I wasn't crazy about The Westing Game, but I really loved Ellen Rankin generally. She might be the first author where I consciously realized "The person who wrote this book wrote more, and I can read them all!"
The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon I Mean Noel; The Tattooed Potato And Other Clues; Figgs and Phantoms.. there were more, but those are the ones I remember.
Now I'm trying to figure out if the quote in the footnote is from Goedel, Escher Bach (more likely to be quoted by a mathematician) or Entourage (more likely to mention the stock market).
It's from the book she's talking about, The Westing Game. (And the author is Raskin, not Rankin. I loved her when I was nine, but googling reveals that I don't remember her name.)
I find myself dropping bits of nadsat into conversation from time to time without thinking about it. There's also a lot of mental cruft from reading The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and (unfortunately) the Illuminatus trilogy, both of which I read at that tender age when stuff tends to stick. Now I can read anything, no matter how brilliant, and forget it within 24 hours. I swear I have the mental acuity of slime mold these days.
What was it about the Illuminatus trilogy that attracted otherwise intelligent young men of a certain type?
9: The Steve Jackson card game probably had something to do with it.
What was it about the Illuminatus trilogy that attracted otherwise intelligent young men of a certain type?
It's kind of Eco-lite, I guess. I actually came to it after reading Principia Discordia, so the literal answer for me is that it was more Discordianism, which I found amusing.
otherwise intelligent young men of a certain type
And me.
LB just keeps landing in the wrong thread.
Yeah, 11 recapitulates my experience, on both counts. And I really thought it was a dude thing. My high school girlfriends were not into it, and I haven't really had occasion to revise my opinion before. I actually wasn't into the books themselves myself so much as things that were Illuminatus-adjacent.
I actually wasn't into the books themselves myself so much as things that were Illuminatus-adjacent.
Score 1 for my card game theory, maybe.
As I recall, it was pretty novel in its day. It predated Foucault's Pendulum, and while there had been lots of novels that featured conspiracies, I don't think there had been many before Illuminatus that were explicitly about conspiracy theories.
It also had that combination of being self-congratulatory about its advanced social views and completely blind to its blatant sexism that was common in late 60s-70s counterculture stuff.
I read Illuminatus in high school as part of a recurring project where students ran a little book fair, and pitched one another on what book to read together. Through some selection/grouping process, we were put into groups of 5-10 to read and discuss particular books (other books I read this way: Dracula, Generation X). Due to my usual lack of advance planning I only got the book the weekend before I was supposed to have read it, so I read the whole trilogy at one go. Which certainly enhanced the insanity of it all.
I was into it because I was into the whole SubGenius Discordian thing.
The one who wins the windfall is the one who finds the -- ASHES!
17: Yep, me too. I used to have a copy of High Weirdness by Mail. I'm sure I got my parents on all sorts of awful mailing lists.
The responses to 9 are incomplete insofar as none of them mention apple-fucking.
I read most of the Illuminatus trilogy, but never really got into it. I did love Foucault's Pendulum years later and generally like conspiratorial fiction.
Something about the tone of it, and maybe the hippy sexism,* put me off.
* I don't think I was especially attuned to sexism as a young person, although I wasn't a total ignoramus either, so it was probably the combination of hippydom AND sexism that set me off.
The only person I know (outside of this thread, apparently) who loves the Illuminatus trilogy is a woman. She in fact just got an Illuminatus-themed tattoo last year.
I was not deeply involved with the trilogy, I admit. But I read them all, and bits pop into my head fairly regularly. I brought up "Christians and Atheists United Against Creeping Agnosticism" in the past couple of weeks, elsewhere.
I was talking to my friend about the trilogy a couple of weeks ago, when it occurred to me that we are recreating the level of paranoia under which it was originally written.
I do think of "immanentize the eschaton" jokes constantly.
20 gets it right. Also, I still notice the time 17:23 more than any other, and have a brief mental nod to the books every time that happens.
I read the Illuminatus Trilogy on the recommendation of someone who was convinced it was actually all true.
28. I would hazard a wild guess that that would be between a quarter and a third of everybody who ever read the damn thing.
Whatever appeal the Illuminates trilogy holds completely bounced off me when I was exposed, for whatever reason. I was a fairly perfect candidate, but the first 30 pages didn't grab me and I dropped it. I keep a copy of the Principal Discordant next to my 3 bibles and Quran just to piss off some imagined fundie who might browse my bookshelf. 20 years now and no one's said anything.
Ugh, autocorrect. Principal Discordant = Principia Discordia.
What time is love?
Wait, wrong Discordianism-related cultural artefact.
It gets considerably better after 30 pages, but it really is fully of hippie sexism.
The other day I was making slides for a presentation, and I had the urge to randomly put the word "fnord" on a slide. So I guess the Illuminatus Trilogy is a pretty good example of the OP for me.
I read Illuminatus when it came out, and it didn't stick at all. Mumbo Jumbo, on the other hand, . . .
28,29: The wikipedia page on the trilogy mentions some insane German hacker in the 80s who was a devotee of the books and apparently became convinced that Illuminati were real.
Oh, yeah, fnord has been a throwaway variable name of mine forever. OP indeed.
Oh, yeah, fnord has been a throwaway variable name of mine forever. OP indeed.
I read the jargon file when I was in High School (before I had done any programming) and so I use Foo, Bar, Baz, Quux . . .
I use foo/bar/baz when I think someone else will see it and find it useful, but if I'm just writing for myself--or it's an early draft and I haven't thought of a good name yet--my variables tend to be swears (fuck, stupidBullshit, godDamnThisShit), grunts of frustration (guh, argh, urrghh, bah), or expressions of hilarity at how bad this is (lol, lolololNoooo, heh, wontWork). If I were to ever write a novel, in the first draft the protagonist would be named Fuckup McGoddamn.
who might browse my bookshelf.
How well-organized are all of your bookshelves? Mine are pretty haphazard-- they had been loosely categorized before a move but are much less so now. I am actually running low on space also, starting to stack books on top again.
I found the Discordian stuff via Usenet in high school and switched to Pynchon in college, around the same time that I took up a serious cigarette habit.
Our kid has us read her the George O'Connor Olympians comics routinely and often, and Eris making trouble at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis is one of the best things in there.
The "literature" bookshelves in our living room are organized more or less Library of Congress-style by national origin + time period + author name. It actually does help with finding things.
I found the Discordian stuff via Usenet in high school and switched to Pynchon in college
Pynchon is definitely grown-up Illuminatus! trilogy. (I've read Illuminatus! but didn't really take to it; it was a bit too pleased with itself for being so daring and satirical. Bit like Tom Wolfe or Ken Kesey. Foucault's Pendulum was better.)
42: Mine are excellently organized so height of book correlates to height of shelf and with extra filthy stuff up where it's a little more out of the way of tiny hands. (I also recently found the sweater I started for you, lw. When I find the yarn too, I could actually get back to it.)
They used to be organized, but between a move and years of mostly buying ebooks I haven't bothered keeping it up. The bookshelves are a testament to what my wife and I were into in our early 20s, along with a non-representative sample of books we've gotten since then that aren't available/won't work as ebooks.
The vast majority of my books have been in boxes for years and what's with me and shelved is small enough that I don't organize it. But I occasionally buy books I don't remember I own, or look for books that I've forgotten are stored elsewhere so sometime this year I'm going to update the catalog I put into LibraryThing years ago which, as an app, meets my criteria of good enough.
One thing about living without another adult is that I've gotten really bad about leaving books in and around my bed. I don't actually regret this at all, but should probably tidy more regularly.
Pynchon is definitely grown-up Illuminatus! trilogy
This might bring the wrath of the blog down on my head, but when I tried Pynchon, I gave up pretty soon, thinking it would be just another version of that, with maybe a dash of Philip K. Dick. I know I'm probably wrong, but at this point, I don't know whether I'll ever come around to trying again.
I think I was lucky in that I encountered Pynchon when I was still completely unaware of his outsized reputation and the existence of a whole Pynchon fandom. I just picked Gravity's Rainbow off the shelf because I wanted something to read.
I sometimes wonder how my experience of the book would have differed if I'd had a lot of baggage going in.
I don't think I'd try to talk anyone into Pynchon, though I have plenty of fondness, but I'd expect experience to differ vastly based on which you try first.
I started with V because I knew it had been my dad's favorite book, then was freaked out by that and put it away for, um, decades? But I no longer remember if Gravity's Rainbow became my favorite book right after Foucault's Pendulum or if The Satanic Verses came in between. Then eventually I stopped being a teenage overimpressed with giant books by boys and much later found my way to I Capture the Castle and have lived happily ever after.
I devoured Gravity's Rainbow in my early 20s, and re-read it maybe 5 times since. My first ex gave me a mint first edition still in its dust jacket as a gift which I still have. I should probably sell it, it must be worth at least a grand now.
Having already read GR, and probably Mumbo Jumbo, before Illuminatus was surely contributory to it not sticking at all.
I first read GR on a 28 hour bus ride through the Bolivian altiplano. Between Pynchon, the scattered sleep and the moon landscapes, getting off that bus was like coming down from mushrooms.
So I finished the fucking Scott book. I swear it could be cut by 80% without loss. He says everything at least 30 times, often in exactly the same words. Why do people write so fucking badly?
And complains in introduction about all this *great stuff* that he can't tell us about because the manuscript *is too long*. And whose fault is that, motherfucker?
The one we didn't exactly have a 162 comment thread about.
Ah, thanks. I'd forgotten the guy's name.
Gravity's Rainbow is IMO a young person's, maybe a young man's, book-- anger and cleverness and boldness.
I actually liked Vineland a lot, but I haven't read any of his later books. Inherent Vice is one I am looking forward to.
61.1: Pynchon and Lovecraft both strike me as authors for whom there is an ideal age at which to first encounter them (early teens for Lovecraft, late teens/early 20s for Pynchon).
61: Young man/young lurid/young Thorn, one of many available gender packages. Also Elfriede Jelinek did the German translation, a labor of whatever the Jelinek equivalent of love would be.
48: yeah, we referred to the futon in my old studio apartment as "the Bedleian Library." I would lose my mind if the shelves weren't organized by content, though. I don't know how people can stand being unable to find books within 2 minutes of wanting to look into them. It's also nice to have, rather than an undifferentiated mass of unread volumes accusing you, a highly differentiated and sorted set of sub-masses of unread volumes accusing you.
My bookshelves are almost completely unsorted, and I get a weird satisfaction about being able to find things on them anyway. Remembering what shelf a couple of thousand jumbled books are on is probably why I don't have enough free brain capacity to do my job without pain. (Although, in job-related news, I do suddenly know a lot about clams.)
62 is probably right. I didn't encounter Lovecraft at that age, which could be why I've never really been bothered about him. Poe, on the other hand I did read in my early teens, and wow!
lw, I hope you like Inherent Vice; I did, but I thought Bleeding Edge was better.
Ok, 'tarians, which book do I hate next? Gravity's Rainbow or God's War? Your vote decides!
I agree with 65.2. And I've definitely read well over half my books, probably over 3/4. I'm getting better at figuring out which things I like to read in paper rather than digital form, though specific aporia on that topic has kept me from the last Cixin Liu.
know a lot about clams
Really fresh littlenecks are insanely delicious, but pretty hard to get if you don't have an easy drive to a coastal seafood shanty.
Thanks for 45, 62, 67 !
I saw Stephen Merritt (The Magnetic Fields' songwriter) Sunday. Great performance. He recited a good stretch of Lovecraft's unmet expectations of New York.
I think I disagree about GR being a young man's book. The tone and the characters, sure, it's frenetic, comic book stuff. But the underlying themes and message are old. It's four color goofiness pasted over resignation and elegiac horror.
You're never too young for resignation and elegiac horror.
You people are ludicrously well read. I haven't read any of this shit. How do you find the time when there is internet to be surfed?
When I had all my books in one place, I separated the history and fiction, but organized each section roughly by chronology, with some rule I don't remember about history books and date ranges. I think I classified them by earliest date in the range. Fiction was by original work publication date, not edition or printing or copyright date.
For a long time I had very little nonfiction outside of history/social science. I think I just kept current stuff on its own, maybe by author.
I'm almost certainly below 50% in terms of reading books I own. I can't seem to stop believing my occasional binges of steady reading will continue, so I keep buying used books.
Ok fine, I'll just hate everything on my own.
A couple of times in my life I've had my library organized the way I'd wanted and was always able to find anything quickly. A couple of life upheavals later and that was no longer the case, and before moving overseas I gave most of my books away. I'm now reduced to a single wide Billy, and not every shelf is full.
My bookshelves are almost entirely unorganized, the only rudimentary organizational principle being height in some cases since not all the books fit on all the shelves. I should really organize them, especially since I keep buying more and I'm getting more serious about actually reading them. I recently bought another shelving module so now I think I can actually fit all the books I have on the shelves I have, which makes this a good time for organizing them, not that I have.
In the past I've organized my shelves in a bunch of different ways: LC call number, height, color, etc. This time I think I might make a division between the ones I have and haven't read, in addition to whatever basic principle I decide on. Publication date is an interesting idea that I haven't done yet.
I possess no physical books. My electronic ones are saved onto a hard drive, organized such that this is equivalent to throwing something into a closet and slamming the door shut before something falls out. Naturally, my parents are librarians.
I posted an even longer version of this and not it's showing up after 20 or so minutes, apologies in advance if this turns out to be a double post...
Read Illuminatus! in my early 30s or even late 20s and found it fun, but not mind-blowing. At that time I was still trying to write a little myself and stole some ideas from it. I think the only Pynchon I've read was The Crying of Lot 49, which was for a college class. I didn't hate it but didn't like it enough to go look for other stuff by him. In hindsight I'd say it was just Illuminatus but without the sci-fi or comedy.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is similar and that was kind of formative to me. In some ways I have a pessimistic and/or nihilistic worldview but can still appreciate the absurdity that's all too common. I often wonder about a chicken-or-egg thing: did I get that attitude from reading those books at an impressionable age, or did I like those books because I already had it?
I go through phases of using my e-book reader, for reasons of saving space in the house, and reading paper books. Somehow new books keep appearing, it's a mystery. I keep wanting to cull the library but for some reason we can never do more than take 3-5 at a time to the little free library on the way to daycare. I almost said that we seem to have reached an equilibrium in storage space and demands for it, but that's crazy, I put a tricycle together a couple weeks ago.