Latest Gene Wolfe book you read (1-10 scale)

[This Means War]

Currently: Dune

Up Next: Dune Messiah

[12 Months of Mao]

I've got The Golem here to begin next.

That is one fucked up book...

It's been on my nightstand for months and I always get a certain length into it and then get distracted with something else. This time it was Flow My Tears... and Foucault's Pendulum, which has been sharing nightstand space with the Golem and is almost finished. His first hallucination though, with the hermaphordite king/queen wearing the wooden crown with a worm carving a rune of destruction, is enough for me to know that I NEED to read this book.

[Pop1287]

I've got The Golem here to begin next.

That is one fucked up book...

It's been on my nightstand for months and I always get a certain length into it and then get distracted with something else. This time it was Flow My Tears... and Foucault's Pendulum, which has been sharing nightstand space with the Golem and is almost finished. His first hallucination though, with the hermaphordite king/queen wearing the wooden crown with a worm carving a rune of destruction, is enough for me to know that I NEED to read this book.

Well, Meyrink was one of those authors who deliberately set out to overwhelm expectations, esp. the ideas of the bourgeois supporters of the arts in Prague/Vienna, so you can look at his writing as expressively eccentric in that it somehow mirrored his life (it does), but you should also keep in mind that he was always trying to fuck with people...so there's another reason his fiction is so strange. If you read his earlier work, his short stories, you see him developing that technique...a little Kafka in there, of course, but also a whole lot of writers like Gogol.

[ibn Horowitz]

When You are Engulfed in Flames - David Sedaris - 7/10
Winter's Bone - Daniel Woodrell - 6/10
It was trucking along real good but the ending really sucked and revealed the formulaic structure of the book in a compromising rather than encouraging way.

[Mr. Budd]

Consider Bely's White Dove or Krasznahorkai's Melancholy of Resistance after Golem - same kind of faceted dark shimmer cultist trip with great prose.

Bely's writing is often a chore at times - but also super rewarding too.

BTW, as mentioned, How Proust Can Change Your Life is great little self-help read. Insightful and smart. 10.

On page 645 of the Search.

[Pop1287]

On page 645 of the Search.

You're a madman...

[riley-o]

carroll - alice's adventures in wonderland - 8/10

[Mr. Budd]

On page 645 of the Search.

You're a madman...

704. Yeah... Booze makes kids SO SLEEPY.

[Pop1287]

Reading that Meyrink book did make me want to read Strindberg's "Inferno" again...also I didn't know until a few days ago that there were actually biographies of John Dee.

I think Penguin might have let that Strindberg volume go out of print. Terrible.

[12 Months of Mao]

Foucault's Pendulum - 8, maybe 8.5
Ending pretty much went exactly where I was expecting it to but it kept me engrossed all the way through. Which is kind of saying something considering that most of what was happening here had taken place hundreds of years prior and was just being recapped. Gave me plenty of esoteric subjects to spend time investigating. Not because I actually think there's a greater truth behind them, just because I love that shit.

However, I think Jacobo Belbo was one of the most annoying fictional characters I've come across since Holden Caulfield.

Consider Bely's White Dove or Krasznahorkai's Melancholy of Resistance after Golem - same kind of faceted dark shimmer cultist trip with great prose.

Noted.

[altars of radness]

1776/10

Never felt his fiction lived up to his other writing/speaking until I read this one. Excellent epic of the general conniving elitist douche-baggery of the founding fathers through the eyes of the most maligned hero of the revolution. Probably the best piece of historical fiction I've ever read.

I read a lot of Vidal before getting into his historical works, thinking that they would be really dry, but they're easily his best novels. Empire, Lincoln, 1876. All excellent.

[Mr. Budd]

I love Strindberg. Inferno, Alone...


Phritz - we can exchange anything - I'd love some little Gerstle postcards etc.

[Pop1287]

I can see "Inferno" totally freaking out people who have OCD.

[Mr. Budd]

And Hamsun's Pan freeing them right after.

[Pop1287]

And Hamsun's Pan freeing them right after.

I have no idea what you mean by this...

[Mr. Budd]

Hamsun has the same unraveling gaze as Strindberg, based in bitterness and informed by clarity and amazing sensitivity but Hamsun seems to realize that if we just go outside once in a while - we can stop the suffering. Schulz and Rabelais work like this too despite they more towards things, not away as if to suggest that if you want to make all that chatter stop - go inside - but do it outdoors. Larder knew it too.

[Pop1287]

Hahahaha...I guess so.

Pan is such a fucking depressing novel...I once knew a guy who had only read "Growth of the Soil", if you can believe that. He missed all the others.

[Mr. Budd]

And I've missed his big one....Hunger. I'll never pare this reading list down...

I'd need a pretty big bucket to carry my "to read" list. Having you well informed people pushing me along doesn't help me want to read less.

After Proust I think I will need to spend a few months reading my wife dinner menus for a while.

[Pop1287]

Hunger REALLY reminds me of parts of Tropic of Cancer (the other way around, actually). It's a fabulous novel but it really is just about suffering...well...and hating "modern" life.

[neckbeard]

look at me, i bone french chicks. doo doo doo. I got syphillis la di dah

[LolaFaun]

Abigail Adams by Woody Holton 8/10

There wasn't too much about her childhood, but since the bulk of her correspondence was during her adult years, it's not too surprising. It was an easy and entertaining read, and it didn't segue into too much about John Adams where it didn't directly pertain to Abigail. I find that sometimes when there's a bio about the female half of a famous couple the author is tempted to start writing about the guy's accomplishments more than the woman's, but that didn't happen in this book.
The correspondence between John and Abigail was heavily sourced, of course, but also the letters she sent to her sisters as well as her management of their real estate holdings in Mass. and her speculation in government bonds. She was the one that increased the family's wealth, and kept them in the black for the entire marriage. One thing I learned that I had never heard before was her daughter's bout with breast cancer, and the MASTECTOMY!! that she apparently survived.

[Phritz]

Hamsun seems to realize that if we just go outside once in a while - we can stop the suffering.

true. when reading it i kept asking myself, why is the guy even going out anymore as sick as he is. but each time he did, he made it through it , he got some distraction and somewhat lifted his spirits.
it was not one of my favourite books, but parts of the story were great. a tale of huge mental and moral strength or better: stubbornness.

[Pop1287]

Sounds like the very beginning of D/G's Anti-Oedipus.

[Pop1287]

FINALLY got my hands on a copy of Gibson's "Zero History." Review in three days? I'm studying Java, dammit...

Hubertus Bigend! References to American Spirits and Austin, TX! Fuck yes...

[doomeddisciple]

The Adventures of Mixerman - Mixerman

I read the blog, I got the book and read the second half in one sitting.

SO much good stuff in that book that any musician or sound engineer should be made to read it. 9/10