What are you currently reading? v2

[third eye squeegee]

Reading Slash's book.. wasn't aware he was such a skag head, but the ghost writer is shit & I wouldn't recommend it, despite the 4.5 star rating on Amazon..

 

[third eye squeegee]

This is a great book

Halfway through it and already I know I'm going to read all of the author's work...

Drugs, a whiff of jailbait, shamanism and the CIA, and loads of other offbeat riffs -

Samhain Grim have you read this? I reckon you'd like it...

 

[Shambles]

Not sure if it would be your type, but the only book I can remember being genuinely freaked out by is this one:

It's by an ex-catholic priest, an exorcist in America...
My opinion would generally be that exorcism was another method of assault on the vulnerable by the church - that what really was happening was mental illness, but there's something freaky about this book.. like this review on Amazon says:

"I don't quite understand what Malachi Martin is trying to achieve, but this book seems to have an eerie feeling surrounding it. From beginning to end, it breaks down the defences of the mind, and ends all logical reason.
I have had a profound change since reading this book, mentally and socially. The book has a frightening grasp, and almost demands to be read after finishing the first few pages. Feelings of guilt and terror accompany any reading. I truely feel that this book does more harm than good for the reader".

Anyway, I slept with the lights on for a good while after reading it (though this was years ago now, when I was younger and less cynical, so I'm not sure if I'd feel the same way now)

I do hope you jest. Have heard him give lengthy interviews and the man is an utter, utter bellend. Fuckin' exorcism bollox?!? If his books are owt like his talks it barely rates as bad B-movie shlock let alone creeping terror. What is it about religious folks being flummoxed by schizophrenia that's so fuckin' scary? Fuckin' offensive if anything, I'd say.

Don't think I've ever read owt that I found genuinely scary. If vaguely "Satanic" stuff is yer thang, I'm quite a fan of James Havoc's prose poety. Satanskin is a fine drop in at the deep end...

"In the time it takes for one man to masturbate in his lonely bed, a million stars burn out; a million more are born. Rivers wend their way to sea, blades trace the curve of backbone under white and virgin skin.
Tonight, we have no sense of crime.''

-- James Havoc, Zodiak Breath"



His other stuff's also belting...

... for those that like (very) graphic novels.

(linky edited cos the piccy wouldn't post here)

He also did a good book about pirates. Which came fairly close to making me vomit at one point

Well, I've recently read The Catcher In The Rye by J D Salinger. It's odd but interesting.

Quality book that.

Have read loadsa books and stuff whilst away. Many of which are thanks to a certain book fairy (Book Fairies ). Still got a couple left though. Will update as and when I have one I remember enough to mention. And will reread t'others soon after.

 

[StoneHappyMonday]

This is a great book

Halfway through it and already I know I'm going to read all of the author's work...

Drugs, a whiff of jailbait, shamanism and the CIA, and loads of other offbeat riffs -

Samhain Grim have you read this? I reckon you'd like it...

Read Jitterbug Perfume. Great book.

 

[third eye squeegee]

I do hope you jest. Have heard him give lengthy interviews and the man is an utter, utter bellend. Fuckin' exorcism bollox?!? If his books are owt like his talks it barely rates as bad B-movie shlock let alone creeping terror. What is it about religious folks being flummoxed by schizophrenia that's so fuckin' scary? Fuckin' offensive if anything, I'd say.

Well I did mention the mental illness dealie, and I've never heard him talk but perhaps it's years of Catholic indoctrination that predisposes one to a fear of zombie Jesus and his adversaries..

As I said, I read it as a teenager, along with William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist - it was fine, but Martin's book scared the bejesus out of me at the time for some reason...

We were fooling round with weegie boards and shit and had a local priest who had a thing for scaring kids with tales of possession, so there's that too.

 

[third eye squeegee]

Read Jitterbug Perfume. Great book.

That'll be my next one so - thanks SHM

 

[Infinite Jest]

Read Jitterbug Perfume. Great book.

SHM is 100% right.

I'm reading Last Man in Tower, by Aravind Adiga. Novel about a developer trying to buy out an apartment block in Mumbai, so he can replace it with a new block. And one guy refusing to leave. Not bad.

 

[farmaz]

Jim Carroll - The basketball diaries.
I can relate to about 90% of it as I have done it, apart from the gay stuff

 

[mydrugbuddy]

I love scary books, although its hard to get a REALLY scary one! Has anyone any suggestions for a really REALLY scary book?

Sheep by Simon Maginn. It's out of print now. But you can get copies cheap off amazon & ebay. A brilliant scary psychological thriller. Far better than any James Herbert crap.

some of the reviews from amazon "Maginn's _Sheep_ was just out in paperback at the time and I picked it up after looking at the jacket copy. Am I ever glad I did. This is one of the most unsettling novels I've read in many years, even though the real horror is only hinted at, never clearly defined or out in the open"


"If you are ever asked to recommend a British psychological thriller, then this is a good one to pick. Strange comings and goings in a remote Welsh farmhouse, odd neighbours, stormy nights, and always the bleating of the sheeeeeep. Daft & scarey story that nestles snugly alongside Silence of the Lambs. "

"Bleak landscape, a family hit by tragedy and torn by guilt feelings, an inferno of fear and dark shadows slowly coming up from their mind. A very subtle psychological thriller with tension building up to an almost unbearable sense of horror. A book that will haunt you. "

i would write my own review but CBA. Apart from this is by far the scariest book ive ever read. Its a psychological horror story, i always find that far more scary than the blood and guts type of horror. Like IMO The Shining is a far Scarier film than some Zombie or Friday the 13th stuff.

I suspect the middle quote meant to say 'dark and scarey' not 'daft and scary'. Makes more sense as there's nothing daft about the book.

 

[masaz]

Thoroughly recommend this. If you've not heard of it Daniel Goleman argues that a balance of emotional as well as rational intelligence is needed in order for the individual to reach their highest potential and for society to achieve some kind of peace.

His premise is that an individual may have a genius IQ but without emotional intelligence ( eg ability to discern and manage emotions) they hold themselves back.

Huh, might give this a read as it's been sat on my bookshelf at home for yeaaaars now.

Reading Cold Comfort Farm myself, it's for my Modern Comic Novel module and I'm actually getting into it. Very funny book, can't really comment so far cos only just started it.

 

[third eye squeegee]

Read Jitterbug Perfume. Great book.

Just started this - looks like it'll be a good read..

Also started this

.. had avoided reading it in the past for whatever reason, but I think it was recommended on here, so ta if it was you

 

[backroll]

 

[third eye squeegee]

Also bought and waiting to read (I love winter as I eat through the books)

 

[scottishdnb]

 

[tekkeN]

a geeky yet surprisingly fun read for a report I have to do, enjoying it lots

Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies to control more and more what we can and can't do with culture. As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What's at stake is our freedom-freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.

Code is of course his most cited work, read several articles on this recently for a module, loving it. He's not a total techno hippy (libertarian) either, he sees the capcity and need for some control, just has that talent to present logic and draw lines on the battlefield in an easy to understand manner. Really interesting how the web is regulated, the constant battle between anarchy and oligarchy

 

[acieed_ed]

Mein kampf

by adolph hitler

i kid thee not i was given a copy by an IRA guy who got out of prison.he is a mad socialist and told me he had it..i didnt even know you could get it in a bookshop in highstreet mental.
Anyway its very long and tedious...dont think i will bother finishing it. Im not even much of a nazi myself anymore ;-)

 

[maxalfie]

Peter Sotos

I was quoting Selfish, Little.

That's one sexy volume you've got there! Seminal Sotos, some of which I haven't read.

As for trusting him, he's deliberately perverse and beyond ambiguous. He's definitely not a paedophile but he reveres childhood in a sometimes-creepy way. I'm trying to fish out his quote about a young girl he knows, but the upshot is 'she must be protected from filth and evil'.

He acknowledges the ascension of the new pornography in media fetishisation of paedophilia. Check out his riposte to Sara Payne's campaigning:

Then again, he complains that his cock is cut to ribbons because he likes to masturbate while wrapping tabloid stories about abused children around it.

Not an easy read, but a rewarding one.



Yep. The very foundation of literature, 'show, don't tell'. Such an old chestnut that it's beginning to rot and stink. Though it still holds true.

I have only read one short story by Peter Sotos on some website about a year ago.
It was written as if the author was a peadophile holding a young girl hostage. He described all the things he would do to her including slicing off her lips and how her mother hated her and wouldn't be looking for her.
I can honestly say that I have never before read anything that disturbed me but that story really did.
It really made me think that the writer was really getting off on what he was writing.
Made a point of avoiding his work since that story.

 

[mydrugbuddy]

Allen Carr's EASYWAY to stop smoking.

I know it works i stopped for about 3 years after first reading that IIRC. Allen states his method will no work unless you read the entire book.
So, well lit comfortable chair - check
various uppers and downers should they be needed - check. (i cant read w/out stims as i fall asleep after abt 2 lines of text otherwise.
plenty of tea, coffee etc
cigarettes - check.

 

[maxalfie]

Currently reading 'Face to face with Serial killers' by Christopher Berry Dee.
I always find reading about serial killers interesting. Trying to find out what made them the way they are and what gives them the urge to continually kill.
Always fascinating how a lot of them were never suspected by friends, family and work mates who all thought they were normal good guys.
Goes to show how easy it is to fool people I guess.

 

[Mailmonkey]

nd, Bad pharma, by Ben Goldacre, i know a lot of Goldacre fans n here...

nsfw'd for size, there's no vadge shots or owt.

NSFW:

Medicine is broken. And I genuinely believe that if patients and the public ever fully understand what has been done to them – what doctors, academics and regulators have permitted – they will be angry. On this, only you can judge.

We like to imagine that medicine is based on evidence, and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature, when in reality much of it is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are well-educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by industry. We like to imagine that regulators only let effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve hopeless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients.

I’m going to tell you how medicine works, just over the page, in one paragraph[1] that will seem so absurd – so ludicrously appalling – that when you read it, you’ll probably assume I’m exaggerating. We’re going to see that the whole edifice of medicine is broken, because the evidence we use to make decisions is hopelessly and systematically distorted; and this is no small thing. Because in medicine, we doctors and patients use abstract data to make decisions in the very real world of flesh and blood. If those decisions are misguided, they can result in death, and suffering, and pain.

This isn’t a simple story of cartoonish evil, and there will be no conspiracy theories. Drug companies are not withholding the secret to curing cancer, nor are they killing us all with vaccines. Those kinds of stories have, at best, a poetic truth: we all know, intuitively, from the fragments we’ve picked up, that something is wrong in medicine. But most of us, doctors included, don’t know exactly what.

These problems have been protected from public scrutiny because they’re too complex to capture in a soundbite, or even 3,000 words. This is why they’ve gone unfixed by politicians, at least to some extent; but it’s also why you’re holding a book of three hundred pages. The people you should have been able to trust to fix these problems have failed you, and because you have to understand a problem properly in order to fix it yourself, this book contains all that you need to know.

So to be clear, this whole book is about meticulously defending every assertion in the paragraph that follows.

Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don’t like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug’s true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in its life, and even then they don’t give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion. In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it’s not in anyone’s financial interest to conduct any trials at all. These are ongoing problems, and although people have claimed to fix many of them, for the most part, they have failed; so all these problems persist, but worse than ever, because now people can pretend that everything is fine after all.

That’s a lot to stand up, and the details are much more horrific than this paragraph makes it sound. There are some individual stories that will make you seriously question the integrity of the individuals involved; some that will make you angry; and some, I suspect, that might make you very sad. But I hope you will come to see that this is not just a book[2] about bad people. In fact, it’s possible for good people, in perversely designed systems, to casually perpetrate acts of great harm on strangers, sometimes without ever realising it. The current regulations – for companies, doctors and researchers – create perverse incentives; and we’ll have better luck fixing those broken systems than we will ever have trying to rid the world of avarice.

Some people will say that this book is an attack on the pharmaceutical industry, and of course it is. But it’s not only that, and it’s not unbounded. I suspect that most of the people who work in this industry are fundamentally good-hearted, and there is no medicine without medicines. Drug companies around the world have produced some of the most amazing innovations of the past fifty years, saving lives on an epic scale. But that does not allow them to hide data, mislead doctors and harm patients.

Today, when an academic or doctor tells you that they are working for the pharmaceutical industry, they often do so with a look of quiet embarrassment. I want to work towards a world where doctors and academics can feel actively optimistic about collaborating with industry, to make better treatments and better patients. This will require big changes, and some of them have been a very long time coming.

To that end, because the stories I am telling you are so worrying, I’ve tried to go beyond simply documenting the problems. Where there are obvious fixes, I’ve set out what they are. But I’ve also included, at the end of each chapter, some suggestions on what you can do to improve things. These are tailored to whoever you might be: a patient, a politician, a researcher, a regulator or a drug company.

More than anything, though, I don’t want you to lose sight of one thing: this is a pop science book. The tricks and distortions documented in these pages are beautiful, and intricate, and fascinating in their details. The true scale of this murderous disaster only fully reveals itself when the details are untangled. Good science has been perverted on an industrial scale, but this has happened slowly, and evolved naturally[3], over time. This has all been perpetrated by ordinary people, but many of them may not even know what they’ve done.

I want you to find them, and tell them.

What’s coming
This book follows a simple trajectory.

We start by defending our central claim: industry-sponsored studies are more likely to produce results that flatter the sponsor’s drug, which has now been demonstrated, beyond any doubt, by current research. In this section we also encounter the idea of a ‘systematic review’ for the first time. A systematic review is an unbiased survey of all the evidence on a given question. It is the best-quality evidence that can be used, and where they exist, systematic reviews are used for evidence throughout this book, with individual studies only described to give you a flavour of how the research has been done, or how mischief has been made.

Then we look at how the pharmaceutical industry manages to create all these positive trials for its drugs. Our first stop is to review the evidence showing that unflattering trial data can simply be withheld from doctors and patients. Companies are perfectly entitled to conduct seven studies, but only publish the two positive ones, and this behaviour is commonplace. What’s more, it happens in every field of science and medicine: from basic laboratory research, where selective publication fills the literature with false positive findings, wasting everyone’s time; through early research trials, where evidence that drugs might be dangerous is hidden from view; and on to major trials used to inform everyday clinical practice. Because so much trial data is witheld from doctors and patients, we can have no clear idea of the true effects of the treatments that we use every day in medicine. The stories in this section go from antidepressants, through statins, cancer drugs, diet pills, and right up to Tamiflu. Governments around the world have spent billions of dollars to stockpile this flu drug, in fear of a pandemic, and yet the evidence on whether it reduces the rate of pneumonia and death is being witheld right now, to this day.

Next, we take a step back, to look at where drugs come from. We cover the drug development process, from the moment someone dreams up a new molecule, through tests in labs, on animals, the first tests in humans, and then the early trials necessary to show that a drug works on patients. Here you will find, I suspect, some surprises. Risky ‘first-in-man’ drug tests are conducted on homeless people; but more than that, full clinical trials are being globalised, a new development that has arisen very suddenly, in only the last couple of years. This raises serious ethical problems, because trial participants in developing countries are often unlikely to benefit from expensive new drugs; but it also raises interesting new problems for trusting the data.

Then we look at regulation, and the hoops you must go through to get a drug onto the market. We will see that the bar is very low: that drugs must only prove that they are better than nothing, even when there are highly effective treatments on the market already. This means that real patients are given dummy placebo pills for no good reason, but also that drugs appear on the market which are worse than the treatments we already have. We will see that companies break their promises over follow-up studies, and that regulators let them do this. We will also see how data on side effects and effectiveness can be withheld from regulators, and that regulators, in turn, are obsessively secretive, withholding the data they do have from doctors and patients. Lastly, we will see the harm done by this secrecy: ‘many eyes’ are often very powerful, to spot problems with medicines, and some of the most frightening harms have been missed by regulators, and only identified by academics who were forced to fight hard for access to data.

Then we take a tour through ‘bad trials’. It is tempting to believe that a simple clinical trial is always a fair test of a treatment: and if done properly, it is. But several tricks have been introduced, over the course of many years, which allow researchers to overstate and exaggerate the benefits of the treatments they are testing. When you get here, you might think that some of these are innocent mistakes; in all seriousness, while I doubt that, I’m more interested in how clever they are. More importantly, we will see how obvious these tricks are, and how people who should know better at every step of the chain, from ethics committees, through to academic journals, have allowed companies and researchers to engage in these shameful, outright distortions.

After a brief detour to discuss how some of the problems around bad evidence, and missing evidence, could be addressed, we move on to marketing, which is where most previous books on drug companies have focused their attention.

Here we will see that the pharmaceutical industry spends tens of billions of pounds every year trying to change the treatment decisions of doctors: in fact, they spend twice as much on marketing and advertising as they do on the research and development of new drugs. Since we all want doctors to prescribe medicine based on evidence, and evidence is universal, there is only one possible reason for such huge spends: to distort evidence-based practice. All of this money comes directly from patients and governments, so we ourselves are paying for this privilege. Doctors spend 40 years practising medicine, with very little formal education after their initial training. Medicine changes completely in four decades, and as they try to keep up, doctors are bombarded with information: from adverts that misrepresent the benefits and risks of new medicines; from sales reps who spy on patients’ confidential prescribing records; from colleagues who are quietly paid by drug companies; from ‘teaching’ that is sponsored by industry; from independent ‘academic’ journal articles that are quietly written by drug company employees; and worse.

Finally, we will see what can be done. While the deceit of a marketing drive can be ignored by an ethical doctor, the problems caused by distorted evidence affect everybody, without exception. The most expensive doctors in the world can only make decisions about your care on the basis of the evidence publicly available to them, and nobody has a special inside track. If this evidence is distorted, then we are all exposed to avoidable suffering, pain and death. The whole system needs to be fixed, and until then, we are all, very truly, in this together.

To an extent, this is a field where you need to know everything, to understand how it impacts on everything else. I’ve bent over backwards to introduce the ideas in the best order, but if all this material is completely new to you, then you might spot some extra connections – or feel greater outrage in your belly – reading it a second time. I have not assumed any prior knowledge. I have, however, assumed that you might be willing to deploy a little intellectual horsepower here and there. Some of this stuff is hard. That’s precisely why these problems have been ignored, and that’s why I’ve had to explain it to you here, in this book. If you want to catch people with their trousers down, you have to go into their home.

By 1978 disco culture was so central to the French entertainment media that the country's leading television personality was a transvestite ex-disco dancer. From the mid-eighties Paris evolved to become a leading force in hip-hop, dance and ambience, building the reputations of bands and DJs such as Orange, Motor Base, Air, Daft Punk, Mirwais and Etienne de Crecy. Their music has taken cross-over into the mainstream with Madonna using Mirwais for her 'Music' collection, Daft Punk appearing on a GAP television advertisement, Air laying the soundtrack to a major film, touring the world and collaborating with Beck, and Etienne de Crecy providing the award-winning soundtrack to the worldwide Renault campaign. Drawing on exclusive interviews by many of the leading names and aided by the French Music Bureau, the book will provide in-depth accounts on the growth of the biggest names in the scene, from inception to global domination.