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Kindle, dude. Good price and good ereader if all you want to do with it is read stuff.

from russia with love - 6/10

a positive six ! a lot of fun but totally silly. fleming had a ton of cool villains in this one but sort of just wasted all of them and then the ending was like why would you do that ??

The Pale King - David Foster Wallace 8?
Real good and huge but unfinished
Some really great chapters, scenes, conversations
Haven't read all the footnotes yet. Tired.
First DFW I ever read.

before I forget again....

The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents by John Dinges 10/10


Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America by Mark Levin. Pathetic/10

Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" and "Deathbird Stories" just came in the mail.

The Wind Through the Keyhole - 7.5

The Monkey Wrench Gang - 10

George R.R. Martin - Fevre Dream 8/10

I don't like vampire stuff at all but I was very entertained by this. I mainly wanted to read this because I wanted to venture into his other stuff, since I am basically completely obsessed with a Song of Ice and Fire and I'm glad I did. Abner Marsh and Joshua York are such fascinating characters, as are Sour Billy and Damon Julian. Maybe I've just just read ASoIaF too much but it was neat picking up on little phrases or sentences here and there that show up in that series as either sayings or even house words (Fire and Blood was mentioned a few times in Fevre Dream.) In the end though, I just want Winds of Winter to be out already.

Metamorphosis
wut

Reich of the Black Sun: Nazi Secret Weapons and the Cold War Allied Legend (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2005)

The Philosopher's Stone: Alchemy and the Secret Research for Exotic Matter (Feral House, April 2009)

Babylon's Banksters: The Alchemy of Deep Physics, High Finance and Ancient Religion (Feral House, April 2010)

Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men: The Surviving Elites of the Cosmic War and Their Hidden Agenda (Feral House, 3 May 2011)

Saucers, Swastikas and Psyops: A History of A Breakaway Civilization: Hidden Aerospace Technologies and Psychological Operations (Adventures Unlimited Press, February 2012)

by

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Farrell

all 5 10/10

Julian Barnes - The Sense of An Ending

This is a powerful little book. It reminds me a lot of Bellow or Roth -- an elderly character having his sense of self annihilated -- but without all the Jew-y neurosis. It reminded me a bit of The New York Trilogy as well; a character faced with a mystery that he becomes obsessed with and really only has his mind at his disposal with which to figure it out. But his story actually comes to a resolution, which helps distance itself from Auster's. There are some great observations about time, history and coming to grips with having an average life. It won the Booker last year and I have no problem with that. 8.5

Hitchens - Hitch 22

Brilliant, but it seems to run out of steam after he gets done talking about Iraq. 8

William Golding - The Inheritors

Good, and typically bleak about the nature of humanity, but I found having the story told from the perspective of a neanderthal to be fucking exhausting. I guess that's the point of the story, and is therefore one of the reasons why the book is considered such a success, but I can't say I enjoyed it very much. There are some surprisingly sad moments and some excitement, but I got over it as soon as I finished it. 7

John Dos Passos - 1919

This is the second book of the USA Trilogy and it's fucking awesome. The language is somewhere between Faulker and Hemingway -- the avant/impressionistic passages aren't as well-executed
as Faulkner and the more bare-knuckle prose has nothing on A Farewell to Arms, but it's pretty intoxicating. Being set during the war, it has significantly less of the leftist/radical/working man's blues of the first book, which gets to be pretty heavy-handed, and focuses more on life in Europe during WWI. Recommended. Looking forward to finishing the set. 7.7

McCarthy - Blood Meridian

Fuck. Maybe not the best novel I've read, but I think it's the best novel written during my life time. It's the second time I've read it, but I don't remember it being this close to perfect. If there's a book everyone who likes books should read, this would be my pick. 10

team blood meridian

Infinite Jest 9/10

Thought the ending was sort of anticlimactic, but it's quite engaging through and through for such a fucking lengthy work.

In the Land of the Living#6
8

Against His-tory Against Leviathan Fredy Perlman 10

John Dos Passos - The Big Money (USA Trilogy Part Three)
Completely bitter and boring. Compared to the second book, which was awesome, this one was just dreary and cynical and made me regret reading all 1200 pages. 3/10

Philip Roth - The Professor of Desire
Really disappointing. 300 pages of Jew-y self-analysis that falls well below Portnoy's Complaint and reads more like a hornier, shittier Saul Bellow. 5/10

David Peace - The Damned UTD
I only read this because it was recommended by a friend, a friend who I'll probably never listen to again when it comes to books. Choppy, repetitive writing about a soccer coach who treated everyone like complete shit. Can't believe I finished it. 1/10

Snow Crash - 7.5/10

I really love people opening interesting side-doors on religious narrative. The best parts of the book for me were when they were talking about language affecting the brain differently depending on the language, and being infected with virus by speech. All the explanations of nam-shub were really interesting. The internet stuff was neat but felt pretty dated. The overarching story was good but it felt like it fell short in key places; I guess I just felt sort of underwhelmed by outcomes and particularly in the climax because it felt like it was building to something that should have been better.

Snow Crash is like if Burroughs made a comic book about the early 90s.

Mountain Dew: the Novel

Soulcraft - Bill Plotkin

Post Office - 11/10

starting Ham on Rye now...

can't go wrong with any REH, excluding Conan, SK is probably my favorite REH character...he's like Stannis Baratheon in steroids

e: i almost left this post in this thread because it was the most off topic thing possible but i'm not going to do that

was looking at Time's Arrow and some others by Amis... seemed interesting, but i wasn't feeling it at the moment. will revisit, though.

High-Rise by JG Ballard - 10/10. makes me wanna write a noise album.

just started Celine's Journey to the End of the Night.

F. Murray Sandyclam wrote:

father of lies wrote:Snow Crash is like if Burroughs made a comic book about the early 90s.

It's basically a much less talented writer doing Gibson while on drugs and pushing everything to EXTREMES, MAN.

But I like it.

save that Gibson started stagnating around Pattern Recognition, while Stephenson has continued to get better and better.

went back and read snow crash the other day, since it's apparently going to be made into a movie. still great.