…then I don’t want to be sane.
Throw in a few frogmen, a library of forbidden books, a shunned house and a curious rock from space and you’ve got the makings of a good time…
I just finished reading Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, and it seems as if his vision of a far off dystopia is much closer than one might think.
Boiling it down, Huxley’s recipe for a “perfect society” entails:
The idea of living in such a controlled environment gives me the creeps, but then I look around at the modern world and I can draw more than a few parallels to Huxley’s imagined world and our own. Huxley’s world wasn’t about the government coming to take things away from individuals (à la 1984), but rather to provide for everyone until they became dependent on the system. Wow…sound familiar? ”Ford be praised…”
After such a heavy, disheartening read, I’m hoping that Dead Babies by Martin Amis can help me scrub my brain of such a negative future view. So far it seems to be working. I’m 40 pages in and instead of wanting to go to the feelies, I now have the sudden urge to squat in a flophouse and dream of my teeth falling out…
So, have you read any good books lately?
My favorite Stephen King quote:
People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.
Just wrapped up Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo last night and am now one hundred pages into Stephen King’s Under The Dome.
Man, that Stieg Larsson really seems to love misogynistic, hyper-violent characters who enjoy partaking in unsafe sex with as many partners as can be squeezed between 500 pages. Other than the rapes, incest, sodomy, torture and mutilations this was an entertaining read. No wonder Quinten Tarantino wanted to make the screen adaptation of this book.
But I’m a sucker for well-written shock and mystery, and will most likely start in on The Girl Who Played With Fire next week after I finish Under The Dome. I hear that the main characters will be back for this second book in Larsson’s trilogy. Curious to see how they’ll be fleshed out after their initial debut in TGWtDT…
Just before we headed off on our vacation last week Karin and I exchanged presents. I hooked her up with a new 64Gig iTouch, and she gave me a present that feeds my addiction:
My wife, the enabler 
Thanks to my (*cough*) sources, I now have ready access to thousands of books. Over the past three days I’ve torn through The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe and Life, The Universe, And Everything (warning, Douglas Adams goes off the dark twisted deep end in this book. I think I’d rather beat myself to death with a stale marshmallow than meet Agrajag in a dark alley…those nasty teeth and broken wings give me the willies!). My new goal is to work through the top 100 science fiction books of all time (only 84 left to go), but will need to squeeze in a few Craig Clevenger and Douglas Coupland books in as well.
So much to read, so little time…
It seems that I’ve been tearing through books at a relatively fast rate in recent days. Thinking a bit about it, I’d have to say that I knock back, on average, fifty pages with each reading session. This is not an alarming rate by any stretch of the imagination, but over time like notches on a gun it does manage to add up. I now have quite a few “dead soldiers” lying about that are in desperate need of shelf space.
The books that I’ve managed to burn through over the past two months are:
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands – Stephen King
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass – Stephen King
A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Tell All – Chuck Palahniuk
Generation Kill – Evan Wright
My Revolutions – Hari Kunzru
The New Dead – Christopher Golden
I’m currently halfway through The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe by Douglas Adams, and have Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer queued up for this week.
It’s amazing the amount of bound paper I have stored in my house, neatly stacked up like seasoned cordwood, anxiously awaiting for an errant spark to set the entire structure ablaze.
Long live the written word!
