Entertainment at work

This past week, whenever I feel like I am getting a little antsy or bored sitting around, I’ve been reading H. P. Lovecraft stories off of wikisource.  I know, I’m just the kind of dork who would spend my time reading short stories in the library, but when I am expected to sit at a desk all day long regardless of whether people need my help or not, I find reading being about the best I can do.  I’ve also begun to love wikisource because it has a whole bunch of shit to read.  Sure most of it is pretty old stuff (because of copy write laws newer stories usually arn’t present) but a lot of the old stuff if pretty kick ass.  Besides the extensive list of Lovecraft stories, I’ve also read some letters that Napoleon wrote, a few stories by Hans Christian Andersen, the first act of Macbeth, a cheesy scifi story about a guy trapped in still time, and then a bunch of other bits and pieces of papers or books.  If I was really looking to increase my repertoire of literature knowledge I’d devout myself to books like War and Peace and Moby Dick but I don’t think I’d have that much fun at work because of the possibility for distractions (though I do intend on continuing with Macbeth sometime soon).  I guess being a reading geek this is about the best thing that I could find online, especially the Lovecraft. 

H.P. Lovecraft became a personal favorite of mine my sophomore year of college.  I was working at the library shelving new books when I came across the complete short stories of H.P. Lovecraft.  I had heard of him before (I think my dad had mentioned him to me) and so I thought “why not?” and checked it out.  To say the least I loved the shit.  Lovecraft’s style of writing is kind of similar to Poe but the stories seem even more fucked up.  They are straight up horror stories dealing with madness and terrible monsters.  Before Stephen King the horror genre had Lovecraft.  Sure a lot of the stories have similarities to one another but personally I think that is what makes them so good, this guy had a whole mythology in his head that has spawned what is called the Cthullu Mythos to which many other authors have contributed.  If you are kind of into horror stories, or monsters, or kind of scifi (though not like robots or spaceship scifi) then I strongly recommend Lovecraft because I’d say he is one of the best.

~ by Nathaniel on December 6, 2007.