This was a lot of fun. From the entries to the historical review, to the notes on each author. By the time you get to the end you feel like Dr. Gaiman and Dr. Mieville and all the others actually exist (and I guess they do, kinda), but especially Dr. Lambshead. He becomes a legendary figure like Allan Quartermaine or Captain Nemo.

Makes a great bathroom book because the entries are short (mostly). I was sad that half of the pages dis-attached from the binding after reading it for a week or two, hopefully that wasn't something common.

SO WEIRD. I read some of this before and it ended up in *that* pile so years later I figured it was time for a reread/finish. It's eh. Some bits are fun (not nearly as many as there ought to be), some are bad, some are seriously dated. I find the intentionally pompous tone of many of the entries grinding. It's more surreal where there were opportunities to be truly incisive. Given what it is, fair amount of body horror.

I think the best aspects are the typography, it's a fun looking book, and Download Syndrome which is hardly eccentric or discredited and I think was largely predictive as of its writing 14 or so years ago.

Este é um bom exemplo de um livro que seria espectacularmente engraçado e agradável de ler se não tivesse tantas páginas, com mais do mesmo.
Gostei mas podia ser melhor!

I had a nasty cold last week, and spent a couple of days in bed, in a NyQuil haze: it seemed like an appropriate time to crack open this little volume of delectably deranged stories. Constructed as a medical guide satire, the "Thackery T. Lambshed Pocket Guide to Eccentic & Discredited Diseases" is what happens when you get a bunch of lunatic New Weird writers and ask them to pretend to be doctors: it's gross, funny, quirky, morbid and very entertaining… if exploding organs are your idea of a chuckle.

The impressive list of collaborators were all obviously on the same page and the collection reads seamlessly. It's a light read, which was honestly about as much as I could handle in my medicated state, and was obviously written more for fun than for social commentary and metaphors. It's exactly what you would expect from a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy writers having a good time. Vandermeer knows how to put this sort of silly little collection together: an introduction about the history of the Guide (now in it's 83rd edition!), Victorian medical textbook illustrations that don't look quite right, and hysterical biographies of all his eminent contributors.

A charming treat for New Weird fans.

The majority of "diseases" in this book were brilliant. Of course with the authors that contributed and Vandermeer as one of the editors, I kind of expected that. Several of my favorite authors put in pieces including Mieville, Moore, and Gaiman. There's only the occasional entry that seems to bog down or try too hard. The majority of the entries are brilliant and even sections like the introduction and biographies are highly entertaining.

Fun enough. Perfect quarantine read. Went into it having no idea of what it was and a lot of rambunctious laughter was had as my friends and I tried to figure what the hell was going on in this book, but after the initial novelty of it wears down it's not something I'm too eager to sit down and read cover to cover.

It's something you'd pull out from your bookshelf and flip through to get a random burst of inspiration or laugh though. Perfect to gift to a friend with a strange or offbeat sense of humor.

I resent this book

This is silly and cute and a pretty fun read. The book is an anthology of imaginary diseases invented by a slew of sci-fi and fantasy writers. A few are priceless, and I was not surprised at all that Michael Moorcock and Neil Gaiman wrote most of the reports that were the funniest and most inventive. It's not an Earth-shattering good book, but it's nice way to pass the time here and there. Toss if on your coffee table and read a disease or two a day.

This is a fun, weird book. A collaborative book where different writers submitted imaginary diseases fro a medical guide coordinated by the fictitious and mysterious Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead. It is however more interesting as an idea than as an actual book to read.

Some of the diseases are really cool, and they all have an usually fun description relating the symptoms, the first known case, the history of the disease and possible cures. The illustrations are also suitably weird. Some of my favourite diseases in the book:

-Ebercitas: an intense infatuation with Eber M. Soler, a lady living in Cordoba, Argentina.
-Internalized Tatooing disease: elaborate artworks psychosomatically imprinted in internal organs.
-Logopetria: words spoken by the patient are physical objects
-Rashid's syndrome (Fictonecrosis, popularly "Bibliophagia"): self-explanatory
-Motile Snarcoma (Motile agglutinate snarcoma of the subperineal pondus): see below
and quite ominously,
-The Wuhan Flu: entropic disordering of the body's atoms cause by pronouncing an unknown set of words

Two things however diminished my enjoyment of the book:
-Because the disease are devised by writers many of them deal with symptoms relating to words, books, paper.. etc and they can become repetitive.
-The second part of the book, that consists of fragments of the "guide" through history as well of stories about Dr. Lambshead, has a couple of good stories but mostly it's a bit too long and just drags. Most of it (because the writers are pretending to be doctors, and pretending the guide is real) feels like a private joke that the reader is not a participant in.

Overall, I believe the book is to be read sporadically and not in one sitting in order enjoy it better. And if you read only the first half that's the description of the diseases and avoid the second part, you really don't miss much.

Music for this book:
Anatomy Theater - David Lang

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"Your snarcoma may turn out to be a motile snarcoma. A motile snarcoma exhibits mobility under stress. In layman's terms, it can crawl. I fact, it will stretch out its fiibrous micelia like tentacles and drag itself around your patient's guts like a bleached baby octopus on Benzedrine"

"Thackery Trajan Lambshead was born on St. Genesius the Comedian's Day (August 25th), 1900, in Wimpering on the Brink, Devon (county), England".

"May it continue to thrive for another eighty-three editions".

It got rather dull.