What's a noise dude reading?

cormac mccarthy - blood meridian

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No Country For Old Men

re-reading in the name of the rose

...in penn station

right now:

Rereading: The Europe of Trusts by Susan Howe
Reading: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes
Recently Read: Crush by Richard Siken, Singularities by Susan Howe

cormac mccarthy - blood meridian

^^ my grandfather recommends this. i have never read mccarthy; do i read this one or no country for old men firsts?

blood meridian is bloody and gory. supposed to be the "best" mccarthy, i've never been able to click with it and i've tried 3x. i can't get past page 100. the road is awesome, no country for old men is just okay.

everyone seems to hate no country for old men

ive only ready all the pretty horses, the crossing and the road. i liked them all tho the 1st 2 might be a little cowboy-y for some.

ian I can lend you blood meridian if you want. I liked it a lot.

in fact I might bring it to Freddy's tomorrow and pretend it's a birthday present

i love blood meridian

has anyone read Tree of Smoke?

dave, i can bring you that yahowa DVD.

i read Tree of Smoke. i thought it was pretty blah. i liked the solider stuff but the CIA officer stuff was a real slog. the two stories merged, sorta. some longish books don't seem long, they fly right by and you want to read more. that was not the case with this one though, it was a drag. the guy is great with a short story but his long stuff i just don't enjoy.

it was also really choppy for a novel? i wanted him to get into certain scenes in real depth and length, but he would just cut scenes off at the knees and stuff. it may be worth looking into though, if you like him, it wasn't horrible or anything.

I've read almost everything by him so I'm sure I'll check it out at some point. maybe I'll wait for the paperback.

No Country for Old Men isn't as good as The Road. The accents seem more forced in print than they did on screen and there's far too much of the "back in the day, the world was..." narration.

everyone seems to hate no country for old men

I liked it well enough -- not at all my genre -- until the sheriff's "society's goin to hell cuz people don't say 'please'" chapter.

ha xpost

i never read denis johnson before - after seeing tree of smoke on every year end list i got already dead and am crazily enjoying it - tho only 50 pages in.

Already Dead is great but it lags a bit in the middle. it has some absolutely gorgeous passages though.

denis johnson for me is like Jesus' Son >>>>>> Already Dead >> Fiskadoro > Resuscitation of a Hanged Man but I liked parts of all of them. Jesus' Son is an all time fave

jesus son is super ace

movie is pretty good too

Strange Piece of Paradise, Terri Jentz (2006)

Two college girls participate in something called the "Bikecentennial", which involves bicycling across America in '76. A few days into their journey, they are camping out in the Oregon desert, and some guy drives his truck over the tent in which they are both sleeping, and then attacks them both with a hatchet. Miraculously, they survive and manage to go on with life. Over the years, the author becomes increasingly haunted by the psychological scars that she bears from the whole traumatic ordeal (the axe-dude was never caught), and she courageously ends up re-visiting the scene of the crime and begins to track down the psychopath. The greatest true crime book ever? And, unlike most entries in the genre, it's written in first-person...plus the author is just plain rad. A fucking great book.

That's my Reading Rainbow style review!

i started tree of smoke, read about 100 pages--there wasn't anything wrong with it, but it wasn't really grabbing me either.

i suck at reading fiction these days, though.

Me too, why is that? Someone broked my imagination?

Actually, though, it takes imaginative facilities to read non-, so maybe I just can't truck with whatever authors' own imaginal worlds these days. By and large, my favorite fiction has always been roman a clef shit, anyways.

Jesus' Son is amazing.

I got a copy of his first novel (Angels) yesterday, I think that's up next.

Anyone else read his plays? I think they were sort of unfairly knocked.

Speaking of plays, anyone ever read anything by Will Eno. I think he's totally brilliant.

i just finished tree of smoke, too. it was - yeah, mr. que - kind of 'bleh.' it didn't really come together in the end, and though it had all the trappings of an Important Novel, i put it down wondering exactly what i'd jsut read.

i read swallows and amazons on laurel's recommendation, and loved it. i am in the first chapters of swallowdale now

my mom LOVES the swallows and amazons books and always was trying to get me to read them when i was younger... i could never get into it

lehane - gone baby gone
thomas - deluxe
routledge comp reader - foucault

Jesus' Son is amazing.

-> i agree. fantastic book.

The Green Man - Kingsley Amis
Henry James: The Young Master - Sheldon M. Novick

green man has been on my list forever ... is it worth picking up?

The supernatural stuff isn't as considered as Amis' usual chronicle between the sexes (the novel has the most inept threesome in lit history).

Re-Reading: William Gass "On Being Blue"

Reading: A. C Grayling "Descartes: The Life and TImes of a Genius"
Achille Mbembe "On the Postcolony"
Aleister Crowley "Konx Om Pax"
J. P. Sartre "Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions"
Howell "Logic and Rhetoric in England: 1500 to 1700"
Empson "Milton's God"
plus various "how to" books about revising your dissertation

Having Read Aloud to Me: C.S. Lewis "Out of the Silent Planet"

Up next: Parker's mammoth bio of John Milton

^^^do they all get equal play?

Achille Mbembe "On the Postcolony"

i just had to read part of this for class; i liked it a lot

STRESS: The Nature and History of Engineered Grief, by Robert Kugelmann
also still working on Walker Percy's Lost In The Cosmos which I highly, highly recommend so far

if not for the short & informal semiotics lesson in the middle then at least for the hilarious/tragic questionnaires

Actually it's pretty interesting how STRESS, Lost in the Cosmos, and my last book - Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow - all sort of dovetail on similar points. Also see Why Things Bite Back by Edward Tenner for more discussion on how modern life is amazingly bad for everyone

like, in a more interesting and intellectually honest way than "fast food nation" is

that book sucked

green man has been on my list forever ... is it worth picking up?

not as funny as KA's best social satires but good, a strange and interesting little supernatural mystery.

ive been considering k amis for a while...i fear hell be a touch to mannish for my taste, but...its worth a go

mostly hacked through todd gittlin's the sixties and the twilight of common dreams...in both cases theres something about his "prose" style i like -- a certain "prophetic voice", to accept a term, that i find necessary in nonfiction these days and a good amount of allusive language -- and a good amount to too close to his home prattle. indeed, too much prattle in general. hes also a bit too tied to born-on-the-fourth-of-the-cold-war thinking for my taste. i appreciate his criticism of later 60's thought, but ... something annoyingly stodgy, as though he can't get past his own frustrations...im reading his stuff to prep on a book idea about the break between the babyboomer gen and what ive been calling "the new lost generation"(and evidently im not alone in that), and his stodgy, strangely higher-than-thee, now-that-ive seen-it-all, approach that proves my points, sooooooo. to the same end im constantly rereading the grails of didion's essays, some galbraith, c wright mills, bucky fuller, etc...need some if stone and w. apppleman williams

otherwise:
playing with mailer's why are we in vietnam
ray mungo's return to sender (have to find a copy of total loss farm ... and get that new book about communes in vt)
don delillo's great jones (something very annoying about this..perhaps just the character. the character names are terrible. so cute (something i couldnt take from k vonegut and irks me about tom pynchon)
and that new collection of letters between the mittford sisters (which is charming as all hell and makes me ...oh, whats the word when yr sentimental for something you never had?)

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bb: if you havent read any kingsley amis lucky jim is definitely where to start. "a laff riot" -- j-p sartre

ha, well, if jp likes it...

n/a: how is that?