Book Hauls!

The Divine Invasion and Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick.

Plus Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland for the wife.
 
Once again, courtesy of Extollager (who kindly had the author inscribe it before it was sent to me), I have received a book by Lars Walker: Blood and Judgment. Both of the novels I have by this writer (who is completely new to me) look to be fantasy of a high order, with a core worldview he is exploring through his writing. Not, from the reviews I've seen, in a heavy-handed, didactic style, but where it informs the novels nonetheless and gives them an added life and depth beyond mere entertainment. I may not be able to get around to these until later in the month, but I must admit to becoming increasingly curious and hopeful about them....
 
Today...

Readme - Neal Stephenson *Latest from the incomparable one. This is a huge book, weighing in at just over 1,000 pages. Sounds good from the blurb! Blurb: In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and returned to the States after the U.S. government granted amnesty to draft dodgers. He parlayed his wealth into an empire and developed a remote resort in which he lives. He also created T’Rain, a multibillion-dollar, massively multiplayer online role-playing game with millions of fans around the world.But T’Rain’s success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold by unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player’s electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game’s virtual universe—and Richard is at ground zero.Racing around the globe from the Pacific Northwest to China to the wilds of northern Idaho and points in between, Reamde is a swift-paced thriller that traverses worlds virtual and real. Filled with unexpected twists and turns in which unforgettable villains and unlikely heroes face off in a battle for survival, it is a brilliant refraction of the twenty-first century, from the global war on terror to social media, computer hackers to mobsters, entrepreneurs to religious fundamentalists. Above all, Reamde is an enthralling human story and epic page-turner from the extraordinary Neal Stephenson.


Ragnarok - A.S. Byatt *From one of the leading lights in world literature (another whose oeuvre I've happily collected) comes this slim but I'm sure no doubt thought provoking novella. Blurb: Recently evacuated to the British countryside and with World War Two raging around her, one young girl is struggling to make sense of her life. Then she is given a book of ancient Norse legends and her inner and outer worlds are transformed. Intensely autobigraphical and linguistically stunning, this book is a landmark work of fiction from one of Britain's truly great writers. Intensely timely it is a book about how stories can give us the courage to face our own demise. The Ragnarok myth, otherwise known as the Twilight of the Gods, plays out the endgame of Norse mythology. It is the myth in which the gods Odin, Freya and Thor die, the sun and moon are swallowed by the wolf Fenrir, the serpent Midgard eats his own tale as he crushes the world and the seas boil with poison. It is only after such monstrous death and destruction that the world can begin anew. This epic struggle provided the fitting climax to Wagner's Ring Cycle and just as Wagner was inspired by Norse myth so Byatt has taken this remarkable finale and used it as the underpinning of this highly personal and politically charged retelling.
 
Yesterday no mail was delivered -- Columbus Day; but today brought:

Fantastic magazine -- two 1962 issues (Feb. and May)
The Long Ships by Bengtsson -- identified as probably the best Viking novel by Lars Walker
The Well of the Unicorn by Pratt -- Lancer paperback with a Tolkien-related blurb
Gone to New York by Ian Frazier, whose Great Plains and Travels in Siberia I've enjoyed a lot
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, author of a good huge biography of Dickens
 
Yesterday no mail was delivered -- Columbus Day; but today brought:
Fantastic magazine -- two 1962 issues (Feb. and May)
The Long Ships by Bengtsson -- identified as probably the best Viking novel by Lars Walker
The Well of the Unicorn by Pratt -- Lancer paperback with a Tolkien-related blurb
Gone to New York by Ian Frazier, whose Great Plains and Travels in Siberia I've enjoyed a lot
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, author of a good huge biography of Dickens
Good haul. I have the recent NYRB edn. of The Long Ships. What publication is yours? My Well of the Unicorn is a Fantasy Masterwork edn.

The Dickens biography looks interesting. Are you not a big reader of Dickens yourself? Unless i'I'm confusing you with someone else I recall we had a brief discussion about the novels of Dickens some little while back? I have a short bio on him but nothing very extensive.
 
Good haul. I have the recent NYRB edn. of The Long Ships. What publication is yours? My Well of the Unicorn is a Fantasy Masterwork edn.

The Dickens biography looks interesting. Are you not a big reader of Dickens yourself? Unless i'I'm confusing you with someone else I recall we had a brief discussion about the novels of Dickens some little while back? I have a short bio on him but nothing very extensive.

My Long Ships is a somewhat cheesy-looking Collins paperback that cost me about half what the NYRB edition would've cost. Mine is translated by Michael Meyer.

Oh yes, Dickens is a favorite of mine. I'm rereading Bleak House right now.

There is a new biography of Dickens out, but my sense from reviews is that the Ackroyd is more fun to read.
 
Oh yes, Dickens is a favorite of mine. I'm rereading Bleak House right now.

There is a new biography of Dickens out, but my sense from reviews is that the Ackroyd is more fun to read.
Damn...Bleak House is one of his best....:cool:

Have you got his travelogues from Europe including Italy and France as well as American Notes and his journal pieces?

I have never read Long Ships before and probably would not have known of its existence except for NYRB who are doing some marvelous work in bringing a lot of old classics and new translations of lesser known master works from around the world into print.
 
I have a collection of Dickens's journalism in a Penguin Classics paperback -- some excellent papers, such as one about walking at night, worth reading again and again. I also have Pictures from Italy and American Notes for General Circulation but haven't read them; I understand that many people think Fanny Trollope's* Domestic Manners of the Americans, which I have read (very good book!) is a better American travelogue than Dickens's.

But on America at about this time I don't know anything better (travelogue-type writing) than Hawthorne's wonderful private American Notebooks. I love his stories and mean no contrast to their disfavor, but the Notebooks show an "uninhibited" observer side of Hawthorne that one might not have expected. Really, Hawthorne's American Notebooks is one of the outstanding literary discoveries, for me, of the past 20 years. Priceless glimpses of the old weird America that we've talked about elsewhere here at Chrons...

*Mother of Anthony
 
I wish I was rereading Bleak House. I wonder if I can convince myself that it counts as horror.

Err, anyway, I did pick up some books yesterday.

Mistress of Mistresses - E.R. Eddison
The White Plague - Frank Herbert
The Court of the Air - Stephen Hunt
Newton's Wake - Ken Macleod
Prador Moon - Neal Asher
The Engineer Reconditioned - Neal Asher
 
It counts as horror. Start with Krook and radiate your way outward from him and see how everything fits with that. :)

Yes, that's an appropriate way of going about it....

Just received in the mail (courtesy of Wilum) a copy of the B&N H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction. Seeing photos of the book, it doesn't look that impressive, but the actual item is something else again. It is really rather attractive, and the cover art, with its shimmering effect, captures some of that eeriness of Lovecraft's cosmic vision -- and the endpaper illustrations are very good! It also is quite correct in being the complete original fiction -- even the fragments are included here, but only one collaboration ("Through the Gates of the Silver Key"), as well as the juvenilia and the essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. All in the corrected text, and with (thanks for Martin Andersson) very few typos! And, despite having so much material, it isn't an unwieldy book, either.

At last! A truly attractive single-volume source for all of HPL's original fiction, and at a very affordable price....
 
Just picked up:

Feersum Endjinn - Iain Banks
Blood and Iron - Tony Ballantyne
Cryoburn - Lois McMaster Bujold
Polity Agent - Neal Asher
Dead Six - Larry Correia & Mike Kupari

All will go in the TBR pile until I finish all the Honor Harrington books. Hopefully I'll finish those by Christmas.
 
Just received in the mail (courtesy of Wilum) a copy of the B&N H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction.....At last! A truly attractive single-volume source for all of HPL's original fiction, and at a very affordable price....
Actually reviews I've been reading all seem to suggest that the book is somewhat ruined by persistent typos. I know there was an earlier B&N edn. that had issues but even more recent comments point to issues of proofreading with what I tentatively assume is this edn...so, sorry if I'm the possible killjoy here BUT what would be helpful would be if you could provide a link or ISBN for us poor wondering souls and to confirm if it is a different or updated edn from the B&N orignal? This is certainly something I and I think a lot of other people here would purchase as certainly YES it is very comprehensive and therefore a very attractive prospect.

Thank you.
 
Mr. G: You might want to take a look at this thread:

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/530706-lovecraft-leatherbound-edition-3.html

(check out posts 38 onward)

Yes, this is the corrected printing, the one poor Martin nearly lost his eyesight over, thanks to hours and hours spent comparing print and screen, various textual notes, etc. and that thread gives some pointers in what to look out for. According to the people at B&N I spoke to, there isn't an alteration in ISBN, but this may not be correct....
 
Picked up about 20 issues of Analog dating from the early 1980s - dipped into a few so far, very much of their time. One issue features a splendid story by Frederik Pohl - Criticality. Another has an outstanding effort by Michael P Kube-McDowell - the Garden of the Cognoscenti. I'm really looking forward to going slowly through the remainder over the winter.

A lucky find was the 1937 Penguin 1st paperback edition of Ghost Stories from an Antiquary by MR James - complete with dust-jacket. It seem Penguin issued many paperbacks with jackets before wartime paper shortages put a stop to the practice. A very attractive book, with orange and white panels, yum. :)

Lastly, Emergence by David R Palmer - took a while to track this one down at a decent price. Emergence received rave reviews when it was first published but has since been largely forgotten.
 
Went a little wild this weekend while traveling:

Vince Bugliosi- Helter Skelter
Lewis Carroll- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Arthur Conan Doyle- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Alexandre Dumas- the Count of Monte Cristo
John le Carre- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Ross MacDonald- Black Money
Robin McKinley- Hero and the Crown, the Blue Sword
 
Mr. G: You might want to take a look at this thread:

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/530706-lovecraft-leatherbound-edition-3.html

(check out posts 38 onward)

Yes, this is the corrected printing, the one poor Martin nearly lost his eyesight over, thanks to hours and hours spent comparing print and screen, various textual notes, etc. and that thread gives some pointers in what to look out for. According to the people at B&N I spoke to, there isn't an alteration in ISBN, but this may not be correct....
Yes indeed.

Thanks for the further information but as has been already stated it could still be a bit dicey sourcing the correct edition. If any copies hit the actual shelves here then I'll know from the description provided whether or not I have the good edition.

Will probably just have to be patient on this one..sigh.
 

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