I'm trying to read House of Leaves by Danielewski. I tried to read it several times but I lose interest. Same thing happens when I tried to read Infinite Jest.
Yeah, I've tried to start Infinite Jest a few times. I think looking at that 2000 page book, and reading the first chapter and thinking what the ******** is this shit, is hard for me. The only book tougher for me is probably Gravity's Rainbow, which feels like Infinite Jest x 10.
I also liked All the Light You Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. It's about a blind woman surviving during WWII in a seaside town in France. Another good book in that vein is The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. It's about two sisters in France in WWII, one on her family farm in the French countryside while the other gets involved with the underground. Being a history buff, there are a number of good histories to recommend that I've read in the last year. The first is The Wright Brothers by David McCollough. It's a fascinating, very readable serious history of the how the Wright brothers helped to foster the dawn of aviation. There was a whole lot more to it than just showing up on a beach and taking the first flight. The other four are more "popular" histories that give good overviews of their subject, are very readable, and, in my view, very good: Killing Reagan by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard - A very fascinating portrait of the life of the 40th President, who he was, what happened in his life, his strong relationship with his wife Nancy, how he became President, and what he accomplished. It shows him flaws and all, and doesn't get heavy into politics. Killing the Rising Sun by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard - If you don't know much about how the US came to drop the 1st atomic bomb and want to know more, this is the place to start. Be forewarned there is some explicit descriptions of violence because of the savagery of the War in the Pacific in WWII. Washington's Secret Six by Brian Kilmeade - This is the story of America's first spy ring which helped George Washington win the Revolutionary War and the impact it's had even until today. It starts out with a modern historian making a discovery that identifies an American spy unknown for over 200 years. Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates by Brian Kilmeade - This is the story of one of America's first forays into World Affairs and how the US Navy played a vital role in it.
I'd disagree. In early years the prize really featured authors that were very much a part of the vernacular. You still see bits of that today. Oe, Kawabata, and Marquez are still very much in fashion both in heavy literature circles and lighter ones, and it's been years since their wins. You get lots of talk about popular authors also like Murikami or Cormac. The award is often more of a lifetime achievement award than a yearly thing though, and maybe that is good and bad. That being said, good literature and popular literature are for the most part completely separate categories now, and the committees choice to award Dylan is amazingly baffling.
Just picked up Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart for like the fifth time. It is my favorite book of all time and I was lucky enough to have a chance meeting with him and have my copy signed before he passed away a few years ago. He is definitely close to the top of the list of the most interesting people I ever met.
True, I may haven been a limited in my statement. Hell, even Camus was pretty popular in his day. I totally agree with the rest of your post.
Thanks for the recommendation. Like some other posters with other books, it's a book that I've had lying around and been meaning to read, so I'll move it up to the top of my "to read" stack. One fiction book, I forgot to recommend in my last post was "My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry" by Fredrik Backman. It's a story about a precocious, wise-beyond-her-years 7 year old girl and her eccentric grandmother in Sweden. Since she's so smart, she's a bit of a one off. The book ultimately becomes a thriller, but along the way takes time to look at and skewer some societal conventions. BTW, I think this is a terrific thread. I've already seen several books that I've never heard of before, but I now intend to read.
No. The original Fantastic Beasts and where to find them was a tiny book for charity that was supposed to be a tiny version of Harry's textbook at Hogwarts. The new Fantastic Beasts book is a screenplay of the film. So you'll just be reading what you'll see on screen. It's not like it will really deviate the way it would if they were adapting a novel. If you like the movie, then you should buy the book/screenplay and read it.
Britt-Marie Was Here is a sequel to that (or at least a continuation of a character), and Backman also just released a novella called And Every Day The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer." If you haven't read A Man Called Ove, you certainly should! I loved that one.
My god, I love that book! Where'd you get it? The illustrator is an amazingly nice person. I met her at Book Expo America, as she and a friend had a booth there. I read through it and said, "I need this book in my store." She's from Chicago, so I contacted her and met her at a coffee place and bought five that sold out quickly. I met her again late summer, I believe and got another ten. She also gave me some punch cards to give out with them with little bird poops to punch whenever you get pooped on. At the expo, they were giving out wet wipes with their contact info as promo materials. So damned clever. They have a new book coming out eventually -- looking for a publisher or something -- called "You are an alien to aliens." I can't wait!
I got it at Land of Nod (Crate and Barrel children's store)- how can you pass up a title like that! They only had one copy.
When I tried to read Infinite Jest, the length of the book was discouraging but the fact that it's unnecessary long is unacceptable. After reading 3 pages of describing things that aren't relevant to the plot, I thought f**k this, life is too short. I also have severe ADHD, the only books I read that I zip through are written by Palahniuk and Murakami. Both of them tend to throw alot of wtf moments every few pages so it's easy to keep your attention.
Infinite Jest is tough, but it's worth the read. It's not especially entertaining, but it is a more complex type of pleasure. That being said I try to only read one really tough read a year, but DFW would be a good choice.
Finished All The Light We Cannot See. Turns out the plot fell apart at the half-way point of the book, the author introduced a few other characters who were really one-dimensional and uninteresting, and the book was at least 2 chapters too long, maybe more. Still a great read, just because the author's such a great wordsmith. Also read The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians by Peter Heather. Good discussion of the Late Roman Empire, good conclusion, kinda boring in the middle. Still think I learned more about the politics of the very end of the Western half in more detail than I had ever read before. I'm about half-way through Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson. So far Thus Spoke Zarathustra is uneven but has its moments. The Mother Tongue is good but, in many ways, outdated.
Good read, actually. Probably 8-10 hours to get through. You get first-hand details that you normally don't get from 80 years of information filtration.
I'm about to start this: http://www.indiana.edu/~libarchm/in...book-cd-release-party-with-henry-glassie.html
Finally got around to "Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates," this afternoon. Good, informative, quick read.
My mom got me a biography on Bill Murray. I'm waiting until the school year to read it because I need to do something during lunch.
Finishing up the fourth volume of Robert Caro's biography of LBJ. On deck (fiction): Hag-Seed, by Margaret Atwood. Will probably re-read Shakespeare's The Tempest prior to starting, since this is apparently a retelling of that story. On deck (nf): Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler Major re-read project for the winter - Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle.