Das Book: the very new reading thread

[Lucy]

that junot diaz looks pretty good, clearance! NICE!

my roommate bought it, and i'm looking forward to borrowing it at some point between whatever hardcovers i'm borrowing from b+n these days (just finished "The Uncommon Reader" by Alan Bennett at the recommendation of a co-worker-- short, breezy, and a good time).

[guanajuato]

you have a roommate, lucy? wha! i dunno where i thought you lived. i believe i thought you lived in a big, red house, although writing that sounds crazy. shut up people. you know how it is.

[dieblucasdie]

you have a roommate, lucy? wha! i dunno where i thought you lived. i believe i thought you lived in a big, red house, although writing that sounds crazy. shut up people. you know how it is.

that's cool, thanks to the just-as-long-as-it-takes story, I always assume you're posting from a cubicle, even if it's 2 AM.

[Lucy]

i do have a roommate (we worked at b+n together in massachusetts) which is good thing on days like today when she remembers we're out of toilet paper when i've forgotten. she's great and we raid each other's book shelves.

[guanajuato]

you have a roommate, lucy? wha! i dunno where i thought you lived. i believe i thought you lived in a big, red house, although writing that sounds crazy. shut up people. you know how it is.

that's cool, thanks to the just-as-long-as-it-takes story, I always assume you're posting from a cubicle, even if it's 2 AM.

i always think you're posting from the inside of a movie house, like you just keep sneaking to the next movie, until they change!

[guanajuato]

i do have a roommate (we worked at b+n together in massachusetts) which is good thing on days like today when she remembers we're out of toilet paper when i've forgotten. she's great and we raid each other's book shelves.

!!!

[edison]

so, we don't have leblanc's lupin novels here. should we be carrying them? anyone?

As the resident French dude here, I'm going to go ahead and say that I've most probably read some of them when I was a kid, but I totally forgot about them. Real helpful, eh?

[Greg Nog]

I picked up the Penguin Classics collection of them last night, so I will compensate for edison's blurred childhood memories.

[davy]

You may already be familiar with these writers, Davy, but just in case...

no, not at all familiar, thanks! that's great stuff. i'm actually going to print this shit out and take it with me to the bookstore. tad williams has gotten me to read a hundred pages of his book at a fair clip, so at this point i feel he deserves a complete reading...so i'll try to give that to him and see how i feel afterwards.

but then, man, these erikson and bakker dudes sound killer.

also, i catch myself sometimes wishing that george r.r. martin would include a little more of the supernatural in ice & fire, but that is to say absolutely nothing about what he does put in there. those books are fucking hard to argue with, and i am mad, mad, mad looking forward to getting all up in jon snow's story in the next book.

[Almanzo]

his books seem like alien fragments, and he's probably the closest any epic fantasy writer except tolken has come to writing major literature out of the genre (though martin does, also, on a good day). although it's not the same on a textual level, reading bakker's books, seems to have the same underpinnings that fans of speculative fiction once upon a time might have felt when they first picked up the shadow of the torturer or something. an alien fragment that you can't quite decipher the use of. except in this case, these are big books, and there's a certain amount of horror to them that gene wolfe doesn't usually expose.

SOLD.

[auto-da-fey]

So I'm just finishing up an anthology called Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, which came out shortly after the 1992 L.A. riots. It's mostly essays rooted in critical theory and culture studies, some of which are really insightful and a few that are mostly just wankery. On the latter front, I'm baffled as to why the thing kicks off with a short, pretty pointless Judith Butler essay (beyond the logic of getting a big-name scholar and putting her first); she just doesn't leap out in my mind as someone whose work connects to the themes at play here, and she spends about seven pages doing exactly what her reactionary critics accuse her of doing everywhere: saying something really simple, but rhetorically obfuscating it in an effort to create the illusion of theoretical profundity. Well, anyway, it's still a good collection.

[Greg Nog]

I finished Dhalgren this morning!  Calloo!  Callay!  It's over!  Thank god!

And now Lupin sits in my bag, anxious to be read.

[davy]

real quick: has anyone here read any china mieville?

"steam punk" is officially the best artistic genre ever, and i need a fall-back in case tad williams doesn't work out.

[andronicus]

Yeah, I read Iron Council in the summer and it was bad ass.

And yeah, steampunk rules.

[Andrew_TSKS]

i myself have read "perdido street station", and i fully agree with andronicus's assessment: badass.

[davy]

i myself have read "perdido street station", and i fully agree with andronicus's assessment: badass.

that's the one i'm considering. and then the scar after that.

[guanajuato]

Ack, I'm drunk again.
Mieville's sort of channeled a combo of Barker and Peake, and he's to be loved. But his recent children's book is to be avoided. It's really bad. I believe Neil Gaiman had something to do with the book's badness. I'm not going on record with that -- but I think China lost his nerve and sought out some oversight. Neil Gaiman is NOT good unless he's messing with his own shit. Otherwise it comes across as precious. I love...LOVE.. Mieville's short stories. If you guys have a chance to pick up Looking For Jake, do so. It's a nest egg of shorts.

[andronicus]

I have The Scar on my bookshelf and want to read it when I get time.  I haven't been able to find Perdido Street Station for a reasonable price.  Iron Council is so much more of a rewarding read if you've read E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class first, Mieville lifts tons of his stuff from there.

His little philosophical digressions are really neat, too, esp the whole golemancy thing.

But these are just asides, the real awesomeness is the kickass story.

[Andrew_TSKS]

andronicus, "perdido street station" is currently in print in mass market paperback, retail $8. i bet you could find used copies online for a good bit cheaper than that. for the record, i have "the scar" on the shelf waiting to be read as well. also, "iron council" is the third book in that loosely knit trilogy (same setting, different characters).

[andronicus]

I'm sure it is, but by 'haven't been able to find', I meant, 'it's not at the bookstore around the way'.

[elpollodiablo]

Steam punk is fine as long as it stays on the page. Those douchebads over at BoingBoing are waaaaay too enamored of it.

[jebreject]

I finished The Road. Not sure what there is to say really.

[Greg Nog]

Steam punk is fine as long as it stays on the page.

No way, what would be even better is if someone had a steampunk wedding.


I started on the Arsène Lupin collection I bought, and so far, it's hell of fun.  Way better for my sensibilities than Dhalgren, that's for sure.

[Almanzo]

China Mieville is absolutely one of my favorite authors. While his Bas Lag books (Perdido, the Scar, Iron Council) are not technically a series, I think that they should definitely be read in the published order for maximum effect. You'll only truly get why Bellis is pining for home if you've already read Perdido, and a ton of the basic world building - which is Mieville's big thing - is taken for granted in that second and third book. Iron Council practically assumes full knowledge of the other two books and the creatures, technology, cosmology, etc. of the Bas Lag world.

The guy's amazing.

[Greg Nog]

I'm doing a bit of winter cleaning, and part of that involves filling up the new smaller bookshelf in my living room with overflow from the large bookshelf in my bedroom.

I always sort of cringe when people talk about how you can tell a lot about a person just by looking at their bookshelf (I wish people would tell me if they're evaluating me in such a way, so that I can say things like "Please don't get the wrong idea about me just because of that copy of Ender's Game"), so deciding which books would be quickly visible to whoever walks into my apartment was fun in a sort of online-survey filling-out-a-profile kind of way.

So I sorted out all my books into "No," "Maybe," and "Yes" piles.  The Nos and Yeses were pretty easy (definite NO on Emily Bronte and Dave Sim, definite YES on Carl Barks and Christopher Marlowe, etc.), but the Maybe pile was much harder, making it particularly interesting to sort through.

As an example, some of the problems and resolutions:

Q:  Usagi Yojimbo or 100 Years of Solitude?
A:  Usagi Yojimbo ; awesome samurai rabbit > misogyny dressed up in mythology

Q:  How much Bester?
A:  50% -- place The Stars My Destination alongside the Chandler and Hammett for a pleasing little block of pulp.

Q:  Bertrand Russell?
A:  A short book of essays, but not the History of Western Philosophy ; should anyone ask questions about the latter, you will be reduced to "Uh bum wha i think i forgot most of it"

Q:  The critical theory collection Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism?
A:  Who are you trying to impress?

Q:  The Tom Toles cartoon collection Curious Avenue?
A:  Who are you trying to impress?

Q:  Bearing in mind that only one novel is sufficient for proper representation of his style, which selection by P.G. Wodehouse will adorn the shelf?
A:  ALL SEVEN OF THEM, EVERY SINGLE ONE, FUCK THE HATERS

So what I have as a result of all this is a full bookshelf of things that I would heartily recommend with my full backing.  If any of you ever come over and want to borrow a book, this bookshelf will not be steering you wrong.  In fact, a number of things on there were purchased as a result of LPTJ recommendations.