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*slashes wrists*

I phoned the police. They were not interested.

Can Richard really B James?

The Dialectical Imagination- Martin Jay

#$@&! The Official Lloyd Llewellyn Collection- Daniel Clowes

33 1/3 SAW Pt. II- Mark Weidenbaum

 

Recently finished Milligan/Allred's X-Statix Omnibus. Pretty entertaining read.

  On 7/14/2014 at 7:10 AM, verticalhold said:

Great book. Have you read "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler..."? One of my all-time favourites.

 

Calvino was a genius.

  On 7/14/2014 at 7:10 AM, verticalhold said:

 

I loved that one!

 

I'm reading "Raisons pratiques" by Pierre Bourdieu and am looking forward to a bunch of Henri Lefebvre stuff I'm going to borrow from my girlfriend.

  On 7/20/2014 at 1:30 AM, Roksen Creek said:

 

  On 7/14/2014 at 7:10 AM, verticalhold said:

 

Great book. Have you read "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler..."? One of my all-time favourites.

 

Calvino was a genius.

 

 

I have not. This is indeed a beautiful book, I guess I'll move on to that one next

 

  On 7/20/2014 at 1:56 AM, poblequadrat said:

 

  On 7/14/2014 at 7:10 AM, verticalhold said:

 

 

I loved that one!

 

I'm reading "Raisons pratiques" by Pierre Bourdieu and am looking forward to a bunch of Henri Lefebvre stuff I'm going to borrow from my girlfriend.

 

 

I'm due for a refresher on both of them

I've got Drugs and the Mind by Robert DeRopp, biochemist. This book's from 1957 but doesn't have any Reefer Madness style vibes to it because the author really looks at things from a professional, acedemic standpoint, but still uses this prose that makes the book a joy to read.

 

Like:

  Quote

 

Now to add further to the addict's miseries his bowels begin to act with fantastic violence: great waves of contraction pass over the walls of the stomach, causing explosive vomiting, the vomit being frequently stained with blood. So extreme are the contractions of the intestines that the surface of the abdomen appears corrugated and knotted as if a tangle of snakes were fighting beneath the skin.

 

The entire book is replete with such rhetoric that I find appealing, and I feel that many contemporary works are incomplete not being presented in such a fanciful way.

listened to china and the chinese audiobook today, pretty cool. free from librivox, a great site of free, user-created audio books

Recommendations on where to start with China Meiville?

thomas ligotti - the conspiracy against the human race

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

 

Finished in the last month or so:

Whatever and The Map & The Territory by Michel Houellebecq - I'm definitely a fan of his now. What should I read next?

 

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston - Even though it's nonfiction, it was so enjoyable it felt like junk food.

 

 

  On 7/23/2014 at 3:32 AM, very honest said:

listened to china and the chinese audiobook today, pretty cool. free from librivox, a great site of free, user-created audio books

Edited July 25, 2014 by doublename

Currently reading "Child of God" by Cormac McCarthy

 

BTW. My interest in this book, has absolutely nothing to do with the incredible jerk off, known publicly as "James Franco" and any of his horse shit movies, or anything else attributed to him for that matter. Fuck James Franco!

Now that I got that of my chest....

 

Cormac McCarthy books are F'n disturbing and creepy, and pretty real, -but hard to put down!

One of the greatest writers in contemporary american literarature ( well in my own humble opinion....)

 

Anyone else in to this dude?

Edited July 25, 2014 by ej23

dirk gently's holistic detective agency

  On 7/24/2014 at 11:56 PM, verticalhold said:

Recommendations on where to start with China Meiville?

 

Perdido Street Station probably, gives you a good idea of his weird, baroque style. Maybe Railsea I guess, although it's aimed a borderline young-adult audience. Still a good read. If you want something more sci-fi oriented, try Embassytown. I'd still go with PSS though, probably because it's the first one I read meself.

Finished Dr Sleep. Unfortunately it was pretty lame. Late SK seems to fall into a pattern of hit, hit, miss.

The misses tend to read like the book equivalent of the high budget horror B-movies released by lionsgate (see 'Cell')

 

Read Blaze after that. The unpublished Bachman novel.

That was really good, read it in a day.

 

Then I read Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story. The one that Eyes Wide Shut was based upon. Very satisfying read.

 

Now I'm rereading Lisey's Story which is definitely a late period SK 'hit'.

The one about JFK/time-travelling was the most interesting SK I've read in a decade, since his memoir. Perhaps because I think that when he goes away from pure horror he's at his best (The Stand, Different Seasons, Misery, etc..)

Edited July 29, 2014 by Philip Glass

  On 7/25/2014 at 10:27 PM, ej23 said:

Currently reading "Child of God" by Cormac McCarthy

 

BTW. My interest in this book, has absolutely nothing to do with the incredible jerk off, known publicly as "James Franco" and any of his horse shit movies, or anything else attributed to him for that matter. Fuck James Franco!

Now that I got that of my chest....

 

Cormac McCarthy books are F'n disturbing and creepy, and pretty real, -but hard to put down!

One of the greatest writers in contemporary american literarature ( well in my own humble opinion....)

 

Anyone else in to this dude?

I'm generally a big fan of his. I reread, The Road and All the Pretty Horses Last Year, and found they were even better than I'd remembered.

With King novels, the formula is - if it is really long, which they most are, it's going to decline rapidly.

 

It's a shame, because most of them start off so good, that it\s almost enough to carry them for another 800 pages, but if they'd just wrapped things up nicely a quarter of the way in, they would have been the best books ever - unfortunately he starts ending them about half way through, then peters out and rambles for another few million pages and forgets the hole plot.

 

Even with The Stand, IT, and Under the Dome, they suffer from this but I guess the pay off of the first 100 chapsters of those books is enough to warrant ready the other billion bits of crap.

 

 

Salems Lot, Pet Cemetary, Christine and his plethora of Short Stories / Novellas, all don't have enough time to go fucking balls out shit.

 

 

 

Still one of my favourite authros ever, but does he know wtf he is doing or does he just black out and come to with a massive fuck off manuscript, read the first section and go 'it's a masterpiece!!' then send it off for binding?

 

Editors and publisher prob do the same.

 

 

All hail the King.

Some books I read in the last five or so weeks..

 

Half way through the last volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Even if I am partial to sci-fi, this historical fiction is good and has kept me interested even if Stephenson's verbose descriptions of things can get a bit long. Good swash-buckling fun.

  On 7/29/2014 at 12:52 PM, azatoth said:

Half way through the last volume of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Even if I am partial to sci-fi, this historical fiction is good and has kept me interested even if Stephenson's verbose descriptions of things can get a bit long. Good swash-buckling fun.

 

 

I want to do a re-read of the Baroque Cycle as it's been almost a decade since I read it, but I can't find the time. Love it, though.

 

Have you read Cryptonomicon?

Edited July 29, 2014 by baph