What are you reading right now?

[Felstaff]

I enjoyed Catch-22, then made the mistake of watching the film, then made the mistake of not reading Closing Time; an error I'm yet to rectify. I'm not sure what state of mind I was in at the time, but at some point in university I visited Liverpool, got drunk, and convinced myself I was Milo and I was running a syndicate where, instead of selling 7¢ eggs at 5¢ and somehow making a profit, I was selling drugs on campus for cheaper than I was acquiring them, yet turning a profit. Scared the hell out of my girlfriend at the time, who told me all about it the next day. I don't remember the event at all, but apparently I was still trying to explain to her how I managed to make a profit for a good fifteen minutes after she left the room and went to bed.

[Kaharz]

I enjoyed Catch-22, then made the mistake of watching the film, then made the mistake of not reading Closing Time

I just put the movie in my streaming queue, is it that bad? I was already a bit suspicious of how well the book would translate into a movie. I haven't read Closing Time yet either, keep forgetting about. I've read Catch-22 four times or so now.

I've currently halfway through Catch 22. It seems to wander around without direction plot wise, but I'm loving the humour.

The plot is somewhat background to the characters and setting and takes a while to actually emerge, but there is one and you eventually see it.

[Lethal Interjection]

On the same general front, I watched the film adaption of Slaughterhouse 5. Didn't expect much, and that's what I got.

That said I've heard that Guillermo Del Toro wants to direct a Slaughterhouse 5 adaption, with Charlie Kaufman writing. That one could get my hopes up, in the unlikely chance it happens.

[Liriodendron_fagotti]

On the same general front, I watched the film adaption of Slaughterhouse 5. Didn't expect much, and that's what I got.

That said I've heard that Guillermo Del Toro wants to direct a Slaughterhouse 5 adaption, with Charlie Kaufman writing. That one could get my hopes up, in the unlikely chance it happens.

Really? You didn't like it? Vonnegut himself loved it. For when it was made, I think it was a pretty good adaptation.

Catch-22 I loved. The sequel I've heard is not as good. Haven't read anything else by Heller, I don't think. Maybe one or two things, but I can't recall (which sort of speaks to them, if I have).

[Liriodendron_fagotti]

I've been on a big sci-fi run. Stranger in a Strange Land, Neuromancer, The Forever War, and just finished Souls in the Great Machine. Having a map of Australia in front of me for the last one would have helped a lot. I was having to guess roughly where things were pretty often. Really excellent though and I'm looking forward to the next two in the trilogy

[Kaharz]

Recently finished Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks. It is was fairly entertaining, more for the people he met and how they reacted to him hitchhiking around Ireland with a minfridge on a bet than for Hawks himself, but he wrote fairly humorously.

Just started Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy yesterday and I am about a third of the way through. It is very good. I usually don't go for rambling adjective laden prose, but he does a good job with it. It flows very well and adds to the feel of the whole instead of just seeming like he really wanted to use his new thesaurus and show off how smart he was. I was told it was even more wretched than The Road and I'm not really getting that yet. Although Blood Meridian is way more violent and at least as bleak, the characters, setting and writing make the violence and bleakness almost mundane. Maybe that is why people find it so much more depressing. I've also never had to look up so many words when reading a book in my life. Most of it is fairly specialized terms, like apishamore, which is a saddle blanket usually made of buffalo hide. No real reason for me to know that one. It is nice that I very occasionally don't have to use a translator for the Spanish parts, but I don't think I've known any full sentences that were more than three or four words.

[Felstaff]

Holy crap, Will Self's Umbrella was a big ask. It's not quite to James Joyce levels of density, but goddamn. No chapters, few paragraph breaks, 400 pages of dense stream-of-consciousness, and no indication as to which character/decade we're currently situated within the mind of... it's a tough old slog. I was a good 100 pages in before I realised that the character's perspective, or the decade, could change at any point, mostly mid-sentence.

i.e. we join one of the protagonists, doctor Busner, at several points in his life. There's no indication which period we're talking about (1971 [main era] or 2010 [current reminiscing]) save the odd mention of a context-specific object (e.g. a British Leyland car drives past, or the Kinks' Ape Man is playing from a radio in another building. There's no mention of the car or the radio, just the way these events affect the thought process of the character we're currently inhabiting. In this case, the lyrics to the song interrupt and intermingle with his memory recall, and the car backfires causing him to think about the current state of the car industry in Britain... but as there's no direct mention of the action, you simply have to infer that that is what happened to make them think that way.

Yet you do sort of get used to it, and end up quite enjoying recognising the sudden shifts from one character to the next. You train your eye to recognise these invisible chapter divisions, and the story is so loaded with cultural references from 1900 - 2010, it's amazing that one man can write so self-assuredly about all of them. I was happy to recognise a mention of Gus Elen, as my grandad used to sing 'Alf a Pint of Ale to me, and a casual mention of Ypres as 'Wipers', which I remember from a whole bunch of WWI literature, but there must have been hundreds that went straight over my head, particularly the 70s political ones, and the 1910s cultural ones. For instance, one sentence quotes an anti-suffrage politician in 1912 (I had to google it), and the very next is a black London vernacular outburst from a Citroën Saxo in 2010, with no markers to let you know... you just have to work it out based on your knowledge of early 20th century political quotes, and the modern vernacular of young black Londoners.

Storywise, it's rather interesting. Basically a fictional version of Oliver Sach's Awakenings, it focuses on the encephalitis lethargica epidemic that came about around the time of the larger 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic. The story jumps between one protagonist Audrey De'Ath (or Death, or Deeth, or Dearth, as her name gets changed over the years via misspellings thanks to the inefficiency of the bureaucracy of the mental institution in which she has been interred for over fifty years), and doctor Zachary Busner, who provides the revolutionary L-DOPA treatment, which awakens the "enkie" patients of Friern Barnet Mental Institution (formerly Colney Hatch). We discover much of Audrey's past, from her time as a suffragist, her engagement to her shocialisht lover (who hash a shpeech impediment), her time spent in a munitions factory during World War I, her two wildly different brothers Stanley and Albert, her childhood growing up in the rundown Pimlico area of London. We also discover much about Busner's past, from his time as a young doctor, his affairs, his divorce, his children (who he barely mentions until the last pages, I think), and his discovery in 1971 that sleepy-sickness patients can be 'awakened' from their comatose time-capsules with fancy wonder-drug L-DOPA. We also follow Audrey's brother Stan, who becomes a soldier in World War I, and becomes a tragic casualty of a dud bomb which explodes near him before they fire it. There's a wonderful surreal (")chapter(") where he finds himself under Flanders Fields in a multicultural commune, where everyone is naked, and people of all races and creeds (including Germans!) live harmoniously in a subterranean lifestyle below the madness of trench warfare that is happening directly above them.

I recommend it. It's a challenge, and it took me like 2 months to slog through, so airport reading it ain't. Plus Will Self is a brilliant writer, even if this isn't a brilliant book.

[Liriodendron_fagotti]

I only read the first and last sentences of that. Might read it.

Just started Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It's good so far. First John le Carré that I've read (started to read). The edition that I have uses a font where the "e" is barely differentiated from "c" which is a little distracting whenever I start reading before I get used to it.

[Felstaff]

Through the Language Glass is, up to the point I am at (around page 100), a nice and Germanically witty little treatise on the evolution of language theory as it relates to colour.

Things I have learned from this book (so far): most documented cultures introduce colour into their lexicons in a certain order: black and white, then red (and warm earthy colours) then green/blue (and cooler, neutral colours). There are exceptions, but for the most part that is how each language evolves. Homer's Odyssey, for instance, barely uses colour at all, and those that are used seem weird to us ("wine-dark sea", "green honey", and no mention of blue! despite it being the colour of sea and sky... quite common landscapes in the Odyssey, to be sure). Initial theorists, including Prime Minister Gladstone, concluded that the ancient Greeks were colourblind, and perception of colour evolved according to Darwin's model, but at a much quicker rate than most genetic mutations. This was thrown out easily enough by early C.19th anthropologists, but it raised questions; why is blue one of the last colours to be added to most languages? THRILLING STUFF.

I've also just started reading William Boyd's Solo, one of the latest big-name James Bond novels. The last 007 I read was Sebastian Faulk's Devil May Care. I have always viewed Bond literature as rather throwaway stuff; enjoyably forgettable, like most of the movies, as Fleming never had the nuance, cleverness, or grit of le Carré's spy novels, so it makes for great airport reading. I'm enjoying it; it's music to watch girls go by compared to the avant-garde field recordings of Umbrella.

[Liriodendron_fagotti]

I finished TTSS. Really enjoyable. Even though I thought I'd figured out who Gerald was, it still kept me on edge and very entertained. When Smiley thinks at the end how all the top brass had inwardly known the truth, it really matches what the reader him or herself is feeling, at least for me. It was the way that le Carré/Smiley built up Bill into this mythical figure that it couldn't be anyone but him. But even when he was about to be uncovered the book was engaging. I loved the Jim & Roach side bit. I'd been comparing le Carré to Tom Clancy, but Fleming is a better match. With le Carré you feel like the story could really happen, which is an excellent quality in spy novels.

The second book in the Greatwinter Trilogy has been hard to find. Out of print, and I'd have to order it from the US or UK it looks like. Can't decide if I want to read more le Carré or pick up some le Guin at a nearby used bookshop.


The language book sounds interesting. Maybe because the sky/water are blue, they never felt the need to label them with a colour - they just were.

[Apocalyptus]

Just finished Paradise Lost. I found it a bit of a slog in parts, especially with all the 'God made man smarter than woman, and so if women don't obey their husbands then everyone gets drawn into temptation and sinful behaviour' being pushed pretty hard towards the end of the book. I did however like the stuff from the point of view of Satan and the fallen angels and the descriptions of the war in heaven and the decision by 'the fallen' to go take over Earth.

Now I'm starting Moth Smoke which is by Mohsin Hamid, who also wrote The Reluctant Fundamentalist. So far it seems to be the story of a banker in Pakistan's fall into dissolution, drug use and crime while he falls in love with his best friend's wife. It's pretty enjoyable so far, and the description of parts of Pakistani society is pretty interesting.
After this I think I'll either read The King in Yellow or Doctor Sleep.

[Edminster]

The funniest court documents I've read in a long time:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210845161/SEC-vs-pirateat40-1
http://www.scribd.com/doc/210845205/SEC-vs-pirateat40-2

They're from the Bitcoin Ponzi case against Pirateat40, which I mentioned a while ago in that one Skype chat. In the deposition, it's learned that rather than losing the proceeds to another ponzi scheme entirely, he loaned the bulk of them out to a dude who promptly fucked right off with them. A representative example of the hilarity within:

[Kimra]

That's... not the funniest court transcript I've ever read. The last court transcript I read had the accused calling the judge Mickey Mouse and all sorts of hilarious insults. It was wonderful... and completely irrelevant out of context. *shares anyway... but not the transcript because I don't have it anymore*

[Kaharz]

I think the most hilarious part is where he went to a deposition with the SEC and did not bring legal counsel. He obviously needed it. "I'm just not going to read the subpoena and then admit to destroying evidence. I'm sure it will be okay."

I haven't been deposed yet. We have one counter-suit pending that might require I give a deposition, but probably not. I've been told I will be the main defense witness if it does make it to court though. I am very much hoping it does not make it to court. I did have to testify as an expert witness once in an administrative hearing. I wasn't supposed to be an expert witness. But after I was put on the stand, the lawyer for the state asked if I could be qualified and everyone agreed, including the contractor my client was suing even though he had no expert witness to dispute my statements. It was an annoying and unpleasant experience overall. The defendant's lawyer was terrible. He object to everything I said until the judge just started overruling him before he could even say why he was objecting. I got reprimanded by the judge at one point for answering the lawyer from the state before she finished speaking. I spent an hour and half on the stand to basically say, "The contract documents said there would be six to eight inches of stone under the driveway pavement and there was none." I'm not looking forward to the times in the future when I will have to do it. But I guess it is better than being the defendant.

[Kimra]

I found it! It's a real document my sister had to study during law school.

Edit: I should perhaps point out that he had refused and run off his representation multiple times in an attempt to delay his sentencing etc. He was not denied any sort of representation, he just threw it out.