Yeah I'm not going to defend every windy tome written by a Nobel Prize winner, but a lot of them are winners for a reason. Pär Lagerkvist's The Dwarf is maybe 200 pages long and is very readable, proof that musings about morality and philosophy don't have to be meandering and boring. Also it's about an evil dwarf who strangles other dwarfs.

I think part of the problem is the style most rewarded by the Nobel Prize committee evolved when readers really didn't have a lot of choices - if the book still hadn't grabbed you by page 50, page 100, page 200, well too bad, there's no TV, no internet, and you can only afford a few books at a time. So people were willing to dig through monotonous pacing and laborious prose to get to the rich pith, whereas today people have so much choice that we no longer have to put up with that crap to get to the good stuff. Yet, some readers seem to believe that things like fun and excitement are anti-literary and don't belong in Serious Literature. My dad has a PhD in literature and is one of these people. They exist.

I think you're going to find some meandering in most Dostoevsky, even his short stories and novellas. I hope you like C&P more though. Fwiw the first couple times I read The Idiot I didn't like it much either--too much like a 19th century soap opera. The whole idea of Myskhin being a 'Christ-like character' didn't really click with we till my third read, but with that one I was able to pick up on a lot more of the difficulty of such a task, and how they basically have to seem kinda crazy, because anything else would come off as goody two-shoes, boring, self-righteous, or whatever. In his notebooks Dostoevsky said that he only thought two people in novels had come close to what he was trying to get at: Don Quixote, and one other farcical character (I forget who). Smushing that kind of character together with his (hypocritical) shots at western decadence and religion, promoting Russian nationalism, psychologizing, and not slighting Orthodoxy, is an interesting juggling act.

I'm sure a lot of it was allegory for Russian society at large that just went over my head, but a lot of the soap-operish interactions you were talking about I felt really dragged on. Obviously still a good book, but there where definitely sections were I felt like just putting the book down.

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Now this right here is a good fucking book. I feel like the whole post-modern thing works really well when paired with unpretentious, simple prose. The whole thing is post-modern and non-linear (although his war experiences were told essentially in order throughout the book), but never felt needlessly disorienting or pretentious. The "so it goes" refrain that came up every time someone died worked really well, and the alien interpretation of time was fascinating. The book was fun but still thought provoking and a really interesting way to go about an anti-war book - it never really shoves a message down your throat and lets you arrive at your own conclusion based off Billy's wartime experiences. Overall, great plot, love his sparse prose and how it uses post-modern devices in a way that's fun and engaging (the post-modern style to me has potential to be really good, but often gets bogged down in pretension and collapses under its own weight).

No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
I saw the movie before the book, which was great. Even though I knew the general plotline, the book was still awesome and I went through it very quickly. There's a reason that McCarthy shows up in most of my big posts here. His prose here still had some of his trademark opaque language, but is a hundred times more accessible than something like Blood Meridian. While I do prefer that McCarthy stories be set at least half a century ago, he did a very good job. I'm sure this will surprise no one, but the story was violent as all fuck. Almost as gruesome as Blood Meridian in parts. Not one of the best McCarthy novels I've read but still quite brilliant and I liked it more than the last one I read before that (The Crossing).

Not sure if discussion of non-fiction is really done here, but been reading a bit lately. I strongly urge anyone even vaguely interested in history to check out Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. The book outlines the grand patterns of history unfolded the way they did and the answer is mainly in the title. Lots of really interesting facts in here, and it was especially interesting to learn why the Europeans decimated that natives with diseases but the Europeans didn't die in droves from the natives' diseases. The middle third of the book was a bit of a slog where it goes into language differences (not really my thing tbh) and West-East geography, but it gets interesting again in the last third which gives an overview of why the histories of different continents unfolded as they did. Also read The nNext 100 Years by George Friedman. A nice light read, while it does get silly in parts, his informed speculation on the future is pretty interesting. Will Japan and Turkey (backed up by Germany) really be the next dominant powers to challenge the states and maybe even start WWIII? Will Mexico really be the runner-up for dominant world power in the 2090s? Will Eastern Europe really become more powerful than Western Europe? Who fucking knows. Some of this stuff seems kind of outlandish, but I'm sure if you told the modern geopolitical situation to someone from 1916 they would think you were insane. Interesting read at the very least although you have to take everything with a shaker full of salt.

Of course it's welcome here, it's been discredited for quite a while now, so it basically falls under fiction.

Yeah, one thing I really like about Slaughterhouse Five was that its point was made mostly by the opposing characters - like the general who defensively insists over and over that the firebombing of Dresden was totally necessary, even though the main character isn't even disagreeing with him. My one quibble is that the "so it goes" refrain is overused just a liiiiiittle bit. I think it would be more effective if it weren't so constant, especially in the early parts.

Still though, of the Vonneguts I've read, it's definitely the most complete book. Cat's Cradle for example has perhaps even better and more interesting ideas, but it's also much much sloppier in terms of plotting and pacing. Despite SF's unconventional structure, it's really tightly put together, and everything it does do works well and hangs together perfectly.

re-reading "A wizard of Earthsea" for the umpteenth time. It's a bit like comfort food as it's a book that's been with me since childhood. But I always see something new in it each time I read it.

Le Guin is a genius someday I'll have to finish the series, I read the first 2, maybe part of 3.

As good as Earthsea is, she's written way better stuff. I can't imagine re-reading The Dispossessed umpteen times though, it's pretty dang dense.

About to embark on The Book of the Long Sun, maybe tonight or tomorrow. Looking forward to it.

I love Cormac McCarthy. Now, I've found the most not-Cormac-McCarthy-McCarthy-sounding author ever, and it's being praised all over the place. David Vann - Goat Mountain. And I hate it. It's a drag. I've kinda given up about two thirds of the way, blasting through comics instead. I think I'm gonna finish it when I'm done with The Invisibles, but only to see how it ends.

One doesn't simply out-McCarthy McCarthy.

The truth if I ever heard it told.

Indeed.

Which reminds me, when will his upcoming book, The Passenger, ever drop? Seems like we keep getting little reminders that's it's still happening but never get a proper announcement. I know he took a break from writing it to do the screenplay for The Counselor, which I thought was a great movie in spite of its disappointing performance, but that was years ago now.

Also, everyone needs to read Suttree. It's easily his second best book but seems to get largely overlooked, even by his fans.

I mean Earthsea to me is a pretty simplistic young adult series with nice good moral stuff (I loved the Jungian elements when I read it), nothing too crazy or complex. I haven't read The Dispossessed, I need to...

by the way there's a great New Yorker article on her circulating, it got me to tear up a few times, love her:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/ ... -k-le-guin

The last 2 Earthsea books are really different in tone and not vety young-adult at all. Very sad stuff about child abuse and the characters getting old.

Haven't heard anything about the new one in a while, no. I didn't know that he already was working on it before doing The Counselor, which was great btw, to be honest. I read it before I watched it, but I really didn't get the hate for it. Anyone here read (or watched) The Sunset Limited? This man can do no wrong.

Suttree is indeed awesome. I don't know if I could even pick out a second best book of his, but it's up there.

"Of what would you repent?
Nothing.
Nothing?
One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all."

Goddamn

Anyone here a fan of Andrei Bely? I've just started Petersburg and it's fucking amazing.

Couple of things came in the mail the other day that I'm simultainiously reading:

"The Eastern Front: Memoirs of an SS volunteer" by Leon Degrelle (otherwise known as "The campaign in the East")

Degrelle was an interesting character - in the 30's he was the youngest political leader in Europe at the head of the Belgian Rexist party by the age of 29. Certainly an accomplished man, having degrees in Law, Philosophy and having operated his own newspaper for some years, and physically brave to boot. It's well known that Hitler had said "If I had a son, I would want him to be like Leon".

But there are a lot of things missing if you are accustomed to reading between the lines and you know the history of the period well. While
I take a lot of the "Occult SS" stuff with a pretty big grain of salt, he seems to either have not known or cared about the extremely hostile attitude towards Catholicism within the Alegemine (as opposed to Waffen) SS organisation. You might well think that such an ultra-catholic might be a bit disturbed by the pagan attitudes of the senior SS - but no mention of this at all.

So, I've been reading The Iliad for a couple of weeks now and even though I'm enjoying it so far, I've got to admit I have trouble remembering details though.

The Iliad is soooo good. I read excerpts in high school and only started reading it this year. Fagles' translation is fantastic.

Has anyone read Henryk Sienkiewicz before? I'd like to read his With Fire and Sword series, but since all the translations are like 100 years old, I wonder if that might hurt the readability.

Man, I hate to play the salty dude all the time but I found the Iliad fuckin horrible. The nicest way to describe it is that you can clearly tell it's one of the earliest books of its' kind. The action: horribly boring. The long lists of people who were killed can fuck right off. To say the level of characterization is thin would be unfair to anorexics. As far as ancient prose goes it's significantly clunkier than the OT's more event filled books, nowhere near as interesting as herodotus, hell even the Epic of Gilgamesh is a better read.

More than perhaps any other book ever written, The Iliad is something that you say you enjoying reading to impress your professor/history teacher/whatever. There's no other reason to pretend to like it.

I just finished Nightside the Long Sun. Good stuff thus far, and interesting how much different the main character is from the main character in BoTS. On this matter I don't agree with failsafeman...at this point in the story anyway. One is a torturer, a perpetually flawed character from birth who ultimately sought to do good; the other is a priest who finds himself increasingly

I look forward to reading onward not only for the story's own sake but to find out how said story is connected to BoTS. Any connections so far are not obvious, though I have my theories...

I got through Nightside of the Long Sun with no problems, it's later on that I bogged down. Connections to BOTNS become much clearer as the books go on.

You ought to take a crack at some of Wolfe's standalones - Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Free Live Free, and There Are Doors especially. The Sorcerer's House, Castleview, and Pirate Freedom are also well worth a read. It's a shame that they tend to get lost among his better-known works, since honestly they're a hundred times better than most things most people will ever read - and most readers prefer a "scattershot" approach, and won't bother reading a lot of works by one author. Also, Wolfe has a reputation for being very dense - which is true of his more famous works, but most of his standalones are quite brisk. Dense in terms of figuring everything out, of course, but more quickly paced and less cryptic than BOTNS for sure.

Oh, I intend to read at least Peace eventually, but it's not up on my list in the short-term. My next fiction will probably be Gravity's Rainbow (I already bought it). I also have a whole shitload of nonfiction books, both ones I need to start reading or ones I started and need to finish; as you can probably imagine, they mostly deal with espionage . What I did after Urth was read three nonfiction books to clear the air a bit before delving into BoTLS. I think this time I'll probably do a nonfiction book, then Gravity's Rainbow, then another nonfiction, and then buy Peace.

Ew, Gravity's Rainbow. Thomas Pynchon was so smart that one day his brain grew so large that it burst through his forehead! It transformed into the shape of a penis, and he proceeded to jerk it off for a few years. The collection of cumrags from that period formed the rough draft of Gravity's Rainbow.

Tad Williams's To Green Angel Tower was rather enjoyable, despite the horrid bloat. A good 1/5 could have been cut and not made any difference, and probably 1/2 could have been cut and the major story would have still been told. It reminded me at times of The Wheel of Time, but with actually good writing. Still, though, I enjoyed the series. Interesting world-building, and it was cool seeing all the things George R.R. Martin took inspiration from for ASoIaF.

Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice was fucking great. Great characters, even the ones you're supposed to hate have perfectly understandable motivations. It moved along fairly slow until BAM the end got super intense out of nowhere. I saw some r/fantasy thread where this series was recommended to people who liked Jon Snow's storyline from ASoIaF, and yeah that's not too far off. Really looking forward to the next books.

Can somebody convince me how great Le Guin's Dispossessed is so I'll read it? I read the first few pages recently. I just haven't done fiction in a long time, grad school is nutty and I've got so much philosophy/psychology/etc I need to read. But fiction would be a really nice break if I can get over the hump.

It's great. Read it.

Anybody a fan of Raymond Carver?

Just watch Short Cuts. Altman knows Carver better than Carver.

DUDE, I have never heard of this movie. I will watch it asap.

It's phenomenal, you'll love it! Hopefully.

It's worth it for Tom Waits and Downey Jr. alone. It's also a really, really well-rounded representation of Raymond Carver and Robert Altman. Essential.

Sienkiewicz is the bomb, by all means check him out. With Fire & Sword is a great start, and it only gets better from there with Deluge and Fire in the Steppe. Having said that, try to avoid the Jeremiah Curtin translations. These are archaic, clunky-ass & really break the flow sometimes. The W.S. Kuniczak translations are better by far, if you can then get those instead.

Any Hunter S. Thompson fans here?

Fan of his writing, not a fan of his fans if that makes any sense. the myth overtook the man long before he took the last exit to shotgun.

Anyway, couple of things on the go at the moment:

'Fight your own war - power electronics and noise culture'
Interesting grab-bag of writings about extreme electronic music. One of the main contributors is an acquaintance of mine so I was fairly certain of the quality before I ordered it.

"Tigers in the mud" - Otto Carius
First hand account of eastern front combat in a Wehrmacht heavy panzer unit. A bit drier than I had expected to be honest.

Yeah, I'm reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail for obvious reasons if you live in the US. He is brilliant. Much more than just a 'drug guy' or something like his fans think - he's a great writer and has a ton of insight. Basically one of my idols.

History of the Kings of Britain was pretty cool. The whole thing is kind of a whirlwind of events, but there are still some memorable characters like Cordelia and Arthur. It's also amazing to think how popular this book was back in the day--it had roughly 4x the success of the works of Chaucer.

I usually don't read fiction but these past two months I have been and this is what I have been reading:

John Ajvide Lindqvist - Let the Right One In

I saw the film (the original Swedish version) long before reading the book and I liked it. The film is quite true to the book except the storyline of the old man which is never developed in the film but is so in the book. I prefer the more subtle narrative of the film to the book actually. Is the book good? I thought it was ok. 2,5 out 5 or so.

George Orwell - Pig Farm

A tiny book about the animals on a farm that through a revolution takes over from the farmer. They build their own society. I didn't like this at all. It could have been made so clever but instead it feels shallow and the points it makes can be seen from miles away.

Bram Stoker - Dracula

The film from the early 90's is based on this book (as opposed to most Dracula films). I really liked the mood it gave in the beginning parts of the book as well as in the latter parts. I thought however that it lost some steam while things were happening in England. Basically it starts on a high note, falls into a shallow valley and then ends of a higher note again. Not excellent but good.

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World

I was intrigued by this one during the first couple of chapters. It was very promising in the set up but I realized that I though the character portrayals seemed to shallow and uninteresting. The ending did bring it back up a little but the lasting emotion was one of disappointment. Interestingly enough I really enjoyed the foreword. Way more than the book itself actually.

William Golding - Lord of the Flies

I loved this one. It felt real, the characters were believable and deep, the description of the nature was amazing and I was drawn into the story. It felt relevant and real. I just finished it and I'm happy I decided to read this one. I know I will read this one again some day (while I probably wont with the other books listed above).



So basically I only disliked Animal Farm. The others were good but wont leave me with any lasting positive impressions... Except Lord of the Flies that I found to be excellent!

Man I love this author! One thing I'll say though is that Let the Right One In is probably my least favourite of his books. I liked it quite a bit (and definitely rated it higher than you), but Harbour and Little Star are so much better! Really amazing books if you're into this type of horror! Also the short story sequel to LtROI is really good, might like it even better than the actual book. Just loved its pace and the way an "every day" story is used to build up to the end.