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What are you reading?


Shane

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The board is a little barren without this.

Since the board went down, I read the new Nathan Rabin book about ICP/Phish. Pretty fascinating stuff.

Currently reading the new Klosterman and Gaiman books, as well as finishing up my book for the DVDVR summer exchange.

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The board is a little barren without this.Since the board went down, I read the new Nathan Rabin book about ICP/Phish. Pretty fascinating stuff.Currently reading the new Klosterman and Gaiman books, as well as finishing up my book for the DVDVR summer exchange.

 

That Nathan Rabin book was pretty solid. I wish he got into the details of his nervous breakdown a bit more. But his breakdown of The Gathering and the cameo of Colt was great.I just read a book by the drummer of Semisonic of all bands. Not just that, but I really enjoyed it. It's a great look at the sleaziness of trying to get a single on the radio and the behind-the-scenes nonsense of corporate rock tours.

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I read a biography of the satirist Chris Morris, it was very short but great if only for reminding me of all the great moments from his career like Brass Eye, The Day Today, Jam & the Why Bother? interviews with Peter Cook. Morris is a rather private person so there's scant details about his childhood & all that sort of thing, which is probably for the best.

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I read a biography of the satirist Chris Morris, it was very short but great if only for reminding me of all the great moments from his career like Brass Eye, The Day Today, Jam & the Why Bother? interviews with Peter Cook. Morris is a rather private person so there's scant details about his childhood & all that sort of thing, which is probably for the best.

 

Morris also wrote Four Lions, didn't he? A very funny dark satire.

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Morris also wrote Four Lions, didn't he? A very funny dark satire.

That's the fella. His work can definitely be seen as dark, though I think that's just a reflection of us as people. Well, except Jam, which is just the strangest collection of sketches I've ever seen. Brass Eye is on the 4OD player, but sadly Jam isn't.

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I've read a lot of the "steampunk for YAs" stuff over the last few years to make sure the books are good/appropriate for my kids, and the Leviathan trilogy was the best of the bunch. 

 

I am reading The Caning about Representative Preston Brooks' public caning in the Senate of Senator Sumner of MA and it is just written okay, but it's a bunch of stuff I don't know so I'm enjoying it.  

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Since the board went down, I read the new Nathan Rabin book about ICP/Phish. Pretty fascinating stuff.

 

Do you listen to the "Analyze Phish" podcast on Earwolf? If not, you should do so. If yes, you might not know that episode 7 was finally released a few days ago. Nathan Rabin was a guest.

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That's the fella. His work can definitely be seen as dark, though I think that's just a reflection of us as people. Well, except Jam, which is just the strangest collection of sketches I've ever seen. Brass Eye is on the 4OD player, but sadly Jam isn't.

The "Kilroy's gone mad" sketch from Jam remains one of the strangest and funniest things I've ever seen. Morris (with Charlie Brooker) also created Nathan Barley, which was a show people either adored or despised.

 

With the board being down, I read all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels that I hadn't before, just got Timequake to go. Anyone know if the collections published since his death are worth getting?

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I have been reading a bit lately. In the past 3 weeks I've read "Between the Bridge and the River" by Craig Ferguson, "Silence" by Shusaku Endo and "This Side of Paradise" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Our local public library is doing a "Reading for Chocolate" so the reading has been somewhat inspired by sweet reasons. 

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Desperately need to do my SBE book this week; odd that it has been so hard to find time for such a shirt read.

Other prose I am bouncing around includes THE GREEN MAN by Kingsley Amis (this Monty's book for the Austin F/SF book club), A FEAST FOR CROWS and THE FALL OF HYPERION by Dan Simmons. Also still working on THE GOD DELUSION by Dawkins on occasion, and David Stockman's excellent THE GREAT DEFORMATION on the Fed, corporate welfare and the warfare state from WWI through the 08 collapse. (For the uninitiated, Stockman was a congressman in the 70s and Reagan's first chief economic adviser, but left disillusioned when it became apparent that the Dept of Defense would get all the funding it wanted, and Reagan would give Weinberger anything he asked for while simultaneously cutting taxes in the name if the Almighty Laffer Curve.)

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Just finished reading "The Long Walk" by Stephen King from the Bachman Books.  I don't think I'm exaggerating but I think that might be one of his best ones ever.  Then again, my favorite King book is "Skeleton Crew," so perhaps the fact that it was only 260 some odd pages had something to do with it.  But yeah, it was awesome, and King actually nails a good ending for a change.

 

Debating whether to read more King or JOHN DIES AT THE END.

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Oh I loooove The Long Walk. I think I first read it around 12-13 years old. You could feel the length just beatingdown on them. Must read for just about anyone, I think.

Read The first trade of Peter David's Legendary Hulk run. Very awesome so far. Todd Mcfarlane's work is a little hit or miss, but he knocks one change sequence out of the park. What the hell dos McFarlane even do now? What's the last book he ever penciled? Cover?

Also finished How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil. Talks about the structure of the neocortrex and how we're trying to replicate it in computers. Some stuff was pretty beyond me, but for the most part I learned a lot of fascinating ahit. His idea behind augmenting our brains by plugging us into the cloud so that all knowledge is universal and instantaneous, sound both awesome and fucking horrific.

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Currently reading Deeply Odd by Dean Koontz. The Odd Thomas books are the only Koontz I read. I read the first book after a huge recommendation, but I have to say, I think Odd Thomas is one of my most favorite literary characters. He's just such a fantastic character.

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Hey, should we make a thread for the book club project?  I don't see one, and I dunno if this board has the same "you need admin permission to post a new thread" deal as the old one,  

 

I've mostly been reading a giant stack of comics recently.  (I almost typed "graphic novels", but I've long found that term to be a wee bit defensive and pretentious, as if the term "comics" didn't get across the entire idea of an illustrated story told in sequential panels.)  Batman's Hush storyline has aged pretty well, aside from how incredibly obvious in hindsight just who Hush is.  The entire Batman RIP extended saga made practically no damn sense whatsoever, and seemed to contain a lot of below-average artwork.  Whedon's Tales Of The Slayers/Vampires still rules.  Scott Pilgrim still has an issue where some of the characters just look too damn much alike and I lose track of who's who (although it's otherwise a sparkling lil' diamond).  And all the others are too mediocre or forgettable for me to even remember what they are.  

 

 


With the board being down, I read all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels that I hadn't before, just got Timequake to go. 

I still dunno why I haven't read more Vonnegut.  Slaughterhouse Five is one of my all-time favorites, and Timequake was pretty damn brilliant itself.  I guess it's just easier for me to retreat to my unchallenging literary equivalents of comfort food, rather than try something a bit more intellectually demanding.  I guess it's like how I never get around to watching the seemingly dozens of Werner Herzog movies I still haven't caught, and instead popping in Shaun of the Dead for the millionth time.  

 

 


Working on Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld. A really neat steampunkish alt history taking place around the beginning of WWI.

 

Do you (or anyone else, but you mentioned it first) have any general recommendations for steampunk books, for someone completely ignorant of that genre?  The visuals and ideas of steampunk are something that I find fascinating to the point of wanting to play around with them in stories myself, but it seems like the books suffer from the same problem as the fantasy genre, which is simply a bad case of Sturgeon's Law with countless untalented hacks who somehow bluffed their way into authorial careers.  So, what's a good short list for beginners?

 



Just finished reading "The Long Walk" by Stephen King from the Bachman Books.  I don't think I'm exaggerating but I think that might be one of his best ones ever.  Then again, my favorite King book is "Skeleton Crew," so perhaps the fact that it was only 260 some odd pages had something to do with it.  But yeah, it was awesome, and King actually nails a good ending for a change.

 

Debating whether to read more King or JOHN DIES AT THE END.

Go with John Dies at the End, sir.  An amazingly wonderful book.  The sequel, This Book Is Full Of Spiders (Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It) is pretty damn good itself.  

 

And my favorite King book is Skeleton Crew too.  I much prefer "get the damn story over with as quickly as possible" King to the sadly more common "drag this stuff out for thousands of pages consisting mostly of pointless filler about characters who get arbitrarily killed off anyway, and then a shitty Deus Ex Machina ending" King.  

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It's 2013 now, which is the time in the future where 1980's "Days of Future Past" X-Men saga was set. 

 

To honour that, I'm re-reading it now. It's pretty damned good stuff, somehow better than I remembered it... maybe partly because the Claremont/Byrne style is a huge nostalgia trip for me. 

 

I might even see if I can dig up season one of the X-Men cartoon and have a look at their take on the story. 

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