AWKWARD ZOMBIE

A bit late to the party... but my friend sent me the first book of Game of Thrones.

It's alright I guess.

Pretty stock standard train paperback fantasy, really

Yeh, it's sort of underwhelming but not terrible. I owe it to my friend to at least read the whole thing though.

On a related note. I cannot for the life of me read on a train without getting a severe head ache.

still trucking through the count of monte cristo

just got to the part where dantes is shoved into the dungeon for doing absolutely nothing :< the fact that he was arrested on his wedding day just...hurts haha

i'm making so little time due to not having a lot of time to read in general...i really only get to read during my lunch breaks. that and it's almost hard to read since the language is very old and that takes a bit longer for comprehension to kick in. i do think i'll enjoy it though.

Almost done with Great Gatsby for the third time through

I've also been rereading Naked Lunch

I seriously need to avert this more. I've been reading Dracula, and it is fantastic! Sure I have to get through a little antiquated language, but it's barely an inconvenience. It's made me laugh. a couple characters could have saved some trouble with better communication skills, but they had believable reasons to do that. 'It would worry them...It can't be supernatural, can it?...' I said believable, not exactly equal to smart.

I enjoyed Frankenstein, even when my exposure was from school. And we all know how that usually hurts a book. And a Connecticut Yankee in King Arther's Court was also a great book. It is seriously dawning on me that these books survive because they are great. And I need to appreciate that more and actually read them. Not stick to the third hand info we all know already.

I have actually read quiet a few classics recently, for school, and found myself pleasantly surprised by a lot of them. The Great Gatsby, for example, was a book I went in knowing very little about, and it was my favorite reed of last year. I also recentlly read 1984 which, well, was 1984, so yeah. I even liked Cather in the Rye, which I thought I was going to hate, because my dad told me it was awful, but I still quite enjoyed.

On the other hand, I did read Heart of Darkness recently. That was, uh...

I HAVE NO CLUE.

Seriously, the whole draw to the book is that Joseph Conrad writes in a "revolutionary," conversational style, but it winds up reading like a stroke.

But basically, it's about some guys going to Africa during the hight of the European settlement of the area and figuring out that the Euro's treat all the natives like shit, because they can, and the Ivory trade is fucked.
Also, there's this crazy guy, Kurtz, who's gone completely off rails and pretty much become a God-Emperor to the natives. But he's really good at getting Ivory, so every wants to meet him and figure out how he ticks, ya know? So after several pages about things that are apparently important, they get to Kurtz, and he's dying of Flu. They try to evacuate him, but he dies several pages latter. He gives the protagonist, Marlow, some papers, but he might have ment to have given him some other papers, which were his notes on how he got Ivory, and fucked up because he's dying of Flu, and stuff. Or maybe he did mean to give him the more personal papers? It's not the clearest point.

Anyway, Kurtz dies and his last word are "The horror, the horror," presumably some kind of lament on his life, or the power of wilderness to erase society's binds, or something like that. So Marlow goes to see Kurtz's unnamed fiance, and he tells her that Kurtz's last words were her name instead, and he felt bad about it, and that's It.
There's also this thing about Kurtz having a "wife" of the wild, who really didn't want Kurtz to leave the jungle, but she doesn't have any intelligible dialog.

Basically, The story is a commentary on the nature of mankind, and how we desier The Savage Wife, if you will, as animals, but are given The Widowing Fiance by society. The titular "Heart of Darkness" is the desirer to be animalistic and savage that lies within us all, because we are all ultimately just animals in society's cage. I think.

I don't know. I TRIED.

Just watch Apocalypse Now if you want to make sense of it. Most of the old English writers can facebattle my booty because I'm not bothering to translate their work. Especially Joyce. ESPECIALLY FUCKING ULYSSES.

I have read Barjavel's The Ice People and it isn't very good.

Apocalypse Now is so loosely based on Heart of Darkness it hurts me.
It hurts me inside that you would consider them similar enough for one to even affect the other.

They're both really good for their medium, but the things the stories have in common boil down to names, and trying to find Kurtz.

Has anyone read the house of leaves?

I've always wanted to read HOL. Is it any good?

I just started reading it and its sorta freaking me out,

which means its pretty freaking good.

I'll have to pick it up.

I think there are like, different versions of the book, with different things in them. Some have color, or something. Can anyone tell me more about this, so I can know what to get for the best reading experience, or what have you?