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The Aleph collection is excellent isn't it. For some reason i wasn't nearly as impressed with the Ficciones one tho. Loads of the stories seemed to be trying too hard - kinda working as ideas but not as text, it seemed to me at the time. Aleph seemed to have far more that fused philosophy and feeling to a trippy degree

PS has Tristram got round to being born yet?

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker.



"This is a fun one".
But it'll still get under your skin.
Mister B. Gone is about a demon, named Jakabok Botch (Or Mister B.), who apparently is trapped in the very book you're reading. The first line is "burn this book" and this seems to be the only thing Mister B. wants. In return for this simple act he offers you his life story. He often interrupts his story to try to persuade you to burn it, but when he realizes he can't, he continues his story, which is a story of morbid humor, torture and horror but also a story of a demon who's trapped in the human world where he roams free.
This is the weirdest, but also one of the most interesting books I've ever read. This book promises to kill you, to torture you, to cut you with a knife, back and forth, just as your eyes move side to side in order to read the words. It even insults your intelligence and even though you know it's just a book, you still wonder why you keep on reading. Maybe it's because of the 10 bucks you paid for it or maybe you're just determined to finish the story... but why? A tiny voice in my head advised me to put the book down, or even burn it. Why risk it, it said. This voice was echoed by Mister B., along with death threats, and even though I knew it was just words on paper, that first line was always in the back of my head. It was always an opportunity, which means I didn't dismiss it entirely. Which is one hell of an accomplishment, I think. Just as getting people to hesitate with saying Candyman five times in front of the mirror, is one hell of an accomplishment.
"Candyman, Candyman, Candyman, Candyman - nope"

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The Freedom Roads

Wow, I'm really surprised by that. I bought Mister B. Gone when it first hit the shelves and I read the first page and thought it sounded interesting, but after a few chapters I got bored with the subject matter. The gore for the sake of it didn't entertain or impress me and I thought the story was whimsical. In the end I stopped reading around half way though, but then again I'm not that familiar with Clive Barker.

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The gore for the sake of it, is exactly what Mister B. Gone is all about. It's a book that doesn't want to be read. Because of this it insults you and tries to get you to stop reading and burn it via the gore. The protagonist does nothing but promote himself as a, well, sick-ass psychopath. It wants you to fear him, be repulsed by him, so much so that you burn the book. And "why don't you burn the book and stop reading?" is the question it asks, and t's an extremely hard one to answer. It's original and unprecedented to my knowledge.

I follow what your saying but even if the narrative suggests or states that he wants to insult, disgust and repulse you, the author actually wants you to read on, even if he wants to push your limits. I wasn't interested after a few chapters, Ill admit I haven't read many 'gore' novels so maybe they just arent for me. Although Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was a laugh.

you didn't even like 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' in ficciones? I like both collections a lot, but I have to admit I seemingly got through the aleph much quicker.

tristram just got born and now his dad is consulting with a crack team of religious and legal scholars about changing his name to trismegistus. just a guess but i don't think they'll be successful.

I vaguely remember that being one of the ones that seemed a bit excessive in its academic-ness to me. But i get a little turned off by citations of the classics etc, even tongue in cheek ones . It wasn't that i wasn't impressed by many of the stories tho, i just found the Aleph ones seemed more accomplished at drawing me into their ideas.

That's understandable. There definitely isn't as much of the "This is a really good idea for a story/novel. Instead of actually writing it, I'll just pretend it already exists and write a review of it." type stories in The Aleph. More gauchos and street toughs too.

You should check out Borges' contemporary, Adolpho Bioy-Casares. I mentioned reading The Invention of Morel and Other Stories here recently. Very highly recommended.

The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami

i'm a pretty big fan of short stories and Haruki Murakami. put the two together and you have almost perfection. this is a great book of short stories, probably in among my favorites, and much better than After the Quake, his other book of shorts.


The Lottery and Other Short Stories - Shirley Jackson

this was also really good! but, Shirley Jackson is honestly an inspiration of mine, and i love pretty much anything she has ever written. my favorite story in this book was "Like Mother Used To Make".


Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

so... this was my first Woolf book, and it's probably going to be my last. i had tried to read To the Lighthouse several years ago, but didn't get very far. i felt i hadn't given her much of a chance, though, so i decided to read Mrs. Dalloway, which i've been told is supposed to be an "easy Woolf read". while i found some parts of it intense and intriguing, overall i'd have to say i really dislike Woolf's style of writing; it's just not my "thing", or whatever.


The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery


Stolen Sharpie Revolution - Alex Wrekk

a zine on how to make zines, basically. i made my first zine about a month ago so i picked this little baby up to get some pointers. now i'm addicted to zine making. i'm in the process of making two more now. anyway, if you're into it, it's a really helpful little book for that sort of thing.


The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

i read this one as a child, but i picked it up again after recently watching the film. it made me fall in love with children stories all over again. i'll always have a soft spot for simple stories such as this one anyway, and will probably never outgrow reading them.


Thirteen Reasons Why - Jay Asher

so like, there is a huuuge difference between children's books and young adult, and ironically enough i tend to usually find the latter a lot more juvenile. this book, while not completely terrible, is pretty much exactly the reason i tend to avoid the YA section at the book store. the plot is interesting enough: some girl who ends up offing herself makes a series of "diary styled tapes" addressing 13 people who she feels contributed to her suicide, mailing them out to each individual before she kills herself. the entire book is pretty much her monologue, and it's your basic girl/boy drama sort of thing. i don't know. this book is just ordinary, but a lot of other people seem to love it. i'm guessing if you loved Twilight, another mediocre attempt at writing, then you'll probably love this. maybe.


The Road - Cormac McCarthy

everyone calls this "unrelentingly bleak", and it is, but i actually found the ending to be somewhat hopeful. while it made me well up, it was actually pretty beautiful. one of the most moving things i've read in quite awhile.

Oo, the source for Last Year in Marienbad no less. Will definitely check that out, cheers - biog looks interesting too

Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett

been re-reading some of her stuff lately. i always loved this as a child.

Snuff ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Probably one of Palahniuk's weaker works (and he's not that great an author, but I manage to find his books interesting enough to read quickly and all the way through) but I understand it was meant to be a simple novella type of story. It felt somewhat predictable and is like a pale imitation of Palahniuk's style.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

i'll be honest. i couldn't even get all the way through Fight Club.

It's all right, he's definitely not for everyone.

Reading my Masters thesis "Jury Psychology in Irish Criminal Trials", which i handed up last week. Really should have read it before i handed it up. Spotted a few small legal errors in it. Too late now i guess!!

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Comment is free but facts are sacred

Currently trying to read Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse for uni. Damned boring, but what can you do?

Currently reading it for my class on Religion, Philosophy, and Science. It's rather outstanding and I would definitely recommend it.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

i find Woolf very flat. i tried reading that book a few years ago, and i wasn't into it, either. a couple months ago i read Mrs. Dalloway, and had a similar experience. like your Fight Club guy, Woolf just isn't for everyone!

The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus:
being his own log-book, letters and dispatches with connecting narrative...

An excellent translated collation of Columbus's adventures into the unknown. You can't get much more fantastically real than the schemes, scrapes and discoveries that emerged from his fertile beliefs, nor meet a greater example of skill shaking hands with serendipity. Here be monsters, heads in honey baskets, and clouds that impersonate islands for days at a time. Locals heave armoured tortoises from their comfort zone with nothing but remora fish, stranded sailors eat last meal after last meal, and miracles become as inevitable as horror & eclipses.

It's a dreamscape of realities, stitched together from letters to sovereigns, family re-embroideries and naked truths laid bare under spanking new skies. You can't be sure the child sorceress had magic powders hidden about her, or that the mountain carved into a temple was ever visited at all. Certainly the footnotes help where they can, delving into detail and overlapping views, but generally they let the narrative flow freely through the stormy remnants of what is known.

I stuck with it through the more thorough and historical passages as i'm researching a short story on his thoughts and deeds. But i reckon anyone can get a something out of this seminal bit of boundary-crossing audacity.

After reading so many great things about Precious, the upcoming movie based on this novel, I decided to give this a try. In terms of its style, this is the most unique novel I've ever read. It's told in first person narration by an illiterate teenager. Much of the text is intentionally misspelled and contains a lot of coarse language, but both improve as the book progresses and the narrator tackles her illiteracy.

As for the story itself, pared down to its most basic form, it is a rising-above-adversity tale but the protagnist of this tale gets a huge helping of obstacles to overcome: morbid obesity, poverty, illiteracy, incest, rape, teen pregnancy, physical abuse, and HIV. A cheery tale it is not, but definitely one I recommend reading. I eagerly look forward to the seeing the movie.

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