July 2010- Why wont this rain stop and I am reading...

I finished House of Leaves, I really really liked it.

Just started The Dead Republic by Roddy Doyle.

The Wall by Jean-Paul Sartre.

oooh, how was that? ave you read any of his other books, jane?

It sure is! Lovely short stories, I can see why he was offered the Nobel Prize.

Derek just sent it to me a week or so ago. I like it so far, though I'm only about 100 pages in. It's the third in a trilogy. Obviously I need to read the other two.

ah, yeah, i knew it was the third in the trilogy. but i think it's meant to be pretty readable without having read the other two. that's nice of Derek, sendng irish books to everyone--what a guy!

i love the cover art for Dead Republic. the one i've seen has a cowboy boot on the front. it's pretty plain, but it looks cool.

I've only read The Commitments and Paddy Clare Ha Ha Ha from him. i enjoyed them both. but is overuse of theol' em-dash puzzled and eventally annoyed me. is Republc like that?

I was reading Beat the Reaper until about halfway through the book when he 'fell in love' with Magdalena (even though he'd only talked to her twice *gag*) and then i couldn't take it anymore. All i've read is this long back story where nothing really happens and he's supposed to be this killer but so far he's only talked about the Russians he killed. Then they went to a shark tank, which was pointless. Then he likes this new girl with a bad knee at the hospital. And there's some guy who has ass problems and an old black guy but it might be the same guy with the ass problems, i don't know. I give up, i'm going to start on All The Pretty Horses instead. Maybe i'll finish Reaper some other time, it's an easy read.

I started reading The Good Guy by Dean Koontz, but I'm not sure if I'll bother getting through it.

I just finished Breakfast of Champions. Onto Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Get ready for depression with Foer's book. It's unbelievably beautiful but very very sad. And I'm not even an American, so I shouldn't relate, but still..

The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss Jr

It's not as much like Less Than Zero as I expected but it's still very good. Anybody who's a fan of Bret Easton Ellis would surely enjoy it.

Glad to hear this. I've had it sitting on my coffee table for a while now but have yet to start it yet.

Still tackling Jennifer Government.

I just finished Demian by Herman Hesse. It was like an ultra-spiritual Catcher in the Rye. If you're into gnosticism or Jungian psychology it's an interesting read.

Now I'm starting The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I've read a chapter so far and it seems this is going to be a rough one for me. But I've been meaning to read it forever and I'm running out of unread books on my shelf. Looks like I have some shopping to do before I finish this one.

Ugh. I have read her four novels and this is my least favorite of them. Perhaps it's because it's the last one I read, and by that time I had realized that her creativity didn't go much further than narcissistic pricks with terrible survival skills who have an unhealthy obsession with architecture, being a prick and fucking precariously.
With that said, I do not recommend this book. At all. This is the one book that I especially do not recommend. It's just like her three other novels, except with different names and the main character is a ginger. That's it. It's like she played a game of Mad-libs with her other books and called it art, much like that one "artist" who put elephant shit on a canvas and called it art.

Fun things to look out for in The Fountainhead:
*Rape
*Girl being turned on by said rape, and subsequent bruising and other injuries
*Girl reversing all accomplishments made by women in the 20th-century by being a subservient, vapid walking fuck machine

Tl;dr: I fucking hate this book.

Slaughterhouse Five.

Awesome book! It's the only one by Vonnegut that I've liked so far.

Just about to finish Pygmy and then I'm reading either The Informers or The Rules of Attraction.

Started "What is the What" by Dave Eggers and it's great. I would have read it well into the night if i didn't have to work this morning.

Last night I started The Postman Always Rings Twice by James Cain.

Read two chapters and I'm loving the writing style.

about halfway through and I am enjoying it so far. Pretty bleak, but not without humour and I like the way he writes. Very immediate.

Awesome! Thanks Kit. It is now moved to my Must Read shelf.

i just bought this. i've read the first chapter, but i don't have time to read it right now because of the draft i'm writing. it's taking up any truely free time i have. but yeah, the first chapter was great. can't wait to read it. it's only a nice little thing too.

you know Clevenger loves this one? I'm pretty sure he used it to teach an intensive.

And McKay just posted that same thing on my facebook page lol.

This is a great book.

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

haha. cool. i'm still working my way through that Clevenger Top Ten list i posted a while back. it must've been on one of the "it's [whatever month] and i'm reading" threads. it's a great list of books, and yeah, this is on it.

Yes! That's the list that got me to buy it.

i have the list in the back of my copy of either Dermaphoria or The Contortionist's Handbook but, i'd like to find it again. You should start a Clevenger's Top Ten thread and we can read them all and discuss the shit out of them. i don't remember them all but here's what i remember was on there:

- Postman

- pop. 1280 (bought this and the above book the other day. looking forward to reading both)

- white jazz

- house of leaves (still taunting me from the bedside table)

- leaving las vegas

- if on a winter's night a traveller (which i bought because it's in second-person, and then later realised it was on this list anyway. two birds, one stone.)

Nice I forgot - I just bought (like 2 days ago) Leaving Las Vegas because I remembered it was on that list.

And I bought If on a Winter's Night a Traveler like the day after you posted that list.

so good. i haven't read any of them yet. but i'm certainly looking forward to them all. i read the beginning of If On A Winter's... and it sounded like an absolute mind-fuck.

I also have The Postman Always Rings Twice . It's about two books down in my to-read pile.

If you get a chance, can you please post that entire Clevenger list again?

Of course. I'm at work now, but when I get home I'll transcribe it again, only this time I'll make a thread for it.

Leaving Las Vegas is awesome, but the movie was a big disappointment to me.

The Genius and the Goddess by Aldous Huxley. I loved Slaughterhouse Five.

Rereading The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis.

The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante

I started Beat the Reaper. I'm about halfway through, and while it's an okay book, it's not ringing my bell the way it seemed to everyone else's. The narrator's tough guy talk feels inauthentic to me, trying a little too hard, and the brief foray into anti-Polish sentiment really grinds my gears.

Mike, what else really grinds your gears?

Currently reading Genesis by Bernard Beckett. Almost finished.

Up next: The City & The City by China Miéville

Thanks, Jane. You know what really grinds my gears?

Guys who write wandering American hip-culture pastoral novels with fantastic prose and little to no plot. That's right, Jonathan Lethem, I stopped reading your book. And I was close to the end, too! But how many times can you wander in search of a burger restaurant and hang out doing nothing with Perkus and then get letters from your wife in space, which was a cool part actually, without actually DOING anything? I mean, 400 pages of it is a bit excessive. Even Salinger quit after a couple hundred.

And then there's Beat the Reraper with it's anti-anti-Semitism. It's laid on a little thick. We get it, you think the Jews were wronged. 180 pages in, and it doesn't seem to connect much with your mafia story yet. But it's good enough that I haven't thrown it away yet.

And speaking of Jews, nobody's come up with a new priest and a rabbi joke in like thirty years. Ya know? I mean, okay, ah, umm. Priest and a rabbi go, go onto the supermarket, and, uh, the priest wants to buy a ham. And the rabbi says, "Ah, I can't eat it. It's forbidden." Couldn't eat it. Not allowed, pigs are like superheroes to them. Is it perfect? No, but I, I don't see you coming up with anything. And that, people, is what grinds my gears.

Jane?

Thanks Mike. Now to sports.

I just finished Jennifer Government and although this was an original concept and a fresh take on corporations/hostile takeovers, the execution kind of fell flat for me.

I'll read some of his other stuff, but I didn't really care for this one.

Yeah, the writing wasn't the greatest, but it was quite original. Unfortunately, for every piece of great originality there was a glaring cliche. I thought John Nike was a great villain, his lines were the ones that made me really laugh. He was rather 2D but it worked for me because he's a parody of 2D people (executives). I also liked the idea of the frequent-buyer conglomerates polarizing the entire business world and how present day organization are turned into corporations (such as the NRA and police). But overall, it seemed like it would make a better movie than book. He should have written it as a screenplay.

Conceptually it was awesome but the execution didn't live up to the ideas.

Moving on to The Delivery Man.

Started reading Democracy by Joan Didion a few days ago.

American Tabloid by James Ellroy

Gabriel's Gift by Hanif Kureishi

Reading The Raw Shark Texts, was about to stop reading it, but then got to the letters and found them to be interesting, we'll see if I finish it.