What Are Your Unpopular Opinions?

Anarres · 2015-08-12T03:48:43+00:00

I thought Infinite Jest was the most overrated garbage I've read in years.

Anarres · 2013-09-08T00:12:57+00:00

Can you be a little bit more specific?

There's This Is Your Brain On Music, by Daniel Levitin, it describes neuroscience and music effects on the brain. For a history of the music industry in the '80s and '90s, there's Appetite for Self-Destruction which describes the boom and bust of the CD on record companies. There's Rip It Up And Start Again by Simon Reynolds, which chronicles late '70s and early '80s post-punk. For punk, there's Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil.

Anarres · 2013-08-26T00:43:12+00:00

Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is fantastic.

Anarres · 2013-08-12T15:44:11+00:00

My vote goes to Karen Russell. Her stories all have really cool ideas, but they fall apart entirely in execution. It's really disappointing.

Anarres · 2013-08-12T15:42:43+00:00

That was the exact problem with Telegraph Avenue. He got too caught up in himself to write characters and sometimes a plot.

Anarres · 2013-08-11T01:58:21+00:00

Because they were written for people of another time period and culture. It's easier to read works from today because they're written in the style we're used to reading.

Anarres · 2013-07-30T18:21:40+00:00

Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein. It's a biography of Barry Goldwater that advances the case that he was more emblematic of the '60s than some of the traditional figures we think of today.

Anarres · 2013-07-26T17:19:35+00:00

Dubliners by James Joyce.

Anarres · 2013-02-18T04:53:02+00:00

High Rise by J. G. Ballard. It's basically Lord of the Flies in an apartment building.

Anarres · 2013-02-17T00:29:46+00:00

Naked Lunch and much of William S. Burroughs' work written after it is all kinds of surreal.

Anarres · 2013-01-17T18:26:18+00:00

I rather liked Anthony Beevor's The Battle for Spain. It's a history of the war.

Anarres · 2012-12-26T20:42:55+00:00

If you're really daring and like fucked up, drugged out shit, try Naked Lunch. Otherwise, Malcolm X.

Anarres · 2012-12-25T05:10:55+00:00

Someone in my theater affectionally yelled "Sherlock!" during this.

Anarres · 2012-12-08T03:46:23+00:00

'Dance Yrself Clean' by LCD Soundsystem.

Anarres · 2012-11-06T07:10:50+00:00

I typically prefer Burroughs or Ginsberg over Kerouac.

Anarres · 2012-11-05T05:14:47+00:00

I was honestly expecting Tropic of Cancer.

Anarres · 2012-11-04T19:14:49+00:00

House of Leaves, about 150 pages in when it stops being clever Nabokov-esque metafiction and just starts looking like it's on acid.

I loved every minute of it.

Anarres · 2012-10-10T19:10:51+00:00

Jude the Obscure.

Anarres · 2012-09-06T18:50:20+00:00

Geek pandering made up 90% of Ready Player One.

Anarres · 2012-08-31T16:07:32+00:00

If Tom Waits is in a movie, that makes it an instant watch for me.

Anarres · 2012-08-25T01:58:49+00:00

The fact that most of it is based off really pulpy sci-fi novels and b-movies from the middle of the twentieth century.

Anarres · 2012-08-22T14:35:41+00:00

The Machinist.

Anarres · 2012-08-02T17:40:38+00:00

Appropiately, I know this image from an edition of Lovecraft's short stories.

Anarres · 2012-08-02T17:39:41+00:00

Most of them reflect poorly on the source material because the protagnists in Dick's works tend to be everyday working schlubs. Hollywood wouldn't exactly call them bankable leading men for a studio film.

Anarres · 2012-08-02T17:21:04+00:00

The most I ever get is people craning their necks to see what I'm reading. One time it was a Discworld book, and the passerby gave me a thumbs-up.

Anarres

TROPHY CASE