Metal Reviews

Thank you, I really appreciate it. How are you doing?

I'm doing well, thanks. Been bored with not having a summer job. However, my passion for reading has come back and is staying so I'm reading quite a bit. Listening to Music and we're moving to a new place in mid August so I'm occupied with packing and whatnot. Life is okay. How are things on your side?

Just started :

Please let me know what you think of it.

Reading concurrently:

Ancient Sorceries and Other Stories-Algernon Blackwood
Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica-Mick Wall
Marvel Comics: The Untold Story-Sean Howe
The Historical Figure of Jesus-E.P. Sanders
Wilt, 1962: The Night of 100 Points-Gary Pomerantz

I like to keep a good mix of material.

/\ Ditto. Currently reading:

The Great Gatsby - FS Fitzgerald
Flying Free - Nigel Farage
Complete Fiction - HP Lovecraft

Have a bunch more to start, thanks to cheap deals at the Kindle store.

I've had a lot of family stuff going on, hence why I wasn't around. We were just told that my youngest son (14) is going to need back surgery, so that has us really concerned. It's scheduled for August 4th. As for me I'm teaching the kids, working in an autism summer program right now. My wife and I finally had our first trip without kids a few weeks ago. We went to Crater Lake in Oregon and then drove down through the Redwoods in northern California. I've been obsessed with Dexter and Sons of Anarchy. I bought a new guitar this year and I've become rather fond of tattoos. I just had my second tattoo done, at least the linework. I have two more visits before it's finished. I've begun working on the designs for two more that I'd like to have.

Others may have done it better, but few have done it with more wit and panache. RIP Hitch

Yeah I considered getting an Emperor (logo) on my arm but there were more important investments to be made considering I have dug in my savings and don't have an income at the moment. Well, good for you for finding more interesting things to discover. I very much hope the surgery goes well for you son. That vacation sounds excellent, and sounds it had quite a bit scenery to enjoy. Very good.

I sold my guitar two years ago. I wasn't eager to learn so I bought more music which I enjoyed more. Maybe you could inform us more about your tattoos in the photo thread.

Back on topic:

Currently reading:

Difference and Repetition (Gilles Deleuze)
The Fourth Intellectual Journey in Transcendent Philosophy (Mulla Sadra Shirazi)

Both colossal books in ontology.

I just finished rereading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. I feel weird saying this but it's my favourite novel, and nothing else comes close. Theoretically I think each author does different things well, so there's no one that blows all the others out of the water, but while most authors do 1-3 things well, DFW does about 12-15 and he does them way better than anyone else. I wort a review:
http://jeffmcq.blogspot.ca/2014/07/davi ... -jest.html

Now I'm onto Samuel Beckett's Molloy and it's a bit of a slog but overall enjoyable. For school I'm reading a bunch of Alasdair MacIntyre and responses to him by academics.

i finished it last night.

the prose is excellent, as is the setup and characterisation. the plot is very intricate and fun to follow. she kind of bungled it near the end. i think long books are the hardest to wrap up elegantly, it's usually either too drawn-out or too short. in this case it's too long, you get the denouement some 200 pages from the end and then she goes back to the events before the book to shed some light on them.

there's this whole astrological thing to it, and the chapters follow the phases of the moon and stuff. it's quite a feat to make the novel conform to these restrictions, but in doing it i think she sacrificed too much in terms of content. it's like those technical acts that care more about sounding technical than about sounding good.

what really disappointed me was (SPOILERS)magical shit near the end, what with the guy getting high, getting shot and getting nourished while stuck in a crate, and by the way how did he get out?

still, the scope, ambition, prose and plot more than make up for this, and even the drawn-out ending is easy to swallow.

now reading Neil Gaiman's Stardust.

One of the few Gaiman books I haven't read yet. Coraline was the last one and I enjoyed it immensely. The movie was nice to look at but it just didn't capture the creepiness or the emotional tension of the book.

I'm a fan of long books but yeah this is true. Will check out The Luminaries someday.

Just 100 pages into Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind and it's fucking magnificent. Great storytelling, love it so far.

I started Name of the Wind a weekish ago and only made it 17 pages in because the writing sucked.

Now reading Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon & it is v. good.

You're wrong. Give it 80 more. If you still don't like it, you're still wrong.

It just had a lot of junk like this:



First, "emphatically" should probably never be there because the choice of words should convey the emphaticness. Second, the italics shouldn't be there because italics read like a internet post that capitalizes words for emphasis. Third, the italics and the adverb do the same thing so together one of them is redundant. Doing something poorly and twice bums me out. Then again the prevalence of this stuff in popular novels makes me think people read books for different stuff than me. It makes my search for good fantasy hard :(

Finished Beckett's Molloy. It had a consistent unique thing going on but was a bit of a slog. Gonna read Martin Amis' The Information before I go on with the trilogy.

Have you read The First Law?

I have not. Is good?