tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post9064299965749481150..comments2024-03-28T03:13:15.831-04:00Comments on Remarkable: Favorite BooksGeoff Klockhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09080580776997273785noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post-84635881632422493652008-07-21T17:51:00.000-04:002008-07-21T17:51:00.000-04:00Oh, for kids books:Shel Silverstein A Light in the...Oh, for kids books:<BR/><BR/>Shel Silverstein A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends<BR/><BR/>I also used to really like Robert Asprin's 'Myth' Adventures series.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post-26611376010529574092008-07-21T08:28:00.000-04:002008-07-21T08:28:00.000-04:00Geoff – Harold and the Purple Crayon is pure, unad...Geoff – Harold and the Purple Crayon is pure, unadulterated genius, and I am grateful for its existence.<BR/><BR/>Ahem, that said:<BR/><BR/>Fiction<BR/>Raymond Chandler – All of Marlowe. All of it.<BR/>Hunter Thompson – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas<BR/>Annie Proulx – Shipping News, Heartsongs, That Old Ace in the Hole<BR/>McCarthy – Blood Meridian<BR/>Michael Chabon – Wonderboys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay<BR/>Jonathan Lethem – Fortress of Solitude<BR/>Dave Eggers – You Shall Know Our Velocity<BR/>Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby<BR/>James Elroy – Black Dahlia, LA Confidential<BR/>Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse Five<BR/>Tim O’Brien – The Things They Carried<BR/>Raymond Carver – Where I’m Calling From<BR/>Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea – The Illuminatus! Trilogy<BR/>Robert E. Howard – A whole heap of the Conan books (they are all the same and they are all amazing, couldn’t pick a favourite)<BR/>The Bible - The Book of Revelation<BR/><BR/>Non-Fiction<BR/>Gerard Jones – Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book<BR/>Chabon (again) – Maps and Legends (many here may appreciate some of Chabon’s thoughtful essays on genre – I’ll see if any are online)<BR/>Thompson (again) – Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72, The Great Shark Hunt, and the first volume of letters when he was obsessed with becoming the new Fitzgerald: The Proud Highway - Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955 - 1967<BR/>P. J. O’Rourke – Give War a Chance<BR/>N. Scott Momaday – The Way to Rainy Mountain<BR/>Any good collection of Mencken<BR/>Thoreau – Walden (and the rest)<BR/><BR/>Theory/Crit (wherein I demonstrate myself to be a product of a typical British Humanities program)<BR/>Baudrillard, all of it but probably The Spirit of Terrorism (the funniest) and America<BR/>Barthes – Mythologies<BR/>Lauren Berlant – The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship<BR/>Laura Mulvey – Visual and Other Pleasures<BR/>Mike Davis – City of Quartz<BR/>Frederic Jameson – Postmodernism/Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism<BR/>Donna Haraway – Cyborg Manifesto<BR/>Ward Churchill – Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of American Indians<BR/>Some Zizek, usually whatever’s newest<BR/>I probably need to read some more Bloom as what I’ve read I’ve enjoyed but not a favourite (yet)<BR/><BR/>Photography<BR/>Bill Owens – Suburbia<BR/>Weegee – various cheap collections I’m always on the lookout for<BR/>Diane Arbus – ditto<BR/><BR/>Politics<BR/>Murray Bookchin – From Urbanization to Cities<BR/>Daniel Guérin – No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism<BR/>Howard Zinn – A People’s History of the US<BR/>Mikhael Bakunin – Selected Writing<BR/>Kropotkin – The Conquest of Bread; Fields, Factories and Workshops<BR/><BR/>Dos and Donts: 10 Years of VICE Magazine's Street Fashion Critiques<BR/>The Onion – Our Dumb Century<BR/><BR/>Poetry<BR/>Any good collection of work by:<BR/>Bukowski<BR/>Iain Sinclair<BR/>Simon Armitage<BR/>Ted Hughes<BR/>Henry Normal<BR/>Whitman<BR/>Coleridge - Mariner, other bits<BR/>Milton - Paradise Lost<BR/>Eliot - The Wasteland<BR/>John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester (I have read a lot of poetry but do not know a lot about it, but I do know that if I have to read Restoration poetry I'm glad Rochester exists)<BR/>Oh, and I just re-read Shakespeare’s sonnets and I think I realised what makes them so great.<BR/><BR/>Any collection of Norse myths and sagas (Snorri Sturluson’s Edda will do)<BR/>Similarly, any collection of Native American trickster tales<BR/>Augustus Caesar - Res Gestae Divi Augusti<BR/>Any collection of Cicero’s speeches (particularly the first one, in defense of Sextus Roscius, before he’d properly refined the rhetoric. It took brass balls to make that speech.)<BR/><BR/>Drama<BR/>Max Frisch – Biedermann und die Brandstifter (I think it’s called The Firebugs in the US).<BR/>Mamet – Glengarry Glen Ross<BR/>Shakespeare – Macbeth, The Tempest (I have a soft spot for the ‘lighter’ works) <BR/><BR/>Childrens<BR/>Roald Dahl – Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr Fox<BR/>The Very Hungry Caterpillar<BR/><BR/>Moore and Campbell – The Birth Caul/Snakes and Ladders (collected as A Disease of Language – maybe should’ve been in comics)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post-26513115009058003652008-07-20T22:33:00.000-04:002008-07-20T22:33:00.000-04:00What I like about the story is the idea that somet...What I like about the story is the idea that something new can be said about Jesus, after all this time. It fits in with all that Bloom stuff about the value of the canon and doing new stuff with old things.Geoff Klockhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09080580776997273785noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post-43990769144745106742008-07-20T22:12:00.000-04:002008-07-20T22:12:00.000-04:00Okay, I read it once in Spanish and then I found a...Okay, I read it once in Spanish and then I found <A HREF="http://southerncrossreview.org/49/borges-judas-eng.htm" REL="nofollow">a full English text of the story</A> online (happily I didn't mangle much of the story in Spanish).<BR/><BR/>I certainly like the story, and I understand how the tale of an academic gone mad would appeal to you :)<BR/><BR/>In the story it's plainly visible that Borges was very influenced by Chesterton and Lord Dunsany, but in particular there is something oddly Lovecraftian about it, especially in the part about the madness at the end. And of course as a fan of weird latter-day gnostic cults, I love his reference to the Docetists.<BR/><BR/>I still prefer Pierre Menard, Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius, and The Library of Babel--but as an old high school substitute teacher of mine once said: "Why read a whole novel when you can read a five-page Borges story?" (For what it's worth I feel like Pynchon has the same density: why read 200 novels when you can read Gravity's Rainbow.)Darius Kazemihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01646249933207430061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post-48529879392867608982008-07-20T17:58:00.000-04:002008-07-20T17:58:00.000-04:00Darius -- Come back and tell me what you think!Darius -- Come back and tell me what you think!Geoff Klockhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09080580776997273785noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post-29083680016581853512008-07-20T17:52:00.000-04:002008-07-20T17:52:00.000-04:00Ahh, I am such a huge Pynchon fanboy it makes me v...Ahh, I am such a <A HREF="http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Image:Dariusk_i_rocket_pynchon.jpg" REL="nofollow">huge Pynchon fanboy</A> it makes me very happy to see GR on your list.<BR/><BR/>Also, yay Borges. I decided when I was 13 that I would take Spanish at school specifically so I could read him. It was only years later that I realized his English translations are excellent, due in part to his rather scientific Latin cognate filled prose, as well as the fact that he assisted in the translations.<BR/><BR/>Oddly, I've never read The Three Versions of Judas. Will do that now.Darius Kazemihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01646249933207430061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post-63042164742184225402008-07-19T15:51:00.000-04:002008-07-19T15:51:00.000-04:00contemporary non-fiction:*Ian MacDonald, Revolutio...contemporary non-fiction:<BR/>*Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties<BR/>*Geoff Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (good call Scott!)<BR/>*Andy Miller's 33-1/3 book about The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society<BR/>*Ian Bradley's The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan<BR/><BR/>contemporary fiction:<BR/>+The Onion, Our Dumb Century<BR/>+George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards series (particularly Books 2, 6, 7, 12, 13 and 15)<BR/>+Chris Claremont's FirstFlight trilogy<BR/>+Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire<BR/>+Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello's Wigfield<BR/><BR/><BR/>classic fiction:<BR/>Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter<BR/>Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities<BR/><BR/>plays:<BR/>Arthur Miller, The Crucible and All My Sons<BR/>Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac (the Brian Hooker translation)<BR/>Moliere, The Misanthrope (Richard Wilbur translation)<BR/>August Wilson, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom<BR/>Turgenev, A Month in the Country<BR/>Chekhov, Uncle Vanya<BR/>Brian Friel, Translations<BR/>Patrick Marber, Closer<BR/>all that Shakespeare stuff<BR/><BR/>Poetry<BR/>Anything by Dorothy Parker<BR/><BR/>Favorite Shakespeare play:<BR/>It's such a cliche to say "Hamlet," but it is my favorite. For a while I liked to say it was "Othello" just to be less obvious, but every time I encounter "Hamlet" I'm reminded that I like it better than any others. (I did get to play "Macbeth" in college though, so that one has a special place in my heart as well.)Jasonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13298753675007196538noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post-61015935171925922972008-07-19T12:02:00.000-04:002008-07-19T12:02:00.000-04:00Jim: Ack! I always spell Spenser wrong. So not so ...Jim: Ack! I always spell Spenser wrong. So not so carefully.Geoff Klockhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09080580776997273785noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post-50580308746554050422008-07-19T06:09:00.000-04:002008-07-19T06:09:00.000-04:00You must have read Spenser pretty carefully. O Ba...You must have read Spenser pretty carefully. O Balliol, o mores.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post-84300923554737854532008-07-19T00:28:00.000-04:002008-07-19T00:28:00.000-04:00Oh yeah, favorite Shakespeare play: It used to be ...Oh yeah, favorite Shakespeare play: It used to be Hamlet... but I think I lean more towards King Lear these days.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23042008.post-10003684464314326512008-07-19T00:23:00.000-04:002008-07-19T00:23:00.000-04:00Poetry (a short one for me):Ted Hughes- The Birthd...Poetry (a short one for me):<BR/><BR/>Ted Hughes- The Birthday Letters<BR/>Allan Ginsberg<BR/>Walt Whitman<BR/>(I think I'd like Bukowski if I ever got around to reading more of him)<BR/><BR/>Fiction (the big one)<BR/><BR/>Chuck Palahniuk-<BR/>Rant (my favorite of his), Haunted, Choke, Fight Club, Lullaby, Invisible Monsters<BR/><BR/>Kurt Vonnegut-<BR/>Welcome To The Monkeyhouse, Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, God bless you, Mr. Rosewater.<BR/><BR/>Douglas Coupland-<BR/>Jpod, Hey, Nostradamus, Girlfriend in a Coma, The Gum Thief<BR/><BR/>Neil Gaiman-<BR/>Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions, American Gods<BR/><BR/>J.D. Salinger<BR/>Cather in The Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey<BR/><BR/>Flannery O'Connor-<BR/>Wise Blood, The Violent Bear it Away, Everything that Rises Must Converge (especially "The Lame Shall Enter First" which is, quite possibly, my favorite short story ever), "Good Country People"<BR/><BR/>Mark Twain-<BR/>Letters From The Earth, any of his humor pieces... especially the ones that involve him tearing up Fennimore Cooper,<BR/>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.<BR/><BR/>F. Scott Fitzgerald-<BR/>The Great Gatsby, "Winter Dreams"... you know... the ones about rich people?<BR/><BR/>Hemmingway-<BR/>The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and The Sea, "A Day's Wait", "A Very Short Story"<BR/><BR/>William Faulkner-<BR/>The Snopes Trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion (Okay, not really my favorite but I am oh so proud of myself for reading it)<BR/><BR/>Gabriel Garcia Marquez-<BR/>One Hundred Years of Solitude<BR/><BR/>Joseph Heller-Catch 22<BR/><BR/>Ray Bradbury- Farenheit 451<BR/><BR/>Thomas King- Green Grass, Running Water<BR/><BR/>John Knowles- A Separate Peace<BR/><BR/>Non-Fiction:<BR/><BR/>Neil McCormick- Killing Bono<BR/><BR/>Chuck Klosterman- Killing Yourself To Live, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.<BR/><BR/>Chris Turner- Planet Simpson: how a Cartoon Masterpiece shaped a generation.<BR/><BR/>Understanding Comics- Scott McCloud<BR/><BR/>Misquoting Jesus- Bart D. Ehrman<BR/><BR/>Kurt Vonnegut- Palm Sunday<BR/><BR/>and, of course, How To Read Superhero Comics and Why (not kissing ass, Geoff, really love that book)<BR/><BR/>Other:<BR/><BR/>America: The Book- Jon Stuart and the Daily Show Writers.<BR/><BR/>Naked Pictures of Famous People- Jon Stuart<BR/><BR/>The Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays- Steve Martin<BR/><BR/>Shakespeare (required by law to put him on here somewhere)<BR/><BR/>The Insanity Defense- Woody Allen<BR/><BR/>The first Best American Non-required Reading collection (2003, I think)<BR/><BR/>The Canterbury Tales... ok, just "the Miller's Tale" and the part where the Wife of Bath tells the virtues of her hoo-ha...<BR/><BR/>The Bible (ok, just the dirty parts)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com