Book thread reboot.

I'm finally breezing through Luke Haines' "Bad Vibes", 100 pages in. Acerbic, funny as hell, painfully self-aware in retrospect, as good as I expected.

Fun book that, as is the follow-up.

Currently reading Susie Day's 'The Brother You Choose', which is a great tell-all on American Black Radicalism told via interview. Would recommend.

Fiction-wise, these past months have seen me totally fall for the short stories of M. John Harrison. Hard to believe he had never been on my radar given the stuff he does. Generally would fall into sci-fi but far too human and nuanced for much of that as a genre. Some wonderful stuff, by degrees strange and intensely human. Can't say enough good things about it.

I'm in the middle of both Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler and Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. About to start a reread of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

Very recent reads I enjoyed:
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic

Things on deck that I'm looking forward to:
Her Lesser Works by Elizabeth Ellen
Worsted by Garielle Lutz

If you've never read Lutz, she has a deserved reputation as an unparalleled crafter of sentences.

I'm still bummed about David Graeber.

This is what I can remember off of the top of my head for this year so far

The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald
Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn - Evan Connell
I Used to Be Charming - Eve Babitz
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare - Henry Miller
The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824 - Harvey Sachs
Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary - John Clubbe

Up next/on deck/in the hole/:
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Céline if you're in the know)
Underland: A Deep Time Journey - Robert Macfarlane

Considering a re-read of "Dune" in anticipation of the movie.

Christian anarchist guy, Jacques Ellul

Hello everyone! I am reading too many books far too slowly. Closest to hand is “The Skin” by Curzio Malaparte, the book he wrote after “Kaputt”, set in Naples during American occupation. Its vignettes are sordid, its assertions are overconfident, its language is too extravagant, overripe, and it might be as great as “Kaputt”. Not sure yet. Keep putting it down, though the same applies to the over dozen books stacked at my bedside.

benadrian wrote: Mon May 03, 2021 3:42 pm Considering a re-read of "Dune" in anticipation of the movie.

Yeah. An old ex of mine works in publishing and sent me this deluxe version recently. I should get on that one soon.


Also this is what i'm currently reading and its workin enough for me.

Pioneer Stories of Arizona’s Verde Valley

This originally came out during the 1930’s, when many of the people who were dragged out there with their families as children in the mid/late 19th century were still alive. The women’s narratives are always more interesting than the men’s, because they hone in on the dangers and hardships, whereas men like to talk about work and grabass. That’s what a lot of the pioneer west was- men living out their adventure fantasies and looking for a fast buck, while women had miserable lives at home. The stories about the wagon trips toward settlement are always interesting..

Oh yeah, Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. Read it before the Scorsese film comes out.