Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Good Reading
It's been a few years since I watched Todd Solondz's Happiness. The first time around, I enjoyed it for how black its black humour was. It's a suburban satire along the lines of Little Children and American Beauty, but relentlessly darker. Not too many comedies involve suicide, pedophilia, fantasies of rape, and sheer misery. I decided to watch it again on the weekend, and since then, I have been jovially melancholy. I'm in a mood where I want to laugh about how much I think life is a farce. I get in these fits at least once a year. Last year, it lead me to the brilliant works of ugliness and sorrow Taxidermia, Ex-Drummer, and Synecdoche, NY.
Those were all movies though, I would like to find another book to make me feel angry, sad, or violated. I didn't have access to the Gallowmere private library, earlier, so I couldn't satisfy my urge when I wanted to. When I returned to my abode, I decided that I needed something which would help me keep track of what I have, and give me remote access to a list of my books. Something other than an actual physical handwritten list, of course. And thus, with a few keystrokes, I found Goodreads.com. It's a site where you can catalog books you have and designate them to lists of read, to-read, currently reading, and other custom categories. It is apparently going for a bit of a social network thing as well. I haven't used it much, and am only a little more than halfway with adding my books to it. I've done all the fiction I currently possess, but I haven't added any of my nonfiction books to it. As well, I plan on going through and reviewing or at least rating the books that I have already read.
My profile can be checked out here.
As for now, I may have found something which can fuck me up, Comte de Lautreamont's Maldoror. I confess I don't know much about it other than that it is a surreal poem about an unabashedly evil person/being who hates everybody and everything. I'm smiling already.
See everyone in hell!
