Not signed in (Sign In)
Categories
- Main Junction
- CROSSED
- London Zoo
- Freakangels
- Music
- Printheads
- Culturegasm
- Web Nuggets
- WorldWeird
- Blogs
Welcome, Guest
Vanilla is a product of Lussumo:
Documentation and Support.
Printheads: The Book Club 2011
Bottom of Page-
- CommentAuthorebullientsoul
- CommentTimeJul 21st 2011 edited
@Corey Just go with the detours, man. Accept that they're gonna come and just gleam whatever you can from them.
I finished Gravity's Rainbow and that book is fucked the hell up. The current book is Portrait Of A Lady, which after ...Rainbow feels like going from black tar heroin to gin and juice. -
- CommentAuthorKidAnarchy
- CommentTimeJul 25th 2011
currently reading Olympos by Dan Simmons,just read Illium...I have read both of these before and I am a fan,influenced hugely by Lord Of Light but i am a sucker for post humans and brane holes...
I have also just picked up Arkham Asylum again and suddenly David Mack doesn't seem so original,those little triangles around things that he love McKean does too.
I wonder who was first ? -
@ oddbill - My wife bought me the set from amazon after the tv series finished and its even more daunting when you see the size of the books. After saying that they are so readable and I'm just starting Storm of Swords 2- Blood and Gold so Ive read the first three books in three weeks. You just get drawn deeper and deeper into that world.
-
-
CommentAuthorFearlessfoz
- CommentTimeJul 26th 2011
@ Oddbill and Smoggy.
Working on the same 4 book set from Amazon. Got it when the show came out and managed to finish the first before anything spoilery happened at the end of the first season... Now currently 2/3ds of the way through book 3 and looooooooving it.
I share your reservations about the number of pages... and the fact that it isn't finished yet. Very worried about hitting the wall after book 5 and having to wait a number of years for the next one.
Aparently GRRM wants to wrap it up with a 7th book... and I really hope that with the success of the show he'll be anxious to plow through and get the finish line in sight.
Anyway I'm enjoying the ride and amazed at how he keeps drawing me deeper as the pages fly by.
Enjoy.
J -
-
- CommentAuthorian holloway
- CommentTimeJul 26th 2011
just read the first two of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels - The Final Program & Cure For Cancer - brain is currently mashed and i'm going to leave it a while before reading the other two. can really see where Grant Morrison got some of his influences for The Invisibles from. -
@StefanJ - hey, cheers for that - really interesting info. Definitely going to watch Soylent Green when I can.
Finished War by Sebastian Junger. I can't really sum it up in any concise way, other that to say that you need to read this book. -
-
CommentAuthorCorey Waits
- CommentTimeJul 26th 2011 edited
@ian holloway
I would actually recommend stopping there. I didn't think much of the last two, especially not the 4th book. I felt that any interesting ideas were drowned out by self-importance and pop-culture references that haven't aged well at all.
More to the point, if you're interested in reading it because of the influence it had on Grant Morrison and Matt Fraction, I would instead recommend Bryan Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. I'm tempted to say that Grant Morrison ripped it off wholesale, but obviously I don't know that, and perhaps he has admitted to it being a big inspiration in interviews that I haven't read. It just irks me how publicly pissed off Grant Morrison was at the Wachowski's when the more PKD, Vonnegut, Burroughs and Talbot I read the more I can see exactly where Grant was getting his ideas from. It doesn't make The Invisibles any less brilliant (and doesn't erase the Invisibles tattoo from my skin), but people in glass houses and all that.
Fraction has said that Arkwright was the real inspiration but that he named Casanova's dad Cornelius because it was too large a cultural touchstone for him to ignore (paraphrasing, obviously). I was pleased to see the character in the new story at the end of 2.4 bringing the Arkwright love into the limelight though. -
-
- CommentAuthorian holloway
- CommentTimeJul 27th 2011
@Corey
I've not had the opportunity to read Cassanova as yet - it's on the list - but Bryan Talbot is one of a very select few authors I buy on sight. The first Luther Arkwright story is up there as an example of comic perfection. I still have my copies of the original run and dig them out at least once a year to re-read - i even have the audio play with David Tennant as Luther (it's not great).
Obviously there's a link to the Cornelius stories in Arkwright but it's a delicate influence. the more i read of A Cure for Cancer the more I thought of the Invisibles - the "I'm tired of being the Harlequin" line was a give away i thought and King Mob is blatantly Grant Morrison reinventing himself as Jerry Cornelius. And yes I agree the Invisibles is a brilliant read and i'm not knocking Morrison - I actually like finding the inspiration for writers (and musicians) i dig. -
-
CommentAuthorCorey Waits
- CommentTimeJul 27th 2011
@ian
Looks like you've thought about it more than me! Honestly I haven't read the Invisibles in about 3 years, but the main thing that stuck out to me from Arkwright was Arkwright's enlightenment and how closely it seemed to be copied for Dane's enlightenment in the first volume of the Invisibles.
Gideon Stargrave seemed like an obvious homage to Cornelius, but other than that I don't think I read as deeply into it as you did when I was reading the Cornelius Quartet. -
-
- CommentAuthorAnanzitusq
- CommentTimeJul 27th 2011
I was always intrigued by Moorcock's claim that Morrison ripped out Jerry for the invisibles. -
-
CommentAuthorCorey Waits
- CommentTimeJul 27th 2011
It's such an obvious homage that I can't imagine him being upset... Especially when in the introduction of a really old edition of the collected Cornelius stories Moorcock basically says he wants people to take the Cornelius idea and run with it. Can't remember the exact wording, but it was something like that. -
-
- CommentAuthorian holloway
- CommentTimeJul 28th 2011
he was definitely upset - check out the Gideon Stargrave wiki page for some choice quotes. i think the most cutting remark has to be...I've read the work of Grant Morrison twice. Once when I wrote it. Once when he wrote it.
-
Re-read PREACHER for the nth time. Started Ray Loriga's TOKYO DOESN'T LOVE US ANYMORE, which is pretty damn good...
-
Finished PKD's The Man in the High Castle 4 days ago and now I'm reading A Storm of Swords while at the same time listening to the audiobook version of Tales of Dunk and Egg.
-
- CommentAuthormybrainhurts
- CommentTimeJul 29th 2011
Dmitri Bykov's Living Souls
It's described on the front as "Catch-22 for modern Russia" which is a pretty bold claim but so far it's living up to that. Stunning writing. -
- CommentAuthorian holloway
- CommentTimeJul 29th 2011
Following on from the Michael Moorcock one from last year Alastair Reynolds, Naomi Alderman and Stephen Baxter are all lined up to write Doctor Who novels - info on the Reynolds one here.
i've just looked at wiki and apparently there's one from Dan Abnett coming very soon too. Abnett gives good novel so i'm happy about this. -
@KidAnarchy Well, they learened it from the same man.
-
Back on the horse with some Ballard short stories while I wait for the next Malazan book to arrive from the library. Also, I'm finally going to read some Sherlock Holmes!
-
Read some Lawrence Block, re-read some Terry Pratchett and started the new Umberto Eco (in Greek). Currently re-reading PATTERN RECOGNITION, as well.
-
Trying to make myself read a book on voice over by Susan Blu. Highly recommended but dull as frickin dirt. Certainly intelligent but ponderous. I recommend Tara Platt & Yuri Lowenthal's Voiceover Voice Actor far more. Fun, casual, loaded with info and insight.
Instead I keep turning to the McSweeney's anthology, The Better of McSweeney's, which in its own funny, high-brow way, is sooo dry it's like chalk powder in my mouth. Maybe it's just how it opens. But moving through the opening "letters to the editor" (ironic letters written by contemporary top-tier essayists) is such slow going I keep putting it down in favor of...
Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim. I can't remember if he comes around here. I know I follow him on Twitter and he usually responds to my replies...so I figured when I had the chance to finally read something of his I should take it. On the plus side, in about two weeks I've read something like two-thirds of it. the action is a damn rollercoaster and even if I take a day or two away from it, eventually I want to come back and find out what happens next. On the down side... Wow the prose could stand a lot of tidying. And the style...}:| There's just something about a book so disdainful of Hollywood and Beverly Hills "types" that it nicknames a cokefiend mover-and-shaker "Brad Pitt" while indulging such cleverisms which would be quite at home in Fight Club that leaves me a little exhausted by its hipper-than-thou hypocrisy. And I'm waiting for the protagonist to quit being such an asshole moron. At first I was intrigued that Mr Sandman Slim isn't much at all a detective, and not too terribly bright. But...some character growth, maybe?
Eh, anyway. On the back flap there's a blurb from William Gibson that begins "The best B movie I've read in at least twenty years." That's about right. It is a ripping good time. Goes fast, teeth are kicked in, stuff explodes, very colorful people (if not always well thought out & defined personalities), cynicism and arcanoi aplenty. Beats the fuck out of trade book.