Truth and Beauty Bombs

He had lots of smaller imprint and indie stuff, but I mostly wanted to read the heavy hitter superhero stuff to start.

I read the entire Marvel Ultimate series, Spiderman, X-men, Fantastic 4, Ultimates, and a bunch of 1 offs, up to and including their final "ultimatum" event, plus a couple of the "Ultimate Comics" that started after that. Some of them were very good, especially The Ultimates (the Avengers of the ultimate universe), some were weak. Overall pretty decent. Plus a few other normal universe Marvel collections here and there, a couple X-men, a couple Avengers, an X-factor.

A few scattered Batman collections, some very good (Year One, the War Gangs saga, Hush) some okay (Haunted Knight) and some awful (All-Star Batman and Robin). On that last one, I finally realized that I really dislike Frank Miller. Year One is the only thing I've read of his that I've enjoyed. I really disliked The Dark Knight Returns and All-Star Batman and Robin was really vile, tone-deaf, stupid, and violently written. I don't mind violence in comic books, often it is really effective in the storytelling or exciting in the action, but Frank Miller seems to write violently.

Then I read a bunch of DC universe continuity, mostly starting around Identity Crisis (which was really excellent, definitely recommend) through The OMAC project on the way to Infinite Crisis (which wasn't awful, but overall not very compelling) and then a bunch of smaller stuff from there, including Justice Society of America (which was pretty fluffy but well done) and Checkmate (which at its best was a mix of international intrigue and spy stories with superheroes!!!) and Secret Six (sometimes over the top and gratuitous, but did some really clever things and pretty well written and drawn).

Then Final Crisis and Final Crisis Revelations, which swung wildly between great and ridiculous. I think Grant Morrison can be really brilliant at times, but he tends to favour the overblown and convoluted too often. Then a few other DC alternate universes, like Kingdom Come and Superman: Red Son, and then on the DC imprint Wildstorm I read Planetary, which was slow to get into but got really good.

To finish up I'm reading the first 4 volumes of the DC Starman Omnibus collections, and the Batman: The Long Halloween. Then I haven't decided whether I'll go back to fiction for a while, or start getting more comics from the Library.

Just remembered a couple more: The Man Who Laughs, The Joker: Greatest Stories ever told, and both Joker and Lex Luther: Man of Steel by Brian Azzarello

Oh hey I just read all of Ultimate Spider-Man (well up until #130) last week. It totally ruled, for the most part. Actually developing Aunt May and Mary Jane as interesting characters instead of just foils for PP tipped it into greatness (I'm only really familiar with Stan Lee era Spidey otherwise though so maybe Amazing does that now too).

Two questions about the Ultimate universe after finishing the run:

Was ultimatum actually any good? I thought it was a really disappointing, obviously rushed way to end Peter Parker's story, although I do respect the decision to refuse closure to his friends/family (that being said the JJJ bits in the epilogue were so so bad). It's possible that the larger context might have helped, I guess, but 125 issues of character development were really obviously building up to Peter figuring out some way to effectively deal with the Kingpin meant that his final conflict being with the Venom thing and the Hulk for no fucking reason, without even dealing with Eddie Brock/all of the daddy issues, was just frustrating.

Also, did Spider-Woman ever show up anywhere else? I thought she was a really cool character idea (and thank god all the other clones died) and then they only ever used her again to wring more melodrama out of the finale.

PS if you (or anybody) are looking for some new comics to read, the four or so issues of the new Daredevil series I've seen were pretty fantastic.

Ultimatum had some good stuff, for other characters. Didn't really care for the Spiderman ultimatum stuff. I also read the post Ultimatum "Ultimate Comics: Spiderman" in which peter is back, and spider-woman is back too I believe.

Although obviously Peter doesn't last too long because now the Ultimate Comics Spider man is Miles Morales

just read a room with a view
that shit owns

Around 80 pages into Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

I got to this part (page 1 of book IV). As it turns-out, they were supposed to have inserted flute-shaped bone tubes into their horses' butts as a means of "inflating the veins" so that it would apply pressure to the horses' udders and, I guess, make it easier to milk them. Herodotus seems to be claiming that this is somehow connected to the fact that the Scythians blind their slaves, but I can't really see the connection to be honest. The only part of that making any sense would be where he says they blind their slaves because they're nomadic, which makes sense I guess since it would be pretty hard to be self-sufficient/escape and find your way home if you are a blind person in a roving camp full of warlike jerks who won't let you leave because that would mean being required to skim cream from horse milk oneself instead of getting a bunch of blind Cimmerian guys to do it.

feel k. surprised by this? didn't have drew down as a woolfbro??

it's actually forster bro

but
I do like the
one woolf thing like five teachers have made me read
over and over
esp
re:

ugh ffffdsjffhjfgffffff

please excuse me while I go learn how to read

Does anyone want to talk about The Once & Future King with me? Because I just finished it today and it's completely amazing.

Wanted to give everyone a heads up that I'm almost done with The Brothers Karamazov and I think it's basically fucking terrible in case anyone wanted to make fun of me for being stupid and having bad tastes.

def reserving that right but
what didnt you like about it?
i guess i could conceive of someone disliking/being annoyed by aloysha
but the rest of the karamazovs & most other characters and the story all ruled imo

forgot to mention I read Misspent Youth like a couple weeks ago re:
remembered the thing I read by hamilton being p average and
god think that might be the most offensive thing I have read

i'm reading Slaughterhouse Five again because the sections where he becomes "unstuck in time" and goes to Tralfamadore feel to me now like hes describing experiences of confabulation but maybe thats just me reading my own experiences into it

No, I thought Alyosha was fine. The characters were all fine. I don't know that there's any one thing that I disliked in particular. It's more that I thought it was thoroughly uninteresting and tedious. I just didn't care about any of the stuff in the entire book. You know, I would be reading and thinking, "Jesus, are they still talking about this?" And that's not to say that I thought it was slow. Just uninteresting and a chore.

But lots of people that know a lot more than me seem to enjoy the book, so maybe it's 2deep4me. I think it's entirely possible that if were a 19th Century Russian dude, I would have gotten more out of it.

I read Northern Lights last week and thought it was excellent. It is hard not to like a kid's book the author of which adds extra oomph to battle scenes between armored polar bears by riffing on the Iliad. Plus that ending. And the daemons and witches and such. Anyway I was intrigued and stimulated by it.

I also picked-up Giles Goat-Boy again from halfway through. It's a lot more readily comprehensible and less overwhelming these days, while still being one of the silliest books I've ever read. Still really looking forward to finding out how He Ends the Boundary Dispute.

Also I've been trying unsuccessfully to make further inroads into Angela Carter for a while now, and I found a copy of Nights At the Circus at the suspiciously well-stocked opportunity shop near where I work, and so far it's very funny but also a bit overpowering. I get the feeling I'm being made fun of but I'm not really sure how, why or if I should mind. I really like the way she writes, though. It reminds me of Anais Nin but with more of a brain behind it. Which reminds me that I never got my copy of Nightwood back from my sister, and that it's probably lost forever, and that's pretty annoying.

Reminds me a bit too much in its implications of the bit in The Candle in the Wind where Arthur finds himself contemplating the possibility that those who wish to live a happy life in this world must engage in metaphorical suicide.

fear and trembling
by soren kierkegaard
boy this dude is obsessed with abraham and isaac

That and being contemporaneous with Christ. Don't know why he never thought of being contemporaneous with Abraham. He would have loved that idea, I bet.

I am halfway through through A History of the Arab Peoples by Alfred Hourani at the moment. He tends to repeat himself a lot, but so far this is fascinating. I read the Arabian Nights and books about the crusades and so forth as a kid, but really I know very little about the Middle East.

reading ada
atm
and it is pretty unwelcoming, tbh

Has anyone else here read The Ruins by Scott Smith? I finished it last night. It's kind of like To the Lighthouse crossed with a Romero zombie film, in that the whole book takes place in the lighthouse, and the lighthouse is actually a mine within which resides a murderous, intelligent vine that likes to fuck with people's heads, and that vine can lay claim to the co-operation of an entire village of Mayan villagers in ensuring that people rarely if ever escape. So in terms of stories about a team of naive young people blundering into a shitstorm by accident this is definitely one of the better ones.

buh so been putting off talking about the stuff I've been reading and wanting to mention to yall
been reading tons of cj cherryh who I thought just wrote junk but so far read two ownage things and one averagish thing
read 40,000 in gehenna and cyteen and downbelow station
v v v v much recommend reading gehenna and maybe cyteen(but only if you read gehenna first)

I hate ada

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%28food%29
?

I have been meaning to read CJ Cherryh for ages but have avoided it for basically the same reason. But I bought a collection of hers for someone for a present and now I may have to "borrow" it from them.

I started re-reading The Eyes of the Overworld by Jack Vance, and while I don't find the language as dazzling as I once did it's all a lot easier to appreciate. Still one of the funniest books I've read. Oddly enough, I looked-up Ada and the Demonia/Antiterra aspect seems to have a lot in common with Vance's conception of the Overworld, the "Real" world, and La-Er, the world of demons. Which wants me to regard the book as pure allegory, except that I can't help falling back on Tolkien's argument towards applicability in literature. I guess I have been out of uni a while and feel a bit resistant towards the use of terms like the Real vs. the Imaginary.

I'm reading The Raw Shark Texts. It's about a man who is being chased by a conceptual shark. I like the idea of it so far, and it has some nice text/visual tricks (although that's nothing to be surprised by nowadays I guess).

that sounds horrible