Still plugging away at Moby-Dick over here. I’m gonna make it, you guys!
Mercurius, the Marriage of Heaven and Earth. A (mer)curious 1990 novel by Patrick Harpur which purports to lay out, obscurely, the secret of alchemy. Oscillates back and forth between the journals of two people, an English country vicar in the early 50s performing the Great Work and a woman in the early 80s, I believe, who comes to live in his house. Quite a bit of Jung in there. Harpur went on to write three nonfiction books touching the same subject, more or less, one of which, Daimonic Reality, is semi well known, in certain (weird) circles, I guess, which is how I came to find him: DR is cited briefly in Jeffrey Kripal’s Mutants and Mystics (or god, was it Authors of the Impossible? They’re all starting to blur together). Having “Philosopher” put on my business cards to confuse everyone, now.
Picked up the art books for Alien Isolation and Prey. Both are beautiful and excellent works and both are slightly disappointing. Isolation’s contains some really good stuff, including material iterated straight from Alien, but it also contains a lot of finished digital art. There should have been a lot more on the early design process. Prey’s on the other hand, has a ton of amazing material but packs it all in, when so much of it really needs bigger sections, more pages, and spreads. Should be twice the size, with even more enlightening text.
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Does anyone have a recommendation for a historical overview of the British Empire? I’m curious how one relatively small island nation conquered most of the world for a time and how the effects are still present today. Something along the lines of this book about the Mongol Empire that I loved-- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan_and_the_Making_of_the_Modern_World
Maybe Winston Churchill? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_English-Speaking_Peoples
Rise And Fall Of The British Empire by Lawrence James or Decline and Fall of the British Empire by Piers Brendon are good. Not particularly short works at around 800 pages each.
Don’t read Churchill until you know the subject well. As a product of empire, he can’t be trusted.
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Blame! You might know Knights of Sidonia, a manga and anime from Tsutomu Nihei. Before he did Sidonia, he did Blame!, a cybperpunk technolandscape full of inhuman architecture, populated by fleeing tribes of humans, genocidal androids, horrific transhumans and weird aliens. Some incredible art, most of it ‘background’, but still page after page of fantastic work, and action scenes that are like stills or storyboards from an accomplished anime, in the vein of Ghost in the Shell in terms of kineticism.
Witch Doctor by Seifert and Ketner. Accompanied by monsterphage Penny Dreadful and loyal paramedic sidekick Eric Gast, Doctor of the Supernatural Vic Morrow cures the sick and heals the wounded by sucking out, killing, or banishing, their afflictions. Morrow is a mad scientist of the best kind, with a dash of humour to go with his overweening arrogance, as he deals with numerous 'orrors which man should not wot of. Some very nice art, though a bit scribbly at times.
Not sure it makes any sense (or would work any better than just posting here) but I created a Stately Play group for book discussion on goodreads. I don’t know much about goodreads even though I’ve been a member for a while, but I think it allows to link books and show what we’re all currently reading, etc.
If you think it’s a terrible idea, we can let it rot on the vine. It didn’t cost anything, so not a big deal.
Here’s the link to join if you want to give it a go:
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I joined both the site and the club and added what I’m reading, but those don’t show up on the club page like Declare does. I guess because you’re the group admin?
Weird. Ill look into it. I don’t know what I’m doing so I probably set something up wrong.
Okay, to add a book to our group you need to actually add it. It doesn’t just grab the book you’re currently reading. Basically, it wants you to add books that you want to talk about specifically in the group. So…
From the group homepage, you’ll see Group Home on the right side. Click “Bookshelf”.
On the next screen, you’ll be able to add books to our group bookshelf by searching and adding it via the dialog on the left of the screen.
Can you do this, or did I mess this up so only I can see these things?
I gather there can only be one book on the Currently Reading list at a time?
edit: never mind, I figured it out.
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Looks like I was able to add something, one of the (basically) three books I’m currently reading, which may be of interest to the Yakuza fans around these parts.
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I really enjoyed The Cage.
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Well, @Neumannium, you finally got me to sign up for GoodReads.
At the moment I’m sort of noodling along in The Magicians, which has been sitting in my wife’s Kindle library for a while. Figured that, since I so enjoyed the capacity of the show to keep surprising me without simply seeming like chaos, it was worth checking out the source material. Satisfactory so far. I also finally found my book about the biology of trees, which I’d mislaid for months, so I knock off a chapter of that now and then. And I finally grabbed Maus the last time I was at the library, and finished it that night. Very impressed by the inclusion of various details and subplots which humanize the story. Makes it feel less like simply an “issue” book. I developed a distaste for books which were trying to tell me some one clear thing when I was in high school, and haven’t really lost it yet.
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Chris Brookmyre, Places in the Darkness. Nice chewy SF slash detective procedural, set amid the seamier side of life on a space station building humanity’s first starship. Brookmyre’s other books tend to the blacker side of dark, but despite the starting corpse, this one veers away from the utterly grim. Enjoyed it.
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“The Steady Atrophy and Eventual Disappearance of …”
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It has taken me way too long to finish Rich Horton’s 2016 Best SF & Fantasy collection.
I’m going to read a G.M. Ford Leo Waterman novel next just so I can get back on track for my Goodreads Reading Challenge.
I’m debating what my next book will be after that. Either Suicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg or The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan.
We’ll see whether I’m feeling particularly Roman or not. 
Maybe I’m missing out, but I’ve never had any interest in any of the sci-fi or fantasy short fiction anthologies. It doesn’t matter if any of the big names contributed, I just don’t see myself getting all that interested in short stories. Perhaps that’s short-sighted in my part.
They’re not for everybody.
But since that’s what I write (well, wrote, as I haven’t written one in years), I have always been interested in the form.