DannyL

Wild Horses
Don't know if you seen Cosey's book about her time in Psychic TV? It's basically a curse on the reputation of Geneis P. Orridge. Someone who ticks all the experimental lifestyle boxes but in her book comes over as a completely horrible damaged piece of shit.

BTW The Star Diaries that I mentioned up thread was turned into a Russian SF show. Looks like fun:

 

catalog

Well-known member
Psychogeography scene is similarly cursed as psychedelic and occult scenes, from the sounds of things. I went to a conference on it this year and saw them all wandering round in the street beforehand, decided then and there to fuck it off
 

jenks

thread death
Huysmann - La Bas
Brothers Goncourt Diaries
Lydia Davis Essays
Endland - Tim Etchells
INSURRECTO - Gina Apostol

Not read any other Huysmann apart from A Rebours - really enjoying it, if it is a bit silly - devotees of the occult in 19th Century Paris, all very transgressive for the time i should imagine.

The Goncourt Bros are great literary gossips

Lydia Davis has translated Proust and Flaubert and is an experimental short story writer and she is very good on the craft (i see Luka sneer at that word) of writing and the importance of acknowledging one's influences.

The Etchells is a series of stories set in a kind of post apocalyptic Sheffield - some of them are quite funny but I'm starting to feel a little of this goes a long way. A bit Ballard and a bit Vic n Bob

The Apostol os very good - novel set in the Philippines, where a daughter goes looking fro her lost film maker father. Layers are history are packed and layered in there - 19th C US colonialism and barbarity, 70s anhedonia and lots of other stuff. I have made it sound dry but it's really readable and very smart.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Currently reading The Star Diaries by Lem. It's a series of short stories about the adventures of an astronaut - his travels a basically a foil for Lem to construct this little absurdist universes, full of paradoxes i.e. the stuff that comes with time travel, planets entirely inhabited by robots, planets where everyone is forced to live a half aquatic life - drawing little lessons about humanity's stupidit, vanity etc. I found it annoying at first 'cos I picked it up hoping for something easy, and its quite densely written but I'm enjoying it now.

This sounds (very superficially) like a sci-fi version of Borges - am I close?
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I've never read Borges so I can't comment. I'm assuming there's an elegance to Borges which there isn't here. It's very slapstick space opera, a bit Douglas Adams but it does have ideas at the core. He was obviously having loads of fun while writing it.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm reading Kim by Rudyard Kipling. It's interesting as a book set in India that could only have been written by someone who grew up there, but at the same time is also viewed through the eyes of a 'sahib'. Like he's got one foot planted in each of these two completely alien worlds.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I've never read Borges so I can't comment. I'm assuming there's an elegance to Borges which there isn't here. It's very slapstick space opera, a bit Douglas Adams but it does have ideas at the core. He was obviously having loads of fun while writing it.

I think you'd like him. Can mail you my copy of Labyrinths if you like.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Currently juggling a biography of Wittgenstein, a collection of Seamus Heaney poems and William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience".

These are all interpenetrating nicely. That's the advantage of book juggling. The disadvantage being I'll never finish any of them.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Dan Simmons - Hyperion. A situation so fucked up that the protagonists have basically made their peace with the probability of getting impaled on a metal spike by a horrifying death-god from beyond time is feeling fairly relatable right now.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
2019 book dump

Best ones in bold

Charles Spencer - Killers Of The King: The Men Who Dared To Execute Charles I
Michel Foucault - Remarks On Marx
Robert Forbes and Eddie Stampton - The White Nationalist Skinhead Movement UK & USA 1979-1993
Silvia Federici - Caliban And The Witch: Women, The Body And Primitive Accumulation
Danny Burns - Poll Tax Rebellion
bell hooks - Black Looks: Race and Representation
Kenneth Dead & Brian Masumi - First and Last Emperors: Absolute State and the body of the Despot
Stewart Home - No Pity
Eva Dolan - This Is How It Ends
Simon Morris - Civil War
Alex Binnie - Scum
Abiezer Coppe - Selected Writings
Victor Headley - Excess
Stevie Chick - Spray Paint The Walls: The Story of Black Flag
Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Mumia Abu-Jamal & Assata Shakur - Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against the Black Revolutionaries
Spitzenprodukte - Red Tory: My Corbyn Chemsex Hell
Emma Warren - Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre

Terry Cooper - Death by Dior
Trevor Hercules - Rage Within
Tim Wells - Moonstomp
Paul Smith (ed) - M.T.V 15.05.1963 - 12.04.2017
Erje Ayden - Sadness At Leaving
Jessica Mitford - Hons and Rebels
Terry Taylor - All Change At Barons Court
Jonathan Rose - The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
Broadwater Farm Revisited: Second Report of the Independent Inquiry into the disturbances of October 1985 at the Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham, Chaired by Lord Gifford QC
Sophie Lewis - Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family
Juliet Jacques - Trans: A Memoir
Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Emanuel Litvinoff - Journey Through A Small Planet
Aaron Bastani - Fully Luxury Automated Communism: A Manifesto
Sylvere Lotringer & Christian Marazzi (Eds) - Autonomia: Post-Political Politics
Tim Wells - No Weakeners
Rudolf Rocker - The London Years
Simon Morris - Sea Of Love
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
I've been finishing an MA this year so haven't read as much of my own non study related books as I'd like to but while evading paperwork, I've managed to finish the following this year:
Have bolded the ones I think were best.

The Skeleton at the Feast - Elizabeth Carmichael & Chloe Sawyers
Superforecasting - Phillip Tetlock
Wilhelm Reich & Orgonomy - Ola Raknes
Embodied Relating - Nick Totton
The Course of the Heart - MJ Harrison
zero History - William Gibson
The Night Manager - Le Carre
Growing up in a War - Bryan Magee
Doughnut Economics - Kate Raworth
Carpe Diem Regained - Roman Krznaric
Stalingrad - Anthony Beevor
This is not propaganda - Peter Pomerantsev
North - Gyrus
The Pixar Touch - David Pritchard
The Star Diaries - Stanislaw Lem
Talking Schools - Colin Ward.

Currently - back on reading about the history of slavery with The Sugar Barons by Matthew Parker & Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everyboody. I thought this would be out of date, a 10 year old book about the internet but its seriously brilliant.
 
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