Now Reading

I was reading it in the work staff room and probably looked mental trying to prevent the howling. I wish I had the same way with words as the policemen.

Yeah I remember reading it in the early 00s and I was balls deep in psychedelics at the time. First time I read it I literally had to bury my face in a pillow and maniacally giggle every few pages.

was thinking of reading 100 Years Of Solitude but I really can't stand magic realism. The whole latin american ghosts at night mumbo jumbo. Ugh

^ don't read it, that's exactly what it's like. it's a wes anderson movie in book form

that book sucks

zaphod confirmed as nick mullen

Found a cool edition of The Gunslinger from King's Dark Tower series and have learnt he then revised it later. Will the later books not make any sense, should I care?

^yah don't worry about it.

The original is better and tbh the first book is kinda stiff and a bit of an outlier in the series. It's still good though.

Worry more about the growing sense of disappointment as he fucks it all up during the last three books.

Also, I'm sure there are online sources for this, but let me know if you want me to fill you in on standalone king books that tie in. Written between DT books. 

Insomnia is a pretty important one, and one of my fave SKs

Thanks mate. I read it maybe 15 years ago, then listened to the audiobook a few years later when I was on the dole and chose to waste my days walking in random directions. This time I will go further in the series, I'm such a King fan so feel like an imposter for not tackling this yet. Is it like A Song of Ice and Fire? The last two of those were a slog.

is there a stephen king book for people who don't like him? the few i've read (cell, dolores claiborne, salem's lot, maybe half of the stand) were all pretty bad. does he ever restrain himself and lose the folksy style? he's one of those writers i feel like i should be into but everything seems like a goofy slog to get through. 

Man, that is not a great selection of starters lol. Cell is probably his worst book. Dolores Claiborne is part of three 'female perspective/feminist' books he put out in the 90s, probably his wife's influence. Gerald's Game is the best out of those. The Stand is great but the first half is def the best half. 

Hard to comment on 'folksy style'. Been reading him from such a young age I've lost any shred of objectivity there.

Try The Bachman Books for grim and non-supernatural stuff (maybe skip Rage though, that one is kinda adolescent). Pet Sematary is one of his best. Desperation + The Regulators are good fun.

The aforementioned Insomnia I recommend a lot though it has a slow start and the 'plot' is kinda all over the place and very hokey, but it's a cosmic horror thing so you may be into it.

Oh! Under The Dome?

I would go with Pet Sematary for King and The Long Walk from Bachman, if you aren't into those he probably isn't for you.

Yup good call. Personally Roadwork is my fave Bachman tho

i've heard those recommended by others, will have to give them a try. the pet sematary movie scared me when i was a kid, so maybe there's hope for the book. is carrie good? i think it's the best movie adaptation, but isn't it his first novel?

Yeah very first one. I find it a bit creaky tbh, along with Salem's Lot

Hearts in Atlantis (specifically, the novella called Hearts in Atlantis which is part of the book called that - this is NOT what the film is of) might be a good King tale for if you don't like King too.. i really liked that one (though, been years since i read it, maybe it's awful!). it's not even horror, or supernatural or anything like that. except it has this amazing weird doomed atmosphere.. 

^ another Dark Tower tie-in. And yeah all of Hearts in Atlantis amazing tbh

David Cronenberg - Consumed

Half way through this thriller about a globetrotting journalist couple with technolust who travel the world to interview unusual people. Topical range includes uxoricide, cannibalism, breast-dwelling insect kingdoms, Issei Sagawa, japanophilia and 3d printing. Expect gratuitous sex, fetishes a-go-go, body horror and extreme levels of technology worship. Heres a trailer, NSFW obvs.

Been reading The Hitchiker's Guide books and they're okay. Occasionally will give me a chuckle, they all seem a bit undercooked though, in terms of actual plot, character, and most importantly, humor. They should be a riot: I've always had a lean towards British humor, I love sci-fi, I love ridiculous shit...but not a single one is really delivering. On the fourth one now and that's sorta skewed away from Dent and Ford (though he just showed up for some reason) and if I get halfway through this and it's not getting better then I'm going to give up. This one is, so far, the worst of them, and I obviously wasn't in love with them anyway. They're quick enough reads, at least, I wouldn't have finished the first one if it wasn't easy to get through. 

edit: upside is there's some fun words that would make for good track names :)

  On 7/24/2018 at 12:49 AM, auxien said:

Been reading The Hitchiker's Guide books and they're okay. Occasionally will give me a chuckle, they all seem a bit undercooked though, in terms of actual plot, character, and most importantly, humor. They should be a riot: I've always had a lean towards British humor, I love sci-fi, I love ridiculous shit...but not a single one is really delivering. On the fourth one now and that's sorta skewed away from Dent and Ford (though he just showed up for some reason) and if I get halfway through this and it's not getting better then I'm going to give up. This one is, so far, the worst of them, and I obviously wasn't in love with them anyway. They're quick enough reads, at least, I wouldn't have finished the first one if it wasn't easy to get through. 

 

edit: upside is there's some fun words that would make for good track names :)

HHG is definitely more of a vehicle for Adams' ramblings, and the plot is secondary... The fourth one isn't as good as the first three, and the fifth one is just depressing. 

Give Illuminatus a try, I found it in a similar vein to HHG (disjointed plot included), but the lols are taken up a notch

Reading Kafka's The Trial, it's definitely interesting but I'm not finding it particularly stimulating right now. I might be able to nail down what rubs me the wrong way about Kafka's style later on, but as of right now I'm not quite able to

Kafka flows like constipation, gotta love him

i like CS Lewis's space trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength. especially the third. the first two are very old fashioned sort of sci-fi with spaceship trips to mars and venus, but the third takes place back on earth and has the best kind of sleepy-english-village-with-SOMETHING-WRONG atmosphere, conspiracy weirdness, cosmic horror creeping in at the edges, comedic farce, slight mushroom trip flavour, druidic ancient elemental power stuff.. of course they're full of sort of but not really, but sort of, christian stuff. my grandpa was a church dude (actually he met CS Lewis once as a kid) and the religious aspect of these reminds me of him - totally open and questioning and interested in everything. so, those are cool books..

anyway i just found out about this writer Charles Walter Stansby Williams, who was mates with Tolkien and Lewis, who wrote all these similar sort of occult thriller books in the 1930s - set in current times/real world, with weird spiritual/magic/unknown-science stuff that breaks through and turns everything into fantastical high stakes farce. i read the first few so far, they're great! one was about the holy grail turning up at a rural parish church and bad primal emotional magician guy + his cold, intelligence oriented researcher acquaintance trying to get hold of it, another about archetypal forms becoming material, another about the stone of solomon which could be divided without diminishing the original. ie, break off a chunk and now you have two stones of solomon, infinitely.

they're fairly low key, and fairly obvious to someone reading nowadays.. he has a really evocative turn of phrase though.. especially when characters experience visionary, hallucinato times. diggin' em.

edit: eg in the book about tarot cards there's an amazing sequence where the primal matter of creation is breaking through into mundane reality and everything dissolves into a golden fog emitted from within the atoms, through which the characters stumble around half corporeal and half not, with archetypal idea forms superimposed on their psyches and bodies, acting out a cosmic battle in an old country mansion (while at the same time sort of wobbling around bumping into the furniture because they, except for the lady who has an extremely jovial and open mindstate, can't see through the fog, and their own bodies appear to have the consistency of pudding..)

  On 8/1/2018 at 12:55 AM, wobbegongs said:

in the book about tarot cards there's an amazing sequence where the primal matter of creation is breaking through into mundane reality and everything dissolves into a golden fog emitted from within the atoms, through which the characters stumble around half corporeal and half not, with archetypal idea forms superimposed on their psyches and bodies, acting out a cosmic battle in an old country mansion (while at the same time sort of wobbling around bumping into the furniture because they, except for the lady who has an extremely jovial and open mindstate, can't see through the fog, and their own bodies appear to have the consistency of pudding..)

reading "on the road" a year after "dharma bums" is an interesting experience. i feel like the former lends a certain sense of sadness to the latter that may have only been implied otherwise, ie. seeing these character young & full of life & going on aventures, knowing that several years on they'll still be acting out the same patterns, but with youth gradually fading & a growing sense of existential aimlessness.

  On 7/14/2018 at 4:00 AM, sweepstakes said:

Finished Borne this morning. I think it was one of my favorite novels.

Really loved it. The film they are making will be amazing if they get the environments and creatures right.

and I think about to dive into The Book of the New Sun as well. Seems like the time is right.