Lots of people hate The Satanic Verses, but they're wrong, and they're grotesquely ugly freaks. It is a work of very rare genius.

Nothing new for me, still ploughing through Murdoch and Pound. I may take a break in the latter for Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.

Ursus and JTS - spot on about Liar's Poker. It reminds me very much of Rough Ride by Paul Kimmage in that respect - the means may change, but the underlying stuff stays exactly the same.

Congratulations Toro, you are the 100th poster.

(edit: or 100th replier, if anyone wants to get pedantic - and I'm sure they do.)

Yeah and on that topic can we get rid of the bit in parentheses in the thread title? It's really really really annoying. Really.

Easily done...

meltdowngraphics wrote:

QUOTE:
I've just finished "The Satanic Verses" (at age 54), and it was worth it! Now for some more lighthearted reading – "The Far Corner" by Harry Pearson. Great anecdotes and stories about North-east football. Has anyone else read this?

Yeah, it's great.

Breakfast of Champions is fantastic. Written in this incredibly blank, childlike fashion, which by never mentioning its moral critique of what it observes at all, points it all the more sharply.

Loved it loved it loved it.

Coming to the end of the (wonderful) Murdoch book, and just starting into Beckett's For To End Yet Again. And (still) working through the Cantos.

I just finished The Rebel Sell and will offer a full book report on OTF soon. I'm reading Gibson's Count Zero which is sort of the sequel to Neuromancer, but not really.

I've got a bunch of stuff on my reading table - novels, graphic novels and other. I think I'm going to re-read the first two volumes of Hellboy soon.

Excellent, perfect...

Me I'm starting on The Mysteries of Udolpho. I need some thrills.

Working on Mark McKinnon's The New Cold War, which is quite good. I hadn't quite realised the extent to which George Soros and Madeleine Albright were involved in the overthrow of Milosevic, and the extent to which senior Otpor leaders later became "revolution consultants" (paid by Soros) to the rest of the former Warsaw Pact. I mean, great that Milosevic got kicked out when he did (and better the way he got kicked out than by, say, invading Serbia), but still a bit slippery-slope-ish.

On the weekend, finished Iain Banks' Look to Windward. I had never read any of his stuff before, and I really enjoyed it. I bought a couple of more Culture novels to read on my next insane journey (only twleve days away, o joy o bliss).

Reed: Count Zero is not bad as early Gibson goes, but I liked Mona Lisa Overdrive better. And Idoru is possibly best of all (though it's a bit later).

Did you like The Rebel Sell?.

I'm glad you liked Look to Windward. I love love love the Culture novels. What else have you got?

Er, I'll have to go look...

(dashes into the house and up the stairs)

Excession and Use of Weapons. You read them?

The Beckett is superb, albeit very brief - again, under sixty pages all told. The Murdoch is now done, and was utterly superb - a total mind-changer. She's an absolutely brilliant philosopher, it's quite amazing that such a high proportion of the comparatively small amount of philosophical work referencing her is so appallingly slipshod.

I'm about to start Pierre Vidal-Naquet's The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present about which I know almost nothing, save that the blurb is enticing, and it was dirt cheap in the British Library bookshop when I was joining there.

QUOTE:
"Reed: Count Zero is not bad as early Gibson goes, but I liked Mona Lisa Overdrive better. And Idoru is possibly best of all (though it's a bit later).

I have Mona Lisa Overdrive. I'll read it soon after I finish Count Zero.


Did you like The Rebel Sell?."
Most of it, yes. I've been meaning to write about that, but I have a lot of thoughts and haven't had time.

I've recently finished Single and Single by John Le Carré, and am now reading (by pure coincidence, because it just happened to be the next unread book on my pile of unread books) another Le Carré: Absolute Friends.

I do like Le Carré's style: very easy to read, very sensible, cerebral, and (unlike, say, Robert Ludlum) for 'spy' novels they concentrate on characters and relationships rather than action and the literary equivalent of SFX. If I'm not careful, I could get to become a Le Carré completist.

Since my last post on this thread, too long ago, I've finished Irving and gone through Wonder Boys, which is as wonderful as everything I've read thus far by Michael Chabon. He's a really seriously bloody good writer, that man.

That was followed by Richard Gott's Cuba: A New History, in preparation for my trip in July. Very interesting, although the first 450 years take up just under the first half of the book, and the most recent 50 take up just over the second half. Inevitable I suppose.

Also inevitably, given that it was published last year, it's now going out of date at a rate the author couldn't have predicted would happen quite so soon.

Today, I started Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, which I'm enjoying so far. I'm also having a go at Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding in Spanish. Well alright, no need for 'having a go', I'm just reading it. It's incredibly simple language but utterly beautiful.