Sulphur on 15/2/2010 at 16:54

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Yeah, I'm well aware of his personal opinions on lots of things. Being a stout Mormon tends to colour your outlook some, too.

I don't let that detract from the fact that the man can write phenomenal stuff, at least when it has little or nothing to do with his or anyone else's personal outlook on contemporary issues.



Read that a a coupla months ago. Pretty good mindfuckery, as is normally par for the course for PKD. It's not quite Scanner or Man in the High Castle, but definitely a good read.

Aerothorn on 16/2/2010 at 01:04

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Currently reading The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. I am considerably less forgiving of James' lack of paragraphs (i.e. a single paragraph will sometimes go on for pages) than I was with Pynchon this summer. James is a great writer and there are all sorts of marvelous sentences in the book, but I can't help but feel it's 200 pages longer than it should be. I dunno, maybe if I was on the beach with all the time in the world I'd be more forgiving - but given that I have to read the whole thing for a class, I just feel irritated with the molasses-on-crutches pace of the narrative.

On the other hand, I just read portions of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad for the same class, and enjoyed it immensely. The entire part on Civita Vecchia is comic gold, featuring such great passages as this one:

"The people here live in alleys two yards wide, which have a smell about them that is peculiar but not entertaining. It is well the alleys are not wider, because they hold as much smell now as a person can stand, and of course, if they were wider they would hold more, and then the person would die."

doctorfrog on 16/2/2010 at 06:39

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My first, too. An excellent book. It was impossible for me not to picture the main protagonist as a very young Conan O'Brian, though, which added to the overall trippiness.

I recently finished Homicide and a biography of Thomas Jefferson, now reading an imported collection of a Hunter Thompson articles called The Great Shark Hunt. Re-reading my favorite short stories of Lester Del Rey, as well.

PeeperStorm on 19/2/2010 at 04:54

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Last week I decided that it was time to reread some Moorcock stuff, and found a little surprise package in one of the stories. First I read a collection of shorts that included "Behold the Man", which involves a guy who's obsessed with meeting Jesus travelling back using a time machine. Then last night I started on An Alien Heat, and much to my surprise the same time machine from the short story makes an appearance there as well. Conversation which takes place in that scene makes it clear that's it's the exact same machine, not just one of a similar type. Even though Moorcock is well known for tying all his stories together in one big, annoying continuity, it's still surprising for a couple of reasons. First, there's absolutely nothing else tying the two stories together, so there's nothing to be gained other than having it be fun for a reader to notice it as an Easter egg. Second, it's very unlikely that any given reader would notice it unless they had recently read the other story and had taken note of the time machine's description. Seems like he went through a lot of trouble to include one unimportant detail that most of the audience wouldn't even notice, and which comes from a story published six years previously.

PeeperStorm on 19/2/2010 at 09:42

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Dammit! I just reread Gloriana over the weekend and I didn't catch that at all. Now that you've told me it's so obvious. Same name and everything.

We need a new smiley-face icon, one for "Duh"...