Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Baby Babbeh
Aug 2, 2005

It's hard to soar with the eagles when you work with Turkeys!!



The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. It's about an autistic boy who decides to try and solve the mystery of who killed his neighbor's dog, and then comes face to face with the break up of his parents relationship. It's narated first person from the POV of the autistic boy. The wierd, detached nature of this perspective is what gives the book most of it's appeal. The plot itself is sort of bland, but it's written in such a way that you don't really mind. Very quick, easy read and I'd reccomend it if you've got a weekend to kill.

The Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories by Can Xue. It's a collection of short stories by a chinese author whose style has been heavily influenced by the works of Kafka and Borges, but which at the same time retains its own special wierdness. Her fiction is about as abstruse as I've ever encountered from this sort of story, and I suspect the translation is a bit rough at times, which doesn't help. Nonetheless, some of the stories are excellent and I'd reccomend it to anyone who's a fan of this kind of fiction and doesn't mind a story where you sort of hit it like a brick wall and slide off. (i.e. the sort of person who likes this kind of fiction)

Next on the list: Bias by Bernard Goldberg.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Lawlita
Oct 10, 2006

deadpan and deadly.
Turkey coma is a good time to get more reading done. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. More utopian literature, with a detached narrative that gives the situation a neat twist. I certainly understand now why people were recommending it in the utopia thread!

RachelO posted:

The Clan of the Cave Bear. It was alright, though a lot of it seems like it was just copied out of a Paleolithic almanac. Lots of long passages describing ancient vegetation and animals, passages that seem to go on and on. Still, it's kind of neat to imagine what life and society was like back then.
Oh man. I remember Auel's The Valley of the Horses was one of the first novels I read in middle school. While I found those descriptions fascinating, I was definitely not ready for the multiple passages of "Neanderthal porn." Yikes.

Dr. Hourai
Dec 4, 2004
More tea!
Through Darkest America by Neal Barrett Jr.
It's sort of a western set on a post-nuclear war earth. It was allright, but not all that. I was recommended it through a thread here, but I don't remember which.

G-Mawwwwwww
Jan 31, 2003

My LPth are Hot Garbage
Biscuit Hider

Baby Babbeh posted:


Next on the list: Bias by Bernard Goldberg.

Stick it out through the first few chapters, it gets slightly better after he stops trying to hate gently caress Dan Rather.

Sweetwater Kill
Jun 7, 2006

La vierge Marie vous regarde.
Just finished Sex, Lies and Vampires by Katie MacAlister.

It was pretty good for what it was: basically a Harlequin romance with vampires. Got it for less than a dollar at Goodwill and I think it was worth that price.

Dr. Kyle Farnsworth
Apr 23, 2004

I just finished Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer. I found it pretty interesting. Smart, but without delving into that smug, Snopes-esque know-it-all tone where they assert that something OBVIOUSLY DIDN'T HAPPEN YOU IDIOT when you can think of 10 ways it obviously could have happened.

Krinkle
Feb 9, 2003

Ah do believe Ah've got the vapors...
Ah mean the farts


I just finished Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency. I liked it but I wish there was a douglas adams thread as I'm not sure I get how it was resolved and would like to have it explained to me.

I think you have to understand coleridge or have read the rime of the ancient mariner or something.

Baby Babbeh posted:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. It's about an autistic boy who decides to try and solve the mystery of who killed his neighbor's dog, and then comes face to face with the break up of his parents relationship. It's narated first person from the POV of the autistic boy. The wierd, detached nature of this perspective is what gives the book most of it's appeal. The plot itself is sort of bland, but it's written in such a way that you don't really mind. Very quick, easy read and I'd reccomend it if you've got a weekend to kill.

a few years ago a friend lent me this book. The title comes from a sherlock holmes story, and the kid tries to be like sherlock holmes. The parts where he talked about sir arthur conan doyle were interesting, made me lose respect for him, and ironically got me into sherlock holmes stories for a while. I think I got up to the speckled band before I got tired of it.

nixar55
Jul 25, 2003

She packed my bags last night. Pre-flight. Zero hour nine a.m. And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then.
I read The Almond by Nadjma about three weeks ago. It was a tale of “a Muslim woman's erotic awakening,” written under a pseudonym. It was also translated from French, so that could explain some of the awkward phrasing. To me, it seemed more like a Western man writing about the exoticism of the Middle East. Sensual and very lurid, but so simplistic. Something about the tone really bothered me. When I finished, I wanted to read a novel set in Morocco by someone who was at least a confirmed resident, so…

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. This was more in line with what was looking for. Beautiful and exotic and really profound. The inner voices of the married couple at the center of the story were frightening. This is a story about people I found to be very empty inside, almost unlikeable at first. And people like that in a dangerous land leads to some extremely sad and disturbing situations. I’m really fascinated by this author and I want to read more of his work. I also want to re-read this novel. I’ve put the movie at the top of my Netflix queue, even though I hear it’s pretty bad.

Next up: No idea! I’ve started and stopped A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller and Iron Council (too political) by China Mieville, so I could give either of those another try. Or Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami. After Bowles, I want something a little lighter.

794613
Oct 7, 2005
I just finished 1984 by George Orwell. I had been meaning to read the book for quite some time. It was a good read.

paperchaseguy
Feb 21, 2002

THEY'RE GONNA SAY NO
V for vendetta Moore, Alan
Thought provoking and shocking. But relatively immature compared to his later works. 8 out of 10.

Liar's poker : rising through the wreckage on Wall Street Lewis, Michael
Eye opening for its frank portrayal of traders and how they view their customers. A bit dull in the middle though. 7/10.

This time let's not eat the bones : Bill James without the numbers
The Bill James historical baseball abstract
Not a baseball fan, I couldn't get into these as much as I'd hoped.

Red lightning Varley, John
A great author, a mediocre book. He doesn't get across the magnitude of the disaster as well as he should. Events just happen, and are taken at face value. Characters are tepid and uninteresting. 4/10.

The wages of wins : taking measure of the many myths in modern sport Berri, David
Fascinating concept. Dull, dry and haughty in practice. Aims for the Moneyball/Bill James target, and misses unentertainingly. 6.5/10.

V-Men
Aug 15, 2001

Don't it make your dick bust concrete to be in the same room with two noble, selfless public servants.

Faderaven posted:

Just finished Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling.

It's a book written by a geek about geeks for geeks. The main characters are some sort of special forces guy and a wiccan priestess!

Having said that I really liked it. I thought his characters were fairly well written but the main villain pretty much comes out of nowhere. I hear I have to slog thru a horrible second book and then a third book to find out how our heroes deal with him.

The second book is still good. It's not a stand alone book though; its purpose is to help set up the third book. I just finished The Protector's War back in October. What people may not like is that it doesn't really have a central enemy they defeat at the end like in the first book. There's a point in the book though where you won't want to stop. It's when the new characters meet the heroes.

I want to read the third one, but I'll wait until paperback. It'll be easy, especially with classes starting for me in January.

I just finished State of Denial by Bob Woodward. I never read his op-ed stuff so I guess he has been playing the sycophant to the Bush administration recently, though when I read Plan of Attack I never got that sense. As usual, he has good insight, but its always backed up with interviews with such key players in the administration and those in the military who handled Iraq. I thought at times that he'd employ a little too strong a hyperbole or criticism at the administration on an issue that's already obvious, but that doesn't really detract from the amount of evidence he puts towards it.

Paper Mache Soul
Sep 6, 2005

Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, Hunter S. Thompson - The only other Thompson book I've read was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but even thought I liked it (it was my favorite book for a while), for some reason I didn't have high hopes for this one. It didn't turn out too badly though, and it's a pretty good alternative description of the 1972 Democratic (which is what he covers) campaign, as well as a good description of how McGovern's political world comes crashing down around him as election day draws near. Although it's good if you know what happened, if you want a less biased view of the campaign, or don't even know what went on in '72, avoid this one. 7.5/10

All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - My second reading though, not sure if it counts but whatever. This is probably my favorite book, and actually usurped Fear and Loathing as previous champion. The book is longer than the Redford/Hoffman movie, mainly because of the overabundance of subject matter - the movie stops about halfway through the book. The book is written in the third person, as if Woodward and Bernstein are reporting on their reporting on the Watergate scandal: how it blew up froma burglary, meetings with Deepthroat, interviews with sources (some of whom agreed to be revealed for the book) and so on. The book actually ends before Nixon's resignation, which is covered from inside the White House in Woodward and Bernstein's book "The Final Days" 10/10

Dr. Kyle Farnsworth
Apr 23, 2004

Someone liked those drat S.M. Stirling books? I guess now I know who "you people who read this" are.

uggy
Aug 6, 2006

Posting is SERIOUS BUSINESS
and I am completely joyless

Don't make me judge you
I just finished Now I Can Die In Peace by Bill Simmons, and later tonight, I will have finished Live and Remember by Valentin Rasputin. The Bill Simmons was a really funny sports book, so it doesn't count as a real book. The Rasputin one is pretty good, but I don't really know where it's headed. It's kind of sitting in one place, but other than that, it has been an enjoyable read.

Yorkshire Pudding
Nov 24, 2006



Heart of Darkness. One of those classic pieces of literature I felt like I needed to read. It was actually a lot better than I expected it to be. I fell in love with Conrad's writing style. The book seemed to read like a sort of like poetry.

uggy
Aug 6, 2006

Posting is SERIOUS BUSINESS
and I am completely joyless

Don't make me judge you
Well, now I finished Live and Remember by Valentin Rasputin. The story really didn't move for almost the entire book, but the ending was really good. The last 30 or 40 pages moved very quickly, and surprisingly, I finished the last 80 or so pages in one sitting. I felt terrible for Mikheyich, the main characters' father/-in law. He was really in the novel just to be the character who saw through all the bullshit, but he was a sad character, and probably the one I most connected with.

I don't know how many other people have read this, but the story offers a fairly good view on love and village life in the Soviet Union during WWII. It's a fairly good novel, and I recommend it to everybody who likes Russian Lit, WWII lit, or a good read. And it's not that long, so go ahead and read it.

Tim Curry Favor
Apr 3, 2005

~*your troubles are all the same*~

794613 posted:

I just finished 1984 by George Orwell. I had been meaning to read the book for quite some time. It was a good read.

I just finished it too.

Want to help start the Party? Reading about complete and total power has me a little hot and bothered.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Krinkle
Feb 9, 2003

Ah do believe Ah've got the vapors...
Ah mean the farts


HamsterHuey posted:

I just finished it too.

Want to help start the Party? Reading about complete and total power has me a little hot and bothered.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

net neutrality act, no child left behind, clear skies bill
Every time I hear one of these names I think of the ministry of love :(

tonytheshoes
Nov 19, 2002

They're still shitty...
I'm on a post-apocolyptic bent as of late, so I just finised Jonathan Lethem's Amnesia Moon, which I thought was an interesting take on the genre, though sort of unsatisfying overall. I don't have anything against "happy endings," but I thought things wrapped up a bit too neatly at the end.

Now, I'm on A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. which, so far, has knocked my socks off.

Pontius Pilate
Jul 25, 2006

Crucify, Whale, Crucify
I just finished The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and thoroughly loved it. It was very funny, deserving its title of Russia's Catch-22. It's a fun, lighthearted affair that manages to make you feel optimistic about the Soviet Union during World War II. That's a tough feat to accomplish. I only wish I could read Russian now.

Real Name Grover
Feb 13, 2002

Like corn on the cob
Fan of Britches
Sideways by Rex Pickett - Yes, what the movie was based on, although if memory serves the book wasn't even published until the film was made.

A good read, if you enjoyed the film. Pickett goes into descriptions of wine every now and then that make it seem like some sort of fanfic, though.

At one point there's a reference to "spelunking" a clitoris, which made me :lol: pretty hard.

Up next: Apathy and Other Small Victories by Paul Neilan

Krinkle
Feb 9, 2003

Ah do believe Ah've got the vapors...
Ah mean the farts


I just read long dark teatime of the soul by douglas adams. For years I had been mad at douglas adams. He blew up the earth, twice, and killed every interesting character he's ever made as a giant gently caress-you to his fans. Dirk gently, whatever that was, could go take a flying leap for all I cared.

Now I've read them and I liked them and it's over and he's dead and there are no more, ever. I'm sad now :smith:

Sinclair
Jan 11, 2006

Plague Doctor Cosplay
"Thud!" by Terry Pratchett. It's great, but I don't think it's as great as some other people think.

EDIT: I dunno, I just didn't get the same feeling that I did from "Going Postal" (which some people seem not to have liked, but I thought was great). It kinda went too far with the "OK THIS IS THE MORAL" stuff, I think.

Sinclair fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Nov 29, 2006

Coconut Pete
Jul 31, 2004

Bad Mother Fucker
The last book I read was Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. While the story is interesting enough to younger readers to allow for manga and a two movies, the book is somewhat disappoining overall, was only okay.

Just started A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, the movie I thought was really good, hopefully the book is just as good.

scopes
Jun 5, 2004
Gil's All Fright Diner and In the Company of Ogres, both by A. Lee Martinez, his first and second books, respectively.

Gil's All Fright Diner is about two wandering friends, a vampire and a werewolf, that are traveling the western U.S. when they stumble into a very small town where the title's diner resides, where they are hired to take care of the diner's "zombie problem." Along the way they encounter zombies, zombie cows, a ghostly terrier that at one point regenerates his severed ectoplasmic head, teenage cultists, the undead spirit of a warlock trapped in a magic 8-ball, and a portal to the underworld and manage to prevent the end of the world.

In the Company of Ogres takes place in your standard fantasy swords-and-sorcerers universe, and tells the tale of Never Dead Ned, an very droll, uninteresting, boring accountant in Brute's Legion, the most powerful mercenary army in the realm. Uninteresting, except, for his nasty habit of not staying dead, hence his name. By virtue of his exceptional service in the Accountancy department, he is given the command of Ogre Company, a unit in which every commander somehow always seems to end up dying mysteriously shortly after taking position. Of course he ends up finally discovering why it is he hasn't been properly dying, and why if he does, it could mean the end of the universe...but not before juggling the love interests of a Siren and an Amazonian warrior, surviving an attack by a wizard whose allergy to magic will eventually turn him into a platypus, avoiding a demon emporer after his secret, and not getting clobbered by Ogre Company itself.

Both are fun, easy reading by an author that looks to have quite a few (at least mildly) entertaining stories in him. I don't demand a whole lot of my recreational reading, though. :)

CUM CURMUDGEON
Feb 6, 2004

by DocEvil
Cities of the Red Night by William Burroughs. I truly believe that anyone who says Naked Lunch is his masterpiece hasn't read CotRN. The book has two separate storylines: The story of Noah Blake, set in 1702: a gunsmith who registers as a crewman with a shady captain named Opium Jones and becomes involved with a group of pirate revolutionaries who seek to bring down the Spanish armada, and the other storyline features Clem Snide, a present day private detective who is retained by a wealthy family to investigate the disappearance of his son. Things that eventually tie the two storylines together: a radioactive virus, ancient magic rituals, time travel, and a set of six cities said to have existed in the modern day Gobi Desert in the far past. If not for Burroughs' knack for satire and apocalyptic weirdness, this could have easily turned into some lame fantasy/historical fiction novel. The only thing that started to become annoying was the overabundance of constant homosexual depravity (much more so than any of his other books that I've read), but it still stands as one of the best books I've read in a long time.

rich thick and creamy
May 23, 2005

To whip it, Whip it good
Pillbug
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh Prop. by Robert Coover. Henry Waugh has a drab, lovely life as an accountant. His only joy is the baseball league which plays every night in his head. His rich inner life has created eight teams of colorful players. He didn't stop with just stats and figures, Waugh created whole back stories, histories and families for each one of his players. Armed only with a pair of dice, he watches his players struggle on towards victory. Lots of dark humor to be found in here. The big allegory is that Waugh is God propelling his world forward one roll of the dice at a time. (Take that, Einstein!)

Though the book proceeds the phenomenon of Dungeons & Dragons by several years, one could dovetail a critique of that game in to the novel as well.

Livid Blue Couch
Oct 16, 2005
I just finished The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie. It took me two months. I loved the story, and the prose was absolutely beautiful - there were times when I'd reread a passage two or three times, or speak a part out loud, just because it sounded wonderful. But it dragged. It's one of those books that will be ten times better on a second reading, because I know that the plot is actually going to move. This reading, though, was almost a chore, mostly because of Rushdie's loooong tangenital descriptions of this or that.

mallratcal
Sep 10, 2003


I finished reading The Death of WCW, last night. It was easy to read but I was hoping for a little more Wrestlecrap.

Myotis
Aug 23, 2006

We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Wild Swans by Jung Chang. This book starts off quite slow, and is basically the entire life story of three generations of women in China from the Japanese occupation until after the cultural revolution. (true story)

Parts of it are depressing as gently caress and reveals the darkest side of human nature, which is far, far grimmer than you ever thought possible. While on the other hand, some of the stories she tells really make you sit back in amazement at the good we are capable of in the worst of situations.

Even though the writing isn't the best and it is, in effect, just a chronological account, this has to be the biggest eye opener I've ever picked up. The change her father goes through during Wild Swans is particularly revealing, and not something I think I will ever forget.

misu
Apr 12, 2005
ASK ME WHY MY OLD CUSTOM TITLE HAD AN MSPAINT PENIS IN IT
Mysterious Skin - starts out about molestation and neglect and ends with a solved mystery. It's a little like VC Andrews meets HP Lovecraft, except in this universe the inbred corn-pone is saved for a single diner pit stop.
I had a hard time reading this but still finished it in a day. The protagonists quests for self discovery gave me that ol' encyclopedia brown 'it's right in front of your nose, you poor bastard' twitch. Somehow it kept me reading.

kurupi
Jun 20, 2001

I fucking hate NCLB.
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote.

This is the first Capote I've read.

I liked the movie, but (as usual)the book was something very different, and I liked it much more. I can understand why the movie had to be so sanitized, but it's a pity that it sucked the life out of the characters.

kurupi fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Dec 3, 2006

Hinge
May 3, 2006

Top Dog.
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever (Books 1-3) by Stephen Donaldson, which seems to drawa bit of criticism here-at least several people have emntioned it in the worst books of all time. I can see where they are going, even if I don't agree. If you are looking for something to happen, say for Covenant to be pro active or shut up about leprosy, it isn't a great book. I found that some of the scnes-The Ranhyhyn and the Colossus, for example, were brilliant and I really enjoyed them. The ending was a bit of a change of pace, and almost makes me wonder how he'll pull 4-6 off, but Donaldson has never shied from a deus ex machina yet.

I wouldn't recommend the book to many people unless I knew they liked that sort of thing, because it is a relatively dry and repetitive book. I'll still be reading 4-6.

Wet Bandits Copycat
Apr 18, 2004

This week I read:

Timequake by Vonnegut.

Even though I love Vonnegut I didn't go nuts over this novel. It admits that it's an amalgam of things Vonnegut wrote and reads like it.

explain to me some stories of Kafka

I've never read anything written by Kafka before so I decided to pick this up. I thought it, and the explanatory essays, were excellent. I'm going to move onto other short stories by Kafka.

The pilgrims progress by John Bunyan.

Christian allegory. It wasn't fun to read, but it's been mentioned in so many other novels I've read that I wanted to look at it because I had no idea what it was. Now I know. It was also mentioned in one of the explanatory essays in explain to me some stories of Kafka so I decided that I had to read it.

I've decided that next week I'm going to read (attempt to read) Palm sunday and Ovid's metamorphosis.

uggy
Aug 6, 2006

Posting is SERIOUS BUSINESS
and I am completely joyless

Don't make me judge you
First Counsel by Brad Meltzer. Probably my favorite thriller writer, which means he's not a real author. It was really good, and it had me turning pages. Read for three hours until the light of a new day is seen through my window. Okay.

Yeast Confection
Oct 7, 2005
Putrid Scum by Crad Kilodney, an autobiography of his life from 1970's to the 1980's selling his work on the streets of Toronto. Aside from being perverted and ridiculously full of himself, he's not a bad writer and can be very funny.

In this book, you learn that Crad only wants two things in life: people to read his books and the love of a woman.

He doesn't get either of them.

Mack the Knife
Feb 8, 2004

would you like to buy a monkey?
I just finished a few books:

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, is a philosophical treatise on fanaticism, and is a very interesting read. It concentrates on the similarities of religious, political, and other forms of fanaticism, the type of personality that is susceptible to them, and how mass movements of this type start and end. It's a short read, too, but very interesting. Highly recommended.

Naked City by Weegee is a book of photographs by the diminutive street photographer. I like his photography, so the stories inbetween were worth reading. He was rather forward-thinking for his time. It's a good historical document of early 20th-century New York City.

New Jersey Curiosities by Peter Genovese. Before Weird NJ, Peter Genovese was exploring the oddities of the state and reporting them in the Star-Ledger. He's more interested in kitsch and Americana than ghost stories and urban exploration, but the book has a wealth of state history is great if you've moved here and want to find some quirky places to eat and visit.

bobservo
Jul 24, 2003

Cell by Stephen King. I have to give the novel credit by suckering me in with an amazing first fifty pages where the action never stops. Then it stops. Cell would be alright as a novella, but I think King wanted to stretch a short story into a novel and had no loving clue how to fill the space. My biggest problem is that after the introduction to the book, the characters are seemingly in no danger whatsoever, which ruins all the fun of the "zombie" angle. King also tries desperately to write for two teenage characters, but apparently his only reference was a book of 1940s slang (I'm not kidding). This is all tied up with crazy psychic elements that make the notion of "motivation" irrelevant; these elements are also there to make some of the poorly written sections of the book (i.e. most of it) seem plausible. Overall, a pretty insulting work, and the worst book I've ever read by King. I'm really astonished that he thought this was suitable for publishing.

Garp
Nov 30, 2006

more illegitimate children than Tom Brady
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. I've heard this book described as the feminine equal to The Cather in the Rye, to me it was far from it. The books protagonist parallels Sylvias own descent into madness after the lead protagonist Esther Greenwood returns home from writing in New York. I found the characters to be dull and boring. While it might have been a rallying flag for the feminist movement the story itself reads like a a depressed teenage girl's livejournal (albeit a very well written one).

Fluke by Christopher Moore. I was hesitant to pick up a book with a "Today's Book Club" sticker on the front but the summary was interesting. I love Moore's writing style and I'm going to pick up Lamb soon. The story is like a silly modern day Jonah and the Whale, starring a sarcastic middle aged Nathan Quinn researching the Humpback song off the coast of Hawaii. By far the best character is Kona, the white rastafarian wannabe from Jersey.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

mallratcal
Sep 10, 2003


Vampire$. Kind of anticlimactic but not bad.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply