yea, after dark wasn't very good at all.

I loved Me Talk Pretty One Day, but things he wrote before and since haven't really hit the same spot.

"Six to Eight Black Men" is very funny, though. What about the weird meta story with the parrot? I wasn't sure what to make of it.

All Over Coffee - Paul Madonna

Collection of the first two year's worth of Madonna's Coffee comic strip that appears in the SF Chronicle. The writing is terribly hit-and-miss, but I don't really care. I just look at the illustrations, which are india ink and various washes. Absolutely beautiful.

I find his stuff works much better in a performance medium. Essays that got a chuckle from me in print have had me in hysterics when I hear him read.

The Best of Roald Dahl
I really didn't know anything about him before picking this up. Apparently he wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. His wicked sense of humor runs throughout the collection of short stories. Just came across the short story that inspired the Tarantino segment in "Four Rooms".

One of the best short story writers ever. Now criminally overlooked.

In addition, he was a fighter pilot (who survived a serious crash in his single-engine fighter), worked with doctors to create the WDT valve which enabled children suffering from "water on the brain" to relive pressure on their brain tissue, and was married to Oscar winner Patrica Neal (she had a cerebral hemorrage when she was pregnant with their fifth child and was paralyzed. Dahl worked with her daily to get her back to full strength, successfully.)

This is just a wonderful treat. A great insight into his stand-up comedy, as well as his life.

Hmmm... pretty interesting life story.
I'll have to look into some bio info about him.

I never read anything but the 2 Charlie books. He's long overdue in my To Read list...thanks for cluing me in.

^ great childrens' book author, and yet flunked English four years running. Also wrote James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox, as well as a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

going solo (by Roald Dahl) is great, one of the more inspiring auto-biographies i've read.

Charlie And The Great Glass Elevator. Not one of his better efforts. I'd have to go with

Charlie And The Chocolate Factory
The Twits
James and The Giant Peach
Matilda
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Witches

Thar's some good summer reading.

This is a sequel to the excellent Boy.

Add that one to the Dahl reading list, along with The BFG. His short story collections are pretty great, too. What I've read of them, anyway.

Wes Anderson is making the animated version of The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Maybe my favorite book of his.

Wikipedia says:

George Clooney as Mr. Fox.
Cate Blanchett as Mrs. Fox.
Jason Schwartzman
Bill Murray
Anjelica Huston

Apart from a rather pedantic objection to Clooney doing what is a very British character, hopefully sans accent, Wes Anderson's name confers some hope.

Re-reading


Seriously, how do people go through life without reading this?

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If you possess an interest in Adolf Hitler, this book allows you a rather disturbing, and vastly interesting, look into the life of the man. As told from men around him, the re-discovered documents used for the book chronicle his rise, hold of power, and decline. For a man who is so often in bold face, a monster to be sure, but it is still incredibly fascinating to read of him going through day-to-day events, from simple to historical. Watch out for false propaganda inserted by the original Russian transcribers (the modern translators attempt to point out each case), but it's still a great piece.

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For whatever reason, I couldn't find a good image of this book. If you have an interest in Kubrick as a filmmaker and artist, this a damn good book so far. It gives some insight/speculation into his process and so on.

never read this, what kind of book is it?

I got this at the book fair last weekend:




And I had to get this one too. We couldn't stop laughing at it and the money went to charity.

Just finished
.

About to start

for the 4th time.

Got a few chapters into it but had to put it down. Maybe the only book I've had to stop reading because of how shitty it's made me feel about myself.

i started reading this last night and i couldn't put it down until i finished it at 630 am. really, anyone concerned with our dwindling privacy and the expanding of the government's ability to ignore the constitution needs to read this.
you can download it for free from the author, b/c cory doctorow is awesome:


download link:
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

not to pry or anything, but in what way?

The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman

Weighty. Amazing. Fascinating. Dissects the events of the first month of the first World War, Tuchman does great analysis as to how and where the individual countries failed and succeeded with their strategies and tactics.

I've heard this utterly depressing. I suppose the big players in any field can be called into question.

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami

This is fast becoming my favourite collection of short stories, I've read and re-read it going on 8-9 times now. Every story uses the earthquake in Kobe as a reference, whether it's direct like the man whose wife becomes obsessed with watching coverage of the quake then leaving him, or the giant frog who enlists an unremarkable man to help him in warding off a similar quake in Tokyo, or indirect, like the woman on vacation who hopes her ex-husband was crushed in the chaos. Every story is great, but 'Thailand' is something else, a menopausal woman, consumed with bitterness, learning a lesson about letting go and moving on.

Hey, has anyone here read Joe Hill? He's Stephen King's second child. I'm told he's following well in Daddy's bloody footsteps. Is it true?

i am reading 'the bell jar' for fun right now
who knew my life would come to this

but seriously, i can't put it down, great book
why is this not talked about in the same way as catcher in the rye?

cause a woman wrote it.
nah, good book.

Paul Westerberg's "Crackle and Drag" is about Sylvia Plath.

I was going to say the same thing.

Also could it have something to do with it being more explicitly autobiographical? Probably not.

I read it thinking I would be indifferent to it--during my big Plath phase, too. I was wrong--great great book.


When I finish the Barthes (I keep napping and watching bad movies instead of reading so it's taking me a very long time to read a short book that isn't difficult to read at all) I'm going to read more Murakami. I've read Windup Bird... and Norwegian Wood, which I think are at pretty opposite ends of his spectrum, and loved them both. I'm thinking next I'll read Kafka on the Shore or the one about the Sarin attacks--what's it called?

Underground

Personally, I'd recommend Sputnik Sweetheart which is kind of the in-between for Norweigan and Windup. If you want to go more in the Windup direction, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is pretty damned spectacular.

flipping through an original print of the last whole earth catalogue. this thing has everything in it. my god what a resource.
also reading the brief wondrous life of oscar wao by junot diaz.

Picked this up today, and spent some time tearing through it. It's just superb so far, the most interesting account of Soviet Russia I've ever encountered, in literature or film. From interesting, largescale important moments to tiny, perhaps more interesting, tidbits author Christopher Andrew takes in the amazing information and life story Oleg Gordievsky puts forth, leading to a read I'm barely able to put down. Recommended for any history buff and/or espionage enthusiast.

I don't have any pictures but I'm reading everything Chandler all at once.



fuck yes.

It's an analysis/distillation of the hero archetype throughout history/mythology.

My AP English teacher senior year had us watch Joseph Campbell's video series based on that book and practically modeled 3/4 of the class around some of the major stories in there by reading a group of books that had related themes and then going back to Campbell's explanation of the archetype pertaining to the segment. In retrospect, that's a brilliant way to design the course and I feel kind of bad everybody in the class took the film time to goof off.

I'm trying to make my own year-long course critical theory, etc. Slow going.





Whatever.

Not a good book to read if you take the subway to work.

Haha, good call.

Having not read it,

whenever I see a paper bag on the subway I just wait for people around me to start choking on themselves.

Here's a tip for the summer time: If the train looks full except for one car, don't go into the empty car, even if it means you have to push your way into one of the other cars and stand real close like you're on your way to a concentration camp. The empty car, no matter how attractive it looks, has already been claimed by the smelliest homeless man in the city.

Or the air conditioning is broken, I have learned.

I just finished reading Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. What a spectacular book. Probably the best writing I've ever laid eyes on. His Blood Meridian is similarly magnificent.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (in English) and Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (in Polish). Ice Nine, fuck yeah.

Just picked up:

Final Crisis 2

as well as the New Avengers and Mighty Avengers.

Should be some good comics tonight.

A little pissed though that the comic store in my home town (which is uber-shitty compared to the places in Chicago) charges tax on comics. I didn't know that it was allowed.

The Stranger is one of my favorite books and I really liked The Plague. And now Camus continues to impress me with The Fall.

I just wanted to point out that "Final Crisis 2" is stellar.



God I hated The Stranger so much. I mean the story was well told, but I hate the overall purpose so much. Such bleak, existentialism is just so "blah" to me.

pretty sure that's not allowed. Call the Illinois Department of Revenue on them.

The Plague deals with similar issues and isn't quite as bleak. In fact, it's almost uplifting. Despite so many people dying.