I'm reading a lot of plays at the moment and just read the play Immaculate by Oliver Lansley. Truly funny and thoughtful, I would definitely recommend it for a quick read!
Yeah, but the Money speech is only about eight pages, if I recall correctly (I don't have a copy of the book here these days - I need the shelf space for dead flies and rodent droppings). Galt's radio speech is sixty pages or so, right? So it's only about one beer's-worth of time to read the Money speech. Galt's radio speech would get you shitfaced before you finish it - which is probably a good idea.
Haha! Yeah, Galt's speech in my copy (I have the Penguin Modern Classics edition) is 60 - 70 pages, somewhere in that area.
Believe it or not, people do own it. I actually used to own two copies - the big hardback copy and the small emergency-backup paperback copy. That's a lot of voluminous tediousness and bad thinking for one bookshelf. At some point in my twenties, when I moved around from apartment to apartment a lot, I lost both of them. I assume they were swallowed by goats. This is perfectly fine, because I'm sure that what came out of the back end of those goats is just as valuable as what went into the front end.
I just finished Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage (Yes, I really have to think to remember the whole title) by Murakami. I loved it, some of the prose is so beautiful it feels almost poetic. Or edible!
I've also been reading some H.P. Lovecraft online recently. His works are much more engaging, but my immersion is constantly broken by me stopping to look up a new word every 3-4 lines!
Yeah, I mean anyone would understand 'We saw in the opaquely gibbous darkness the uncountable countenance of a thousand batrachian morphoids, of membranous dimensions and countless weird, conjugal appendages creating an image of the apotheosis of the unnamable. Here, indeed, was every form of dactylitisism, diabolism, and materialism gone wrong'.
Yeah, but see, I get this, except for the use of the word gibbous. It doesn't apply. And Lovecraft was fond of illogical things like, "the uncountable countenance of a thousand batrachian morphoids" - dammit, H.P., if there's a thousand of them, then they're countable! The rest of it is all typical Lovecraft bullshit, especially that bit about the "unnameable." For some reason, Lovecraft was always trying to horrify us by telling us that things were ancient and unnameable. I like the bit about materialism gone wrong, though. That really is horrifying.
Hey! Dr. Seuss was deep! Besides, Hegel was writing in German, and it's a little-known fact that he's never been translated into English. Professors just said he was, and handed everyone all his Hegelian German stuff out in English philosophy classes, pretending it was in English and getting all superior and stuff when students who only read English couldn't understand it. On the other hand, I probably just made that up. It's been a beery evening, mostly thanks to the ridiculous Packers-Bears game.
Words such as 'salubrious' and 'betwixt'. I'm reading his short stories in chronological order you see, so am nowhere near scraping the surface of the Cthulhu mythos yet. I'm basically sifting through and highlighting all of the words I don't know. My final high school exam finished this morning, but I stayed behind for the whole day to use up the remainder of my $60 printing quota. I wonder if the teachers and other students were mystified at seeing sheets of Lovercraft horror strown across the library tables?
Sounds like my teenaged self. I also used my girlfriend's printer money to print Off his fungi from yuggoth poems.
Halo: Broken Circle. Newest book in the Halo series. Yes, it isn't the best writing in the world, but everyone needs their own guilty pleasures. That series has been mine for a long time now.
Insurgent, the sequel to Divergent. Saw the movie and decided I'd see what the book series was like, a lot better than the movie, but that's not saying too much.
I'm rereading "Empire from the Ashes" by David Weber for the third or fourth time now. It is still a beautifully done story (used to be three books actually) I've read around halfway through it in around maybe 12 hours total. I read it first in seventh grade in around a week. Loved it so much back then and I still love it just as much now.
I just finished Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger and Chris Ryan's Masters of War about the same time. The former was really enjoyable although the ending was quite disappointing. The latter was through-and-through fluff, commuter-reading as I call it, easy to pick up from where you left off, but I like SAS op adventures... Now I'm starting Elizabeth Moon's Vatta series. The first novel Trading in Danger is not super promising, though, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish the entire series.
There are Klingons in Lovecraft's work? Golly. I'm reading Authority by Jeff Vandermeer, the second in his Southern Reach trilogy. The first book, Annihilation, was satisfying, intriguing, character driven, and only 200 pages long. A 200 page long, traditionally published, science fiction novel is like time traveling back to the 1960's of science fiction publication. I absolutely loved it. This second book is just a few pages longer.
Currently reading Plugged by Eoin Colfer, I kind of messed up the order and read Screwed first which is the follow on from this book. Either way it's a brilliant book. He really translates his talent that he shown when writing the Artemis Fowl series into the adult realm as it were.
