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 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Are the actual lovecraft stories any good?

Lets just say I keep all reading of Lovecraft to before lunch-time. Lol, I do like his stories and they are well written, but man do they play with your head.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Are the actual lovecraft stories any good?

Yes, depending on your tolerance of archaic prose. I’d recommend his more famous stories, such as Call of Cthulhu, Dunwich Horror, At the Mountains of Madness, Dreams of the Witch House, and Shadow Over Innsmouth. However, if you want to read something a bit crazier, Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath is pretty wild.


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On that note his contemporary, Clark Ashton Smith, wrote some pretty intense fantasy. I highly recommend the longer version of The City of the Singing Flame, as well as some of his Zothique stories, which were the most Metal! fantasy around before Moorcock and Warhammer.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Are the actual lovecraft stories any good?

I've read a few and found them entertaining. I think that some of them, like the Cuthulu, have elements which have become so commonplace in fantasy/geek media that some of the "surprise/shock/amazement" value that they might have once had has diminished. Also many are just short stories, not long sagas or epic tales so that has an influence on the structure and nature of many of the stories. That said the only real way to find out is to have at try and read them. Being slightly older books the language used can, for some, take a bit longer to get used to reading before you'll settle.

maybe I'll pick up a book of his stuff then, see whats happening. all I've read for the last year has been black library, mainly horus heresy, and while I enjoy it, its nice to step into something a little more classic and or acclaimed.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Are the actual lovecraft stories any good?

His writing has influenced almost all modern horror and a lot of sci-fi and fantasy (including 40k, like ancient mysterious races and unfathomable extra dimensional gods do you?). So yeah.

The stories suggested by others are great, but if you want really messed up horror (not in the over the top violent kind of way) I'd suggest The Rats in the Walls.

Also note if you've got a Kindle or other e-reader his work is all legally free now. Amazon has several super cheap collected editions (they can be worth getting simply because someone has gone through the effort of basic formatting - whilst many "free online libraries" just give you a text document).

Discworld, obviously.

More or less anything by Brandon Sanderson, though his new foray into sci-fi is a bit of a change. While enjoyable it's definitely rougher around a few edges, but that's to be expected when it's a new genre for the writer.

The Inheritance Cycle has a firmly rose-tinted place in my favourites list. The bridging compilation book, 'The Fork, the Witch, and the Wyrm' was rather a let down for me, personally, but still had that passive, morale-boosting effect of "I can write about this well" that the original books did.

Oh, I forgot about classics; Dracula, The War of the Worlds, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Lost World,
etc. All great.

I tried reading Frankenstein many years ago and whilst I appreciate it’s themes and importance, the language was just too archaic to make it an enjoyable read.

On the flip side I read the full, unabridged Robinson Crusoe when I was 10-years old. It took me forever because of the language, but I loved it. The imagery still lives with me today, but I’ve never dared reread it, in case it doesn’t live up to my memory. Sometimes you just can’t go home again.

Yeah I had that with David Copperfield. My nan got me it for Christmas when I was young, but I couldn't read it due to the language. I still feel bad about it now she's gone.

If we're covering non-fiction as well as fiction, I'll recommend The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris and Simons. It is (amongst other things) a real eye-opener as to the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.

Oh, I thought of some classic Sci-fi...

Anything by Frederick Pohl. I'd especially recommend his later stuff, and even more especially the wonderful novel Gateway. I also have a soft spot for The World at the end of Time, which probably is not as "good" in a literary sense, but has stuck with me since I read it as a young teenager twenty five+ years ago.

Enders Game by Orson Scott Card. Apparently the Empire trilogy (starting with Daughter of the Empire) by Janny Wurts and Raymond E. Feist left a mark, although I haven’t reread it in decades. Don’t seem to read as much as I used to anymore...

 Duskweaver wrote:
If we're covering non-fiction as well as fiction, . . .

While I haven't even finished it yet, The Italian Wars 1494-1559; War, State and Society in Early Modern Europe by Mallett and Shaw (the 2nd ed, which I'm tempted to buy as well has it Shaw and Mallett) has been immensely enjoyable, though perhaps because it IS a book that is a subject I have a degree in, and the time period fits the bulk of my university studies.

The opening chapter was a bit of a slog, attempting to keep track of who was allied to whom, and which country each person served/was allied to was, well, impossible. . . though getting past that, you sort of forget that spiderweb chart in your head, because the narrative of events and causality brings those things into decent clarity.

Guess if we’re adding non-fiction, The Lucifer Effect was kind of cool as well.

Not sure if the findings from the Stanford Prison Experiment hold up today as much as they did back then, but it’s interesting watching how an initially ethically grey study changed over time.