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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

What are you currently reading?

  
  

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Tryphena Absent
17:46 / 17.09.02
I love Gaudy Night. Though I really enjoyed the Bellona Club best.
 
 
kbuxton
20:47 / 17.09.02
Mazarine... I haven't read the Pamela Dean book so I can't comment on it, but I'd say move Sewer, Gas & Electric to the top of the stack. It's fantastic.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
22:47 / 17.09.02
Dipping in and out of Hagakure for the stillness, and reading (for the first time) Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - which is motoring along in a most enjoyable way, so far.
 
 
Saint Keggers
02:38 / 18.09.02
Just finished David Starr, Space Ranger by Issac Assimov (writting as Paul French) and now starting on Lucky Starr and the Pirates of thr Asteroids. SHort little novels around 150 pages each..light reading for the can.
 
 
The Bitch
04:33 / 18.09.02
I am currently reading a plethora of textbooks, which leaves me with no time to read for leisure....
 
 
jUne, a sunshiny month
08:52 / 18.09.02
i tried "Nova" by Sam Delany, which didn't made me sit on my ass as i was thinking it could, but was cool enough.

i re-read the tragic and brilliant and totally amazing autobiography of this russian dancer who became just totally mad... a friend of mine let me read it and before to give him back, i re-read it. now, i got some big hole in my memory and cant find the name of the guy... fuck it.

i'm waiting for this "Coraline" book by this Gaiman guy...
and re-read old vertigo tpb all summer long.
 
 
kagemaru
20:47 / 18.09.02
Just started the whole "Amber" series by the late lamented Roger Zelazny.

Should last me to the weekend
 
 
Trijhaos
22:19 / 18.09.02
I just finished The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich and I'm really starting to get disappointed with Dick. He just doesn't live up to the hype. I read all these reviews and messages and stuff singing his praises and I just don't see it.

Oh well.

Onward to An Historical Guide to Arms & Armor by Stephen Bull.
 
 
Baz Auckland
23:17 / 18.09.02
Am re-reading Schrodinger's Cat and just grabbed a bunch of Leary and Wilson books from the University Library today. I am getting very interested in Leary, Kesey et al. Will start a thread, or just check out the Magic forum soon.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
04:59 / 23.09.02
Finished One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and have discovered it's nowhere near as wank as I'd expected. I don't know why, but I just had. Amazing stuff; the Chief's visions are superb.

In other news, I picked up a copy of John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor and am finding that yea, it doth rock verily. Wordy but eminently readable, much like The Quincunx by Charles Palliser; it apparently features piracy, cigarettes, lechery and lots of boozing. So, it should be much like a barbemeet, really.
 
 
Ariadne
09:50 / 23.09.02
I'm on a re-reading phase at the moment, it seems. Just reread 1982 Janine, Alasdair Gray, and now I'm reading Jane Eyre again.

Last week I read Janice Galloway's latest, Clara. I usually love Galloway so I was excited to see it, but it didn't grab me as much as her other stuff. It's about Clara Schumann, pianist, composer and wife of Robert Schumann. It was okay, but not what I was hoping for. Her other work is very truthful and sharp. Not that this wasn't, but it was a love story - love for music as well as the husband/wife relationship - and less acerbic than I expected.
 
 
nutella23
15:44 / 23.09.02
William Blum's "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower". Though it does tend to get a bit hyperbolic, it does a provide a good overview of the consistency of US foreign policy since the end of WW2. Sort of an updating of an earlier book he wrote called "The CIA: A Forgotten History", though it goes into less detail. Still worth a read.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
12:04 / 26.09.02
I've just read Coraline actually... it's actually really good, though it's more of an echt children's book than all this Young Adult stuff I keep hearing about... such as Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve which I thought was pretty good as these things go - cities as giant predatory mechano-organisms, London vs the Anti-Traction League, plus all the usual stuff you get in this kind of book.

Flaubert's Parrot
Aberystwyth mon Amour
Death and the Penguin
The School of Night
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:39 / 26.09.02
I'm reading 'The Psychology of Clothes' by J.C. Flugel. It's a lovely book written in the 1930's and I'm finding it very interesting though a little bit obvious.
 
 
cakemix
17:27 / 28.09.02
i'm still reading that damn buddhist meditation book
i've got some sort of weird block with it = well, actually, i've got someone new in my bed, so haven't had time to read it lately...
 
 
Persephone
18:31 / 29.09.02
"Placetne, magistra?"
"Placet."

sniffle

hooray hooray hooray
 
 
wembley can change in 28 days
14:33 / 04.10.02
This morning I read Tom Stoppard's On The Razzle, which is an excellent adaptation of the Viennese comedy Einen Jux will er sich machen, which was eventually adapted, over many authors, into Hello, Dolly! Stoppard's adaptation is much closer to the original (Dolly doesn't even exist) and it's fucking funny. Highly recommend. Also, just finished a stack of Oscar Wilde's plays (if i read A Woman of No Importance, i think i've read the lot of his drama), but am preparing to take a break from the breakneck speed of drama and get into Bertrand Russel's The Problems of Philosophy. I've been on such a roll lately, i'm almost afraid to start something that will slow me down. However, now that i have graduated from university, i intend to educate myself.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
14:48 / 04.10.02
Narcissus in Chains, Laurell Hamilton - took me six hours - very stupid and I adored every second.
 
 
Bear
15:01 / 04.10.02
Undoing yourself with Energized Meditation and Other Devices by Christopher S. Hyatt. Just got it in the mail yesterday, seems ok so far has anyone else read it and followed the exercises, its the one that RAW raves on about in Prometheus Rising.

Also reading

Cities of the Red Night
My Life with the Spirits
Collected works of Edgar Alan Poe
and Moby Dick

I really need to stick to one book at a time, they all sort of melt into one.

I'll hopefully be buying the new Stephen Baxter book of short stories.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:16 / 04.10.02
Ramsey Campbell- "The Face That Must Die" (I went horror-novel crazy when in the Fantasy Centre a couple of days ago)
John O'Farrell- "Global Village Idiot" (okay, he's a second-rate Mark Steel, but that's better than none- and his bit about pet passports IS fucking hilarious).
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
03:46 / 27.10.02
I have almost finished Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, which is heavy going, but quite informative. I'm then wondering whether to rip through Red Dragon again, or to go for the Malory, or to keep on the esoteric bent. I'm a bit concerned that NaNoWriMo will take away all my reading time...
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
17:10 / 27.10.02
Bleak SODDING House...
 
 
Ariadne
19:41 / 27.10.02
Ooh, this thread is living again. I've started The man who walks by Alan Warner. I like it .. but I seem to have hit on a can't-read phase. I sit down to read and immediately jump up to do something else. I've left two books halfway through because I thought I was bored with them, but I think I'm just having a funny turn. It'll come back - I'm hoping I'll get hooked into TMWW soon and be fine.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
21:03 / 27.10.02
Yes, I'm rereading Red Dragon and it fucking sucks. The prose is more wooden and formulaic than I ever remembered it.
 
 
bjacques
22:20 / 27.10.02
I just started Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Maturin,
and finished "The Club of Queer Trades," by
G. K. Chesterton. It's a collection of six
proto-Father Brown mysteries, wherein a
retired judge solves mysteries by focusing
on some moral precept instead of the bare
(and often misleading) facts. Chesterton
converted to Catholicism, and these
stories (as well as The Man Who Was Thursday and
The Napoleon of Notting Hill) are exercises
in rendering Catholic dogma more intellectually
satisfying to a modern (about 1904) person. It's
very obvious and maybe not very convincing,,
but good light reading anyway. One "queer
trade" involves adding drama and romance to
a client's life.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
23:00 / 27.10.02
How's the Maturin read? I've never been able to get into it yet...
 
 
wembley can change in 28 days
08:54 / 30.10.02
I'm reading Margaret Atwood and actually, really, quite totally enjoying it. I guess this now means I'm officially a soppy Canadian feminist, or a bitch.

Bleak House, Kit Kat? You show me someone who isn't secretly turned on by that kind of masochism, and I'll show you someone who isn't pursuing an English degree...
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
10:06 / 30.10.02
Slowly working through the Tristram section of Malory. Slooowly.
 
 
Shortfatdyke
10:51 / 30.10.02
I'm just about to start Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson. I've been stalling because it was described as 'hard SF' and I was worried that I wouldn't understand it, but since the author's told me to stop being silly, I suppose I should get on with it....
 
 
ephemerat
14:05 / 30.10.02
I've just completed (the thoroughly wonderful) Mythologies by Roland Barthes and, fictionwise, The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. by Brian O'Doherty which proved engaging and well-researched if not exactly life-changing.

Just starting Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung and All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson.
 
 
Pepsi Max
14:05 / 30.10.02
The Sorrow of War. Having carried this book thru four countries over two months I still haven't finished it. It remains one of the most traumatic books I have encountered. Prose style is a bit weird mind. Might be the translation but it definitely has a dreamy and disconnected field. Some one's life flashing before their eyes...
 
 
Catjerome
14:51 / 30.10.02
Siegfried Sassoon biography by Jean Moorcroft Wilson. Many thanks to the Barbelither who recommended it - it's great reading so far.
 
 
illmatic
07:54 / 01.11.02
I'm reading "The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethian Age" by Dame Francis Yates, which is amazing. She briefly traces the history of the Christian Cabala (Moorish Spain, before the expulsion of the Jews) and goes on to look at the influence of Cabalism and Neoplatonism in the Renaissance and Elizabethian age. Reading this exposes my vast ignorance of history. Also, seeing how closey classical magick and Christianity were linked is something of a revelation.

I've got another two books of hers as well... I KNOW I'm gonna enjoy 'em but oh, my tired eyes...
 
 
Harhoo
15:01 / 01.11.02
Just this moment finished Eight Minutes Idle by Matt Thorne. I've always an inchoate dislike of the bloke but found a copy for a couple of quid so took the plunge. Despite my prejudice found myself really quite liking the first half of the book, which is a relative modish dissection of office life and, without being that wankified, its philosophical implications.

The book that takes a odd right turn and becomes totally saturated with sex. And then in the last 30 or so pages the plot, which has been stuck on the back burner due to the doing of the sex, kicks into life again and then ends abruptly.

After a bit of thought I've decided to put it in the "disappointing pseudo-intellectual work of the kind that the French do much better than us" category.

Next up: The Corrections as I have an unerrring ability to jump on a bandwagon just when it's about to finally leave town.
 
 
Rage
02:21 / 02.11.02
Just begun A Scanner Darkly. So far it's one of the best books I've ever read, and I'm only on chapter 3.
 
  

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