^ Wow. I almost never read graphic novels either but this got me very excited. I just jumped to my library's site to put a hold on it.

oh awesome! i am plowing through it and am about halfway done. a really great book so far and very informative about israel/palestine.

How have you got on with that? I've tried to read it a few times and never been able to finish it.

I can't remember how far I got. I tried a few times because I always felt it was a book I should like. I don't remember particularly disliking it or anything, just not being able to really stick with it. It's a book I always see in secondhand shops so I'm wondering if it's not a common problem.

I just finished The Virgin Suicides so its been a good transition into rereading American Gods. Eugenides is just such a mercilessly good writer, so fluid, so captivatingly bland and yet surreal to become as ordinarily out of the ordinary like a mushroom trip. Not overpowering like acid, not a subtle enlightenment like DMT, but the perfectly syncretic blend. Only Gabriel Garcia-Marquez does this better, and even he could take some lessons from the Virgin Suicides, though I just couldn't get into Middlesex even as superbly written as it was. There is a new one I'm lazily seeking..

Only Patrick Suskind speaks to me more deeply, and only Clive Barker lures me more. With American Gods, I enjoyed it the first time, but I think this second time and at this junction in my life I am appreciating it better. Lately I've been feeling evaporative, which I am starting to understand weirdly as a good thing, but its kind of a readjustment to be existentially evanescent. So I am getting this novel a bitter more intuitively then the first time through. I find it visual, subtle, coy. The motifs slowly unveil themselves but only so slightly as if being shy..

I'm finally reading "our band could be your life"

Great book, really enjoyed it. Except for the Mission of Burma chapter. That one was pretty boring.

Next week probably I'll find out what I'll be reading over the summer. I'm excited!

YES! I was stuck in this chapter :(

Dayum, I really never got into Michael Azerrad's writing style and found this book too...factual to interest me. It didn't really embody the feeling of the bands it talks about.

Opinions aside, I'm genuinely interested in why you liked it and what I could be missing

i am almost done with this. seriously though, it is one of the best books that i have read on the subject of colonialism/violence against women etc. it manages ina brilliant way to touch on almost every relevant subject, from physical sexual violence, violence against nature, forced sterilization, cultural violence in the form of cultural and spiritual appropriation, the prison industrial complex.
seriously, everyone should read this book.

Azerad is a terrible music writer, you nailed it. While gets the facts, his books read more so like newspaper articles and less like music biographies.

I only really remember the SY chapter. It was more about the personalities than the music but I did like the fact that it wasn't just the standard hero worship. It appeared fairly critical of what Azerad seemed to see as a quite cutthroat centre to the band. I found that quite interesting.

I'm sort of surprised at the Azerrad distaste here. I read both Our Band Could Be Your Life and Come As Your Are and found them both to be pretty enjoyable accounts. I always looked at both of them as neutral straight pieces. I dunno, The Perfect Pencil in the Butthole Surfers chapter cracks me up.

This is as opposed to someone like Derogatis, I always hated how he wrote.

Oh I just noticed the American Gods picture up there. I really enjoyed that book myself. I got reading The Sandman and that was a great trip. But even without the pretty pictures it was a good read. :)

La gaia scienza by Friedrich nietzche.

 

The phonograph stopped playing; the stack had run out.
"Like, I better flip the deck," one of the young hipsters said.
"No, man, don't play no more records," Red said.
"Yes, man."
"I don't want to listen to no more of them records!"
"All reet, all reet, Red, I only thought-"
"They're dragging me!" Red shouted.
"Yeah, yeah man." The companion touched the hipster's sleeve. "Like we better cut, Jim." The hipsters left.

I just finished this one through. I understood it much more clearly this time, perhaps I was in a more lucid mode or a more receptive mood. It seems to me that this is essentially a personification of grieving or finding faith. The gods in this novel are symbols of belief. Shadow is grieving his dead wife, and the meeting of these gods through out the story is a symbol of his searching for faith while grieving. Each of his relationships with the personified gods is really just symbolic of his trying to develop an understanding and relationship with them in his mind. The gods themselves are symbols of all the things humans believe in, tangibly and tangibly, forces, phenomena, technology, ideas, opinions, myths, etc etc. What believe become "gods" and in this novel these beliefs are just personified as the characters called gods. The old gods battle the new gods, the old ideas battle with the new ideas, all in the mind of Shadow for dominance, for influence, for a relationship. Laura, as a zombie, represents his inability to accept her loss. she carries on because he still believes in her, just as the gods carry on because of the last bits of belief which keep them going. She destroys several of the gods in this story to save Shadow, symbolizing how his grief for her is overpowering even the other gods, the other aspects of reality. Only she remains somewhat real to him, everything else is in flux. Each event, each idea, each force, becomes a new god which he interacts with. In the end he only wins the battle for his own mind when he accepts and embraces her death as concrete, and lets her go. Further, the struggle with the gods only ends when he also yields to fate, and accepts whatever comes in the flow. As he concludes, "the only thing I've really learned about dealing with gods is that if you make a deal, you keep it.. even if I tried to walk out of here, my feet would just bring me back." Since the gods in this novel are essentially just all the aspects of human reality and the human experience personified, then what Shadow is saying is that in the end, all humans can do is submit to the whims of reality. This is truth. A delightful novel now that I have really attached myself more so to it. The first time I read it through I enjoyed it, but I didn't find any kind of depth, but now, I think I get it :)

I finally got my hands on a copy of A Clash of Kings in the library, today.