Trashy Books

OK - to show committment I have just ordered Gene Wolfe's New Sun series, in two volumes now instead of 4 books. Just wondering when I will finish them ... and just to really kick me while I'm wobbly, I'm looking at the four novels written around the Halo game after reading my lad's game manuals.

Tom, you'd probably do well to go ahead and order URTH OF THE NEW SUN, a sort of coda to the main four books. It isn't essential, but it takes Severin on a more explicitly SF journey with some really crazy stuff going on. Imagine reading a SF book where the narrator has no idea what SF is. I also recommend LEXICON URTHUS, a kind of scholarly dictionary for the series that after 15 years just came back into print out of nowhere. It's extremely well done and provides a lot of clarity to some of the more arcane stuff- I didn't really get what that Apu Punchau stuff was all about until I read it. It also clears up some of Wolfe's more esoteric word choices.

Michael Barnes wrote:

Tom, you'd probably do well to go ahead and order URTH OF THE NEW SUN, a sort of coda to the main four books. It isn't essential, but it takes Severin on a more explicitly SF journey with some really crazy stuff going on. Imagine reading a SF book where the narrator has no idea what SF is. I also recommend LEXICON URTHUS, a kind of scholarly dictionary for the series that after 15 years just came back into print out of nowhere. It's extremely well done and provides a lot of clarity to some of the more arcane stuff- I didn't really get what that Apu Punchau stuff was all about until I read it. It also clears up some of Wolfe's more esoteric word choices.

Cheers Mike, I saw both of those listed in my Amazon search - wasn't sure where Urth of the New Sun fitted in, and thought I may have need of the Lexicon if my comprehension of the book is unchanged from 20yrs ago .

No one has shot down my suggested Halo reading yet .... still early days though .

I grabbed the Gene Wolfe books on Michael's recommendation, and will likely start them this weekend.

I also picked up the Charles Huston series about the vampire detective, Joe Pitt. It is very well done in the noir genre, very good hard-boiled crime writing and dialogue. Quite easy to read as well - I plowed through all 4 of them in 4 days (I glanced at the prose in the Gene Wolfe books, and I expect that to be a little more onerous reading).

Michael Barnes wrote:

Tom, you'd probably do well to go ahead and order URTH OF THE NEW SUN, a sort of coda to the main four books. It isn't essential, but it takes Severin on a more explicitly SF journey with some really crazy stuff going on. Imagine reading a SF book where the narrator has no idea what SF is. I also recommend LEXICON URTHUS, a kind of scholarly dictionary for the series that after 15 years just came back into print out of nowhere. It's extremely well done and provides a lot of clarity to some of the more arcane stuff- I didn't really get what that Apu Punchau stuff was all about until I read it. It also clears up some of Wolfe's more esoteric word choices.

Looked like I was right about the denseness of Wolfe's book, especially if I need a damn dictionary to understand it. Doesn't Apu Punchau have something to do with Incan religion? This is starting to sound like coursework....

Space Ghost wrote:

I grabbed the Gene Wolfe books on Michael's recommendation, and will likely start them this weekend.

Well, I can tap you up as well to explain it to me when I finally finish ... (2010 maybe) - or I may just surprise myself with wisdom and insight gathered over the intervening two decades since I last read it .... nah, I'll be chasin you guys up .

Well, there is a reason that there are thousands of pages worth of discussion about BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, so we may have to create our own support group here if you guys are reading them. There's so much ambiguity and so much that is unclear in the books that there's plenty to discuss. And some very rich thematic stuff too, the books are definitely thought provoking and full of REEL LITTURACHOOR.

I'm about to start on Mervyn Peake...

Mervyn Peake? I read the first book of the Gormenghast trilogy but didn't enjoy it. In fact, I actually hated every single character. They weren't just people with flaws, or even sinister villains, they were just a collection of shitty people, mean, petty, grasping for shallow goals with ruthless nastiness. I didn't bother starting the second book.

For the first half of the year I pretty much just read late medieval/early modern history books, and then in the second half I mostly read Black Library Warhammer books; Specifically the Malus Darkblade series (which is greater than the sum of it's parts; I was impartial to the first two books, but by the fourth couldn't put them down), the Horus Heresy series (the most epic and well written thing from BL) and re-reading the Gotrek and Felix series.

I recently re-read Starship Troopers for the first time since I was 13, and liked it more this time around. I also read Dune for the first time, and was surprised by how readable it was (I first tried to read it when I was around 12-14 and found it too difficult), definitely worth reading.


Regarding Zelazny, he is one of the many authors I tried to read when I was too young to handle them (along with Robert Heinlen, Phillip K. Dick, Frank Herbert etc.) and have since continued to put off revisiting. I remember Zelazny as being kind of hoky and new agey (although that impression might be based off of the cover for all I can remember) how would fans of his classify his style? Would I be pleasantly surprised by his readability, as with Dune?

PseudoIntellectual wrote:

Regarding Zelazny, he is one of the many authors I tried to read when I was too young to handle them (along with Robert Heinlen, Phillip K. Dick, Frank Herbert etc.) and have since continued to put off revisiting. I remember Zelazny as being kind of hoky and new agey (although that impression might be based off of the cover for all I can remember) how would fans of his classify his style? Would I be pleasantly surprised by his readability, as with Dune?

Zelazny isn't hokey or new agey at all. His work is very readable, as he writes with amazing economy. Some writers will blather on for page after page without saying much of anything, while Zelazny can imply an entire epoch with a couple of terse sentences.

The typical Zelazny work features a clever and cynical protagonist, often times one who is incredibly long-lived and possibly mythological in nature. Zelazny is particularly good at conveying all of these elements, especially a weary cynicism that might realistically arise after a century or two of existence. And yet somehow these characters are easy to relate to, both as familiar archetypes and as likeable anti-heroes. The other thing that Zelazny does really well is write interesting concepts. The only bad thing about Zelazny's writing is his poetry, which he sometimes snuck into otherwise great stories.

My favorite works by Zelazny:

Doorways in the Sand
A Night in the Lonesome October
the Amber series, especially the first five books
Eye of Cat

PseudoIntellectual wrote:

I recently re-read Starship Troopers for the first time since I was 13, and liked it more this time around. I also read Dune for the first time, and was surprised by how readable it was (I first tried to read it when I was around 12-14 and found it too difficult), definitely worth reading.

Same for me on both: baffled by both as a teenager; love both as an adult. Particularly Starship Troopers, which I read about twice a year now. I'm now starting to anticipate entire passages, word-for-word, about a page before I get to them. I'm not sure if that's good or bad ...

Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand was really good. I also remember liking Jack of Shadows a lot (but it's been fifteen years and I had to Google the title).

I haven't read his catalog in depth, but he is quite good.

I gotta bang the drum for a couple of my favorites:

China Mièville's Perdido Street Station is full of things a trasher would love, and the follow-up The Scar is even better. He goes off-course a bit in the third novel, but the first two are great stories in a well-realized interesting world.

Also, anybody who hasn't read Tim Powers' stuff is missing out. He tends to write historical spec-fic, often taking actual events and weaving the story around them to tell his own hidden story, usually bizarre. His spy novel Declare uses the Cold War and the true double-agent story of Kim Philby as a jumping of point for an even colder war between intelligence agencies, with Mother Russia attempting to harness the power of primeval djinn to secure the borders. My favorite Powers novel, highly recommended.

Last Call is a story of Tarot poker for souls, with a healthy dose of the Fisher King legend, and Bugsy Siegel's days in Las Vegas. Truly memorable characters in this one.

Other excellent ones include The Anubis Gates, one of the few good time-travel novels I've ever read (plus crazy Egyptian magic), and his take on a vampire story with Shelley and Byron as major characters, The Stress of her Regard. Last but not least, voodoo, undead pirates and the search for the Fountain of Youth make up the story in On Stranger Tides.

(hmm. for some reason preview is getting the diacritic on Mièville right, but backslash-escaping all the apostrophes. yeesh.)

Mièville is a strong writer, but I don't like the flavor of his setting. He isn't doing anything wrong, it just isn't my taste. I appreciate him moving away from Tolkienesque stereotypes, but his setting is maybe too british for my liking. Too steampunk. Too something. That said, I have read Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council. Of the three, my favorite was The Scar, just because I liked some of the central characters and concepts.

I usually enjoy the writing of Tim Powers, but Declare jumped around too much chronologically... kept knocking me out of the flow of the story. I do enjoy the way he invents an interesting magic system for each of his works, and then ties them to a particular setting. His writer buddy James Blaylock does the same, only with worse results because Blaylock loves to write protagonists who are annoying nitwits. The worst that I can say about Powers is that he is apparently a serious alcoholic, because his settings always place some mystical importance in a particular type of alcohol or the general state of drunkenness. For example:

Drawing of the Dark: a brewery in Vienna is the spiritual center of the West.

Dinner at Deviant's Palace: getting drunk is a way to block the psychic powers of a certain entity.

On Stranger Tides: rum consumption aids in the wielding of voodoo magic.

Earthquake Weather: the fate of the Fisher King is tied to the health of vineyards on the west coast.

I agree about The Scar, best of the three. I don't know if it would hold up without some of the exposition in Perdido Street Station, though. The setting may not appeal to everyone, but it's not terribly derivative, and has enough theme for four or five Ameritrash games.

I've read a some of Blaylock's stuff, and he's a totally inconsistent writer. Some of his books are brilliant, and some of them are just rubbish. I really liked Blaylock's The Rainy Season and Winter Tides (both California ghost novels), but Homonculous was just unbearable. I love steampunk novels, and that one still sucked.

I'm not sure if Powers is a raging alcoholic or not, but there's definitely a theme there. You forgot the magic Zinfandel in Earthquake Weather, and the fact that the lead character in Expiration Date is/was a major alcoholic as well. And then there's the whole smoking ghosts phenomenon. That's a messed-up book.

Regardless, the only time I've been disappointed by Powers is the most recent novel, and I think it's just that it's too similar to the rest of his recent-history novels.

Michael Barnes wrote:

And I just finished re-reading all of the Solomon Kane and Conan stories. Between you and I, I think that other than RED NAILS and BEYOND THE BLACK RIVER most Conan stories turn out to be extremely repetitive. Don't get me wrong, they're great stuff...but reading them in one pass like that you really, really get worn out on certain elements of them. But those two stories are just monumentally great- and not just because they're Conan- they're just great stories with awesome vignettes of action.

But far and away the best thing I read this year was Gene Wolfe. I never read him before, but the BOOK OF THE NEW SUN books (SHADOW OF THE TORTURER, CLAW OF THE CONCILIATOR, SWORD OF THE LICTOR, and CITADEL OF THE AUTARCH) are, hands down, the greatest fantasy books I've ever read. Period. Including Tolkien. I highly recommend them to anyone interested in approaching genre from a much more literary angle. .

Love me some Solomon Kane! Was what drew me in to ATOE (Solomon Kane with bewbies!).

Agreed wholeheartedly on the Conan comments. If you like the genre then I simply cannot recommend enough reading through the Kane books by Karl Edward Wagner (Not to be confused with Solomon Kane). Some indy press just released a year or so ago the full collection. Extremely well done stuff. Imagine if Conan was immortal, how intelligent he would become, how bored with life and willing to try anything. In his books he has tried on every role from Conan to Sauron to the Grey Mouser. Many of the originals are very sought after and hard to find.

...

I've read Gene Wolfe's Sun books 2x now. They are awesome in the original sense of the word. I still do not undertand them but I knew every second that I was reading something that would be studied for generations. I hear tell their have been a fair share of PhD theses written on them. In my opinion they will be regarded to SciFi in the same vein as adding zero was to mathematics.

Ok I am done gushing now.