read this book for me ok thx bye

if you buy the book for me, i will read it

if you buy it ill read it!!!!

xpost goddammit

Can somebody read The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon for me please? I bought a copy but couldn't get into it and then dropped it in the bath. I don't want to read it now it's all soggy, and I don't want to buy another one because I already bought this one. And I was having trouble with it anyway.

Can someone read the second part of Don Quixote for me? Is it more of the same?

don't read Fanon.

why not? is it bad? can you summarise why?

The second book of Don Quixote is more of the same except gone CRAZY APESHIT POSTMENTAL.

I've read the second part of Quixote, ages ago. It responds to the unauthorized sequels written by others in the intervening years, which is an interesting thing to be doing, but otherwise it is mostly an inferior sequel in the common way of such things.

Obviously I don't have the necessary spare time to go reading titles of that length, but on the basis that it has 'Science Fiction' in it, I will also volunteer if you hand me a copy.

lumme this is goin to be my most expensive thread evah!

I like the second book more, cos I'm cussed like that. The Don sets out on his adventures again only now most of the people he meets have heard of him because of the success of the first book. Not only that, but the various bootleg sequels have cast doubt on his character and spawned a whole bunch of Don Quixote wannabes who are also wandering the Spanish countryside spoiling for a duel. The Don is constantly having his head fucked with by cruel bastards who delight in seeing Pancho get a good beating. And so on, and so forth.

The second book is much more focussed on Quixote/Panza, as well as elaborating its dizzy riffs on the real/fake Dulcinea. Book One is padded with a bunch of lovey-dove storys about nobles not marrying each other and pretending to be peasants. Book Two is cleverer, surrealer and downright darker than that.

Yeah, I didn't like the second half of the first book tedious stories about nobleswith the tedious nobles stories. Maybe I will read the second book after all.

I liked the first book because The Tale of Inappropriate Curiosity (Lothario is persuaded to seduce his friends wife) is JUST LIKE what the NOTW and the Fake Sheikh did with Sven Goran Erikson.

I also liked the bit when Sancho is sick on Quixote who is then sick on Sancho. And also the bit where Sancho shits himself.

The Don is constantly having his head fucked with by cruel bastards who delight in seeing Pancho get a good beating sounds excellent. Maybe I will try again, or possibly save it for the summer. I am currently doing battle with AJP Taylor's English History, 1914-1945. It is excellent bedtime reading as it is so staggeringly dull. "And then what happened was... and then what happened was...", for 600pp. You make the second book of DQ sound excellent by comparison.

TS Quixote vs. Gargantua

the pauper house of language

on the Fanon tip, Black Skin, White Masks is better than Wretched of the Earth in a certain way (more theoretical, less call-to-arms-y), so you might like it more, Cathy.

I refuse to believe Jameson is readable, because I tried too goddamn many times to read that accursed Postmodernism book, without success. Eagleton probably misrepresented the Jameson book, mark s. because that's what Eagleton does.

haha i know, that's why i hate him! i just quite liked this review!!

yeah, I just read the first paragraph of the review, and it seemed interesting. BUT THAT'S HOW HE GETS YOU!!!

normally he's lost me by then!

heh. fair enough. fie on ye, terry eagleton!

In the airport last month I was standing in a bookstore, my numbed eyes sliding idly over the titles, when I heard two women behind me, talking.

"Oh he's great. I've read every one of his books."

"Really?"

"Oh yeah. I haven't been reading a lot lately, you know, everything's been so CRAZY, but I'll usually read about two books a month."

"Which one's the best?"

"Oh, this one. This one for sure."

And here I wanted to turn around to see what she was pointing at. But I remained incognito. Eventually they left, and I looked to see what author they'd been talking about. They had been standing, apparently, at a table packed in close with about twenty titles by one James Patterson, writer of thrillers. I was so impressed that two women, whose superficial way of talking and general air of idiocy belied the fact that they were VORACIOUS readers (well, one of them, anyway). I picked up one of the books. #1 New York Times. #1 Washington Post. #1 etc. A quote on the back: "A young writer of thrillers could do far worse than to imitate London Bridges..." Well, since I consider myself a young writer, and occasionally strive for the thrilling turn of phrase, and since these women's surprising avidity had humbled me, I bought it. The guy must be doing something right, no?

The problem is, it's TERRIBLE!! These things are supposed to be page-turners, g*ddamn it, and I can't get past the third chapter. So my request is for someone to please read "London Bridges" and tell me what, if anything, this Patterson fella gets right.

btw I had hours to wait, because I'd just learned that literally two feet of snow had just fallen on New York, so I went to the pathetically foreshortened and hopelessly mis-shelved "classics" section and put every book on it in alphabetical order by author.

Meh. You're like the opposite of the Hawthorne Heights street team. Are you in the Ne Yo street team?

Mike I have to warn ya I love that A.J.P. Taylor book so our mileage on DQ may vary.

Gah. What will I read then? On my unread shelf there is the new Jonathan Safran-Foer, Master and Margarita, the Summer 1985 issue of Granta (Science), Darwin's Worms by Adam Philips (I have no idea what this is — a friend left it), and Cosmology: A very short introduction. I also have DQ and the AJP Taylor to finish. None of them are particularly appealing.

In my Amazon shopping cart I have: The Coming of the Third Reich (which has received good notices), Rememeber Remember the Fifth of November (which I think I must have added around Bonfire Night in a fit of concern about my ignorance) and Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping (which got a fantastic review in the NYRB). These were all a good idea at the time, but not of them grab me right now.

Gah. I might just go to Borders and get a Jeeves and Wooster book and some Seinfeld DVDs.

Don't be ripped off by the new hardback Jeeves and Woosters - they're a swizz.

I liked Master and Margarita, though it is one of those books that is really great and compelling and then you end up kind of losing enthusiasm for it and finding that it drags. Well, that's how I found it.

The Claudine novels by Colette is waiting for me at the post office, and I am excited.

Ooh, I want to read AJP Taylor. I will put it on a post-it note. That always works.

can someone with subsciber magic post that article to this thread from the lrb (i can't read it all).

kthxbye.

yay!

i only have it on paper! i am not typing it out as WELL as buyin copies for ethan tokyo rosemary and martin!

do u subscribe? becauze subscribers to the print edition can register and log in to get the full contents online!!

haha,

keystrokes plz. ysi?

no at the moment i buy it at my local hackney newsagents

I just checked and was appalled to find that Oxford University doesn't have an institutional electronic subscription to LRB [*]. I had one when I worked at Macquarie, which, although a nice university, doesn't have Oxford's resources. I CUSS THEM BAD. (Them being Oxford.)

[*] Or The Economist or NYRB or The Atlantic or The New Republic, all of which are available at Macquarie. CUSS.