u/Supah_Cole

It's hard to put into words but I feel as if the o\i project has finally been justified.

Don't get me wrong, o\i has had its highlights so far - Been Undone has been a slow grower on me since it unsuspectingly dropped this January (though it seems like many here immediately gravitated towards it). Bucket is great and feels up to snuff with any of the i/o tracks - a sure sign that that song almost made that album, guaranteed, and just barely missed because the other 12 were just that important. And the others have been nice to have. But I Belong To The Sky just feels modern and exactly what a song in 2026 should sound like. That groove, man.

I like A Hard Lesson, but then when Gabriel started talking about it in terms of just "being a track that *almost* made a lot of albums", it deflated a little bit of my own personal excitement about a very good song. When an artist talks down about their own craft, the feeling becomes contagious, no matter how good the product really is sometimes. In my opinion we'd just come off of two whiffs and then followed it up with a song that Peter was talking about almost as an afterthought.

Then we get this. And it makes all the difference in the world.

It sounds, and feels, like a bright sunny day with only a smattering of small little clouds in it. It also feels like a culmination and a mission statement of everything Peter has learned at Real World Records. The rhythm is layered and light and bouncy. The instruments soar with airiness. The optimism is downright groovy, and I've not felt that way in a good long while. Maybe not since Olive Tree or Road to Joy really has music directly improved my mood. Listening to Road To Joy feels like a great party from a few years ago that you can still crank at any moment. Olive Tree feels like a jeep drive through a friendly and oft-toured, off-road safari, splashing through puddles as you say hello to the predators and prey. But I Belong To The Sky feels like a nice, much needed, stretch.

I hope Dark-Side doesn't trade in the catchy, windy beats for something too dramatic or theatrical. The point of the song, seems to me, to be the whimsicality of the music, the freeness of the feel, the breathing of the beats, the breeziness of the performance. Loose, full of fun sounds, light on your feet. If the rest of Side B is on this level and this mood, I'll be happy as a bird.

Final paragraph:

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."

The rest of the novel is basically a power trip fantasy through '40s America as a young dude experiencing sex, drugs, rock and roll, and following an inconsiderate character who runs away from problems just for the thrill. Okay - whether or not you can agree with that or you like it, you can at least understand it. But then what is this about "God is Pooh Bear"?? I can't find an answer to this anywhere on the Internet.

Also worth noting is that the next sentence - the last sentence of the book - doesn't start capitalized.

Is there anything he means by this? Or is it just - between these two lines, there's where all the amphetamines wore off and Kerouac finally collapsed after writing the massive scroll/I'm reading too deep into this?

Here's the list, in (relative) order of easiest to hardest, where you should start vs. where you should end. I am trying to keep books that whittle it down to 100-200 pages, no more.

I am looking for feedback: If anyone can think of something that meets this criteria, please share!

• Call of the Wild (Jack London)
• The War Prayer (Mark Twain)
• The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
• Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck: See also: The Pearl; The Red Pony; Tortilla Flat)
• Animal Farm (George Orwell)
• The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
• Lord of the Flies (William Golding - I remember this being much longer than 200 pages, but, according to Goodreads, it clocks in at a cozy 182. Thanks to the comments for catching this one!)
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)
• The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
• Carmilla (Josephine Sheridan Le Feu)
• Mother Night (Kurt Vonnegut)
• Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
• A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
• Daisy Miller (Henry James)
• Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf - this is the only one on the list that I *haven't* read yet)
• Elevation (Stephen King - some people would slander this choice, but, it's modern, and, maybe unpopularly, I found a lot to like about this one, the metaphor for death is strong)
• Siddartha (Herman Hesse)
• Daphnis and Chloe (Longus)
• Theogony (or, alternatively, Works and Days) (Hesiod)
• The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe)
• The Stranger (Albert Camus - also, many Camus books; The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, Exile and The Kingdom, etc)
• Art of War (Sun Tzu)
• Candide (Voltaire)
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Leo Tolstoy; maybe also Hadji Murat)
• Notes From Underground (Fyodor Dostoevsky; also, White Nights)
• The Prince (Machiavelli)

Thoughts? What can I add? Thanks!

Edit: I have added a few thanks to the comments - Lord of the Flies, Carmilla, The Prince, White Nights, Tortilla Flat, Mother Night, Daisy Miller, Siddartha, etc). I also need to specify that THIS LIST WAS NOT WRITTEN WITH AI. I AM NOT AN AI.

Every "Track 5" on a Peter Gabriel solo record:

• Humdrum
• White Shadow
• Family Snapshot
• Shock The Monkey
• Mercy Street
• Only Us
• I Grieve
• Listening Wind
• Wallflower (New Blood)
• Four Kinds of Horses

Specifically, it sounds sonically somewhere between Mercy Street, I Grieve, Wallflower, and - maybe Biko and maybe Live and Let Live?

My ranking (as of this moment - which is subject to change):

• Mercy Street
• Family Snapshot
• Four Kinds of Horses
• Shock The Monkey
• Wallflower (New Blood)
• Won't Stand Down
• White Shadow
• I Grieve
• Listening Wind
• Humdrum
• Only Us

I read Animal Farm in High School, 1984 earlier this year, and a few months later I got around to Coming Up For Air. It was billed to me as an Orwellian take on what it feels like to have WWII looming over your heads, that, prophetically enough, was released just a month prior to WWII. It seemed like an example of a man who knew the future guessing it right again. I was incredibly eager to pick it up - only, to be kind of disappointed.

It's a "British Humor" book from my comprehension, with an old man boomer character who was overweight, bald, red in the face, dishonest, sold insurance, and spent almost all of Part One talking about people's opinions of him "as a fatty". I imagined that the guy who wrote 1984 would be subversive and cool - this book eroded that opinion. Especially how it ended with a "wife bad" punchline ending.

Is it worth it to try his other novels? While I still think that we are largely in the Brave New World and Handmaid's Tale timeline more than the 1984 timeline that American conservatives seem to (used to?) love touting, I still massively respect 1984 as a novel. As Google begins its most final, essential step in destroying the part of search engines where you critically think, I would love to know if there is anything else in Orwell's canon that's worth a reading - or, if it's all sardonic and unlikeable as George Bowles/Coming Up For Air.

Title says it all. Here's what I've read so far:

Dark Tower (Mainline):

• The Gunslinger
• The Drawing of the Three
• The Waste Lands
• Wizard and Glass
• The Little Sisters of Eluria
• The Gunslinger Born (#1)

Dark Tower (Adjacent)

• Everything's Eventual
• Eyes of the Dragon

Miscellaneous Stephen King Novels:

• Carrie
• The Long Walk
• Elevation
• Cycle of the Werewolf
• Gerald's Game
• Different Seasons
• You Like It Darker
• The Life of Chuck
• On Writing (25th Anniversary Edition)

What I Still Need To Read (Apparently)

• Salem's Lot
• The Stand
• It
• Insomnia
• Hearts in Atlantis/Low Men in Yellow Coats
• The Talisman
• Black House
• Wolves of the Calla
• Song of Susannah
• The Dark Tower
• The Wind Through The Keyhole
• Other Worlds Than These

This is fun but this is also, a LOT of work. I'm also trying to get through a whole lot of classical literature at the same time AND, live my life working two jobs (plus band and girlfriend responsibilities). I don't know if I'm capable of doing all this before October rolls around. Hell, I'm still midway through Crime and Punishment.

How little chance do I have of getting through what I need to and reading Other Worlds Than These when it launches in six months? I know that this may be a silly question to ask, because the book isn't out yet, but - What do I need to have read? What would Other Worlds Than These potentially spoil? Thankee Sai

This is interesting in many ways and for several reasons. It's an unfinished book that doesn't work - and also, one that I recommend because I can't stop thinking about it.

I picked this up at my library without knowing what it was and apparently this is written as an abandoned and unpublished rough draft for The Stranger, and the main character even shares the same name. But whereas that book is about a devil-stand in without a soul, explaining the mentality of absurdist philosophy, the protagonist Patrice "Mersault" lives a complete and fulfilled and fulfilling life, with an intact personality. The book ends with the titular happy death that he has, after he's been observant enough and able enough to experience just about every earthly pleasure there is. Happiness, great food, travel, sex, love, relationships, fatherhood... And the one thing that DOESN'T belong on that list, murder.

The Stranger would then take the concept of a soulless murderer doing an act of killing right at the start and make a complete novel thesis statement about absurdism that stands correctly and stands tall. That book is a complete experience in which all parts tie uniformly and cohesively together. But here, that idea of Mersault the non-feeling murder is introduced and then taken no further. But Camus can't effectively backpedal having his main character murder a man (and frame it as suicide!) in cold blood in the first chapter.

So - everything that happens in the second half of the book is completely unjustified. The most interesting character in the book, the crippled Zagreus, and our would be hero, lay dead immediately, and what we are left with is a vague, interesting, disjointed trial run of what would become the pioneering philosophical novel of the twentieth century, The Stranger.

That means you'd write this off as something like Go Set A Watchman - an early draft of the author's best work, published posthumously or without permission, right?

Well, I don't honestly know. I think there is still somehow, shockingly, literature of value here.

Because so few of this book's ideas get reused, it probably warrants publication, from the most interesting thinking writer of the World War II era you get to walk around inside his mind and see the beginning of the now ultra-prevelant idea that everything is absurd and nothing matters. And yes, the thing that breaks this book *right down the middle* is the fact that the protagonist GETS AWAY WITH MURDER! Part two is a collection of happy thoughts and poetic ruminations, with the name "Mersault" (one of classical literature's and fiction's coldest killers) stapled onto it.

And yet those are really well and beautifully written ruminations.

Can you, as a reader separate the connotations of The Stranger himself, from the beautiful sentences about life, happiness, the search for love and meaning, and the wonderful and deeply inviting prose Camus writes so well? Camus is edgy and known for it, but he also writes as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald at his best. An example, in one of the best quotes of the book:

"He realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. Most men cannot even prove they are not mediocre. He had won that right. But the proof remained to be shown, the risk to be run." -P. 82

Wow. It's perhaps the most insightful thing I've ever read. And the description of death is right up there even with Leo f*** Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". How did he manage that? Is that just a happy side effect of the French language at its most stunningly realized?

I don't know. And I don't think I'll ever know. This book is like having a friend who just has one giant playlist full of everything he likes, and you play it and five or ten of the most beautiful songs you've ever heard come on - but they're all completely different genres and themes and there is absolutely zero connective tissue between any of them at all.

Is that what you would like to find out? Does having A Happy Death sound like a good time, even?

If you think you can make yourself think so - then I suppose I recommend it. Crazy ride.