charlieblue: (carni: scorched +salted earth policy)
2011-03-05 10:15 pm

there are thieves, who rob us blind

This is my time of great unrest, the time of of the Great White Western Privilege Troubles. South America seems so long ago, like a fairytale out of a book I read a long time ago, when I was a child and still believed places could be uncharted, a colonialist's wet-dream.

Well I'm homeless now, sleeping on couches and rolling into law school with unbrushed hair and an intellectual swagger. I'm not exactly a humble person, and practically living in a building that was built specifically for the law kids, which includes the most amazing University library you will ever see and secret nooks and crannies filled with couches and floor-to-ceiling windows, well, that doesn't help my enduring sense of entitlement.

Scenery matters to me, and while I'm kind of lost at the moment, stumbling around the city in a house-hunting-induced delirium, with no footing but that found in half-cocked classified ads, leaping puddles and trying to remember those long ago times when I landed back in Melbourne and found out China Town had turned into a river.

The weather's bleak now, nothing dramatic and nothing sunny, just grey, sometimes a little greyer, never comfortable. I can never be happy in my own skin when the sky is sky and not roiling clouds or blinding blue. There's something indecent about whether in which you can neither curl up in front of a laptop nor go outside and read in the sun.

...I think this is where Wes Anderson steps in and force feeds a deranged literate parrot, a half-blind limousine driver and a long-lost celebrity brother into my life.

-

Books I've read over summer if anyone wants to talk about them:

Tender Is The Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald (every single song in the world now reminds me of this book)
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (I stayed up all night because I couldn't face finishing it in the morning, it was so bleak and so lovely)
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez (swimming in tears and light, because I can't not get purple-prosey about my love for this man's genius)
Franny and Zooey - JD Salinger (haters gonna hate, I'm a convert)
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction - JD Salinger (he is so much wittier and lighter in spirit and heavier in soul than I ever imagined)
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (a kind of simple perfection)
Jack Maggs - Peter Carey (dark, amusing literary hat tricks)
The Aleph - Jorge Luis Borges (he breaks my mind)
charlieblue: (s: drunk under the proverbial duckpond)
2010-10-23 12:23 pm
Entry tags:

Stop the Press!

The Truth, by Terry Pratchett

My reading of this book was greatly enhanced by the notion that Tom Hardy should play Mr. Tulip, closely followed by the logical conclusion that Joseph Gordon-Levitt should play Mr. Pin.

Mr. Tulip, essentially, is what you would get if Quentin Tarantino got ahold of Tom Hardy's character Freddie from The Take. 'What does it say?’ //  )

All in all a rip-roaring read, though not as gripping as the Discworld book I read previous to it, Nightwatch. I could talk forever about this book, but I've already meta'd a bit about Vimes, and I'm tapped out at the moment. Suffice to say that this was probably my favourite of all the Discworld novels so far. Brilliant plotting, and I was in love with the irreverent treatment Pratchett gave some very high-end, abstract and theoretical physics.

I keep hearing great things about the Witches arc of Discworld, but remain unconvinced. I think I'm just too much in love with the Ankh-Morpork capers.
charlieblue: (s: through a daisy darkly)
2009-05-24 01:05 am
Entry tags:

The Secret History

So I just finished The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (yes, I'm ridiculously late to the party, stop laughing), and my mind is satisfactorily blown. Rather than attempt to impart my impressions through words, at which I would no doubt fail miserably, I instead choose to use pictures, quotations and music.

Photobucket


Spoilers for the book beneath the cut.

Dionysis [is] the Master of Illusions, who could make a vine grow out of a ship's plank, and in general enable his votaries to see the world as the world's not. )
.
.
.

Mix: As Serious As your Life. )