Now Reading

Finished Kafka's "The Trial" the other day. Quite a strange book where you find that some of the time it just waffles on about something insignificant for no real reason. Almost like he's got a word limit to get to. Maybe that was always his style?

I may read him again if anyone has any recommendations? I'm curious. Gonna get onto the next Patterson WMC (6) next.

wow, what an odd reaction to The Trial… Did you like it at least? I avoided Kafka for years after the ubiquitous high school experience of having The Metamorphosis utterly ruined with vapid classroom overanalysis. When I finally gave him another shot I fell in love, & I'd definitely rank the Trial among his better long-form works.

I just reread Joyce's Portrait of the Artist & now I want to run away from home to write poetry & be a dick to people by only speaking in Latin.

not high literature but kept hearing that ready player one was really good. got about 70 pages in and whoa buddy is this bad so far

  On 6/9/2016 at 4:41 PM, juiceciuj said:

not high literature but kept hearing that ready player one was really good. got about 70 pages in and whoa buddy is this bad so far

Somebody lied to you, m8.

you've read it? it doesn't get better? it's going to be the next spielberg movie i think. i hoped it would be at least around the same level of decency as like, enders game or something

  On 6/9/2016 at 4:56 PM, juiceciuj said:

you've read it? it doesn't get better? it's going to be the next spielberg movie i think. i hoped it would be at least around the same level of decency as like, enders game or something

yeah, was surprised about the huge praise it got. I thought it was fine, but nothing particularly innovative, a quick read and relatively engaging story. could make for a decent movie though.

the first 70 pages basically sounds like the author writing about himself except for he's an ultra cool millionaire that invented the matrix. all the 80s wank is really getting old.

  On 6/7/2016 at 11:48 PM, doorjamb said:

wow, what an odd reaction to The Trial… Did you like it at least? I avoided Kafka for years after the ubiquitous high school experience of having The Metamorphosis utterly ruined with vapid classroom overanalysis. When I finally gave him another shot I fell in love, & I'd definitely rank the Trial among his better long-form works.

 

I just reread Joyce's Portrait of the Artist & now I want to run away from home to write poetry & be a dick to people by only speaking in Latin.

I must say I did enjoy it. Not sure it'd be high on my list to read again straight away but maybe in years to come. What else would you recommend, I'd like to read another of his and compare.

Neal Stephenson's SevenEves is bound for the screen. (fingers crossed) i wonder how they'll do some of the stuff w/o it looking like "The Expanse" tv show .. which is pretty good btw.

http://deadline.com/2016/06/seveneves-movie-ron-howard-brian-grazer-bill-broyles-apollo-13-skydance-1201769130/

In An Unspoken Voice - How The Body Releases Trauma by Peter Levine. Pros and cons to this 1, but will take all the help out there

You Can't Always Get What You Want by Sam Cutler. Purchased for his personal insights into the Grateful Dead (rather than the R Stones 1st half) and the bloke writes lucidly considering the volume of drugs consumed. Crackin insights into Jerry Garcia, Owsley Bear Stanley and trying to maintain their behemoth wall of sound rig & road-crew/family. Also a man who recognized the blues basis that was missing when Pigpen passed, but thats a bit of a statto pointer for this forum. Superb if you love the early Pigpen-era Dead.

  On 6/9/2016 at 8:04 PM, spratters said:

 

  On 6/7/2016 at 11:48 PM, doorjamb said:

wow, what an odd reaction to The Trial… Did you like it at least? I avoided Kafka for years after the ubiquitous high school experience of having The Metamorphosis utterly ruined with vapid classroom overanalysis. When I finally gave him another shot I fell in love, & I'd definitely rank the Trial among his better long-form works.

 

I just reread Joyce's Portrait of the Artist & now I want to run away from home to write poetry & be a dick to people by only speaking in Latin.

 

I must say I did enjoy it. Not sure it'd be high on my list to read again straight away but maybe in years to come. What else would you recommend, I'd like to read another of his and compare.

 

The Castle is likewise excellent. Also hard to go wrong with pretty much any collection of his short stories you run across. Come to think of it, Kafka's probably an author whose individual pieces really benefit the fuller your familiarity with his other work.

I am now reading something called Modern Dogma & the Rhetoric of Consent wherein dude keeps denying the incompatibility of… uh… reasonable and unreasonable reasoning… So far has done nothing but scapegoat and nitpick Bertrand Russell for no especially compelling reason.

Spratters, a collection of his short stories is far more enjoyable imo.

I've got a soft spot for The Burrow.

Ray Monk's "Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": a real lucid read into the life of Wittgenstein. It varies nicely between diary entries, letters and careful analysis of the unique character that is Wittgenstein. As a result, the author never forces an opinion on you, but simply observes what the path of Wittgenstein was. I can really recommmend it: 100 pages in and it feels like 30.

Finished Pynchon's V. which was lush. Then I read Never Let Me Go which was

Now Brave New World which I've somehow never got around to reading.

recently read:

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said - PKD (re-read)

Scale - Keith Buckley

Into The Miso Soup - Ryo Murakami

---

Flow My Tears is classic PKD. great book.

Scale is by the vocalist of one of my favourite bands (Every Time I Die) so i was pretty worried it would turn out shit, but it's good. not amazing, but good. he has a lot of potential as a writer so i hope he does more.

Into The Miso Soup was great too. i breezed through this over a few days. highly recommended this one.

  On 6/13/2016 at 5:52 AM, doorjamb said:

 

  On 6/9/2016 at 8:04 PM, spratters said:

 

  On 6/7/2016 at 11:48 PM, doorjamb said:

wow, what an odd reaction to The Trial… Did you like it at least? I avoided Kafka for years after the ubiquitous high school experience of having The Metamorphosis utterly ruined with vapid classroom overanalysis. When I finally gave him another shot I fell in love, & I'd definitely rank the Trial among his better long-form works.

 

I just reread Joyce's Portrait of the Artist & now I want to run away from home to write poetry & be a dick to people by only speaking in Latin.

 

I must say I did enjoy it. Not sure it'd be high on my list to read again straight away but maybe in years to come. What else would you recommend, I'd like to read another of his and compare.

 

The Castle is likewise excellent. Also hard to go wrong with pretty much any collection of his short stories you run across. Come to think of it, Kafka's probably an author whose individual pieces really benefit the fuller your familiarity with his other work.

 

I am now reading something called Modern Dogma & the Rhetoric of Consent wherein dude keeps denying the incompatibility of… uh… reasonable and unreasonable reasoning… So far has done nothing but scapegoat and nitpick Bertrand Russell for no especially compelling reason.

 

  On 6/13/2016 at 8:02 AM, hello spiral said:

Spratters, a collection of his short stories is far more enjoyable imo.

 

I've got a soft spot for The Burrow.

Cool cool, had a look for The Castle and found the collection for £1.99. I shall purchase.

I finished Sphere (loved it) and I'm now reading Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut is always fun. He has a knack for building characters out of quirks and eccentricities in a way that invites real empathy and insight. Kind of like what I imagine Wes Anderson is always trying to do with his movies (imo he doesn't often do it successfully, ends up w more quirk and less substance)

Finished the first of the dark is rising sequence, I know it's for young adults but it kept being referenced in folklore books so thought I'd give it a go. Very enjoyable, but not sure if it's enjoyable enough to read the other four that follow. Anyone delved further?

Recently I started obsessively buying/reading books about music:

John Coltrane: His Life and Music (bio peppered with musicology)

George Van Eps - Harmonic Mechanism for Guitar, 1-3 (a thousand page OCD exegesis on fingerings, counterpoint, voice-leading, etc)

John Cage - Silence (early essays and lectures)

This Is Your Brain On Music (Neuro, Social, Psych and Ev-Psych perspectives on music)

Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (Coltrane's bible)

The Music of Bela Bartok (hard analysis)

Effortless Mastery (how to think about making music, essentially)

Being Here (interviews with contemporary improvisers)

Where the Heart Beats (on Cage and Zen Buddhism)

Derek Bailey - Improvisation (history of its theory and practice, East and West)

  On 6/22/2016 at 10:46 PM, Boxus said:

I finished Sphere (loved it) and I'm now reading Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut is always fun. He has a knack for building characters out of quirks and eccentricities in a way that invites real empathy and insight. Kind of like what I imagine Wes Anderson is always trying to do with his movies (imo he doesn't often do it successfully, ends up w more quirk and less substance)

Wow the Vonnegut, Wes Anderson comparison is something i've never thought about but i totally see what you mean. For me the simplistic writing style means that the truly profound moments take you completely of guard, and i guess i can see that in some of Wes Anderson's stuff as well.

on Fellowship of the Ring. read The Hobbit as a kid and hated it. enjoyed the LOTR films though, especially the extended versions. they make for good 'put on and lie down on couch and zone out' viewing.

anyhow, LOTR Book. i'm ... kind of loving it. the time from which the book was written is kind of perfect cos it feels relatively modern and brisk but also has a nice colorful writing to it. astonished to be honest at how little i'm hating the whole thing :^)

The Universe in Your Hand. Basically it's a breakdown of what we know about the universe in plain language. Did you know that the Earth 'orbits' a 'star' called 'the sun'?

Haha I've read that too, quite fun but even simple speak can't help me with quantum physics.

  On 6/29/2016 at 9:27 AM, tec said:

Haha I've read that too, quite fun but even simple speak can't help me with quantum physics.

What aspects of QM did you have problems understanding?

(Just curious)

I haven't reached the quantum bits yet. It's a fascinating universe out there. Could do with some nice background music to give future failed manned missions a nice thing to listen to as they die though.