Books, books, books...

[Redbliss]

Right now I am half way through Communion: A True Story by Whitley Strieber. It is basically about an alien encounter the author had as well as some other strange occurences he experienced throughout his life and how he deals with them. I would suggest it for anyone interested in this sort of stuff, but it is best to at least start the book with an open mind. Also, it can be a pretty creepy book if you read it late at night.

I am also trying to find a book that a read back in high school but I cant remember the name of the book. It is about a selfish man who lives with his mother and is too lazy to get a job or do anything for himself, and instead he makes others do everything for him. I cant really remember much of the story because I didnt read the whole book, but I do remember a part where he gets a job selling hot dogs from a hot dog stand but he only uses the job so he can walk around the city and eat hot dogs all day. If anyone knows what book I am talking about could you reply. Thanks.

EDIT: I found the book I was looking for. It is called A Confederacy of Dunces. If you read what I wrote above and are interested in the book, the following is a link to the book's wiki. It is pretty good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confederacy_of_Dunces

Edited July 24, 2010 by Redbliss

[Redbliss]

I'm working on Team of Rivals by francis kearns goodwin, biography of lincoln and his cabinet, focusing on the lives of those other men and their interactions with lincoln before, during, and after the civil war. Lots of great info about the cabinet's decisions during the war, some good, some bad. Also a lot of history about the beginnings of the republican party and the shifting attitudes during the abolitionist movement.

If you like history books you might want to look up Eric Foner's book The Story of American Freedom. Not sure if you read it before, but it is basically about how the definition of freedom changed throughout US history, covering most everything from the American Revolution up to present day. I am only about 3 chapters in, but it is a good book for those who are interested in history books.

[Nachimir]

EDIT: I found the book I was looking for. It is called A Confederacy of Dunces.

A friend bought my that for my birthday a few years back. Really good book

[juv3nal]

Oh hey. A book thread. I tried to do a search to make sure I hadn't posted a list dump here before. I'm a bit of a lit geek.

Some of my favorite fiction:

Collected Fictions - Borges

Dictionary of the Khazars - Milorad Pavic (to say the author's politics are...unfortunate is probably putting it too politely, but it's still a neat book)

Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall (I actually like House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, which does similar things, more than RST, but RST is probably more likeable to more people)

The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk

Wittgenstein's Mistress - David Markson

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano

The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

[Thyroid]

Today I found out that Glenn Beck has a best-selling novel out. It's like the Onion, except without all the good stuff and more of the bad than you could spill in a bathtub.

Synopsis: "A public relations executive and the woman he loves fight to expose a conspiracy to transform America."

My brain has exploded.

The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano

The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

Always wanted to read these, especially the Auster books. I read about absurdism one time and the article mentoned that the trilogy explored the idea. I've been interested since.

Edited August 1, 2010 by Kroms

[circadianwolf]

I just finished Cory Doctorow's For the Win, his follow-up to Little Brother*. It's pretty great. Basically a novel superficially about MMOs that's actually about the global financial system, 3rd world sweatshops, and labor unions.

* It's not a sequel, and he wrote another novel in-between, but they're definitely in the same spirit of "kids fight the power".

[monkeyarmada]

Nappi, I asked a sci fi-loving friend of mine for recommendations and he told me to mention Richard Morgan (Altered Carbon) or any short story collection by Charles Stross (some of which you can read online).

I don't think Richard Morgan has written a bad book, Altered Carbon is great, The Steel Remains is the last one I read, a bit more fantasy rather than the Science Fiction, but sill great. I recommend anything in these two photos, they represent my favorite book shelf.

[Thyroid]

I recently read this book, partially because of Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent, partially because of Sean Vanaman's neverending love for it, and partially because the opening sentence grabbed my attention "the way only a testicle squeeze can" - IGN.com.

Thou art shall read it. Opening chapter excerpted here.

[Randall Theil]

I recently read this book, partially because of Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent, partially because of Sean Vanaman's neverending love for it, and partially because the opening sentence grabbed my attention "the way only a testicle squeeze can" - IGN.com.

Thou art shall read it. Opening chapter excerpted here.

I read some of Yiddish Policemen's Union and it seemed fine, but I lost interest somewhere about 100 pages in. Kavalier and Klay is great, though.

I picked up Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe at the library today. I'm pretty stoked. I've only read the books he wrote in the 60s, so it'll be interesting to see how his style has changed across 50 years. A Personal Matter is one of my favorite novels of all time, so I have high hopes.

[Sleepdance]

Earlier today spoke to Boris Pahor. Still fells to amazing to say anything else...

[tm_drummer]

Earlier today spoke to Boris Pahor. Still fells to amazing to say anything else...

Oh, Boris! Yeah. Much better than Borut Pahor, which I thought you wrote at first. And for a second, I almost thought you're going for a career in politics...

[GreatPenguala]

If you want a good fantasy genre look out for Terry Goodkind. he has an amazing series that i have read a few times. Check out the Sword of Truth series first book is called "Wizards First Rule". . . . wizards...they are everywhere!

[Roderick]

In order to get the 'Pretentious!' achievement I'm reading Tolstoy's War and Peace and it's really good. It's a massive, sprawling chronicle of Russian life in the time period of the Napoleonic-Russian wars seen through the eyes of multiple high society families in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

The scope is jaw-dropping.

[EDIT] Bah, I'm already angry at myself for my faux-irony and false modesty in this post. Yeah I'm reading War and Peace, and no, I don't think that's pretentious at all. I'm reading it because it seemed super interesting and I like this sort of book. So I can just go fuck myself

[Thyroid]

STFU, hipster fag.

Nah, it's a good book, and anyone who says you're a pretentious douche for reading it needs to get off the hipster cunt bicycle. Leo Tolstoy to Douglas Adams, who cares as long as they write well and the book ain't a pile of highly glossed-over junk? Moby-Dick is, maybe objectively, the best piece of prose I've ever gazed on, and so anyone who dislikes you for reading it should wash the sand out of their asshole. I rant, but I rant like a sane man.

Edited December 11, 2010 by Kroms

[vimes]

In the same trend as Rodi, I've been reading 'classics' - mainly because I was getting ashamed of having second-hand knowledge of them. So I've read The Catcher in the Rye, I'm halfway through Dostoievsky's Brother Karamazov and next up are A Tale of Two Cities and a Sherlock Holmes Anthology.

At first, I thought Catcher in the Rye wasn't moving me because I wasn't reading it while going through teenagehood ... but I've come to realize that I could never have empathize with Holden, mainly because his angst and antisocial behavior are made possible by the fact that his parents are loaded with cash. It's not like he's angsty against its environment - which would be compelling and truly rebellious - this environment actually enables him to throw fits and tantrum.The only part I could feel for the character was in his completely unreal and detached love for his siblings ... however, after finishing the book and ruminating over it for a few days, I think that the fact that I can't identify with Holden isn't making the book a bad one : it still offers a voice to a very unique - at least to me - character and way of thinking. It's completely foreign to me, so at least it something that was thought-provoking. Also, even the though the writing is very peculiar, you forget there's a writer behind all that; which is no small feat.

As for The Brothers Karamazov, I think I'll write something when I'm done (only 400 pages remaining:tup:) because while it's dated in some place - the woman in this book are having hysterics in most scenes and everybody is oozing with passion- I believe that in terms of 1) narrative structure 2)use of secondary characters 3)parallel storylines 4) use of timing and concurrent events 5) character centric moral depiction, there are a bunch of patterns any storyteller lurking at the interactive field could learn from.

[Nappi]

Just finished Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. A truly haunting book which I can heartily recommend to everyone who has not yet read it. What I find the most fascinating about this kind of sci-fi is how it often investigates humans and the humankind much the same way neuroscience often investigates the brain and nervous system: take something away, be it the link between certain parts of the brain, ones individuality or the communication, or stimulate something and observe how the system reacts.

I started reading Moby-Dick some years ago but I found it quite tedious and couldn't go on. I finally finished it in an audiobook form about a month ago. It was an interesting book but the long passages about whales and actual whaling where still a bit too much for me. I listened through Herman Melville's Typee as well. It too was interesting but I would much have preferred an account of Melville's actual captivity on Nuku Hiva instead of a novel based on that.

And since everybody seems to be reading Russian books nowadays, I can confess that I'm almost done listening to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot.

Also, I appreciate the fact that the dictionary tries to substitute 'neuroscience' with 'pseudoscience'.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I just gone on from The Hobbit to The Denial of Death.

I like to keep it varied

[miffy495]

At first, I thought Catcher in the Rye wasn't moving me because I wasn't reading it while going through teenagehood ... but I've come to realize that I could never have empathize with Holden, mainly because his angst and antisocial behavior are made possible by the fact that his parents are loaded with cash.

Interesting. I love Catcher, but that's actually the same reason I couldn't stand On the Road. I didn't feel like Kerouac was really rebelling against anything, but rather acting like a spoiled and entitled twat, totally blind to his own entitlement, whom I wanted absolutely nothing to do with. Maybe the difference for me was that Catcher was fiction and that Holden actually seemed to grow up over the course of the book?

[Roderick]

Kroms and Vimes, good posts there. I loved reading Moby Dick a few years ago (so much so that I even adapted the story into my Captain August webcomic, which became an insane, year long project http://www.captainaugust.com/moby-dick-%28or-the-whale%29-1). It was undeniably a tough read, mostly because of the many asides into whaling, but I again loved the scope of it. I loved how daring it used its proze, now all Shakespearean and full of pomposity, then whimsical with sea shanties and singing. It might sound strange, but I had long been struggling with the question what literature was. When I had read Moby Dick, I finally knew.

War and Peace is, as you can imagine, a year long endeavor in itself, and I have a good 450 pages to go myself. I´m taking it slow, and I´ve been reading various shorter books in between, notably Howl´s Moving Castle, The Last Unicorn, Origin of Species and Beyond Good and Evil.

The Apple store velocipede was hilarious, thank you.

[Thyroid]

I finished A Game of Thrones a couple of days ago. Its silly moments aside, it's pretty good. At times, it's as unputdownable a fantasy novel as you're going get. It's a little on the dark side, though, so keep that in mind before indulging.

[Orv]

Glen Cook's "new" series, The Instrumentalities of the Night which starts off with The Tyranny of the Night (A redundant title if I've ever heard one) continues his tradition of deep and plentiful humanity and lore in all of his work.

And now that I've gotten the book reviewer that was possessing me out of my system;

Read this godsdamned book.

[Thyroid]

I have another weird request (edited to remove the 4am-ism from the post).

Anyone know any science-fiction where a bunch of explorers descend on a planet or something? Or are trapped in an impossible situation and need to survive?

Anything with astronauts descending to meet some hungry horror, basically, or working together to survive.

Edited October 5, 2010 by Kroms
Edited to remove the 4am-ism from the post.

[SometingStupid]

Does anybody know of any books that any kind of information on the Nazi's fascination with the supernatural, particularly Die Glocke (or "The Bell") it's pretty interesting stuff.

Fiction or fact will do...

EDIT:

The 2009 version of Wolfenstein may be a good place to start actually.

Edited October 3, 2010 by SometingStupid

[elmuerte]

I have another impossible request.

Anyone know any science-fiction where a bunch of explorers descend on a planet or something? Or are trapped in an impossible situation and need to survive? I ask because I'm a huge fan of the Doctor Who episode "The Impossible Planet", so anything that brings-up, in my head, this image:

I'm sure Robert A. Heinlein wrote about that

[Thyroid]

Suh-weet. Any you recommend in particular?