The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I bought Penny Arcade: Attack of the Bacon Robots the other day. Awesome stuff, interesting to see Gabes art evolve. Plus Tycho gives little factoids about each strip.

jute gyte wrote:I liked Snow Crash and LOVED Cryptonomicon.

have you read any of his baroque cycle? i'm halfway through 'the confusion' now... 'quicksilver' was great. i think it's stronger than cryptonomicon

-craig

Haven't read any of the Baroque cycle, though I plan on it. Aren't there recurring characters from Cryptonomicon in it?

Just read:
The Torturer's Apprentice: Stories by John Biguenet
Oyster by John Biguenet

At a yard sale this weekend I found a book I've been looking for for years: A Liar's Autobiography, Volume VI by Graham Chapman. So far, it's as good as I'd suspected it would be. Very funny, and very sad.

velocities by stephen dobyns. this is the collected poetry (up until 1992) of dobyns. some of this stuff is really great. if you're into poetry, i'd recommend it.

I have Dobyn's Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides but haven't read it. I'll check it out now.

Just recently finished All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren. It's absolutely fantastic. The book I was most strongly reminded of was Heart of Darkness, both in terms of subject matter and also the visceral styles of each of the books, in that I really felt inside the book, as opposed to merely reading it.

Working on Lolita, Nabokov is hilarious.

Right now I'm reading the diary of Brian Eno from 1995 ("A Year with Swollen Appendices") which is really pretty interesting as it alternates between philosophical musings on music, composing, etc. and talking about hanging out with his kids, so you can see he's a normal guy. Pretty cool.
-bill

Just finished:

Soft! by Rupert Thompson

I just finished A Scanner Darkly and it was fucking amazing. The Author's Note at the end left me in tears, for chrissakes. My first foray into Philip K. Dick. Next up is either Neuromancer or Gravity's Rainbow.

I am a huge K Dick fan, but I am left a little cold by 'Scanner' - it's good, but read Valis next. Read Valis! Read Valis! Now that book actually hurt my brain a little. In a good way.

I'm going to take a breather for a while, but I plan to read Valis soon.

HeuristicsInc wrote:Right now I'm reading the diary of Brian Eno from 1995 ("A Year with Swollen Appendices") which is really pretty interesting as it alternates between philosophical musings on music, composing, etc. and talking about hanging out with his kids, so you can see he's a normal guy. Pretty cool.
-bill

I read that as an unedited proof before it was released. Very fun.

Neuromancer is very totally good.

j$ wrote:I am a huge K Dick fan, but I am left a little cold by 'Scanner' - it's good, but read Valis next. Read Valis! Read Valis! Now that book actually hurt my brain a little. In a good way.

I also recommend Ubik.

Steve

I also recommend Divine Invasions, a P. K. Dick biography by Lawrence Sutin, who also wrote the only worthwhile Aleister Crowley bio around. Philip K. Dick is one of the most interesting people I've ever heard of and a great writer to boot.

I just got to the end of Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle - although, I've still got the final chapter to come, I hate finishing a book on a train and not having anything else to read - so I've started the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. It's really easy going and I'll be done by Friday but it is great so far on a number of levels and I've only read half of it.

songfight sure has a dick fetish. zing!

jute gyte wrote:Haven't read any of the Baroque cycle, though I plan on it. Aren't there recurring characters from Cryptonomicon in it?

sorry it took so long to respond to this.. the answer is "kind of"

-craig

a bebop a rebop wrote: Working on Lolita, Nabokov is hilarious.

Pale Fire is the very thing I always hope to find when I first peek into a new book.

I also recently read an early Nabokov, called Invitation to a Beheading. He claims he composed it before he'd ever read any Kafka, but the resemblance with The Trial is remarkable. As is the book in general.

Just yesterday I finished reading a book called The Comforters, by Muriel Spark, who just recently died this past April. It's a remarkable book about a woman who realizes she's a character in a book. Crazy stuff.

Now I'm reading Philip Roth - The Ghost Writer. I'll tell you what I think of it once I get far enough in.

the path to the spiders' nests by italo calvino. i'm about 3/4 of the way through this, and it's a really cool novel. it's calvino's first, and the first i've read of his. i'm having a hard time understanding why calvino didn't become better known outside of the academic world.

next, i hope to get my hands on a copy of calvino's cosmicomics.

Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace
Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter
and I'm re-reading Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson.
I also recently re-read Less than Zero and The Rules of Attraction, both by Bret Easton Ellis.