Books, books, books...

[Max Ernst]

Hi book thread.

 

I finished The Recognitions recently and I think it may be the best book I have ever read. Instead of moving straight on to another book, I just read analysis and essays on the novel because I love it so much and wanted to live in it as long as I could. It is nearly a thousand pages, so the fact I finished it and was still unsatisfied is a testament to how good it is. Also, it reminds me of Annie Hall in that it is deeply in love with literature but it is very scathing of the intelligentsia. 

 

I am also reading Dead Souls and that book is very funny and not nearly the dark exploration of the soul I was expecting. 

[Ucantalas]

So, since I started going to the library here I've been reading a lot more.

-"Black List" by Brad Thor: It was alright. Supposed to be a thriller with a sort of paranoid "the-government-is-always-watching-you" type of theme... but of course it doesn't matter because the main character is the greatest soldier ever in the world and no one can stop him just because.

-"Six Years" by Harlan Coben. I liked it, but it had its dumb moments. The main character's ex made him promise he would leave her alone when she gets married to someone else, then he sees the obituary for her husband. When he tries to reach her to offer his condolences, she is nowhere to be found and the dead man had another family who knew nothing. It was an interesting read, but there were times where I just got annoyed at the protagonist. He is expending all this time and effort trying to find her, and talks constantly about how much he loved her, but then in the same sentence insists he's not obsessed with her and just loves her... Maybe the point of it was that he actually was but was in denial? It just felt uncomfortable to me.

-"Odd Apocalypse" by Dean Koontz. Another one of the Odd Thomas books (number 5, I believe). The first one was great, the 2nd was alright, and then the 3rd and 4th were pretty forgettable, in my opinion. This one, however, I will not be forgetting any time soon. Now, the series started with a fry cook who could see ghosts. That was about it, it was all pretty simple and not that weird. This one has crazy pig beasts, portals... its all over the place with weird shit. It was better than the 3rd and 4th Odd Thomas books, but still not that great. The first is still the best of the series in my opinion.

-"Scarecrow Returns" by Matthew Reilly. It's big, dumb action in a small, dumb paperback. I loved it. Although it had a pretty disturbing torture scene that bothered more than any one found in any movie or game. I can't really explain why it bothered me more than others I've seen in other media, but something about it just really rubbed me the wrong way and made me feel weird about it. (Also, do not read this book if random deus ex machina type things bother you.)

-"On Writing" by Stephen King. One part autobiography with one part guide to writing, it was a really interesting read. I used to like writing stories when I was younger and stopped, but this book had me considering getting back into it. I enjoyed it very much.

[Argobot]

I'm dangerously close to accomplishing something I've never done -- read all of the books that I own. Usually I buy books at roughly the same rate as I read them, so there's always a huge stack of unread books waiting for me. Part of me enjoys that because books are the only things I like owning and collecting It's just nice to see a fully stocked bookcase (I don't actually own a bookcase so for me it's really a fully stocked counter space).

But lately I haven't bought any new books, at least not at the rate I normally would. That means I'm reading books that I bought over a year ago. As of today, I have 5 unread books left. It's a strange experience, but I'm kind of looking forward to the moment when I can say that I've read every book I own.

[Gormongous]

I finished Dream of the Red Chamber about a month ago, after spending four months reading it. Honestly, I've been wanting to write something on here, but have been putting it off because it is by far better than any more prestigious book I've read and more prestigious than any better book I've read. Does that make sense? It's three thousand pages covering between three and five years (I didn't do the best job keeping track) in the slow decline of an aristocratic Chinese family, with a cast of characters in the hundreds. I read a chapter a night and it was the best long-term experience to which I've committed myself since my first year of grad school. It's just so full of small moments and incidental details that I learned all of the characters more intimately than many of my friends, so that for weeks after I was meeting people and thinking, "Oh, she is definitely a You San-jie," or "He is like a happier Jia Lian." For a third of a year, it became a second life I lived before bed and it was magical.

 

I've resigned myself to being unable to sell this book (or rather five books, if you go with the excellent Hawkes-Minford translation) to anyone, which is maybe for the best when it's such a long book where so little happens. Still, it was a good enough experience that the apocryphal ending thrown together in the penultimate chapter did exactly nothing to change my warm feelings for the entire experience.

[Merus]

I've been trying to read more, and broaden my range a little.

 

Bad Pharma is a scathing and comprehensive deep dive into the medical industry, and how it's systematically distorted in ways that hurt patients. It spends a good deal of time on the pharmaceutical industry, for obvious reasons, but it's just as unimpressed with governments, researchers, and medical regulators like the FDA. I learnt a lot about science and ethics from it, which I'm sure the author would be happy about because that's his job, and it gave me a lot to think about when it comes to how much we really know about medication and whether it's the best possible treatment.

 

Wool is a post-apocalyptic story about people who live in a gigantic silo. Anyone who expresses the idea that they want to leave the silo are immediately sentenced to do so, and they're given wool pads to clean the cameras showing the outside world. It's reasonably well-told, although there's nothing really new going on, and I think the author probably killed off a few too many characters while I was still getting invested.

 

I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and the opening quote is addressed to Phaedrus. I couldn't handle that.

[seamus2389]

I finished Dream of the Red Chamber about a month ago, after spending four months reading it. Honestly, I've been wanting to write something on here, but have been putting it off because it is by far better than any more prestigious book I've read and more prestigious than any better book I've read. Does that make sense? It's three thousand pages covering between three and five years (I didn't do the best job keeping track) in the slow decline of an aristocratic Chinese family, with a cast of characters in the hundreds. I read a chapter a night and it was the best long-term experience to which I've committed myself since my first year of grad school. It's just so full of small moments and incidental details that I learned all of the characters more intimately than many of my friends, so that for weeks after I was meeting people and thinking, "Oh, she is definitely a You San-jie," or "He is like a happier Jia Lian." For a third of a year, it became a second life I lived before bed and it was magical.

 

I've resigned myself to being unable to sell this book (or rather five books, if you go with the excellent Hawkes-Minford translation) to anyone, which is maybe for the best when it's such a long book where so little happens. Still, it was a good enough experience that the apocryphal ending thrown together in the penultimate chapter did exactly nothing to change my warm feelings for the entire experience.

 

 

I found that on project gutenberg, started it, found out the original translation wasn't complete and now stare at the collection on amazon thinking will I click buy. You have not helped in dissuading me from that but have got me thinking one of my arbitrary reading goals for next year will to the read the  5 chinese classics

 

I've been trying to read more, and broaden my range a little.

 

Bad Pharma is a scathing and comprehensive deep dive into the medical industry, and how it's systematically distorted in ways that hurt patients. It spends a good deal of time on the pharmaceutical industry, for obvious reasons, but it's just as unimpressed with governments, researchers, and medical regulators like the FDA. I learnt a lot about science and ethics from it, which I'm sure the author would be happy about because that's his job, and it gave me a lot to think about when it comes to how much we really know about medication and whether it's the best possible treatment.

 

His previous book - bad science is also very good, focuses more on pseudo medicine

[Gormongous]

I found that on project gutenberg, started it, found out the original translation wasn't complete and now stare at the collection on amazon thinking will I click buy. You have not helped in dissuading me from that but have got me thinking one of my arbitrary reading goals for next year will to the read the  5 chinese classics

 

The Penguin Hawkes-Minford translation is essential, in my opinion. I read a chapter or two of several different free ones and they just don't hold a candle. Hawkes (along with his son-in-law Minford, although to a slightly lesser extent) translates in a warm and effusive style that feels like a mid-century English novel rather than an eighteenth-century Chinese one. I used my university library for reading them, but I am going to get the five-volume set for my birthday tomorrow.

 

I'd also like to read the Four Classics (I guess you're counting The Plum in the Golden Vase, according to Wikipedia) sooner rather than later, but I feel very strongly that Dream of the Red Chamber is the best of the four and I wouldn't want the rest to be a rote exercise.

[Ucantalas]

Just finished reading Doctor Sleep by Stephen King.

I thought it was good. I enjoyed reading it. But... as the sequel to The Shining, I don't think it holds up that well. It feels very different from The Shining, and at some points I felt that making it a sequel that shares the same main character, it felt like it was just an excuse for the protagonist to have psychic powers.

[namman siggins]

Reading Bird Box and while the premise is grabbing me the book weakens when it flashes back to what life was like before the "creatures".

 

For those who don't know: 

Something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.

Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remain, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now, that the boy and girl are four, it is time to go. But the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat—blindfolded—with nothing to rely on but her wits and the children’s trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. And something is following them. But is it man, animal, or monster?

Engulfed in darkness, surrounded by sounds both familiar and frightening, Malorie embarks on a harrowing odyssey—a trip that takes her into an unseen world and back into the past, to the companions who once saved her. Under the guidance of the stalwart Tom, a motley group of strangers banded together against the unseen terror, creating order from the chaos. But when supplies ran low, they were forced to venture outside—and confront the ultimate question: in a world gone mad, who can really be trusted?

Interweaving past and present, Josh Malerman’s breathtaking debut is a horrific and gripping snapshot of a world unraveled that will have you racing to the final page.

Malerman is great when he's describing Malorie and her children journey from the house; it's tense and at times nerve wracking. Sadly all atmosphere and tension falls apart when he moves to talk about her past life and the survivors she was with with.

 

The survivors feel stilled and cliched and their problems just as much. They're not as fleshed out as Malorie; hell, even Malorie's sister was fleshed out better than the survivors and she was only there for a few chapters! But, I'm going to be a bit more forgiving of it since I'm only 60 pages in and the survivors came in not that long ago. I just hope Malerman is able to keep the moment he has when he's writing about the present to the past. 

Other than that, I'm re-reading Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai and it continues to be one of my favorite modern books; Krasznahorkai is a modern literature master!

Highly recommend it to y'all:

http://www.amazon.com/Seiobo-There-Below-Ndp-1280/dp/0811219674

[juv3nal]

Betrayals by Charles Palliser (of Dickensian pastiche Quincunx fame) is pretty great y'all.

[Tanukitsune]

Has anybody bought the latest Humble Book Bundle? I only know of American Gods and I was curious about the rest.

[juv3nal]

Has anybody bought the latest Humble Book Bundle? I only know of American Gods and I was curious about the rest.

 

Nope, but if you like American Gods, I would recommend Tim Powers' Last Call. I may be biased though as I'm a huge T. S. Eliot fan.

[neonrev]

Not a book, but still incredibly good.
http://www.sbnation.com/2014/8/18/5998715/the-tim-tebow-cfl-chronicles
Its 44,000 words, it gets close. You also don't need to care or know about football to enjoy. I certainly don't, and I loved it. It's a retelling of Jason and the Argonauts in the best of all possible ways.


Edit: I also mostly wanted to hit the 'last post in all sub-forums' goal and I did it. I just needed to say a thing about a book. I can rest easy.

[namman siggins]

Went to a yard book sake yesterday and bought these

Edit: except Station Eleven, bought that from Amazon.

[Merus]

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is by turns fascinating and disturbing.

[Blambo]

I feel like Moby Dick had been completely and forever ruined for me. I knew the ending beforehand, I had a light grasp of the themes involved, and all that was left was seeing how the little details fit everything. The specter of my prior knowledge even retconned a lot of the emotional experience I had while reading it.

[osmosisch]

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is by turns fascinating and disturbing.

It's the better version of that stupid philo. 101 thing that everyone was raving about a while back.

e: found it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie%27s_World

[namman siggins]

Just bought the new Margaret Atwood book, Stone Mattress; I can't wait to delve into it.
 

Not really book but a collection of short stories.

[Woodfella]

I am currently reading "Blood Meridian" and jesus effing christ! It's brutal and brilliant, 

 

I keep a dictionary close at hand and have to go back and reread a number of passages but oh boy do I really like this book. It's horribly grim and beautiful at the same time. McCarthy's prose is so weird, he uses strange and old words. I really like him though and have done for a while, I pretty much copied the first page of All the pretty horses for my GCSE creative writing exam(don't tell anyone) 

 

Wondering if anyone else has read Blood Meridian? I am on chapter XI so no spoils but what did you think? 

[namman siggins]

God, I fucking love Blood Meridian.

 

I remember when I first read that book and being blown away from the get go:
 

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

What way to start your novel and to instantly hook your reader. McCarthy does a beautiful job drawing an image in the reader's head about our protagonist, his age, where is at in the world/class through lyrical straight-to-the-point prose.

 

Another thing I like about McCarthy and it comes out especially in Blood Meridian is his ability to describe the landscape in which his characters' inhabit; the landscapes feel worn out and lived in and they instantly come alive within a few words; they're also characters themselves. The landscape becomes living beings that fight or help the characters' or they are a reflection of the characters' exterior and interiors; they're never static in McCarthy's world, they're always bursting with life and energy, even a desert is shown to be bursting with life and energy.

 

His exploration of violence was another thing that attracted me to him and Blood Meridian. Havin been a victim and perpetrator of violence, his themes of violence hit home to me. The senseless violence that his characters'  act upon and that violence, real violence, can occur out of the blue without and was something that reflected my reality growing up. To read what violence does to a person's psyche was something that I didn't get much of at that time. The books I was reading didn't explore the full intent of violence and how it shapes the world and the people it's done by and thrust upon. So when I came across McCarthy and his stories, it was a revelation, a reflection and allowed me to escape and explore the violence in my life.

Also, you can't go wrong when you have a paragraph like this:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Talk about cinematic! My god! McCarthy starts off with a panoramic view, then moves to a series of closeups. Within these closeups, McCarthy takes us through time and space. McCarthy compresses a lifetime of violence and battle and brutality in this paragraph, and he does this by the grab that Native Americans are wearing.

 

pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust

McCarthy uses the garb to show how victorious and brutal the Native Americans have been through the ages and there are sneak peaks of the victims they have slain: from the conquistadors to the white stockings to the bloodstained weddingveil. 

 

God, I fucking love this book!

[voxn]

BI-ANNUAL BOOK UPDATE

 

gravity's rainbow is kicking my ass. I enjoy the writing piecemeal, but reading for long stretches - as I tend to do - is absolutely exhausting, and meaning starts to congeal halfway to my brain and lie there comatose.

 

reread (most of) Consider the Lobster, which I think Sean recommended years ago? Still great, but in particular the article on athlete biography's has stuck with me the most this go-around. It has that wizard quality of obvious and resounding clarity as you read it, but trying to later recall the turns of phrasing that made it so precise is impossible. (also experienced this lately watching Feynman lectures)

 

been thinking about The Sense of an Ending a lot lately, going to have to re-read it soon!!

 

and I've been reading plenty of campier stuff, too! Stormlight Archives was really entertaining, and currently re-reading the Quantum Thief books. The third book in the trilogy came out in July, only 6 months after the second, which seems (somewhat distressingly) in this world of GRRM novels and video games an absurdly short time.

[Argobot]

Since a lot of us here read Cloud Atlas, I'm hoping that the David Mitchell interest will carry over to his newest book, The Bone Clocks. It's in the same vein as Cloud Atlas -- fragmented narratives that span across time -- except there is a single protagonist who connects each of the different narrators. Mitchell is truly wonderful at writing characters and that's what I enjoyed most in this book. His downfall, I think, is the need to bolt on what feel like superfluous fantasy subplots to his novels. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet fell victim to that and so does The Bone Clocks. The fantasy story is supposed to represent the struggle between Good and Evil, but Evil in this book is represented by people who actually kill innocent babies. That's such a facile approach to a weighty subject, and it's made weaker in comparison to the complexity of the writing that surrounds it in the novel.

[tberton]

That's unfortunate to hear. I am really excited to read The Bone Clocks though, since most of the stuff I've heard has been great.

[Nappi]

I have The Bone Clocks sitting on my bookshelf but I don't know if I want to pick it up right after Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

 

I agree that David Mitchell can be quite frustrating author at times. Parts of his novels are among the best writing I have ever come across – like the Frobisher story in Cloud Atlas or the more mundane parts of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – but those are always balanced by elements that I find off-putting – like the innermost stories in Cloud Atlas or the cult in The Thousand Autumns or the comet shaped birthmark in fucking everything.

[Nappi]

I have The Bone Clocks sitting on my bookshelf but I don't know if I want to pick it up right after Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

 

Decided to read Randall (xkcd) Munroe's  What if: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions instead. I'm only 30 pages in but I'm loving it already. I don't know which percentage of these questions have already been answered on xkcd what if (which I only discovered just now) but I can still heartily recommend buying a physical copy of the book to anyone who is interested in this sort of stuff (xkcd, science, absurd thought experiments, etc.), if only because the book is beautifully laid out.