Hey, Books

[chiapet]

I am, but I mostly just use it as a means of keeping track of what I want to read.

[chiapet]

Someone recommended The Book of Lost Things to me. I started it without knowing what it's about. It's a take on dark versions of fairy tales but with a bit of a twist. Short, easy read, loved it. (I did have a bit of a start a chapter or two in after realizing it was -not- a children's book).

[Alchemy]

I am reading Gravity's Rainbow. Oh boy.

[menikmati]

Just finished the Cider House Rules.

[caeden]

i really enjoy john irving. i'm currently reading a prayer for owen meany by him. i feel that he makes his characters extremely believable

[benhur]

I am reading Gravity's Rainbow. Oh boy.

good luck getting past bananas

[RageAgainstTheAoki]

I am reading Gravity's Rainbow. Oh boy.

I just picked this up from the library yesterday. Looking forward to pretending I enjoyed it.


I just finished Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star. I found it strangely affecting, but really indulgent at times; he really gilds the lily in some passages. Anyway, if you're wondering what Death In Venice would be like with a lot of explicit sex, check it out. Does anyone have recommendations on where to start with V.S. Naipul, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith or Margaret Atwood?

[Dogvolta]

I just picked this up from the library yesterday. Looking forward to pretending I enjoyed it.


I just finished Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star. I found it strangely affecting, but really indulgent at times; he really gilds the lily in some passages. Anyway, if you're wondering what Death In Venice would be like with a lot of explicit sex, check it out. Does anyone have recommendations on where to start with V.S. Naipul, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith or Margaret Atwood?

I've read 10 novels/diarys/essays of Virginia Woolf. I wouldn't recommend any of them. Her writing is too abstract, obtuse, and experimental with minimal pay off (depending on who you are, how educated you are, and how much you break each sentence/page/passage/chapter/book down).

Still, I guess I would recommend Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, and Between the Acts. Between the Acts might have been my personal "favorite". All three of those books are relatively easy reads, emphasis on relatively.

For an insane challenge, just start with The Waves. I look back on that book with ZERO fondness.

[roberto73]

Last week I finished Crime by Irvine Welsh. It's a sequel to his 1998 novel Filth, which was a lot of fun and notable mainly for being partially narrated by a tapeworm living in the protagonist's intestine. Crime was a different beast entirely – more of a straightforward thriller than anything I've seen Welsh do before, which was kind of cool. He's always been an unconventional writer, so to seem him try his hand at a more traditional genre was a lot of fun.

I'm not starting anything in the next few days so I can dive right into A Dance With Dragons next week.

[NachoCat]

Need a spot for your books?

http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/house-of-shelves.html

[chiapet]

Why yes, I have always wondered what Death in Venice would be like with a lot of explicit sex. On the list. (Actually it was already on my list and I can't remember who recommended it).

Irvine Welsh: I want to like his stories, more than I actually like his stories. Premises that sound fun, and all that. But then, I've only read Crime, Ecstasy and Trainspotting.

[chiapet]

Apparently Welsh's Ecstasy has been made into a movie that will be released this fall:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1809287/

[RageAgainstTheAoki]

Why yes, I have always wondered what Death in Venice would be like with a lot of explicit sex. On the list. (Actually it was already on my list and I can't remember who recommended it).

Which one is on your list? Death in Venice or The Folding Star? If it's the latter, skip it and read Hollinghurst's far superior The Line of Beauty. I mean, that's the one he won the Booker for, after all. It's just a much better book in every possible way. Fair warning, Hollinghurst is obsessed with the British class system and gay sex. Think Henry James + a dash of camp humor + lots of anal.

[Courtney]

Has anyone read Bob Mould's book yet? I'm considering.

[MissingPerson]

The other day I realised that I now own three copies of exactly the same edition of Mary Shelley's The Last Man.

I've not read a single one.

[Hannahrain]

Whereas if you were more disciplined you'd have read all three in immediate succession?

[Alchemy]

good luck getting past bananas

I just picked this up from the library yesterday. Looking forward to pretending I enjoyed it.

I'm about 300 pages in thus far. So far I've mostly enjoyed it. There were some sections that I forced myself through, but most of the sections have been funny and interesting. I love all the songs... It is a bit difficult to tell what is going on at times, but if you just keep going forward, it starts to make sense.

[RageAgainstTheAoki]

Well, put me in the couldn't finish Gravity's Rainbow camp. Not because of Pynchon's writing, but because some joker tore out about 25 pages from the first third and replaced them with pages from what appeared to be a dismayingly specific guide on female self satisfaction. Or perhaps I just had the special edition.

So, instead, I moved on to Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which I absolutely loved. I can't believe I took so long to read one of her novels. You could probably encapsulate the plot for the entire novel in just a paragraph. Not much happens, but I was captivated throughout the whole thing. It's as much about how she tells the story as it is the story itself. I was struck by how authentic her voice was throughout the novel; whether we were in the thick of a Haitian street gang hustling on a busy street corner or in the middle of stuffy lecture on Rembrandt at an elite liberal arts college. I'm not doing a very good job of paying tribute to Smith's talent, but there are little set pieces throughout in which you're left almost breathless by how beautifully she unwound the truth or emotional core of a moment. She's also got a wicked sense of humor. While the novel centers on the disintegration of a marriage and on the fractured racial, class and spiritual identities of all of the members of that family, it's often really funny.

In the author's notes she pays tribute to E.M. Forster and this really does feel like her modern take on Howard's End with race and sexual politics thrown into the mix.

[bmack86]

So, hey, Kazuo Ishiguro fans. What do you like, what do you love, what do you hate of his work? I recall Pot and Guedita mentioning The Unconsoled, and that was one of the more incredibly rich novels I've read. I'm mostly through with Never Let Me Go and it's pretty damn gripping as well.

[Courtney]

Well, put me in the couldn't finish Gravity's Rainbow camp. Not because of Pynchon's writing, but because some joker tore out about 25 pages from the first third and replaced them with pages from what appeared to be a dismayingly specific guide on female self satisfaction. Or perhaps I just had the special edition.

So, instead, I moved on to Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which I absolutely loved. I can't believe I took so long to read one of her novels. You could probably encapsulate the plot for the entire novel in just a paragraph. Not much happens, but I was captivated throughout the whole thing. It's as much about how she tells the story as it is the story itself. I was struck by how authentic her voice was throughout the novel; whether we were in the thick of a Haitian street gang hustling on a busy street corner or in the middle of stuffy lecture on Rembrandt at an elite liberal arts college. I'm not doing a very good job of paying tribute to Smith's talent, but there are little set pieces throughout in which you're left almost breathless by how beautifully she unwound the truth or emotional core of a moment. She's also got a wicked sense of humor. While the novel centers on the disintegration of a marriage and on the fractured racial, class and spiritual identities of all of the members of that family, it's often really funny.

In the author's notes she pays tribute to E.M. Forster and this really does feel like her modern take on Howard's End with race and sexual politics thrown into the mix.

You should read White Teeth next, if you're digging Zadie. It was my favorite book that wasn't assigned as class reading, while I was in college.

[guedita]

White Teeth is FAR better than On Beauty (which I also loved).

[Courtney]

I agree.

[RageAgainstTheAoki]

So, hey, Kazuo Ishiguro fans. What do you like, what do you love, what do you hate of his work? I recall Pot and Guedita mentioning The Unconsoled, and that was one of the more incredibly rich novels I've read. I'm mostly through with Never Let Me Go and it's pretty damn gripping as well.

Love this thread. Always reminds me of books I mean to add to my 'to read' list. Ishiguro is definitely an author I need to explore soon.

You should read White Teeth next, if you're digging Zadie. It was my favorite book that wasn't assigned as class reading, while I was in college.

White Teeth is FAR better than On Beauty (which I also loved).

Thanks, ladies! Good to know. I'll definitely be checking out White Teeth in a book or two. Right now I'm on an Alan Hollinghurst kick. I'm reading The Spell. Too early to offer a verdict, but I so like his voice that even if this one turns out to be a bit of a dud, I'll still have had a good time reading it. I can't wait to read his new book, The Stranger's Child, which appears to have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize before even being released.


Joan Didion. Where to start? The Year of Magical Thinking?

[menikmati]

Just finished another book on the Holocaust, this one being "Doctors From Hell" by Vivien Spitz (who was a court reporter for the Nuremberg trials). It pretty much strictly deals with the trials and details of the human experiments that went on at the concentration camps under the Nazi's watch, citing a lot of witness testimony.

It's pretty gruesome and sad/hard to read at parts...I won't go into any of the details (you can read all about the experiments/trials on wikipedia)...the thing is though, if you've read the wiki articles, then there really isn't much new to find in this book that hasn't been covered elsewhere, but that aside, it was interesting to hear it from the perspective of a woman in her early 20's, about as green as they get, and covering this for her first major trial reporting.

I think for my next book, I'm gonna tackle Lipstadt's "Denying the Holocaust".

[GoodGirlGalaxy]

Just finished another book on the Holocaust, this one being "Doctors From Hell" by Vivien Spitz (who was a court reporter for the Nuremberg trials). It pretty much strictly deals with the trials and details of the human experiments that went on at the concentration camps under the Nazi's watch, citing a lot of witness testimony.

It's pretty gruesome and sad/hard to read at parts...I won't go into any of the details (you can read all about the experiments/trials on wikipedia)...the thing is though, if you've read the wiki articles, then there really isn't much new to find in this book that hasn't been covered elsewhere, but that aside, it was interesting to hear it from the perspective of a woman in her early 20's, about as green as they get, and covering this for her first major trial reporting.

I think for my next book, I'm gonna tackle Lipstadt's "Denying the Holocaust".

I had a professor that was pretty adamant to have us read a novel called Austerlitz which was an off-kilter interpretation of the Holocaust through the eyes of a Holocaust victim's son who made it out of Nazi territory before the concentration camps were in effect. W.G. Sebald has a weird way of going about this novel, namely that he omits interruptions. It'll seem like Book 18 (Penelope) of Ulysses in that sentences don't end for pages and pages, and to keep track of the young man's journey becomes a challenge of its own.

That said, I'm trying to plow through Infinite Jest by D.F.W. and I'm wondering, is there a sort of pay off to all this madness? Each chapter takes a dozen or so pages to really make sense and then the comedy ensues and then tragedy and comedy sort of intermingle into a sloppy but affecting prose but I still am left thinking: Where's this all going? Any spoiler-free feedback?

[amyzzz]

That said, I'm trying to plow through Infinite Jest by D.F.W. and I'm wondering, is there a sort of pay off to all this madness? Each chapter takes a dozen or so pages to really make sense and then the comedy ensues and then tragedy and comedy sort of intermingle into a sloppy but affecting prose but I still am left thinking: Where's this all going? Any spoiler-free feedback?

You get a bigger picture as you read more of it. I finished the book this spring, and although a bit exhausting, it was ultimately rewarding. Just take your time reading it if you need to. MAKE SURE you read all the footnotes, especially that long one about all the movies Hal's father made.

[chairmenmeow47]

recently finished "the time machine did it" by john swartzwelder. it was a super easy read, exceptionally hilarious and perfect for the past four weekends of road trips. if you love his simpsons episodes, you'll love this.

[GoodGirlGalaxy]

That "movies Hal's father made" has been the only rewarding footnote so far. And the one about the hats. Thanks, amyzzz.

[amyzzz]

Damnit, I wish I had the book with me to thumb through right now so I could point you to other footnotes. I will try to remember later. And HEY, search this thread for Infinite Jest; there should be other tips in here (from smarter people than I).

[chiapet]

I just got back from the library with so many books in my satchel that I sort of strained my back carrying them home. Yay books.

Starting with Hideous Kinky which is really short, will probably read it before or after I go out tonight.