Mucha na Dziko

maybe it's not what I'm "reading" right now, but still it's a book I've recently acquired and I find it very captivating (to just browse through it and find interesting stuff)




It's a Taschen album of album covers sorted by the artists who made them. So it reads more like an art exhibition rather than a "music history" anthology.

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jadis

An all-star cast

SGR

Great book. I read it back in college because I was a fan of The Fall (band). I read The Trial in college too due to its appearance on that Belle & Sebastian album.

Lisnaholic

Yeah, that's a weird one, elph!
Before or since, the only books I've read that were remotely like that were...er... other books by William Burroughs.

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953

Mucha na Dziko

Naked Lunch is funny and all, but tbh, Burroughs is ****ing unreadable


Experimenting with the form is interesting, but Burroughs does it in such a way that I can't relate to most of the time.
I mean, sure, Naked Lunch is great as a novel you'll start reading out loud to all your acid-out buddies, but it's not a good book.

All of Burroughs' oeuvre seems to me like a toned down Gombrowicz's novel.

He's amazing, and he channels the feeling of being out of your mind, but he never accomplishes being relatable at the same time. He just does wild ****.

Gombrowicz on the other hand is a writer who makes up stories too absurd to be true, but through his first-person narrator he really makes you feel like you we're the one being unreasonable, not him.

Burroughs makes you feel like he is the unreasonable one, and you are here to have some sense and judge him.

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grindy

Naked Lunch is entertaining af. I've had times when I've finished reading it and started it again right away because I just wasn't ready to leave this wild ride.

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A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

SGR

Isn't that basically what Fernando Pessoa's 'Book of Disquiet' was?

Lisnaholic

This sentence is quite ambiguous: Are you chopping down a sentence that would otherwise begin, "I have never read a novel...."
or are you giving us a tip: "Don't read a novel..." ?


Either way, your comment reminded me of the novel Eyeless In Gaza, which I have mentioned here before. It's a story that ranges from 1902 to 1935, but Aldous Huxley rejected conventional narrative sequence: instead each chapter is titled with a date, and the dates are all shuffled up. It quickly gets bewildering, unless you do what I did: make a list of page numbers so that you can jump around the book and follow the chronological order. That's when it becomes both less demanding and more satisfying.

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953

SGR

Good point, I thought it was the latter interpretation, I didn't even think of the former.

Mindfulness

The last book I read was a Christmas gift book about crypto;
Didn't get the crypto assets book I wanted so I told my family the author's name of the one I'm wanting to read;
Would be nice to mix the reading of the book into a blog section, might do that;

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