Funny book.

Just finished



Much better than I expected, and a fitting farewell. Most were unpublished writings from or about the WWII era. Vonnegut was my first favorite author, and I still re-read the books that got me hooked in high school, Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five.

I'm now about 3/4 of the way through



It's good before-bed reading, as each chapter is about three pages. Funny, but not necessarily enlightening.

still reading

I'm enjoying it but the pacing is languid


Medieval scholars pan this but I read the first few pages and kind of dig the guys style.


A total impulse buy, never heard of this before but it seems like it'll be fascinating to me.

I cant get this... thing out of my head. Cant stop thinking about it.

LOVE LOVE LOVE that book! Especially, but not limited to "How to Tell a True War Story."

The one book I read on a yearly basis.

HELLO, FINALS WEEK



Hannah Arendt, On Violence




Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political


Ira Chernus, Dr. Strangegod: On the Symbolic Meaning of Nuclear Weapons
Ira Chernus (ed), A Shuddering Dawn: Religious Studies and the Nuclear Age

Rebecca S. Bjork, Strategic Defense Initiative: Symbolic Containment of the Nuclear Threat

Patricia M. Mische, Star Wars and the State of Our Souls: Deciding the Future of Planet Earth

Debbora Battaglia, E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces

Always been a sucker for fairy tales.

I started reading Jamaica Kincaid's travelogue of her trip to the Himalayas but the first ten pages were her just talking about how much she loves finding new types of seeds.

Totally did not feel like the same author that wrote "A Small Place."

oh well, we'll see how it develops.

It took me almost 4 months and a pit-stop read of Colbert's book but I have finally finished Guns, Germs, and Steel.

I was a history major in college so the great majority of this information was not new to me but the genius of the book comes in the way he puts it all together. It really is a must-read.

About a hundred pages or so into this.

Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future for my paper on science fiction. Sort of surprisingly--my first Jameson. Excellent.

Just got:



Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy. We'll see if I even get to this.

Also a book about the Strategic Defense Initiative called Star Wars and the State of Our Souls!

Sheesh Biggie, you sure are blowing through the McCarthy library. I'm taking a break for some less violent stuff. This girl can only take so much blood and guts even if the stories are magnificent.

Paul Madonna - All Over Coffee
Somehow Paul Madonna's amazing inkwashed and cartooned cityscapes of San Francisco had escaped me until I saw his work in the San Francisco Chronicle a couple of weeks ago when I was there. Impulsively, I sought out and bought this compilation of his cartoons, although the word "cartoon" doesn't seem to do them justice. This is the sort of thing that I would aspire to in my art and writing if I, you know, actually painted and wrote. I probably prefer the humor and arcana in Ben Katchor's urban and architectural storytelling, but the beauty in Paul Madonna's art blows that away.

i've read one of his books before -- terribly interesting stuff. this is someone i'd like to have a few beer with

His A Year In The Maine Woods is older, and appears to be out of print, but that's a really good one. It looks like his subsequent books extend themes from it (ravens, winter biology).

Can someone tell me whether The Sound and the Fury gets better after the first 100 pages? Because the first 100 were fucking boring me to death.

I've been told that it does, but I never made it past page 50 myself.

Chicago Public Library's spring 2008 One Book One Chicago selection. My first Chandler novel ever. I thought that it would be bogged down by all of the ubiquitous Chandler parodies that I have heard/read/seen in my lifetime, but it was a lot of fun. Definitely a product of its time, but compelling stuff.

Finished!
Absorption in progress.
Thoughts to come.

Has anyone else here read any books by this author? I was thinking of starting a thread about it but I have no reason to believe that it could possibly get more than a response or two, even though these are some of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read.

Ishmael articulates a lot of feelings about the world that I've had for a long time but have never been able to put into words. I can't say that I ever would have come to the same conclusions on my own or that Quinn's ideas should be taken as fact, but it tries to answer so many nagging questions that I've kept to myself for so long. I mean, I have tried to talk to people about this stuff but no one really gets it. Not so much about how things came to be this way, but about how they just can't go on like this for much longer. So reading this book, which seemed to speak to so many or my deepest questions and fears, was really a revelation. I can understand why it might not be for everyone. The narrator starts off believable but eventually becomes kind of annoying -- a fact that's later attested to and explained in My Ishmael -- and the dialog is kind of "preachy" but if you understand what the book is and what it isn't, that's not really an issue. Anyway, I let my gf borrow it and she absolutely hated it so I'm hesitant to recommend it to just anyone even though I get the feeling it's one of the most important things I've ever read.

Currently reading The Story of B and not far enough in it to really comment.

I get the impression that Quinn is pretty well-known in certain circles but I wasn't even aware of him at all until a few months ago. So I really have no idea how loved/despised/recognized his works are.

Fascinating, Undo. You've got me curious.

I'm not being purposefully vague about these to give them some kind of a mystical quality, it's just that if I explained exactly what they were about, it would instantly turn off a lot of readers who might otherwise get something out of them. And just stating the books' thesis statements and leaving it at that would lead a lot of people to say "Really? No shit!" and then shrug their shoulders, or just write it off as neo-hippie, new age eco-freak bullshit or something.

Everyone's so quick to hate these days. I don't agree with Ayn Rand or anything but I don't turn into a raging asshole like half the people on this board do whenever her name is mentioned.

No one wants to admit that they could stand to learn anything from a book anymore unless it reinforces their own worldview. I don't know if it's just the overeducated, underemployed, internet-dependent people in our society or if it's just everyone but you can't talk about ideas anymore without getting shit on. At least on the internet. Everyone wants to fly so high above the fray.

I'm sure this post makes no sense, I'm just rambling and bitching about things I've seen, mostly here, over the past 2 or 3 years.

No, it makes total sense to me. I enjoy reading books that make me think about things in a different light. I may not agree with them 100%, but I can usually take something away from them.


OTM.

I've read the first Ishmael and found it pretty enlightening, with a lot of alternative ideas about how to view the world and our role in it.

Ishmael is a mind altering experience.

picked this up today based on my love of Vaughan's "Y: The Last Man" series.

This does not disappoint, beautiful stuff. I'm only about a 1/3 through, and it already feels like one of the most powerful comics that I have read.

The hippie stoners at my high school (the ones that would read books occasionally) all loved Ishmael.

"Dude, you've got to read Ishmael" was commonly heard as joints were going clockwise at parties.

Never read it though, so I don't have an opinion, just the funny mangled idea of what the book is about that my friends and I created.

Just finished the first installment... it was so great, I need to go buy "Cycles" but the comic store isn't open today... but tomorrow I will.

trying to read child of god by c. mccarthy, but it is pretty brutal/gross. i don't know if i'll even get through all 150 pages.

also reading grant morrison's arkham asylum mini-series for the first time, pretty interesting

Just finished:

Richard Thompson - The Biography, by Patrick Humphries.

Just began:

Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, ed. by Benjamin Hedin.

Just finished reading Brave New World for the first time since I was in 5th or 6th grade. I really don't understand all the praise this book gets. It is kind of a cool idea (esp. for the time it was written) but has poor execution after about the first quarter. The Savage couldn't be more annoying as a character and all the others seem far too two-dimensional. Again, after about the first quarter, the book begins to read like an awful sci-fi movie. I'm glad it was short so I was still able to get a small amount of enjoyment out of my reading. My junior high self was wrong - this book is no 1984.

Philosophers generally don't make great novels, it is my impression.

Ishmael was a weird one for me. Some great insights and a lot of interesting ideas, but wow was it ever preachy. The arrogance found in each and every sentence made it really hard for me to latch on to it. Plus all the people I knew who 'loved' the book, were real uppity and self-righteous. Really put me off. Even the structure and plot of the book was irritating. Still, I'm glad I read it and it really did change the way I look at things. Very interesting stuff.

by Lee Siegel

Can't be as good as his previous Love In A Dead Language, but so far so good.

The worst part of the novel is that it does not make a compelling argument against the drug-filled, genetically enginireed society that Huxley creates. By all accounts, it sounds like a nice place to live.

The Savage was just a little bitch.

Chandler was a poet, his lines scan & evoke beyond the language put upon the page.

Started. We'll see how this goes.


Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Just started this today (a little expensive for a collection, but it is such a nicely put together one, that it is just a pleasure to look at for the most part). Although i prefer the above cover to the one I own.

Love what I have read.

Appleseed - John Clute

A classic Space Opera gone Postsingularity -- the maybe creaky plot (nearly like something out of the Lensman series) is propelled more by the words that limn it than it's own devices.

I'm 90 pages in and still trying to get my footing on this things tossing, heaving decks left slick with the juice of ideas crushed in the rush forward to the next paragraph's ideation. The language of this thing can run from Elizabethan to "Yo! MTV Raps" in the length of a sentence fragment, inventing the sociological/tautological/linguistic/gymnastic symbologies wholesale for the rest of the thought. They could never make a movie of this book that could capture a fragment of the meanings within it, nor would 99.44% of the moviegoing audience pay $12 to watch it if they could.

I'm loving it.

wow, this brings back memories. powers is the first 'alternative' comic i ever got into, followed closely by transmetropolitan. i wish bendis would've stuck to his own series, instead of immersing himself in all that ultimate crap.

have you read the first issue of final crisis yet? i just dled it off another board, and i'm about to get stoned and read it twice. can't wait.

I was about to read it tonight, along with the new Superman 11.

Seriously, Morrison is totally owning comics right now. Batman 677 was so frickin' good, and I haven't really followed much of his run, but I feel like i need to go back and go through everything.

Finished Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader. I have read just about every Dylan-related book I can get my hands on, but this annoyed me, though I can't articulate why. Not really big on the inclusion of pieces bashing Dylan and this has a couple of those.

Now reading:Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. Maugham takes rather a dim view of the clergy. He characterizes the Parson as "Unaccustomed to working" which struck me as somehow hilarious.

Got into this after reading sister Amy's wacky cooking book (see previous pages), but I'm actually doing the audiobook. Sedaris has just the reedy, squeaky voice you would expect from a gay North Carolinian. Posters here have commented that the family stories are better than the other ones, but I will say that "Six To Eight Black Men" (performed before a live audience here) is a classic that should be a Christmas tradition in every household.

I kind of want to read the new Salman Rushdie, but all the reviews have been pretty "meh." It still sounds like a fun summer read, and I love Rushdie's imagination, so I'll probably hit it anyways.

Sedaris is a gifted storyteller and all...and he does make me laugh...but my BS-meter really started blaring with this book. I'm sure he's had a lot of wacky stuff happen, and his family-life was warped. Got that. Yet, some of the stuff is so over the top that it strains credulity.

if your bs-meter goes off while reading sedaris, i don't know what kind of ten-bell alarm goes off when you read a. burroughs.

After Dark - Haruki Murakami: Took me a lot longer to finish than most Murakami's, and I'm not really sure what the point of it was, not in a Wind-Up Bird Chronicles-Oh-My-God-That-Blew-My-Mind-Even-As-I-Don't-Understand-it way as a "Hmm, okay, that's that." I'd like to re-read it some time in the future and see if I glean a little more out of it. Right now, though, it definitely falls into the camp of lesser Murakami, which is still a good camp in which to find oneself.