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The New Reading/Book Thread: With That Same Ol' Bad Taste!
Dublo7
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Alright, this is the new book thread, and that.
Let's talk about what great literary works we are reading, pondering, and in most of your cases, substituting for shite!
I just finished Fictions by Borges. I can't believe it's taken me this long to get around to reading Borges. I'm going to re-read a few of the stories again today, and see if I can head down to the bookshop to find some more.
I'm also hankering for reading some more Pynchon. I might go get a copy of V!
Let's talk about what great literary works we are reading, pondering, and in most of your cases, substituting for shite!
I just finished Fictions by Borges. I can't believe it's taken me this long to get around to reading Borges. I'm going to re-read a few of the stories again today, and see if I can head down to the bookshop to find some more.
I'm also hankering for reading some more Pynchon. I might go get a copy of V!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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it was pretty fantastic
Do people here have good reads? I need more recommendations.
http://www.goodreads.com/extemporanea
I just read faithful place by tana french and I'm now out of reading material. not sure what I feel like reading next.
Just finished Crooked Little Vein.
People are some weird motherfuckers.
Can't find my copy of the silmarillion.
want some good comics, serialized
what a wonderful post this is
If you want more great Borges, go to Labyrinths
I think it has some of the same ones as Fictions, but it's his other fine collection
it's a literature wet dream
http://numberblog.wordpress.com/
I was thinking of getting The Aleph next; should I go with that, or with Labyrinths?
Anyway, I'm now around 50 pages into V. So far, so good.
Ooh, how is Mason and Dixon? Have you read any other Pynchon?
I'm probably going to start The gone away world over the weekend and I'm really looking forward to it, it looks ridiculous.
The Gone Away World is good times. Probably my favorite read of the year thus far.
Now reading these
The Europe book is fat and educational and has tiny writing, which feels pretty weird after the light popcorn read of Temeraire. Kind of feels like homework.
So much fun is that book. The less you know about it before you read it the better.
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
I fucking love Malcom Gladwell
I finished Eaters of the Dead again last night. I liked it. It's a pretty simple read and I wish it had more backmatter and pedantic foot notes, but as a single document, it's still pretty fun. It's the kind of fantasy I like (if you can call it that) where it mixes basic, mundane historical reality with the stranger parts of our own world. In this case the wendol aren't actual monsters and there aren't actual dragons, they're just Neanderthals and any other instance of legend or fantasy is, more or less, a misunderstanding of what the thing actually is. Then you add a thousand years of rumor and mistranslation and all of the sudden, these minor misunderstandings turn into mythical beasts and such. I find that to be incredibly cool.
I don't like fantasy that's way out there, with a million different races co-existing and fake languages and magic. I like ugly, gritty, down to earth stuff, which I guess is why I like the Conan series. There's a lot of fantastic stuff in it, but it all comes down to these very grounded ideas.
Plus, I'm of the opinion that as a monster, you can't do any better than a giant, blood-thirsty ape. People have tried and they've failed.
Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk
Oral biographies lend themselves to the audiobook format so well, because each character gets his own voice and it really helps flesh out the world. I can't even imagine going back and just reading this.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (BBC Radio Play edition)
Basically they make a radio drama out of the book, and it is fantastic. Plus one of the hobbits from LOTR (Billy Boyd) has one of the main roles, it's really fun to listen to.
Literally anything by David Sedaris. It is all solid gold.
I want to pick up some of Sarah Vowell's audiobooks too, because she not only has a fantastic reading voice, she has a fantastic literary voice, and apparently cameos by famous funny people.
I've got a copy of Hyperion by Dan Simmons on the backburner because it was free from Audible for a promotion they were doing. Dunno how good it'll be, but it was free, so I already got my money's worth.
I just finished the last of the Conan shorts (at least the ones published when Howard was still around) this morning.
I almost regret having read them, but I'm still going to read at least The Hour of the Dragon and maybe the Solomon Kane stories before I give up on him completely.
I'm still thinking Howard was probably at least a little bit of a terrible person, what with the blatant racism and casual rapes and all.
That said, The Tower of the Elephant is a blatant Lovecraft ripoff and is awesome for it.
He also spent most of his life hating himself and everyone he knew.
Then he killed himself.
So, he may have been a bad person, but it's not like he didn't earn it.
I'd like to think that Lovecraft's racism was zeitgeist but that is a tough argument for anyone who was alive while Mark Twain was writing.
If he were alive today, he'd probably be one of those people who says things like, "I'm not racist, but..."
When his mother took ill, he made it known that he would kill himself when she died.
No one stopped him when he went out to the car with a gun.
I think this may have had something to do with it:
HP Lovecraft isn't as blatantly racist, but if you read into his life you'll find that he's got more than a few personal problems regarding the non-white races. Plus, he was a huge Anglophile, which is not all that endearing of a human quality.
I guess you could argue that each of their prejudices are results of the time, but, even if it is, their biases still show up in their works.
i can't stop giggling at this cover
The most blatant offense that I can recall out of Lovecraft is his comparison of a reanimated black man to a gorilla. I'm not excusing it by any means, but it was pretty standard for his time. Definitely racist, but no more so than your great grandfather.
Most of the Conan stories come right out and say that black people are mentally, culturally, or morally inferior. Sometimes it's as simple as the narrator saying something like "and he did this horrible thing because he was black and black people are just like that". One of the more popular plots is Conan saving a white woman from being raped by black men (often only to rape her himself).
Occasionally he also harps on the Jews.
Mieville's ornate vocabulary is hard to appreciate when I can't tell some of the words he's made up from real words that I just don't know.
An isolated town serves to examine the inter-relations of the various social, political, and religious factions of modern-day Turkey. It might be a bit lengthier than necessary, but it's very worth it. A lot of the connections he draws are a little surprising, but they each make sense in their own way.
Lovecraft also wrote a story in which a character has a vision of the future wherein the US is conquered by asians.
He was not as polite as I was just now.
also is it horrible of me if when i see the name conan i dont think of 'the barbarian' or 'o'brien' but 'detective conan'