recently read books
 

i read delillo's underworld and enjoyed it a great deal.

read any great books lately?

i can't seem to finish breakfast of champions.

oh and the works: anatomy of a city was kind of a let down. or at least what i've read so far.

700 sundays, except it wasn't a great book.

sula
dreams of sleep

not very notable.

The Heart of Darkness.... it wasn't that good.--for my brit.lit class

Neverwhere--- Neil Gaiman.... I loved that book.

New Moon, by Stephanie Meyer

and now i'm reading Rebecca--by Daphne De'Maurier

i hated rebecca! ugh so boring and slow!
didn't really care for heart of darkness. i heard too much about it and was left unimpressed.

I don't know if this counts since I'm reading it for a class, but the American Holocaust is proving to be worth the doll hairs I had to spend on it.

yeah I'm not really enjoying Rebecca. But I'm one of those readers who cannot stand to quit reading a book half way through... i'd just feel like a failure. So I have to finish it. I'm almost done, thank god.

Did you know that Daphne Du Maurier wrote The Birds?

The last couple books I've read, I haven't enjoyed. Prep was a quick read, but disappointing. The Wonder Spot was awful.

Now I'm reading Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which is good.

howard hughes: his life and madness .... some 600+ pg biography, very comprehensive, very telling. has alot of stuff nobody knew about until its release. what's notably amusing s hughes' "memorandums" to his aides about what proceedures need to be done to avoid germs. he was a truly sad man

that sounds like a really cool book.... i wonder if any libraries around here carry it...

Would you recommend it? I saw it at the bookstore some months ago and became immediately interested, but my rules and guidelines of book buying render me unable to purchase a book that is more than $8.

I would. I love Klosterman. He's a good writer and really hilarious, but also smart.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/06...CLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

edit: that's a now reading, by the way. not very far into it yet.

http://img.tesco.com/pi/Books/L/03/0747579903.jpg

I was a big fan of Irving before, but this book is just freakingly awesome.

what's it about?

Amazon.com
At over 800 pages, John Irving's Until I Find You is a daunting proposition at best. Anyone who finishes it will have acquired forearm muscles, sore shoulders, and not much else. The story is self-indulgent, repetitive and, ultimately, boring, that cardinal sin that readers can't forgive. Longtime Irving readers have stayed with him through a few hits and a miss or two, but this is an all-time low. We are accustomed to Irving's work as quirky, bizarre, and off-the-wall and have forgiven all by calling such high-jinks and characters "imaginative" or "absolutely original." The only thing original about this tome is the descent into soft porn.

Jack Burns, the hero of the tale, is four years old when it all begins. He is the illegitimate son of Daughter Alice, a tattoo artist and, guess what, daughter of a tattoo artist. She takes Jack on a pilgrimage to find his womanizing father, William, a church organist and "ink addict." By seeking out church organs and tattoo parlors, she expects to find him. She doesn't, and by now we have spent more than a hundred pages in Northern European cities doing an imitation of Groundhog Day. Same story, different day: a little prostitution for Alice, a few questions asked; alas, no daddy.

Alice and Jack return to Toronto so that Jack may enter a previously all-girls school, which will admit little boys for the first time. There begins another 200 pages of the girls and the teachers abusing Jack, over and over again. By now, he is five and is, for some unfathomable reason, eminently interesting to girls and women. His "friend" Emma keeps careful track of "the little guy," as she calls Jack's penis, looking for signs of life. The worst part of all this is that none of it is funny or sad or even clever. There are wrestling vignettes, of course, and prep school tedium, but no bears. Maybe bears would have saved it. There were funny parts in The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules as well as poignant, horrific parts in both of those and other Irving novels. This story is flat. The voice never changes; it just drones on.

Jack becomes an actor. First, he is a boy in drag because he is so pretty, then he takes transvestite parts. He and Emma, now a published novelist, live together in LA, which provides endless opportunity for name-dropping. His career eventually takes off and he gets recognition and awards, but still no daddy. Irving, it turns out, never knew his father, either. Perhaps this exercise will exorcise that demon once and for all and Irving's next book will be about something more compelling than a little boy's penis and his trashy mother's antics. If you do make it through to the book's snapper of an ending, you deserve to find out what it is on your own. Call it a reward.

From Publishers Weekly
Actor Jack Burns seeks a sense of identity and father figures while accommodating a host of overbearing and elaborately dysfunctional women in Irving's latest sprawling novel (after The Fourth Hand). At the novel's onset (in 1969), four-year-old Jack is dragged by his mother, Alice, a Toronto-based tattoo artist, on a year-long search throughout northern Europe for William Burns, Jack's runaway father, a church organist and "ink addict." Back in Toronto, Alice enrolls Jack at the all-girls school St. Hilda's, where she mistakenly thinks he'll be "safe among the girls"; he later transfers to Redding, an all-boy's prep school in Maine. Jack survives a childhood remarkable for its relentless onslaught of sexual molestation at the hands of older girls and women to become a world-famous actor and Academy Award–winning screenwriter. Eventually, he retraces his childhood steps across Europe, in search of the truth about his father—a quest that also emerges as a journey toward normalcy. Though the incessant, graphic sexual abuse becomes gratuitous, Irving handles the novel's less seedy elements superbly: the earthy camaraderie of the tattoo parlors, the Hollywood glitz, Jack's developing emotional authenticity, his discovery of a half-sister and a moving reunion with his father.

i am reading some book by ismail kadare but i can't seem to find the english title anywhere

Marton Amis - Night Train, pretty excellent

very close to finishing Ian McEwan's Saturday

bout to read brave new world again

The only books I've read recently are The Man Who Tasted Shapes and Blink; both were pretty interesting though they were both assigned reading for a class.

i can't seem to finish anything i start reading

i just finished slapstick by vonnegut this morning, before that i read the pleasure of finding things out by richard feynman. loved them both

Mr nice... its pretty cool, its one of those books that i should have read but never got round to.

good book... have you ever read Brave New World Revisited? or The Doors of Perception?

The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen.

This book got an awful review by awful Michiko Kakutani in the NYT, who was, as usual, full of crap. Her out-of-context quotes from this collection and snarky, highly subjective conclusions about The Corrections may as well have indicated that she hadn't read either book.

I myself would have preferred a new novel from Franzen to this, and I'm hoping he didn't sell his soul or wring it dry with The Corrections, and furthermore this doesn't ellicit the same kind of cheer-worthy stuff as his last collection, but as memoiristic essays go, it gets a thumbs up.

oh awesome. man, he's incredible. i have to admit that one of my nemeses, trotskilicious, recommended him to me. i'll check this out.

Every time someone who is not a disillusioned young man or the current American President reads Camus, an angel gets its wings.

I know nothing about you, so you could just be a disillusioned young man, but I would guess in that case you would be reading one of his more subversive works, so here's to the benefit of the doubt and fighting the liberal intellectual backlash.