What Book Did You Read Last Night??? (9 Viewers)

I used to work absolutely surrounded by cokeheads and I had no idea, I found out years later. I knew there were a few alchoholics but I figured they were just going to the bathroom to get the hell away from work for a bit (understandable). The innocence.
 
Rammstein continue to step up their long form video game.

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Fuck me, I didn't know they made one of my... emm, favourite? formative let's say, book into a film.

The last time I read this I promised myself I wasn't going to read it again. I think I got rid of the book. But now I'm wondering if I'll give it a quick read again, or just watch the film.


I finished Neil Gaimon's Neverland last night. It's... ok?

I mean, loads of people were banging on about him and someone was so worked up about him she gave me a book. It's fine. I guess. Harry Potter for older people.

Some of the characters were good, I enjoyed Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar.
 
Been thinking about going to see The Painted Bird but wondering exactly how traumatising it’s going to be.
 
I used to work absolutely surrounded by cokeheads and I had no idea, I found out years later. I knew there were a few alchoholics but I figured they were just going to the bathroom to get the hell away from work for a bit (understandable). The innocence.

It's rife in music, every 3arena size gig I work there's people doing coke, cunts
 
My reading has gone to pot lately, a combination of having a small child around the place (not a complaint, btw!) and general inertia. Picked out a handy easy read in Pete Paphides "Broken Greek" to get back into the swing of things and finished it there a while back. Really enjoyed it.
 
Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844-1850 by Abbas Amanat.
The Baha'i religion emerged from this movement, I got a bit curious about it after visiting a castle where the Bab himself (the leader of the movement) was imprisoned for a while. Basically, he claimed that he was the fulfillment of Islam the beginning of a new post-islamic era and that the Sharia was cancelled. Something like that anyway. There were hundreds of pages devoted different strands within orthodox and heterodox shia theology that explained where the Bab's ideas were coming from and how they lined up with expectations of some strands within Shia islam and also how the represented a complete break with Islam, all of which I forget already. It was hard work and a brief line or paragraph would have been enough about that stuff for me. After all that there was surprisingly little about the major uprisings and battles in which nearly all of the babis were slaughtered, only references here and there to various people eventually dying in these events or in the big purge after some of the babis tried to kill the king. Anyway, it took me ages to read, but it was interesting all the same.

Now I'm reading the first four Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin. I am enjoying it so far.
 
reading this

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as you'd expect its chock-full of stories about different things he's done and people he's met. Its a good read but there's serious name-dropping going on (sometimes, it seems, just for the sake of it), and some of the stories he includes are clearly only to justify the name-dropping.

I'm still in the Bob Dylan years, about half-way through the book. But overall, enjoying it.
 
Read this


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Guys, Biden ain't gonna save us.

I'm back to fiction now, life is too depressing otherwise.
 
FYI, the tl;dr solutions in that book are as follows:

1) Debt Cancellaton for the global south
2) Stop using GDP as measurement for how "good" a country is doing, says that lost its usefulness at some point in the 1970s
3) A shorter working week for all
4) Less intensive crop growing and better soil management (i.e. rewilding and allowing the more complex nature systems exist)
 
Recently finished a Robert Heinlein 'compilation', consisting of his "Future History" stories all collected and ordered chronologically.
Hadn't read Heinlein in years, so it was interesting to come back to him again. I'd read probably half of these stories before, and it was a good reminder of how drastically Heinlein's opinions of things could change in a short space of time, even how contradictory some of his opinions could be. One minute he's full on libertarian 'I should be allowed to do whatever I want on my farm', the next minute he's pure 'well you have to be able to tell people how not to be stupid after all'.
The other thing that's pretty clear is that Heinlein really was generally a lot better at the 'young adult' type stories he wrote than he was at the more serious 'adult' ones. The two sort of merge as this story collection goes along, it's kind of like he figured out his true voice wasn't either or but rather a mixture of the two.

Anyway good book, also very amusing to compare his 'predictions' with the actual development of technology, but he actually did pretty good in some ways, and also there's the odd thing he came up with that he explains and you kind of go "Like why haven't we made some shit like that already??".
Heinlein was a good writer, even if he was a bit of a mentalist at times, oh and he couldn't write women for shit usually, very of his time really. This compendium has some good stories and shit but the best Heinlein is still The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by a mile.
 
A Season in Carcosa. Anthology of short horror stories inspired by Robert W Chambers influential weird fiction collection The King in Yellow. Some good stuff, some self indulgent muck.
I tend to avoid any stories that try to build on other author’s worlds (Carcosa, Cthulhu, etc.) as generally it is a disappointment. Usual problems: Poor imagination so need to hijack someone else’s better ideas; a need to overexplain things that were left unexplained for a reason; merging unrelated things from the same universe in some sort of battle royale type situation.

There is some great stuff that builds on other mythoses (like Lovecraft himself building on Chambers) - generally it’s an author who is good to begin with. For example I really liked Alan Moore’s Neonomicon/Providence comics as he not only really got the original weird fiction ideas but knew how to spin them in a way that wasn’t utterly cliched or banal.
 
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its a short little Spanish novel that I was supposed to read in a spanish course, but the course ended up getting cancelled, so just reading it anyway. Its really good. I'll let you know in a while if I can figure out what its about. The title translates as 'A Year Without Summer'. My spanish teacher figured it was apt for the year thats in it.
 
reading this

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as you'd expect its chock-full of stories about different things he's done and people he's met. Its a good read but there's serious name-dropping going on (sometimes, it seems, just for the sake of it), and some of the stories he includes are clearly only to justify the name-dropping.

I'm still in the Bob Dylan years, about half-way through the book. But overall, enjoying it.

this was good too, but got a little wearisome by the end. It makes me want to listen to the hell out of The Band, though.

Its amazing how these music autobiographies often make it sound like everything came so easy to bands, when I'm sure that can't have actually been the case.
 

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