Great Western Forum

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checkthypulse - May 19th 2010 @ 06:36 am

just starting Dune for the first time. don’t know where I’ve been but wherever it was there was not enough scifi around.

I read dune for the first time as well. Shit is so dope but then you go to the library figuring you’ll find what happens next and theres 15 prequels / sequels half written by his son and I just give up and read something else.

Reading the Iron Dragon Daugthers by Micheal Swanwick. It’s a 21st century story about if elves and shit were common place. Elves snort pixie dust and make rock music, dragons are giant sentient jet fighters, and like in every book written by a dude over 1/2 the book is about the 13 year old character barely avoiding being raped by every dude that even looks at her.

fukoslav27 - Jun 21st 2010 @ 02:25 pm

Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great. I needed a dictionary, Apparently my vocabulary in not so great.

I have the audiobook of that. It’s so great. You can hear him at varying levels of inebriation throughout the reading. I love that guy, hope that cancer doesn’t kill him any time soon.

I’m about a chapter and a half into Mein Kampf… Read it free here! http://www.mondopolitico.com/library/meinkampf/toc.htm

Roark - Sep 3rd 2010 @ 08:18 pm

fukoslav27 - Jun 21st 2010 @ 02:25 pm

Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great. I needed a dictionary, Apparently my vocabulary in not so great.

I have the audiobook of that. It’s so great. You can hear him at varying levels of inebriation throughout the reading. I love that guy, hope that cancer doesn’t kill him any time soon.

I did not know he read his own book for audiotape, does not surprise me though.I will have to check it out. Afraid it will be one of the last times we will be able to hear his voice. Big fan.

Like everybody else in this thread, I just finished House of Leaves. I had the opposite experience of a lot of people here - I think I had built it up so much before cracking into it that I expected it to require more of me as a reader than it actually did. Though it could be circumstantial; I spent last weekend petsitting far outside of town with literally nothing to do but read that book, so it was constantly fresh in my mind and maybe because I wasn’t layering it on top of an active daily life, it went by quickly and relatively easily. I feel like it’s probably extremely polar - if I hadn’t done it in one shot, it’d have taken me forever.

I also just read Shalom Auslander’s memoir, Foreskin’s Lament. It’s a bitterly funny account of rebellion and personal misery growing up in a strict Jewish family and his resentment toward a higher power you get the feeling he’d really rather not believe in. Quite funny, a very quick read, and easy enough to follow after a distraction or break that it’d make a good public transit book. Here’s an excerpt:

It is Monday morning, six weeks after my wife and I learned that she is pregnant with our first child, and I am stopped at a traffic light. The kid doesn’t have a chance. I know this God; I know how He works. The baby will be miscarried, or die during childbirth, or my wife will die during childbirth, or they’ll both die during childbirth, or neither of them will die and I’ll think I’m in the clear, and then on the drive home from the hospital we’ll collide head-on with a drunk driver and they’ll both die later, my wife and child, in the emergency room just down the hall from the room where only minutes ago we stood so happy and alive and full of promise.

That would be so God.

Currently reading: Pale Fire. God, I love Nabokov.

I’m also stumbling through a copy of Gatsby in Spanish, but I’m so rusty that it’d barely qualify as “reading” it.

waywardscience - Sep 7th 2010 @ 03:03 pm

I’m also stumbling through a copy of Gatsby in Spanish, but I’m so rusty that it’d barely qualify as “reading” it.

Spanish and Russian?  You’re definitely a spy.

-.——- ..- .-. / —.——- .-. -.—/  .. ... /  . -..- - .-. .-—- .-. -.. .. -. .- .-. -.—.-.-.-

Well, fuck. Formatting on this site is apparently spy-proof. Curses. It should still work if you copy and paste.

:

Message above. Anyone who can decode it wins a prize! Eat that spy girl.

waywardscience - Sep 7th 2010 @ 03:03 pm

Currently reading: Pale Fire. God, I love Nabokov.

That reminds me, I’m overdue for a re-reading of “Invitation to a Beheading”

I haven’t read that one, but it’s on the list.

HORSERAPE - Sep 7th 2010 @ 05:22 pm

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Message above. Anyone who can decode it wins a prize! Eat that spy girl.

There’s something wrong with your colon, but you’re too embarrassed to discuss it?

proctologyspy

Proctolo-gypsy.

Pro-ctolo gypsy.

I was going to photoshop a sign of a gypsy picketing with a CTOLO! sign. but you get the idea.