I do quite a lot of reading - I'm doing English at Auckland. This past semester I took a post-colonial literature paper and read some great stuff - Coetzee, Rushdie, Naipaul, Toni Morrison's Beloved, etc. I enjoy much of the stuff I study, but doing lit at 3rd-Year level doesn't really leave you much time for pleasure reading. I have my last exam tomorrow, and next week I plan to finish off a few stories by Nabokov (my favourite author in the world), and then make a start on Ishiguro's The Remains Of The Day, which is one of those books I've been meaning to read for yonks.
So, yeah.
how did you find Toni Morrison's Beloved?
Having seen the flim a week or so back, and finding it lacking in depth, a weak love story combined with slash / zombie/ ghost movie..... I was thinking that the book may fill in the gapeing holes.
Will it or will I be just as distatisfied?
I haven't seen the film but I think the book's really good. Overall I'd say it's pretty dark and it gets ambiguous about what the hell's going on (particularly when it's narrated by Beloved), but if there's any love story going on its mainly about Beloved and Sethe not Sethe and.. the guy whose name I can't remember. Paul?
I mention it being ambiguous cos you may not find it fills in the holes, however you learn a lot of the history of each of the (older) characters and I definitely thought they were all well fleshed out.
Beloved was the second best novel I read this past year (my fave being Coeztee's Disgrace). I liked it very much, though I hear the movie is crappo.
I quite like Rushdie, though I found Midnight's Children derivative of other "magic realist" authors, like Garcia Marquez and Grass (especially his novel, The Tin Drum - which is my favourite all-time novel). Still, his follow up effort, Shame, seemed to show some maturation, yet it seems that it was only until The Satanic Verses that Rushdie really found his voice. I've yet to read it, though.
umm... been reading War of the Worlds - H G Wells .. , pretty cool so far, especially considering how old it is
also recently read 'A Scanner Darkly' by Phillip K. Dick and that was wicked, as are most of his books. .
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Alchemist - Paul Ceolho
The Lessons of Don Juan - Carlos Castenada (The whole series is good)
Jonathan-Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Junky - William Burroughs
Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
The tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller
Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse
Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
The Education of Little Tree - Forest Carter
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
ohh... "A clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess is great book. They characters have there own strange vocab, Once you get into the swing of its really quite a unique experience. You find yuorself reading apparent gibberish but understanding exactly what it all means. Genius.
Someone I reckon more people should know about is Haruki Murakami.
I've read three of his books, am on to my fourth at the mo. They all seem to involve a guy in his 30s who finds himself alone in the world but runs into a series of unusual people, with some kind of underlying thread slowly unravelling. That's reducing the plots to basically nothing, so probably sounds shit, but they're really cool. Kinda like detective yarns (he's normally in the dark at first, slowly trying to figure out what's going on, and there's a lot of "of all the bars in the world, she had to walk into this one" type narrative) but with a bit of metaphysics and a bit of supernatural stuff. The line between natural and supernatural just gets crossed without much comment - seems to be a real Japanese thing to me.
My top recommendations based on the ones I've read so far would be 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles' and 'Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World'.
yesmum
2003-11-04 17:55 (link)
I love Murakami right up until the endings, which tend to always leave me feeling very unsatisfied, so I was wary of reading a book of his short stories because I was afraid that I'd be left unsatisfied 12 times in one sitting, which is never a good thing at all. However, then my sister gave me a proof copy of ummm crap, it's something about an elephant, and it has a pink cover, and it was wonderful. Maybe because they were shorter there wasn't so much of a lead up to the (lack of) ending, or maybe I just read them in a better frame of mind, or maybe they were just complete packages.
I've read Muarakami's collection of stories, The Elephant Vanishes, which I enjoyed quite a bit. I enjoy his style - simple, yet elegant - and his deadpan sense of humour. I have The Wind-up Bird Chronicles sitting on my shelf.
I recently read Greg Bear's 'Eon', billed as 'the greatest SF novel of our generation' or some bullshit like that. It was awful. Really, really bad yet I couldn't put it down. And I had crazy dreams all the time I was reading it.
Now I'm reading the Good Doctor's "Better Than Sex" - the book of his writing during the 1992 American Presidential Campaign. Thompson's latest book is pretty good too.
HST is weird. It took me a while to get into his writing, it wasn't until I read the first volume of his letters that I had some understanding of what he was writing and why. Now I can't get enough.
I just finished reading a history of Rolling Stone Magazine, and there was a lot in there about HST and it was just an all around brilliant book, except that it was written in 1990, so it missed grunge which would have been more significant to a person of my age than the Eagles. But still, it was packed full of interesting bits and lots and lots of cocaine. One of my favourite stories in there was about how the founder, Jann Webber, once deflowered a girl and then the next night had her over for dinner, and he used the sheet as a tablecloth, and put her plate over the stain. She didn't know but his flatmates did. That's both absolutely horrible and absolutely hysterical at the same time.
(First time I ever read Fear and Loathing, I'd just picked it from the used bookstore down in Devonport and I was on the bus going to a mates. It was the most embarrassing bus ride of my life, I couldn't stop laughing and we're not talking quite chuckling either, I was cackling like a loon, snot bubbles and tears type shit, you know).
I've recently finished reading The Hammer of Eden - can't remember the author's name. And Killing Floor, by Lee Child. Both good books. Have just started on Cry Vengeance by Ron Handberg - it's about a bunch of rape victims that go around slaughtering rapists that got away with it and chopping off their balls - nice.
I think I'm on about my tenth anniversary of getting half way through Lord of the Rings and giving up because they were begatting each other for page after page after page. No wait, that was the bible - they must have been pledging alliegence to one another then.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance has to be read slowly, and even repeated (I'm up to the 3rd time) to get full value from all those metaphysical concepts. Such a cool book. If you like it...read "Lila" which is the sequal. In this one Pirsig further develops the ideas he discuss' in Zen and the Art.
-King lear
-Bonjour Tristesse
-The shipping news
-Virgils Aeneid
-Aristophanes comedies
probly something else that iv forgotton... god u lucky ppl who hav time to read for enjoyment no mata how bad the bk is...i wish...
bonjour tristesse- by francoise sagan... can get it in french- which is a bit of a random read... its more to the point in the english version...which makes it better...
I have a really bad habit of reading 3 or 4 books at a time, must be something to do with having Bipolar Disorder, but at the moment for light entertainment i'm re-reading the intire discworld series by Terry Pratchett for about the 12th time, I just finnished a book on basic Taoism and started into basic Zen, re-read the hobit for the first time in 10 years.
Also read a book about the Tararua Ranges, just a basic kinda history really, but quite informative and a book on the history of surfing in NZ.
Getting nostalgic now....I have a large file tucked away someway in my brain labelled "Magnanomous Sunrises". One of the best I've ever seen was sittin' on top of Mt Mitre (2nd highest peak in the Tararuas - 2000 something metres high). Watching the sun rise above a blanket of white fluffy clouds below. The clouds looked like a the surface of a lake and the highest peaks of the Tararuas, Mt Ruapehu to the North, Mt Taranaki to the North East, and the Southern alps (obviously to the south), peirced the cloud, looking like islands in that cotton wool water. When the Sun rose above the clouds they adopted a a fuckin' brilliant luminous white appearance. Lush.
Yeah I know, they are right behind where I live, so I spend as much time in them as I can, sadly that hasn't been much lately, but now that summers is back hopefully i'll get back into it.
Hard to read but. If you liked Catch 22 you'll probably enjoy "The Tin Drum" - Gunter Grass. Same sorta slightly demented inner dialogue type narrative. Very clever writing.
I struggled to get into it for the first few chapters and it was difficult to work out the chronological order of it but after a while I got hooked. Not to mention that it reads like a Monty Python sketch.
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I do quite a lot of reading - I'm ...
I do quite a lot of reading - I'm doing English at Auckland. This past semester I took a post-colonial literature paper and read some great stuff - Coetzee, Rushdie, Naipaul, Toni Morrison's Beloved, etc. I enjoy much of the stuff I study, but doing lit at 3rd-Year level doesn't really leave you much time for pleasure reading. I have my last exam tomorrow, and next week I plan to finish off a few stories by Nabokov (my favourite author in the world), and then make a start on Ishiguro's The Remains Of The Day, which is one of those books I've been meaning to read for yonks.
So, yeah.
how did you find Toni Morrison's ...
how did you find Toni Morrison's Beloved?
Having seen the flim a week or so back, and finding it lacking in depth, a weak love story combined with slash / zombie/ ghost movie..... I was thinking that the book may fill in the gapeing holes.
Will it or will I be just as distatisfied?
I haven't seen the film but I think ...
I haven't seen the film but I think the book's really good. Overall I'd say it's pretty dark and it gets ambiguous about what the hell's going on (particularly when it's narrated by Beloved), but if there's any love story going on its mainly about Beloved and Sethe not Sethe and.. the guy whose name I can't remember. Paul?
I mention it being ambiguous cos you ...
I mention it being ambiguous cos you may not find it fills in the holes, however you learn a lot of the history of each of the (older) characters and I definitely thought they were all well fleshed out.
¿did you find rushdie incredibly lame?...
¿did you find rushdie incredibly lame?
Beloved was the second best novel I ...
Beloved was the second best novel I read this past year (my fave being Coeztee's Disgrace). I liked it very much, though I hear the movie is crappo.
I quite like Rushdie, though I found Midnight's Children derivative of other "magic realist" authors, like Garcia Marquez and Grass (especially his novel, The Tin Drum - which is my favourite all-time novel). Still, his follow up effort, Shame, seemed to show some maturation, yet it seems that it was only until The Satanic Verses that Rushdie really found his voice. I've yet to read it, though.
philip hose farmer - the fabulous ...
philip hose farmer - the fabulous riverboats
im quite enjoying <i>Flight 441 ...
im quite enjoying Flight 441 Disaster in the Kaimais
an interesting true story about that NAC Plane that crashed on approach to Tauranga 40 years ago, New Zealands worst Plane crash on its soil.
i've always like the name imogen....
i've always like the name imogen.
awwwww thanks *giggle**blush*...
awwwww thanks
*giggle**blush*
umm... been reading War of the Worlds - ...
umm... been reading War of the Worlds - H G Wells .. , pretty cool so far, especially considering how old it is
also recently read 'A Scanner Darkly' by Phillip K. Dick and that was wicked, as are most of his books. .
[ http://www.mp3.com.au/grusome ]
Some of my favourites: Brave New ...
Some of my favourites:
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Alchemist - Paul Ceolho
The Lessons of Don Juan - Carlos Castenada (The whole series is good)
Jonathan-Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Junky - William Burroughs
Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
The tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller
Steppenwolf - Herman Hesse
Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
The Education of Little Tree - Forest Carter
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
i also enjoy Orwells 1984...
i also enjoy Orwells 1984
William S /m/....
William S /m/.
ohh... "A clockwork Orange" by Anthony ...
ohh... "A clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess is great book. They characters have there own strange vocab, Once you get into the swing of its really quite a unique experience. You find yuorself reading apparent gibberish but understanding exactly what it all means. Genius.
Someone I reckon more people should ...
Someone I reckon more people should know about is Haruki Murakami.
I've read three of his books, am on to my fourth at the mo. They all seem to involve a guy in his 30s who finds himself alone in the world but runs into a series of unusual people, with some kind of underlying thread slowly unravelling. That's reducing the plots to basically nothing, so probably sounds shit, but they're really cool. Kinda like detective yarns (he's normally in the dark at first, slowly trying to figure out what's going on, and there's a lot of "of all the bars in the world, she had to walk into this one" type narrative) but with a bit of metaphysics and a bit of supernatural stuff. The line between natural and supernatural just gets crossed without much comment - seems to be a real Japanese thing to me.
My top recommendations based on the ones I've read so far would be 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles' and 'Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World'.
yesmum 2003-11-04 17:55 (link) I ...
yesmum
2003-11-04 17:55 (link)
I love Murakami right up until the endings, which tend to always leave me feeling very unsatisfied, so I was wary of reading a book of his short stories because I was afraid that I'd be left unsatisfied 12 times in one sitting, which is never a good thing at all. However, then my sister gave me a proof copy of ummm crap, it's something about an elephant, and it has a pink cover, and it was wonderful. Maybe because they were shorter there wasn't so much of a lead up to the (lack of) ending, or maybe I just read them in a better frame of mind, or maybe they were just complete packages.
Whoops. Serves me right for repeating ...
Whoops. Serves me right for repeating myself.
I've read Muarakami's collection of ...
I've read Muarakami's collection of stories, The Elephant Vanishes, which I enjoyed quite a bit. I enjoy his style - simple, yet elegant - and his deadpan sense of humour. I have The Wind-up Bird Chronicles sitting on my shelf.
I recently read Greg Bear's 'Eon', ...
I recently read Greg Bear's 'Eon', billed as 'the greatest SF novel of our generation' or some bullshit like that. It was awful. Really, really bad yet I couldn't put it down. And I had crazy dreams all the time I was reading it.
Now I'm reading the Good Doctor's "Better Than Sex" - the book of his writing during the 1992 American Presidential Campaign. Thompson's latest book is pretty good too.
HST is weird. It took me a while to get into his writing, it wasn't until I read the first volume of his letters that I had some understanding of what he was writing and why. Now I can't get enough.
I just finished reading a history of ...
I just finished reading a history of Rolling Stone Magazine, and there was a lot in there about HST and it was just an all around brilliant book, except that it was written in 1990, so it missed grunge which would have been more significant to a person of my age than the Eagles. But still, it was packed full of interesting bits and lots and lots of cocaine. One of my favourite stories in there was about how the founder, Jann Webber, once deflowered a girl and then the next night had her over for dinner, and he used the sheet as a tablecloth, and put her plate over the stain. She didn't know but his flatmates did. That's both absolutely horrible and absolutely hysterical at the same time.
Heh, The Rum Diary is a ...
Heh, The Rum Diary is a classic.
(First time I ever read Fear and Loathing, I'd just picked it from the used bookstore down in Devonport and I was on the bus going to a mates. It was the most embarrassing bus ride of my life, I couldn't stop laughing and we're not talking quite chuckling either, I was cackling like a loon, snot bubbles and tears type shit, you know).
If you like HST, you should check out ...
If you like HST, you should check out (if you haven't already):
Bill Bryson's - A walk in the woods
Dave Barry - A boy and his hobby
And anything by P.J. O'Rourke (this guy kills).
I am reading Working Womans Art Of War ...
I am reading Working Womans Art Of War - Chin Ning Chu
I keep picking up cheap books from The Warehouse everytime I'm there ...
I've recently finished reading The ...
I've recently finished reading The Hammer of Eden - can't remember the author's name. And Killing Floor, by Lee Child. Both good books. Have just started on Cry Vengeance by Ron Handberg - it's about a bunch of rape victims that go around slaughtering rapists that got away with it and chopping off their balls - nice.
I'm half way through reading Zen and ...
I'm half way through reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
I'm halfway through that book too. I ...
I'm halfway through that book too. I have been for the last five years.
I'm also close to celebrating my tenth anniversary of getting a third of the way through "Atlas Shrugged".
I think I'm on about my tenth ...
I think I'm on about my tenth anniversary of getting half way through Lord of the Rings and giving up because they were begatting each other for page after page after page. No wait, that was the bible - they must have been pledging alliegence to one another then.
Ayn Rand *shudders*....
Ayn Rand *shudders*.
I'm halfway through that book too. I ...
I'm halfway through that book too. I have been for the last five years.
Yeah, this is like my 8th month of reading it.....my aim is to finish it before the end of next year
wow, that really worked, I trust you ...
wow, that really worked, I trust you know I was replying to Robyns post.....oh well.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle ...
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance has to be read slowly, and even repeated (I'm up to the 3rd time) to get full value from all those metaphysical concepts. Such a cool book. If you like it...read "Lila" which is the sequal. In this one Pirsig further develops the ideas he discuss' in Zen and the Art.
-King lear -Bonjour Tristesse -The ...
-King lear
-Bonjour Tristesse
-The shipping news
-Virgils Aeneid
-Aristophanes comedies
probly something else that iv forgotton... god u lucky ppl who hav time to read for enjoyment no mata how bad the bk is...i wish...
Is Bonjour Tristesse like Bonjour ...
Is Bonjour Tristesse like Bonjour Timothy? Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmilan.
<i>//Bonjour Timothy? ...
//Bonjour Timothy? Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmilan.
wasnt that a movie???
Really? Was it a movie staring Milan ...
Really? Was it a movie staring Milan Borich at a young age? No way, I so totally didn't know that.
bonjour tristesse- by francoise ...
bonjour tristesse- by francoise sagan... can get it in french- which is a bit of a random read... its more to the point in the english version...which makes it better...
I have a really bad habit of reading 3 ...
I have a really bad habit of reading 3 or 4 books at a time, must be something to do with having Bipolar Disorder, but at the moment for light entertainment i'm re-reading the intire discworld series by Terry Pratchett for about the 12th time, I just finnished a book on basic Taoism and started into basic Zen, re-read the hobit for the first time in 10 years.
Also read a book about the Tararua Ranges, just a basic kinda history really, but quite informative and a book on the history of surfing in NZ.
The tararua Ranges a fuckin' ...
The tararua Ranges a fuckin' beautiful. Fantastic place to go walk about.
Getting nostalgic now....I have a large ...
Getting nostalgic now....I have a large file tucked away someway in my brain labelled "Magnanomous Sunrises". One of the best I've ever seen was sittin' on top of Mt Mitre (2nd highest peak in the Tararuas - 2000 something metres high). Watching the sun rise above a blanket of white fluffy clouds below. The clouds looked like a the surface of a lake and the highest peaks of the Tararuas, Mt Ruapehu to the North, Mt Taranaki to the North East, and the Southern alps (obviously to the south), peirced the cloud, looking like islands in that cotton wool water. When the Sun rose above the clouds they adopted a a fuckin' brilliant luminous white appearance. Lush.
Yeah I know, they are right behind ...
Yeah I know, they are right behind where I live, so I spend as much time in them as I can, sadly that hasn't been much lately, but now that summers is back hopefully i'll get back into it.
mmmm....summer. I'd like to do a few ...
mmmm....summer. I'd like to do a few missions into the rangers this summer myself. Definitly on the list of things to do.
Catch-22....
Catch-22.
Hard to read but. If you liked Catch 22 ...
Hard to read but. If you liked Catch 22 you'll probably enjoy "The Tin Drum" - Gunter Grass. Same sorta slightly demented inner dialogue type narrative. Very clever writing.
Catch-22 is a classic (great ...
Catch-22 is a classic (great characters).
I struggled to get into it for the ...
I struggled to get into it for the first few chapters and it was difficult to work out the chronological order of it but after a while I got hooked. Not to mention that it reads like a Monty Python sketch.
for the last few months I have been ...
for the last few months I have been reading the wifes books, and being a guy who does not really read alot, have quite enjoyed:
Catcher in the Rye
To kill a Mockingbird
1984
Hitchickers guide to the galaxy
After reading a fair bit latley, I still enjoy a beer and a spliff, followed by a night at the local, much, much more....
[ http://theblimp.tripod.com ]
"42" fuckin' classic!...
"42" fuckin' classic!
1984 is alright but Animal farm is an ...
1984 is alright but Animal farm is an excellent story.
We read To Kill a Mockingbird in 6th ...
We read To Kill a Mockingbird in 6th form at school for English, I enjoyed it.