I'm a big fan of the Utopia/Dystopia genre. I would recommend a book called This Perfect Day by Ira Levin, if you can track it down.
At the moment I'm reading Philosophy in the Boudoir by the Marquis de Sade. Interesting how it pre-dates so many thematic aspects of transgressive media and even mainstream pornography in general.
In my book queue are a few Tennessee Williams plays to re-read. I wish I had more time to read something that isn't educational theory and media studies textbooks
I agree with you regarding the Poe and Doyle comparison. I think that Poe writes in a beautiful and poetic manner, and his tales are tight. I love his gothic sense of 'the other' and reading one of his stories is very much like hearing music from the 80s era of The Fall. Knotty and mysterious, but endlessly compelling.
To Warp-Rattler:
It’s a shame about the potential difficulties presented by further release of those novels. I’d kill for a 4 novel compilation.
As for Conrad, I find myself appreciating his supposed intentions but find further distancing difficult. I try not to be overly sensitive when it comes to art as I accept that horrifying people are capable of producing the most wonderful art. Just look at Wagner.
To Engineer:
One of my favourite authors by far, I would highly recommend A Scanner Darkly and Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich as further reading. His paranoia is addictive.
Galactic Pot Healer is a lesser-known but still excellent Dick novel which I find to be terribly underrated. I second Scanner, and will see you and raise you one Man in the High Castle as well, for being very unsettling.
Also, DADoES?/Blade Runner is one of the few book/movie combos where the two are completely different, but still excellent in their own way. Can't say that for many adaptations.
Dick's short stories are also very good (IMO more accessible than the novels) and have been collected in 5 or 6 volumes.
Messing about with Valis right now, but other books got in the way.
Randorama wrote:ban CMoon for being a closet Jerry Falwell cockmonster/Ann Coulter fan, Nijska a bronie (ack! The horror!), and Ed Oscuro being unable to post 100-word arguments without writing 3-pages posts.
Eugenics: you know it's right!
CMoon wrote:Dick's short stories are also very good (IMO more accessible than the novels) and have been collected in 5 or 6 volumes.
Over the years i've been [very] slowly working my way through all his short stories, hopefully i'll finish them all before i kick the bucket. I've read 34/121. Great stuff, and nice for short attention spans - i have trouble getting through entire books anymore.
I'm really struggling with Stapledon's 'Star Maker'. It's just so dry! A shame really as the premise and intellectual content is brilliant.
I have a few books queued up, notably something by Gogol, Gulliver's Travels, three unread PK Dick novels and a few non-fiction music and space travel books. Not sure where to start.
I'm reading Chapel of Extreme Experience and a collection of James M. Cain novels. I'm currently on the Postman Always Rings Twice, to be followed by Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce. I've got Dashiell Hammet and Mickey Spillane collections on the way too. I'm glad to be done with my grad classes because now I can read some stuff for fun.
Chapel of Extreme Experience is pretty interesting and a quick easy read. It's a short history of stroboscopic light and its use by psychiatrists/psychologists and artists and writers to induce hallucinations similar to the ones induced by drugs like LSD and psilocybin. If you've never heard of this before, here's how it works. A person sits with their eyes closed facing a light source, either a strobe light or a static light behind a wheel with holes cut in it, and at certain frequencies a person will begin to perceive kaleidoscopic images and sometimes full blown scene hallucinations and time distortion. This will also potentiate the effects of psychedelic drugs like mushrooms. One of the theories is that as the flashing light replicates the frequency of certain brainwaves it kinda short circuits the scanning mechanism of the brain and the hallucinations are the result. This can also happen with the eyes open as well, as people have reported having flicker induced visions, hallucinations, and trance-like states during ordinary activities, for example, riding a bike through a forest.
Found the ammusingly titled Portable Poe which has a bunch of his stories that I haven't read, some critical readings and some correspondance. Nice collection in the same series as Portable Marx which I've spent a lot of time with. I will be tracking down more Viking Portable Series books for sure.
Also reading a book about bonsai to try and help me prolongue the life of a beautiful Chinese Elm.
Life of Pi is on my sidetable right now. I think someone in this thread recommended it. Got into the second part last night, going well so far but didn't know it was so heavy on religion. Shouldn't be long before I'm through it, then it's onto Vinelands, then Eyeless in Gaza once it gets here.
Finished the Chapel of Extreme Experience last night and had a chuckle about the closing of the book. The world's largest, most wide spread experience with flicker? A tuesday night in 1997 in Japan when people reported going into trance-like states, altered vision, shortness of breath, fainting and seizures during an episode of Pokemon.
Just finished Stephen King's 'Under The Dome', wasn't bad. Reading his last collection of short stories at the moment, 'Just After Sunset', and loving it. There's something about his shorts that I've always ejoyed, kooky, odd, often silly, sometimes spooky, but always entertaining, and isn't that the point?
I'm about to start Mick Ronson's (Bowie's Spiders From Mars-era guiarist) bio, which should be interesting.
n0rtygames wrote:[The wife] once asked me "whats a shoryuken?" so I gave her a real life demonstration. Except she was too close on the spin. So I actually SRK'd her. With full vocalisation too...
I'm reading 'Taken by Storm, The Album Art of Storm Thorgerson' a brilliant book about brilliant album covers and '50 great curries of India' by Camellia Panjabi. I have recently finished an inspiring autobiography by Jackie Stewart called 'Winning is not enough.' He talks about his battle to overcome the label of 'being thick' throughout his life, to discover later (when a millionaire) that he suffered from dyslexia.
Which version of Journey to the West? Waley's version (Monkey) is cheap, widely available, and actually an easy read. I can't imagine readying the whole thing (Journey to the West)--though I've had friends who have done that.
I'm slowly going through two non-fiction books right now: the Sun Ra Space is the Place biography and A Short History of Nearly Everything. The latter is an easy read but I've been reading it only at work, while the former is surprisingly arduous to burrow through but fascinating anyway. The whole business with Sun Ra has had me thinking of the Afro-futurist movement so I ordered up some Delany. It will be good to read some actual science fiction, plus I've heard Delany is a writer, not a word hack like so many other sci fi authors.
Don't know if it counts but I completely annihilated the Walking Dead compendium in about a week. Felt pretty wrong reading it so fast since I was probably reading a year's worth of comics every day.
Randorama wrote:ban CMoon for being a closet Jerry Falwell cockmonster/Ann Coulter fan, Nijska a bronie (ack! The horror!), and Ed Oscuro being unable to post 100-word arguments without writing 3-pages posts.
Eugenics: you know it's right!
CMoon wrote:Which version of Journey to the West? Waley's version (Monkey) is cheap, widely available, and actually an easy read. I can't imagine readying the whole thing (Journey to the West)--though I've had friends who have done that.
I'm slowly going through two non-fiction books right now: the Sun Ra Space is the Place biography and A Short History of Nearly Everything. The latter is an easy read but I've been reading it only at work, while the former is surprisingly arduous to burrow through but fascinating anyway. The whole business with Sun Ra has had me thinking of the Afro-futurist movement so I ordered up some Delany. It will be good to read some actual science fiction, plus I've heard Delany is a writer, not a word hack like so many other sci fi authors.
Don't know if it counts but I completely annihilated the Walking Dead compendium in about a week. Felt pretty wrong reading it so fast since I was probably reading a year's worth of comics every day.
Haha yeah I hear you there! I read the "100 bullets" series in like two or three days a few months back. Been reading "Asterios Polyp" lately and I can say it has the most intriguing artwork of any graphic novel I have ever seen.