I listened to an interview with Jonathan Franzen the other night. Talking about Freedom. I've not read anything by him but he sounds pretty good. Is Freedom a decent place to start?

I would highly recommend reading The Corrections first. He's worth checking out.

Cool. thanks. I'll definitely pick it up.

He was good friends with David Foster Wallace. Have you read Infinite Jest?

No, I haven't. I'm just coming out of a really long spell of not reading much fiction at all, so I'm trying to catch up with stuff. So I'm wide open for recommendations

Cool, cool. I've found myself getting back into fiction myself now that I've been sober for the past 6 months, ha!

Haha, yeah, totally. I think the last writer I got really into was Michel Houellebecq, which was a fair few years ago. He's excellent, though. I'd recommend anyone read Atomised and Platform

Will keep him in mind, thanks.

Islands in the Sky by Arthur C. Clarke

I have the edition in the bottom right corner.

tarot cards.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to ink. again.

Just finished rereading "Room Full of Mirrors". A fantastic, well researched, biography on Jimi Hendrix. Written by Charles Cross...would recommend it to anyone that might take even a slight interest in the subject matter.

Currently, (again...) rereading "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson + the Invention of the Blues". Another personal favorite. While covering much info. on Mr. Johnson, the book is not so much a biography as an attempt at tearing the mythology in early blues apart, and making the best possible sense of things (one of these "myths" in the minds of many uneducated blues fans is that Robert Johnson had some hand in inventing the blues...and all that rubbish about the blues being little more than early African American misery expressed through stringed instruments). Again, I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject matter.

"Scholars love to praise the 'pure' blues artists or the ones, like Robert Johnson, who died young + represent tragedy. It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy." - B.B. King

That's a great book. It's very much the antithesis to Greil Marcus' account which really is pure mystification. But I think Wood misunderstands that mystification around Robert Johnson. He did have an enormous hand in inventing the blues, not as a musical form so much as lending it a mystique. People like Marcus knew that the person they were writing about wasn't the 'real' Robert Johnson but in writing about him how they did they provided the blues with an aura that has been almost as influential as the music itself. There'd still have been The Rolling Stones had the myth surrounding Robert Johnson not been created, but I suspect they'd have never written 'Sympathy for the Devil' without it.

the last temptation, and an anthology of stuff from Rollerderby

I'm currently reading The Border Trilogy, by Cormac McCarthy. Just finished All the Pretty Horses. I love the tone and mood of the book.

Not that you were asking me but... I was quite disappointed with Freedom, but I wonder if perhaps some of what Franzen did was ironic (e.g. the name dropping, the earnest environmentalism, etc) or designed to make us conscious of how uncomfortable we get when things are treated earnestly as opposed to ironically. I'm not sure, I was quite confused after reading it, as it just left a completely different (kind of blank) impression compared with The Corrections.

And I didn't really care for the characters either.

No doubt, thanks for your thoughts.

I have like 20 pages left and I will prob. give it 3 stars on my library's site.

Patty's autobiography was really hard to get through and there was very little memorable dialogue. Shouldn't her autobiography been written with the tone and style of Patty? It was clearly Franzen....that was a major flaw for me and it just sucked.

My favorite moment of the book was prob. when Walter replies to Joey in a manic non-parental manner after being told that he is in some trouble, "Hey, so am I! So is everybody!"

"Moonchild" and "The Drug and Other Short Stories" by Aleister Crowley.
"King Lear" by Shakespeare, of course.

^ sounds compelling.