currently reading brothers karamazov, go me

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism 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.

acid makes everything better bra

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!."

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

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.

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

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 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.

This
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Red_Chamber