TBB Book Recommendation Superstation !!

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > TBB Book Recommendation Superstation !!

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

OscarDiggs posted:

Pretty drat close to finished "The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga. All in all a story I very much enjoyed (and I didn't think I was going to first, but the details and the charm of the main character sold me) and it was interesting reading something by a non-white author. I'll be looking for new things to read soon, so are there any recomendations along similar lines?

Jhumpa Lahiri's supposed to be great (one of a million authors I keep meaning to read). She writes more about Indian-American immigrants than about people in India itself, but it's still probably good to have another perspective on India and the modern world, especially from a woman.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 10:31 on Oct 24, 2018

# ¿ Oct 24, 2018 10:28

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 23:38

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Just picked up Bellefleur, which I'd been vaguely intrigued by for years but never checked out. Any recommendations for more Oates, aside from no-brainers like the other gothic novels and the Wonderland books?

# ¿ Jan 13, 2019 06:50

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Sorry for asking, I guess.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2019 05:43

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Will keep in mind, thanks.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2019 03:10

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Goondolences.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2019 04:36

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Sorry, I got nothing.

Edit: All the King's Men, maybe? Still need to read that one.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Jan 26, 2019

# ¿ Jan 26, 2019 08:19

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Is that the one with the MoonPies

# ¿ Jan 31, 2019 03:25

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Dadbod Apocalypse posted:

It�s a self-esteem thing.

Actually, it's just fun to be a dick on the Internet.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2019 03:37

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

If the bear fucks a human, though, that's good, like the classic Canadian novel Bear, by Marian Engel, about a bear that fucks a human.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2019 04:07

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

vox populi, vox ursi

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3880821&pagenumber=1#lastpost

# ¿ Feb 2, 2019 06:54

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

What's a good place to start with Zola?

# ¿ Feb 17, 2019 10:27

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Merci beaucoup.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2019 15:19

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

There's a lot of cool shared worldbuilding in Japanese literature; they even came up with a whole conlang to write the books in.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2019 23:55

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

apophenium posted:

A coworker just thrust The Rules of Attraction upon me, by Bret Easton Ellis. I've never read anything by him but haven't heard much good. Is this one of his worthwhile books? Without pointless misogyny or murder or whatnot.

Everything on the Wikipedia page makes it look insufferable enough to not bother looking further into than the Wikipedia page.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2019 04:00

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Aleksandr Afanasyev's Russian Fairy Tales.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2019 01:12

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I sent an email to my professor about this and will probably get a few solid recommendations back before long. There isn't much I can offer myself that I haven't already brought up in other threads.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2019 10:02

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

chernobyl kinsman posted:

what's out there on slavic and/or eastern european mythology and folklore? i can't find much at all, and can't gauge the quality of what I do find. I'd prefer something aimed at a more scholarly than popular audience, but i'll take pretty much anything that's not crazy. anyone have any suggestions?

Looks like the best one-stop book is Russian Folk Belief, by Linda J. Ivanits, which I had already checked out from the library to read as soon as I have the chance. From what I gather, it does have a tendency to exaggerate the pagan element of dvoeverie, but it's 30 years old at this point, so that's not really a surprise. Apart from that, though, it's quite a comprehensive survey of Russian folk traditions and is definitely the scholarly sort of book that you're looking for.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2019 22:41

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

StrixNebulosa posted:

Might've asked this before, but let's try it again: I'm looking for books that capture the feeling of X-COM. Military sci-fi against an incredibly dangerous force, one that might be impossible to defeat. I'll take horror or optimism or both, just - something, anything that captures the feel of the original X-COM game.

A Matter for Men, by David Gerrold.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2019 00:19

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

StrixNebulosa posted:

Thanks!

I've also seen The War Against the Chtorr: Invasion, the hardcover compilation that pairs it with its first sequel, at every other secondhand book store I walk into, so you might want to keep an eye out for that.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2019 00:44

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I admit that I have not actually read any of the Chtorr books myself.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2019 18:06

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

StrixNebulosa posted:

As for Lamp's rec, uh... which author? Does anyone know?

It was an unreadable anime epic whose author kept posting lengthy excerpts on the TV Tropes forums around the time of the early mock threads. If you have the time, I encourage you to at least skim my two favorite posts about it, which I will refrain from directly quoting here.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2019 19:04

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Badger of Basra posted:

I just read Empire of Cotton, which is basically an economic/social history of cotton as a commodity. Is there a book like this for pepper?

Google's giving me a lot of results for Pepper: A History of the World's Most Influential Spice, by Marjorie Shaffer.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2019 03:02

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Faulkner and O'Connor at the very least.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2019 05:36

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Franchescanado posted:

edit: What translation are you reading for War & Peace? Who translated the version of Crime & Punishment you liked? That might be a part of why W&P isn't working for you.

Nah, War and Peace just sucks. Anna Karenina is a river that sweeps you along; War and Peace is a lake that you swim across laboriously and with frequent stops to tread water.

Philthy posted:

I read Anna Karenina on a whim about 5 years ago. I burned through it because it had everything. Literally everything. I decided maybe I was missing out on the whole Russian lit thing, and read Crime and Punishment. I found it to be good, but not great. I moved on to War & Peace. I've tried reading this about 6 times since. I just cannot get into it, and it feels like it was written by someone else entirely. It's dry. I've made it maybe 250 pages in at the most. It feels like I'm reading a history book instead of a fantastic novel that has emotions, characters you cheer for and hate, social arguments that feel like actual conversations, on and on. Basically, I am looking for something as great as AK. This might be too big of an ask. How about just half as great? Keep slogging through W&P?

Anyone?

The Brothers Karamazov is not only my favorite Russian novel but my favorite novel. I recommend the Magarshack translation, which is unconscionably out of print (replaced in the Penguin Classics by McDuff's stuffy version) but is dirt-cheap on AbeBooks or eBay. I have to admit that Ivan's philosophical crisis is pretty quaint a century and a half later, but a thousand-page book has room for a creaky board like that when everything else is brilliant.

In addition to the other Russian books recommended, I'll offer Andrey Bely's Petersburg (Elsworth's translation if you're not committed to reading all three major ones or learning Russian to read the original) and Vasily Aksyonov's The Burn, which don't really convince you of their authors' worldviews like Anna Karenina does (especially not Petersburg, which was written by a crazy-pants Theosophist who believed that the color blue was evil) but are full of enough nightmarish psychedelia and kaleidoscopic prose tricks that it's beside the point.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 07:42 on May 28, 2019

# ¿ May 28, 2019 07:24

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Human Tornada posted:

2 - A good non-fiction account of the Golden Age of Piracy with a heavy dose of the personalities and the nitty-gritty of piracy. Empire of Blue Water, The Republic of Pirates, and Under the Black Flag are three that I'm looking at.

I recently saw Alexander O. Exquemelin's The Buccaneers of America at a secondhand book store. It's an eyewitness account written by one of Captain Morgan's seamen. The one I saw was translated from the original Dutch by Alexis Brown; Wikipedia says that the first English version (1684) was apparently sourced from a badly garbled Spanish translation, so steer clear of that.

# ¿ May 29, 2019 00:21

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

C. J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union books. Merchanter's Luck is a good place to start.

Edit: Stephen Leigh's The Crystal Memory isn't part of a series but is very similar to the Alliance-Union books and is worth checking out if you enjoy them.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Jun 1, 2019

# ¿ Jun 1, 2019 17:52

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Azran posted:

Hey everyone, I'm looking for something in the thriller/crime genre (a genre I've read basically nothing of), the only requirement is that it should have a strong female protagonist. Any recommendations?

I got Rosalie Knecht's Who Is Vera Kelly? in the last Secret Santa. I haven't read it yet, but it seems like exactly what you're looking for.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2019 18:40

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Stringent posted:

Three Musketeers would seem to fit the bill.

Keep an eye out for a modern version if you go with this one (I have Eleanor Hochman's), as most editions unconscionably use a censored Victorian translation.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2019 14:41

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

The Worm Ouroboros, The Well at the World's End, even The Chronicles of Prydain.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2019 22:09

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

The modern book that pulls this off best is Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke. It's written in the voice of a regency-era writer, complete with imagined footnotes etc.

The peak of this kind of thing is probably Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which is not a fantasy novel but is definitely fantastical.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Aug 14, 2019

# ¿ Aug 14, 2019 23:39

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Bilirubin posted:

wait wtf why did nobody tell me this before?

That honestly is one of the least crazy things in it.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2019 05:54

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Wasn't that one written specifically for adaptation into another movie? I haven't read it, but the movie sucks rear end.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2019 02:43

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

spacetoaster posted:

Thank you guys for the recommendations! I read everything and enjoyed it.

Now I need some more recommendations.

Anything with several books in it would be great.

C. J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union books are better than just about any other space opera.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2019 04:44

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Rolling my eyes as I read The Things They Carried, wishing that Cthulhu would show up to make things interesting and scary.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2019 15:45

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Pretty much any book about Agent Orange is already going to be more effective horror than whatever you're asking for.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2019 15:55

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

funkybottoms posted:

If I Die in a Combat Zone is also excellent, but totally non-fiction as far as I know.

Tim O'Brien also wrote The Things They Carried, which is fiction. Very entry-level recommendation (it's on high-school reading lists), but it's an undisputed classic.

One that I haven't read but has been on my list for a while is Bảo Ninh's The Sorrow of War, a Vietnamese novel about the North Vietnamese side of the war. There's also 2016's Pulitzer winner The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which isn't really a "war novel" as such but confronts America's dominance of the war's cultural narrative.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Aug 27, 2019

# ¿ Aug 27, 2019 19:10

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Stanisław Lem's Solaris, with the caveat that the real English translation is only available as an ebook.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Aug 30, 2019

# ¿ Aug 30, 2019 01:19

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I should also point out that the Tarkovsky Solaris film is fantastic too. It's hard to say whether you'd like it or the book more. Don't bother with the lifeless Soderbergh one.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2019 06:17

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Kangxi posted:

Any good fun sci-fi or military fiction with a woman protagonist? I'm travelling next week and need some light beach reading.

Plenty of C. J. Cherryh books.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2019 17:33

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 23:38

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

Andrey Bely's Petersburg hits all of those criteria. I recommend John Elsworth's translation.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2019 01:38

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