Books - check them out

[??????]

im reading bolanos the Insufferable gaucho
its made up of short stories and some essays
still don't get why he's considered great
i hate how sex obsessed he is

[snoorkel]

i think it's because he wrote  a 800 page book and it had a cool cover/title

[ME##]

gonna read don quixote like any good white person soonish

[snoorkel]

gonna read don quixote like any good white person soonish

hispanic*

[ME##]

gonna read don quixote like any good white person soonish

hispanic*

the moorish ppl of spain considers themselves hwite

[snoorkel]

gonna read don quixote like any good white person soonish

hispanic*

the moorish ppl of spain considers themselves hwite

thats sfucked up

[The Hand That Fisted Everyone]

Been reading this book called full metal apache which is kind of like observations and essays about scifi in Japan and America and how that relate to and feed off each other

[The Hand That Fisted Everyone]

also got my library card today and read a book of poems called A Coney Island of the Mind. Author was Lawrence Felinghetti.

a lot of the poems are kind of garbage/i don't get poetry. Many of the poems are political, and touch on similar topics the Ginsburg addressed, and Ginsburg's poetry is better, but A Coney Island of the Mind is a great place to jump to if you enjoyed Howl.  I really enjoyed "I Am Waiting" and "Dog". The first section gets worse as you read it. The second section was written with the idea of jazz accompaniment playing while the text is read aloud. Most of the middle section of the book is great.  Third section is stuff from an earlier book and contains poems similar to the first section but they were more enjoyable.

I read the whole thing in the library. The poems have names but you only find them out in the index. Above the poems are just roman numerals, though i don't think there is a sequential order to the poems (like you have to read ix to understand x). Kind of wished i checked it out but oh well.

[snoorkel]

you read the whole book without even checking it out? freeloader

[The Hand That Fisted Everyone]

at least i was reading a book!!!!

[ME##]

at least i was reading a book!!!!

this

[Socks]

Started reading the Doors of Perception by Huxley after coming across my Brave New World paperback and realizing I hardly know anything about the author! Of course this is not true. As long as you have read something by someone, you know something of them.

So one of the opening pages explains in lovely style why we don't get each other. As Shakespeare said, expectation is the root of all heartache. So when you can't wait to show someone your most prized possession, can hardly understate a profound and private thought to the world, or profess an extreme and undying feeling for another and they just frown and stare blankly back at you, well, that feeling of being gutted, of something missing, or something lost, is unfortunately, the nature of our perceptions, which are as varied as the stars are numerous.

Perhaps I will try less to explain in vain why something is so important and of such significance to those blank staring faces. Might just be saving myself from shear and utter disappointment.

Anyhow, I have copied the relevant part here for your own perusal.

"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are
by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers
desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very
nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights,
fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We
can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation,
every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another
to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our
own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put
ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases
communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the
Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where
ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for
understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which
the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see
others as they see themselves."

[silvertone]

i always like the heaven and hell part of that book

[Samus Aran]

So…I’ve been really lazy about reading for like the past year. I’m going to try to fix that. I dug out books that were in my car and went to a used book store to get some more, as all my other books are still stored at home up north until we land a new apartment here in Minneapolis.

So with the ones from my car plus my new purchases, my current reading list for August/September is:

-The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut (currently reading)
-Invisible Monsters, by Chuck Palahniuk
-To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
-Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, by Tom Stoppard
-Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov
-Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
-The Penultimate Truth, by Philip K Dick
-The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
-Naked Lunch, by William S Burroughs
-Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut
-Armageddon in Retrospect, by Kurt Vonnegut
-Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
-Island, by Aldous Huxley
-The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne

top four are ones i already had with me, other ten are ones i bought today. some of these are things i always meant to read, some of them are ideas i got from boyagers. i looked for the valis books at this place, and didn't find them. also could not find pale fire. or a lot of other books boyagers suggested in various threads.

[TooB]

totally forgot that I was interested in reading I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream