Interesting frame premise and very good epistolary stories

This book was very interesting and had some nice imaginative pictures. If you like things of the odd, then this book might be right up your alley.

I've had this fabulous tome for awhile now, and probably still haven't finished reading it, not really. This is not because of a defect in the book, but is rather because it is, as the editors say in the introduction (quoting Oscar Wilde), "a browsing experience, to dip into and to savor, rather than take a wild carriage ride through." And that's exactly how I've been approaching the book, reading an entry here and an entry there, not reading it from cover to cover. And I think it works best thi...

This is a monster that shames but does not shamble, that bites but does not shit, that writhes but does not grasp.This anthology succeeded as a perfect diversion. Premise is simple: fictional scholar/collector travels the world assembling the merely odd and the paranormally affected. Nothing too ghastly. Just weird. I bought it for the heavy-hitters, Moore, Chiang, Negarestani and especially Miéville, and they did not disappoint. Most of these collections are typically hit-and-miss, this one was...

5/6 - This book is wacky. And I mean WACKY with a capital W!! It's like a 'choose your own adventure' books crossed with a non-fiction full of footnotes. Every paragraph or so I'm flicking to the contents to find the page number for the correct section that further describes the occult item that was just mentioned in passing in the main body of the text.If you go by the page numbers I'm only up to page 23, but if you go by the number of pages I've actually read it'd be more like 33. I've had to

I’m being generous with those two stars. This really rubbed me up the wrong way with a panoply of writers and artists I otherwise really like and respect mistaking playful for self indulgence. It’s so slight and daft that the stories have no tension whatsoever. It’s all undercut by the general sense of a mutual admirers all dicking about and writing the slightest pieces imaginable and thinking it will do. Moorcock almost acquits himself, Moore falls to pieces utterly after a rather lovely initia...

3.5Personal highlights:"Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny" by Ted Chiang"Lot 558: Shadow of My Nephew by Wells, Charlotte" by Holly Black"A Short History of Dunkelblau's Meistergarten" by Tad Williams "Shamalung (The Diminutions)" by Michael Moorcock"Pulvadmonitor: The Dust's Warning" by China Miéville"The Thing in the Jar" by Michael Cisco"A Key to the Castleblakeney Key" by Caitlín R. Kiernan"1972: The Lichenologist's Visit" by Ekaterina Sedia

Book Info: Genre: Satire/speculative shortsReading Level: AdultRecommended for: Those who enjoy speculative fiction and clever storytellingMy Thoughts: I learned about cabinets of curiosities from reading the Pendergast novels by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. One of the novels is actually titled The Cabinet of Curiosities and it explains what these are. Basically, a cabinet of curiosities is a private collection of interesting and odd things, which were quite popular in the 19th century. Wh...

Very unique book. Fiction written as though it were non-fiction. Lots of big words and references to history, culture, physics, you name it-the book incorporated knowledge from all arenas and fields. I spent a lot of time looking up words and researching things and places I wasn't familiar with. I enjoy that learning experience. If you are a polymath this would be a funny and amusing read for you. If you're not, you will need to spend time finding definitions and background info. Although I enjo...

How do you describe a book so strange and unique it defies genre? The Cabinet of Curiosities is like no other book. Probably closest to steampunk, that doesn't even begin to describe it. The illegitimate child of Monty Python and Umberto Eco. Full of contributions from dozens of artists and authors, it's "entries" vary from stories inspired by, to descriptions of the items contained (or formerly residing, or related to) in the Cabinet, a sort of organic museum itself that defies description, lit...

Weird shit A sprawling museum of impossible things, of magical and mechanical oddities straddling the real. The postmodern enthusiast with a fantastical imagination will find much to wonder at. The objects are as fascinating as the stories created around them, drawn from an arensal of speculative subgenres: clockwork inventions, Tesla's dabblings, modern sculpture, artefacts of mysterious possibly occult origin, and others too weird for any adequate explanation. I liked the latter-most best, sho...

A group of science fiction authors made up Dr. Lambshead, an eccentric collector of the bizarre and macabre, and wrote a series of pseudo-scholarly essays describing items in his collection. It's a genre I really like but is pretty sparsely populated: fiction in the form of nonfiction. A lot of it is playing with the uncanny, things that are almost, but not quite, human; or straddle the line between animate and inanimate.I don't know whether I've read the whole book, it's the sort of thing that

This book was a waste of my time. If I wasn't so against the simple action of burning books, I would burn this one.

I really liked the *idea* behind this book. And I really liked what Ann VenderMeer wrote about the book on John Scalzi's blog, "Whatever". I really wanted to get a kick out of how this thing was done. But aside from a few fun stories, I felt really let down.Here's the basic premise: Thackery T. Lambshead has a collection of eclectic oddities that he stores in his mansion in some ill-specified cabinet. Each of the contributors to the "Cabinet of Curiosities" anthology contributed words or artwork...

This is an odd collection. I labored my way through the first section, which read like a catalog of museum items, fittingly enough. I'll be honest though--after a couple of those types of stories, I was bored and ready to move on to something different. One of the later stories in that section was pretty horrifying though. That one will stay with me for a while. I finally got to the second section, which contained stories about the house and collection, and found myself interested. Life interven...

I got this anthology to read the piece by Ted Chiang. I was interrupted by another book, an inter-library loan, that arrived the day after I started Thackery Lambshead. It was a quick read and I got back to this one a few days later. I found myself unable to sit and read for long, arising at the smallest interruption. Before I had reached a quarter of the way through, it was obvious that I had no interest in finishing the book. I can't say why, really. I just had no interest. The stories, little...

I've only added this book because there are contributions from Naomi Novik, Holly Black and Garth Nix. The other contributions may be good but I'm particularly interested in reading the above three. If anyone knows where I can read them separately, let me know.

I got to page 170 of this book and then decided to set it aside. It's a very creative idea; the whole book is about a fake man name Lambshead and his curiosities. It's written like a non-fiction book. I wasn’t a huge fan of Vandermeer’s “City of Saints and Madmen” either and I didn’t realize this book was related to that one (which it is).This isn't the kind of book you sit down and read, but rather a good coffee table book that you pick up now and then and read a bit of. It's intriguing, odd, b...

I admit to having difficulty with this book. It's fiction but is presented as non-fiction which totally threw me little mind. There were a few stories I enjoyed but the majority were just too strange for my tastes. Not something I would recommend to anyone.

"The Singing Fish" by Amal El-Mohtar is just wonderful. Now I want this book.