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Guest The Vidiot

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still Gibson. finished Pattern Recognition, my second readthrough. first time was way back in uni days. got a lot more out of it this time round.

 

moving on to Spook Country (also a second readthrough) and then Zero History, before going backwards to the Sprawl Trilogy of which I've only read Neuromancer.

 

i thought virtual light was one of his better reads (corny though enjoyably so in a gibson-way).

 

also,

 

i wanted to emphasize how awesome john fowler's The Magus is. a beautiful labyrinthic story with Old-Greek-inspired pseudo-mythological aspects interwoven with interesting takes on psychoanalysis. it's also intruiging from a literary viewpoint, in that it goes deeply into the "i versus me" and "writer versus narrator" minefield --though all done very tastefully.

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omg i just found an english copy of this

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lol, i missed this, Cowboy Henk is brilliant, used to love the shit out of kamagurka as a kid. Dutch pride 4 real.

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Guest disparaissant

just finished Parable of the Sower and Fledgling, both by Octavia Butler. The former was amaaaazing, so well done. The latter was pretty good, but I couldn't help but be creeped out by all the sex scenes (main character is a vampire who looks like she's maybe 10 years old. I mean she's actually 53 or something but still goddamn)

 

reading "they marched into sunlight" by david maraniss for a class. it's about october 1968 and switches between a platoon getting ambushed in vietnam and the dow protests in madison. nice and historical and also very well written.

 

have a stack of books for when the semester ends that includes judith butler, jorge luis borges, and the entire run of love and rockets.

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i wanted to emphasize how awesome john fowler's The Magus is. a beautiful labyrinthic story with Old-Greek-inspired pseudo-mythological aspects interwoven with interesting takes on psychoanalysis. it's also intruiging from a literary viewpoint, in that it goes deeply into the "i versus me" and "writer versus narrator" minefield --though all done very tastefully.

 

I almost bought this at random the other day, not knowing anything about it. I read the blurb on the back and it gave the impression it was some kind of seductive thriller or something. I'll give it a try.

 

I've almost bought John Fowles books probably 30 times. But I've never read him. Heard A Maggot was delightfully weird.

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The Riddle of the Travelling Skull is absolutely ridiculous so far—a mystery novel starring a pretty daft everyman who rambles about a chinaman with a scar running down his face, switching bags with a clergyman whose bag turns out to contain a human skull, and going to indonesia to get a rare berry for candy flavoring/coloring. This is in like, the first fifteen pages. Apparently there's a four-legged, six-armed human spider at some point in the book. It's all over the place, and hilariously so. It's like, the pure mystery novel, totally convoluted and jumbled as fuck.

 

Also picked these up.

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i wanted to emphasize how awesome john fowler's The Magus is. a beautiful labyrinthic story with Old-Greek-inspired pseudo-mythological aspects interwoven with interesting takes on psychoanalysis. it's also intruiging from a literary viewpoint, in that it goes deeply into the "i versus me" and "writer versus narrator" minefield --though all done very tastefully.

 

I almost bought this at random the other day, not knowing anything about it. I read the blurb on the back and it gave the impression it was some kind of seductive thriller or something. I'll give it a try.

 

I've almost bought John Fowles books probably 30 times. But I've never read him. Heard A Maggot was delightfully weird.

 

do it. very disorientating, like kafka trying to do a love-story with the ghosts of jung & freud sitting on one of his shoulders and william burroughs on the other

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Just bought a bunch of used books: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamatsov, The Fountainhead, and a short stories collection of which I have only read The Hunger Artist by Kafka. Kafka's a great writer, and I like his short stories because they're really short.

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Yeah but are you reading the originals? i feel like there's a lot lost in translation. read this quote about translating kafka recently,

 

One such instance is found in the first sentence of The Metamorphosis. English translators have often sought to render the word Ungeziefer as "insect"; in Middle German, however, Ungeziefer literally means "unclean animal not suitable for sacrifice"[36] and is sometimes used colloquially to mean "bug" – a very general term, unlike the scientific sounding "insect". Kafka had no intention of labeling Gregor, the protagonist of the story, as any specific thing, but instead wanted to convey Gregor's disgust at his transformation. Another example is Kafka's use of the German noun Verkehr in the final sentence of The Judgment. Literally, Verkehr means intercourse and, as in English, can have either a sexual or non-sexual meaning; in addition, it is used to mean transport or traffic. The sentence can be translated as: "At that moment an unending stream of traffic crossed over the bridge."[37] What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of 'Verkehr' is Kafka's confession to Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of "a violent ejaculation".[38]
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Yeah, but I don't know German or Russian. I'll take the translations over nothing. I like the copies with annotations, although I don't think that mine have those. And I'd read about that final line before; The Judgement is a great story.

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count zero by william gibson.

 

dude is amazing with words. it floors me. i reread sentences and paragraphs of his so i can marvel at the weird structure and descriptions.

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Arthur Machen's "The Hill of Dreams" which was at some point called by the much better title "The Garden of Avallaunius." it's a nice semi-autobiographical novel that occurs mostly in the narrator's head as he struggles to write, but is mostly lost in fantasies from childhood and whatnot. overall it has a few parts that kind of trudge along, but what novel doesn't? the second half is really picking up, got about another 16% according to my Kindle.

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Arthur Machen's "The Hill of Dreams" which was at some point called by the much better title "The Garden of Avallaunius." it's a nice semi-autobiographical novel that occurs mostly in the narrator's head as he struggles to write, but is mostly lost in fantasies from childhood and whatnot. overall it has a few parts that kind of trudge along, but what novel doesn't? the second half is really picking up, got about another 16% according to my Kindle.

 

I started this one after I read 'The Great God Pan', which I enjoyed a lot, but 'THOD' was such a different story I had to put it down. I will try again, was worried it would just meander the whole time. Thanks for the info.

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