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pill for your ills posted:I'm now attempting Naked Lunch. Suggestions? Words of caution? Anyone plain loving hate it? As for me, I take that book straight up, thanks. It's weird as hell and kind of smutty and creepy but it also has a dark beauty to it that makes you appreciate a heroin-free lifestyle. I just finished two anthologies edited by Isaac Asimov - "Best of the Hugo Winners" and "More Hugo Winners". They collect science-fiction's Hugo winners from the late 1960's and each story is introduced by Mr. Asimov himself. He's amazingly funny in this context and comes across as a dirty old man. It's wonderful and I am sad I never got to meet him in person. His characterizations of Harlan Ellison are especially amusing. Oh, just finished Harry Potter book 7. Finally, all done with that series!
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Jul 22, 2007 20:37
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pill for your ills posted:I'm now attempting Naked Lunch. Suggestions? Words of caution? Anyone plain loving hate it? Read it slow; not to savor it but to recover between the routines. Drugs, sex, rape, murder. Naked Lunch can be very emotionally draining.
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Jul 22, 2007 20:51
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Mother Night- Kurt Vonnegut After finishing it this is my second favorite book of his behind Sirens of Titan. I really liked Campbell, the way he was so apathetic about everything except his writing and Helga appealed to me.
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Jul 22, 2007 21:03
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Speaking with the Angel, a collection of stories edited by Nick Hornby. His son has severe autism, and the book raises money for schools for such children. The stories are uniformly good with much humor, even the horrifying ones. Irvine Welsh, Roddy Doyle, Colin Firth(!), Helen Fielding... it's a well rounded collection and was thoroughly amusing. Plus it's a good cause. Truly delightful, go get it. Now I'm reading The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy, based on his teaching the children of Yamarack island, the "Gullah" community. It's as gripping as his other works, I'm enjoying it quite a lot. I'm in Atlanta for work, typing this from a sushi bar (MF Sushi) because I am alone and work called me to fix some poo poo.  Got Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, and threesome of Flannery O'Connor - Wise Blood, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and another, to hold me over.
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Jul 24, 2007 02:12
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Encryptic posted:Finished Love In the Time of Cholera last night - amazing book. I really, really love the way Marquez writes - insightful, touching, and funny all in one book. I just started this one last night, and I'm already halfway through it. His prose is stunning. I was amazed at how subtle it can be; if you're not paying attention, you would almost have missed Dr. Urbino's fall from the mango tree. Marquez lures you into believing that the story is going to focus on one thing and without warning, he changes it all around on you. Since this one has been so good, I was thinking about One Hundred Years of Solitude next. Does anyone have any comments/warnings?
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Jul 24, 2007 03:13
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FuzzyLollipop posted:Since this one has been so good, I was thinking about One Hundred Years of Solitude next. Does anyone have any comments/warnings? I read it about a month and a half ago, as a matter of fact. Excellent book, though I'm leaning towards Love In The Time of Cholera as my favorite of the 3 books by Marquez I've read so far. If you like "Love", you'll like "Solitude" as well, though. Same style, though the storyline is very surreal. I love the way he presents all sorts of bizarre occurrences as though they're totally normal. The only issue I really had is although a family tree is included at the beginning, it can be tricky keeping track of who's who since a lot of names get passed down over the generations the book chronicles.
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Jul 24, 2007 03:34
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FuzzyLollipop posted:Since this one has been so good, I was thinking about One Hundred Years of Solitude next. Does anyone have any comments/warnings? Pretty loving amazing. Honestly, I think a book that is closer to the "style" of Love in the Time of Cholera though would be his novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Its light on Magic Realism too, and deals with the same sort of widespread social networks that Love plays with.
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Jul 24, 2007 23:10
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Just finished Despair by Nabokov. I don't know that I enjoyed the first 9 chapters that much, because the story doesn't really become clear in what it is trying to do until the last 2. However, those last two chapters were brilliant. The book lacks the prose of Lolita, but the plot is much stronger(as Lolita's plot is a pointless guise for the unmatched language). Any doubts that I had about Nabokov's place as my favorite writer are gone as he shows in this book he has a much firmer grasp of plot than he is ever given credit for. I'm aware here that many people like the plot in Lolita, but it was secondary to me. Deserves a fourth read with an emphasis on plot, I suppose. I think the manner in which the novel came to the form it exists in had a big impact on the style. It isn't written with the mastery of English that Nabokov shows in Lolita or Pale Fire, it feels in places exactly like most translated novels, very sterile. This is no surprise considering Nabokovs stance on translation. Certainly worth a read for absolutely everyone, but don't come into it (as I did) expecting another Lolita.
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Jul 25, 2007 00:06
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I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows...
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Jul 25, 2007 01:26
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I just finished The Iliad by Homer translated by Robert Fitzgerald. It took me a really long time to get through it, I'm talking years. This was not due too much to Fitzgerald who did the best translation I have yet seen. It was due to Homer. I had to take him a little at a time, but most of this is that I do not know much about Greek culture and that I did not hear it being recited to me as people would have in ancient Greece. Most of it, though, was still good writing. The part I didn't like was after the death of "Hektor". The next couple chapters dragged on and on until the end, which I thought did not really wrap anything up at all. The battle could still be going on, and we aren't told who will win. In all, I recommend Fitzgerald, but not The Iliad as much unless you want some tough reading.
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Jul 25, 2007 05:44
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Bdurox posted:I just finished The Iliad by Homer translated by Robert Fitzgerald. It took me a really long time to get through it, I'm talking years. This was not due too much to Fitzgerald who did the best translation I have yet seen. It was due to Homer. I had to take him a little at a time, but most of this is that I do not know much about Greek culture and that I did not hear it being recited to me as people would have in ancient Greece. Most of it, though, was still good writing. The part I didn't like was after the death of "Hektor". The next couple chapters dragged on and on until the end, which I thought did not really wrap anything up at all. The battle could still be going on, and we aren't told who will win. In all, I recommend Fitzgerald, but not The Iliad as much unless you want some tough reading. Its a lot better if you read the Iliad not as a tale about the Trojan War in total, but rather about the involvement of Achilles in the battle. It begins with him quitting, the climax is his return, and the completion is his ultimate glory. It's really a story about him, not the war.
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Jul 25, 2007 05:55
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Finished Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay last night. Fantastic book all the way through - loved how he weaves so many disparate themes together seamlessly.
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Jul 25, 2007 16:33
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I just finished reading S. M. Stirling's Dies the Fire and The Protector's War. Now I need to find A Meeting at Corvallis so I can complete this awesome post-apocalyptic medieval warfare trilogy.
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Jul 25, 2007 19:16
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I just finished 4th of July by James Patterson. Over the summer, I read good book then bad book, and this was my bad, cheesy, simple thriller book. I've been reading the Women's Murder Club books by Patterson over the summer, and, as I enjoy his work, I found this one to be pretty good. The best part in it was the court case, as I find trials, and law as a whole, fairly fascinating. The whole murder part of the book was pretty terrible, and a huge letdown from the other ones. I cannot say that these are excellent books for someone who is interested in reading good writing, but they do a good job at portraying the thriller genre. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't as good as the first 3 in the series. Now on to a Baseball Economics book. Yay!
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Jul 26, 2007 04:13
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Just finished Heat by George Monbiot. Fascinating and very convincing.
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Jul 27, 2007 11:54
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Finished The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, which inspired the Johnny Depp movie The Ninth Gate (which isn't nearly as good as the book due to leaving a lot of stuff out and changing other things around). The book is excellent, nonetheless. It has a similar feel to The Name of the Rose, and there's even a few references to TNOTR here and there. I liked how they went into detail about what each of the engravings signifies (something that wasn't really touched upon in the movie), among other things. Moving on to A Shadow In Summer by Daniel Abraham.
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Jul 27, 2007 15:50
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Well, I finished The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy. It was enjoyable throughout. He has a great sense of humor and the sad tale of the black kids isolated on the island, their school neglected by the board of education, is an important one. We see small victories as he fights against the tide of bureaucracy, racism, and the Yamacraw folks' own traditions. It's a good story, and he does make a difference in the end. It was made into a popular 70's movie called Conrack with John Voight, which is sadly not on DVD. I started It Can't Happen Here, and I'm surprised at how funny it is already.
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Jul 27, 2007 16:10
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Just finished The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White. It's the Second in a trilogy. I liked the first book, A Boy's Own Story, a little more, but this was still amazing.
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Jul 27, 2007 17:51
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ErikTheRed posted:Neuromancer by William Gibson. It was a great read, as I'm sure most of you know. That ending still has me scratching my head a bit though. Has me wanting to read some more cyberpunk now though. Read Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. A good piece of noir/cyberpunk. As good a story as we'll get in this age where elves and sorcery seem to rule. The second novel, Broken Angels is also a good read, although it's more of a military sci-fi/cyberpunk (which is my dream novel), than a noir story, which I'm kind of glad it switched tracks. Morgan wrote a good mystery with Altered Carbon, I'd hate to see what might have happened if he tried to follow up with another mystery.
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Jul 27, 2007 22:17
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Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank It was an alright read about a small town in Florida surviving a nuclear war with the Soviet Union in 1959. It was fun reading about my hometowns of Tampa and St. Petersburg becoming craters of radioactive glass. But drat, some parts of this were boring too. It had a completely transparent plot where every event came completely expected and the outcome fully predictable. Some of the dialogue in the beginning was pretty retarded with all women being portrayed as either retarded or hysterical. The book even opened from the point of view of a character that turned out to be next to useless and played an extremely minor role throughout the story (except to occasionally make some ungodly stupid remark). I know it seems I'm complaining an awful lot but this book was somewhat enjoyable. The parts that were good were very good. However, the parts that were bad were loving terrible. Next is Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk.
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Jul 28, 2007 19:31
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The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I was in the advanced English class, and we didnt' have to read this when I was in school, instead we read Jane Eyre.  Thoroughly enjoyed the story.
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Jul 28, 2007 20:52
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Three Cups of Tea by Gregg Mortenson and David Relin The story of a climber who in failing to climb K2, is nursed back to health by a remote northern Pakistani village and vows to give them a school. He follows through, and then some. Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic The story of a bunch of Yugoslavian refugees in early nineties Amsterdam, most of who work cheaply assembling BDSM apparel for a shop called the Ministry. It details their experiences with dealing with the loss of their country and the war, and exactly how Yugoslav identity was constructed and deconstructed and why. Currently in the middle of The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al-Aswany, and after that I'm tackling The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, which comes highly recommended by the cute Russian chick next door in my sublet.
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Jul 29, 2007 04:54
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I just recently finished William Golding's Lord of the Flies and topped that off by watching the 1990 rendition of the book. My personal favorite book, and it translated fairly well into movie form. Lord of the Flies is a story of a group of British schoolboys trapped on a deserted island who increasingly turn savage, to the point where they are simply referred to as "the savages".
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Jul 29, 2007 05:08
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Mack the Knife posted:Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. I actually enjoyed the movie better; the parts with Alex and his creative use of English are the best, and some of the shtetl stories are quite good. Other attempts at magic realism fell flat for me, and I'm glad they left them out of the movie. The book is still quite enjoyable, but drags quite a bit during the parts that are supposed to be Jonathan's novel. It's well constructed and a quick read otherwise, with a few delightful characters who are worth your while. Interesting, the magical realism and the shtetl stories were my favourite parts, and I was disappointed they left them out of the movie. He combines a whimsical tone with the dark subject matter very very well in some of them, and there was a lot of depth there that made the movie feel very plain and one-dimensional without that entire half (third?) of the novel. I liked Alex's mangled English as well, but it began to feel formulaic after a while. I just finished Foer's new book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close on the weekend. I'm not sure how to feel about it. On one hand, some parts were sad and funny and beautifully written in the same way that most of Everything is Illuminated was. On the other hand, the blank/single-lined pages, pictures, text that runs together etc, etc seemed a bit gimmicky. Have any other goons read it? What did you think?
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Jul 29, 2007 09:46
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Finished A Shadow In Summer over the weekend. Interesting debut with some good ideas. Some bits are a bit clunky (people using poses to express themselves), but it's not a bad debut and certainly nice to see something reasonably original in the realm of fantasy. I'll be keeping an eye out for the follow-up whenever it comes out. Well into another fantasy debut that's been talked up a bit - Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind. Fun read so far.
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Jul 30, 2007 16:07
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Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk I think I've found a new favorite author. I really enjoyed his minimalist style of writing and it was refreshing not being able to guess exactly what was going to happen at every event unlike the last book I read. I think the next book of his I'll read is Choke as I've heard it's being filmed right now. Great story about the last survivor of a cult in middle America and his rise and fall as a media messiah. Next is Time Traveler's Wife.
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Jul 30, 2007 17:09
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Time Out of Joint by P.K. Dick. I quite enjoyed it, although it really tailed off badly. There were a few pages where it felt like he had just finished reading A Clockwork Orange and really loved it. That was just awkward.
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Jul 30, 2007 20:53
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perceptual_set posted:Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk I read The Time Traveler's Wife earlier this summer. It wasn't really what I expected, but it was really, really good. Enjoy. As for my contribution, I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Very disturbing, but in a good way. I don't usually go for his usual subject matter, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Next on the list is Moby Dick--it's sort of one of those classics that everyone should read sometime in their life, yet I've just never gotten around to it until now.
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Jul 30, 2007 23:52
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porkchoppie posted:I read The Time Traveler's Wife earlier this summer. It wasn't really what I expected, but it was really, really good. Enjoy. All I'm expecting is a tragic love story that is light on the science fiction of time travel, am I on the right track?
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Jul 31, 2007 00:08
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perceptual_set posted:All I'm expecting is a tragic love story that is light on the science fiction of time travel, am I on the right track? Essentially it's more about the tragic love story than about the inner workings of time travel itself, but the time travel plays a pretty big role in what happens to Clare and Henry. So yes, in a way you're on the right track.
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Jul 31, 2007 00:16
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Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson. I'm looking to travel Europe, so this was perfect for me. And, Happy Endings: Tales of a Meaty Breasted Zilch by Jim Norton. It was good, and drat is Norton a pervert. I mean, you may think you know he's a bit kinky... but Jesus loving Christ.
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Jul 31, 2007 03:27
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porkchoppie posted:Essentially it's more about the tragic love story than about the inner workings of time travel itself, but the time travel plays a pretty big role in what happens to Clare and Henry. So yes, in a way you're on the right track. Excellent, and exactly what I was looking for.
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Jul 31, 2007 04:10
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Dante - The Divine Comedy. Inferno was an absolutely stunning work, Purgatory was less-interesting but still a solid read, and I honestly got about halfway through Paradise and was bored out of my mind
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Jul 31, 2007 06:52
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Claude Simon's The Flanders Road. Based on an ambush the author (as a calvaryman (literally on horseback, his captain armed with a saber)) was caught in during the French collapse in 1940; on paper it's more a mishmash of multiple voices at different stages of the war. Fairly dense Proust-meets-Faulkner style with a pinch of Joseph Roth. BookBarn being as it is I feel like I should add there's not so much battle though, more fleeing and obsessing over decomposing horses. Good, but I still prefer his later Georgics.
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Jul 31, 2007 07:08
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Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis It was insane and amazing.
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Jul 31, 2007 07:35
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Just finished The Paths We choose by Sully Erna (the lead singer of Godsmack. It's his autobiography, and it was really good. It was not your usual rock-autobiography, it dealt more with his life growing up, and what shaped him to be the musician he is. I also really liked it because I'm from around the same area of Mass as Sully, so alot of the locations in the book were fimiliar to me. right before that I read Scar tissue by Anthony Kedis (lead singer of The Red Hot chili Peppers). which was also a good read. Now I need a new book. 
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Jul 31, 2007 15:12
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Farenheit 451 - I always saw it get thrown around when people bring up 1984, so I decided to read it. Overall, I felt that it was pretty disappointing, the messages it gave were positive and I agreed with them, but the presentation was shoddy and was hard to follow. It was an extremely fast read and the story kept me engrossed, but sometimes I had to stop and figure out what just happened because major plot happenings seemed to jump at me out of nowhere and super quickly. I'm glad I read it, but I don't know if I'll be reading it again.
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Jul 31, 2007 23:17
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Finished Fowles' The Magus a couple of days ago. I fully enjoyed all of the mystery and intrigue surrounding the story. It was a book that I wanted to keep going on and keep getting more and more absurd just to see how Fowles would get us out of it.
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Jul 31, 2007 23:34
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Tommah posted:Farenheit 451 I could have done without the robot dog but I loved the family in the TV.
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Jul 31, 2007 23:48
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perceptual_set posted:I could have done without the robot dog but I loved the family in the TV. Yeah, I liked the story and the majority of what went on. It was just the actual writing that disappointed me the most. The Parlor was my favorite thing about the book. It was written in 1953, so the idea that people would become engrossed in fictional reality television shows that Bradbury had remarkable insight into the future. He was dead on.
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Aug 1, 2007 00:56
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