Robert E. Howard's sole novel-length Conan, The Hour of the Dragon. I've yet to find a better writer in the fantasy field than Howard. The first paragraph of this one:
The long tapers flickered, sending the black shadows wavering along the walls, and the velvet tapestries rippled. Yet there was no wind in the chamber. Four men stood about the ebony table on which lay the green sarcophagus that gleamed like carven jade. In the upraised right hand of each man a cruious black candle burned with a weird greenish light. Outside was night and a lost wind moaning among the black trees.
For action and atmospherics, Howard bests them all. And he wrote before Tolkien, Lieber, computer games et al set the common standards for fantasy.
You absolutely cannot go wrong with Howard's Conan stories.
And El Borak is fun, too.
Delany's a very interesting writer. Dhalgren is at the top of my desert island list, but it's so totally not a book for new to Delany readers that I can't exactly recommend it.
From the description, I get the feeling that Hogg might be more to the Doodlebug's taste...
Hogg is totally worth reading, but not for the timid.
Personally I'm hoping a large number of viewers confuse Mad Men with The Mad Man ; hilarity will ensue!
Goblins do it in the street!
Actually, I had to look a third of those up. Yick.
** spoiler omitted **
Goblins do it in the street!
Actually, I had to look a third of those up. Yick.
That, of course, was not the one that was making me go "yick."
:)
Anyway, it doesn't sound any worse than your average story by de Sade. Funny paraphrase from some introductory essay that I read years ago: "If de Sade wrote, as the French say, books that you read 'with one hand,' the other one must be used to hold a bowl in which to vomit."
Also, to anyone out there into feces or golden showers, my bad. To each their own, as long as it's consensual.
Goblins do it in the street!
EDIT: I highly doubt I will start reading Delany with Hogg.
That, of course, was not the one that was making me go "yick."
:)
Anyway, it doesn't sound any worse than your average story by de Sade. Funny paraphrase from some introductory essay that I read years ago: "If de Sade wrote, as the French say, books that you read 'with one hand,' the other one must be used to hold a bowl in which to vomit."
Also, to anyone out there into feces or golden showers, my bad. To each their own, as long as it's consensual.
Goblins do it in the street!
EDIT: I highly doubt I will start reading Delany with Hogg.
It's depressing how often works will consign de Sade to the deepest pits of hell, call him the most evil man ever, and the like. I don't claim to be deeply aware of his work and life, but from what I can tell he differed from his contemporaries mostly in candor. People who are widely admired had faults every bit as serious as his, and often much more so.
IIRC, he wasn't a particularly nice man. I believe he was thrown in jail for running riot amongst his servants. I don't know if the details are actually known, but I don't think it was for merely having consensual kinky sex with his inferiors.
Otoh, as you say, how much worse was he compared to contemporaries? I couldn't say, but de Sade, of course, was one of the original internet trolls and he compounded his deviancy by writing work after work justifying evil and describing horrific rape-laden stories with all of those nasty spoilered things above.
Anyway, he does have his fans--and not just with S&M enthusiasts. Camus treated him pretty seriously in The Rebel, IIRC, and so does Camille Paglia.
There's also a pretty good movie about him with Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet called Quills
From The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White.
There was a murmur of admiration from the committee, and the grass-snake added gently: "It was why he tried to give you an idea of nature, king, because it was hoped that when you were struggling with the puzzle, you would look about you."
"The politics of all animals," said the badger, "deal with the control of Might."
"But I do not see..." he began, only to be anticipated.
"Of course you do not see," said Merlyn. "You were going to say that animals have no politics. Take my advice, and think it over."
"Have they?"
"Of course they have, and very efficient ones they are. Some of them are communists or fascists, like many of the ants: some are anarchists, like the geese. There are socialists like some of the bees, and, indeed, among the 3,000 families of the ant itself, there are other shades of ideology besides fascism. Not all are slave-makers or warfarers. There are bank-balance-holders like the squirrel, or the bear who hibernates on his fat. Any nest or burrow or feeding ground is a form of individual property, and how do you think the crows, rabbits, minnows, and all the other gregarious creatures contrive to live together, if they have not faced the questions of Democracy and of Force?"
It was evidently a well-worn topic, for the badger interrupted nefore the king could reply.
"You have never given us," he said, "and you never will give us an example of capitalism in the natural world."
Merlyn looked unhappy.
"And," he added, "if you cannot give an example, it only shews that capitalism is unnatural."
How true!
Vive le Galt!
IIRC, he wasn't a particularly nice man. I believe he was thrown in jail for running riot amongst his servants. I don't know if the details are actually known, but I don't think it was for merely having consensual kinky sex with his inferiors.
Otoh, as you say, how much worse was he compared to contemporaries? I couldn't say, but de Sade, of course, was one of the original internet trolls and he compounded his deviancy by writing work after work justifying evil and describing horrific rape-laden stories with all of those nasty spoilered things above.
Everyone is a monster in the past, honestly. I'm pretty cynical about it.
According to Wikipedia, he procured prostitutes of both sexes for himself and friends. This is pretty much a non-event in itself. We can look askance at the ages, but back in the day women were fair game as soon as their first period. It's horrific, but that doesn't really set him apart from what's usual for the period. He probably abused some of the prostitutes he hired, which is again horrible but doesn't necessarily single him out. Maybe he was bad enough that it stood out to the constabulary at the time, which is noteworthy, but aristocrats raping and abusing people is really standard behavior. Even in the US, it was legal to rape your wife in some states until the 1990s. I don't mean to minimize the horror of that, but the fact alone is reason enough to wonder about just about everybody.
I'll grant the poisoning as not typical behavior, though.
Which, going down the Wikipedia entry, brings us to sodomy. This is a bit of a pain. Did he rape his victim or did they have a consensual tryst and got caught? It's hard to tell because someone would always claim to be a victim to avoid prosecution, since claiming rape was the only way to avoid serious penalties if caught in flagrante. If someone knows more details I'd be glad to hear them.
He was terrible enough to scare off lots of servants. I'll grant that stands out too.
Ok, he's a bit worse than usual. Maybe a lot worse, maybe not. But still not Hitler, you know? None of them are what I'd call nice men.
It sounds like we're pretty much in agreement, except that where you looked stuff up, I am relying on memories of introductory essays read over a decade ago.
On a somewhat more frivolous note, I whipped through Pat McIntosh's Stolen Voice this weekend. Fun plot (singers keep disappearing, but one who disappeared 30 years earlier suddenly reappears, having only aged 5-6 years), and exciting period/Scots vocabulary.
Also marched through a few more pages of Babayaga: Babayaga's sister's stepdaughter is visiting her; B. offered to draw up a nice bath for the girl, but en el agua flotaban trozos de zanahoria, hojas de laurel, y nabos! Tenía que escapar de inmediato!
Finished up The Book of Merlyn. It was amusing in its full-on misanthropy, but, strangely, half of the book were the chapters from The Sword in the Stone where the Wart was transformed into an ant and a goose.
Not sure why that is--there seems to have been quite a bit of re-writing between editions of The Once and Future King. I believe The Book of Merlyn was left unfinished.
Anyway, a nice little epilogue that made me cry.
Also finished the first part ("Empty Mirrors--Gates of Wrath") of Ginsberg. Hmmm, what to read next...
...and it's back to Bluebeard by Vonnegut. So far, so good, the history of Abstract Expressionism and the post-WWI Armenian genocide. Vonnegut was always good at weaving in history with his stories.
What Books Are You Currently Reading?: A Musical Interlude
Yeah, he's OK. I don't share the raving fandom that a lot of people have for him, mostly because (IMO) his mastery of the language wasn't quite the equal of the ideas he was trying to convey.
I disagree entirely, but whatever.
Leaving that aside, I was reading Bluebeard which employs the usual Vonnegut technique of small, short chapters that are further broken up into even smaller portions of just a few paragraphs and I was struck how he should have been born 50 years later so he could have been a blogger.
I disagree entirely, but whatever.
If we agreed on books, Comrade, you would be left with nothing to read, because your tried-and-true method of simply picking up whatever I don't like would fail! Oh, the horror!
Well it's not Vonnegut but I just devoured The Left Hand Of God by Paul Hoffman. You guys with a dark sense of history may get a kick out of his historical musical chairs game of plagiarism with altered biblical verse and swapped out naming conventions. It has a very weird narrative prose but it kept me engaged.
What Books Are You Currently Reading?: A Musical Interlude
In Our Time History on Aethelstan.
just finished the skeptic's guide to conspiracies by some guy named monte cook. good stuff
Finished Bluebeard. It's awesome.
Finished Bluebeard. It's awesome.
Just cause humanity ends up as a race of farting hippy walruses? Whatever dude...
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Finished Bluebeard. It's awesome.Just cause humanity ends up as a race of farting hippy walruses? Whatever dude...
That's Galapagos. Which, I re-learned from linking Kilgore up above, features one Leon Trotsky Trout. How could I have forgotten that?
Just started Ragnarok, the End of the Gods By A.S. Byatt. I am always looking for fresh interpretations of Norse Mythology to yoink concepts from.
A.S. Byatt? Comrade Curtin's going all highbrow on us!
I'm thinking of reading The Hunger Games books so my mom will stop bugging me.
A.S. Byatt? Comrade Curtin's going all highbrow on us!
Don't worry. It's not like I'll be touring Dublin on June 16th or anything like that.
"When you wet the bed first it is warm and then it is cold."
Spoilered for drug-addled literary hilarity:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming
down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road
met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a
glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne
lived: she sold lemon platt.
O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.
O, the green wothe botheth.
When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put
on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.
His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano
the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:
Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.
I tell ya, I honestly thought I was still hallucinating when I read that =D
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Hee hee!
Drugs and Joyce go well together!
EDIT: Personally, I prefer Dylan Thomas's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. More hee hee!
Hee hee!
Drugs and Joyce go well together!
EDIT: Personally, I prefer Dylan Thomas's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. More hee hee!
I think drugged is the only way I could take Joyce. I had to read the Dead for a British Lit class and while it's far from his most obtuse work I still could barely grasp what was going on. I don't think I was alone, as most of the classroom discussion focused on that horse walking around a statue instead of whatever passed for a plot in the thing.
Then the teacher admitted that Joyce's work became increasingly onanistic with age and the main point was probably about how funny it would be for literary critics to go over the text years later.
Then the teacher admitted that Joyce's work became increasingly onanistic with age and the main point was probably about how funny it would be for literary critics to go over the text years later.
Hee hee!
just started saga of old city (finally!) by some guy named gary gygax. i'm 130 pages in and enjoying it.
Then the teacher admitted that Joyce's work became increasingly onanistic with age and the main point was probably about how funny it would be for literary critics to go over the text years later.Hee hee!
His word, not mine. I got to define it for the class, though.
Took a break from Jared Diamond's oppressive repetitiveness* and re-read Robert Parker's quick and breezy Playmates, a mystery novel about gangster-inspired point shaving on the Taft basketball team. Just for fun, I forced myself to picture the classic hero-detective Spenser as actor Jason Statham, because it shouldn't have worked at all. But it actually worked surprisingly well, to the point where, by the end, I could actually kind of hear Statham delivering Parker's trademark droll quips.
The documentary version was worse. I think half of it was the same guy working with the same bit of taro. Even by the standards of television documentaries that's pretty bad.
The documentary version was worse. I think half of it was the same guy working with the same bit of taro. Even by the standards of television documentaries that's pretty bad.
You know someone else should have written the script when the same phrase gets repeated about every fifth sentence.
Gord the Rogue! My love-hate relationship with these books is well-established up above. Have fun!
James Joyce! His ghost is hee-hee!ing in Heaven, thinking of all those undergrads forced to read his books while literature professors wonder if the joke is on them.
Jared Diamond! Is a very boring writer. Not being very science-literate, I found GG&S's ideas exciting but the writing tedious. Collapse was even worse. I miss Stephen Jay Gould.
How about being on topic instead of catty remarks about the reading of others? I think I might be able to swing that. :)
Currently debating whether I want to read:
Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't need a Miracle to Succeed by Richard Carrier
Sense and Goodness Without God by Richard Carrier
Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages by Frances and Joseph Gies
The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails edited by John Loftus
The Wars of the Roses by Alison Weir
Carrier's something of a brain-crush for me, but I've never read one of his longer works. I've read bits and pieces of Sense and Goodness and Not the Impossible Faith in blog posts and discussions. He's also in at least a few chapters of Loftus's anthology.
Weir is a name I knew and dismissed when I was a teenager because the first book of hers I saw looked more like a romance novel mistakenly put in the history section, but I heard her on In Our Time and she convinced me that my teenage estimation of her was predictably uncharitable.
Gord the Rogue! My love-hate relationship with these books is well-established up above. Have fun!
i will! i just finished the first book and have found nothing to hate so far. :-)
Currently reading Patricia McKillip's Harrowing the Dragon, as well as Arnold Lobel's Sopa de Ratón, which is closer to my Spanish reading level than Babayaga—I made it through a whole chapter without needing a dictionary to find out what was going on! (Though I did manage to insert "ogressa" appropriately into a sentence this weekend, which encouraged me to keep pushing on with Babayaga as well.)
Reading back through Steven Saylor's Roma Sub Rosa series. Currently on A Gladiator only dies once. I don't find the short stories in this book as engaging as the longer ones. So far, none of the mysteries have been at all satisfying to see to the end. Sad day.
I was going to read some comic books, but what, with all the snooty literary posturing, I decided I would instead raid my now homeless player's art books.
Marc Chagall--Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers
A portrait of one of Don Juan de Doodlebug's favorite bits of Biblical pornography
[Looks down his nose at you]
Opted for Sense and Goodness Without God. Half the price of paper to read as electrons.
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V is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton.
So far, that guy in the Guy Fawkes mask hasn't shown up.
;-)
Opted for Sense and Goodness Without God. Half the price of paper to read as electrons.
In the event anyone else is considering the book, the nook version's free sample is terrible. The rest is much better so far.
I read Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges.