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October Reading 2016 - Something Spooky?


RedEyedGhost

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Here's my plan for the month:

  1. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay - 17% in and I'm really enjoying it
  2. Suicide Motor Club by Christopher Buehlman
  3. No One Gets Out Alive by Adam Nevill
  4. The Pilo Family Circus by Will Elliott
  5. The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp

The order might change, but all in all it should be a fun month.

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Even though I'm not really into the whole Lovecraft scene (only read about five of his stories) I'm reading the Autumn Cthulhu anthology.  Pretty good.  Standout story so far is "After the Fall" by Jeffrey Thomas, which mixes a world altering strange event with quietly effective family drama.     

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I was flipping through some old books on my Kindle and realized there was an incomplete trilogy I read a few years ago. I checked and sure enough the third book is out now, so I've decided to re-read it because I couldn't remember anything about it except that I had liked it. So I am reading The Heir of Night by Helen Lowe.

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Not a big fan of horror so despite it being the "season", I doubt I will read much if any at all.  I do find that scary works much better in late January or February when it is the coldest and darkest and you can feel a bit isolated even in a full house.

Struggling a bit with K. B. Wagers' Behind the Throne.  It reminds me a bit of Rachel Aaron's Paradox series.  It is filling but a bit on the empty calories side.  By this I mean that it moves along but if I stop and consider what I have read, not much really happens for the page length.  There is a lot talking to and at each other.  But there really isn't much depth or real complexity to it.  I think Aaron's work was a bit better since she did handle conspiracy a bit better.  Here the plot skims a bit too much and the main character and narrator is a little too contrived in carefully thinking of her own past and knowledge as the story calls for it instead of simply sitting down and figuring things out.  Which is why I'm a little stalled at the halfway point.  It's not horrible to set aside but at this point I should have more momentum and. well, I'm not.  Hopefully it will pick up a little more in a bit.

 

Up next is Ken Liu's The Wall of Storms.    And then I will probably jump into Keith Donohue's The Motion of Puppets which I actually see is categorized as both fantasy and supernatural so maybe that fits for a proper October read.

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Finished The Werewolf of Paris - very strange book, very risque for something written in the 1930s (everyone's animal desires are in full flow), and a book that might be just as much historical fiction as horror. The actual lycanthropy plot gets overwhelmed by the backdrop of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, which is actually conscious on the part of the author, who asks what is one little werewolf when all the world is drunk with blood? Mind you, it's hard to feel sympathetic for Bertrand:

He rapes his own mother.

 

Next up is The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James.

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Finished off The Judging Eye over the weekend and started up The White Luck Warrior.  Really enjoying the series, but I think I'm going to need to do a re-read after a Robin Hobb break to catch some of the undertones that I'm sure I missed on this first read through.

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Posted in the September thread by accident even though September is so last month:

Finished The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp

Pretty creepy read, very fitting for the month of October.  The Exorcist meets House of Leaves for the social media generation.  Not quite the scare factor that both of those had for me, but it has its moments.

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Finished The Turn of the Screw (it's short, yes, but Henry James' prose does not make for light reading). I definitely subscribe to the school of thought that the governess was mad, and that Mrs Grose was actually trying to make her worse - so much of the thing screams "this is an unreliable narrator!".

Next up is Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.

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Finished off Carmilla. Also short, but a good deal more reader-friendly. A modern reader can guess how things will go very quickly, but might well find it interesting how old some vampire tropes actually are - Carmilla predates Dracula by a quarter of a century, yet has things like "people often think vampires are X, but they're really Y." Oh, and the not-very-subtle lesbianism - Le Fanu's way of dancing his way around Victorian social taboos.

Fast forwarding a century... next up is The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty. 

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On 10/1/2016 at 6:40 PM, stonebender said:

Even though I'm not really into the whole Lovecraft scene (only read about five of his stories) I'm reading the Autumn Cthulhu anthology.  Pretty good.  Standout story so far is "After the Fall" by Jeffrey Thomas, which mixes a world altering strange event with quietly effective family drama.     

I just picked that up myself.

Anna Pillsworth (of the Lovecraft Re-read) and I are exchanging books. I'm reading her YA Cthulhu books (Summoned, Fathomless) and she's reading Cthulhu Armageddon.

:)

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I read Nnedi Okorafor's Binti, which I liked even though I'm not sure I'd necessarily have picked it as an award-winner. I thought it had an engaging protagonist and although the human supporting cast wasn't that memorable (I think it could have better to have some scenes with Binti's family rather than just hearing about them) it did have some interesting aliens in it. It does a good job of slowly revealing the details of Binti's culture, although in some other areas it felt as if detail was a bit lacking (I'm still a bit vague on what exactly the astrolabes were, other than some form of computer). It's definitely a story of two halves with an abrupt change of pace halfway through, but I thought both of those portions of the story were interesting.

I've also started Adrian Tchaikovsky's Spoils of War, a short story collection set in his Shadows of the Apt world. I liked the main series a lot, and I find these stories to be a good addition even if it's been long enough since I've read some of the novels that I remember some of the characters in the shorts re-appearing in the main series, but can't really remember that much about them.

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30 minutes ago, The Wolves said:

Reading Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier a gothic suspense classic. It's slow so far and the reviews says it will pick up in the middle of the book so I'm trying to stick with it. 

As I recall it this is one of the case where the movie is considerably better than the book although the book is o.k. (but it must be more than 20 years I read it).

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Finished the second Bujold novella Penric and the Shaman.  I loved Penric's Demon and I was delighted to see that there was a follow up.  Trying to get my hands on the second novel of Jemisin's Broken Earth series. Should be here any day.  :stamps foot:

I left JR Johansson's second YA novel in the Insomnia trilogy at my best friend's house.  If she's home, I might stop by after work to pick it up.  I hate it when that happens.  I need a bigger purse.

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I finished Death's End by Cixin Liu.  Great book.  Liu really puts mankind through the wringer in this one, almost too much so.  It's a great capstone to the trilogy, though I think I liked the previous books a little more. 

A another great book was Bardugo's Crooked Kingdom.  Man, that was a fun and entertaining read.  I can't wait to read whatever Bardugo writes next. 

Next up will be The Gradual by Christopher Priest. 

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