UPDATE NOTE (3 July 2011): Not really an update, I just ended the final paragraph, as it was incomplete somehow. ORIGINAL POST: My friend Chris still hasn’t read HPL, though he is an excellent writer working in genre fiction and really, I imagined he would have somehow, for some reason, just because Lovecraft’s influence is so pervasive in the speculative arts. I think I was urging him to address that oversight, when he asked me which stories have meant the most to me. I figured I might as well blog it, and then, like most things I swear an oath …
Tag: books
The Caryatids, by Bruce Sterling
I’ve had The Caryatids on my shelf for a while now, and have been trying to set aside time to read it. After all, Bruce Sterling was a formative influence on my own idea of SF, whether you can see it in my own writing. In a conversation the other night, somehow I kept ending up talking about his work with our guest, a futurist. The funny thing is, when I talked about Sterling’s work, it was his ideas I kept mentioning, and my references to The Caryatids was no exception: I talked about the three big loci of power …
The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
You could say I’m catching up on stuff I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Much of that includes non-SF books, but there are also a lot of SF novels in the pile of books I’ve been meaning to read for ages. Among them number several by Charles Stross, but I was very curious to see what a Lovecraft/Spy-Thriller mashup would look like. (Especially since I have a specifically Lovecraft-meets-Chun-Doo-Hwan story brewing in the back of my mind now.) So, finally, I grabbed my copy of The Atrocity Archives and dived straight in! For someone like me–less well-read in …
Mind Meld, and Mission Accomplished (in Draft)
Two things I’ve written. One you can read, one you can’t. Here’s the one you can: SF Signal’s Mind Meld for the week is about to-read piles, and I’m one of the people they invited to contribute/comment. See everyone’s to-read lists here. I should note that a number of the people who contributed are, in fact, in my extended to-read list. I’m just not getting more books for now till I’ve sorted what to do with the thousand or so I already have. The thing you can’t read, yet, is a ~5000 word story (it’s a few words short, but …
More Books on Belgian Beer (and More)
I mentioned reading Jeff Sparrow’s Wild Brews a while back, and noted that I wanted to read about the other Belgian styles of beer, covered in other books in the same series. Well, I wish I’d gotten to them sooner, but I have finally gotten to Stan Hieronymous’ famous Brew Like a Monk: Trappist, Abbey, and Strong Belgian Ales and How to Brew Them, and Phil Markowski’s Farmhouse Ales: Culture and Craftsmanship in the Belgian Tradition. Both books are really good, though the latter is slimmer than the former. I don’t have a great deal to say about them, in part …
Conscience of the Beagle, by Patricia Anthony
I commented a while back on how it was odd that Patricia Anthony had disappeared from the SF scene, after having been such a rock star through the 90s. That was when I happened to decide I would check out whatever of her work I could get my hands on, other than what I already had (which was, at the time, only Flanders and God’s Fires — books I have yet to get to). Conscience of the Beagle is a slim book, and one that I recognized immediately as something I’d read back in Canada, though I couldn’t recall what …
Daniel Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko… in Korean.
I’m not sure how applicable the good common sense in this book is for the Korean job market, but Pink’s advice seemed good to me when I read the English version. It’s available in Korean, and I’d recommend it for whichever students come to you with career questions. If nothing else, it gives a message other than the ones they seem most likely to get from the (often misery-inducing) advice of their friends and families.
Reading Street
If you’re curious about what happened with that textbook series I was working on last year, for which I wrote the reading-text narratives for a series of English textbooks for Korean elementary schoolkids, focused on English reading and writing skills, this post is for you.
Crazy Korean Phrase Book
Those who remember my post English Made Difficult, about a crazy series of English textbooks (widely) used in Korea during the 1970s will enjoy the look at this ridiculously useless travel phrasebook for visitors to Korea that looks almost as if it is from the same publisher and author. Check it out. (And a tip of the hat to Josh Brandt, who posted about this on a mailing list.)
I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère (Trans. Timothy Bent)
This is, as the author himself puts it, “a very peculiar book,” but for me, it was an unusually quick read, I think partly because of its very oddness. First, the good: I found it fascinating. I found it fascinating how Carrère sketches out what he understands to be the relationship between Dick’s life and his writing, a pattern that immediately brought to mind Rudy Rucker’s notion of transreal fiction — fiction that is essentially SFnalized autobiography — as he discusses it in this essay. Well, and as I mentioned recently, Wikipedia claims Rucker came up with the idea after reading …