As I Lay Dying
Psh...not impressed.

great book, got taken away from me last summer, but im getting even at last



fucking tiny picture. it says: "Beyond Thinking: A Guide to Zen Meditation"

also:

(another tiny picture)

karnak café, by naguib mahfouz. i got derailed from this one last december but just restarted. i'm brushing up on egyptian history so i can get what the fuck he's talking about (thanks, wikipedia).

and finally:



oh yeah baby. vol 1 of the collected gilbert hernandez stories from love and rockets. he's like, the garcia marquez of comix, with a gringo touch.

are you really into meditation? if so, kudos to you, man.

meditation is so simple its hard.

I don't think I've ever hated reading a book as much as I did that one. Utter torture. I feel your pain.

The problem with Jane Austen is that you have to have a vagina to like her writing.

Or a prick of a teacher insisting you read it.

But they can't force you to like it though, can they?

Really? Sad.

Yeah, I finished it tonight. His whole style in that book just rubbed me the wrong way. I had to stop reading for about 30 minutes after the half-page about sleep and being and not being. It just made zero sense to me.

Oh I don't read Faulkner for sense. Elaborate southern grotesque with a little bit of mind reading is all I care for.

It's like Lovecraft writing an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies.

I like things to at least make a little sense and overall this book did. Just some moments I had to seriously reread entire pages to see what he was getting it. I didn't have to do that with Ulysses and it made me feel weird. Oh well.

Up next for reading:
continue Trainspotting
start Fellowship of the Ring (for a class) and Perks of Being A Wallflower and after finishing that, American Psycho.

I really <3 my English teacher. She's one of two English teachers in my last 4 years in school who have actually been passionate about the subject, and have really been a great friend to all her students, as well as a great teacher who really has helped us improve our command of the language.

The other AP Lit teacher teaches a lot of cool, more obscure stuff (Equus, Lysistrata) and a few great ones (Importance of Being Earnest), but never collects work, grades work, etc. That's cool for a lot of people, and sometimes I wish I was in his class for the ease, but I still really like my teacher because she actually is challenging and the pay off is obvious.

after a long hiatus, I finally picked up On Stranger Tides last night, perhaps I'll read a bit more after work this morning

i try.

yeah, it's hard as fuck.

Okay, bookies. I'm going to buy a copy of On The Road next week and I want to know if I should get the standard published copy or the "original scroll" edition?

I read this tonight and really enjoyed it. It's kind of a strange, eerie childern's bedtime story for adults...I guess that's the best way to put it. I cannot wait to see the movie.

The "original scroll" is only useful if you give a fuck about Kerouac. If you give a fuck about the actual book, get the real thing. It's like buying the version of the Waste Land that's all hand-written and Ezra-edited--it's cool if you're super into Eliot, but only if you're super interested in him. It was edited for a reason.

I.

Wish I'd taken a picture of this before it was painted over (ya need ta see it, to fully appreciate it) but there was this graffitti on a wall I'd always see on the way to work on the train that said:

"If you close your eyes, the cars almost sounds like faraway ocean waves"

To which someone drew an arrow pointing to this heady musing and replied thus:

"I fucked your mum last night".

So stupid that I had to laugh...

II.

If we're talking books though, then the last book I read was something I found at a bus stop.....



I came away thinking this is like a female version of William Burroughs "Junky".
She was one strung out woman....

1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die

The standard, published copy. The novel's editing was justifiable - the scroll edition has no breaks and is littered with bad grammer (I don't mean that in a pedantic way - I mean it's confusing enough as to be unreadable). Without the editing, it's too self-indulgent as to be worth the bother of finding the good bits.

The only good thing about it is he uses the real names and is a bit more open about a few of them having sex with each other. Not that it makes a difference if you're not interested in the beats themselves.

I've been reading 101 Reykjavik. I like it, really reminds me of Martin Amis (Success, Money-era): the prose has a beat-like rhythm, everything is refracted through a knowledge of low pop.culture, lots of philosphical analogies between people/things and what brands, TV shows, groups, they represent - should be annoyingly hip but isn't somehow.