what are you reading now?

droid said:

The new Adam Roberts is fantastic. Review here:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/11/the-thing-itself-adam-roberts-review-novel

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droid said:

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“You got me. I don’t want to die. I’m terrified of death. I fear there’s nothing beyond it and that this existence is the only one I’ll ever possess. That’s why I’m here.”

2019. Humanity has witnessed its greatest scientific breakthrough yet: the cure for aging. Three injections and you’re immortal – not bulletproof or disease-proof but you’ll never have to fear death by old age.

For John Farrell, documenting the cataclysmic shifts to life after the cure becomes an obsession. Cure parties, cycle marriages, immortal livestock: the world is reveling in the miracles of eternal youth. But immortality has a sinister side, and when a pro-death terrorist explosion kills his newly-cured best friend, John soon realizes that even in a world without natural death, there is always something to fear.

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craner said:

I'm reading the Western literary canon in order, from beginning to end.

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There was no sun, only a forever of black cloud reaching from horizon to horizon above dark water and the dusty plain before it. Nothing grew there. A cold wind gusted across the grey dust, the ash and cinders, the still water.

His arrival in the emptiness did not go unnoticed. Because the raggedy figures upon the briny shore, where the oily waters lapped and fizzed and lapped and fizzed, raised themselves up wearily and onto their thin legs. Draped in remnants of cloth, the slender arms of these shabby silhouettes were raised to the sky and from unseen mouths came a faint wail.

There were no birds in the air; they formed the terrible flotsam upon the tide of the dead water. In their thousands they surged and flopped. A black flock of feather and bone, upon which the raggedy men descended to scoop them up with their scarecrow parts, and to offer them like treasures brought to a king by beggars.

Kyle came out of the dream, his face strewn with dried tears. He had been dreaming for hours, but only remembered the last scene of some awful torment that ended by a great dead sea. But he did not wake fully. Could not have done.

Bewildered by his passage from such strange sights, and confused by the unlit space about him, he could not understand where he was. There was a room in the distance, its door ajar. A thin brown light flickered around the outline of the doorway. From its rapid stutters the vague odour of things burned and still burning pulsed. Bonfire smells of autumn, the crackle of kindling damp with cold rain, the doused steam of blackened meats, the chill of wet stone.

He tried to move, but the thought failed to become motion. There was no feeling in his limbs; just a numbness, a vacancy inside his joints. His breath failed to come out in more than shallow sucks and pants at the blackness before his eyes, as if some weight pressed upon his windpipe. Or maybe the chambers of his lungs were now too small for the task set them.

An absence of more than light hovered in the wings of his mind. Like a descent into the great cold depths of lightless oceans beneath icecaps and skies without stars, a curious unbreathable gravity pulled him down and down and down, through himself, then out of himself.

Struggling against the nothingness that tried to snuff out the little ember of his frantic awareness, he was suddenly and profoundly and absurdly aware of his hands, his feet. They seemed to redefine themselves from out of the darkness, without so much as a twitch, but he knew from their size and weight and unfamiliar lengths of finger and thumb, that they were not his hands. Nor were these his feet. Too thin and long, the cumbersome, lifeless feet hung over the mattress, as if his body had outgrown the bed of a child.

Within a sense of his own face, different contours of cheek bone and forehead and small mouth and longer teeth suggested themselves. Long hair curled wiggish across his brow, about his jaw. It stank. Was oily, unwashed, dipped in spoiled water, rank upon the stained and musty pillow that cradled his skull. He couldn’t see it, but knew the pillow case was patterned with continents of aged stains.

He sank further into the darkness, beneath the unfamiliar body that had tremulously held him, like it tried to hold on to smoke within outspread fingers. Sank deeper into the void where the distant chaos of bird calls and the cries of men swirled around, far off but approaching. All attracted to his hapless sinking paralysis, his dropping off and away. And the swirling of this cacophony was driven from the screams of an animal within its heart. Swine bellows and guttural bleats rose from shaky jowls and a large mouth. A black tongue and yellow teeth. Wet, close . . .

And then he woke, and dropped. Fell from the air. But no more than a few inches, on to a bed. Where he bounced and snapped upright in a seizure that electrified his body into a sense of its former shape, its dimensions, its familiarity.

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luka said:

I'm on pg 111 of Finnegans wake. I'm also reading psychotherapy literature and giving two American poets a chance, Clayton Eshleman and Rosmarie Waldrop. Also going to have a go with Alejandra Pizarnik

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