that’s awesome! thanks!

i was aware that utexas had the archives but didn’t know that they had put it all up online and free for the public. which is brilliant.

and fuck Charles Dickens. Praising Dickens for his writing skill in 2017 is like praising Stephen king for his writing skill in 2117. Dickens was a fucking mass-market writer, selling salami to the masses just like Stephen King.

Yeah they’re exactly the same. You nailed it. World wrong, you right (again).

I don't think people read Dickens now for his way with words, which is incredibly bloated at times, at least by today's standards, but for his creation of characters that seem to have near universal relevance, and for his social conscious. We can all play the game of dismissing a great writer on purely formal, medium specific grounds, but we dismiss a lot of great writers that way and end up celebrating a lot of mediocre ones in their place.

He had some great character portraits, which is what I liked about him. You may as well say Shakespeare and Dostoevski were hacks; they did "popular fiction for the masses", too

Exactly — though the social consciousness of his work has come under some scrutiny, I’m not about to dismiss it. It’s important to remember that Dickens was one of the most famous human beings in the world while he was writing, and he stil (often, at least) chose to focus his stories on the day-to-day lives of the British working class and ruined ex-aristocratic families, struggling with love and legacy and so on.

He’d be “woke” by today’s standards. But we can’t really evaluate Dickens on 2017 standards, because the literary world has been so flooded for so long with disciples and disciples of disiples that, like Shakespeare of the Beatles, his influence has been so vast that it makes his own work seem almost derivative. Just because he influenced essentially every Westwrn novelist to lift a pen.

And his character construction is masterful. His prose may feel quaint or “boring” at times, to some, with no perspective. But fuck that noise.

Yep yep.

Bashing the greats for their greatness is cool though. Bashing what’s universally acknowledged as brilliant is super punk rock because it’s *so* unexpected. Rage against the machine, and all that. #toocoolforquality

gonna re-re-re-re-re-watch RAN this weekend.

HURRAHH!!!

Such a good film. I think it's actually my favourite Kurosawa film.

Keeping on topic I'm about 1000 pages into War and Peace and I'm honestly loving it. Even the bits where he's waffling about why such-and-such a battle was lost start to grab me. It's annoying to be at a bit where Prince Andrei, or whoever, is having a dramatic scene and then the next chapter is an essay. However, just as you get into that chapter, he might go off to see what the Rostov family are getting up to.

I honestly love all the characters in it, ESPECIALLY Count Bolkonsky. They're all flawed characters (some more than others) but they all have even the smallest amount of redeeming factor. Except Pierre's wife. God, she's a fucking cunt.

This pretty much sums it up. I dunno, I've grown up with Dickens all my life so I've a soft spot for him.

Thing is, people have anything else to do in terms of entertainment. So having a book that may be bloated by today's standards was nothing. You could easily spend hours reading with no other distractions around.

Got this for Xman, looks like it's going to be great. One of my favorite periods of literature. America from POB to around 1880



https://us.macmillan.com/truthsragge...9780374534400/

its been cold and frigid the past week and I've been reading more...

The Bomb Maker - Thomas Perry. Well written thriller and I learned a lot about making bombs and deactivating them. Scary shit, really.

Two Kinds of Truth - Michael Connelly. the latest Harry Bosch novel, goes deep into the world of pill addicts and dealers, one of the best Bosch novels in awhile, and they're all good anyway.

Reilly:The First Man- Robin Bruce Lockhart. I've been fascinated by Sidney Reilly since I saw the miniseries on PBS back in the 80's. With the contemporary sophistication of intelligence agencies it is odd to read how highly he was regarded for what seems to be obvious, for instance, the best spies to recruit are going to be people of influence and power. You try to position people into those roles over time. While the series depicted Reilly's official death out in the woods by Stalin's goons, in this book,Bruce Lockhart's son shows tendencies and possibilities that Reilly never died and actually went to work for his home country, Russia. Much of Stalin's crew was not sophisticated and Stalin did need a few people of intelligence around to communicate with other people of intelligence.

The Looking Glass War - John Le Carre. 2018 will be my Le Carre year when I read the 20 novels of his I haven't read. Halfway through I can't really say what the book is about yet but I can't put it down.

Rob Instigator's TOP 5 BOOKS of 2017.




-In 2017 I managed to read and review 23 books for my blog RXTT's Intellectual Journey (https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/)

Of those, here are my top 5.




Hail! Hail! Rock N Roll - Chuck Berry (autobiography) http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...uck-berry.html




Black Is The New White - Paul Mooney (memoir/autobiography/comedy)

http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...e-and-his.html




Tycho & Kepler - Kitty Ferguson (science history)

http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/1...o-shining.html




A World Apart - Gustav Herling (Memoir about Russian Labor Camps)

http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...ag-prison.html




The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester (sci fi novel)

http://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2017/0...-for-ages.html

i started pk dick's VALIS again after hearing a felicia atkinson song with quotes from it, but then i switched over to radio free albemuth, an abandoned precursor to VALIS.

VALIS is way better. one of my fav books.

G R E A T fucking book.

Andrew Wilson, Blood Beneath the Skin

Just finished this bio of Alexander McQueen. Never the nicest man in the world but still, what a tragic story.

as a sculptor, I always admired A McQ's use of media. I put his stuff way way beyond "fashion". Do wish he would have stuck around, as I think he could have done a lot more

Yeah, he had a love/hate relationship with fashion and was apparently interested in moving into other areas of art. Although something I didn't realise until reading the book was that he'd been diagnosed with AIDS not that long before he killed himself. That's not the death sentence it once was, but still. I think his self-destructive personality would've got the better of him one way or another. To say he was a complex character is putting it mildly.

I've made it through the prologue of LotR: Fellowship of the Ring. :D

Just started 3rd book of the Vandermeer Area X trilogy. Not bad. Got em from my public library, so didn't (and wouldn't) buy em. :/

Still working on the Russia in Revolution book. Taking place about 100 years ago. Damn, people say there is no progress, you need to read something like this to see just how far we've come.