You must retrieve that book and scan every page!

"We need textbooks that don't refer to the civil rights movement as 'Trouble ahead'!"

Reading Catch-22 due to one of my favourite band's shared name with the book. Very good stuff.

Catch-22 is absolutely amazing. I need to read it again sometime.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
 

I've just started reading Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishamel Reed.

I'm a third of the way through. It's a hilariously bizarre parody of Western mythology full of dumb cowpokes, capitalist ranchers, voodoo cowboy heroes and.. a native American Chief who flies a helicopter made from the refuse of ghost-towns, woven together with a plant called plastic.

Bear in mind that it's set in the 1880s and was published in 1969.

Yeah.

The Etymologicon. It's about the English language, in case you haven't guessed. It starts with a subject or a particular word and then just explains all the othe words it went into and why. It's a good trivia source, and I feel smarter just reading it. Things I have learnt across four pages:

1. The word 'gentle' comes from the word 'gentleman', not vice versa!
2. The word 'gentleman' actually comes from 'genos' as in 'genetics', used to mean 'well-bred'.
3. This is also the source of the word 'generous', which originally meant high-born people but later grew by association to mean people with enough to spare.
4. Robert Recorde invented the equals sign "=" simply becaue he didn't like having to write out 'is equal to' every calculation.
5. He chose two horizontal lines of clearly equal length, because it was the most equal thing he could think of.
6. Ironically, the gifted mathemetician late died in a debtors' prison, presumably meaning his accounting was somewhat poor.

Finally, fiiinaalllly started Discworld; The Colour of Magic. I love it to bits.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Fantastic writer, he says some brilliant things.

IRON WEST by Doug Tennape-

Oh wait I finished it. Cool 30$ book with less than one total page of dialog, Doug.

Now I'm reading Caiphas Cain: Defender of the Imperium. I don't like it as much as Ravenor, since each chapter is just "The day started out pretty average, and then something reasonably likely happened, and then I was worried, and then we won a battle." The liner notes are also annoying and distracting. Still an okay read, but Dan Abnett is a better writer.

Also, I got a book called An Incomplete Education for Christmas. It lets me be an expert on anything.

Reading And Another Thing... by Eoin Colfer. It honestly reads like a clumsy fanfiction as done by a skilled and clever writer. Very, very funny but the allusions to space pot and uncountable Guide notes are a little off-putting.

The Dark Tower Volume 3 by Stephen King and Alta by Mercedes Lackey. Both really good books. Dark Tower is particularly gripping, especially during Volume 2.

I am suddenly in the mood to rant about how awful the last three Dark Tower books are.

I've been reading Discworld, aaaand Discworld, and even more Discworld. I love Discworld!

Started with Interesting Times. It was Interesting. Then, Men At Arms, which is my favourite. Followed up with Guards! Guards! and Nightwatch (Sam Vimes is just unparalleled levels of kickass). Currently I'm reading Small Gods, which I feel like Meech suggested to me. It's a bit different, but still shaping up really well. I buy them in pairs at the end of each Paycheque (one a week) so I'll be following up with The Truth (The 25th Discworld novel~, according to the cover) and I placed an order for Snuff, which is both Hardcover, the newest book and about Sam Vimes. Discworld is amazing, Discworld is amazing, oh my god, Discworld is amazing.

Welcome to the club.

Speaking of clubs, I'm reading Fight Club right now. Really good book, but actually quite different from the movie, which is good. Some interesting scenes that I'm surprised aren't in the movie. I'd recommend reading it.

Not finished it yet, though, so I can't compare it to the movie properly, but so far I think I prefer the film.

So did the author, apparently.

That probably wasn't me.

Wait....

Do I need to read? :/

And no I'm not a stupid person so if you're here to say that, please die!

Awful? Awful?!? No, sir! They were not awful. They are consecutively the worst thing to happen to print in well, ever. They are absolute shit. If I wiped my ass with them, my ass would be filthier than before I started. I am appalled that they were even published.

Man that sounds bad, son. :confused:

It sure does, dad.

Why are they so awful? I'm really curious now.

Doctor Doom, snitches, Stephen King is God, men with ferret heads, woman gives birth to spider, anti-climax with Father Christmas and worst ending ever.

Wellllllll......let's see. He at one point writes himself into the story. He seems to forget past events, and rules of his own world. They are generally boring. Punch out ending preceded by the dumbest victory over a villain imaginable. Weird people who think that human pus and snot is a delicacy. Robot werewolves. General stupidity. Roland becomes the pickiest, and lamest douchebag ever. Bad writing.

Edit: Also that stupid shit that WoF just wrote down.

Also the villain Stephen King has been building up as Roland's arch nemesis for the whole series gets his eyes eaten by a spider who then gets food poisoning and is killed by a badger thing.

Also that villain turns out to be the exact same person as someone else in the series when it was expressly stated that they are not the same person, and in fact Roland once saw them together at the same time but now they are the same person apparently.

Well, that sounds pretty awesome to me. Can't go wrong with robot werewolves and ferret-headed men.

Yes, you can. And he does.

Who is also the same person in another Stephen King book with a horrible ending. Specifically The Stand, where the whole of the main cast except a retard, a pregnant woman and a guy who couldn't be in the climax due to breaking his leg die when the Hand of God (No really) detonates a nuclear bomb and blows up Las Vegas.

Also said villain spends half the thousand page book trying to birth the anti-christ, when he finally succeeds he throws him out of a penthouse suite window in a fit of rage.

The Stand is a complete waste of time. The protagonist's struggle is completely worthless since god steps in and does all, and I mean all, of the work for them. They never needed to be anywhere near anything to win. They could have just napped all the time, and our dear lord Jesus Christ would have still have given them ridiculous victory.