ThunderPeel2001

Books, books, books...

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So I'm trying to compile a reading list for 2014. I'd like to get some literature on there, but my tastes are not particularly well-developed, as I was poorly served by the local library growing up and stayed on the pulp maybe a little too long. I'd love some relatively accessible literature to broaden my palate (as a guide, I devoured Cryptonomicon, got most of the way through Yiddish Policeman's Union before losing interest, and couldn't stomach Infinite Jest) and some thought-provoking non-fiction, as my list is a little light on both.

 

Do you want classics, contemporary or both?

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Do you want classics, contemporary or both?

 

In terms of non-fiction I'm happy for anything, I have some classic fiction on my list already but would be happy to entertain suggestions.

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I'm currently reading Ivanhoe, and so far I have two major observations:

 

1) It's got Robin Hood in! Who knew?! I bet Sir Walter Scott would get a lot more people to read his book if he changed the name to "Ivanhoe: A Robin Hood Story".

 

2) The bad guys in this book are ridiculously dedicated to the craft of being bad guys.

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I just finished NW by Zadie Smith and it was really excellent; definitely one of the best books I've read recently. Thanks Argobot for recommending and eventually guilting me into finally reading it.

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I just finished NW by Zadie Smith and it was really excellent; definitely one of the best books I've read recently. Thanks Argobot for recommending and eventually guilting me into finally reading it.

 

I'm glad you liked it! Now you can read the essay where Smith discusses the two paths for the novel http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/?pagination=false

 

NW is a synthesis of the two distinct paths she outlines, which is one of many reasons it is such great (and I think important) book.

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Ah yeah I remember reading that. I'll have to read it again now in light of this.

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I just finished NW by Zadie Smith and it was really excellent; definitely one of the best books I've read recently. Thanks Argobot for recommending and eventually guilting me into finally reading it.

Could you say something about what you found so good about it? The quality of the portraiture of these broken people? The sense of place it has?

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In terms of non-fiction I'm happy for anything, I have some classic fiction on my list already but would be happy to entertain suggestions.

 

For newer fiction that's both literary and accessible, you might try Gary Shteyngart. A Super Sad True Love Story is a fantastic, funny, melancholy near-future science fiction novel about man growing old in a youth-obsessed culture told through alternating diary entries and social media exchanges. Absurdistan is the story of a rich oafish Russian man who accidentally becomes an important figure in a civil war in a former Soviet republic.

 

For non-fiction, I haven't actually read this, but I bought my wife a copy of The Poisoner's Handbook Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum for Christmas, and I've been anxiously waiting for her to finish it so I can steal it without feeling guilty. 

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This reminded me that I haven't read a lot of Australian literature either, so I Googled 'best Australian novels' and added like five books to my list. I am apparently one of like five Australians to have never read The Power of One.

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Finished the Culture series by Iain M Banks recently (highly recommend!), now getting into the Amber series by Roger Zelazny (which I started reading years ago as it was recommended reading for Planescape Torment fans, but I hadn't gotten into it properly the first time around).

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I'm halfway through Frank Baum's Oz series. Remember how Conan Doyle tried to end Sherlock, but was more or less forced to continue by popular demand? The same happened to Oz, although Frank seemed to love the world as much as his fans, while I've heard Conan Doyle hated Sherlock a bit in the end.

 

Anyway, I've only read one book after the time he tried to end the Oz series, I expected it to take place in Oz's past and there would be no more Dorothy, but it seems I was wrong, the Patchwork Girl of Oz takes place after The Emerald City of Oz, which is a bit of a shame since I really liked how Frank ended up the series and now he seems to be backtracking to make room for story. He literally rid the world of Oz of all evil in that book and made it impossible for it for evil to exist in it... 

 

The Kalidah were wild, them tame and now wild again. I'm pretty sure all the event that took place in Emerald City of Oz can be practically ignored, because the more I read, the more of what the book did is undone or simply forgotten.

 

It's still a good read and it's fascinating to learn more about Oz... it was practically the Harry Potter of it's day and Frank Baum himself made a few unsuccessful black & white Oz films that look good, but are rather tedious to watch.  

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I just finished Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and it has to be one of the most unnerving books I've ever read. His prose is unbelievably gorgeous, which contrasts sharply with the horrific actions of Humbert. It's unbelievable Nabokov is able to write a character like Humbert's as convincingly as he does. 

 

I know some critics refer to the book as "a story of a hyper civilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America"...as it says on the back of the copy I have, but reading it through this lens seems like a bit of a leap to me (I have trouble making connections like these, which may make me a literary baby).

 

Parts of the novel were incredibly difficult to read, because of the events within, but I tore through the novel pretty quickly, mainly due to the incredible prose. I'm very glad I read it, and would recommend it highly.

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That book about a university professor that people keep recommending? It's pretty great: occasionally hilarious, often sad, but always beautiful. There is something fascinating about a novel on a Russian professor living in the Unites States and constantly struggling with his English written by a Russian emigrant who has mastered the language like perhaps no one else ever. The novel is full of passages like this:

 

"The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglebooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody."

 

The novel does convey exceptionally well the fish out of water feeling (Nabokov would really deserve less worn-out idioms than this) of living in foreign surroundings and having to communicate in a language that you are not completely comfortable with. I was delighted by the transformation from a comical and clumsy professor to a knowledgeable croquet master that Pnin underwent when he was in the company of his Russian peers. At the same time, the novel is also a sad reminder that I will probably never be fluent enough in English to enjoy Nabokov’s writing to its full extent.

 

Perhaps not as "perfect" as Lolita but definitely less harrowing, Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin is worth checking out, especially if the subject matter of his most famous novel has kept you from reading Nabokov until now.

 

Incidentally, listening to Lolita - narrated by Jeremy Irons - while playing SimCity (2013) was easily the most bizarre literary experience I have ever had. By the end, I couldn't help but think that among my citizens, who keep dutifully cheering at every extension to my mansion and forget all about their sadness the minute the waves of pleasure caused by the construction of a new park in their neighborhood reached them, there might roam a Humbert Humbert-esque rationalizing monster and that there was nothing I could do about it despite being an all-powerful city building god.

 

 

By the way, now that I have finished Pnin, Goodreads recommends me to check out John Edward Williams' Stoner. Has anyone read it? Is it any good?

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pnin is my favourite book!

 

it breaks my heart constantly and i want to give him a huge hug while also laughing at his bumbling and funny appearance (funny + sad is my favourite combination in general)

 

it's amazing the detail to which he captures pnin's utter and tragic devotion to his russian heritage, he literally cannot relate to anything through any other lens. the prose is brilliant of course, sometimes it feels like nabokov's unbelievable mastery of the language is used to play games with the reader but in pnin it's deployed to either make you laugh or to cut deep into pnin as a human

 

 


Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind (alas, recollections of his marriage to Liza were imperious enough to crowd out any former romance), but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and killed by an injection of phenol to the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past. And since the exact form of her death had not been recorded, Mira kept dying a great number of deaths in one's mind, and undergoing a great number of resurrections, only to die again and again, led away by a trained nurse, inoculated with filth, tetanus, bacilli, broken glass, gassed in a sham shower-bath with prussic acid, burned alive in a pit on a gasoline-soaked pile of beechwood

 

 

i haven't read stoner yet - it's been on constant reserve at the library since it blew up last year :/ - but another good book about university professors is lucky jim, though this is more straightforwardly comic.

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Finished the Culture series by Iain M Banks recently (highly recommend!), now getting into the Amber series by Roger Zelazny (which I started reading years ago as it was recommended reading for Planescape Torment fans, but I hadn't gotten into it properly the first time around).

 

I just started reading the Culture series; Iain Banks lived not too far from me and when I died a friend of mine recommended some of his books. I started with Consider Phlebas and just finished Use of Weapons and I'm absolutely loving it (I got halfway through Look to Windward but it never really grabbed me). I want to dig into some of his non-SF works, but Culture is just way too tempting so I'm probably going to pick up Player of Games tomorrow. He was one hell of an author, and an all-round awesome person.

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I'm in a book club now with my favorite person to talk to about books, so that is rad! She lives in Austin so our book club will be happening over Skype or something... the first book we're doing is Swamplandia! I'm not far enough into it to have anything to say about it, but I figured I would post here anyway because a. I'm excited about being in a book club again, and b. I'm sure I'll be commenting about it soon enough.

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By the way, now that I have finished Pnin, Goodreads recommends me to check out John Edward Williams' Stoner. Has anyone read it? Is it any good?

Yes, it is excellent. It is a quiet and understated portrait of a life, from beginning to end. Beautiful prose but not showy. Told almost entirely by way of the interior life of its central character. Just great.

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I'd definitely do a bookclub on Swamplandia! - I've been itching to read it.

Swamplandia! is a marvelous book!

I've become a huge fan of Karen Russell stories and her new collection was one of my favorite books for '13

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Yes, it is excellent. It is a quiet and understated portrait of a life, from beginning to end. Beautiful prose but not showy. Told almost entirely by way of the interior life of its central character. Just great.

 

Haha, yeah. The first sentence in my previous post was actually a reference to people constantly praising Stoner. Anyway, I picked it up after I finished reading Pnin. I'm not completely sucked in it yet, but it seems good.

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Haha, yeah. The first sentence in my previous post was actually a reference to people constantly praising Stoner. Anyway, I picked it up after I finished reading Pnin. I'm not completely sucked in it yet, but it seems good.

Aww, yeah. Spam. It works.

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Thanks to Argobot's recommendation I picked up Alice Munro's Selected Stories and holy crap that is some amazing writing! I don't think I've ever read something that has managed to transport me into a female perspective so well.

Such true writing, for lack of a better word.

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Thanks to Argobot's recommendation I picked up Alice Munro's Selected Stories and holy crap that is some amazing writing! I don't think I've ever read something that has managed to transport me into a female perspective so well.

Such true writing, for lack of a better word.

I'm glad you're liking it! Munro is really a master at describing people. Her fiction is just leagues beyond anything else I've ever read.

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