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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2003: What are you currently reading?

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The Return Of Rothkoid

12:47 / 30.12.02

OK. It's now - where I am, at least - New Year's Eve. Well, the day thereof, but you know what I mean. The last day of 2002. And so, I thought it was time to get the spark-plugs properly screwed into the next instalment. When it's 2003, 2003 reading goes here.

You know what you doing! Starting tomorrow, post away!

Old brown-eye is back

20:53 / 30.12.02

Am about to crack on with Hitler's Children by Jillian Becker, having just found Luke Haines' lovely Baader Meinhof thang in the sales for a fiver. Amazon feedback ranges from calling it the definitive history to a big pile of poo; anyone else read it?

Foust is SO authentic

00:33 / 31.12.02

Well, I'm reading Fight Club for the second time, prompted by having finished Lulluby last week. I'm enjoying it much more the second time around - I'm getting used to Palahniuk's style and tone. I wish I had read the book before seeing the movie; I keep wanting to read the themes from the film into the book. It's kind of distracting.

I've also got to start reading Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel this week. Tthat's for a history class, not pleasure. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.

And I just returned the trade paper back of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so now I'll have to re-read Dracula.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

07:47 / 31.12.02

I just started Al Alvarez' "The Savage God- A Study Of Suicide" which I've been looking for for about two years and which has just been reprinted. Very good so far (about 50 pages), but no more uplifting than a book which frequently references Plath and Levi could reasonably be expected to be.

Therefore I'm diluting it with brief snatches of "A Little Book of Mornington Crescent" and...

THE BEST BOOK IN THE WORLD EVER (well at the moment, anyway- I just bought it yesterday, and it rocks)-

"Schott's Miscellany"- a veritable cornucopia of... well... stuff. Everyone should own a copy. Or they'll smell of bins.

14:17 / 31.12.02

I bought that for my father, and then read it myself before he had a chance to have a look at it. It's great, isn't it - I was reading it thinking 'but why didn't I think of this?'. He's doing some other ones, I think - one on food, &c.

15:30 / 31.12.02

I'm about a third of the way through Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It's an interesting book if you're interested even in a little bit in the subject of cryptography. I don't exactly enjoy all the jumping around Stephenson does. I know it's kind of necessary, but it's a bit distracting when you jump from the 1940's to the 1990's.

On the non-fiction front, I just finished Learning Perl by Randal L. Schwartz & Tom Chistiansen and am currently working through the exercises at the end of each chapter. It's a good introduction to Perl, but to get the most out of it, it seems you need to also read Programming Perl .

16:20 / 31.12.02

I'm just about finished with the Illuminatus! trilogy, and on the comics front I just finished Batman: Black and White.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

17:00 / 31.12.02

Finished Peter Stark's Last Breath last Friday, which was frankly shite. Well-written shite, but shite none the less. A book about what happens to your body when extreme sports go wrong and you start dying but far too long, with Stark trying to explain them all with little vignette fiction. Fuck off!
After that went through Introducing Lenin and the Russian Revolution, the theory books can be a bit hit and miss, but the history and people ones are normally quite good, at least for the overview of their life angle.
Read Michael Moore's Stupid White Men on Christmas afternoon, interesting and fun. His attack on the Democrats for being spineless wonders is better than his attack on Bush. As he says, you expect to get fucked over by the Republicans, but when the Democrats do it too...
Currently reading Stephen King's On Writing, I haven't read anything of his since the appalling 'Needful Things' but am enjoying it so far.
After that I've got the Complete Jimmy Corrigan to try and get through. Someone gave me an issue ages ago and I just didn't get it at all, maybe this will do the trick.

The Return Of Rothkoid

23:10 / 31.12.02

Well, now that it is 2003 everywhere (hold off posting, tssk) I'll jump in. I'm still reading The Difference Engine: should finish that today, I hope. But thanks to two lovely Barbelith people, I've also got some year-long reading ahead: Robert Burton's The Anatomy Of Melancholy and Alyn Shipton's A New History Of Jazz. Both are behemoths, and I'm going to make an effort to read a bit of each every day.

05:47 / 01.01.03

I'm half way through Prometheus Rising by RAW (obviously) and Space by Stephen Baxter.

Once I'm done with those I can jump into Vonnegut.

10:30 / 01.01.03

That's probably the best way to tackle the Burton, Rothkoid; I haven't actually ever read it, but went to an excellent lecture solely on that book that provided such a good outline and guide to it (if I ever were to read it) that I at least know where to start. The little bits I did read of it, about a year and a half ago, were wonderful, though.

15:11 / 01.01.03

I'm in thew middle of Dark is rising by Susan Cooper, which I kind of thought was appropriate for this time of year, and indeed it is.

15:12 / 01.01.03

I've just finished I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan - Lucifer undergoes a trial period of incarnation with, predictably, hilarious results. But it is actually very funny indeed and, though it's basically a jolly good light read, it does have some Screwtape Letters-y moments. It was also greatly improved by the fact that Lucifer's narrative voice is eerily reminiscent of Haus.

I resolved, for New Year, to start reading Radical Enlightenment by Jonathan Israel again, and this time to carry on until I have finished it, so I suppose that counts as an ongoing thing. Also Bright Earth by someone-or-other, about the history of pigments - upcoming thread in Art and Design springing from this, you have been warned...

15:13 / 01.01.03

Oh, and I've just finished The Bad Mirror, this really cool book of essays about underground cinema which I got for Christmas and had read two thirds of by Boxing Day.

16:32 / 01.01.03

I'm reading "The Illuminatus Trilogy", "Don Juan" by Lord BYron, and "Promehteus Unbound" by Shelley.

19:14 / 01.01.03

I just got a copy of Schott's Miscellany as a late Christmas present.

Fantastic. (from the perfunctory skim I've had of it).

The Return Of Rothkoid

21:04 / 01.01.03

It's only available in the UK at the moment, isn't it? I've had no luck finding it locally...

22:42 / 01.01.03

Nearly finished Paul Auster's Moon Palace which I'm enjoying more than I did his New York Trilogy, but the former has made me want to re-read the latter.

On the stack to read are Christmas presents: Donna Tart's The Secret History;Mike Moore's Stupid White Men and Joe R. Lansdale's Captain's Outrageous.

06:31 / 02.01.03

Rothkoid, it's been available here for a while. Try Borders in the General Reference section: Ben Schott, Schott's Original Miscellany (Bloomsbury, 2002) $29.95 It's a small hardback with a tasteful, old style cream dusk jacket ya can easily miss.

It *is* fascinating. And I was delighted by the following entry (on p. 151) under 19th Century Canvas Sizes:

Kit-Cat* ..... 36" x 29"

*After the portraits of the members of the Whig Club which met (c.1700)in the house of Christopher (Kit) Cat. The canvasses had to be cut to fit the room's low ceilings.

06:59 / 02.01.03

Damn, KCC beat me to I, Lucifer. On the home stretch with it now, and it is very enjoyable. Wickedly funny in parts, and a nice premise.

07:01 / 02.01.03

Cavatina - also where Kit-Kats get their name, apparently. Long, horizontal choccy bars. Like paintings with the tops cut off.

14:50 / 02.01.03

Damn - discovered. However, my dimensions are definitely *not* 36" x 29".

My Bright Earth book is by a chap called Philip Ball, and I recommend it. Some very interesting stuff on ancient use of pigments - why the Greeks might have gone for their 'four colour' style of painting, how they saw colours on a scale from light to dark and that's why they thought that if you added white to red you'd get green... also on early chemistry and alchemy. I love the names of the pigments (I always have anyway) - orpiment, realgar, sinoper, etc. Seductive, just like the rows of paints in an art supplies shop.

15:09 / 02.01.03

Myself, I'm having another run at Erasmus's Praise of Folly, just for the hell of it. I read it years ago, on an airplane: I have it in the back of mind that this could make an excellent comic, albeit a very trippy one. I might read Boethius next, or I might prise D's new copy of the Kalevala (which I bought for her) from her hands.

As always, am reading aloud to Claire: we're currently working our way through the All-of-a-Kind Family series of books by Sydney Taylor: I loved these books when I was a kid, and picked up a reissue of the first on a whim, never expecting Claire to be interested (she has soundly rejected the Little House books, which broke D's heart)—but, as unlikely as it seems, my throughly modern daughter has glommed onto this saga of a poor Jewish family growing up in Lower Manhattan in the early years of the 20th Century. Who'd have guessed?

After we finish the series, we'll probably start on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which could take us a month or more to finish.

22:46 / 02.01.03

Jack - your daughter sounds cool. Sounds a cool concept - socially aware childrens literature, if I'm not reading too much into it. What gets her about it, do you think? My fave as a kid was Fungus the Bogeyman. Not a large step from there to The Invisibles, really.

Currently finishing off "Shamans, Mystics & Doctors" by Sudhir Kakar. He's a Indian Freudian psycho-analyst who is analysing the various healing traditions of his country (folk traditions, demonology, tantra, faith healing and ayurveda) through a psycho-analytical lens. Best thing about it is he isn't all psycho-analytical reductionist about it, and is aware of the uneasy space he's in, balancing between two cultures. Fascinating stuff.

23:19 / 02.01.03

Eco's Baudolino. I seem to be having the same problem that I did with Foucault's Pendulum - on reaching the halfway point, I've started to lose interest. One chapter will completely grab your attention, one a little bit later will feel like a slog to get through. I sometimes get the feeling with Eco that he's not really leading you anywhere, just showing off. It's a shame, because when it's enjoyable it's fantastic. Maybe it's just that I've not had the time to settle into it, reading a bit every now and then rather than devoting any time to it. Something else that strikes me about his novels is that I seem to like them more a couple of weeks after I've finished them. If a book sticks with you it's got to be doing something right...

Once that's finished, I'm either going to start The Outsider or take a couple of months off life to plough my way through The Decameron, both members of the "been wanting to for ages, never got around to it" list.

23:58 / 02.01.03

I've just started Churchill's Second World War. Interesting to see just how large a scale he had to think on. quite well written as well if very one sided.

06:18 / 03.01.03

You didn't start Churchill's Second World War, nuberty. The Germans did when they invaded Poland. Don't mug yourself.

Have now finished I, Lucifer and have started Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin, a non-fiction history by Richard Davenport-Hines. But I only got as far as the foreword before falling asleep last night, so I can't tell you what it's like yet.

07:00 / 03.01.03

I, too, am reading Eco's Baudalino and so far it's really good - I'll see how we go. I liked The name of the rose so I'm expecting to enjoy this.

Little boast here: I spent Christmas reading Harry Potter in French and am very impressed with myself that I could understand it. I want a magic baguette for my birthday.

09:07 / 03.01.03

I got some groovy WH-Smith vouchers from Granny for Christmas so last night I bought Porno by Irvine Welshand In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin.

Reading the cat first and so far (which isn't far at all really) it seems like it's going to be good and easy to follow which is a big plus for me!

Looking forward to reading Porno though for the simple fact that it's been awhile since I actually read some fiction.

09:57 / 03.01.03

Ariadne: You big bloody show off.

11:04 / 03.01.03

I have been postponing Vatikanets Kældre, translated from "Les Caves du Vatican" by Andre Gide. I will start tonight.

11:53 / 03.01.03

I'm reading A User's Guide to the Brain which is not, sadly, a handbook for confidence men. It's a neat little intro to the current state of neuroscience. The author seems to be pushing a theory, behidn the scenes, that the movement and somatic functions of the brain influence thinking, emotion, and learning much more than one would suspect. Unless one is a Reichian therapist, I suppose.

I started The Recognitions by Gaddis, just because Johnathan Franzen hates him (well, sort of), and the three pages (our of like, 9 billion) I've read so far have been pretty good. We'll see how deep I get into that, how quickly.

12:19 / 03.01.03

Mr Illmatic: mais oui!

12:23 / 03.01.03

You know I had A User's Guide to the Brain in my hand last night ready to buy but my friend suggested Porno so he could borrow it after I'd read it, might have to pick it up next then.

14:42 / 03.01.03

Jack - your daughter sounds cool. Sounds a cool concept - socially aware childrens literature, if I'm not reading too much into it.

Well, she is—but alas, I'm afraid you are. As hard-hitting social literature, I'd rate these about with those "American Girl" books, except in this case (as with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books) the nostalgic evocations of a long-gone way of life were written by someone who actually lived it (the books were first published in the early 1960s).

"Poverty" is a relative state on the Lower East Side in 1912—these little girls may each wear the same dress to school every day for a full term, but nobody's going to bed hungry. But the poverty, such as it is, is just another signifier of otherness—like the time period, the location, the religion and ethnicity.

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