Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[ancience]

Salon.com's Wanderlust for leisure, and Brave New World and The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha for school.

[pmcd9]

Hello ancience.  Mighty fine avatar you've got there.  Welcome to the board.

~Paul

[Bozack]

Howdy, Ancience.
Currently, I am about halfway through "The Confusion," Neal Stephenson's latest attempt to build his biceps up via carting a 1000-page longhand manuscript everywhere. It's actually really good. Immediatly lined up is "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone," a biography of the Carter Family, "England Is Dreaming," a massive, phone-book sized history of punk rock in England and "Alice in Quantumland," an allegorical tale trying to make quantum physics more understandable for my primative Cro-Mag brain. Also, I STILL have to read Toches' "In The Hand of Dante."
Sigh. I'm back to reading every book I can pick up, again. Oh well!

[andalucia]

"England Is Dreaming," a massive, phone-book sized history of punk rock in England

Oh lord, I read that a few years ago when I was into the punk rock, and my brain is still spitting out punk trivia.  I'd put the Slits' cover of "Heard it through the Grapevine" on a mix for a friend as a nostalgia trip for myself, and was still able to recite their names and ages at time of recording for her when she asked the band's name.

I just finished The Red Tent and I'm onto The Will to Power.  I guess that is kind of a weird juxtaposition.

[CortJstr]

I read The Princess Bride last week. It was a fine read. I like the part in the introduction where he says, "you're only reading this because you saw the movie" so then he talks about the movie for a bit.

[jay-ell]

I read The Princess Bride last week. It was a fine read. I like the part in the introduction where he says, "you're only reading this because you saw the movie" so then he talks about the movie for a bit.

An excellent read.  The book and the movie have slightly different "hooks," so I had no trouble mentally separating the two.  Except for Cary Elwes.  He stayed mentally in my head in the book version, because he's just so darned cute.  

Welcome aboard, Ancience!

[CortJstr]

I read The Princess Bride last week. It was a fine read. I like the part in the introduction where he says, "you're only reading this because you saw the movie" so then he talks about the movie for a bit.

An excellent read.  The book and the movie have slightly different "hooks," so I had no trouble mentally separating the two.  Except for Cary Elwes.  He stayed mentally in my head in the book version, because he's just so darned cute.

I found that the descriptions in the book matched the actors pretty much right on anyway. Except Fezzik because he does not have a mustache! At least he said "hello, lady."

[AlohaDawg]

Any other foodies out there, have you read "The Debt to Pleasure" by John Lanchester? If you haven't, it's awesome.

Never heard of it, tell us more.

Interestingly, in the UK it was titled "A Debt to Pleasure". The Richmond review reviewed it thusly:

First novels are often accused of being thinly disguised autobiography. John Lanchester has performed tortuous literary acrobatics to escape this dictum. What he has used from his previous incarnation as a literary and restaurant critic is a finely tuned sense of literary dos and don'ts, and an encyclopedic tour of world gastronomy. For the literary type, Lanchester's malevolent and self-deluded protagonist, Tarquin, is a satisfactorily deceitful and menacing guide through a psychopath's life and relationships. For the gourmand the learned, precious, but frequently just observations that litter the narrative journey from Britain to France on the nature of food, and the plethora recipes that accompany these ruminations, are a delight.

Tarquin (a name he adopted to replace his given name, Rodney) is convinced that his achievements in the culinary world far outstrip those of his dead brother, a celebrated sculptor. A harmless enough conviction, one might think: deluded, yes, absurd, yes, but hardly dangerous. It is Tarquin's great gift - his love of food - that provides us with more and more clues as to why he is trailing a seemingly harmless young couple on their honeymoon, armed with a well-thumbed copy of the Mossad Manual of Surveillance Techniques.

Tarquin's life is his work of art. His parents, his nanny, his brother all experience Tarquin's genius at full tilt. He is an ironist and a humourless pedant. To create a character who carries the whole thrust of the narrative upon his smug and thoroughly dislikeable shoulders is a daring move on the author's part. The result is a novel which is part thriller, part culinary guide and which functions with chilly luminosity. This is not a novel of the heart, but of the mind. And although Tarquin's empty narration can become wearisome at times, admiration for Lanchester's technical virtuosities has the edge as Tarquin fulfills his debt to pleasure with gruesome satisfaction.

It's a good read and I recommend it to those of you who consider yourself foodies.

[AlohaDawg]

And to set the record straight, regardless of some of what that last paragraph of the review says, this book is NOT about Jough.

[jough]

Man, that book is so much like my life I SHOULD SUE

[miles]

In Cold Blood kicks ass.  If you ever wander over near the True Crime section again at your local bookseller, check out David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets upon which the TV Series (which I never watched) was based.  Not much like In Cold Blood, not at all in fact, other than I found them in the same section.  It was a very engrossing read.

Despite the encouragement of this board, I have yet to make it much further into Rabbit Redux.  So, for them moment I'm reading Truman Capote In Cold Blood, and a book on Freudian psychology (it's a good laugh so far).

[CortJstr]

Cryptonomicon?  Eeeexcellent.

Not the one I was thinking of, though it's superb. I was talking of... Quicksilver. Bingo.

I just started Cryptonomicon. I was interested in the Triology Quicksilver's part of but I've never read any of Stephenson's stuff before so I decided to read this first since it's only 900 pages instead of 2,700.

I finished Codex by Grossman yesterday. Once you get past the first 2 chapters it's a good read although there's a small part of the ending that isn't satisfying.

[Mite]

As long as this got resurrected, I'll add my current reading list. I'm on a bit of a 19th century Brit Lit kick lately. I'd convinced myself in high school that I hated the stuff, but, determined to give it one last try, I picked up Pride and Prejudice. Loved it (perhaps because I was dreamily imagining Colin Firth the whole time). Now I'm reading Hard Times, which is forcing me to re-evaluate my opinion of Mr. Dickens. It's a really biting, hilarious satire.

I also just finished Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which is just about the funniest book about being a punctuation nazi I've ever read. As a person who weeps openly at misplaced apostrophes, I loved it.

[Bozack]

Right now, I'm pumping through Nick Cave's book, And The Ass Saw The Angel, which is actually amazing, despite being a novel set in the American South with classic American South Literature characters written by an Australian. Despite the fact that he uses "dialect" (which means that "ah" equals "I"), and the fact that brutal Southerners is almost as cliche as the prostitute with the heart of gold that is also in the book, it is an amazingly intricate, fantastically dark piece of literature. If you're a Nick Cave fan, pick this up; if you don't know who he is, pick it up, and then grab a few albums. I'm a ways into England's Dreaming, but my interest is flagging, which is sad, because I'm just getting to the good stuff on the Sex Pistols. I grabbed a bunch of books on sale (another Nick Toches! A hardcover book called "Malcontents," filled with satire!). Sigh. All of my reading time this summer seems to be called already.

[Gimpson]

I don't know how I missed it, but Tom Robbins published a new book last year, and it just came out in paperback.  So far, Villa Incognito is pretty good, but I just started on it yesterday...

I don't think Tom Robbins is capable of writing a bad book, though.