What are you reading?

Read a fair bit of Bergson as an undergrad and gained from it.

This is an interesting introduction, primer which also focuses on his friendship with William James and explores some entwined themes in their individual oeuvres.

Where too next is the question.

Finished this in a couple days. Ive always enjoyed/been curious about post apocalyptic stories who knows why. This one is horrifying and engrossing and nauseating and I couldn't put it down. I also don't know if I should recommend it. I know I'm a bit of a worrrier so I keep thinking well what if... and we're just a misunderstanding away from complete annihilation.

For whoever was talking about Jon Dos Passos' U.S A.:

I enjoyed "a fortune teller told me" so i decided to read more from terzani. Guess I wont be putting a bookplate in this one.

edinatlanta said:

For whoever was talking about Jon Dos Passos' U.S A.:

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/fiction-u-s-a-by-john-dos-passos-c6539b1f

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Reading it now and saw that piece. Fairly challenging read but good so far!

edinatlanta said:

Finished this in a couple days. Ive always enjoyed/been curious about post apocalyptic stories who knows why. This one is horrifying and engrossing and nauseating and I couldn't put it down. I also don't know if I should recommend it. I know I'm a bit of a worrrier so I keep thinking well what if... and we're just a misunderstanding away from complete annihilation.

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This has been generating a lot of noise since its publication. In the Reagan Evil Empire “we begin bombing in five minutes” I lived next to Garden Island Naval base. Great flat and in the event of nuclear conflagration I knew I’d be vaporised. I did not want to fight the cockroaches then and I do not want to do it now.
Fail Safe (both novel and film)was problematic enough thank you.

Almost seven hundred pages and reads like a novel. Very good book.

Started The City of Brass - very different from most of the other 'mythological/fantasy' based books I'm used to, so there's a bit of a learning curve. (Djinn/Efrits, Middle east landscapes vs Roman/Greek or Norse style gods, 'western' magic/wizards/etc)

Robert E Howard: The Conan Chronicles Volume 1, 1933-36.

"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."

Fantasy's more dangerous cousin 'Sword & Sorcery', where things are less black and white and the heroes more anti, was pretty much established by Howard's creation of a handful of characters, of which Conan is by far the most enduring. Better written than I expected - and sometimes beautifully so - these stories are immensely entertaining pulpy fun, set in a mythological version of Earth's prehistoric past.

Hugely influential, Howard wrote about 20 short stories and a single novel about Conan the Cimmerian, mostly released in the Weird Tales magazine over a period of 3 years before his death by suicide at age 30. Lovecraft (who wrote for WT at the same time) and Howard were pen pals, and occasionally Conan have brushes with Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

A note on book editions: While the two volume The Conan Chronicles from the Fantasy Masterworks imprint is fine enough (and how I started reading this), a better way is to get the 3 volume Del Rey/Random House set (I have these in the mail), as it doesn't try to list the stories chronologically (which is unimportant for Conan's adventures) but instead goes by the more fitting writing/publishing order. And they have great illustrations. For those curious for a sample, most stories are in the public domain and available through Project Gutenberg. You can read the first published story (with Conan as king) here.

venividivicibj said:

Started The City of Brass - very different from most of the other 'mythological/fantasy' based books I'm used to, so there's a bit of a learning curve. (Djinn/Efrits, Middle east landscapes vs Roman/Greek or Norse style gods, 'western' magic/wizards/etc)

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Yeah, that different perspective was one of the things I liked best about the trilogy.

I recently finished The Devourers by Indra Das, set in India in the present and the Mughal period and which had a unique take on djinn/ifrit/shapeshifters/werewolves. Quite a wonderful book, if you can handle a bit of gore.

HORNS said:

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Almost seven hundred pages and reads like a novel. Very good book.

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Read Antony Beevor? He has a very literary narrative style in presenting military history.

CL Moore: Jirel of Joiry, 1934-39.

"This window might be a magic one, opening into strange lands, but through it had gone the man she swore to kill, and where he fled she must follow."

Also a writer for Weird Tales, Catherine Lucille Moore was one of the first to take inspiration from Robert E Howard, one of the first women writing genre fiction, and with Jirel of Joiry she created the first female protagonist in Sword & Sorcery. In medieval France, Jirel is the ruler of the fiefdom of Joiry, and this Golden Age Masterworks edition collects all six short stories, each containing encounters with the supernatural. Interesting enough read, especially from a historic perspective, but I preferred Moore's SF stories about Northwest Smith, and the chewier prose she employed for him.

Geoffrey Firmin said:

Read Antony Beevor? He has a very literary narrative style in presenting military history.

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No, I haven’t, but his stuff has popped up on my recommendations many times.

edinatlanta said:

Finished this in a couple days. Ive always enjoyed/been curious about post apocalyptic stories who knows why. This one is horrifying and engrossing and nauseating and I couldn't put it down. I also don't know if I should recommend it. I know I'm a bit of a worrrier so I keep thinking well what if... and we're just a misunderstanding away from complete annihilation.

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See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)
(also available here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima)

Also: https://www.sturdyroots.org/file/a-remembrance-of-hiroshima.pdf