Book Thread

Had some grand plans to go out to a family breakfast to start 2018 but everyone woke up in a shitty mood & started arguing by 8AM. So, I’ve spent most of the day reading Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter.

As I change of pace I have been slowly making my way through this:


Considering the topic it reads very easily. It's basically just a bunch of first-hand reporting/diary entries from his time spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and other Arab and North African countries during and after the "Arab Spring."

It's been fascinating to read about the occupation of Baghdad. I was 9 or 10 years old then and I only vaguely remember watching footage of that on television. I had not developed any critical faculties so none of it really meant anything to me at the time. I've never adequately revisited that time in history so it has been really astounding to witness the degree of American and British arrogance and incompetence.

I feel like watching In The Loop again sometime soon after reading this.

Picked up A Naked Singularity from Sergio De La Pava today. It has been put somewhere into the Post-Modernism canon already and supposedly reads like a DFW-meets-Gaddis from the blurbs and write-ups I've seen. About 10% in and I don't hear those voices entirely. Its a much smoother read so far, whereas The Recognitions took me a few false starts.

I like it and think I'll tear through this one pretty quickly, or at least until I hit about 400 pages and likely slow down due to life.

i remember liking it

For being a "PoMo" book, this thing is incredibly easy reading. I'm already about 200 pages deep and I'm enjoying it. I think what I'm liking most is that it reads very much like a my-first-post-modernism type of book, veering wildly from subject to subject with rambling characters whose interests cover basically everything but the dialogue is quick and written very much like college students chatting after two or three beers. I understand some of the Gaddis comparison with regards to the conversation though I still think Gaddis does it (much) better.

i'm itching to read Dreams from My Father for some reason. has anyone who has been through it got much to say about it?

Good book! Veers into social/political ideas at times but is mostly just a pleasant story of the president as a young person.

C-poots wrote:

Picked up A Naked Singularity...

This was enjoyable and a surprisingly easy read throughout. The characters started to lose a bit of their unique voices towards the end, and the heist seemed strangely shoehorned into the plot as though De La Pava felt he needed more conflict than that which comes from the devolution of his central character, but it was still enjoyable.

Since I never finished At The Existentialist Cafe I've decided to start that over. I never did get to finish The Recognitions and my copy was lost to the ether of Bushwick Brooklyn so I'll be purchasing that again and starting it over as well. Trying to maintain a read-at-least-one-book-per-month regiment throughout 2018.

Any suggestions based on my reading history are welcomed.

just picked this up, very excited to get into it

Really enjoying it! Not quite as comedy heavy as I would have expected but the funny parts are all very funny. Nicotine and alcohol withdrawal appears to have diminished my attention span to the extent that I'm not capable of reading real books so perhaps I'm gonna have to stick to autobiographies for a while.

I'm in the middle of the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. Solid and easy reading fantasy for anybody interested in such things.

Picked up The Recognitions again, it feels good to have that book in my hands once more.

This past week I read and enjoyed a couple of classics for the first time: Turgenev’s Fathers and Children (AKA and sons) and Camus’ The Stranger.

Devouring this whilst listening to a loads of Current 93. Succeeded in freaking the cat out more than myself but enjoying it all the same.

last minute of this spooked me a little in an old cottage in remote rural Austria in the dead of night last week, not gonna lie. I looked up expecting to see something ghastly.

This recent diet of diabolism has me tempted to get a tattoo of Moloch:



My Mom is very chill for a lay preacher and very accepting of my agnosticism but I'm not sure how she would feel about me getting an image of a child-sacrificing deity permanently stained on my body.

That said, fuck it, I'm nearly 40.

I’m reading If Beale Street Could Talk. It’s my first time reading Baldwin and it took about the first 20 pages before I had to pause and appreciate this is something very good.

np james lord "a giacometti portrait"

Nick wrote:Had some grand plans to go out to a family breakfast to start 2018 but everyone woke up in a shitty mood & started arguing by 8AM.  So, I’ve spent most of the day reading Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter.

I started the year with a Greene novel and am now reading his The End of the Affair. He could become my favorite writer after these two novels and I can’t believe it’s only in 2018 that I’ve discovered his writing.

This is a really enjoyable read, but there's certainly a ton of NYC nostalgia built into my enjoyment.

Some stop motion czech adaptations of The Good Soldier Svejk from 1954 are playing at the Siskel Film Center Wednesday night.

Son of a bitch. I wish I had known about that earlier.

Trnka's my man! Damn it.

ClosetOfExhaustion wrote:Some stop motion czech adaptations of The Good Soldier Svejk from 1954 are playing at the Siskel Film Center Wednesday night.

Fuck, kept meaning to tell people this. I'm bad at boarding. Sorry Zappo.

I took a copy of Kafka's Amerika from some chick I'm boinking. Anyone enjoy this novel??