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From Summer 2020 What Are You Reading?
Listening: Just started John Crowley's AEgypt. I struggle with Crowley. I've started both Little, Big and Engine Summer. The first was impenetrable, the second maybe a little easier on the brain. He has a strange rhythm to his writing which I find exhausting; and listening to AEgypt on Audible is no less of a task to follow. His paragraphs are rooms with many doors and no matter how much I rewind, I still have trouble following the free associative subject matter - one minute he's describing angels in a scrying glass, the next a clergy-boy, then a bus journey through a mythical America, an internal monologue about wish-fulfilment, a meeting with a shepherd - and that's just the first hour of this massive great book. I admire Crowley's imagination, but he certainly isn't spoon-feeding me here.
― doorstep jetski (dog latin), Tuesday, September 1, 2020 10:33 AM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink
I've only read shorter things, in collections now out of print, but Novelties and Souvenirs is all the shorties (and some not so short), as of 2004, anyway. Amazon's Look Inside for print edition will even let you access some whole stories via titles in table of contents, and the Kindle version provides a bunch of previews. I don't remember ever having much problem with the ones I read, but could be we're in similar strata of spacey density.
I recently came across "The Reason For The Visit" for the first time, in Interfaces, a 1980 anthology edited by Virginia Kidd and Ursula K. Le Guin: somehow he indicates right off that his guest is Virginia Woolf, although he never drops the name (eventually says, "I can't remember if I ever got to the lighthouse," which isn't a euphemism: he's just strung out on her letters, diaries, essays, and I've been there). Her English manners just get more lovely, and he feels her disappointment in him. Oh, this has happened before, in attempted demonstrations of social changes to time travelers Dr. Johnson and "to Max Beerbohm I'd insisted that I would be considered well-dressed---even something of a dandy---wearing an old, yellowing tropical suit and a vulgarian's Hawaiian shirt. But those visitors were figments, really. This visit was hers, and she asked the questions, and I was shy."
― dow, Tuesday, September 1, 2020 1:39 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink
Oh yeah, there's also a 2019 round-up of stories, And Go Like This, and Reading Backwards: Essays and Reviews, 2008-2018, which might or might not provide illuminating gateways to his brain, hmmm.
― dow, Tuesday, September 1, 2020 5:46 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink
(Title might be a warning.)
― dow, Tuesday, September 1, 2020
― dow, Friday, 6 November 2020 17:53 (three years ago) link
four months pass...
one year passes...
I remember first encountering him in adolescence. I read Beasts, Engine Summer and The Deep, all of which made a huge impression on me. Little, Big came out when I was in high school and was, I thought, a major leap forward (although the older books still hold up on re-reading). I've kind of lost touch with him since Aegypt, although I did re-read Little, Big after reading Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane (which struck me as a pale shadow of Crowley's book). Sounds like I have a lot of catching up to do.
― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Wednesday, 20 April 2022 20:56 (two years ago) link
ten months pass...
Douglas A. Anderson, editor of the very fine Tales Before Tolkien, reporting:
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2023
Today the Book I Ordered Seventeen Years Ago Actually Arrived
I kid you not. The book was to be published in 2006, as the 25th Anniversary Edition of its original publication in 1981. Now it has appeared in 2023, the year of the book's 42nd Anniversary. I won't go into the long (looong...) history of the delays, but will merely thank those involved for their perseverance to finally see this book published. The book is Little, Big, by John Crowley. This version contains the author's preferred text, illustrations by Peter Milton, and an essay by the late Harold Bloom, one of a number of people who have died in the interim since the book was announced.
The book itself is oversized (about 8 inches by 10 1/4). It weighs over five pounds. It is not an easy book to handle, or to read from. But it is out. And I will not repeat the idiotic phrase (which I have always hated, and thought inaccurate) that it was worth the wait, because it isn't.
But maybe worth the weight, judging by cover art only---and hey
the author's preferred text
, so now that it's ff out, I'll wait for a nice-priced VG used copy.
from
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2023/02/today-book-i-ordered-seventeen-years.html― dow, Saturday, 25 February 2023 21:13 (one year ago) link