Book recommendations

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

Last month my mom mailed me a handful of books she'd picked up at a 3-for-2 sale at Borders. Absurdistan was one of them. I think I'll give it a shot after I finish Pale Fire, which I just started this morning after owning a copy for about 4 years. I've read most of Nabokov's catalog, and I think I already like this more than everything but Lolita.

 

I just finished Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, which is pretty good if you're into being terrified by Mormons. I borrowed it from my roommate after having to to step away from Gravity's Rainbow again after another 150 pages. This thing and I are having a war.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Speaking of books having owned for four years but not having read, I'm currently reading Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. I hope this gets better, because the 43-page opening chapter was a tough slog.

[Smartly Pretty 0]

This isn't really the appropriate thread because I'm sure you've all read it in school at some point, whatever. The Cask of Amontialldo is the most amazing short story in the history of forever.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

I've never read On the Road.

 

Happy 50th birthday, On the Road.

[vivalaultra 0]

This isn't really the appropriate thread because I'm sure you've all read it in school at some point, whatever. The Cask of Amontialldo is the most amazing short story in the history of forever.

 

Amontillado. I wouldn't say it's the most amazing short story in the history of forever, although I would've agreed when I first read it in 9th grade. It's my favorite Poe, probably. I really like Faulkner's short stories, moreso than his longer works. 'A Rose for Emily' is good. I think my favorite short story ever is 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings' by Garcia Marquez.

 

Marquez.pdf_JSESSIONID_GzTy6vnTp04NzJHyNhF3nMnQ2fLqJcRGWlGQpShXQlGkQlGKrvFd_1202151094_sage2_b.webct.uh.edu_80_443__1928834_sage4_b.webct.uh.pdf

 

And there it is. That might be illegal and it also might not work.

[godthedog 0]

i think i'll start reading books of short stories during the school year. seems like a good way to keep my sanity without making too big a commitment, and i'm embarrassed at how few short stories i've actually read.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

Speaking of books having owned for four years but not having read, I'm currently reading Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. I hope this gets better, because the 43-page opening chapter was a tough slog.

 

This, William Gaddis's JR, and Celine's Journey to the End of the Night have all been sitting on my bookshelf for 2-4 years and I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to reading any of them.

 

I've never read On the Road.

 

You've missed out on absolutely nothing. What a dull piece of shit.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

I couldn't finish Journey to the End of the Night. There's a lot of really nice writing, and, yes, some of it was very funny, but the whole affair was just too excruciatingly bleak. The narrator would've been better off comitting suicide.

[PLAGIARISM! 0]

I've never read On the Road.

 

Happy 50th birthday, On the Road.

 

A book I actually have read!

[At Home 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

Pussies

[Corey_Lazarus 0]

Ellis' Lunar Park is something I finished a week or two ago. I can honestly say that it's probably the best book I've ever read, and easily his most emotional. It's a weird blend of autobiography, his usual "sex, drugs, rock n' roll" style, and horror, and it all revolves around the relationships forged, bent, broken, and molded of a father and son. A little bit of everything, with an ending that nearly had me in tears.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Corey, you should read An American Dream, by Norman Mailer. Ellis took a lot of cues from Mailer.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

So I gave up on finishing Under the Volcano. Overwritten melodrama disguised as Serious Literature.

 

There's a few hours where, after I decide to give up on a book (this one only being the third I could not bring myself to finish within the last year), I feel bad, as if I let the book defeat me. This passes, though. My reading time is too precious to waste on crap.

 

Which isn't say I quit all books I dislike. Not at all. I can loathe a book with every ounce of my being, but, if it's an easy, quick read, I'll stick with it to the end. Under the Volcano, Saul Bellow's Herzog and Celine's Journey to the End of the Night (these being the aforementioned three books) were utter fucking chores to get through. And hey, at least I can see why people would like that Bellow and that Celine; I'm at loss as to how Lowry's work remains a classic. The 100 pages I read were little more than cheap trash.

[godthedog 0]

currently reading 'how far she went', a collection of short stories by mary hood. won the flannery o'connor award apparently. nice language but nothing special.

[Henry Spencer 0]

Journey To The End Of The Night is one of my favorites. We must fight.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Look, I said I could see why people like it.

[Jingus 0]

Yeah, it's not like Tess Of the D'Urbevilles, where we can all agree it's a piece of shit, right?

 

 

 

And yes, I WILL fight anyone who claims to like that book.

[vivalaultra 0]

I love Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Granted, it's a little heavyhanded and ponderous in places, but the 15 year old girl for me just weeps for poor Tess.

 

Oh well, Jingus, I guess I'll meet you in a 6-sides of doom electrified cage match with sharks circling around the ring.

[justsoyouknow 0]

Picked up The Stranger and Glamorama, by Camus and Ellis, respectively, at the used bookstore down the street. It's turned into this Sunday ritual that my sister and I go after I get bombed with the folks for family dinner night.

 

Finished The Trial by Kafka the other day - long, rambling, and completely absurd, but I enjoyed it. I was really taken aback by the ending, so I guess that's a plus. I started The Human Stain by Roth, but couldn't get into it, so I reshelved it for the time being.

 

Inc, anything else by Mailer you'd recommend?

[Corey_Lazarus 0]

Ah, Glamorama. Fucking beautiful in

its complete 180-degree turn about halfway into the book. From standard Ellis wealthy, decadent elite people to full-on international espionage with small bits of ultraviolence tempered throughout

.

 

Trying to finish up Jim Norton's Happy Endings, which is the first book I've ever openly laughed at outside of the first time I read Foley's first, but since it's just a collection of journal entries that have no true linear placement (meaning that it jumps from 10 years ago to a few months before it was published, with no rhyme or reason), it's sorta hard to go through all the way.

 

After that it's Less Than Zero, which I should've read years ago, and then maybe I'll try to get back at Lords of Chaos.

[Jingus 0]

Oh well, Jingus, I guess I'll meet you in a 6-sides of doom electrified cage match with sharks circling around the ring.

Yes. Yes you will. "Hey, let's write a book in which some random innocent girl gets tortured for three hundred pages, finally snaps and kills the guy responsible for completely ruining her life, and then gets executed for it." Yippee. (Although it did supply one of the most horrifying mental images I've ever run across, when Tess imagines her dead baby in Hell, being bounced up and down in an oven on one of those giant wooden spatulas that they use on pizzas.)

 

I liked The Trial a lot, it's personally my favorite thing of Kafka's that I've read, way better than Metamorphosis which I thought was kinda overrated. The ending was awfully outta nowhere, you're right, but it's still a damned good read, a better explanation of the paranoid mindset than I've ever seen.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Ernest Hemingway: hot or not? I read The Sun Also Rises recently, marking the first time I'd read one of his works since my freshman year of high school. I liked TSAR okay, but wasn't particularly moved by it.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

Hemingway's so hot that he's blazing 18 jams in a row. TSAR is one of my favorite books--it does the jaded socialite malaise thing even better than Gatsby--but A Moveable Feast is even better: bashing Fitzgerald, ditching his first wife for his second wife, and being weirded out by Gertrude Stein in France. I also like his short stories as a general rule, especially everything that's from In Our Time. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (not from that collection) has one of my favorite titles ever.

[Jingus 0]

Technically you could count The Old Man and the Sea as a short story, I guess. I wish the Official Grammar People would institute a page count for the differences between story/novella/book. I loved that one so much that I ripped it off years later in an English project where we were required to write a historical story, and basically made mine The Old Knight and the Crusades. (It was also part of a larger story I never ended up finishing which had a plot which was damn near identical to Saving Private Ryan... which came out two years later.)

 

 

Oh, and I've never been able to get anyone to explain how this made sense, so please take a crack at it: the Historical Story thing was our big research project of the year. Ya know, the kind of dumbass research project where you're required to fill out a stack of "reference cards" and make about a hundred different drafts and outlines. Well, the English teacher in question also made us do the most retarded, illogical thing I've ever heard of. We were supposed to take quotes from non-fiction sources and put them in our fictional stories. Let me repeat that: we were supposed to take quotes from history books and put them in our original fiction narratives about dead historical people. She never explained how the fuck that was supposed to work, or what it the point was. I think she was just such an idiot she assumed that all research projects needed to have quotes in them, no matter that this was supposed to be creative writing.

 

This meant that my Crusades story had several passages in it that went like this:

The Templars charged into the city, their broadswords wildly hacking in every direction, and "The knights rode up to their knees in blood" (War for the Holy Land, Smith & Jones, 1973, page 69).

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

There's no set rule for what constitutes a short story/novella/novel, and generally, a novella will be marketed as a novel by its publishers, since the idea of a "novel" sells better. If you want something to bide by, there's this:

 

While there is some disagreement of what length defines a novella, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000 or 60 to 130 pages.

A reasonable estimation.

 

The other Hemingway I've read was The Old Man and the Sea, which I consumed when I was 14. I hated it, but, again, I was 14. Also, I acquired A Moveable Feast at the same time I did The Sun Also Rises, so I will get to that one soon.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

What is the TSM literati's views re Moby-Dick? I had to read it for a class last year and I found it both mind-numbingly dull and mind-blowingly amazing at varying intervals. I'm just not sure if the really great parts are worth slogging through the hundreds of pages about the various uses of whale blubber that surround them.

[Guest Soriano's Torn Quad]

I always thought the consensus was that the book is great once you--I'm so sorry here--trim the fat of the whaling industry tangents.

[Jingus 0]

A lot of older books tend to be like that, with long passages talking about how some little piece of the world works. Which makes sense in an era before electronic media. Les Miserables sure as hell comes to mind, with its great sequences shoved in between gargantuan piles of paper just talking about this kind of factory or that sort of church or this particular historical battle or that group of college kids' hours-long argument or DAMMIT HUGO SHUT UP.

[Giuseppe Zangara 0]

Save for that brutally long exegesis on the various types of whale that weighs down the middle, Moby-Dick is good.

 

Along those lines, the only flaw in Don Quixote is too many pages-long speeches on propriety and valor and such. Which is a minor quibble, really, as it don't take up much space in that wonderful novel's near-1,000 pages.

[Edwin MacPhisto 0]

I liked Moby Dick as far as I can remember. We spent most of a quarter in AP Lit on it, many moons ago. I kind of like stuff that goes on and on about minutiae in the midst of some really amazing writing (see: Dickens' Our Mutual Friend). Melville's not bad at all, though ultimately I've never been able to get into most of the renowned 19th century American authors with any sort of impressive passion.