Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

    The thread for people who are incapable of putting books down because they have to finish what they start. Even if the book is utter crap and you know life is too short.

    Casuals by Phil Thornton. Serioulsy, what the fuck came over me to pick this up in the first place?
    Sophie's World by Jostein Gardner. Utter, utter dreck.

    At a stretch, I might include No Logo because it is so deeply wrong and embodies pretty much everything that is wrong with the left in Canada but her works do have a certain style, and it was such a popular phenomenon that one kind of had to read it just to keep up with everyone else.

    #2
    Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

    A Book Of Memories by Peter Nadas is a book I finished despite it being possibly the most insufferably dull self-indulgent drivel I've ever encountered. I think it's because it's ostensibly about the Hungarian uprising, and I really wanted to read that stuff. So I read a couple of hundred pages of tiresome tripe and 1956 hadn't shown up yet, but by that stage I'd invested way too many weeks of reading to just give up and forced myself to read the rest of it.

    Comment


      #3
      Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

      Christ, No Logo was an awful read. Po-faced, polemical and repetitive. It would've made an interesting essay or pamphlet, but should never have been dragged out as long as it was. I hated it.

      Comment


        #4
        Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

        I quite liked Casuals. And I read Sophie's World by accident because someone had recommended that I read Sophie's Choice. The former was okay as a bluffer's guide to philosophy, but when I finally got round to the latter I realised where I should have gone first.

        Anyway, I read Thomas Mann's The Magic Bastarding Mountain to the end, and what a never to be repeated haul up a sheer cliff face with no equipment it turned out to be. And Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (volume one only - I'm just going to have to live with not finding out what happens in volumes two, three and four).

        Comment


          #5
          Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

          Re: Casuals. Strange. You seem so sensible otherwise.

          Comment


            #6
            Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

            I read Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life by John Sellers. It's all about a saddo and how obsessed he is with Built to Spill and Guided By Voices. After reading it, I decided to listen to some Guided By Voices. I have no idea what the fuss was all about.

            I learned nothing. I gained no insight.

            Comment


              #7
              Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

              I once read Kane And Abel by Jeffrey Archer. It's the worst-written novel I've ever read. And I used to read Asimov.

              Comment


                #8
                Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                All Archer's novels used to be lashed into shape by a long-suffering editor named Richard Cohen.

                Wouldn't you love to see what state the manuscripts were in when they first landed on Cohen's desk.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                  I just remembered one more.

                  The Last Party, John Harris. Pointless. The story of a tiresomely watery "love triangle" between several people whose personal lives I couldn't care less about, and their arguments with some other people.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                    So what's the critique of Casuals? I remember starting a thread about it a few years back on OTF, but don't recall any major objections to it. I read it and thought - ah, so that was what that malarkey with designer clothes was all about. Interesting, but glad I didn't waste my time being anything other than a scruff.

                    Reed, Guided By Voices are a real 'grower' band - put some on your MP3 player and eventually they'll creep up and surprise you.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                      As a youngish teenager I inhaled several books by pseudo lama Lobsang Rampa.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                        pseudo lama Lobsang Rampa
                        I liked the cover by Rocky Sharpe and the Replays.

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                          The follow up: Lama Lama Ding Dong was much superior.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                            So what's the critique of Casuals?
                            Does anyone really need a sartorial history of scallies? Enlivened with the occasional special guest appearance of such prominent 80s musical persona as whatsisname from The Farm?

                            I had picked up the book on the hope that it was about terrace culture. It turned out to be middle aged men reminiscing about their teenage years spent nicking shirts and getting into rucks.

                            My eyes were bleeding by the end of it.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                              The Bastard Verdict by Donald Finlay.

                              QC, defender of infamous murderers, arch-hun, muttonchop wearing motherfucker and shite novelist.

                              For anyone not familiar with Oor Donald, he was a member of the Rangers board forced to resign after being vidoed singing 'party' songs at a supporters smoker.

                              The book tells the story (what I care to remember of it) of a Rangers supporting QC and his involvement with a family of Celtic supporting criminals.

                              Hours of my life that I will never get back.

                              Comment


                                #16
                                Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                                "I had picked up the book on the hope that it was about terrace culture."

                                You picked up a book hoping it was going to be about terrace culture, and were surprised that it was a sartorial history of scallies? What exactly were you expecting? A treatise on the art of synchronised urinating? The semantics of pre-match banter? The influence of Wagner on terrace chants?

                                Comment


                                  #17
                                  Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                                  I started reading the last of the Jason Bourne books actually written by Robert Ludlum.
                                  Fuck me what an appaling, stilted, mysoginistic, feebly written, plotted nad paced pile of arse. And to think I though Freddie Forsythe was unbearable.

                                  Comment


                                    #18
                                    Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                                    You thought that was bad? Try reading the Jason Bourne books written by Eric Van Lustbader or whatever his name is. They make the Ludlum books look like literary masterpieces. They're that good.

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                                      You picked up a book hoping it was going to be about terrace culture, and were surprised that it was a sartorial history of scallies?
                                      I was disappointed that it was *only* a sartorial history of scallies. Some of that other stuff would have been welcome, actually.

                                      Comment


                                        #20
                                        Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                                        At a stretch, I might include No Logo because it is so deeply wrong and embodies pretty much everything that is wrong with the left in Canada
                                        How so? I'll second that it's tedious and says nothing new, but I don't know what's quite so 'wrong' about it.

                                        Comment


                                          #21
                                          Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                                          Some of it was new at the time, I think.

                                          First of all, Naomi Klein is a snob. A lot of her stuff about how branded goods are not "authentic" is good old fashioned positional-goods stuff. I especially like the bit where she talks about how awful it was that her downtown neighbourhood was being invaded by "inauthentic" people converting lofts into condos, which were just ruining her neighbourhood, which had hitherto been "authentic" (I believe she had an illegal loft at the time - only available through some pretty serious connections - in the building right behind the one WOM works in). In other words, she doesn't like people having more affordable versions of what she has.

                                          Second of all, the entire book is a frankly weird syllogism which moves from "workers in the garment trade are ill-paid" to "the mark up on some garments is pretty high" to "Nike and similar companies can get away with high mark ups because of advertising" and ends up arguing - effectively - that advertising and exploitation are intrinsically linked.

                                          Which is nonsense on at least three counts:

                                          1) To the extent anyone is being exploited, I'm sure the exploitation is at least as bad on whoever is making my $10 shirt from Bangladesh (or wherever) is being exploited at least as badly as whoever made my TFC replica kit. To single out the replica kit makers is simply playing on guilty feelings one might have for paying too much for clothing.

                                          2) Conditions in garment factories are undoubtedly bad - but it isn't obvious that the people who go in them are worse off than if they hadn't (some may be, of course, and it's certainly not an excuse for abusing of workers, but it needs to be recognized that in many places, it's better than what else is on offer)

                                          3) I'm fairly sure, in the course of human history, that economic exploitation preceded advertising.

                                          Had she simply said what she actually meant - that capitalism is bad, and that the west should in neo-colonial fashion impose our own labour laws on developing countries - she would never have received a fraction of the attention she did. But since she has a clever eye for sloganeering, she clothed the argument in a bunch of trendy talk about culture jamming and sold milions of copies instead.

                                          Comment


                                            #22
                                            Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                                            .

                                            I suppose I can't really be judged because I had to finish it to write a review, but a book called 'Death Dance' by one Linda Fairstein was the most incompetent twaddle I've ever read.

                                            .

                                            Comment


                                              #23
                                              Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                                              The Da Vinci Code, it would have great stuff if I was still doing numbing my brain in that cake factory, unfortunately I was a teacher at the time.

                                              Comment


                                                #24
                                                Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                                                First of all, Naomi Klein is a snob.

                                                I wouldn't say that's true, though she may come across that way in her writing. I've only met her a couple of times but know her parents reasonably well and calling any of them snobs is a bit OTT. You can argue that they're our equivalent of Hampstead Socialists and represent what, from the outside, may appear to be a left-wing elite, but snobs, nah. What they are, each one of them, is fervently active, socially engaged and very productive but I've never detected a shred of the type of entitlement that suggests snobbery.

                                                Comment


                                                  #25
                                                  Judge Me By What I Should Have Put Down But Didn't

                                                  AG, I thought the focus on the more expensive goods was important because it showed how little of the money went to China or wherever even where there was all that cash flying around this end. I didn't infer from this that it was better to buy a cheap shirt.

                                                  Re "neo-colonialism", I thought her point was that the labour laws existed already in the developing world but the institutions were too weak and the corporations too strong. I don't wanting to uphold existing legal minimums (decided by the country's themselves) is out of order.

                                                  Comment

                                                  Working...
                                                  X