Literature, because you can't have opera

Blackaby · Post by **Blackaby** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 1:45 am

Well, if you're all feeling highbrow - why not discuss literature?

I don't really read much, although right now I am reading I am Charlotte Simmons because of a thread on this forum. I doubt it counts as literature, however, being that it's largely concerned with the sexual habits and social hierarchies within American colleges. Still! Books! Gotta love 'em. Discuss!

Toxic · Post by **Toxic** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 1:50 am

I'm currently reading "Welcome to the Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut. It's bloody brilliant.

CJBurgandy · Post by **CJBurgandy** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 1:50 am

I'm working on some Discworld novels because I've told myself over and over again that I'm going to read them all in order.

though I guess I should also read the last few xanth novels that have come out even though they've progessivly gotten worse.... I guess book series just weren't meant to be 30 books long.

Kirb · Post by **Kirb** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:09 am

I'm fond of classic literature. Les Miserables would probably rank as my favorite, but it depends on my mood, I suppose.

I'll still read paperback novels. My English professor hates me when I do, though. Calls them trash fiction.

Yeahduff · Post by **Yeahduff** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:14 am

Just finished The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. You should all read it. No, it's not really science fiction (though it does involve lots of time travelling), but it's damn good.

Finally getting to Huckleberry Finn just now. My education was a joke.

Smight · Post by **Smight** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:21 am

yeahduff wrote:Just finished The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. You should all read it. No, it's not really science fiction (though it does involve lots of time travelling), but it's damn good.

Time Travel is science fact!

uhhh I'm reading Northwest Passage right now. I believe it's a first edition I got from a methlab we were detoxifying.

Yeahduff · Post by **Yeahduff** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:22 am

Smight wrote: Time Travel is science fact!

And once we perfect gene therapy, we'll be able to cure it.

CaptainClaude · Post by **CaptainClaude** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:25 am

I'm still nipping between Lolita and Knees up mother earth.

It makes for an odd mix.

Yeahduff · Post by **Yeahduff** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:29 am

Ooooh finished Lolita a couple of months ago. Delicious.

Who wrote that other one?

CaptainClaude · Post by **CaptainClaude** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:33 am

Robert rankin.

it's all british pub culture stuff, the story revolves around two characters having to manage a local team to the cup final to stop hell covering the earth and destroying everything.

lots of running gags and injokes.

for more on robert rankin: http://sproutlore.com/

Blackaby · Post by **Blackaby** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:52 am

I love me Robert Rankins. I started reading them back when the first Corneliuses were coming out. Oh, they were a world of fun.

Mr.Bob · Post by **Mr.Bob** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 2:55 am

Moby Dick! Because keeping up appearances is everything!

Dutch! · Post by **Dutch!** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 3:09 am

I'm in the middle of the Da Vinci Code, and it's an easy, flowing read and it's picked up my interest in history and that sort of approach to religions. I read the first one, Angels and Demons, a month ago and really enjoyed that too. It was like reading Faerie Tale again, the way it was written.

I hear they're making a movie of the Code too...shoulda made the first one, I reckon.

Other than that, I spend a lot of time around modern children's literature (yes, that's right...modern children's literature). We're reading 'Two Weeks With The Queen' in the classroom at the moment...about a kid who goes to England to meet the Queen to ask her to let him borrow the Best Doctor In The World to come back and cure his little brother's terminal cancer. Add into the story a gay couple, one of which is dying of AIDS, and you've got a bloody good little story that makes you laugh, cry, think and reach the end and think 'that was bloody brilliant'.

And yeah...you can still read it with kids.

Yeahduff · Post by **Yeahduff** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 3:22 am

ryclaude wrote:Robert rankin.

it's all british pub culture stuff, the story revolves around two characters having to manage a local team to the cup final to stop hell covering the earth and destroying everything.

lots of running gags and injokes.

for more on robert rankin: http://sproutlore.com/

Sounds like fun. I'll check that out.

Mr.Bob wrote:Moby Dick! Because keeping up appearances is everything!

Well, yeah, why do you think this is my fourth post on the first page?

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 3:26 am

Toxic wrote:I'm currently reading "Welcome to the Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut. It's bloody brilliant.

Vonnegut is damn good. "Hocus Pocus" was a wonderful mosaic where I get to put pieces of his life together, and "Cat's cradle" is, I guess, the only cheerful book about the apocalypse. A guy has to be crazy to write something like that. Though, I was a bit dissapointed by "Slaughterhouse 5", I guess I had too high expectations. I'm still to see Roy Hill's film, supposedly Vonnegut said that it was better than the novel.

Ooooh finished Lolita a couple of months ago. Delicious.

If you think "Lolita" was delicious, you should read "Pale fire". The whole novel was written in a form of comments accompanying a poem. Go postmodern.

I'm in the middle of the Da Vinci Code, and it's an easy, flowing read and it's picked up my interest in history and that sort of approach to religions. I read the first one, Angels and Demons, a month ago and really enjoyed that too. It was like reading Faerie Tale again, the way it was written.

I hear they're making a movie of the Code too...shoulda made the first one, I reckon.

Ack! Everybody's reading it here, from a teacher to a housewife. I personally wouldn't mind, but I know that the whole reason for it's popularity (at least here, in Serbia) is that people have problems making a difference between a documentary and a well-documented fiction, so most of people here read it as if it was all true, being proud that they "learned" something of a history, which by the way feeds their craving for mistics. Also, "History in 10 1/2 chapters" was largely read as documentary here.
Sadly. I really don't have anything against the book, but that totally put me off from even thinking of reading it.

Personally, I have periods of more reading and less reading, and now is one of the less. I can't remember what was the last fiction I read, it was either "Great Mon" by Fournier or "Dead souls" by Gogol...

CaptainClaude · Post by **CaptainClaude** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 3:45 am

yeahduff wrote:
ryclaude wrote:Robert rankin.

it's all british pub culture stuff, the story revolves around two characters having to manage a local team to the cup final to stop hell covering the earth and destroying everything.

lots of running gags and injokes.

for more on robert rankin: http://sproutlore.com/
Sounds like fun. I'll check that out.

You might have some trouble with that, I couldnt find them anywhere in the US.

Still, that's what the internet's good for eh?

Blackaby · Post by **Blackaby** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 3:47 am

Slaughterhouse 5 was my favourite book growing up.

I hate Da Vinci Code, but only because it is horrendously badly written. Anything that can convince people I may be a descendant of Jesus can't be all bad.

My favourite book is Stanley Elkin's The Magic Kingdom, in which nine terminally ill children go to Disney land. It is possibly the most brilliantly written book in the English language. Well, the most brilliantly written book I've ever read, at least.

My next favourite is James Ellroy's American Tabloid. That's also brilliantly written. It's the point where Ellroy's style is its cleanest, its most perfect - everything on either side of it kind of dwindles off into crapnicity, and his latest annoys me a lot. American Tabloid is about the bad guys in American history and how they rocked out - like LA Confidential, but closer to history.

Thea Astley's Hunting the Wild Pineapple is the best Australian book and the only one by her that doesn't annoy the poop out of me. It's about a guy with one leg.

What else can I recommend? In Science Fiction, I love oule Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and in Fantasy (and I hate fantasy) I love Robert Rankin's Greatest Show of Earth.

The best kids book is Anne Fine's Flour Babies (it made me cry!) and the most screwed up book in the world is Peter Carey's The Tax Inspector. My best pulp book goes to Ben Elton for Past Mortem and best exotic creepy story to Mark Z Danielwhatthefrikever's House of Leaves. Non-fiction award goes to Oliver Sacks for Island of the Colour Blind.

I have a book case of my favourite 100 or so books which is sitting right opposite me.

JexKerome · Post by **JexKerome** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 4:18 am

Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons are fine pieces of fiction, though frankly I'm disappointed they are cut from the same cloth. Still, DaVinci is superior to Angels & Demons, so it's obvious the author got his formula down pat the second time around.

I've also just read two pieces of non-fiction, 102 Minutes and End of Faith. The first is a re-telling, built from cell-phone calls and the like, of what went on inside the Towers that bright morning of September the 11th. It confirms many things I suspected about the event, and proved me wrong in others. Very interesting read. End of Faith, on the other hand, is a treatise that holds mankind has no further use for religion, and tries to prove that nowadays religion is only good for making your neighbor miserable, an opinion I've shared since my Catechism teacher tried to convince me to hate Jews way back in elementary school. (My signature is lifted from this book, by the way). Even so, some of the arguments in this book I find hard to swallow, but have given me a lot to think about.

And lastly, and I may regret admitting to this, I've finished reading the first two Harry Potter books. I had never given them a chance, considering them not worth my time, but since then I've decided I lose nothing by trying; after all, I could have always burnt the first if it turned out to be the piece of children-aimed crap I suspected it to be. Needless to say, I was surprised to find a rather intelligently-spun yarn, and now have read the second and will buy another at least before the month is up. I still resent J.K. Rowling, though.

As for Lolita, there was a few years ago an unauthorized companion novel (Nabokov's family moved legally against it) called Lo's Diary, and which is (yes, you guessed it) the supposed diary of Lolita as the events in the original are unfolding. It's not quite as good as Lolita itself, but it's still a very good companion read. The thing I most like (and most dread) about Lolita is how much I identify with the male protagonist, so much that I wonder if maybe Nabokov was not the same kind of scum.

McDuffies · Post by **McDuffies** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 6:10 am

But perhaps he is after all.

Every book of his that I touched had some, always different kind of sexual deviation almost as a part of his style. In "Pale fire", a main character is a supposed king who is open about prefering boy companions and practically disguisted about heterosexual love, and in "Ada or ardor", there's incest starting from the first chapter. There is a certain level of fascination by that in his work, though I'd never try to psychoanalize artist through his work.

Anyway, my favourite books in no particular order:

"La Petit prince" by de Saint Exup

RemusShepherd · Post by **RemusShepherd** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 6:56 am

Right now I'm just reading Asimov magazine. But I have Mieville's Perdido Street Station sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be started. I read more on vacation than I do at home, so I'll probably wing through it during Xmas.