What's a noise dude reading?

dashiell hammett short stories

the sound and the fury

Tortilla Flats

Growing Up In Tier 3000 - Felix C. Gotschalk
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller, Jr.

oh my god, I love you wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fiat_Lux_Canticle_map.png

junot diaz - drown
dash shaw - bottomless belly button
william gass - the heart of the heart of the countr & other stories
lester bangs - mainlines, blood feasts

*country

crime & punishment

how's drown so far?

good! not as good as oscar wao but I like it. it's short stories

got a couple don delillos from the library

running dog - good, pulpy, kinda reads like william gibson (or I guess, later gibson reads like '70s delillo). post-vietnam nazi sex film conspiracy
end zone - football at a small-town texas college. not liking this, I think I'm gonna bail out and finish the lester bangs instead

What's a noise dude reading? has new answers

the above is appearing mysteriously at the top of every page/thread on ILX that I visit ("has new answers" is colored blue")

ok so well

"the four noble truths" by the dalai lama tenzin gyatso (not sure i'm interpreting this one correctly as it seems to be merely reaffirming my pessimistic worldview)
"city of quartz" by mike davis (so far a great history of los angeles)

had to stop reading "angler", the 2008 book on cheney because it was just bumming me out so much

i also finally read the booklet to the ozzy-era sabbath box the other night as well as the "o.o.b.e. adventure" orb maxi-booklet

the above is appearing mysteriously

maybe you bookmarked a post by accident?

just finished Raymond Carver - Cathedral

xp that must have been it;

strange; just reserved a raymond carver short stories collection at the library today

had to stop reading "angler", the 2008 book on cheney because it was just bumming me out so much

ha, i bought this but i doubt i'll be able to stomach it either

about to finish crime and punishment; moby-dick is next.

crime & punishment/moby-dick both work as alt-titles for cheney!

haha

reading flannery o'connor short stories for a bit, then planning to dig deep into faulkner.

recently:
harry crews "the knockout artist" (v good, if a slightly unsatisfying conclusion)
"might as well live" a bio of dorothy parker
john fowles "the aristos"

Just finished the Patternmaster quartet (never read Clay's Ark or Mind of My Mind before--those were great!) Starting on either Jack Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Violence or Pohl's Gateway next.

i couldn't find my copy of sound & the fury so i am reading more harry crews--this time "feast of snakes" and holy shit is it bleak. there is something really distressing every ten pages or so, from a crazy girl rubbing shit in her hair, to brutally training pitbulls, to a guy thinking about concentration camps while he assfucks his travel companion. oh, harry crews, you love to be appalling.

btw ian i just ordered warlock cuz of that cormac thread

oh, warlock is good! it's more of a traditional western than most of the mccarthy i've read, but it's a good book and enjoyable to read.

fine by me! i'm just queuing up a bunch of books for this summer. so far:

against the day
warlock
suttree

this time "feast of snakes" and holy shit is it bleak

eep I almost got that at the library last time. instead I got Cathedral which was pretty fuckin bleak in its own right

have not heard of warlock, I'm interested

this time "feast of snakes" and holy shit is it bleak

an ex gave me this : /

la carre _smiley's people_
atwood _handmaid's tale_
plus, borges short fiction here & there

handmaid's tale was my mom's latest read, she's had 7 boys and is married to a very religious man -- i guess it must have really bothered her because she said she hated it and "don't bother returning it" :\

yo im reading gravitys raindbow--this books is pretty f-in rad

yeah dude its sick. I'll probably re-read it at some point, when I read it the first time a few years ago it took me so long to finish that by the time I got to the end I forgot what happened at the beginning. Against the Day went a lot quicker even though it's more pages (I think because I decided I didn't have to "figure it out" and should just plunge ahead)

bolano's 2666

i keep looking at maybe getting that but it looks like a serious commitment.
Worth it?

yeah, it's good. I was getting bummed by all the people saying books 2 & 3 were not up to snuff, and was anticipating my pace getting slowed down when I hit them, but it didn't happen. the thing's eminently readable.

in some weird way, bolano convinced me novels shouldn't try to be about real life anymore, they should just be navel-gazing meditations on literature. tho he probably felt the opposite way.

oh yeah, 2666 was gonna go on my summer list, but i'll admit to feeling the same way, forks.

someone recommend me some quick stuff.

u read any george saunders? do you like short stories? the leonard michaels story collection that came out 2 years ago was pretty awesome too

i am embarrassed to admit that i've never read any saunders---he's been recommended several times, tho

having the 3 vol paperback ed of 2666 takes the edge off the commitment fears

genius marketing move by FSG imo

yeah all long books need to come in small paperback volumes for easy subway reading

each paperback volume of long books should be written by a different author

fuck long books

someone recommend me some quick stuff

you could take a cue from elmo and hit up some borges

ficciones is the bomb

Carver is quick.

And while on the subject, i think "Cathedral" is maybe his most optimistic/uplifting story; the volume as a whole illustrates a kind of painful, technicolor suburban drama but in a way that is often universally appealing/affirming, rather than totally alienating as in Crews. His (Crews) characters are often much more exaggerated & absurd than what you find in Carver and I think that allows him to take them to further extremes without it seeming forced.

ANYWAY, don't ever suggest "A Feast of Snakes" to anybody--they'll hate you. And I wonder why the fuck an ex would suggest it to Mookieproof! It's almost like saying, "Here, I hope u puke."

also quick:
Asimov "Foundation"
Brautigan "In Watermelon Sugar"

I like Feast of Snakes!

Anyways, I passed on the mammoth 2066 (they were sold out of the tpb) and opted for my first HL Humes book in 'The Underground City'. Saw a dope documentary on this cat and really looking forward to it.

And another pile of graphic novels. I've got a serious addiction.

no, i thought feast of snakes was good, just really difficult to read. people talk about how hard blod meridian is to read, and for whatever reason i found parts of feast of snakes 100x harder to get through.

I think i cauterized part of my brain in college reading the most offensive shit I could get my hands on: books about prison rape, 120 days of sodom, loads of burroughs and crews and bukowski, just any fucked up thing to see how I could handle. Printed word don't freak me out much anymore. DeSade especially was instrumental in that: when you read 100 pages of writing about eating shit, that's around two straight hours of thinking about eating shit. You might as well have eaten shit.

I mean, bully for you if that's your thing. I discovered it really ain't mine.

harry crews is not de sade! i mean, crews is really entertaining and easy to read and funny for the most part.

carver is short & quick/'easy' to read but gets pretty brutal after 5-6 stories--for me at least

read delmore schwartz short stories