OPPAI ORACLE

i'm reading treasure island and the plot is great, but the illustrations and the book cover is what makes it special for me. i'm using the everyman's library edition. i feel like i'm reading an old book taken out of a chest. the illustrations by mervyn peake are stunning. everytime his illustrations pop up in the book i get as close as i can to the page and look at every little line in awe of how he did it. i think the technique is cross-hatching? anyway it's so eerie and beautiful

That's really cool. One of my all-time favorite old illustrators, Edward Gorey, was a master of cross-hatching. In fact, I was so inspired by it that I tried to replicate it on my drawings when I was like 10 or 11. It was excruciatingly difficult even when I was half-assing it basically just drawing a bunch of X's and lines with nowhere near the compactness of these guys:

haven't read in a while.
finished reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse at a bookstore. pretty intriguing philosophical novel on self-discovery through indian philosophy conveyed somewhat short and simply but is additionally rather vast, the sort of book i seem to be drawn to (another favorite book of mine is The Crying of Lot 49) and is pretty inspirational for my own writing purposes, pretty beautiful. also intrigued from wikipedia that it took quite a while to complete due to the immersion needed by the author.

Recently read this, it was pretty good for being a 200-year-old "modern" fantasy story.

Also currently been reading Bastion (cover is kinda dumb so not posting it), which is a progression fantasy story sort of like the Cradle series if anyone knows of that. Idk if people here like those kinds of books though lol