The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Arts & Entertainment => Topic started by: AugustWest on June 28, 2005, 08:58:02 pm
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Or, What are you reading now?
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Maybe 14 pp is long for a thread here at the acheboard, but if it's still active and on-topic, shouldn't we encourage that kind of behavior?
Hell, I've seen threads over 100 pages long on other boards, and those remain on-topic and active.
Why for, August? Why for?
Edited to remove heelitude
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Ilium but I'm like 6 pages in. It's the first Simmons book I've read but I've heard many times that Hyperion = good.
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This is a better thread title. That's why for enough, isn't it?
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Woo Hoo! Validation!
And from a hot chick no less. Woot.
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I still don't get it.
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I have mostly been reading a lot of comic books. Many of them were not very good but some of them were excellent. Also, I reread Howl's Moving Castle more or less as a direct result of the movie.
I guess I don't sound extremely literary, but it's more that I just really like comic books. I'm sure nobody would ever have guessed that.
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Ilium but I'm like 6 pages in. It's the first Simmons book I've read but I've heard many times that Hyperion = good.
!!
Yes, Hyperion is excellent and Ilium is another good one.
Hope you enjoy the read as much as I did. BTW, the sequel, Olympos, comes out in July.
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Finished the Human Factor by Graham Greene a few days ago, and it was really fantastic. I think it's officially the first spy novel I've ever read, and also the first Greene novel I've ever finished (started but never finished the Orient Express--it was great, but I do have a problem finishing novels sometimes). From what I've heard, there is much less violence in the Human Factor than other spy novels, but it certainly didn't diminish the excitement and dread. I've read some people complain that it was basically a political tract for communism and the anti-apartheid movement. Well, I guess it is a bit sympathetic to communism, but it certainly wasn't propaganda (for example, Stalin's atrocities are compared to--and in the eyes of the communists, perhaps some how mitigated by, the bomging of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the British bombings of Hamburg. But it's not like the message was USSR good West bad). And yes, it certainly takes a position against apartheid. Apartheid was certainly horrible, and for all I know the novel being published at the time it was may have been important to the anti-apartheid movement, but I understand why people are annoyed by overt proselytizing in fiction. However, I don't feel that it ever got in the way of enjoying the novel.
I started Joy in the Morning this morning while waiting at the auto shop. Only my second Wodehouse book, and already I am totally engrossed. I again decided to put off Demons, because I have been really stressed lately, and lighter reading helps to calm me down.
After this I will read some more Elmore Leonard and start the Lew Archer series by Ross Macdonald.
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Over the last week (family reunion in Destin, Florida, woooo!) I read:
1. Cosmic Trigger- The Final Secret of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson,
2. Transmission, by Hari Kunzru,
3. Hells Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson,
4. This Must Be the Place: The Adventures of Talking Heads in the Twentieth Century, by David Bowman,
5. The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
All of which were exceedingly good. I'm now rocking out to Waterland, by Graham Swift, and I'm eyeing a copy of Finnegans Wake that I bought at a used book store, on blog-recommendation of our very own Andalucia. I've started reading it aloud in what I hope to be a passable Irish brogue.
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Finished the Human Factor by Graham Greene a few days ago, and it was really fantastic. I think it's officially the first spy novel I've ever read,
Please allow me to recommend the works of John LeCarre. Very much in the same vein as Graham Greene. Try the S miley Trilogy (i.e. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; S miley's People.)
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Finished the Human Factor by Graham Greene a few days ago, and it was really fantastic. I think it's officially the first spy novel I've ever read,
Please allow me to recommend the works of John LeCarre. Very much in the same vein as Graham Greene. Try the S miley Trilogy (i.e. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; S miley's People.)
When I was at a used book store a couple weeks ago, I was looking at the LeCarre section and was thinking "man, I really would appreciate a recommendation or two now," so, thanks!
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3. Hells Angels, by Hunter S. Thompson,
Dude!
I just finished that last night!
What the hell?!
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Not recently read but recently reread and still one of my favorites:
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Read it, it's awesome.
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Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor. So far, yummy.
the man knows how to write a sentence.
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Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor. So far, yummy.
the man knows how to write a sentence.
Survivor was the first Palahniuk I read, and still in some ways one of my favourites. I just got Diary, and Haunted, but haven't read either yet. Apart from that I have read them all, probably rating Survivor and, the one with Monster in the title as my favourites. And possibly Choke.
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bill, the galactic hero on the planet of bottled brains by harry harrison & robert sheckley
pretty decent not too serious scifi
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1984
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Ilium but I'm like 6 pages in. It's the first Simmons book I've read but I've heard many times that Hyperion = good.
!!
Yes, Hyperion is excellent and Ilium is another good one.
Hope you enjoy the read as much as I did. BTW, the sequel, Olympos, comes out in July.
So I dug on Ilium so I got Olympos and finished it this week and . . . well, yeah. Olympos was just weird. I'm not sure quite how to describe it but I hope his other books aren't like that. Plus I've never before seen somebody call a woman's fun bits her sex. And he did it like 4 times in one paragraph. It was very jarring.
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bill, the galactic hero on the planet of bottled brains by harry harrison & robert sheckley
pretty decent not too serious scifi
You've read the Stainless Steel Rat books, right? If you're going to read Harrison, these are a must (at least the first 3 or 4).
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So I finally finished Infinite Jest after a month and I'm a bit confused. I understand he doesn't tie everything up for you and some of the conclusions were easy to make but some of it is just hard to wrap my head around. Like how many narrators were there and what was the deal with the footnotes?