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I just finished Burmese Days by George Orwell. It took me a little while to really get into, but after the first 70 pages I flew through the rest. I can't quite say why, but I kept seeing parallels between it and The Razor's Edge by Maugham. Almost as if Flory is a sort of beaten-down, imperfect Larry Darrell. I generally liked it, but found the conversations with the Indian doctor to be a little heavy-handed and clumsy in espousing Orwell's opinions. Next up is Gravity's Rainbow.
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Oct 24, 2007 23:53
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The Various by Steve Augarde. Interesting, though I'm not entirely sure I understood the ending. Might become clearer when I get the time to read the sequel.
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Oct 25, 2007 05:17
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Neverwhere by Neal Gaiman. I really liked the story, even with the slightly predictable ending. My first experience reading Gaiman outside of the Sandman world, and I'm definitely satisfied. I'll probably pick up American Gods at one point. Moving on to All Tomorrow's Parties by Gibson.
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Oct 25, 2007 07:03
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Testaments Betrayed by Milan Kundera. A novel-length series of connected essays about novels. Incredibly precise and balanced criticisms and analogies, very intelligent analysis, and made me go out today and buy some Hemingway and Amerika by Kafka, which I'm now reading alongside Testaments... Pretty heavy going and incredibly scholarly, but very, very good, and made me see some writers and novels in a new light.
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Oct 25, 2007 21:55
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Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk This book was so loving great. It more than made up for the half-disappointment Haunted was. To me, it was like Chuck Palahniuk and Neil Gaiman had a baby or something. So great. A reporter investigating Sudden Infant Death Syndrome discovers a book of poems at each of the homes involved and finds that a specific poem has the power to kill. He meets some really strange Wiccans and a woman who also knows about the secret poem and they travel the country destroying each copy of the book in circulation. It was so satisfying and, and... and - God, I loved it.
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Oct 25, 2007 22:03
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Awakenings by Oliver Sacks. Anecdotes of a ward full of post-encephalitic patients with symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Apart from the stories themselves he talks about what a doctor needs to be towards a patient, the possibility of a "romantic science" and how the patients themselves perceive the disease. I must say, after reading it, I feel for you Parkinsonians.   
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Oct 26, 2007 16:10
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perceptual_set posted:Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk Have you read Choke? Myself, I enjoyed Haunted quite a bit. I felt that the 'reality' parts between the stories were dull, contrived, and classic Pahluniak-condescension, but the stories were some of the better shorts I've read in some time. My wife enjoyed it a lot too, so I picked up Choke for her, last night, on a whim. And to answer the thread: I just finished World War Z. Brooks' writing is a bit weak, but there were some real shining moments. Especially the recounts of the dog trainers, and how the guy never used to be a lover of dogs until he witnessed the puppies starving to death in the pet store next door, but felt helpless to do anything. I think it would have also benefited from more tie-ins between the characters. Perhaps focus the retelling accounts, or, visit the core characters more often. The middle of the book seemed to drag for me, like "This is this guy's account, and he's in China. Now this guy, he's in Jersey," and they just didn't vary enough for me. Still worth a read, though, and I'm looking forward to the film. I picked up The Road by Cormac McCarthy (and immediately tore off the "Oprah's Book Club" sticker). It looks good, any goons read this one?
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Oct 26, 2007 18:31
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idhindsight posted:I picked up The Road by Cormac McCarthy (and immediately tore off the "Oprah's Book Club" sticker). It looks good, any goons read this one? Tons of goons have. It's fantastic. I hope it's a jumping off point for you for more McCarthy like it was for me.
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Oct 26, 2007 19:55
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idhindsight posted:Have you read Choke? Myself, I enjoyed Haunted quite a bit. I felt that the 'reality' parts between the stories were dull, contrived, and classic Pahluniak-condescension, but the stories were some of the better shorts I've read in some time. I have! If you look back in my posts in this thread you'll see my reviews for both books, but only if you're bored - they aren't very exciting reviews. In fact, that sentence about Haunted you wrote was my sole complaint, so technically we completely agree. I loved the stories and thought that the book would have been better as marketed as just a collection of short stories without the back story. Choke was very entertaining and I look forward to the film but Lullaby and Survivor have been my favorites, so far. Rant is sitting in my "To Be Read" pile. I'm currently reading World War Z by Brooks (for Halloween and because it's finally in paperback), The God Delusion by Dawkins and The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans.
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Oct 26, 2007 20:35
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perceptual_set posted:I loved the stories and thought that the book would have been better as marketed as just a collection of short stories without the back story. It's almost like he was afraid to just release a book of short stories because they don't sell well (I have no idea why, I adore short story collections). But the "glue" had its moments. "I fainted, and you ate my rear end?" was loving hilarious.
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Oct 26, 2007 21:06
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One thing I completely forgot to mention about Lullaby was that in the story the characters burn down a bookstore called The Book Barn, which I found amusing.
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Oct 26, 2007 21:38
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YancyDCjew posted:Tons of goons have. It's fantastic. I hope it's a jumping off point for you for more McCarthy like it was for me. In a McCarthy vein I just finished No Country for Old Men in anticipation of the Coen Brothers film. Finished Cat's Cradle today as well Clarence Darrow fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Oct 28, 2007 |
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Oct 27, 2007 04:24
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We by Vevgeny Zamyatin. I finally got around to reading this after hearing about for years as the 'inspiration' for Nineteen Eighty Four. Overall I'm glad I read it, but I was very much underwhelmed by it. The prose is minimalist and very obtuse, written in the style of a journal. Very little attention is given to describing significant characters and events.
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Oct 27, 2007 07:05
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Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Kant. *cue crazy laugh* Oh well, at least it wasn't the Critique of Pure Reason...
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Oct 27, 2007 07:52
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The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass & The Beat Hotel by Barry Miles. The Tin Drum was an excellent read, but the quality kind of varied chapter to chapter, and the ending was a letdown. It's worth reading though for books 1 & 2 alone. Similarly the 2nd half of The Beat Hotel didn't interest me as much as the 1st. William S. Burroughs creating cut-ups and becoming a scientologist just didn't read as well as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso drunkenly harassing old surrealists. (As an aside, does anyone have an opinion if Burroughs cut-up novels are worth the effort of reading?)
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Oct 27, 2007 14:54
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WrestleCrap: The Very Worst of Professional Wrestling by Randy Baer and R.D. Reynolds. Basically a compendium of bad gimmicks wrestlers have been saddled with, and when good ideas go bad. Having been a fan of the website forever and a day, I was delighted when this book turned up as one of the Wowio freebies, and I blitzed through it in the space of a day. It's a funny book, even if you're only vaguely familiar with pro wrestling (the book explains the "insider" terms), but I have to say the website entries are that much funnier. Maybe the extra pictures sell it better.
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Oct 27, 2007 16:53
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I Am America (And so can you), Stephen Colbert Good, fast, and fun read. I've seen people complain it's not as topical as his tv show, and I disagree. It still mocks the same things his show does, but in a broader sense.
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Oct 27, 2007 19:13
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SLAUGHTERCLES posted:(As an aside, does anyone have an opinion if Burroughs cut-up novels are worth the effort of reading?) Naked Lunch yes, the other ones no, probably not. I've had The Ticket that Exploded sitting on my shelf for the last three years, and I've really tried with it, but it's just a mess. Fragments of good stories appear and disappear, but it's really not worth the effort unless you love being very frustrated, or are able to read while high. You could try The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard, which remains readable on a chapter-by-chapter basis, and can be read in any order, but even that's hard. It's an interesting experiment, but if you want something coherant out of it, it aint going to happen. Some of his recorded stuff is good though, it's worth hunting that down, though more on a by-song basis as the albums are patchy. The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, Ah-Pook the Destroyer and Seven Souls are all interesting, and Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups is superb if you want an overview of how he and Brion Gysin refined the latter's technique. There's a program called Cut 'n' Mix, that's free to download, and lets you cut up texts in various ways, which is quite a lot of fun to play around with, and it creates some pretty amazing imagery from time to time. RobertKerans fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Oct 27, 2007 |
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Oct 27, 2007 22:20
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I just finished Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, and I thought it was a decent attempt at ontology through phenomenology, but he claims too much about the primordial existence of the Dasein.
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Oct 27, 2007 22:34
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The Flying Comma posted:Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics by Kant. *cue crazy laugh* Oh well, at least it wasn't the Critique of Pure Reason... Well I just started Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals and find it manageable so far, but anything is manageable after reading Aquinas. As a Johnnie I have to read it. What's your excuse?
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Oct 28, 2007 00:04
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America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction. Like the Daily Show, I found this very hit and miss. Parts of it were riotously funny, while others were just groanworthy or evoked absolutely no feeling or opinion whatsoever. Works much better when it's being kind of subtle than when it's having Thomas Jefferson talk about his bitches. I'd read I Am America, but honestly Colbert's shtick has already gotten a little old on me.
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Oct 28, 2007 18:40
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Spook Country By William Gibson. This was enjoyable enough, especially if you're a Gibson fan. The technology elements are more interesting than those in Pattern Recognition. Locative annotation/art and augmented realities are a lot cooler concepts, in my opinion, than viral marketing. However, the bad guys seem a little too inept, and the good guys a little too talented to create any great feeling of tension or suspense, but that's not necessarily bad, since in the end, the story is about an ex-CIA operative pranking war profiteers, and that is satisfying in light of modern events.
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Oct 28, 2007 20:07
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The Mind Of A Mnemonist by A.R. Luria. I tried to finish it in one session but I started reading it at night and got tired.  Most of the time the experiences of the patient described were quite funny, although sometimes they were just sad. Good if you want a quick read (my version is approximately 100 pages, and not very big ones at that) about a remarkable person.
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Oct 28, 2007 21:36
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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I am a late arriver to this book mainly because it's such a cliché American novel. Don't get me wrong, it was a good book, but it's one of those books you'd have crammed down your throat in a class. So I stayed the gently caress away from it. Until now. I read it and I was quite pleased with the book itself. I came into it think that it'd suck but it turned out a pleasant surprise and definitely one of my favorite pieces of American Literature.
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Oct 28, 2007 21:52
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I just finished The Time Travelers Wife and like other goons I thought it was a great book. I was skeptical at first because it seemed more like a "chick book" and not a genre I usually read, but I really enjoyed it. Right before that I read The gently caress up by Arthur Nersesian which was a hilarious page turner. It's a story about a guy who's life just goes to poo poo, and he never really recovers, but it is very humorous and a great read, highly recommend it. Not sure what to read next, I think I'm gonna go with The Road. I need to start keeping a list of books I want to read, because I tend to forget. EDIT: Also, to anyone else who's read The Time Travelers Wife, do you get the feeling that the new NBC show "Journey Man" is loosely based off this book, or is it just me?
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Oct 29, 2007 00:37
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wolf_man posted:EDIT: Also, to anyone else who's read The Time Travelers Wife, do you get the feeling that the new NBC show "Journey Man" is loosely based off this book, or is it just me? I think it steals some of the less amazing aspects of the book. Overall I think the show is poo poo and don't pay it much attention. I'm looking forward to the movie that is currently in production. If you want to read the book before it has OMG NOW ITS A MOVIE stickers all over it, pick it up in the next few months before the hype starts.
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Oct 29, 2007 01:17
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wolf_man posted:I need to start keeping a list of books I want to read, because I tend to forget. I've just started doing this. It's actually quite useful. I tried to make a list of 35 books I wanted to read before 35. I couldn't think of any titles. But I will.
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Oct 29, 2007 01:59
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Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer. Summary for those who skip my verbal diarrhea: Interesting book, but certainly not without flaws. Mixed feelings about this one - I liked it, but at the same time, I wish Mailer's editor or the publisher had reined him in a bit. I poked around on the Net and read a few reviews of the book that were written back when it came out (1983) and I have to agree with a bit of the negative commentary, although I wouldn't call it a total disaster. To be sure, it's an interesting book - most of the story takes place with the protagonist Menenhetet telling the story of his four lives to the Pharaoh Ramses IX - with a fair amount of detail about Egyptian religious practices, warfare and the like mixed in. Mailer's prose and imagery as well as his obviously vast amount of research serves the book well in this regard, so I can't say I found it dragged much, aside from the parts I mention below. Unfortunately, at the same time, there's a ridiculous amount of cringe-worthy sex scenes throughout. I'm not prudish by any means, but dammit, I want to read a historical novel, not what one reviewer termed "Egyptian porn". I can't decide if Mailer was actually trying to make them "sexy" or "deep" or if he just said "gently caress it, I'm going for the laughs" by the end of the book. I don't have the book handy but I can't imagine anyone rattling off this huge list of adjectives to the person they're having sex with - as with the several scenes involving Menenhetet loving Ramses II's wife Nefertiri. Not to mention, the apparent obsession with rear end-raping throughout - Menenhetet gets jumped by Ramses II not once but twice in the course of the book, among other things. I also read David Attenborough's fantastic book Life In The Undergrowth. I picked this one up based on a mention in one GBS thread or another (probably a "Pictures of Cool Bugs" thread or something) and I absolutely loved it - the photos are gorgeous and there's an incredible wealth of information about insects and other invertebrates, their roles in our world and how they go about their lives. I knew about some of the things Attenborough talks about, but he describes some other truly mind-blowing stuff like the huge Venezuelan centipedes that deliberately hunt and eat bats, for instance. Encryptic fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Oct 29, 2007 |
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Oct 29, 2007 17:17
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Knocked off some shorter ones that were clogging the shelves: Voltaire's Candide, which everyone and their dog loves, and rightly so. I imagine folks on here have already said all there is to say about this so I'll let it go. Padded with a distracting number of footnotes for such a short book though (not to mention the junk Penguin stuff into the appendices). Next up was Goldberg: Variations by Gabriel Josipovici: Wealthy, insomniac landowner hires poverty-stricken writer to lull him to sleep with an original story of his each night; he fails and he's out. Goldberg Variations meets the 1001 Nights, more or less. The idea is gold and the writing's good (a touch underdone in parts), but somehow it just doesn't stick, not to mention ending on the most ill-advised and jarring high-note since the Lives of Others. Still, with the unstable, shifting narrative voice and great concept, I'd say it's worth a short for fans of Calvino. Someone in here recommended Elfriede Jelinek's Wonderful, Wonderful Times to me a while back, so I finally got off my rear end and read it. It centers around the lives of misfit teens nearing the end of high school in immediate post-war Austria. I wasn't so crazy about it as I was The Piano Teacher, but I still think she has the latent potential to become some sort of pulpy asphalt-Bernhard. She's got his sneering detached irony down, but the meat of this one seemed a little too static and heavy-handed (not that Jelinek's known for her lightness of touch). Having said that I'll probably read another at some point, just cause of that nagging feeling the moons'll align. Last up was Castle Keep by William Eastlake, which is Catch-22 in the army with the machismo turned up. Some good scenes undermined by contrary hero-worship. Not sure what he expected people to make of it; kinda like if Heller'd had Yossarian kicking Nazis in the throat as a rousing finale. Fine for the bus or whatnot, but I'm surprised the usually dependably finicky Dalkey Archive thought it was worth reviving.
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Oct 30, 2007 09:14
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Julian by Gore Vidal. A novelization of the life of Julian the Apostate, the 4th century Roman emperor that attempted to return Rome to Hellenism from the dark grip of Christianity. I think that this book is important, because while it is fiction, it does an excellent job at showing how exactly Christianity intermingled with Roman politics after Constantine. The book has three narators: Priscus, the atheist philosopher; Libanius, the pagan teacher; and Julian. Throughout the book, the characters are used at mouthpieces to show the historical justification against Christianity as explained by a 4th century Roman. Everything from young Julian asking his tutor "Did Jesus defeat the gods?" and not receiving a satisfactory answer to the older Julian explaining to a Christian that his god was nothing more than someone who wanted to reform Jewish society in his lifetime, and never intended to be deified. Julian was well veresed in Christian scripture, and the Christians were only able to stammer incomprehensible half answers to his challenges. Luckily, there are still alot of texts by Libanius and Julian which have survived. We already know that Julian is going to die, but he's an inspiring character, and I was rooting for him to change the world the whole time. Interestingly enough, Julian was very fair, and he didn't persecute the Christians. He instituted religious freedom, and hoped that the different factions of Christians would defeat each other. The last sentence of the book was in a note Libanius wrote to himself. I found it depressing. "With Julian, the light went, and now nothing remains but to let the darkness come, and hope for a new sun and another day, born of time's mystery and man's love of light." It's dated 381.
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Oct 30, 2007 15:36
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I generally read non-fiction travel narratives. The last book I finished was Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufmann. It was an amazing story of a teenager from Kansas who set off to attempt a "Big Year" in the 1970s (a Big Year is an informal competition to see as many different species of birds in North America within a single calendar year). He did this with practically no money; his final tally, including food and lodging was just over $1,000 for the entire year. He hitched over 50,000 miles, including a long trip all the way to Gamble, Alaska and back. Along the way, he developed a greater appreciation for ornithology than just tick-marks on a list, and he is now one of the most well-known ornithologists in America. Along the same genre, my next book is going to be Big Twitch by Sean Dooley which is a story about an Australian Big Year. Edit: If you're interested in more books like this, I would recommend The Big Year by Mark Obmascik, Chasing Birds Across Texas by Mark T. Adams, To See Every Bird on Earth by Dan Koeppel, and the father of all birdwatching narratives, Wild America (1955) by Roger Tory Peterson Gilgamesh fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Oct 30, 2007 |
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Oct 30, 2007 19:55
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Snake Agent by Liz Williams. This is the first in the Detective Inspector Chen series and a great freaking start it is. DI Chen is the chief liaison between the Singapore Three(a licensee designer city)police force and Hell. Sounds odd? Add to it he is the acting mortal in favor of a Celestial goddess and is married to woman that is quite a bit more than she seems. And so is her teakettle. At its heart this is a murder mystery. Add the liaison from Hell, Chen's counterpart, Zhu Irzh investigating the same murder and it gets all the more interesting. Fast paced, exciting, and most importantly- intelligent, this book was fantastic. Trips to Hell, demon-hunters, new technology and inferences to where big breakthroughs really come from play out amazingly. I have the next book in the series, The Demon in the City and plan to start it as soon as I finish a couple other half started books.
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Oct 30, 2007 20:16
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As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, and I really liked it, though not nearly as much as The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner is shaping up to be one of my favorite writers, and I plan on picking up Absalom, Absalom tomorrow. I also finished Factotum by Charles Bukowski. A very good read, much like his previous book Post Office was, but unlike Post Office, it didn't end so abruptly and leave me unsatisfied. I can't find Women anywhere, so I'll probably see if my library can order a copy of it from anywhere. If not, I know they have a copy of Ham on Rye. I'm about one act into Shakespeare's Macbeth, and I love, love, love it. Finally, I picked up The Road by Cormac McCarthy tonight after hearing so much about him.
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Oct 31, 2007 03:46
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YancyDCjew posted:edit: Mentioning magical realism reminded me of my favorite book of the past year or so. The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian. God gets pissed and unleashes a new flood, but this time he commissions an architect to make a floating children's hospital. Angels, miracles, love, and heartbreak. I don't think it's for everyone, but I was absolutely crushed that it ended, I really wanted it to keep going.
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Oct 31, 2007 16:20
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Just finished Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel, after my girlfriend insisted I read it. An interesting portrait of a lifelong depressive, but I can't believe how self-important she is. It almost put me off reading on when every third page was a rant about how no-one understood her pain, and only she felt this bad and only she would ever know such suffering. thankfully She does have a decent turn of phrase on occasion.
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Oct 31, 2007 20:25
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meanmikhail posted:Finally, I picked up The Road by Cormac McCarthy tonight after hearing so much about him. I finished this the other week. I knew what I was getting into what with the more or less constant and consistent praise-cum-warnings around here, but at the same time I hadn't read it so I didn't really know. It was the most crushingly depressing and oppressively bleak piece of writing I've ever had the pleasure of reading. I finished Nick Hornby's latest, Slam, today. It was good. Not without its flaws, but thoroughly engrossing and as usual, surprisingly heavy despite how accessible his writing is. I think I liked it more than How To Be Good or A Long Way Down, but it's still nowhere near High Fidelity or About A Boy.
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Oct 31, 2007 22:01
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Just finished the ninth book in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, and honestly, I'm glad he's dead. The series started out interesting and now it's just an endless procession of overly descriptive paragraphs resulting in little to no plot resolution. That being said, though, I can't stop reading it(the series). I've also finished Nightwatch, by Sergei Lukyanenko. It's a pretty good read with likable characters and a interesting story. The sequel, Daywatch, is turning out to be pretty good as well.
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Oct 31, 2007 23:02
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I just started reading through a translation of Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen because the Wikipedia plot summary sounded kinda interesting to me. Even for fantasy, this story is seriously weird. I'm probably missing a lot of Norse folklore details, but a lot of things seem implausible.  Interesting protagonist though, a grade A rear end in a top hat/loser. Wonder what his fate will be later on. 
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Nov 1, 2007 13:07
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The Ringworld Throne, Larry Niven Third in the Ringworld novels, and as much as I enjoyed the first two, I have to admit this one was pretty awful. I just couldn't get into it, and I just pushed through just to get it into the "read" pile. It might have helped if I'd read it while The Ringworld Engineers was fresher in my mind, because I think a lot of my dissatisfaction with the story stemmed from not remembering who most of the characters were, apart from Louis Wu & Co. Also, a good portion of the story was not Louis Wu's crazy hijinks. Also, there was entirely too much about "rishathra". The idea of divergent species of human shagging each other willy nilly just reeks of an adolescent furry's masturbatory fantasy. It was an interesting social aspect in Engineers, but in Throne it's brought up, and at length, in an obsessive fashion. It greatly strains my suspension of disbelief to think the first thing two groups of related humanoids would do upon meeting is have an orgy. *Every* time.
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Nov 1, 2007 14:57
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Just finished Ghostwritten by David Mitchell earlier. I enjoyed Cloud Atlas and Number9Dream, but this one didn't grab me as much. Mitchell is a great writer and I love how he switches from style to style for each person's story, though I didn't find all of them to be totally compelling.
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Nov 2, 2007 04:38
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