Rolling "Books Recently Read" Thread

[FoolofaTook]

what are your guyses fav psalms? this is mine. hella visceral imagery!

Psalm 137 1611 KJV (duh)

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

[The exploding boy]

*face psalm*

[FoolofaTook]

choke on a choad motherfucker

you got a problem with kjv, motherfucker, huh?

[FoolofaTook]

Super cool. A little beyond me, though, as most things are.



classic romantic fantasy/fairy tale. good stuff.

[FoolofaTook]

I didn't just read this but I thought the covered looked cool:

[FoolofaTook]

[D.]

Originally Posted by D.

To round out November, I've got these in the pipeline:

Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs
Ian McEwan - The Cement Garden
John Nichols - American Blood

I wasn't feeling A Gate At the Stairs and wasn't in the mood for American Blood; I've been more in the mood for short stuff.

The Cement Garden was so haunting. Highly recommended.

The new Gloria Steinem is decent; then I burned through a quick, Thriller-centric MJ bio, followed by two equally weird books (The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli & Threats by Amelia Gray) and Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company (which was really actually great).

Currently on a small book of short stories called The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas by David Rothbart before I close out the year with The Nuclear Age by Tim O'Brien and Wandering: Notes and Sketches by Herman Hesse.

[D.]

Sneaked in The Neon Bible and maaaan, what a fantastic book. Dude wrote it at 15 years of age like how the fuck... I was watching this new show called South Park and drawing terrible comic books when i was 15 Jfc

[redbreegull]

just re-read The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. It's a short story (just 12,000 words according to wikipedia). It was written as a reaction H.G. Wells, who Forster felt was too optimistic about the implications of technological dependence. Truly a great work of science fiction and a precursor to many, many later stories. It's very fascinating how accurate some of Forster's visions seem today, more than a century after he put them to paper. Highly recommend. Lots of very poetic, beautifully written passages, and Forster has a way of making you get all worked up about social issues.

even more interesting will be how completely different this story is from his other works namely Passage to India and Howards End if anyone has read those.

[D.]

I have Passage to India but haven't read it yet. I'll look up that short story though

[FoolofaTook]

Passage to India blew my mind.

Pretty cool stuff.

[FoolofaTook]

there's this one chapter (the pivotal one) in which the main character supposedly assaults this one lady. it is quite senescent.

[FoolofaTook]

its always the best, most cum inducing pages that get glued together with gushing fountains of steaming semen.

[FoolofaTook]

[buzzard]

Bye and bye they passed a stand of roadside cholla against which small birds had been driven by the storm and there impaled. Gray nameless birds espaliered in attitudes of stillborn flight or hanging loosely in their feathers. Some of them were still alive and they twisted on their spines as the horses passed and raised their heads and cried out but the horsemen rode on.

[FoolofaTook]

"And when the light of some little distant city makes a slight flush upon the edge of the sky, and the happy golden windows of the homesteads stare gleaming into the dark, then the old and holy figure of Romance, cloaked even to the face, comes down out of hilly woodlands and bids dark shadows to rise and dance, and sends the forest creatures forth to prowl, and lights in a moment in her bower of grass the little glowworm's lamp, and brings a hush down over the grey lands, and out of it rises faintly on far-off hills the voice of a lute."

-Dunsany

[FoolofaTook]

And the season of the orchard-bloom appeared. One night the King of Arizim called his daughter forth on his outer balcony of marble. And the moon was rising huge and round and holy over dark woods, and all the fountains were singing to the night. And the moon touched the marble palace gables, and they glowed in the land. And the moon touched the heads of all the fountains, and the grey columns broke into fairy lights. And the moon left the dark ways of the forest and lit the whole white palace and its fountains and shone on the forehead of the Princess, and the palace of Arizim glowed afar, and the fountains became columns of gleaming jewels and song. And the moon made a music at its rising, but it fell a little short of mortal ears. And Hilnaric stood there wondering, clad in white, with the moonlight shining on her forehead; and watching her from the shadows on the terrace stood the kings of Mondath and Toldees. They said:

"She is more beautiful than the moonrise." And on another day the King of Arizim bade his daughter forth at dawn, and they stood again upon the balcony. And the sun came up over a world of orchards, and the sea-mists went back over Poltarnees to the Sea; little wild voices arose in all the thickets, the voices of the fountains began to die, and the song arose, in all the marble temples, of the birds that are sacred to the Sea. And Hilnaric stood there, still glowing with dreams of heaven.

"She is more beautiful," said the kings, "than morning."

[FoolofaTook]

[Mooney]

finished three books since christmas:

vonnegut - player piano
vonnegut - mother night
kafka - metamorphosis

[FoolofaTook]

metamorphosis is not a book fool

how were those vonneguts?

[FoolofaTook]

[FoolofaTook]

just kidding.

this is what I am really reading:



it's been a decade, and since I have been acting the fool in those past ten years(no pun intended), and since the first perusal gave me so much whole-hearted amusement, I decided to re-read this totally senescent read. in book three Sancho and the knight of the woeful countenance vomit into each other's faces. it's pretty funny.

[FoolofaTook]

Sancho came so close that he almost put his eyes into his mouth; now just at that moment the balsam had acted on the stomach of Don Quixote, so, at the very instant when Sancho came to examine his mouth, he discharged all its contents with more force than a musket, and full into the beard of the compassionate squire.

"Holy Mary!" cried Sancho, "what is this that has happened me? Clearly this sinner is mortally wounded, as he vomits blood from the mouth;" but considering the matter a little more closely he perceived by the colour, taste, and smell, that it was not blood but the balsam from the flask which he had seen him drink; and he was taken with such a loathing that his stomach turned, and he vomited up his inside over his very master, and both were left in a precious state.


well that's the best I can manage. but the translation I am reading is much livelier, and it amused me greatly.

[FoolofaTook]

[ilikeplanets]

Damn foolofatook send me your reading list!

[FoolofaTook]

what is a reading list?

i go whither the spirit leads.

[ilikeplanets]

I guess it's documented here pretty thoroughly anyway. (I meant your past reading list, not future. I can't make plans either.)

[Run To Me]

I am now reading Crime and Punishment, but it's slow going, since I keep leaving it by a toilet I rarely use.

I had to stop reading Isabelle Allende's Infinite Plan after the third or fourth gratuitous rape story. I don't like darkness arbitrarily injected into my novels, especially when it's nothing more than a transparent attempt to generate easy sympathy for a protagonist

If u want to deal in cataloging human darkness, you need to get serious and be doing it on a David Foster Wallace level to keep me onboard

[FoolofaTook]

try reading crime and punishment

[FoolofaTook]

there's this one dude, evil as fuck, the one who kills himself