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Reading this because another guest in the local park recommended it, turns out to be a Japanese novel about a journalist interviewing a woman serial killer who seduced most of her victims through her exquisite cooking. So far it's very informative about Japan's food culture, and the author is quite good at describing not just the taste but also the smell and texture of all the food prepared.

been really enjoying Lloyd Kahn's books about various types of handbuilt architecture around the planet and seeing how all these vary across different cultures and geographical areas, I had no idea for instance that there was this big a subculture for this in France for exampe

around here the plot relocates to Hungary and the story instead illustrates aspects of that country's history which few people in English-speaking countries know about at all, I am curious how this novel was received by Hungarian audiences and whether they found Pynchon to represent it accurately

Jeg er ved at genlæse den her, kan godt lide at den foregår i Portugal der ikke er nær så overeksponeret i medierne som fx Frankrig eller Spanien og Kuijpers har afbildet landets unikke landskaber og arkitektur-stilarter i omhyggelig detaljegrad.

Plottet minder mig også meget om Elmore Leonards "Ude af øje" om en kvindelig FBI-agent der bliver forelsket i en gentleman-mestertyv, som hun forsøger at fange.

Halfways through and it feels very similar to most of James Ellroy's novels in that it uses the historical crime fiction genre to tell the less well known chapters of a major American city (just Milwaukee instead of LA) and is also written in the street-level slang of the era it's set in. (just the early 1930's instead of the late 1940's/early 1950's)

Lew Basnight from "Against the Day" also makes an appearance.

I can definitely see why people consider this an obvious product of the 1990's by now, at some point the main character gets a job at a concert promoter and the most popular music group in the future depicted play... a cross between grunge and retro garage rock a la Gluecifer or Hellacopters?

"A Horrible Religious Error" might be the single most blackly hilarious poem I have read in a long while

This is clearly inspired by William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy but nowhere as avantgarde in prose style, and easier to read even if still very complex narratively. Stephenson explains the ins-and-outs of the setting to the reader way more than Gibson did in his early books, for sure.

The setting is also clearly parodying a lot of the weirder utopian ideas popular in right-libertarian circles and the tech industry.

This has a much stronger conceptual unity than all other of Hughes' poetry collections I have read so far, other than "Birthday Letters". To be specific, it is about the crow's archetypal role in various cultures and religions both as a messenger of death (hence between the worlds of gods and mortals) as well as a Trickster figure.

Some of the poems appear to be more about humans who embody the same archetype.

just learned about how provocative Yayoi Kusama's early work was, right down to her appearing in public orgies as part of performance art projects, and this was in the mid-1960's

rereading this I can see a bit more conceptual continuity with Anaïs Nin's other books, both Bijou and the artist who hires her as a model only to fall in love with her from "The Delta of Venus" appear in the short story "the Queen"

interesting to read not just poetry but also short stories and even stage play manuscripts by Hughes, his short stories take place in a similar "mysterious Britain where lots of weird and disturbing folk culture survives into the modern day" universe as his poems, one ("the Suitor") includes an encounter with "Men in Black" type characters

I wonder if the Angyars are supposed to be the future descendants of modern day Hungarians (who call themselves Magyars - the term "Angyar" being halfways between those 2 words)

I am giving this a re-read since it was the first book by Anaïs Nin I read. I find it interesting that so many scenes are clearly intended to be both erotic and disturbing at the same time. (e. g. the flashback in "The Woman in the Dunes" to when the title character was sexually assaulted while witnessing a public execution)

I love how Ted Hughes could really capture the entire atmosphere of this old mysterious Britain where every other corner had some type of otherworldly folklore attached to it, and soak in the atmosphere of the ancient and eldritch behind the mundane everyday life just waiting to burst out even in the modern era

This is jam-packed with interesting ideas that it keeps shooting at the reader at a breakneck pace, very typical of hippie-era science-fiction novels. I can see how this inspired Gene Wolfe to write "The Book of the New Sun", in the whole "people living on a planet with a mediaeval society surrounded by high-tech spacefaring civilisations they barely are aware of let alone understand but soon have to" setting.

around here it gets to listing various secret experimental aircraft that may or may not have caused quite a few UFO sightings, the prototypes for the B-2 and F-117 stealth bombers being just the tip of the iceberg

This book presents a significantly more nuanced view of Richard Doty, a former USAF officer tasked with feeding deliberate misinformation about alien invasions to ufologists in order to distract from secret test flights of experimental aircraft, than I remembered. For example here Doty makes it clear which information about UFOs he gave ufologists he actually believes in, and which was intended as misinformation.

Ted Hughes is in the same category as Sylvia Plath in that he effortlessly makes most other poets look amateurish in comparison

Decided to give this a re-read after having read "Project Beta" by Greg Bishop which goes into more detail about the Paul Bennewitz case in which the USAF deliberately fed an ufologist with misinformation about alien invasions to conceal tests of then-secret high tech equipment.

This goes into way further detail about ideological schisms within the ufological community than I remembered from 1st read, for starters.

what struck me most often while reading this novel was how many things about the plot predicted the arrival of the mysterious interstellar object 'Oumuamua, and might even have inspired some of Avi Loeb's theories about it

The chapter on militia leader Randy Weaver is way more evenhanded than I thought it would be, Ronson (who is himself Jewish) spends a lot of time dispelling the popular conception of Weaver as a Neo-Nazi since Weaver didn't get along with the Neo-Nazi segment of the militia movement at all. (Weaver's experience being that most Neo-Nazis start with astute criticisms of capitalism but then blaming that on the Jews)

This is full of interesting information about modern Japanese art I've never encountered before. For example I learned about a lot of explicitly left-wing popular art movements in the interwar era that were suppressed brutally by the Japanese authorities in the 1930's, and the Gutai movement who were the most important and influential art movement in Japan just after the war, basically an Asian equivalent to Fluxus.

Found out there are A LOT of volumes of Henk Kuijpers' "Franka", a comic book series about a red-haired woman private detective that has been running since the 1970's, that have no reviews on here. I have to correct that.

bought this from a friend a long time ago and flicked through it but gave it a dedicated read until now, will correct that

There are also some interesting call-backs to earlier Maigret novels, like in one chapter he has a flashback to Porquerolle, the fictional fishing village on the Riviera in "My Friend Maigret".

This one has a bit more complex a mystery at its heart as well than most of the other Maigret novels I've read, and requires more deduction and investigation to solve.

Finished re-reading my anthology of Robert E. Howard's Conan short stories and they are WAY better than I remembered so it definitely needs a new review. Yeah some of them have issues and REH tended to recycle plots in order to crank out as many stories for a paycheck just to make a living, but at his best he was one of the finest pulp authors ever.

I can understand why this is my mother's favourite Maigret novel, we get way more insight into the inspector's private life and his overall thought processes outside of work here than in the others since it follows him on vacation. UNTIL a murder is committed at the resort where he's staying!

I also like that it explores many of the unique social/economic structures peculiar to resort towns like Vichy in France.

AND around here Keel alludes to the homemade nuclear fallout shelter that Danish UFO contactee Knud Weiking and his Universal Link movement built in 1967 because aliens told Weiking via telepathy that nuclear war would break out on Christmas Eve that year.

Something else that strikes me on reread is how much contactee Woody Derenberger and his meetings with Indrid Cold, a human alien from planet Lanulos, takes up.

Decided to re-read this because winged humanoid stories have become a popular topic again in the Fortean subculture. There are some interesting anecdotes here like how Mothman witnesses often ended up feeling physically ill with similar symptoms as those frequently reported by UFO witnesses.