What are you reading

[yosef666]

I think Martian Time-Slip is one of the all time best PKD works. It spoke to my personal fears and experience more than any other PKD work except A Scanner Darkly...   It's not his best written work, but the whole style of repeating phrases and scenes with subtle variations between them really got to me.

GUBBLE GUBBLE

Fair enough. I wasn't trying to disparage it by any means, just not among my personal favorites of his. Still far better than anything most other genre authors could ever come up with, though. The man was brilliant.

[P-K]

i'm consuming vast amounts of material regarding the Waffen-SS, especially the volunteers from other countries like Belgium, Holland, Bosnia,etc.....Finland will be next.

also an excellent book on the V2 weapon : http://www.schifferbooks.com/newschiffer/book_template.php?isbn=0764324527, rather technical, but also great background, didn't know the Britisch actually copied the V2-design (Operation Backfire).

[bitewerksMTB]

Read that the guy who started BME died which led me to his blog which led me to this pdf book he compiled:

http://www.zentastic.com/blog/meet-tommy/

Just started scrolling through it & there's an interview with a guy who has paid 'to be impregnated with AIDS' along with photos of his body mods & eating shit.

[Jordan]

Read that the guy who started BME died which led me to his blog which led me to this pdf book he compiled:

http://www.zentastic.com/blog/meet-tommy/

Just started scrolling through it & there's an interview with a guy who has paid 'to be impregnated with AIDS' along with photos of his body mods & eating shit.

I've been wondering if Shannon killed himself by piercing his brain. I've been to BME bbqs in Toronto, even though I'm very much beneath a moderate when it comes to that kind of stuff, and the couple of times I met him, he seemed like an alright guy. I like that Pain Olympics genital torture video he supposedly made, anyway. Funny that I didn't hear about his death until it was in Reason today, or at least I didn't read it until today. His reasoning for offing himself seems kind of weak, and I wonder if it had more to do with Caitlin than he was letting on.

[m.]

Thomas Tryon Harvest home: "a family relocates in an isolated village that seems an idyllic farming community. The villagers celebrate a number of festivals that revolve around the cultivation of corn. While the villagers are ostensibly Christian, the main character gradually becomes aware of the paganism that underlies life in the village, particularly its rituals."
Very good one. Similar theme/feel as The Wicker Man (and both from 1973 as well).

[post-morten]

Sofi Oksanen's latest book Kun kyyhkyset katosivat (When the Doves Disappeared) is due to come out in Swedish translation soon.  I'll be sure to read it since I really liked her previous one Puhdistus (Purge). Any of you guys from Finland read it yet? Or is she considered too PC/mainstream, despite her goth styled public persona? I know that she's a self-proclaimed bisexual, but I remember reading somewhere that she was also into bdsm. Anyone knows more about this? I'd like to see her in a Grunt video, haha.

[Hal Hutchinson]

Re: Sofi Oskanen:

Sofi Oksanen's latest book Kun kyyhkyset katosivat (When the Doves Disappeared) is due to come out in Swedish translation soon.  I'll be sure to read it since I really liked her previous one Puhdistus (Purge). Any of you guys from Finland read it yet? Or is she considered too PC/mainstream, despite her goth styled public persona? I know that she's a self-proclaimed bisexual, but I remember reading somewhere that she was also into bdsm. Anyone knows more about this? I'd like to see her in a Grunt video, haha.

I was given 'Purge' by an ex-girlfriends mum whilst visiting Finland.Not read it yet.

Apparently S.O is Estonian?

[post-morten]

I was given 'Purge' by an ex-girlfriends mum whilst visiting Finland.Not read it yet.

Apparently S.O is Estonian?

Her mother is Estonian, while the father is Finnish. Apparently spending childhood summers at her maternal grandma's house in Estonia and hearing all her stories, formed her fixation with Estonias complicated past history.

[FreakAnimalFinland]

I'd like to see her in a Grunt video, haha.

Huh, Sofi was at the Lumous goth fest where Grunt played. Not sure if she had entered venue by the time I played, but after gig she was in audience. I made conscious move to pass her with Durden style if you know what I mean.

[tiny_tove]

I am not sure, have her books been translated and are they any good at all?
The Purge thing sounds interesting.

[Jaakko V.]

I am not sure, have her books been translated and are they any good at all?
The Purge thing sounds interesting.

The Purge has been translated to 38 languages... And there is also a movie of it in international circulation.

Can't comment on her books...

Movie trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKNpZf776_4

[post-morten]

I made conscious move to pass her with Durden style if you know what I mean.

You punched her nose? Would have been a good publicity stunt, if nothing else!

[FreakAnimalFinland]

Not that. When passing woman, you make the conscious decision if it's going to be this shy method of turning your back and passing through, or just opposite: the good old bulge-side making the contact, with intent to make quick rub on the way. In this light sweep of hand over latex skirt. It's not question whether the woman notices (or cares), but that you do.

[Jordan]

A friend was nice enough to bring me some reading material for my hospital stay, and after having exhausted issues of Bananafish, Unsound and Muckraker, I bit the bullet and settled down with Standing In Two Circles, and though I've read many of the articles elsewhere, I must say that writing is NOT Mr. Rice's forte. The article on Savitri Devi has at least four paragraphs that lead with "Whether you love her or hate her, agree or disagree..." and leaves you feeling like you've just read a schoolboy's book report.

The ' Dystopia' article is even worse, I don't think I've read it, though an abridged version does appear in Apocalypse Culture 2. He makes so many assumptions about Darwinian evolution that are so pedestrian, not to mention patently false, that it's obvious that he has no real understanding of Darwin's work. Darwin didn't posit an arrow of evolution, that's an earlier idea that Darwin, as an abolitionist sought to disprove. Spencer used the term "survival of the fittest" after reading Darwin, but meant it in a way that was inline with his earlier economic theories. Darwin picked it up, but Darwinian fitness isn't generally understood along the same lines.
Also, and I understand it is a somewhat older essay, but to call Freud the "father of modern psychology" hints that he has absolutely no understanding of what modern psychology is. Freud's literary/metaphorical understanding of the psyche has long been left behind by objective science wrought from statistical analysis, neuro-imaging, etc. I still think that Freud is relevant in some regards, but Mr. Rice, in trying to seem intelligent, ends up bragging of his ignorance.

[HongKongGoolagong]

Richard Brautigan - six novels and one book of short stories, re-read over the last few days

This writer who will always be associated with the 1960s is increasingly forgotten and marginalised. His most famous book Trout Fishing In America is one of his worst: twee and silly aphorisms which sold two million copies to people who had taken so much LSD that's all they could concentrate on. His voice is somewhere between Jack Kerouac and Kurt Vonnegut, and the more misanthropy and black humour he reveals behind the mock-naive tone the better the books get. In Watermelon Sugar seems at first to be set in a hippy utopia, but then you get a mass suicide and the narrator's ex-girlfriend killing herself too...The Abortion and Sombrero Fallout are decent novels based on relationships and their failings, with some inventive wit. His final novel So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away is a creepy and morbid thing based around a disastrous decision to suddenly shoot a gun while hunting: the ghost haunting the book was Brautigan's own as after its publication and poor reception he impulsively shot himself late at night after drinking, aged 49. Short, simple and always interesting books, and a sad life lived by the writer.