Topic: The Literary Thread

[Snarky]

As part of an attempt to read books written by female women, I also read my first Jane Austen (Mansfield Park) relatively recently. I also read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the amazingly titled Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead which was bizarre and excellent.

I recently read Who was changed and who was dead off your recommendation, Ali. I thought it was pretty good, but (as mentioned above) I don't like it when the author doesn't seem to have any sympathy for many of the characters, and subtly or not-so-subtly ridicule them for their self-delusions and hypocrisy. It feels cheap to me. You made them up, so of course you can make them seem foolish!

[ThreeOhFour]

I recently finished Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell and really enjoyed it. It was the most interesting use of magic in a book I've seen, I think, and I like how all the elements came together towards the end. It also had some beautifully imaginative and vivid scenarios.

I've also been catching up on the Discworld books - in the last month I've read I Shall Wear Midnight, Carpe Jugulum, Unseen Academicals, Soul Music and re-read Men at Arms. Really enjoyed I Shall Wear Midnight and Soul Music, the other were fairly standard Pratchett fare to me (that is, I enjoyed them but they weren't really outstanding to me).

On Dave Gilbert's reccomendation I've also been reading through The Dresden Files books - fairly standard gumshoe PI novels except the main character is a wizard. It started out kinda cheesy but I'm up to the 4th book and the series gets more compelling. One thing I find kills the immersion is the amount of trouble Harry Dresden gets in. He absolutely has the worst luck of any character I've read, and the way he goes from mishap to mishap makes me wonder why the author felt so compelled to beat him up so much.

On my "books to read list" at the moment is Snuff, A Canticle for Leibowitz and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

[Hudders]

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a bit tedious at the beginning, but it's worth sticking with.

I've also been reading through The Dresden Files books - fairly standard gumshoe PI novels except the main character is a wizard.

This sounds amazing.

I just finished Motherless Brooklyn, which is about a PI who has tourettes and Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test which now just has me going around trying to figure out which of my colleagues would score more on the Hare checklist for psychopaths...

[kaputtnik]

Oh, books! I also read them!

There are so many interesting suggestions in here! I haven't read a single, really, not one single book of the ones you mentioned. I did read The Gambler by Dostoevsky many years ago, and some Haruki Murakami books I found at the local dump (they weren't that bad), and I know Terry Pratchett exists. And I think I must have read I Spit On Your Graves by Boris Vian, only my copy was in French and my French is not very good. I did get and like the notion of a fake America, built from collective media memory like films and music, though.

I got an ebook reader about a year ago, and ever since then I've been reading a lot of badly formatted and sloppily OCR-scanned pdf copies of the great works of fiction. I just finished Italo Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies, which is an amazing collection of metafiction about the act of narrating. Before that, I read the second part of John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy, a really, really intense book. I had read the first part some years ago and just discovered that Updike wrote one book at each turn of the decade, starting in 1960, and let his characters age in real time, which seems absolutely fascinating to me. It's as much an exercise in writing as it is a part of (fictional) cultural memory, totally embedded in the history of the US.

At the moment I'm reading Post Office by Charles Bukowski, which is great if you like Charles Bukowski, and not really great if you're sitting on a crowded bus with a headache. I have it in pdf form on my ebook reader, which is probably the lousiest way ever to read Charles Bukowski. In case of sudden battery death (which happens all the time and makes me want to break the reader in half, bring it back to the store and say "I only wanted to turn the page!"), I carry The Voices of Marrakesh by Elias Canetti in paper form. It oscillates between beautifully described literary snapshots of the city and moments of unbearable postcolonial gaze upon the "totally foreign and uncomprehensible" people. Like, a black coal vendor standing in front of his coal and you can only make out the eyes. Geez, and that guy was awarded the literary nobel prize?

[ThreeOhFour]

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a bit tedious at the beginning, but it's worth sticking with.

I got through a fair bit of it on audiobook before I realized that I prefer to do the reading myself, and I found the story really interesting, so I want to start again, this time reading myself

[Eric]

I went to a used book store and dropped $100 this week, mostly on trying to fill out my PG Wodehouse collection (Wodehouse is the literary equivalent to comfort food for me), and some kids books for my son.

I also picked up At Swim-Two-Birds by Brian O'Nolan, which I've been dying to read since reading a synopsis of it last year, a nicer copy of Jerome K. Jerome's classic Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), and a new lending copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which is my favorite book.

Unfortunately for me, reading for pleasure is something I don't do much currently. I also bought some books by Barthes, Baudrillard, Foucault, Bakhtin and Raymond Williams that might figure into my dissertation, which takes up most of my time (which explains why I haven't made any progress on game making lately, but also why I've been posting so much as a method of procrastination).

Alex Cox's 10,000 Ways to Die, a retrospective of the Spaghetti Western.

I'm dying to read this one myself. I have a collection of hundreds of spaghettis, and often disagree with Cox on his overall opinions of film, but appreciate his analysis of the finer details.

[Tuomas]

When was I last here? What happened to the place?

Anyway, it seems you're doing something I do fancy, so yeah, I shall list the last few books I've read.

Been in Berlin lately studying German literature, so I've basically went through a collection of Short stories + Amerika from Franz Kafka. At the moment I'm doing two courses of Thomas Mann, essays, short stories and novels, having read Der Zauberberg and Buddenbrooks. And umm, well there's Nathan der Weise from Lessing, which is basically a drama, but I read it so meh. And I've been through Goethes and Heinrich Heines poems. Oh 2 books for my bachelors from Yade Kara, one being Selam Berlin and the other one Cafe Cyprus.

That with the transaltion work I do with R.A. Salvatore, I guess it's not such a wonder I haven't been around for a while, is it?

[Dave Gilbert]

On Dave Gilbert's reccomendation I've also been reading through The Dresden Files books - fairly standard gumshoe PI novels except the main character is a wizard. It started out kinda cheesy but I'm up to the 4th book and the series gets more compelling. One thing I find kills the immersion is the amount of trouble Harry Dresden gets in. He absolutely has the worst luck of any character I've read, and the way he goes from mishap to mishap makes me wonder why the author felt so compelled to beat him up so much.

You're only on book #4? Oh, Harry goes through much worse...