Choke is issued with a warning:
'If you're going to read this, don't bother.
After a couple pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece.
Save yourself.
There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair.
You're not getting any younger.
What happens here is first going to pis you off. After that it just gets worse and worse.'
...
I should have listened.
Chuck and I, we just don't get along.
I find him to be all shock and no substance.
And it's not even that shocking.
Angela Carter's made me blush harder and with more eloquence than Palahniuk will ever be capable of*.
Sometimes though, sometimes he comes out with a quote i can walk away with and that's probably why i keep giving him second chances:
' "The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight."
Caged inside too many laws.
By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn't real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture.
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.'
Choke
(Page 159-160)
*I love her. I love her. I love her. And i will never stop professing that love.
'Crowds had gathered beneath the television monitors. Clark decided that whatever they were looking at, he couldn't face it without a cup of tea. He assumed it was a terrorist attack. He bought a cup of Earl Grey at a kiosk, and took his time adding the milk. This is the last time I'll stir milk into my tea without knowing what happened, he thought, wistful in advance for the present moment...'
Station Eleven
(Page 233)
Rating: 3.5-4/5
'The hovel on the Ferry stood, or, rather, leaned at a bibulous angle on a narrow street cut across at an oblique angle by another narrow street, all the old wooden homes like an upset cookie jar of broken gingerbread houses lurching this way and that way, and the shutters hanging of their hinges and windows stuffed with old newspaper, and the snagged picket fence and raised voices in unknown tongues and howling of dogs who, since puppyhood, had known of the world only the circumference of their chain. Outside the parlour window were nothing but rows of counterfeit houses that sometimes used to scream.'
American Ghosts & Old World Wonders
(Lizzie's Tiger)
(Page 4)
'I killed the car. And at once provoked such sudden, resonant quiet as if, when I switched off the ignition, I myself brought into being the shimmering late afternoon hush, the ripening sun, the very Pacific that, way below, at the foot of the cliff, shattered its foamy peripheries with the sound of a thousand distant cinema organs.'
- (The Merchant of Shadows)
(Page 66)
'In Burgundy, in the Middle Ages, they held a Feast of Fools that lasted all through the dead days, that vacant lapse of time during which, according to the hairy-legged mythology of the Norsemen, the sky wolf ate up the sun. By the time the sky wolf puked it up again, a person or persons unknown had fucked the New Year back into being during the days when all the boys wore sprigs of mistletoe in their hats. Filthy work, but somebody had to do it.'
- (In Pantoland)
(Page 102)
The legend of my birth begins with my dad in the midst of reading Angela Carter's novella, Love.
...
We were fated, Ms Carter and I.
Fated.
Rating: 4/5
A bonus Charles:
Who i currently refer to as: Monster Munch.
Equals doesn't tread new science fiction ground but the philosophy remains a constant:
All's forbidden and all are lost to wanting
Combine this with breathtaking cinematography, two actors graced with subtlety and a score to shred your insides and you've got a tale as old as time told gut-wrenchingly well.
30/31
'Moon marked and touched by sun
my magic is unwritten
but when the sea turns back
it will leave my shape behind.
I seek no favor
untouched by blood
unrelenting as the curse of love
permanent as my errors
or my pride
I do not mix
love with pity
nor hate with scorn
and if you would know me
look into the entrails of Uranus
where the restless oceans pound.
I do not dwell
within my birth nor my divinities
who am ageless and half-grown
and still seeking
my sisters
witches in Dahomey
wear me inside their coiled cloths
as our mother did
mourning.
I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon's new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white'
A Woman Speaks
'She suddenly dropped her bantering tone and looked me straight in the face. I at once felt ill-at-ease, and began to fidget. Even to-day I cannot get used to people who stare at you while they are talking, or come very close to make quite sure that you are listening. My only thought then is to escape from such proximity. I go on saying "Yes", while gradually edging away; their insistence and indiscretion enrage me. What right have they to try to corner me?'
Bonjour Tristesse
(Page 91)
Rating: 3.5/5
'Winter always was my favourite season. Is this yet winter? I do not know. There is some technical definition, something based on calendars and the position of the sun, but I think one simply becomes aware that the tide of seasons has irrevocably turned; that the animal in us smells winter. Disregarding the imposed grid of our chronology, winter is something inflicted upon our half-world, something taken away from the land by the cold and cooling sky and the low and lowering sun, something that permeates the soul, and enters the mind through the nose, between the teeth and across the porous barrier of the skin.'
A Song of Stone
(Page 3)
'We each contain the universe inside our selves, the totality of existence encompassed by all that we have to make sense of it; a grey, ridged mushroom mass ladled into a bony bowl the size of a smallish cooking pot.'
- (Page 165)
Iain Banks' writing always puts me in mind of the beating of weathered wings.
Rating: 4/5
Ps. Would you look at all those filthy, fluffy toes. Ridiculous.
'The lack of emotional connection with other people has the odd effect of making you feel separate and alien ‑ as if you are observing the human race from somewhere else; unattached and unwelcome. [...] People scurry around, doing their little jobs and raising their little families and shouting their meaningless emotions to the world, and all the while you just watch from the sidelines, bewildered. This drives some sociopaths to feel superior, as if the whole of humanity were simply animals to be hunted or put down; others feel a hot, jealous rage, desperate to have what they cannot."
I Am Not A Serial Killer
(Page 51)
Rating: 3.5/5
Oft accused of being a creeper due to my love of all things supernatural and gore-filled, i was expecting much more from the first in Dan Wells' John Cleaver series.
Give me blood and demons and fucking pandemonium.
But please don't give me Holden Caulfield with a butcher knife.
It's just too goddamn whiny.
Charlie puts more fear into me.
(Genuinely.
I've got the scratch marks on my shoulder to prove it.
The cat knows how to lunge.)
This won't stop me from probably reading at least the next book in the series, Mr Monster and most definitely watching the movie.
Christopher Lloyd is a good enough reason to watch just about anything.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Social Icons