what are you reading now?

droid

droid

Well-known member
I really want to read this:

41CYFu9QN6L._SX363_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
Ligotti is getting the Penquin treatment:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/penguin-classics-to-publish-ligotti-stories-1442851513?tesla=y

Read Shaman by KSR. Absolutely brilliant. Watched Herzog's thing about the Chauvet caves recently after listening to this NPR show featuring Herzog & McCarthy and it dovetailed nicely with that:


Also just finished Walden after maybe 20 years since the last read. Holds up pretty well.

And a distracting McCarthyesque post-apocalytpic zombie thing which I reviewed on good reads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1397388667?book_show_action=false
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
Read Peter Heller's 'The Painter' AGAIN.

Luka - you should check him out, Id say youd like his stuff.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
He's basically a transcendentalist. Loves his poetry.

“There is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there was someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. And. You can’t metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of the gut. Muscles, sinew, bone. It is all of you.

When you walk you propel it forward. When you let the sled and sit on a fallen log and. You imagine him curling in the one patch of sun maybe lying over your feet. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can’t bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with sound even of breathing.”
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and

“Isn't that strange? To be able to feel so much tenderness for a person, and I did, and powerful attraction, sometimes, and yet feel no love. It seems cruel, almost monstrous. I mean I can love a bug. I have watched a spider weaving her web in the evening, in the young alder branches along the river, and I have loved her. Truly. Or a small moth trying to beat her way off the water of a dark pool, her soaked wings stuck to the surface as if by glue. And gently slid a leaf beneath her and lifted her to the ground, praying that her wings would dry without damage. I've done that. And yet I could not love my wife.”
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luka

luka

Well-known member
I got a court of miracles by b catling I'm going to give that a chance. I haven't read a book in many many months now. I haven't needed to since I got a smart phone
 
N

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
I got an Andrew Vachss book ("Down in the Zero",number 7 in his Burke series) as a xmas gift many years ago.
Finished it and I was not that impressed with DitZ, but
impressed enough to go back to number one ("Flood", 1985) in his series "centered on a man named Burke and his battle against child abusers" (wikipedia) and 3/4 through I would say it's good, rough, direct, streetwise modern noir with a big heart.
http://www.vachss.com/av_novels/flood.html

He himself is quite the character as well, here's an interview from 1992:
http://www.vachss.com/av_articles/rtcl_wkgd.html
"More than any contemporary in America, he has lived what he writes" ... "He receives death threats almost weekly" and so on.

And here's another one from http://chuckpalahniuk.net/interviews/andrew-vachss
"When I began writing I had the devil's own time dealing with reviewers who said what I was writing about was a product of my sick imagination."
I've seen this quoted on/by Vachss several time - when he was starting out no-one believed him and he struggled with getting published.

Sadly we now know we live in world of sickos: Catholic priests, famous DJs, UK establishment figures in alleged abuse/potentially murder and the last
case to hit the press, the aptly named Marie Black and her motley crew: http://metro.co.uk/2015/09/28/woman...ex-ring-jailed-for-at-least-24-years-5411268/
 
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C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I read and watched Baraka's "Dutchman" and it was excellent.

Random inquiry, but can anyone possibly recommend me a Pessoa biography of some kind? I read The Book of Disquiet perhaps... a year ago? And I'd enjoyed it quite a bit, but I had been sold on him and his own bizarre story and wanted to get a more comprehensive view of him.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
No idea if there's a biography but it would interesting. He was a networker actually. Friends with Crowley actually
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
Gotten into an awful habit of flitting between books. Have 18 on the go now and I reckon at least 1/3 of them are gonna slip by. Here's a few:

Dark Alliance - Gary Webb's exhaustive investigation into crack, the CIA and the Contras. Devastatingly detailed. No wonder they killed him.

China Mountain Zhang - Maureen F. McHugh. Really quixotic sci fi set in a Chinese dominated world after a Maoist style revolution in the US. Strangely mundane yet captivating. Shades of Le Guin at her best.

Michaelangelo Matos' 'The Underground Is Massive' - Pretty good history of dance music in the US. Some familiar ground but a lot of local detail about promoters, parties etc.

Cioran - History of decay. Strangely poetic pessimist philosophy. Has some adherents around here I think. He's not half as 'sinister' as Chine Mieville makes out.

History of 7 killings - Just won the Booker. Well worth a read.
 
C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
luka said:
No idea if there's a biography but it would interesting. He was a networker actually. Friends with Crowley actually
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Just learned that on the wiki.

A friend of mine theorized that perhaps his hyperdetailing and depersonalization was manifestations of autism but I can't put much weight in a guess like that. Regardless he seems like, the ideal person to study in that regard.

Another book I finally tackled was the Marc Eliot Disney biography "The Dark Prince of Hollywood". Disney comes off horrifying but kind of intriguing. Arguably one of the first people to help figurehead the 'validation' of animation as an artform despite his own lack of talent, his bizarre demands of fealty in the Hollywood system while functioning essentially as an independent studio in conflict with the majors. His antisemitism, racism, fear of communism (leading him to go as far as work as an informant for J. Edgar Hoover and snitch out a ton of his staff during the McCarthy-era) and just general social conservatism. And at the same time, pretty interesting psychoanalysis on his storytelling for his works and what it meant to him and his identity (so badly abused as a child he had an obsession with proving he may have been raised by people who weren't his biological parents). He comes off as Howard Hughes with imagination.
 
C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
droid said:
Foundation.
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I'm maybe a 10th in, and their brevity is impressive considering the kind of stuff he tries to cram in there. I also love that he adores Le Fanu so much which reminds me that I have to get into him proper as Carmilla is still one of the greatest things I ever read.
 
C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
droid said:
Yeah, hes really good. Have you read Arthur Machen?
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Nah, but I've definitely been meaning to. I'm honestly not that extensive a horror buff so its all taking a certain amount of time for me to get to... Years of stuff like trying to read Frankenstein way too young or Dracula boring me to death slowed me down.
 
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