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I somehow ended up reading Lolita (for the second time), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses at the same time.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I finished first, and, while at times the prose was a bit plain, it was a mostly enjoyable and easy read. It seems to me one of the most tactful pieces to discuss any sort of religion; nowadays I'm surrounded by poseurs who tell me 'Yeah, man, christianity is suffocating the world!' (not kidding) and pseudo-intellectual "entertainment" like The Golden Compass people drag me to see. The aesthetic philosophy at the end was at least interesting, and the whole 'oh my god what if I can't measure up to my literary forebearers' aspect was mildly heartwarming because I'm an angsty obsessive youth myself.

Lolita is pretty much covered by Broco so I won't be redundan/display my intellectual ineptitude just yet. I have to write a thematically analytical essay for it, and I think I can basically boss it. Least hopefully.

Ulysses I'm on page two hundred and some of the seven hundred in my edition, and I find it perversely entertaining despite my inability to understand why. It's been a hard read, though; I can't get through much more than about thirty pages in a sitting when I actually have time to just sit down with it. What's the concensus on this one?

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That sounds potentially interesting, I suppose. Might look into when my queue isn't such a god damn train wreck.

BY THE WAY guys I think Ulysses is pretty slick. Damn.

Also picked up Wuthering Heights today, it's been kind of hard to follow but maybe that's because I've been reading it in distracting environments? Seems like I won't be disappointed though so!

Just thought you should know!

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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.

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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.

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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.