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I Ain’t Miserable
This is a bit from A Confederacy of Dunces that made me chuckle. It’s a good example of the novel’s typical dialogue and humour. “I refuse to ‘look up.’ Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.” “I ain’t miserable.” “You are.” “No, I ain’t.” “Yes, you are.” “Ignatius, I ain’t miserable. If I was, I’d tell you.” “If I had demolished private property while intoxicated and had thereby thrown my child to the wolves, I would be beating my breast and wailing. I would kneel in penance until my knees bled. By the way, what penance has…
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A Confederacy of Dunces
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole Published: 1980 (written in 1963) Narrated by: Barrett Whitener Length: 13:32 The backstory of this novel is actually quite tragic. It’s explained in the introduction by Walker Percy, who was the man instrumental in getting this published. The novel was written in 1963, after Toole’s other novel The Neon Bible, and both failed to get picked up by publishers. This drove him deeper into his existing depression, which eventually lead to his suicide in 1969. His mother later found the carbon copy of the manuscript in his house and brought it to Walker Percy after also failing to catch the interest of…
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R.I.P. Terry Pratchett
Sir Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, died this week after struggling with Alzheimer’s for eight years. He was 66 years old, which seems so unfairly young, particularly for someone who still had so much passion for his work. In the mid-90s, before I ever picked up a Discworld novel, I played something called Discworld MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), which is a massively multiplayer online text-based computer game. The sort where you literally type ‘backstab Mike’ to stab Mike in the back with something pointy. They had built the world up from his books, filling it with his hilarious descriptions and ridiculous characters, and my friend and I were in…
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Saga, Volume 4
Saga, Volume 4 by Brian K. Vaughan Illustrated by: Fiona Staples Published: 2014 Publisher: Image Comics Length: 144 pages Collects: issues #19-24 Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples know how to open a volume with a bang. You’re off running right from the first page with a close-up of an alien birth in action. They’re excellent at having little shocks in their books in an age where it’s difficult to shock anyone. I love that I just don’t know what I’m going to get when I open these pages. The story jumps ahead a bit here. The crew is somewhat settled now, and it turns into an odd slice of…
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February in Review
Books Acquired: None. Books Read: Saga, Volume 4 by Brian K. Vaughan A Brief History of the Celts by Peter Berresford Ellis A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley Skin Deep by Brandon Sanderson This was a decent reading month, full of mostly short but quality reads. Also I finally, finally, finished A Brief History of the Celts, which if you follow me on Goodreads you may have noticed had been marked as Currently Reading since last November. Every time I nearly dropped it, something interesting would pop up and keep me reading. No books purchased! How’s that for self-control?…
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Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin Published: 1825–1832 (serialized), 1833 (single volume) Translated by: James E. Falen (from Russian, 1990) Narrated by: Stephen Fry Length: 04:21 I can’t remember where I found the link, but I came across Fry Reads Onegin a while back and knew I had to download it. Stephen Fry narrates the 1990 translation of Eugene Onegin, and it’s available to download for free. I didn’t know anything about the poem, but I will listen to anything narrated by Fry, so I decided to give it a try. I read after listening to this that it’s the origin of the Onegin stanza (aBaBccDDeFFeGG), which did jostle some distant…
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Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan Published: 2012 Length: 304 pages Clay Jannon is a recent college graduate in San Francisco. He worked for a short time as a web designer at a start-up that unfortunately went under. He wanders into a dark and dusty bookshop on a whim one day and lands a job on the night shift. The bookstore turns out to be even stranger than it looks. The owner is very secretive, there’s a whole section of books that Jannon’s not allowed to read, and most of the clientele seem mildly insane. His curiosity soon gets the better of him, however, and he finds himself very…
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Dracula
Dracula by Bram Stoker Published: 1897 Narrated by: Alan Cumming, Tim Curry, Simon Vance, Katherine Kellgren, Susan Duerden, John Lee, Graeme Malcolm, Steven Crossley Length: 15:28 Told entirely through written correspondence and journals, the story first follows Jonathan Harker as he visits Count Dracula in Transylvania to assist him in a real estate purchase in England. The first third of the book is him slowly learning more and more about what Dracula is, and I absolutely loved this section. Both the initial feeling of Harker being in a foreign land at the beginning and the pacing of how Dracula’s true being was revealed were both perfect. I was hooked from…
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Top Ten Most Read Authors
If you click on ‘My Books’ in Goodreads and have a look at the bottom of the left hand menu, you can see a link to your most read authors. I thought instead of listing the top 10, I’d break it down by number of books read. I excluded comics for this, as they tend to skew the numbers. 23 – Terry Pratchett 14 – Robert Lynn Asprin, Christopher Moore 9 – Neil Gaiman, Nick Hornby, Robert Jordan 8 – Robin Hobb 6 – Chuck Palahniuk 5 – William Shakespeare, John Scalzi, George R.R. Martin, J.K. Rowling, John Wyndham 4 – Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Coupland, Stephen Fry, Margaret Weis 3…
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An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield Published: 2013 Length: 304 pages When Chris Hadfield was commander of the International Space Station, he managed to bring back that childhood fascination of space that some people forget as they grow older. He was the first astronaut to really make use of social media to show the amazing sights of space travel – he took beautiful photos of the earth from orbit, he made HD videos to show the trials and wonders of living with no gravity, he held live Q&A sessions with elementary schools (it would have blown my mind as a kid, and still would, to video…