Book recommendations

[Hank Kingsley 0]

Rant was the first of his that I've read. I liked it but do agree that it could've been cut down by about 30-50 pages. The "Party Crashing" stuff was pretty lame, neural transcripts sounded neat, and I did like the concept of

killing one's parents to become immortal

even if he took it a little far.

 

 

 

[godthedog 0]

anthony bourdain - 'the nasty bits'.

 

read more or less the whole thing in 2 days during my downtime at work. i have no interest in either food or travel writing, but i still find bourdain compulsively readable. he way he writes is very assured and just really really...good. not nearly as good as 'kitchen confidential', mostly because the pieces are too short for him to really get on a roll, but great brain candy.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

I'm gonna start on Mailer's The Executioner's Song in the next day or so. Afterwards, I'll get a couple of significantly shorter books in before starting William Gass' The Tunnel; I need to read as many telephone book-sized epics as I can before summer's end.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

There's a passage in The Executioner's Song wherein Geraldo Rivera scores weed for an attorney of Gary Gilmore's. It really happened.

[Corey_Lazarus 0]

Almost done with Ellis's The Informers. Decent, but the worst of the three Ellis that I read to become a fan of his (Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and Glamorama). Next up is Ellis's Lunar Park, which sounds like an interesting premise (Ellis sticking himself into one of his novels, almost sounds like a blend of Rules and Glamorama, which are my two favorites of his, with Rules being my fave).

 

The Informers has a lot going for it. Ellis doesn't stick to one character for too long, which helps freshen things up, but all of the characters are exactly the same, save for Bryan Metro (a rock star on tour in Japan with a bad coke/drinking habit, and a penchant for brutally raping and beating his groupies), and you're never quite sure which one you're reading about because, thus far (I have maybe a hundred pages to go, just over halfway done), four of the characters are related to each other by blood, and two are friends of theirs. There's a part where it's a collection of letters sent to somebody named Sean at Ellis's fictional NH liberal arts school Camden University, presumably Sean Bateman (and I'm also assuming that the writer of said letters is the girl who sends him love letters at Camden), which is very refreshing, but the really interesting parts are few and far between. It's as if Ellis took the formula he had for Psycho, where the first half of the book is spent conditioning the reader to the drone of his character's life, but then forgot about the part where things of interest occur. In fact...that sounds like his style exactly. The first half of Glamorama is much the same, save for some hints here and there of what's to come, and the first half of Rules is nothing but introducing the characters and establishing that they are, in fact, intertwining with each other. Can't wait to finish Informers and start up Lunar Park.

 

After that, it's off to non-fiction with Lords of Chaos, which is about the underground black metal scene in early 90's Europe that spawned murders, suicides, and the fabled church burnings.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Thread deserves to be updated more than it is. I'm still on The Executioner's Song, though I'll have it finished within the next couple of days. Mailer's handling of the material makes for the most jarring, unbiased treatment I've ever encountered over the argument of the death penalty. Though the events depicted within the book are now 30+ years old, there's more than enough human drama and political grist for either side in the debate regarding capital punishment, even to this day.

[Hank Kingsley 0]

Finished Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading earlier this week. Bought it blindly based on my love for Pale Fire and the description, which compared itself to the surreal landscapes of Kafka's "The Trial." Oddly enough, despite a similar style, Nabokov had no access to Kafka's works throughout his writing this book, which makes some of the similarities (names: Nabokov's Cicinnatus C./Kafka's Josef K.) all the more interesting. It follows Cicinnatus, in prision for an absurd crime, who experiences absurd and dreamlike events as fluidly as he does his life. It's anchored by his idealistic journal writings, which eventually play a huge part during his execution. Highly recommended.

[Your Paragon of Virtue 0]

Wait, what's so similar about the names there?

[Hank Kingsley 0]

Just the structure, with only a last initial given instead of a full name, jumped out at me. Then again maybe it's just a European style that I never picked up on, I don't know.

[Kristianna 0]

So umm... nobody has cared about reading for nine days now, huh?

 

I'm currently reading "The Rights of Man" by Thomas Paine. Its one of those books that I think people who actually give a shit about the world and other people should definitely read.

[Scarlett_Rayne 0]

So umm... nobody has cared about reading for nine days now, huh?

 

I'm currently reading "The Rights of Man" by Thomas Paine. Its one of those books that I think people who actually give a shit about the world and other people should definitely read.

 

 

The Rights of Man is pretty good... I'd check out some Emerson and Thoreau as well if you enjoy this

[godthedog 0]

john kennedy toole - 'a confederacy of dunces'

 

very very good for what it is, but it could have been much better if it went somewhere. sort of suffers from the 'finnegans wake' thing, where reading the first 100 pages is exactly as effective as reading the other 300. there's a lot of greatness in there, but it felt like toole wasn't mature enough to handle his gifts yet.

 

next up, joyce's 'a portrait of the artist as a young man', which i haven't read since i was seventeen.

[Jingus 0]

there's a lot of greatness in there, but it felt like toole wasn't mature enough to handle his gifts yet.

Considering he was a completely inexperienced unpublished amateur who never wrote anything else, are you surprised?

 

For some reason I keep forcing myself to go back to Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series. Let's just say that the latest one, Harlequin, isn't AS bad as some of the other later books in the series, but it's still got its (massive) share of flaws. Especially since the entire series has by now become more formulaic and predictable than porn.

 

World War Z was interesting. It's by Max Brooks, the guy who wrote the cult favorite Zombie Survival Guide, and this time around it's a novel, sort of. He still writes as if it's all real. The basic gist is that the book is what George Romero never had the budget to portray: a worldwide zombie outbreak that takes humanity to the very edge of extinction. It's written almost in the form of a hundred little short stories, as different people all over the world tell about their own personal experiences with the undead. Highly recommended to zombie fans, but I don't see it appealing much to others.

 

 

re Palanhiuk: yeah, what the fuck is it with his endings? It's like sometime before he writes the last 20-50 pages, he just gets really stoned and forgets what the book was about.

[godthedog 0]

the guy studied english at columbia. that's not quite a creative writing MFA, but it's hardly the makings of an amateur.

 

looking at his biographical stuff, i get the sense that he was just taken with his own genius and thought the book was perfect as it was.

[Jingus 0]

Never been paid for it = amateur.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

gtd's right re: Dunces. That Pulitzer had to be more for the potentially enormous talent that was lost rather than it being a great book.

[vivalaultra 0]

I agree with the sentiment about A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole modeled it after Cervantes' Don Quixote where it's more of a series of episodes than a continual linear story. It's good to read selected parts of it, but reading it from start to finish, it's kinda all over the place. And, for the record, Toole did have another book published. It's called The Neon Bible and he wrote it when he was 16, but it wasn't published till...I think 1987 (several years after he had died) by his mother. It's a decent enough read, kinda depressing.

[godthedog 0]

looking on wikipedia, i'm woefully behind on my pulitzer prize-winning books, having only read 3 others. i better start catching up.

[Jingus 0]

::looks on wiki::

 

Same here, only two or three of 'em. Oddly, I've actually seen more movies based on Pulitzer-winning books than I have read the books themselves.

 

Oh, and were there NO other novels published in the year 1991? A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, my pockmarked ass. The book was a generic PC remake of King Lear, in which Lear molested his kids when they were young. Button-pushing bullshit.

[godthedog 0]

i wonder if 'to kill a mockingbird' would still hold up if i tried to read it again. god i loved that book.

[Guest •]

I first read it in 8th grade and I loved it as well.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

looking on wikipedia, i'm woefully behind on my pulitzer prize-winning books, having only read 3 others. i better start catching up.

I've read 10. The judges of the National Book Award, as far as novels go, tend to have better taste.

 

EDIT: Let's break this down to specifics, re Pulitzer Prize winning works I've read.

 

Fiction:

 

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugendies

The Amazing Adventures of Kavilier & Clay - Michael Chabon

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

American Pastoral - Philip Roth

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway

 

 

Non-fiction:

 

The Armies of the Night - Norman Mailer

 

Drama:

 

Proof - David Auburn

Fences - August Wilson

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams

Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller

Our Town - Thornton Wilder

 

Separating Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song and The Armies of the Night into Fiction and Non-fiction categories respectively is supremely arbitrary.

[Youth N Asia 0]

Has anyone read the Dexter books by Jeff Lindsay? I love the series and am thinking about starting the books

[godthedog 0]

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

American Pastoral - Philip Roth

 

is the first as shitty and full of itself as the movie is, and is the second as great as everyone says it is?

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

I read The Hours about five or six years ago for a class. It didn't leave a great impression on me, though I recall thinking it was okay; I never saw the film version. American Pastoral is one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors, so yeah, that one's real good.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

Ditto on American Pastoral. The Hours is decent to good, and not as full of itself of the movie; getting rid of all the weepy, exaggerated emoting from the female leads helps a lot. It's a lot more subtle in the book, though I certainly don't love it.

[Hank Kingsley 0]

I had a few Borders coupons, so I picked up McCarthy's The Road and one of David Mamet's newer plays, called Romance. The latter is of course a really quick read and I'm almost finished with it. It is hilarious. I would love to be in a production of it. It's set in a courtroom, with a judge drugged out on antihistamines, a Jewish defendant and his anti-Semitic attorney, a gay prosecutor, and a plan to ease Middle Eastern tensions.

[Angel_Grace_Blue 0]

Shogun by James Clavell is a pretty good read. Once I realized that this is a novel and not an action movie and that there aren't going to be huge samurai battles and junk, I enjoyed it a lot more. Of course, some people might be all "Mwah, who cares about a story? I want heads gettin' hacked off!". Those people are lame. This book is not.

[godthedog 0]

next up, joyce's 'a portrait of the artist as a young man', which i haven't read since i was seventeen.

 

this was not good.

 

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Reading Absurdistan, which is plenty entertaining. I keep seeing the narrator as an overweight, Russian-accented Ali G, which is somewhat distracting; given the similarities between the two characters begin and end with both being white and loving American rap, images of Sascha Baron Coen were not likely the author's intent.