I don't want to write anything more than a paragraph on that mindbogglingly silly play. It was a riot, but the damn thing was an insult to my intellect. Honestly, I only named this post after it for the earnest puns.
*high hat*
Okay lets move onto something a little more interesting! The Importance of Being Earnest was not the only thing I had finished reading today. I recently finished a novel which was a collection of various short stories by H.P. Lovecraft, who, if you are not familiar with the name, is one of the forerunners of the American horror genre and the mind behind the inception of the Cthulhu mythos. You can look him up on Wikipedia if you'd like to know more (and to be honest he looks like he could be out of a horror story himself, if you know what I mean).
The book I picked up is called The Call of Cthulhu and Other Dark Tales and includes Lovecraft's stories such as The Colour Out of Space, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Whisperer in Darkness, and of course, The Call of Cthulhu.
The writing was fantastic to say the least. The way in which Lovecraft inspired an entire culture posthumous to his original publications is unseen in many other genres. His writing pushed the horror genre into new frontiers and practically created table-top gaming. Not only this, but the methods in which he described information to the audience is phenomenal as well. The descriptions of New England are elegant, but the vaguely descriptions of the eldritch horrors leaves much to imagination. Of course, this does not justify the blatant racism in his writing; but that's not really what I want to focus on. You can read more about this here.
For many of you, the name Cthulhu rings a bell. The elder god's influence on popular culture is somewhat overemphasized and even a little ironic. Cthulhu first appears in the story The Call of Cthulhu and is later referenced in many other Lovecraft stories. This happened to be my least favorite story though. Much of it was an impersonal retelling of several events that took place, which the speaker later connected to the raising of Cthulhu from the city of R'lyeh. Unlike his other stories, I felt this one had no real horror factor, but instead served as an introduction to a character who played a somewhat significant role in the cosmic picture of Lovecraft's writing.
My favorite story on the other hand would have to of been The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Despite Lovecraft's tendency to write in the form of a memoir--revealing the end of a string of events at the introduction to a story--I was kept on my toes for most of Charles Dexter Ward. The author drops hints at what will happen many times throughout this novel, rewarding clever readers who analyze fiction and can predict endings while giving more casual readers a pleasant twist. I was in between these two, following the trail of hints enough to have an idea of what was going to happen, while still being surprised at the end of the book. This is one of the longest stories in the collection, and one of the longest stories which Lovecraft wrote, so a lot of time was dedicated to fleshing out past events as well as what was going on in the current moment.
Time to move past this sort of appreciative ramble. It's late and the creatures who pipe tunelessly in the darkness at the center of Chaos are whispering to me and informing me to sleep. Not sure where I am going to go next with my reading though. I've tossed a few ideas around in my head this far. I've got some Sherlock Holmes stories which would be fun to read, Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, various works of Edgar Allen Poe (I own a huge textbook of his complete works), any of the seven books I have by H. G. Wells, finishing the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, or A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. So much to read, and so little time... So we'll see where I go from here! For now, I've got to start on The Wizard of Oz for book club and get some rest.
May your adventures lead you away from those dark temples where ancient cults once worshiped.
No seriously, your brain will turn to soup.
Hobey ho,
-- Nate
(Word count: 769 words)
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