What Book Are You Currently Reading ?

[Batman]

`Few venture as thou hast in the alarming paths of sin.' This is the final judgement of Satan on Victoria di Loredani, the heroine of Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), a tale of lust, betrayal, and multiple murder set in Venice in the last days of the fifteenth century. The novel follows Victoria's progress from spoilt daughter of indulgent aristocrats, through a period of abuse and captivity, to a career of deepening criminality conducted under Satan's watchful eye. Charlotte Dacre's narrative deftly displays her heroine's movement from the vitalized position of Ann Radcliffe's heroines to a fully conscious commitment to vice that goes beyond that of `Monk' Lewis's deluded Ambrosio. The novel's most daring aspect is its anatomy of Victoria's intense sexual attraction to her Moorish servant Zofloya that transgresses taboos both of class and race. A minor scandal on its first publication, and a significant influence on Byron and Shelley, Zofloya has been unduly neglected. Contradicting idealized stereotypes of women's writing, the novel's portrait of indulged desire, gratuitous cruelty, and monumental self-absorption retains considerable power to disturb. The introduction to this edition, the first for nearly 200 years, examines why Zofloya deserves to be read alongside established Gothic classics as the highly original work of an intriguing and unconventional writer.

Well that was tough going, decent book but far too similar to The Monk by Matthew Lewis, the author actually uses the pseudonym of Rosa Matilda so she didn't even try to hide the influence.

The ending was a complete rip off of The Monk but nowhere near as good.

The characters were pretty standard and the story didn't excite me, I'm glad that I read it and I would recommend it to fans of this genre but I can think of many books that I would put above it.

I'm just about to start this now (at last, Amazon lost the first copy that I ordered so they had to resend it)

The state has been recently taken over and is being run by the tyrannical and philistine ‘Average Man’ party. Under the slogans of equality and happiness for all, it has done away with individualism and freedom of thought. Only John Krug, a brilliant philosopher, stands up to the regime. His antagonist, the leader of the new party, is his old school enemy, Paduk – known as the ‘Toad’. Grieving over his wife’s recent death, Krug is at first dismissive of Paduk’s activities and sees no threat in them. But the sinister machine which Paduk has set in motion may prove stronger than the individual, stronger even than the grotesque ‘Toad’ himself.

The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime.

Don't worry El Kabong, I'll be getting started right on 1984 once I have finished this one.

[Batman]

Finished this, cracking book, not as good as Lolita but still well worth a read.

Nabokov has a strange way of making really dark subject matters quite light hearted, his characters kind of remind me of Kafka's in their blase approach to serious situations.

Krug is a celebrity philosopher and when a new government comes into power called the Ekwilists who enforce equality upon everyone and believes that if no one is individual then everyone must be happy, Krug opposes this and the head of this new political party try to force him to publicly support them, they arrest his friends and everyone close to him and he still refuses to back down, eventually they take things up a level and its only right at the end of the book when you realize how far they are willing to go to get the support that they want. Oh and the head of this party is nicknamed The Toad, an name bestowed upon him when he was at school with Krug, yeah it turns out that Krug used to bully The Toad rather severely whilst they were at school.

one thing I would say is if you are going to read this then take a look at Hamlet first and familiarize yourself with the general story because there is a 20 page chapter devoted to it.

anyways, I'm finally going to be getting started on

Winston Smith is a low-rung member of the Party, the ruling government of Oceania. He works in the Ministry of Truth, the Party's propoganda arm, where he is in charge of revising history. He is but a small brick in the pyramid that is the Party, at the head of which stands Big Brother. Big Brother the infallible. Big Brother the all-powerful. In a totalitarian society, where individuality is suppressed and freedom of thought has its antithesis in the Thought Police, Winston finds respite in the company of Julia. Originality of thought awakens, love bloosoms and hope is rekindled. But what they don't know is that Big Brother is always watching...

lets see how this stacks up to Bend Sinister then

[Batman]

@El Kabong finished it last night, I have to say that on balance I think I would opt for re-reading Bend Sinister by Nabakov over 1984.

Both brilliant books released at roughly the same time about the same subject, 1984 was more of a standard story whilst Bend Sinister made me stop and think a little bit more.
As I was reading 1984 I kept thinking to myself 'wow this still seems pretty damn fresh considering it was released in 1984' then I would catch myself and think 'hang about, it is set in 1984 but it was released in 1948.
It still reads as though it could have been published for the first time just yesterday.

Orwell really did have the future nailed on, I mean we are 33 years down the line from when the book was set and the things that he was imagining are not far from reality now, he did a fantastic job in that regard.

What was it that old Hill Dog said about it then? you mentioned it was something about how we need to 'trust the government' just those 3 words seem to go against the entire premise of the book.

Eric Sanderson wakes up in a place he doesn't recognise, unable to remember who he is. All he has left are journal entries recalling Clio, a perfect love now gone. So begins a thrilling adventure that will send Eric and his cynical cat Ian on a search for the Ludovician, the force that is threatening his life, and Dr Trey Fidorus, the only man who knows its secrets.

I started this today, only on about page 30 or 40 but it seems like good fun so far

[El Kabong]

She said the following....

“Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism,” Mrs. Clinton writes. “This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered.
“The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust towards exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves,” she continues.

[Batman]

She said the following....

“Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism,” Mrs. Clinton writes. “This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered.
“The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust towards exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves,” she continues.

In that case she is a fool, he wasn't being tortured in order to breed mistrust, he was being conditioned to blindly follow.

The first two thirds of the book is where the mistrust is formed, the final third of the book shows how far The Party are willing to go in order to ensure that blind worship, they forced Winston to abandon every belief he held against The Party and Big Brother, even when he meant it, it still wasn't enough for them, they needed 100% compliance and the only way to do that was to go after the one person he loved, by the end of it there wasn't any room for anyone else other than Big Brother.

[El Kabong]

She said the following....

“Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism,” Mrs. Clinton writes. “This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered.
“The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust towards exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves,” she continues.

In that case she is a fool, he wasn't being tortured in order to breed mistrust, he was being conditioned to blindly follow.

The first two thirds of the book is where the mistrust is formed, the final third of the book shows how far The Party are willing to go in order to ensure that blind worship, they forced Winston to abandon every belief he held against The Party and Big Brother, even when he meant it, it still wasn't enough for them, they needed 100% compliance and the only way to do that was to go after the one person he loved, by the end of it there wasn't any room for anyone else other than Big Brother.

Thank you for the confirmation

[Batman]

Well this took me a week longer than anticipated but that is only cuz I was pretty fucking ill last week and the meds I was on knocked me the fuck out so I was in no fit state to do any reading.

I'm a bit conflicted by this book, some parts of it were extremely well done and pretty fucking clever, other parts (a large chunk at the end) was just outright plagiarism and that bothered me.

Its basically about a bloke who wakes up with no memory at all of who he was, he goes on a voyage of self discovery, falls in love, and has to do battle with a big fuck of conceptual shark that eats memories...yeah

There are some pretty cool sections with 'text imagery' including a few pages of a shark made up of nothing but text, it works pretty well, its like a watered down, easier to read version of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.

Once you get to the end you have to go over in your head the whole book that you have just read and try to figure out where it actually begins and if there is a cross over, I'm pretty sure I have got it figured out and after having a quick look online it looks like there is quite a few people that agree with me so I'm pretty satisfied with the conclusion.

I've also just hit my reading challenge for the year, 30 books I've read so far, everything else is just a bonus now.

I'm not overly sure what to delve into next, its out of

First published in serial form as Der Golem in the periodical Die weissen Blätter in 1913–14, The Golem is a haunting Gothic tale of stolen identity and persecution, set in a strange underworld peopled by fantastical characters. The red-headed prostitute Rosina; the junk-dealer Aaron Wassertrum; puppeteers; street musicians; and a deaf-mute silhouette artist.

Lurking in its inhabitants’ subconscious is the Golem, a creature of rabbinical myth. Supposedly a manifestation of all the suffering of the ghetto, it comes to life every 33 years in a room without a door. When the jeweller Athanasius Pernath, suffering from broken dreams and amnesia, sees the Golem, he realises to his terror that the ghostly man of clay shares his own face. . . .

The Golem, though rarely seen, is central to the novel as a representative of the ghetto's own spirit and consciousness, brought to life by the suffering and misery that its inhabitants have endured over the centuries. Perhaps the most memorable figure in the story is the city of Prague itself, recognisable through its landmarks such as the Street of the Alchemists and the Castle.

During the 1950s, Gold Medal Books introduced authors like Jim Thompson, Chester Himes, and David Goodis to a mass readership eager for stories of lowlife and sordid crime. Today many of these writers are admired members of the literary canon, but one of the finest of them of all, Elliott Chaze, remains unjustly obscure. Now, for the first time in half a century, Chaze’s story of doomed love on the run returns to print in a trade paperback edition.

When Tim Sunblade escapes from prison, his sole possession is an infallible plan for the ultimate heist. Trouble is it’s a two-person job. So when he meets Virginia, a curiously well-spoken “ten-dollar tramp,” and discovers that the only thing she cares for is “drifts of money, lumps of it,” he knows he’s met his partner. What he doesn’t suspect is that this lavender-eyed angel might just prove to be his match.

Black Wings Has My Angel careens through a landscape of desperate passion and wild reversals. It is a journey you will never forget.

I'm also tempted to re-read Dantes Divine Comedy (or maybe just Inferno) I'm not decided yet

[El Kabong]

Cambridge to 'decolonise' English literature
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education...d=tmg_share_tw


Yyyyyyeah, see I'm of the mind that we can learn NEW things and discuss NEW things by reading authors from different cultures and places, but still classics are classic for reasons and there's no need to kick authors out of a curriculum based solely on their race.



@Batman your thoughts?

[Batman]

Cambridge to 'decolonise' English literature
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education...d=tmg_share_tw


Yyyyyyeah, see I'm of the mind that we can learn NEW things and discuss NEW things by reading authors from different cultures and places, but still classics are classic for reasons and there's no need to kick authors out of a curriculum based solely on their race.



@Batman your thoughts?

OK so this is what bothers me in this birds 'open letter'

What we can no longer ignore, however, is the fact that the curriculum, taken as a whole, risks perpetuating institutional racism.

Why not just broach the subject, the very first paragraph throws out 'institutional racism' that is similar to that tranny model who was sacked from the shampoo advert for saying 'all white people were racist' only to backtrack and say that what she meant was that 'all white people are institutionally racist' or some shit like that, by whacking the word 'institutional' in front of racism it appears that does not constitute saying that anyone is purposely racist, just that they are racist but its not their fault.

She also asks for

The inclusion of two or more postcolonial and BME authors on every exam paper.

This is the main part that boils my piss, its like when the BBC made that new rule that every comedy panel show now needs to have at least one female comedian (even though I don't like the bloke fair play to Jason Manford for refusing to go on anymore BBC shows after that)

What this girl is saying is that BME authors need to be shoe horned into every single exam paper regardless of how good they are or regardless of the fact that there could be hundreds of white authors more deserving of it, the BME authors need to get in purely based on their race (is that not encouraging institutional racism and discrimination?)

End of the day the as you said the classics are classics for a reason, because they are the best in their genres, not because the author was white, black, yellow or green.

There is an old saying, never judge a book by its cover, this would completely go against that.

[Beanz]

"The Daily Telegraph has admitted its story suggesting the University of Cambridge was being “forced” to drop white writers from its curriculum was inaccurate, as the black student who featured on its front page spoke out after suffering “racist and sexist abuse” as a result.


The newspaper on Thursday offered a ‘clarification’ after Lola Olufemi, the women’s officer at Cambridge University Student Union, was among dozens of students to sign an open letter to the university’s English department calling for non-white authors and “postcolonial thought” to be “meaningfully” incorporated into the current syllabus."


Finally the DT does the right thing after days of racist garbage on this page....



Don't believe everything you read mate. And certainly don't believe something that Lyle posts after being pointed towards it by his alt right hysterical gay white failed British overlords.

Lyle does not believe in intellectual integrity. To even broach the subject of diversity makes you a snowflake in his book. We used to have proper debates here, very hard nowadays but just for another point of view maybe have a gander at this and then see if you think The Telegraph was being honest

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...mi-curriculums

[Batman]

What a fantastic book that was, the story was simple enough, Tim Sunblade (as he is now known) has been working a shitty job on an oil rig he finishes work and gets himself a prostitute, she ends up staying with him for a few days and although he wants to he can't seem to shake her off, she is quite honest about her interests and motives 'once the moneys gone, I'm gone' but neither of them can stay away from the other.

Its a pretty volatile relationship, certainly of the love/hate variety, she tries to steal him money, he gives her a bit of a beating, she fights back, he realizes that against his better judgement he has fell in love with her and she is just the right person to help him carry out an armed robbery that he has been planning since he was inside.

Virginia is certainly a restless type of girl, the mundane life doesn't agree with her, Tim Sunblade knows what he wants, he doesn't know why he wants it just that he does.

Fantastic book I'd recommend it to anyone, I can't wait to get the chance to pick it back up and re-read it.

[Batman]

The lives of the Barretts, a suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents despair, the doctors are unable to halt Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie's younger sister, Merry. As she recalls the terrifying events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories begin to surface and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed.

Really enjoyed this, it seems like its been a while since I read a bog standard exorcism horror, this ticked all the boxes apart from one, it wasn't scary at all.

There are three different narratives in the book, Merry when she is 8 years old describing things as they happened, Merry 15 years on when she is being interviewed for a true crime and finally a random blogger who describes things as seen in the TV docuseries.

The influences in the book were obvious, almost too obvious, the lead character Merry is basically an extension of Merricat from Shirley Jacksons 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' she is playful and naive and doesn't fully understand what is going on around her (An 8 year old girl trying to deal with her 14 year old sisters schizophrenia/demonic possession) and whilst she doesn't have that twisted sense of mischief that Merricat had but the whole of her narrative had the almost exact same feel (the author actually admits after the book that this was his inspiration but it was painfully blatant. He did however manage to keep it entertaining and enjoyable, sometimes books written from a kids perspective can be cringe worthy but he managed to avoid this.

Paul Tremblay really did try to drag the dated exorcisms into today's world of Wikipedia, iPods and reality TV, it didn't always hit the mark though, the actual 'horror' side of the book suffered from this, the exorcism almost took the backseat for the descriptions of the TV show's cast and crew.

There is a nice little section after the book where the author gives a break down on each chapter describing where his ideas and influences came from, and he has a little chat about his favourite horror films and books etc, I like that sort of thing, it gives you an idea into how their mind works.

It certainly isn't the greatest of books but it was certainly a cracking little page turner.

[Batman]

I think I'm going to stick with the whole 'horror, demon, exorcist' shizzle for the minute and start this tomorrow

In a peaceful Vermont courtroom, humanity will be called to trial by endless evil. Ancient and implacable -- armed with sensuality, delusion and horrible death -- it will join itself to human weakness in an unholy alliance.

Not since The Exorcist has there been such a powerful novel of demonic possession as Son of the Endless Night.

Now I have no recollection of buying this at all, I just got home from work one day and there it was on the floor as I walked through the door, I have either hit the 'one click buy' button on Amazon without realizing it or I have made another of my drunk purchases, I really have no idea, usually if I am buying books when drunk I'll get 4 or 5 delivered sporadically over the course of a few weeks, its actually quite good fun not having any idea of what it could be, I've stumbled across a few gems that way.

Anyway, if its shit I'll put it down to the 'once click buy' button, if its good then I'll chalk it up to drunk batman being out of his noggin on Stella or Rum.