What are you reading

[RBN JHN]

I just picked up The Shards from the local library the other day, after being on the waiting list a few weeks. Will probably get started on it this weekend.

Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms were much too meta and postmodernist for me, interesting to see where this one goes.

I think you will like the Shards. Most better than the mentioned books by you. This is a more straight forward story. Enjoy the read

[Atrophist]

I think you will like the Shards. Most better than the mentioned books by you. This is a more straight forward story. Enjoy the read

Thanks mate :) I'll drop a quick review here later.

[tiny_tove]

animal factory by orwell. still valid

[Balor/SS1535]

Show Adult by Peter Sotos
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (I love her novels, and I am working my way through all of them.)
Inner Experience by Georges Bataille
Violence and the Sacred by René Girard (Fantastic and worth reading if you have not.)
Becoming Noise Music by Stephen Graham

Plus a few other academic monographs (on Heidegger and Walter Benjamin).

[Atrophist]

Finished BE Ellis's The Shards on the weekend. It took me a bit longer to finish it than I thought, the writing is deceptively straightforward but I kept having to go back and forth, because I constantly thought I had missed something.

Somehow this seems like the type of book he should have written maybe 20 years ago, if not further back. It does seem like drawing a line under his entire life, and career, and the stuff he has been writing about pretty much forever. It's also a bit longer than I think it should have been. The hints of Bret being the Trawler himself weren't too on the nose, imo. The whole doppelgänger thing with Mallory was a bit more interesting.

Anyway, even having said all the above, I really enjoyed this. It's wild to imagine that 16-17 year olds really live like this, or at least used to? Driving luxury cars, being able to buy anything they want, having straight and gay sex left right and center, going trough cocaine, weed, Valium, Quaaludes and tequila like they are air. Jeeez.

Looking forward to what he does next. Let's hope the next novel doesn't take 13 years.

[NedOik]

Lately alternating between...

'Rudyard Kipling – A Study in Literature and Political Ideas'. 1940. By Edward Shanks, whose 'People of the Ruins' is worth checking, dystopian tale of Marxism destroying the world.

Victoria Glendinning - 'A Suppressed Cry'. 1969. Diary of a Quaker girl who died at 22 after struggling to escape her "stifling" background.

Louis Marlow -'Seven Friends'. 1953. Interesting dude. Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, WS Maugham being amongst aforementioned 7.

[Commander15]

Gustave Le Bon - The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

[parantuja]

Just read Knut Hamsun's Hunger. It's comedic at times and his description of his mental and physical deterioration feels so accurate. It's a fun and quick read. The ending is a bit sudden and unsatisfactory though. Still recommend it.

[Wild Nature Acolyte]

Currently reading: The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. Relevant in many ways to the political and economic climate of the current times we live in.

[Vrenndel]

Finished Eumeswil by Ernst Jünger a couple days ago.
Currently around the last pages of The Gates of Janus, by Ian Brady.

[4xAM]

I read Dracula in anticipation for Nosferatu. The opening sequence was really suspenseful and chilling. I thought the parts with Renfield were a bit too long, but the infection process, the cat and mouse game with Dracula, the scenes with Dracula himself were all really engaging. It hasn't been dulled at all by the legacy its left.

I also read David Toop's Ocean of Sound. I liked the colorful descriptions of all the artists and the connections between them. It's a great overview of ambient music's predecessors. I just wish he had spent more time talking about the 80s/90s UK electronic music scene.

I'm reading The Box Man by Kobo Abe now. It's interesting. Surreal, wistful, funny.

Becoming Noise Music by Stephen Graham

This looks cool, I might read this next.

[Balor/SS1535]

I read Dracula in anticipation for Nosferatu. The opening sequence was really suspenseful and chilling. I thought the parts with Renfield were a bit too long, but the infection process, the cat and mouse game with Dracula, the scenes with Dracula himself were all really engaging. It hasn't been dulled at all by the legacy its left.

I also read David Toop's Ocean of Sound. I liked the colorful descriptions of all the artists and the connections between them. It's a great overview of ambient music's predecessors. I just wish he had spent more time talking about the 80s/90s UK electronic music scene.

I'm reading The Box Man by Kobo Abe now. It's interesting. Surreal, wistful, funny.

Becoming Noise Music by Stephen Graham

This looks cool, I might read this next.

The Graham book was just ok.  The introduction was really good, and some of the historical portions of the chapters are solid.  The book becomes pretty tedious, though, when he tries his "close listenings" of albums---which only serve to keep illustrating the main point of the book (that noise music fluctuates between the formlessness of noise and the form of music) and very little else.  Realistically, it should have been an extended essay with a few examples, not a full book.

Speaking of David Toop, though, how was the book?  I've had Sinister Resonance on my shelf for a while now since I discovered an excerpt of it in a omnibus on hauntology.

[Balor/SS1535]

In Graham's defense, though, I did prefer his approach to analyzing noise by actually listening to noise much more interesting than Hegarty's overly theoretical interpretations.