Book recommendations

[vivalaultra 0]

I hate to walk into the middle of a Pynchon discussion. And I haven't read Against the Day yet, but I just wanted to mention that I started reading The Echo Maker by Richard Powers. It was the runner-up to Cormac McCarthy for the 2007 Pulitzer. I'm 40 pages in and it's well-written for sure, but I'm hoping it picks up soon plotwise. It's got this interesting 'bird motif' going.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

The Echo Maker is really good, though I found the ending kind of flat. (Mainly, the resolution for one of the central characters.)

 

EDIT: What are some good books from the past year, I wonder. I've read the following:

 

Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Philip Roth - Everyman

Thomas Pynchon - Against the Day

Cormac McCarthy - The Road

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Hey, Byron, did you like the Chums of Chance as much as I did? It was a little disappointing how their presence diminishes in the second half of the book.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

Yeah, I found that sort of dissapointinting too. I didn't absloutely love the CoC, but I did think they provided a nice counterpoint to everything else that was going on. Though I didn't find their dissapearence from the novel as dissapointing as Lake Traverse's.

 

Another problem I had with the book is that it seemed like some of the charactierization got lazier near the end. I'm thinking of Yashmeen in particular; she goes from being probably the most interesting character in the book (especially during the Göttingen section) to being basically just another run-of-the-mill Pynchon heroine who's into kinky sex.

 

As for good books from the past year or so, I'm currently reading Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which had all the critics going nuts last year. It's nothing earth-shattering, but it's nice enough (though the narrative voice--that of an over-educated college freshman--can get a little grating from time to time).

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

I took a rec from this girl with somewhat decent taste and am reading A.M. Homes' This Book Will Save Your Life. It reads like a screenplay for a potential Hollywood production starring Tom Hanks. It's pretty not good so far, but it's almost fascinating in its transparency.

 

EDIT: Fun, literary-related bit of gossip: Homes and David Foster Wallace were once lovers in college.

[vivalaultra 0]

I just finished reading that book. I was surprised it came out in the last couple years, as the 'biting critique' of Hollywood and pop culture read like something out of 1997. I did like one of her other books-Music for Torching a good bit, though.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

There's some really clunky writing in this book—especially in the opening pages, which was almost enough to make me stop reading then and there—but it's turning into something easily digestable, if pedestrian.

 

Also, about the clunky writing, there's a part where she describes a character's thick-soled boots as "Parliment-Funkadelic boots." That's it. That's not so much novel-writing as it is script notation. And that's just one of the many things I've encountered in the first 70-something pages that makes me wonder if this book didn't start out as a screenplay. Apparently, this book has been optioned to be turned into movie, but no casting decisions have been made. If Hanks does end up involved, You Heard It First here, from me, at TSM.

[godthedog 0]

currently reading 'at swim, two boys' by jamie o'neill. it's taking me forever, mostly because it's not very compelling. lots of patchy james joyce imitating (in particular, a few jarring pages that blatantly rip off the "ithaca" chapter of 'ulysses' for no apparent reason), with characters who are mostly pretty thin.

 

before that, i read faulkner's 'intruder in the dust', which was also not very compelling. the more i read faulkner, the more he seems like a hit-or-miss guy rather than the uber-genius i'm told he was.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

Man, this sucks. I stopped reading Gravity's Rainbow for the moment because it was too big to take back and forth to work on the metro, and now I want to (finally) read Kavalier and Clay, and am having the same problem. I need a bigger laptop bag. If I ever resolve this problem, I may take a run at Finnegan's Wake this summer.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Is your commute to work the only time you read?

[vivalaultra 0]

Hey, Inc, did you happen to see Cormac McCarthy on Oprah today? I thought, despite the awkwardness and the fact that McCarthy looked like he was trying to physically disappear into his easy chair, it actually went better than I had expected.

[Guest Vitamin X]

... does/would Inc even watch Oprah? Even for Cormac McCarthy?

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

Is your commute to work the only time you read?

Not at all, but it's my favorite time to read--I've got 25 minutes each way, and it's either that or listen to music. It's also the perfect time of year in D.C.--end of spring/start of summer, before it gets ungodly hot--so I've been reading outside at lunch, too. I'm really poor at balancing multiple books at once; even in college, when I was taking 2-3 English classes at a time, I tended to go start-to-finish on one, then move on to the next.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Hey, Inc, did you happen to see Cormac McCarthy on Oprah today? I thought, despite the awkwardness and the fact that McCarthy looked like he was trying to physically disappear into his easy chair, it actually went better than I had expected.

She made him blush, which was kind of cute.

 

The interview was okay. Didn't learn much new stuff—except for his briefly discussing what inspired The Road—but I wasn't expecting much new, anyway.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Is your commute to work the only time you read?

Not at all, but it's my favorite time to read--I've got 25 minutes each way, and it's either that or listen to music. It's also the perfect time of year in D.C.--end of spring/start of summer, before it gets ungodly hot--so I've been reading outside at lunch, too. I'm really poor at balancing multiple books at once; even in college, when I was taking 2-3 English classes at a time, I tended to go start-to-finish on one, then move on to the next.

Get a man bag to handle the weightier tomes. Both Gravity's Rainbow and that Chabon book are worth the effort.

 

I'm not much for multiple-books-at-a-time, either, unless it's a short story or essay collection.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Any of you fellows ever read Ian McEwan? I think I recall Edwin singing his praises. Anyway, the review in the NYT Book Review this past week of his newest one intrigued me.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

Atonement is great, and Saturday is really good, even if it gets a bit gimmicky/gratuitous in its final act. I haven't picked up On Chesil Beach yet, but might grab it this weekend and tear through it--the reviews I've read suggest a very quick read. I want to delve a bit further into his back catalog this summer, I think.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

There's gonna be a film version of Atonement coming out later this year; I should probably get it now so I'll have it out of the way.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

As for good books from the past year or so, I'm currently reading Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which had all the critics going nuts last year. It's nothing earth-shattering, but it's nice enough (though the narrative voice--that of an over-educated college freshman--can get a little grating from time to time).

 

Finished this. My initial reaction ("nothing earth-shattering, but nice enough") turned out to be a little off the mark as the book wound up being way better than "nice enough" (though still not quite earth-shattering). After the first hundred or so pages a lot of the forced quirkiness that I found grating started to drop away and was replaced by some really great writing and a genuinely intriguing plot.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

I'm considering reading either The Executioner's Song or Don Quixote, but I've read a lot of really long books in the last year or so and am thinking I need a break from 1,000 page epics.

[godthedog 0]

about 10 or so pages into antoine de saint-exupery's 'night flight'. nothing's happened yet and i'm already hooked just because the descriptions are so great. based on that, and on the fact that 'the little prince' is my probably favorite book in the world, i have very high hopes for this.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

A few friends and relatives, knowing that I majored in reading books, got me books for my birthday. One such book was Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which I read in two days and was disappointed to find out was really just some inconclusive pop psychology jibba-jabba. The disappointment comes from the fact that lots of people I know whose tastes I generally trust said this was pretty cool; it reads like an unedited manuscript, just a hodgepodge of reverse-engineered faux social science. The best thing that can be said of it is that it contains a good number of interesting little anecdotes and stories, which would work better without the book's cumbersome and Insightful intro-to-cognitive-psychology framework. I'm going back to Kavalier and Clay now.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

I'm reading Don Quixote. It's plenty amusing, though there's the drawback of the book's many, many lengthy passages of dialog. I'm sure excising some of the novel's verbal calories would not ill-effect its plot protein, but hey, this was originally published 400 years ago, so whaddaya gonna do.

[justsoyouknow 0]

Read Palahniuk's Rant. Huge thumbs down from me, and I've enjoyed the majority of his work. But it seemed like he ran out of steam towards the end, and just went, "Ok, fifty pages to go, let's wrap this thing up" and started throwing shit out there.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

I've kind of gotten that feeling anytime I've read a book of his. If I ever took the guy seriously, I stopped after he wrote an astonishingly lame, jilted letter to the Salon book columnist who said that Diary sucked:

 

Dear Laura Nelson [ sic ],

 

I have never responded to a review, perhaps because I've never gotten such a cruel and mean-spirited one.

 

Please send me a copy of your latest book. I'd love to read it.

 

Until you can create something that captivates people, I'd invite you to just shut up. It's easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It's a lot more difficult to perform one. I'd also invite you to read the reviews Fitzgerald got for "Gatsby" from dull, sad, bitter people -- like yourself. -- Chuck Palahniuk

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

What a pussy! Terrible fucking writer, too.

[justsoyouknow 0]

Seriously. Anytime you have to go, "....and then he travels back in time and fucks his mom. BAM!" then you know you should consider something different out of life.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

Okay, now I actually do want to read another one of his books, just to see that happen.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Some things you shouldn't even joke about.

[justsoyouknow 0]

The more I think about it, all of his books are exactly the same. Nihilism, time travel, nonlinear format.