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really digging "Darkmans" by nicola barker.  i like her style a lot.  every now and then i don't understand  why something is funny because BRITISH! but mostly it all translates pretty easily.    she hits things just right.. 

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Yeah, Barker is unashamedly British, obsessed with small town life / characters. After reading a whole bunch of American books where I just about understand certain references / nuances, it's nice to get everything for once. :cattears:

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one of you sci fi geeks please advise: having read Neuromancer, would I be foolish to skip the middle one before reading Mona Lisa Overdrive?

 

coincidentally I just started reading Count Zero last week, seems ok so far.

 

I alway seem to be disagreeing with Keanu

but I loved the Pattern Recognition trilogy

So much so that I bought a signed copy of PR

WG's newest book is about a post-apocalyptic performance artist

Which sounds awesome imo

Tanks guise. Picked up MLO at a garage sale last week, but reckon I’ll hunt down CZ first.

 

Gibson’s not a priority at the moment anyway; this time of year it’s all about the old school spooky: Poe, Stevenson, Lovecraft, James, De La Mare… Stuff to listen to haunted house SFX by :fear:

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back to reading at a normal pace after infinite jest left me feeling like I had learning disabilities

Jorge Luis Borges - A Universal History of Infamy ~ Got a book compiling all of Borges' short story compilations and this is the first one. It's not particularly worth reading. It's all fictionalised, 5 page accounts of real life criminals like Billy The Kid. Even Borges says it's shit on the intro. But there's a story in there that's supposedly the beginning of the magic realism movement, so if that's your jam check that out. But yeah, it's kinda crap. Now on to Ficciones so it only gets better from here

 

Santiago Lorenzo - Los Huerfanitos ~ Really good, as are all 3 of his novels so far. One of my favs spanish authors alive. Hasn't been translated and probably never will so no use in saying much about it

 

 

now reading White Noise as I really liked

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Borges is amazing...wish my Spanish was good enough to read him untranslated

 

I've been reading China Mieville's political articles and I am frankly embarrassed for him. He is a smart guy and a sweetheart but Jesus Christ, he interprets everything uni-dimensionally through the lens of Marxism, and so some of his conclusions are truly idiot. Like, any time someone poor does something bad against 'the bourgeoisie', it is a reaction to class (and thus half-justified). Now, Marxism is a completely valid way to abstractly parse the world, but if it's the only fucking tool in your toolbox then imo you have truly lost the plot. Models should be like the translucent pages of an architectural blueprint, holographically layered on top of each other. It really makes me not want to read him.

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Finished Italo Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" some time ago. Liked it quite a bit.

 

Also read Marco Polo's Travels. Now reading a biography on John Dee.

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Excerpts from Marina Abramović's memoir read like Camus:

 

'When I was young, I thought our flat was the height of luxury. Later I discovered it had once belonged to a wealthy Jewish family, and had been confiscated during the Nazi occupation. Later I also realized the paintings my mother put in our apartment were not very good. Looking back, I think — for these and other reasons — our home was really a horrible place.'

 

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/02/books/review-marina-abramovic-memoir-walk-through-walls.html

Edited by doublename
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Yeah, Barker is unashamedly British, obsessed with small town life / characters. After reading a whole bunch of American books where I just about understand certain references / nuances, it's nice to get everything for once. :cattears:

 

 

oh i love it though.  it's only now and then w/some of the slang and colloquialisms where i have to think real hard trying to get it.  mostly it's just really awesome. such great characters and story arch.  will have to check out more of her work once i plow through the pile of stuff to read/max/msp tutorials. fack. 

 

edit: and oh shit.. that book review.. stole it for my FB wall. too good. 

Edited by ignatius
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194805.jpg

 

This is rocking my brain right now: It's a compilation of interviews with Noam Chomsky. His stone-cold rationalism and research-based fact dropping ensures that every response feels like a mic drop.

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I bought Pattern Recognition yesterday from a bookshop but I have lots of other books in queue also so I don't know when I'll get to that.

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One reason I love PR is because of the hypertextual element of "20 years on, here's how the world does and doesn't resemble Neuromancer"

(Y'all prolly noticed the protagonist has the same first name innit...)

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I bought Pattern Recognition yesterday from a bookshop but I have lots of other books in queue also so I don't know when I'll get to that.

it's quite good

 

 

Just started reading hard-boiled wonderland again and I'm feeling a bit underwhelmed. Was much better in my memory

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I bought Pattern Recognition yesterday from a bookshop but I have lots of other books in queue also so I don't know when I'll get to that.

it's quite good

 

 

Just started reading hard-boiled wonderland again and I'm feeling a bit underwhelmed. Was much better in my memory

 

 

i enjoyed pattern recognition a lot. it made me feel a little displaced and sleep deprived.  

 

i skipped a few of his books because they were like spy novels or something and i just wasn't feeling it.  but Gibson's last one.. "The Peripheral" i liked a lot.

 

finished Darkmans by nikola barker.. i think she could've let that book go on for another 50 pages easy and let it just get weirder and weirder.  it wraps up so quickly.  enjoyed it a lot. been thinking about it all day.. 

 

not sure what to read next. there's a big pile of stuff i'm anxious to get to. 

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Pattern Recognition was fucking lush, will grab the other two in the 'trilogy'

 

Now started Jim Crace's Quarantine. I've only ever read Being Dead by Crace (which I highly recommend). Have a bunch more books by him that have accumulated from seeing his name on a book in a charity shop and bringing them home.

Off to a great start so far.

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Now started Jim Crace's Quarantine. I've only ever read Being Dead by Crace (which I highly recommend). Have a bunch more books by him that have accumulated from seeing his name on a book in a charity shop and bringing them home.

Off to a great start so far.

 

I read Harvest after seeing it in the gothic exhibition in the British Library, couldn't really get into it but I was hoping for some kinda Wicker man weirdness so the fault may have been my own.

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