Yes! Good stuff.

John Fante, Ask the Dust

Re-reading this, a personal fave, guaranteed to appeal to fans of Hubert Selby and Bukowski (who wrote the foreword claiming it inspired him to become a writer).

*ear perks up*

Oh really?

me too! without the hashtags

Runnin’ With the Devil: A Backstage Pass Into the Wild Times, Loud Rock and the Down and Dirty Truth Behind the Making of Van Halen. Penned by Noel E. Monk.

Its ok and has some educational material but there is also a vagueness that may be explained by the single line tucked towards the end when Monk mentions his old friend Valium.

I like to collect music. I look for fungi of all types and take photos of them. I watch American Football and my Astros (GO ASTROS!). I draw and paint. I write book reviews of all I read. I enjoy inhaling the smoke from green flowers. I like cheese of all types.

Uh... working. Watching shows and movies after a long day of work. Critiquing everything I see and hear. Comic books. Stats and science shit — research. Politics — following political and social developments and subsequently freaking out about them.

Animals. Love animals.

I also have this lifelong habit of coming up with shit in my head. No matter what I’m doing, my brain seems to automatically try its hand at said thing. If I’m reading comic books, I think of comic book characters I would create if I were in that field (I probably have a whole multiverse of bad ideas saved up at this point). When I’m thinking about music a lot, I can’t help but come up with imaginary bands and artists and labels and albums... alternative histories, and so on. I do the same with books and movies. Make shit in my head. Never actually make anything though. Well... I do write all the time and I have made tons of music, but not the kind of stuff that I do in my imagination.

This is probably indicative of some kind of borderline spectrum disorder, honestly. Probably means I’m crazy or worse.

finished 100 Edible Mushrooms https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/...mushrooms.html

I really like finding great authors. Really dislike finding them after their deaths

"Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives."

franquista de mierda

Yeah tell me about it.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this.

What’s it like?

Growing up poor in rural Spain. Published in 1942, so there's Franco and the church pretty much in control, brutal, but with a surprising amount of humor & so well written.

Nice. Thanks. I will look into it for sure.

Chirbes "On the Edge" for a contemporary view of a similar story

HAHAHHA! I told you I read only 4-5 novels a year! I slam my brain against grad-level science and reference books for the most part. ahhaa. I told you I wuld finish BOTNS, and I will! sonic promise. I will finish the second book by xmas.

i don’t understand finishing a book you started because “you have to”

i did too much of that in grad school— ruined reading for me, for years

life is too short to read books that cease to interest you, especially when it’s for leisure

—

i’m rereading this:



a great book for where i live. i’m sure more people will need it where the earth is going

Yeah, but each book is only like 100 pages! Jesus! Just read the thing! It’s all supposed to be one book anyway. Cripes!

It’s the fact that you read such heavy material that I know you are up to it. It’s because of that that I recommended it to you. I told you, I’ve only met one other person who’s finished it.

Anyway. Fucking Christmas bitch.

Well BOTNS is the best thing ever. If Gene Wolfe were a more well-known author, this thing would be taught in grad level philosophy courses. Makes Lord of the Rings look basic.

I’ve just never had anyone to talk about it with is all. :(

Anyway, Rob read the first volume (was published in four volumes), and said he loved it. And he hasn’t even scratched the surface of the story, so I wanted him to finish the COCKSUCJING THING BECAUSE I HAVE NO CONTROL OVER ANYTHING!

LOTR makes LOTR look basic!

so what you’re saying is... potshots are free for all?

as for that book i think if he loved it as much as he said he would have continued

one time i skipped an organic chemistry exam because i was way too deep into a cortázar book (hopscotch). i fucking lied to the teacher, claimed i was sick.

i can’t read cortázar these days anymore but when i got the bug i got the bug and i got it bad.

—

im gonna go look at the first pages of this book you say and see if it’s true. but if LOTR is your benchmark... i don’t know.

next time you should compare it with ulysses!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/bo...iction-ulysses

i gotta run but will look into it some more

The Cultural Dictionary of Punk '74-'81 by Nicholas Rhombes, He has a great write write up about Sonic Youth and their "pretensiousness" questioning if that even matters. Sly,smart and funny as hell...

Jeez, you do this all the time. Chill and try not to come across as such an autist. People have lives, they do and read other shit that you might not want them to and that's fine. CONSTANTLY banging on at someone to read a book, listen to an album or whatever (which you do. All the time) doesn't do anyone any favours. Just breathe.

LOU REED
by
Anthony DeCurtis

Kinda brief at around 400 pages. VU doesn't even get a full hundred.

Still, it's cool he assumes the reader already knows a lot. He spends time confirming or denying juicy rumors, but otherwise tries to focus on new ground.

Still, Lou was always elusive, and I'm not sure this book manages to explain him in any deep way. An enjoyable read, but I don't feel closer to understanding who the man really was.

Dude, it’s all in good fun. Rob and I have been chatting about this since 2015 (2014?) and he knows I’m gonna ask him every once in a while. I think I’ve asked twice this year.

Do I do this all the time? Not really. Yeah, I have badgered NR for not reading SAGA, and for not listening to TLOP. But that’s twice. Is that all the time? I don’t know.

I am chill. I am chill. I am chill. I am chill. (Breathe) I am chill.

You guys all know I’m a neurotic, anxiety-ridden, sleepless, guilty Catholic workaholic with a big ball of unraveling string in my head at all times. Let me have this one thing. Let me harp on people for not doing what they said they are gonna do. I beg you. I beg you.

LOTR is not my benchmark, I just think it’s probably the most famous series in the history of sci-fi or fantasy. Fair? It’s also a damn good boom (“Fellowship...” was always my favorite, and I got a huge kick out of “Silmarillion,” which is much closer to BOTNS than the actual LOTR series. I was just trying to come up with an example of a SF/Fantasy book that’s universally renowned and a veritable literary classic.

Gene Wolfe’s world-building puts Tolkien’s to shame. And it’s not just this one book... Book of the New Sun begat Book of the Long Sun — another four-volume masterpiece that takes place in the same “universe” but is not a sequel — the book that NPR called the #1 science-fiction/Fantasy book of all time (BOTNS was #3, even though it’s objectively better). And Book of the Long Sun begat Book of the Short Sun, a direct sequel to Long Sun which gets hella weird, even for this author, and acts as both a sequel and a prequel to BOTNS.

But yes, in terms of actual complexity and originality, BOTNS is definitely more like Ulysses than it is like LOTR, which might as well be the Princess Bride for how it measures up to this behemoth.

These books, by Gene Wolf, are equal parts Dickens, James Joyce and ... honestly, I can’t think of anything else that fits. Lovecraft maybe?

¼ Dickens, ¼ Joyce, ¼ Lovecraft, ¼ the fucking Bible.

I just want someone to talk to about it.

ETA: Rob did love the first novella volume of BOTNS. He has a review of it on his site. It’s called “Shadow of the Torturer.” Problem is, he has no clue what the book is about yet.

For the record, I asked Rob to recommend me a book he adored that I’d never read, and promised to read it while he read BOTNS. He never recommended anything. Said he had to think about it. Two years ago. Point is, I was willing to work for this!

Did you read this? It’s a pretty concise little write-up of the first half of the book, but it leaves out SO much. If you’re interested, maybe you should read the thing.

i red a few paragraphs on the amazon look inside thing and they weren’t bad paragraphs. that was a good sign. i might read that some day, “torturer apprentice severian.” lol.

thing is im in full business mode at the moment so this is what i’m about to start reading:



oooooh yeah. fuck entertainment ha ha ha ha. and fantasy. i want a good steak!

Was the first chapter "Get rid of the sports channels"?

Finished this yesterday and it really was just brilliant. There was a load of stuff about the FALN the Puerto Rican liberation terrorist, paramilitary, freedom fighters, whatever you wanna call them, which made me think of Rob Instigator. Some of the stuff that happened in the 70's that is now pretty much forgotten about is insane. What baffles me is that the media played up the idea that terrorist acts in America only started with WTC.

I honestly can't recommend it any higher.



Next up I'm gonna plug this gap in my knowledge of ancient Rome.

ha ha ha ha

no!

it’s about good management at work, not destroying your life outside of work :D

^ that looks like something I should read.
Getting things done is all I do and all I worry about doing.

My mom went to school with, and was involved politically, with the people that went to DC from Puerto Rico and shot up congress and tried to assassinate Ford. crazy shit.

For real? I know you said your parents were politically active relating to that. Didn't know to what level.

The bit that got me the most was reading about the FALN's bomb expert William Morales. From a bomb exploding in his hands and taking 9 of his fingers (among other things) to his prison break. What was interesting is how still no one is really willing to open up about them.

Many of the Puerto Rican attackers were pardoned.

Aye they were. But I'm relating to interviews etc. The author of the book managed to get interviews with every level of groups from the Weatherman, to the BLA, but the FALN seemed to be the hardest one to get interviews with. Pardons or not.

I do wonder if anything like the FALN will happen again. Especially with the way Trump has been with Puerto Rico. Do you reckon there will?

Finished Rick Strassman's DMT: The Spirit Molecule http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/1...ibilities.html

started this



Kelman does great dialog

Well I've started this beast. It'd been sat on my shelf unread for far too long and needed reading. So far it's actually great, and it's certainly a lot more readable than I expected it to be. However, I already know that given the amount of characters introduced it's gonna get confusing real quick.