Book Club: Money

[lemon boy]

Okay- Who actually read it or do we need to wait just a bit for some folks to catch up.

Pipe up cause we can defer a week if there's a gaggle of people with just a week or less worth to read.

I'm done with it

[cj001f]

completed, but patient, here

[lemon boy]

Silently but irrefutably I farted in the cab back to her duplex.

655321.123556

[lemon boy]

week's up:
[trying hard as hell not to do a book review]
okay, I admit it: I love the book Money. It is my favorite fiction book. Read it years ago, re-reading it was the same pleasure all over again and then some.

Self is the prol brawler and you just know that in then end he's gonna get money-fuct. It's the ultimate money sin: using it, loving it but not respecting it.

Plus all the deranged hijinx that Self gets up to. I dig it. At first the whole bit with MA actually being a character seems like pointless ego stroking, a la Clive Cussler but in the end he really makes himself work as a character. Go figure.

The thing I like most about MA's writing is that he has a real gift for the English language, a huge vocab coupled with a dead accurate ability to turn a phrase + tight storytelling = good stuff.

And now...onto some favorite quotes:

Then she knelt in front of him. One thing was clear: the cowboy must have spent at least six chaste months on a yoghurt ranch eating nothing but icecream and buttermilk, and with a watertight no-handjob clause in his contract. By the time he was through, Juanita looked like the patsy in the custard-pie joke, which I suppose is what she was. The camera proudly lingered as she spat and blinked and coughed....Hard to tell, really, who was the biggest loser in this complicated transaction - her, him, them, me.

The yoghurt image has long stuck with me though I'd forgotten where it came from.

I am pussy-whipped by money

Oh
yeah.

I have tried in the past to feminize myself. I womanized for years. It didn't work, though on the other hand I did fuck lots of girls.

Here then, tentatively, is the recipe for my suicide bid: a hundred fluid ounces of scotch, fifty aspirin, a week-long course of antibiotics, and twelve yeast pills.

Q: What does MA take at the end?

[cj001f]

At first the whole bit with MA actually being a character seems like pointless ego stroking, a la Clive Cussler but in the end he really makes himself work as a character. Go figure.

The MA character worked... but being one of the only recognizable /characters made it a decent bit of shameless egostoking. A good chronicle of the 'new unpleasantness' or

''London is a pub,'' he declares, looking disgustedly out of his study window into the gray street below. ''Not the pub with the jolly butcher and the smiling grannies; it's the pub of eight or nine alcoholics, a handful of hustlers and nutcases and a few token regular people. It's a stew,'' he declares. ''The whole idea of the pub as a place for the working man has vanished. Who's working? Now the pub is where you go all day. We're in a gentle, deep decline,'' he says quietly. ''Not as frenzied as America's, but perhaps even more poignant, more tragic.''

[lemon boy]

I guess that ummmm we need beer?

[fixiewrek]

So, I need to know, does this book get better? I'm about 100 pages into it and all I've gotten is tales of a womanizing drunk who somehow has managed to fit this all into doing pretty well for himself. Lots of self loathing and self knowledge of his fucked life, but without the ambition to alter his course. The MA character has recently come into play, is this the start to something new.

Working my way through it, but looking for motivation to keep on going.

[BeanDip4All]

I thought we were reading Blood Meridian?

I guess I missed the memo.

[fixiewrek]

Not for Book Club, but rather, just finished up a book (Kafka on the Shore, good ready BTW) and needed something new. Looked back at the original book club book and saw some decent reviews of Money so decided to check it out. Maybe Blood Meridian is next.

[Big Blue]

I thought we were reading Blood Meridian?

I guess I missed the memo.

I was reading it, but there seemed to be little interest, so I put it off for awhile. If people are looking to do another book club now, I have the book in hand and am ready to go.

[satori]

Cheers CJ for sending me those books. Ive finally finished Money and am thinking of Middlesex next...one of my gay coworkers recommends it so will give it a whirl.

Money, MA's style seems a mixture of 1st person, 3rd limited and omniscient...eventhough that was prolly more to Self's obsessive thinking and fucked up nature with the booze and blow sending his mind spinning. The book made me kept thinking of The Dice Man in style but also Self's obsessive nature of booze, drugs, women, and the hangup of having to be fucked up. Whereas in Dice Man it was more that he wanted the Dice to control him and help him lose his Ego and be fucked up because he couldnt do anything without the dice...

Great book. Enjoyed the visual imagery which he wrote with ease. Kinda like a Kundera in that sense as thats what really stands out for me in this book