The Book Discussion Thread

[Grouchy]

So it goes.

[dreamdead]

Finished Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Get Your Gun. Surprised by how little coverage this one gets in the universities because the vitriol that it levels against the institutions behind wars is quite effective and thorough. Works best as an examination of how the wounded mediate their pain through memory, longing, and rage. Certainly stands with some of the better modernist texts even if its aim is less personal than societal.

Likely will start some Flannary O'Connor short stories since I've read her anthologized stories but never any of her collections. So A Good Man is Hard to Find it is as I continue deeper into Wharton's The Custom of the Country.

[Mysterious Dude]

Gulliver's Travels is surprisingly vulgar.

[Grouchy]

Gulliver's Travels is surprisingly vulgar.

Yeah, it's awesome, that book.

[DavidSeven]

Anyone have recs for humor books in the vein of Sedaris's stuff? Doesn't necessarily have to be memoir-ish or "non-fiction."

Looking for something funny to mix in with more practical non-fiction stuff I'll be reading over the holidays.

[Mara]

Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened was quite funny. Ditto Tina Fey's Bossypants. Neither are as literary as Sedaris, but worth reading.

[Mara]

Oh, and I assume that the Hyperbole and a Half book is fantastic, but I haven't read it yet because it's on my Christmas list.

*waits impatiently*

[DavidSeven]

Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened was quite funny. Ditto Tina Fey's Bossypants. Neither are as literary as Sedaris, but worth reading.

I actually read an e-book sample from Let's Pretend... last night and thought it was pretty hilarious. I do wish the writing was as good as Sedaris's, but I think I'll give it a shot anyway.

Already read Bossypants. Definitely enjoyable.

[Winston*]

Anyone have recs for humor books in the vein of Sedaris's stuff? Doesn't necessarily have to be memoir-ish or "non-fiction."

Looking for something funny to mix in with more practical non-fiction stuff I'll be reading over the holidays.

Read David Rakoff's Don't Get too Comfortable and Half Empty this year. Definitely a funny guy who could spin a phrase. Also a gay This American Life contributor, to tie him closer to Sedaris.

[Winston*]

Jon Ronson also, particularly Them: Adventures with Extremists, which also has the bonus of being fascinating.

[Mara]

Got a couple books I really wanted for Christmas, as well as (surprise!) a Kindle. My book backlog is serious, though-- I have a couple books I need to finish before they're do at the library, and my schedule is pretty tight. I remember fondly when I was in school and could take a full week after Christmas to catch up on all my reading.

[dreamdead]

Finished out Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find collection. I'd read the title story and "Good Country People" in anthologies before, but I found the collection uniformly solid. Few things will be as wonderfully bitter and critical as her "The Displaced Person," which is as harsh a story as any I've read of O'Connor's. I've read that the Everything that Rises Must Converge collection isn't as excellent, but that will happen sometime early next year.

As it stands, I'm halfway through Wharton's The Custom of the Country--which is wonderful, albeit slow--and Pynchon's Bleeding Edge--which has just been started, but already has a wonderful voice. The rhythm of Pynchon's words already make me want to go back and do Inherent Vice early next year.

[DavidSeven]

Read David Rakoff's Don't Get too Comfortable and Half Empty this year. Definitely a funny guy who could spin a phrase.

Nice. Read the summaries and looks exactly like the type of stuff I was looking for. I'll queue one of these up.

[DavidSeven]

Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened was quite funny.

Finished this over the holiday. Really funny. It definitely reads like a blog (though I've never read through Lawson's) and is pretty slight, but her wit still comes through. Found it relate-able, even though her upbringing and current lifestyle couldn't be more different than my own.

[Mara]

Just finished up Hyperbole and a Half. As expected, it was excellent.

I do wish that it had been... larger. It was normal book-sized, and I would have liked it to be coffee table book-sized. But that's a minor complaint.

[Grouchy]

Finished Pattern Recognition by William Gibson today. Hell of a book. I can foresee some criticisms of it (conclusion wrapped up a bit too neatly, main character never experiences real danger) but it kept me thrilled to the very last word and the prose is amazing. This is my first novel by Gibson, and he's specially great at describing moods and places.

Most important of all, the novel's concept and understanding of the internet age is remarkable - the foresight, particularly. I mean, this is a book written in 2003, more than ten years ago, yet it has the NSA and the Echelon program as an omnipresent menace, it foresees a series of enigmatic footage that obsesses people in message boards (when the lonelygirl15 phenomenon was still three years into the future) and the world of compulsive commercial branding it describes has done nothing if not getting more real since its publication.

[Winston*]

Just finished up Hyperbole and a Half. As expected, it was excellent.

I do wish that it had been... larger. It was normal book-sized, and I would have liked it to be coffee table book-sized. But that's a minor complaint.

My little brother got me this for Christmas...along with Infinite Jest for balance.

Read the bits about her younger self's time capsule and her retarded dog. Really funny. I'd never read her website.

[D_Davis]

Finished Pattern Recognition by William Gibson today. Hell of a book. I can foresee some criticisms of it (conclusion wrapped up a bit too neatly, main character never experiences real danger) but it kept me thrilled to the very last word and the prose is amazing. This is my first novel by Gibson, and he's specially great at describing moods and places.

Most important of all, the novel's concept and understanding of the internet age is remarkable - the foresight, particularly. I mean, this is a book written in 2003, more than ten years ago, yet it has the NSA and the Echelon program as an omnipresent menace, it foresees a series of enigmatic footage that obsesses people in message boards (when the lonelygirl15 phenomenon was still three years into the future) and the world of compulsive commercial branding it describes has done nothing if not getting more real since its publication.

Probably my favorite book of his. He's very good at writing about the very near future. It's definitely a trait of the cyberpunks, and Gibson is a master. He's actually improved with age.

If you get a chance to, check out City Come A Walkin', by John Shirley. It's a little more genre-orientated, and hardboiled, but it's a super great example of early cyberpunk that isn't as well known as others. In it, Shirley examines the city as a living entity - it's really good.

[dreamdead]

Took about a month, but finally finished Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge. Not fully confident about Pynchon cycling through some of the more fringe politics that unfolded after 9/11, but the book has several spots that undercut that sort of mindset. Likewise, there are one or two spots that uncomfortably lack the sort of gender consideration that seems appropriate for the character--at least one sexual encounter feels more plot-mediated than character-motivated, considering the aggressor's background. Ultimately, the book is at its strongest in its exploration of Maxine and her two kids, chartering how she works to ensure safety for them even as they're coming of an age that doesn't require that safety anymore. In that sense, the opening and closing of the novel are dynamic and richly conceived--expressly commenting upon the changing age but without the sort of nostalgia that could damage a book. Pynchon's cyber-avatars and the Deep Web are also convincingly drawn, full of pregnant possibility and future-looking--always a joy.

And his prose at its best is still simply one of a kind. Haven't read anything else of Pynchon's post-Gravity's Rainbow, and this makes me want to get around to Inherent Vice this year.

[Mara]

Well, Vicious by V. E. Schwab was surprising and noteworthy. It's a little rare to see a writer tackling the idea of, for a lack of a better term, "superheroes" in novel form. This feels a little bit like a comic book, and a little bit like a summer blockbuster, but Schwab wisely chose to keep this a novel because it has a distinct and important difference from the normal genre: this is a superhero book without any heroes in it. One might argue that it is a double super-villain origin story. These are not even anti-heroes. They're Bad Guys.

Schwab has no problem telling us this from the beginning: she opens with a quote from Joseph Brodsky. "Life-- the way it really is-- is a battle not between Bad and Good, but between Bad and Worse."

I liked it.

[dreamdead]

Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette was a lot of fun. The design of the story--how letters, emails, and narration blend together--is an interesting challenge for something so fun, and the characters get such great character. Useful for those interested in a comic novel, and for those who want a novel to convince you to want to go to Antarctica.

Pretty sure that I'm gonna make this year the "read everything by Alice Munro" year. It's been wonderful so far. Read two of her collections already so far and have another four in my possession.

[Gittes]

Are there any fans of Austen (and Pride and Prejudice in particular) on this forum that have read P.D. James' Death Comes to Pemberley?

[dreamdead]

And finished Flannery O'Connor's collection Everything that Rises Must Converge. This one is not as exemplary as A Good Man is Hard to Find, treading many of the same themes, but lacking a superlative story to anchor the collection, whereas O'Connor's earlier collection had at least three. And while that former collection balanced the moralism with ironies and sudden revelation, this collection feels too pat in its ostracization of those who don't conform to O'Connor's worldview. In that respect the book feels too much like polemics and not full enough in its art.

[Kurosawa Fan]

Amazon's 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime


I love the variety of the list, but holy hell are there some egregious omissions (no Dostoevsky chief among them).

[Raiders]

Amazon's 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime


I love the variety of the list, but holy hell are there some egregious omissions (no Dostoevsky chief among them).

I think they were going more for "popular" books as well as primarily books of English-origin and were trying to be as all-encompassing in terms of age and genre as possible. It is not intended to be much of a "best of" or even an academic list. Kind of a strange impetus in general.

Still, the inclusion of fucking Murakami and not Dostoevsky or even especially Tolstoy (War and Peace and Anna Karenina are extremely well-known) is just bizarre.