Checks out. Wiki says:

x-post this to the Mel Gibson thread and you'll be meta boarding, Tony.

ASFTINDA is just a blast, read it soon (same goes for Consider the Lobster.)

And The Girl With Curious Hair and Broom Of The System...

figure somebody would have...i tried searching before posting but didnt see anything...pretty great book though espcially if someone wants to learn more about how this whole collapse went down in laymans terms

his other books are just as good and also nice, fast, smooth reads

Working on Douglas Coupland's Generation A and having a weird sort of problem with it. Say what you will about Coupland, the guy's great at writing distinct characters, which is usually what keeps me reading his stuff. Generation A is a dystopian future novel, and that's what I'm kicking against. His dystopia, a world in which the bees and insects are all extinct (maybe) and global warming has accelerated at an exponential rate, is probably realistic, but in a worst-case-scenario way that I find defeatist and depressing. I've never been an optimistic sort, and I'm sure no Pollyanna, but more and more I find others' darkness almost unbearable. It just seems like a cop out, in a way, especially coming from a writer who has always found rays of hope and light in even his darkest work. I guess what I'm saying here is that, anymore, dystopias seeem like an easy out. We know the world is all fucked up and the future is ever more uncertain: Doesn't it take more imagination to find a hopeful future than a hopeless?

I'd agree with that. Dystopian futures also seem to be full of survivial mechanisms. Because "a" is gone, and "x" is in short supply, characters must do the following things (in sequence) to survive. It's very linear and drives the plot nicely, but it's not very interesting.

I think the trick with a utopian future is making it believable. Yeah, it'd be good to live in a world that's disease free where everyone has everything they need. But how'd they get there? How'd they make it work?

Now reading:



Over the past week I read:





...and I can't say I particularly enjoyed either. Northanger is certainly the weakest Austen I've read, and despite his music-obsessive tendencies, I must say I found Rob Fleming a rather unendearing chap in HF.

Even as a send up of Gothic fiction?

this. i've always enjoyed northanger abbey as a goof on the typical gothic bs. udolpho and all that. it's a pretty witty read, overall. and not in the traditional jane austen way. i'm by no means a completist, but it's the one of hers i've enjoyed the most.

Well, that was the pretense under which I was reading it. I'm taking a course in Gothic Fiction next semester (hence the Dracula). And whilst I guess at times the gothic parodying was entertaining, I still found it a very laborious read - Catherine Morland certainly is one of her more pathetic heroines.

Currently making my way through the Essential Thor collections



A classic of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby years

Finally got around to reading this after always hearing good things. It's hilarious so far, although I'm not sure it deserves all the praise showered upon it. A little too cartoony at times. Still, a very enjoyable read.

I've been reading like a madman lately:

It's really good obviously but I'm not sure if the titular character justifies all the brooding that the narrator (and Conrad) engage in. There's not enough to him to warrant the 'opaque' and 'inscrutable' qualities ascribed to him.

My least favorite book of all time. An interminable slog dedicated to bashing one's head in with Conrad's Catholic certainty that people who do bad things get theirs in the end. Could've made the same point in a short story and spared the world this exercise in tedium.

Do you like Conrad in general? I find 'Heart of Darkness' mesmerizing.

LJ started out as a short story and Conrad expanded it by adding all the stuff on Patusan which is probably stretched beyond its inherent interest. I'd like to read Nostromo which is supposed to be his best.

Yeah, Tony, I liked Heart of Darkness quite a bit, and maybe need to give LJ a second chance. Haven't read it since high school.

fifteen pages into an eight page book. unsure as to how i feel about this one.

Reading French author Muriel Barberry's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, an exquisite translation of a near-perfect (so far) novel. Concerning the solo and tandem thought lives of an ugly, middle aged Parisian concierge and a 12 year-old super genius living in her building, the prose is so elegant and yet so clear that, while I know nowhere near enough of Kant to say for sure, I now assume it's completely possible to disembowel his body of work in three paragraphs, 60 pages into a 250-page book.

My first thought was, "Oh, he's reading it again." My second thought was, "That's a ridiculously short book." And then I realized you just left out a "y."



I'm currently reading

Saw this one mentioned up thread, so I picked it up. I'm 50 pages in--it's very engaging, though in a not-quite-cold, distanced way. Reminds me of The Plague in that regard.


Zbigniew Herbert - The Collected Poems 1956-1998
Brilliant cover on this one. I saw it by chance in a used bookstore and decided I would most likely have to buy it based on the cover image alone. It was a great coincidence, because a few days prior I had read a few of his poems and was meaning to check out more. I like the way he unites idea and image. He seems to have a proclivity for ars poetica, and at times he veers to far into musings on language that lack a strong image to demonstrate the principle at hand. But this is my only complaint so far.

I had a similar thought process, though I never got to the "left out the y" part, and I just thought he was doing something tricky with language.

sloppy boarding there, and i wasn't even intoxicated. just pre-occupied at work. to be fair, that whole thing feels like you're fifteen pages into an eight page novel. bewildering, and mostly not in a positive sense. some nice turns of phrase (this is presumably where he got "i wish we were an eagle" from), but it's stilted and awkward, rudderless. i'll save the rest for when i actually have to review this.

I adore this book.

Question: Any readers of Bizarro fiction...if so...authors, titles, suggestions?

I'm a WWII buff (or at least trying to be) --- so after doing some research, this came up on the Must-Read's. So far it's fantastic. Extremely detailed literary work. The author really went above and beyond the amount of research I had expected. Since the Third Reich is the creature that sprouted from Hitler, this book (so far) is a comprehensive biography of Hitler and every single event surrounding his lifetime that followed from WWI and that led into the subsequent one. It goes as in-depth as discussing (in quite extensive detail), all of Hitler's influences, such as Bizmarck, Martin Luther, Nietzsche, Wagner, etc -- and how their ideologies and teachings were adopted by and molded by Hitler to create the quintessential embodiment of them all, which in turn resulted in the Third Reich. Many excerpts are cropped out of Mein Kampf and put into a workable context, so the reader can follow along and understand what the fuck Hitler was actually trying to get at in his manic writings. There are scholars and academics that have been known to disprove of the book, but this is most likely a result of the author's bias against Hitler. He even predicts of this in his Foreword:






The book is over a thousand pages and looks like this. You can imagine how hard it is to read this book in public (where I do most of my reading). I don't exactly get the most pleasant look when I walk around with it.

Surely a tribute to others' ignorance more than anything else. An indispensible read for anyone wanting to understand how such evil came to seem so rational, sensible and popular.

I find it a really interesting book. One that I have returned to over and over. I think one of the reasons it seems to be so loved is that it works across so many levels. It is simple enough to teach in middle school. I use a many of the vignettes in both my sophomore and AP lit classes, and I did have a class where I studied it in college (but you are right, the discussions were not as deep or as analytical as the rest of the works we had read in the class).

The truth of the matter is that I think it the pieces are much better than the whole. As a "novel" I don't think it quite works, but some of the vignettes like the title story are absolutely stunning in how they capture those moments of realizing who you are and where you come from.

The moment where Esperanza finally realizes how other people see her life, (when she says, "There. I lived there.") is crushing. But that is why, in my classes, I just teach this vignette. I can't quite justify teaching the whole work.

Currently reading:


Only two stories in, but the first one was a joy and the second one (while slightly plodding) had an amazing finish. All in all, good stuff.


Halfway through and wow. Yes, it makes me uncomfortable at every turn, but my god is this one of the best written books I have read in years.


Thinking about picking up (because I dug his last novel: Sag Harbor) does anyone have any thoughts on:

sag harbor was great, but never read any of his other books. plz let me know what you think of this one.

in other news, does anyone want to try to do a somb book club? there's been more activity here than i've ever seen. would love to tackle some book, compare thoughts with yinz guys.

This idea has been floated before and, as ever, I'm totally in favor.

i thought it had, but my brain is fried by drugs, lack of sleep and a late night break up.

Had I the inclination, I'd page back and see why it never happened. My gut feeling is someone put the kibosh on it or moaned a lot or maybe we just fucked off and didn't do anything.

Other hand, the board's so moribund at this point it's hard to see any good reason not to give it a shot.

how do we choose the book? i remember someone saying moby dick, but i'd rather do something current-ish. outside of the cannon, which precludes cormac mccarthy. what about more obscure nabokov, like pale fire, or the new gary shteyngart, that is coming out any day now?

I'm down for pretty much anything. After Of Human Bondage, I've been keen to read The Painted Veil, but I'll go for whatever people decide.

I need to be able to find it at my local library, though - finances prevent a trip to the local bookstore.

Or maybe it was concerning a possible SOMB Favorite Books Poll which NO ONE but me seemed gungho for.

it wouldn't be right, especially considering my current station, to go for a book that isn't available at the library.

If we can come up with consensus and some more people, let's try. Probably oughta wait for Ogawa to finish his move to NYC.

(Uh... sorry if that was a state secret, Ogawa.)

try out half.com. I get all my books from there. I can't count the number of books I've picked up New (or close to it), for $1.99. The more classic the novel, the cheaper you'll inevitably find it.

I said I was interested last time as well; not sure how one person could have put an end to it, just don't participate.

i really wanted to do a poll/end of decade list...


but let's hear some suggestions then. if there are even five of us taking part, i think this would be a success.

Pale Fire is not obscure and is quite canonical.

more obscure, as in not lolita.

I am the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the window pane is a great opening line.

I might be game in playing along with this, but it would have to be "library available"...I ain't got the $ or inclination to buy a book I might never read again.

Yeah this is a classic but you're right it's looooong.

Keep meaning to buy some Hannah Arendt.

Enjoyed this recently. Good book. I like the way the main character knows he's in the company of a confidence trickster but chooses to believe in him anyway. Because he needs money to pay his wife. Because he needs a surrogate for his father. He scrutinizes the deception every step of the way but still gets taken in. That's why the conman picks him as a mark and knows what to tell him. And there's a metaphor too for the act of reading a book. I believe this bit. I don't believe that. But overall the author carries you for the ride and even encourages your scepticism to win your faith in the pay off. It's a compact book but the ideas are well chosen and extremely complimentary. For example, the guy is part financial investor, part psychiatrist. It's intimated that he's able to excel in these fields because he's free from having any personal investment in the lives of those he assists. Without minding the consequences it's possible to seize the day. There's an irony that if the money handed over to this guy was in exchange for all the psychological insight he divulges, instead of an investment with an expected return, then maybe it would be a fair bargain. Two conflicting notions of growth and interest. At times it's unclear what the conman's role is and indeed he switches between them. Yet there's some struggle within him too, which comes to light in his poem which he reads. There's a self-contradicting awareness that to really seize the day is not to free oneself of consequences of past and future but to let them have unity with the self in the moment at all times and to be in possession of oneself. Another irony that the main character then collapses into grief at a funeral of a man he does not know and as such looks perfectly the part despite not being invested in the consequences at all. Strange too his disdainful commentary on social obsessions with money whilst being utterly obsessed with making money himself. Though of course this in turn is a subterfuge for his relationship with his father and his wife. Freedom, money, these are things he cannot seize until the day he stops grasping so hard. And by then all that's left for him to seize is grief. A very well worked set of motifs though I feel I must read the book again sometime to uncover all of it. I first picked it up the morning after a friend's wedding party two years ago but only had time for a few pages. Bought a copy in a charity shop earlier this year and read it on Sunday. Bellow writes exquisite prose and uses some interesting stylistic shifts to good effect. He doesn't overstate his themes and lets them rise naturally to the reader's attention. I only paused a couple of times to note down some story ideas of my own which occurred to me part in thanks to the structure of what the author was doing. Thoroughly enjoyable 120 page book that I read relatively slowly.

^^I haven't read a Bellow. Possible start to the putative "book club"?

maybe you want to start with something that there is fish for.

You guys do know that used books can be had for extremely cheap on amazon? As little as a penny for a paperback.

i have read some bellow, but i think he's a fine author with whom to start.