Now Reading

[tec]

Vernon God Little, it broke my idea to read every Booker Prize winner, sub-Bukowski tosh and I don't like him much either. Probably go for some Ian McEwan next.

[Guest Ron Manager]

I found the 1Q84 trilogy put together in a neat "little" book, and I remember some vaguely positive post about it in this very thread so I purchased it. Just a few chapters in so we'll see how good it is.

 

I recently read that (in the single-volume edition too). Pretty good, I enjoyed it a lot. It's no Wind-up Bird, but definitely along the same lines. A good editor could definitely have shaved 100-200 pages however...

 

Cloud Atlas.

Yes I picked it up because of the thread on here.

 

I was thinking of getting this too (not because of any watmm thread though)...

[GORDO]

I've been trying to remember the title of a book since forever, maybe you can help. google-fu didn't do the job.

 

The book is set in a dystopian future and about the only details I can remember is that everyone's kinda depressed and suicidal, there's a particular type of people that suicide by running until they drop dead, also a library is somewhat important to the plot but i don't remember much as to why I think the main character hides there or something. rings any bells?

[Guest Iain C]

[chenGOD]

 

Cloud Atlas.

Yes I picked it up because of the thread on here.

 

I was thinking of getting this too (not because of any watmm thread though)...

 

It's good, not great. Worth a read before the film comes out and people start declaring it "the most important book written in the last 20 years". Also the film trailer really overplays the linkages between people across generations. Some of it is there, but nowhere near as much as the trailer makes it out to be - it is not the integral part of the story.

[Hugh Mughnus]

I've finally picked up Will Self's : "My idea of fun" again.... interesting read..

[logakght]

Calculus...

[zkom]

Group theory..

[Guest Glass Plate]

recently read:

Cormac McCarthy - Child of God

Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

Kenzaburo Oe - Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

Cesar Aira - The Literary Conference

 

Reading:

Cesar Aira - Varamo

 

Only standout book in the bunch was Child of God. McCarthy fucking delivers. Will make for an AWFUL movie. Way too literary for a visual transformation.

Edited September 9, 2012 by Glass Plate

[Guest Ron Manager]

Cloud Atlas.

Yes I picked it up because of the thread on here.

 

I was thinking of getting this too (not because of any watmm thread though)...

 

It's good, not great. Worth a read before the film comes out and people start declaring it "the most important book written in the last 20 years". Also the film trailer really overplays the linkages between people across generations. Some of it is there, but nowhere near as much as the trailer makes it out to be - it is not the integral part of the story.

 

Interesting, thanks, will probably check it out soon.

 

Just started David Peace's The Damned United. Having read his other books, however, two chapters in I feel like I'm waiting for Cloughie to start murdering people or something...

[chenGOD]

Cloud Atlas.

Yes I picked it up because of the thread on here.

 

I was thinking of getting this too (not because of any watmm thread though)...

 

It's good, not great. Worth a read before the film comes out and people start declaring it "the most important book written in the last 20 years". Also the film trailer really overplays the linkages between people across generations. Some of it is there, but nowhere near as much as the trailer makes it out to be - it is not the integral part of the story.

 

Interesting, thanks, will probably check it out soon.

 

Just started David Peace's The Damned United. Having read his other books, however, two chapters in I feel like I'm waiting for Cloughie to start murdering people or something...

 

The Damned United is a great read. The film's not bad either, but the book is awesome.

[takeshi]

Assasination Vacation - Sarah Vowell

[murve33]

I read "The Little Prince" (A kids book) twice this weekend. It was very beautiful.

[zkom]

Finished the Lord Dunsany anthology (and a tongue-in-cheek Finnish collection of Lovecraft/Paavo Väyrynen parodies..), now reading this:

 

 

Seems good so far after the two first chapters.

[baph]

That cover for Vineland is so much better than the standard US cover for Vineland.

[logakght]

where should I start with "The Sandman"?

[logakght]

loaolaweoaroalrtoateo nvm

[zkom]

speaking of covers, one of my pet peeves are books that have NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING XYZ plastered all over the front. I hate that shit. I've been trying to find a copy of Fight Club that doesn't have that but it's pretty much impossible here.

 

I almost fell to pieces when I saw Jonathan Swift's original Gulliver's Travels with a cover picture from the Jack Black movie.

 

Imagine some kid buying the book thinking it will be like the movie with Jack's goofy comedy and then getting 300 pages of commentary on 18th century British society. Mind you, it's a good book but that kind of marketing is way misleading. Well, maybe some kid is going to get educated by accident..

[zkom]

Though, I kinda want to see the Bible with a cover image from the Life of Brian and the text "The book that inspired the hit movie Life of Brian".

 

[patternoverlap]

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

[Guest Iain C]

Only standout book in the bunch was Child of God. McCarthy fucking delivers. Will make for an AWFUL movie. Way too literary for a visual transformation.

 

It's a great novel. I'm an unashamed fan of McCarthy, you should read more of his books if you haven't already. Suttree is my favourite.

[chenGOD]

now reading this:

 

 

Seems good so far after the two first chapters.

 

Was not impressed with Vineland, just seemed like a weak Tom Robbins novel with some literary nod to Hunter S. Thompson's vision of '60s American counterculture. But it's been a while, so maybe I'm being unkind.

I wouldn't say it was a bad book, just I expect more from the guy who wrote "Gravity's Rainbow", you know?

[baph]

Vineland works better when read after Against the Day, imo. It's like a little "seventy years later" coda to a book that wouldn't be published for 15 more years.

 

I think it might be the best of Pynchon's "light" tier books (Lot 49, Vineland, Inherent Vice).

 

Vineland also has one of my favorite bits of Pynchon paranoid whimsy:

 

 

She drove on downtown, being extra careful because she felt like doing harm to somebody, found a liquor store with a big Checks Cashed sign, got the same turndown inside. Running on nerves and anger, she kept on till she reached the next supermarket, and this time she was told to wait while somebody went in back and made a phone call.

 

It was there, gazing down a long aisle of frozen food, out past the checkout stands, and into the terminal black glow of the front windows, that she found herself entering a moment of undeniable clairvoyance, rare in her life but recognized. She understood that the Reaganomic ax blades were swinging everywhere, that she and Flash were no longer exempt, might easily be abandoned already to the upper world and any unfinished business in it that might now resume… as if they’d been kept safe in some time-free zone all these years but now, at the unreadable whim of something in power, she must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect. Someplace there would be a real ax, or something just as painful, Jasonic, blade-to-meat final—but at the distance she, Flash, and Justin had by now been brought to, it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If the patterns of ones and zeros were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least—an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name—its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are the digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, And the only thing we’re good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

 

The night manager came back, holding the check as he might a used disposable diaper. “They stopped payment on this.”

 

“The banks are closed, how’d they do that?”

 

He spent his work life here explaining reality to the herds of computer-illiterate who crowded in and out of the store. “The computer,” he began gently, once again, “never has to sleep, or even go take a break. It’s like it’s open 24 hours a day. . . .”

 

[zkom]

I've read Lot 49 and Inherent Vice and loved both, so I guess I'll probably like Vineland too.

 

I've also read Gravity's Rainbow and V and enjoyed them too but they are quite a bit harder reads.. For example Inherent Vice seemed just to flow so smoothly that I could hardly put the book down. In comparison Gravity's Rainbow took some work to digest and I could only read it in short segments.

[chenGOD]

Vineland works better when read after Against the Day, imo. It's like a little "seventy years later" coda to a book that wouldn't be published for 15 more years.

 

I think it might be the best of Pynchon's "light" tier books (Lot 49, Vineland, Inherent Vice).

 

Vineland also has one of my favorite bits of Pynchon paranoid whimsy:

 

 

She drove on downtown, being extra careful because she felt like doing harm to somebody, found a liquor store with a big Checks Cashed sign, got the same turndown inside. Running on nerves and anger, she kept on till she reached the next supermarket, and this time she was told to wait while somebody went in back and made a phone call.

 

It was there, gazing down a long aisle of frozen food, out past the checkout stands, and into the terminal black glow of the front windows, that she found herself entering a moment of undeniable clairvoyance, rare in her life but recognized. She understood that the Reaganomic ax blades were swinging everywhere, that she and Flash were no longer exempt, might easily be abandoned already to the upper world and any unfinished business in it that might now resume… as if they’d been kept safe in some time-free zone all these years but now, at the unreadable whim of something in power, she must reenter the clockwork of cause and effect. Someplace there would be a real ax, or something just as painful, Jasonic, blade-to-meat final—but at the distance she, Flash, and Justin had by now been brought to, it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If the patterns of ones and zeros were “like” patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least—an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being’s name—its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are the digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, And the only thing we’re good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God.

 

The night manager came back, holding the check as he might a used disposable diaper. “They stopped payment on this.”

 

“The banks are closed, how’d they do that?”

 

He spent his work life here explaining reality to the herds of computer-illiterate who crowded in and out of the store. “The computer,” he began gently, once again, “never has to sleep, or even go take a break. It’s like it’s open 24 hours a day. . . .”

 

 

fair enough - like I said - it's not a bad book. I'll give it another whirl after semester is finished. Reading load is insane this term.