I love books, grew up among, and still live among, teetering piles of To Be Reads. In my dotage here, I admit I have less patience for plots that feel too familiar, and I tend (even more than I always have) toward the strange and surreal. But a beautifully-written and perfectly normal book can also bowl me over.
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When lovely Cara Quayne dropped dead to the floor after drinking the ritual wine at the House of the Sacred …
When lovely Cara Quayne dropped dead to the floor after drinking the ritual wine at …
There is a murder in a somewhat notable setting, a group of somewhat interesting suspects, there are Inspector Alleyn and the inevitable Fox of Scotland Yard. Eventually it turns out that one of the suspects is guilty, and is arrested and will presumably be tried, and likely convicted.
Nothing (and I suppose this is a spoiler, if only a negative one) especially mysterious or puzzling happens, there are no particular surprises or twists, and as a result one comes away with rather a neutral feeling about the whole thing.
Still, there are much worse ways that one could have spent the time.
Lovecraft only quite different.
Mostly more conceptual than body-horror, definitely weird and unsettling, certainly not cliched.
A friend pointed out, based on the stories in another Ligotti collection but also true of this one, that while Lovecraft's narrators are usually a normal human reporting on their contact with the weird and uncanny and mind-bending, Ligotti's narrators are more likely to be part of the weird and uncanny and mind-bending themselves, even if for the first few sentences we don't realize it.
And that's an important difference.
Definitely worth reading; what more can be said?
Foul Play Suspected is a 1935 crime novel by British writer John Wyndham. It was …
The author of "Day of the Triffids", but no aliens here. In form and basic setup it's a well-crafted comfy British mystery: plucky girl returns from India to find that her brilliant eccentric scientist father has disappeared, she appeals to her two somewhat ne'er do well witty young male friends who have a housemaid named Mrs. Roberts, eventually Constable Pennywise is involved, and ultimately the sharp-minded Inspector Jordan of Scotland Yard, we have a side-plot about which of the young men if any may be in love with the girl, and so on. Quite nice!
But also we get some rather weighty addresses from more than one of the characters about how there are bad trends in the world and people are just hiding their heads in the sand, about how war is bad and (private, capitalist) weapons makers are very bad, and ultimately the message of the book is …
The author of "Day of the Triffids", but no aliens here. In form and basic setup it's a well-crafted comfy British mystery: plucky girl returns from India to find that her brilliant eccentric scientist father has disappeared, she appeals to her two somewhat ne'er do well witty young male friends who have a housemaid named Mrs. Roberts, eventually Constable Pennywise is involved, and ultimately the sharp-minded Inspector Jordan of Scotland Yard, we have a side-plot about which of the young men if any may be in love with the girl, and so on. Quite nice!
But also we get some rather weighty addresses from more than one of the characters about how there are bad trends in the world and people are just hiding their heads in the sand, about how war is bad and (private, capitalist) weapons makers are very bad, and ultimately the message of the book is that sometimes a desperate character has to take things into their own hands, and do illegal and even violent things.
Which is rather outside of what we expect from the genre. But (or therefore) it works, and works well. A fast, but memorable and worthwhile, read.
Foul Play Suspected is a 1935 crime novel by British writer John Wyndham. It was published by Newnes under the …
Content warning Mild spoilers for the basic background premise
This is probably an excellent book; but it mostly just left me puzzled.
I think this is because:
I haven't read the larger work that it's ancillary to; I should really read No Longer Human.
I couldn't tell how many of the odd things that happened were intended as metaphor, or character development, or surrealism, and how many were just because that's how things are in Japan, or how they were at that time, and I just don't know that culture.
People are described as blushing at times when that doesn't make sense to me; is that indicative of something from the author, character development, or is it just that blushing has different associations in Japan? A nurse at the sanitarium sleeps in the same room as the patient; is she amazingly devoted, or is that what a Japanese sanitarium is expected to be like? Most globally, the main character has tried to commit suicide with a lover; she died but he was rescued. He does not seem especially perturbed by this, mostly just palling around with his friends while recovering in the sanitarium. Is this bizarre character development, an illustration of the emotional deadness of this set of people, or would the Japanese expectation be that virtually all negative emotions would be routinely suppressed in that situation?
The author's frequent, almost constant, fourth-wall breaks to lament what a bad writer he is and how badly the novel is going seemed just offputting to me. Would they have made more sense in the original environment? I don't know, but given that he's universally thought to be a good writer, it seems likely that I'm just missing it.
Smaller things included some translation issues, where for instance the colloquial English used to render (I assume) a roughly equivalently colloquial Japanese felt rather jarring for whatever reason among the still strongly Japanese kimonos and in-room hibachis and so on. Translation is hard; probably I am just not that good at reading in translation.
So why did I write this down, even? Mostly for myself, I suppose, in case I want to recall what the book was like later on.
If you aren't me, should you read it? Probably! I imagine it's quite good...
"On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the …
"On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses …
Just such a wild and good book. It could be described as "Moby Dick, except that instead of chasing a whale in a sailing ship, they're chasing a giant mole in a railroad train", and that would be accurate but also not. And it sounds ridiculous, and it is, but it works, and it's terrific.
It's also steampunk of a sort, but steampunk that's fresh and unique and not Just Steampunk.
It is a wonderful time, a rollicking adventure, a sweet romp, complete in itself, the loose ends not exactly tied up but not exactly left dangling. It is easy to imagine (and even long for) sequels, or other stories in the same universe, but it's also easy to imagine there won't be any; this was about perfect.
Highly highly recommended.
An expedition into the indescribable.
I came to this book from Sandifer's "Neoreaction a Basilisk", and even though that book is partly a commentary on this one, the commentary is in this case more interesting than its subject.
It may be that different people just have very different susceptibilities to horror, and that mine and Land's have little or no overlap. This brief story shows us two parents worried about their daughter, the three of them going into a somewhat interesting sensory-immersion video game together, and then coming out again (OR DO THEY??? [portentous orchestra hit]).
Even including that obvious final trope, nothing about it struck me as disturbing, scary, horrible, or anything else related to horror, although there were lots of multisyllabic words telling me how terror-inducing it all was. Okay, I guess? For some people?
Various promising elements introduced early on (a creepy stuffed animal, a classmate attempting suicide after the daughter said …
I came to this book from Sandifer's "Neoreaction a Basilisk", and even though that book is partly a commentary on this one, the commentary is in this case more interesting than its subject.
It may be that different people just have very different susceptibilities to horror, and that mine and Land's have little or no overlap. This brief story shows us two parents worried about their daughter, the three of them going into a somewhat interesting sensory-immersion video game together, and then coming out again (OR DO THEY??? [portentous orchestra hit]).
Even including that obvious final trope, nothing about it struck me as disturbing, scary, horrible, or anything else related to horror, although there were lots of multisyllabic words telling me how terror-inducing it all was. Okay, I guess? For some people?
Various promising elements introduced early on (a creepy stuffed animal, a classmate attempting suicide after the daughter said something mysterious to them) are dropped and never taken up again; perhaps the reader is supposed to fill those bits in, but I didn't see anything in the video game world that would have had much of an effect on a modern youth, except possibly to get them to try a free trial subscription.
Given that I didn't find any horror in the horror story, it's perhaps not surprising that I didn't find the analysis of horror in general, and the horror of Fermi Paradox in particular, especially convincing either. It seems to me that horror, to be effective, must be grounded in the concrete and visceral, even if has a significant component in the abstract and unknown. A fly-covered liver can be horrible by itself; the purely abstract idea that something we currently haven't thought of might remove humanity from the universe sometime, not so much.
An expedition into the indescribable.
Eight short stories about Inspector Montalbano and his crew.
I feel as though I ought to have enjoyed these little police mysteries more, given how famous and well-regarded the author and the character are.
I read the first story and half of the second a while back, but bogged down and put it aside. Today I picked it up again, more determined, and read from the beginning of the second story all the way through. It wasn't bad?
These are simple crime mysteries with a homey feel; one is clearly supposed to like Inspector Montalbano and his setting: the general feel of small-city Sicily, the housekeeper who cooks so well, the young girlfriend from Genoa whom the housekeeper dislikes, the various foods and drinks that are so often and lovingly mentioned, the colleague that knows the history of every attractive woman in town, the eccentric unreliable secretary or something at the station who talks in a barely comprehensible accent …
I feel as though I ought to have enjoyed these little police mysteries more, given how famous and well-regarded the author and the character are.
I read the first story and half of the second a while back, but bogged down and put it aside. Today I picked it up again, more determined, and read from the beginning of the second story all the way through. It wasn't bad?
These are simple crime mysteries with a homey feel; one is clearly supposed to like Inspector Montalbano and his setting: the general feel of small-city Sicily, the housekeeper who cooks so well, the young girlfriend from Genoa whom the housekeeper dislikes, the various foods and drinks that are so often and lovingly mentioned, the colleague that knows the history of every attractive woman in town, the eccentric unreliable secretary or something at the station who talks in a barely comprehensible accent that draws one to think about how a translator translates something like a thick regional accent.
(In this translation, Catarella has lines like "Chief, 'ere'd be a soitain Signor Valletta onna premisses wantin' a talk t'yiz poissonally in poisson," and one is extremely curious what that was in Italian and what it signified.)
The crimes, even when the Mafia is involved, are relatively mundane, even when horrifying. The solutions are sometimes completely unremarkable, sometimes aided by the equivalent of a fortunate shower thought by the Inspector, sometimes involving a little casual law breaking or letting the guilty go free in the interests of a wider justice. Which is all fine. Montalbano sometimes feels like a slightly-too-perfect possible self-insert, but not painfully. I guess it's somewhat comforting and heartwarming overall?
But I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old and jaded, but I didn't come away feeling like it had all been a particularly good use of time in the reading. Maybe if I read more of them I'll come to know better and be fonder of this world, and more eager to just hang out and be comfortable in it?
Maybe we'll see. :)
Eight short stories about Inspector Montalbano and his crew.
Content warning Ending
@pre@boing.world Yeah... that's why the end was so utterly... moving or whatever it was (did I already reply to this? I don't really understand bookwyrm yet!). The thing there is that she doesn't mind, she is basically and sincerely fine and happy with it. And that's... such a thing!
Remember that no teacher has ever spoken or written a single word of teaching!
About halfway through this book, Foyan writes:
"I will settle something for you right now: the ultimate rule is to see your own mind clearly. This is what Buddhism is, as far as I am concerned."
That's it, that's the whole thing. Every other section of this book, every other sentence, is not saying anything different.
So, why? Because, I would speculate, even though it is all the same, and all free of any content or teaching, each different series of words, like a different set of bird cries or patterings of raindrops, might be the thing that someone needs to hear to be freed, or to attain a little insight. Or to smile.
And Foyan may have been a wily expert at arranging especially effective ways of saying exactly the same empty thing.
Therefore, read …
Remember that no teacher has ever spoken or written a single word of teaching!
About halfway through this book, Foyan writes:
"I will settle something for you right now: the ultimate rule is to see your own mind clearly. This is what Buddhism is, as far as I am concerned."
That's it, that's the whole thing. Every other section of this book, every other sentence, is not saying anything different.
So, why? Because, I would speculate, even though it is all the same, and all free of any content or teaching, each different series of words, like a different set of bird cries or patterings of raindrops, might be the thing that someone needs to hear to be freed, or to attain a little insight. Or to smile.
And Foyan may have been a wily expert at arranging especially effective ways of saying exactly the same empty thing.
Therefore, read the whole thing! Why not?
Why not?
Why not?
