New books, new worlds in your living room

[Loredoctor]

The Oxford History of the British Empire - 19th Century arrived today!

[I'm Murrin]

I remember a while back someone (possibly Foul?) posted about TS Eliot, specifically The Waste Land. That prompted me to give it a look, and I really wasn't that interested - there were one or two parts that I liked, but mostly it just seemed long, dull and incomprehensible. My failing, not Eliot's.
Last week I saw The Waste Land and other poems in Blackwell's, and decided to have a look. I read a few pages of it, and actually found that I enjoyed that small part quite a bit. I thought about it for a while first, and then today I made up my mind and went back and bought it.
It's a nice little paperback edition with a simple cover, which is what caught my eye in the first place.

[Drundaar Rockheart]

Decided to read after procrastinating
ROMEO AND JULIET
HAMLET
JULIUS CAESAR: William Shakespeare
Just re-read
THE GOLDEN COMPASS
THE SUBTLE KNIFE
THE AMBER SPYGLASS: Phillip Pullman (great sci-fi if you haven't read it yet)
Just Bought
THE ELRIC SAGA: Michael Moorcock
DUNE: Frank Herbert
And ANGELSAND DEMONS:Dan Brown (when I get around to it)
.......I need to go out side..

[Avatar]

The Waste Land...there were one or two parts that I liked...

And I will show you fear in a handful of dust...

I've always liked it. And yeah, it was Foul IIRC, we were discussing one of his poems I think.

I have a soft spot for Elliot...McCavity, The Mystery Cat was the first poem I ever memorised. That said, some of them I don't particularly like, like The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock. *shrug*

It's always the same with any poet, some you'll like, some you won't. Hope you find a few of the former.

--A

[Loredoctor]

I just picked up Laurence Rees' The Nazis - A Warning from History.

[Alynna Lis Eachann]

Finished a book for the first time in over a year. Heh, that's what happens when your only responsibility is to show up to lecture, field work and meals. Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales. The writer comes across as arrogant, but his style pulled me in, and it was easy to keep reading despite the attitude.

From a Booklist summary highlighted at Amazon.com:

What impels people to risk their lives by climbing mountains or deep-sea diving? What confluence of forces leads to drastic accidents? Why do some people survive disasters while others perish? A renowned journalist intrigued with risk, Gonzales conducts an in-depth and engrossing inquiry into the dynamics of survival. Relating one hair-raising true story after another about wilderness adventures gone catastrophically wrong and other calamities, Gonzales draws on sources as diverse and compelling as the Stoic philosophers and neuroscience to elucidate the psychological, physiological, and spiritual strengths that enable certain individuals to avoid fatal panic and make that crucial "transition from victim to survivor."

It makes for thought-provoking reading, and the bibliography at the end has some promising source material. Now if I could just get another three weeks of no responsibility... Bet I could finish all the books I starter and had to put down.

[Edit: The last of my Amazon orders just came in: Why I Hate Canadians and How to be a Canadian by Will Ferguson, and How to Move to Canada: A Primer for Americans by Terese Loeb Kreuzer and Carol Bennett - yes, I'm thinking about moving, but I'm too lazy to do all the research myself. ]

[I'm Murrin]

Today I bought a copy of Mark Z Danielewski's new novel, Only Revolutions.
To give you an idea of what sort of book this is: I gave it to the cashier, she picked up the barcode scanner and opened the front cover--no barcode. She flips it over, opens the other cover--and is greeted by an identical page, upside-down. Finally she looks at the spine, and finds two barcodes, one rotated 180 degrees to the other.

[Avatar]

Cool.

--A

[I'm Murrin]

Here's a little more. The book has two stories, 360 pages long, and you turn the book over to see one or the other. There is no back cover - only two fronts. One story is by "Sam", the other by "Hailey".
Cover:

First page (Hailey)
First page (Sam)

[Avatar]

This reminds me of a book I saw once, (whose name and author I can't recall), where the pages were printed oddly. Some were upside down, some horizontal/landscape. Don't think I ever read it, but it sure looked odd.

--A

[I'm Murrin]

House of Leaves, also by Danielewski, had an even less conventional layout than this book - for the most part, the positioning of the text on the page was related to the subject of the chapter--two columns for a chapter on twins; shortshortshort-longlonglong-shortshortshort paragraphs in a chapter called SOS; footnotes spiralling around and through and back forth in the pages when it talked about the nature of a labyrinth. One piece in particular was very good - it had text at a slope when the character went downhill, it squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces when he went through a tunnel, and it even climbed vertically up the page when he went up a ladder. Really added to the experience of reading it.

[Avatar]

Yeah, I dunno...sometimes that sort of thing annoys me. Never liked ee cummings for example.

That "spiralling" sounds familiar though...how old is the book?

--A

[I'm Murrin]

Well, I said 'spiralling', but except in one or two small cases, it isn't literal spiralling. The book is fairly recent; it was published in 2000, but was around on the internet for a couple of years before that.

[Avatar]

Nah, probably not the one I'm thinking of then. I distinctly remember (while flipping through it) that one page at least had the words running in a spiral from the centre of the page to the edges.

Ah well, not important.

--A

[I'm Murrin]

Today I bought a hardcover of Fury by Salman Rushdie. I found it in The Works for only £1.99.

[Loredoctor]

The Short History of World War II

[Loredoctor]

Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.

[Loredoctor]

Captain Warner's (German U-Boat commander) Iron Coffins: A Personal Account of the German U-Boat Battles of World War II.

[Seareach]

"Dead Europe" by Christos Tsiolkas. Since I met him I thought I should at least read his new book. In your face type of stuff but with this brilliant writing style. Very powerful but definitely not for those who are easily offended (it's quite blasphemous...and actually quite disturbing...and, well...) but there's something about it that had me not wanting to put it down. That's saying something, considering it's not the type of book I normally enjoy reading!

[duke]

I read Dead Europe a few months ago. Gripping, shocking, suspenseful, horrifying, intense ... and dare I say it, brilliant.

I'd almost call it an Australian literary horror novel. Cant wait to read what Tsiolkas does next.