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House of Leaves I devoted a good month of reading to this book, reading it at home and on trains commuting to work, and my lunch breaks. Very interesting. I'm not joining the camp or the web forum, I don't think it was the best thing ever written. That said, it was enormously long (for my patience level) and I was interested to the very end, so I highly suggest picking it up (like anybody on TBB hasn't read it already). Now I need to finish Towing Jehova and Crimes against Logic
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Aug 26, 2008 04:38
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Haunted by Chucky P. This was the second time I started reading this book, having started a first time but losing interest after a few chapters. This time around I have to say I enjoyed it. By the end I got to know the characters well and the book threw a few curve balls here and there. Not my favorite by him, but I'd say it's one I rather if not just for the short stories. I'm starting on House of Leaves tonight, and then moving on to Rant.
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Aug 26, 2008 06:21
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Time Scout by Robert Asprin. Good start to a series I thought, and I have the rest queued up to read after I'm done with Valis. I was half expecting it to be lighthearted and jokey; this after all is the author of the Aazh/Skeeve Myth series and the Phule books. There was a certain amount of humour present, but mostly it was about a young prospective time scout (person who ventures into unexplored time-holes caused by an as-yet unexplained incident that damaged space time and which are now being exploited for vacationing purposes) who has severe daddy issues being acquainted with how much she really DOESN'T know about history and how brutal history can be when she breaks away and tries to go time scouting independently she ends up being beaten, gangraped and imprisoned in 16th century colonial africa. High points of the book are scholarly mostly, with one of the tutors explaining the religious significance of animal sacrifice in ancient Rome, the social snobbery of Victorian England and so forth. However, there's plenty of derring-do and causality-based pseudoscience to keep happy those who just want a fun Time Travel romp.
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Aug 26, 2008 14:52
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Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk. I enjoy Chuck's work - if I didn't, I wouldn't be on my 6th book of his in a couple months time. Each one sucks me in and I can't put the drat thing down. But at the same time, the more I read of him, the more flaws I discover. Lullaby from a concept perspective is fantastic. The whole 'song that can kill you' thing seems silly, but he makes you buy it, and fleshes out the implications surrounding it. It's a perfect thematic fit for the story he's trying to tell. The metaphors comparing the constant bombardment of pop culture that try to tell you how to think, to supposed magic spells that literally control your thoughts, are fairly well thought out. And this is the first book of his (that I've read at least) that really deals with ethics and right vs. wrong in terms of society as a whole, instead of just how things affect you as an individual. The normal Palahniuk quirks - stream of consciousness narration, random trivia, constant repetition, exaggeration - are all present, of course. I've accepted these as just parts of his style for the most part. There are some ridiculous points here and there where, for instance, the exaggeration is just too much, but my enjoyment of his books far outweighs these idiosyncrasies. My only real problem with this book (and some of his other books that are guilty of this as well) is the flimsy nature of the climax. It's not that the ending is bad - I don't expect or want everything to be wrapped up in a tight little bow - but that, thematically, we aren't much further from where we started. The climax consists of the resolution to an additional problem that arises during the course of the narrative, but this isn't really any kind of climax for the main thrust of the narrative. The nature of the book isn't one that can have a clean thematic wrap-up, but things could certainly go further than they do. I can't really say I know what Mr. Streator learned, or how he changed. This is not true of all Palahniuk's novels - for instance, Choke has an extremely satisfying thematic and emotional conclusion (and it isn't a deus ex machina ending where someone simply tells him what he should learn, like in Survivor - he actually sees growth in Denny and is able to relate it to things his mom tried to impart on him as a child). But like I said, enjoyable and generally insightful as always. Next up, Rant! Neo_Reloaded fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Aug 29, 2008 |
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Aug 29, 2008 18:22
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Neo_Reloaded posted:Lullaby from a concept perspective is fantastic. The whole 'song that can kill you' thing seems silly, but he makes you buy it, and fleshes out the implications surrounding it. To me, Chuck likes to create what looks like an urban legend, but make it about billion times sicker, disgusting, that can't possibly be true  etc. I bet he loves hearing "jesus christ you write some sick poo poo you twisted gently caress!"
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Aug 30, 2008 00:26
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The Assault on Reason | Al Gore Holy poo poo. Holy poo poo is the Bush administration hosed up. I mean, we all know it but God drat does this book absolutely scare the poo poo out of me. What the christing gently caress is wrong with us? If you're unfamiliar with the book, it's basically a laundry list of everything that is wrong with our country as a result of the Bush administration's actions. It's good but it'll scare you and piss you off endlessly.
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Aug 30, 2008 01:22
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The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger I loved this book. I typically have issues with longer books because I feel like the author has built something great up and then they rush to the end. Not so with this book. I love that he only visited his daughter in the future and not Clare. I love the picture of her sitting in her chair, at 82, waiting for him to come back to her. Her style is great, I loved how she didn't give everything away at once, the order that she gives away about his visits with Clare when she was younger didn't seem logical but it turns out it was and it just flowed so nicely. I also loved how she wrote differently for different times in their lives. Like when Clare is 6 and her version of the story is basically one big run on sentence of things you'd think a 6 year old would say/notice or when they are going through their miscarrages and how the writing changes from when they were just married. In short, I loved this book and it felt complete. And finished. And nor rushed. So good!!
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Aug 30, 2008 23:30
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I only wonder how butchered the movie is going to be.
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Aug 31, 2008 04:33
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They will likely ruin it. I will still be the sucker who goes to see it though.
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Aug 31, 2008 05:42
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No question. I'll see it too
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Sep 1, 2008 00:11
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I just finished 'Soon I Will Be Invincible' by Austin Grossman.
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Sep 2, 2008 04:36
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I finished the last book (#8) in the Buddha mangas by Osamu Tezuka. I've read very little actual manga, and I decided that if I was going to go with one, it better be done by the most famous artist, and it was pretty drat sweet. It's still a very light and cartoonish style, but it doesn't pull punches at all with nudity, death, and violence. It's directed at a fairly young audience, but coming from no knowledge about the Buddhist fables, it was pretty entertaining to read, not to mention Tezuka actually designs characters to look completely different from each other. You can pick any major character out of huge crowd at a glance. Anyways, it did a good job of rolling in Buddhist tenets and definitely of the land at the time and how the politics intertwined in that. I was hardly ever bored and despite the 4th-wall breaking here and there, it was a coherent story. [img][/img]
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Sep 2, 2008 10:25
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I'm rereading John Buchan. I know everyone thinks 'hurr Empire building anti-semitism and public schoolery', but in fact there's so much more to his writing than that. Yes, he writes 'shockers' and war stories as well as the historical novels, but he's wonderful at action, male friendship and the countryside, and there's a decency to his morality that is actually really likeable. And he writes love and loss so well. I'm just reading A Prince of the Captivity for the first time, and he's giving the background of the character, a repressed old Etonian soldier type who lost his son aged 5, and I had to stop reading because I was blinded by tears. It's painfully good. Read The Power House and The 39 Steps for starters, but do read him, he derserves to be remembered.
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Sep 2, 2008 15:56
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A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay. A historical fantasy set in a quasi Medieval French world. The characters are one dimensional, the action isn't very exciting; the dialog is very stilted and his world isn't that engaging.
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Sep 2, 2008 16:09
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Webman posted:A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay. A historical fantasy set in a quasi Medieval French world. The characters are one dimensional, the action isn't very exciting; the dialog is very stilted and his world isn't that engaging. Sounds awesome. Just finished Breakfast of Champions and it confirmed my opinion that Vonnegut is god.
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Sep 2, 2008 20:39
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The Illuminatus! Trilogy, it just may have been the most fun book I've ever read. Mind blowin'
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Sep 3, 2008 02:28
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Lately I've been reading through John Sandford's Prey novels. They're kind of cheesy detective stories. They certainly aren't good, but when you're studying English it's hard to find time to read anything actually through-provoking while you're trying to balance your course-load.
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Sep 3, 2008 02:31
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Mountain Lightning posted:I just finished 'Soon I Will Be Invincible' by Austin Grossman. What a coincidence, I just finished this book too. It's like reading a comic book in the form of a novel. It's about a villain who's trying to take over the world and the team of (dysfunctional) heroes who keep stopping him. I liked how the story paid homage to comic book conventions while also being aware of the corniness of them; one can tell the author is a comic fan. The book was funny, the characters likable, and despite the use of common comic themes, the plot wasn't completely predictable. I really enjoyed it, and I think it's a worth a read by any comic book fan.
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Sep 3, 2008 06:51
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The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler: The best noir novel of all time. His other books are fun little dark romps but this is just so much more. The plot is pretty much the same as every other Chandler only twice as long, but that's not the point at all. Los Angeles as metaphor for society and all that is great and horrible about it. I'm very glad I tracked down the address of the house Raymond Chandler spent the last years of his life in here in San Diego, finishing the last chapter of his masterpiece looking out at the same shoreline he used to. /sappiness Very underrated on the great American novel list.
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Sep 3, 2008 09:48
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Suttree by Cormac McCarthy - As good as Blood Meridian is, I'd say this is the best thing I've read from McCarthy since I've read almost all of his books at this point. Suttree follows the titular character, Cornelius Suttree - who has left behind his marriage and a life of privilege to live in an old houseboat on the river in Knoxville, Tennessee and spend his days fishing, drinking, occasionally working and encountering a massive cast of eccentric characters. As is typical of McCarthy - he describes everything in his gorgeously overwrought epic fashion (the introductory chapter that takes you through the squalid riverside quarter of Knoxville is particularly memorable) while musing on life, death and everything in between. Surprisingly for McCarthy - it also has a fair amount of hilariously absurd moments like Harrogate getting sent to the workhouse for loving watermelons. Blood Meridian and The Road get plenty of (well-deserved) love around here, but I hardly ever see anyone talk about his earlier or less well-known stuff, so here you have it.
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Sep 3, 2008 17:47
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The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow - I enjoyed this one, although I did find it slow going at some points. There were also some irritating tendencies, like when characters randomly burst into florid soliloquies and improvised philosophical dissertations that seemed really out of character. For the most part though it was a very well told, and fairly well paced story, especially considering the length. Mr. Sandman by Barbara Gowdy - I plowed through this in a couple of days, which I rarely do anymore. It was very engaging, quite often hilarious, and dealt with some surprisingly deep, dark subject matter without losing its sense of lightness. In that sense it actually reminded me somewhat of Vonnegut, although without the more fantastic, sci-fi-ish elements he tends to throw in. The story itself is quite standard, following the lives of a family over the course of several years, but with everything tied together by a strange, quasi-mystical youngest child. It's hard to describe without spoiling, but I highly recommend it.
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Sep 3, 2008 19:13
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Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene No other book has redefined my understanding of a topic so completely. I'm sure someone else who has read this will be able to elaborate more concisely than I would be able to.
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Sep 3, 2008 21:49
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I just finished Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. I greatly enjoyed Everything is Illuminated when I picked it up on a whim last year, so I don't know why it took me so long to buy his second novel. It's very similar to Everything is Illuminated. Someone extremely critical might say it was just a rehashing, style-wise, but I don't mind; more awesome is still awesome. I found it perhaps a bit slower than the first, but everything came together in the end, and one of the major themes of the novel speaks to me on a very deep level "It's always necessary." This is another one of my favorites, and I eagerly await whatever Foer decides to write next. Next up for me are the Ember books by Jeanne DuPrau, which were recommended to me by a close friend. After those, I'll be reading Michael Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Mahasamatman fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Sep 3, 2008 |
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Sep 3, 2008 23:01
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Nimitz Class by Patrick Robinson It's the mystery of a the disappearance of the Nimitz class carrier Thomas Jefferson. You follow a brother of the captain of the ship as he words with the CIA and MI5 to figure out who did it and why. I thought it was an average book. It was my first mystery type novel and I enjoyed the timeline of how he figured things out and such. However, the end of the novel was less than satisfying. The resolution left much to be desired. Next up is 2010: Odyssey Two . I finally managed to find a copy at the local used book store woo!
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Sep 4, 2008 02:24
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The worst journey in the world- I loved it, excellent account of daily life exploring Antarctica. I was expecting more information regarding how the return was perceived by the public, but am much happier that it ended the way it did. I loved jimmy pigg 
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Sep 5, 2008 04:38
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ProfessorFrink! posted:Next up is 2010: Odyssey Two . I finally managed to find a copy at the local used book store woo! If you're into Arthur C. Clarke I highly recommend the Rama series. The first book is written so brilliantly and with concepts I had never thought of before.
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Sep 5, 2008 20:34
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Lately I've been on abit of a "books that turned into movies" kick, but after reading Fight Club I decided I needed to read more Pahlaniuk so I picked up and read Haunted which is incredible and at the same time disturbing. Any book that contains a chapter that caused people attending readings to faint consistently obviously has some real powerfully crafted wording. "Can you pretend to love me forever?" Just loved it.
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Sep 6, 2008 04:41
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I just finished The Man With the Iron Heart Newest Harry Turtledove Alternate history. Basically Reinhardt Heydrich big time Nazi douchebag who in our history got killed by Czech Partisans, survives and leads a Guerilla movement against the post war occupation of Germany after ww2. Basically it's like he flipped on CNN and decided to write a book based on it. See Harry Truman play George W Bush, See Cindy Sheehan played by a Housewife in Indiana. It's an interesting concept which sadly gets hit by Clancy Syndrome.... too much of a heavy message.
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Sep 6, 2008 04:47
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A Short, Sharp Shock by Kim Stanley Robinson This is the first other book of his I've read since the Mars Trilogy and I really enjoyed it. It strikes me as a more philosophy-oriented Gulliver's Travels on acid, with a love story and dash of amnesia thrown in. It's a very surreal book loaded with symbolism, and while he does spell some of it out for you, there's definitely enough that's not explicit to convince me that I need to re-read it again. My only real complaint is the length; at 208 pages it's more of a novella, and I felt like a lot of things didn't get the fleshing out they deserved. I was trying to write up a summary since Amazon's/the jacket's isn't very good, but decided to just crib a better one from a reviewer instead: An Amazon Reviewer posted:That plot focuses on an amnesiac character who finds himself abruptly thrust into a peculiar world, a thin strip of land surrounded by an untravelled ocean. As he travels along through this evocative landscape, he interacts with a cast of memorable persons most of whom are not clearly friends nor enemies, but all of whom provoke some kind of response in the protagonist (and in the reader). The meaning of this journey starts out simple -- a search for someone who might be his partner, and who was kidnapped by a band of local thugs -- and with every page, it becomes more complex. By the end, the journey has become a metaphorical strand tying together cosmology, love and hate, cultural diversity, parallel universes, the unrecoverable loss of memories, and I don't know what all else. Pompous Rhombus fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Sep 6, 2008 |
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Sep 6, 2008 13:52
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The Devil You Know by Mike Carey Fun little supernatural twist on the hardboiled story. It started out pretty goofy, but once you realize what is going on it's pretty disturbing. The second novel is only out in the states in hardcover and the third won't be out for a long time. Amazon.co.uk time I guess.
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Sep 7, 2008 21:19
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Flying Colours, C.S. Forester This picks up right where Ship of the Line's cliffhanger left off. The ending is enormously satisfying, out of the jaws of death style. Going Postal, Terry Pratchett Gee, I wonder what this could possibly be about. Introduces the lovable Moist von Lipwig, and that makes it a definite high point in the discworld series. A Stir of Echoes, Richard Matheson Hypnotism can make you telepathic, but it's really not much fun since that kinda stuff is freaky and disturbing. That's always the tough thing about Matheson, he doesn't seem to understand that sometimes people can actually enjoy the Twilight Zone. Commodore Hornblower, C.S. Forester Hornblower gets set up with a small fleet of ships to stir up poo poo in the Baltic. Since he's utterly set now, the insecurity he always feels is a little muted, but he still manages to worry he's somehow going to gently caress up royally and end up in the gutter. Thud!, Terry Pratchett I took far too long to read this, and I didn't grok the ending too well, but Pratchett is always fun. Could've made more fun of The Da Vinci Code, and I would have liked to know more about Thud the game.
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Sep 7, 2008 21:43
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig I read this a long time ago (high schoo) and at that time was thinking "Oh, so profound, new age" blah blah blah. My second read through I found it much more interesting and even though I don't agree with what the author proposes (Quality is the interface of the matter and mind. We form our reality from not only the romantic 'immediate' senses but from the classical 'logical' senses. In short, everything is brought together be it groovy cats or squares). I really dug it in the sense that it does add a new facet in how to think about what you're doing and in general promotes leading a life that's always trying to improve the quality of your life and how you work. Quality meaning what is 'good' is not always 'logical'. Very dense book though, and if you aren't onboard in the first 75-100 pages you will be bored. Worth a look though.
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Sep 9, 2008 15:15
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Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut I went through a Kurt Vonnegut phase in high school, and I think it had quite a bit to do with my developing philosophy at the time - essentially, Vonnegut's worldview always involved deep compassion mixed with deep pessimism. This novel is one of the only Vonnegut books I've read since then (I started but lost interest in Hocus Pocus earlier this year), and while it doesn't have quite the impact Cat's Cradle or God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater had back then, it is entirely worth reading. If nothing else, the story involves of the most radical acts of empathy in Vonnegut's career: Vonnegut takes on the perspective of an American who became a Nazi radio propagandist during World War II, in order to be in a position to broadcast coded messages out of Germany - that is, to be an American spy. But it's not so simple as all that - and in this book, the complexity does not involve the Byzantine plot threads of your basic spy novel, but thorny moral and philosophical tangles that could not be less concerned with espionage. Vonnegut wrote in the introduction that he knows the story's moral: "We are what we pretend to be; so we must be careful what we pretend to be." But I finished the book and am still thinking about it, and certainly not about the "moral" Vonnegut has, perhaps facetiously, claimed. There are hard questions about love, evil, guilt, and blame posed here, and, being who he is, Vonnegut does not deign to answer any of them for us. Being who he is, Vonnegut probably knows that such questions don't truly *have* answers - and such stories as this one don't truly have morals.
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Sep 10, 2008 02:38
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Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin ...I only finished this book within the last 10 minutes, and I'm astounded by the fact I hadn't heard about it sooner. Helprin's style of prose absolutely floored me from beginning to end, the plot strays off but comes back in ways that make sense, and the deus ex machina fits amazingly well with the magical realism. Not to mention the absolutely terrific plot. I can't honestly say I've cried because of a book until...right now. Dammit, I need to sleep.
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Sep 10, 2008 05:13
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Read A Soldier of the Great War next  I love Helprin's novels.Hit and Run by Lawrence Block. The latest of his Keller novels- a nondescript hit man that we follow on his jobs. The last 2 novels have been different, and this one of course sets Keller up- this time as a fall guy. Seeing how he manages to escape a country-wide manhunt is quite interesting, and Block manages to bring such fantasies down to Earth, and make them believable and realistic. Keller is a great character- the likeable, stamp-collecting hit man with his acerbic fixer Dot sending him out on jobs. I highly recommend the series, even though this may be the last. Though I doubt it. Oh, I also read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. A rightful classic. I didn't feel like slogging through the Archipelago books so I got one day of life in the gulag distilled into a fine novel. It's a short read and worth reading. Mack the Knife fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Sep 10, 2008 |
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Sep 10, 2008 18:11
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Mack the Knife posted:Read A Soldier of the Great War next I've got that lined up to read soon. Winter's Tale was interesting enough to get me interested in a new author, that's for sure. He's got a lot of stuff out, too.
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Sep 10, 2008 18:47
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Chamberk posted:I've got that lined up to read soon. Winter's Tale was interesting enough to get me interested in a new author, that's for sure. He's got a lot of stuff out, too. I'll have to pick it up after I finish House of Leaves, I basically committed myself to it, had it for way too long.
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Sep 10, 2008 19:45
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Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, tran. Edith Grossman I read the first book for a class, but when I have time I'll finish it off. For being largely considered one of the first novels, it's still pretty easy to read. And funny, much funnier than I had expected. It's like a medieval, episodic Two Stooges.
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Sep 10, 2008 21:02
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Lanark: A Life in Four Books was a pretty interesting read. Check out the wikipedia page for it - it's done in a really unique style, without being pretentious or anything. Ok, it seems a little pretentious but it was written long before every english major tried to "shake things up". that was followed by a quick read of Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis. Definitely falls flat in comparison to all of his other books, but I really appreciated the fact that he tried writing about something a bit different. Did anyone else like Lanark? It seems like it's a minor classic but very few around me are familiar with it. I just happened to find it in my brother's room and that was the first time I'd ever even heard of it.
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Sep 10, 2008 22:21
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An ARC of Le Carres next book A Most Waanted Man in between reading my current work book, Das Nibelungenlied in English, to be followed by a squinty eyed reading of the original High German with half a dozen reference books amassed around me as I read. God help me.
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Sep 10, 2008 23:02
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