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What are you reading?

StephenHero

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Richard Branson is great. One of the few people I openly envy.
 

jimbo123

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Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. I thought it was a very suspenseful story but I didn't like the direction they took things in the final act.
 

surrender

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"The War For Muslim Minds" by Gilles Kepel

optional reading for one of my undergrad classes, never got around to reading it until know
 

StephenHero

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A SF favorite it seems....


ishiguro-kazuo-remains-of-the-day1.jpg
 

StephenHero

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For my next book, I've got this one lined up. Anybody read it?

the_windup_bird_chronicle.large.jpg
 

Connemara

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Picked up some poetry today. Dylan Thomas: Druid of the Broken Body by Aneirin Talfan Davies, The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh, and Complete Poems by Kavanagh.
 

MetroStyles

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Originally Posted by StephenHero
A SF favorite it seems....


ishiguro-kazuo-remains-of-the-day1.jpg


Never Let Me Go is better.

Originally Posted by StephenHero
For my next book, I've got this one lined up. Anybody read it?

the_windup_bird_chronicle.large.jpg


Best. Book. Evar.
 

Connemara

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Originally Posted by MetroStyles
Never Let Me Go is better.
I find that very hard to believe, but I've only read like ten pages of NLMG.
 

StephenHero

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On Goodreads, Never Let Me Go scores a 3.65 compared to Remains of the Day's 4.07. I picked up Remains of the Day first for that reason, just as I'm gonna read Murakami's highest rated work first. I think there is usually something to be said for collective criticisms as it makes searching for music and books so much more efficient.
 

MetroStyles

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Originally Posted by Connemara
I find that very hard to believe, but I've only read like ten pages of NLMG.

Originally Posted by StephenHero
On Goodreads, Never Let Me Go scores a 3.65 compared to Remains of the Day's 4.07. I picked up Remains of the Day first for that reason, just as I'm gonna read Murakami's highest rated work first. I think there is usually something to be said for collective criticisms as it makes searching for music and books so much more efficient.

I don't know anything about reviews, all I know is that I read both in the last year and thought that Never Let Me Go was slightly more interesting. Both are worth reading.
 

King Francis

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Originally Posted by SField
Re-reading:

God is Not Great by Hitchens.


On women and food, you're one of my favorite posters, but that book is trash.

Originally Posted by GoSurface
I'm not particularly bothered by the grimness or the unwaveringly graphic violence; in fact, those scenes almost always end up leaving me cold (Someone told me I must be really ******* jaded). The problem I have with the book is the language. It's unrelenting, yes, but only in how overwrought and try-hard it is. I don't think it lacks originality, but rather, subtlety.

I'm sure McCarthy fanboys will come in saying I just don't know how to read the book, but I kind of 'got it' after the first 5 pages.


I can't help but feel that the scenes of carnage are one of the glories of the book, terrible as that sounds. They are not so much dispiriting as exhilarating. And the language . . .

The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.
At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.
I don't expect every author to write like that, but Jesus Christ. Out of context, on an Internet forum, that writing still stuns me. In context it can be overwhelming. I could almost assent to your judgement that it is overwrought until I return to the book and find again that the cumulative effect of the language is that it seems not literary at all, not written but rather emerging somehow naturalistically, inevitable.

This is achieved, I think, by the lack of authorial commentary and other novelistic devices, by the stringing together of evocative scenes so that it becomes more a prose epic than anything else. Yes, it's about the farthest thing from Hemingway or Evelyn Waugh or any of a slew of bland contemporary authors one could name, but I can't help but feel it is perfect for McCarthy's terrain (in all senses). At its best it is sublime.

--------

As for me, I'm currently reading Patrick White's Voss (incredible novel), the bilingual Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda (translated by Reginald Gibbons), Auguste Rodin by Rainer Maria Rilke, Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner (highly recommended), and the July/August issue of Monocle.
 

Treen

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Currently: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin When I've finished that: The Trial by Franz Kafka I like it, the dystopian fiction.
 

Thomas

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Originally Posted by SField
Re-reading:

god is not Great by Hitchens.


As much as I like Hitch, I didn't care much for that book. I thought he was trying way too hard.

Originally Posted by StephenHero
For my next book, I've got this one lined up. Anybody read it?

the_windup_bird_chronicle.large.jpg


I recall liking quite a bit.

Just finished:

The Italian Secretary (C. Carr)
Harry Potter Books 6 and 7

Now reading:

The Inner Circle (TC Boyle)
 

Dakota rube

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The Accidental Billionaires:
The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
by Ben Mezrich

Pretty good read
 

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