Page 25 of 41 FirstFirst ... 15 23 24 25 26 27 35 ... LastLast
Results 721 to 750 of 1208

Thread: What are you reading?

  1. #721
    Join Date
    Nov 2011
    Location
    Highland Park, IL
    Posts
    14,384
    Mentioned
    994 Post(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by kleiner352 View Post
    You just described such a large percentage of people who own Infinite Jest!
    Yeah well I'm afraid it's gonna be there a LOT longer LOL. I still have to tackle "Middlemarch.:

  2. #722
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    the beginning of the end
    Posts
    9,342
    Mentioned
    732 Post(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by allegro View Post
    Yeah well I'm afraid it's gonna be there a LOT longer LOL. I still have to tackle "Middlemarch.:
    @allegro , i cannot put into words how utterly incredible that book is, it its mind boggling variety of themes, styles, voices and types of narrative distance.
    The author also has some kind of fucking preternatural grasp of the english language and vocabulary.
    AND, a whole bunch of it centers around addiction.
    I now understand why DFW fans seem elitist, because it's the "hardest" thing i've ever read (and i've read Ulysses and East of Eden and a bunch of shit like that.) I now understand why people say they wouldn't recommend this book to just anyone because i think you have to possess a certain intellect and also either be reasonably well versed in etymology or familiar with a lot of semi archaic words if you want to have to keep from reading it with a dictionary close by.

    That being said, @kleiner352 possesses the requisite intellect and the aforementioned linguistic veracity, and he just read it also, and he thinks it's awful, self indulgent horse shit, so go figure.
    Last edited by elevenism; 08-27-2016 at 02:51 PM.

  3. #723
    Join Date
    Nov 2011
    Location
    Highland Park, IL
    Posts
    14,384
    Mentioned
    994 Post(s)
    Yeah well, remember, I have read some pretty difficult shit (archaic? we had to deconstruct Milton's "Paradise Lost and we had to spend weeks with friggin' "BEOWULF")) for a B.A. in English Lit. and the reviews I read of "IJ" pretty much agreed with @kleiner352 so it pushed it to my "meh" list. But I'm glad you were positively affected by it.

    If you love that complicated stuff, go tackle Tolstoy's "War and Peace" with French and nicknames and a patronymic list ...
    Last edited by allegro; 08-27-2016 at 04:24 PM.

  4. #724
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    the beginning of the end
    Posts
    9,342
    Mentioned
    732 Post(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by allegro View Post
    Yeah well, remember, I have read some pretty difficult shit (archaic? we had to deconstruct Milton's "Paradise Lost," and we had to spend weeks with friggin' "BEOWULF") for a B.A. in English Lit.
    Tis why i recommend it to you. That was my point.

    And Bewowulf isn't that difficult. I saw the cgi movie version and it wasn't very complicated at all

  5. #725
    Join Date
    Nov 2011
    Location
    Highland Park, IL
    Posts
    14,384
    Mentioned
    994 Post(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by elevenism View Post
    Tis why i recommend it to you. That was my point.

    And Bewowulf isn't that difficult. I saw the cgi movie version and it wasn't very complicated at all
    ZOMG go to your room.

    Here is a sample from this translation (because pretty much no undergrad can read Old English, but this maintains the rhythm [meter] of the original):

    Last edited by allegro; 08-27-2016 at 03:59 PM.

  6. #726
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    the beginning of the end
    Posts
    9,342
    Mentioned
    732 Post(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by allegro View Post
    ZOMG go to your room.
    lololololol

  7. #727
    Join Date
    Mar 2014
    Posts
    4,429
    Mentioned
    251 Post(s)
    I will say despite not enjoying Infinite Jest, I've seen plenty of people say their life changes due to it and how impacting it is. I wouldn't personally care to call it trash because I hate doing that with things and find it very dismissive but it just most certainly was not for me. Seems to be the kinda thing that either really, deeply resonates with you or absolutely fails to capture you.

  8. #728
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Gothenburg, Sweden
    Posts
    654
    Mentioned
    6 Post(s)
    I'm reading Atlas Shrugged to the sounds of Ghosts by NIN. They're a match made in soundtrack heaven.

    Ghosts is really the perfect noise to block out noises.

  9. #729
    Join Date
    Aug 2016
    Posts
    85
    Mentioned
    0 Post(s)
    Started The Gunslinger by Stephen King on my tablet until my tablet broke. Then I switched gears to Baudolino by Umberto Eco. Both great reads so far.

  10. #730
    Join Date
    Mar 2014
    Posts
    4,429
    Mentioned
    251 Post(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by sentient View Post
    Started The Gunslinger by Stephen King
    So many people talk about this book not being as enjoyable as the rest of the Tower series, but I really did fall in love with it from the start. Great to here you're enjoying the start of that incredible journey! In case you don't know, I'd highly recommend reading some other King inbetween books, because they all kinda interlock and it'll make a lot more sense as you go. Bare minimum, having read The Talisman, Insomnia, Hearts In Atlantis, 'Salem's Lot and The Stand will help with several aspects of the series making more sense to you.

  11. #731
    Join Date
    Aug 2016
    Posts
    85
    Mentioned
    0 Post(s)
    I absolutely loved The Talisman, even more than The Stand. Of the books you listed I have yet to read Insomnia and Hearts In Atlantis. His forward to this edition told of how he had since come back to the entire Dark Tower series after completing it to make it more cohesive, so I'm excited to dig my way through them. I've since got a new tablet so I've been back into it. It very much has the scent of Talisman and Stand.

  12. #732
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    the beginning of the end
    Posts
    9,342
    Mentioned
    732 Post(s)
    John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" has long been my favorite short story.
    I just got the collection, and i think it's really cool that the stories in the collection are thematically linked.

    Also, the first story, "frame tale," is a fucking mobius strip onto which are printed the words "once upon a time there was a story that began" with fucking instructions to cut it out and assemble it, creating, of course, and endless loop (once upon a time there was a story that began once upon a time there was a story that began once upon a time...(ad infinitum.) Now if that's not avant garde artsy bullshit, i don't know what is

  13. #733
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Los Angeles
    Posts
    9,214
    Mentioned
    551 Post(s)
    rereading Clive Barker's "The Great and Secret Show." This is a masterpiece. He's so under sung for his lyrical wit and satire because he gets tossed in the "horror author" bundle. The Great and Secret Show though... god, it's like a window into another world. After a while, you're not even reading a book anymore.

  14. #734
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    the beginning of the end
    Posts
    9,342
    Mentioned
    732 Post(s)
    I am just finishing Lolita (thanks @kleiner352 . )
    I've gotten a REALLY big kick out of it, and read it quite slowly to try to catch all of the legendary wordplay. And good god, there is a lot of it.

    Next i think i'm going to try The Girl on the Train before moving on to White Noise by Don DeLillo. I haven't read anything that isn't billed as some type of intellectual masterpiece in a hot minute.

  15. #735
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Chicago, Illinois
    Posts
    10,565
    Mentioned
    528 Post(s)
    Sharp Objects is officially the most upsetting book i've ever read

  16. #736
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    the beginning of the end
    Posts
    9,342
    Mentioned
    732 Post(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by eversonpoe View Post
    Sharp Objects is officially the most upsetting book i've ever read
    i fucking LOVED that book. i read it when it came out.

    The Girl on The Train is pretty bad ass. It's kind of a Gillian Flynn rip off, but in a good way.
    Also, it's the fastest selling book of all time.
    I'm digging the shit out of it.

  17. #737
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Chicago, Illinois
    Posts
    10,565
    Mentioned
    528 Post(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by elevenism View Post
    i fucking LOVED that book. i read it when it came out.

    The Girl on The Train is pretty bad ass. It's kind of a Gillian Flynn rip off, but in a good way.
    Also, it's the fastest selling book of all time.
    I'm digging the shit out of it.
    my friend was very disappointed in the movie

  18. #738
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    the beginning of the end
    Posts
    9,342
    Mentioned
    732 Post(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by eversonpoe View Post
    damn.
    i was hoping it'd be good, but i've also seen lukewarm reviews. i was hoping it would be good, as the director did The Help and Get On Up/

    Oh well, the book is fun at least.
    It reads like it needed david fincher and trent and atticus.
    Last edited by elevenism; 10-08-2016 at 11:06 PM.

  19. #739
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Vancouver, BC
    Posts
    696
    Mentioned
    30 Post(s)
    cool... returning to Guns, Germs and Steel after pausing on page 220 for a few months.

  20. #740
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    the beginning of the end
    Posts
    9,342
    Mentioned
    732 Post(s)
    @eversonpoe have you read Dark Places?
    I'd say it's far more disturbing than Sharp Objects.
    I really love Flynn's work. "Sharp" is the best way to describe it.

    edit: seriously though, don't watch the Dark Places movie. it's REALLY fucking bad.

    Oh...also, did you see this? http://www.echoingthesound.org/commu...=sharp+objects

    Sharp Objects is to be an HBO mini series starring Amy Adams, produced by jason blum, directed by Jean Marc Valee (dallas buyers club) and Marti fucking Noxon is the showrunner-this adaptation promises to be good
    Last edited by elevenism; 10-08-2016 at 11:12 PM.

  21. #741
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Chicago, Illinois
    Posts
    10,565
    Mentioned
    528 Post(s)
    Quote Originally Posted by elevenism View Post
    @eversonpoe have you read Dark Places?
    I'd say it's far more disturbing than Sharp Objects.
    I really love Flynn's work. "Sharp" is the best way to describe it.

    edit: seriously though, don't watch the Dark Places movie. it's REALLY fucking bad.

    Oh...also, did you see this? http://www.echoingthesound.org/commu...=sharp+objects

    Sharp Objects is to be an HBO mini series starring Amy Adams, produced by jason blum, directed by Jean Marc Valee (dallas buyers club) and Marti fucking Noxon is the showrunner-this adaptation promises to be good
    i saw that about the HBO series and that's why i decided to read the book, actually.

    haven't read dark places. my mom said that's her favorite of the three. i'm interested but wary, given how upsetting sharp objects was for me.

    Spoiler: by the way, i was 100% convinced Adora was the killer pretty early on in the story (never, ever thought it was a man, even before hearing the kid's story), not just of Marian but of Anne & Natalie, so it was a terrifying shock when it turned out to be Amma who killed the other two girls. oof.

  22. #742
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    the beginning of the end
    Posts
    9,342
    Mentioned
    732 Post(s)
    @eversonpoe , it's been seven or eight years since i read Sharp Objects, but i don't remembering it fucking my head up that much.

    But i feel like i should warn you that Dark Places lives up to its name. It's one of the rougher things i've ever read. It revolves around a ghastly massacre style murder that includes children, and if i remember it right, it tells the story multiple times as more clues come together.
    There's some like family abuse stuff in there too.

    I remember it being pretty damned shockingly intense and brutal.

  23. #743
    Join Date
    Nov 2011
    Location
    Right here
    Posts
    2,534
    Mentioned
    169 Post(s)
    H.P. Lovecraft.

    I've got my greedy hands on a wonderful anthology edition. It has:

    The Shadow Out of Time
    The Dreams in the Witch House
    The Call of Cthulhu
    At the Mountains of Madness
    The Outsider
    The Colour Out of Space
    The Dunwich Horror
    The Whisperer in Darkness
    The Shadow over Innsmouth

    I love you, book.

    The only thing that kind if piss me off is that they did not translate the famous "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." properly. In French, they turned it into: "Dans sa demeure de R'lyeh la morte, Cthulhu attend en rêvant". What they did is that they applied the adjective "dead" to R'lyeh instead of Cthulhu, which changes the meaning of the phrase. /end of anal retentive rant.

  24. #744
    Join Date
    Feb 2013
    Posts
    970
    Mentioned
    10 Post(s)
    Dr. Eben Alexander - "Proof of Heaven". This whole NDE stuff is fascinating and I don't know what to think of it, maybe I'd say "I'm trying NOT to believe", but... maybe...? (I consider myself an agnostic)

  25. #745
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Chicago, Illinois
    Posts
    10,565
    Mentioned
    528 Post(s)
    currently on the fifth (and possibly final) Johannes Cabal book. each one has been vastly different, which has made them all fun and refreshing to read. highly recommend the entire series.

  26. #746
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Laughingstock of the World (America)
    Posts
    4,579
    Mentioned
    104 Post(s)
    This thread.

  27. #747
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    the beginning of the end
    Posts
    9,342
    Mentioned
    732 Post(s)
    I just finished Libra by Don DeLillo. I am reading the Twin Peaks book. And i have a few stories left to go in John Barth's incredible collection, Lost in the Funhouse, the titular story having long been my favorite short story of all time.
    The other books i have purchased recently are Fight Club, American Psycho, Underworld by Don DeLillo.
    I also got Anne Rice's second Jesus book, Songs of the Seraphim book, and The Wolf Gift (this stemming from a policy of reading everything she writes that has been going on since i was about 13.) And i've got The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter Thompson-he fucking cracks me up.
    I am a voracious reader. I am always, always in the process of reading a book. But i somehow didn't realize that there was actual comtemporary literature being written. I have read a LOT of shitty books from the grocery store, and i mean a LOT.
    Then i finally got around to reading House of Leaves, which blew me away, as it pushed at the envelope of what a fictional work even is. This took me down the path to David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest, which, with its maximallist prose and utterly fucking insane depth and number of themes and styles, seduced me into a couple of months of obsession.
    So now i am all about post modernism and post-post modernism or the "new sensitive" or High Octane Monkey Fuckery or whatever you want to call this stuff. Before, it was every Stephen King, Anne Rice, John Steinbeck, and Michael and Kathleen Gear book, with the occasional classic like, say, A Clockwork Orange or The Invisible Man or Catcher in the Rye, but more often than not, when waiting for the new King/Rice/Gear book, i read bestsellers culled from the grocery store. Many of these were entertaining, and some of them. like The Poisonwood Bible, approached greatness, but 99 percent of them were utterly forgetable and a LOT of them were flat out BAD. I read them, however, as since i was about 3 years old, i read, pretty much every day. It's a compulsion. I will read the backs of shampoo bottles and cereal boxes. I will read the fucking yellow pages :P
    Now that i know about about writers like Wallace and DeLillo, i feel as though i have arrived quite late to a party, but it's like a late 90s rave party with 10,000 people and an unreal lineup and i have eaten 4 or 5 ex pills with a beautiful girl
    I am reading books that challenge me, books that open my mind, books that ask deep questions about God and Love and the Nature of Reality. And the amazing thing is that these books are fairly contemporary! I mean, i always thought that such books generally contained stuffy language and anachronistic jokes and outdated political and cultural allusions.
    I don't know why i thought that. I don't know, for the life of me, why i thought that "literature" was no longer being written.
    But now i am in a new world of words and ideas that is nothing short of ecstatic.

    Please forgive me for writing a fucking essay here, and thank you if you actually read it

  28. #748
    Join Date
    Feb 2013
    Posts
    970
    Mentioned
    10 Post(s)
    Finished reading Matt Ruff - "Set this house in order", recommended by a friend of mine who knows me, obviosly. :-) That kind of book, where you can return to re-read first chapter and know better this time. "I was twenty-six years old when I first came out of the lake" - like, what? :-) Recommended.

  29. #749
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Brbr Deng
    Posts
    2,567
    Mentioned
    100 Post(s)
    Not sure if anyone else here reads "short" franchise fantasy novels, like for Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, etc. They're perfect to read when you have a few hours as most of them are just over 300 pages and the font is rather large...

    I just read World of Warcraft: Illidan and it was rather good. Being the first Warcraft novel I've read by William King, I had no expectations and ended up happy. If you enjoyed The Burning Legion expansion, or like The Legion in general, you will be smiling the whole time. There's a lot of Akama, The Black Temple, Argus, etc.

  30. #750
    Join Date
    Mar 2013
    Location
    the beginning of the end
    Posts
    9,342
    Mentioned
    732 Post(s)
    I am going to read Fight Club i think, before DeLillo's Underworld, just for a quick change of pace and also because so many of you guys have talked about it.
    But i am seriously looking forward to nearly 1000 pages of Don DeLillo's seductive writing-i fucking adore his singular style.
    Also, i read a review somewhere that said that there were two masterpieces written in the 90's, with one being Infinite Jest and the other being Underworld. This, to me, is very promising.

Tags for this Thread

Posting Permissions