The wash instructions on the inside of my jeans.

My wife and I went to our local library today and got library cards. Tonight I'm going to start reading The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

Is this your first time in a library? Well, better late than never.

I'm still into Dance with the Devil by Stanley Booth.

I just got this book from the library recently but I'm in the middle of Voices From The Street by Phillip K. Dick which so far I'd say is okay but not his best.

No, just the first time in my new town.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick.

I read that last year. Don't get the fuss over Dick. I mean, I like Dick, but I couldn't ever be enthusiastic about Dick. I enjoyed Dick, but I couldn't ever see myself shouting about Dick in the streets to other people. I've met quite a few people who love Dick, but I wouldn't say I was one of them. Alright and all, but I wouldn't ever go to being a full-time Dick-lover.

Do Androids is my least fave of his, I must admit

I'm reading the Satyricon of Petronius [etc]. I love how classics (as in proper classics, not Victorian guff) are bawdier than a Sade-ian blush.

On thursday I read all 262 pages of The Color Purple by Alice Walker. In the preceding three days I had read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I really enjoyed Hawthorne's likening of the child born of sin to a wildflower, as well as his entertaining polysyllabic adjectives.

Read The Scarlet Letter if you can, but pass up Walker's drudge through the land that time forgot.

Oh, and in between serious books, I do like to read a series of books about my home city of Liverpool- the Haunted Liverpool series, which is now up to about 17 books, is a collection of paranormal tales that are full of real detective work on the part of the author, Tom Slemen, who sat next to me on the bus once. He's written a Wicked Liverpool book too, which is just about grisly victorian murders. It's sort of heartwarming to know that orphan children were used as human guinea pigs for vaccines in the 1800s, right on my doorstep!

Wow, I tried to read that a few years ago but really couldn't get to grips with it. There's a contemporary novel by Michael Bracewell about a bloke who bunks off work that's packed with references to it. I'll try and find the title.... hang on...........looking on amazon....bear with me......here ya go....it's called 'Perfect Tense'.

I'm in the swing of epic poetry and classics. Strangely enough, I find a lot of 'straight' narrative literature massively confusing. Joyce or Pound or Eliot I adore endlessly, your Senecas, Ovids, Virgils, Euripides and the like I have no problems with, but something that is more obviously 'narrative fiction' and I simply can't follow it. I tried reading a Maeve Binchy book recently (my old dear recommended it) and it was like reading a book in Hebrew (a language I don't speak).

That's a well dope book. There's references to it all over American culture like some sort of pox. F'rinstance, the video to Smells like teen spirit.

The entirety of Dante Aligheri's Divina Commedia can be read online, if you're interested;

http://www.divinecomedy.org/divine_comedy.html

I find reading any length of text from a computer screen far too cumbersome for my eyes though.

And in a Simpsons hallowe'en special set in the puritan era, I noted the letter A had found itself emblazoned on the blouse of Edna Krabappel.

AND I LAUGHED

Thanks, but I read that a fair while ago. If you haven't - Hell is awesome, Purgatory pwns all and Paradiso is utter, utter guff.

It makes me happy to know that there are two people in Britain who laughed for the same reason at the same time at the same joke for the same faintly worrying reasons of faux-intellectual self-satisfaction.

I've read it too, but I don't agree with general consensus that Paradiso is considerably worse than the other two. What's so bad about it?



There's safety in numbers.

I didn't really care about Paradiso, seemed like a big old wankfest over the notion of Paradise. A bit too happy-clappy, 'everything will be ok' with a litany of legendary Christians. Purgatory just struck me as eternally confusing, which appeals to my sense of ethics.

Oh, well there you go then. I'd surmise Dante wrote it as a Christian and for Christians. What I enjoyed most about the whole thing was the complete slap in the face at the end, when he "can't" describe what God looks like. Actually the whole poem is about people being slapped in the face; Virgil gets knocked back from Paradise for being a pagan, which I thought was pretty funny in a car crash kinda way. I'd love to go back in time and just add 'pwned' to the end of the verse.