Book thread

[Maclowery]

Re-loaded my tablet with a bunch of nerdy fantasy/sci fi stuff that I haven't read before ( instead of re-reading my favorite authors yet again). So far I'm underwhelmed by Roger Zelasny's Amber series. Just feels weird and dated. Neil Gaiman is totally awesome though, and his American Gods is lots of fun. Basically, gods and mythical creatures and angels etc all exist in reality through humanities' belief. Only modern society is different, so stuff like trolls and elves are fading, while new, um, things are emerging. Its weird and cool as hell.

Also flying through a re-start of Jim Butchers tremendously entertaining Dresden Files, which are funny, pulpy novels about a wizrd for hire in modern Chicago, fighting all your basic baddies (vamps,werewolves, demons). Its super fun.

[lukethedrifter]

I would really like to read a book again some day.

[docellis]

I lost the book I am reading.

I asked the gym attendant lady if anyone turned in a book and she said yes, pulled my book out, handed it to me and said "Very interesting reading you are doing" causing me to turn a bunch of shades of red. The first chapter of the book I am reading describes a father using his 30 min lunch break to rush home, masturbate and get back to work. His computer won't boot up so he has to use his 13 year old sons laptop.

Very embarrassing.

[thrill]

I lost the book I am reading.

I asked the gym attendant lady if anyone turned in a book and she said yes, pulled my book out, handed it to me and said "Very interesting reading you are doing" causing me to turn a bunch of shades of red. The first chapter of the book I am reading describes a father using his 30 min lunch break to rush home, masturbate and get back to work. His computer won't boot up so he has to use his 13 year old sons laptop.

Very embarrassing.

My friend told me he found lesbian porn on his laptop. He's a 25 year old gay man who still lived with his parents at the time, so now he owns a laptop that his dad used to j.o.

He moved out two days later.

I think his dad did it on purpose to get him out.

[lukethedrifter]

I lost the book I am reading.

I asked the gym attendant lady if anyone turned in a book and she said yes, pulled my book out, handed it to me and said "Very interesting reading you are doing" causing me to turn a bunch of shades of red. The first chapter of the book I am reading describes a father using his 30 min lunch break to rush home, masturbate and get back to work. His computer won't boot up so he has to use his 13 year old sons laptop.

Very embarrassing.

My friend told me he found lesbian porn on his laptop. He's a 25 year old gay man who still lived with his parents at the time, so now he owns a laptop that his dad used to j.o.

He moved out two days later.

I think his dad did it on purpose to get him out.

Sure it wasn't his mom?

[thrill]

His dad copped to it.

[JackofDiamonds]

Before this thread goes too far into the Dad's porn preference abyss, I'd like to make a course correction.

I am reading Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49." Anyone else read it before? It's a fever dream. I'm 60 pages in and still can't get a firm grasp on time/space/plot/character in the book.

[The Third Man]

Yeah, I wasn't much of a fan to be honest. Oddly, despite being his shortest by far, I found it the most difficult of his works to find any grounding in. It ended up feeling kind of futile and pointless to me. I also thought the prose was a step or three down from his best. I could be wrong, I read it right on the heels of Gravity's Rainbow so of course it wasn't gonna compare.

I just finished reading Mason & Dixon. I'll copy and paste my goodreads review:

The most digressive and, in many ways, the most characteristically American of Pynchon's novels. Pynchon's other two opuses, Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day, are characterized by complex plots involving paranoid, wartime, international capitalist conspiracies, but Mason & Dixon is much more episodic in comparison, presenting a series of riffs on 18th-century America and its bizarre-yet-often-true events. It's just an utter joy to follow its protagonists through the winding backwoods of the American colonies, coming across in their travels such oddities as a pot-smoking, Yiddish-speaking George Washington, a mechanical duck capable not only of flight and speech but seeming to possess even a soul (not to mention erotic impulses), vegetable farms which produce specimens the size of houses, a man whom upon the full moon transfigures into a beaver, and too many other absurdities to catalogue here.

But even setting aside its multitudinous surface pleasures as a piece of historiographic metafiction (BIG WORDS), it's a wonderful examination of the attitudes and politics that shaped America in its formative years, and which have continued to embody - for better and for worse - the spirit of the country ever since. Pynchon juxtaposes the horrors of slavery and the massacre of natives with the wonders of the Enlightenment (exemplified by Pynchon's liberal portrayal of Benjamin Franklin as a promiscuous, electric-magician rock star, an account not as far from the truth as you'd think) and the diverse and utterly unique personalities that are drawn to the promise and potential of a new country. It's perhaps the one Pynchon novel that's optimistic in any greater sense - he's hardly a thoroughbred nihilist, but he's always had a vicious streak of cynicism, which is replaced in Mason & Dixon by a profound melancholy. In transporting his sensibilities 250 years into the past, Pynchon has taken to heart the optimism that surely must have characterized the founding fathers in their quest for a newer, better, free-er country than before.

Reflecting its fixation on history and historicity, the novel examines the concept of time in great depth - its flows both forward and backward, the role of memory in our lives, the great unknown of the future, and so on. There's an omnipresent irony in reading about the exploits of two characters about whom we know, if not the capital-T Truth (which is impossible to ever know), then at least some semblance of it, and the paths their lives would take them on - all the while the two wondering to what final purpose their lives have led (or been constructed for, keeping with Pynchon's paranoia).

Of course, at its heart, the novel is about two divergent personalities - the somber, thoughtful Mason, who spends much of the novel pondering life's meaning in the absense of his beloved, deceased Rebekah, and the cheerful, carefree Dixon who is content to while away his days chasing skirts and drowning himself in beer - who come, over the years, to possess a shared fondness despite their marked differences in attitude. These two are easily the most sympathetically drawn characters in Pynchon's body of work, in no small part because of the greater role they take on than the usual Pynchon protagonists, and perhaps also because of their foundation as historical figures, who thus seem more real even in Pynchon's exaggerated account of their lives. Their journey through the heart of America and their witness to the clash between scientific exploration and the intangible, ineffable natural beauty of the world (which, given Pynchon's own fondness for abstruse scientific minutiae, is meta as hell) provides us with the most vivid, three-dimensional Pynchon characters yet. The two don't act so much as react to the shaping influences of the country, and by extension we come to know them, just as they come to know each other, in greater depth.

And that's to say nothing of the aesthetic merits. Pynchon has always had an unparalleled way with words, and in adopting his style within the confines of 18th-century vernacular - replete with superfluous capitalization, apostrophes, dashes, and anachronistic diction - he manages to lose none of his charm, humor or insight. His allusive style provides many of the book's funniest moments - try as he might with all his fancy words, he can't completely skirt around the fact that his characters are discussing having sex with a goat. What's most impressive is how digestible it is - after a few dozen pages, deciphering it became second-nature. (Perhaps having GR and AtD as primers helped.) In fact, I was saddened as much for any reason to have finished Mason & Dixon because I know of no other novel written like this. Thank God then that it's Pynchon, whose books demand rereads like nobody else's.

Right now I'm 100 pages into a reread of Blood Meridian.

[Maclowery]

Finished Neil Gaiman's American Gods. He's enormously well-respected in the fantasy-lit community, and I'd somehow dodged his stuff for way too long. His most mainstream attraction is probably Coraline - if you saw the superb movie (one of my favorites ever), he wrote the original book.

Anyway. American Gods is superb. As a fantasy junkie, it was much more grounded in 'our world' as it were, than my usual fare. But tons of fun for me to read, with lots and lots of references to mythical creatures and old religions, etc. I feel like it's a terrific yarn for people that don't usually stray from real-world crime-dramas, non-fiction, etc, to try something out of bounds.

Pretty sure I already mentioned the theme - Gods and creatures exist through our beliefs, but are generally fettered with all of our mortal problems. Many of them existed in the Old World, and are thus waning now that they're in Americana, with all the neon and bells and whistles of technology. It's not as crazy as it sounds - it's almost more of a surreal travelogue of Americana. Try it out. It's my favorite read in months.

[heyzeus]

Before this thread goes too far into the Dad's porn preference abyss, I'd like to make a course correction.

I am reading Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49." Anyone else read it before? It's a fever dream. I'm 60 pages in and still can't get a firm grasp on time/space/plot/character in the book.

Yes, I loved it. I think it's a great vision into the grand tradition of the American conspiracy theory, and how our natural curiosity and skepticism and obsessive/compulsive behavior can grow into full on paranoia. By the end of that book I felt just as crazy as the protagonist (I forget her name), and wondered if the mailman was out to get me. I mean, he probably is.

I chose Crying of Lot 49 as an intro to Pynchon because I didn't have time to take on Gravity's Rainbow. But now I think it's time to do that.