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 …