What are you reading now?

[mekanor]

Wouldn't "no metal" mean "Stone Age Star Wars"?

haha you'd think, but they come up with alternatives to metal that get them a little further along!

[Charlie]

Zen Bones, Zen Flesh: A Collection of Zen and Pre-zen Writings

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones is a book that offers a collection of accessible, primary Zen sources so that readers can struggle over the meaning of Zen for themselves. It includes 101 Zen Stories, a collection of tales that recount actual experiences of Chinese and Japanese Zen teachers over a period of more than five centuries; The Gateless Gate, the famous thirteenth century collection of Zen koans; Ten Bulls, a twelfth century commentary on the stages of awareness leading to enlightenment; and Centering, a 4,000 year-old teaching from India that some consider to be the roots of Zen.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lovely little book of short tales. Though easy to dip in and out of, it's a book that challenges a person's way of thinking and encourages one to re-examine their perceptions of the world and themselves. I wish I could say I understand all the 101 stories, but I don't, no doubt because, unlike intelligence which is visible to all, to recognise wisdom requires wisdom.

Here's a quick story from the book showing that to extract true happiness and the essential oil out of every experience, one must live fully in the present:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

[importaku]

I rarely buy books nowdays but couldn't resist these



The great british tuckshop is a fantastic encyclopedia of old sweets & advertising. Im fascinated by the history of finite stuff like food, looking back on the packaging brings back so many memories, it's like childhood time machine. Mail order mysteries is a amusing look at what you actually got if you sent off to the adverts in the back of comics.

The last 2 books are art books from Topps, one covering the mars attacks card series & the other garbage pail kids. All the books in this series are labours of love, from the wax paper replica dustjackets made to look like the original card wrappers to the fact every book in the series comes with unreleased bonus cards attached to the back cover, inside is high quality printing of all the original cards. Loving the garbage pail kids one, i forgot just how many series there were. Sadly the book only covers the first 5 series but hopefully there will be a second book to cover more like they did with the wacky packages cards, as with most of the books in the series they actually manage to use the original art prints so they are sharper & higher quality than just scanning the cards in.

[JazzFunk]

^That Garbage Pail Kids one is scrumptious, hope they get it in at The Works in a few months! I'll cross my fingers, still remember when they were doing those massive Love & Rockets anthologies for ?1.99 each, I got the lot for peanuts.

[importaku]

I love the topps book series, the wacky packages ones were just as amazing. I wish i could afford to go for all the real cards but nowdays just easier to go for the art books insead.

Heres a random pic from the gpk book

[JazzFunk]

Aaaaaaah, such nostalgia! The artwork was incredible, I used to copy them all the time at school, they really influenced the way I draw/paint.

Bet the original artwork looks effin' awesome all blown up and 'HD' on the page!

Definitely one to keep for life, that.

[importaku]

It's pretty amazing that they are still making garbage pail kid stickers even now. As a kid i found them surreal, even now they are pretty grotesque even by modern unshockable standards.

[charlesr]

Max by Gordon (on Bordersdown). Bought it on the strength of reading one of his other books (Another World) and it's great so far. Imaginary fast grow babies FTW!

[Charlie]

Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973 by Charles Bukowski

I guess most people are familiar with Bukowski. If not, he's kinda a poet of and from the people, a non-intellectual poet who lived most of his life in poverty and wrote about what he knew best: whores and drinking and gambling and filth and fighting and f*cking. But don't let that put you off, he has a way with words and is capable of beauty and truth.

Here are a couple of gooduns:

Pull a string, a puppet moves ...

each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand --
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha ...
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she'll ask:
my god, what's the matter?
and you'll answer: I don't know,
I don't know ...?

-----------------------------------------------

And this one's lovely:

?There's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do you??

[smouty]

I've not been reading much recently so now have a backlog to work through.
Currently on the 6th book in the Safehold series - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safehold - Midst toil and tribulation.
Then I have the third in the Glass books trilogy, a Chemikal Marriage but I think I'll re-read the 2nd -The Dark Volume - as it has been 5 years coming
Then I'll start The Different Girl which is also by the glass books author, G.W. Dahlquist.

[Dogg Thang]

I have been reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson. A big fat fantasy epic and I read them when I was a teenager and thought they were fantastic so have been recommending them to people ever since. On rereading them, however, man they're hard work. The first book in particular is a real chore. Almost nothing happens and the prose is awkward. The main character is impossible to have anything but contempt for and the only thing keeping me going was the memory that, way back when, I found something to enjoy in these.

Mid-way through the second book now and it's better, mostly because the main character is barely in it now, but it's still hard work. Every now and again, I think the author went a bit hard on his thesaurus because there are these little pockets of baffling words all sitting together.

But I'm beginning to see a little of what I enjoyed about it the first time around. Just a little. The story is basically about this bitter, angry leper from our world who gets thrown into a Tolkienesque world where everyone thinks he's a hero. He doesn't believe anyone is real and doesn't want to do anything but moan. And yet there are all these grand magic lords treating him like a god. Unlike other stories where he would get over that pretty quickly and rise to the quest, he's constantly fighting the whole idea and, in doing so, it kind of breaks down the whole fantasy world. People constantly sacrifice themselves for him, which we see so much in other fantasy stories and yet here the pointlessness of it is exposed. It's almost like a little experiment in trying to tear down a fantasy epic.

But that makes for a pretty miserable read in places.

I'll keep going, if only because I get a snigger every time the author uses the word 'ejaculate' when people speak quickly.

[aticatac]

Necroscope - Brian Lumley

[QualityChimp]

Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves by Matthew Reilly.

It's a holiday tradition for me to read one of Reilly's brilliantly fun shouty shooty action books.

[RobRoy]

I have been reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson. A big fat fantasy epic and I read them when I was a teenager and thought they were fantastic so have been recommending them to people ever since. On rereading them, however, man they're hard work. The first book in particular is a real chore. Almost nothing happens and the prose is awkward. The main character is impossible to have anything but contempt for and the only thing keeping me going was the memory that, way back when, I found something to enjoy in these.

Mid-way through the second book now and it's better, mostly because the main character is barely in it now, but it's still hard work. Every now and again, I think the author went a bit hard on his thesaurus because there are these little pockets of baffling words all sitting together.

But I'm beginning to see a little of what I enjoyed about it the first time around. Just a little. The story is basically about this bitter, angry leper from our world who gets thrown into a Tolkienesque world where everyone thinks he's a hero. He doesn't believe anyone is real and doesn't want to do anything but moan. And yet there are all these grand magic lords treating him like a god. Unlike other stories where he would get over that pretty quickly and rise to the quest, he's constantly fighting the whole idea and, in doing so, it kind of breaks down the whole fantasy world. People constantly sacrifice themselves for him, which we see so much in other fantasy stories and yet here the pointlessness of it is exposed. It's almost like a little experiment in trying to tear down a fantasy epic.

But that makes for a pretty miserable read in places.

I'll keep going, if only because I get a snigger every time the author uses the word 'ejaculate' when people speak quickly.

Great story but i agree... i had to sit with a dictionary when reading it lol

[Finsbury Girl]

I have been reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson. A big fat fantasy epic and I read them when I was a teenager and thought they were fantastic so have been recommending them to people ever since. On rereading them, however, man they're hard work. The first book in particular is a real chore. Almost nothing happens and the prose is awkward. The main character is impossible to have anything but contempt for and the only thing keeping me going was the memory that, way back when, I found something to enjoy in these.

Mid-way through the second book now and it's better, mostly because the main character is barely in it now, but it's still hard work. Every now and again, I think the author went a bit hard on his thesaurus because there are these little pockets of baffling words all sitting together.

But I'm beginning to see a little of what I enjoyed about it the first time around. Just a little. The story is basically about this bitter, angry leper from our world who gets thrown into a Tolkienesque world where everyone thinks he's a hero. He doesn't believe anyone is real and doesn't want to do anything but moan. And yet there are all these grand magic lords treating him like a god. Unlike other stories where he would get over that pretty quickly and rise to the quest, he's constantly fighting the whole idea and, in doing so, it kind of breaks down the whole fantasy world. People constantly sacrifice themselves for him, which we see so much in other fantasy stories and yet here the pointlessness of it is exposed. It's almost like a little experiment in trying to tear down a fantasy epic.

But that makes for a pretty miserable read in places.

I'll keep going, if only because I get a snigger every time the author uses the word 'ejaculate' when people speak quickly.

Interesting. I've been meaning to re-read these for ages as there is a new series out. I enjoyed them back in the day but were not up there in my fav list. I thought the Gap series was far more enjoyable. I can't say I remember a whole lot about the Thomas Covenant stuff except those cool arse martial arts dudes who fight the sand gorgon(?) which I think is in the 2nd chronicles?