/lit/ - Literature

>>22940992
>Friendly reminder that Bakker is KING
Correct post
>Vengeance roamed the halls of the compound—like a God.
>And he sang his song with a beast’s blind fury, parting wall from foundation, blowing ceiling into sky, as though the works of man were things of sand.
>And when he found them, cowering beneath their Analogies, he sheared through their Wards like a rapist through a cotton shift. He beat them with hammering lights, held their shrieking bodies as though they were curious things, the idiot thrashing of an insect between thumb and forefinger …
>Death came swirling down.
>He felt them scramble through the corridors, desperate to organize some kind of concerted defence. He knew that the sound of agony and blasted stone reminded them of their deeds. Their horror would be the horror of the guilty. Glittering death had come to redress their trespasses.
>Suspended over the carpeted floors, encompassed by hissing Wards, he blasted his own ruined halls. He encountered a cohort of Javreh. Their frantic bolts were winked into ash by the play of lights before him. Then they were screaming, clawing at eyes that had become burning coals. He strode past them, leaving only smeared meat and charred bone. He encountered a dip in the fabric of the onta, and he knew that more awaited his approach armed with the Tears of God.
>He brought the building down upon them.
>And he laughed more mad words, drunk with destruction. Fiery lights shivered across his defences and he turned, seething with dark crackling humour, and spoke to the two Scarlet Magi who assailed him, uttered intimate truths, fatal Abstractions, and the world about them was wracked to the pith.
>He clawed away their flimsy Anagogic defences, raised them from the ruin like shrieking dolls, and dashed them against bone-breaking stone.
>Seswatha was free, and he walked the ways of the present bearing tokens of ancient doom.
>He would show them the Gnosis.

>Please. Don’t be a—
>The roar of flame. The thunder of toppling shelves. Fire broke like foaming surf about his Wards. A blinding flash, illuminating the vast chamber from corner to corner. The crack of thunder. Achamian stumbled to his knees. His Wards groaned in his thoughts.
>He struck back with Inference and Abstraction. He was a Mandate Schoolman, a Gnostic Sorcerer-of-the-Rank, a War-Cant Master. He was as a mask held before the sun. And his voice slapped the distances into char and ruin.
>The hoarded knowledge of the Sareots was blasted and burned. Convections whipped pages into fiery cyclones. Like leathery moths, books spiralled into the debris. Dragon’s fire cascaded between the surviving shelves. Lightning spidered the air, crackled across his defences. The last queues fell, and across the ruin Achamian glimpsed his assailants: seven of them, like silk-scarlet dancers in a field of funeral pyres: the Schoolmen of the Scarlet Spires.
>The glimpse of tempests disgorging bolts of blinding white. The heads of phantom dragons dipping and belching fire. The sweep of burning sparrows. The Great Analogies, shining and ponderous, crashing and thundering about his Wards. And through them, the Abstractions, glittering and instantaneous …
>The Seventh Quyan Theorem. The Ellipses of Thosolankis … He yelled out the impossible words.
>The leftmost Scarlet Schoolman screamed. The ghostly ramparts about him crumbled beneath an arcana of encircling lines. The Library walls behind him exploded outward, and he was puffed like paper into the evening sky.
>For a moment, Achamian abandoned the Cants, began singing to save his Wards.
>Cataracts of hellfire. The floor failed. Great ceilings of stone clapped about him like angry palms to prayer. He fell through fire and rolling, megalithic ruin. But still he sang.
>He was a Scion of Seswatha, a Disciple of Noshainrau the White. He was the slayer of Skafra, mightiest of the Wracu. He had pitched his song against the dread heights of Golgotterath. He had stood proud and impenitent before Mog-Pharau himself …
?Jarring impact. Different footing, like the pitched deck of a ship. Shrugging slabs and heaped ruin away, tossing thundering stone into sky. Plunging through meaning after dark meaning, the hard matter of the world collapsing, falling away like lover’s clothing, all in answer to his singing song.
And at last the sky, so water-cool when seen from the inferno’s heart.
Unholy kino. Bakker really is king.

>>20127062
I don't think this fits. Yeah, it's dark, and it is fantasy (sci-fi too), but it is very literary and the themes really aren't the same. It's a great book though, just not that similar.

>>20126705
This does fit, to a T. Similar themes and vibes.

>>20125386
Wrong. Beserk is near the peak of manga, Bakker is near (at?) the peak of genre fiction.

>>19786242
Pic related is some Darkness That Comes Before.

On the non-fiction front, The Crusades: Iron Men and Saints is really great, it covers the First Crusade and its personalities in depth. Also the audio version has a great narrator who does a lot of classics. Although if you want a full coverage of all the Crusades with a bigger view on politics and events within the Crusader States, Zoé Oldenbourg's The Crusades is a classic too.

The Great Game by Hopkirk is stories of Russian and British espionage, exploration, and war in the 19th century, when much of Central Asia was still poorly mapped and still had a medieval culture and governance system. The book focuses on the exploits of individual explorers and spies a good deal, and their harrowing adventures. It reads like a thriller at times. Parts are on the Steppe or up in Tibet, but a great deal is in the Desert. It also has a full coverage of the British Wars in Afghanistan.

Finally, Hourani's the History of the Arab Peoples is an excellent survey.