[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I read Neverness and liked it a lot, but I managed to miss the rest. Must remedy that lack at some point.

It's been an interesting series. They seem to separate Neverness from the rest, though I'm unsure why, as it has felt, to me, to be part of the series. Perhaps Neverness is to A Requiem for Homo Sapiens what The Hobbit is to LotR. One reader on MR mentioned that she(?) felt that Neverness could and possibly should be read after reading the others, which I thought was very interesting - well, it re-piqued my interest in finally completing the series anyway.

I liked the Foundation series (and knew and liked Asimov), but while it's undoubtedly "classic", I'm not sure it's a "favorite". I'd have to think a bit about what is, aside from LoTR.

I should probably include some of the Robot books in there as well, but I mean to be quite specific about referring to the Foundation series as "favourite" rather than "best". I read them in my early-to-mid-teen's, as fiction reading had not all that long become my...salvation?...well, certainly my main focus (I did chronically introverted, angst-ridden teen' really well ). Books from that period of time (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Saga of the Exiles, and, naturally, LoTR) maintain a golden status as "favourites", in much the same way as The Goodies or Monkey (Magic!) did for me with TV.

As much as I disliked many aspects of my youth, the bits I did like achieve some pre-eminence, especially in the glow of the subconscious realisation that I had everything ahead of me. Today...not so much. I also think that because my memory can seem so difficult to imprint at times, the things from long past that I do recollect obtain significant bias.

I mentioned elsewhere recommending Dan Simmons' _Hyperion Cantos_ to a friend. Bantam published the first HC edition as two PBs, but didn't indicate on the first book it was part one of two. My friend ran into the cliffhanger at the end of the first PB, and was so incensed her refused to read anything else Simmons wrote. I told him it wasn't Simmons' fault that the publisher was an idiot, but to no avail.

Yeah, that's definitely up near the top of the list. Less so, his Ilium & Olympos. I feel like he tried to allude to and reference and do too much in them (and they could possibly win an award for "Least Scary Boss Monster Of The Year" - that is, in Setebos, not Caliban who was suitably monstrous ). I still enjoyed them, though I found the Hyperion Cantos to be far more pleasurable (in that case, I would probably say "better").

I can multitask, but there are limitations. For instance, I can't ignore the TV. "Voices" compel me to pay attention. I can have music as a background activity. The SO watches far more TV than I, and w ears headphones to spare me.

I do not do multitasking very well. Some friends wondered how I managed to satisfactorily do my former job as "IT Project Manager" (which, I humbly must admit, I was rather good at), what with multiple setup, testing, re-testing, and live retail banking application conversions over multiple machines and multiple financial organisation customers simultaneously...all this if I can't multitask. The thing is, I didn't multitask - I just set things so that they came to me one at a time, and so that I also wasn't reliant on memory - a request or a step in the project plan or an enquiry were managed by working with time management and information software systems, and enabling all parties to have access to tools and information to help themselves. Things could then come at me one at a time, and be dealt with immediately through reference to stored materials, and the overall plan was already as minimalist as possible, and logically step-based, with pre-set reminders for everything.

As with you, I cannot ignore "voices". Similar to your TV example (which I also share), I cannot abide things like pubs - when the music's pumping, and well-lubricated conversations are bouncing all around you (along with the beer that seems to inevitably gets spilt on me), I cannot hold a conversation with a single person talking/shouting directly into my ear. I just tell people I have "dyslexic hearing" (apologies to anyone whom might be offended by the insensitivity of this phrase - it's just an attempt to obtain an analogy that explains how for me the spoken word blends and mixes up with all others around it, as, I believe, dyslexia is sometimes described).

My SO can get totally lost in a book, and suddenly come back to Earth with a startled grunt. "Omigosh! I'm sorry!" "You were reading. I'm used to it. Not a problem..."

Yeah, I get that. I barely hear a thing once I'm in a book, and I'm frequently the recipient of my name being shouted by The Loved One, to get my attention.

I've read "Zen", though not re-read.

I'm still not sure I "get it", but I am satisfied, after three readings over a few years, that I've "got" as much as I can from it. I found it an interesting book, and the first to properly put me in the mind of a completely alien (to me) way of thinking. I was, again, young when I first read it. I was probably about 25-30 when I last read it.

Likewise "Fear and Loathing". Hunter was a strange dude.

Yes, he was a "pro'".

I recall a letter of comment to Rolling Stone back when on the order of "Dear Hunter Thompson: We think you are a great writer. But if you ever came to our town, we'd lock you in the closet and run like crazy f*****s!"

I recall, in relation to a discussion about poets, someone talking about Hunter S. Thompson as a poet, and it had never occurred to me that he was otherwise until someone asked what poetry he had written. I didn't know of any. I guess I was influence by paragraphs like the opening of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which always felt like poetry to me. Anyway, I did end up finding at least one piece:

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?...0a%20Mad%20Dog

I think I understand just how they felt.

With my "sexual" preferences known, it is often inevitable that some people consider my attraction to the work of a male like, let's say, the music of Robbie Williams (not all of it - it's his self-referential self-deprecating satire of "pop" that often pleases me), to be indicative of a (assumed sexual) attraction to the person. This tends to apply to actors, musicians...even writers if they're in the public eye. This is rarely a valid inference, as I am generally as overt at presenting my desire for males whose form I do admire (Mmm, Laurence Fishburne) as any male is about the object of their physical desire.

Hunter S. Thompson scares (scared) the hell out of me too. Even putting aside my inherent shyness, I never had any desire to see him or meet him.

However, like with those whose work I might admire (Clive James is another), I definitely have parts of me that wish they could be him, at least those parts that relate to the writing aspect of him.

Re-reading Mr Thompson is like a shot of hallucinogenic to the creative centres of my brain, and that's sometimes a good thing (for me, if not for those subject to the results ).

(I think I included that last sentence to justify an argument of thread-topicality in the rest of the guff I just wrote ).

Cheers,
Marc (Is the going getting weird yet?)