasty. Which doesn't surprise me seeing it's by Bloch, whom I treat with caution given is other work.

Next up : The Haunter of the Graveyard (1969) by J. Vernon Shea


EDIT - I am really fed up with short stories, but still dreading the doorstopers writers pass as books these days. Halp.

 

[Li Kao]

Agents of Dreamland (2017) by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Early July 2015, in Winslow Arizona. The Signalman, a government agent, is waiting to meet with a mysterious woman, whom he obviously loathes. But the stakes are too high to act any other way.

So first, Caitlín R. Kiernan ! At last, her name is quite present in modern weird fiction, and I was anticipating our meeting. So I was going in with positive preconceptions. And I'm closing this book with positive preconceptions. But I unfortunately didn't have the great experience I had hoped for, nothing to tarnish the idea I had of her writing, but yeah, it was somewhat of a miss. Sort of a good miss, so there is that.

It was a difficult read for a non native, and I suspect it could be one even to one. The text is demanding. Nothing is clearly explained, the reader has to keep trying to piece every small bits together to make sense of the characters and events that are unfolding. So yeah, it's not the easiest of story to read. Which is not helped by the crazy way it is narrated. When one chapter takes place in early July, another can and will be situated dozens of years before, and yeah, even after. Protagonists change depending on the chapter too, maybe obviously, but not all of them still have their full sanity. Did I say it's a demanding text ? It's not automatically a bad thing, mind you, it's weird fiction and sometimes you have to work a little to appreciate the nuances of a story. And that's without talking about the fact that some cosmic horror stories are not meant to be fully understood.
So great and intriguing characters. Creepy scenes, that don't show but suggest. What could go wrong ?

Well in my mind the story is self-sabotaging when it comes to its length. It's a short story, and believe me I love and read a ton of short stories. But in this case, when all was said and done, I can't help but feel the overall plot lacking. Like the narrative is hurrying a little too quickly toward an ending. There is an inconsequentiality to the characters' actions, or put another way, the story ideas are great, the story events are a little lacking. I know that powerlessness can be a trait of cosmic horror, too, but I feel the story beats veer a little too close to pointlessness, and that the overall text would have gained to be longer and being granted some more beats.

So at the end of the day it was a very solid cosmic horror story, I will very probably read the follow-up cases and Kiernan still has all my attention. But it was a little short.

 

[Cacher]

Start reading Gardens of the Moon again. I really want to get into a huge fantasy series, and Malazaan being bought up by fantasy community every time in recommendation list is intriguing. This first book is notoriously difficult and confusing to read so I dropped it for five or six times now.

This time I am going to check every difficult vocabulary and make notes during reading. Hopefully this time I could push through.

 

[Gevin]

Start reading Gardens of the Moon again. I really want to get into a huge fantasy series, and Malazaan being bought up by fantasy community every time in recommendation list is intriguing. This first book is notoriously difficult and confusing to read so I dropped it for five or six times now.

This time I am going to check every difficult vocabulary and make notes during reading. Hopefully this time I could push through.

Feel free to ask here if you have any pressing questions. I'd also recommend the Tor re-read: Malazan Reread of the Fallen – Tor.com, but I'd avoid Bill's commentary since it's aimed more at re-readers and it has some spoileres

 

[Cacher]

Feel free to ask here if you have any pressing questions. I'd also recommend the Tor re-read: Malazan Reread of the Fallen – Tor.com, but I'd avoid Bill's commentary since it's aimed more at re-readers and it has some spoileres

Thanks for the re-read page! Oh yes, I just finished re-reading the prologue. Like Amanda from the re-read, I have tons of questions haha. But maybe I should find the answers from the book. Really fun to read others' first impression on the book, though.

 

[Li Kao]

The intro spits fire, yeah. I too have tried to read it years ago, dropping it at the start of part 2 I think. Very strange moment in the book that put me off a little.
I’ve got no more love in me for fantasy anymore, even avoiding it, but if I read the genre again, Malazan would be in the short list.

I would add The Black Company to this list. In fact, the only Fantasy I’m interested in is Dark Fantasy. I realized some years ago that I need some grim & gritty and character driven drama to make me really feel for the genre. So the Big Commercial Fantasy with its myriad 500 pages trilogies leaves me cold.

 

[EdwardTivrusky]

No No No No No! It's not that old, it's not, it's not! GDMF! It is...

 

[Mivey]

I read his Neuromancer trilogy, but I never really read his first book, actually. I think I should fix that one of these days...

 

[EdwardTivrusky]

I read "Burning chrome" and no kidding it changed my outlook on things and seriously kickstarted my interest in 3D, VR, Meta-Data Visualisation etc which wouldn't be realised until years later. Jaron Lanier building on Evans and Sutherland's work, Palo Alto Labs, Xerox PARC etc all astounded me and now we have Epic's Metaverse and i don't want it. There again those "Cyberpunk" pioneers also identified the dystopias that would come so we were warned.

Anyway, Burning Chrome is a great collection of stories as it Bruce Sterling's Mirrorshades. There's some i feel are weak but it depends on your outlook and what you wanted. Dogfight co-authored with Michael Swanwick really hit me hard back then as an edgy teen and is still one of my favourite short stories.

 

[Li Kao]

The haunter of the Graveyard (1969) by J. Vernon Shea
The host of a horror TV program has lived for several years now in a remote part of town, near a dilapidated graveyard that most people avoid. He likes to go there though, and particularly at night to read his horror books. Who doesn't ?

Meh, it's nearly not worth the time I will spend writing this post. And it's too bad because there was potential. I don't think there is a line of dialog, it's mostly descriptions, not bad ones, the cemetery feels suitably moody, the vibe is good. Then it ends in the most mundane, by the number, pastiche way possible.

 

[Linkark07]

Finished reading recently Steelheart of the Reckoner series by Brandon Sanderson.

Eh, as a YA novel it is fine. David isn't a memorable protagonist. What kept me going was that, again, another story about evil people with superpowers and some normal people are doing everything to defeat them. It shares some similarities with the Boys, except this is a post apocalyptic world when the supervillains rule the world and we don't have a guy constantly saying the c-word.

Next month club book is Night Shift by Stephen King. Never have read King in my entire life so looking forward to this.

 

[ZKenir]

Not exactly traditional books as their audio books but there's a Black Library bundle on humble bundle

Black Library Bundle

 

[Stevey]

I'm on book 33 of The Horus Herresy - War Without End which is an anthology of short stories.

Just finished Deathfire which was really good.

 

[Kyougar]

Just finished reading Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton

It is... ok. Has many parallels to Hyperion by Simmons. (portal homes and narrative structure, sadly no Sol Weintraub.)

It is the prelude to the rest of the two books so I am not giving up. I read Misspent Youth and continued reading the Commonwealth saga regardless, a good decision after that mediocre book.

Hamilton has the uncanny ability to make you care about a storyline and getting annoyed by chapter cliffhangers because another storyline will come next and you just want to get it over with... until you care about the other storyline more than the previous one.
The biggest example of this is the Void Saga, where I didn't care about the inside-Void storyline and just wanted to know what happens to the humans in the Galaxy. ... until I was craving the void sequences and got annoyed by the outside stories.


My biggest love is still for the Nights Dawn Trilogy, though. I finished it 1,5 times in German (started reading Neutronium Alchemist before I know it was a several book saga (which were 6 books in German instead of the 3 original English books) and read it two times in English. Although, I skipped two or three POV's in the re-reads, didn't care about Al Capone at all)

 

[Kyougar]

Finished the rest of the trilogy.

Not his best works, I have to say. The second book was a slog, especially the Ollie chapters I nearly completely skipped. Book 3 was worlds better but still not as pulling into the world and wanting to know what happens next like Nights Dawn, Commonwealth. and Void.
Most Cliffhangery ending of any trilogies he did. Book 3 was good enough that I still want to know what happens after that cliffhanger.

And he still has this weird German-torturing fetish going on. If he needs examples outside of the UK and the US, it is largely German cities or regions that get fucked up.

Speculation of "Book 4" of the "trilogy" or another trilogy (he said he will write another book in the Salvation universe):

See more

• Neana are probably semi-bad guys, they were not in the arkships captured by the Olyix and didn't come out of hiding
• Sanctuary and the place where the future message is coming from is probably the same location
• Yirella is probably the one who either makes the message 60.000 years into the future or makes sure that the message gets sent at that time
• There is probably a galaxy/life-ending threat 60.000 years into the future that needs a unified Milky Way, so they manipulate the Olyix to do what they did in the past to unify the 6000 alien races

 

[Li Kao]

I've got a question in the back of my mind for the last few days. Can any people here point me to a website that cover news and reviews about imaginary fictions ? By that I mean sf fantasy horror etc. Not sure how they are labeled in English.
I only know about Locus, and this is not really doing it for me.

If you have a very good site about fiction in general, without fantastical elements, I guess I would be curious too. Trying to challenge my confort zone.

 

[Li Kao]

Fuck fuck fuck, I knew what it was as soon as the intro talked about it being a Twilight Zone episode, it fucking had to be that one…
I read it, not that scary, no big deal. Then you start thinking about it and… fuck.

It‘s a Good Life by Jerome Bixby (1953)
…
Fuck

 

[Li Kao]

Brushed off the kindle on a whim, trying to see how the screen change my sleep schedule. I'm taking a liking for the little thing, years late, but now I'm annoyed by the perspective of having to change it one day and have no fucking button option.

Continued The Weird by Jeff Vandermeer and fell in love with...

'Same Time, Same Place' by Mervyn Peake
Some evening, a young man who lives with his parents realize that he can't stand them anymore, that he can't stand his life, that he has to go out.
He will discover that even in the cities, the night can harbor some very disturbing things.

Short, to the point, creepy. The sort of story that lingers in your mind when you turn the lights out. Nothing horrible, just creepy.
I now clearly have to read Gormenghast.

And I just started...

'Malpertuis' by Jean Ray
My first 'hey I loved his work in The Weird, let's try another story.' One of his most famous, with a movie adaptation featuring Orson Wells.

The owner of a demented manor coupled with a store is dying. He summons his family and friends and make them an offer they can't refuse.

What a mess, I already had tried reading it years ago and can see why I dropped it. The beginning is slow, the narration is confusing, and Jean Ray frequently use a vocabulary that flies one mile over my head. And I'm was not a fan of the type of horror the book go for sometimes with one specific character, very eccentric, phantasmagorical ?
But you take a liking to the characters and yesterday the story genuinely creeped me out. Again, nothing that horrible, just plain unnatural. So good.
There are some seriously good prose too, had to underline a paragraph for the first time in years.
I'm not sure I will get it, like 'The Shadowy Street' that was so great in The Weird by the way (read it, how to creep the reader with... stillness), but when it's good, it's very good.

 

[Li Kao]

Decided to follow Malpertuis with the first Dying Earth book by Jack Vance. Wanted to try reading something else than horror for a change. Chose poorly. Now I need to learn to drop books.
It’s imaginative 50’s genre fiction. It’s the inspiration of D&D. It’s Science-Fantasy. And it’s I don’t give a flying fuck about what I’m reading.
And while I’m not particularly woke, at least not enough, that’s also more than a little misogynistic at times.

So yeah, I’m beginning to scare myself there, but I think it’s back to horror for me.

 

[OSatan]

How lengthy are the Wheel of Time books?

Classic each book is double the previous one?
The start chunky from the beginning?

 

[Pommes]

How lengthy are the Wheel of Time books?

Classic each book is double the previous one?
The start chunky from the beginning?

The Wheel of Time books are very long:

 

[Kyougar]

The Wheel of Time books are very long:

The wandering Inn The Wandering Inn

Total

8.888.536

:>

 

[Stevey]

Still chipping away at the Horus Heresy, currently on The Silent War.
Couldn't track it down in paperback so got the Kindle version.
I use the app on my Samsung phone, never used it before, but its pretty good to be fair.

 

[「Echo」]

Amazon product ASIN B071R98WJM
I never read Lovecraft before. I figured I should start. So far I've read up to "The Doom the came to Sarnath."
I like that these are for the most part, bite-sized stories i can read a little at a time whenever i'm idle or waiting on tea to boil lol.

 

[Li Kao]

Amazon product ASIN B071R98WJM
I never read Lovecraft before. I figured I should start. So far I've read up to "The Doom the came to Sarnath."
I like that these are for the most part, bite-sized stories i can read a little at a time whenever i'm idle or waiting on tea to boil lol.

In case you didn't know, Sarnath is part of HPL's Dream Cycle. A series of short stories apart from the Cthulhu Mythos (but very much linked to it, so I'm just posting all this for the pleasure of seeing a new reader).

 

[Mivey]

How lengthy are the Wheel of Time books?

Classic each book is double the previous one?
The start chunky from the beginning?

Stay about the same, and the latter ones get a bit longer.

That being said, for their enourmous size, the early ones are actually a "fast" read in the sense that the story moves very quickly. I haven't progressed far enough to tell you much about those latter books.

 

[dummmyy]

I've been reading Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance since april of this year i got like half way through the book and Pirsig kind of got up his own ass and i just haven't picked up another book. One of my resolutions is to try and read an hour a day or something like that. might be too ambitious

 

[Pommes]

Stay about the same, and the latter ones get a bit longer.

That being said, for their enourmous size, the early ones are actually a "fast" read in the sense that the story moves very quickly. I haven't progressed far enough to tell you much about those latter books.

In the middle (roughly about books 6-10) the story does slow down. After that it picks up again.
How slow the books are perceived does probably depend on the reader.

A way to speed up the story: listen to the audiobooks on a high speed

 

[OSatan]

The Wheel of Time books are very long:

Stay about the same, and the latter ones get a bit longer.

That being said, for their enourmous size, the early ones are actually a "fast" read in the sense that the story moves very quickly. I haven't progressed far enough to tell you much about those latter books.

Thanks to both, that was the answers I was looking for.

Amazon product ASIN B071R98WJM
I never read Lovecraft before. I figured I should start. So far I've read up to "The Doom the came to Sarnath."
I like that these are for the most part, bite-sized stories i can read a little at a time whenever i'm idle or waiting on tea to boil lol.

This seems to be a true complete collection, enjoy.

As a poster above said, He has two main concepts in his work so until you get used to it you will probably get lost in some of the work.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a novel so be ware when starting that one if you want a quick read.

 

[Li Kao]

Dropped The Dying Earth and resumed my reading of a book I had also dropped for years. Talk about learning to let go.

So yeah, The Perseids and Other Stories by Robert Charles Wilson. I had an averse reaction to the ending of a particular short, and more globally to each one, and I’m happy to say… it’s still exactly the same after that.
To expand on my issue, while the writing is quite good, every fucking pages transpire an unbearable melancholy. The main character always seems to finish ass fucked by fate or some other thing at the end of each short.
To caricature, if I ever met RCW, the first words that come to mind would be ‘Are you okay Mr Wilson ? How are you these days ?’

So yeah, depressed as fuck Sci-Fi / Weird fiction.

 

[「Echo」]

In case you didn't know, Sarnath is part of HPL's Dream Cycle. A series of short stories apart from the Cthulhu Mythos (but very much linked to it, so I'm just posting all this for the pleasure of seeing a new reader).

This seems to be a true complete collection, enjoy.

As a poster above said, He has two main concepts in his work so until you get used to it you will probably get lost in some of the work.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a novel so be ware when starting that one if you want a quick read.

Yes, I'm quite glad I was able to find a totally complete collection!
Honestly I dunno much about Cthulu stuff and it's relations. That's why I thought it would be ok to just jump in at the "Source" the guy credited with starting it all. So as I been reading, I assumed all the stories were loosely tied by an overall universe. After all, nearly each story is referencing some alien sounding world or place or being haha.

Mostly I just wanted to stuff my brain with his complete works to have a reference point.

And size isn't an issue, it just makes it easier to pick it up here and there. Of course I also read full-size novels and stories too when time allows. Now I know this thread exists, I can post about those from time to time also!

 

[OSatan]

Jerusalem - Alan Moore

I'm finally FREEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


A good book but waaaaay too gimmicky for its own good, the ending left me legit cold (and not in the good way if I'm being sincere, He ends it in and afterlude not even in the main book!) but the last page pulled me back in there is a map

As a look inside Alan Moore's mind I found it legit shocking, It is completely based on a christianity point of view as the only one and I have never pegged him as one of those "England died when Lady Di died"