I’ve it 3 times (as well as TS&TF, but the second read was just to understand it, like you said).

Frankly I find the first two Dylan albums boring, and Times is worse than the debut because in addition to boring it’s preachy. Another Side and Freewheelin’ are huge improvements - Freewheelin’ is top 5 Bob, certainly.

The first Dune book is the only one I thought was any good. Yes, I’ve read all of the first four, and will never bother with the rest. Herbert went way overboard with the world-building and religious metaphors and forgot about interesting characters and exciting space-opera (which is basically what Dune is - the Roman Empire in space, or more accurately, the Umayyad Caliphate).

Speaking of which, just finished I, Claudius. It was a deserved best-seller in its day, though probably outdated - Graves seems to lean too hard on exaggerated cliches of Imperial decadence, taking the ridiculous legends of Tiberius and Caligula at face value. The Roman Empire wasn’t nearly as decadent as it’s been portrayed in popular culture, and many of the nasty reputations of certain Emperors were written long after the fact by partisan historians invested in portraying the outgoing emperor as vile in order to build up the current emperor as a savior, so a lot of stories have to be taken with a grain of salt. And we all know (or should be aware) the Christian persecution was wildly overblown propaganda of the early Church, not to say that they weren’t slaughtered and persecuted, just in far few numbers for far fewer years. During Nero’s reign they were an obscure Jewish cult no one cared about, much less Nero. Any, the book was well-written and entertaining, if a bit dubious in historical accuracy.

Talking Heads are like XTC in that they theoretically make interesting, catchy pop music that I should like, but are just....I don’t know, perhaps too self-satisfiedly ‘clever’ for their own good? Byrne is an annoying vocalist who leaves me cold; perhaps with a more tolerable singer invested with a bit more soul, I might like them better (and the less said about Partridge’s vox the better).

At this point in history, Rainbow are one of those 2nd-rate 70s hard rock bands like Budgie or UFO that were big on the circuit then but had no real big hits, are never played on the radio, and most people have forgotten about. They only survive of marginal interest to cult fans because Blackmore and Dio were in the same band. And I like some Budgie and some UFO but Rainbow just sounded so bog-ordinary, just generic hard rock songs, nothing special except for the singer and guitarist.
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Return of the Native - Jude the Obscure is on of my favorite late 19th century novels, but my second foray into Thomas Hardy’s Wessex turned out to be an unexceptional Austen-style twist on the Marriage Plot. I knew I should’ve picked up the Mayor of Casterbridge instead.

Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim - No, he wasn’t a rapper, though he influenced many (Ice T took his name from Slim and along with Henry Rollins and other LA hipster cognoscenti of low-rider gansta schtick have pumped up his work in a documentary about Iceberg that I haven’t seen). This autobiography spans from his childhood during the Depression to the end of his criminal career in the late 50s, and was published in 1969 to success that cemented his legendary, iconic status. Iceberg isn’t a born writer and the overabuse of ghetto slang from mid-century America, which is thrown about in practically every sentence, cries out for subtitles (he helpfully provides a glossary for squares). The book overcomes its lack of polish (along with lack of morality, self-awareness, basic human decency) by the fact that Iceberg’s life as a street hustler was, if all is to be believed (and he hardly seems like a trustworthy man), just....wow. This is the filthiest, nastiest, misogynist, casually violent, stomach-churning account of a vile, amoral excuse for a so-called human being who should’ve been castrated at birth, that I have ever read. I had to put parts of this down in disgust, particularly where he describes keeping his ho’s in line by viciously beating them with coat hangers and then proceeding to fuck them (and there are several scenes of that sort). His ego is also unbelievable - he genuinely seems to believe that he’s irrestible to all women. Eddie Murphy based his SNL character Velvet Jones on this dude, and I’m not sure exactly how much he helped inspire the stereotypical blaxploitation pimp style, but it’s certain he and this book did in part. In short, this is a dirty story of a dirty man, and you should read it. Irvine Welsh namechecked it as an influence on Trainspotting - makes Nelson Algren and Hubert Selby look like whiteboy poseurs by comparison; this really digs into the dark, dark demi-monde. This is one hella book, as Iceberg himself might say.