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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

2004: What are you currently reading?

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17:03 / 10.03.04

About to start Chuck Pahlaniuk's "Fight Club" and Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain's "Acid Dreams: A Social History of the CIA, LSD, the 60's & Beyond". Looking very forward to both.

Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless

19:34 / 10.03.04

Concerning the Pelevin novel, I believe the original Russian title is the equivalent of Generation P' short for Generation Pepsi- i.e. the first generation to be exposed to capitalism while young. Of which the protagonist Babylen=Babylon Tatarsky is the exemplar. When it was published in English they changed the title, because they quite reasonably thought no one would get the reference.

19:46 / 14.03.04

I've not got much further in the Foucault since I last posted, mainly because university has taken over my reading material for the forseeable future. Before that, though, I read A Prayer For Owen Meany, which is every bit as good as I've heard, and which I actually tried to get home early for. For the next few months (in theory at least) it's going to be a lot of books about web design. Although I did buy a DH Lawrence, Fay Weldon's Female Friends and Madame Bovary on Friday, so may yet succumb to the temptation of one of those...

Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless

20:59 / 14.03.04

I've been reading John Gray's Straw Dogs. It's awful

The author (not to be confused with the guy who wrote Men are from Mars. . . ) . is an ex-Thatcherite professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. The book is an argument against the Enlightenment and progressivism in general. It is glib, derivative and plain wrong. There is a lot of Malthusian/Gaian rubbish about the earth having 'mechanisms' to crush the 'plague of humans' currently infesting it, a misreading of the later Wittgenstein as 'naive idealism', some spuriousness about free will half-argued with irrelevant evidence, the old and frankly silly argument that the Holocaust and other beastlinesses of the c.20 invalidate the Enlightenment tout court (He does at least manage to admit that the death rate due to war in primitive societies is much worse than developed ones, but doesn't seem to want to join the dots). According to Gray the humanist belief that we are a race apart from the rest of nature is the root of all this evil. He thinks this belief is somehow unjustified. He ends with the conviction that the world will run itself much better if humankind becomes a race of apathetic contemplatives.
Read it if you enjoy throwing books across rooms.

03:33 / 16.03.04

About to start "Perdido Street Station" by China Mieville. I'm quite curious after everything I've heard about it.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

13:18 / 18.03.04

Rakehell- I envy you, one of my favourite books of the last few years. Has that 'ooomph!' factor that you only get when you encounter a series talent with no preconceptions for the first time.

Anyway, I've just finished rereading Philip Pullman's Amber Spyglass, my parents got me the set for Christmas. Am now embarking on these Lemony Snicket books that seem to be popular with the genuine kids, The Bad Beginning.

Fifty pages in and it all seems rather dull, this may actually be one of those books that are genuinely for children or maybe it's a book that the children are forced to read to kill off any sparks of imagination or wit in them. But at least by being 50 pages in I'm about a quarter of the way through, then it's back to the grown-up books for me.

18:09 / 18.03.04

Finished Soldier of the Mist by Gene Wolfe and Threshold by Caitlin Kiernan simultaneously. Soldier of the Mist was a great read but it tended to be a bit bulky in places. Every God/ddess gave alternate names during introductions so your brain worked overtime trying to figure out who is who.
Threshold-Lovecraft, Beowulf, trilobite palentology in Alabama. Enuff said. Excellent writing looking forward to Low Red Moon.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:09 / 18.03.04

Dan Simmons' "Ilium"- having written some of my favourite skiffy novels ever (the Hyperion series), Simmons crapped in my face by being a dreadful writer of horror fiction.
100-odd pages in, though, Ilium seems to have been written by the same DS who wrote Hyperion. I'm loving it. Big space opera malarkey, Culture-esque shenanigans, and Athena gifting Diomedes with nanotech implants... it rocks. Although the remaining 500 pages may suck, I am hoping SO hard that they don't. Because I'm gripped.

The Return Of Rothkoid

21:09 / 18.03.04

Rereading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the first Murakami I ever read - largely because I only just replaced the copy that'd disappeared...

Also, finally got the Female version of Milorad Pavic's The Dictionary Of The Khazars. I'll be trying to find the one paragraph difference at some point.

ONLY NICE THINGS

22:45 / 18.03.04

Flowers - the Bad Beginning is a very interesting piece of transgressive children's fiction. See howoogy the final scene makes you feel...

Stoatie - that sounds interesting - I'm big on reworkings of the Trojan War. Worth buying?

Just finishing off Mark Antony is the Scott-Kilvert translation of various parallel lives of Plutarch. It's a reread, but alwasy good fun. I'm getting warm fuzzies because a friend was enthusing about my loan of Bury and Meiggs earlier tonight...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:10 / 19.03.04

So far it's worth buying- but I'd hold on a couple of months, cos the one I've got's a big trade paperback edition which cost about eleven quid. I reckon the normal B format will come out soon. Or you could just borrow mine when I'm done.

Hattie's Kitchen

11:30 / 19.03.04

Just finished "An Introduction to Zen Buddhism" by Suzuki, just started "Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown, which seems to have Catholics everywhere gnashing their teeth in rage...also just started a 1981 Beano annual I found while clearing out some junk.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

13:26 / 19.03.04

Sorry Haus, I've finished The Bad Beginning and was bored all the way through. I'll shaghai the next passing seven year old and attempt to find out why it's so popular. Does book two start with a car full of diminutive gangsters coming to save the children? Because at the moment all it sets up is the possibility that this is The Perils of Penelope Pitstop with three Penelopes.

13:35 / 19.03.04

I've been reading "Dictionary of the Khazars" male version, but had to put it down to get at "Privatizing Culture: Corporate Intervention in the Arts" for my book club. Then I booked a trip out of town tonight so I'll miss the meeting anyway, which is ok because PC:CIitA is a bit dry.

I read the last third of "Da Vinci Code," which made me wonder if the "Left Behind" novels were as badly written and inspired me to write this bitchy rant and go out and buy another copy of Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.

I'm also working my way through The History of the Future: Images of the 21st Century, by Christophe Canto and Odile Faliu, a series of essays and fantastic pictures from 1851-1961, published last decade by Flammarion. Happily, it's in English. Being French, it draws heavily on illustrations by Albert Robida (if you don't read French, just click the links), whose pictures I bought recently at a book market (the book had been destroyed, alas). I can't get enough of this stuff.

16:36 / 19.03.04

As I Lay Dying, on the grounds that it's no more downbeat than the news.

16:37 / 19.03.04

As I Lay Dying, on the grounds that it's no more downbeat than the news.

stephen_seagull

00:03 / 20.03.04

I'm currently reading The Greatest Gift by Danny Leigh (for my own personal reasons), Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson AND Middlemarch by George Eliot (for my Narrative unit), Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding AND Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne (for my 18th Century Period Study unit), and The Merchant of Venice by - guess who? - William Shakespeare (for - guess what? - my Shakespearean Tragedy unit).

I am also currently suffering from itchy eyes and headaches. My dreams also involve big words trying to eat me.

19:12 / 21.03.04

The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan by Jimmy McDonough

Interesting mainly for the peek into the sleazy, exploitation film industry catering to Times Square, NYC back in the sixties. Not so much for the peek into Milligan's personal life.

Finished Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife by Mick Farren, so I picked up a stack of his older books at my local used bookshop. Necrom, Vickers, and The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys should be done soon.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:08 / 21.03.04

"The Texts of Festival" was kind of fun, as far as I remember, Mick Farren-wise.

I've suddenly, due to recent tidying, realised that I never actually read all of the stories in "Bear and his Daughter" by Robert Stone. Seeing as how he actually has a NEW. BOOK. OUT. NOW!!! and I can't afford it for at least a week, this seems like a sign.

Without recourse to my usual rant that bores everyone senseless (special apologies to Meme Buggerer and squirmelia)... Robert Stone rocks. He rocks like fuck. He rocks a snow leopard's ass.

23:30 / 21.03.04

As I Lay Dying, on the grounds that it's no more downbeat than the news.

Dude, that book is hilarious. It's all a joke, you'll see!

Prego the Werlf

16:06 / 23.03.04

Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore, Von Bek by Michael Moorcock,CHAOS by James Gleick and Prime Chaos by Phil Hine.
So help me, they're all about the same thing , but then isn't everything? Could Science, History and Magic be the sick three way we've all been waiting for?

16:55 / 23.03.04

A History of Secret Societies by Arkon Daraul
The Book of Thoth by Crowley

Thoth is quickly becoming one of the most difficult non-philosophical texts I've ever read. Ugh.

19:49 / 23.03.04

Amidst "too many comics" (NXM trades, Persepolis), I've just begun "An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment" by Patricia Fara. I love Enlightenment science, and found this in my county library so picked it up at a snatch. I also picked it up because Dr. Fara ran one of my favourite courses (on science and literature) at university, and spoke excellently on this topic and how it related to Frankenstein. It's really readable, and absolutely fascinating.

Kind of gave up on A White Merc with Fins, which never had great things expected of it, but still failed to deliver...

Jack The Bodiless

12:04 / 24.03.04

Just finished Barcelona Plates, a book of short stories by alt.com veteran Alexei Sayle from a few years back. While you can see that the style is basically identical in each - a prose narrative version of his brilliant old skewed sweary rants, sentences each bleeding into one another, there's a lot to like about this.

'My Shrinking Circle Of Acquaintances', 'Lose Weight, Ask Me How', and 'Locked Out' are fantastic, slightly surreal horror-tinged absurdity, the latter actually reaching heights of creeping death ; 'The Minister For Death', the title story and 'Back In Ten Minutes' are lovingly tragic character studies ; and as for 'The Last Woman Killed In The War', I quite agree with Douglas Adam's lengthy quote on the back cover calling it a masterpiece, and comparing it to Waugh. Utterly transcendent, and hilariously heartbreaking in the final line. Damn...

12:05 / 24.03.04

Despite saying upthread that I was never going to read a non-course-related book again, I appeared to be reading two such books just now. The first is The Very First Light, which is about a NASA team investigating background radiation (and is my warm-up for The Elegant Universe, which will be this summer's reading project). It's interesting, not only about the cosmology and astrophysics involved, but also about the politics within and between scientific teams, something I'd always assumed existed, but not to the extent the author talks about.

I'm also about to start another collection of F Scott Fitzgerald short stories, which has a couple of his that I've not read. So I'll no doubt enjoy that, having been in a mood for more F Scott since reading some of his letters at the start of the year!

VonKobra,Scuttling&Slithering

15:01 / 24.03.04

The Sound And The Fury: A Rock's Backpages Reader, edited by Barney Hoskyns

GREAT Marvin Gaye interview...

pretty dull Nirvana interview by Jon Savage...

Fascinating bit on the Beatles debut in America by Al Aronowitz...

Very Illuminating piece on early Bowie and the Myth - factory around him by Steve Turner...

10:41 / 25.03.04

RD Blackmore, Lorna Doone. I love this book! It's both a sappy love story and a very funny social commentary. Some of the barely-there commentary is hysterical.

17:22 / 25.03.04

I have ADD so I am always rading "at" a LIST:

Sanctuary Daddy Faulkner
Tales of Pain and Wonder Caitlin R. Kiernan
Songs of a Dead Dreamer Thomas Ligotti
Cavalier and Clay Chabon
anything i can lay my hands on by Clark Ashton Smith

All Best,

Rick

17:23 / 25.03.04

oh, and how it's going, not well at all, having trouble concentrating

Love,

Captain Ritalin

03:23 / 26.03.04

I'm slowly making my way though 'A Thousand Years of Solitude' but have been distracted by Chapters 1-154 of 'Hikaru No Go' which is an amazing manga comic about a kid who become a Go master...

...it's so addictive for some reason, even though a good 1/4 of the book is just pictures of hands placing stones on the board...

08:11 / 26.03.04

I am reading too much stuff again, Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook, lent to me by BiP, trying to get my head round tranexual issues a bit. A very laid back and accessible style, lots of fun and very challenging in places too. I still have some slight problesm with some of her statements but mostly it's great.

See also The Drag King Book pretty much for the same reasons above, but this one has more pictures so it's easier. The pics rule epecially the pastiches of Run DMC.

Also - A drooled on copy of Dante's Inferno.

Spirit of Haiti by Myriam Chancy, a novel set in Haiti just after the fall of the Duvalier regime, hoping it will have some juicy bits about Voodoun in it. Very prose heavy so far, so the story as such hasn't grabbed me, but I'm only about 50 pages in.

And I've just finished An Introduction to Hinduism by Gavin Flood, which is brillant, a really concise history and up to date summary of academic thinking in the area. Great, because it doesn't just stick to the brahmanical/Vedic traditon but takes into account worship of local deities at the village level, and Tantrism. Looks at the way a modern Hinduism has been constructed out of a lot of disparate traditons and the reasons for this as well.I'd recommend it to anyone as an solid introducion to the area.

Whisky Priestess

11:31 / 26.03.04

"The Sound And The Fury: A Rock's Backpages Reader, edited by Barney Hoskyns"

I warn you in advance that the author of the NWA interview or article is a twat. Such a twat that I just had to make his twattishness known. It might be a decent article though.

Moving on from twats, I am currently reading Arts and Wonders by Gregory Norminton, who as far as I'm concerned is a criminally underhyped child prodigy (well, 27) whose brains I must eat in order to grow wiser and more talented.

I am pleasantly surprised, too, cos I read his first book which was quite good but was really a bunch of short stories you wished he'd taken further. I thought this one might be a bit of a weighty intellectual ponce-fest (set as it is in 16th-century Milan) but it's actually great and great fun - still clever but funny with it. You know that thing when whatever you're sposed to be doing, you want to drop it and get back to your book, and you keep sneaking little hits of it? Like that.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:41 / 26.03.04

Aargh.

I'm having a Book. Dilemma.

I'm halfway through Dan Simmons' "Ilium", which is hitting the spot as far as skiffy goes right now.

But I just bought Robert Stone's "Bay of Souls". Which is by Robert Stone. And therefore WILL be the best book I read all year.

Yes, I know the answer to this... finish the Simmons first. But my enjoyment of the space opera will be diminished by the fact that I'm hurrying it to get to the New. Robert. Stone. (I can feel its presence. It's sitting there in my bedroom. It knows it's vying for attention with the second half of a skiffy novel. It's angry. It's waiting for me.)

Aargh.

All I can say, Mr Simmons, is that your book'd better have a bloody good second half.

Whisky Priestess

13:42 / 26.03.04

I have a solution:

Give Ilium (for which I have been searching charity shops fruitlessly for ages) to me and read the Stone book while I read Ilium. I will then precis Ilium for you and you can decide whether you want to finish it.

Sound fair?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:09 / 27.03.04

Oh shit. Apparently the David Peace book I ordered has arrived at the bookshop now as well.

AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!

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