I know I've mentioned my love for The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers several times, most recently in my review of Alternate Routes [https://thelastredoubt.com/on-higher-powers-pt-2/]. The book made a profound impact on me decades ago in middle school, and held up well as more than childhood nostalgia disorder when I read it again recently. Nevertheless, I missed a lot of the symbolism in it. For example, the connections between the events in the book and the liturgical year. Then I came acr…
All posts in books
It's been a while, and I've accumilated a few odds and ends that don't call for a full post. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hate is bad. So we are told. Of course, the same people will gladly tell us that "White Lives Don't Matter [http://archive.is/ME10Q]". I know, I know, they'll tell you that it's not "white lives" as in "the lives of white people," but instead "white lives" as in "lives lived as if you were white" -…
I know I have once mentioned Tim Powers [https://thelastredoubt.com/on-higher-powers/], and specifically the book of his that left an impression on me for nearly 40 years to the point of tracking it down and buying it. Drawing of the Dark was as good as remembered, possibly better and weirder - and so I bought a couple more of his books. While one of his better known works, Anubis Gates, is in my reading pile, I ended up reading a much more recent work first, the hidden-world modern fantasy Alte…
Alexandru Constantin recently put up two posts I'd like to tie together. The first was a review of "Neon Harvest" by Jon Mollison [https://barbarianbookclub.com/2020/03/23/book-review-neon-harvest-by-jon-mollison/] . > Neon Harvest does something different, something cool. It’s not a true sci-fi nor a true cyberpunk. Jon takes the technological baseline of the early 80’s and stagnates it. It’s a pre-digital cyber-thriller. The heroes still use pay-phones, newspapers are still on paper, and cas…
Alexandru Constantin notes that not only is much of modern fantasy shallow in substance, but it also posesses no depth of style [https://barbarianbookclub.com/2020/03/26/its-all-about-style/comment-page-1/], rendering it almost unreadable. > Most of all, all three of the books had pedestrian writing that lacked any hint of style. The prose felt like early young adult, middle school grade, nothing fancier than early Animorphs, and the plot and characters felt stolen from a overwritten D&D modul…