what are you reading?

[MadJohnShaft]

Finished and enjoyed The Company - I bought a DVD of the book that was a TNT miniseries too.


Moving on to something next - maybe





This is supposed to be a masterpiece, might be too much for me to stay on top of though...I had to read the first sample chapter twice.

[johnny problem]

Asimov's I, Robot.  It's a great book and absolutely unrelated to the movie.
Next in line is either Philip k. Dick's Martian Time Slip or Vulcan's Hammer.

[lowdaddy]

the counterfeiters - andre gide

[Dylan Thomas]

Asimov's I, Robot.  It's a great book and absolutely unrelated to the movie.
Next in line is either Philip k. Dick's Martian Time Slip or Vulcan's Hammer.

The Martian Time Slip is great, though I haven't read Vulcan's Hammer.


Currently re-reading Ursula K LeGuinn's The Left Hand Of Darkness.  Great book, blew me away when I first read it, though that was years ago and I felt the need to revisit it now that I have a different perspective on life.  She's one of my favorite authors of all time.

[MadJohnShaft]

I read that a couple years ago too - I read it at 13 or so and didn't remember much. Masterpiece.


I am trying to decide between:








and then I just noticed that I bought but did not start reading....





So much classy stuff to read and so much classy time to do something else..

[lowdaddy]

under the volcano is great.  i haven't read the other three.

[diasdegalvan]

Just finished reading I Am Legend by Richard Matheson I enjoyed it haven't watched the movie adaptation starring Will Smith but I hear it's a lot different than the book. Don't know yet what I'll read next.

[SabbathJeff]

Very focusedly,

Rat Salad right now.

Finishing up the chapter on vol 4, 8 I think? 

I like that it approaches the love for the riffs from a musician's standpoint, it's just hard for me to appreciate his appreciate in that way because I'm not really a musician, always more an artist, but I feel his love for the classic sabbath years as he calls them, and the book deserves its place with the good sabbath biographies that are available.

[JemDooM]

I'm a few chapters from finishing A Dance with Dragons p1 which is awesome, can't wait to get back to Cersei!

Today I read most of Say you love Satan, fucking great read!!

[Dunedin]

I've just started "touching from a Distance" by Deborah Curtis, Ian Curtis' widow. So far she's not painted a pretty picture of him. Jealousy, controlling and very self centred seem to be the main character traits she remembers.

[diasdegalvan]

Read 2001: A Space Odyssey found it to be great I know the film by Kubrick is supposed to be a classic but after 40 minutes I stopped watching too boring weird I'll try again later.

Right now midway through Sabriel fast paced fantasy read.

[SabbathJeff]

Started/finished Love's Executioner.  Will begin delving deeper into Dr. Yalom's work.

[Lip]

4th Harry Pooter - Goblet of Fire - and Dan Browns new one... Inferno. Also been dipping into Drood by Dan Simmons - but - I've been nursing that read forever - and Quantum Psychology by Robert Anton Wilson

[diasdegalvan]

Read Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke which was excellent now I'm reading Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. midway through and it's really interesting reminding me of Event Horizon being in deep space and past loved ones who should be dead start appearing in the spaceship.

[MadJohnShaft]

'tis a classic

I read this on a plane cause it was on my kindle... interesting, she knows a lot of the 70s-80s people well

[MadJohnShaft]

For a few years now, I've been trying to think why the fuck to still buy paper books so I started buying books that are 'weird', art objects, underground, or otherwise strangely plotted so that the physical makes more sense, and as a collection taken together is something worthwhile to still have in paper format. I sure do not want to own many more paper books unless there's a real reason. (In fact, this month I finally re-stumbled into French Oulipo novels, which is something I looked into a bit when I was a kid, but unlike in the 80s where each purchase took years of looking in every used book store diligently, you can buy this shit on the internet easily - so I am using restraint to avoid getting too many.)



Tloth



The imagination runs wild in this book -- rather like a chariot with a wheel slipping from its axis. A maddening read -- I couldn't finish this book in one sitting , as someone commented above. One chapter a night was all I could handle, and with the plot and locales veering all over the map, I had a hard time remembering what I had read the night before. And yet, I knew that I absolutely HAD to finish Tlooth, and when I did, I was glad; the end reveals what this book is about (and it is about something after all). Erudite, staggeringly digressive, subversive, dreamlike, pansexual: TLOOTH gives mainstream fiction a rousing slap on the behind. (Expand that metaphor into something more knuckle-y, and you'll get the gist of what I really mean.) It's not a book in the usual sense of the world. It's a disorientation. Either you are up to it, or you aren't. NOT an Oprah Book Club selection (thank God)!





Hopscotch



Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.




Building Stories



*Starred Review* Ware has been consistently pushing the boundaries for what the comics format can look like and accomplish as a storytelling medium. Here he does away with the book format—a thing between two covers that has a story that begins and ends—entirely in favor of a huge box containing 14 differently sized, formatted, and bound pieces: books, pamphlets, broadsheets, scraps, and even a unfoldable board that would be at home in a Monopoly box. The pieces, some previously published in various places and others new for this set, swarm around a Chicago three-flat occupied by an elderly landlady, a spiteful married couple, and a lonely amputee (there's also a bee bumbling around in a rare display of levity). The emotional tenor remains as soul-crushing and painfully insightful as any of Ware's work, but it's really insufficient to talk about what happens in anything he does. It's all about the grind and folly of everyday life but presented in an exhilarating fashion, each composition an obsessively perfect alignment of line, shape, color, and perspective. More than anything, though, this graphic novel (if it can even be called that) mimics the kaleidoscopic nature of memory itself—fleeting, contradictory, anchored to a few significant moments, and a heavier burden by the day. In terms of pure artistic innovation, Ware is in a stratosphere all his own. --Ian Chipman



The Quincunx



"The Quincunx" is an epic Dickensian-like mystery novel set in 19th century England, and concerns the varying fortunes of young John Huffam and his mother. A thrilling complex plot is made more intriguing by the unreliable narrator of the book - how much can we believe of what he says? First published in 1989, "The Quincunx" was a surprise bestseller and began a trend for pastiche Victorian novels. It remains one of the best.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



Hypnerotomachia Poliphili



One of the most famous books in the world, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, read by every Renaissance intellectual and referred to in studies of art and culture ever since, was first published in English by Thames & Hudson in 1999.

It is a strange, pagan, pedantic, erotic, allegorical, mythological romance relating in highly stylized Italian the quest of Poliphilo for his beloved Polia. The author (presumed to be Francesco Colonna, a friar of dubious reputation) was obsessed by architecture, landscape, and costume—it is not going too far to say sexually obsessed—and its 174 woodcuts are a primary source for Renaissance ideas on both buildings and gardens.

In 1592 an attempt was made to produce an English version but the translator gave up. The task has been triumphantly accomplished by Joscelyn Godwin, who succeeds in reproducing all its wayward charm and arcane learning in language accessible to the modern reader. 174 black-and-white illustrations



I Wonder



Quirky, poignant, astute, funny—this beautiful book presents a compelling collection of observations on visual culture and design, written and illuminated by world-renowned typographic illustrator Marian Bantjes. In Stefan Sagmeister's telling words, Bantjes's work is his  "favorite example of beauty facilitating the communication of meaning."




Tree of Codes



Tree of Codes is a haunting new story by best-selling American writer, Jonathan Safran Foer. With a different die-cut on every page, Tree of Codes explores previously unchartered literary territory. Initially deemed impossible to make, the book is a first — as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling. Tree of Codes is the story of an enormous last day of life — as one character's life is chased to extinction, Foer multi-layers the story with immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person's last day everyone's story. Inspired to exhume a new story from an existing text, Jonathan Safran Foer has taken his "favorite" book, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and used it as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story told in Jonathan Safran Foer's own acclaimed voice.


A Humument (I have a couple of these and some signed plates I framed)



"A 'treated Victorian novel'—treated with humor and poetry, and a feeling for the 'ghosts of other possible stories' lurking in the original text. It may be the closest a paperback book has come to being an art object."—New York

In the mid-1960s, Tom Phillips took a forgotten nineteenth-century novel, W. H. Mallock's A Human Document, and began working over the extant text to create something new. The artist writes, "I plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents, and surrealist catastrophes which seemed to lurk within its wall of words. As I worked on it, I replaced the text I'd stripped away with visual images of all kinds. It began to tell and depict, among other memories, dreams, and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love's casualties."




Blast!    Since I'm a fan of the futurists and the vorticists, although they are sort of Nazis.




Blast was the short-lived literary magazine of the Vorticist movement in Britain. Two editions were published: the first on 2 July 1914 (dated 20 June 1914, but publication was delayed)[1][2] and published with uncharacteristic and shockingly bright pink cover art, referred to by Ezra Pound as the "great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus"; and the second a year later on 15 July 1915. Both editions were written primarily by Wyndham Lewis. [3] The magazine is emblematic of the modern art movement in England,[4] and recognised as a seminal text of pre-war 20th-century modernism.








These are sitting in my wish list until someone gets me an Amazon gift card....



Exercises in Style



"A work of genius in a brilliant translation by Barbara Wright....Endlessly fascinating and very funny." —Philip Pullman

The plot of Exercises in Style is simple: a man gets into an argument with another passenger on a bus. However, this anecdote is told 99 more times, each in a radically different style, as a sonnet, an opera, in slang, and with many more permutations. This virtuoso set of variations is a linguistic rust-remover, and a guide to literary forms.




Pataphysics



Of all the French cultural exports over the last 150 years or so, 'pataphysics--the science of imaginary solutions and the laws governing exceptions--has proven to be one of the most durable. Originating in the wild imagination of French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry and his schoolmates, resisting clear definition, purposefully useless, and almost impossible to understand, 'pataphysics nevertheless lies around the roots of Absurdism, Dada, futurism, surrealism, situationism, and other key cultural developments of the twentieth century. In this account of the evolution and influence of 'pataphysics, Andrew Hugill offers an informed exposition of a rich and difficult territory, staying aloft on a tightrope stretched between the twin dangers of oversimplifying a serious subject and taking a joke too seriously. Drawing on more than twenty-five years' research, Hugill maps the 'pataphysical presence (partly conscious and acknowledged but largely unconscious and unacknowledged) in literature, theater, music, the visual arts, and the culture at large, and even detects 'pataphysical influence in the social sciences and the sciences. He offers many substantial excerpts (in English translation) from primary sources, intercalated with a thorough explication of key themes and events of 'pataphysical history.


Lesabendio



First published in German in 1913 and widely considered to be Paul Scheerbart's masterpiece, Lesabéndio is an intergalactic utopian novel that describes life on the planetoid Pallas, where rubbery suction-footed life forms with telescopic eyes smoke bubble-weed in mushroom meadows under violet skies and green stars. Amid the conveyor-belt highways and lighthouses weaving together the mountains and valleys, a visionary named Lesabéndio hatches a plan to build a 44-mile-high tower and employ architecture to connect the two halves of their double star. A cosmic ecological fable, Scheerbart's novel was admired by such architects as Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, and such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (whose wedding present to Benjamin was a copy of Lesabéndio). Benjamin had intended to devote the concluding section of his lost manuscript "The True Politician" with a discussion of the positive political possibiliti<\h>es embedded in Scheerbart's "Asteroid Novel." As translator Christina Svendsen writes in her introduction, "Lesabéndio helps us imagine an ecological politics more daring than the conservative politics of preservation, even as it reminds us that we are part of a larger galactic set of interrelationships." This volume includes Alfred Kubin's illustrations from the original German edition.
Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion, who wrote fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.

[diasdegalvan]

[lowdaddy]

Lie down in darkness by William styron.  I read it many years ago and loved it.  Interested to see how my opinion of it may have changed.  Or not.

[MadJohnShaft]

Building Stories - not the kind of thing you can bring to the beach though

[diasdegalvan]

This book is pretty dang awesome. It's about the Soviet space program and the first man in space Yuri Gagarin.

[berrugal]

Oh, summer, reading and swimming and salty tits (my penis can be salty too!)

I just read Darkness Visible by the Lord of the Flies guy...damn weird book. Reads like something Alan Moore could have done in comic. I didn't like but didn't dislike it. Books are pyschotropic aren't they? this ones that have a lot of description of mental states specially, it's too easy to look up around you and start viewing the world like you have been reading...

But that was all for letters (this book I picked it up from a garbage container in the street, when I saw it was by Golding) I went to the local library in Menorca and borrowed at a rate of three comics / day.

Ones that you might find around:

A 90's vibe to it, tastes like grunge. I liked it

And Return to the Sea. http://www.anymanga.com/kaikisen-return-to-the-sea/

An d many other comic books, from Spanish authors, and italian, stuff not translated into English ... but now I gotta work

[berrugal]

@MJS

Roberto Bolaño is some overrated ball of hype, they've been trying to sell him (he's dead already btw) like he's the new South American genious, but I have not been able to finish a single of his novels, (started 3 of them) It's only good to put you to sleep.

On the other hand Julio Cortázar is good. But Hopscotch might not be a good choice. Cronopios and Famas or any other short story compilation from him are best.

[MadJohnShaft]

Yeah - the NYT bestseller lists promote a lot of stuff like Savage Detectives that I don't find all that engaging. Maybe the people in NY are so busy yelling and complaining that every book is a nice break.....I still will take a shot at it.




I started reading a 1902 diary by this 19 year old from Montana that is a very famous book - I Await the Devil's Coming by Mary MacLane....



Mary MacLane's I Await the Devil's Coming is a shocking, brave and intellectually challenging diary of a 19-year-old girl living in Butte, Montana in 1902. Written in potent, raw prose that propelled the author to celebrity upon publication, the book has become almost completely forgotten.

In the early 20th century, MacLane's name was synonymous with sexuality; she is widely hailed as being one of the earliest American feminist authors, and critics at the time praised her work for its daringly open and confessional style. In its first month of publication, the book sold 100,000 copies — a remarkable number for a debut author, and one that illustrates MacLane's broad appeal.

Now, with a new foreward written by critic Jessa Crispin, I Await The Devil's Coming stands poised to renew its reputation as one of America's earliest and most powerful accounts of feminist thought and creativity.


I wonder if any of the reviewers made it to the latter 2/3 of the book - the language is heavy and beautiful. I don't really care what she's typing and it's certainly not a feminist genre novel,  it's just perfect. 

[Danny G]

Rereading "The Music Lesson" by Victor Wooten again


Sent from a can on some string using Tapatalk

[astroman]

@MJS

On the other hand Julio Cortázar is good. But Hopscotch might not be a good choice. Cronopios and Famas or any other short story compilation from him are best.

I love Hopscotch. LOVE IT. I will check out some short stories though. Have not read anything else of his.

Reading Cloud Atlas. Huge fan of the film and really enjoying the book so far. Of course, I have not made it to the Apostrophe Fest yet....we'll see how that goes.