Not signed in (Sign In)
-
Options
Categories
- Main Junction
- London Zoo
- Warren's Pub Table
- FREAKANGELS
- Music
- Printheads
- Art And Moving Pictures
- Internet
- Mad Science
- Fantastika!: SF & The Weird
- Blogs
Welcome, Guest
Vanilla is a product of Lussumo:
Documentation and Support.
This discussion has been inactive for longer than 5 days, and doesn't want to be resurrected.
-
finished Jane Eyre last week and enjoyed it more or less. I liked the way the characters were built. the sort of eye that Bronte had isn't so common now, except in specific genre writing, and it seems like no one is allowed to take the sort of time she indulged in getting to the action. Or maybe I should read more (Southern) gothics.
Still slowly working away at Merton's Seven Storey Mountain. I have make sure to clear my head of any babbling on religion (or anti-religion) in my immediate life in order not to have immediate reactions to Merton's POV. I have several excellent friends who are atheists and I've realize a lot of my knee jerk thought trends toward skepticism, even though when I really let myself go on uninterrupted navel gazing I can't escape the reality that I Believe. So I try to clear out my ego and just let what Merton wrote come in and sit around awhile before I determine where it needs to get filed. -
@mybrainhurts - The Things They Carried is great, one of the best Vietnam War books I've read after Dispatches. Also kudos for finishing Downriver - I absolutely loved bits of it when I picked it up, but I just couldn't get past some of the other bits - I think I gave up on it after the third time he made a real reach to describe something wholly unlike a penis as if it were like a penis.
-
@256 - I agree, I really loved The Things They Carried. I thought the story with the girl going with Green Berets could have worked perfectly as a stand-alone short story, but overall it was one of my favorite war books (Red Badge of Courage being one my least favorite).
I've started reading Love in the Life Cholera, but it starts off real slow. I'm hoping it turns into an amazing story, but I keep glancing at some of Cormac McCarthy novels I haven't finished wondering if I should change out what I'm reading. -
I'm half-way through Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters at the moment, and it's genius, though really not the most obvious Austin novel to add sea monsters to, seeing as in Persuasion all the men are in the navy, but though it feels a bit forced it's funny and interesting. I just wish there was slightly more orginal Austin in it, because that is the real reason I'm reading.
I have my house's book club on wednesday so I need to try and finish Mrs Dalloway by then, but considering that I've read it like 4 times and it's one of my favourite of Woolf's novels that will be easy. -
Re-read The Handmaids Tale by Atwood earlier this month (as in read it for pleasure instead of for High School AP Lit) and enjoyed it so I got a copy of Orax and Crake that I'm slowly dipping into.
Re-read the first 150ish of crooked little vein then a friend saw it and wanted to borrow it for the bus ride to Thanksgiving. It's the perfect book to be reading while dealing w/ ultraconservative fam so I let it go.
Also on the non-fic side I'm deep into Believer, Beware selected by Jeff Sharlet, Peter Manseau and editors of Killing the Buddha. It was a perfect birthday gift after a long conversation about faith. -
Just started Ken Macleod's LEARNING THE WORLD. Also started the first novel in the Fu Manchu Omnibus vol 1, THE MYSTERY OF DR FU MANCHU.
-
-
CommentAuthorrickiep00h
- CommentTimeNov 25th 2009 edited
Well, on a whim I tried to restart Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears, which was the last Clancy book I attempted. I was so frustrated by the second chapter that I took all my Clancy books except Red October to Half-Price and sold them all. I got like ten bucks for 'em. Good riddance.
I then came home and picked up this version of Eliot's The Waste Land and reread that. If anything falls into "guilty pleasure" for me, that's it. I always feel like a pretentious twat reading it or talking about it, but I really like that damn poem.
Still haven't gotten around to the library, but my new card came in the mail this week, so I should do it soon. Sooooon. -
-
- Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett (Wonderful. As Pratchett always is)
- The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil (had to take a break on it for a bit)
- Woman of Independent Means by Gail Vaz-Oxlade (loaned by a friend. Apparently has some good financial advice. Haven't got to it yet)
- High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (Second reading. Good break-up companion)
- Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin (goes well with the Kurzweil book, oddly) -
Let's see. I finished Palimpsest a couple of days ago, and now I'm reading The Big Sleep. I don't know how I never picked this up before, it's a ton of fun, crazy levels of detail without being boring, and seems meant to be read out loud.
-
-
CommentAuthorChristian Sager
- CommentTimeNov 25th 2009
I just finished I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly & JM Ken Niimura. Great comic, that fluctuated between humor and melancholy in a story that was (SPOILERS)
ultimately about dealing with death. I would actually recommend it to anyone struggling with the death of a loved one.
My work reading right now is Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons but I'm moving slowly through it during lunches. For the train rides I'm blowing through trades of Y The Last Man and alternating with D&D sword porn novels about the Dark Sun setting. -
-
@spinnerin Palimpsest was absolutely beautiful. I loved it. What did you think of it?
-
- CommentAuthorundulatingungulate
- CommentTimeNov 29th 2009
Wetware - Dennis Bray.
Cells, computation, consciousness and life. Interesting. -
@munin218 - Agreed. Valente did a great job with the setting and characters. It makes me want to paint bits of blue map on myself.
-
-
CommentAuthorCorey Waits
- CommentTimeNov 29th 2009
Ok, I've got less than a hundred pages left in the Condition of Muzak and whilst I've enjoyed the Cornelius Chronicles, I'd find them difficult to recommend.
The first one starts off as a rollicking sci-fi actiony/adventury thing, but it seems like Moorcock soon realised that this wasn't what he wanted to write at all, as the rest of the series is more about chronicling the fall (and rise and fall and rise and fall and rise again) of his semi-fictional civilisation, through the lens of a handful of (mostly unlikeable/unhateable and criminally unmemorable) characters.
Not to mention that for every enjoyable page, there's a page of pointless (and arguably skip-able) brand-name-dropping cataloging. I'm sorry, but I don't care what long-forgotten designer clothes the characters are wearing when their motives are completely impenetrable.
I could easily recommend the fourth book, because I've been enjoying it rather more than any of the other three... The only problem, of course, being that the fourth book might only be enjoyable because I already understand the setting, characters and style from reading the other three.
I'm also beginning to dislike Jerry rather a lot. He seems little more than a puppet for the other characters to use and abuse, having no personality of his own that isn't derived entirely from the clothes he is wearing or what music he is listening to.
I have a feeling that this could be deliberate and possibly somehow be related to the point of the series, but change the fact that it's hard to reconcile the Jerry from the start of The Final Programme with the Jerry of The English Assassin or Muzak.
Maybe I'm just thirty years too late?
Be interested to hear what any resident Cornelius/Moorcock fans have to say (feel free to continue the discussion in the December thread if this one is closed shortly). -
This discussion has been inactive for longer than 5 days, and doesn't want to be resurrected.