Metal Reviews

the hell? you actually liked the seventh book?

are you fucking mental?

It was good, with a kind of gay ending.

There are some really bad parts in it. Like, really bad. Like:


SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!





Susannah's ending, which was the cheesiest thing ever. And that stupid spider kid of Roland's who kills Flagg, subsituting an awesome villain for a shit one. Oh, and the Crimson King being a crazy old man throwing Harry Potter toys.

But otherwise, I thought it was an awesome book. The deaths were written very well; the insurrection against the slave camp was great; and once again, though Roland's ending is very love/hate among fans, I thought it was perfect. It was either that or Stephen King would had to have told us whether there was a God or not.

So, maybe I'm mental. I know fan opinion is very divided on the seventh book, but a good portion of fans do like it, and the ending.

Finally read The Catcher in the Rye. I definitely should have read it earlier because it didn't really strike me as the classic as everyone sees it. I thought it was pretty good, but not that good.

I wanted to throw book 7 against the wall when I read the ending, but with time it's made more sense and I sort of want to reread the series, now. When it's good, it's good enough to be gripping, for sure.

I've been thinking about reading them again, but commitment is needed.

I read a couple of those books and I kinda forget what happened in them. All that comes to mind is black lady having sex with an evil spirit, a heroin addict, and a weird cult that sacrifices people.

See!

Best series ever.

I love the Dark Tower series, I'm on the fifth book now. Wizard And Glass was difficult for me to get into, but by the end I was hooked.
SPOILER:
Susannah's death saddened me a great deal.

Afro_D-Shak:

May I recommend that since other people haven't finished reading Wizard and Glass, you spoiler that out by changing the font to black and writing SPOILERS in big letters?

Jesus.. Stop the spoilers :(

I'll do that, I didn't think it'd be a problem since that fact is revealed fairly early on in the first book, but I'll do it nonetheless.

Now reading

EP Thompson - The Poverty of Theory. Basically a 300-page blow by blow demolition of the thought of Althusser, which trapt may find fun to read if you can find it.

Just ordered some novels which I hope will arrive before I go on holiday. (If they don't, there wasn't much point).

Mary Shelley - The Last Man (plague wiping out the population of earth from the writer of Frankenstein)

Zola - The Debacle

Matthew Lewis - The Monk (old horror book about a randy incestuous murdering monk, written in the 18th century which was despised for its obscenity at the time )

HG Wells - The First Men on the Moon (I love HG Wells)

Herman Hesse - Siddhartha

So far it's wut?!

Wonderful book.

Finished Daily Life of the Etruscans by Jacques Heurgon- some interesting chapters, but all in all pretty boring- then again, I'm not into social history.

Now:

Cicero- Letters to Atticus: Volume II

Pseudo-spiritual oriental philosophy acting as a mask for Christian moralism. Hesse is extremely overrated.

Don't lie and say that when reading the series that reference in the first book revealed it to you. Somebody reading the series wouldn't know the relevence of it, or even remember when you get to the said bit.

Hmm wonder what kind of strain that would put Zizek under as well since I see Althusser and him being related. Is it written from a leftist perspective?

Went back to Zizek - In Defense of Lost Causes. I've failed at reading this entire summer. Haven't been able to finish or even start something these last few months.

Frig is right on Hesse. I enjoyed Siddhartha due to the hype from this forum. Looking back on it, it's nothing to write home about.

Absolutely; Thompson was maybe one of the world's greatest Marxist historians, and was very influential on the Anti-Soviet New Left. I know a lot of people who seem to completely worship The Making of the English Working Class as a piece of social history.

But he was also a full-time activist and campaigner, so he is incredibly disdainful of those Marxists that wrote off the idea of looking at people's actual experiences as "empiricism". Hence why he despises Althusser. He seems like a free-thinker to me, completely devoid of dogmatism but still committed to socialist/Marxian ideas.

He didn't live to see Zizek, but I can't imagine he'd have been a huge fan. But, I don't think he'd have reacted the same way as he did to Althusser. Zizek doesn't seem to actively discourage activism and the study of history, or the analysis of any empirical experience, in anything like the same way as Althusser does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_p_thompson

So he's bashing the Althusser's historicism. I assumed it was for is emphasis on ideology. Zizek is definitely an armchair theorist but he isn't opposed to activism. Zizek can also be opposed to activism when it loses sight of challenging capitalism and only seeks to aid suffering individuals. I'll be checking it out. I really want to study some more on the dialectic and historicism.