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I put the first Dirk Gently book on my PSP, but it will probably suck since I got the 2nd last christmas and still haven't bothered reading past like chapter 4.

I'm writing an essay on The Clocks by Agatha Christie. The rough draft won't be due until sometime in early January, but I wanted to get a head start on my late start.

Revvy, have you by any chance read Love in the Time of Cholera?

No I have not, but it sounds interesting!

I had to read And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express and they were both awesome.

that's the best doujinshi i've ever seen

recently i started reading house of leaves, though so far i have only read the introduction it is very cool and weird so far

This Ella Minnow Pea book is pretty badass.


Book Description
Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet

so i'm up to part 7 of house of leaves and i read the whalestoe asylum letters in the appendix, which are weird as hell (they're the letters johnny truant's mother sent him after she was sent to the asylum after trying to do him in; she is totally "off one's cake"). i also read all that shit about echoes in part 5, for some reason.

also; the edition i have is the monochrome one so "house" is in grey rather than blue. does this affect reading a whole lot or is it just less colourful? PLS HALP

i also got the "palomar: the heartbreak soup stories" hardcover (by gilbert hernandez) with my christmas money, which is 520 pages' worth of love and rockets comics set in the mexican town of palomar, "where men are men and women need a sense of humour". i've read the first fifty pages so far, it's kickass and could probably kill you if it were used as a blunt weapon.

let's revive this thread too

i started reading catch-22 last month, got about 120 pages or so into it then stopped. it still has the bookmark in so i can pick it up again any time i want to, but i'm horribly undiligent when it comes to reading extended works for long periods. i'll get to finishing it sometime, honest! i like how it's written, it makes you want to read it aloud

oh also i finished house of leaves. it was good, pretentious and meandering as all hell but it did it well enough for me to read it through, so danielewski must have been doing something right.

also of course i'm still on a steady diet of funnybooks, but those aren't REAL books now are they. oh what the hell here's a quick list of my best recent reads

buddha by osamu tezuka, which is a totally cool and awesome biography of buddha, i've been waiting for this to come out in paperback since forever and now it has so i'm reading it.
skeleton key by andi watson, which is about a girl called tamsin who finds a strange key that can open doors to other worlds, meets a wacky japanese fox-spirit girl who accompanies her on her excellent adventures while they're persued by some jerks who want the key back/try to retrieve tamsin's school pal from said jerks. the first volume kind of sucks though, it's some of his earliest work- the later volumes give up on the plot for slice-of-life material, though the dimension-hopping is still present (which is good)
scott pilgrim and the infinite sadness, this FINALLY came out last month, oh god it is so good and you still should all read it, pretty much everyone here is this book's target audience

i have also been collecting the full-colour fist of the north star books lately. i have books 1-5, and 7, i am currently keeping an eye out for #6.

this list went on for longer than i was expecting! and i tried to keep it short! waah

i listened to a scanner darkly on audiobook it was great

you can pirate it

This summer I've read

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A Heinlein. A hippy martian comes to earth and ends up with his own cult.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick. A bounty hunter "retires" renegade andriods on the remains of dying earth.
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley. Babies are made in factories and everyone takes drugs. If you're different, you will probably die.
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown. Eww. No. Don't read this. It's not worth it.

nf

The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin. Whoa, I read for a couple hundred pages, but further evolution is required to completely grasp it.

Currently reading
The Tipping Point - Malcom Gladwell. Examines social epidemics and describes how they are caused. Very interesting. I guess I'll learn why stupid books like Da Vinci Code became so absurdly popular.

Brave New World was neat

You can buy Soma in the drug stores in River City Ransom

Zephyr wrote:The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown. Eww. No. Don't read this. It's not worth it.

Now you're saying this because you're a Mormon, right?

Zephyr wrote:Currently reading
The Tipping Point - Malcom Gladwell. Examines social epidemics and describes how they are caused. Very interesting. I guess I'll learn why stupid books like Da Vinci Code became so absurdly popular.

You should also read Freakonomics, which among other things has a different (and in my opinion more convincing) argument for the drop in new york crime than that presented in gladwell's book.