BOOKS. whatcha readin...?

[chalkdust]

well I discovered I like Kurt Vonnegut, Amos Tutuola, Marx, Frantz Fanon and Mary Renault. You guys probably know these people already. But perhaps not Mary Renault. She is a good writer. English woman, writes about ancient greece and persia... fiction stories.

There is a Guatemalan novel "after the bombs" good.

Danticat "Krik Krak" good

Marx is worth it. His thoughts on Hegel are challenging.

Amos Tutuola is a good yoruban fiction author. Check him out, he writes in a unique way. I would suggest him highly. He is funny and intelligent.

If any of you want a good historian anthropologist, may I suggest Inga CLendinnen. All her books are amazing. She writes about the European Australian contact, the mayan conquest by spain, and the Aztecs. She is a good writer.

Herman Wouk is ok.

Joseph Conrad Lord Jim is good.

I am highly looking forward to reading Wole Soyinka Collected plays one and two. I also purchased all of VS Naipauls works both his novels and his non fiction books about india and the cARIbbean. He is highly regarded and I expect to enjoy his work.

Putting off reading Mahfouz the Cairo Trilogy

Thomas Mann Joseph and his Brothers

and putting off reading the Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

[chalkdust]

I would also like to read the Sea of Fertility Trilogy. it is japanese but has been translated. And I have the "tales of Genji" in my room as well.

I also suggest Ben Okri. He has a trilogy and a book "dangerous love."

then there is Syl Cheney Coker and B Kojo Laing. I have their books the last Harmattan of Alustine Dunbar, concerto for an exile, blood in the deserts eyes, search sweet country, woman of the aeroplanes. It is supposed to be magical realism. I also have exegisis for this. I will explain understand one day

I am takling Wilson Harris "The Carnival Trilogy" "The Guyana Quartet" and the Carib Myths "Age of the Rainmakers" and "SLeepers of Roraima" in order to understand him I must read Dante and Goethe, the secret of the golden flower and Herman Melville.

I would suggest him. He has essays too. Some people think it is good.

Slavoj Zizeck. Hard to understand. Noam Chomsky, hard to understand but damn if it means something!

Jacque LAcan and Freud. worth it after all. Jacque lacan is an interesting character.

Your suggestions look good. I am aware of this dominican writer you like. Dominicans challenge me.

The Japanese writers, eager to read them

there is a haitian author I should mention

he wrote "how to make love to a negro without getting tired" and he also wrote "I am a japanese writer" he is highly regarded and studied as well.

[chalkdust]

http://www.amazon.com/The-Negritude-Poe ... =negritude

http://www.amazon.com/Omeros-Derek-Walc ... rds=omeros

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/116276 ... 00_s00_i00

[ric]

@alpha
liars poker is top fucking notch for what it is

you can tell it's his first book. I don't remember the writing in "moneyball" being as bad.

the stories are excellent. as he goes along in his career he just flattens out the language, but i have zero qualms about the writing in the first one.

[chalkdust]

If anyone can recommend something by Japanese authors that would be cool. The only one who appears to be really popular in the West is Haruki Murakami but I'm not sure if it's my thing, maybe I should give him a shot but I like to read something a bit more lowbrow and crazy.



This guy is the jap Poe. Very crazy short stories. The famous pick is the story of a guy who develops a fetish for locking himself up inside a chair.



Pretty cool urban ghost story in typical Japanese style. Psychological suspense kind of thing.

I think I know of first guy, thanks. I have a few japan books I will have to go to my amazon page

[chalkdust]

hey ADOLUS HUXLEY IS A GOOD AMERICAN writer. peace. i dont know. used to like james baldwin. dont know if still do. lol

[kato]

hey ADOLUS HUXLEY IS A GREAT BRITISH writer. peace. i dont know. used to like james baldwin. dont know if still do. lol

[chalkdust]

kato. david rudder is freakin better than bob marley. shango electric is a beautiful song.

[chalkdust]

For Homer and Virgil, Robert Fagles is the man who is considered a great translator. So if you want to read the illiad, oddyssy or aneid, Robert Fagles is the man to check for.

right now I am struggling with plato PArmenides, this is a difficult text that makes little sense to me at all. So I purchased the following books to help understand.

http://www.amazon.com/Platos-Parmenides ... s+meinwald

http://www.amazon.com/Platos-Parmenides ... nides+soul

http://www.amazon.com/PLATO-PARMENIDES- ... s+cornford

and this edition of dante

http://www.amazon.com/The-Divine-Comedy ... TYJZXMYUHP

[alpha]

@alpha
liars poker is top fucking notch for what it is

you can tell it's his first book. I don't remember the writing in "moneyball" being as bad.

the stories are excellent. as he goes along in his career he just flattens out the language, but i have zero qualms about the writing in the first one.

wasnt as bad as I made it seem. Just noticeable after reading his later works first.

[perlman]

Just started Lord of the Barnyard. Great so far. To bad the author topped himself. I blame the swag of Kanye West.

[VideoKilledThe]

[perlman]

The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington ruled. Best story ever about a Black slave lesbian necromancer who's into necrophilia.

Also Lord of The Barnyard is so amazing I can't believe I didn't read it before. I instantly ordered Tristan Eglof's other two novels. It's a shame he went out like Hemingway.

[Joe Pesci]

Journey to the End of the Night.

My first time reading anything by Celine. The guy is such a smarmy asshole. I love it.

[perlman]

That book is awesome. And will make you want to kill yourself. But you'll feel good about doing it.

[Versive]

The Idiot by Dostoevsky. Garnett translation. An old English teacher of mine just told me she heard there's a better version out now, but I'm already over 100 pages in. Decided to pick this up because it had been sitting on my shelf for a while and I need a good break from genre fiction. My first Dostoevsky. Enjoying it so far... funnier than I'd expected.

[chump change]

Reading "the information" by james gleick... i may not be smart enough to finish it

[procure uno]

The Yellow Birds

Absolutely incredible novel. quick read. powerful writing.

At the age of 17, Kevin Powers enlisted in the Army and eventually served as a machine-gunner in Iraq, where the sky is “vast and catacombed with clouds,” where soldiers stay awake on fear and amphetamines and Tabasco sauce daubed into their eyes, where rifles bristle from rooftops and bullets sound like “small rips in the air.” Now he has channeled his experience into “The Yellow Birds,” a first novel as compact and powerful as a footlocker full of ammo.

In the northern city of Al Tafar, 21-year-old Pvt. John Bartle and his platoon engage in a bloody campaign to control the city. Before his deployment Bartle promised the mother of 18-year-old Pvt. Daniel Murphy he would take care of her son, bring him back alive. It is a promise that, as Powers reveals from the earliest pages, he will not keep. But in the meantime they suffer through basic training together, followed by Iraqi street fights that leave rooftops covered in brass casings and doorsteps splashed with blood — all under the command of the growly, battle-­scarred Sergeant Sterling, who punches them in the face one moment and claps them on the back the next, ordering them to combat both the insurgents and the mental stress that threaten to send them home in a box with a flag draped over the top.

Though a colonel in a crisp uniform smelling of starch does his best “half-assed Patton imitation” and tells the young soldiers to “give ’em hell,” Bartle feels little sense of drive or destination or purpose. He knows this is not his grandfather’s war. He will kill some. He will drive away others. And then, while he patrols the streets, he will “throw candy to their children with whom we’d fight in the fall a few more years from now.” There is a helpless resolve when he dodges bullets and ducks mortar blasts and studies corpses and considers going AWOL, doing his best to survive while wondering how he can honor his promise to keep Murphy intact, when he feels as if he himself is disintegrating.

The novel moves, fitfully, through Virginia and Iraq and Germany and New Jersey and Kentucky, from 2003 to 2009. Recalling the war, Bartle says, is “like putting a puzzle together from behind: the shapes familiar, the picture quickly fading, the muted tan of the cardboard backing a tease at wholeness and completion.” This serves the story in two ways. First, it turns readers into active participants, enlisting them in a sense as co-authors who fit together the many memories and guess at what terrible secret lies in wait, the truth behind Murphy’s death. Because they lean forward instead of back, because they participate in piecing together the puzzle, they are made more culpable.

Then too, the fractured structure replicates the book’s themes. Like a chase scene made up of sentences that run on and on and ultimately leave readers breathless, or like a concert description that stops and starts, that swings and sways, that makes us stamp our feet and clap our hands — the nonlinear design of Powers’s novel is a beautifully brutal example of style matching content. War destroys. It doesn’t just rip through bone and muscle, stone and steel; it fragments the mind as a fist to a mirror might create thousands of bloodied, glittering shards.

When Bartle ends up confined to a military prison, he has only his memories to keep him company, memories he tries to chase down even as their logic and sequence evade him: “My first few months inside, I spent a lot of time trying to piece the war into a pattern. I developed the habit of making a mark on my cell wall when I remembered a particular event, thinking that at some later date I could refer to it and assemble all the marks into a story that made sense.” But the marks begin to run together, and disorder predominates. Eventually, he knows, the walls will appear scraped over entirely, scoured down to a blind white patina.

Bartle’s uncertain memory — a willful forgetfulness partnered with the inability to control images of so many bullets tearing through bodies and making them dance — makes it impossible for him to return stateside. Throughout the war, he has wanted nothing more than to come home, but once home, everything reminds him of something else. His hand closes around the stock of a rifle that isn’t there. From the moment he steps off the transport plane and walks through the airport, “the ghosts of the dead filled the empty seats of every gate I passed: boys destroyed by mortars and rockets and bullets and I.E.D.’s to the point that when we tried to get them to a medevac, the skin slid off, or limbs barely held in place detached, and I thought that they were young and had girls at home or some dream that they thought would make their lives important.” When his mother embraces him and tells him he’s home at last, he doesn’t believe her. A fan whirs, a train rattles in the distance and Bartle’s pulse flutters up into his eyes, every little thing a trapdoor sending him into that dark place where the alligators wait with widening jaws.

In this way, “The Yellow Birds” joins the conversation with books like Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony,” Brian Turner’s “Phantom Noise” and Tim O’Brien’s classic, “The Things They Carried” — and wakes the readers of “the spoiled cities of America” to a reality most would rather not face. Here we are, fretting over our Netflix queues while halfway around the world people are being blown to bits. And though we might slap a yellow ribbon magnet to our truck’s tailgate, though we might shake a soldier’s hand in the airport, we ignore the fact that in America an average of 18 veterans are said to commit suicide every day. What a shame, we say, and then move on quickly to whatever other agonies and entertainments occupy the headlines.

Powers earned a master’s degree in poetry at the University of Texas at Austin. This is evident in the music of his sentences, the shining details he delivers like tiny gems in so many of his descriptions. The soldiers wake to the “narrow whine of mortars as they arced over our position and crumpled into the orchard,” and Bartle’s body pulses with “an all-encompassing type of pain like my whole skin was made out of a fat lip.” His language is as dazzling as the flashes of a muzzle.

Of course, fancy phrasing can be a distraction as well, and Powers occasionally stumbles — especially when Bartle is thoughtfully processing the war or staring moodily out at the landscape. Consider this half-page passage about clouds bunching over the ocean: “I knew, watching them, that if in any given moment a measurement could be made it would show how tentative was my mind’s mastery over my heart. Such small arrangements make a life, and though it’s hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and the end of my war. . . . ” On it goes, with lengthy brow-­furrowing meditation and descriptions of the Iraqi desert’s enclosure and how lost Bartle felt among the “innumerable grains of sand.” Passages like this seem better suited to sonnets about strummed lutes and foggy moors. The emotional recoil of the war is strongest when Powers remains in scene, when he keeps his soldiers on the march.

Midway through the novel, a group of soldiers huddle around a gut-shot private. His skin pales even as his lips go dark purple. His body shakes and spittle runs down his chin. Everyone leans in to hear what he will say. But when he dies without speaking, his comrades cast down their faces in frustrated surprise before wandering aimlessly away. Bartle wishes aloud that the dying soldier would have said something, and his sergeant responds: “They usually don’t.”

But Kevin Powers has something to say, something deeply moving about the frailty of man and the brutality of war, and we should all lean closer and listen.

[RacquetballGangsta]

almost done with these two. both really excellent. into Saramago more at the moment though.

[Joe Pesci]

Basically straight up smut but Henry Miller is hilarious which makes this a good read.

[Harry Hater]

Next 2 books I wanna read






anybody check these?

[Dap]

Next 2 books I wanna read






anybody check these?

bought cheat for my brothers bday and he loved it. he's 32 with a girlfriend. she also thought the book was hilarious

[phil connors]

[BARRY LURKIN]

GREAT CHOICE, FRAN.

[Gregg Popabitch]

Comprising two distinct but interrelated plots, the narrative runs back and forth between the two, taking up each plotline in alternating chapters.

The odd chapters tell Kafka's story as he runs away from his father's house to escape an Oedipal curse and to embark upon a quest to find his mother and sister. After a series of adventures, he finds shelter in a quiet, private library in Takamatsu, run by the distant and aloof Miss Saeki and the androgynous Oshima. There he spends his days reading the unabridged Richard Francis Burton translation of A Thousand and One Nights and the collected works of Natsume Sōseki until the police begin inquiring after him in connection with a brutal murder.

The even chapters tell Nakata's story. Due to his uncanny abilities, he has found part-time work in his old age as a finder of lost cats (a clear reference to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). The case of one particular lost cat puts him on a path that ultimately takes him far away from his home, ending up on the road for the first time in his life. He befriends a truck-driver named Hoshino. Hoshino takes him on as a passenger in his truck and soon becomes very attached to the old man.

Nakata and Kafka are on a collision course throughout the novel, but their convergence takes place as much on a metaphysical plane as it does in reality and, in fact, that can be said of the novel itself. Due to the Oedipal theme running through much of the novel, Kafka on the Shore has been called a modern Greek tragedy.

Wish I got the one with that cover, I like it better. Not my favorite Murakami book so far, but still great.

Got into Murakami in the past year and have been mainlining that shit.

Read Kafka, South of the Border, Norwegian Wood, and Sputnik. Gonna get into the huge undertaking of IQ84 next.

[perlman]

I listened to the IQ84 audio book. Shit was dope. Now I'm onto A Wild Sheep Chase. Strange but good.

[Mindbender Futurama]

"Sex and God: How Religion Destroys Spirituality" by Darrel Ray an all-time classic. couldn't recommend it more.

"The Divinity of Sex" by Charles Pickstone

"Days of War/Nights of Love" by CrimethInc.

"The Procrastination Equation" by Piers Steel

[LilLeftBrain]

Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur in contemporary Toronto, who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in a bohemian neighborhood. This naturally brings him in contact with the house full of students and layabouts next door, including a young woman who, in a moment of stress, reveals to him that she has wings--wings, moreover, which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.

Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain; his mother is a washing machine; and among his brothers are a set of Russian nesting dolls.

Now two of the three nesting dolls, Edward and Frederick, are on his doorstep--well on their way to starvation, because their innermost member, George, has vanished. It appears that yet another brother, Davey, who Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, may have returned...bent on revenge.

Under such circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to involve himself with a visionary scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet connectivity, a conspiracy spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles of hardware from parts scavenged from the city's dumpsters. But Alan's past won't leave him alone--and Davey is only one of the powers gunning for him and all his friends.

pretty bat shit, well enjoyed despite the tech parts being more than a bit dated and a somewhat anticlimactic ending

[perfectprism]

Comprising two distinct but interrelated plots, the narrative runs back and forth between the two, taking up each plotline in alternating chapters.

The odd chapters tell Kafka's story as he runs away from his father's house to escape an Oedipal curse and to embark upon a quest to find his mother and sister. After a series of adventures, he finds shelter in a quiet, private library in Takamatsu, run by the distant and aloof Miss Saeki and the androgynous Oshima. There he spends his days reading the unabridged Richard Francis Burton translation of A Thousand and One Nights and the collected works of Natsume Sōseki until the police begin inquiring after him in connection with a brutal murder.

The even chapters tell Nakata's story. Due to his uncanny abilities, he has found part-time work in his old age as a finder of lost cats (a clear reference to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). The case of one particular lost cat puts him on a path that ultimately takes him far away from his home, ending up on the road for the first time in his life. He befriends a truck-driver named Hoshino. Hoshino takes him on as a passenger in his truck and soon becomes very attached to the old man.

Nakata and Kafka are on a collision course throughout the novel, but their convergence takes place as much on a metaphysical plane as it does in reality and, in fact, that can be said of the novel itself. Due to the Oedipal theme running through much of the novel, Kafka on the Shore has been called a modern Greek tragedy.

Wish I got the one with that cover, I like it better. Not my favorite Murakami book so far, but still great.

Got into Murakami in the past year and have been mainlining that shit.

Read Kafka, South of the Border, Norwegian Wood, and Sputnik. Gonna get into the huge undertaking of IQ84 next.

This is required reading after finishing Kafka (John Updike review/analysis of the book): http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/0 ... rbo_books1

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is where you should go next if you are ready for a big undertaking I'd say, it's his claim to fame and will likely end up being his legacy along with Norwegian Wood

I listened to the IQ84 audio book. Shit was dope. Now I'm onto A Wild Sheep Chase. Strange but good.

Wild Sheep Chase is quality, I wish he would write a shorter, funnier book like that again. The sequel Dance, Dance, Dance is supposed to be good too

[ALASKA]

just got these for xmas, looking forward to reading them once i finish 2666 and the society of the spectacle.