What BOOK are you reading right now?

lots of canadiana novels i've bought used have had copious notes taken by high school students, sometimes the ideas being discussed in the class bring a new dimension to the work, other times it's a real distraction

This one is bizarre. I might even scan a page to show...

That's a rather masculine shade of pink deej.

i was trying to find the most highlighter like pink i could find

I am reading the craziest book ever right now. House of Leaves. Anyone heard of it? It's basically a haunted house story, but the way it's written, the way the story unfolds, the massive amount of footnotes and reference material, and the crazy typesetting peculiarities throughout take it way beyond being just another book.

for example?

Oh **** kicky, I've been encouraging people to read that book for YEARS!

I especially liked how I would get more caught up in the footnotes, than the actual story.

I re-read it maybe a year ago, and found new things that I didn't see or "get" the first time around. I'm sure if I read it again in a few years I'll find more stuff. The last time, I had found this weird symbol of some type, and, know nothing was in this book by chance, actually spent way more than an hour (maybe 2) backtracking, going forward, backtracking again, sliding sideways, tumbling perpendicular to a viewpoint, tracking down the origin. There is no way, because there was no reason, to have connected the two points by going forward, you had to do it by going backwards.

Since you're reading the book, I'm sure you're the only one who understands what I'm saying.

GO MINOTAURS!

anyway

I'm reading a book called Blasphemy by Mike Resnick.

It's science fiction, funny, and horrible at the same time.

The book is made up of 2 long stories, and 5 really really short ones.

The first long story, Walpurgis III, takes place in a time when there's hundreds of populated planets, and over the generations people, meaning families, are moved from one to another.

Walpurgis is a planet were everyone is a Satan worshipper.
The reader comes to realize Walpurgis III is actually a very law abiding place .

Why should anyone do evil on the street, when one can get it out of their systems during their religious services? Also, since there's no concept of "turning the other check" people are generally hesitant to piss off their neighbor.

A good read, Resnick is witty, and spins a good tale.

This will give you an idea..



I can be patient or a scurrilous dismisser. Grant has told me some bits about the etruscans that I didn't know (and more), so I carry on. I'd toss the book except that Sweetie with the Marker gives up shortly after the pages I plow through now.
She (I just know it is a she) may have changed markers. Her marker ran out and she turned to probably a fine line sharpie, and came back to loud, and I perceive this highlighting as slightly more orange. Or, maybe not. Maybe she just lost the marker for a while.

I lied, I'm not so sure it was a fine line sharpie.

I think note taking went awry at some point.

Uh, still submerged in Russian and Soviet fiction, as I was when I last posted. But I'm going about it all backwards. The authors I'm reading have taught me that Russians are totally hilarious, as opposed to despairing wretches.

I'd like to talk about Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. Y'all heard of 'em? I read The Twelve Chairs and peed my pants laughing. Not the mild, chuckle-on-the-bus kind of laughter that most "humorous" literature elicits. But laughter to the point of tears. I'm anxious to read the follow-up, The Little Golden Calf.

Know what was interesting? I had no clue these guys were so huge in 20th century Russia. To this day, I think, they are quoted as Brits quote Monty Python or Americans quote the Simpsons. A credit to their work, yes, but the introduction reveals that Malenkov recognized the lack of legitimate humorists in the USSR as a state problem. To address it, 200,000 copies of The Twelve Chairs were eventually released and literally read to pieces.

I use to pick used books that had been highlighted while in college. If I came across a book with as much highlighting as yours, I turned it down.

I didn't see the markings until I got the book home - the local good will is often crowded in the book section; I just grabbed it on recognizing the title and author. The good news is that I'm on page 77 and the markings stop at page 83, in a book of 474 pages.

They ran out of fluid in their marker

I am not reading my fourth book at the same time - my new one was a Xmas present from my daughter, "Oklahoma Fans"

I'd never realised that The Twelve Chairs that Mel Brooks made a movie of in 1970 was based on a Russian classic - just read that Mel's mothers family were Russian jews from Kiev.

Replying a tad late, didge -

I'm a fan of the soho crime book series. I probably have 50 of them, usually purchased used. One had charming little squiggley notes in fine point pen, all of them interesting..

Sort of reminds me of, sob, the old library card indices. Sometimes scribbled notes on those - basically a library violation at the time, I think - were also interesting.

Which brings up the vatican library - the vat - recent article on it in the NYT - they've saved all the big old card indices, or so it seems.

For example, the chapter about when they find themselves in a hidden maze in their house (oh, the word "house" is always typeset in blue everywhere it appears in the book) is written as a maze. There's a footnote reference that takes you to a footnote that is written in about a one-inch column all the way down the left hand side of the two-page spread, and it continues on for about ten pages on the left hand sides of each two-page spread. Then at the end of that, there is another footnote reference that takes you to another footnote that is formatted upside-down in another one-inch column on the right-hand side of that same two-page spread, so you have to flip the book upside down and read that footnote for the ten pages or whatever to get right back to the page you started the whole process on.

Plus, there are other 2" x 2" inch blue-outlined (probably blue was chosen to give you a sense of actually being in the house) boxes with another footnote that goes for about ten or fifteen pages, but this time, on the back of each page with a blue box, there is another blue box with the same text in it, but reversed, as if it were the back of the text on the other side of the page, and then on the right side, there is the next successive blue box of text that you have to read to get to the next place. I think that one ended with a box filled with nothing but complete black—a dark void, which is a big theme throughout the book.

And that's just one chapter. The rest of the book has all kinds of crazy type formatting, like twenty pages in a row formatted in a small box of type in the middle of each page that gets successively smaller (the box, not the text) so that it feels tighter and tighter, while one of the characters is going into a tunnel that is getting successively smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter...

I looked it up, the unusual formatting style of the book is called ergodic literature, according to wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_literature

Anyway, it's pretty cool.

I'm alternating between the short stories of Ernest Hemingway and something called 75 readings. In other words, teaching materials dominate my life.

Fbaezer gave me a list of latin american lit some years ago - here on a2k but no link immediately, though I can dig out the thread - and I eventually ordered some of them or others that sounded interesting. Brat that I am, I have been slow to start, as in, don't tell me about a parrot. (Ok, I eventually nodded to the parrot).

Now I'm pleased -

Julio Cortazar

Blow up and other stories
originally published as end of the game and other stories.

I'm about 2/3 through. I'm not antagonistic yet. Quite the opposite. this is a wonderful book.

I have had it for years but not read it yet.

Sounds like I should.