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Do the Spanish have hearts?

YouTube - The Stone Roses - I am the Resurrection (audio only)

It's called segregation, and it's shit.

But anyone is welcome to join, if they accept Jesus?

Do you mean 'deification'?

I think he's thinking of people standing above their graves with dowsing rods.

1. jokes about child abuse/rape/sexual violence are absolutely, unquestionably wrong and its lamentable that anyone would think otherwise. imagine if you, your brother/sister, girlfriend/boyfriend or your own child had been abused or raped by someone, i doubt you'd be making jokes about it. it will never ever be funny. the effects dont just go away after a few days, they stay with you forever and im amazed and saddened that there are so many people that think jokes about those subjects are fine to make.
   
   

Making a joke about something is not the same as condoning it.

I can think of plenty of jokes that involve death, eg the "aeroplane going down / limited number of parachutes" genre.

1) They're not considered particularly risque, because jokes about death are common.

2) Finding one of those jokes funny /= finding the recent Air France crash funny. It goes without saying that you'd expect the effects of that to stay with the families of the deceased for a long time, too.

I'm not saying that you should find the paedo jokes on this thread funny, though. Most of them have been shit.

Mosque we have a thread like this?

Lincolnshire Poacher. Amazing stuff.

hmmmm.....

1 - the davinci code - dan brown
2 - lord of the rings - professor a dumbledore
3 - freakonomics - thora herd
4 - being jordan - eddie jordan
5 - the joy of sex - noel edmonds
6 - chicken soup for the teenage soul - jeffrey dahmer
7 - close to the edge - jim davidson
8 - fly fishing - jr hartley
9 - it's not about the bike - brian harvey

close?

That was pretty much my guess, but you would've had to ask Brucey to be sure.

has anyone read the enormous David Foster Wallace book? I get the impression (from reading his essays) that I wouldn't enjoy it very much, but don't want to dismiss it out of hand.

I read For Esme, With Love and Squalor recently. It's such a shame that Salinger only seems to be remembered for Catcher in the Rye.

+1 to Great Gatsby of course

why

Ha! I thought I'd got away with a rapid post-deletion.

I happen to disagree with you, but I was getting all excitable and opinionated. Sorry about that.

I find Steinbeck a bit trite. While I could gripe about a lot of what Hemingway wrote too, it doesn't matter because he writes so fantastically.

Hemingway influenced Chatwin, our greatest and most eccentric travel writer. There's a bit in one of Chatwin's books (In Patagonia, I think) when he writes something like "Looking at his shelf, I saw he had all the best books".

I quite like the idea that "the best books" exist and that you can quickly scan someone's shelf to check that they've got them. I imagine that there's about nine of them. You probably have to have the right editions, too.

Hemingway's short stories are superb.

"For Sale: baby shoes, never worn."

I suppose we shouldn't really turn this into a hate thread, but I totally agree. McEwan/Amis/Barnes etc being the worst offenders. Amis is embarrassing, but I actually find some McEwan properly awful too – Saturday, notably. Oh, God, and Amsterdam. And yet he invariably gets ecstatic reviews…

Amsterdam was unbelievably poor. And that won the Booker.

You're right though, enough hate! :)

Let's go back to Hemingway. I'm torn between A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises. Think I might re-read them both.

New York Trilogy was appalling, I only manage about 2 of the stories and binned it.

Sympathise, although the last story was the only one worth reading. It's as if he suddenly wakes up and realises that he actually wants to write, instead of going through the unbelievably-contrived motions. Still, you weren't missing much.

Paul Auster's terrible. As is Zadie Smith. Auster in particular is one of those writers that I suspect people like for the wrong reasons. I am unlucky enough to have had to read almost his entire output at one point, for work. It gets much, much worse than NYT, believe me. I don't mind his non-fiction writing, though.

I suppose Roth would fall into your college-circle-jerk thing too; and Coetzee. It is pretty unforgivable.

I read Disgrace a long time ago and wasn't sure I remembered it well enough to include on my shortlist, but otherwise would have put it up. On the strength of Boyhood, I'm going to read more of Coetzee's stuff.

Thanks for the tip about Auster. Saved me more excruciating tedium. Assuming the rest of his output is as boring and averagely-written as NYT, what are the "wrong reasons" that get people to bother?

A lot of modern "literary fiction" comes across like an old boy's / girl's club. Most of the "establishment" can write well (or very well), but the themes they choose to deal with are only of interest to themselves and people with lives near-identical to their own. Our forum about fixed-gear bikes in London shows more interest in the real world than most of the last decade's novels.

The Road is class in a glass. Also, Blood Meridian.

DeLillo was guilty of the college professor thing with White Noise, but otherwise he's kept his nose mostly clean. On Beauty by Zadie Smith comes to mind as a classic of the genre, but I'm picking at random - there are hundreds of forgettable novels about having an affair with your student and trying to get tenure while suffering from writer's block.

On the writing-about-the-process-of-writing front, I'd include Paul Auster, for New York Trilogy (perhaps the world's most boring book?), Mao II and even At Swim Two Birds, which was at least funny, ish. The problem is that writing, the activity, is very boring to describe, but also something that writers tend to spend a lot of time thinking about.

Joyce, you say?

Tolerable.

Delillo, Roth etc? Roth i can not abide. I'm likely ignorant but i wouldn't throw Bulgakov into that category.

DeLillo was guilty of the college professor thing with White Noise, but otherwise he's kept his nose mostly clean. On Beauty by Zadie Smith comes to mind as a classic of the genre, but I'm picking at random - there are hundreds of forgettable novels about having an affair with your student and trying to get tenure while suffering from writer's block.

On the writing-about-the-process-of-writing front, I'd include Paul Auster, for New York Trilogy (perhaps the world's most boring book?), Mao II and even At Swim Two Birds, which was at least funny, ish. The problem is that writing, the activity, is very boring to describe, but also something that writers tend to spend a lot of time thinking about.

Murakami is the perfect hipster writer, in my humble etc etc – style over substance. I also can't get along with Marquez at all. I think his books are a bit schlocky.

The Sun Also Rises is a masterpiece, though, I think.

At the moment I'm in the middle of few things – Mason & Dixon by Pynchon, which is unbelievable; I'm re-reading Crash by Ballard; and then some Richard Ford short stories. I'm about to start Moby Dick, too, which I've never read before.

Have you tried any Don DeLillo, other than Underworld? I remember your comment from the advertising thread.

Some of my earliest memories were of walking out of the room because someone was playing MJs tunes. I really find nothing remarkable about his music at all.

Some of my earliest memories were of being touched by MJ.

I'd have to disagree Bulgakov's Master and Margarita is an unbridled joy.

Borderline magical realism - it's more like Animal Farm or Gulliver's Travels, ie straight social satire. And I missed something in the translation I read, because I didn't think it was that great.

Oh, and we're coming close to another of my pet hates, writers who write excessively about writing, other writers, publishers, or life as a professor of literature at small, liberal American arts colleges.

I bet the cheap jokes are coming from people who are either too young to remember Jackson at his sublime, phenomenal best in the 80s, or are just Daily Mail readers with an obsession with 'peados'.

Come on, let them have their little cracks.

Rollmops = filth.

My grandpa was a Pole and used to feed us that. I am scarred.

I saw a man with a very long stick walking through town the other day.

I stopped him and asked "Excuse me - are you a polevaulter?"

He replied "No, I'm German. How did you know my name was Walter?"

1. Shia LaBeouf, unfortunately.