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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2003: What are you currently reading?

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The Return Of Rothkoid

10:11 / 25.11.03

Really? It's good? That thang always struck me as rather lightweight, when I was looking at it.

(He says, from the depths of airport fucking literature.)

10:38 / 25.11.03

Well, it's a pop history rather than a philosophical investigation, and is therefore written in a light and accessible style, but I think it is thought-provoking and intelligent, and it assumes that the reader is interested and intelligent as well - I hate it when books talk down to the reader. Interesting discussion of automata in relation to the Encyclopedie and La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine, for example.

12:16 / 25.11.03

Almost done with The Underground Man by Mick Jackson (?),
From there I'll probably go on to a Murakami. Umm I re-read King's Dark Tower about halfway through The Underground Man because I found out he intended to finish it. Before resuming The Underground Man I waited for it then read DT5:The Wolves of the Calla. Oh I also managed to squish in
a reading of a PKD short-story Paycheck.

18:56 / 26.11.03

Im currently working my way through Ellroy the LA Quartet were amazing Dudley Smith (a corrupt LAPD vice cop fpr those of you that missed LA confidential) im now reading American tabloid which is proving just as interesting and just as detrimental ti my studies.
Apart from that Im reading Vlastos on the disorderly motion in the timaios-whioch is instructive but quite dull.

The Return Of Rothkoid

01:22 / 27.11.03

Hey Nostradamus by Douglas Coupland. It's pretty breezy so far, but there's a clarity here I like.

03:31 / 27.11.03

I'm reading Steven Sherrvill's "The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break". Interesting book. The setting so far is very mundane - trailer park, restaurant kitchen - but obviously the protagonist is not and this leads to some interesting observations. It's a third-person limited POV so we get the Minotaur and nobody else, and he's managed to make the Minotaur come accross as someone who's lived for five-thousand years and adapted time after time to new environments. He's cleverly showing that our concerns are not his concerns and his are not ours, yet we have so much in common. I wasn't surprised to find out that the author is a poet because the book has some great passages.

No star here laces

03:08 / 28.11.03

I've taken a big step and bought my first Hemingway. Kind of inspired by what Colin Wilson says about him in "The outsider". I'm a few chapters in to "For whom the bell tolls" and am liking it, although far from blown away.

Perhaps its one of those books you have to get a long way into before it bites, or perhaps he's one of those authors that has been so influential that they've lost a bit of their "new-ness" to the reader.

I dunno. I find it hard to think that something so canonical just isn't very good.

Regrettable Juvenilia

14:04 / 28.11.03

Jefe: FWTBT is okay, but it suffers a little from all the shitter books that came in its wake - it's kinda like the seed from which bad Frederick Forsyth novels and the like grew, sadly. I'd recommend The Sun Also Rises aka Fiesta as the best Hemingway to start with.

14:29 / 28.11.03

if you are going to read hemmingway try men without women it is a collection of short stories they really introduce you to his style and are all amazing.

15:47 / 28.11.03

no no no old man and the sea, that's the best place to start with ernie

03:09 / 01.12.03

I just started Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Excellent so far, but I'm only about 40 pages into it.

04:13 / 01.12.03

Teh dead Father: has anyone else read it? I don't like it but can't put it down

stephen_seagull

17:18 / 01.12.03

I'm currently reading quite a few books. I suppose that's what comes from being a Literature student. I'm supposed to have finished reading 'The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling' and 'Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus', but haven't. The former was quite good... as far as I got in to it anyways, but I was as disinterested in the latter as I was at GCSE level (about... 3 years ago now). I'm now in the process of reading 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' and 'The Bourne Supremacy': the former because it is required reading under my 'Author' unit (as were 'TJ' and 'Frankenstein' - hah! I won't be finishing that then), the latter for personal reasons (Jason Bourne kicks rocking butt like there's no fcuking tomorrow). I plan to finish the Ludlum one though.

03:56 / 02.12.03

"Speed Tribes : Days and Night's with Japan's Next Generation"
by Karl T. Greenfeld. It's a little dated now having been written ion 1994, but according to my friends the chapters on the youth motorcycle gangs and the geisha are still both relevant and interesting. The author was fairly young when he write the book, so it approaches the subjects with what I feel is a more non-jugdmental view than someone older would.

05:27 / 02.12.03

I'm reading Stephen Kings revision of The Gunslinger. Too early on to say if it's an improvement or not.

Then in reverse chronological...
Peter David "Stone and Anvil"
various "Star Trek:New Frontier Omnibus"
Peter David "God's Above"
"DUNE : The Machine Crusade" - Anderson & Herbert
"Shadow Puppets" Orson Scott Card
"The Godfather" Mario Puzo

...startling really that you have to go back SO far until you find a non SciFi, an even then it's the G'Father for the nth time...

The Return Of Rothkoid

11:28 / 02.12.03

Robert Hough's The Final Confession of Mabel Stark.

She's seen a Real Live Tiger, you know.

19:07 / 02.12.03

You will love Days of War, Nights of Love by CrimethInc.

"We fell in love in the wreckage, shouted out songs in the uproar, danced joyfully in the heaviest shackles they could forge; we smuggled our stories through the gauntlets of silence, starvation, and subjugation, to bring them back to life again and again as bombs and beating hearts; we built castles in the sky from the ruins of hell on earth.

Accepting no constraints from without, we countenanced none within ourselves, either, and found that the world opened before us like the petals of a rose."

http://www.crimethinc.com

20:38 / 02.12.03

Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life by John Heskett. Really very good - succinct, interesting, looking at broader pictures rather than isolated examples.

Stephen_seagull: Tom Jones is rather fun, you just have to accept that Henry Fielding likes to write a lot. What's your complaint with Frankenstein? It's a wonderful, wonderful book, so important to modern concepts of sci-fi. It's also very interesting if you know the contemporary arguments Shelley is commenting on, and to see how an author can integrate a real understanding of science so well into her book. I was a lit student, and whilst I can see how a first year student would find Tom Jones heavy going (wait til someone makes you read Clarissa), Frankenstein's got SO much in it... I'm just curious as to why you're disinterested!

Brigade du jour

21:43 / 03.12.03

Just finished Fellowship Of The Ring in one marathon session last night, seen the film version this lunchtime, and then did first two chapters of Two Towers on way to visiting parents. Just. Fucking. Wow.

Yeah I know, I've been living in a cave since 1954.

stephen_seagull

13:42 / 05.12.03

Am now reading the poetry of Walt Whitman. Or at least parts of the poetry of Walt Whitman. And still working on 'The Bourne Supremacy'.

The Return Of Rothkoid

03:01 / 07.12.03

Oh, and Peter Ackroyd's Milton In America, too.

The Apple-Picker

22:26 / 07.12.03

I'm reading The Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry, Poetry and Mathematics, and selected poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, collected poetry of David Citino, and The Yellow Heart. --Too many other things, too, but these are the things getting my attention over the past week.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

14:19 / 08.12.03

[impish]

So is anyone going to read Absolute Friends?

[/impish]

15:34 / 08.12.03

Are there any Faulkner aficionados here? Since commencing my Lit. MA i've been working my way through his oeuvre, and have to say that the man's a bit special. The Sound and The Fury ranks amongst the finest novels i've ever read, and As I Lay Dying and Light in August would be close behind. But... right now I'm reading Absalom, Absalom! and I can safely say that it's the most diffcult book i've ever come across. The prose is so intense, and the narrative time shifts so disconcerting, that I can only seem to get through about 7 or 8 pages at a time. It's widely acknowledged to be his tour de force, and I can just about begin to appreciate why, but i'm finding it much too impenetrable to fully enjoy. If anybody is familiar with it, then any advice which may make the novel less arduous would be much appreciated. Cheers.

11:29 / 15.12.03

I'm currently whizzing through The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price, which I can thoroughly recommend, though I still find the central relationship a little unbelievable and rather tiresome. Premise of the book is similar to DWJ's The Dark Lord of Derkholm, though there aren't any griffins in this one (boo). An evil corporation builds a time machine to go back into another dimension, where they intend to set up a tourist industry and exploit resources, but in order to do so they come up against the local marcher clan, the Sterkarms, with hilarious res... no, actually, but you get the idea. Really gripping book, very well written.

14:45 / 15.12.03

Finished Singularity Sky by Charles Stross.

Grand Space Opera with quality science and politics. Telephones fall from the sky of a backwater colony of a technophobic tinpot dictatorship, promising anything in exchange for entertainment. Tinpots send a fleet to engage the entity responsible and risk incurring the wrath of the godlike AI who scattered humanity across the cosmos back in the mid 21st century. There's a UN weapons inspector who deals in Weapons of Mass Causality Violation, a Democratic Extropian Soviet, and tons of other Big Ideas.

I'm not that big on Space Opera unless it's from the 30s or 40s, but I'd read Stross' novella A Colder War online and was very impressed with its Lovecraftian take on the Iran-Contra affair.

03:38 / 16.12.03

D.B. Weiss' Lucky Wander Boy. It's a very cool book about video games and one man's love of the classics. It's about a bunch of other stuff too and it's really clever and funny. I think that anyone who has ever downloaded MAME and some roms should read it and anyone who hasn't should read it to perhaps understand why people would.

I have cold and ma not expressing myself as well as I'd like. Probably best if you go to the site and read something coherent.

02:17 / 22.12.03

Don Delillo's "Underworld".

Our Lady of The Two Towers

12:31 / 23.12.03

Just finished The Trials of Arthur Pendragon by himself and C.J. Stone, it's slightly annoying that Stone always refers to himself in the third person but is quite interesting, if only because Arthur was involved with most of the land-related protest movements of the 1990s.

And now because everyone else was doing it, so I might as well too, Jaspar Fforde's The Eyre Affair.

14:54 / 23.12.03

Reading Cryptonomicon, as I have been for the past month or so, but enjoying it even more now that I can read more than 20 pages at a time. A bit overwritten, but great fun, and making me even more of a cryptography geek than I was previously...

Brigade du jour

17:30 / 25.12.03

About a quarter of the way through Philip Pullman's Northern Lights. Four people in the space of a month said I should read it. So I am. And it is gooood.

See that sheep? That's me that is.

The Return Of Rothkoid

01:16 / 26.12.03

Well, I only just started J. S. Foer's Everything Is Illuminated which I thought was great. Except I left it up at my parents' place after Christmas, so I'm a bit pissed, as I was getting right into it and its mix of wonky translation and Judaism. Hmph.

Jack Maggs by Peter Carey got a flick through, as well. Lovely stuff - powerful and tasty.

No star here laces

11:27 / 26.12.03

Take it all the way up to the finish on 2003 with this thread, then.

Cryptonomicon 'overwritten'? Blasphemy! I loved the style of the book, actually, and almost wished it was more descriptive, cos I just wanted it to go on and on.

I've got "Quicksilver" by my bedside now, waiting to start. Probably won't get tackled until my next major airplane journey. It's interesting that Stephenson has chosen to go historical with Quicksilver - kind of what he was hinting at with Cryptonomicon, I guess. Except this time its alchemy. Should be a very Barbelith read, anyhow. I'm all for sci-fi authors doing history - they always seem to do it well, eg "Days of Rice and Salt"...

My last major airplane journey involved reading Vernon God Little this year's booker prize winner cover to cover. Nice book, but really, there are so many books like this, that it seems an awful choice for the booker. The milieu of Texas small town full of fuck-ups is straight out of Joe Lansdale, Carl Hiaasen et al. The hero, a confused teenager trying hard to get by and conspired against by fate is identical to the central character in Tietam Brown and loads of other books I can't think of just now. I mean, it's funny, but the targets (fat people, consumerism, reality tv culture) are pretty easy ones and it just didn't seem that insightful or fresh to me.

The best thing I'm reading just now is John Gray - "Straw dogs". I've been meaning to get this for ages and it really hasn't disappointed. Gray basically takes apart all aspects of culture and philosophy which rely on a needlessly anthropocentric view of the world. He constantly exposes the assumption that humans are different and special, and takes aim at the idea of 'progress' in general, continuing the thread he started in "Al quaeda and what it means to be modern". The book is not perfect - Gray has an irritating habit of dismissing ideas because they are popular or reflect religious beliefs, and he makes a lot of assertions about language and neuroscience that I think are just plain wrong. But it is a great polemic, genuinely thought-provoking and really challenges a lot of assumptions you didn't know you had.

Other stuff I'm reading: "You can't eat GNP", "101 experiments in philosophy" by Roger Pol Droit

unheimlich manoeuvre

12:45 / 26.12.03

strangely just starting to read Cryptonomicon which had been languishing neglected in Manchester.
only about 150 pages in but it's detailed fun and engrossing.

also dipping into On Belief by Slavoj Zizek. it's as much of a headfuck as all his writing. still haven't got a complete grip on Lacan, like what is the barred S(ubject) exactly?

got given Warlock on Firetop Mountain for xmas so i'll probably read that next. (nothing beats trying to read with your fingers stuck in six different places.

)

El Gato - space opera can be excellent. ever read the Reality Dysfunction by Peter Hamilton?

10:10 / 28.12.03

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt.

I love her style it's all mysterious, and she makes loads of really interesting, original observations about life.

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