Reading

[cimorene]

I have not exactly run out of things to read -

➡️ Wax and I were reading Martha Wells's Fall of Ile-Rien. I have to get the last two from her and run them through Calibre to fix the format and the sorting for my ereader app, then put them on my phone.

➡️ After I finished the Iliad and Odyssey, I was thinking perhaps some more ancient Greek plays. Anybody have any suggestions? I don't really want to start with Antigone, which I've read before, or anything else about Odysseus.

➡️ Took a little break from Arthurian romances because a lot of people seem to be recommending that you skip the Vulgate and just read Malory, but I was so bored by him that I contracted an intense, teeth-grinding grudge about it as a teenager, and I'm not sure if I want to try again. I was having trouble turning up good resource lists of individual Arthurian romances to read, and the scattered nature of the information just couldn't stand up to my ADHD. Or vice versa.

➡️ I read the first book of Stephen King's Dark Tower series a couple months ago. I might read the second one soon.

➡️ I actually bought another novel recently to read but I forgot to transfer it to my phone. The Goblin Emperor, I think?

➡️ I am thinking I might try one of the Anne Rice books soon, now that we finished s2 of IWTV. Wax reread them all last year but I've never read them because as a voracious young genre reader I avoided all horror. I don't like horror! I'm not gonna read any of King's horror titles. But I have a good idea of what the horror levels are here and I think it'd be fine. And I mean, I do like vampires. Saberhagen's sort of humorish? Dracula series (which starts with a retelling of Dracula from the count's perspective) was my favorite as a teen.

-but I am having trouble with what to read next and have been dithering and unsuccessfully looking for a piece of fanfiction to satisfy some nebulous craving. You know when you find a really long AU novel in some unknown fandom, or one you haven't thought about forever, or have never read before, and it's unusual and arresting and absorbing? Like that one where Xena and Gabrielle are professional chefs, or that one that's just like 500k of Landeskog marrying Danny Briere, of all people? There's no good way to look for those.

Comments

[shaggy]

As someone who generally avoids horror/thrillers, if you can handle Stephen King, you can handle Anne Rice!

[cimorene]

I think my wife said something similar, as these are favorite writers from her teenaged years. But OTOH The Dark Tower is very much not part of King's horror oeuvre, and I understand these particular books are a lot less horrible than his horror books usually are. Dark fantasy is probably the publishing umbrella for them, and the one which would cover Rice as well if she weren't prone to getting shoved into the gay and/or romance ghettos. As it's been a month, the most horrible thing I remembered about The Gunslinger was that a donkey died, but Wax reminded me that there's also a thing where he kills a whole town of people, but that wasn't very graphic.

[shaggy]

If you like Dark Tower you'd probably like The Stand, at the very least.

I read a ton of Stephen King as a kid and the dude has a fucked up imagination, but most of his classics are really more psychological suspense vs. explicit gore. Tommyknockers is one that really sticks out to me as one to avoid if that kind of thing makes you queasy.

I need to revisit the Dark Tower series since he's written more in the series since I last picked up a King book. Looks like a lot of fanboys consider the 4th in the series to be one of his best works.

[cimorene]

Well, I kind of liked The Gunslinger, but I don't think his style is really for me. There's slightly too much viscerally disgusting stuff for my taste.

[torachan]

I would say Vampire Chronicles contains zero horror unless the very existence of vampires counts as horror. But like, it's mainly interpersonal drama with vampires. Nothing scary except Lestat's ego.

[cimorene]

You make a good point, at least going by two seasons of TV show and what she shared on her reread. I think the very existence of vampires must be what got them categorized as such. I mean... they do kill people, but probably not as many of them as a lot of mainstream (not to mention military) sf or fantasy.

[isilya]

It’s so funny you say this because there’s an AO3 writer who gets really into hyper specific niches in niche fandoms that I really enjoy, just finished a reread of her WWI Downton Abbey opus. She’s also two long fics which have a lot of camping/subsistence living and I am all for every tiny detail of Geralt scooping clay out of the river and learning how to smoke meat lol.

https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alex51324/pseuds/Alex51324

Also, as far as Greek plays go, I’m a fan of Euripides.

[cimorene]

Oh, yay!

[vass]

Have you read any of Plato's dialogues? He is absolutely insufferable, but I still recommend the Symposium for the relationship drama.

[cimorene]

Ha, I have not, I have just read and watched a lot of hilarious material about other philosophers complaining about him, pretty much! Maybe I should.

[anatsuno]

ooh where is that "500k of Landeskog marrying Danny Briere, of all people" ? I am curious.

When asked about Greek plays, Mom recommended, trying to recall from long ago,
Prometheus Bound from Aeschylus, all the Oedipus stuff by Sophocles, and probably the Trojan Women and Iphigenia in/at Aulis from Euripides :))

[cimorene]

Apparently it just felt that long. She has a few other stories in the pairing in different universes though. https://archiveofourown.org/works/3614310