Caltrops - Dead Trees





	[quote name="Zsenitan's Top 5 books thread"]I'm the only person left who reads. Also it will be a top 10. 1. His Master's Voice / Fiasco - Stanislaw Lem This should be two entries but it isn't. Anyway these books are about science, scientists, scientific success, scientific failure, and the complete aloneness of humans in the universe. They ought to be slow, dry, and obvious, if they were meant to be taken as "literature" worthy of prizes; they ought to be juicier, louder, more cinematic to be mass market paperbacks. Instead they are, recursively, books that would be written by their own characters: scientists with little perversions, scientists with bad tempers. They are ironic, lyrical, compelling, and shocking. Mandatory reading. 2. Jhereg - Steven Brust I read the shit out of all of these books all the time no matter how lame they get, because after a while they aren't about Vlad any more, they are about Steven Brust. He permeates the whole series, and while he has written other books, it's the Vlad Taltos series that builds up a framework complete enough to ignore: that is, as a world it obeys its own rules independently, so we the readers can concentrate on the odd man out - Vlad/Steven. I tried to write to him about this once and was very coldly rebuffed. 3. Pere Ubu - Alfred Jarry A satire of the middle class which is more timely now than ever, if you take it to be explicitly about bankers. The play is alright on its own but I think the Gaberbocchus Press version, with its handwritten script and illustrations, is the complete work that I love so much. It would be impossible to visualize such events otherwise. 4. The Chronicle Of The Hundred Years War - Jean Froissart At first I liked this (totally immense shelf-ful of) book(s) because of their tales of pomp, pagentry, war, tragedy; things like the Mort D'Arthur and other fictionalized representations of the same matter always left me a little cold. Later on I came to love Froissart's war stories because - though I didn't realize this at first - he is completely biased, a classist bore pandering to a specific (noble) audience, and so his retellings are always laced with little jabs at peasants and unworthy bloodlines. Medieval History for the spiteful! 5. The Tale Of Genji - Murasaki Shikibu This is the book of the original bishie!!!!!! About a beautiful dude and the places first he, then his son, parks his sausage. But its many extremely picturesque scenes - which proceed serially rather than with the intent of creating a major climax and resolution - are unforgettable and beautifully detailed. The overall view is of world of elves, graceful, elegant, superstitious, and erotic. An immense book, too, one that you can really get lost in for a few weeks no matter how quickly you read. 6. Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail 7. The Federalist Papers Between these two books one sees the point of light and the prismatic result of politics through the American lens. I would like to be a fan of de Tocqueville's "Democracy In America" rather than the Federalist Papers, but on the one hand it is disgusting to depend on foreign sentiment for national identity, no matter how valid, and on the other hand it is a book even longer than the Tale Of Genji. 8. Any number of books of folktales and fairy tales I barely distinguish the differences in subject matter and style from book to book here, but I have dozens of them and read them all the time. I'm not sure why. Sure I wanted to be a princess, until I understood that princesses get punked all the time. My parents didn't read us fairytales; they read us newspapers, books on manners, and stories from my grandmother's library of short stories written for juvenile audiences in the 1920's and 1930's. In any event I learned to read all at once shortly before I turned 3 (the last time I would ever meet an educational target on time in my life) and never needed their help after that. Probably it is about fundamental story forms - a library of models for telling about what happens in people's lives. 9. The Malcontent - John Marston I should have labelled this spot "Shakespeare anything" but it turns out that my favorite Shakespeare play isn't a Shakespeare play; it's a dazzling work by a near-contemporary instead. Marston was a little under 400 years before his time; his style of extremely dry, roundabout, non-obvious, referential humor (and everything he wrote was funny, whether or not it was supposed to be a comedy) wouldn't come into vogue until the mid-1970's. His ideas about drama are so completely sympathetic to my own (unbearable, unentertaining) ones that it's a wonder his works were preserved at all; I think he would have his tragedies staged with Greek masks if he could. 10. The Collected Works Of Caltrops (awww!) I have read more here than any other single place anyway, and it has influenced my writing style; nor have I missed that there are two or three Caltrops House Styles which are adapted by all regulars, and by which they can be known no matter what name they post under. Of the reading material I recommend, it's mostly things on Caltrops or Lem.[/quote]