[Books] Richard Price - Lush Life

I mentioned Richard Price in this blog some time ago (here). Besides writing books, he also created the great TV Series "The Wire". But this post is about books. About "Lush Life", to be specific.

As I am tired of thinking about how to write a half-decent book review, I thought about a faster way to post the books I read and like. I always liked statistics, so I am just listing some aspects and give points for them. Like that:

Authenticity: 5/5
Style: 4/5
Humor: 3/5
Dialogues: 5/5
Story: 4/5








To finish the review up. I will post a picture of a double page I more or less randomly photographed out of the book. This gives you a good idea about the style, language and maybe more.

For me it was a cool read. I was kinda scared that it would be hard to read, but no problem at all. I think I learned a lot of new words by reading it. Overall 4/5.

JPod by Douglas Coupland

Hell yeah, this book's going to make you laugh a lot. Unless you're a totally unfunny dickhead, of course.  But wait, maybe it's not that easy ...

JPod was my first book by Douglas Coupland who's probably most famous for his 1991 novel "Generation X". (Reminder to myself: read Generation X.) The scenery it describes is pretty much where I see myself living in. Not in every little detail of course, but in the big picture. So, that's probably why I had no problems understanding even the weird things of this book and finding them funny. But after some research on the web I find that this novel divides opinions.
To point that out I will link two reviews on it, one which is positive, and one which is negative.


January Magazine Review
 
Futurismic.com Review

Wikipedia on Douglas Coupland


For me, this book was - after some challenging novels - a relaxing read, that made me laugh out loud and even inspired me in some ways. Not to see everything too close-minded (is that a word?) and being more gritty when doing art for example.

Did you like Matthias Faldbakken's "The Cocka Hola Company"??
Then you will probably like this one too!

James Joyce's Dirty Letters

Oh my! 

Shocking! 

"Nora, my faithful darling, my seet-eyed blackguard schoolgirl, be my whore, my mistress, as much as you like (my little frigging mistress! My little fucking whore!) you are always my beautiful wild flower of the hedges, my dark-blue rain-drenched flower."

I found a nasty selection of love letters by the irish novelist and poet James Joyce, addressed to Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom James would go into self-imposed exile and who will give birth to his first child.

James Joyce; Photo by C. Ruf, Zurich, ca. 1918

Full of shame I must admit that I haven't read Joyce yet. But this will change soon as I have laid eyes on Ulysses now, which is probably his most famous work. To get you hooked on Joyce, you might start with those letters I was talking about. To be found here. 

"Have I shocked you by the dirty things I wrote to you? You think perhaps that my love is a filthy thing. It is, darling, at some moments. I dream of you in filthy poses sometimes. I imagine things so very dirty that I will not write them until I see how you write yourself. The smallest things give me a great cockstand - a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers, a sudden dirty word spluttered out by your wet lips, a sudden immodest noise made by you behind and then a bad smell slowly curling up out of your backside. At such moments I feel mad to do it in some filthy way, to feel your hot lecherous lips sucking away at me, to fuck between your two rosy-tipped bubbies, to come on your face and squirt it over your hot cheeks and eyes, to stick it between the cheeks of your rump and bugger you."

For the win / Makers by Cory Doctorow

What a great, exciting, informative and inspiring book "For The Win" was to me. And even though I am not a native English speaker it was very easy to read after having adapted the gaming vocabulary (don't worry girls, it's not that much). So again, I advise anyone who's familiar with the english language to give it a try in the original version.

I don't want to write a review, since I bet there are 20+ reviews to be found in the internet and all of them are probably better than mine would be.You can find one here by wired.com and another one here on SFSite.

To introduce the author, Cory Doctorow, I have linked an interview with him. It is mostly about Makers, another novel he wrote, and, of course, For The Win. Just to let you know, Cory Doctorow has been voted amongst the 25 most influential persons in the Internet by the Forbes magazine. Check the corresponding article.

A definitive must-read for everybody interested in the internet, gaming, economy and science fiction. Escpecially a must-read for everybody else.

Get illuminated - Robert Anton Wilson Week on BoingBoing

What a nice feature on BoingBoing: It's Robert Anton Wilson Week. For those who don't know: he's the one responsible for the mindfucking Illuminatus! trilogy. That's the real Illuminatus! book, not that crap by ... ! As most of you can probably figure out themselves, people who write such crazy, beautiful books, are very likely to have interesting stories and happen to know interesting people. Read more about him here on his Wiki-Page and find out about his relationship to the LSD-Pope Timothy Leary or his writings for the Playboy mag.

Impudent Strumpet .. Brave New World

First Post...I'm gonna make it quick and painless. It's gonna be about a book I just read. A pretty famous one, most of you probably know about. It's called Brave New World and was written by Aldous Huxley in 1932. Since there are hundreds of summaries of this novel I am not trying to do another one. Instead I'll leave you with two quotations I liked and two links to a free audio recording, for which Aldous Huxley himself read "Brave New World".

To give you an idea: The book is about a future society, that is under total control.

People are not naturally born and raised by their mother and father. Birth has been industrialized. People get classified into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, ... and Epsilpons, according to their physical and mental abilities. They get conditioned by several (wicked & weird) processes to fit the life and work they are supposed to do. The important Bokanovsky Process makes it possible to create up to 96 twins out of one egg. Which is great for more industrialization. Imagine 96 twins on 96 production lines doing the exact same work.

          "The menial staff of the Park Lane Hospital for 
     the Dying consisted of 162 Deltas divided into two 
     Bokanovsky groups of eighty-four red-headed females
     and seventy-eight dark dolichocephalic male twins,
     respectively. At six, when their working day was 
     over, the two Groups assembled in the vestibule of 
     the Hospital and were served by the Deputy Sub-Bursar
     with their soma ration."



Holy Ford! Speaking of which. God also has no place in this society. He has been replaced by the great Ford. Yes, the Henry Ford who invented the conveyor belt.


         "'ART, SCIENCE - You seem to have paid a fairly high
      price for your happiness,' said the Savage, when they
      were alone. 'Anything else?'
     'Well, religion, of course,' replied the Controller.
     'There was something called God before the Nine Years'
     War. " 

To finish my little picture of the Brave New World, I wanna introduce soma. Soma is a drug, that everybody in this futuristic society takes to feel good (and to repress any kind of emotions..that's how the people got conditioned).

          "Hug me till you drug me, honey

     Kiss me till I'm in a coma

     Hug me honey, snuggly bunny

     Love's as good as soma."


In my opinion this book is a must-read for everybody interested in social criticism. But not only then it offers a lot of fun. It's also written in a very nice style, with lots of great pictures, drawn so beautifully with words. (Just imagine a normal person (from our society), finding him/herself in a Bokanovsky group of 96 persons, seeing only 2 faces amongst them (one masculin and one feminine) and hearing only two different voices.) Since I am interested in music, I especially liked how he saw and described future music.


         "In the synthetic music machine the soundtrack roll 
     began to unwind. It was a trio for hyper-violin, 
     super-'cello and oboe-surrogate that now filled the 
     air with agreeable languor. Thirty or forty bars - 
     and then, against this instrumental background, a 
     much more than human voice began to warble."


I recommend reading it in English. I am not a native speaker and had no problems, and although a dictionary is recommended to get all the beauty of Aldous' language it is not necessary to get the big picture. By the way, did you know that Aldous Huxley grew up in a family of biologists ? Interestingly, his grandfather was known as "Darwin's Bulldog". But you can read all about that at different spots like:

Wikipedia about Aldous Huxley 


To finish this post, here are the two links to the forementioned MP3-recording, on which Aldous Huxley read his great novel Brave New World:

Brave New World Recording Part 1

Brave New World Recording Part 2