Reading Thread 2: Pagemasters

[Cerceaux]

Talk about what you're reading.

Re-posting my last post:

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon vol. 1, by Naoko Takeuchi
I've been feeling kind of overwhelmed with school lately, so I went out and bought comic books to make myself feel better.

Also:
Hell House, by Richard Matheson
I don't know if I'm just immune to horror novels or if it's actually lame, but I'm halfway through and it's not scary unless you have a phobia of cats.

 

[flowersofnight]

Finished up the other day with:
"A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage", by Jeremy Collier. It was written in 1698 as an attack on the moral depravity of Restoration theater XD

And started:
"Aventuriers et boucaniers d'Amerique" (Adventurers and Buccaneers of America) by A. Oexmelin. The author was an apprentice surgeon who fell in with real-life pirates of the Caribbean in the 1680s, then made it back to Europe and wrote about what he saw and did. It was the first and most influential book about pirates.

and:
The Protest Psychosis - just read the Amazon description, I'm too lazy to type up my own XD

 

[Manneking]

I'm currently reading Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami. I really enjoy his writing style and after reading Norwegian Wood and Deep Dark I've really been submerged in to his works. He's got a really nice surreal style that isn't too weird.

 

[PureElegance]

"Aventuriers et boucaniers d'Amerique" (Adventurers and Buccaneers of America) by A. Oexmelin. The author was an apprentice surgeon who fell in with real-life pirates of the Caribbean in the 1680s, then made it back to Europe and wrote about what he saw and did. It was the first and most influential book on pirates.

http://www.amazon.com/General-History-Pyrates-Dover-Maritime/dp/0486404889/
http://www.amazon.com/Under-Black-Flag- ... pd_sim_b_1
These are better. *pirate expert* ::kisaki::

I definitely want to read the one you're reading though. Maybe after I'm done with these "what did I just read" Noh plays.
Not even the one about Lady Rokujo haunting Aoi is that good. It's just so much "blablablaBuddha*chantchantchant*Buddha"

God, Noh plays. After next week we're finally reading Chinese plays, YESSSSS.

Liu Jung En - Six Yuan Plays
The Peony Pavilion

And other books in the future that I don't remember right now.

EDIT: Now I feel bad XD Noh plays aren't all terrible, but I just don't get anything from them, they don't make me think deeply. I liked Visit to Ohara and a few others, (Mishima not counted here because he's modern) but some of them are so stylized and stuffed with Buddhist things. And Noh plays are meant to be performed with music and all, so I think I'm missing out on a lot.

 

[Sumire_hitsugi]

In the middle of Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. It's interesting~

 

[Cerceaux]

In the middle of Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. It's interesting~

Have you seen the movie?
They're quite different, but I like both.

 

[Sumire_hitsugi]

^Yes! I'm a Ghibli fan, so I usually get their DVD's.
I like both also.

 

[flowersofnight]

The Protest Psychosis - just read the Amazon description, I'm too lazy to type up my own XD

Fact: this turned out to be an utter waste of time.

Started instead:
The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook
It's a manual for mistresses in the 19th-century British Raj, on how to manage their household and servants XD

 

[MissUMana]

[Started instead:
The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook
It's a manual for mistresses in the 19th-century British Raj, on how to manage their household and servants XD

Could it be that you're nostalgic of the days when the sun never set on the British Empire"? XD

 

[flowersofnight]

Could it be that you're nostalgic of the days when the sun never set on the British Empire"? XD

I dunno, it seems like being a transplanted Anglo-Indian mistress of the house was a pretty thankless lot in life XD Seems to have been the "expat bubble" lifestyle, times 100.
There was a huge culture shock relating to cleanliness when compared to local ways. The book assumes you'll have to "train" your servants like children and set up a system of rewards and punishments to keep them in line. And it specifically warns you about listening to anything they say about "tradition" XD

 

[MissUMana]

Ah, the blessed days when we brought the gift of our superior civilizations to barbarian lands! Those were the days. XD

I could never understand how they could stand the climate though. But I have to admit their determination upon wearing "proper" clothes no matter what never ceased to make me admirative.

 

[Taku]

well it's traditional to clean your rasoighar i.e. kitchen with cow dung... so they have a point there

 

[PureElegance]

^Yes! I'm a Ghibli fan, so I usually get their DVD's.
I like both also.

... you mean, you LOVE Howl's Moving Castle.
The book didn't really do anything for me and I've actually forgotten most of it. I guess I just have the movie version in my head and I'll always be blown away by it. It's definitely not my same experience when I saw Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame and then read the book, in that case I love them both!

*eternally jealous of Sophie*

I finished with In An Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence (200 over the weekend and it was pretty awesome.
http://www.amazon.com/Abusive-State-Neo ... 822342391/
Being harpooned is only a woman's problem.

It wasn't even complicated to read, it's not that long, and it's something people should pick up if they want to learn anything about domestic violence and rape.
Obviously putting batterers in jail isn't doing anything on a deeper, cultural level (studies show their behavior barely changes before and after jail and/or government treatment), and the book highlights some possible solutions.
Same thing going on with the sexual harassment rates, they actually haven't gone down, so we need a different solution other than desexualizing the workplace. This stuff is so... ugh, sometimes But I really like the examination of famous rape trials and I loved reading the prosecutor's strategies (that sent innocent boys to jail) and interviews with battered women on how they were treated by the government/therapy.
Anyways, the fem movement had to compromise a lot by getting help from the state, there are so many unintended consequences like that dual-arrest, but I'm not sure they could have gotten as far as they did without state intervention. Oh the dilemma~ /


I donno what I'm going to read over the break for fun! XD Hmmmm~ Maybe something Virginia Woolf-related... Something I can finish in my little week break ;_;

 

[Berserk]

The Protest Psychosis - just read the Amazon description, I'm too lazy to type up my own XD

Fact: this turned out to be an utter waste of time.

My jaw dropped when I read the description

Ionia, Michigan is the dinky little town where I was born and raised, yet I never knew anything about a hospital for the criminally insane. I'm guessing the former civil war fort on West Main St. that currently serves as an MDOC prison is where that used to be held. In what way was this a waste of time? I might have to read it just because of how unbelievable it is that there's any published literature about Ionia fricken Michigan.

My mind has been completely blown for the day

EDIT: This is the Michigan State "Reformatory" that I'm guessing used to be the mental hospital

This spot-on description of my town from an outsider's perspective is just eerie to read:

Yet even the most cursory tour through the three-block downtown suggests that Ionia's fate is linked not to an investment boom but to Michigan's declining economy. Many shops on the red-brick Main Street remain boarded up or empty. At noon in the Blue Water Café sit men who might, in better times, have held gainful employment. The 88 Cent Superstore inexplicably holds a "half prices sale." Perhaps not surprisingly, the only businesses that appear to be thriving reside in the strip malls outside of town: Walmart and Instant Cash Advance/Bondsmen.

You might drive through Ionia on a sunny day and never have a clue about Ionia's other past, the past covered over by the tranquility of decline, the past seemingly far removed from a not unrecent time when being sent to Ionia was synonymous with a life sentence of electrotherapy, straightjackets, and padded cells.

Ionia was always a sleepy little town to grow up in with more than its fair share of impoverished, oftentimes creepy residents. I always attributed that fact to our rural nature and never connected the dots to see how it's part of the picture of Michigan's economic decline.

There are plenty of deranged townies like Dirty Dan and Peppermint Patty, the type of people we like to call "Ionia's finest" lol. I wonder if there's a connection between them and our history as the state's repository for the insane.

This book is just so uncanny to me. When I'm in town, Mom and I always meet for lunch at the Bluewater (it used to be located on Bluewater highway, but has recently moved to Main Street, so this book is fairly up-to-date). I wonder if the men that inspired his observation about "gainful employment in better days" are the two twins who work as servers there. I've always thought that about them too...

EDIT II: Oh! And the Meijer South of town (my place of employment) is doing better than the Wal-Mart is! It's also a regional supermarket, keeps a larger staff on-hire, and offers its employees generous health and retirement plans, so it enriches the local economy much more than Wal-Mart ever will. I could write a book about Wal-Mart's move into Ionia. Those bastards destroyed a historic barn, bribed the city to get access to our water utility (despite not paying taxes because they located themselves outside the city limits), and they keep such a minimal workforce that it's hardly added any jobs to the community. Wal-Mart can screw itself.

 

[MissUMana]

well it's traditional to clean your rasoighar i.e. kitchen with cow dung... so they have a point there

Sacred dirt is bound to clean just great, isn't it?

 

[flowersofnight]

Ionia, Michigan is the dinky little town where I was born and raised, yet I never knew anything about a hospital for the criminally insane.

Subject is becoming aware of experimental parameters. TRANQUILIZE AND NEUTRALIZE

The prison hasn't been a hospital for the insane since the '70s; maybe that's why you never heard of it. According to the author the buildings still exist (or did when he wrote the book) but they try really hard to cover up the fact that it was ever a mental institution.

The book was really light on content and padded out with PC blather though. They had 3 or 4 profiles of inmates' lives in the asylum, a couple meaningless interviews with former employees, etc. It's really not an in-depth history of Ionia, or the Ionia hospital, or of anything in particular. I dunno, check it out if you want but don't pay more than a couple bucks.

EDIT: everyone go back a page, I just bumped Berserk's long post off the page ::kisaki::

 

[Cerceaux]

Hell House, by Richard Matheson

Okay just finished this and it was laughably lame. If it really is the "scariest haunted house novel ever written" as the back cover boasts, I'd hate to see the lesser ones.

 

[Berserk]

Just a bit of correction: It's not the facility on W Main St. that used to be the Asylum, like I was thinking. After reading further, it used to be what are currently the headquarters for the Michigan State Police located on Riverside Drive, which is basically just on the flipside of the Grand River from W Main St.

This is the most recent picture you can find of the facility XD. These days, that hill is so overgrown with forest that you can't see any of the buildings until you drive all the way to the top of the winding driveway. I can't find any recent photographs for some reason, so I guess they want to keep the headquarters location somewhat discrete. I've only been there once, when my mom went there to properly dispose of some prescription pills.

I also want to make some corrections to the book: The Chili Dawg Contest is not famous at all in Ionia XD. At least I've never heard of it in my 16 years of living there. It's the Free Fair and (formerly) the B.93 Birthday Bash that Ionia is most known for. The latter got us on the national news when the Grand River flooded, destroying thousands of attendants' cars and stranding them in our podunk town for days. It was such a disaster that B.93 never came back to Ionia despite having held the festival there for decades.

Lastly, Ionia is not really a city of 10,000+ people. A change in the census criteria caused our city to be rewarded by Lansing for being "the fastest growing" city in Michigan. What was the change? We started counting prison inmates as "residents". The number of actual residents in the city is just under 5,000. Wal-Mart was furious after it learned about this census trick, because they built their store South of town under the understanding that we were twice the market that we really were. Serves them right

 

[Wandering_Fox]

Hell House, by Richard Matheson

Okay just finished this and it was laughably lame. If it really is the "scariest haunted house novel ever written" as the back cover boasts, I'd hate to see the lesser ones.

I felt that way about "The Haunting of Hill House". I know it was supposed to be a psychological experience and the reader was left to wonder whether there were truly supernatural forces at work or not. but I felt the pace of the work left a lot to be desired and it came off as fairly pedantic rather then suspensful. That being said though, I really enjoyed the later film adaptation for what it was. It was definitely a teenage thriller, but I felt it did well for what technology was available, and the house was an incredible set. I thought Elenore's character was very well developed and the relationship with her mother and family made her into an ideal underdog lead character.

And who didn't love watching Owen Wilson get decapitated?

 

[Cerceaux]

^Hell House suffers from a thin plot, dull characters, and lack of real suspense, which it tries to make up for with shock value.
The supposed "scary" scenes mostly revolve around bizarre sexual violence (which interestingly enough only affects the female characters, hmmm...).
I think supernatural stories are more effective when they use subtle creepiness. Things like dishes suddenly flying around a room just aren't scary on a printed page.

I've seen The Haunting and the visuals were nice, but the acting was kind of painful. xD The source novel might be worth a try in the future though.