Best Book You Read Latey

[Sleepy]

Been making my way though the Bible lately, finishing up Leviticus. Obviously the King James version because the old english is a joy to read. I definitely think a primer or summary would have been good to read before starting, I have a lot of trouble keeping track of who's who. The lineage is very important- Maybe someone's made a family flow chart or something... Anyways I'd recommend at least having one because you can get them at the dollar tree.

[yoku]

Been making my way though the Bible lately, finishing up Leviticus. Obviously the King James version because the old english is a joy to read. I definitely think a primer or summary would have been good to read before starting, I have a lot of trouble keeping track of who's who. The lineage is very important- Maybe someone's made a family flow chart or something... Anyways I'd recommend at least having one because you can get them at the dollar tree.

I skipped over the sections of who begat who, I know that its important but i had the impression that they included those parts to show that even among the chosen people some where more chosen than others. Like Josephs brothers were all assholes.

[don]

Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel by Thomas McMahon

I wish I could find a scan of the cover for the 1981 Avon edition of this book. They make it look like an American riff on a Marquez novel, complete with blooming New Mexico cactus flowers. It’s still in print, I think, but its being handeled by some university press who chunked a mushroom cloud on the cover and called it a day. I would never have bought it if I’d found a copy with the cover they show on Amazon.

Thomas McMahon was a scientist and literary writer from the middle of the last century. He helped develop the rubberized running track. Principles, his second novel I think, is a coming of age story about a young man living with his father in Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Manhattan project. It’s a great premise for a literary novel – McMahon (and the critics praising him) repeatedly tell us that it is about the camaraderie of scientists pushing themselves outside of the moral and intellectual bounds of convention while also being an unflinching portrait of a boy’s sexually troubled adolescence. The protagonist follows his father to Los Alamos and they leave their mother behind. Both develop an obsession with a girl named Maryanne, who is the father’s assistant and mistress. She fucks the shit out of the adolescent son in a sequence which is the book’s most artful and disturbing. It’s basically rape, and the kid goes to shit in its aftermath. He loses his mind when he gets his first physics job later in life because it’s all tied together – the science, the bomb, the sex.

The thing is, though, the premise of the book never quite materializes. The other scientists (fictionalized versions of Einstein, Oppenheimer etc but not recognizable) never gel as personalities and their work happens outside of McMahon’s narrative. Learning that they listened to jazz or drank is a poor substitute for actually showing their relationships. The father and son are more interesting and so is Maryanne, although she’s a cipher for the most part. It’s definitely a twentieth century novel in that it views sex as the end-all be-all of human life, at the expense of the atom bomb which provides so much interest to the project.

It’s weird because this is a great premise and the execution is interesting, if uneven. But the book seems to confuse restating the premise for executing the premise. The thing is, though, I can totally see how something with that problem could not only get published but could accrue critical praise – at least for a few years. This book works best in summary form.

[UniversalWorldBaby]

Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel by Thomas McMahon
[...] I would never have bought it if I’d found a copy with the cover they show on Amazon. [...]

perhaps sometimes you can judge a book by it's cover...
how much do you think the cover contributes to the legacy of the author?
is cover art a crutch for the lack of literacy in the modern age, or can it add to the understanding of the text in the right context?

I have a beat up copy of "World's Best Science Fiction: 1969" in the book club edition that has one of the simplest covers of any book I own, yet I enjoy many of those stories more than most of the collection. It looks something like this:



there's something compelling about this very minimalist style that speaks to me, but at the same time I do enjoy the opposite side of the cover art spectrum, like so:



the image here leaves very little to the imagination, yet imposes upon the reader a vivid image of the story that is to unfold...

then, there is the odd sort of creative cover that pushes the meta boundaries of fiction like the version of Fahrenheit 451 that comes with striking paper on the spine and a match built into the book so you can burn the book, if one so chooses:



While a bit of a gimmick and potentially a distraction from the actual text itself, it's hard to ignore the novelty of this one!

[don]

I think the visual packaging of a book is important in that books are art objects in and of themselves, text aside, and a good text deserves good presentation. Gimmick kinda stuff like the matchbook 451 is less effective than an attractive cover imo since it hinges on already knowing the content usually. Books compete for your time with a lot of visually stimulating shit and I think publishers owe it to their authors and audience to make things as crisp and attractive as they can possibly be. I loved Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore but did not save the crappy Amazon print on demand version of it I bought with its clipart cover... A good book should be an object a lot of care went into, it's not just a physical container for text. If I want text with no presentation I'd find a .txt file or a pdf.

[ZugIslandProdigy]

I bought this book because of the cover (and because it was $2 used on Amazon) and I have no regrets



The book is a collection of short stories set in an imaginative fantasy world, which seems to be slowly sliding into never-ending stagnation and decay. The very first city the reader sees when reading through the stories of the book (which are presented in chronological order) is a half-ruined crumbling wreck- and things don’t get much better as you read on. I prefer this style in fantasy writing because it connects the work thematically to medieval literature (which is the root of a lot, but not nearly all, fantasy literature,) in which writers usually conceived of their time as a long twilight of the earth, doomed never to recover the heights of the Roman civilization, culminating in an eventual apocalypse. JRR Tolkien, for all his skill as a medievalist, kind of killed this association in The Lord of the Rings (although JRR’s references to steam trains and guns in his first couple of Middle Earth works indicate that he may have not always meant for them to be “medieval.”) The writer who I think captured this idea best was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote a number of super rich pulp stories set in the fictional county of Averoigne in medieval France, but more stories set in Zothique, his vision of the last inhabited continent before the death of the Earth.

But McNaughton’s setting isn’t just like medieval Europe, as we know from some (schlocky?) exotic details he chooses to include – EG describing characters’ names as pictographs, describing heraldic tattoos for various noble families in his setting, naming and characterizing some members of a pantheon of gods. Here, McNaughton evokes Robert E. Howard, though their prose styles aren’t very similar.

Robert E. Howard, distraught over the death of his mother, killed himself in 1936. In response to this tragedy (and the death of HP Lovecraft a year later,) Smith stopped writing. In 1937, Tolkien published The Hobbit, and until recently, I believed The Hobbit marked the end of a golden age of pulp fantasy writing (science fiction continued further, ofc.) Reading The Throne of Bones (which was published in '97) made me happy to say that, far after 1937, there was a working author who captured the mood of that golden age (and not just somebody who knew the names of all Lovecraft’s evil gods.) Although McNaughton died in ‘04, I think there is probably an heir to this tradition somewhere out there. We’ve just yet to find him.

Also, the book does contain human-undead sex scenes, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

[Penseroso]

Finished The Narrator by Michael Cisco. Some of the strangest prose I've ever read couched in crazy metafictional ideas about war and the telling of war. This dude is one to keep your eye on for.

[don]

Finished The Narrator by Michael Cisco. Some of the strangest prose I've ever read couched in crazy metafictional ideas about war and the telling of war. This dude is one to keep your eye on for.

That sounds really cool. Could you say some more about it?

[Penseroso]

Finished The Narrator by Michael Cisco. Some of the strangest prose I've ever read couched in crazy metafictional ideas about war and the telling of war. This dude is one to keep your eye on for.

That sounds really cool. Could you say some more about it?

The setting is surreal fantasy world that's difficult to find a comparison to, think Planescape Torment meets Warhammer but less gay. The protag is a "Narrator", which I think is someone that uses some kind of language magic that is ostensibly the metafictional aspect of the book (it's left murky, intentionally I believe). It would've been easy for this to devolve into fourth-wall breaking "whoa look I'm a character in a book ain't I self aware" but it works completely in the book's setting. The protag is drafted into a war he doesn't know much about and falls in love with a cannibalistic widow. Most of the book is intentionally confusing episodes that take place in the war interspersed with passages that meditate on the nature of how one understands war.

On the surface level the book is a really fun military SF story. Cisco has the chops to write entertaining fiction but he still pumps it full of "literary" ideas. A lesser author would be hailed as having "unique and vivid worldbuilding" if they employed Cisco's ideas purely for fun alone. Here's a couple of snippets to show off his style:

The armor worn by these Ghuards is worth describing in some detail. It is all or nearly all made of a special paper-light metal, the same kind Wacagan use for their legbands. It’s an uncanny experience seeing the Ghuards in their armor—you begin to wonder if you’ve gone deaf, because, massive as it is, the armor makes almost no noise at all. No thundering footsteps, no clattering. Huge forms sail by you as quiet and easy moving as balloons. The helmets are traditionally moulded to resemble the heads of berserk jackasses, with ears three feet long bolt upright on top them. The eyes are great blind concavities with a slit for each of the occupant’s eyes recessed at their innermost edges, flanking the false-perspective nose ridge—actually a flat trench, not encroaching on the Ghuard’s field of vision. In a perversely-inspired bid for perfect ugliness, the designers had trapezoidal openings cut on either side of the muzzle, and mail jowls hang flabbily out of these. The rest of the false face is a wedge snout with a horrifying if rather nicely-rendered snarl of projecting axe-head shaped teeth. A narrow, shaggy mane of needles runs in a tapering stripe down the rear of the helmet to the small of the back, rippling hypnotically like the scintillation of a wheeling school of fish. When have I ever seen a school of fish wheeling? Those manes must be fantastically expensive and time-consuming to make. The chest, shoulder, and upper arms are plated over with two layers of armor separated by an air layer. There are two sets of hands—proper man-sized ones, in fine and elastic metal gloves, and colossal mechanical gauntlets that can crush a man in their grip. Strips of mail hang down from ledges at the tops of the thighs. From chains affixed to each armored groin dangles a pair of dull metal balls, bigger than a man’s head and dotted with scratch-shined pimples, which clack meditatively together with every stride. The legs are thick pistoned trunks with ponderous hinges at the ankles, and incongruously prim pointed feet. They puff along in swarms of flies—their hindquarters and thighs are caked with excrement, as the Ghuards exhibit a marked disinclination to divest themselves of the armor once they’ve got it on.


There’s a spot I faced as I slept, where a heap of stones receded into a jumble of details I didn’t bother to make sense of at the time, and as I glance at them again I feel a memory come on, a dream of a black-streaked mouth in the stones, that spoke dream talk to me along the wind. I remembered the voice, but not in the way I normally remember voices. I didn’t hear it in recollection, but my memory started making vocalities at me and it was the affect of the voice that it partially imitated; distracted, sexless, neutrally old, talking off at an angle and to itself, but I was meant to overhear. I only overheard it speak. A strong definite sound, but it trembled. It was a death’s bed murmur, words maybe addressed to death, or through it, by a dying speaker.



“If his own train were wrecked, and this were yet no spur, then it would be she and he. Intimate in the half-light. She was the one who started, who hid, like her kind will. There is always more second wind, hidden or trapped in pockets below the earth, or in the trees, or in each other. You spread more whenever you shall sit down to write. That’s the difference between lives; try it, and there shall be some wind to move the death out of your path. Boneless mummified words sifted through your writing fingers will receive and hold the death there, present before you and even trapped. You turn over death and life, passing them back and forth through something like a window, and drive the death sentences through what you did not know ...”

[Loud Speakers MC]

When All of The Brothers Are Silent, The Photographic History of The Waffen SS
It was written and edited by Waffen SS veterans.
The Foreword was written by hand in 19th Century German handschrift by the founder of the Waffen SS when he was in his 90s.
The English version was translated by Joachim "Jochen" Peiper shortly before he was murdered in France by French Communists in the 1970s.



Don't expect your NEETbux to be able to float the price. Hard copies are relics. I own one of the later editions. It's sitting on my bookshelf.