I actually looked that up when it was first mentioned, does look interesting. Doesn't have so many ratings yet, that's usually why I pass on some books, given the cost of a single book I want to be sure.
So I finished Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and I didn't think it that terrible, especially coming after a month of nature droning from Radcliffe and the awful Charles Brocken Brown story. Maybe I've just read a bunch of stuff I don't like for an extended period so it was a relief, who knows, but there was some stuff to like. I will first, however, note that it is EXTREMELY campy and almost silly. Also, I hope you like RANDOM capitalization for EMPHASIS because it doesn't stop. SERIOUSLY annoying. Okay, I'll stop. And yet, the overall story left a nicely ambiguous ending and questioned the psychological state of the narrator, giving the reader a sense of being duped by an unreliable narrator when they thought they were just reading something being outright ridiculous. I want to say it moves quickly as well, but I just can't due to James' very long paragraphs that get hard to read as they can be more than a page long. There's also a serious pacing problem where every time something semi-interesting happens, the character needs to think about it and elaborate their fears to the reader. Every time. It gets old. But it packages itself rather nicely, and it's good to see an old time American ghost story. Though I'm rather certain that there never were any ghosts present. That's some of the fun of it. And Mrs. Grose. Other than having a fun name, she's a pretty cool character that your left contemplating her true knowledge and intentions throughout the whole short novel. At the very least, that keeps the reader going. James' depiction of the children is the largest fault of the story. He was trying for some perfect image of children thing to provide contrast for later in the story and build mystery, but it just came off as the flattest, most boring children ever, which hardly acted like any sort of children. Yes, this may have been on purpose depending on how you take the ending, but in reality it makes them hard to read. Overall, not as bad as some other stuff I've read. I'll give it a bump for historical value, but it isn't hitting any of my read again wickits. On the side, I read a couple of short stories as well. Mark Twain's "A Ghost Story" was a delightful little story that captures a lot of Twain's skills. The imagery is gorgeous, even bordering on actually being frightening, or at least awe-inspiring, despite the story being semi-obvious. But it has that sort of strange otherworldly tone to it, with a backing of humor near the end; something only Twain really seemed to perfect. I love his short stories, far more than his novels. My favorite would be "The War Prayer," but this one is pretty decent. It's also very small, which makes it comfortable few minute read. Worth the time. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's "The Shadows on the Wall" was interesting in its stylistic change from what I had been reading previously. The story is mostly dialogue, which leaves the reader to a lot of inferring the story through their conversations. But what made it special, as the story was rather bland, was how natural the uncomfortable conversation was portrayed. Instead of the high language that some of these older stories take, the dialogue was very real feeling. Being from the early twentieth century, that would make it fall into the Moderism and Realism realms, so this makes sense, but it was still fun to read. Not the best, but each character was unique and the ominous nature of the underlying story made it interesting for a ten minute read. Thanks for sitting in on my long-winded reading of the week. Next up is one I've been waiting for for years: Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.
Dipping out of Brian Evenson's dark short story collection Song for the Unravelling of the World after the disappointment that was Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes. Seems I'm going for darker, more surreal stories recently. I also read Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti.
This, not out of choice (although I have always wanted to know my trees) - it’s for the horticultural apprenticeship I’m doing.
As an ecologist--though currently unemployed--I think you've made a good choice. Not sure if you'll need any of the more diagnostic-oriented guides, but The Wildflower Key by Francis Rose is the standard. Bit more technical. Hm.
I already had this book but during my recent move I was a little more ruthless with my book dumping than I should have been and it went the way of the local tip. It might sound stupid but what I like about this particular guide is that the book itself is of normal height to width ratios. So often with these things they’re either long and thin or almost square. It bugs me.
I hate you all!!!! My books-to-read list is getting longer and longer because of the reviews in this thread
Yeah, definitely a double edged sword thing going on here. Finished a run-of-the-mill thriller called Black 13. Ended up skimming over the last few chapters, which is something I never like to do but the book got frustrating. This was one of those £1 deals from Amazon, this one didn't work out that well. Started a kind of techno-thriller called Burn-In, sort of Sci-Fi, and so far not bad.
I've been consuming audiobooks while doing handsewing. Just finished The Summer House by James Patterson and Brendan DuBois. Damn, do I feel inadequate. I'm never going to be able to come up with that kind of convincing insider dialogue for the strike force in my W.I.P. Especially not the in-jokes.
So, I finished Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House a little bit ago, and I'm a bit disappointed in myself. I think I had been talked into how great the novel is for the better part of a year by other readers, and by the time I finally read it, I wasn't completely sold on it. I don't want to start on two much of a down note though, so let's pop in a bit of good that I felt appeared quite often. The characters were very much each their own individuals, none of them blending or falling flat unless intended by Jackson. I believed all of them and their little nuances that carried. The semi-narration of the main character Eleanor was also quite interesting. She lies to herself often and is confused on who or sometimes what she really is. She lies to other characters often as well, telling the truth through her thoughts and the attitude carries the juxtapostion of many aspects of the novel along with it. Also, the house is brilliantly designed; labyrinthian in nature and subject to many contortions and irregularities which are the hallmarks of the novel. It's a mix of the Gothic castle against the structure of a unscrupulous architect's design. That's kind of the point she puts forward in designing it. It's unwelcoming in the extreme, and yet, no one is willing to leave it when it really has them enraptured in its mannerisms. But the novel sure has its faults. Same as with Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts, the novel teeters off into a new direction and loses a lot of its narrative terror and bite midway through. Jackson's overuse of foreshadowing made it so you didn't exactly know the end, but did know that it really wasn't going to be any sort of satisfying. A lot of characters and history was just sort of left hanging and it made the whole novel just kind of move from scene to scene without much other than a flatlined narrative tension through the last third. The character dynamics sort of changed in that period too and it wasn't as engaging. I think she was trying for the isolating feelings, but it just came off as rather unlikeable for me. Overall, it's worth a read because of how short it is and how well Jackson collects her characters in a sort of talkative narrative style. The style really is a sort on its own, almost like a very toned down Palahnuik without all the swearing. It takes risks and I like that about it. But as a whole novel, I'm not that big of a fan. A shame really, because of how much I love "The Lottery" and other shorts from her. Oh well. Anyways, I'm off to a bunch of horror shorts next week. Hoping to find a few gems in there. I'm sure there will be, considering Poe and Lovecraft are in the mix.
... And I'm wondering now if Kubrick based the Overlook hotel on this to some extent. He generally did massive amounts of research and was aware of anything in his current genre that was worthy of note. Each film he made was considered the best in its genre at the time it came out (and for some time afterwards, in some cases still). Possibly King modeled his Overlook on it now that I think about it.
I start reading Ulysses by Irish writer James Joyce. I tried to read this modernist novel several times already, but the maximum reached the third chapter. This time I want to read to the end, no matter how long it takes me.
I didn't enjoy House either. I would suggest We Have Always Lived in the Castle instead. Mary Katherine Blackwood is one of my favourite characters in all of fiction. If you don't want another sustained Jackson narrative, I suggest The Lottery and Other Stories. As for me, I just purchased The British Library of the Weird's Dark Fantasy collection entitled Doorways to Dilemma.
The White People was included in my short story collection I described above. Here's what I have to say about The White People. God, I need to breath. I feel like I need to preface this by saying I like Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, Blackwood, Eddison, Tolkien--pretty much all the main fantasy or weird or horror authors. I've read quite a few of the traditionally "difficult" classics like The Iliad and Crime and Punishment. I've read The Mabinogion and other obscure medieval and Classical works. I did not understand this story in any respect and it made me genuinely angry. I have no idea at all how this is such a well-known and influential work of fiction. I've seriously no idea what I just read. The writing is abysmal. This is a first for me, honestly. I've never in my life read something that made me angry. This was a non-story. There is no character. There is no plot. The writing is atrociously repetitive and clunky. This is how it goes for anyone who hasn't read it: Two faceless characters discuss concepts of evil in that overly technical Victorian style I've become incredibly bored of by now. This frame story leads to a young woman's green book in which she tells a story--or what I thought would be a story--that illustrates their conversation. The rest of the 40-50 pages is in this overly long travesty of a work of fiction is as follows: young girl tells us about some white people she's seen once in what I could only assume is Machen's failure to emulate a younger person's writing style. Imagine a kid's voice as he or she says: "And it was a big tree and I saw behind that tree a funny black person and there was a loud noise and it scared me!" It's essentially that style all the way through, and without any paragraphs at all. Nauseating. Excepts she'll inexplicably say words like "stratagems". Christ. She wanders into some strange wild landscapes with weird spinning rocks that somehow emit blue light, sees something strange which isn't described, comes back and thinks about it. Then she proceeds to think about and laboriously repeat fantastical stories in full that were told to her by some nurse of hers who may or may not be connected with the white people--whoever they are. Basically random symbolism and nonsense that's impossible to care about because this is now a story within a story within a story. Eventually she goes back to this place--and this is where it got genuinely infuriating--she somehow blindfolds herself, and know everything is true after apparently walking in a circle three times, then she goes to some other place and contacts a 'dark nymph' whose name she knows for some reason and which has never been mentioned in the story once. At this point I put the book down and genuinely wondered if this was an erroneous version. The epilogue is the two people from the start talking vaguely about the story. Somehow I'm supposed to know that the thing she saw was a statue. Then there's some talk about alchemy and how if you know alchemy you'll understand the symbolism and the weird actions in the stories-within-stories. Congratulations, Machen. You've made me hate a work of fiction and myself for forcing myself to complete it. If you're about to say I'm just an idiot, don't bother. Tell me why I've got it all wrong and why I should attempt to understand this thing. Usually I analyse and care a great deal about stories, but I sincerely hate The White People.
Hilarious. Honestly, this is some good advertising. I'm moderately interested now in seeing what's so terrible about this story. If I have some free time, I may try to contend with your interpretations. You try and look up any articles on the story? Sometimes I read a few articles on something I didn't understand and it really helps. Have to read at least a few though otherwise you get very much biased.
I remember being a bit agitated a few times reading The White People as well, for the same reasons. You'd understand what's going on a lot better if you read his novella The Great God Pan. they deal with a lot of the same themes, and if I remember right, Pan is a lot more readable, and explains things much better. I think I downloaded a book with both stories in it from Gutenberg or Archive.org. In Victorian times children did have quite a vocabulary. They would have heard their parents talk like that all the time, assuming they're educated, and education was far superior then to what it is now. By 5th grade they probably knew more words and could spin far more complex sentences than most adults today.
This is true enough, especially as seen by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein as she writes the word "countenance" at least twice on every page. Sometimes five or six times. Mind you, she was quite young when she wrote that. The word selection was very different during different time periods.
Here: The Great God Pan @ Archive.Org This one was like the key that helped me understand The White People.
I wrote something up a while back that should also help: Post on Lovecraft and Machen. The first part is about Lovecraft, but largely fits Machen as well. Keep in mind that the girl in The White People is a younger version of the woman in The Great God Pan and it should start to fit together. I see the scientist doing the operation at the beginning of Pan as a representation of cruel heartless Science itself, but at the same time he's a man, committing terrible deeds on the poor girl he operated on. So the eruption of pagan horror is a sort of curse visited on him, and perhaps on unethical Science/scientists, or just on humanity itself for meddling in these secret things. And it's also everything Christianity tried so hard to repress.
I'll look up some analyses of this story later on, but I really think it shouldn't need another short story for it to make sense. The White People was included as an apparently exemplary part of Machen's oeuvre. Well, I'm not convinced. And don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the Victorian style--I've read more books from the 19th century than I have books from this century--but I just felt that Machen's style in this was so poorly executed that words like stratagems seemed very out of place. I don't know if it was to emulate a young person's speech, but I couldn't help read it in this way. In one sentence, I kid you not, 'and' was said nine times. It read like a kid being out of breath and trying to tell a curious incident to an adult. Just a babble of words. As for the story itself, it honestly felt like a sequel to something else or that I had pages torn out of my book. The end is where it really starts to confuse me. This girl blindfolds herself then walks around a bit, says "The story is all true," and that's it. She then proceeds to go to this weird well where she somehow knows who some white lady is and then also figures out the identification of a dark nymph called Alanna, who hasn't even been in the story until that sentence. Then it just ends. The epilogue discusses processes of alchemy... I genuinely don't understand how anyone could understand this work as a standalone.
Just picked up Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Candidate for the most convoluted opening sentence; still not sure what it was trying to say.
