MINERVA - read-only archives

Read anything good lately anyone?
I had linked before in the blog to these short stories by Marc Laidlaw, and , which seemed to be received well. There's also available on scifi.com. Some are good, some not so good. I bookmarked the sight and have been reading stories from time to time. I think people here may like the stories by Gardner Dozois and Scott Westerfeld as well for example. (for some reason everything on that site loads slowly, so be patient.)
I also recently enjoyed reading a whole bunch of Sherlock Holmes short stories, which are also available for free online. By following links on his wikipedia page you can get most of them. A lot of his best are from "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", and you can find links to the stories .
Some people here had mentioned reading the books by Iain M. Banks, and I thought I might give his stuff a try at some point. Any recommendations for a starting point?

I'm really, really liking David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, Ghostwrittten) and his post-structural post-genre stylings. It's so different to nearly everything else around at the moment it makes traditional novels look, well, a bit lightweight.

As well, I really like Umberto Eco, particularly when he's in his postmodern deconstructionist mode - the way he tells a story and builds intruige and draws the reader in, only to pull it all apart again and remind us that the truth is generally far less complex than we might want to believe. Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose are really well worth reading; really hard going at times, but astonishingly well written and really, really rewarding.

And if you want your head really fucking with, get hold of The Invisibles graphic novels by Grant Morrison. They're an utterly insane mix of... well, everything. What if every conspiracy, religion, secret society, philosophy, weird science and bizarre belief you ever heard was true? That's the idea behind it. It's fucked up, but really good fun with it.

Personally, I don't much like Iain M. Banks. But I do very much like Iain Banks :) Dead Air was fun, and The Crow Road is a wonderful slice of journey-of-self-discovery storytelling. And Raw Spirit is pure dead brilliant for making you want to go out and spend far too much money on scotch. I recommend the Talisker 18yr, for what it's worth.

I've been rereading Borges' 'Ficciones' this week. Fans of Eco would like Borges very much, I imagine ('The Name of the Rose' incorporates several typically Borgesian tropes - labyrinths, libraries and mirrors - and having a blind character named Jorge of Burgos certainly indicates a direct homage).

Other literary obsessions include Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Ligotti, Mark Danielewski and Jeff Vandermeer (particularly 'City of Saints and Madmen', which is a beautiful little masterpiece. With squid.)

Well I seem to have been severely out-literaried here haven't I? My little alien short stories and mysteries seem rather prosaic now. :( Heh. I've got a copy of The Brothers Karamazov sitting on top of my pile of things to read when I feel like something a little more, eh, weighty. The sheer mass of the thing has kept me away for quite some time now though, so perhaps I should just move it aside. As I indicated above I've read mostly short stories lately, it is nice to have these bite-sized stories when you're not looking to start something serious.
Oh, and "postmodern deconstructionist mode", "post-structural post-genre stylings"?! My goodness parm, I don't know what these mean, but if I'm to assume they're not gibberish, your, erm, erudition (ha ha, check me out!) is indeed imposing.
Anyway, of what you guys mentioned David Mitchell seems the most interesting to me now. Maybe I should replace Dostoevsky with Ghostwritten on top of my dust-pile? Is that the best one to start with?

(And I've tried a number of times to make myself become a connoisseur of whiskey/scotch but despite my best efforts I've basically failed to get past the face-puckering stage.)

That method of drinking vodka reminds me of Xykon's philosophy on drinking coffee, which goes something like this:

When you drink a great cup of coffee you savour it as much as possible. You focus all your concentration on it. You try to immerse your mind in it's flavour, scent, warmth...

When you drink a really bad cup of coffee you compare it to ALL the great cups of coffee you've had. You try to smother it's horrid, thick, repulsive nature with the memory of every cup that was better than it. In this way, drinking a truly awful cup of coffee is a more enjoyable experience than any single cup of java could possibly be.

And yes I referenced in the 'pompous literary discussions' thread!

Anyone read "Altered Carbon"?