Books!

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Famous Mortimer
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Re: Books!

Post by Famous Mortimer »

Freed Roger wrote:Mort stopped reading books for a while? Glad things are back in order.
I had awkward shifts and never felt like I had the time. But now, normal office hours, get home, feet up, couple of hours before the game starts, it's pretty nice.

Freed Roger
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Re: Books!

Post by Freed Roger »

Donnie Ebert wrote:
Freed Roger wrote:Mort stopped reading books for a while? Glad things are back in order

Recently read "To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret" title sort of says it all. Has some nice writing. More about the author's personal side rather than the places and things he had to deal with. Pretty good.

Now am onto Jeff Tweedy's memoir. Conversational. Relatable since I am downstate IL mid size town guy from his era. How we related to culture, music etc is familiar.

As fan of Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, Son Volt, and Bottle Rockets - it is cool to read some backstory -though kind of had a sense of the characters' personalities already by their musical paths.
I am enjoying it.
I listened to the Tweedy-read audiobook version, and it's fantastic.
Tweedy referencing Farrar (the voice/style) as Old Testament, i got a kick out of that. Seems appropriate by comparison to Tweedy. I don't take it as derogatory one bit.

baseburglerlou
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Re: Books!

Post by baseburglerlou »

My son has Fahrenheit 451 on his summer reading list for his Freshman lit class. I had never read it so did so last week. Very quick read and superb. Might read some other Bradbury stuff. Any recommendations?

I also am a big UT / Son Volt / Wilco fan and loved Jeff's book. Jay's memoir (Falling Cars and Junkyard Dogs) is also very entertaining and written in a completely different style from Jeff's (shocker).

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Jocephus
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Re: Books!

Post by Jocephus »


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Jocephus
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Re: Books!

Post by Jocephus »

my brother wrote a book about alan moore!

https://www.amazon.com/Alan-Moore-Criti ... 35006047X/

A complete guide to the comics work of the writer Alan Moore, this book helps readers explore one of the genre's most important, compelling and subversive writers.

In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers:

· Moore's comics career – from his early work in 2000AD to his breakthrough graphic novels and his later battles with the industry
· Moore's major works – including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Saga of the Swamp Thing and Promethea
· Key themes and contexts – from Moore's subversion of the superhero genre and metafictional techniques to his creative collaborations and battles with the industry for creator control
· Critical approaches to Moore's work

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G. Keenan
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Re: Books!

Post by G. Keenan »

Jocephus wrote:
April 19 21, 6:19 pm
my brother wrote a book about alan moore!

https://www.amazon.com/Alan-Moore-Criti ... 35006047X/

A complete guide to the comics work of the writer Alan Moore, this book helps readers explore one of the genre's most important, compelling and subversive writers.

In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers:

· Moore's comics career – from his early work in 2000AD to his breakthrough graphic novels and his later battles with the industry
· Moore's major works – including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Saga of the Swamp Thing and Promethea
· Key themes and contexts – from Moore's subversion of the superhero genre and metafictional techniques to his creative collaborations and battles with the industry for creator control
· Critical approaches to Moore's work
Awesome! Kudos and congrats to your bro.

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Famous Mortimer
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Re: Books!

Post by Famous Mortimer »

Absolutely! I paid a fortune to export my entire collection of 2000AD to the USA, so I've been a fan of Moore since forever. I might have to check this book out.

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Famous Mortimer
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Re: Books!

Post by Famous Mortimer »

I'm working my way slowly through "Nothin But A Good Time", the oral history of hair metal. Lots of interesting people, lots of good stories.

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Jocephus
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Re: Books!

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The Third Man
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Re: Books!

Post by The Third Man »

Been reading a lot lately.

-Ride a Cockhorse by Raymond Kennedy: one of the most entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny comic novels I've read (though to be sure, I'm kinda weak in that regard). It chronicles the rapid, self-propelled ascent of a formerly-mild-mannered loan officer, Frankie Fitzgibbons, at a small New England bank, who one day snaps and decides to aggressively take charge to get what she wants: first by seducing the high school drumline leader who marches past her house on the reg (the sex scene that ends the first chapter is one of the funniest bits of fiction I've ever read), and then by going full fake-it-till-you-make-it Scarface mode on her coworkers until she's rapidly installed herself as CEO and begins to liquidate threats to her new power. Kennedy's punchy, descriptive comic prose and gift for acid-tongued dialogue speak for themselves but what's even more impressive is the manner in which he exploits the sympathies of audience-identification to subtly demonstrate the ease with which a demagogue begins to believe their own hype. He switches gears so smoothly from Mrs. Fitzgibbons' earlier, more lucid and measured observations to her eventual, stark-raving-mad paranoiac fantasies that it's easy not to notice how he's shifting the Overton window of her behavior further and further to the edge, because of the force of both the character and her will, and his rapidly-developing plot, which breathlessly catalogues a litany of blackly-comic personal and professional abuses. I'm honestly amazed that this one has never been made into a film. It lends itself so well to an adaptation: you could squeeze it into two hours and not miss a beat and its characters, dialogue and opportunities for splashy, manic comic setpieces are all a screenwriter's dream.

-The Recognitions by William Gaddis: ranks among the most difficult and allusive novels I've ever finished, but as somebody who is better prepared than most to grok the oft-maddening intricacies of postmodern maximalism, I didn't sweat what great or small allusions I surely missed this first go-round, because I was still more than capable of appreciating the novel in its lyrical beauty, narrative complexity, and philosophical and emotional depth. It's—briefly—the story of the son of a Protestant minister, whose wife's death opens the novel, and his lifelong struggle to reconcile his severe Calvinistic upbringing with his artistic inspiration. He suffers a severe illness as a child and in a state of rapt, feverish delirium, becomes entranced by a recreation of Heironymous Bosch's Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things; however, as an adult, he ultimately despairs of the inability of anyone besides God to truly create anything of original and transcendent beauty, and so finds himself the witting fool of a sinister moneyman who pays him to forge masterpieces. The novel goes a lot broader than that, and one of its pleasures, both on this first turn and surely on rereadings, is the joy of its deliberately challenging allusiveness: trying to make sure you can keep the pace with its effortlessly fleet prose all the while retaining the most important details from the impossibly dense thicket of cultural and theological references it heedlessly plunges you into. It's a novel full of fakes and charlatans aspiring towards either fame or transcendence, and Gaddis gleefully shifts the ground beneath your feet throughout, leaving you uncertain of the forgeries which might very well have been conjured in plain sight of you. I'm already very much looking forward to rereading it sometime, especially with a more thorough reference to the guide by Steven Moore, which I arbitrarily consulted throughout (mostly for translations of foreign text). Also going to tackle J R very soon, after my current read: Ulysses.

There's other stuff I'll get to later.

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