Books Part V, featuring Benny Profane and the Whole Sick Crew

[bono_212]

Read more.

Easily done.

This is my Lovecraft collection.

I'm actually sitting right next to it. It's like it's almost...watching me...

Full contents:

Spoiler

The Beast in the Cave
The Alchemist
The Tomb
Dagon
A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson
Polaris
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Memory
Old Bugs
The Transition of Juan Romero
The White Ship
The Street
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Terrible Old Man
The Tree
The Cats of Ulthar
The Temple
Facts Concerning the Late Arther Jermyn and His Family
Celephais
From Beyond
Nyarlathotep
The Picture in the House
Ex Oblivione
Sweet Ermengarde
The Nameless City
The Quest of Iranon
The Moon-Bog
The Outsider
The Other Gods
The Music of Erich Zann
Herbert West--Reanimator
Hypnos
What the Moon Brings
Azathoth
The Hound
The Lurking Fear
The Rats in the Walls
The Unnamable
The Festival
Under the Pyramids
The Shunned House
The Horror at Red Hook
He
In the Vault
Cool Air
The Call of Cthulhu
Pickman's Model
The Silver Key
The Strange High House in the Mist
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Colour out of Space
The Descendent
History of the Necronomicon
The Very Old Folk
Ibid
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Dreams in the Witch House
Through the Gates of the Silver Key
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Evil Clergyman
The Book
The Shadow out of Time
The Haunter of the Dark

Appendix: Juvenilia
The Little Glass Bottle
The Secret Cave
The Mystery of the Grave-yard
The Mysterious Ship (short version)
The Mysterious Ship (long version)

Discarded draft of "The Shadow over Innsmouth"

Supernatural Horror in Literature

I don't have a kindle. I like to hold real paper books.

These are the two Lovecraft books I checked out from the library. They were the only two Lovecraft books available to check out at the branch I go to:

The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: H.P. Lovecraft: 9780739489017: Amazon.com: Books

H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (Library of America): H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub: 9781931082723: Amazon.com: Books

Are these cool? Haven't even looked at the contents very closely, although I think that one of them contains At The Mountains Of Madness.

An annotated book might be a little distracting while you're first reading it, if I had anything specific to point out.

 

[u2popmofo]

Easily done.

This is my Lovecraft collection.

I'm actually sitting right next to it. It's like it's almost...watching me...

That looks fancy.

I bought this on a whim in the early '00's while at a Borders:

The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch: 9780345350800: Amazon.com: Books

I think the "whim" was partially based on the Metallica song, partially on the front and back covers' artwork, partially on the description of the stories on the back cover. I was not disappointed. Have been a big fan since, I've even watched that silent black and white Call of the Cthulhu film that was on Netflix.

Speaking of horror, I finally started reading The Passage. Enjoying it.

 

[bono_212]

That looks fancy.

I bought this on a whim in the early '00's while at a Borders:

The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch: 9780345350800: Amazon.com: Books

I think the "whim" was partially based on the Metallica song, partially on the front and back covers' artwork, partially on the description of the stories on the back cover. I was not disappointed. Have been a big fan since, I've even watched that silent black and white Call of the Cthulhu film that was on Netflix.

Speaking of horror, I finally started reading The Passage. Enjoying it.

That's like the copy of the book, isn't it?

 

[elevated_u2_fan]

Okay, I'm going to share this, because book nerds and/or Cori gossip hounds might dig it.

I had been dating a guy for a short while, and I just called it off. I was disappointed that I didn't get to meet his mom, because his mom is Annie Fucking Proulx. She just recently moved to the area from Wyoming.

Oh well.

was it Elbow guy??

 

[lazarus]

I miss Surfer Guy.

Spoiler

 

[corianderstem]

was it Elbow guy??

Nah, he's been out of the picture since last October.

KEEP UP, ELFA.

 

[bono_212]

I think you only mentioned that on facebook

 

[corianderstem]

It was implied in how I just stopped talking about him all of a sudden.

IT WAS IMPLIED!!!

 

[bono_212]

 

[Rachel D.]

Guys... I'm not gonna be a librarian. They sent me a letter of rejection. But, I had a surprise phone call and subsequent surprise job interview today, so I might be a bank teller instead.

Anyway, I've been reading Mockingjay. It's still exciting, but after the last two books having the Hunger Games themselves as the central event, this one seems like it's not really going anywhere very fast. I know it's probably leading up to some big thing that's going to happen at some point, though.

 

[bono_212]

Hey, at least you went for it, and at least they let you know. I hate when you get an interview and they say nothing.

 

[corianderstem]

What is the protocol for meeting a guy who has written a book (self-published, but good for him) and he's mildly flirting with you and suggests we have coffee after I've finished the book to debrief (i.e., hey, let's have a coffee date) ... and then you read the book and it's just awful?

Cool concept, but I hate his style and the characters are all just awful. I'm going to have to practice some diplomacy.

#Coridatinglife

 

[bono_212]

Ouch. I feel bad mildly critiquing Travis' stuff and I like his writing. I can't imagine what I'd do if I hated one of Travis' books.

 

[corianderstem]

I'm only halfway through. Maybe it'll have a cool twist or something. He said it was the first of a trilogy. (Oh dear.)

 

[bono_212]

Dear God in heaven.

 

[martha]

Cool concept, but I hate his style and the characters are all just awful. I'm going to have to practice some diplomacy.

"Paolo, I thought the concept was cool, but your writing style isn't a kind I usually enjoy. Also, I thought the characters needed more development."

Then bring up something less controversial, like the Supreme Court or something.


That's all I got.

 

[corianderstem]

Yeah. After reading his author's notes/acknowledgements, I even got annoyed with him as well as the book. Like, it made me think the main character had a lot based on him, and it was a big turn-off.

Oh well.

 

[bono_212]

Are you even going to get coffee now?

Sent from my U2 Interference iPod using U2 Interference

 

[corianderstem]

I dunno. I might still reach out to see if he wants to get together.

 

[martha]

Bail.

Unless he's hot.

 

[lazarus]

Ball.

Unless he's not.

 

[martha]

Two schools of thought on this one.

 

[corianderstem]

I didn't actually see him without his sunglasses on. (But in his defense, it was a gorgeous sunny day and we were outside the whole time.)

The end of the book did have an intriguing twist (although one I should have seen coming). If I had one iota of sympathy for the main character, I'd read the next book.

 

[LemonMelon]

According to goodreads, I've finished reading 48 novels since I started college. I don't know if that's a good number or not, for someone that wants to become a novelist, it seems a little low to me. I really should read more.

It took me a while, but after months of letting them hang around, I tore through The Black Dahlia, American Psycho and Nausea this week. Pretty heavy reading. Black Dahlia was a keeper, I can't wait to get started on the rest of the LA Quartet. American Psycho was far more vivid, detailed and significant than Less Than Zero, but the gore was too much for me and I'm not especially sensitive to that sort of thing. It became so pervasive that it took away from the story and what little character development there was. Still some great stuff in there. Fucking hilarious in spots. Nausea was too theory-dense to really allow the story to breathe, but I was impressed by Sartre's wonderful command of language. It had some lovely passages and was mercifully brief, but it's not something I'll likely come back to.

Now I'm working on Trainspotting, Altered Carbon and Dune. I'm about a quarter of the way through Trainspotting. The characters are as vile and hysterical as I remembered them being. Good stuff so far. The Scottish dialect takes some getting used to, but it does add to the personality of the characters.

 

[djerdap]

The Big Nowhere is my favourite in the Quartet. Dudley Smith is a fantastic villain. LA Confidential is one of those examples where I actually prefer the movie, although I liked the book. It's a very convoluted novel, and the film did a very good job of cutting a lot of the stuff that just seemed to unnecessarily prolong the story. White Jazz is the first example of Ellroy's verbless staccato prose, and it did take some time to get used to, but it presents a fitting closure to the material.

The Underworld USA Trilogy is just as good, if not better. At least I think so, since I never finished Blood's a Rover for some reason (maybe because it did get a bit repetitive in terms of new characters having similar fetishes and eccentricities as the old ones). But the first two parts are excellent, especially American Tabloid. A lot of people hate The Cold Six Thousand due to its hyperactive staccato style, but it has a great pay-off and some of the Tabloid characters actually get more intriguing and three-dimensional as the story reaches its end.

I loved American Psycho when I read it quite some time ago, although I vividly remember it started to run out of steam by the last third. For me, the violence was simply too cartoonish to take it seriously, which might have been Ellis' point. But it was pretty hilarious, especially in the first half. Another example where I think the movie was at least on par with the book.

 

[lazarus]

Love Ellroy. Still haven't read Blood's A Rover yet, though I've owned it for a while.

Black Dahlia is probably my favorite, but it might just be because of that final line.

The whole quartet is fantastic.

 

[IWasBored]

I thought trainspotting was alright. Not half as difficult to read as people made it out to be. It's not Finnegan's Wake, at least.

Hated the constant italics in American Psycho so much that it made me really despise the book. I sort of disliked it in general (whereas I liked the movie), but italicizing everything struck me as one of the cheapest, lamest things possible to lean on for stylistic emphasis that even if I was to come around to the novel itself, I'd never get past that nonsense.

 

[LemonMelon]

I thought trainspotting was alright. Not half as difficult to read as people made it out to be. It's not Finnegan's Wake, at least.

Seriously, I can read it at my normal speed and hardly lose out on anything. It looked like a different language for a couple of seconds, but it's not like there's a massive vocabulary of dialectal variations here. Your brain adjusts fairly quickly.

 

[IWasBored]

Seriously, I can read it at my normal speed and hardly lose out on anything. It looked like a different language for a couple of seconds, but it's not like there's a massive vocabulary of dialectal variations here. Your brain adjusts fairly quickly.

Exactly.

 

[martha]

Holy cow. For the first time in a very, very, very long time, I quit reading a book because it sucked. At Home in Mitford, by Jan Karon, was the book. I read that she was inspired by Miss Read, one of my very favorite authors; they both write "small-town" kinds of books. The big difference? Miss Read can write. She has plots, characters that do things, wry humor, realistic situations, contemporary (for the times) issues, all tightly, cleverly, well written. Jan Karon, not so much. This was the first one in the series, and I can be forgiving with authors just starting. JK Rowling, for instance. Her first few chapters in her first Harry Potter kind of bumble along, but at least she had a clear plot and interesting shit was going on. In this book today, by page 70, I was done. Nothing was going on that meant anything, the dialogue was stilted and lame, the characters were out of a creative writing handbook, as was the setting. Sheesh. I'm kind of a hard-ass, but reading this right after some Trollope, who is a master at character creation, was too much.


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