noooooo, you're going to want to snatch that one back too before she gets a chance to read it. :( like half of the six hundred pages are made up of very detailed love scenes, and the other half is just as equally blech-worthy. strange coming from a son, i think.

you should've trusted my bad review!

Because a woman who has given birth might not just yet be able to understand sex. :rolleyes

Well I had heard good and bad reviews. Yours being the bad, and my ex accounting for the good. :\

She says she likes it so far, and yes, I can handle my mum reading love scenes. Thanks for the heads up though, I wont ask her any details.


While on that topic, I was lent a copy of The Unknown Terrorist by a female workmate, and there is a very detailed part where a man ejeculates into the face of the female protaginist. I felt very uncomfortable when the workmate asked me what part I was up to, and I was up to THAT PART. Pretty lousy book btw.

I don't think i emphasized how disgusting it actually is well enough. the book isn't just like a novel that contains gratuitous sex, it's full-on erotic literature with a crummy underlying story, and that's why i think it makes a strange son-to-mother gift.

but uh, the basic idea is nice, give your mom a top bestseller that someone you were close to recommended.

edit: it's a sugarcoated sappy porno

Well the someone I was close to didn't recommend it to ME so I could read it and get off :(

WHAT HAVE I DONE?

I finished All Quiet on the Western Front recently and it was pretty much the best thing I've ever read, so continuing on that theme I picked up Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger. Only read the introduction so far but it seems pretty good.

While I was at the book shop I also got The Art of War for £3 which isn't really something you can sit down and read for long periods of time but is very interesting none-the-less. Good coffee table/toilet book.

you should just trust me in the future :(

"On the day Germany declared war in 1914, 19-year-old Ernst Jünger enlisted. He fought with an infantry company -- the 73rd Hanoverians -- for the next four years and participated in some of the most famous and bloody battles of all time: the Somme, Cambrai, Passchendaele. "

Wow, he's lucky to have lived through that. Also, the Washington Post review of it sounds interesting enough, but to be completely honest the cover art and title already had me hooked.

Elx: I will, yes. I will just have to avoid talking to my mother for the next week or so.

One thing I love about books like this is how taken out of context parts of this book written by the evil baby-impaling Hun could've been written today by any young soldier heading out to Iraq or Afghanistan:

Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war. We had set out in a rain of flowers, in a drunken atmosphere of blood and roses. Surely the war has to supply us with what we wanted; the great, the overwhelming, the hallowed experience. We thought of it as manly, as action, a merry dulling party on flowered blood-bedewed meadows. ' No finer death in all the world than...' Anything to participate, not to have to stay at home!

But yeah, check it out. It's only <300 pages and should be available in most used book stores.

:lol

Yeah, your typical soldier heading out to Iraq or Afghanistan is going to know words like "enraptured" and "bedewed."

I believe he was talking about a British soldier, my good sir. :posh

Hey, I like the little hoppy red thing. What is it, an alien?

It's an emoticon, you just put in :cok and it works.

That changes everything :(

I finished reading Tortilla Flats and Cannery Row. I couldn't decide which one I liked more.

I've been working my way through some Nigel Cawthorne books. I just finished Public Executions. His stuff seems to be all over the board and I've already started spotting some recycled information that almost seems copypasted from book to book. So far the good material is really good and the bad material is really bad.

Public Executions has a lot of great information and illustrations, but the editing is shitty. And he's a writer/editor, pfft. But still, good coffee table book if you want people to wonder about you.

I'm currently working on Twilight.

I'm still trying to figure out the appeal.

I felt the same way about The Catcher and the Rye.

Tried to start "Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze", but the writing style is annoying me too much. I'll probably just end up skimming it.

They gave their lives for the defense of their homeland, and you can't even read their book properly. Nice.

I'm still reading Consider Phelbas, and I am absolutely loving it. I only get sparse time to really read in peace (less time on the internet maybe? Fool) and I often can't bring myself to stop.

Sci Fi how it should be done. It's fast paced, yet still intricate and descriptive, has interesting and varied characters and situations... plus, I'm loving the all powerful anarchists The Culture, as I do all futuristic utopian societies.

I finished Bonfire of the Vanities and am currently working through Ulysses and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.

I'm glad I stuck it out with Bonfire of the Vanities past it's slower moments. Some of the creep characters got their come uppance, and not at the expense of the story's realism. VERY GOOD.

Zhukov...I'm hoping at this point that the sanctimonious thing is a joke.

There are plenty of good documentaries on the kamikaze out there. This particular one was written by a man who felt it was more important to write detailed character sketches of random people at a shrine than to provide a lot of actual content. It was reading more like a "gaijin in Japan" travel narrative than a book on the kamikaze. And I've already read more than enough "gaijin in Japan" travel narratives.

Of course.

Agreed, though at least with The Catcher in the Rye I occasionally felt sorry for the main character. Bella's just plain annoying and a complete Mary Sue. Probably doesn't help that the book's 80% description diahrrea, 18% shallow romance, and 2% actual plot.

You know, speaking of travel narratives and annoyance with them...

I like Paul Theroux. I really do. But...

YOU HATE WHITE PEOPLE. WE GET IT.

Over and over it crops up about how the evil caucasian tourists ruin "his" travels, "his" islands, "his" interactions with people. The fact that he's also caucasian and that perhaps he's being indulged by the locals is one he seems to completely miss.

Edit- I probably said all this before, but any time I pick up any of his stuff I get irritated at it all over again.