Now Reading

  On 2/24/2013 at 1:59 AM, Ron Manager said:

 

  On 2/23/2013 at 5:05 PM, mokz said:

 

  On 2/23/2013 at 4:49 PM, Ron Manager said:

Speaking of PKD, just started The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Only ever read The Man In The High Castle. Looking forward to getting stuck in.

 

I think I've read most of PKD's work in the last twenty years but probably I missed some novels. I can't remember exactly what I've read because there's so much of it over such a long period and I just read what I came across unsystematically. At least I know I haven't read his Exegesis.

 

As for "now reading" I'm currently reading Carroll's Alice in Wonderland stories.

 

Any tips? I've got Ubik and Valis in mind to check out soon, as they seem to get mentioned quite a lot. I guess Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is probably a should-read too.

I don't remember everything, but yeah, the Electric Sheep and Valis-trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer) are good. I remember also liking The Time Out of Joint, Now Wait for Last Year and Galactic Pot Healer. A Scanner Darkly is also considered a classic but I did not personally find it that interesting. The animated movie was good though.

Ubik is brilliant, as is A Scanner Darkly.

  On 2/23/2013 at 7:50 PM, eyemdr said:

Just finished Tolkien's The Silmarillion. Interesting ancient history of Middle-earth and the lands across the sea to the west. Also has a good overview of the events just before The Lord of the Rings, going into a lil bit of detail about the origin of the wizards and the meetings of the White Council.

The Silmarillion would make an epic film.

Library of America has 3 volumes, smallish in size but 1000 pages long, where you basically get every book he has written.

(of PKD)

Awesome that you can buy them as a pack now ! You get these stories :

• The Man in the High Castle
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Ubik
• Martian Time-Slip
• Dr. Bloodmoney
• Now Wait for Last Year
• Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
• A Scanner Darkly
• A Maze of Death
• VALIS
• The Divine Invasion
• The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Those are hardcover books, take the dust cover off and it's like :

About the only thing left to get it the Short Story Collection, and you've got 95% of his written oeuvre.

whoa a pkd discussion on watmm??

  On 2/26/2013 at 4:22 PM, zaphod said:

whoa a pkd discussion on watmm??

whoa...sarcasm from zaphod??

lol

pkd vs Kurt vonnegut. go!

edit: i totally need that pkd set.

i personally dislike having so much of an author's work packed into a single book like that (or three books in this case). the paper quality is also hit or miss with the library of america books, it's often thin and brittle with clostraphobic margins. plus it looks lame to just have a diverse array of authors on your shelf in matching volumes like that, it brings to mind that encyclopedia brittanica cool kid from the 80s.

idk what the point of this post is exactly. juss sayin i guess

Carlos Fuentes: Terra Nostra

I'm finishing the first book now. Anyone read this book(s) yet?

  On 2/27/2013 at 5:38 AM, Alcofribas said:

i personally dislike having so much of an author's work packed into a single book like that (or three books in this case). the paper quality is also hit or miss with the library of america books, it's often thin and brittle with clostraphobic margins. plus it looks lame to just have a diverse array of authors on your shelf in matching volumes like that, it brings to mind that encyclopedia brittanica cool kid from the 80s.

 

idk what the point of this post is exactly. juss sayin i guess

Fair enough - I have no experience with library of america books so can't comment on that one way or the other.

I don't mind omnibus editions as long as they're done well....don't really mind what it looks like so much.

*omnibus through drywall*

how is that?

this is really good

just finished The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. strange and thought-provoking read, really enjoyed it. can't decide what exactly happened at the end. i'm a PKD newb, but would definitely recommend to anyone.

feast of the goat by mario vargas llosa

^ pkd is the man VALIS is the best shit ever

very sensitive and intelligent portrait. great research. full of love, brilliance and sadness as you would expect.

"

“Boat?”

This is a word is that flows down past the Ghats, past the ears of the five goats with stitched and torn woolen jumpers on, worn to their mid sections, portions and parts with bits of four skinny legs, some broken, some not there, some strong and some without hair, fur or the shock of no mop, there the animal with a coat that trots down from step to step so eloquently, sometimes hopping. These are the words that we put into the mouths of the herds, and that drain down the alleyways where the saucepans meet the curd, where the engineering disappears in a mist of smells, blocks of stones, cleanliness repelled. These are the voices that are always heard (by us)

“Boat?”

“Ghat….”

Now a mocking voice comes closer still, another place “Tomato season”

“He must be fucking joking, done so much grouting the cunt”

“TOMATO SEASON? Whar the fuck is he on about?”

There is another sentence around thoughts of two very aesthetic ladies and the end of weather…

<When the rivers froze (that wasn’t it!)>

…With the regurgitated sounds of the Ganges that was far away from that place, it was in essence a giant collapse of reflectors that time that sent the river bed bad, bad boy river with no common sense of the regret of the streaming course, no weather means no umbrella, no umbrella means no china. End of weather, for the next month there would be no rain or wind, the sun would remain to shine down on such imagination that was the world in the view of watching these people, experimental games gone wrong when one man sang a one man show that liked to include his fellow performers, and the beds were made of pressups. The TV showed flavours of burden (text in, pay up) and the rivers flowed both ways while the engines chugged in every street.

THERE’S NO CHARACTERISATION (because they are frames)

Imagine a circle of infinity, like blobs, WE KNOW, a circle is infinity, but that's pretty simple stuff, but you can do it, not explaining much to you, that's the trick, how can a word affect you and your civilization, civilisation like the english, the z is not too britizch and that’s trying too hard.

“He used to beat me up as a kid”

“I can see why”

“Where’s the tiles? They’ll eat you”

"

i'm in school currently so most of my reading has been stuff for courses...parts of The Iliad and The Aeneid, some Plato, some 17th and 18th century British Poetry (Blake is crazy but i like it, Byron is awesome as i already knew). read Black Thunder by Arna Bontemps recently, which is a fictionalization of a real slave revolt in 1800 in Virginia...it was oddly written (lots of changing narratorial voices, etc., cliched imagery at times), but there's a lot of mastery mixed in with awkwardness. overall a good book, and interesting partly because of its content and the time when it was written. we're now going over a poetry compilation he did of black American writers, mostly focused on the Harlem Renaissance folks. Langston Hughes is of course a highlight (does anyone here read poetry? i don't remember seeing much poetry mentioned).

beyond school stuff i'm reading a Kindle version of Unstuck #2 http://www.amazon.com/Unstuck-2-ebook/dp/B00AQ9RXZU/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1362773158&sr=8-12&keywords=unstuck... there's some interesting stuff in here so far. looking forward to The Water Spider, first read about the story here: http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/12/the-water-spider/ and my interest is thoroughly piqued.

Anyone else read this?

in that edition, too, which is an amazing cover.

feast of the goat was good i would recommend even tho the author is a foreigner

startin on martin amis' money now is it any good

yeah amis' money is a great read, sums up a lot, bit of extra fear and loathing.... nice