Metal Reviews

Mervyn Peake- Titus Alone

I loved the first two Gormenghast books but couldn't get into that one at all... too damn wierd

I've actually read it before, and damn right is it one of the weirdest books ever. Its really different from the other two (cars wtf?) but I still find it to be very funny and enjoyable. Of course, it can't beat out Titus Groan or Gormenghast, and I completely understand why people wouldn't be able to read it.

Reading through The Two Towers for the 3rd time. Its been so long that I forgot how many little things were changed in the movie. The movies still rock my dingleberries in their own way though.

Cicero- Letters to Friends , Books 7-12

The plotline seems like the most stereotypical Marxist idealist revolution plot. The writing puts me off since it is just so stuffy with its sterotypical 19th century metaphors for workers being devoured by mines.

I'm reading some Cicero in Latin. Arguments against Catalina or something. I enjoy it compared to other writers like Augustine.

Those orations against Catiline are fantastic (well, in English- I'm nowhere near good enough to read them in Latin). And Augustine grates quite easily... Some of it is interesting, but ever second sentence quotes something from the bible and then every other sentence talks about how great God is and what a bad bad boy Augustine used to be... but not anymore!

I loaned a book at random from the library (Digging to America by Anne Tyler) because there was this really cute girl working there.

I'll have to read it quickly so I can loan a new one.

An Abundance of Katherines - John Green

The first part was good and clever thinking but the second is not. Nobody is really going to check you if you read it or not and in the extreme case somebody actually asks about it say that it wasn't for you or you thought it wasn't good enough and stopped after 50 pages. Just go back there and create more excuses to talk to the girl.

Jesus, people actually talk to you in Danish libraries? Here, it's like loners anonymous. Even the staff are introverted.

Bear in mind, Edge, that she's probably a serial killer or something. Most pretty girls don't choose to work in libraries.

Haha. Oh well, I'm halfway through and it's OK, I guess. I'll loan a book about serial killers tomorrow and we'll see how she reacts. lol.

No no! Ask her if they have or can order this one for you:
http://www.amazon.com/New-Ladies-Man-Co ... 95&sr=8-11

And try to look the part while you do that!!

Sounds useful, I've always wondered how you break it off after getting someone pregnant - but without her freaking out!

Short stories by Flannery O'Connor

I'm definitely not getting all of the literary devices, symbolism, and whatnot in these stories, but they're still really great. I'll have to read more about them on the internet because I'd like to know more about what's actually going on between the lines...

Also trying to finish the Fellowship of the Ring. I'll be damned, but it just puts me to sleep.

Tom Bombadil is a merry old fellow,
bright blue is his jacket and his boots are yellow

Metaphors, eh? These things really happened, you know... Obviously politics is central to the whole novel but it goes a long way beyond simply "capitalism is bad". A lot of it is about the interplay between competing theories of Marx and Bakunin, and Zola was by no means a straight-up Marxist at all.

And idealist? I don't know how far into it you are, and I don't want to spoil it for you, but seldom will you read a book that is more pessimistic about workers' revolution.

Just as a story it wins, IMO. Relentlessly grim and violent (which I like!), and Souvarine is maybe my favourite creation in all of literature.

Personification of the mine is the only real metaphor that I was talking about. It just seemed to pound the idea in of the mine eating the miners which was true in a way.

It's definitely of the stodgy, every detail matters, a lot of build up and detail before the true conflict arises style of 19th century French writing but I'm growing to like it.

Finished the Hobbit. I really liked it.

Now, I'm reading the 6th Harry Potter book. I figure I might as well finish the series if I got this far.

finished Shame, was really good once i got into it. Now reading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov