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Zonkerbl wrote:

pineappleheadindc wrote:

pineappleheadindc wrote:I just pre-ordered the soon-to-be-available 1,000 page Haruki Murakami novel, 1Q84. I think it'll be released and shipped in October.

I'm a real fan of his. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of my fave books.

Amazon.com says that my book should arrive Friday.

This is a good thing.

(I'm currently re-reading some old novel I got in an airport when I was away on business. Replay - about a guy who time travels back into his past over and over again).

OMG YAY CAN'T WAIT!!!!!!

I knew that guy's name - Haruki Murakami - sounded familiar. I read the English translation of his "Kafka on the Shore" - good coming of age story with lots of serious stuff mixed in with lots of hilarious bizarre stuff, and it was a real page turner. Are his books routinely translated into English so well?

I imagine he has very good translatiosn. His books sell. And he's easy to translate. I read the windup board chronicles and Kafka on the Shore in the original Japanese, and compared to your typical Japanese writer, the language and references are made for turning into English.

Some Japanese actually complain that his work feels foreign.

willbcocks wrote:I imagine he has very good translatiosn. His books sell. And he's easy to translate. I read the windup board chronicles and Kafka on the Shore in the original Japanese, and compared to your typical Japanese writer, the language and references are made for turning into English.

Some Japanese actually complain that his work feels foreign.

Coolness. Thanks to the folks posting on this thread, I just ordered IQ84 (an improvement for me) from Amazon.

DallasShalDune wrote:Book thread on-topic--I'm starting Infinite Jest. I'm excited to see what it's all cracked up to be.

post your thoughts here when/if you finish. It's a really difficult book to finish if you don't have large chunks of time to dedicate to it, or if you, like me, have ADD and have trouble following meandering sentences. The pleasure of reading DFW, for me, are the strands of absolute truth embedded in what seems to be a tangled mess of a narrative.

Too, I'm guilty, i think, of blind dfw sychphantism (based mostly on how much I love his non-fiction stuff, "Lobster," "Supposedly Fun", etc...), so I wonder sometimes how pre-disposed I am to thinking every word he's ever written is great, even if I don't fully understand it.

Will do, swami. I really enjoy Pynchon, so I'm hoping my experience with schizophrenic writers thus far has prepared me for DFW. I've listened to a lot of speeches and interviews with him in the last few months, and as I leave college and enter the "real world," I can't help but have his philosophies and ideas in mind. The guy was a genius. Shame he died.

Just finished The Strain trilogy. I heard mixed reviews of it before reading. People were saying some points were amazing and then there were parts where it was like lets wrap it's up. I must say I was thoroughly pleased by it. It actually had a super natural phenomenon explained with rational scientific logic.

Recently I've read the first half of Blood Meridian but I've lost interest in it. I've started to read the Bourne series and the main character is not like he is in the movies. I'm locked in though.

I read a book a while back that I would endorse reading called Star Wars Red Harvest. Talk about a fun book, it's about Jedi and a highly contagious zombie strain. Great premise and it was well written. I'm not going to spoil anything but it's interesting to find out what happens when a light saber cuts of a body part and then that part is used as a weapon against the Jedi.

If you like thrillers, my daughter gave me an entertaining one for Christmas. She got it at a dollar store, believe it or not. It's called "A Deadly Silver Sea." Some crew members hijack a cruise ship. Hi-jinks ensue. Reminds me a bit of Die Hard, but the personal stakes for the main character are higher. Not the best thing I've ever read, but it's entertaining.

^^Just read a couple of reviews. I'm interested.

just downloaded "The Whore of Akron: One Man's Search for the Soul of LeBron James" and am incredibly stoked to read it. It was written by Scott Raab, a life-long Cleveland sports fan and sports writer who, as the title implies, basically rips Lebron a new one. Reading this, for me, will be schadenfreude at its best. can't wait.

finished reading Grifftopia by Matt Taibbi over the weekend.

Great read and even though Taibbi is clearly NOT a con, he
pulls no punches in his criticism of both parties. He does save
his choicest criticism for Alan Greenspan and backs it up
well from where I sit. More readable than one might expect.

Bump for Random Thoughts integration...

daSwami wrote:just downloaded "The Whore of Akron: One Man's Search for the Soul of LeBron James" and am incredibly stoked to read it. It was written by Scott Raab, a life-long Cleveland sports fan and sports writer who, as the title implies, basically rips Lebron a new one. Reading this, for me, will be schadenfreude at its best. can't wait.

was just discussing this with a friend from Cleveland/cavs fan who is still unhealthily bitter at Lebron. He wants me to read the book and I told him I kind of got the gist from the title. What did you think?

One of my favorite books from my Jr and High School days is a book called Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I've actually read it multiple times and even read the sequels, which were't as good by still entertaining.

I'm working on finalizing a mystery that I wrote and getting it to press in June.

I expect everyone on this board to buy 10-20 copies for your own reading pleasure and to give as gifts.

MDStar wrote:One of my favorite books from my Jr and High School days is a book called Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I've actually read it multiple times and even read the sequels, which were't as good by still entertaining.

Then you might like 'Little Brother' by Cory Doctorow, or his other book 'For the Win' which have some of the same flavor of Ender's game. I liked some of the Ender sequels even more than Ender's Game, though not at the time. There have subsequently been 'parallel' novels following other characters from the series, but I didn't think they were as successful, leastways the one I read wasn't all that great.

doclinkin wrote:

MDStar wrote:One of my favorite books from my Jr and High School days is a book called Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I've actually read it multiple times and even read the sequels, which were't as good by still entertaining.

Then you might like 'Little Brother' by Cory Doctorow, or his other book 'For the Win' which have some of the same flavor of Ender's game. I liked some of the Ender sequels even more than Ender's Game, though not at the time. There have subsequently been 'parallel' novels following other characters from the series, but I didn't think they were as successful, leastways the one I read wasn't all that great.

Yeah, "Ender's Shadow" was pretty good as it was a direct paralleled to "Ender's Game". Didn't like the other's that followed his brother and sister so much though.

Nivek wrote:I'm working on finalizing a mystery that I wrote and getting it to press in June.

I expect everyone on this board to buy 10-20 copies for your own reading pleasure and to give as gifts.

Awesome! Let us know when it's available - and if you're doing any book-signing thing.

congrats nivek on the book. self publishing, or you got a deal?

ender's game was interesting but the epilogue was a completely different story than the first few pages. it felt like a lesser version of starship troopers to me.

and to bridge the not-so-random to here, while i disliked heart of darkness, i can agree with BA's "dislike but still respect" train of thought. i can appreciate the themes (at times over the head with the darkness issue) but the material itself was probably the longest 110 pages I've ever had to slog through.

Relocated from the suddenly very literary Random Thought thread

barelyawake wrote:Don't have to like it. Merely have to respect it. And honestly, I respect pretty much every piece of art out there, even when I don't like it. And I really wasn't responding to you, mon. I was responding to the "worst book I have ever read" comment.

I wouldn't have listed the artists if I hadn't personally heard them mention the book as inspiration for their work. And the fact that it takes 400 pages to tell the same joke is why it gets funnier -- see every comedian retelling the Aristocrats joke for decades.

I saw a documentary on the Aristocrats. It's far from the funniest joke I've ever heard, but it can be hilarious repeatedly in the right context. The comedians in the movie obviously held the joke in high regard, but seemingly not always for the same reasons. In its telling and retelling it became less funny and more clinical, to my mind serving (in the movie) as a demonstration of comic craft as much as anything else.

I would never call A Confederacy of Dunces the "worst book I have ever read" (I don't know what I would assign that title to, but I hope i didn't finish it) or even a bad book, because too much writer's craft went into it, there's simply too much there (I didn't see it as a one-joke novel, more a complex framework of parallel and interconnected jokes), and too many people I know whose opinions are not easily dismissed loved it.

I once read an essay on the novel The Recognitions, William Gaddis' first novel. I've never read it, but my wife and some other friends have, and they all love it. The novel was widely panned when it came out, but is now on Time magazine's 100 greatest novels (or English language novels, I forget how they phrase it) of the 20th Century. Much academic attention is spent looking at how a now-recognized "masterpiece," which itself dealt with the recognition of masterpieces, was overlooked by so many in its time. With all the back story I have on A Confederacy of Dunces, I still may be missing the boat on it.

Nivek wrote:I'm working on finalizing a mystery that I wrote and getting it to press in June.

I expect everyone on this board to buy 10-20 copies for your own reading pleasure and to give as gifts.

They'll all be signed 1st editions, of course.