Books

K8teebug wrote:
I finished "Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl" this weekend. It was fantastic.

This is on my up next

Currently in the middle of Mudhoney: The Sound and the Fury from Seattle

Just finished Feeding Back: Conversations with Alternative Guitarists from Proto-Punk to Post-Rock It wasn't quite as insightful as I had hoped, but still a good read

I am enjoying Danielewski's The Familiar serial series.

I also finished (a compilation of) Kant's Political Writings and Roth's Patrimony which are both good.

Now that I am going to have to use the Metro to get to work for an unknown amount of time (we lost our parking lot…), I will be needing books to read while on the train.  Right now I have a few on deck - all of the books Bret Easton Ellis wrote, and the Songs of Fire and Ice series…

Sidehatch wrote:

Relaxer wrote:Oh man, I just went to my office's Free Book shelf

I imagine there have got to be some good finds there

There are some great finds there, but it involves going up to 4th floor and scanning hundreds of books, most of them dumb novels. But I always find enough of them to keep me involved in several good ones at a time. Right now I'm reading these:





My goal is 100 books this year. I've got 6 completed and the ACC book will be done in a couple days.

I have to say that I legitimately teared up several times reading the ACC book. Valvano's and Smith's deaths were pretty heartbreaking.

all of the books Bret Easton Ellis wrote

The Rules of Attraction is one of my favorites and never really got mass appeal
I also liked the informers, but not as much

LtZ is OK,
but American Psycho is so great and disturbing at the same time
the context of the 80s NYC is important to the story

Got to meet him during the Lunar Park book tour
I liked that book, but really 'fans only' book IMO

Also:
The Informers (1994)
Glamorama (1998)
Imperial Bedrooms (2010)

(I plan on reading all of the books this year)

Sidehatch wrote:

all of the books Bret Easton Ellis wrote

The Rules of Attraction is one of my favorites and never really got mass appeal
I also liked the informers, but not as much

LtZ is OK,
but American Psycho is so great and disturbing at the same time
the context of the 80s NYC is important to the story

Got to meat him during the Lunar Park book tour
I liked that book, but really 'fans only' book IMO

Rules Of Attraction is the only thing he wrote that I didn't think was total ass.

killsaly wrote:
Also:
The Informers (1994)
Glamorama (1998)
Imperial Bedrooms (2010)

(I plan on reading all of the books this year)

I listed Informers - and I liked it


BEE has two 'scene's' in different books that take place in bathtubs that have stuck with me for decades.  I can't seem to shake them and still give me the chills


I do love how he name drops music constantly, for me that was an element that always made his stuff much more enticing …well the drugs and sex too

Glamarama  (SPOLIER alert)…started off good, but really couldn't buy the idea of super models becoming terrorists.  Any story about with models as the main characters is a bad idea to me

I think I read 10 pages of IB…so can't comment

Sidehatch wrote:
Glamarama  (SPOLIER alert)…started off good, but really couldn't buy the idea of super models becoming terrorists.  Any story about with models as the main characters is a bad idea to me

Glamorama aka "Not Inspiration for Zoolander…"

Julian, wrote:Got to meat him

whoa…that was quite the Freudian slip
but my misspellings and poor grammar is legendary on this board…so why change now

Sidehatch wrote:
I listed Informers - and I liked it

Oops.  Your punctuation made me think that the Informers mention was part of your Rules of Attraction sentence and I missed it.

so rereading please kill me .. i had not realized a lot of the stooges stuff is pulled direclty from iggy's book i need more… which i am also reading

anyways, kinda sad rereading it even if it is the best book ever .. since i read it last about 4 years ago bowie, lou reed, and rock action have passed.. also tommy ramone

Yeah I've read Please Kill Me probably a dozen times. One of my favorite books.

Legs McNeil also wrote this:



The first half, when the porn industry started getting big in the 70s, is the best part. But it spends WAY too much time on the John Holmes/Wonderland murders and it felt like the second half was all about the mob and not nearly enough about Amber Lynn, Nina Hartley and Seka. So, kinda disappointing and as a result, I've only read it 5 or 6 times.

That said, has anyone noticed how oral histories are so much more common now with music/sports/entertainment books? They can be really interesting if well-edited but I feel like this is a lazy way to create a book.

I mean, the best rock books are the ones that have a clear, well-written narrative. And creating that is hard! But if you're doing an oral history, you basically just edit the transcripts of your interview and call it a book. It's like an outline with quotations. Feels like the easy way out, kind of a cousin to the 'found footage' film genre. I came up with that simile as I was writing it.

Relaxer wrote:
That said, has anyone noticed how oral histories are so much more common now with music/sports/entertainment books? They can be really interesting if well-edited but I feel like this is a lazy way to create a book.

I mean, the best rock books are the ones that have a clear, well-written narrative. And creating that is hard! But if you're doing an oral history, you basically just edit the transcripts of your interview and call it a book. It's like an outline with quotations. Feels like the easy way out, kind of a cousin to the 'found footage' film genre. I came up with that simile as I was writing it.

Totally agree.. its lazy and  is only as good as the source material NOT the "author".. the Pixies oral history was pretty poor.. I still want to read the one about Janes

For the Savage book on punk I find the interviews far more interesting in a way than the actual book..

I've read Whores, the Jane's book. Since I'm a HUGE Jane's fan, I gobbled it up and re-read it often. But it's so obvious that all of the quotes from the bandmates themselves are from past interviews (which the author admits). I don't think they contributed to the book itself at all.

In fact, when reading a subpar oral history, you can always tell right away who cooperated and who didn't. For example, Eric A's sister clearly made herself available for as much as the authors wanted because she shows up on every damn page commenting on shit, even when Eric A was long out of the band. Perry's old gf Casey also was around with nothing to do because it seems like she's got multiple quotes per page, even after she was long out of the picture.

This was another laughably terrible oral history



I'd say a good 95 percent of the quotes are from random dudes who opened for Nirvana in Kansas City in 1989. So if you were curious what Les Thugs or the bass player from Tad had to say about Kurt's suicide, here's the book for you!

I don't think I recognized the name of a single person quoted in this book. It was just a lot of guys like Daniel Kenowski (guitar tech for Pond).

That said, this was a great oral history on that era:

interesting.> I also heard the Replacements one is pretty bad….just a bunch of people talking about how great they were …