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So I've been reading a whole bunch of Elmore Leonard, and a lot of the time, he has characters end sentences with "uh?" which to me seems like a strange sound (English is my second language). Is it a Florida or Detroit thing (seeing as a lot of his books take place in those places, and I haven't been there, only Boston/NY/Baltimore/SF/Philly for any real length of time)? I interpret it sortof like the Canadian "eh?" or a more lazy "huh?" which I guess is what he means, it just seems a little odd to me to write it like that.
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Oct 22, 2011 15:42
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Hah, that makes the books even more entertaining.
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Oct 23, 2011 12:44
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coyo7e posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_%28novel%29 This series pissed me off, everybody acts like children. They literally get red in the face and glare at each other when somebody does something they don't like. What the gently caress. Only decent part was the guy in the ship during transit.
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Dec 8, 2011 22:33
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i love cuttin a book, youre the first to read that poo poo,ts great.
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Dec 23, 2011 06:19
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By the way, anyone else a Good Reads librarian? I just signed up today, was wondering if you guys had some stuff to tell, good/bad, whatever. Mostly I signed up cause a lot of older Danish works and authors are terribly fragmented, and I'm on a binge of those right now, so I had to fix those so I wouldn't die from sperg overload.
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Jan 13, 2012 22:37
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Benny the Snake posted:Hey, I saw Spook County by William Gibson on sale at my library's bookstore. I'm not too big of a reader (I've glazed thru most of the short stories in The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler), but I loved reading Neuromancer back in my Sci-Fi lit class. How is Spook County? Money's not the question but I'd like to know if it's worth my time. It's near-future stuff, day after tomorrow type sci-fi. Not at all as far flung as Neuromancer. I like it, but you should be aware that it's the second book in a trilogy (starting & ending with Pattern Recognition & Zero History respectively). The second & third books tie into each other more, with Pattern Recognition being more stand-alone, but I recommend reading them in order.
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Aug 2, 2012 11:04
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Handsome Dead posted:Am I justified in getting a Kindle just because I can't stand it when a series of books don't match? I've been reading John Le Carré and I've just got Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and found it isn't Penguin Classics but another imprint that is emulating the style. It looks just different enough to just look like a knock off. Well if the appearance is important, getting an e-book is kindof self-defeating. I usually try to get the same editions when I order used books, but if I can't then I don't really bother.
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Aug 11, 2012 09:47
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stratdax posted:I've only read The Metamorphosis from Kafka in school. I have a somewhat vague understanding of what "Kafkaesque" means - once Nately's Whore started dropping in and out of the story near the end seemingly at whim, I just kept thinking "is this what 'Kafkaesque' refers to?" There was a sense of doom that could come without any logic. Did I have the right idea? Yeah, simply put Kafkaesque usually means either impending doom and/or impenetrable bureaucracy. Lobster Henry posted:Catch-22 is also one of my favourite novels, but I've never been able to make much headway into Heller's other works. I've never encountered anybody who has recommended them, and none of them seem to have received a fraction of the attention shown to Catch-22. I read Good as Gold & Something Happened some years ago and quite liked them (and Catch-22 is still next to my bed, waiting to be read  so I can't compare). Something Happened was exhausting and depressing, but was saved by the language and the ending. If it had been any grimmer I might not have made it through to those last redemptive pages. Good as Gold was hilarious; you could probably call it a Kafkaesque comedy.
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Aug 17, 2012 02:17
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UltimoDragonQuest posted:What is the origin and purpose of "a novel" being written on book covers? I suspect it goes all the way back to when novels were new (as in the meaning of the word novel) and the word was displacing the previous word "romance" in the 1600s. That is, to differentiate from the romances, they put "a novel" in the title. Edit: Yep,  from Wikipedia Carthag Tuek fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Jan 22, 2013 |
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Jan 22, 2013 06:31
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SpaceMost posted:I'm almost finished Pillars of the Earth and Ken Follet's sad sack early medieval England is really wearing me down. Someone please tell me it ends on a happy note. I read it on a friend's recommendation 2-3 years back, and the only thing to stick in my mind is the cartoonishly evil rapist nobleman. I don't even remember how it ends, but probably everything gets tied up neat in the end since it's pretty airport-fiction-y.
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Mar 9, 2013 02:44
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The Dregs posted:Is there a thread in the BB for Lord of the Rings/Middle Earth? (And if not, why the hell isnt there one?!) Google didn't help me find anything but our threads for LOTR Online. The Hobbit thread in CineD had a lot of folks talking about all the books and the world in it before the movie came out, dunno if they still do, but it wouldn't surprise me. E: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3455569
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Mar 24, 2013 23:30
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SilkyP posted:Been reading some Paul Theroux after seeing a book of his on sale and wanted to know of some other good travel writers. I have read everything Bill Bryson has written and am a big fan of his as well. I quite liked Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat. I got it in a crate with a bunch of Theroux books so that's maybe why I associate them. It's less serious in tone, more jovial, but as serious in topic.
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May 2, 2013 05:36
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I used to have a stack for unread books, but I soon realized it looks much better if I shove em in the regular shelf and just let people know that I've read 90-some% of the books on those shelves.
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Oct 5, 2013 03:47
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except for the whole literal comedy part, i was thinking elmore leonard. lots of books set in florida, and theyre hilarious
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Nov 30, 2013 05:03
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Danith posted:Anyone know if there's a script or something that lets you sort books on amazon by page count? Sometimes I like a long book to read and so many are only like 290 pages Tried looking at some greasemonkey scripts but I guess there aren't any right now. What I do though is buy a handful of books at the time, and then I pick and choose depending on my mood. Sometimes I just can't read an actual book so I might be better off with a short story collection, and sometimes I'm just hungering for a big old brick.
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Dec 14, 2013 09:49
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Jumpingmanjim posted:In the context of old books (circa 1799), what does 'plate' mean? Am I right in thinking that it's an engraving print that would have come with the book when it was first sold, but could be easily removed and resold separately? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped-in_page Example from a 1931 book of Rembrandt drawings I had lying around:   In case it's unclear, the drawing itself is printed separately and glued into the dotted rectangle which was printed on the page.
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Jan 9, 2014 16:36
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Benny the Snake posted:So I wana read "American Gods" by Neil Gamian, but the "author's perfered text" is twice as much as the first edition. Is there a significant difference between the versions, or can I get away with being a cheapskate? I've only read the preferred version, but I think it's supposed to be the uncut original manuscript (though copy-edited). Something like 20% longer? But no idea if it's worth it..
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Sep 28, 2014 14:33
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Yeah, a lot of local bookstores around here have websites with their inventory up so you can call in an order, even if they might not have a fullfledged shopping cart.
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Dec 30, 2014 22:40
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In my experience the owners or employees usually know of other stores that specialize differently.
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Dec 30, 2014 23:32
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blue squares posted:What book has the craziest "making of" type story behind it? Like weird things that go on with the author like bizarre research or something? You could make a case for a lot of biographies (the book about the soccer team in the Andes forced to cannibalism springs to mind) or pseudo- (A lot of Hemingway's stuff is deeply rooted in his own war experiences, etc). You want something more though, right? Do you have an example to spark the mind?
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Mar 21, 2015 00:15
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Put crudely, "Jackass but as a book"  I'll try and think on it.
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Mar 21, 2015 00:41
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Oh poo poo I just remembered: Nellie Bly. In 1889–90 she traveled around the world as one of the first to ever do so in less than 80 days, inspired by the book of that name, and reported having done so as the first. But more apropos: She took on a false identity and pretended insanity to have herself comitted in order to expose the inhumanity of mental asylums in the 1880s. Also, that brings to mind Günter Wallraff who's lived as fictional personas and taken jobs as such in order to expose systemic racism, etc There's also a woman named Charlotte Johannsen who infiltrated a Danish neo-nazi milieu and later wrote about it, dunno if that is available in English: http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Johannsen
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Mar 21, 2015 00:50
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Stravinsky posted:Please never use the words fan fiction in regards to religious beliefs ever again or I am going to spasticly flail my little retard arms uselessly until I fall over and piss myself and die. My blood will be on your hands what about this one quote:No, Moslems don’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah.
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Apr 3, 2015 23:08
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Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy
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May 6, 2015 20:38
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Cormack McCarthy, Child of God
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May 6, 2015 21:04
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Edited by GRRM though They probably started some at 400 pages and ended up 2000.
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May 24, 2015 03:43
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VagueRant posted:I was meaning to check out some Raymond Chandler (the makers of Grim Fandango said it was a big influence and I'm an uncultured goon). Some quotes I've seen were pretty great. Any specific book stand out? The Big Sleep is very good imo. Also you can get all his novels in 2 paperbacks, I bought them like that, they're short as hell.
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May 30, 2015 10:44
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Get it, it's a pretty quick read. There's a Cormac McCarthy thread by the way: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3503637
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Jun 9, 2015 18:33
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Paper With Lines posted:I just finished Franzen's Corrections and really liked the children characters, but hated the parents until the last 100-150 pages or so. I assume he did this on purpose. I've read it a couple of times and I hate a different character the most each time, it's great. I think the only one I haven't hated yet is Denise. It reminds me a little of Good as Gold & Something Happened (Joseph Heller) in that I hate the characters but like the book. I liked it better than Freedom, but I dunno if that's cause I read The Corrections first.
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Jul 13, 2015 13:57
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Paper With Lines posted:This is interesting. I love Denise. I especially love the part towards the end where it describes her divorce and then her hate/love/seduction relationship with Brian and Robin. But. But. I never hated either of the other Lambert kids. Gary seemed to be a douche but he tried (and his wife was awful) and the same seems to be true for Chip, but for different reasons. I guess it's mostly just Chip & Gary that I hate, the parents aren't bad except for having old people opinions on stuff. Probably part of it is the brothers are both super insecure and remind me of the bad parts of myself. Gary is depressed as gently caress and paranoid, his wife is actually pretty reasonable when you consider how he's acting around her and the children, constantly trying to fight her and become the favorite parent. Chip covers his insecurities with ridiculous poo poo like having coeds do ritalin (or something, I forgot) off his dick, and constantly blowing away all his money, basically whole #yolo poo poo you mention. They do have good sides of course, but they mostly come out at the end.
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Jul 16, 2015 14:31
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Alhazred posted:Speaking of Orwell, I finally found this little gem: its seriously the best possible cover for that book
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Jul 26, 2015 02:59
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ToxicFrog posted:I read books because it's fun. lol if your opinions aren't always at either extreme.
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Aug 19, 2015 19:14
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krampster2 posted:When you order something online like a pizza or a book I often wonder if there is a character limit to the additional notes section. If not I would like to find an eBook of War and Peace and paste the whole thing in there. Or perhaps just a lengthy poem describing in great detail how I would like the package left by the downstairs door. I once ordered a pizza online where they hadn't put a limit on any of the extras, one of them just being "slice it please" (which cost nothing) so i ordered it sliced like 23 times or something like that but it was still only sliced like a regular and the delivery guy was annoyed cause it took a lot of their thermal paper to print out my dumb order.
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Aug 22, 2015 02:21
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Juanito posted:I'd throw a fit if I were paying for a pizza that I wanted sliced 23 times, and didn't get exactly that. What happened to the customer is always right? Well the slicing was free so I didn't pay for it, but then again in a way I guess you could say I did cause it was my part of my order that I paid for. This is deep.
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Aug 22, 2015 02:54
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Is that the Hemingway story? The Sun Also Rises? I forgot the title but I read a really good story by Hemingway about a Toreador. Hemingway's documentary style works really well with things like that. Def recommended.
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Sep 13, 2015 02:59
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Casimir Radon posted:It's always weird when you buy used books and there's an inscription for someone else in there. One I got yesterday was dated 2010, jackass didn't even hang onto it for 5 years, if that long. To me those are a plus. Book's got provenance. Aunt Jan wishes you the best.
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Sep 13, 2015 22:52
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I buy a lot of used books, and one of the places I got them from consistently had handwritten recipe file cards put into them as bookmarks. Like they just put whatever reasonably sized paper in there, and for some reason they had a pile of recipes that some grandmother wrote down. It was fantastic. Sadly they appear to have run out, lately it's just been blank paper :/
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Sep 13, 2015 23:10
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Better World Books & World of Books on Amazon UK have worked well for me in the past. They have pretty much everything and are cheap as hell (1p for the book + GBP 3 or so for shipping to EU iirc).
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Sep 24, 2015 13:46
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I don't think characters can win.
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Sep 30, 2015 16:24
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tonytheshoes posted:Stupid question--I try to be pretty meticulous about logging the books I read on Goodreads, but I'm at a loss when it comes to short stories... Just looking for some other opinions on how you all might log short stories if you don't read the entire book... argh. It's the only area of my life where I have OCD, and I can't figure out what to do. #nerdpeopleproblems Ideally they'd alter their database so each "work" is an entry by itself and you can mark a given collection of works read or just a handful of short stories from different collections. Would also fix books that for practical reasons are split up into two volumes, but are a single work. But short stories don't have ISBN numbers so it'd probably be a nightmare to maintain, metadata-wise. Anyway I stopped using goodreads because reading became a numbers game.
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Oct 9, 2015 20:56
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