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frytechnician posted:Best writer for the way he writes for me is Waugh. Oh poo poo, Brideshead Revisited is also an all-time favorite. So beautifully written.
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Apr 3, 2023 12:24
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Doc Fission posted:Oh poo poo, Brideshead Revisited is also an all-time favorite. So beautifully written. Probably the best-written book I've ever read despite it not being in my Top 10. Maybe top 20.... Waugh was an unbelievably catty bitch of a man by most accounts but holy poo poo did he write wonderfully. The Loved One and A Handful Of Dust are just savage af.
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Apr 3, 2023 13:05
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WILDTURKEY101 posted:The Book of the New Sun I've bounced off this book twice. Everyone says it is so awesome but it just seems silly to me. Not sure what I am missing. Anyway, my favorites are probably The Catcher in the Rye Shogun A fire Upon the Deep
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Apr 3, 2023 13:20
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The Watsons Go To Birmingham - 1963 reading that book was a critical moment in my life when I discovered it in the library in elementary school and took it out on a whim
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Apr 3, 2023 18:14
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The Way Things Work. Scientific explanation of everyday machines for children, illustrated by cartoon mammoths. Probably the first book I ever read where I consciously realized I was learning something. I haven’t touched it in years and I still think about it all the time A Voyage to Arcturus. Psychedelic rocket-ship odyssey from 1920, about traveling to an alien world and constructing a personal philosophy from the fragmentary teachings of the weirdoes you blunder into along the way to your inevitable doom. This book absolutely rules. Starting off from going to a fancy Edwardian seance with a bunch of middle class people, the protagonist has gone to Scotland, got drunk, and participated in nude horseplay in an abandoned lighthouse within fifty pages, and meets and murders alien Jesus not even halfway through the book. I forgot to add Riddley Walker. A visionary child wanders confusedly around post-nuclear-apocalypse Britain, a ruinous hellscape populated by clueless barbarians who use weed as money, pass down their history by a religious ritual derived from Punch & Judy puppet shows, and really, really want to find out how to reinvent bombs. All told in the mangled future-English of the day. skasion fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Apr 3, 2023 |
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Apr 3, 2023 18:57
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In my early teens I happened across the four books of Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile at a garage sale, and was immediately in love with them. Was in love again probably a decade later when I learned about the shared-universe companion series, the Galactic Milieu. I've read all the books a number of times, and parts of them really still stick with me to this day. I won't say they're amazing genre-defining fiction or anything, but they just worked for me so drat well.
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Apr 3, 2023 23:40
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My favorite book is Lord of the Flies and it will always be relevant. Also, sucks to your assmar
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Apr 4, 2023 00:01
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In fiction, 1984, and for nonfiction, FIASCO by Frank Partnoy of all things. I like the true tales of Wall Street genre, and he worked in fixed income derivatives at Morgan Stanley in the late 90s with all of its client-screwing shenanigans, and basically reads like a dress rehearsal for the subprime crisis.
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Apr 4, 2023 00:04
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When I was in my twenties a bunch of stuff by a little group of writers coming out of a movement they called New Narrative-- a bunch of gay guys and some ladies in the 70s and 80s who were in overlapping workshops and reading groups in the Bay Area. I fell in love with them immediately and doing so right as I was going into grad school changed my life in a lot of ways, but mostly I loved that a lot of their works felt like hanging out and chatting and being bitchy. They all made being queer in a troubled time feel fun and funny instead of a big slog, and made writing about heavy stuff feel like it could still be charming and off the cuff. My favorites by all them would probably be Century of Clouds, by Bruce Boone, which is a little memoir-type thing circling around his failed attempt to do well as a seminary student, and Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck, which weaves together a retelling of the life of the titular medieval mystic and a kind of choppy 20th century gay relationship. I also really love all of Bernadette Mayer's books but if I had to pick one I'd go with Sonnets from 1989. An insanely good novel I love is Lolly Willowes which Sylvia Townsend Warner published in 1926. It sort of begins as a sort of arch comedy of manners about a middle-aged woman but gradually becomes about her making a pact with the devil and becoming a witch. It's really funny and dry but also has a lot of anger in it, like a lot of Townsend Warner's books. Some other ones that I don't need to really give a summary of are In Search of Lost Time which I decided I'd only ever read in waiting rooms and which took me like 15 years to finish, and the old and busted Walt Whitman anthology I borrowed from my dad's book-shelf in highschool.
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Apr 4, 2023 01:23
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Major Isoor posted:It's not the most highbrow book out there, but my favourite series is The Black Company by Glen Cook. Same. Really like the style of this series and how the perspective changes when the role of historian changes. Patton: A Genius for War by Carlo D'Este - he compares history to the Geroge C. Scott movie.
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Apr 4, 2023 02:42
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DeadFatDuckFat posted:My favorite book is Lord of the Flies and it will always be relevant. Also, sucks to your assmar I somehow missed this at school as I dodged a ton of classes but got round to reading it last year and yes, Lord Of The Flies loving owns hard.
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Apr 4, 2023 09:27
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DeadFatDuckFat posted:sucks to your assmar i say this a lot and nobody ever gets it
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Apr 4, 2023 09:37
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frytechnician posted:I somehow missed this at school as I dodged a ton of classes but got round to reading it last year and yes, Lord Of The Flies loving owns hard. We read The Inheritors instead because our teacher was a hipster and that was a tough slog to get through as a teenager
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Apr 4, 2023 10:28
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My all time top books are Anathem Blindsight And The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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Apr 10, 2023 19:30
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I read this one recently and had a couple of inadvertent laughs imagining Howard Campbell as PPJ (or vice versa). But also yeah, the corollary to modern irony posting and how that can become who you are was pretty stark, and it made me examine my own online behaviors and how (or if) they've changed over time.
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Apr 10, 2023 20:57
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Bookish posted:Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - I knew nothing about this book going into it and I am so glad for that, I was blown away. I will echo these two choices and add: Little, Big by John Crowley - Absolute adult fantasy masterpiece. I love Engine Summer, Novelties and Souvenirs (short fiction collection) and Ka!: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, as well. I have read Ægypt (AKA The Solitudes), too, but had more trouble getting into that one. Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson - The novel that hooked me on KSR. Edit: Must also mention Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy. Rental Sting fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Apr 11, 2023 |
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Apr 11, 2023 22:22
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the shining. i reread it every couple of years. don't know what about it that resonates with me so we'll, but it's such a good slow descent into jacks insanity
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Apr 11, 2023 23:46
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Rental Sting posted:
God i loved this book. after being lukewarm on some of the other stuff i read i was 100% locked in from start to finish Favorite has got to be Blood Meridian, closely followed by East of Eden
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Apr 12, 2023 01:39
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I read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita back in 2015, and it destroyed me. It's probably weird to say it's my "favorite" book, but it is without a doubt the book I've come back to the most in my life. I am not generally in the habit of re-reading books, but I've read Lolita front-to-back twice, the first time knowing virtually nothing about it, the second time in 2019 with Alfred Appel's Annotated Lolita edition and its copious footnotes, which gave me a much deeper appreciation for how unbelievably dense it is. About a year ago I got an itch to read it again after listening to Jamie Loftus' Lolita Podcast, a multipart series that talks about the book and its social and media legacy, and I picked up my incredibly lovely, waterlogged annotated copy* and did something I've never really done before (but I have since adopted as a habit) of writing in the margins, adding my own annotations on top of the ones already there, and just drawing attention to connections I was noticing, little writing tricks and tics of Nabokov's (his love of alliteration, his juxtaposition of opposites, his characteristic lilts) and the book opened up to me in a way that I had not experienced before. This novel has taken me through highs and lows of feeling and literary enjoyment and just appreciating what writing can be. It is a beautiful carriage ride through the depths of Hell and every single time I pick it up I find something new, and that is not even a little bit an exaggeration. It's unbelievable. It's a book I would recommend to anybody but not to everybody, if that makes sense. It is a book written from the point of view of a pedophile, and the explicitness of it ranges from poetic euphemism to glancing disgust. It's a novel I recommend wholeheartedly with heavy advisement. It's a book you're going to come out of feeling like poo poo. If you can read it, do, but if you can't, don't. *I bought it from a used book store the instant I found it, and it looks like it was probably a victim of a cardboard box in a flooded basement, but the shittiness of it felt like it gave me license to beat it up a little more by flipping back and forth and writing all over the thing
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Apr 12, 2023 03:27
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Mind over Matter posted:In my early teens I happened across the four books of Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile at a garage sale, and was immediately in love with them. Was in love again probably a decade later when I learned about the shared-universe companion series, the Galactic Milieu. I've read all the books a number of times, and parts of them really still stick with me to this day. I won't say they're amazing genre-defining fiction or anything, but they just worked for me so drat well. Bloody hell, was not expecting them to pop up!  Was hooked on them all from the first book back in the eighties, she did such good world building throughout. ----- I have read Dune once a year since 1984, sometimes i'll read three or all six in the series if i'm in the mood, so much deeper than i imagined when i started. There must have been a "thing" for companion/reference books in the eighties because i have one for both series.  ----- Read 1984 & Brave New World, one after the other and that was a sobering introduction to my teenage years.
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Apr 12, 2023 04:47
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Heath posted:Alfred Appel's Annotated Lolita edition and its copious footnotes Seconding this recommendation -- this was my first copy of Lolita (which I read as a tenth-grader, so, yeah, long story), and Appel's annotations are great. The concept of doing a reread and adding your own annotations as well is fantastic.
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Apr 12, 2023 10:35
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Bookish posted:Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - I knew nothing about this book going into it and I am so glad for that, I was blown away. You might like Klara and the Sun, one of his newer and better works (tbh most of hist stuff us at least good). I still remember reading Remains of the Day, it blew me away. Here's my favourite espionage related novels: A Perfect Spy - this novel has everything, espionage, hosed up family relationships, melancholy loss of a past that wasn't even good The Sympathizer - I think everyone has read this but it really is very good The Quiet American - one of my favourite Graham Greene novels. He shares a lot of sensibilities with le Carré I think. Espionage novels are a really interesting genre, the setting attracts authors who want to explore almost contradictory characters, which feel so much more interesting and real to me.
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Apr 12, 2023 13:14
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Harold Fjord posted:My all time top books are Anathem Blindsight was amazing (available online here! https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm), but unfortunately the sequel Echopraxia left me cold. I was lucky enough to get ahold of an imported UK omnibus edition of both novels a couple years ago, which I'm glad for no matter what because previously I had only read the first one online. The sequel starts off promising -- a disgraced biologist is searching for any organism left with an unmodified genome in the eastern Oregon desert, as personal penance for his role in developing bioweapons! When he suddenly gets trapped in a battle between a vampire controlling military-grade zombies, and a monastery full of physics researchers who have formed a hivemind by speaking in tongues! But it doesn't quite maintain that madcap momentum, nor the sheer onslaught of bizarre concepts, and Watts doesn't make much of the opportunity to elaborate on his unique take on vampires. If anything, the vampire character he includes in the sequel is even more inscrutable than Sarastri in Blindsight. I'll still recommend Blindsight to anyone, though. Not sure if I'll ever catch up with any of Watts' other novels, as they all sound relentlessly depressing.
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Apr 12, 2023 23:19
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bible (* insert the hugest smug face jpeg on the entire internet here *)
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Apr 12, 2023 23:59
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does it count if I only just read the book for the first time 6 months ago? Blood Meridian and/or Moby Dick
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Apr 21, 2023 04:35
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Doc Fission posted:Oh poo poo, Brideshead Revisited is also an all-time favorite. So beautifully written. There's an episode of Frasier where he tells a trekkie Star Trek is just a television show. His coworker gets this hideous snarl on his face and says "So's Brideshead Revisited." This apparently deeply wounded Frasier and that's all I know about it.
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Apr 21, 2023 07:10
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Bookish posted:If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino - A book basically about reading a book, but so much more. hell yeah dude this book is sick and loving owns. It might be my favourite ever.
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Apr 21, 2023 11:19
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Calvino’s really good. Invisible Cities is up there with my favorites I think. or The Nonexistent Knight
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Apr 21, 2023 12:16
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I think my favourite book is probably Embassytown by China Mieville, because I've always been a fan of sci-fi and etymology and this melds the two in interesting ways. I also like that the aliens within the book are distinctively alien, but still understandable in terms of motivations. I usually only read a book once and then probably never touch it again, but I've read Embassytown cover to cover about 4 or 5 times and I keep going back to it.
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Apr 25, 2023 17:03
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my favorite book of all time is probably either Ulysses by James Joyce or Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse). my second favorites are probably Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel and À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. i am also particularly fond of Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti.
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Apr 26, 2023 12:09
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s_k_a_m_ posted:my favorite book of all time is probably either Ulysses by James Joyce or Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse). my second favorites are probably Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel and À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. i am also particularly fond of Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti. I've only made it half-way through Maldoror because I hate that you don't always know who's saying/doing what. I'm sure that's intentional but so is Vanilla Coke.
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Apr 26, 2023 12:14
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3D Megadoodoo posted:I've only made it half-way through Maldoror because I hate that you don't always know who's saying/doing what. I'm sure that's intentional but so is Vanilla Coke. which translation did you read? i think the Paul Knight and the Alexis Lykiard translations are the best personally. I think this is the best edition I have, personally https://www.amazon.com/Maldoror-Complete-Works-Comte-Lautr%C3%A9amont/dp/187897212X.
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Apr 26, 2023 12:23
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s_k_a_m_ posted:which translation did you read? Marko Pasanen 
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Apr 26, 2023 12:28
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Marko Pasanen i have not read this one yet; i will check it out. you should check out other translations too if you want to pay for them.
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Apr 26, 2023 12:31
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My favorite is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The story of a man's life collapsing through no fault of his own, all the while his society is disintegrating around him. It resonates more than I'd like it to.
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Apr 26, 2023 17:50
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I am extremely basic and only read trash books for idiots. My favorite book is IT.
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Apr 27, 2023 03:23
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titties posted:I am extremely basic and only read trash books for idiots. My favorite book is IT. you should read The Idiot
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Apr 27, 2023 09:45
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disaster pastor posted:Favorite's a weird word for it, but I read Nevil Shute's On the Beach a couple times a year. Incredibly depressing concept, the writing makes it clear that things are hopeless, but the way Shute writes the characters* dealing with inevitability and hopelessness just really works for me. On the Beach is my favourite novel of all time, for exactly the reasons you said. It's the one book I've never been able to get out of my head, even years after reading it.
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Apr 27, 2023 23:37
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My favorite book ever is Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. When I started reading it I didn't care much for the sections about the kids but they really grew on me and I just love everything about it. Just a feel good story about two complete morons saving the world. The depictions of the Four Horsemen absolutely own as well. The show is extremely good too and my only real complaint is they cut out a few parts featuring the Horsemen. Can't wait for s2 (based on ideas they had but didn't get to write as Terry got busy with Discworld and Neil with Sandman).
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Apr 28, 2023 15:03
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Chingiz Aitmatov's The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years/И дольше века длится день is an excellently-constructed novel about the experience of living through the latter half of the Soviet Union in central Asia. Hilariously, censors objected to the original, rather meaningless title (The Hoop) and somehow let the rest of the book through, despite it being a damning (if subtle) anti-colonial criticism of the Soviet national project in central Asia. Aside from it just being a really good novel, I like it because it's very much not the sort Russian-language literature that's typically popular in the US, which is largely stuck in the 1800s for whatever reason. Late Soviet literature doesn't get a lot of play here, doubly so if it's from non-Russian SSRs.
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Apr 29, 2023 03:44
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