Gaming World Forums
General Category => Entertainment and Media => Topic started by: cowardknower on November 29, 2009, 05:01:56 am
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im reading the chronicles of thomas covenant the unbeliever and its like a big fucked up adult version of the chronicles of narnia.
it's pretty good though.
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i am playing bass
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i am playing muse
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im reading the chronicles of thomas covenant the unbeliever and its like a big fucked up adult version of the chronicles of narnia.
it's pretty good though.
that actually sounds like something I'd like to read.
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I've read two of the three chronicles, he rapes his daughter and is a leper. its a depressing book. I'm reading the third series and so far it's even worse.
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Book 6 of the Wheel of Time, A Crown of Swords I think?
I'm still digging the series.
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im reading waiting for the barbarians for the millionth time :)
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infinite jest
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just finished che's motorcycle diaries (gr8 book about 2 guys getting drunk and shooting dogs)
also reading Christopher Hitchen's Blood Empire and Class (about the uk/us special relationship) and whatever shit i've got lying around (tom waits: innocent when you dream, and charlie brooker's latest book).
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just finished che's motorcycle diaries (gr8 book about 2 guys getting drunk and shooting dogs)
also reading Christopher Hitchen's Blood Empire and Class (about the uk/us special relationship) and whatever shit i've got lying around (tom waits: innocent when you dream, and charlie brooker's latest book).
christopher hitchens is a pretty disgusting neocon
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he changes his political views more than most people change their clothes
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not really. he used to be a trotskyist now he's a neo-con.
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I've read two of the three chronicles, he rapes his daughter and is a leper. its a depressing book. I'm reading the third series and so far it's even worse.
dude you asshole do not spoil things man. what is wrong with you.
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I'm reading The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood right now.
drive a car off a cliff (http://www.gamingw.net/forums/index.php?topic=10811.0)
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not really. he used to be a trotskyist now he's a neo-con.
that's a pretty common transformation and I don't think it's a coincidence
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i am the opposite, i used to be really right-wing in my teens, now i'm liberal socialist
I remember steel said something about that also, that it's common for people to change from conservative libertarian to libsocialist and vice versa
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I'm almost halfway through Stranger in a Strange Land. It's entertaining, but not as thought-provoking as I expected (I've never read Heinlein). Some of the character interactions are REALLY cheesy, I'm talking like anime romance cheesy. You've got this innocent, socially inept dude from Mars who captures the attention of about 4 beautiful women who all happen to live in the same mansion. It's like Tenchi Muyo.
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that's a pretty common transformation and I don't think it's a coincidence
Why do you say that? I'm trying to educate myself on the various -isms of Marxism but i'm still pretty woefully ignorant on a lot of them
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Why do you say that? I'm trying to educate myself on the various -isms of Marxism but i'm still pretty woefully ignorant on a lot of them
revisionism
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dude you asshole do not spoil things man. what is wrong with you.
THE FACT THAT HE IS A LEPER DOESN'T SPOIL ANYTHING, ITS HIS CHARACTER SO QUIT OVEREACTING
maybe the daughter bit a little
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I'm almost halfway through Stranger in a Strange Land. It's entertaining, but not as thought-provoking as I expected (I've never read Heinlein). Some of the character interactions are REALLY cheesy, I'm talking like anime romance cheesy. You've got this innocent, socially inept dude from Mars who captures the attention of about 4 beautiful women who all happen to live in the same mansion. It's like Tenchi Muyo.
keep reading it's absolute garbage
get farnham's freehold next it's gold
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then for us, the living
that's all I've read by him. they're all pretty funny but they also made me feel kind of embarrassed for him. I wonder if fanfic writers are inspired by his writing style or if it's just a natural tendency
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I'm reading Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture by Marvin Harris
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http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Zombies-Classic-Ultraviolent/dp/1594743347
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i saw that the other day and asked myself: "who the fuck is actually buying and reading this horseshit?"
welp...
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i saw that the other day and asked myself: "who the fuck is actually buying and reading this horseshit?"
welp...
how dare they soil the godly work that is pride and prejudice
it makes me so mad grr
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i am playing muse
omg me three
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no wait i'm playing music. sorry my bad
reading: A BOOK FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO BE STINKING RICH BUT DON'T KNOW HOW
seriously thats what its called
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Gomorra and The Divine Comedy! I'm rich.
edit
oh, and I think there are some spelling errors in the topic title. You should change that before people say we-who-read can't spell.
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http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Zombies-Classic-Ultraviolent/dp/1594743347
Same here. I think I might pick up Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters next.
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how dare they soil the godly work that is pride and prejudice
it makes me so mad grr
it's not that... it's just of all the things out there you can read, that's what you're goin' with? :welp: I don't even mean this in too snobby of a way, it's like tabloids, fan-fic-y starwars expanded universe shit, or grocery store romance novels. You just sorta raise an eyebrow and ask "really?"
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jane austen is bad enough
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it's not that... it's just of all the things out there you can read, that's what you're goin' with? :welp: I don't even mean this in too snobby of a way, it's like tabloids, fan-fic-y starwars expanded universe shit, or grocery store romance novels. You just sorta raise an eyebrow and ask "really?"
eh, a lot of people dont take reading seriously. im just happy they are reading anything at all, i know too many people who go LOL BOOKS!!!!!!!! XD and then watch football all day.
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watch football all day read books all night :fogetcool:
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it's not that... it's just of all the things out there you can read, that's what you're goin' with? :welp: I don't even mean this in too snobby of a way, it's like tabloids, fan-fic-y starwars expanded universe shit, or grocery store romance novels. You just sorta raise an eyebrow and ask "really?"
It's not that I don't like reading good books. In the last month I've read both of Obama's books, three books on Lincoln, a book on Jackie Robinson's impact on society and baseball, two books on the Civil War, and one about the history of the Negro Leagues. It's nice to have something light and fun once in awhile. Besides, I fucking hated having to read her books in my high school English classes. It's nice to see someone desecrate her work and actually make it entertaining.
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idk man, it's still like the literary equivalent of buying a "weird al" album IMO
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I'm reading Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood and also some old Gore Vidal essays (they rule, he rules). Also today I picked up a secondhand book on homosexuality from the seventies put out by the Kinsley Institute that was basically a statistical study of diversity within the San Francisco gay community, it's probably really outdated by now but still pretty cool. Apparantly more than half of the males surveyed put their number of sexual partners at 500+ and the authors put a big asterisk after that for a note at the bottom saying MAY NOT BE TRUE.
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I am reading Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami and History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. Both are good.
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infinite jest
loved it
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i saw that the other day and asked myself: "who the fuck is actually buying and reading this horseshit?"
welp...
enough people for this: http://io9.com/5415829/pride-and-prejudice-and-zombies-will-be-a-miniseries
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I'm almost halfway through Stranger in a Strange Land. It's entertaining, but not as thought-provoking as I expected (I've never read Heinlein). Some of the character interactions are REALLY cheesy, I'm talking like anime romance cheesy. You've got this innocent, socially inept dude from Mars who captures the attention of about 4 beautiful women who all happen to live in the same mansion. It's like Tenchi Muyo.
i know, isn't it hilarious? i love the first mention of sexual activity:
"Presently Smith reached out and touched her right mammary gland."
genius!
but they reason they love him, anyway, is cause he's a fucking MARTIAN. i'd be in love with any half-attractive martian woman, i'm sure.
the book can be a huge drag at some parts. your anime romance, his characterization in general, the large section of futuristic legal/political intrigue in the beginning-to-middle, when jubal harshaw becomes the main character for the middle 400 pages or so, etc. that said, i thought it got much better by the end. once the action leaves that mansion it starts getting really good actually. i finished it for the first time about two weeks ago and a lot about it has been sticking in my head ever since.
as awkward as heinlein is with women, he actually has insight on sex. the relations between the characters are silly, but the book has more to say about HUMANITY and SEXUALITY than with PEOPLE and SEXUAL ACTIVITY. so... stranger in a strange land fails dramatically but the ideals are sound... some of them anyway.
at least i think so, but maybe i'm just into group sex.
"Sister lovers
Water brothers
And in time
Maybe others
So you see
What we can do is to try something new
If you're crazy too
I don't really see
Why can't we go on as three."
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farnham's freehold is the most sexual one of his, you should really check it out
his ideas about sex seemed old-fashioned revolutionary back when I read his books so maybe you just agree with him. he is definitely more idk, inventive with sexual themes than probably every writer I've read besides uh james joyce. which is a reason why I think of heinlein as the forefather of the modern erotic fanfiction movement
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Just finished The Wee Free Man and Earth is Room Enough this week.
I wanna pick up The Dispossessed next.
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that's a pretty common transformation and I don't think it's a coincidence
common according to what standards. for every trotskyist turned into neocon there is 2 marxist leninists turned into oil magnates and 10 maoists becoming glorious international buisnessmen
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finished infinite jest
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Just finished The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo its very good
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Just finished The Wee Free Man and Earth is Room Enough this week.
I wanna pick up The Dispossessed next.
EARTH IS ROOM ENOUGH WAS REALLY FUCKING GOOD.
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common according to what standards. for every trotskyist turned into neocon there is 2 marxist leninists turned into oil magnates and 10 maoists becoming glorious international buisnessmen
Common by the standard that a lot of prominent neocon ideologues in the us were trotskyists.
Perhaps those other transformations were no coincidence either :hmm: niiiiiiiice try marmot
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finished infinite jest
way to go
im reading broom of the system right now. wallace is such a great. seriously, i am p. sure i am getting a collection of his short stories for chirstmas and im sure ill plow through that too. he just rocks.
it's funny though; reading broom, he basically lifted the concept of some totally irrational manmade NOTHINGNESS (which was a key point in jest, got a lot of attention, though i forget what it was called... it was the big nothing where the president moved all the garbage and waste or whatever? some no mans land. you know what im talkin bout if youve read it) from broom
forgivable, just strikingly obvious. i feel it's a concept he found very funny, and was not able to flesh out to satisfaction in broom. jest, however, is over twice brooms size, so there he had plenty of room with which to work.
you guys should recommend me other authors. i like dfw. i like authors. run with it.
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i am reading the idiot by dostoyevsky. i am liking it all right. the prince lev is a nice guy but i don't see what the whole big deal is with natasha fillipovna...guess i'm not a pure soul. i just don't get it.
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EARTH IS ROOM ENOUGH WAS REALLY FUCKING GOOD.
I agree, it had some really advanced ideas and great stories. I still like Nine Tomorrows better though (Profession and The Feeling of Power are simply amazing).
I find it funny that Asimov evoked all those fantastic inventions but never got over punch cards.
I am now reading The Dispossessed and My Brother, the Yakuza.
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I am currently reading Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. It is fucking awesome.
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So I finished the Dispossessed and it was fantastic and is a most for anyone who's interested in sociology. I love it.
Read more books, you fucks
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I'm reading Andre Gide's 'The Immoralist', which is pretty good but not really what I want to read at the moment so I'm more trying to finish it off by this point. What a horrible way to do things huh but I already have a depressing amount of books around where I lost interest halfway through and never got around to finishing them so.
Also DietCoke or someone what's a good place to start with Slavoj Zizek? I picked up 'The Metastases Of Enjoyment' today and am kind of enjoying it and liking a lot of the ideas but as I don't know Hegel or whoever at all a lot of passages are kind of beyond me. Is there some kind of entry-level BABBY EDITION of this stuff with chewable cardboard pages and bright pictures of balloons or should I try to suck it up and start trying to read the dudes he references?
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lol i watched Zizek! and then forgot abotu that guy
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follow him on twitter. this is a funny thing
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lol i watched Zizek! and then forgot abotu that guy
do better than this if you're gonna discount guys nobody really knows two hecks about
i've been listening to him lately and i dunno what to think yet but this is doing nothing but making me get annoyed at the fact i'm listening to him which i don't deserve so: smell my feet
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Man I'm horribly ill-read in all this stuff so I have no idea if he's........canon lol or not in these circles. I liked a lot of stuff in the book and some of it about the uh 'postliberal' fetishisation of the Id in terms of the culture of Enjoy Youself ;) and the connection with fascist fake politics and spectacle seemed really good. Maybe he's just paraphrasing someone else though?? Gimme all opinions. Lets open up a dialectic in this motherfucker. I'm gonna watch that Zizek! thing tomorrow maybe.
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im read catch 22
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war and peace
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war and peace
lLLooong books?
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go read les mis or some shit
contemplate.
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lLLooong books?
yeah im on chapter 27 and my iphone says i'm 6% into the book aaaaa
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new york trilogy - book 3
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catch 22 is the shhiiiiiiiiit its a terrible shame it gets wasted on so many unwilling highschoolers :(
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i started reading samuel becketts trilogy and now im depressed. i know they sell harry potter books with darker alternate 'grownup' covers so people dont get embarrassed to read a colourful wizardbook on trains and such but i think this should go the other way as well so that stuff like this has a ~DisNeY PrINceSS~ version with pictures of playful kittens on every other page because i seriously spent the whole day in LISTLESS FUNK while reading it
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i hope that kitty can get out of his box!! @_@
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black jacobins
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Good Omens
I just got finished, and had to let someone know.
Now excuse me while I go read more books.
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Currently reading The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman.
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Man I'm horribly ill-read in all this stuff so I have no idea if he's........canon lol or not in these circles. I liked a lot of stuff in the book and some of it about the uh 'postliberal' fetishisation of the Id in terms of the culture of Enjoy Youself ;) and the connection with fascist fake politics and spectacle seemed really good. Maybe he's just paraphrasing someone else though?? Gimme all opinions. Lets open up a dialectic in this motherfucker. I'm gonna watch that Zizek! thing tomorrow maybe.
it's applied lacanian psychoanalysis as motivation (or justification) for structures in marxist theory. i'm not big on marxism or lacan, from what i can tell he's generally regarded as a SHOW BOAT and some people like him and some people don't. i don't know how accepted he is as an academic
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I found a copy of Black Hawk Down lying around. I might read it. Haven't read a book outside of school stuff in a while.
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Stephanie Meyer books is what I am currently reading and some romance pocketbooks
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oh ymyy god
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the corrections by jonathan franzen
it's one of those that ive been reading off and on for a really long time in between dozens of other non-fiction books.
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Just finished A Clockwork Orange. A friend said I should read it so I did...I really liked it! Hard to get used to the Nasdat at first but overall a pretty good book. Now I'm reading Where the Red Fern Grows because I had to read it in 7th grade and it was one of my favorite books...this will be my 3rd time reading it. I cried when I finished the first and second time :(
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The Infernal City (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Infernal_City). I don't normally read books based on games and such, but The Elder Scrolls has a fantastic world that has always been begging to be written about.
It's a pretty decent book so far, nothing fantastic or really memorable, but it's an enjoyable read. My only gripe is that the chapters are ridiculously short.
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you should all read The Manual of Detection because it rocks. seriously
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"Veronika Decides to Die" by Paulo Coelho
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the hero of ages trilogy, "the last empire" the well of accension" and "the hero of ages" i had to get the lase one from an importer since it wasn't out in britain yet, pretty good book interesteing idea for "magic" i put that in quotes buecase it's not exactly what i'd call magic but it works well in it's place.
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stephen king - under the dome
about 700 pages in
pretty decent so far, not as good as the stand or the dark tower series
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I just finished 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison and really really liked it, although I think it could have been stripped down a little! Like there was a symbolic aspect I guess where the main character is not meant to be taken as just one guy but kind of emblematic of black consciousness at the time or whatever and I think part of it too was one of those things where an entire era is meant to be invoked by a single person's experiences (like those historical novels where the hero accidentally meets every single important historical figure of the time etc *bumps into some guy its abe lincoln!! they shake hands*) but this didn't mesh too well with the more realist style of the writing and parts of the plot. The shock therapy part especially seems thrown in there. It was a good book though I want to read more black fiction now!
I've started 'Cousin Bette' by Balzac and am enjoying it, although I'm not liking it as much as 'Cousin Pons'. Maybe that's because it all seems very mannered after the Ellison book though. Middle-class french people with problems!! I'll keep going.
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finished 451. it was really good
now crying of lot 49
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i loooove books
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the last book I read was Plato's Phaedrus. I've got like 3 unfinished books lying around my dorm room that I plan on reading eventually.
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what are some good lighter reads you guys like
i dont think 49 is clicking so much..
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49 owns, it's kinda confusing in the beginning but gets a lot better. keep going ... let radiohead guide u
i'm enjoying hesse's the prodigy atm, you could try that
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currently reading persepolis by marjane satrapi. very excellent, heartwarming/breaking account of growing up in iran during the islamic revolution.
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49 owns, it's kinda confusing in the beginning but gets a lot better. keep going ... let radiohead guide u
i'm enjoying hesse's the prodigy atm, you could try that
im following the plot really well. i actually reread from like 20 to 100 to get a better feel for the chain of events cuz they can seem so random if you dont catch the links.
some passages are really enjoyable but i just dont think it's as interesting stylistically as GR was. i like all the jacobean allusions and it WORKS i guess but thank god it's short
i guess this is just what micropynchon looks like.
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I keep meaning to check out Lot 49 since I loved Gravity's Rainbow but idk I tried it once and it felt like a smug, bad parody of that whole style. I don't even remember what it was about it but a lot of that kind of US postmodernism kind of walks a fine line for me between kinda gleefully anarchic and obnoxiously indulgent and self-absorbed. It's been a couple years though so ???
I finished the Balzac one it was good although holy shit none of those french dudes could end a novel to save their lives. Every time I read one of them you get the impression they say everything they want to 50 pages before the end and the rest of it just kind of goes on until someone dies and then there's a funeral and then there's what happens after the funeral and so on until every conceivable loose end has been tied up. Like there was this bizarre bit at the end with a secret ring of assassins (?!) in an otherwise pretty down-to-earth novel, and it exists only to kill off a couple characters and then is never mentioned again. And there's the philandering father who runs off in disgrace and then turns up again by a weird coincidence and then rehabilitates himself before running off again. It doesn't add anything it's just sort of distractingly there to drive home what we've already picked up over the course of the whole book beforehand. Also all of Balzac's books are kind of part of one big series and you have characters recurring in different roles over different books etc, which is fine on paper but in the book it's kind of weird having these incredibly colourful and rounded people just pop in for a single scene and disappear again. It's like watching a film and having some scene-stealing minor character come out of nowhere in the third act and then leave suddenly without doing anything. Actually I liked it and his writing style a whole lot because I enjoy reading books by people who seem actually interested in life and people instead of just viewing them as props but yeah the endings are always frustratingly dragged out.
I've started reading 'Maldoror' by the Comte de Lautreamont which is great but heavy-going so I'm also reading the Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens and liking that a lot too. You can uh definitely tell he's being paid by the word and the whole thing is like 800+ pages long and mostly improvised so I'm kind of dreading that part of it but it's also pretty funny and the writing style works well with the characters and humour so.
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what are some good lighter reads you guys like
i dont think 49 is clicking so much..
i mainly read essays or detective shit (chandler 4 life) if i just want something light to chill out to but if you want something thats uh more worthwhile as well as light you should check out 'invisible cities' by italo calvino. it's really short (you could finish it in a couple hours) and uh deliberately disconnected in a sense that a lot of it is just broken up into page-long descriptions of different cities which are basically standalone prose poems but it's a really great and beautiful book so maybe that??
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i just picked up infinite jest again for another attempt and i'm mostly liking it so far at about 150 pages in. there are some really hilarious parts with Don Gately or the Erdedy guy and the pot obsession. anyone get through this book?
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Also DietCoke or someone what's a good place to start with Slavoj Zizek? I picked up 'The Metastases Of Enjoyment' today and am kind of enjoying it and liking a lot of the ideas but as I don't know Hegel or whoever at all a lot of passages are kind of beyond me. Is there some kind of entry-level BABBY EDITION of this stuff with chewable cardboard pages and bright pictures of balloons or should I try to suck it up and start trying to read the dudes he references?
Zizek is really readable and does a good job of relating a lot of lofty shit to everyday life examples, but if you want to really "know where he's comin' from" you'd have to be familiar with Lacan and Hegel.... and if you want to really know where they're coming from you'd have to be familiar with Freud and Kant... and on and on and on. It's all incredibly boring and I wouldn't recommend digging too deep into it, leave it for the vultures in philosophy departments who've resigned themselves to picking at those corpses for a living. Zizek's writing kinda provides a 'good enough' understanding of lacanian psychoanalysis and hegelian bullshitting since he's a respected scholar in both schools of thought you really don't have to go further unless a particular reference intrigues you enough to do so.
The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Ticklish Subject, The Fragile Absolute, The Plague of Fantasies, In Defense of Lost Causes, and The Parallax View are all really good books by him that I'd recommend reading if you're into this kinda shit but you're unlikely to find anything in his work that's particularly groundbreaking. When you get right down to it, he's an old wishy-washy E-bloc hegel-obsessed Marxist who likes to tease away at politics, religion, and culture with lacanian psychoanalysis and a dirty sense of humor.
His buddy Alain Badiou has been writing some pretty interesting stuff lately, but it's French continental philosophy translated into english so keep that in mind if you ever choose to give him a whirl.
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Yeah I am cautious about getting into philosophy shit because so much of it seems to make sense only as a response to or elaboration of other philosophy shit, I just feel like a dummy when I like some of the ideas in this stuff but am only grasping them on the shallowest possible level. Superegos Are Bad!! I Am Eight Years Old. It's mainly the Lacan stuff that goes way past me though so idk. I've been meaning to check out Badiou too mainly because he seems to make everyone uncomfortable.
do you know if Deleuze is good or not, he was gonna be next on my list because he seems to be brought up a lot in this context and the capitalism & schizophrenia thing sounds interesting but if it's just uh french philosophy with added marxism then nah im good lol
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I ma reading Sight of Proteus by Charles Sheffield. It's a sci-fi centered around the exploits of the Office of Form Change. People who control legal and illegal forms a century from now. Forms being the physical remodelling of people to have special abilities or a given look.
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do you know if Deleuze is good or not, he was gonna be next on my list because he seems to be brought up a lot in this context and the capitalism & schizophrenia thing sounds interesting but if it's just uh french philosophy with added marxism then nah im good lol
Everything I know about Deleuze or Guattari has been second hand. I have almost no interest in reading them any time soon because the excerpts I have read were stilted as hell and filled with all that pomo jargon. I don't know if it's just the way people in France talk or a conscious effort on the part of translators to ensure nobody reads it, but it comes out sounding like unreadable garbage in English.
Frankly, my position on the whole lot of them is similar to Chomsky's (http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html): It's a big cult, not particularly useful, and basically autofellatio for academics. Zizek is at least fun to read and only sometimes a pain in the ass.
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Currently reading The Two Towers.... after I'm done with LOTR it's time for either Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche of The Metamorphosis by Kafka
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That Chomsky thing rules but I find some of this stuff kind of worthwhile on a strictly personal level! I mean I'd hesitate to call any of it true (or........"true" heh) or valuable at all but just taken as stuff to think about/argue with it can be fun. iirc you pointed out in the old lit topic that all those situationist guys were just rich kids messing around and I do think a lot of the psychogeographical stuff they talked about is stupid and unhelpful on any practical level at all but it's fun to think about. I wouldn't trust these guys in terms of ideas to live by at all so much as how much shoptalk I have to slog through to find interesting thoughts (this is a very collegekid thing to say but whatever!)
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That Chomsky thing rules but I find some of this stuff kind of worthwhile on a strictly personal level! I mean I'd hesitate to call any of it true (or........"true" heh) or valuable at all but just taken as stuff to think about/argue with it can be fun. iirc you pointed out in the old lit topic that all those situationist guys were just rich kids messing around and I do think a lot of the psychogeographical stuff they talked about is stupid and unhelpful on any practical level at all but it's fun to think about. I wouldn't trust these guys in terms of ideas to live by at all so much as how much shoptalk I have to slog through to find interesting thoughts (this is a very collegekid thing to say but whatever!)
the situationists were definitely revolutionaries who's ideas(at least Debord's) should be taken seriously, I just like to poke fun at them being trust fund brats because a lot of people I know who claim to be "influenced" by the situationists are themselves a bunch of white upper middle class kids who've never had to support themselves for a day in their lives. It's funny to me that the folks shouting "never work" are always the ones who've never had to. :sport:
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Currently reading The Two Towers.... after I'm done with LOTR it's time for either Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche of The Metamorphosis by Kafka
go with Kafka
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go with Kafka
OK
http://www.sonn-d-robots.com/dfw/readings/Remarks-on-Kafka.mp3
http://www.sonn-d-robots.com/dfw/readings/
found this yesterday
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I DONT TOTALLY UNDERSTAND BUT I SURE LIKE TO LISTEN
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the situationists were definitely revolutionaries who's ideas(at least Debord's) should be taken seriously, I just like to poke fun at them being trust fund brats because a lot of people I know who claim to be "influenced" by the situationists are themselves a bunch of white upper middle class kids who've never had to support themselves for a day in their lives. It's funny to me that the folks shouting "never work" are always the ones who've never had to. :sport:
my family is fuckin in the bills i have the best life im a real lucky kid
just playin the cards...
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my family is fuckin in the bills i have the best life im a real lucky kid
just playin the cards...
Live it up dogg
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zizek is a baffoon. i havent read his shit but ive seen the documentary and while he did some p. good trolling, he said a lot of nonsense, and i am suspecting its probably the same with his works, especially because i know what type of people like them (dumbasses who substitute literary references and jargon for substance)
i am reading bolano's 2666 in spanish and some random poetry books. mayakovsky now is my fav poet
honestly, instead of reading the latest abortions of those living corpses from the really corrupt intellectual elite of paris, y'all should read some wittgenstein. after reading dat shit you'd understand why these folks and their zany word play are awful. They start from the idea tthat by making the correct configuration of words, you'll find some truth. thats why these people write 1000 pg tomes of nothing. philosophical propositions say nothing. the only use philosophy has is in clarification:
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the situationists were definitely revolutionaries who's ideas(at least Debord's) should be taken seriously, I just like to poke fun at them being trust fund brats because a lot of people I know who claim to be "influenced" by the situationists are themselves a bunch of white upper middle class kids who've never had to support themselves for a day in their lives. It's funny to me that the folks shouting "never work" are always the ones who've never had to. :sport:
deboring is the worst. vaneigem is much better man
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i should probably read him yeah but honestly part of why i like checking out these guys is because im doing a pure maths course and find it kind of refreshing to hear ideas like this even if (or possibly because) theyre probably bullshit! i get enough rigorous set theory at home
i do think you could probably carve out a good niche in academia by latching on to some incomprehensible dude and then talking like mr. myagi all the time though. when one analyses foucault does foucault not also analyse you?? when you radicalise the superstructure you also superstructuralise the radical. one thinks of homer......
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hi marmot.
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hi earl
chip
i rediscovered gw when someone sent me a chatlog about some people divorcing in irc and i thought that was p. cool
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do you know any good música hispana tradicional?
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zizek is a baffoon. i havent read his shit but ive seen the documentary and while he did some p. good trolling, he said a lot of nonsense, and i am suspecting its probably the same with his works, especially because i know what type of people like them (dumbasses who substitute literary references and jargon for substance)
i am reading bolano's 2666 in spanish and some random poetry books. mayakovsky now is my fav poet
honestly, instead of reading the latest abortions of those living corpses from the really corrupt intellectual elite of paris, y'all should read some wittgenstein. after reading dat shit you'd understand why these folks and their zany word play are awful. They start from the idea tthat by making the correct configuration of words, you'll find some truth. thats why these people write 1000 pg tomes of nothing. philosophical propositions say nothing. the only use philosophy has is in clarification:
one couldan't examine the limits of a form with/out pushing the boundaries one-self
also if zizek was a town he'd be jargon city. also also current french (postmodernist?) philosophy is pretty much the opposite of what you said?
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one couldan't examine the limits of a form with/out pushing the boundaries one-self
also if zizek was a town he'd be jargon city. also also current french (postmodernist?) philosophy is pretty much the opposite of what you said?
not really
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got 2666 on a total whim
tempted to get into that but not sure if worth it
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zizek is a baffoon. i havent read his shit but ive seen the documentary and while he did some p. good trolling, he said a lot of nonsense, and i am suspecting its probably the same with his works, especially because i know what type of people like them (dumbasses who substitute literary references and jargon for substance)
He's fun to read but there's really nothing of great importance in his work. Its really just a bunch of psychoanalysis of popular culture, the occasional Stalinist posturing(immediately followed by digression), and dirty jokes.
also Wittgenstein owns, I've been reading Philosophical Investigations at work on my downtime when I'm not fucking around on my phone.
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i've always suspected that zizek suffers from some undiagnosed but exceptionally high functioning autism. i disagree with so much he says, but i can't help but find him interesting in the same way i find a literary character interesting. he's a profoundly wacky dude.
also i love watching him speak. he reminds me of the character vincent d'onofrio played in men in black where he played this 20 foot tall insect trying to fit in a 6 foot tall man's body. he's perpetually uncomfortable and always talks as though someone has a gun to his head.
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i just picked up infinite jest again for another attempt and i'm mostly liking it so far at about 150 pages in. there are some really hilarious parts with Don Gately or the Erdedy guy and the pot obsession. anyone get through this book?
i'm 600 pages in. it has some pretty great moments so far but i'll let em come to you because it's cool when things start clicking together in it.
also gotta read some dope lit crit essays for a class
and some dumb australian books for two other classes
i do think you could probably carve out a good niche in academia by latching on to some incomprehensible dude and then talking like mr. myagi all the time though. when one analyses foucault does foucault not also analyse you?? when you radicalise the superstructure you also superstructuralise the radical. one thinks of homer......
hahahahahah that's really good
remarks-
zizek:
turn churches into grain silos is awesome. i love that he picked grain silos but i'm not sure why i love that. something about silos i guess?
wittgenstein:
only read tractatus what do i think i think it was cool
situationists:
best group
(...he typed into his imac)
here's some fun reading for you all, http://www.theabsolute.net/misogyny/onwomen.html schopenhauer, nothing new, many of you have probably read it as it's kind of well-known if you know much about schop but damn i love this essay
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not really
yeah really, you seem unaware that they're working from a completely different framework. it's like criticising atheism for not having any authoratative scripture and not dealing with the second comming of christ, or a book for having the words formed into sentences rather than arranged alphabetically
also zizek is definitely jargon laden (other and Other are really Really different) and postmodernism wouldn't make claims towards finding truth (this is pretty much what characterises postmodernism)
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you're all fat babies writhing around in your full diapers.
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I got given foucault's pendulum and I liked the name of the rose so I'm gonna read that. I also heard it's got sephiroth in it??
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been reading a ray bradbury collection of short stories called "The Golden Apples of the Sun". It's ok. Bradbury is not my fav but it's the only book I have currently.
Just got Building Harlequin's Moon by larry niven. gonna start it tonight i think.
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i'm halfway through pickwick papers and really enjoying it a lot! i feel sorta guilty about liking it so much because there's a lot of stuff i think would be a little gross if i analysed it too much (sam weller is a great character but "lovable cockney servant" is not something i wanna defend particularly) but i don't really care because the tone of the whole thing is so gleeful. i was kind of suspicious of dickens for ages partly because of the whole GREATS OF LITERATURE thing and partly because whenever i saw an adaptation of like a christmas carol or oliver twist or great expectations it always seemed very trite. i want to pick up more of his stuff now though. does anyone know if 'bleak house' is good because it sounds a lot more interesting than some of his other stuff.
also i read christopher isherwood's 'a single man' today and thought it was pretty great, although i have mixed feelings about the ending.
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finished pickwick papers, still like it a lot. there's a lot of sentimental stuff but the other side of that is a real affection for the characters and humanity as a whole that i enjoyed a lot. i also read a book of julio cortazar short stories which was really good.
i just started 'the decameron' by boccaccio, it's this 14th-century book set during the black death which is basically a collection of 100 stories told over 10 days by people trying to wait out the plague. it's also raw as hell, i opened a chapter at random after i got it and it turned out to be a dirty story about a gardener and eight horny nuns who slept with him on a rota. the stuff about the plague is horrifying aaa. i am liking it a lot so far!
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i am reading bolano's 2666 in spanish and
how do you like it? i'm at the beginning of the seocnd book (so around halfway) and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. what is the point of talking about every fucking woman killed every other page???i was
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how do you like it? i'm at the beginning of the seocnd book (so around halfway) and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. what is the point of talking about every fucking woman killed every other page???i was
what is the point of anything
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what? i mean i'd understand if it had some meaningful relation to the story at hand or mauybe it gets explained later on but it seems really pointless. bolano already explained in the beginning that hundreds of women around Santa Teresa were getting killed and could have left it at that - except every other page the main plot is cut into an explanation of how the next woman was killed and its just all forgettable, especially with all the little details and names he includes into each case
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let it overwhelm you bub. feel your own powerlessness as it keeps happening. it has been happening for years, and it could keep happening. and all you yourself can do is read it and be horrified. don't skip any of them.
what is the point of anything- and what is the point of the real murders ever happening
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i just started 'the decameron' by boccaccio, it's this 14th-century book set during the black death which is basically a collection of 100 stories told over 10 days by people trying to wait out the plague. it's also raw as hell, i opened a chapter at random after i got it and it turned out to be a dirty story about a gardener and eight horny nuns who slept with him on a rota. the stuff about the plague is horrifying aaa. i am liking it a lot so far!
that sounds ill i'm gonna get that
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i just started 'the decameron' by boccaccio, it's this 14th-century book set during the black death which is basically a collection of 100 stories told over 10 days by people trying to wait out the plague. it's also raw as hell, i opened a chapter at random after i got it and it turned out to be a dirty story about a gardener and eight horny nuns who slept with him on a rota. the stuff about the plague is horrifying aaa. i am liking it a lot so far!
no fucking way. this is a pretty big book that got namedropped/we had to know about in our mother language classes (finland :rolleyes: ) but goddamnit if the teachers knew the content of that book what the hell.
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wittgenstein... or wolfenstein? hmm, hard decicion...
WITTGENSTEIN 3D (SHOOT THROUGH BULLSHIT). it's just a joke! i don't read wittgenstein and i have been preparing this joke for the whole day!!
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obama decepticons
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shit it got really good
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"The Catcher in the Rye" by J. D. Salinger
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is it because of the new southpark you phony!!!
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let it overwhelm you bub. feel your own powerlessness as it keeps happening. it has been happening for years, and it could keep happening. and all you yourself can do is read it and be horrified. don't skip any of them.
what is the point of anything- and what is the point of the real murders ever happening
way to go. i am so lazy on forums :fogetshrug:
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i am playing bass
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you're all fat babies writhing around in your full diapers.
who needs literature........... when u have communism
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been reading a ray bradbury collection of short stories called "The Golden Apples of the Sun". It's ok. Bradbury is not my fav but it's the only book I have currently.
Just got Building Harlequin's Moon by larry niven. gonna start it tonight i think.
yo read The Illustrated Man. you WILL like it.
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can someone poast a link to the one thread steel made a while back with all those recommendations in it?
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he didn't make it, but are you talking about: http://www.gamingw.net/forums/index.php?topic=77211.0 this one? he posted in it alot (so did you i think). i read through it recently. maybe you are talking about a different one.
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he didn't make it, but are you talking about: http://www.gamingw.net/forums/index.php?topic=77211.0 this one? he posted in it alot (so did you i think). i read through it recently. maybe you are talking about a different one.
idk. i'll look through it
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http://www.gamingw.net/forums/index.php?topic=77770.0 is it this one? there don't look like there are too many recs though. i think ryan made a topic with all the modern lit recommendations in it http://www.gamingw.net/forums/index.php?topic=78518.0
i've stopped reading the decameron for the moment because it's kind of uh just crude short tales for the most part! there's nothing wrong with that but i'm not sure if i wanna plough through 100 of them right now. i just finished 'at swim-two-birds' by flann o'brien and a bunch of the newspaper columns he did as miles na gopaleen, they're all pretty great. at swim-two-birds in particular is kind of famous for being uh pre-postmodernism (drowning in prefixes, help) and metafiction and all that but it's also very funny and weird too! a lot of the humour for me came from this really dead-on take on dublin speech patterns etc and i'm not sure how well that'd translate abroad but i'd still recommend it.
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didn't steel make a sticky in his forum that was like READ THESE WHEN MY EYES CAN FOCUS ON STUFF
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Reading A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen. One of my favorite authors! Only problem is his books make me depressed by like the second page :(
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i'm reading a mao biography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao:_The_Unknown_Story)
yes i know it's not very good - i've read most of the critisisms - but I don't have anything else to read for now
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Didn't Diet Coke rip apart that book in another thread awhile ago? Or maybe it was another book on Mao. All I know is he ripped apart a book on Mao.
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i don't know it was probably this one
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i'm reading a mao biography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao:_The_Unknown_Story)
yes i know it's not very good - i've read most of the critisisms - but I don't have anything else to read for now
lol why would you even read that? that book is huge, a bunch of lies/bunk sources(but lots of them!) and openly sells itself as revisionist history
throw it away and go to a bookstore tomorrow
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Reading A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen. One of my favorite authors! Only problem is his books make me depressed by like the second page :(
Almost the entire body of Derrick Jensen's work is completely awful sentimental bullshit and transparent radical posturing. Anyone advocating abandonment of industrial society just doesn't get it and will always remain politically castrated.
he's got some interesting things to say about violence... but on the other hand he openly tells people that he cries about salmon
His book Welcome to the Machine will give you a straight up panic attack, I'll give him that much
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lol why would you even read that? that book is huge, a bunch of lies/bunk sources(but lots of them!) and openly sells itself as revisionist history
throw it away and go to a bookstore tomorrow
i don't know someone gave it to me for my birthday and once i read up on it i kinda started hating them for giving it to me. i just started reading it for kicks to see how bad it was and it pretty much reads like a Crichton action-movie novel right now. hmmm I guess I could start reading tropic of cancer which i totally forgot i had on me.
I am considering buying a real biography though - do you have any suggestions?
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i don't know someone gave it to me for my birthday and once i read up on it i kinda started hating them for giving it to me. i just started reading it for kicks to see how bad it was and it pretty much reads like a Crichton action-movie novel right now. hmmm I guess I could start reading tropic of cancer which i totally forgot i had on me.
I am considering buying a real biography though - do you have any suggestions?
there's pretty much no good biography about Mao. Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China is probably the best book to read if you're interested in the subject.
I'm not really into biographies tbqh so I'm not the one to ask about em
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i'm reading through wittgenstein's philosophical investigations and it's pretty much nothing like what marmot said (so far)
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modern lit was the best thread
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Almost through reading Orcs: by Stan Nichols
I don't know what the standards for fantasy reading are around this circle of all places, but I really like what I'm reading so far, and could easily recommend it to others.
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I just read The Rum Diary. It's the first book I've completed in a long time, so I really wanted to mention it.
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I finished Moon Palace by Paul Auster a couple of days ago. It was pretty good!!!! Glen Hobbie is a decent baseball player, but he will never make it big because "hobbie" refers to amateurism
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I'm going to continue reading Hunter S. Thompson, so I picked up Gonzo Papers Volume 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time. In addition, I acquired Dirk Gently's Holistic Detecrive Agency by Douglas Adams for purposes of purely fictional reading.
I wish I had started reading again sooner, because it's much more rewarding than any time waster.
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I've finally decided to start working on the small backlog of books I got.
Reading Halo: Contact Harvest. Going kind of slow as I've been distracted from finals as of late. Also, I discovered its a prequel and I generally don't love prequels.
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Halo: Contact Harvest. I finally ACTUALLY started to read a decent amount of it (about halfway through). It's actually gotten pretty good... now that its describing first contact with the covenant. All the stuff before hand was kind of dull in comparison.
Also wanted to save this thread.
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I'm reading Moby Dick, it's really good. There's a lot about whales in it!! "Enough with the whales Einstein". Like there's whole chapters justifying the existence of a vindictive white whale and also notes on whale species and whaling lore and I think I understand what it's trying to do but uh it's kind of tiresome because a lot of the stuff on Ahab especially is really good and sharp but it kind of gets buried under justifications and kind of worthless digressions. Like I guess the point is that the devil's in the details and that rather than seeing it all as a big allegory (worthless specifics framing Big Idea) it's exactly the specifics which make it interesting and important but the actual writing consists mostly of good and evocative ideas which get thorougly drained of all interest as the book goes on and on about their basis in reality. Ahab rules though and I'm still enjoying it.
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I just finished King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Lorenz, and The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. Now I'm reading Godel, Escher, Bach, which i feel like hasn't really gotten to the point yet but, I'm only about 1/4 of the way through and it is really interesting anyway. I'd recommend any of the three to pretty much anyone interested in just some interesting general knowledge level nonfiction.
edit: it was actually kind of cool. I was just reading in GEB about propositional calculus, and my precalc teacher actually explained something using one of the rules out of it, which i thought was pretty neat. you know, cause i knew what was up and no one else did, so fuck their shit, etc.
edit2: catamites, my dad was telling me about this book he read all about whalers from new england. i think it was a narrative but was very informative and based actual history. i couldnt tell from your post whether you liked the details in moby dick, or didnt, or that you liked the details but just not the way they were used in the scope of the novel. i think its the third option, but i just thought i'd mention this book to you. i will ask my dad tommorow what the title is.
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The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling. This book explores hacker culture, the public's view of hackers, and the LEA's dealing with them. It's centered around a large sting operation and ensuing court circus and explores how this affected politics and civil libertarianism in particular.
Available online http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html or on eBay. I'm reading the paper version.
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I'm reading the Shambala Guide to Taoism then I'll be reading the Chinese classic Journey to the West.
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The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton. It's a surreal comedy/thriller set in 1900s London. It has poets arguing passionately about philosophy, chaos vs. order, anarchy, bombs, detectives, sword duels, etc. I loved it, it's probably the funniest book I've ever read and great in many other ways too
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I just started reading A Game of Thrones because HBO is coming out with a tv series based on it and I've always heard great things about the book so I figured I should read the source material first. I've only read the first three chapters and I'm enjoying it so far.
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I finished The Magicians by Lev Grossman a week ago. It's marketed as "harry potter for adults" which is pretty funny, since anybody who reads it for that reason is going to be very disappointed. I'm sure that a lot of semi-autistic manchildren have HURLED down the book in a rage when the protagonist they had been projecting themselves onto cheats on his ultimate nerd wish-fulfillment girlfriend. It's also not a very honest comparison as the books have nothing in common beyond "there's this secret school that teaches magic". It's pretty obviously an anti-escapist novel! There's a running theme of powerful magicians being deeply miserable people, and it's hinted that the reason they can even do magic in the first place is because they hate their lives so much and want to change things so badly that it just comes naturally. Anyways, I liked the book a lot, and it's really easy to get into. I'd definitely recommend it to someone who has been reading WARCRAFT: THE NOVELISATION or something and wants to step up their game a lil bit.
I also just started on Life of Pi by Yann Martel, since everybody I know who reads books has been q-tipping their dickhole over it for a while now. Man oh man. Based on the fact that his latest book (Beatrice and Virgil) is an allegorical thing involving talking animals, I kind of assumed this book would largely be about Pi and a big dumb talking tiger having achingly philosophical discussions on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, but it is literally about a boy trying to survive on a lifeboat with a goddamn actual man-eating tiger. I mean, I eventually would have read it either way, It's just that I would have read it sooner if I had known this.
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Now reading "Carrie" for the first time on my droid since I only have a virtual copy and no E-Reader like Kindle or something. It's actually pretty good.
Also, still slowly trudging through Contact Harvest. Work, video games, forgetfulness, and finally laziness have largely got in the way of reading physical books. Which is what Contact Harvest is in this case, not because its a bad book.
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i've never read the great gatsby so i just got a copy and i'm going to read it and tell you all what i think! the past three books i've read though all have a character who mentions it at least once and its always been on my list to read so i finally got round to getting a copy.
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I started Finnegans Wake on the basis that my college has a whole shelf full of books trying to explain it so I might as well make use of them to get the fucking thing out of the way early / spend rest of life reading agatha christie without guilt. The language is actually a lot of fun at times once you get into the flow but it's still kind of a struggle and I have to keep flicking between it and the CliffNote things by Joseph "Star Wars" Campbell which is basically just a plot summary/translation of everything in the book. "Verisimilee thrau bellingtons bay a cruk, a crux done dithers for thine din" => He opened the door.
Also yeah Trash Head 2 I haven't read Life of Pi but kind of assumed the same thing! I might have to check it out now
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I started Finnegans Wake on the basis that my college has a whole shelf full of books trying to explain it so I might as well make use of them to get the fucking thing out of the way early / spend rest of life reading agatha christie without guilt. The language is actually a lot of fun at times once you get into the flow but it's still kind of a struggle and I have to keep flicking between it and the CliffNote things by Joseph "Star Wars" Campbell which is basically just a plot summary/translation of everything in the book. "Verisimilee thrau bellingtons bay a cruk, a crux done dithers for thine din" => He opened the door.
Also yeah Trash Head 2 I haven't read Life of Pi but kind of assumed the same thing! I might have to check it out now
serious question: why are your reading finnegans wake?
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The Lies of Lock Lamora.
Basically it's a fantasy novel centered around the Gentlemen Bastards, a group of con artists as they con and cheat people. It's really enjoyable and funny, really really funny. Highly recommend for those intereested in confidence games.
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serious question: why are your reading finnegans wake?
Curiosity I guess?? Also I liked Ulysses a whole lot and thought it was p rewarding once you get the hang of the writing and start to notice what's going on! I thought Finnegans Wake would be the same and by some accounts it is so I guess it's a question of how much work I can stand to put into it (probably not enough)
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the reason i asked is because i've routinely heard that the story is just not interesting enough to warrant spending such a ridiculous amount of time and effort in order to even be understood
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yo read The Illustrated Man. you WILL like it.
whoa super late but that was the first bradbury i ever read and i did indeed like it, and it's why i am willing to read other bradbury books.
i've been reading a lot of philosophy and stuff! I have some Camus, The Plague which I'll be starting soon, and The Fall which I read and LOVED. Such a fantastic book, there are just so many good lines in it. It's one of those that I will end up reading over and over again. I'm still looking for The Stranger (I can get it off amazon or w/e but seriously I haven't found it any bookstores, new or used, it's crazy) because it's like THE Camus book.
I've read a bunch of Kafka, I have a collection of his stories and I read them in between longer books. Kafka is fucking awesome, I think I like A Hunger Artist the best so far (Metamorphasis was good, really good, but A Hunger Artist just struck a chord with me).
I'm reading Sartre's The Wall right now (5 stories, I've finished The Wall, The Room, and Erostratus so far). Sartre is an excellent writer, and The Wall and Erostratus were both AMAZING. I'm still liking the other stories, and I can't wait to start the last one... Childhood of a Leader, sounds fucking intense. Intimacy is good but a little dry so far.
I also have Walden by Thoreau which im so psyched to start! I found it in a used bookstore after searching B&N and Borders, it was like 4 bucks.
I also have Meditations by Marcus Aurelius which is very nice but not really a novel.
If anybody has any good philosophy, especially existentialist philosophy novels, I'm all about it right now!
I'm also looking for some Anton Chekhov collections, haven't found any yet and I've heard he's like the master of short story writing.
OH! I read The Old Man and the Sea a month or so ago. Incredible book! I read it in one sitting, it was so gripping and intense. I was literally tired after reading it. Hemingway is the man!
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the reason i asked is because i've routinely heard that the story is just not interesting enough to warrant spending such a ridiculous amount of time and effort in order to even be understood
catamites is from dublin iirc they all speak like that there :welp:
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whoa super late but that was the first bradbury i ever read and i did indeed like it, and it's why i am willing to read other bradbury books.
i've been reading a lot of philosophy and stuff! I have some Camus, The Plague which I'll be starting soon, and The Fall which I read and LOVED. Such a fantastic book, there are just so many good lines in it. It's one of those that I will end up reading over and over again. I'm still looking for The Stranger (I can get it off amazon or w/e but seriously I haven't found it any bookstores, new or used, it's crazy) because it's like THE Camus book.
I've read a bunch of Kafka, I have a collection of his stories and I read them in between longer books. Kafka is fucking awesome, I think I like A Hunger Artist the best so far (Metamorphasis was good, really good, but A Hunger Artist just struck a chord with me).
I'm reading Sartre's The Wall right now (5 stories, I've finished The Wall, The Room, and Erostratus so far). Sartre is an excellent writer, and The Wall and Erostratus were both AMAZING. I'm still liking the other stories, and I can't wait to start the last one... Childhood of a Leader, sounds fucking intense. Intimacy is good but a little dry so far.
I also have Walden by Thoreau which im so psyched to start! I found it in a used bookstore after searching B&N and Borders, it was like 4 bucks.
I also have Meditations by Marcus Aurelius which is very nice but not really a novel.
If anybody has any good philosophy, especially existentialist philosophy novels, I'm all about it right now!
I'm also looking for some Anton Chekhov collections, haven't found any yet and I've heard he's like the master of short story writing.
OH! I read The Old Man and the Sea a month or so ago. Incredible book! I read it in one sitting, it was so gripping and intense. I was literally tired after reading it. Hemingway is the man!
i'm gonna go atypical here and throw out the unbearable lightness of being, really up your street if you're going existential philosophy. also, a love story.
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I'm reading "Midnight Cowboy," which until today I did not realize was a book before it was a movie.
I like the story but I don't like the way he writes. Something about the tone seems like it was intended for kids, which is weird considering the subject matter.
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I've been reading finnigans wake for like five years
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whoa super late but that was the first bradbury i ever read and i did indeed like it, and it's why i am willing to read other bradbury books.
i've been reading a lot of philosophy and stuff! I have some Camus, The Plague which I'll be starting soon, and The Fall which I read and LOVED. Such a fantastic book, there are just so many good lines in it. It's one of those that I will end up reading over and over again. I'm still looking for The Stranger (I can get it off amazon or w/e but seriously I haven't found it any bookstores, new or used, it's crazy) because it's like THE Camus book.
I've read a bunch of Kafka, I have a collection of his stories and I read them in between longer books. Kafka is fucking awesome, I think I like A Hunger Artist the best so far (Metamorphasis was good, really good, but A Hunger Artist just struck a chord with me).
I'm reading Sartre's The Wall right now (5 stories, I've finished The Wall, The Room, and Erostratus so far). Sartre is an excellent writer, and The Wall and Erostratus were both AMAZING. I'm still liking the other stories, and I can't wait to start the last one... Childhood of a Leader, sounds fucking intense. Intimacy is good but a little dry so far.
I also have Walden by Thoreau which im so psyched to start! I found it in a used bookstore after searching B&N and Borders, it was like 4 bucks.
I also have Meditations by Marcus Aurelius which is very nice but not really a novel.
If anybody has any good philosophy, especially existentialist philosophy novels, I'm all about it right now!
I'm also looking for some Anton Chekhov collections, haven't found any yet and I've heard he's like the master of short story writing.
OH! I read The Old Man and the Sea a month or so ago. Incredible book! I read it in one sitting, it was so gripping and intense. I was literally tired after reading it. Hemingway is the man!
I am masturbating furiously at the mention of Camus. You should read A Happy Death. It was pretty much Camus's prototype for The Stranger, but it is a lot more positive I think. I think The Stranger is probably better, but I also read it when I was seventeen or so. I don't really know, but it seems to me that most people don't know about A Happy Death. Also, I found The Plague pretty boring compared to his other stuff.
Also, I have been meaning to read Satre for the past couple years cause my girlfriend was all about him. I'm taking french now, and most of the reason I am, is so I can read Camus and other people in the native language. And also to listen to Jacques Brel because he kicks ass all over the place.
edit: also I am aware that Camus is pretty much a cliche among disenfranchised youths, so don't make fun of my giant boner for him.
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So, I finished Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami yesterday. It's basically the story of some jobber with no personality, emotions (aside from wistful melancholia), or notable qualities, and how he copes with the suicide of his best friend (spoiler: by donkin' his bereaved, emotionally unstable girlfriend on her birthday while she weeps uncontrollably). It's pretty monotonous. Nothing really happens, and nobody learns anything. I don't think I liked a single character in the entire book, which made it terribly difficult to care about anything that was going on. Also, Murakami seems to love writing sex scenes, despite being awful at it. There's maybe 8 throughout, even though only one of them is strictly necessary to the plot. After a point, I just started skipping to the next page whenever I saw "she brushed her hand over my".
Anyways, forget that shit, because now I'm reading "...If on a winter's night a traveler" by Italo Calvino, and it rules. Here's an excerpt;
You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they are of unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into molecules and atoms passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy.
Hurl the book and reduce it to photons. This paragraph actually continues on like this for another half-page. The dude is hella mad at that book!!
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currently reading brothers karamazov, go me
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currently reading brothers karamazov, go me
WHAHAY! My other half and I were thinking about writing a musical based around it!
"Smerdyakov, Smerdyakov...what a creepy misfit! / Smerdyakov, Smerdyakov... I bet he really did it!"
Good times!
What am I reading at the moment? I'm rereading 'Outlaws of the Marsh' for the second time. The first time through I realised that, by volume 4, I'd forgotten a LOT of the characters, so wasn't enjoying the plot development due to only knowing like half the cast! It's about 108 heroes who fight a CORRUPT VIZIER to restore the Empire to a less corrupt state, so there's a shitload of characters to keep up with heh. A lot of the major ones have stories of their own within the text, but a lot of others are like TERTIARY in other people's stories.
For example: two guys who have some BEEF with a character and pursue him through a market, later to JOIN UP when they find out who he is. Or any one of the random groups of bandits XD!
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Finally got around to starting a sci-fi short story compilation book a friend said I should read. in about 100/700 pages.
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I'm reading Huck Finn and I'm about to go over the to the bar to read it.
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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shock-Doctrine-Rise-Disaster-Capitalism/dp/0141024534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1294952767&sr=8-1) a book about neoliberalism and the forceful spread of it via shock and awe, torture and other subversive tactics, resulting in the destruction of various developing and recovering states. it owns. there's also a harrowing chapter about MKULTRA which forms the basis of the theory: that friedman's capitalist ideal can only be achieved by wiping out a society and building anew. but like MKULTRA, it doesn't result in a healthy subject, it results in an incredibly broken one.
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acid makes everything better bra
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I just picked up 'A brief history of time' to supplement my reading. I've read the first chapter now and WOW - I've always avoided this thing because I know pretty much jack shit about science, but it has been accessible as hell so far, even if I have had to reread bits a few times. I know it's a huge selling book, but I can totally see why. This is how ALL educational material should be written!!!
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WHAHAY! My other half and I were thinking about writing a musical based around it!
"Smerdyakov, Smerdyakov...what a creepy misfit! / Smerdyakov, Smerdyakov... I bet he really did it!"
Good times!
What am I reading at the moment? I'm rereading 'Outlaws of the Marsh' for the second time. The first time through I realised that, by volume 4, I'd forgotten a LOT of the characters, so wasn't enjoying the plot development due to only knowing like half the cast! It's about 108 heroes who fight a CORRUPT VIZIER to restore the Empire to a less corrupt state, so there's a shitload of characters to keep up with heh. A lot of the major ones have stories of their own within the text, but a lot of others are like TERTIARY in other people's stories.
For example: two guys who have some BEEF with a character and pursue him through a market, later to JOIN UP when they find out who he is. Or any one of the random groups of bandits XD!
I read this and enjoyed it a lot although many things in it are repetitive like a lot of times when one of the main characters meets someone they're like. "OHH Song Jiang I heard so much about you it is an honor to finally meet you!."
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I've already written two papers on "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and now I'm revising. If I could, I would rape Connie and poop on her juvenile chest.
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I'm in two reading groups right now but mostly we're reading/discussing things I've already read but in my free time I've been reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
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'Notre Dame de Paris' by Victor Hugo. It's pretty good, but I think Kevin Kline might have been quite an interpretive leap...
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Read a Dean Koontz book for the first time. "Sole Survivor'. It was slow to start, picked up in the middle and later parts, then let me down with a dumb and unsatisfying ending.
Pretty disappointing, going to read Phantoms next anyway because I heard it was really good. Figure I'll give Koontz another chance.
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I have sort of gotten out of reading in the last few years but I am tryin to get back into it and I have just started reading Wyrd Sisters. Never read a Discworld before but I watched the animated version of this one and liked it so I'm gonna read it. V. awesome so far.
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I need some fiction, thread reminded me to read brothers karamazov
I read a bunch of stuff as part of a class on the artist figure, including doctor zhivago, death in venice, tonio kroeger, and portrait of the artist as a young man. one of those classes where I actually learned something about myself tho it made me kind of nuts for a while I think
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i've been trying to go through the architecture cannon recently. i picked up a bunch of books for the summer and stole a bunch from school. i finished invisible cities by italo calvino, and i'm going through towards a new architecture by crobusier / s, m, l, xl right now. though the latter mostly just sifting through. this is exciting, i'm going to have tons of time to read
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Which architecture books are good? i've been meaning to read some since foreverrrr but don't know where to start. i read Militant Modernism (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Militant-Modernism-Zero-Books-Hatherley/dp/1846941768) a while back and liked it and flipped through one called The Architectural Uncanny or something but whenever i look up photos of this stuff i just go hrm yes that is definitely a building no doubt about it. take me from crib. Invisible Cities is excellent though.
Right now I am being a lazy dude and starting books without being able to finish them. I'm in the middle of Eugenie Grandet by Balzac which is okay / not his best so far and a bunch of JG Ballard short stories which are really excellent and much better than his novels imo. I'm also reading "Against Nature" by Huysmans which is pretty great. I think it was originally a parody of uh decadent amoral fin de siecle guys like Baudelaire and so on but the more it goes on the more momentum it seems to draw from these sources until it actually does embody and encourage the stuff it originally mocked. The only character is an inbred aristocratic aesthete who cycles through obsessions before getting bored of them and who eventually refines his tastes to the extent that a breath of fresh air or a badly-written sentence can almost kill him. It sounds like really obvious broad satire and to some extent it is but there's passages talking about his preference for the blatantly artificial over the natural and his love of painters like Gustave Moreau or Odilon Redon or various bizarre and gaudy plants that it becomes pretty grotesque and haunting in its own right and which led to the book actually being celebrated by oscar wilde and baudelaire and so on (also richard hell which was how i heard of it). It's pretty funny too.
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Read the first 70 or so pages of Phantoms by Dean Koontz. It is REALLY GOOD thus far.
However I wish he'd do his research. The characters find a revolver, and mentions that is a 9mm and that is has 10 shots. That would be one ridiculous looking weapon. That I'm pretty sure doesn't exist and likely never will.
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The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski. Pretty good so far.
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This
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Red_Chamber
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NO WAY Doktor! That's the one of the FOUR GREAT CHINESE CLASSICS that I haven't read! Is it good? I've really wanted to get ahold of a copy for a while, but finances have been bleak.
Have you read OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH, ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS, or JOURNEY TO THE WEST / MONKEY? They're the others and each is pretty fantastic (plus they've each inspired pretty fantastic videogames also).
Are there any games based on Dream of the Red Chamber, or is it too much FAMILY POLITICS or whatever to translate to pressing buttons?
PS: Oh yeah, book I'm reading at the moment is EUROPE: 1815 - 1960. While I'm enthralled by most historical periods, the nineteenth century is time which I've pretty much only skimmed over in my reading. It's been pretty fantastic so far, especially as it's separated into almost article style/length sections on each of the major events, revolutions/political changes, and international policies of each decade. I'ma read some fiction again soon, but I have to reward myself with a history book every so often lest I burn all my books in a fit of rage.
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NO WAY Doktor! That's the one of the FOUR GREAT CHINESE CLASSICS that I haven't read! Is it good? I've really wanted to get ahold of a copy for a while, but finances have been bleak.
Have you read OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH, ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS, or JOURNEY TO THE WEST / MONKEY? They're the others and each is pretty fantastic (plus they've each inspired pretty fantastic videogames also).
Are there any games based on Dream of the Red Chamber, or is it too much FAMILY POLITICS or whatever to translate to pressing buttons?
PS: Oh yeah, book I'm reading at the moment is EUROPE: 1815 - 1960. While I'm enthralled by most historical periods, the nineteenth century is time which I've pretty much only skimmed over in my reading. It's been pretty fantastic so far, especially as it's separated into almost article style/length sections on each of the major events, revolutions/political changes, and international policies of each decade. I'ma read some fiction again soon, but I have to reward myself with a history book every so often lest I burn all my books in a fit of rage.
I've read Outlaws of the Marsh and I read like 300 pages of Journey to the West. I own all four classics. I really like the Foreign Language Press versions they're cool.
Dream of Red Mansions (lol it has like 5 different titles) so far is really good. It can get a little confusing because they keep switching between the two mansions and different characters and stuff, but I like how they describe everyday life back then. Like culture, religion, and stuff like that.
Journey to the West is really cool too because if you didn't know it's based on a real story. Xuanzang was a real monk who really travelled to the West (India) for scriptures and a biography was actually written about him. This book is a fictional account with so much mythological aspects.
After reading Dream of Red Chamber I plan on finishing Journey to the West and then starting Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I loved the video game series and Dynasty Warriors.
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I ordered Bruce Campbell's autobiography a couple of days ago so when that gets here, I'm gonna plow into that. That's about as far as my recreational reading goes.
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Which architecture books are good? i've been meaning to read some since foreverrrr but don't know where to start. i read Militant Modernism (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Militant-Modernism-Zero-Books-Hatherley/dp/1846941768) a while back and liked it and flipped through one called The Architectural Uncanny or something but whenever i look up photos of this stuff i just go hrm yes that is definitely a building no doubt about it. take me from crib. Invisible Cities is excellent though.
i'll get back to you on that, I have a list of books my studio professor who's a great guy recommended for me. as far as other books, s, m, l, xl is a great book so far. i picked up another one called architecture at the edge of everything else by esther choi and it has a lot of shit garble architecture lingo but there are some other really interesting articles dealing with projects being built right now
i stole another great book from school called the history of postmodern architecture by heinrich klotz and it provides a really extensive overview over great postmodern architects like mies and rossi.
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last book i read in full was house of leaves. i read it at the same time when i was settling into a new apartment and holy shit did that make things scary.
i started reading the girl with dragon tattoo because of the hype but it was really boring and i stopped after a hundred pages of exposition.
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i started reading the girl with dragon tattoo because of the hype but it was really boring and i stopped after a hundred pages of exposition.
My girlfriend almost stopped reading because of that, but she reckons if you can get past the first book (which is pretty much exposition for the second and third) that the rest of the trilogy is pretty great.
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I am reading uh TOO MANY BOOKS AT ONCE atm. I'm reading The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (as in Twin Peaks) and Journey to the West. Also as of today I am reading The Great American Novel by Keith Malley and I have never laughed so hard at a book in my life.
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moby dick and volume 3 of capital
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I just finished Embassytown by China Mieville, it was pretty fantastic [pun ][/pun] and definitely the best book of his that I've read so far. I really like his stuff for being huge tangled masses of ideas but I thought there was a level of focus here and a slowly building tension that really brought it home. I'd definitely recommend it if anyone wants a good scifi book that's more focused on imagination and neat ideas than uh starwars stuff.
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Under The Dome. Stephen King.
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Under The Dome. Stephen King.
Man I really enjoyed that book.
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Glad to hear that. You read any other Stephen King stuff?
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Not really, Under the Dome was the first King novel I read.
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OH! Well, I've read a decent bit of Stephen King, When I finish I'll let you know of some of his other good stuff (comparing to Under the Dome) but right off the bat:
-Firestarter (first book of his I read, loved it, Got me into Kings other stuff)
-The Stand (considered his best book by many)
-The Dark Tower Series (his only book series, pretty good, Book 4 was kind of meh though, rest were great)
-Cell (Stephen Kings Zombie book, I personally love zombie stories, or any apocalyptic stories for that matter)
Any authors you've read that are similar? I tried Dean Koontz with mixed results thus far. 1 good, 1 very bleh.
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I just read 'Z for Zachariah' - stayed up all night reading it, in fact.
It's aimed at teenagers so it isn't HIGH END FICTION, but I found it really enthralling. It's about a girl surviving post-nuclear holocaust alone, until one day a stranger shows up in a radiation suit. BUT IS HE FRIEND OR FOE!?
It concentrates on the relationship between the two and gets pretty tense at times. I'd suggest it for anyone wanting a light read in terms of literary style, but still having depth.
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You gotta read Carrie and Christine first, work your way up to The Stand because it is awesome. Don't wanna SK-peak too early.
I've not read Insomnia but I'm told on good authority that it's also awesome.
The last novels I read were:
The Quantum Thief
The War of the Rull
Enjoyed both thoroughly. The former will make your head explode a bit at first but once you understand how the characters are communicating it will all make sense. The latter is a good psychological survival and one of the fruits of my I-will-buy-shitto-sci-fi-from-oxfam phase that I've been going through for about a year now.
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I suppose your right Ed. It probably would be good to "build up' to The Stand.
I was just suggesting the stuff I know is good and that most people liked. Personally I thought Christine was just OK. I enjoyed it but yeah not among his best. I've only read half of Carrie so I can't comment. but I already know how it ends (not just because its referenced all the damn time, I actually saw just the ending of the movie, though I suppose it's possible its different in the book)
Is Cujo any good?
I'm glad to hear Insomnia is good, as I have it and haven't got to reading it yet.
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Reading: Phikal, A Chemical Love Story
By Ali Shulgin the guy who synthesized the whole 2c-X family of psychedelics drugs and some other MDMA like drugs. Its part auto-biography and part chemical encyclopedia. Pretty interrested read so far, and a handy guide when trying out some new chemicals.
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Just started A Clash of Kings after finishing up A Game of Thrones. Loving it so far since it just feels like I'm continuing the first book which really grabbed me at the last hundred or so pages.
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Wow, this thread is still alive.
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just finished Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk this morning. I like his books, Invisible Monsters and Survivor so far being my favorites. Choke was good. I have Diary that I'll crack into later, and I really want to get Pygmy but I haven't found it at any stores yet.
So now that I've finished I'm going to finish up Exile and the Kingdom by Camus, which I started but got interrupted halfway through. I also bought a Gilgamesh book that I'm kind of excited to start.
Got some more Hemingway and Dubliners that I'm looking forward to.
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Just started A Clash of Kings after finishing up A Game of Thrones. Loving it so far since it just feels like I'm continuing the first book which really grabbed me at the last hundred or so pages.
This is what I was going to post, except for "just started" read "nearly finished".
(ONE UPPED MY POLISH COURTESAN!!)
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Wow, this thread is still alive.
its not
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Just finished Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler. Now I'm reading The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten.
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CS Friedman's "Black Sun Rising" is a pretty good book. 1200 years after human colonists have left earth and landed on the planet Erna, mankind has finally been able to somewhat tame the fae, a source of power derived from nature which materializes mankind's deepest fears. Priest, Adept, Apprentice, and Sorcerer together take down some of the most threatening mental constructs Erna has seen yet. Sounds cheesy, you say? Actually, the characterization is great, the writing style is excellent, and the plot devices are intriguing. Also, that priest is the most badass priest ever in literary history. It's a good book to chillax with. It's the first of a three novel series.
I also finished LE Modesitt's "A Soprano Sorceress." The book is about a middle-of-the-road opera singer who is summoned into another world where suddenly her singing allows her to cast spells and shit. The main character is annoying, the beginning is slow, and the plot device is...trite. Don't recommend. I think I'ma start Modesitt's Recluse series though...that's supposed to be better.
As of now, I'm starting the clusterfuck that is Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Save me. Save me.
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I'm still!! reading Robert Musil's "Man Without Qualities" and haven't even hit the halfway point yet. it's really good though.
Right now I am flipping through one of those small Penguin sampler books on the "Tales Of Cu Chulaind" (cuchulainn cuchullain) irish folktale stuff. It's surprisingly excellent!
It was Cu Chulaind's gift, when he was angry, that he could withdraw one eye so far into his head that a heron could not reach it, whereas the other eye could protrude until it was as large as a cauldron for a yearling calf.
I don't know what this means but it's pretty funny!
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Book 6 of the Wheel of Time, A Crown of Swords I think?
I'm still digging the series.
I'm about well i haven't looked at in a while but I'm on the third book, and i also have the 4th one in a bag somewhere. and yes it is a good series. it doesn't feel as hard to read compaired to lotro, not as wordy.. tch tbh i can't describe what i'm on about but reguardless it's a good book series.
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Just started A Clash of Kings after finishing up A Game of Thrones. Loving it so far since it just feels like I'm continuing the first book which really grabbed me at the last hundred or so pages.
I am jealous of you guys, because I just now got to this point. Which is upsetting because I ended up seeing the entire first season before even realizing it all came from a series of novels to begin with. I started reading the first one so I could get to where the TV series left off (I wasn't sure, but the more I read, the more I realized that the entire first season was going to follow along with the entire first book pretty reliably), but with the way that particular story is presented, it really, REALLY sucks to read when you are in the position of already knowing what's going to happen at the very end the ENTIRE TIME YOU ARE READING IT.
I cannot emphasize this enough, if you EVER imagine yourself reading Game of Thrones at some point in your soon or distant future, for the love of god don't you DARE watch the show first! (unless you happen to be the kind of person who like things being completely ruined for you. To each his own I suppose.)
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RESERECTION POST. I didn't want to have to make another. This one suits the purposes of which I am aiming.
I've recently gotten a Kindle, which, by the mere fact that the kindle always contains a few books I want to read and is always nearby (I constantly carry it around) I've been reading at any point in time when I have nothing better to do. Which has been speeding up my reading. I've decided I want to read all of the Stephen king books I've skipped over, in order from which they were released.
-I finished Carrie, which was an extremely depressing book (much like the movie) but a little more so if only because you get to know Carrie herself a lot better.
-I also read through Salem's Lot. I've never cared for vampire stories (especially with the classical 'hypnotic gaze' types) but this one did a pretty good job of keeping the vamps interesting.
-Finally, the most recent SK book I've finished was The Shining. I have seen the movie before hand. Thought it was just OK. Then I read the book and realized that Kubrick changed a lot of the core story making it a bit meaningless. The book is a million times better. The movie is just more 'quotable'.
****SPOILERS:****
I will give Kubrick credit for the excellent "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy" reveal scene though.
****END SPOILERS***
-Of course, before these 3, I already finished Rage. The book Stephen King doesn't want published anymore. It was just 'OK'. Didn't think it was spectacular.
-The first book I read on my kindle, while being a very recent SK book,' Under The Dome', was pretty good if a bit overly long.
-The book I'm currently reading of his is "Night Shift" Which has 2 of his more well known short stories. Children of the Corn and The Lawnmower Man. Thus far I'm really enjoying it.
When I do eventually "complete" all of kings books, I plan on reading World War Z since I'm such a zombie apocalypse nut, Finishing the Eragon/Inheritance Cycle series, finding some new authors to read, and maybe giving Dean Koontz another shot.
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I'm reading and almost finished The Lies of Locke Lamora. It's so great
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I got a Kindle for xmas also wrapped, good times right?
I loved World War Z, the whole interview-style of writing really kept me gripped, especially as you get interesting snippets without having to wade through tons of shit as part of it. It was like fifty great little stories condensed into one easy read.
I'm reading Ken Follet's 'World Without End' at the second. I loved 'The Pillars of the Earth", so I figured I'd try a semi-sequel set a couple of hundred of years later. Absolutely loving the medieval intrigue and skullduggery!
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Just finished Red Seas Under Red Skies, the sequel to Lies of locke lamora.. now waiting for the third book and i have no idea what to do with my life.
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Lol I know the feeling hero bash.
Finished Night Shift. Its the second short story compilation of Stephen King's that I've ever read. But its his first. I have to say its a lot better in general then the other one I read. However the other one I read had The Mist in it and that was just a fantastic short story.
Now reading "The Long Walk" and holy crap this book's premise is messed up.
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hey should I get a kindle for cheapness or buy alot of books in hardback and put them on a bookshelf so I look cultured/more attractive to womens
yes I am that fucking vain
I think I'll try to buy em anyways because I'm getting some art for my walls and some books would fit. I'm gonna get some of those books that cata name dropped in the crazy art thread and maybe some TS elliott (I really like that poem about the end of the world(thats TS elliott right?)). And probably some more vonnegut, I really like kurt vonnegut. And WWZ too because I read about it and it seemed really good for a zombie novel.
Hey what was that book that steel kept name dropping and said was the best book he ever read or had read in awhile? It had the word "fortune" in the title I think.
also some book suggestions would be cool.
Fuck a steven king though I can't stand steven king his shits like a grown up version of goosebumps. Fuck a dean koontz too. I read one of his books about a murderous doll and some alien girl and that shit was better than king (just because it was so fantastically stupid).
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Also maybe lovecraft, lovecraft is a badass
Lovecraft makes steven king look like a dumbass little 4 year old with a pencil and dehabilitating fear of clowns and crazy fat ladies
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You haven't read much if any of his books and/or you are a hipster.
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Also, you realize King was inspired by lovecraft?
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The thing that upsets me most about Lovecraft is the fact that I know exactly why I have gone on for this long without reading anything by him.
I took one look at his last name and assumed that what he wrote would be out of my genre. With a name like "H.P. Lovecraft", I would expect him to exclusively write stuff that J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Meyers to be inspired by, (only hypothetically speaking, of course. It would be absolutely preposterous to presume that Stephanie Meyers has ever read anything ever) long before I would ever expect it to inspire someone like Stephen King.
For pete's sake, it sounds exactly like a cross between "H.R. Pufnstuf" and a MMOCPG (massivley multiplayer online cooperation playing game, which is a lot like a MMORPG, but everyone gets along and nothing ever gets killed)
If it's actually a pen-name, I swear I am going to punch a hole in the wall. Although I couldn't help but respect the guy for picking that name out. (that is, if there existed a trophy for most ironic pen-name ever conceived)
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No I have read several books by steven king when I was younger and I didn't like any of them. He tries to instill fear and suspense in a genre where you have to have some crazy ass/unimaginable shit going on to actually entertain people on a level that other mediums can do much easier. But his subjects are fucking boring as hell. TBH I only read "misery", "it" (only a few chapters before junking it), and some book about some incredibly old but terrible ass geriatric lady on some new england island (I think it was one of his books that wasn't actually horror related but also the worst imo).
I never read that dark castle series or whatever they're called, the ones that go on and on and are supposed to be some of his best works so maybe he pulled some creativity out of his ass in those I never saw.
Lovecraft is a master of horror and has been since the early 1900s. Dude mastered writing and storytelling on a level that barely anyone can meet decades later and did it all before he hit 30. Just like poe he instills fear not with gruesome tales or outright "physical fright" but with incomprehensable ideas and themes that make your skin crawl just thinking of them. It doesn't matter who inspired who steven king is horrible compared to those guys imo.
Also mary shelley but I've only read frankenstein by her, but that alone rivals most other authors entire collections. But I don't read as much as I should anymore.
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Well, that might explain it. I've given up on 2 of his books. One of them was in fact "It" (I'm going to push myself to read all of it at some point) and the other one was "Thinner". And Misery is one of his lesser books I'd say, kind of slow, only mildly interesting. This literally might be a case of reading the least effective books for introduction is all.
The book that got me into his stuff was Firestarter. So maybe try that?
Anyway, I didn't like Dean Koontz because he doesn't research before writing. I'll run into some weird inaccuracy that'll pull me out of the story on occasions. Also, he has some pretty obvious elements of preaching morality through his characters like how marijuana is horrible or all illegal drugs are horrible or some shit. However his writing style is to the point but still decently descriptive, his plotting is well paced and interesting, etc. So I sort of enjoyed the 2 of his books that I've read (Phantoms and Sole Survivor) and plan on reading a few of his other stuff to give him another chance eventually.
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If you've never sat down and read lovecraft you should def do it. The only thing is he's an old school writer so some of his word usage and descriptions are hard to understand. Well the criteria itself is pretty fucking mind boggling. Like, cthulu has multiple different personifications because the way he writes is just so openly interperated. There was some fan novel called the "necronomicon" or something by a canadian guy I read that is a first person novel written in the lovecraftian universe and thats what originally got me interested in his work.
They should definitely make a lovecraft game or mini-series that shit would be wicked.
I think the reason I like lovecraft so much is because alot of what he writes about is this scifi-theology thing that old pagan gods are infact some superdestructive aliens half of which view mankind as a nuisance and the other half just don't give a shit at all. There are central characters, places, and themes but they pretty much jump from place to place and are pretty much totally insignificant to the larger skew of things. I think its "Call of Cthulhu" which is about a steam ship expedition or something like that which stumbles on some pagan ritual meant to ressurect the evil god Cthulhu. Some of the crew or something end up barely escaping the temple alive but all get killed when they get to the ship and a lone surviving 2nd mate ends up running the ship across the sea trying to escape from the giant tentacled asshole cthulhu drawing him to the old americas (or something like that).
And that is an example of a hopeful and optimistic lovecraft story from what I've read. Its mostly very oppressive, hopeless, and horrifically epic.
Like from what I remember, lovecraft's interperatation of the center of all existance and the god to all gods is some fucked up/dark cathedral in the center of the universe full of sadistic devil gods worshipping a central king god who is completely insane, personifies the very concept of insanity and dwarfs your very understanding of what insanity is. And is like a offputting vortex of all chaos and destruction.
Really the way he wrote it reminds me of the quantum physics theory that in the middle of all existing star patterns, planets, galaxies, is one big ass black hole. And I think in a way that is what lovecraft was trying to describe.
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Thats just what I remember though its been awhile since I read his stuff, I'm prolly gonna buy everything I can when I get home.
lovecraft faqs:
- He was a racist
- He was an athiest
- family had a severe history of mental illness
- Caused physical illnesses with his own mental distress
- Died at an early age
- theorized he might have died as a virgin
- theorized that he might have been asexual
- was scared of alot of shit
- was pretty much a shut in most of his life with few friends
He actually fits the bill for the insane art thread.
Shit the steel book I was looking for was Infinite Jest
Also wanna get motorcycle diaries.
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They should definitely make a lovecraft game or mini-series that shit would be wicked.
You should play Magic: The Gathering. The set that was based almost entirely on Lovecraft horror was what single-handedly built my interest back in Lovecraft horror.
It sure kicks the crap out of the set out now that is based on Mary Shelley horror. (Although tbh once you give Cthulhu a creature type, you are pretty much screwed when it comes to trying to imagine something that could ever possibly top that)
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on subject of horrorlit I'm reading some short stories by Stefan Grabinski and really, really liking them. Kind of short horror / uncanny stuff from around 1920. tbh I find a lot of Fantastic Fiction kind of labourous to read since the focus on atmosphere can lead to really dense overwritten prose but I'm not feeling that here. Most of the stories lead in genuinely unexpected or unnerving directions without being too coy about it or feeling the need to explain anything. "Szamota's Mistress" is my fave so far
also reading some Paul Celan poems because im puke & a wretch
also also a cheap collection of Winsor McCay's "Dreams Of The Rarebit Fiend" which is really good. i like how a lot of the characters have this slightly frozen weightlessquality, like they were all traced from the same image over and over while the background shifts behind them
(https://legacy.gamingw.net/etc/cdn.comicartfans.com/Images/Category_4398/subcat_96885/McCay%20Rarebit.jpeg)
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I recently learned an author by the name of Greg Bear was writing a set of books set in the time of the forerunners in the halo universe. Planning on reading them when I'm caught up on SK.
Finished The Long Walk. Nearly my favorite Stephen King book. Seriously excellent.
Going to start up on Roadwork next. And then The Running Man.
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Anyone can recommend books with conartists, scams, psychological warfare, etc..? I've been watching the Liar Game series and is starting to read the manga again.
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I'm about 200 pages into Infinite Jest, it's pretty rad. so far the whole story has been told in a sort of narrating, expository form... David Foster Wallace likes to describe everyones habits and details and anxieties, and then gives you the backstory on the place they're brooding in, and it's unique and captivating, and written in this kind of colloquial, stream-of-conscience-yet-readable format... although he throws a lot of archaic/obscure references/words I keep having to look up (like one every page... possibly just me not knowing the refs, as dave eggers says in the forward that you won't have to look up much), and the foot notes are all at the back (of which there are like 100s), but thats kinda part of the fun.
I highly recommend it so far!!
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Beyond 2012: Catastrophe or Awakening?
By Geoff Stray
We're gonna find out soon enough if it's even 1/2 way right!
Check it out on Amazon.
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Finally finished Roadwork. It wasn't great but it was OK.
Moving on to Cujo. Also, literally when I began reading it last night (around midnight), I heard a fuck ton of coyotes/wolves/coywolves howling outside. First time I've ever heard such a thing, holy fuck it was creepy sounding.
EDIT: I am not bullshitting.
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Finished a couple of books since my last post. Cujo was pretty good, but it was a little slow oddly enough.
I also read The Running Man and it was pretty awesome. Definitely one of his best books.
I also read Different Seasons, which had 2 of his more well known stories (because they got well known movie adaptations) "Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption", and "The Body" (its movie was called "Stand By Me" which I've yet to see but I want to now.
Then I read Cycle of the Werewolf, which was ok.
I'm now reading "Thinner", which, last time I tried to read I got bored and put it down in the middle. This time I'm warming up to it a bit. Still one of his weaker stories though.
And then I'm going to read "It" which I also didn't think was that great last time I read it and I did the same as "thinner", I dropped it in the middle. Hopefully I warm up to it like I am warming to "Thinner".
I went wondered what a top 10 SK list for me would look like now that I've basically read half of his books, so I went through and picked them out: (out of roughly 48% of all his books) Note that this isn't my Top 10 favorite books of all authors. IDK if I could even make one at this point as I'd argue I've not read enough authors.
1) Cell
2) The Stand
3) The Dark Tower Series (all but the 4th book)
4) The Long Walk
5) Skeleton Crew (For The Mist)
6) Firestarter
7) The Running Man
8) Different Seasons (for Shawshank and apt pupil)
9) Desperation
10) The Talisman
So anybody interested in reading his stuff should probably start at or near the bottom or so of this list. Yes, I made a top 10 list, shut up.
His worst IMO books are probably:
Thinner
It
And the 4th book in the Dark Tower Series
In no particular order.
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Finished Thinner. It had a fucked up ending, I can say that much with out feeling I've spoiled it.
Starting the outright TOME that is "It" and the book oddly enough has also warmed up to me a bit like thinner did. Hopefully it's ending doesn't disappoint me like Thinner's did however.
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Is no one else reading anything?
I FINALLY FUCKING FINISHED "IT"
The pacing of that book was pretty bad. But the ending was OK. and there were a few decently interesting spots through out. But really he should have made the book a hell of a lot shorter.
Which is funny because a lot of people feel the same about The Stand (or its uncut version, which is just slightly longer than It) but that book was great pretty much through out, with, oddly enough, its ending sections being the weakest but they then I was like, "I got this far" so it was easy to read the rest.
"It", is Stephen Kings longest book (ignoring the uncut The Stand release), I can't help but feel like its probably his weakest.
I'm still content that I read it and finished it though. Now I'll probably eventually watch the movie. Based on what I read though I know they probably cut huge swaths of the story out (and some... uh scenes probably 'push the envelope' a bit too much for Hollywood. Anyone who has read it will know what I'm talking about)
Moving on to his only 'classic fantasy' style novel. "The Eyes of The Dragon"
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I remember reading It when I was like 13 or 14 and it took me a solid 3 or 4 months to read. I liked it a lot but that was a long time ago. I think to properly read Stephen King you kind of have to just sit back enjoy the ride and not think to deeply into it or else you will find a shitload of flaws.
I just read Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. It was ok. I understand why it was so controversial in the 80s but besides a few parts (namely the snuff film, the dead guy and the little girl) it seemed pretty tame to me. I had already seen the movie and I think if there was an award for "Least Faithful Adaptation of All Time" it would win. I would say for a quick read it's pretty good but for a serious work of literature, which it sometimes seems to be referred to as, it's pretty weak.
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Great choice Warped! I did a reading fair presentation once in middle/high school, and that was the book I chose. Coincidentally enough, my partner was the same friend who turned me onto the Ice and Fire series of books years later. I did all the work, but I needed a partner because I could tell that the single-person category was going to have much stiffer competition, which was ironic in of itself.
I still remember putting shapies to one of those clear dividers you sometimes see on those spools of blank cd/dvds and breaking it in half. (You'll know what I am talking about after you have read into the book a bit more.) Looking back, I kinda want to read it again. (you know, instead of reading It)
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Read the first 15% of it last night before I hit the hay. I'm already like it a hell of a lot more than It lol. I'm also a little bit more intrigued because it takes place in the same world most of the dark tower series takes place in.
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Rereading Prydain Chronicles.
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World War Z
I just started it tonight and I'm at the palastinian narrative of the book. So far I love this damn book. The human element and the detail and specifics of the story as a kind of personal report, it makes it so much more involving and frightening. IE: the rate of the disease being spread increasing through black market organ transplants and smuggled refugees. The raid on its initial outbreak in a small town in tibet. The "patient zero" being a bitten twelve year old boy and the mystery around what exactly bit him and the doctor's frightening and gruesome introduction to the whole thing. His associate forwarning him by telling him their kind of code phrase for something horrible is about to happen, "everything is going to be alright".
man I love this book
Also the parts about the conflict between palastinians and israel and israel being pushed back towards the mediteranean sea, china being the number one supplier of black market organs via political prisoners, canadian anti terror units. I'm kind of wondering how much of this pre-war stuff actually has some relevancy to our current geopolitical status? This book is so damn good.
Edit: I just got to the part with the suburban mom talking about her kids acting up because of hearing about zombies so they got them on prozac and ritalin. "I can't believe she just sold all of her stuff and suddenly moved her family to some cabin in alaska. I thought she was smarter than that, one of those non-ignorant mexicans."
AAAAAAAAAAHHHH FUCK! THIS BOOK!!
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Farren we are brothers in loving this book.
I've read it over and over since I got it (not as much as ASoIaF series but still)!!
I'm APPREHENSIVE about the movie though. Apparently it's about Brad Pitt trying to stop the outbreak from happening or some shit.
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Its amazing
the social commentary is so damn insightful. I just keep laughing out loud and going YES YES YES I've read half of it in a couple hours. I've never read a book that fast.
The harvard educated ex-wallstreet trading executive that is hired on to reboot a dying economy and studying marxist theory "white collars having to learn to get dirty". Every business associate, pampered yuppie trash asshole becoming completely worthless and having to learn an actual trade from the very same lower class people they looked at so narrow nosed and treated like some sort of commodity.
And that part with the hired security ex military merc dude and the "pampered, celebutant slut's" rat dog meeting eyes. "Wheres your master? Wheres yours? Fuck em..."
this.......this is my bible...
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Finished The Dark Half. It was just OK.
Reading 4 Past Midnight. Currently just finishing up The Langoliers novella in it (its the first story). And It pretty much kicks ass.
Stephen King seems to be at his best when he does either post-apocalyptic, Twilight-zone-esque, or adventure books.
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the brothers karamazov was good, a lot of the characters are like bonzi buddy
idk what to read next. I have some books about cities and urban design that I wanted to get around to reading sometime. I've recently read the Death and Life of Great American Cities, the Makeshift Metropolis and City of Slums. each is pretty good, but Death and Metropolis have some issues and I don't find either of them to be particularly well-written. whyte is better. catamites you might like to read/watch whyte's social life of small urban spaces if you haven't already, touches upon both space (catamites the space fetishist -saltw) and fantasy 70s-80s urban america
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the brothers karamazov was good, a lot of the characters are like bonzi buddy
haha, i don't really know what this entails but i might start reading this next. the only dostoyevsky book i have read is the idiot and i liked it a lot. actually this is a good reminder, because i could use some focus with my reading. i'll zone in on him.
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4 Past Midnight was OK. The only really good novella of the 4 it had was 'The Langoliers' IMHO. And even it mildly disappointed me in the ending.
Secret Window, Hidden Garden would probably have been better if I didn't already know the ending. Because I kept reading it and all I could think about what the book hints at through out the story and I almost starting thinking "Agh its so OBVIOUS, c'mon man!"
'The Library Policeman' was a oddball jumble of story concepts and themes written in a oddball way. A good 30% of the story was a character telling some of the backstory of the main villain essentially. It was OK but I can easily say its title is kind of misleading. And the story almost feels like it goes into completely unrelated tangents. I'd explain further but I'd end up spoiling it.
'The Sun Dog' This story actually was well written (Though it's epilogue was silly but not in the 'haha' way) And despite its initially dull sounding premise it did a good job of hooking me in.
Since I've read so much of King's work, I mentioned his strengths in an earlier post. I can also say without a doubt that he does have 3 glaring weaknesses:
-His stories DO sometimes revolve around a high concept that either seems like he opened up a dictionary and picked a few random words or picked a single THING and makes it evil like: "Evil Car" "Evil Camera" "Evil Dog" "Evil Fangirl" etc.
-He sometimes goes overboard with the 'slice of life' and 'everyday' parts. He usually does this in order to give his characters more depth but they end up being kind of boring.
-He relies on bizarre 'magical' unlogic sometimes as almost a crutch to his stories endings a bit too often.
EDIT: Also I'm starting on 'Needful Things'
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haha, i don't really know what this entails but i might start reading this next. the only dostoyevsky book i have read is the idiot and i liked it a lot. actually this is a good reminder, because i could use some focus with my reading. i'll zone in on him.
it's the only dostoevsky book I've read, but I've heard it's the most similar to the idiot out of dostoevsky's work. it goes pretty in depth on a subject we talked a little about a while ago
edit: ended up getting a book of Dostoevsky's short stories, including White Nights and Notes from Underground. both sound really good, tho some of the details I've read about Underground sound a little cruddy, I hope they're just from ppl imposing their own crumby ideas on the stories
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Just finished What Gandhi Says (http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/gandhi/) by Norman Finkelstein. Very illuminating book on the nature of satyagraha, the morality of civil disobedience, coercion and violence, his political convictions and how he reacted to them being put to the test. It's sure to be surprising because of the many misconceptions that exist about Gandhi, but ultimately it reveals the very strong moral convictions of a man who stayed completely true to them even in the most trying times. It's so short you can read it in a day, so grab it.
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Notes from Underground, White Nights, and Dream of a Ridiculous Man were good!! I have a favorite author I think
you can tell white nights is one of dostoevsky's earlier short stories but it has more bonzi buddy characters so it's good
goldenratio, I don't know if you're still around or check this thread but a while back you said you liked Kafka a lot and Camus and that you were looking for more existential stuff to read. I recommend Notes from Underground if you haven't already read it, ppl call it "the first existentialist novel" and both Kafka and Camus were influenced by Dosty according to the book I have
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Notes from Underground, White Nights, and Dream of a Ridiculous Man were good!! I have a favorite author I think
yes!!!! Notes from the Underground is one of my favorite books........i read it in high school and didnt think much of it, but then i grew up and reread it earlier this year (post-college wasteland) and now regard it as more relevant to being human than 98% of all philosophy texts i have read
i finally got my own copy of my favorite book, "Jakob von Gunten", beautiful novel by heartbreaking swiss writer Robert Walser.
reading his writing is like remembering a dream. happily re-reading it now
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i finally got my own copy of my favorite book, "Jakob von Gunten", beautiful novel by heartbreaking swiss writer Robert Walser.
reading his writing is like remembering a dream. happily re-reading it now
robert walser's the best!! i've been really getting into all the short stories of his i can find for the last month or two and have The Assistant lined up too. haven't read Jakob Von Gunten but i hear it's his best novel. i like how a lot of his shorts kind of meander and excuse themselves out of existence. enthusiastic heavily sweating franz kafka writes afterdinner speech for all the beautiful ladies ha ha ha :sweating: :sweating: :sweating:
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about a third of the way thru thomas pynchon's "against the day", so far it's one of his best. he's becoming the go-to writer for when i want to get my head straight and remember what's important. i plowed through Mason & Dixon and Vineland before this and liked them a lot but found them spotty, there are these exceptional passages that have to do with small, important acts of grace or betrayal in the perpetual negotiation between private desire and organised systems of control, how these acts echo and build and merge into one another, but most of these passages are kind of buried between pages of this heavy jocose house style that doesn't do anything for me. against the day feels like a focusing and culmination of the best parts of these other books. it's also, not coincidentally, the most directly political of his books - a lot of what i think is his best writing "works" because of the way the funny, playful, human stuff gets framed within a broader, bleaker history of, mostly, management versus labour so that the two narratives alter and comment on each other, amplifying or changing what's happening in the other. there are like a twenty tangents running at the same time so far and each is playing off the others, idk how much it's going to come together but who cares. i haven't seen many people talk about this as opposed to gravity's rainbow / crying of lot 49 so this is me talking about it and recommending it if you liked gr particularly :)
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Reading The Idiot (torrented) cause I can't find other books by that author
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Side question: does anybody here read books on their computer? I can't imagine doing that, even though I read a lot of articles and stuff.
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Me. Read many books on pc, I guess I got used to it but I still like reading from a physical book for some reason it's harder to focus on the story while on a pc
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I have a nook. Not the same at all but I just wanted to say they are awesome, totally worth the money if you've ever thought about getting one.
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I find it difficult to read anything but relatively short articles on the computer screen. I've got kindle on my phone tho and that works pretty well
Reading The Idiot (torrented) cause I can't find other books by that author
you're talking about dostoevsky? that's classic literature, so several of his works are on project gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/314?sort_order=title and several more are free from the kindle store
I hear the idiot is one of his more difficult novels, tho I haven't read it yet myself. you might prefer Notes from Underground to start, idk. I read the brothers karamazov first.
btw gr idk if you saw thisgoldenratio, I don't know if you're still around or check this thread but a while back you said you liked Kafka a lot and Camus and that you were looking for more existential stuff to read. I recommend Notes from Underground if you haven't already read it, ppl call it "the first existentialist novel" and both Kafka and Camus were influenced by Dosty according to the book I have
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Wow I didn't notice that thanks for reposting. I'll definitely add this to my list and I was planning on going to the bookstore this weekend anyway so thanks (sounds interesting enough to pick up I mean). Plus it's not too long which length usually isn't a negative so much, but I'll tend to choose my shorter books first when deciding what to read next.
also
the brothers karamazov was good, a lot of the characters are like bonzi buddy
wow I want to read this so much now. I've always been interested in that one anyway, as far as "Dosty's" work goes for no particular reason. But now I might end up getting both of them.
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some of the translations are really bad for brother's karamazov. i can't remember which ones are terrible, but it's worth doing a google search on it before you commit to 3000 pages of Russian interfamilial drama.
fake edit: i think that the pevear (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pevear)[/size] and v[/size]olokhonsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larissa_Volokhonsky)[/size] translation is usually considered the best
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I find it difficult to read anything but relatively short articles on the computer screen. I've got kindle on my phone tho and that works pretty wellyou're talking about dostoevsky? that's classic literature, so several of his works are on project gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/314?sort_order=title and several more are free from the kindle store
I hear the idiot is one of his more difficult novels, tho I haven't read it yet myself. you might prefer Notes from Underground to start, idk. I read the brothers karamazov first.
btw gr idk if you saw this
Yep I actually found out about him from reading this topic and thought I haven't been reading for afew weeks so why not. I'm interested in the story from what I've read so far but I think my ignorance in russian geography, politics and history would make me miss some of the deeper stuff.
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I'm still just chipping away at capital/das kapital. it's really working out for me, though. Once I'm finished with it I'd like to talk about it in depth with dietcoke and whoever else has read it around here, but not yet.
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Side question: does anybody here read books on their computer? I can't imagine doing that, even though I read a lot of articles and stuff.
Yes man! I read books on:
Mac
Kindle (primarily)
Phone.
Initially, before I got my kindle, I found it hardish to read on the computer screen, but you get used to it after a while. The only really annoying thing is using the mouse to change pages etc lol. SCROLLINS!!!
It works a lot better with like larger books with illustrations (like D&D manuals etc) than text documents, but as long as they're formatted properly the latter can be easily readable too.
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sweet lit party
also
wow I want to read this so much now. I've always been interested in that one anyway, as far as "Dosty's" work goes for no particular reason. But now I might end up getting both of them.
haha...you'll see what I mean I think!! and yeah I enjoyed both of them a lot I think you'll have a blast
some of the translations are really bad for brother's karamazov. i can't remember which ones are terrible, but it's worth doing a google search on it before you commit to 3000 pages of Russian interfamilial drama.
fake edit: i think that the pevear (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pevear)[/size] and v[/size]olokhonsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larissa_Volokhonsky)[/size] translation is usually considered the best
the project gutenberg stuff is probably all going to be the original translations by Constant Garnett, who ppl have criticized for various reasons. I read her translations of NfU and DoaRM and both seemed fine and captured what dosty was going for at least
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Yeah I couldn't imagine reading a whole book on the computer. I was really interested in The Hacker Crackdown (http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html) which is available online in its entirety, so I took one quick glance at it and rushed to eBay to buy a hardcopy. I love paper.
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You killins mother earth dada ;-;
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I'm sorry Faust mother earth was destroyed to make paper for the new Harry Potter novel.
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I'm trying to get used to reading my books off my phone. (If nothing else, to get me reading more often without carrying stuff around I am not carrying around already.)
Since it's something I do have to get used to, paper will always feel better to me.
(Man, I thought Rowling made the last Harry Potter the final volume precisely because otherwise the earth was going to be destroyed by lack of trees, but there's a NEW one!?)
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(Man, I thought Rowling made the last Harry Potter the final volume precisely because otherwise the earth was going to be destroyed by lack of trees, but there's a NEW one!?)
No.
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Just finished Notes from the Underground and that was some good shit, definitely gonna reread it in the future.
Anyway my next would either be Brother Karamazov or Marx Capital(with a free online course)
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I feel bad for the prostitute
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Gerald's Game, took me a while to read it despite it being kind of short. It was kind of slow.
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oh hey I'm reading Galapagos by Vonnegut. I've been on a Vonnegut kick lately, I read Breakfast of Champions a couple months ago, and I'm really interested in Cat's Cradle and Sirens of Titan which I already have on my nook.
I also picked up The Satanic Verses and Notes from Underground at B&N a while ago which are both sitting on my dresser because I really want to get into those.
But anyway Galapagos is really great so far, I love Vonnegut's style. Good stuff. Pretty interesting and fun read.
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I got this book today: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/999790007/trial-of-the-clone-a-choosable-path-gamebook-by-za
It's kind of cool. It's like a choose your own adventure but also an RPG? like the beginning has pages to write your stats and HP and inventory and equipment and stuff. I've only just started it and I don't even have a pencil in my entire house I think but, it's a pretty neat idea.
Also I've been hooked on my nook recently because it's super easy to lay in bed when I'm going to sleep and just prop it up and read without having to hold a book and turn pages (so difficult), so I finished the Vonnegut, read a couple chapters of Pygmy by Palahniuk but it was kind of meh so I'm now on a Philip K Dick/sci-fi kick.
I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep for the first time (I don't know why I never read this back when I was on my major PKD kick when I was like 20) and it was pretty good. PKD is an OK writer but I don't think that's his strong point at all. He does a pretty good job of making you wonder what the hell is going on, what is real, etc. I'm good at not trying to "find out" the ending to stuff (like in movies, even predictable ones I'm usually good at suppressing that desire to "guess what's going to happen") but I feel like some the stuff can be fairly predictable but still interesting.
Anyway I still have Notes from Underground right on top of my MUST READ list.
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Finished Dolores Claiborne. Will return to explain my thoughts on it when I am not so drowsy.
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Ok so I'm nearing the end of The Sirens of Titan. I fucking love this book. This is probably my favorite book I've ever read. I'm going to read Cat's Cradle next, but then I'm gonna give Sirens a second go. Seriously I fucking love this book. I would recommend it to anybody. I haven't finished it yet so I might be speaking too early, I have maybe 20-25 pages left, but so far it's excellent excellent excellent.
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I read a lot of Vonnegut in school and only recently finished Slaughterhouse Five. The best part is that no matter what he writes, it's inevitably going to be an unsequential sci-fi with quirky humor, as if it might be impossible for his mind to produce anything else. He's got some wartime experiences he wanted to get on paper, but despite the subject matter, it comes out in the signature Vonnegut language-genre.
Stephen King version: "WW2 veteran wartime flashbacks manfest as a lurking omnipresent evil worm/clown beast (take place in charming New England village)"
Michael Crichton: "Firebomb survivor returns from Europe with more than PTSD. Expert scientists investigate A strange illness he developed in Dresden... or coule be... of extraterrestrial origin???"
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Last book I've finished was Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway. It's posthumous and completely unlike his other published stories, like maybe he considered shitcanning it.
The story unfolds pretty peacefully in the BERMUDA chapter, with a few intense and well-written moments, but still has that Hemingway "talking about Paris, literary name-dropping, talking about really good meals he had" for a few stretches, which can be boring. Can't relate much to the HAVANA chapter without spoiling the book, but flash forward to AT SEA and the book takes a complete Adaptation.-esque 180, like Ernest had a Nic Cage pulp serial writer brother who hijacks the whole piece. It's pretty wild. I don't know what the intention was for this book, but I had a decent time reading it. I think there is some "iceberg" there, as Hemingway was experimenting heavily on that device later on, but died before the book could be completed.
EDIT: Currently reading True Grit. Fun read.
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Stephen King version: "WW2 veteran wartime flashbacks manfest as a lurking omnipresent evil worm/clown beast (take place in charming New England village)"
Michael Crichton: "Firebomb survivor returns from Europe with more than PTSD. Expert scientists investigate A strange illness he developed in Dresden... or coule be... of extraterrestrial origin???"
Haha, those are spot-on.
I have this audiobook Micro by Michael Crichton that my mom bought and gave to me because she thought it was boring (the first part is "sciency" and they talk about microbiology and pharmaceuticals and stuff). I started listening to it and for one thing, these types of books ("thrillers", anything by Crichton or Koontz or whatever) are so uninteresting to me. We listen to some of these on roadtrips to my grandmas house a couple times a year, and she always picks them and she always picks these types of books. I just don't even care about the plots in any of them.
But anyway this book Micro is basically Honey I Shrunk The Kids except with scientists, including the stereotypical Russian girl who is great at Karate with a generic accent, and the Indian kid who's naive but incredibly smart, etc. But yeah, Honey I Shrunk The Kids. It's stupid as hell.
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I've never read any Michael Crichton.
As much as I love Stephen King, I concede that his works do have a bit of redundancy. Namely in setting. Though he actually writes 1 of 3 types of stories. 'Adventure' type stories, 'monster' type stories, and during the 90's he wrote a lot of transparently political and social commentary stories, typically lacking any fantasy. Dolores Claiborne namely... which was actually a pretty good book...
The 'monster' stuff he does is typically bad (though there are exceptions).
Currently reading Insomnia on and off. It's mildly entertaining but there are some eye rolling points.
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I enjoyed reading Jurassic Park, as I was a huge fan of the movie as a child, and enjoyed seeing words like VELOCIRAPTORS in ordinary lower-case "velociraptor" language, along with the suggestion that some dinosaur may be covered in feather. In addition, Ian Malcolm becomes a catalyst of a sort of "rock star" mathematical "Chaotician", in which he consumes large quantities of drugs following an injury, only to assume the voice of skeptical outsider, spouting chaos theory nonsense for every manner of reader to entertain.
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In the book, there is a somewhat detailed sketch of the setting in which the story takes place titled, "The Pali." Near the base of the waterfall in the sketch, reads the small inscription "NUMQUAM OBLIVISCEMUR MICHAELIS CRICHTONIS," which translated from Latin, reads "We Will Never Forget Michael Crichton."
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My only real experience with Crichton (aside from JP movies and whatnot) is this one book, but as someone who has a moderate amount of scientific knowledge, it seems like his "sciency" writing would be very impressive to a layman, but anyone who knows anything about the subjects would only be mildly interested, and a lot of what he writes is just entry-level knowledge written in a verbose, flowery language that makes the scientific insights seems grander than they really are.
It's like all those detective/cop shows, where all the technobabble is really basic knowledge that is rife with buzzwords often mixed incorrectly. But to the average viewer of these shows that doesn't understand a bunch of the words, it sounds like legitimate "tech speak" and they don't even pay much attention to it.
I think my point is that Crichton writes books that loosely involve science to appeal to non-scientifically-minded people who want to feel smart because they're reading about science. That sounds way more elitist and mean than I really intend, and I'm trying more to judge his writing than his readers.
I have Cat's Cradle on audiotape (got it for like 3 dollars at the used bookstore i go to) but I'm also reading the book version and I feel like it's a better book to read than have it read to you.
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I like that sci-fi that's more of a "WHAT IF" without slaving over the (made up) details. Phillip K. Dick always thought out elaborate situations based on hypothetical technology or circumstances without the urge to bore the reader with technical jargon or verbose pseudo-science like Crichton. Some might call it "magic realism" and I think that's cool. Crichton is always trying to SELL an idea, like THIS VERY WELL COULD HAPPEN IN 5 YEARS, and then creating the perfect Hollywood thriller complete with perfect asshole villain, snarky cool scientists, a dash of corporate distrust, and military/government/espionage (guns n shit). Oh yeah, and end on a cautionary tale note, "dont say i didnt tellll yooouuu!" Definitely recommend Crichton's NEXT if you want the ultimate nutso experience.
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I have Cat's Cradle on audiotape (got it for like 3 dollars at the used bookstore i go to) but I'm also reading the book version and I feel like it's a better book to read than have it read to you.
I've never tried audio book, but for a road trip, I'd probably chance it for the experience. I expect I would miss a lot because, while I can read as thoroughly as I please, listening to the material means I'll probably miss certain points and not go back to re-evaluate. I might be making this up, or some high school english teacher told me, reading evokes a higher level of critical thinking than listening, because audible conversation continues whether you're ready or not. You can't take that extra second to ponder on a facet of thought, and especially in the field of news radio/talk shows, the listening audience loses their critical edge when evaluating the legitimacy of spoken word.
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Yeah, you do find yourself zoning out more frequently. I would definitely recommend it with books you don't care too much about. I also discovered that listening to podcasts is aewsome for roadtrips, I don't know why I never thought of it before. My mom's friend burned some This American Life segments and those were pretty good to listen to. I never listened to podcasts much, but after that I went looking for some and now try to find episodes that would be good to listen to on a trip.
But they do help time go by faster. We drive to my grandma's about 2 or 3 times a year, and it's a 6 and a half hour drive, which gets quite tedious. One time we drove up but my mom's stereo was broken, so we had SILENCE and TALKING the entire drive, both ways. It wasn't too bad, my mom and I get along, but about 3 of those hours consisted of my mom complaining about every person at her work.
Anyways yeah, if you have a long drive, 2+ hours, try an audiobook. Or try to find radio plays like War of the Worlds or Hitchhiker's Guide or whatnot. I have a cassette tape series of The Lord of the Rings that's acted out like a play (instead of just reading the book). It's interesting.
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yo i made a separate topic for audiobooks and podcasts, because i consider those things separate enough from wh book you read to justify it.
i'm listening to a bunch of audiobooks currently and i'm also reading a bunch of good old-fashioned print books too. i've been reading Ender's Game for months now and i really should try to find time to finish it... also i've gotta finish The Count of Monte Cristo one of these days but danngg that book is HUGE. also i recently acquired The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, so i plan on reading those as soon as i can.
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The only Russian literature I've read was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita) and I remember that being very good, though it has been a long time.
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^its good
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I'd ditch the MLM bullshit and stick with just the first M. ;) The three volumes of Capital, the Grundrisse, and The German Ideology are all incredibly important books that are about as fresh today as when they were written. I've been doing a study of Marx's critique of political economy in my spare time for a few years now and recently picked up Michael Heinrich's Introduction to the 3 volumes of Capital and it's very good considering that it's just an introductory text; I'd really recommend it. There's a growing body of literature associated with value-form theory taking a fresh look at Marx's "wertkritik" since the availability of the economic manuscripts. It's fascinating because it seems to buck a lot of the orthodoxy rooted in 2nd/3rd International dogma opening the way for a fresh and timely re-evaluation of Marx, although a lot of it seems to be philology it's still pretty interesting if you're into this sort of stuff.
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Been doing a lot more reading these past few months, including reading Davinci Code for the first time.
Working on The First Law trilogy, their great and im on the last book. A friend has recommended The Painted Man so I may give that a read when im done with my current book.
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hm?
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The Green Mile. I never saw the movie but the book is pretty good.
I've heard nothing but good things about the movie to so I'll probably eventually watch it.
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i am reading werner herzog's conquest of the useless. i've been a bit of a neanderthal and out of the habit of reading seriously for a couple years, and this has been a great thing to get back into the game. it's a collections of journals he kept while making his film fitzcarraldo, which was notable for him successfully pulling a 320 ton steamship over a reasonably steep hill without the use of special effects. i picked this up somewhat reluctantly, figuring it would be a slightly boring collection of production notes. it's not. at all.
i am at the part where termites eat one of his journals and rather than try to fake it he just writes a little apology, scavenges two barely legible sentences that survived the termite attack, and skips ahead several months to where the next journal picked up.
i don't remember ever having this much fun reading a book.
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I'm currently reading The Plague, by Albert Camus (translated from French to English by Stuart Gilbert). The story is actually a bit uneventful and at parts the author draws out detail a bit much, but his overall writing style is appealing to me. I should be done with it by the end of the week.
I'm also re-reading Rumo, by Walter Moers (translated from German to English by John Brownjohn [seriously, ][/seriously,]), before i hand it off to my niece. It's a pretty fantastic/silly story in a made up land with a surprisingly dark (like, Pixar dark) beginning.
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taking another shot at The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, about halfway in (so 650 pages :bar​, it's mostly about ideas and there's a lot of good thumbnail caricatures of things that are still around today (idee-fixee TED-style poptimism, allure of nebulous seaweedy states of Pure Feeling esp to businessmen and stock merchants, progress....) but the weird, loose, self-cannibalising structure makes it dufficult to get a fix on.
also reading Salem's Lot by Stephen King. i read The Dead Zone a while ago and kinda liked it, feel similarly about this one - they feel like nerd fantasy books with an image of grown-up life that's crude and sorta grotesque at the same time, like in terms of contrast between the gentle bookish (but still 100% man!! and everyone takes time out to recognise this, he drinks beer etc) suburb protagonists and the brutish townies who are always one step away from evil possession or killing someone... coupling of bland semi-idyllic smalltown presentation with what seems like some creepy score-settling thing going on between the lines in the way the different characters are presented is more unsettling than the monster bits. also i'm a sucker for stereotypical america zones presented as spooky psychic hotspots. but they're also pretty goofy and bland as books and go downhill after the first couple chapters!
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I just read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? followed by Ubik followed by A Scanner Darkly (all PKD novels).
It will be a while before I read another existential crisis. I enjoyed them all but perhaps reading in the order I read them I subjected myself to an increasing feeling of despair! ASD, being equivalent to watching a car crash in slow motion as the protagonist is turned into a vegetable.
Ubik was incredible. It deals with the concept that humans can be kept alive after death in some form of stasis and can live out their own fabricated realities in half-life, but as time goes on the world starts to regress through time as what they remember of their world ebbs away. There are more factors than just this which I wouldn't want to spoil, it gets quite horrific. It makes me want to read more novels that are close to how absurd actual dreams are.
At the moment I am reading Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. It's an apocalyptic novel with a sorta deadpan scientific narrative/main character. It seems less about horror and closer to some sort of simulation theory with a smattering of story-events. It's hard reading but at the same time it's interesting and feels somewhat accurate so I keep on going. The author seems somewhat emotionless half the time, besides just noting that many of the characters encountered are "in a state of shock".
I tried to read the sequel to The Quantum Thief which is called The Fractal Prince, however, I don't know what kind of drugs Hannu was taking at the time he wrote it but is beyond the scope of my neanderthal brain and I cannot understand it enough to enjoy it.
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Still read books during brief periods of "nothing else going on and don't have time or energy to play a video game" So for me progress is generally fairly slow.
Reading "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" a book I had no clear idea about before reading. That is, all I knew was the title and it sounded like something I would not care for but I began reading it anyway and was pleasantly surprised. Nothing spectacular thus far but its definitely more interesting than its name implies.
Before that I read Bag Of Bones which was largely 'meh' and almost fit the typical SK novel to a fault and The Regulators which, while notably more violent than most of his work, I found myself struggling to care for the characters struggles. I think the one reason for this is that Stephen King tends to jump around a lot to different characters in the book and it makes it hard to keep them all straight so when shit happens to them its hard to really even follow who it happened to in the grander context of the story.
Its funny I love SK but I often come up with more to complain about with his work than to praise. He does strike fricken gold sometimes though.
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I've started reading Naked Lunch, and it's a very engaging read. Poetically written, but full of 50s slang which at first makes it a little hard to follow, but I'm much more comfortable now.
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recently finished The Psychopath Test, Lolita, and Right Ho, Jeeves. all good stuff. not too long ago, i also finished The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Graveyard Book, and a bunch of Mark Twain short stories. i don't think i'll ever run out of books to get through!! i'm currently in the middle of Ender's Game (which i've been in the middle of for a long time...), The Stranger (by Albert Camus), and Thank You, Jeeves.
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I really liked Ender's Game. But Orson Scott Card is a deluded asshat in many ways. His asshattery seems to stem from his strict religious upbringing.
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review of the dystopian novel, Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fifth Edition (http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/book-of-lamentations/)
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enojoying re-reading Pattern Recognition (on which a lot of the themes in my new game are based) and Neuromancer. Gibson's work has aged well, like Alfred Bester's.
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I recently read several books that I maybe should have read when I was younger:
Moby Dick, Catcher in the Rye, and Crime & Punishment I thought were pretty good. I didn't find them life-changing as I've heard them described, tho maybe that would be different if I had read them at the right age. Sections of MD were good but the bulk of it was pretty boring! A lot of C&P is really good, tho it's still my least favorite of Dosty's writings so far. I found Rodion a little too BadAss & wished would have been more despicable and more like the Underground Man.
I thought The Stranger and The Great Gatsby both kinda stunk! again maybe if their main themes were still new to me I'd like them more. I liked how scotty/fitzy wrote dialogue and his character interactions. I dunno if I should read the stranger (camus) again, cuz I really didn't get anything out of it. I've read some criticism and other people's takes on both of the books, and nothing I've seen anyone say about either of them sounds very interesting!
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Just finishing Smarter Than You Think, a treatise on how social media technology and the internet in general is improving cognition amongst upright, bethumbed apes. I am probably going to try and tackle some Murakami next. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles seem to be in order.
Also, for PKD fans, find a copy of Martian Time-Slip. You will not be disappointed. Promises.
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Anyone finished 'Raising Steam' by Terry Pratchett yet? What did people think?
I read reviews of it slating it before I bought it, accusing the publishers of taking advantage of Sir Terry and laughing at him (i.e. just releasing trash to sell, even though he's no longer capable). I'm 2/3rds of the way through currently and can honestly say that it's the Discworld book that's gotten me the most excited since 'Night Watch'. I love Harry King's reintroduction, I like the industrialisation vibe, I'm loving the ham-fisted luddite-religious angle with the Dwarf plot. Everything seems well tied together for a 30th anniversary, 40th book spectacular. I just hope it doesn't lose momentum towards the end now (LIKE A TRAIN, GET IT, BECAUSE THAT WOULD SUCK IF IT HAPPENED TO A TRAIN TOO, IT WOULDN'T GET TO ITS DESTINATION!!!)
Does anyone agree, or are there criticisms that are apparent that I'm not picking up on due to rose-tintedness and shit?
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I haven't been reading at all lately. :(
I need to almost set aside a day where its all that I do. I find that I burn through books a lot faster if I go in 1 session instead of popping in and out.
Though I'm not 'poping in and out' to read at all anymore even since I got a gamepad for my phone I end up just playing Yoshi's Island on an emulator. I used to take my Kindle everywhere but now that I 'by default' have a portable gaming system with me at all times it seems redundant. Maybe I should alternate.
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does manga count cause i caught up with all the translated pages of oyasumi punpun, that mangas a fucking trip if i've ever seen one. asano inio knows how to write damn good characters.
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I just finished Slaughterhouse Five last night. It's a super amazing book and you should totally read it if you haven't already. It's so amazing that a dude could write a book that deals so heavily with a man's supposed abduction by aliens and have that actually strengthen his narrative about the Dresden bombings. I love how humorous and weird it is without taking any of the power away from the subject matter. I need to read a lot more Vonnegut now.
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I just finished Slaughterhouse Five last night. It's a super amazing book and you should totally read it if you haven't already. It's so amazing that a dude could write a book that deals so heavily with a man's supposed abduction by aliens and have that actually strengthen his narrative about the Dresden bombings. I love how humorous and weird it is without taking any of the power away from the subject matter. I need to read a lot more Vonnegut now.
Oh shiiiiit. I love Vonnegut. My favorite is definitely Cat's Cradle though Breakfast Of Champions is good if you'd like something a little more "stream of consciousness".
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does manga count cause i caught up with all the translated pages of oyasumi punpun, that mangas a fucking trip if i've ever seen one. asano inio knows how to write damn good characters.
Infernal hails. I think all 13 volumes were translated when you wrote that, so there isn't really any "caught up". I haven't read (and don't intend to read) the 13th volume because I think appreciate the ambiguity of an open ending more than anything the actual ending could ever bring me.
Right now I'm reading Julius Evola's "Revolt Against The Modern World". It's about his own esoteric interpretations of traditional civilizations compared and contrasted with the degenerate and declining societies of today. Evola's worldviews are definitely some of the most unique and unprecedented among anyone, but a disproportionate amount of attention is focused on the fact that he's elitist and racist.