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I need really epic fantasy, preferably with wizards. I love the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and GRRM's neverending story, didn't dig the Malazan Book of the Fallen or Brian Ruckley's Winterbirth, and have A Wizard of Earthsea and The Blade Itself on my to-read list. I know to avoid Goodkind and I've no urge to dig into the Wheel of Time series...where to now?
chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Jun 29, 2009 |
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Jun 29, 2009 04:29
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I'd like to read more about Daoism, but all I've got is an unannotated Tao te Ching and the Tao of Pooh. Any suggestions as to where I should go next? Annotated Taos especially preferred.
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Aug 1, 2010 07:14
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I need some light reading. For some reason I'm really in the mood for a horror or dark fantasy (emphasis on the dark rather than fantasy) novel set in a small town. Something more Alan Wake than Stephen King. I'd love for it to be as well-written as such a thing could possibly be.
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Feb 2, 2012 01:34
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I need a horror novel. I'm actually thinking of starting a horror book megathread, if anyone's interested. I love House of Leaves, The Raw Shark Texts, and Ligotti - stories that are great at inserting the totally unnatural into the mundane, are heavily atmospheric and steer away from body horror. Something creeping and unsettling. Any suggestions?
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Aug 12, 2012 06:03
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Ornamented Death posted:Beneath the Surface by Simon Strantzas (the style of stories here are very reminiscent of Ligotti) and pretty much anything by Laird Barron are good places to start. These look right up my alley, thanks. I should've mentioned that short stories and novellas are great as well. e: actually, probably even preferable. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Aug 12, 2012 |
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Aug 12, 2012 16:34
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I need some philosophy. From any school. I have a very little background in stuff that can be applied to lit crit (Greenblatt, Said, Campbell, Jung, Freud, hooks, Foucault, Aristotle) and that's it.
chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Jun 19, 2013 |
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Jun 19, 2013 18:02
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If you're over the age of 19 and you're not grappling with some deeply-rooted misogyny don't touch Bukowski with a 10 metre cattle prod. A lot of the Big Old Great Greats of Poetry are in the public domain, so if you don't feel like grabbing an anthology you can browse, say, Shakespeare's Sonnets here, or Dickinson,, or Coleridge's entire Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or Rumi. But that's going to limit you to primarily pre-20th century stuff, so take it as you will. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Feb 13, 2014 |
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Feb 13, 2014 19:08
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Franchescanado posted:That's really harsh and oversimplifying a great writer, and I vehemently disagree. Yeah, nah. Bukowski is great as a lonely, depressed and angry Freshman, sure, but he has very little to offer beyond that if you aren't a straight white guy. He's an epitome of hypermasculine literature post-Hemingway, and for what it's worth anecdotally I've personally never known someone who didn't fall into the straight-white-male category who wasn't at best revolted by Bukowski. Slate posted:Tortorici had a similarly visceral reaction to Charles Bukowski: "I will never forget reading Bukowski’s Post Office and feeling so horrible, the way that the narrator describes the thickness of ugly women’s legs. I think it was the first time I felt like a book that I was trying to identify with rejected me. Though I did absorb it, and of course it made me hate my body or whatever." He is a flawed person, sure, and among his flaws are the romanticization of the drunk, angry white sexist. The misogynist themes in his work - which are by no means subtle - are rarely if ever self-examined, certainly never set up to be knocked down; instead they feed into his old-man-drunk-at-3-AM-with-a-typewriter mythos and reinforce it. It's a toxic mythos and one that we're supposed to recognize as flawed, but also to admire for its honest-toughguy ethos. He repeatedly returns to the open abuse of women, presented with a wink and a nudge, and instead of recoiling in horror at his entire existence the reader is invited to understand, appreciate and partake in it. For real, can you think of a single less-than-horrific presentation of women in his entire corpus? I sure as hell can't. I'll defer to another critic who said it better than I can: quote:Bukowski's antics with women, his thoughts about them, are one vast and sniggering cliché. He has nothing to tell us about them because, I'm convinced, he knows nothing about them (e.g., "the ladies will always be the same.") and is determined at this point not to learn. They are a dirty joke to him, a dirty joke on him. Inside the web of his booze-bull-and-broad exploits lurks a demon sexual jingoist, erupting and irrupting in self-punishing concatenations; hostile, frustrated, puglistic- fearful of the role into which (he thinks) one is cast by fate of genitalia. And less serious, but here's a woman writing about why not to date a man who reads Bukowski. Anyway I'll end the derail but for the love of God don't read Bukowski. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Feb 13, 2014 |
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Feb 13, 2014 21:36
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regulargonzalez posted:e: There's a bit of irony in someone with a Wild Cards tag ripping on Bukowski's outlook on women and sex. For your next essay, tell me about Cersei's discovery of her friend's "Myrish swamp" or about fat pink masts. Don't know what you're talking about dude ASOIAF is a model of feminist lit and not at all dumb garbage that's fun to rip on  kolby posted:Hey guys, I was looking for some recommendations on books that have a certain Twilight Zone type of feel. Specifically, the one's where someone wakes up in a strange place and they have to figure out what the hell is going on(I guess they were all like that). Some movie examples I can give would be "Cube," "Oldboy" and the beginning of the first "Saw." I am reading "The Trial" right now and I just can't get into it, but I like the concept. Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts doesn't get enough love imo. Protagonist wakes up with no memory, letters keep arriving in the post from his 'past self,' something called the Un-Space Exploration Committee is involved, and also he's apparently being hunted by a conceptual shark that eats ideas. It's odd in a postmodern way, and leans a little more towards House of Leaves than some of the other things on your list, but it sure keeps the Twilight Zone vibe running for long periods of time. I dig it. e: Adib posted:If you decide to read him, then as a Persian with an interest in Rumi, I recommend Franklin Lewis' Rumi: Swallowing the Sun. Having been published just last year, it's a very recent book. He's one of the foremost Rumi scholars in the world and has a real gift for rendering Persian poetic verse into English. If your poetry has to rhyme, then you'll absolutely want to go with Jawid Mojaddedi's Masnavi series, which he plans to publish in eight volumes (currently, the first three have been published). He maintains Rumi's exact rhyme scheme and nothing about it feels shoehorned. Incidentally, the Masnavi is typically hailed as Rumi's most prodigious work. I've read Lewis and large chunks of Bicknell's work; have you read Coleman Barks' translation? I've heard mixed reviews. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Feb 14, 2014 |
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Feb 14, 2014 03:59
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I posted this in the History Book Thread and killed it, so I'll repost it here:me posted:I'd like books on the histories of Wales and Scotland. Is John Davies' A History of Wales worth the read? Is there an equivalent for Scotland? The book doesn't have to be a single narrative like Davies; I'm fine with reading a few books in sequence that cover different time periods.
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Feb 22, 2014 07:31
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Yay Pudding! posted:I'm looking for some stuff that would be good for a 11 year old boy who enjoys fantasy stuff. It would be something I read out loud to him, so difficulty isn't an issue. I just don't want anything overly dark/violent or sex stuff. His mom reads LOTR to him, so I guess that would be a good baseline. Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence, Emily Rodda's Deltora Quest books and Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, in no particular order. I loved Cooper and Rodda when I was around that age. E: I don't think there's much questionable content in Sanderson (dude is Mormon to the bone) but the reading level might be a little high for an 11-year old. But maybe not, if he digs LOTR. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Mar 10, 2014 |
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Mar 10, 2014 06:00
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I'd like a solid work on the character of Satan in the Hebrew and Christian bibles. Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan is good, but it's primarily focused on the actions of the early church; I'm looking for something more textually-focused.
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Mar 24, 2014 04:42
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Just jumping in to say that anyone who likes fantasy, historical fiction or just really lovely contemporary prose might want to give some though to Nicola Griffith's [i]Hild:/i] Amazon posted:In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king’s youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby. The Toast has a good article in which Hild is held up as the anti-Game of Thrones.
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Mar 31, 2014 17:48
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BrosephofArimathea posted:
I think you're confused on this one. Monster Island was the one in which a bog mummy uses wizard-zombie powers to fight a group of Somali pirates who have come to NYC to find AIDS medication for their queen or something. Also the primary antagonist is another zombie wizard named, I believe, Gary. The Rising is the one in which the Large Hadron Collider undoes an ancient spell keeping evil angels locked in a parallel dimension and they make zombies somehow. I think there's an evil military commander and a lot of rape. Both of them are terrible.
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Apr 2, 2014 03:39
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I've got a monthly book club running with some friends. Each month one of us picks a book that fits two criteria: 1) It's by a woman 2) It's preferably by a non-American woman This month it's my turn. Last month we went for horror and read I Remember You by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir; this month we're apparently all in the mood for horror again, so I'm looking for a horror novel that's by a woman who is preferably from outside of America. Any suggestions would be great! Also, if anyone's read Laura Kasischke's Mind of Winter - are there genuine supernatural elements or is it all psychological horror? And would you recommend it?
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Nov 23, 2014 07:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I need BotM recommendations pale fire is a great idea id like an excuse to revisit the mabinogion in a non-academic context, and thats on gutenberg iirc du maurier - rebecca
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Jul 29, 2016 19:07
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bizarro fiction is great if you're an adolescent male who thinks titles like The Baby Jesus Butt Plug are at all interesting or edgy
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Aug 11, 2016 14:50
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WickedHate posted:What would a big Tolkien fan like that's nothing at all like Tolkien? You know, if you wanted to broaden their horizons. The Nibelungenlied
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Aug 20, 2016 05:22
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i wasn't kidding about the nibelungenlied
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Aug 20, 2016 20:10
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im gay posted:Can anyone recommend books similar to Sphere by Michael Crichton or other sci-fi books that take place in modernish times? Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child write in a subgenre often termed 'technothriller' that usually matches up well with the kind of thing that Chrichton was doing in Sphere. I used to love them. Look into their co-authored book The Ice Limit (which has a new sequel I've not read), about an expedition to retrieve an anomalous object found in the arctic Also Child's solo novel Deep Storm, about a drilling rig which uncovers extraterrestrial tech no time travel tho
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Aug 22, 2016 15:24
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If you read Naked Lunch sober you're grievously loving up
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Aug 26, 2016 04:26
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TommyGun85 posted:I feel like Naked Lunch is one of those books everyone says thry have read, but nobody actually has. The Strand had a display out a few months back labeled 'books you pretended to read in college.' I don't recall whether Naked Lunch was on there, but Ulysses and Infinite Jest both were
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Aug 26, 2016 18:36
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Cerepol posted:I've gotten burned out on series and fantasy after fantasy. Whats a nice quick non-fiction to read to get me back into it. non-fiction on what man, you want like particle physics or north korea or
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Sep 1, 2016 18:08
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Jerry Mumphrey posted:Need some audiobook for travelling and I want to do some Cormac McCarthy that I haven't read before. Child of God, Orchard Keeper or Outer Dark? Child of God. Child of Gooooooooooddd
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Sep 2, 2016 18:31
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If you want grim nonfic: My Traitor's Heart, Rian Malan. One of my favourite nonfic books; a memoir of growing up as a sympathetic Afrikaner under Apartheid. Deeply shocking if you've not read about the (horrific) systemic abuse and murder under that system. Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick. An incredibly detailed and compelling look inside the (horrific) way in which people live in North Korea, based largely on interviews with defectors In the same vein, Escape from Camp 14, Blaine Harden. Recounts the (horrific) life and eventual escape of a man born inside one of NK's detention/labour camps; essentially modern-day concentration camps. The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang, about, uh, the Rape of Nanking. Details the gruesome bits like Japanese officers having beheading competitions and the widespread sexual assaults and accompanying mutilation. Horrific. e: also The Graves Are Walking, by John Kelly, about the Irish potato famine. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Sep 7, 2016 |
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Sep 7, 2016 05:31
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all history books are biased richard rhodes, the making of the atomic bomb is excellent and comprehensive
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Sep 18, 2016 21:32
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in search of lost time is seven volumes long so if you're committing to it i hope you've got a free schedule for the next year
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Oct 1, 2016 04:09
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A human heart posted:It's not that hard to read im mostly kidding. it isn't, but you do need to be committed to make it through all 4K or so pages. i haven't. Solitair posted:How easy is it to stop after one volume, then pick up the next one after some time has passed? in theory it's not that hard; in practice you will give up after or in the middle of volume three. you will keep meaning to come back to it, but you will not do so. eventually you will lie about having read it all while flirting with another english lit grad student; if she is impressed, she will not show it. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Oct 1, 2016 |
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Oct 1, 2016 06:34
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Can anyone recommend good academic works/sources on Victorian painting or Victorian visual art in general? lol midterm papers coming due
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Oct 9, 2016 03:12
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Captain Hotbutt posted:I recently picked up Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean up Sin-loving New York on an impulse buy, but it's flipped a switch in my brain and I'm becoming quite interested in 1880s - 1910s New York City history. Any fiction or non-fiction that revels in the grimier, more criminal aspects of the city during that time? Not necessarily interested in Great Gatsby-esque examinations of the American Dream but I'm open to suggestions like that if its deemed essential reading by you fine folks. Absolutely read Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum, by Tyler Anbinder. It reaches a bit earlier than your1880s cutoff date but it's great read and will give you a vivid, grimy, gutter social history of the area at the time.
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Oct 12, 2016 02:46
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Human Tornada posted:I'm looking for some breezy sword and sorcery books with more of an emphasis on action/adventure and less on magical mumbo jumbo and prophecies (a little magic is fine). Preferably part of a series and/or available in audio form. scott lynch, the lies of locke lamora more magical but with a lot of action/adventure: mistborn, brandon sanderson
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Oct 12, 2016 04:00
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Splicer posted:They're really good, despite the first one is a repurposed star trek fanfic. lol
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Oct 20, 2016 21:04
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Splicer posted:Don't let this humorous piece of trivia put you off! It's a good series, i'm alright thanks
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Oct 21, 2016 17:41
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MaxxBot posted:I want to read some books on early modern warfare and/or the transition from medieval to early modern warfare, so far I found a book called European Warfare, 1494-1660 by Jeremy Black who seems like a pretty well respected historian. Any other recommendations? he is indeed. you might also try frank tallet's War and Society in Early Modern Europe: 1495-1715, though that works to set warfare in its sociopolitical context rather than focus entirely on the killing part
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Oct 27, 2016 21:43
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thiselton-dyer, the folk-lore of plants. has sections on lightning plants (as in warding off), plants in witchcraft (as in those that witches use and those for warding off witches), plants in demonology, plants in fairy-lore, plants and the weather, and plants in folk-medicine
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Nov 7, 2016 00:05
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roth's the plot against america
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Nov 12, 2016 17:02
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books on consciousness?
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Nov 21, 2016 23:27
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if you haven't developed a hobby by retirement age you're probably going to die unfulfilled and unhappy within two years of your last day on the job, hth
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Dec 6, 2016 00:24
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Mother Night, yeah
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Dec 7, 2016 16:37
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Old Man Mozz posted:hey ya'll - life has been kind of crappy lately so I'm looking for any suggestions for gay wizards escapist trash books. jim butcher's dresden files series has a straight wizard with a gay incubus brother if that's your thing start on like book 3 though
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Dec 9, 2016 18:46
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