That's very generous Stopharage, PM incoming.

Currently quite obsessed with Joe R Lansdale and have been buying all of his books that I can get my hands on - he's pretty much my favourite author at this point. Surely one of the great modern American writers.

Reading 'Paradise Sky', an epic western that combines his trademark crackling and hilarious dialogue with yet another great protagonist against a background of post-Civil War Texas.

pantyfire wrote:

I've not liked any of Mielgilles stuff. Don't really know why, it just doesn't gel with me.

China Mielgelle

Tempy wrote:

stuff about Pluto by Naoki Urasawa

Wow, cheers for mentioning this, couldn't put it down, started reading it briefly when I got home from work yesterday,the next thing I knew it was half eleven and I had finished it. I used to be able to read like that as a kid, just devour books, but maybe age has stunted my imagination but I only seem to do that nowadays with comics and some other books. Wow, and thanks for bringing it to my attention, think I'll be revisiting it soon, was super fun, agree about the final act being a rush to tie things up though

Reading the book of the film, Casino by Nic Pileggi.

It's all over the place narrative-wise and it can be hard to remember whose dialogue you are reading at any one time because of the jumpy style. You can tell it was written as the film was being made.

It's a bit of a mess but the content is very interesting. There's a lot more going on than even in the fairly packed film.

Well finished New Paris. Left slightly angry.

It is the literary equivalent of Homeopathy.

The moderately interesting concept of the Manifs, distilled into innocuousness through exceptionally poor description and visualisation. A dull story that could not be saved, I venture the essay at the end of the story was shoe-horned in to legitimise, or attempt to add mystery to, the failed experiment to leverage a novella off a singularly poor, derivative, idea.

By the end China appears to be flogging, what is in all likelihood, a can of dog food.

The man can clearly write, as exemplified by the Bas Lag Series which displayed skill at weaving compelling intertwining story lines and fleshed out characters.

Thinking on it, there is some writing in the book, turns of phrase, descriptions etc which some reviewers have latched on to as examples of brilliance, but I can't help but feel that the are just poor examples of a second rate Joyce.

I impulse bought that mieville along with Pluto and 20th Century Boys so it is too late for me.

Lol Griffin didn't understand the ending.

tigerswiftly wrote:

Lol Griffin didn't understand the ending.

Individuals who haven't suffered some kind of debilitating industrial accident or caved in their own skull with a brick would understand the ending. It smacks of some prepubescent polytechnic student's idea of something deep.

This was quite good, although with books like this it runs the risk of being obsolete before it's even published, such is the quick turnaround of meme's, attitudes, groupthink, feuds and cultural appropriation online. I knew lots of it anyway, just from general day-to-day existence online, but it filled me in on some of the areas I'd missed or issues which had been too depressing and squalid to even bother investigating in the first place.

I'm not sure if these people deserve quite so much attention, but it is an interesting area. It does at least save you the trouble of visiting these sites and interacting with their denizens, which can only be good. I think I'm fairly internet-savvy but even I felt like a pensioner reading some of it. Needless to say, many of these people are completely awful, in many varied and wide ranging ways.

Obviously lumping together all the factions that make up the phenomenon under the 'alt-right' umbrella is a bit simplistic but I understand it's a good selling point for the book, and to be fair it mostly avoids generalising and points out the many inherent contradictions within. Yeah, I dunno if these people even deserve such attention but it's good that someone documented a moment that may or may lead to other developments and mutations.

Obviously everyone involved would laugh off the idea of this book anyway, or threaten to rape and mutilate the author (whilst being secretly flattered that someone had bothered to write about them in the first place).

It's a good outline, the actual theorising of what's behind it isn't that convincing. It had it's moments, wouldn't say it was rubbish or anything but there's still room for a more definitive take.

I'd imagine it was somewhat rushed out to take advantage of the post-Trump serge in discussion of the 'alt-right'.

A Perfect Vacuum generally kept up the quality for 16 imaginary book reviews with some of them not actually being that tongue-in-cheek and rather serious ventures. There's a pretty good/crazy attempt in there to answer Fermi's Paradox and the silent universe problem by saying aliens created our laws of physics to keep us incarcerated and conceptually drowsy which is directly after a story about a man explaining how he feels about Godhood when he creates digital life in a digital eden and his creations start forming belief camps as he refuses to interact with them. (which reads a lot like Darwinia basically). 

One in there, Belief Inc, describes a near future where we pay AI driven corps to basically create any life scenario we can imagine to spice up our lives and what happens when two of these competing corporations find they're entwined with two clients and two heavily contradictory requests (one man wants to save his neighbour's wife in a train crash, his neighbour wants him humiliated in the attempt) that results in an incident of such economically wasteful expense as two AIs try to play chicken with eachother that legislature has to be brought in to save the nations finances.

@Stopharage

When you said you'd send me a couple of things, I thought you were going to send me something you had finished with. I certainly wasn't expecting you to buy me books from Amazon. Thank you very much indeed and thank you also for the book you bought for Dexter. All very much appreciated.