what are you reading now?
Following Jon's list, this is this year's so far:
Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky
The Sugar Barons - Matthew Parris
A Wizard of Earthsea AGAIN
Isis: Inside the Army of Terror - Michael Weiss & Hassan Hassan
Yaksini Magic - Mike Magee
Corbynism - Matt Bolton & Fred Harry Pitts
The Loosening Skin - Aliya Whitely
Hello World - Hannah Fry
Hine's Varieties: Chaos & Beyond - Phil Hine
Semiosis - Sue Burke
Voodoo & the Art of Haiti - Sheldon Williams
Pit Sense & the State - David John Douglass
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
Haitian Vodou - Mambo Chita Tann
A People's Tragedy -Orlando Figes
The Miracle Club - Mitch Horowitz
Monstrous Cults - Stephen Sennitt
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sexual Revolution - Wilhelm Reich
The Skeleton's Holiday - Leonora Carrington
Still Here - Danielle See Walker
Maoism: A Global History - Julia Lovell
Ode to Charles Fourier - Andre Breton
Arcimboldo - Werner Kreigskorte
Torre David - Brillenbourg & Klemper
The Supermale - Alfred Jarry
Making the most of it - Bryan Magee
Shoot the Damn Dog - Sally Brampton
The Man who solved the market: Jim Simons& the quant revolution - Greg Zuclerberg
Guede a Mo: A Workbook - Houngan Ya Sezi Bo
The Big Short - Michael Lewis
Things Can Only Get Better - John O'Farrell
Reasons to stay alive - Matt Haig
A New World - Whitely Streiber
Fools Gold - Gillian Tett
My Last Supper - Jay Rayner
Grand - Words Over Windows
8 Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery - Babette Rothschild
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
Undead Uprising - John Cussans
3us - Carl Cattermole
Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky
The Sugar Barons - Matthew Parris
A Wizard of Earthsea AGAIN
Isis: Inside the Army of Terror - Michael Weiss & Hassan Hassan
Yaksini Magic - Mike Magee
Corbynism - Matt Bolton & Fred Harry Pitts
The Loosening Skin - Aliya Whitely
Hello World - Hannah Fry
Hine's Varieties: Chaos & Beyond - Phil Hine
Semiosis - Sue Burke
Voodoo & the Art of Haiti - Sheldon Williams
Pit Sense & the State - David John Douglass
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
Haitian Vodou - Mambo Chita Tann
A People's Tragedy -Orlando Figes
The Miracle Club - Mitch Horowitz
Monstrous Cults - Stephen Sennitt
The Hound of the Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sexual Revolution - Wilhelm Reich
The Skeleton's Holiday - Leonora Carrington
Still Here - Danielle See Walker
Maoism: A Global History - Julia Lovell
Ode to Charles Fourier - Andre Breton
Arcimboldo - Werner Kreigskorte
Torre David - Brillenbourg & Klemper
The Supermale - Alfred Jarry
Making the most of it - Bryan Magee
Shoot the Damn Dog - Sally Brampton
The Man who solved the market: Jim Simons& the quant revolution - Greg Zuclerberg
Guede a Mo: A Workbook - Houngan Ya Sezi Bo
The Big Short - Michael Lewis
Things Can Only Get Better - John O'Farrell
Reasons to stay alive - Matt Haig
A New World - Whitely Streiber
Fools Gold - Gillian Tett
My Last Supper - Jay Rayner
Grand - Words Over Windows
8 Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery - Babette Rothschild
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
Undead Uprising - John Cussans
3us - Carl Cattermole
jenks
thread death
I’d start with The Bluest Eye, just to build up to Beloved.
linebaugh
Well-known member
I havent read Beloved but Sula is much shorter and also great if you want a shorter start. Bluest Eye is good too but doesn't have the trademark fantastical elements
john eden
male pale and stale
@constant escape that’s a fine Cometbus selection! It’s quite difficult to get hold of his stuff in the UK. I really like the way he just kept banging out zines and got better at writing. The one about second hand book dealing in NYC is really amazing.
constant escape
winter withered, warm
Oh I actually only have a couple of em, I just had to pull that from Google images.
But yeah from the little taste I've had, I like the style. The one about NY comic artists really gave you a deep sense of that culture, seeing as all the artists are referencing each other, telling stories about each other, etc.
But yeah from the little taste I've had, I like the style. The one about NY comic artists really gave you a deep sense of that culture, seeing as all the artists are referencing each other, telling stories about each other, etc.
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Still a canny read.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Och, sure you can, laddie!
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Fair do's.
Do you think its been superceded at all? If so by what?
Amazing book. What struck me about it was how its written as an aid to therapy, and done so sensitively.
2020 reads:
Robert Dellar etc. - Seaton Point
Simon Morris - Watching The Wheels (impossible not to read this as a suicide note, as I did in late January)
Simon Morris - Sea Of Love
Simon Morris - Civil War
Philip Ziegler - The Black Death
Paul Barker (ed) - The Other Britain
Alfred Jarry - Ubu Roi (though catch the O.U. version with Donald Pleasance on YT! Ubu! Ubu!)
Alfred Jarry - Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll
Malcolm Gaskill - Witchfinders
Eliot - The Wasteland (plunged me into a spring/summer of recurring jinxes, many involving The Cocteau Twins)
Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
Matthew Ingram - Retreat
Marie Kondo - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (some interesting personal anecdotes from KonMari)
Thomas Disch - 334
PKD - Clans Of The Alphane Moon
PKD - Martian Time Slip
PKD - Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (paranoid police state where blacks are more or less eliminated - read this a week before you-know-what kicked off)
PKD - The Man Who Japed (and then someone destroys a statue)
Tom Vague - King Mob Echo (I CAN'T BREATHE)
PKD - The Unteleported Man (WTF?? Bolded for giving me a migraine)
PKD - Game Players Of Titan
PKD - The Galactic Pot Healer
PKD - A Maze Of Death
PKD - The Cosmic Puppets
PKD - Dr Bloodmoney
Jim Thompson - The Getaway
Jim Thompson - After Dark My Sweet
Steve Jones - Lonely Boy: Tales From A Sex Pistol (brilliant until he joins the Pistols, then ZZZ...)
James Herbert - The Rats (classic)
Ursula LeGuin - The Lathe Of Heaven
James Mason - Siege (don't cancel me, it was shit)
Shakespeare (?) - Pericles (lol, this is nuts)
Shakespeare - Cymbeline
Donald Trump - Art Of The Deal
Charles Simic - Hotel Insomnia
Baudelaire - Selected Poems (this is every year, TBF)
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (ditto)
Gordon Burn - Fullalove
Mick Norman - Angels From Hell
Camus - The Plague
Boris Vian - Froth On The Daydream
Fred/Judy Vermorel - Starlust
Muriel Spark - The Ballad Of Peckham Rye
Muriel Spark - The Public Image
Muriel Spark - The Comforters
Muriel Spark - The Girls Of Slender Means
Muriel Spark - Momento Mori
Lewis Shiner - Deserted Cities Of The Heart
Michael Moorcock - The Final Program
Alasdair Gray - 1982 Janine
Grim Humour 1983-1987 (UK zine comp with pointless additional waffle)
Jay Rubin - Making Sense Of Japanese
Cure Dolly - Unlocking Japanese
ABANDONED:
PKD/Ray Bradbury - The Ganymede Takeover (painfully 'wacky')
Michael Moorcock - Mother London (painfully dull? a real slog, and annoying characters)
John Lydon - Anger Is An Energy (piss-poor and full of easily checkable lies)
Some loser - Gold Dust Woman (shit AND smug Stevie Nicks biog, one of the worst things I've EVER read. 'Tango In The Night' became a daily fixture of my Lockdown 1.0)
Oh, and there was something by some philosothinker about a vampire squid, it was mentioned here in March? I can't remember what it was called but I downloaded it off Soulseek and it was great for 6 pages before it went all wooooh Deleuze and I couldn't follow a fucking sentence.
Robert Dellar etc. - Seaton Point
Simon Morris - Watching The Wheels (impossible not to read this as a suicide note, as I did in late January)
Simon Morris - Sea Of Love
Simon Morris - Civil War
Philip Ziegler - The Black Death
Paul Barker (ed) - The Other Britain
Alfred Jarry - Ubu Roi (though catch the O.U. version with Donald Pleasance on YT! Ubu! Ubu!)
Alfred Jarry - Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll
Malcolm Gaskill - Witchfinders
Eliot - The Wasteland (plunged me into a spring/summer of recurring jinxes, many involving The Cocteau Twins)
Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
Matthew Ingram - Retreat
Marie Kondo - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (some interesting personal anecdotes from KonMari)
Thomas Disch - 334
PKD - Clans Of The Alphane Moon
PKD - Martian Time Slip
PKD - Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (paranoid police state where blacks are more or less eliminated - read this a week before you-know-what kicked off)
PKD - The Man Who Japed (and then someone destroys a statue)
Tom Vague - King Mob Echo (I CAN'T BREATHE)
PKD - The Unteleported Man (WTF?? Bolded for giving me a migraine)
PKD - Game Players Of Titan
PKD - The Galactic Pot Healer
PKD - A Maze Of Death
PKD - The Cosmic Puppets
PKD - Dr Bloodmoney
Jim Thompson - The Getaway
Jim Thompson - After Dark My Sweet
Steve Jones - Lonely Boy: Tales From A Sex Pistol (brilliant until he joins the Pistols, then ZZZ...)
James Herbert - The Rats (classic)
Ursula LeGuin - The Lathe Of Heaven
James Mason - Siege (don't cancel me, it was shit)
Shakespeare (?) - Pericles (lol, this is nuts)
Shakespeare - Cymbeline
Donald Trump - Art Of The Deal
Charles Simic - Hotel Insomnia
Baudelaire - Selected Poems (this is every year, TBF)
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (ditto)
Gordon Burn - Fullalove
Mick Norman - Angels From Hell
Camus - The Plague
Boris Vian - Froth On The Daydream
Fred/Judy Vermorel - Starlust
Muriel Spark - The Ballad Of Peckham Rye
Muriel Spark - The Public Image
Muriel Spark - The Comforters
Muriel Spark - The Girls Of Slender Means
Muriel Spark - Momento Mori
Lewis Shiner - Deserted Cities Of The Heart
Michael Moorcock - The Final Program
Alasdair Gray - 1982 Janine
Grim Humour 1983-1987 (UK zine comp with pointless additional waffle)
Jay Rubin - Making Sense Of Japanese
Cure Dolly - Unlocking Japanese
ABANDONED:
PKD/Ray Bradbury - The Ganymede Takeover (painfully 'wacky')
Michael Moorcock - Mother London (painfully dull? a real slog, and annoying characters)
John Lydon - Anger Is An Energy (piss-poor and full of easily checkable lies)
Some loser - Gold Dust Woman (shit AND smug Stevie Nicks biog, one of the worst things I've EVER read. 'Tango In The Night' became a daily fixture of my Lockdown 1.0)
Oh, and there was something by some philosothinker about a vampire squid, it was mentioned here in March? I can't remember what it was called but I downloaded it off Soulseek and it was great for 6 pages before it went all wooooh Deleuze and I couldn't follow a fucking sentence.
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
possibly this, for similar reasons
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the …
A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of…
Yep! Read that one. On the shelf. It's a great synthesis. Idk - I felt van de Kolk was more obviously trying to make his name/career with that book in a way that Rothschild isn't. Seems very American in that way. I was tempted to make a consipiracy joke - "those Rothschilds get everywhere" but it's not quite coming.
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