This user on LibraryThing looks to have spent an entertaining yesterday writing one liner reviews of books - some of my favourites:

The Virgin and the Gipsy by D. H. Lawrence
Naive girl falls for a good-looking drifter & pays for it.

The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill
Bunch of ex-bohemians get drunk & fade out.

Watership Down by Richard Adams
Some rabbits put on a morality play.

Mysteries by Knut Hamsun
Itinerant weirdo shows up in town & flips everyone out before jumping off a pier.

Steve V. wrote:

Skronk wrote:

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.

I liked that a lot. Really great stuff.

I just read Nick Blinko's "The Primal Screamer." UNREAL.

Have you guys read his poems from prison? They're also very good.

timpickens wrote:

Steve V. wrote:

Skronk wrote:

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.

I liked that a lot. Really great stuff.

I just read Nick Blinko's "The Primal Screamer." UNREAL.

Have you guys read his poems from prison? They're also very good.

Yeah, "Stone Hotel", I bought one from my local record store. It was an excellent read. Here's a good one:

"Tran"

"spoke no english
and beat me at chess
on a regular basis

they deported him back to vietnam
when his sentence was over

he cried"

I've been reading Albert Camus' "The Stranger". It's really good. I look forward to "The Fall".

daniel robert chapman wrote:Mysteries by Knut Hamsun
Itinerant weirdo shows up in town & flips everyone out before jumping off a pier.

This book rules!

I recommend checking out the film version of Hunger sometime.

the collection of shorts, the Illustrated Man, was always my favourite.


so nice, the Cult of Ray.

Heroes And Gods Of Sumer - An Anthology Of Heroïc And Mythological Poetry From Mesopotamia, Herman van Stipthout (ed.) (in Dutch)

An Introduction To Poetry, Louis Simpson (ed.) (mainly focusses on the British and American canon with an especially neat historical overview of theory and criticism and the likes, my bedside book at the moment)

The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

Does anyone here agree that Oscar Wilde's prose is bullshit?

This afternoon I finished 'Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72' by Hunter S. Thompson. Flashy brilliance.

I still haven't read '...Las Vegas' - my HST reading has tended to be dependent on what has turned up in charity shops and I think Thorr's recommendation of 'The Rum Diary'. It's amazing process writing; some of my favourite parts of '...'72' were when the admission came that the deadline was too close for writing so they settled for transcribing taped conversations. And it becomes apparent that the writing and the talking are practically inseparable. Whether Thompson's assertion's can be rigorously fact-checked is quite another matter, but there's a real honesty to the way there is almost no alteration from the conciousness stream to the typed word.

Unfortunately, the cult of Gonzo Thompson can lead down some unfortunate alleyways, which I think is why I've shyed away from '...Las Vegas'. I mean, this...

'Great Shark Hunt' is my favourite by a length.

It's just a compilation of his articles but that was where he really excelled.

Oh, and I've started on another Ring Lardner collection, so I might be out of interesting observations for a while.