Reviews and Comments

The first three novels are very good as straight up literary fantasy and read well without trying to mine them for deeper meaning. The fourth one reveals a lot of things but I lost a lot of steam reading it and didn't feel the desire to try to piece it all together.

There's a lot of people who apparently just keep reading these books over and over again and try cross-referencing them against other works and looking up the etymology of the obscure words to try to solve the mystery. But honestly, that feels like a project of diminishing returns. I have one or two short things written by Gene Wolfe scholars that I might read if I really feel like it later but I am done with him for now.

This book has been really good for me. Picking up a random poem and reading it aloud with your voice is a good thing to do and I will continue this practice after I finish the book.

Right now it is a little slow going because I have reached the elegies and they both bum me out and also make me feel like a voyeur. There are a few good ones though, particularly "R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida" by Emily Bronte.

This is a biography by someone who is actually a historian but is enamored with the subject and writes very well to the level of the popular audience it was intended for. It is surprisingly good.

And a bigger surprise for someone who isn't familiar at all with this history -- there's black magic!

This book didn't start well for me. The introduction by Douglas E. Winter is the worst intro to a book I have ever encountered. Then the author herself admits it is cringey in the preface. So it took me awhile to warm up to the stories in the collection.

Yup, parts of it are cringey self-conscious 90s subculture stuff. I wouldn't have liked it at all back then but there's good stuff shining through that I recognize reading it here and now.

Peter Straub's afterword is excellent -- it pinpoints what is good about this collection and gives me hope that Kiernan's later writings will align much more with the vision she is trying and nearly failing to get across here.

Content from The Great Courses/The Teaching Company is all over the place. The Rick Roderick lectures from the nineties are some of the best shit ever. Some of it is really bad in terms of dumbing down or trying to produce pop academia. Or weird agendas I am too embarrassed to admit that I slogged through.

Elizabeth Vandiver is one of the better presenters in terms of saying which ideas came from where, which ideas are her own, while leaving room for people to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions.

I just came off of a super opinionated book, that I loved, about Greek tragedy by someone who is selling it hard but didn’t provide a lot of the detailed background that these lectures provide. So this is good to fill in the missing bits.