Velocity sent me a copy of a story she's finished recently, which was an absolutely gripping read.
Also recently read Dan Brown's 'Angels & Demons'- I had read DaVinci Code a few months back and I had high hopes... thing is, I felt like Dan Brown was sorta going through the motions with this one, it's too similar to DaVinci Code for my liking- like he basically just changed the names of the characters and substituted Opus dei for Illuminati.
I finished reading 'The Closers' by Michael Connolly last week- it's my first Connolly paperback, and I absolutely loved his writing style, very 'real' and understated. Great detective story too.
I started reading Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis on Tuesday and it freaked me out so much that I had to stay up late and finish it before I could go to sleep. The book is supposed to be an autobiography, except that it's not true. Oh and also, Patrick Bateman of American Psycho is alive and killing people...
Lucky - I've been looking for Lunar Park but the local bookshops don't have it. I've read pretty much everything else he's written, and I've heard that there is quite a lot of his earlier works embedded in this one.
The copy of Lunar Park that I had was a preview copy. I found mistakes in it and felt special. There is also a lot of his other books embedded in it, and it's fun trying to pick out what's real and what's not.
Also, it made me want to do a lot of coke. Not that I'm easily influenced or anything, really. I didn't spend the whole time reading Fast Food Nation craving Macdonald's, honest...
Just finished Jonathan Safran Foer's first book: Everything is Illuminated. Excellent stuff. If you like your comedy served up with a health dose of tragedy, this is the book for you. (And read it now, before the film version ruins it for you).
Also recently enjoyed...
* Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
* Look to Windward - Iain M Banks
It's an autobiography of the Wicked Witch of the West and portrays Oz as you've never seen it before. Class divisions, racial unrest, an unsympathetic dictator involved in genocide and a green skinned equal rights insurgent who gets portrayed as the baddie in the film!
Also have just finished reading the "Illuminatus Trilogy" by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - absolutley brilliant. I haven't read a book that breaks my brain like this in a LONG time - going to take me a couple more readings before I really suss out whats going on everywhere. I can certainly see how it inspired Grant Morrison to write the Invisibles!
Christmas was a great time for books! Rounded out my Jeff Noon collection (Aldous Huxley meets Jimi Hendrix inside Buckminster Fullers body!). Also got The Algerbrist (sp?) by Iain M Banks - haven't read it yet through. Also picked up some HP Lovecraft (I'm playing the Call of Cthulu Xbox game at the moment and it's great!!) as it's just dammed hard to find. Found a few more additions for my Bruce Sterling collection, including a hard to find non-fiction essay he did on the telecommunications industry a couple of years back as a follow up to one of his books (The Hacker Crackdown).
Strangley enough I also took the time to read some government policy/proposal documents over the break too - sounds dull and boring but I often find them interesting.
I'd get more done if I spent less time reading. I'd get even more done if I spent less time waxing lyrical over the books I've read!
//"Illuminatus Trilogy" by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
I started reading this, but quickly realised that right now, I don't want all those mind bending ideas given to me in the form of fiction... straight up ideas can be communicated much more efficiently in a non fictional manner, without all this "entertainment value" crap. :)
So I'm reading Cosmic Trigger II (the depressing one).
Bear in mind that not everything in Illuminatus is fiction - half the fun is digging out what is real and whats fantasy (sometimes its quite the opposite to what you'd expect). I also borrowed Pearces copy of the Principa Discordia (the re-issued Steve Jackson Games version with extra pages - which you should ignore) which is full of lovely little 'what is the budda nature' type questions...
It took me so long before I actually understood what the phrase, 'Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law'...
//Bear in mind that not everything in Illuminatus is fiction - half the fun is digging out what is real and whats fantasy (sometimes its quite the opposite to what you'd expect).
This is true... and I was being extreme for hilarity's sake... fiction can be great, especially when written by someone as intelligent and learned as Wilson.
//I also borrowed Pearces copy of the Principa Discordia
I borrowed that off him a couple of years back. Quite entertaining.
Demanding the Impossible, A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall
The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip S. Foner
Its about that Time, Richard Cook
Going to meet the man, James Baldwin
Cook's book is about Miles Davis recorded works. I like reviews like this, as much for the going back to listen to the parts they find vital/important.
The Panther book is great, really quite illuminating to hear the words from the Horses mouth, so to speak.
Baldwin's stuff is nearly all good, thats to say I have not found anything of his I don't like.
Their is a Doco on the History Channel for anyone thats interested.
I just finished William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition'. The whole cyberpunk thing seemed incredibly embarrassing to me so I've avoided this guy's writing like the plague. But this book was sitting around in the guest house I'm staying in, and I saw it was in a contemporary setting and gave it a go. Awesomeness. So many cool little snippets and asides. The main character is allergic to the semiotics of marketing!! Haha! Wraps up too well, I thought, but maybe he's homing to get it turned into a movie?
Before that I read Johnny Cash's autobiography, the name of which I can't recall. The more recent one, anyway, which goes up to the point of doing the second album with Rick Rubin et al... Quite enlightening, but I'm not a big fan, so as I'd expected I particularly like his style or feel greatly inspired or anything by the end of it.
Have to second 'Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World'. Hot diggety. Although having read 4 Murakami books in a row a couple of years back I've felt no desire to read any more.
I tend to find Murakami's endings really unsatisfying but love them up until then. When I read a book of his short stories, I was like "oh, I'm going to be unsatisfied twelve times over" but I found that they actually delivered.
Would that be The Elephant Vanishes? If so - a great collection. Murakami's written a truckload of short stories, yet the only ones available in English are EV and After the Quake. I wish Jay Rubin or Phillip Gabriel would hop to it.
Yeah, Murakami's endings are pretty vague, but the opposite is what I found a bit disappointing with 'Pattern Recognition'. Of the ones I've read 'Wind Up Bird Chronicle' (I agree with Myshkin's comment below) and 'Hardboiled Wonderland...' satisfied me most. Both had fairly clear conclusions. Well, as clear as anything else in the stories. :)
Rohinton Mistry's book of interlinked short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag, is one of the most satisfying books I've read in a while. I was also much impressed by Patrick White's The Solid Mandala and J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man (which incidentally I have just finished a review of - visit the link).
At the moment I'm reading a collection of Jane Austen's early fiction for the coming semester at uni - also quite good, though I'm by no means an Austen fan. That may change...
I'm reading Sarah Hall's Electric Micelangelo: she's a new author to me. Its main claim to fame is the intense way in which she's written it - I'm finding it fabulous. The subject matter won't appeal to all - its about the life and times of a tattoo artist who, when his mum and his mentor both die, hightales it to Coney Island to set up shop - but its brilliant.
Other great books recently read include Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle (it outranks anything else I've read by him, Ron McLarty's The Memory of Running and, best of all, James Joyce's Ulysses.
It's funny but similar threads have popped up on some of the other boards I frequent. I guess people did a lot of reading over the break (I know I did). I always find these threads interesting because I get too see who likes what and plenty of new referrals.
I recently read Paul Auster's "City of Glass". It's sorta like the literary equivalent of a David Lynch film - the plot didn't really make sense and the characters were surreal. An enjoyable read, though and I'll probably read more Auster.
"After The Layoffs" by Paul Levinson was OK. It's a Palahniuk-esqe tale of a dude in a small US town who becomes a hitman after the factory he works in shuts down. The ending was a bit crap but it was a generally good book.
Speaking of Chuck Palahniuk, I started "Diary" but got a bit bored and didn't finish it. Nowhere near the quality of "Fight Club", "Survivor" or "Lullabye". Chuck seemed to be stuck in a rut with "Diary".
I finished Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" in December. "The System Of The World" was really, really good. The best ending in any Stephenson novel. If you're into science, pirates, economics, alchemy, 17th century politics or swordfighting then I can heartily recommend the "Baroque Cycle". And "Cryptonomicon". Ten kinds of awesome.
I've started tagging some books with "reading-list" on del.ico.us. It'd be really cool if other people did that too so we could easily find out about new books.
Ah, this reminds me - I read Paul Auster's Book of Illusions recently as well. It might appeal to some of the more "art for art's sake" members of NZM: it is about this silent movie star who disappears when talkies start, everyone thinks he is dead. Instead, he's in the desert, making movies - with the strict instruction that within 24 hours of his death, they are to be destroyed. There are some great descriptions of films I'd have loved to have seen, plus an interesting story.
"Margrave of the marshes" by John Peel. ( the first half is his autobiography, and the second half was finished from his diary by his family after his death).
got it as a present along with "...and this one fades in quietly..." which is a 2CD complilation of 40 of his favourite songs. Been reading and listening- freaky moment when the book and the CD both got to Robert Wyatt at the same instance.
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Yup- Velocity sent me a copy of a ...
Yup-
Velocity sent me a copy of a story she's finished recently, which was an absolutely gripping read.
Also recently read Dan Brown's 'Angels & Demons'- I had read DaVinci Code a few months back and I had high hopes... thing is, I felt like Dan Brown was sorta going through the motions with this one, it's too similar to DaVinci Code for my liking- like he basically just changed the names of the characters and substituted Opus dei for Illuminati.
I finished reading 'The Closers' by Michael Connolly last week- it's my first Connolly paperback, and I absolutely loved his writing style, very 'real' and understated. Great detective story too.
//Velocity sent me a copy of a story ...
//Velocity sent me a copy of a story she's finished recently
Yay! I'm recommended! I'll probably have to send you a real copy if it ever gets published, so you can give me free publicity.
//if it ever gets published, Why ...
//if it ever gets published,
Why wait? I'd buy a copy..
[ http://www.lulu.com/ ]
I must recommend Cosmic Trigger by ...
I must recommend Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson.
It is well paced, intelligent, entertaining and it will change your brain.
I started reading <I>Lunar Park</I> by ...
I started reading Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis on Tuesday and it freaked me out so much that I had to stay up late and finish it before I could go to sleep. The book is supposed to be an autobiography, except that it's not true. Oh and also, Patrick Bateman of American Psycho is alive and killing people...
Lucky - I've been looking for Lunar ...
Lucky - I've been looking for Lunar Park but the local bookshops don't have it. I've read pretty much everything else he's written, and I've heard that there is quite a lot of his earlier works embedded in this one.
The copy of <I>Lunar Park</I> that I ...
The copy of Lunar Park that I had was a preview copy. I found mistakes in it and felt special. There is also a lot of his other books embedded in it, and it's fun trying to pick out what's real and what's not.
Also, it made me want to do a lot of coke. Not that I'm easily influenced or anything, really. I didn't spend the whole time reading Fast Food Nation craving Macdonald's, honest...
Just finished Jonathan Safran Foer's ...
Just finished Jonathan Safran Foer's first book: Everything is Illuminated. Excellent stuff. If you like your comedy served up with a health dose of tragedy, this is the book for you. (And read it now, before the film version ruins it for you).
Also recently enjoyed...
* Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
* Look to Windward - Iain M Banks
Is Iain M Banks his name when it's ...
Is Iain M Banks his name when it's science fiction or when everyone is drunk and miserable in Scotland?
'M' is sci-fi Iain....
'M' is sci-fi Iain.
Currently reading 'Wicked' by Gregory ...
Currently reading 'Wicked' by Gregory Maguire...
It's an autobiography of the Wicked Witch of the West and portrays Oz as you've never seen it before. Class divisions, racial unrest, an unsympathetic dictator involved in genocide and a green skinned equal rights insurgent who gets portrayed as the baddie in the film!
Also have just finished reading the "Illuminatus Trilogy" by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - absolutley brilliant. I haven't read a book that breaks my brain like this in a LONG time - going to take me a couple more readings before I really suss out whats going on everywhere. I can certainly see how it inspired Grant Morrison to write the Invisibles!
Christmas was a great time for books! Rounded out my Jeff Noon collection (Aldous Huxley meets Jimi Hendrix inside Buckminster Fullers body!). Also got The Algerbrist (sp?) by Iain M Banks - haven't read it yet through. Also picked up some HP Lovecraft (I'm playing the Call of Cthulu Xbox game at the moment and it's great!!) as it's just dammed hard to find. Found a few more additions for my Bruce Sterling collection, including a hard to find non-fiction essay he did on the telecommunications industry a couple of years back as a follow up to one of his books (The Hacker Crackdown).
Strangley enough I also took the time to read some government policy/proposal documents over the break too - sounds dull and boring but I often find them interesting.
I'd get more done if I spent less time reading. I'd get even more done if I spent less time waxing lyrical over the books I've read!
//"Illuminatus Trilogy" by Robert Shea ...
//"Illuminatus Trilogy" by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
I started reading this, but quickly realised that right now, I don't want all those mind bending ideas given to me in the form of fiction... straight up ideas can be communicated much more efficiently in a non fictional manner, without all this "entertainment value" crap. :)
So I'm reading Cosmic Trigger II (the depressing one).
Bear in mind that not everything in ...
Bear in mind that not everything in Illuminatus is fiction - half the fun is digging out what is real and whats fantasy (sometimes its quite the opposite to what you'd expect). I also borrowed Pearces copy of the Principa Discordia (the re-issued Steve Jackson Games version with extra pages - which you should ignore) which is full of lovely little 'what is the budda nature' type questions...
It took me so long before I actually understood what the phrase, 'Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law'...
//Bear in mind that not everything in ...
//Bear in mind that not everything in Illuminatus is fiction - half the fun is digging out what is real and whats fantasy (sometimes its quite the opposite to what you'd expect).
This is true... and I was being extreme for hilarity's sake... fiction can be great, especially when written by someone as intelligent and learned as Wilson.
//I also borrowed Pearces copy of the Principa Discordia
I borrowed that off him a couple of years back. Quite entertaining.
Demanding the Impossible, A History of ...
Demanding the Impossible, A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall
The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip S. Foner
Its about that Time, Richard Cook
Going to meet the man, James Baldwin
Cook's book is about Miles Davis recorded works. I like reviews like this, as much for the going back to listen to the parts they find vital/important.
The Panther book is great, really quite illuminating to hear the words from the Horses mouth, so to speak.
Baldwin's stuff is nearly all good, thats to say I have not found anything of his I don't like.
Their is a Doco on the History Channel for anyone thats interested.
I just finished William Gibson's ...
I just finished William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition'. The whole cyberpunk thing seemed incredibly embarrassing to me so I've avoided this guy's writing like the plague. But this book was sitting around in the guest house I'm staying in, and I saw it was in a contemporary setting and gave it a go. Awesomeness. So many cool little snippets and asides. The main character is allergic to the semiotics of marketing!! Haha! Wraps up too well, I thought, but maybe he's homing to get it turned into a movie?
Before that I read Johnny Cash's autobiography, the name of which I can't recall. The more recent one, anyway, which goes up to the point of doing the second album with Rick Rubin et al... Quite enlightening, but I'm not a big fan, so as I'd expected I particularly like his style or feel greatly inspired or anything by the end of it.
Have to second 'Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World'. Hot diggety. Although having read 4 Murakami books in a row a couple of years back I've felt no desire to read any more.
I tend to find Murakami's endings ...
I tend to find Murakami's endings really unsatisfying but love them up until then. When I read a book of his short stories, I was like "oh, I'm going to be unsatisfied twelve times over" but I found that they actually delivered.
Would that be The Elephant Vanishes? If ...
Would that be The Elephant Vanishes? If so - a great collection. Murakami's written a truckload of short stories, yet the only ones available in English are EV and After the Quake. I wish Jay Rubin or Phillip Gabriel would hop to it.
Yeah, Murakami's endings are pretty ...
Yeah, Murakami's endings are pretty vague, but the opposite is what I found a bit disappointing with 'Pattern Recognition'. Of the ones I've read 'Wind Up Bird Chronicle' (I agree with Myshkin's comment below) and 'Hardboiled Wonderland...' satisfied me most. Both had fairly clear conclusions. Well, as clear as anything else in the stories. :)
The thing that will stay with me ...
The thing that will stay with me forever from Wind Up Bird is that graphic description of the fellow being skinned alive. Now that's gruesome!
i've tried to get past the first ...
i've tried to get past the first chapter of that book the wind up bird three times now... can't get past the strange phone sex call.
I could tell you about the riveting ...
I could tell you about the riveting stuff I've been reading at work lately. I haven't even started the book I got for christmas.
However, there is one book I've been reading lately that I can recommend: Joelle Thomson's under $20 wine guide...
Life of Pi by Yann Martel is very very ...
Life of Pi by Yann Martel is very very good.
Just finished Black Oxen by Elizabeth Knox, really got into but unfortunately failed to 'get' the ending. Damn.
TimeOuts Guide to Bangkok. Pretty damn ...
TimeOuts Guide to Bangkok. Pretty damn straight on the money as opposed to Lonely Planet.
Is that where youse guys went?...
Is that where youse guys went?
Yeap. It was ace....
Yeap. It was ace.
What'd you bring us back for show'n ...
What'd you bring us back for show'n tell?
i'm reading the second book of the ...
i'm reading the second book of the chronicles of amber by roger zelazny. am planning on making it into the next blockbuster movie.
Rohinton Mistry's book of interlinked ...
Rohinton Mistry's book of interlinked short stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag, is one of the most satisfying books I've read in a while. I was also much impressed by Patrick White's The Solid Mandala and J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man (which incidentally I have just finished a review of - visit the link).
At the moment I'm reading a collection of Jane Austen's early fiction for the coming semester at uni - also quite good, though I'm by no means an Austen fan. That may change...
Oh, here's that link:...
Oh, here's that link:
[ external link ]
I'm reading Sarah Hall's Electric ...
I'm reading Sarah Hall's Electric Micelangelo: she's a new author to me. Its main claim to fame is the intense way in which she's written it - I'm finding it fabulous. The subject matter won't appeal to all - its about the life and times of a tattoo artist who, when his mum and his mentor both die, hightales it to Coney Island to set up shop - but its brilliant.
Other great books recently read include Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle (it outranks anything else I've read by him, Ron McLarty's The Memory of Running and, best of all, James Joyce's Ulysses.
What a strangely kick arse ...
What a strangely kick arse topic/response!
Hell yes :-) It's funny but similar ...
Hell yes :-)
It's funny but similar threads have popped up on some of the other boards I frequent. I guess people did a lot of reading over the break (I know I did). I always find these threads interesting because I get too see who likes what and plenty of new referrals.
I recently read Paul Auster's "City of ...
I recently read Paul Auster's "City of Glass". It's sorta like the literary equivalent of a David Lynch film - the plot didn't really make sense and the characters were surreal. An enjoyable read, though and I'll probably read more Auster.
"After The Layoffs" by Paul Levinson was OK. It's a Palahniuk-esqe tale of a dude in a small US town who becomes a hitman after the factory he works in shuts down. The ending was a bit crap but it was a generally good book.
Speaking of Chuck Palahniuk, I started "Diary" but got a bit bored and didn't finish it. Nowhere near the quality of "Fight Club", "Survivor" or "Lullabye". Chuck seemed to be stuck in a rut with "Diary".
I finished Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" in December. "The System Of The World" was really, really good. The best ending in any Stephenson novel. If you're into science, pirates, economics, alchemy, 17th century politics or swordfighting then I can heartily recommend the "Baroque Cycle". And "Cryptonomicon". Ten kinds of awesome.
I've started tagging some books with "reading-list" on del.ico.us. It'd be really cool if other people did that too so we could easily find out about new books.
[ http://del.icio.us/foaf/reading-list ]
Ah, this reminds me - I read Paul ...
Ah, this reminds me - I read Paul Auster's Book of Illusions recently as well. It might appeal to some of the more "art for art's sake" members of NZM: it is about this silent movie star who disappears when talkies start, everyone thinks he is dead. Instead, he's in the desert, making movies - with the strict instruction that within 24 hours of his death, they are to be destroyed. There are some great descriptions of films I'd have loved to have seen, plus an interesting story.
"Margrave of the marshes" by John Peel. ...
"Margrave of the marshes" by John Peel. ( the first half is his autobiography, and the second half was finished from his diary by his family after his death).
got it as a present along with "...and this one fades in quietly..." which is a 2CD complilation of 40 of his favourite songs. Been reading and listening- freaky moment when the book and the CD both got to Robert Wyatt at the same instance.
black hole & the newest acme novelty ...
black hole
& the newest
acme novelty co
thing