Now Reading

McCarthy's alright, really. Blood Meridian for me just sort of stakes out its claim and proceeds to stay there forever, past the point of being admirable or effective. I probably liked it better than I remember liking it.

Unrelated: I think I'm going to start Bleeding Edge in a few.

Anyway.

I have a dream wherein an aged, incontinent, half-naked, but preternaturally jovial Pynchon defecates into McCarthy's lifeless and open maw. Pynchon grins. He is dancing, dancing, and he doesn't seem to strain. He says he will never stop in all the world's turning as he extrudes something darkened by melena, redolent of copper. It hangs tense, pendant for just a moment but threatening like a great onyx phallus backlit by an exploding sun, and it drops between the desiccated lips. The child watches, because he's still there, remember him, the child, but his eyes do not see the searing orb, only the long shadows cast by Pynchon as he writhes and hops and squats, as if dark shells descended from hat brim to limit the child's gaze. Oh, sez Pynchon. Hey. Fuck of with that Qlippoth shit for a sec? Hey, this one's a doozy. The child turns his eyes instead to the fetid golgotha of smoldering infants. Ahhhhnnnnngh, sez Pynchon.

True story.

  On 2/16/2015 at 1:33 AM, luke viia said:

 

  On 2/13/2015 at 3:59 PM, ThatSpanishGuy said:

Gödel, Escher Bach - 50 pages in, 700 to go, and if the first 50 pages are representative of the whole book, this is going to be one of those books you have to read with pen and pencil besides you

It is. There's a section in the middle where he goes pretty far into the TNT stuff. Helped me to actually write and transcribe some of it.

 

Just finished Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland....good, quick novel. First book of his I've read.

Currently reading Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, a Canadian writers one book fantasy epic. Pretty decent so far. I prefer concise fantasy over 8-book ongoing sagasl

this woman used to be on the silk road forums, usually trying to earn the trust of vendors for "research she was doing on a book". that's this book. now she's on the hub sourcing another juicy story.

so far there's nothing new here besides putting everything in chronological order with (almost) all the characters. one main problem (so far) is ormsby wrote this too early and thus doesn't know some of the juicy details such as who tony76 was, the hacker scamming DPR etc. still, makes for a good bedtime story

Reading Inherent Vice, very funny. Nowhere near as complicated as his other stuff, but I'm totally OK with that.

The Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon (Thomas Harris)

Much better written than I anticipated. Lean and mean and keeps you turning the pages.

Time for some fun pretentious bullshit!

Damn my half finished copy of House of Leaves has been on the shelf for years now.

Read the review for that over at the Guardian website, sounds like a real gimmicky author. The review mentioned it's apparently going to be 27 volumes?! Well, I hope it's better than it sounds.

^Extremely gimmicky

  On 5/14/2015 at 12:05 AM, doublename said:

^Extremely gimmicky

I don't doubt such approaches can be interesting and involving, but I am old fashioned with my novels and prefer the words and their meanings to be the only tricks, not experiments in typography. I hear Infinite Jest by D.F. Wallace does similar things, a book I do want to read eventually, so who knows whether I'll enjoy that approach or find it aggrieving, merely getting in the way of enjoyable, organic prose.

Also, if that's the case, then it might not be a good book to read on the kindla--all those footnotes are bound to get fucked up by the digital format--which means I'll have to get a bulky physical copy. *gulp*

tried about a phew tiems 2 get in 2 Infinite Jest but its footnoting, po-mo, hypertextual endless sentences were just 2 much 2 cope w. but persisted & wen iBroke thru dat ice, iWuz hooked; an awsm book.

rcntly rd:

'A Different Drummer: The Story of E.J. Banfield, the Beachcomber of Dunk Island' by Michael Noonan. overly scholarly bio of an early white explorer in the great barrier reef. p. boring read given the explorer's life was so amaze. 6/10

'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy. harrowing, 10/10

Infinite Jest actually reads pretty well as an eBook. You can treat the footnotes like links, instead of flipping back and forth 5-6 times on a single page.

  On 5/14/2015 at 1:09 AM, Bechuga said:

 

  On 5/14/2015 at 12:05 AM, doublename said:

^Extremely gimmicky

 

I don't doubt such approaches can be interesting and involving, but I am old fashioned with my novels and prefer the words and their meanings to be the only tricks, not experiments in typography. I hear Infinite Jest by D.F. Wallace does similar things, a book I do want to read eventually, so who knows whether I'll enjoy that approach or find it aggrieving, merely getting in the way of enjoyable, organic prose.

 

Also, if that's the case, then it might not be a good book to read on the kindla--all those footnotes are bound to get fucked up by the digital format--which means I'll have to get a bulky physical copy. *gulp*

Read on amazon review that the kindle version is actually half assed and too tiny to read. I mean it's been printed very beautifully and it's semi hard cover but yeah I mostly 'read' Danielewski's recent stuff just for fun/laughs.

Also got a proper book though, Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.

I've been making my way through Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces". Watched the PBS show Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell for, "The Power of Myth", and I loved it. So then I decided to give the book a shot. Really enjoying it & learning a lot that I didn't know before. Makes me even more fascinated and curious about mythologies & culture from all over the world.

Started 2666 yesterday, anyone here familiar with it?

^I read it a while back

Reading Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks, great stuff as expected. It's been mostly the usual case studies so far, not sure if gets into his own psychonautic experimentation at any point, but I hope so. I once hallucinated the face of Jesus on a wall while completely sober, was not in any way a religious experience, but offered me insight into how others may have been fooled throughout time.

Has anyone read any Bill Bryson? I like his travel-type books but my favourites are probably A Short History of Nearly Everything and America 1927 (not sure what the proper title is).

SHNE is a Carl Sagan esque story about all sorts of stuff. It talks about life, physics, geography, famous scientists and pretty much anything else related. Really nice book.

The other one is about America during 1927. It mainly focuses on the summer and talks about Lindbergh, prohibition and Al Capone, Babe Ruth, Henry Ford etc. Just all the major events from that short period (there were quite a lot apparently).

Yeah man Bryson is typical reading, nothing new. Most of the bookolics will have read him. That Appalachian trail book was awesome. Same goes for the short history of everything and short history of home thingy. His latest was so-so.

His next book is a travel book about England, which seems a nice idea.

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson (he helped finish off The Wheel of Time iirc).

I wanted a standalone or short fantasy series to read after eating the huge chunks that GoT offers up.

------

Also, any recommendations on where to start with Mr. Philly K 'Donglord' Dick?

I've seen some discussion on here before about his books and was intrigued after reading about him a bit more this week. I do know not to start with VALIS though, that's the general opinion at least.

  On 5/15/2015 at 8:50 PM, dumplings said:

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson (he helped finish off The Wheel of Time iirc).

 

I wanted a standalone or short fantasy series to read after eating the huge chunks that GoT offers up.

 

 

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Also, any recommendations on where to start with Mr. Philly K 'Donglord' Dick?

 

I've seen some discussion on here before about his books and was intrigued after reading about him a bit more this week. I do know not to start with VALIS though, that's the general opinion at least.

yeah, the books after A Scanner Darkly are all pretty much the same story (related to the fact that he was going crazy, they're good too, but probably better if you're already well versed in his stuff), if you like Science Fiction in general I'd start chronologically with Solar Lottery, they get progressively better after that. Alternatively my picks would The Man in the High Castle, The Game Players of Titan, A Scanner Darkly, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and Martian Time Slip.

  On 5/15/2015 at 9:05 PM, caze said:

 

  On 5/15/2015 at 8:50 PM, dumplings said:

Elantris by Brandon Sanderson (he helped finish off The Wheel of Time iirc).

 

I wanted a standalone or short fantasy series to read after eating the huge chunks that GoT offers up.

 

 

------

 

 

Also, any recommendations on where to start with Mr. Philly K 'Donglord' Dick?

 

I've seen some discussion on here before about his books and was intrigued after reading about him a bit more this week. I do know not to start with VALIS though, that's the general opinion at least.

 

yeah, the books after A Scanner Darkly are all pretty much the same story (related to the fact that he was going crazy, they're good too, but probably better if you're already well versed in his stuff), if you like Science Fiction in general I'd start chronologically with Solar Lottery, they get progressively better after that. Alternatively my picks would The Man in the High Castle, The Game Players of Titan, A Scanner Darkly, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and Martian Time Slip.

 

Thanks for the rec's caze. I'll be sure to use this as a rule of thumb in future.

Dropped Godel Escher Bach cause the last thing I wanna do after spending all day working on this stupid CompSci degree is read more about programming nonsense

Started Gravity's Rainbow now... let's see how that goes... hopefully I'll be done by the end of the summer

Good luck with Gravity's Rainbow! Remember: the first 200 hundred pages are merely the intro.

The timing is quite apt, actually: as you start on that, I have finished Inherent Vice, which I enjoyed very much. Pynchon Lite indeed, but that's not to say it's shit, in fact I highly enjoyed it, very funny.

http://monoskop.org/images/d/dd/Tarkovsky_Andrey_Sculpting_in_Time_Reflections_on_the_Cinema.pdf