Melbourne Beats

I'm not a regular reader, but I started reading 'Humanity - An Emotional History' by Stuart Walton and cannot put it down.

What an awesome book, it goes thru all our major emotions: fear, anger, , sadness, jealousy, contempt, shame, embarrassment, surprise and happines. It describes how they've been used and exploited throughout history in politics, relationships, business, etc...


any other books to recommend?


[edit: add authors name]

anything by Robert Rankin.

Lullaby - the new Chuck Pahlaniuk book.

The man is a sheer genius. The book is based on the premise that an old African culling song has surfaced in a forgotten book, inadvertantly allowing the reader to kill those that the song is read to.

Pahlaniuk takes the Big Brother theory of the inundation of information from all angles and turns it on its head. What if sticks and stones could break our bones, but words could kill us?

Fucking brilliant.

I can also highly recommend Scar Tissue, the Anthony Keidis autobiography. Honest, open and pulls absolutely no punches. An amazing insight into the mind of a drug addict and international celebrity and the intricacies of both worlds colliding.

cool book.

i liked survivor better.

some books i enjoy:

"slaughterhouse 5" - Kurt Vonnegut

"catcher in the rye" - jd salinger - some of his other work is cool too.

"the double", "house of the dead", "crime and punishment" - fyodor dostoyevsky

"on the road" - Jack Kerouac

"brave new world", "the doors of perception" - aldous huxley

"wonderland avenue" - danny sugerman

of course.."fear and loathing in las vegas" - hunter s thompson

one i just started too, seems interesting so far:

"Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed" - jared diamond

My Year of Meat :: Ruth Ozeki

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time :: Mark Haddon

Both awesome. TCIOTDITNT is written from the perspective of an autistic child - gold!

Ag3nT[]0raNg3 wrote:cool book.

i liked survivor better.

Agreed, would love to see it as a movie, but who the hell could do Tender justice???

I have Transforming the Mind by the Dalai Lama (and others) on order - can't wait to get stuck into it

eskay wrote:I have Transforming the Mind by the Dalai Lama (and others) on order - can't wait to get stuck into it

yo get your hands on the huxley book "doors of perception" i mentioned above, itll blow your mind.

Mr Nice.

Howard Marks autobiography is pretty cool.

was one of the worlds biggest weed trafficers (sp??)

The Matriarch: The Kathy Pettingill Story. By Adrian Tame.

wicked read! its like an interview sort of read about her son Dennis Allen. some of you might know of him. Was the biggest drug dealers in Melbourne in the 80's.

If you like fantasy, then anything by Terry Brooks.

Absolutely brilliant

I'm reading Shantaram at the moment, probably take me a year to finish it though

very interesting read

I am reading a book called Mungo - the man who laughed a lot, or something like that.

seems like a good read so far

I also just finished the 98 Sydney hobart tragedy - Farken full on

although, the weather we just had pretty much replicated the conditions in Bass strait that they had back then.

20 meter swells & 70 - 90 knot winds

V scary

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

I laughed out loud twice.

Can't wait to see Keira Knightly as Elizabeth - rowrl.

Will wrote:Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

I laughed out loud twice.

Can't wait to see Keira Knightly as Elizabeth - rowrl.

All about corsets or piercings with you innit Will?

Feigan wrote: I also just finished the 98 Sydney hobart tragedy - Farken full on

although, the weather we just had pretty much replicated the conditions in Bass strait that they had back then.

20 meter swells & 70 - 90 knot winds

V scary

yeh, i saw a guy speak recently - he was a paramedic in one of the rescue chopper crews. he showed us footage of him dangling amongst these freaken huge waves trying to rescue dudes..awe inspiring stuff.

TimmyG wrote:

Will wrote:Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

I laughed out loud twice.

Can't wait to see Keira Knightly as Elizabeth - rowrl.

All about corsets or piercings with you innit Will?

And tatoos.

Will wrote:

TimmyG wrote:

Will wrote:Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

I laughed out loud twice.

Can't wait to see Keira Knightly as Elizabeth - rowrl.

All about corsets or piercings with you innit Will?

And tatoos.

Can anyone say dominatrix?

Sneaky Hands - some of the stories from the rescues are amazing.

The rescue team did something like 6 months worth of rescues in 6 hours, and majority of people who where on the winches, had only done training on flat water or in a lake

Fair ask if you ask me!

I'd really like to see some of the footage - where can you see it?

My dad was actually sailing in the race that year and turned back - damn good move IMO. But they where actually saying it was more dangerous to turn around as the seas where heading north and the yachts would have been surfing 20 meter swells back to Eden

TimmyG wrote:Can anyone say dominatrix?

domen.. dimat... dermi...

feck it.

no.

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson.

love it.

Will wrote:Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

I laughed out loud twice.

Can't wait to see Keira Knightly as Elizabeth - rowrl.

Pffffft. Can't beat the BBC version! You're actually reading it?! That's dedication!! Got the vid from my high school days if you want to borrow. Only 6 hours long....

Ag3nT[]0raNg3 wrote:

TimmyG wrote:Can anyone say dominatrix?

domen.. dimat... dermi...

feck it.

no.

Feigan wrote:Sneaky Hands -
I'd really like to see some of the footage - where can you see it?

i saw it at a strategy briefing for the company i work for, the guy had parlayed his experience into a lucrative career as one of those inspirational speakers. Probably was charging like $1G an hour or something ridiculous.

There was a news chopper following them around that took the footage - there must be archives of some kind around that are accessible to the public. Amazing though, the guy reckons they were 70 feet up in the air and getting hit by spray from the waves.

Ani wrote:

Will wrote:Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

I laughed out loud twice.

Can't wait to see Keira Knightly as Elizabeth - rowrl.

Pffffft. Can't beat the BBC version! You're actually reading it?! That's dedication!! Got the vid from my high school days if you want to borrow. Only 6 hours long....

actually it's only 5 hours (6 x 50 minute episodes)... I have the DVD
and the book... which I reread about once a year
P & P rocks!

Anybody says Davinci Code i'm gonna fuckin scream. I love the book but I'm just tired of EVERYBODY and their DOG and their DOGS KIDS talkin about it.

Anyways, I'm reading the Dune Legends trilogy.

Didn't we do the book thread already? Well anway, I'm giving Michael Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon a second go because there's so much in it to digest. And I cannot recommend these books enough:

Gary Webb - Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
(R.I.P. Gary Webb. That's what you get for telling the truth these days)

Alfred McCoy - The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade

Yep, we definitely did this already.

Still on the Russian tip I've been on for the last 2 years and currently reading:

Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment for 7th time and The Idiot <- quite possibly the best book I've gotten stuck into for a looooong time.

Plus various bits and pieces of Tolstoy and Gogol

Paulo Coelho: The Alchemist

ruby wrote:The Idiot

ive seen that book in the shops

it made me chuckle a bit when i looked at it.

mecka wrote:Anybody says Davinci Code i'm gonna fuckin scream. I love the book but I'm just tired of EVERYBODY and their DOG and their DOGS KIDS talkin about it.

Did you hear they're about to make it a movie starring Tom Hanks & Audrey Tatou?

I'm reading the dice man... normally I avoid books that are 'hyped' until I've forgotton what the hype was.. but this is a ripper read.
I'm gonna have a dice weekend... see if it alters my moral code as it's supposed to..

I wanna read those travel books that the D-Gen guys have done, Phaic Tan & Molevanie (I think??)


my housemate has Phaic Tan, so I'll borrow it when he's done.

I also just finished The Dirt (Motlet Crue)

Read a book called monster if anyone gets a chance

top read

breaksRbest wrote:I wanna read those travel books that the D-Gen guys have done, Phaic Tan & Molevanie (I think??)

Molvania's piss funny... probably more so to me because of my background

I second Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist and also Veronika Decides to Die
Crime and Punishment is brilliant - need to give that a second look methinks. Lucky for me my mum's a huge Dostoevsky fan and owns every book every written either by or about him

ukime wrote:Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson.

love it.

well worth going and reading his more recent ones as well! "Cryptonomicon" and "The Baroque Cycle Trilogy". great author all round.

other favourites:

Haruki Murakami "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle"/"A Wild Sheep Chase"

Irvine Welch "Glue"/"Porno"

Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson.

love it.

ohhh I love that book too, Cryptonomicon is good too. 'cyberpunk' classics spent a half year dissecting these books for uni. Thye are well worth the time....

snow crash was rad.

hiro protaganist.

Been meaning to read Snow Crash for ever..

'The Tesseract' by alex garland (now made into a crappy movie like The Beach was... why do they keep doing this when his books are so good???)

'Lighthouse Keeping' by jeanette winterson (tho its got a crappy girly looking cover)

ukime wrote:Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson.

love it.

BEST...BOOK...EVER. Stephenson sorta went a bit wierd after Cryptonomicon, still good stuff, but not what I expected...yet still entertaining, damn good writer, up there with Gibson....just not as odd . Been outta touch with a lot of the cyberpunk stuff, eager to get back into it when time permits!

PHEAR THE DELIVERATOR!

Zerotonine wrote:Stephenson sorta went a bit wierd after Cryptonomicon, still good stuff, but not what I expected...yet still entertaining, damn good writer, up there with Gibson....just not as odd .

hmm. full credit to Stephenson really, he'd done the geek thing to death and has moved into different realms.

the Baroque Cycle book ("Quicksilver", etc) are an effort to get started on, but are the most insanely well researched and still highly entertaining books I think I've ever read.

Gibson, on the other hand, has lost the plot completely. "Pattern Recognition" was turgid and stale.

I haven't read Gibson in ages, he kept trying to reinvent his 80s stuff in his new stuff ... which wasn't really inventive. Well, that's when I stopped at Mona Lisa Overdrive, or the one after, I can't remember.

Snow Crash is da bomb. I wanna direct it into an anime-comic-style movie

I think that any film version of "Snow Crash" outside of animé is doomed to disappoint. just look at what happened with "Johnny Mnemonic".

on a tangent though, check out the trailer for "Sin City" though! looks awesome!
http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/sin_city.html

Yeah had a look at that the other week - talk about film noir looks good!

not sure if this counts as a book strictly speaking but I've been reading William Blake

The Fly

Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death,

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live
Or if I die.

Ag3nT[]0raNg3 wrote:Mr Nice.

Howard Marks autobiography is pretty cool.

was one of the worlds biggest weed trafficers (sp??)

The Matriarch: The Kathy Pettingill Story. By Adrian Tame.

wicked read! its like an interview sort of read about her son Dennis Allen. some of you might know of him. Was the biggest drug dealers in Melbourne in the 80's.

fuck yeah, one of my fav books, got another one of his called the book of dope stories, which is a whole bunch of short stories of his travels and stories that were told to him, good read also.
Along the same line is another HIGHLY recommended book called "marching powder" by Rusty Young about an english dude who was caught smuggling coke in Bolivia and went to the San Pedro Jail which is a fuckin crazy place, they actually manufacture most of Bolivias cocaine IN the Jail! Must read, very intriguing

Blush wrote:I'm reading the dice man... normally I avoid books that are 'hyped' until I've forgotton what the hype was.. but this is a ripper read.
I'm gonna have a dice weekend... see if it alters my moral code as it's supposed to..

no shit dude, im reading that ATM too!

1. you reply to this post
2. you go rape Arlene
3. you start a thread titled "Dice weekend"
4. you call oxfam and donate to the tsunami victims
5. you come to DJ Krush tonight
6. you go to SUV & Pendulum

Roll away

Att System: It's Irvine Welsh. I highly reccomend Ecstasy, Filth and Trainstpotting.


Snow Crash started out really well, but had one of the most pathetic half-arsed endings of any story I've ever experienced. Very disappointing.

Will wrote:Att System: It's Irvine Welsh. I highly reccomend Ecstasy, Filth and Trainstpotting.

sweet, sweet irony.

Will wrote:Snow Crash started out really well, but had one of the most pathetic half-arsed endings of any story I've ever experienced. Very disappointing.

yeah, "Cryptonomicon" was far better IMO. "Snow Crash" was running on the coat tails of "Neuromancer", etc.

Will wrote:Att System: It's Irvine Welsh. I highly reccomend Ecstasy, Filth and Trainstpotting.

ecstacy is fucken cool.