I just checked this out the other day.
I read "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" in a couple of hours, and liked it a lot. I just started "Nightmare Alley", since I'm a sucker for stories about carnies up to no good.
Book Talk
462nathan. wrote:I just checked this out the other day.
I read "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" in a couple of hours, and liked it a lot. I just started "Nightmare Alley", since I'm a sucker for stories about carnies up to no good.
That looks awesome.
I thought about printing up a batch of books which would've been a collection of stories by some writers I know, and the general theme was going to be old pulp and noir novels. Never got it off the ground because no one wanted to commit.
Book Talk
463Steve V. wrote:Skronk wrote:Colonel Panic wrote:Skronk wrote:Bourrough's Naked Lunch is a classic.
I dunno... I don't get what all the hoopla's about. I mean, Burroughs was a decent prose stylist and I can appreciate what he did for freedom of speech and introducing experimental techniques in literature, but from an average reader's perspective that book kinda sucked.
It's a hit or miss with Naked Lunch. It really only makes sense if you look at burroughs' work.
I think that Naked Lunch at this point gets credit for being a "drug" book for a lot of people. There are some great stories, an unexplainable and so far unrivaled prose style...yet, whenever I talk to folks about Burroughs, they mention "oh yeah, he did a lot of smack" or something like that. There's this mystery around this book that intrigues some people, but for the most part, it sucks a lot of people in for shitty reasons.
The Cities of the Red Night, Place of Dead Roads, and the Western Lands are in many ways head and shoulders above Naked Lunch.
Yeah I agree. There are good passages in Naked Lunch, but getting to them is like shopping for records at Goodwill. You have to wade through oceans of Mantovani and Mitch Miller before you get to anything remotely worthwhile. Unless you enjoy reading gratuitous homoerotic sleaze and endless transparent metaphors for drug addiction, I think it's a total waste of time. The first time I read it I thought it was the most mind-blowing prose I'd ever laid eyes on, but that was back when I was like 18.
I think Naked Lunch is one of those books that hipsters have always liked to have on their shelf (whether or not they ever actually read it), just to present evidence of how hip they are.
I never read The Western Lands but Cities of the Red Night and Place of Dead Roads were a lot better.
Hell. I think even Junky was better.
Anyway, doing an assload of heroin is no excuse for producing shitty work solely on the merit of one's reputation.
Book Talk
466Some things I've been reading over the last few weeks...
Haruki Murakami: After Dark. His new "novel," more of a novella. This is the third book I've tried by him, and I wasn't impressed by this at all. Seemed loose and meandering, with bland prose, and the characters were much too acquiescent in disclosing their secrets to strangers to keep the dialogue going. I think I might try Norweigan Wood next.
William Gay: I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down (Stories). This guy was in O.Henry's best a few years ago for that scary "The Paperhanger" stuff. I usually don't go for Gothic southern fiction, and I'd been putting William Gay off for years, but I'm glad I finally caved in. These stories are surreal, violent, imagistic, powerful. Writes like a scaled-down Cormac McCarthy at times. Highly recommended.
Cormac McCarthy: The Road. What can I say, I love apocalyptic novels. Another author I've been putting off for years, stupidly. Loved this one. I have to go back to some of his others soon.
Best New American Voices: 2007. This is that yearly annual that comes out with short stories featuring upcoming literary talents. It's usually a mixed affair---writing program stuff. Most of the stuff in this year's volume was sophmoric or predictable. I really enoyed Lydia Peelle's "Shadow on a Weary Land," a story about some backwoods characters in search for Jesse James long-lost treasure. There should be more stories with metal detecting in them.
That's all for now.
Haruki Murakami: After Dark. His new "novel," more of a novella. This is the third book I've tried by him, and I wasn't impressed by this at all. Seemed loose and meandering, with bland prose, and the characters were much too acquiescent in disclosing their secrets to strangers to keep the dialogue going. I think I might try Norweigan Wood next.
William Gay: I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down (Stories). This guy was in O.Henry's best a few years ago for that scary "The Paperhanger" stuff. I usually don't go for Gothic southern fiction, and I'd been putting William Gay off for years, but I'm glad I finally caved in. These stories are surreal, violent, imagistic, powerful. Writes like a scaled-down Cormac McCarthy at times. Highly recommended.
Cormac McCarthy: The Road. What can I say, I love apocalyptic novels. Another author I've been putting off for years, stupidly. Loved this one. I have to go back to some of his others soon.
Best New American Voices: 2007. This is that yearly annual that comes out with short stories featuring upcoming literary talents. It's usually a mixed affair---writing program stuff. Most of the stuff in this year's volume was sophmoric or predictable. I really enoyed Lydia Peelle's "Shadow on a Weary Land," a story about some backwoods characters in search for Jesse James long-lost treasure. There should be more stories with metal detecting in them.
That's all for now.
Book Talk
467(From the kerbled thread)
I just finished The Terror by Dan Simmons and it blew my doors off.
Reading his horrifying and taut descriptions of the amount of labor that went into mere survival on one of these early polar expeditions is exhausting. Simmons is a master of genre fiction, no matter the genre. He's done sci fi, horror, and suspense all with equal facility and power.
I just finished The Terror by Dan Simmons and it blew my doors off.
Reading his horrifying and taut descriptions of the amount of labor that went into mere survival on one of these early polar expeditions is exhausting. Simmons is a master of genre fiction, no matter the genre. He's done sci fi, horror, and suspense all with equal facility and power.
You had me at Sex Traction Aunts Getting Vodka-Rogered On Glass Furniture
Book Talk
468
I'm reading Rusty String Quartet, a book of poetry by Raegan Butcher. It's very good. Over 300 short poems about women, life, work, and about how much he'd like to die. He's like Bukowski without the drinking. It only cost my broke ass 10 bucks, too.
Marsupialized wrote:I want a piano made out of jello.
It's the only way I'll be able to achieve the sound I hear in my head.
Book Talk
469The other week I finished George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. What an altogether fantastic read!!! I'm not an Orwell fanboy but suffice it say I was thoroughly impressed and would even go so far as to say that Keep the Aspidistra Flying is, like Dead Souls, one of those books it'd be a crime not to read before leaving this swollen, perspiring planet of ours. Haven't read a book of this calibre in months it seems.
I was inspired to give this book a shot after catching a film adaptation of it called A Merry War, starring Richard E. Grant (one of my absolute favorite actors of all time). The woman who played his girlfriend in the film, Helena Bonham Carter, was also first-rate, as they say. As far as films go, it was fairly conventional (not all that cinematically ambitious) but I liked it all the same because the story and acting were compelling all the way through.
Here is a synopsis of the book for those who give a fuck, flying or otherwise:
Wooo-cheee-beee, beee-yotch!
I was inspired to give this book a shot after catching a film adaptation of it called A Merry War, starring Richard E. Grant (one of my absolute favorite actors of all time). The woman who played his girlfriend in the film, Helena Bonham Carter, was also first-rate, as they say. As far as films go, it was fairly conventional (not all that cinematically ambitious) but I liked it all the same because the story and acting were compelling all the way through.
Here is a synopsis of the book for those who give a fuck, flying or otherwise:
London, 1936. Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god; and Gordon is losing the war. Nearly 30 and "rather moth-eaten already," a poet whose one small book of verse has fallen "flatter than any pancake," Gordon has given up a "good" job and gone to work in a bookshop at half his former salary. Always broke, but too proud to accept charity, he rarely sees his few friends and cannot get the virginal Rosemary to bed because (or so he believes), "If you have no money ... women won't love you." On the windowsill of Gordon's shabby rooming-house room is a sickly but unkillable aspidistra--a plant he abhors as the banner of the sort of "mingy, lower-middle-class decency" he is fleeing in his downward flight. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell has created a darkly compassionate satire to which anyone who has ever been oppressed by the lack of brass, or by the need to make it, will all too easily relate. He etches the ugly insanity of what Gordon calls "the money-world" in unflinching detail, but the satire has a second edge, too, and Gordon himself is scarcely heroic. In the course of his misadventures, we become grindingly aware that his radical solution to the problem of the money-world is no solution at all--that in his desperate reaction against a monstrous system, he has become something of a monster himself. Orwell keeps both of his edges sharp to the very end--a "happy" ending that poses tough questions about just how happy it really is. That the book itself is not sour, but constantly fresh and frequently funny, is the result of Orwell's steady, unsentimental attention to the telling detail; his dry, quiet humor; his fascination with both the follies and the excellences of his characters; and his courageous refusal to embrace the comforts of any easy answer.
Wooo-cheee-beee, beee-yotch!
Book Talk
470After finishing Against the Day and feeling compelled to re-read my now falling apart copy of Gravity's Rainbow, I'm now (after years of wanting to do this) reading Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. (Looking at the price on the link, I should have bought it from Amazon instead of the shop...)