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Printheads: The Book Club 2011
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Currently reading <em>Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire</em>...not sure why I never picked this series up, but working my way through it I've found that it speaks to that whole "inner child" thing that loves shit like this to this day, if in more mature forms. Also starting Neil Gaiman's <em>Stardust.</em>.
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- CommentAuthorInvincibleM
- CommentTimeMar 23rd 2011
Just finished Infinite Jest. Took about three months of on and off reading.
If you ever want to convince someone not to do drugs, that's the book to do it.
Next on the docket: White Noise by Don Delillo -
- CommentAuthorMercer Finn
- CommentTimeMar 23rd 2011
Am gonna launch into Peter Singer's How Are We To Live? tonight. -
I’m pacing myself through Zachory Mason’s The Lost Books of The Odyssey, not wanting it to end.
Short story riffs on the classic, reimagining passages/motivations/characters. It's effortless and really lyrical. Has anyone read it? Recommend any other authors with a similar style? I want more, but it’s his first. -
The Fountainhead was extremely satisfying, so i started right in on Atlas Shrugged.
@robb, i can't recommend anything in book form, but have you read Myths Retold? definitely not lyrical. -
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CommentAuthorWarped Savant
- CommentTimeMar 23rd 2011
Allana -- I thoroughly enjoyed both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged but I'm not sure if I'd be able to read them back to back. Maybe at the time I could've, but I know I couldn't now. Have you read anything else by Rand? Anthem is a quick one but good, We the Living is her philosophy but not nearly as heavy handed as the rest of her stories. -
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@Warped Savant, as i said, the momentum i built up from reading Anthem is what encouraged me to push on through The Fountainhead - but i was surprised i finished it so quickly and was so caught up in it. i thought i had better not push my luck, and got Atlas Shrugged right away. i'm glad i did, because so far she's made good on the promise of "a development of the ideas I only alluded to in The Fountainhead," or whatever it is it says to that effect on the back cover.
The Fountainhead was such a frustrating read in so many ways (for example, almost all her characters are impossible, which makes it so easy to plug those sorts of enviable conversations into their mouths) that's it great to see some of them rectified in AS (much more flawed/believable characters, thus less speechifying) - though she tempers this with quite a few more cheesy references to outright evil and a whole lot more trivial adversity thrown in people's ways. i can't shake the feeling that she's not much more than a sugar-coated Nietzsche sampler, which i guess is her right because Nietzsche was a horrible fiction writer and his ideas needed someone to illustrate them in a different way.
but, as long as Rand retains her ability to spin a good sexual domination scene, call me a fan.
(edited because i should know better than to throw the word "rape" around so flippantly on the internet. the scenes in the book are portrayed as consensual, so it doesn't apply.) -
@King Monkey - you're in for a treat with the Stainless Steel Rat works. I ran into these and the Retief series by Laumer at about the same time in my youth, and it was a much-needed dose of relief from the Ellison, Farmer, and other gloomy New Wave stuff I was reading. I just went back and reread the first seven or eight, and they still hold up well.
Along with /Ringworld/, the Stainless Steel Rat is one of the SF properties I would most like to see on the screen, preferably as a series. -
I'm about half way through Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which has been just wonderful, once I passed a hundred or so pages and became acclimated to the dense, period language. Even early there were great passages, but not long ago I passed a chapter about a possibly perpetual motion watch that Dixon was given by his mentor and felt cursed to be custodian of, as every day that passed in which he did not have to wind it stacked one more rebuke upon the illusion of comprehensibility he has built his life around, until a member of his surveying party who has taken an almost erotic lust for the device eventually swallows it whole. This book is full of gorgeous little alleys like that.
I've taken a brief break to read a novelization of a video game. I have not and don't intend to play the actual game. I would never have entertained even doing this, except the author of the novelization is Peter Watts, who has been one of the most mind-bending nihilistic geniuses in the genre for the past few years. The book is Crysis: Legion. It is a breezier read than a lot of Watts' stuff, due to the plot being constructed around the narrative of a First Person Shooter, but it is well done and a great match for the bio-horror science fiction Watts is rightly famous for.
It's actually a pretty cerebral action game novelization. If you didn't know it was based off of a game you might not realize it while reading it. It works perfectly fine on it's own.
It's also amusing that the reading Pynchon beforehand has made Peter Watts, who is one of the more intellectually challenging authors in science fiction today, seem breezy! -
Picked up and started reading Down and Out in London and Paris.
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Re-reading GREEN MARS.
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- CommentAuthormybrainhurts
- CommentTimeMar 31st 2011
Got a bunch of books from the awesome Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink, a really great experimental small press which just appears to have gone under. So I'm reading Tom Bradley's Vital Fluid, a story of two rival hypnotists, and GX-Jupitter Larsen's Sometimes Never, described as a noise novel which attempts to replicate the sounds of noisecore like Harry Pussy or Hanatarash in prose form. Interesting stuff.
On the lighter side I've just finished Lauren Beukes's Moxyland which is a solid cyberpunk yarn and Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold, a good fantasy revenge thriller and though I wasn't a big fan of his original trilogy set in the same world, this book is a lot tighter structurally and actually makes the previous books work better. -
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CommentAuthorCorey Waits
- CommentTimeMar 31st 2011
Still listening to The Strain audiobook. The audiobook is fantastic because of Ron Perlman's talents, but even if you're not into audiobooks I can recommend picking up the dead tree edition.
It's a vampire story, but it's written as a quasi-medical thriller (as in, the main character is an epidemiologist, and thus is trying to approach it from a scientific view, even after he finds out that they're dealing with vampires).
Really great stuff. -
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i did finish Atlas Shrugged but it wasn't nearly as enjoyable as The Fountainhead in the long run... it was dreary and monotonous, up until the least satisfying "happy ending" in existence. i'd rather have no closure at all than the sort of closure that makes you feel you've been condescended to. my last post was so early on in the book that i didn't know she was waiting to introduce her impossible characters and their long-winded manifestoes until later on. sigh.
i went on a short aside into rape in literature with Disgrace by Coetzee. i had read the first few chapters two years ago and had been convinced at the time that the main character's faults were massive and horrendous; this time around i came to the complete opposite conclusion. i hate that sort of cognitive dissonance: i'm trying really hard to remember why i dissented so strongly the first time around, but coming up with nothing.
i then got 150 pages into Pynchon's Against The Day before admitting defeat. i've got Mason & Dixon next on the shelf, so maybe that one won't alienate me quite so much. -
- CommentAuthorInvincibleM
- CommentTimeApr 4th 2011
Finished White Noise. I enjoyed it thoroughly. The nuns at the end were especially nice.
Next up is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, which I've been putting off for some time. -
I'm currently reading My Life in France by Julia Child and absolutely loving it. I didn't give Paris much of a chance when I was there (trip was a bit ruined when someone broke in to our room and stole money and cameras), so now I'm thinking another visit might be in order.
Comic reading is the wonderful Mega-City Masters vol 1. Loving it so far. -
- CommentAuthorJamie Heron
- CommentTimeApr 4th 2011
@Corey Waits: Ron Perlman narrates The Strain audio-book?! Well I'm getting that then, even though I've read it and the sequel.
Hm, it's been a while since I've read anything actually, The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi was good; space-opera-esque science fiction with a heist story thrown in. There were some great elements that I'd hate to spoil. Then there was 'A Wise Mans Fear' I read all 998 pages in two days, so that's a thumbs up I guess. If I could still move my thumbs independently...
Ooh, and Use of Weapons was good, though Surface Detail is still my favourite Culture book, so there. -
been getting into the baroque trilogy lately. also enjoying nick tosches, gerard de nerval, and the shotgun rule. i'm undecided on charlie huston; the shotgun rule was great, but i'm not loving his other stuff. might give sleepless a go after the baroque trilogy gets done.
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@ Fauxhammer - I can't really imagine how an electronic version of House of Leaves would work, really ...
I recently spent a lot of time alone, on a beach, in a hammock, so, in that time, I read: Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose, Kazuo Ishigoru - Never Let Me Go, and Paul Theroux - The Collected Stories.
Now I'm reading All the Pretty Horses, and less than halfway through I had ordered a collected edition of the Border Trilogy.
For light relief it's the complete Judge Dredd Casefiles, and Akira collections.
I am having a strangely great week. -
I've been listening to I Am Not A Serial Killer, by Dan Wells, on audiobook. One of the most awesomely creepy things I have ever read. At each point in the book I am torn between wanting to know what happens next, but also really not wanting to know. This makes for slow going, but serious kudos to Mr. Wells for being able to evoke such a powerful reaction.
I'm also reading a lot of Aristotle's Metaphysics for a class I am taking, but I don't think I would recommend that to anyone without a serious hard-on for ancient Greek philosophy. It's a very outdated method of thinking, which I wouldn't mind so much given that it is over two thousand years old, but so much of his core philosophy is still present in today's society that it makes me kind of worried for our culture.