I’m now reading several books, most notably Bulfinch’s Mythology, which I’ve been reading for months now. Also Shackleton’s The Heart of the Antarctic in addition to Treasure Island, the latter of which I find, for whatever reason, unavoidably dull. =P
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Animal farm is a book that I am reading.
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spoiler
glue
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I am reading The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagle, as well as Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers and The Philosophy of Tolkien by Paul Kreeft.
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Started on the Call Of Cthulhu.
It spook
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Heard it as audio book yesterday, right after Color out of Space. I found the other one way more unsettling in direct comparison.
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ah yes I sure do love casual racism and not understanding Euclidean geometry
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Huh? What does that have to do with a horror story?
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I mean… most of the time the things we fear are the things we don’t understand. Lovecraft apparently never understood anything in life and had an existential crisis on paper. In Lovecraft’s case you just have to wonder if he really didn’t understand anything because he was unable to or if he was just not willing to put more thought than essentially required into it and preferred a world where everything that was not like the things he saw at home was just there to potentially kill him.
Lovecraft. Being so racist in his writing that publishers add notes that they do not support his views and describing real existing simple things as if they were so mind crippling incomprehensible to the human mind that they must be from another world. Like mathematics and geometry behind temple structures and colors outside the perceivable spectrum.
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Ok, so in other words he was crazy? Makes sense… he sounds like he’s a high anxiety, depression-prone person at the least.
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After reading his wiki this seems more correct than I thought. He was mentally abnormal and struggled with suicidal tendencies for a while when he was younger. Though not for the reasons I have provided so far. It also says he had genuine interest in English history astronomy, chemistry and science overall, strange that he messed up so bad despite that.
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I don’t think that’s just you, read it and felt it is rather overrated, the actual act with the island kinda just fizzles out. I would say that writing standards were different back then…but other contemporary books like Robinson Crusoe, 20,000 Leagues etc. have much tighter narratives and pacing.
I took a quiz, “Guess the quote, H****r (dictator man) or Lovecraft” and yup he certainly had some messed up views. Seems like the worst stuff was expressed in personal letters, although once you see it, it’s clear many of his stories are allegory about the so called “dangers of mixing of the kinds” and prejudice towards others, founded in insecurities about himself. Many have stated his work is certainly a case of separating art from artist. However, it is good to keep the background of a work in mind when reading it.
As for me, I’m currently pottering away at reading the last Redwall book still, been so busy with school 'n stuff.
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I’m currently reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for school.
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I think it’s worth mentioning that his mental illness was not the source of his bad character. End of the day, Howard Phillip Lovecraft was elitist scum who was so unwilling to address his own crippling insecurities that he rolled them outward onto innocent people. This was not an unfortunate mental circumstance, it was an unconscious permission he gave himself to not think any further than the baselessly arrogant whimsies of his social surrounding.
That being said, I really did enjoy his take on cosmic horror and alien life; semi-corporeal entities and overlaid realities may be readily navigable subjects now, but a hundred years ago very few authors were tackling those concepts. There’s a reason he didn’t get famous until after he died.
Lovecraftian=cool, Lovecraft=TRASH. That guy sucked, let’s take his stuff and forget about him
I’m not an expert on the subject but the older fiction I’ve read tends to be aimed without a destination. Gulliver’s Travels is a great example. Just “hey, what if this next thing happened?” And then it does, but, “what if the next thing happened?” And so forth. Treasure Island, The Time Machine, 20k Leagues etc generally have more solid structure as you said but even those just seem to be going on a stroll through their world. That’s actually the part I personally like the most; it’s somewhat freeing to enjoy a story universe without being prodded along to a finish line
I’m reading The Hero with 1000 Faces and will be starting on a little book called The Book of Dreams soon
@Rukah let me know how it is I got so bored with the lead-up I bailed
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It’s pretty good so far, the older English gets easier to deal with as you go along
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I’m normally not too emotional of a person when it comes to reacting to stuff like that, but I legit teared up that part. It wasn’t even the fact it was happening that got me, it was the fact that they didn’t understand it. Still one of my favorite books I’ve ever had to read for school.
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Finishing the Mistborn Trilogy and then going to read Children of Hurin.
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That was political satire on the part of the author, though the ending is nothing if not depressing.
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Oh, that’s interesting. And I’m sure it went over my head because the politics were a couple hundred years old. I’ll have to double back around and dig into that
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