Tim Burns Effect posted:

I just realized my current reading list is accidentally comprised entirely of italians (calvino, de maria, ferrante), any more i should add to the list while i'm at it? Eco maybe?

Krankenstyle posted:

The Fatherland movie (Turtledove book where Nazi germany won ww2 and managed to cover up the holocaust) was kinda low budget but Rutger Hauer was good in it, as I recall. I've never had any desire to read any of the books though ew. Might read Man in the High Castle cause I like Dick's short stories.

Guy A. Person posted:

So I'm running the reading challenge this year and I'm doing something a little different where in addition to thread wildcards (someone in the thread just tells you what book to read) there is a challenge for getting a wildcard from another thread, hopefully to encourage posters to wander around the forum a bit more.

So anyway, since this is my favorite TBB thread, hoping someone can give me a book to read. Just gently caress my poo poo up.

A human heart posted:

Did you guys know that The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka is really good? Please increase your african literature power levels, everyone

Franchescanado posted:

I know this is better suited for the recommendation thread, but I trust this thread more.

I've been thinking about novels with a heavy emphasis on music. Thomas Pynchon has plenty of songs, dance numbers and musical passages in Gravity's Rainbow, V. and Inherent Vice, but I really can't think of other novels or authors who write about music well. Any ideas or recommendations?

Oliver Reed posted:

potentially posted before or already familiar to you, here are nabokov's thoughts on various authors

quick & amusing read

Gorn Myson posted:

Human history is merely a Civ scenario where Gandhi never got nukes.

Mr. Squishy posted:

Skip to the one where a rich guy is drinking ground-up monkey brains for immortality but now he swings around his mansion late at nights.

Nckdictator posted:

Srice posted:

Thinking the next thing I read might be something from the longlist...anyone have any takes on anything on the list?

quote:

We die how we lived… I even go to church and wear a little cross, but there has never been any joy in my life, and there isn’t any now. I never got any happiness. And now even praying won’t help. I just hope that I get to die soon… I hope the heavenly kingdom hurries up and comes, I’m sick of waiting. Just like Sashka… He’s in the graveyard now, resting. [She crosses herself.]

Mel Mudkiper posted:

A man who reads about Eastern Europe and is not prepared for incomparable human misery

Budgie Jumping posted:

That's what I'm talking about! What's that from?

quote:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. "My father and the others in the squad stood looking over at the lake in the old town," the ex-Mesa army chief says. "In front of them stood a bunch of white-robed men, the commander of the unit behind them. There was this large, white horse, that's how tall they were. The commander of the unit next to them sat and did not look at them."

But Buendía had seen the soldiers, he could remember. The commander would call over his son, who would answer, and then, with ease, the three would step out at the other end with their wands drawn. After a few minutes of waiting, he would lead them ashore to their horses. "He'd do it again," Buendía recounts, a little later.

From then on, Buendía says, he had little choice but to stand his ground. "There was a certain dignity about it to do something that was going to be done very quickly. I had to make the stand."

Shibawanko posted:

The coup was clearly staged to result in death, he probably didn't think it would actually work, which is why so much preparation went into the suicide. In any case even his explicit motivations for the coup were more complicated than that, he saw the postwar ideology of "passive, victimised Japanese people" as a ploy by the Americans to treat Japan as their colony, and the language of the coup was mostly directed against that.

Real Japanese fascism exists but it's invariably strongly sinophobic or talks about killing all zainichi Koreans and things like that. I've read a lot of Mishima, including some of the untranslated "theory" stuff and it never strikes that tone, as far as I'm aware. The worst it gets is when he says things like how the inherent unity of Japanese culture prevents things like racial frictions from occurring and that the US is a false model for examining that sort of thing in the context of Japan. Japanese fascists also generally do not like Mishima and don't talk about him. Contemporary Japanese fascists are also usually pro-American.

derp posted:

Like what?

quote:

A medical internship consists of more than spectating at complicated bowel operations, cutting open stomach linings, bracketing off lungs, and sawing off feet; and it doesn't just consist of thumbing closed the eyes of the dead, and hauling babies out into the world either. An internship is not just tossing limbs and parts of limbs over your shoulder into an enamel bucket. Nor does it just consist of trotting along behind the registrar and the assistant and the assistant's assistant, a sort of tail-end Charlie. Nor can an internship be only the putting out of false information; it isn't just saying: "The pus will dissolve in your bloodstream, and you'll soon be restored to perfect health." Or a hundred other such lies. Not just: "It'll get better"—when nothing will. An internship isn't just an academy of scissors and thread, of tying off and pulling through. An internship extends to circumstances and possibilities that have nothing to do with the flesh. My mission to observe the painter Strauch compels me to think about precisely such non-flesh-related circumstances and issues.

fridge corn posted:

By modern I just meant like not classical greek stuff but whatever I started reading the Pamuk I found in a charity shop the other day but thanks for the suggestions