THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => ENJOY => Topic started by: Allybee on 24 May 2010, 23:21
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I just picked up some tob robbins and a few books about buddhism for the summer. I'm actually reading reviews of these books on buddhism on amazon and it's amazing how heated people get about something that I regard as personal and up for at least some interpretation. anyways, I'm kind of lost as to what else to look into. I think I'll have a lot of free time this summer and I thought that seeing what other people are going for might jog my memory or inspire me. so what are you reading? is it light or dense? fiction or nonfiction? what is your favorite summer (ie, for pure enjoyment) book?
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I recently finished Looking for Alaska by John Green. Its a fairly quick read and probably worth the few books it'll cost used. The person who suggested the book to me advised that I don't really read into the synopsis and just go at it without any prior knowledge. It definitely worked.
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If you're on a Kerouac kick I'd highly recommend Desolation Angels, if only for the amazing beginning section which describes him sitting on top of Mount Desolation being a fire watcher, and then coming down from the mountain to get a lift back into the city.
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I've been working my way through the Dune series. It's interesting to see how well Frank Herbert's prose and storytelling abilities evolve with each volume. Dune, as much as I love it, seems stilted and juvenile compared to Children of Dune. It probably could've benefited from an additional hundred pages or so. Additionally, Dune Messiah is about half the length of any other book in the series and also has a noticeably larger typeface - it's essentially an extended prologue to Children of Dune.
I'm halfway through God Emperor of Dune now, and it's a fascinating take on religion. Herbert's also gotten a lot better at articulating his views on gender roles in society, so he seems much less like a bigoted prig in the later volumes.
After I'm done, my next conquest will be China Miéville's The City & The City, a book I've been stoked to read for a while, but only recently came out in paperback. However, it might be a while considering there's still Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune to complete. I'm a little OCD about reading series.
But I'm not gonna fuckin' touch the abominations that were spawned by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Fuck those guys.
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If you want something to stay up late thinking about, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is a fantastic, mind-boggling read.
In terms of non-fiction, I have The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz on my to-read list.
Right now, though, I'm plugging through the Wheel of Time series again, 'cause the new book came out recently and it's been years since I've read any of these books, so I want to be fresh when I read it. I'm on Lord of Chaos right now. Next on my fiction list is to re-read Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. I read Red last summer and Green over Christmas break (along with the first 3 WoT books), so it's about time I read Blue again. Now that I've graduated from grad school, I actually have time (and energy) to read books for pleasure.
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I plan on finishing this massive book of H.P. Lovecraft stories I've been reading as well as probably Maus (assuming it wins the book talk poll thingy).
Beyond that, I've been thinking about rereading Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House which is a collection of his short stories, some of which are gloriously fan-fucking-tastic. Also been thinking about rereading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea but I'm not sure if I'm ready for page after page of detailed scientific descriptions of mundane ocean life again (I only read it last summer, I think, for the first time)
There's also a new Dan Simmons book that sounds pretty interesting. I forget the name, but it's about a Native American boy who touches the dying General Custer's body and is possessed by his spirit (or something). Should be interesting; I've been enjoying the historical fiction phase Simmons has been going through lately.
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It looks like this is going to be Beat Summer as far as my reading is concerned - I just finished On The Road and got The Town and the City for my birthday, and might try to pick up The Dharma Bums and The Subterraneans, maybe even collected poems. After that I was thinking maybe Hemingway or H.S. Thompson! I'm not sure though. First of all I'll have to finish whatever book the book club comes up with.
Read some thompson! He's probably my favourite author. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and fear and loathing on the campaign trail are both brilliant. Get The Great Shark Hunt after those, it has most of his best articles in it - kentucky derby, aztlan, etc.
I'm on a big David Foster Wallace kick right now. I read Infinite Jest a few months ago but just started the broom of the system this week and ordered some of his short story collections. I'd highly recommend Infinite Jest, it's a wonderful and completely enthralling novel. Don't let the length put you off.
Hoping to read a book every day or two in the summer.
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My first read of the summer was Ender's Game, which I had never read before, but an abundance of free time and a pushy best mate finally convinced me. It was quite good! I don't really feel obliged to read anything else by Orson Scott Card, though, with the possible exception of Speaker for the Dead. I feel like filling in too many extraneous details, or associating lesser sequels or companion series with the book I liked so well may sour its charm.
Since then I've been slogging my way through book four of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, A Feast for Crows. It's definitely enjoyable reading, but it is a long book, and because of the way Martin split the plot and perspectives between this and the perpetually forthcoming 5th book, there's a lot less to make me want to tear through it like I did the first three books. Especially after the sheer number of game-changing events in the preceding book, A Storm of Swords, this book is much less easy to get through. It's not difficult reading, of course. There're just way fewer sympathetic characters and it feels like not as much is happening.
After that, I'm not sure! I picked up an old pulp thriller by John D. MacDonald at a thrift store on a whim, but I dunno if I want to go straight to another kind of genre fiction right after reading sci-fi and fantasy. It'll certainly be a much quicker read, but then I just have to wonder what to read again.
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My first read of the summer was Ender's Game, which I had never read before, but an abundance of free time and a pushy best mate finally convinced me. It was quite good! I don't really feel obliged to read anything else by Orson Scott Card, though, with the possible exception of Speaker for the Dead. I feel like filling in too many extraneous details, or associating lesser sequels or companion series with the book I liked so well may sour its charm.
Although, the parallax novel to Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, is amazing. All of my friends who have read it prefer Shadow over Game. It follows Bean around, and reveals a lot. It's amazing, truly. I didn't like most of the books following Ender's Game too much, but all the ones about Bean (the Shadow series) were great.
And, Speaker for the Dead takes place centuries later, anyway, I don't think it fills in all too many details (although, it has been a while since I read it, perhaps it does).
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Yeah! The fact that the narrative of Speaker for the Dead is so removed from that of Ender's Game is what made me think it had the most potential. I guess I may give Ender's Shadow a try, but not for a while yet.
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Yeah, Ender's Shadow is good, but definitely not if you've immediately read Ender's Game preceding it. I spaced it out by a period of a few months and liked it a lot.
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Starting to read The Dark Tower series. I'm not quite sure I like King's writing styles so far.
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just randomly picked up a book about Teddy Roosevelt at the grocery store on my lunch break.
that should be interesting.
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My first read of the summer was Ender's Game, which I had never read before, but an abundance of free time and a pushy best mate finally convinced me. It was quite good! I don't really feel obliged to read anything else by Orson Scott Card, though, with the possible exception of Speaker for the Dead. I feel like filling in too many extraneous details, or associating lesser sequels or companion series with the book I liked so well may sour its charm.
Speaker for the Dead is a drastically different book and may as well be the beginning of a quite different series. I enjoyed the series, unlike many, due to its xenobiology theories, but its religious and metaphysical themes still left me sour.
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I read the first part of In Search of Lost Time by Proust in class a couple semesters back and I really liked it, so I've decided to spend a fair bit of the summer reading the rest. Or at least some of it, kind of a huge project seeing how I don't read much nowadays. I plan on changing that though, so we'll see.
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After I'm done, my next conquest will be China Miéville's The City & The City, a book I've been stoked to read for a while, but only recently came out in paperback.
I just looked that up because the title intrigued me. I think I'll have to get it now, the concept sounds excellent.
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the library I go to is closed till Tuesday, but when it opens up I'm borrowing a copy of Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor.
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I just picked up some tob robbins?
Do you mean Tom Robbins? Because the really amusing thing is I was about to start a thread basically going "TOM ROBBINS WHAT DO YOU GUYS THINK OF HIM" and just happened to glance in here first.
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infinite jest is right after blood meridian on my list
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This summer I'm taking Thoreau's 'Walden' and 'Civil Disobedience' to the US with me. After that it's whatever the library in Old Forge has.
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There's also a new Dan Simmons book that sounds pretty interesting. I forget the name, but it's about a Native American boy who touches the dying General Custer's body and is possessed by his spirit (or something). Should be interesting; I've been enjoying the historical fiction phase Simmons has been going through lately.
Is Simmons' book out yet? I don't know much about him but picked up The Terror for cheap this winter and enjoyed it quite a bit. Also, which HPL collection are you reading (I ask 'cause he's my favorite author)?
Right now I'm reading some of Algernon Blackwood's John Silence stories. I just finished The Picture of Dorian Gray. I have lined up Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (re-reading, as it’s my favorite Pynchon novel); Borges' "Library of Babel", Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory; and a collection of Ambrose Bierce's ghost/horror stories. Also as the mood strikes me, I'm reading bits of Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.
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Yeah, I just saw it at the book store, I think it was called Black Hills.
and the HPL is some sort of "anniversery" (or something) edition of Necronomicon. It's poorly binded in shitty faux-leather with gilded lettering on the front and a picture of a cthulhu statue.
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Yes, I've seen that Lovecraft book in stores. It looks like a good collection: it's got all of his major works, though the ordering perplexes me a bit.
If you're interested in Lovecraft, I recommend seeking out "The Mound," which he ghost-wrote for Zealia Bishop (it's available in The Horror in the Museum, a collection of his revisions). IMO, it stands with the best stories he put out under his own name, and contains the germs of themes he later expanded upon in At the Mountains of Madness and "The Shadow Out of Time."
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My summer reading right now consists of mostly comics: Maus, Scott Pilgrim, Sandman, and a few others. I'm also planning on reading some books I haven't read, but have been meaning to for quite a while, such as Neuromancer, the other books from Quirk, and The Hitchhiker's Guide series.
Currently I'm working on The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, next will be Maus (for the discussion thread!), and then Persuasion so I can officially have read all of Austen's books.
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alright, I just ordered Maus and the new Simmons book.
:-D woohoo
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It being the first day of winter here, I'm finally going to get around to reading Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman.
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My personal summer reading list right now consists of Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons. Due to how little and how slowly I've been reading recently, that may end up being all I read.
However, I would love to read more Iain Banks, and plan on doing so eventually. I also want to reread Ilium and Olympos by Simmons. There's just so much to do and I always have so little time
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I'm reading Persuasion at the moment, I think I read it once before actually but I don't remember, and then I will maybe buy Maus too. I've never actually read a comic...
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I just bought Maus! And I've read bits of comics...
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I've read the Beano!
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... I saw the film...
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I just bought the necronomicon. yay!
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... I saw the film...
Doesn't count.
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Bone is a delightful comic book series, as well. Very accessible to both children and adults, and just as good and compelling to either.
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I'm reading Garrison Keillor - Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, just because it's so darn good and "elicit(s) a summer smile" as it says in the opening poem..
Other than that Sophie Calle - M'as Tu Vue..
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The film didn't mention anarchism once despite it being the central theme of the entire comic! Evey was a prostitute accidentally approaching a policeman, she wasn't going on a romantic date after curfew! And the roses were violet carsons, not ruby wedding! Basically Hollywood screwed it almost as badly as they did with Swamp Thing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJf0Sr1Ktmk) (which is another comic you should read, once you get a little more into it).
This is why I watched the movie first. I wanted to thoroughly enjoy the movie before I thoroughly enjoyed the comic. One way street there.
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I'm going to (finally) read Huckleberry Finn this summer. And now you guys are making me think I should reread Maus, which would provide a nice contrast to all the silly superhero nonsense I have been into lately. And of course Blood Meridian has been sitting on my Reader for some time...
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Right now I'm going through Maus at a fast pace, and next I have another Terry Pratchett in the mail, as well as Mass Effect: Ascension. That should be interesting. I've also bought my dad For Crying Out Loud by Jeremy Clarkson for Father's day, so I'm likely to read that as well. Don't you like gifts of mutual enjoyment?
I'm also really loving Play.com, where I can get all these books for next to nothing, where they have sales every other day that are so massive you'll often have trouble finding a non-discounted article on the site.
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I started to read Neuromancer, but I couldn't get into the dialogue style so I took it back to the library. Maybe I'll try again some other time, but I've got a stack of books waiting for me right now and I didn't want to finish it if I wasn't enjoying it. Yesterday I started Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I love it so far. I'll probably try to finish the series this summer. I'm waiting for Volumes 1 and 3 of Absolute Sandman from the library (I have 2 and 4 from there already) and when one of my friends comes back into town, I'll be borrowing Maus from her. I'm excited.
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Gibson has some cool ideas but for the most part his prose kind of sucks.
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My problem with Gibson is that he can't really write characters who are ignorant or who even just wear their hearts on their sleeve very well. His detached tone and penchant for grabbing random details to fixate on works fine for a Case or a Turner, guys who are knowledgeable about the world they live in and who seem well-equipped to deal with any problem but their own internal issues. Maybe they're not the most interesting characters, but they're rarely jarring.
But when he has to lighten things up and write for the Chevettes and the Bobby Newmarks of his books, I find myself cringing a bit because it comes off as a li'l condescending a lot of the time. I have the same issue with Neal Stephenson.
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I haven't read much Stephenson, apart from Snow Crash, and that was ages ago. Though I remember enjoying it rather thoroughly.
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Both Gibson and Stephenson rub me the wrong way sometimes. It's inevitable, I suppose; hypothetical cultures are their stock and trade, so I guess that some characterizations (and especially phrases) won't ring true for everyone.
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Gibson is pure cyberpunk, the original indeed, thus much of his prose is dehumanising. You'll notice that, apart from describing implants, most characters in the Neuromancer get more time dedicated to describing their cigarette lighters than their faces. I like that sort of style quite a lot. I think Gibson helped introduce a certain vicerality into sci-fi literature that has born much good fruit. There's also something inherently sexy (in a fetishistic way) about the way he describes things.
Stephenson is just Gibson turned up to 11.
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It wasn't so much the prose itself or the characters/landscape that bothered me, it was the actual dialogue between characters. And sometimes certain bits of action were underdeveloped, such as Linda Lee's death. Some of the descriptions of Chiba were pretty awesome, but the dialogue brought it down for me. I guess I just don't like cyberpunk lingo.
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The Demonata is a fun series.
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I should probably stress that my earlier criticisms mostly apply to Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. As far as protagonists go, I feel like Case did the best job of fitting Gibsons' strengths. He's not a big talker and or even a very engaging character, per se, but that's sort of the point, since he's a guy for whom normal life had lost its flavor.
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It wasn't so much the prose itself or the characters/landscape that bothered me, it was the actual dialogue between characters. And sometimes certain bits of action were underdeveloped, such as Linda Lee's death. Some of the descriptions of Chiba were pretty awesome, but the dialogue brought it down for me. I guess I just don't like cyberpunk lingo.
Agreed. I liked the opening description of the sky being the color of a television turned to a dead channel, but when he had to repeat it three times over the course of how far I got into the book, I thought to myself, "this guy kind of sucks at prose writing." I found the entire thing pretty boring and uninteresting. I didn't finish the book so I can't judge the whole thing, but my experience of it was one of mostly disappointment considering how influential the novel was.
You may want to check out Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. It's pretty crazy and off-beat but in a way I found engaging, not off-putting. It's like Neuromancer (the good bits), H.P. Lovecraft, the Maltese Falcon and... I don't know, I don't read a lot of surreal stuff, but it reminds me a little bit of Milan Kundera when he got more interested in writing about ideas and character-ideas than he did actual plot or story.
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I'm a couple of chapters into Dan Simmons' new one Black Hills and I'm really enjoying it. The style is absolutely nothing like any of Simmons' previous work (that I've read anyway), which is refreshing after the marathon that was Drood (excellent as it may have been, it was nothing short of some sort of literary endurance marathon).
Oddly enough, the book that it reminds me of the most is In The Face of My Enemy, which is an older pulp sci-fi book about an immortal, shape-shifting caveman as he lives through the millenia.
while we're on the subject, you should all try to find a copy of In The Face of My Enemy because you can prolly get it super cheap (it's out of print, but it's not very popular). It's no masterpiece but it's one of my favorite sci-fi books I've ever read.
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Speaking of Sci-Fi, any self respecting fan of the genre should read The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. Love it or hate it, without it there would be no cyberpunk. I kind of chortled reading Neuromancer, thinking "Wow this guy just wants to be a hip Alfred Bester."
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Alfred Bester
(http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/4985/alfredbester.jpg)
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Named after the writer I believe as a sly reference to The Demolished Man, sinc the guys a psychic? Never got much into Babylon 5.
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tenser, said the Tensor.
Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun.
Gibson is influential firstly because of his ideas, and secondly because he also came along at just the right time: science fiction had not been cool in any way for maybe a decade. Sci-fi had a really good time in the 60s, what with the space race, New Maps of Hell and the publication of some of the best science fiction of all time and a similiar golden period of sci-fi cinema. Then it kind of died off weirdly until by the end of the 70's. Neuromancer (and Burning Chrome) came at just the right time. It made sci-fi cool, got people thinking about the upcoming information age, and has profoundly influenced a LOT of sci-fi since. I think you'd probably be pretty hard pressed to find any science fiction novel of the last 20 years that hasn't been influenced on some level or remove by William Gibson.
There's a lot of sci-fi that has to be read a bit like that. I mean, Asimov's prose was often clunky as hell and Arthur C. Clarke wrote some dross, but it's the ideas behind them that are fascinating. William Gibson invented the word 'cyberspace'. I'm pretty sure he also invented the term 'surfing' and the idea of cybersex too.
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Stars My Destination was way better than Demolished Man, IMO. I think Alfred Bester himself said as much.
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Yes but I'm pretty sure as the dude is a psychic spy/cop that the specific reference is to The Demolished Man, irrespective of whichever is the better novel, a matter upon which I made no proclamations whatsoever!
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Yeah, you're right. Giving credit where credit is due, Neuromancer is hella influential, but the fact is is that if you're like me and read Demolished Man and Stars My Destination before picking up Neuromancer, you're going to be pretty disappointed. Neuromancer was very similar to them, except with a bigger emphasis on the grit of setting and the style (which Gibson keeps mistaking for actual prose) ramped way, way up. It's definitely an important book, and if someone is super duper into sci-fi it's important to read it to see how influential it was and see how it changed a lot of our society in interesting ways. But the book itself was pretty boring to me when I've already read about most of these ideas in a book that had such a memorable and cool climax like Stars My Destination. (Although I might be a bit 'colored' for the ending considering I grew up with a synesthesic brother and knew pretty much exactly what Bester was doing and thought it was massively cool.)
All power to Neuromancer for revitalizing the sci-fi genre! But Stars My Destination was an infinitely more entertaining read for me.
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FINALLY got vol. 1 of Absolute Sandman today and I'm already to issue 15. I am definitely hooked and am loving it.
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Sandman's pretty good! Nothing super striking, but it is very memorable and you'll be thinking about it for a while. Has lasting power.
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Have since finished One Fearful Yellow Eye, and am about 50 pages from the end of The Man in the High Castle, which, though I do consider myself a fan of PKD, I had not yet previously read. Really interesting in terms of how it deals with culture clashes, imperialism and speculative alternate history, but not really enough to unseat Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said as my favorite novel of his. As I've read this, I've been going back and forth between it and an anthology called New European Poets.
By the by, the library couldn't find its copy of Wise Blood when I wanted it. I should remember to try again next time I go.