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CallmeYahweh · **08-20-2013, 08:57 PM**

(08-20-2013, 05:43 AM)Jove Wrote:
(08-19-2013, 09:12 PM)CallmeYahweh Wrote: Oh man! He was in SanFran just a few weeks ago and I totally missed the visit. I almost got into a six week writing workshop with him a handful of summers back but had to back out due to some problems with funding on my end. Biggest disappointment of my life thus far.

I like Pratchett on occasion. I'm not sure I could read him all the time but he's definitely got a lot of really good stuff. (I'm a bit biased towards Douglas Adams though!)

Also love ACD and Lovecraft's work. I'm about to break into a few books by GK Chesterton I got a while back, but never got around to reading. Neuromancer though, I'm not sure I want to go near. William Gibson's stuff is so dense it takes me months to get through it all.

I had no idea he was here until Thursday last week but fortunately the tickets hadn't sold out, which was surprising considering the place was packed. His talk ended at half eight in the evening but the book signing queue was so long I didn't reach him until about 11:30pm. I'm pretty sure he didn't go home until the early hours of the morning, but he signed all of our books with little drawings and quotes.
Such a wonderful guy.

Oh man, disappointment is certainly an understatement, a six week workshop with Gaiman would be... wow, basically.

I kind of grew up on Pratchett, well, Discworld, weirdly enough I just couldn't get into his kids books as a kid, but Rincewind? Yeah I totally got into that. Good Omens was the first thing I read that had a bit of Neil in it and it's what got me to read Neverwhere, American Gods and Stardust. I love those three books but I'd have to say American Gods is my favourite (despite not being American) followed closely by Neverwhere and Stardust.

I'm a pretty big Sherlock Holmes fan (and by extension, a Jeremy Brett fan), although Lovecraft is actually a bit more of a recent read for me. I mean I had always known about Cthulhu and such, because internet, but I'm really impressed by a lot of his other short stories, well the ones that go a bit more in depth than "it was too indescribable to write about".
As for Douglas Adams, again I'm also a huge fan, although it was kind of painful to read Mostly Harmless.

As for Neuromancer, that's okay, I'm pretty dense too

Oh, awesome! Yeah, I've heard that he's a pretty decent human being. Very nice to his fans and whatnot. I admire his style of writing greatly; spent a few years emulating it, as a matter of fact. He's what got me reading fiction again. That's pretty damn sweet that you got something signed by him!

I had a lot of pressure from friends/family to read and get into Discworld. Good Omens is probably my favorite of his stuff. It's the right mix of that dry humor, and whimsical narrative with Gaiman's flair for prose.

I owe a lot of my love for the noir and detective genre to Sherlock Holmes. He's where that all started for me. I especially love how his legacy has carried on. Lovecraft is a lot like that as well -- though I'd argue that Lovecraft's worlds have only gotten better after his death. Lovecraft was strange guy, and while his writing was pretty boring, the worlds and ideas he left behind were fantastic.

I like a lot of his stuff that isn't Cthluhu based. Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath is easily my favorite of his work. Herbert West is also really good. And I'm really sad that we will apparently never get to see Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of At The Mountains of Madness.

Gibson's stuff takes a herculean effort on my part to get through. I like his writing well enough, and the stories are killer, but what hangs me up is the amount of work you put into reading to make sure you catch everything. His books are huge, and generally take me a readthrough or two to make sure I'm on the page with them. A buddy of mine swears by Cryptonomicon though so I suppose I'll have to settle in for a few months and bite the bullet. It is definitely worth what you put into it.

Stop playing with our hearts square

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes