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Finished The Name of the Wind last night and really enjoyed it. Just started Underworld by Don DeLillo, thanks to a recommendation in the recent DeLillo thread. Seems pretty interesting so far, based on the prologue.
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Aug 1, 2007 16:29
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Battle Royale by Koushun Takami - Amazing book. I'm just sad that it is over and wish it didn't end.
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Aug 1, 2007 21:59
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Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth. A life-changing experience, as with all his books.
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Aug 2, 2007 05:38
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Got through Plato's Republic and went on to read Sartre's Nausea as a refresher afterwards. I also snuck in Howl and a few other Ginsberg poems in the middle  . I'd never read Republic in its entirety before, so while the ideas weren't all new, it was still enjoyable, although some of it of course felt dated. Also, the sections on restricting poetry and such bored me to tears. But then parts were still rather beautifully illustrated, especially towards the end when things became most generalized.Sartre on the other hand was completely excellent. I had only read essays by him previously, and Nausea was pretty much what I was expecting for a philosophical novel. His presentation was surprisingly vivid. Loved the constant biological imagery and the moments of epiphany. Going to start reading Camus' The Fall now for part two of my annual existentialist binge, since I've already read the Plague and the Stranger previously. 
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Aug 2, 2007 09:01
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The Game by Neil Strauss. I think I finished it in about 5 days, which is pretty quick for me considering this was like the second book I've read by choice in around 3 years. It was hilarious.
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Aug 2, 2007 09:54
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I just finished A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings I'm not about half way through A Storm of Swords. I just want to say thanks to this forum for introducing me to this series. I had never heard of these books/Author/series as i don't read much SciFi. I have been in-thralled by these books.
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Aug 2, 2007 13:23
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Just this minute finished No Dominion by Charlie Huston. Interesting to read about vampires (vampyres) which are not caught up in the cliches I hate, and the philosophies of each clan were well thought out, but christ did it loose momentum towards the end. Flatest ending ever I swear.
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Aug 2, 2007 16:33
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Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks by Christopher Brookmyre. Very impressed with this, which he described at a talk last year as "my take on the world of psychics and the paranormal...and how it's all a lot of bollocks". I've noticed that his writing's matured over the last two books, he doesn't seem to be forcing the humour as much as he was previously.
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Aug 2, 2007 16:46
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I just finished reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Awesome in all senses. I am starting now Red Seas Under Red Skies, the continuation of The Lies of Locke Lamora.
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Aug 2, 2007 21:39
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Finished The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was predictably great. Sherlock Holmes and Watson are probably two of the greatest characters ever written. (By Arthur Conan Doyle, that is. I still don't quite see how everyone is just "allowed" to write their own fan fiction episodes in Holmes' life.)
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Aug 3, 2007 04:12
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Jug Jug posted:Got through Plato's Republic and went on to read Sartre's Nausea as a refresher afterwards. I also snuck in Howl and a few other Ginsberg poems in the middle Your reading is like mine, only in a different order! I read Republic several years ago and really enjoyed it, despite the fact that it was probably too difficult for me at the time. Nausea is easily one of my favourite novels, I just reread it in preparation for writing an essay on it (and Herzog  ). Sartre is a surprisingly good novelist. People look at me strangely when I tell them it's funny, however:Antoine Roquentin posted:"Cheese," I say heroically. For some reason, this quote always makes me laugh (yeah, it needs the context of that idiotic Autodidact, sorry). Oh, and I've also read The Outsider and The Plague, but Camus is proving very difficult for me to get into. Let me know how you go with The Fall, I want to know if I should read it or give The Plague a second chance. Sounds pretty good though.
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Aug 3, 2007 12:14
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Excuse the long-rear end review. The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins) - I have a real weakness for bloated, Victorian prose - and it doesn't get more bloated than serialized Victorian prose - so The Woman in White was promising to be a joy to read. Once you get over the fact that Collins, Dickens and their contemporaries were basically writing the Dragon Ball Zs of their time, it's easy to overlook that they describe every. pointless. thing. But, prose like this can become tedious if the story completely falls apart. That being said, The Woman in White is one of the books I finished only because I made it to the point where quitting would have been a bigger waste of my time. Collins opens the book promising to tell the story as a relay race: a character will tell their part of the story, and so on, in chronological order. This happens until a point, then Collins gets a little too comfortable, lingering on single characters for far too long - the last part of the book is especially guilty of this, being told almost completely by one character. Collins keeps the most interesting protagonist of the story, Marian Halcombe, out of the action by her own choosing - though the reason is really Collins' crazy sexism. Allow me to give you some examples: Women are constantly passing out, falling unconscious, and getting sick all because of their overwhelming emotions. The headstrong, smart, female character is ugly, and constantly laments the fact that she is a woman. This same character also recovers from an extreme emotional upset by doing housework. The hero's love interest is basically treated like a giant infant and all information is kept from her so she doesn't develop emotion-based AIDS or something like that. It's cute and silly at first, but the sexism eventually becomes tiresome. The last third of the book really starts to sink when Collins allows the character of Walter Hartright to become the hero - and he's the most proper Victorian hero the world has ever seen. There are going to be some spoilers ahead, so skip the next paragraph is you really want to read the book (DON'T): Every choice Walter makes is the lamest, wussiest action possible. Towards the end of the book, he has the chance to destroy a man who has ruined the lives of others, but instead lets him escape because it's the "proper" thing to do. And so he doesn't have to get his hands dirty, the universe disposes of his enemies for him: one dies by accident in a fire, and the other is murdered by strangers. Another character dies by natural causes at the end of the book, just so Walter can have an estate and money. It's all very artificial, and you can tell that Collins was reacting to the "novels are the violent video games of the mid-19th century crowd" with this work. Walter doesn't have to commit a single immoral action to save the day. The ultimate slap in the face for the reader in The Woman in White is the reveal of a major plot point. A character trying to hide a secret is the antagonist, and you spend about 500 pages wondering just what the heck the secret could possibly be. When it's revealed, the secret is the most anticlimactic chunk of poo in the entire book - but, then again, every reveal in The Woman in White is nearly as disappointing. Andrew Lloyd Webber recently made a musical out of this story, changing all of the boring plot points to make them much more interesting. I only wish that Collins would have had the same concerns.
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Aug 3, 2007 19:04
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kelmaon posted:Oh, and I've also read The Outsider and The Plague, but Camus is proving very difficult for me to get into. Let me know how you go with The Fall, I want to know if I should read it or give The Plague a second chance. Sounds pretty good though. For what it's worth, I really loved The Plague, but apart from a few moments, The Fall didn't really grab me. I do need to re-read both of them, however, as it's been a couple of years.
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Aug 3, 2007 20:37
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kelmaon posted:Your reading is like mine, only in a different order! Hey philosophical novel buddy  .I've already gotten about halfway through The Fall because it's a really, really easy read, possibly due to the long monologue style. Honestly I have to say it doesn't compare either to Sartre or to Stranger/Plague, although those might be tinged positively by memory. I'll post if it redeems itself, but so far I'll have to agree with Kapowski and say to just go with the tried and true Camus. I liked The Stranger the best personally. Also, I loved that quotation and laughed for a minute or two when I read it. A good absurdist should always be funny. But oh, Self-taught Man  . I've never heard of Herzog, though. If you found it very interesting, could you summarize? I'm on the lookout for my next plan of attack.
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Aug 3, 2007 22:52
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Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters novel, an aging art critics vitriolic lashing-out at Austrian culture. By the end of the book he's outlined some fairly pat psychological grounds for the obsessive hate, but its hard not to read it as a wider metaphor for cultural disillusionment in post-war Austria; the monologue is too twisted and convoluted to believe he'd just give you the key to it at the end... Ah well, I give it one puzzled, admiring shrug.
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Aug 3, 2007 22:58
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Jug Jug posted:Hey philosophical novel buddy  camus is amazing. have you read his short stories? i'd recommend them very much so: Exile and the Kingdomalso, if you have not read any Simone de Beauvoir, I'd say that you should read some of her work. I just finished her book Ethics of Ambiguity. Shmazing stuff
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Aug 4, 2007 02:55
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Just finished Yes Man by Danny Wallace. Absolutely brilliant novel about a guy who decides to say Yes to every opportunity and offer that he gets, and what effect this has on him. Often books with premises like this are written badly, but his style was perfect - one of the easiest books to read that I've ever come across, despite a rather unfamiliar vocabulary(ok, well not so unfamiliar, as I am aware of all the British slang used, but strange to read it) the book flows extremely well. I also think it is a much more life changing book than regular philosophy. It has interested me in trying out this "yes" thing. I wonder where it will take me if I do decide to give it a shot. I'd suggest it to everyone, whether you only read fantasy or only read non-fiction. It is also absolutely hilarious so if you're just looking for a very funny book, it fits that as well. Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Yes-Man-Danny-Wallace/dp/1416918345/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-0048178-1169462?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186192791&sr=8-1 So it looks like I'll have to read Camus and Sartre then you guys. So stranger is the best to start with for that "genre" of philosophy novels?
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Aug 4, 2007 03:02
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I have just finished Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francoise Rabelais. This book is about the two giants Gargantua and his son Pantagruel and their adventures with their friends Panurge, Gymnast and others. The book is generally five books in one, beginning with Gargantua's birth and ending with Panurge's quest for the Holy Bottle. I recommend the translation by Burton Raffel, since the book is quite vulgar (the book was written in the 16th century, and even in Rabelais' time the book was too vulgar for peoples' tastes), Burton Raffel translates the book word-for-word, without leaving anything-tasteless or otherwise-out. This book is hilarious, interesting and awesome. I guess I could describe the genre of this book as adventure. If you need more information, there is an entry for the book on Wikipedia.
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Aug 4, 2007 04:20
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Well, just finished The Fall. Like I said, it was a very easy read, so even if you have some doubts reading it won't set you back too far. That said, I did begin to enjoy it a little more. Especially coming to Jesus, his time as a prisoner-pope, and the  ending. So it was well worth the time. It seemed to be a combination of Notes from the Underground and the Trial, which I'd bet would make a decent essay, now that I think about it. Camus is definitely one of my favorite authors anyway, so there's that regardless. He also seems to be more tenacious about the idea of death and suicide than Sartre, and it gives the impression at least that he pulls it off a little better. Also, I wish I took French in high school. fancy pantz posted:
I haven't, but I need to. I see the Myth of Sisyphus referenced all over the place, so I need to get a collection of them apparently. On the other hand, I think I'll squeeze in one more piece of "classic" lit before I head off to school while I can give it effort and save those essays for afterwards. Everybody wins. QVT posted:So it looks like I'll have to read Camus and Sartre then you guys. So stranger is the best to start with for that "genre" of philosophy novels?
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Aug 4, 2007 10:03
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bobservo posted:The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins) You are a brave, brave man. Rather like Twain's famous skewering review of Fenimore Cooper, many authors have written of the pain and tedium of reading Wilkie Collins. The Moonstone in particular. You should look them up, they may help you recover  As for Camus, I loved The Stranger and The Plague. His essays are a bit harder to get through, but The Myth of Sisyphus is a good start.
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Aug 4, 2007 13:59
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fancy pantz posted:
Exile and the Kingdom is really great, particularly that one about the failed strike. Must read that one again too!
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Aug 4, 2007 18:06
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I just finished Vonnegut's immortal classic Cat's Cradle. It's one of the best books I've ever read, presenting some interesting, though extremely cynical, takes on humanity, an odd cast of characters, and one of the most out-of-left-field endings I've ever read. It's a quick read too. In short, read this book now.
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Aug 5, 2007 01:34
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I just finished The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and I'm an emotional wreck right now. Holy poo poo, what a tragic story. I knew it was a sad story from the beginning and I was concerned that I didn't care enough about the characters to have the events give me any emotional impact. At the first of a series of blows to the heart I was quickly proven wrong. Amazing story. Read it.
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Aug 5, 2007 02:56
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perceptual_set posted:I just finished The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and I'm an emotional wreck right now. Holy poo poo, what a tragic story. I knew it was a sad story from the beginning and I was concerned that I didn't care enough about the characters to have the events give me any emotional impact. At the first of a series of blows to the heart I was quickly proven wrong. Amazing story. Read it. Yeah, I put it down the same way. Really hits hard that one. It really burns my rear end seeing people whipping through book after book, when I've been stuck on Infinite Jest for like a MONTH now. It should really count as like, 5.
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Aug 5, 2007 03:23
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Mack the Knife posted:You are a brave, brave man. Rather like Twain's famous skewering review of Fenimore Cooper, many authors have written of the pain and tedium of reading Wilkie Collins. The Moonstone in particular. You should look them up, they may help you recover Can you provide me with some links, sir 
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Aug 5, 2007 03:43
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The Demolished Man. It was pretty entertaining. I saw it at the top of sci-fi critics' lists so I figured whatever. It's pretty much like a big crime story with a twist at the end a la Hitchcock. It's not profound stuff or anything and good for a day's reading. It's an old binding too that's got like that old psychedelic kind of artwork that you don't see anymore.
Noby Goatse Boy fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Aug 5, 2007 |
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Aug 5, 2007 04:54
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I just finished Rant by Chuck Palahniuk. It was the first thing aside from Guts that I've read by Palahniuk. I really liked it, however I thought the ending was a little extravagant.
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Aug 5, 2007 09:06
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TantiaTope posted:I am starting now Red Seas Under Red Skies, the continuation of The Lies of Locke Lamora. I just finished this. I think I actually enjoyed it more than The Lies of Locke Lamora, it felt a bit more together - Lies was kind of all over the place, while this one is still all over the place, but not as much :P
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Aug 5, 2007 14:14
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Just finished The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Not a bad book, not great either. I think more than anything it left me feeling a bit depressed and moody. Ah well.
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Aug 6, 2007 03:29
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I read A Confederacy of Dunces over the weekend. It's pretty entertaining for the most part, though Ignatius is such an irredeemable rear end in a top hat sometimes, it gets irritating. At the moment I'm reading an older Gene Wolfe book I haven't read yet: Castleview
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Aug 6, 2007 18:12
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I just finished: Soon I Will Be Invincible - It was a campy superhero novel, and I loved it for it. Really played upon a lot (if not all) of the superhero tropes while at the same time managing to treat all the characters like real people. Not very deep, but a lot of fun. The Road - Amazing, beautiful, haunting. Nothing I can say that hasn't been said here before. All I wonder is who is going to play them in the movie. The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana - Graham Greene writes with such nuance, easy, and...I don't know--fluidity of prose...he puts you wherever he is. Makes you feel Mexico, or Havana, or Vietnam, or where-ever else. he's quickly becoming my favorite writer. I'm probably going to read The Power and the Glory next. Though, I may re-read some of the stories in Jim Shepard's Love and Hydrogen, which are some of the best most convincing and heartbreaking short stories I've ever read. Or Dostoevsky's White Nights. Who knows.
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Aug 6, 2007 21:19
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Just finished Perdido Street Station. As a steampunk fan I liked it, though the first two hundred pages or so were pretty slow. Also the world was so incredibly bizarre that I had some trouble connecting to it. I'm interested to see more, but a lot of times it felt weird just for the sake of being weird and didn't really fit together.
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Aug 6, 2007 21:52
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Just finished Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich. It's about the job search in white collar/corporate America. Just as sobering as Nickel and Dimed, just a different set of problems and challenges. Made me question a lot of things about corporate America and wonder why people sacrifice and destroy their lives for it.
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Aug 7, 2007 02:12
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Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace He shoulda called this Infinite "Text". Holy cow, I needed *2* bookmarks, one for the main text and one for the footnotes! And that's not because it's a pain flipping back and forth a lot (there are almost 400 footnotes), it's because some of the footnotes are too long to comfortably read in a single sitting! And some have footnotes of their own! This isn't so much a book you read, as one you conquer. I really think Wallace does his best to make it difficult to read, in many ways. From 3 page runon sentences to 5 page paragraphs, to differing writing styles, 20 page footnotes with footnotes of their own, and much more. It gets really irritating in places, but screw you Wallace I'm not giving up! I'll finish this monstrosity! One month later... *thump* I'm exhausted, but I finished. Why, I'll never know, because the book ended so abruptly you could really have just stopped anywhere and it would have made just as much sense. Nothing came together, nothing was tied up, nothing was explained. It just ended with a scene that could have been anywhere else in the book. My overall impression is that Wallace made a (long as hell, of course) list of literary and writing devices, and had as a goal the use of all of them. It's also pretty clear he wanted to make this novel as difficult to read as possible. All this made it incredibly sterile, and smothered what little story there was. If this is what Wallace is normally like, well, all I can say is life's too loving short. But at least my bookworm penis is now so long NASA just launched a space probe to look for the tip. 
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Aug 7, 2007 02:31
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I found Water For Elephants in the cafeteria at work, so I read it over the course of a few lunch breaks. Even though I have always enjoyed reading novels about Carnivals and Circus', I've been avoiding this book because of the soccer mom love that it is receiving. It was a quick read and surprisingly entertaining. The romance scenes were laughable, with phrases like "Jacob, I want your stuff inside me" urging me to put the book down. Fortunately, those scenes were limited and the other parts of the book, involving the carnival life were rather interesting.
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Aug 7, 2007 03:27
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Just finished Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Although he can sometimes get rather cantankerous in tone, it's a nice read of how stuff works at the genetic level.  Whenever he wants to illustrate an evolutionary concept, he uses fun and interesting examples, which is a bonus. It's an easy read, but you have to like his style.
Psychosomatic Tumor fucked around with this message at 14:15 on Aug 7, 2007 |
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Aug 7, 2007 13:44
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Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. A really crappy book that reeks of trying too hard. Ellis obviously cataloged a whole pile of net absurdities and then mapped them each out as one chapter of his book. That's fine if there's a point to all of the absurdity (Jerry Stahl can pull this type of thing off), but I got the impression that Ellis was just trying to impress/disgust with what was actually pretty mundane and stupid stuff. It also features a few Ellis standards, for anybody who has read his comic book work: - the cool and stand-offish anti-hero who smokes (how so very edgy) - the goth girl assistant who is supposed to represent some sort of riot grrrl but is written more as a whack-off fantasy - sexually corrupt politicians ahoy In many places, it reads much more like something you'd expect from Garth Ennis rather than Warren Ellis too. It's just a catalog of sexual absurdity that doesn't go anywhere or do anything. At least Ennis isn't taking himself seriously though. In places and theme, it sometimes reminded me of Chuck Palahniuk (with the trivial minutiae), Jerry Stahl (with the catalog of extremes), and the alternate insane history of James Ellroy (particularly from American Tabloid). That said, all three of these authors are in a league way beyond Ellis, at least as far as this book is concerned. Very disappointing. I think Ellis could do so much better. It also closes with the extremely tiresome and cringe inducing typical rantings of Ellis where he tries to paint himself as some sort of artist martyr. *** Side note -- I really enjoy UK writers as a rule, but my advice to UK writers is that if you set your story in America, be sure to have an American editor check your book for UK slang and vernacular coming from your American characters. It's really jarring when a guy who is supposed to be from Kentucky starts looking for "a spanner to fix my lorry". In Crooked Little Vein, there was a guy who is supposed to be from Chicago talking about a "carport". That would be a parkade to a guy from Chicago. It's a little thing, but that's what editors are supposed to be for. InfiniteZero fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Aug 7, 2007 |
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Aug 7, 2007 16:12
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InfiniteZero posted:Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis. I was considering reading this book, but you just turned me right off to it. I like Ellis, but he's a one-trick pony. Transmetropolitan was loving awesome, but everything else he's done seems to be "Transmet Lite." I gave up after reading a couple more major series' from him. Even Desolation Jones is basically "What if Spider Jerusalem was a secret agent?"
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Aug 7, 2007 17:30
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i just finished reading Insomnia by Stephen King. great book, offers insight on becoming old and losing sleep, you get attached to the characters, he really did a good job giving them life. The only bad part about this book is that it's over. 
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Aug 7, 2007 18:46
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Zero Karizma posted:I was considering reading this book, but you just turned me right off to it. I like Ellis, but he's a one-trick pony. Transmetropolitan was loving awesome, but everything else he's done seems to be "Transmet Lite." I gave up after reading a couple more major series' from him. Even Desolation Jones is basically "What if Spider Jerusalem was a secret agent?" It is a lot like Transmet. It reminded me of those single issue Transmet issues where different artists drew a one page mini-tale(like the dolphin people and whatnot). It was all over the place and great when good and rolleyes when bad. I liked it way more than Desolation Jones though. Heh, Hitler porn lol. EDIT- Just finished another novel by a comic book writer, The Devil You Know by Mike Carey. This was a fantastic murder mystery/haunting/hard boiled dick novel. The premise is an exorcist in a version of our world right now except for the minor detail of the dead returning to roost. Our (anti-)hero has had a bad experience and is out of the game until a a job he cannot refuse comes along. Succubi, mute ghosts, European pimps and autistic museum directors abound. A splendid new world and great writing made this a pleasure to read and the almost certain future books in the setting are going to be bought the second they come out. Next up is First Among Sequels the newest Thursday Next novel by Jasper Fforde and Happy Ending by Jim Norton.
CrimsonGhost fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Aug 8, 2007 |
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Aug 7, 2007 22:20
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