One of the good ones...

[sabotabby]

It would have been wouldprefernot2's 38th birthday today.

What are you reading?

Comments

[groovitude.livejournal.com]

May he rest in peace. Did anyone write an obitary for him in ljers4eternity?

I am currently reading two wonderful books: The Prophet Armed by Isaac Deutcher and The Sun Also Rises by Ernst Hemingway.

[sabotabby]

Not that I know of.

Ah, Hemingway. I like Hemingway.

[sabotabby]

Oh, I was wrong. Someone did write a brief one. I second the "horribly unfair."

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Last night, I read Alan Moore's Top Ten: The Forty-Niners and tonight I'll finally finish Ray Raphael's A People's History of the American Revolution (Howard Zinn, series editor).

[sabotabby]

And then on to Kushner? Or Bulgakov? ;)

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Probably Kushner.

BTW, seanmonster was commenting on your review post last night. He said he very much wanted to read The Imp; and lo and behold, it arrived the next morning. I'll probably get it to him next weekend, if not before.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Oh, and Re: assessment stamps, I recommend "laminating" them with box tape. You will probably have a much easier time than I had. All you have to do is color print onto sticker paper - I had to hand color every one.

[sabotabby]

I think they're going to be black-and-white. The two I've designed so far are, anyway, although one would look good in black, white, and green.

Box tape is a good call, though. Did you distribute them to other branches, by the way? We're all very broke.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

I never got around to distributing them to other branches, but I know it gets done.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Well, contrary to my prediction, I wound up reading M@B next instead. It reminds me of Scott Dicker's Jim which had a similar dead-pan, no-punchline style. The Onion staff member employed the same dots for eyes blankness, except the artwork was far more primitive. A typical strip would start with Jim in a lazy boy and the caption, "I didn't do anything today," and the next four panels was the same drawing with no text. It was picked up by our college paper and I became hooked. Dickers later said that he did Jim because he hated comic strips.

This was after I had bought all the books. Bastard.

M@B seems to be in the same vein only much better.

So this guy lives in Toronto?

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

Oops. He's named Scott Dikkers and he was editor-in-chief for a time. His strip was also called Jim's Journal and got a good review on Salon.com. The collections have titles like I Went to College and It Was Okay and I Got a Job and It Wasn't That Bad.

[sabotabby]

Well, I think M@B likes comic strips. Or fakes it pretty well.

Yep, he lives in Toronto. I even know him, albeit not well enough to end up in one of his comics. He's very nice and shows up at all the 'zine fairs.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

I finished M@B and Prison Funnies. Liked the former, disliked the later. Shock jock humor really doesn't work for me very often. If the gimmick is especially ground-breaking, it may work on me once or twice; but since surprise is a major part of shock humor, it ceases to amuse once you start to expect it. I'm about a quarter of the way into Kabuki. The chaotic page composition makes it slow going. I'll get to the text-based books soon.

[sabotabby]

For my part, I read Kings in Disguise (holyshitwow, but I bet you could have predicted that) and Cynical Man (bwah!).

Yeah, Kabuki isn't one of the more reader-friendly comics. Nor is the writing that good, but I love the design and art.

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

(holyshitwow, but I bet you could have predicted that)

Heh, yeah, I thought so ;)

[funnel101.livejournal.com]

I'm reading:

Tolkien, "The Lays of Beleriand"
Marc Levy, "Si C'etait Vrai"
Thich Nhat Hanh, "Living Buddha, Living Christ"

[sabotabby]

And I love the icon, too.

[nuncstans.livejournal.com]

I just read The Ghost Writer, by Philip Roth, and now I don't know what to read.

[sabotabby]

Fortunately, it'll be awhile before I run out of things to read. It hasn't happened in a long time. And then when it does, I whine to any one of a number of friends that I'm out of things to read, and they load me up with books again.

Who needs a library card, seriously?

[rackletang.livejournal.com]

Re-reading The Color Purple.

[sabotabby]

And oddly enough, I don't think I've ever read that.

[rackletang.livejournal.com]

It's been yeeeears since I have. Most of what I remember about it is from the movie.

[sabotabby]

Yeah -- it's one of those things that I always think I've read because I saw the movie at some point.

I hate it when that happens.

[one-serious-cat.livejournal.com]

Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God
Cintra Wilson, A Massive Swelling
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment

To make up for that last book, I do intend to read some Marx & Engels later on this week.

[seanmonster.livejournal.com]

Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris

[mcsokrates.livejournal.com]

in memoriam:

I'm still slogging through "A History of Inner Asia" by Svat Soucek, as well as the September 2005 issue of Asimov'e Science Fiction. "Jailbird" by Kurt Vonnegut is in my messenger bag, and will get read maybe.