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User
Reviews 123
Approval 98%
Soundoffs 230
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Last Active 09-26-19 3:01 pm
Joined 01-26-17
Review Comments 9,464
| Butcher's Reading List..
recent literature digs.. | | 1 |  | The Fall
Perverted By Language
Teaching My Mother to Give Birth by Warsan Shire - easily the best poetry collection I've read in years. Shire is Kenyan-born, Somali in origin, resides in London. Sensuous, highly agile and fantastically subversive, especially given her Muslim upbringing. A pleasure. | | 2 |  | Charles Mingus
Pithecanthropus Erectus
The Boat by Nam Le - gauzy, soulful short stories from a Vietnamese émigré to Oz. | | 3 |  | Harry Pussy
What Was Music?
Submission by Michel Houellebecq - the best living French writer, most known for his futuristic take on loneliness, The Possibility of an Island. Here he images a world where radical Islamists take over Paris, and all the good and bad that ensues. | | 4 |  | The Afghan Whigs
Gentlemen
The Music of Chance by Paul Auster - the eternal dig, hardly leaves my rotation. Auster's take on gritty mysticism can and often gets in over its own head, but Music of Chance is taut perfection, a book about a degenerate gambler and a nihilist who lose a poker game to two enigmatic billionaires and are tasked to build a stone wall around their mansion to pay off their debt. A slow descent into madness follows. | | 5 |  | Swell Maps
Jane From Occupied Europe
Collected Poems by Derek Walcott - the modernist vanguard of the West Indies. This collection is irreplaceable in my library. I peeked it in a shop, and spent the next two months gathering money to get the old hardcover. So utterly beautiful, while never collapsing into flowery crud. | | 6 |  | David Bowie
Low
The Abortion by Richard Brautigan - an absurd satirist who was greatly admired by Captain Beefheart. Think Ken Kesey but with a more blackened comic tint to his writing. | | 7 |  | The Dead C
Trapdoor Fucking Exit
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. - another eternal dig, a noir modernist writing a cult book that would underhandedly launch an entire genre of inner city realism. Brutalist and brutalistic, and so alive. | | 8 |  | The Thrown Ups
Melancholy Girlhole
Mad Man by Samuel R. Delany - a doctoral student stuck in the midst of his thesis goes out for a walk in the park to shake off writer's block and ends up having a hot, filthy affair with a homeless man, shaking off both the writer's block and a decade of repressed homosexuality. A torrid, beautifully shameless book filled with deep cut philosophical quotes, hazy park scenes, cock cheese and big black cock. | | 9 |  | Jeffrey Lee Pierce
Wildweed
Stop-Time by Frank Conroy - A coming of age tale as written by someone who hasn't seen daylight in decades, Oliver Twist meets American Gothic meets methamphetamines. | | 10 |  | Flux of Pink Indians
The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks
Timebends by Arthur Miller - for my scant money, the best memoir ever written. Miller takes on everything here, New York through the 50's, 60's and 70's, port union corruption, anti-Semitism, Broadway, finding identity, WASPS and gated myopia, Death of a Salesman, Marilyn Monroe and youth wasted and recovered, ambition, selling out, coming back, Pinko paranoia and downtown dirt. Perfection. | | 11 |  | Vivien Goldman
Dirty Washing
I've Tasted My Own Blood by Milton Acorn - the forgotten cadre of Montreal's great renaissance of Jewish poets, on par with Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen and all the rest. Fucked off and left for dead in obscurity and all the better for it on the page. | | 12 |  | Sonic Youth
Daydream Nation
Sayonara Gangsters by Genichiro Takahashi - a feverish, manic jaunt through Japan, that both relishes and takes the piss out of the country's hyperbolic cultural kinks. You can read it in a day, and still feel dizzy weeks later. | | 13 |  | Ground Zero
Revolutionary Pekinese Opera, Ver. 1.28
Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been by Chase Twitchell - incredibly tactile poetry from one of the best women in the game. It's always an indescribable pleasure to read someone who's so clearly in love with language, plying and bending it adoringly into sheer paragons. | | 14 |  | John Coltrane
A Love Supreme
Gargling with Tar by Jachym Topol - Czechoslovakian children leave their Soviet-bombed orphanage and set about the country(ies), stealing, smoking, suffering, surviving and re-learning to feel. | | 15 |  | Rip Rig and Panic
God
Captains of Sand by Jorge Amado - another eternal dig and another recounting of homeless children, this one by the legendary Brazilian writer. Captains of Sand sees a pack of abandoned and orphaned children form a community in packhouses scattered across Brazil's coastline. It's a fictionalized account of a true happenings that were taking place as the country went through its umpteenth political upheaval. Poignant, violent and at times, gloriously sordid, it's been a favourite for quite some time. | |
butcherboy
08.22.18 | Another twenty titles or so coming later tonight.. | Papa Universe
08.22.18 | some bloody goodies on here (especially 14) | Winesburgohio
08.22.18 | i love all i'm familiar with but i'd like to give special mention to 13 and 1 -- i'm not usually into poetry but there's no denying the power and discomfit of those collections. been meaning to acquire 11, now is the chance to seize the day | widowslaugh123
08.22.18 | Cool. 6 is awesome. | butcherboy
08.22.18 | Hop onto the book train, kids, because reading is power! | Papa Universe
08.22.18 | you need some of them recs? | butcherboy
08.22.18 | hit me.. but I don’t want fantasy or soft sci fi.. | Chortles
08.22.18 | these sound just lovely you dashing scholar, 3 and 4 especially caught my eye. added to my reading list for sure | Papa Universe
08.22.18 | Emile Zola - L'Assommoir
Artur London - Cofession
Blaise Pascal - Pensées
Guy de Maupassant - Boule de Suif
Günter Grass - The Tin Drum
Carlos Ruiz Zafón - The Shadow of the Wind
Thomas Bernhard - On the Mountain
Vadim Shefner - Курфюрст Курляндии (cause there needs to be some sci-fi after all) | butcherboy
08.22.18 | Know Zola and bernhard, and can’t stand de Maupassant.. will check the others.. cheers, Uni | Papa Universe
08.22.18 | why no Maupassant? | WeepingBanana
08.22.18 | Props for brautigan, I have that story somewhere, gotta read it. Also Delany seems cool, I've only read one short story of his that was a collab with Harlan Ellison | sixdegrees
08.22.18 | might I recommend
the Bible | guitarded_chuck
08.22.18 | "Blaise Pascal - Pensées"
pls sir this is a serious discussion | butcherboy
08.22.18 | @Uni - meh, he's a bore.. | Papa Universe
08.22.18 | oh hey, Chuck, the proof that you can be over 40, but still act like a 14 year old.
(might not be the one to talk) | Papa Universe
08.23.18 | somehow I read it as that you just feared and loathed las vegas and are about start a cemetery for pets...
hell, I can't read | Winesburgohio
08.23.18 | read Chronic City and A Naked Singularity bitch-ass i require someone to discuss both with (and don't get me started on my life of 2666, if you're looking for contemporary fiction recs) | butcherboy
08.23.18 | I love Bolaño.. 2666 could have been 200 pages shorter.. still, he took on so much in that book and did most of it justice.. | Winesburgohio
08.23.18 | i disagree except for the part about Fate, which could definitely have used a trim, otherwise everything was essential | cylinder
08.23.18 | 6 sounds cool
| butcherboy
08.23.18 | You’re damn right, munchkin.. | GUNGFUHAMMERFIST
08.23.18 | confederacy of dunces | guitarded_chuck
08.23.18 | im 29 papa but yes not exactly a yung'n anymore
im taking a mental breather from the heavy russian classic lit and nonfiction ive been into the past couple years and started the dark tower series, something i knew id get to at some point because i loved king growing up and still do, seems fantastic so far, lotr meets sergio leone | butcherboy
08.23.18 | ^need to tackle the dark tower series.. haven't read king in a while.. he's a fantastic writer.. | butcherboy
08.23.18 | @gung - confederacy of dunces is the eternal dig to end all eternal dig.. that book is in a league of its own.. | Winesburgohio
08.23.18 | @butch fuck o.k. so let me run my Gay theory by you: The Savage Detectives and 2666 are ying and yang because the former is about divergence (of bodies; geography; circumstance) and the latter is about convergence of same, converging on a hell demarcated by violence and misogyny that already exists and there's no way out of, as academia, individualism, journalism, structures and literature have failed. such a bleak work, such a call to arms, but to what? love both novels equally btw, alongside "last evenings on earth" which is his hidden gem |
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