Ballsworthy posted:That is a great loving book, good choice. If you like Egolf you should check out Arthur Nersesian, specifically The gently caress-Up. Loving it thus far, and I'll definitely look into that.
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May 1, 2009 06:19
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I'm reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. For the 3rd time. 
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May 1, 2009 06:31
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Mirick posted:
The Algebraist isn't a culture book, interestingly enough. You should also check out his non sci-fi stuff under Iain Banks. I recommend The Wasp Factory
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May 1, 2009 06:33
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- Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks.
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I've gotten into SM Stirling lately, currently reading Conquistador and have the Books of the Change series sitting on the shelf to read next.
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May 1, 2009 16:47
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Nice Sweet Meat posted:I'm reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. Re-reading it for the second time at the moment. I just finished reading London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd and it got me in the mood to re-read the Baroque Cycle.
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May 1, 2009 19:49
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Oh god I just bought the Complete Collection of Hemingway short stories. Also, a probably lovely Brian Herbert Dune book on CD for $5.
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May 1, 2009 21:20
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Just started reading "The Last Secret of the Temple" by Paul Stussman. So far it's pretty good. According to most reviews its a smart version of a Da Vinciesque novel. Hopefully its loving awesome.
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May 2, 2009 00:31
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It's summer vacation and so I thought I'd go on a little spending spree to celebrate. I just bought Joyce's Dubliners, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I still have quite a bit left of Ulysses (Currently at 'Sirens'). I know a lot of people recommend reading Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first, but I'm honestly not having much difficulty enjoying Ulysses. Jurispathic fucked around with this message at 04:07 on May 10, 2009 |
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May 2, 2009 03:05
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I just dropped a bit of money on some books. Novels: JPod by Douglas Coupland The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon Both of those were discounted, and I had heard good things about both, so I plopped some cash down for them. Memoirs/Bios: Born Standing Up by Steve Martin Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaels Yes Man by Danny Wallace Other: The Final Four of Everything, applying Bracketology to random things The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, all about American Chinese food Mock Stars, about Indie Comedy (think Mr. Show, things like that) Comedy on the Edge, about the rise of the golden age of stand-up As you can tell, I'm on a sort of Comedy Binge, with the books about Steve Martin, Indie Comedy, and whatnot. Also, just want more books. Never can have too many.
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May 2, 2009 05:01
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Started Dan Simmons' Summer of Night on the bus this morning. Good first chapter (edit: make that first two chapters, the first is just a short blurb about the history of the school), I went into it knowing that it was pretty much It, but as far as I'm concerned any good author that wants to rewrite a King novel should feel free to do so. It also reminds me of McCammon's Boy's Life, which reminds me that I probably ought to read some more early McCammon. I've read everything from Blue World forward, excepting the most recent Matthew Shephard novel, and I think I read Baal, but he's got a lot of stuff I haven't read. Boy's Life was the sheeee-it, and every thing else of his I read was passable at worst, so it's kinda odd that I haven't dug any deeper. Ballsworthy fucked around with this message at 18:55 on May 5, 2009 |
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May 5, 2009 17:10
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 I've only finished the introduction, haven't had much time to read it yet.
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May 6, 2009 03:10
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mastapasta posted:
It seems like a really long book, but a lot of it goes really fast. Very interesting narrative, and a really good story (at least in my opinion).
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May 6, 2009 03:38
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I just picked up Pygmy, Chuck Palahniuk's newest book. I always get his new ones even though the more recent ones have been disappointing. This loving book, however, is great. Probably my favorite of his right now just because of the mix of humor, gore, and ridiculousness. I won't spoil anything here, but drat is it good and the gimmick actually helps the story instead of hurting it like in Haunted. I also have The Children's Hospital but haven't started it yet. I, too, saw it and got it on a whim because I figured it would be in and out of the bookstores like most of the McSweeney's stuff. And chiming in on the 2666 ownage. Finished it awhile ago and loved it. Savage Detectives is great as well.
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May 6, 2009 05:57
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I'm reading Counting up, counting down by Harry Turtledove and Twilight.
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May 6, 2009 14:03
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Born or Bred? Martin Bryant: the making of a mass murderer http://www.smhshop.com.au/details.php?id=1508
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May 6, 2009 14:57
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The Stand by Stephen King arrived today. Hope it's a good one!
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May 6, 2009 16:53
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I started Necklace of Kisses by Francesca Lia Block last night after finishing all the YA Weetzie Bat books. I'm afraid I'm going to have a lot of trouble reading whatever I go to next unless it's more Block. But I should be getting Pygmy soon. That'll either work out wonderfully or terribly.
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May 6, 2009 18:24
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Thanks to Border's loving weekly coupons I bought The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, which is extra-awesome because the stories were selected by Joyce Carol Oates. I saw her speak this semester at IU and she was really quirky and awesome and funny. This is the 4th or 5th short fiction anthology I've bought in the past three months. Gah.
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May 6, 2009 19:24
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The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks. Quarter of the way through. Fast moving, at least.
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May 7, 2009 02:25
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Got tired of reading modern sci-fi / fantasy so I got David Copperfield in the mail the other day. This will be my first Dickens book, and probably the first real piece of classic lit I've read since high school. So about 5 years. My pea sized attention span is trembling. 
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May 7, 2009 05:19
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I just picked up Steven Pressfield's The Afghan Campaign hardcover for $6 at Barnes & Noble. I heard he writes cool hist-fic, so I figured why not.
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May 7, 2009 17:54
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thingfromtheswamp posted:The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks. Quarter of the way through. Fast moving, at least. I liked the first one... then the whole thing just got a bit ridiculous. I read the whole trilogy anyway. It felt like some of the characters in the end could just do whatever the hell they wanted with no real problems.
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May 7, 2009 18:21
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Got fifty pages into The Road tonight. Even though practically nothing has happened, I'm loving it. There's a nasty fire going on where I live right now, so the ashen imagery is particularly poignant to me.
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May 8, 2009 05:27
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Just started Neil Gaiman's American Gods. About 75 pages in and it's awesome so far.
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May 9, 2009 20:46
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I just picked McCarthy's The Road today as well. 18 pages in. It's good so far.
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May 9, 2009 21:39
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Yoshifan823 posted:I just dropped a bit of money on some books. I had no idea the short-lived series JPod was based on a Douglas Coupland book. Despite having my cousin in it, I never really got into the series but I may give it a read because I think Douglas Coupland is awesome. I've just started reading The Gum Thief and I'm really liking it so far. I also bought Zombie Survial Guide by Max Brooks after just finishing World War Z.
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May 10, 2009 00:22
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I'm tearing my way through DFW's Consider The Lobster right now. Between his take on the Porn Awards and linguists taking dictionaries way too seriously, I've loving it.
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May 10, 2009 03:54
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Just finished rereading I Am America (And So Can You) by Stephen Colbert. I forgot how funny/ridiculous it was. Hopefully there will be some neat extras when the paperback comes out in the fall. Just bought Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (probably the only way I'll ever finish a Jane Austen book) and Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis.
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May 10, 2009 05:34
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I just picked up Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, And Then There Were None by Agitha Christie, and The Complete Sherlock Holmes Volume 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Probably going to start with And Then There Were None since I've never read anything by her.
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May 10, 2009 21:37
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Stanley Park, by Timothy Taylor, it's a comedy about a heated rivalry between two schools of culinary thought (local, traditional styles vs. post-national fusion) in Vancouver BC. So far in the first chapter our protagonist, a chef, is meeting his father who is a participatory anthropolgist studying the homeless population of the titular park; they catch a duck and the chef son is roasting it over a fire and goddamn it made me hungry. Liking it a lot so far. Update: this guy needs to stop talking about black cod, I love black cod like I love my mother but I never see it around here. The book isn't really about what I said it was about up there, that's just some marketing BS that I fell for; it's really just about a chef struggling to keep his restaurant open, but I'm enjoying the heck out of it. Ballsworthy fucked around with this message at 18:55 on May 13, 2009 |
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May 11, 2009 20:06
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Was walking through the bookstore last weekend and saw this 900 page monstrosity For some reason I always had this idea that Lovecraft was really hard to read so I never even looked at it before. I read the first 2 stories in the book store and immediately purchased it!
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May 12, 2009 04:52
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Reading Lolita in Tehran has been my bedtime reading the last couple of nights. It's a bit pretentious and tries too hard to be a "literary" book, but the description of the women's lives in the Islamic Republic is pretty compelling.
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May 13, 2009 03:26
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Columbine by Dave Cullen. He basically spent an entire decade researching everything around the...well, school shooting is the wrong word. It was more of a failed bombing. Harris and Klebold had intended to blow up the school, massacre the survivors, detonate more bombs, die in a "blaze of glory" and then get a last laugh from beyond the grave when their own bomb-rigged cars would blow up in the parking lot, killing emergency responders, survivors, wounded, parents -- the more, the better. Fortunately, Harris wasn't nearly as smart as he thought he was. All his timed explosives failed. He was also a classic full-blooded psychopath: arrogant, remorseless, manipulative and COMPLETELY lacking in anything resembling empathy or emotional comprehension. Also: Brrrr.
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May 13, 2009 21:57
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Gary the Llama posted:Probably going to start with And Then There Were None Definitely a good choice. It is in my opinion one of her best books, as well as one of my favorite books of all time. It's deliciously written and, of course, very clever.
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May 13, 2009 22:30
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Am about half-way through Prefect by Alastair Reynolds. It's not bad, but to me it doesn't have the polish, flow, and depth that his Redemption series books did. Just finished Jim Butcher's relatively new Dresden Files book Turn Coat which I enjoyed more than the last few, but I still miss the underdog wit from the beginning of the series.
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May 13, 2009 23:01
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I just started The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. seems good so far. I also have Requiem For a Dream by Hebert Selby Jr. that I will start after reading The Alchemist. BigRed0427 fucked around with this message at 03:51 on May 14, 2009 |
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May 14, 2009 03:37
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Last couple of days been reading The Plague by Camus. Before that just finished Dr No which was good but an extremely slow start with Bond spending far too much time futzing around Jamaica (also even though I understand that the book was written in the 60s by a British person its still surprisingly racist.) And for The Plague I ended up buying a copy even though I have it checked out from the library. Mostly because the library's only copy was extensively written in by some kind of moron. Its copiously underlined and there are a lot of margin notes, its quite annoying.
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May 14, 2009 04:29
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The Machine posted:Oh god I just bought the Complete Collection of Hemingway short stories. Hah! I bought the same Hemingway book yesterday! I always stayed away from him because I thought he would be dry and unwieldy. Then I heard an NPR reading of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and loved it. Drove to the store after work and picked up his short stories. How are you liking it so far? I'm only 8 or 9 stories in so far but I loved "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "Indian Camp." Great stuff.
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May 14, 2009 07:59
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I just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and now I'm currently reading Notes from Underground. The Road was amazing. Notes from Underground isn't really doing anything for me so far, and I'm about halfway through. After that I think I'm going to pick up some James Ellroy novels.
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May 14, 2009 12:19
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Devi posted:I started Necklace of Kisses by Francesca Lia Block last night after finishing all the YA Weetzie Bat books. I'm afraid I'm going to have a lot of trouble reading whatever I go to next unless it's more Block. I read a whole streak of her books last year, one after the other, which is something I really try not to do. I started off with the Weetzie Bat collection and ended up buying a six or so of her other books used off Amazon and not surfacing for a while. It was fun. Reading now - Tom Robbins' Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. I tried reading this before, but only made it about fifty pages in before I wanted to slap the main character in the face. She's materialistic, prudish, stuck up, ashamed of her friends and reviled at the office. She really is the antithesis of every protagonist I've ever read and enjoyed before. But, since I bought the book outright three years ago, I'm giving it a second shot and seeing it through to the end. And then I'm going back to the pile of Coupland I've got stacked on my floor.
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