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The bit where he suggests cutting up and pasting together the commentary with the poem, then says "or I GUESS you could buy another copy" was pretty darn funny. I mean, the guy is clearly off his rocker and damnit I want to know why 
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Feb 24, 2012 09:11
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One of the coolest things about Pale Fire is how much thought Nabokov put into the whole book, even the index. Picked up a couple at the used bookstore this morning: Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me and Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim. Was thinking about getting Byron's Don Juan but I've got a bunch of poetry on my shelf waiting to be read already.
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Feb 24, 2012 18:31
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Thanks for the recommendations on what book to start with on the last page, guys. Unfortunately I just bought more books. Pretty soon I'll drown in a sea of my unread books.  Pet Sematary and The Dark Tower II - VII by Stephen King (I really liked The Gunslinger) Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins I'm going to start with Pet Sematary since I've heard that it's King's most depressing book.
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Feb 26, 2012 05:53
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In the last few days I've started Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. It has been hyped here there and everywhere. So far it's pretty good - I finished Shadow of the Torturer today and I'm about to start Claw of the Conciliator. Is there a reference site somewhere with all of the allusions that are scattered through the series? I'm sure I'm missing about 75% of them...
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Feb 26, 2012 22:27
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About 50 pages deep into Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor," which is a hilarious and very well-written take on 1690s America. Great stuff.
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Feb 26, 2012 22:41
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I started Jack Kerouac's On the Road the other day. Why the gently caress did I not read this book a long time ago? It's marvelous so far and I'm only at part two!
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Feb 27, 2012 08:18
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Just started Albert Camus' The Plague on the way in to work this morning. I've read The Outsider a few years back and enjoyed so, so looking forward to this one.
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Feb 27, 2012 12:18
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Just started Love by Stendhal. So far it's clear that he was bitten and bitten bad. In fact, he'd probably have gone down a treat in E/N if it had been around in his day. Having said that, so far it's interesting enough and holding my attention nicely.
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Feb 27, 2012 14:32
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Just started reading Blindsight by Peter Watts, and Asimov's I, Robot which I both bought this month. Also reading a bit of Lovecraft. Yesterday I bought: Ender's Game, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, and Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth. This last month I bought: Dune, Ringworld, Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous With Rama, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Lovecraft's Necronomicon, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes but as a gift for a friend. Found 2001, Rama, Memoirs, Sherlock Holmes and I Robot in a used bookstore a few stores down from the dentist I've been visiting. I had been searching for Memoirs for a while and it came as a very pleasant surprise to find it there. Also, I'm not allowed to buy anymore books for a while. 
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Feb 27, 2012 23:36
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Chamberk posted:In the last few days I've started Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. It has been hyped here there and everywhere. So far it's pretty good - I finished Shadow of the Torturer today and I'm about to start Claw of the Conciliator. There's the mailing list at urth.net but it sucks for actually trying to find anything. I've been meaning for ages to pick up Solar Labyrinth: Exploring Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, though. But yeah, BotNS is dense with allusions - it helps a little to be up on your Greek mythology, of course. Edit: Started The Gathering Storm day before yesterday. I figured I followed the drat series for so long that I might as well see it out. Sanderson's definitely a lot faster-paced than Jordan - as evinced by the fact that I'm 2/3 of the way through it already. It goes a lot faster when there's not so much of Jordan's much-maligned braid-tugging and describing clothes. It's a shame he died so early and wasn't able to finish it himself (as craptastic as that might have been), but at least he left plenty for Sanderson to work with. Encryptic fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Mar 2, 2012 |
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Mar 2, 2012 05:03
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Just bought the other day: Graceling by Kristin Cashore Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan Emma by Jane Austen His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass (Everyman's Library (Cloth)) by Philip Pullman Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey Hooray for ordering a fuckton of books when you can't read because of your crippling depression!
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Mar 2, 2012 05:13
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Johnbo posted:Just started Albert Camus' The Plague on the way in to work this morning. I've read The Outsider a few years back and enjoyed so, so looking forward to this one. And would you say it is readable? I admire Camus's standpoints, but I'm not sure how I feel about him as a writer. I really tried getting through one of his philosophical books, L'Homme révolté, but I had to give up a few pages in. I was simply unable to follow his train of thought, to put it mildly. Now I have La Peste sitting here on my bookshelf, and I'm a bit apprehensive even though it's a novel this time around. Thread relevance: starting on La Duchesse de Langeais by Balzac. Should be a good read, but it will more than likely take an embarrassingly long time to decipher some of his run-on sentences in French. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Mar 2, 2012 |
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Mar 2, 2012 05:20
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stimulated emission fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Mar 3, 2012 09:37
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Just got back from my local Humane Society's quarterly book sale. Everything's a quarter. I got The Goodyear Story by Richard Korman. The tagline says, "An inventor's obsession and the struggle for a rubber monopoly." Sounds crazy enough to be interesting. Especially when you look at the cover:  This dude looks intense. And then there's this gem:  Can this be as bad as I've heard? Can I make it through til the end? Will I burn my first book?
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Mar 3, 2012 15:53
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Chiba City Blues posted:Finally started A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick. I'm really identifying with the main character (not the drug use- the depersonalization and hallucinations due to mental illness) so I'm kind of glued to it. Haha I read that book years before I had done any real drugs. Sometime between then and now I got into real drugs and now I'm a recovering addict and I kind of wonder if I should reread it again at some point. VALIS too. Unfortunately I don't know where either of those books went... I have all my other PKD books (except for Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which I loaned to a therapist I saw maybe twice) except VALIS and A Scanner Darkly. No earthly clue what happened to them.
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Mar 3, 2012 19:19
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I've been sitting on a copy of 1Q84 for the past few months. As much as I love Murakami's prose and other works...the length of this title is daunting! I might have to set it aside for some lighter fare.
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Mar 6, 2012 08:59
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Getting through A clockwork Orange. Doesn't feel as dated as the movie looks.
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Mar 7, 2012 12:08
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Just bought (and finished) The Hunger Games and I enjoyed it. It was a well-paced, fast read and I'm curious to see where she takes the story in the next two books. I've started on John Adams by David McCullough but I'm also tempted by Space Chronicles by Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Game of Thrones.
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Mar 8, 2012 03:29
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Phlegmish posted:And would you say it is readable? I admire Camus's standpoints, but I'm not sure how I feel about him as a writer. I really tried getting through one of his philosophical books, L'Homme révolté, but I had to give up a few pages in. I was simply unable to follow his train of thought, to put it mildly. Now I have La Peste sitting here on my bookshelf, and I'm a bit apprehensive even though it's a novel this time around. It's definitely readable. I've not read any of his non-fiction but The Plague was brilliant; the language can be frustrating in parts but the way he has set up the narration works really well with the subject of the story. drawnstring posted:I've been sitting on a copy of 1Q84 for the past few months. Do yourself a favour and read this immediately. It may not be his best work (I don't think he'll ever top Norwegian Wood) but it's still a fantastic read and once you start it you'll find yourself totally absorbed it by it.
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Mar 14, 2012 13:55
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I've Just started reading "Anathem" By Neil Stephenson and I have to say its growing on me. At first I was having throuble penetrating the use of so many different words and phrases but I really am enjoying it thus far.
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Mar 15, 2012 04:04
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Whoa! I feel right at home here after seeing the books you guys mentioned on this page  I'm halfways through Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. Reading it is like.. eh, lying down in the grass, watching the clouds fly by and eating icecream to get rid of a hangover that actually doesn't feel that bad any longer.
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Mar 15, 2012 13:14
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I've an order that's coming tomorrow from Amazon. As ever, many of the titles are due to reviews/suggestions either from this forum or the Goons who post over at Good Reads. A selection - Laughter in the Dark - Nabokov A Parisian Affair and Other Stories - De Maupassant The Complete Fairy Tales - Grimm Bros Wizard: Life and Times of Nikola Tesla - Marc Seifer Walking - Thoreau I think in total there are twelve books. Even though I don't do it very often, buying books is one of the very few things I don't ever feel guilty about spending money on. When I add up the total cost against the simple pleasure of settling down to read, it's always a bargain.
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Mar 16, 2012 02:19
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About to start reading GRRM's Dreamsongs, Volume II. Hope it's as good as the first volume.
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Mar 19, 2012 07:16
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Finally got a few bucks and bought a bunch so far this month: Used The House of God - Samuel Shem Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (Pevear & Volokhonsky translation) East of Eden - John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck Freedom - Jonathan Franzen The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL - Stefan Fatsis White Jazz - James Ellroy LA Confidential - James Ellroy The Black Dahlia - James Ellroy The Big Nowhere - James Ellroy My Dark Places - James Ellroy The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett (Everyman's Library HC) The Great War and Modern Memory - Paul Fussell American Prometheus - The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer What Do You Care What Other People Think? - Richard P. Feynman A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917-1918 - Merrion & Susie Harries The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany - William L. Shirer The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millenium - Robert Lacey & Danny Danzinger New Catch-22 - Joseph Heller (Everyman's Library HC) The Long Ships - Frans G. Bengtsson Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age - Modris Eksteins One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 50th Anniversary Edition (HC) - Ken Kesey Flashman, Flash for Freedom!, Flashman in the Great Game - George MacDOnald Fraser (Everyman's Library HC) Currently Reading: A Few Seconds of Panic by Stefan Fatsis because I am jonesing for football super bad.
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Mar 19, 2012 10:47
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I just started The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, and I've got high hopes for it to make me more interested in reading non-fiction that's not about architecture, as it was voted the #2 non-fiction book by the Modern Library. Also, I've always been interested in how other people experience religion, and I'd like a better view into their heads than my normal dismissive thoughts. To the person reading Cosmicomics above, I assume they've already finished it, but I cannot recommend it and his other books, especially Invisible Cities, enough.
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Mar 19, 2012 19:16
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I spent most of the day in the airport so I bought the first Iron Druid book when I got there and managed to read the entire thing in 1 sitting. I just bought the second one. It was a pretty fun read, like the first Dresden Files books. Hopefully the quality gets even better like the Dresden Files books did.
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Mar 20, 2012 03:40
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The second and third books are awesome, but god drat the ending to the third book pissed me off. Still, can't wait for the new one. The author is on twitter, and is pretty good about replying to tweets.
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Mar 20, 2012 09:03
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The Great Gatsby (almost done with it) Bright Lights, Big City The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things by Peter Sagal Lolita, 50th Anniversary Edition Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism) by Emmanuel Todd The Follower by Jason Starr The Art of Fielding: A Novel by Chad Harbach The last 3 books were inspired directly and indirectly by the tweets of Bret Easton Ellis over the last couple of days.
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Mar 21, 2012 15:07
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Just started The Hunger Games, it's surprisingly entertaining so far.
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Mar 21, 2012 16:29
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OgreNoah posted:To the person reading Cosmicomics above, I assume they've already finished it, but I cannot recommend it and his other books, especially Invisible Cities, enough. Oh well, started reading Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks. It's kinda slow so far (I probably feel this because Cosmicomics was so easy and fast to read) but I'm gonna give it a chance.
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Mar 23, 2012 15:21
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Got a coupon from amazon and on-a-hunch bought 4 books last week. Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" Finished first one and the second has about 30 pages left. I realize these are no-brainers (must reads) when it comes to books, but I only recently have found myself hooked on literature.
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Mar 29, 2012 09:37
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Inferno by Larry NIven edit: got about a third through it and putting it on the shelf for awhile. I can never really tell whats going on; the writer seems to jump around a lot and its really frustrating for a semi-beginner reader (was dumb and thought id rather watch a move than read a book) Cold Sprunk fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Mar 31, 2012 |
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Mar 31, 2012 05:30
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Just started Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. drat I love his prose.
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Mar 31, 2012 07:13
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I've already read a third of The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo. It's been a while I wanted to read something on the Stanford prison experiment. And god drat, that's more terrifying than I thought. The speed with ordinary, educated and balanced young people are interiorizing their roles (and go to the full spectre of dominating - dominated) is mind blowing. Picardy Beet fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Mar 31, 2012 |
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Mar 31, 2012 20:16
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Picardy Beet posted:I've already read a third of The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo. I'm so glad you brought this up! I've had this book sitting on a shelf for years, I completely forgot about it, definitely reading that next.
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Mar 31, 2012 21:25
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Like every other goon I am currently reading Zack Parson's Liminal States. I'm pretty slow so I'm only 17% through. I'm also 58% through The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and while the writing and worldbuilding is excellent, I'm just so incredulous about how loving perfect and brilliant at everything the protagonist is. Today I started reading David Hughes' The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made which looks like awesome light reading. I really like reading about movie production, especially when things go wrong. I also got from the library The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C Clarke. I'd heard of it before but I don't know too much about it. I just got it because I loving love space elevators in science fiction. And as far as I've heard, this is the original space elevator story.
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Apr 4, 2012 06:34
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I just started two books. The first one is The Irish Americans: A History. Title pretty much says it all, and it's written by Jay P. Dolan, a former history professor at Notre Dame. He starts in the 1700s with the decline of the linen trade in Ireland that sparked their rush to America. I'm about 10% in currently. The second book has been sitting on my father's shelf for a long time, and I just decided to pick it up. I've heard the story before, and even attended an exhibit about it at the Field Museum in downtown Chicago. It's called Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. It's just an incredible story, and the man is a goddamned hero. Felt it was time to actually pick up the book and give it a read.
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Apr 6, 2012 05:13
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Hedrigall posted:I'm also 58% through The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and while the writing and worldbuilding is excellent, I'm just so incredulous about how loving perfect and brilliant at everything the protagonist is. I recall a goon once saying that imagining that the key to making Kvothe's narration enjoyable is to read it with Zapp Brannigan's voice. It really works wonders.
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Apr 6, 2012 05:23
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Alright well, I've recently started reading The Amber Room by Steve Berry because it was given to me by a relative a little while ago. Seems fairly good so far; sort of getting a "The Last Templar" vibe from it - although some of the things/tradecraft in it from the two professional killers/treasure hunters isn't exactly McNab-grade stuff, sadly. Anyway, I've just found Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson and got it on the cheap, seeing as it was recommended to myself and my dad. So yeah, what do you all think of it? should I bump it up on my to-read list, or is the general opinion among goon ranks that it's nothing to get excited about? (same goes for the rest of the series, I guess. Are the first few the only ones worth reading, like Dune, or are they all of the same level of quality?) Thanks guys
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Apr 7, 2012 08:48
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pakman posted:The second book has been sitting on my father's shelf for a long time, and I just decided to pick it up. I've heard the story before, and even attended an exhibit about it at the Field Museum in downtown Chicago. It's called Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage. It's just an incredible story, and the man is a goddamned hero. Felt it was time to actually pick up the book and give it a read. Ok this is just from what I remember of Shackleton in middle school but "hero" isn't quite the word. I mean he gets the whole crew killed right
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