Numero 23 and 24 have now been completed. Yeah, I'm so not reading 50 books this year... ah well.

Numero 23 is a collection of Cthulhu Tales by the master himself, H.P. Lovecraft. Before I read this collection, lent to me by my friend Troy, who is a HUGE Cthulhu fan, my entire exposure to the Cthulhu mythos was a couple of mentions of things in Stephen King short stories, a Batman Elseworld's mini-series, and quite a few rousing games of Arkham Horror. Heck, it wasn't until we first played Arkham Horror a couple of years ago that I found out that this is the inspiration for the Arkham Asylum that is a permanent fixture in Batman comics.

So, being the English major that I am, when faced with something that I like that has 'source material', I try to read the source material. Plus, I generally like short stories.

Upon reading these, I can see why they stuck with people. They're not striving for out and out 'horror', nor are they going for the gross out, which, especially in this day and age I find terribly refreshing. No, the overwhelming sense and tone I got from Lovecraft was a serious sense of dread. Lovecraft was really big on the whole idea that he cannot possible explain just how terrifing or horrible something is; he'd rather leave it to your imagination, and I think that's great. What I can conjure up in my little ol' brain is going to be more frightening to me than pretty much anything he (or anyone else) can come up with because I am going to frame it in the context of something that definitely scares me. If I'm not told exactly what it is, there's no sense of disappointment, I can never be let down by the reveal.

Of course, Lovecraft does have a distinctive style, and this does become repetative upon a lot of reading; he really does like the twist in the last line sort of reveal, and that's fine, but after awhile, you start to see the twist coming. Kind of like watching to many M Knight Shayalaman movies in a row I imagine.

But his characters are a wonderful combination of the absurd and the absolutely normal, juxtaposed beside one another as two worlds that shouldn't meet invariably do. He does a very, very good job at imposing his monsterous creations on a very normal countryside and making everything seem bizarre and uncomfortable.

My favourites? "The Rats in the Walls", "The Colour Out of Space", "The Dunwitch Horror" and the "Music of Erich Zann".

Number 24 was a... difficult book. Not only for the subject matter, but also for the fact that it would often make me so angry that I would have to put it down for a while. Not angry at the book mind you, but angry at the world it talks about. Number 24 is Naomi Klein's the Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This book follows the adherents to Milton Friedman's so called Chicago School style of economics, the utlimate in free-market capitalism, through the 30 years of its initial birth at the University of Chicago. She tells us how it was implemented in violence and chaos in countries such as Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Russia, Iraq, Sri Lanka and in the USA. She tells of harmful economic policies shoved through on nations where the populace is currently 'in shock', whether through a change in government, war, or a natural disaster, the market is thrown open to foreign investors who come in and reap billions of dollars, while the bulk of the population finds itself worse off economically than they were before. Its a frightening, maddening look at globalization and big business and all the dirty things the CIA have done. It makes you think the IMF and the World Bank are nothing more than robber barons, set up to supposedly help countries facing a financial crisis, but setting such hard rules for the countries that they must follow Chicago-style rules to qualify for aid, and once again, no one is seemingly helped except huge multinational corporations. Honestly, reading this book made me want to move away to some remote place in Canada where I wouldn't have to rely on government (much) or deal with any big business. But that's not realistic and I accept that. Klein has scrupulously backed up her argument (there are pages and pages of notes stating exactly what her sources are) and she's going to need them, as her book has already come under fire from such right-wing publications here in Canada as the National Post, and I imagine she's also unpopular in other places too. But there seems to just be too many similarities in what all these countries have faced who have been forced to go to a free-market economy to completely discount her theory. A good disaster is good for business, that's all there is to it.