Bilirubin posted:

I will be reading White Noise by Don DeLillo. Starting...now in fact!

Opopanax posted:

Bilirubin posted:

Its starting out super funny in an ironic, distant way that would appeal to goondom at large I suspect. The discussion with the main character's son over the rain was hilarious

Opopanax posted:

The rain discussion and The Most Photographed Barn in America are both outstanding

quote:

On April 23, 1869, in drizzly and warm, gauzy and green Kaluga, Aqua, aged twenty-five and afflicted with her usual vernal migraine, married Walter D. Veen, a Manhattan banker of ancient Anglo-Irish ancestry who had long conducted, and was soon to resume intermittently, a passionate affair with Marina. The latter, some time in 1871, married her first lover’s first cousin, also Walter D. Veen, a quite as opulent, but much duller, chap.

quote:

The “D” in the name of Aqua’s husband stood for Demon (a form of Demian or Dementius), and thus was he called by his kin. In society he was generally known as Raven Veen or simply Dark Walter to distinguish him from Marina’s husband, husband, Durak Walter or simply Red Veen.

Opopanax posted:

Made it just in time. Oof, what an anxiety inducing story, I really liked it despite the pit in my stomach the entire time.

For January I'll be reading


I got it from the TBB secret santa so it fits that. I've been trying to read more non fiction (and specifically theory) so looking forward to it

quote:

Ved’ (“it is, isn’t it”) sidesplitting to imagine that “Russia,” instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no-longer-vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles!

quote:

Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had be come nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world.

quote:

[S]he felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian “to the devil”) with the banning of an unmentionable “lammer.”

quote:

Rolled up in its case was an old “jikker” or skimmer, a blue magic rug with Arabian designs, faded but still enchanting, which Uncle Daniel’s father had used in his boyhood and later flown when drunk. Because of the many collisions, collapses and other accidents, especially numerous in sunset skies over idyllic fields, jikkers were banned by the air patrol; but four years later Van who loved that sport bribed a local mechanic to clean the thing, reload its hawking-tubes, and generally bring it back into magic order and many a summer day would they spend, his Ada and he, hanging over grove and river or gliding at a safe ten-foot altitude above surfaces of roads or roofs. How comic the wobbling, ditch-diving cyclist, how weird the arm-flailing and slipping chimney sweep!