[Adilegian]

[Felix]

[shrugtheironteacup]

[shrugtheironteacup]

the Aeneid of Virgil
good casual toilet reading
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[Ness]

420 pages into Donna Tartt's A Secret History. I can already tell I will miss this book after I finish it.

[Ness]

[Adilegian]

[negativedge]

So, Gravity's Rainbow is a pretty dense little number, guys.

[Dracko]

The world is done: J.G. Ballard is dead.

[shrugtheironteacup]

He can die?
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[Winona Ghost Ryder]

:(

[dark steve]

man :<

if anyone is interested, I highly recommend http://www.amazon.com/J-G-Ballard-Re-Search-8-9/dp/0965046974/, but the run on it is definitely going to take it completely out of reach by tomorrow

[Dracko]

Guys, you have no idea how badly this affects me. :(

[shrugtheironteacup]

It's funny. I started with some of Ballard's more recent stuff years and years ago, not getting to his older work until more recently. Almost exactly a year ago I bought a copy of Crash in an english book store in Chiang Mai, finally read it in a security booth in Alaska.

Picked up the Crystal World and related after returning to Oregon and read them before the new year.

It was like he grew younger and more vital as time went on.
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[falsedan]

The Man in the High Castle has me by the balls and I love it.
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[elvis.shrugged]

The Man in the High Castle is incredible. The amount of research that Dick put into the history of it is epic.
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last.fm
tumblr

[Tulpa]

I started reading the Man Who Was Thursday. I really like it! GK Chesterton is a hell of a stylist.
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[Renfrew]

When I was a kid my dad read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings to me several times and since then, I've tried to read them myself but I never get to far. I tended to find them just dull and too slow and not enough action for fantasy novels.

However, a few weeks ago some of my friends wanted to do a LotR extended edition marathon and that kind of got me in the mood to try the books again. I started reading Fellowship and I loved it. I found it to be very charming. As a kid I found all the details to be dull and slow and boring, but now they just add to the rich world. I am totally obsessed with back stories and mythology, often to the point where I find the history presented in a fiction world to be more interesting than the main story itself, so I love love love all the hints and shout outs to Tolkien's in depth and never completed mythology.

So I finished Fellowship and read a couple of other things and moved on to the Two Towers. What I mainly remembered from that is "we ran x leagues this day and then slept and then ran some more leagues and then we had some more leagues to run so we ran some more leagues," and I never followed this entire book at all very well when I was younger. IT made a good deal more sense now and my favorite parts of it were probably the hobbits time with the ents and the other hobbits time with Faramir (mainly for all the mythology talk). However by the time Aragorn's half of the book ended I was just ready to move on. I struggled through most of the second half not paying all that much attention and really just wanting to get it done so I could move on to other things.

The first of the above mentioned other things is Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I'm not all that far into it yet but I'm really really digging Jake and Bret's relationship and I can't wait to read more.

After that I'm going to tackle Snow Crash. I remember you guys talking about it a long time ago and always meant to get it, and now finally have.
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[negativedge]

[Levi]

Guys I am contributing to the literature thread to suggest everyone read Lafcadio Hearn who has not already, since it seems he hasn't been mentioned in all the long years of SB. For those who do not know, he is the ideal demon fusion of Tim Rogers and H.P. Lovecraft -- A man among men who can weave a single essay about architecture into a discussion about evolutionary reincarnation that then veers into perfume recipe trading before resolving itself by talking about ghosts.

Freely available at Project Gutenberg! All his books are pretty good! Even the one about America!

[Intentionally Wrong]

Wow, this thread got long while I wasn't looking.

Just finished Gravity's Rainbow, which was great, and picked up Infinite Jest. I was actually looking for stuff by J. G. Ballard or Robert Coover, but the bookstore didn't have anything. Anybody have experience with their work?

EDIT: Oh, wow, I should have just jumped right to the last page.

[Shiren the Launderer]

[crispyambulance]

I reread this thread and made a list of books to read (at work).

Stranger in a Strange World by Heinlein
Pale Fire by Nabokov
Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon
Elizabeth Costello by Coetzee
Cryptonomicon by Stephenson
If This Is a Man by Levi
Catch-22 by Heller
Book of the New Sun by Wolfe
Childhood's End by Clarke
Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Bukowski
Blood Meridian by McCarthy
Moby Dick by Melville
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture by Benedict
On Chesil Beach by McEwan
Invisible Man by Ellison
Midnight's Children by Rushdie
The Razor's Edge by Maugham

So far. Please help me improve it! Are these books good places to start with these authors? I've only read Bukowski and Nabokov before.

[CubaLibre]

The Iliad of Homer (trans. Lattimore).
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Dracko]

Needs more Borges.

[Shiren the Launderer]

Cryptonomicon is dumb. Maybe read Infinite Jest instead if you want to read a sprawling Pynchon-esque novel.

[Broco]

Elizabeth Costello is a very experimental work and an unconventional place to start with J.M. Coetzee (it happened to be where I started, and I liked it, but your mileage may vary). His most widely praised work is Disgrace.

[crispyambulance]

Why is Cryptonomicon dumb? This thread has some glowing posts about Snow Crash and then a few about how the ending is terrible, and I remembered that Tim said he liked Cryptonomicon somewhere so I figured it was perhaps a better place to start with Stephenson.

Broco, my tastes definitely tend more toward unconventional. I read the first few pages on Amazon because I didn't remember anything about Coetzee, and it seemed OK. Thanks for the tip.

[!=]

Any of you have read some Column McCann?

He was invited in some radio program I stumbled upon, and he seemed like a genuinely smart man. This does not however mean I know what to expect from his books, so any comment appreciated first before I try looking some of his novels up.

[Shiren the Launderer]

[gambrinus]

[Capt. Caveman]

Cryptonomicon is fantastic, fuck the haters.

Anathem was pretty terrible. Somehow I managed to trudge about 3/4 of the way through before I realized I just didn't give a fuck about any of it and was wasting my time.

Borges fans: please read Brodie's Report, if you haven't already. If his early work in Labyrinths, Fictions, etc. set off tiny sparks in your head, Brodie's Report is a book which sticks a knife in your gut and slowly twists, smiling all the while (that there are literally lots of knives in the book is Thematically Important). The Penguin Classics edition is bundled with his short prose-etry volume In Praise of Darkness which is also well worth reading.

RIGHT NOW I've been reading Light in August which is not surprisingly, great, though I'm not that far in yet. Still, I can't deny the hypnotic power of Faulkner's prose.

[CubaLibre]

Joe Christmas might be the best character in fiction. (Just kidding, it's Achilles, but Joe Christmas is in the running for second.)

The other two though are sort of flawed. It's still a beautiful book.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[negativedge]

I am now reading Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse. I don't know why I didn't think enough of this to finish it in high school. Now I feel like a hopeless dork because I'm posting about a book about a boring day in the life of snooty turn of the century semi upperclass intellectuals on a video game forum. Also everything I'm reading is from like the 1920's.

[boojiboy7]

The Modernist period has some good stuff, dogg. Enjoy it.

[Adilegian]

Reading Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki, which is pretty awesome. A quick read, and a great account of an awesome adventure.
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[Tulpa]

Reading Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda right now. Anthony Faulkes Translation. It's quite fascinating. The euhemerizing is kind of annoying and blatantly silly. Odin became a descendant of King Priam of Troy, and Asgard, instead of being in the third heaven, is actually the city of Troy.

I like the translation. Whenever the name of an As has some folk etymology attached, the old icelandic word is shown in italics with a translation in brackets.

The actual writing style of eddic poetry is really confusing to follow but very interesting.
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[crispyambulance]

I'm reading Le grand cahier by Agota Kristof. I read somewhere that Itoi adapted bits from it into Mother 3, and I figured at eight dollars it'd be worth it at least to practice reading French. Every single character is a hilarious misfit, and I'm constantly switching between being surprised, repulsed and sympathetic by their unsettling antics. The French text is passably written, perhaps a little too terse and dry, but considering the personalities of the narrators, it's appropriate. Cool book.

[YourImaginaryFriend]

Reading Hiroshima by John Hersey. The writing is methodical and not either sympathetic or apathic, just really a portrait of the lives and the event that it transcribes. Not quite sure on it yet, about halfway through and what is going on is pretty depressing. Certainly a good piece of journalism, but seeing as I don't know much about Hiroshima beyond basic know-how and the history classes, this is much more effective in painting the horror of it than I had previously known. Not that I didn't think it was horrible, I don't want to be misread in that regard, but it was certainly nothing I dwelled upon and for that I feel kind of like an apathetic jerk.
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[Shiren the Launderer]

Publishers Weekly Inherent Vice review

[Tokyo Rude]