teach dubdobdee a lesson

[dubdobdee]

i wz just readin a review of the upcomin book by CHARLES STROSS and it looked interesting (= ORCS-EYE-VIEW POLITICAL SWORD-AND-SORCERY afaics) and i thought I NEED NEW BOOKS TO PUT IN PILES AND NOT GET ROUND TO FOR YEARS

LJ skool me on stuff i ort to look at, non-fiction and the other one (be bold: i have read next to nothing you expect i have)

Comments

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

China Mieville: Perdido Street Station - large and inventive book set in Anhk-Morpork-but-for-real, well-paced and terrifying and packed full of ideas (not all of them his, but all of them slightly nervous in each other's company)
Ben Marcus: Notable American Women - mental claustrophobic book about a matriarchal cult who practice using words to kill, I have already made this sound too coherent.
R.F. Laird: The Boomer Bible - the garbled and obscene history of the whole world told by a gang of Philidelphia punks for whom everything in the past has happened more or less at the same time. Intensely cross referenced, because every joke is improved by repetition.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I have been reading The Hobbit aloud to Isabel (will be good practise for eventual reading to smaller family members) - it is AWESOME FUN to read aloud, moreso even than Uncle!

Appreciate this isn't exactly a useful recommendation tho.

[fathands.livejournal.com]

The Anthropos Spectre Beast by Tadeusz Konwicki.

How could things possibly get worse

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Candide is currently rocking my socks off. V funny if a bit repetitive.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Just getting around to reading "London Fields" by Martin Amis, is great if you're in an wry, apocalyptic sorta mood. Whenever someone asks me to point them toward non-fiction and non-fictionesque stuff, I always mention Sebald's "Rings of Saturn." (Anything by him, really, but "Saturn" is a pretty good place to start.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

I finished EP Thompson's "The Poverty of Theory" earlier today (sukrat homework). Have you read his "The making of the English Working Class"? I've just ordered it form my library.

Also got hold of a cheap copy of Levitin's "This is your Brain on Music". Getting on that next.

Ficton wise I don't know if you've ever read Mishima. Read the first of the Tetralogy and "Confessions of a Mask". Its maybe too neat, somehow, but I felt like reading a lot more form him at the end of it.

[spittake.livejournal.com]

From the library I have books about Constantinople, the Five Points, World War I, and Nancy Cunard.

I am also reading a book about the history of food, but the writer throws in the "rule of thumb" anecdote which makes me very cross.

[koganbot]

Do not eat any salad that contains thumbs?

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

'against the day' comes out in paperback at the end of the month.

i've been reading 'faust' in the david luke / oxford classics translation on and off, just got on to part two. surprisingly naughty-but-not-coded.

other than that, nothing too committal lately. lots of books on ethics, trying to devise an ethics syllabus for use in the future (i have never taught ethics and also know nothing about it). books on cavell and wittgenstein. j.l. austin. emerson. i believe there's a history of welfare in america waiting for me at the library. i wish i could read only for fun, at present.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I joined a site called bookmooch, through which one swaps books (for points, so you don't have to find people who want to exchange one for one or anything). It's not been great for serious mainline literary stuff, but it's been very good for crime, so people I have been reading lots by lately include:

Lawrence Block: A big Pete favourite too. I've read about 40 of his, and they are all excellent. The Burglar series is lighthearted, the Scudder PI novels are superb and affecting, the Tanner spy series very clever, and so on. Not a heavyweight literary figure, but consistently excellent.

Andrew Vachss: A powerful writer with an obsession. He is a lawyer specialising in child abuse, and almost everything he writes revolves around this - including his Batman novel, which I just read. His regular character is Burke, a figure like no other I've seen in fiction, paranoid and driven.

James Lee Burke: One of the best writers of gorgeous prose anywhere, and with a superb way with complex moral issues, and with immensely scary villains. Most of his star Dave Robicheaux, a cop in the Louisiana bayous - reading his scene-setting descriptions is worth doing even without the stories.

Also Joyce Carol Oates (not generally a crime writer), who has written a staggering volume (she's surely by far the most productive serious literary writer ever) and variety of books - horror, family drama, crime, thinly disguised biography, boxing, poetry and much more. I think her writing has a force and richness comparable to someone like Faulkner.

Oh, and Larry McMurtry, whose popular success with things like Terms Of Endearment and the Lonesome Dove series means he is often undervalued. The best writer ever at making you sad with the same line he makes you laugh with, and always a total joy to read, whether on his westerns or his contemporary fiction.

[brooknononsense.livejournal.com]

i second joyce carol oates, foxfire is awesome.

have you read any edmund white?

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I have read a couple of his - he writes beautifully, and I will read more.

[koganbot]

Clancy Sigal, Going Away. It's 1956, he's going away, so he visits everyone he's ever known.

Nelson Algren, Who Lost An American. An American wanders around overseas, lost and pugnacious.

John Dewey, The Quest For Certainty. The certain gives way to the likely.

Thomas Kuhn, Black Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912. Planck doesn't know what he's found until Einstein and Ehrenfast figure it out for him.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Blithedale Romance. Not as blithe as the title suggests.

Rex Stout, Murder By The Book. Archie gets crush on slightly overweight woman, while dodging guff from grossly overweight man.

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke, modernist classic (a category of lit I tend to find funny & uplifting rather than offputting & alienating btw). Wikipedia sez get 2000 translation, not 1961.