nose in a book
Sep. 11th, 2013 09:48 pmThis week I've rediscovered what 'hiding' feels like.
Hence, books!
What are you currently reading?
The Citadel of the Autarch, by Gene Wolfe.
What did you recently finish reading?
In what I'm sure will be no surprise to anyone, the first three volumes of the Book of the New Sun. As noted elseweb, it feels like my brain is being force-grown. I tried to read these ages ago and bounced off them, and then read them through for the first time while I was still at Waldenbooks, and haven't read them since. But after determining that Robert Graves is bad for my blood pressure, Northrop Frye is brilliant but hard to focus on (I can't read literary theory for fun all the time), and Jim Hines's Princess books are too lightweight even when they're trying to tackle heavy subjects[1], I needed something with narrative that would fry my brain. Hence, Wolfe.
[1] This is not a condemnation of the Princess books! They're a very good example of what they are. That's just not at all what I need right now.
What do you think you'll read next?
I bet you think the answer is The Urth of the New Sun, don't you? WRONG! I'm going to dig up the handful of New Sun short stories out of my Wolfe collections and then reread Castle of the Otter, before diving into Urth. I'm a little skeptical of Urth anyway. I seem to recall it being kind of a slog.
(ISDFB, in its listing of the complete Solar Cycle, gives two stories from Endangered Species, 'The Cat' and 'The Map,' plus 'Empires of Foliage and Flower' which I'd already known about but didn't have access to on my first reading. Oddly, ISFDB doesn't list 'The Night Chough,' a Long Sun story about Oreb the raven that was first published in a Crow anthology.)
Hence, books!
What are you currently reading?
The Citadel of the Autarch, by Gene Wolfe.
What did you recently finish reading?
In what I'm sure will be no surprise to anyone, the first three volumes of the Book of the New Sun. As noted elseweb, it feels like my brain is being force-grown. I tried to read these ages ago and bounced off them, and then read them through for the first time while I was still at Waldenbooks, and haven't read them since. But after determining that Robert Graves is bad for my blood pressure, Northrop Frye is brilliant but hard to focus on (I can't read literary theory for fun all the time), and Jim Hines's Princess books are too lightweight even when they're trying to tackle heavy subjects[1], I needed something with narrative that would fry my brain. Hence, Wolfe.
[1] This is not a condemnation of the Princess books! They're a very good example of what they are. That's just not at all what I need right now.
What do you think you'll read next?
I bet you think the answer is The Urth of the New Sun, don't you? WRONG! I'm going to dig up the handful of New Sun short stories out of my Wolfe collections and then reread Castle of the Otter, before diving into Urth. I'm a little skeptical of Urth anyway. I seem to recall it being kind of a slog.
(ISDFB, in its listing of the complete Solar Cycle, gives two stories from Endangered Species, 'The Cat' and 'The Map,' plus 'Empires of Foliage and Flower' which I'd already known about but didn't have access to on my first reading. Oddly, ISFDB doesn't list 'The Night Chough,' a Long Sun story about Oreb the raven that was first published in a Crow anthology.)