hey estela guess what

the only one i remember well was about a girl with multiple personalities that i think was murdering people and also did a lot of weird sex things maybe?

haha and ai yi yi! i think i have been wise to avoid mary higgins clark!

oooh for good and not-that-trashy mysteries you should try maeve binchy

i read one by her a long time ago but i don't remember it as a mystery, more like a romance?

oh no way, defintely psychological thriller styles

ok u are right i just checked wiki

i must be confusing here with someone else??

hmm, wonder who you're thinking of

the writer i'm thinking had a lot of her thrillers turned into mini series and she's british. goddamnit i can't remember any of the titles!!

was ordered to come to this thread. I just finished Alice In Wonderland and am like 5 pages into Through the Looking Glass. I've been boring lately and have also been re-reading my favorite bits of Calvino's Cosmicomics instead of seeking out trashy summer thrillers like I should be doing.

i started reading that janet frame book today but couldn't get into so instead i'm gonna read another a.m. homes

oh lxy you might like muriel sparks??

xp: thank you, unr. i'm sorry i didn't say please, i meant to but then i had to go make a drink.

thanks for the rec., ruby!

something about reading unreg's post made me choke and then i spit wine everywhere which was not so classy but kinda trashy so maybe it fits.
anyway, i was gonna say i should read those this summer, unreg. why bc <3 them.

you're drinking spitz!

hey estela guess what

chickenbutt

xpost

hahaha. er, sorry, I guess. is there a special type of wine you're supposed to drink while posting on ilx? (need this for my records)

I <3 them as well but feel a little cheated for not having read Alice as a kid — like I'm missing a lot of its magic by reading it with an adult's mind, stopping to figure out how x passage has made its way into pop culture, and not getting totally immersed in it the way I expected. but a giant, hookah-smoking caterpillar is AWESOME no matter how or when you read the book, so no great loss there. Cosmicomics is highly recommended etc.

The Tourist, Olen Steinhauser

is what i'm reading now. it's about SPIES!

recently read

Roseanna, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

this is the first in the acclaimed Martin Beck series, which is apparently the measuring stick for all second half of the 20th century detective-genre fiction.

i had to make a book cover for it because there is a yucky picture on the front. but the story was good.

now reading

Inspector Imanishi Investigates, Seichō Matsumoto

Sjöwall and Wahlöö are referenced in the accolades. I love the description of the protagonist on the cover:

"Inspector Imanishi... Haiku poet, gardener, and the most dogged homicide detective on the Tokyo police force."

i just started i was amelia earhart, which my friend left for me because she said it was quick and fun. it is quick but so far not fun and more ehhhhhh. i am not having good book luck!

i started the janet frame but didn't like it so i put it down

i started some book by ishiguro but i didn't like that either so i put it down too

i then started 'democracy' by joan didion but that wasn't working out for me either

then i got halfway through steve erikson's 'our ecstatic days' but it was weird and not that well written and i was only keeping on reading it because i felt bad about giving up on the last 3 books

now i'm REALLY reading 'another you' by ann beattie which is okay and also 'los angeles' by a.m. homes (who is currently my favourite writer) which is really good

I started the newest China Miéville The City & The City on the bus ride home tonight. Just the right tinge of strangeness and something-not-quite-rightness so far. The imaginative leaps in Perdido Street Station will be hard to top.

lxy i LOVE the beck novels. what do u think of the wallander books?

max i haven't read any but, like the beck series, wallander has been on my list for a long time. i will go to the book store at lunch. my supply is running low and today is pay day!

you might want to consider the imanishi mentioned above. his detective work is rather more naive than beck's, but there is a similarity of disposition, i guess, between the two.

i will! i got into beck & wallander last year while ari was studying sweden & we took a trip to stockholm.

i highly recommend the bbcs wallander series w/ kenneth branagh too.

and obviously the matthau laughing policeman movie even tho its set in SF not sweden

true confession: it turns out i have read a wallander. jergins reminded me. i never remember that detective's name, just the author.

i liked how grimy it is, and i like the detective a lot. i found it to be a bit more gruesome than i normally like, though, so i haven't read any more.

it was One Step Behind that i read.

i need to hook up my printer so i can take the paper to the library that will get me a library card but i'm using the printer box as a bedside table right now. choices.

max i am unrecommending that imanishi book. it's annoying me.

Man in the Dark, Paul Auster

i am a HUGE fan of auster's wife, siri hustvedt - just went through a phase of reading all her stuff

i loved the new york trilogy tho i havent read it in five or six years but i havent been able to get into anything else by dude

turns out i only read comic books anymore... the last wordsy book i read was "artists in trouble" by aram saroyan. it was pretty good - well written, but not too engrossing.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark (thanks, ruby!!)

AND

Lonely Planet, Australia !!!

XD

the ballad of peckham rye is one of my favourite books, i <3 muriel spark, she is so evil and funny.

AND

:) !!!

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett

a favorite

"I don't like crooks, and even if I did, I wouldn't like crooks that are stool-pigeons, and if i liked crooks that are stool-pigeons, I still wouldn't like you."

t.c. boyle's 'road to wellville' (about kellogg and his sanitarium). this is the 3rd novel of his i've read - not totally loving his stuff, but they're easy to digest. his short stories are waaaaaay better - really weird and unpredictable.

i really liked World's End waaaay back when i read it - 20 years ago? but i heard him read one of his short stories on npr after that which sounded horrible, and the reviews of his other novels made me think maybe he just had one good book in him

'tooth and claw' is amazing - it's the first collection of his i read. there's a story about a down-on-his-luck guy who ends up agreeing to buy this mountain lion (i think? or some other big cat) from some old guy at a bar, and what happens when he gets it home is just bizarre.

ytth told me he teaches/taught at USC and is apparently a really arrogant asshole.

yeah i saw him read at a bookstore in LA and hes a real pompous jackass

i saw dave eggers at a reading on saturday - for all the ilx hatred of him, he's actually a very affable guy, not smug or anything. is it just some kind of weird jealousy thing that ppl hate him?

the reading was full of annoying old ppl who asked stupid questions at the end.

i think people mostly hate him due to the whole narcissism of small differences thing

Berlin, Pierre Frei

http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/7941/48964405.jpg

I'm at the chapter where gay guys inherit their shallow, passive, childlike nature from their oppressed housewife mothers. I'm half-convinced that Betty wasn't a homophobe at all — she just really, really hated Tennessee Williams.

(er, great book in almost all other respects...)

that's interesting, unreg! i always meant to read that but never got around to it. i'm curious about it.

i think i am secretly interested in outdated pseudopsychology too

the early history of dream interpretation fascinates me, probably because I did a project on it in lolinto to psych. like there was this 19th century French psychologist/philosopher who believed dreams were our way of expelling (peeing & pooping, in technical terms) wasteful images from the brain. and he thought people who didn't dream went loony because their brains were overstuffed with useless memories that had no outlet for escape. I'd pay good money for a bathroom reader full of batshit psych theories, & I'm sure such a thing exists somewhere...

"lolintro to psych," even

hey

cheers to the good guys

the other day i was walking to the wine store and a little white dog was on the sidewalk running away from its owner and she said "can you catch her?" and i picked her up and she said she's 14 years old and going deaf whenever i call her she goes away from me and i gave her the dog and it reminded me of harry because it was small and white and a rotter

also i was like 1 foot taller than the owner

aw, harry is small and white and a rotter and also he is 14 and a little bit deaf now too:( but he is in good and sturdy spirits and he still runs around a lot and is greedy and cheerful so that is as much as we could wish for. i can't even imagine what sorrow lies ahead so i hardly ever let myself think about it.

some dog advice given to me by a dog lover:

when your dog is elderly, that's the time to bring a young pup home; sometimes having that youthful energy around will give more energy to the older dog and extend its life. and when your beloved eventually passes, you'll have another little creature that needs all that same love and care from you and will help you move on.

that is good advice, it must be very quiet and lonely to suddenly be living in a house with no noisy little animal charging around.

i Double Dog Dare estela to post a poll of her 50 favourite albums

mookie

sorry i cherish you and everything but you've been double dog dared

i am pretending to be very disappointed

but even so

i’m working on this at my own pace, having noted on dare day that no deadline was provided. any postdated changes end this dare immediately and disqualify any new ones. sorry i do make the rules

i am extremely patient, and indeed stipulated no deadline, and am certain that you are posting this interim notice in the best of faith(s) <3