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What are you currently reading?

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13:52 / 04.04.02

Just finished 1st and 2nd Book of Kings (the old Testament, from Solomon to the Babylonian captivity, including Elijah and Elisha ragging on the Kings of Israel and Judah for sacrificing babies and jumping through fires on high places).
Every Lent, I read the Bible - next year: the Chronicles.

To make up for it, I read Chester Brown's "Ed the Happy Clown" last night, which cannot be described (interdimensional gateways, a penis with the talking head of a tiny Ronald Reagan, vampire lovers and rat-eating pygmies in the sewers), as well as Dav Pilkey's transcendent "The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby," which must be read by grownups as well as second graders.

I've also started Ken Wilbur's "A Brief History of Everything," which comes highly recommended.

14:13 / 04.04.02

English Eccentrics by Edith Sitwell - quite entertaining, but I would like a lot more evidence.

Before that, Slaves of the Mastery by William Nicholson. This series is *so* good. I cannot wait for the third vol. Even if Nicholson did write the screenplay for 'Gladiator'.

15:44 / 04.04.02

Finished Number9dream (see thread), also finished The Last Samurai (which was great and will spooge more on in this thread later). Flicked through Matt Beaumont's e, which is trashy rubbish, but it makes me laugh occasionally, which is better than unfunny trashy rubbish. Also: just started reading bits out of Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies: Tony Harrison, for my dissertation (which I need to go into crunch mode on) - but it's a good read anyway.

I rather liked the translation of the Hagakure I read; lots of great stuff and lovely writing/imagery. Just take it with a pinch of salt, something my friends don't quite get.

Regrettable Juvenilia

18:56 / 04.04.02

Finished Kavalier & Clay in a diner on Madison Av - I loved this novel. Proper thread to follow. You must all read it.

Just started Sadie Plant's Zeros & Ones - love it already. Ada Lovelace was fucking cool.

18:59 / 04.04.02

having just returned from the first proper holiday i've had for years I can join in this thread with a full report. First off the 2 books I think of as Jesuits in Spa-a-a-ce but otherwise titled [B]The Sparrow[\B] and [B]Children of God[\B] by the woman with the insane stare, Mary Doria Russell [http://literati.net/Russell/]
both of which are excellent, yes the Jesuits went to find God's other children in space first too. And got horribly tortured due to a linguistic misunderstanding. Crises of faith, redemption, revolution, music, linguistics, I loved them and no I'm not catholic.
2nd up; Octavia Butler, [B]The Parable of the Sower[\B] and [B] Parable of the Talents[\B]. Hm. Jolly holiday reading of dystopic not-too-future insane Christian America in which a new 'religion' called Earthseed [without personification in a Godhead] is founded by the heroine Olamina who gets a load of survival skills together in order to, er, survive. Compellingly written but. Oddly in this 'feminist' text - interesting in terms of gender in its presumptive het role and in terms of race, foregrounding mixed race couples, I started to think it was homophobic by default and possibly with iffy reproduction politics - the new community founded by the heroine Olamina all being het couples busy productively baby making in the bleakness of it all. And, despite the frequency of rape by the agents of Christian America and others none of the women have abortions or seek them and end up loving the babies all the same. Obvioulsy I'm not saying that wouldn't happen, but I would have thought abortion skills would have been rather desirable given the awfulness of the world as OB imagines it. The only appearance of a lesbian couple briefly surfaces in jail, for comfort, and death by punishmentlashing a few pages later. There's a bit more to rant on here...has anyone else come across this series?
Polished off the 1st installent of HP by JKRowling, gender traitor, on the beach, having run out of books and there being no Anne Rice in English to buy and returned home to finally start reading Joanna Russ's classic FemaleMan, hurray!

[Jeff noon is great btw, I love it that everything is set in manchester - am about to purchase Pollen]

04:40 / 05.04.02

Super Cannes by Ballard

06:34 / 05.04.02

A son of the circus by John Irving. It's great but also v large, and my library books are due back tomorrow and I'm only half way through.
Do I go for the fine and help to subsidise the library system I love so much (it stops me having to buy quite so many books so I can hand my spare cash over to my favourite barman) or do I renew it?
If I renew it, I have to take all the other books I've already taken out back (Roald Dahl's boy, GK Chesterton's Father Brown Omnibus, Thigmoo (I forget the author), A Sharpe book (I know, I know) and a rather dull book on graphic design) OR renew them all at the same time via phone so I have loads of books renewed that I've read and the library people think I'm mr thicky.
Oh, it's all such a pain.

06:53 / 05.04.02

Now on Armadale (Wilkie Collins) which should be entertaining (especially after a bit of general reading on Victorians).

Paleface - anyone who wants to spooge about The Last Samurai is all right by me - I love that book (though the bit with the astronomer who believes him is a little painful still). Made me feel terribly inadequate, mind.

06:59 / 05.04.02

fly, re: Ada - see Lynn Hershman's film Conceiving Ada starring Tilda Swinton
as Ada, flawed indeed except for stellar performance from Ada ("No you must
not 'save' me, every age must have its own numerical equations")
see www.lynnhershman.com

ONLY NICE THINGS

06:59 / 05.04.02

Just finished "Ready to Catch him Should he Fall", by Neil Bartlet, which is just fabulous. The highly stylised story of the love affair and wedding of an Older Man and a Boy, and had me close to tears at least twice. Hugh Grant unlikely to appear in the film version.

Deva - The DoubleClick Cafe I had in mind was set in America - popular girl trying to get extra credit in the face of the dawning realisation that she is not sure she wants to follow her jock boyfriend to party college "West Central" is given a school paper assignment to write about the DoubleClick Cafe. But, the proprietors of DoubleClick Cafe having seen the Internet Cafe for the first time in London, so possibly this was an attempt to transplant the franchise, as I do have vague memories of a similar story set in England. What would be a) perfect and b) I suspect the case is if the same storyline was being used for both, leading to "Days-like-These"-style cultural-transposition mishaps.

The best part was her article at the end, which was, brilliantly, unreadably poor.

13:14 / 05.04.02

Recently read the Eyre Affair, which started out crackin' good but got a little predictable towards the end. It'd make a great movie though. Just finished Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, which I found nearly unreadable, and devoid of any real suspense or emotion. I'm gonna try to slog my way through a translation of Lacan's Ecritsnext in non-fiction, andThe Real Life of Sebastian Knight by that excellent writer Mr. Vladimir Nabakov.

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

10:10 / 07.04.02

Brilliant, everytime I notivce one of these threads I manage to be reading a Bernard Cornwell novel (Harlequin, this time), still someone's already mentioned Sharpe so I feel a bit better.

Fortunatly in my defense I've just finished reading Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates. Brilliant novel very insvible-esque (most stop describing things like this, very lazy), though I was a little uncomfortable with all the sexuality of adolescence stuff. Before Fierce Invalids I was reading Paul Auster's Mr. Vertigo, also very good and with handy instructions on how to fly.

Both these novels where a belated joint Birthday/Christmas present from a friend who's trying to improve my taste in novels (mostly pulpy trash), though she's just reinforced a theory that "proper novelists" are in fact just writinf fantasy and SF under a veneer of respectability.

From the the realms of my vast bad novel collection comes Ice Station by Matthew Reilly, an appalling Thing/Aliens rip-off with the added twist that the British and French are the evil oppressors of America (presumably only in the Antartic) and the monsters are mutated elephant seals. Oh now I've spoilt it for you. So bad it had to be read.

Periodicly dipping in to the Sherlock Holmes stories for the fourth or fifth time as well as having a collection of Celtic faerie tales on the go.

Non-fiction is the Queen's Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. John Dee. Very, very good and I thoroughly recomment it to anyone interested in the history of magic or the rennaissance.

The Return Of Rothkoid

10:18 / 08.04.02

Just as a quick aside (I'm still ploughing through Mailer's Ancient Evenings and finding it fucking fantastic), anyone interested in Dee might want to follow up The resistable rise of Reidcourchie's current reading with either Peter Ackroyd's The House Of Doctor Dee or Gustav Meyrink's The Angel Of The West Window - the latter is particularly good, and more "biographical", I suppose, than the Ackroyd take...

15:36 / 08.04.02

I just finished The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco. It was the first of his books I've ever read, and I felt like I was reading an unfunny, but trying, version of Thomas Pynchon's 'Mason and Dixon' or R.A. Wilson's Historical Illuminatus. It was.. okay. I've been told to try some others by him, such as Focault's Pendulum, which is better....

Am reading: In the Mountains of Madness, which is a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories. Again, the first time I've read anything by him, and I am impressed. Damn good story so far about Unspeakable Evil in the Antarctic. I think I'm enjoying it more, due to the things I've read in the Illuminatus! books, which were taken from Lovecraft like Miskatonic University.

17:37 / 08.04.02

Since I last posted in this thread I finished 'The Corrections' and liked it far better than I expected - though I also found it horribly depressing. I read 'The Athenian Murders' by, uh, I forget who the author is already. Interesting, but it drags, though that may be due in part to the translation. And now I'm reading Arthur Nersesian's 'The Fuck-Up' for a friend's book group and it is absolutely torturous going. Every time the damn narrator goes anywhere, he tells the reader which streets he's crossed, which he's walking on, and what cool 80s-NYC landmark he's admiring that is no longer there because of this reason or that. I live in NYC, so I find this tedious. If I didn't live in NYC, I'd be totally unable to picture what he was talking about (because his writing is bland, passive, and occasionally just plain bad) and I'd be skimming long passages. There are glowing quotes all over the place about this book, and I haven't a clue why. I need, desperately, to read something good next.

pointless and uncalled for

17:41 / 08.04.02

Use of Weapons - Iain M. Banks

01:14 / 09.04.02

done with Le Carre, now on The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil. for those not in the know, Kurzweil was/is a major player in the syntesizer and electronic keyboard industry, and apparently he can write too! it deals man's attempt to create the next step, outside of evolutionary means. good, interesting reading, especially for those of us who are into proletarian science.

02:28 / 09.04.02

reading bleak house on the train was often embarassing, as trying to hold in my giggles often resulted in weird half-choking sounds, and i picked up a tendency to forget to get off at the right stop. but putting it down was not an option.

07:42 / 09.04.02

Still on Armadale, but nearly there now... just as an aside - Barry, I got stuck on The Island of the Day Before but I would like to have a bash through Foucault's Pendulum, so if you do fancy giving it a go maybe we could read it at the same time...

The Return Of Rothkoid

08:34 / 09.04.02

Barry: haven't read The Island Of The Day Before but keep seeing copies of it secondhand. However, Foucault's Pendulum and The Name Of The Rose are great - though Eco's smugness is prevalent to a certain degree in both, if that's what bugged you.

But then, I thought RA Wilson was a cockmonkey, so I may be biased.

08:50 / 09.04.02

I just finished a really amazing, sad, scifi novel called 'Flowers for Algernon'. I've started Rosemary's Baby, but it isn't doing it for me, so I don't know if I'm actually still reading it, or not, but I just cracked jt leroy's sarah and my big! exciting! find! of the day (completely obscure to anyone who's not from australia), a secondhand copy of a collection of writing by anna munster et al published by wicked women back in the day. also working at paul gilroy's 'between camps' and, as of this arvo, empire - which i find fucking annoying, i don't know why since i liked negri and hardt's labour of dyonisus (tall poppy syndrome? boring old marxist syndrome? boring american lit professor syndrome?)

seriously thinking about paying for access to an academic library. hmm...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:23 / 09.04.02

Currently- "Sex and Rockets- the occult world of Jack Parsons", "Three to See the King" by Magnus Mills, who ROCKS (but gently), and STILL Herodotus' bastard "Histories". Haven't even been NEAR the Primo Levi bio I spent 25 quid on last week.

12:35 / 09.04.02

Crunchy - Flowers for Algernon is great. I really, really liked it, and have read it in a variety of incarnations... the original short story was published with a dramatisation for BBC Radio Burt Coulds did of it, for comparison purposes, and was very impressive - the adaptation is well-written, because it sticks to the point. Only later did I read the full novel that the short story was expanded into. The story survives compression and expansion very well.

hanabius yamamura

21:25 / 09.04.02

flowers for algernon ... brilliant book , dread pirate ... sad and thought provoking ...

06:23 / 10.04.02

I haven't heard anybody mention that in years. Recently finished Islands in the Net after reading the cyberpunk thread, and from there moved on to The Man Who Ate Everything which reprints an article that seems to have really gotten to Bruce Sterling. Stuttering through Empire of the Senseless. And was reading A Brief History of Time until I checked out The Universe in a Nutshell (same material, but more, with better pictures and swearing.) Thoroughly enjoying Dervish is Digital by Pat Cadigan, who still does cyberpunk better than any of the boys. And assorted video game crit.

02:27 / 11.04.02

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S. Thompson
A Mencken Chrestomathy - H.L. Mencken
A People's History of the United States - Howard Zinn
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - Kurt Vonnegut
The Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare

I need to read only one book a time. Fuck.

04:08 / 11.04.02

I hear that. Especially 'cause I started Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future while visiting the bookstore this evening. Seems meant to spook me.

ONLY NICE THINGS

10:00 / 11.04.02

Um...flicking through Baudrillard and the Millennium, which is liek a Crunchie bar. Looking forward to , by Barbara Ehrenreich, because I'm curious about what her fiction is like.

10:05 / 11.04.02

In what way is it like a Crunchie bar? Tingly on the tongue? Makes you glad it's Friday? Light yet satisfyingly noisy?

10:29 / 11.04.02

Maybe it's just rather sweet?
I'm starting Ulysses, very slowly. Haven't even made it past the introduction yet. And it's hugely heavy - a Yorkie of a book.

11:41 / 11.04.02

Started Camille Paglia's Sex, Art, and American Culture on the train this morning. Better subway reading material there isn't. Although she's a little overblown adn breathless sometimes, especially when talking about her own accomplishments, Paglia is just such a super stylist. A pleasure to read.

14:30 / 12.04.02

Great Expectations - my first shot at Dickens, how behind am I?

Armadale was great, though I felt a great deal more sorry for Lydia Gwilt than I suspect I was meant to, and thought her husband was a complete twart after the honeymoon. I also brought Howl's Moving Castle back from Southsea for Haus, and read it again in the meantime.

ONLY NICE THINGS

15:02 / 12.04.02

Sax- because it's light and brief and quite bubbly...

Goodness Gracious Meme

16:21 / 12.04.02

Satayjit Ray - The complete adventures of Feluda
Barney Hoskins - The Lonely Planet Boy: a pop romance

Krister Kjellin

19:19 / 12.04.02

A new transalation of the Aenid by Virgil. Just got to the third song yet, but it's interesting to see how much closer it is to our modern novel than it's form models the Iliad and the Odyssey. And it has some brilliant metaphors as well, and quite fluid narration.

A Thousand and one Nights, a recent translation of the Cario edition. That thing is pretty saucy, isn't it? I never realized, from reading the children's versions. But they're at each other like well-oiled rabbits. Constantly!

Glad to see people still read Iain Banks. Thought his hip-factor had diminished to just above zero. Then again, people may not be as hip here as I've been led to belive?

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