I find the Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, and A Secret Garden books charming.  Any others I might like based on those?

Sweetgm2 wrote:

I find the Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, and A Secret Garden books charming.  Any others I might like based on those?

Try the LM Montgomery Emily books. They're really beautiful.

So I'm in a half of "The Universe in a Nutshell" by Stephen Hawking and I think that this book is a real miracle. I mean, it's about complicated physical issues and sometimes I feel that I understand some parts of it, which is weird because I have always been a physical dummy (mostly due to my teachers, one of them was teaching us how to open a window properly for, like, two hours...). So, after I will read this... "A Brief History of Time", here I come! :3

Snow wrote:

Reading Out by Natsuo Kirino.

This was a fantastic book, and if you enjoyed it I strongly recommend trying her other novels as well. Grotesque was fantastic, though I really resent the editing the translation did to remove something that was probably a very effective thing in the novel. It staggers me that now, in 2015, people are able to remove sections of a work of literature because they don't like them, but still have the balls to release a version to get money. Fuck you people. But Kirino is great.

Enea wrote:

Stephen Hawking

YAYAY. I'm always glad to see someone reading his books, they're classics for a reason, though I think it was quipped that Brief History of Time was the most popular selling book that no one ever read. I actually found it more accessible than Universe in a Nutshell, though, so if you plodded through that you'll do fine. If you feel the need to explore past that, Brian Greene is another really excellent, accessible physicist writing popular science.

Goodreads sounds like something I should do in principle...should I make an independent account or is there some good reason to link it to the unholy Bookface?

Giovanna wrote:

Grotesque was fantastic, though I really resent the editing the translation did to remove something that was probably a very effective thing in the novel. It staggers me that now, in 2015, people are able to remove sections of a work of literature because they don't like them, but still have the balls to release a version to get money.

I didn't want to ask before finishing the book lest I spoil something, but now I'm curious after reading it. What did they change? Everything I managed to find on the topic is quite vague about what exactly was edited out or changed.

Btw it was great! Thanks for the recommendation. The ending [was a bit of a bummer at first until I reminded myself not to take everything literally, and I'm presently amusing myself with various theories on what is what.
My take on it is that the prominent characters are just what the narrator says they are - parts of her, and it is arguable whether any of the events seen from their POV actually happened at all, or are just elaborate manifestations of her psyche. All the characters do exist in reality, but they are much different and might be only the base on which the narrator projects herself to compartmentalize and avoid facing reality. My theory is that she broke on the day her mother died, and while her central persona is seemingly unfazed by this, this deep feeling of abandonment and loneliness pervades the account of every other character, the trauma and sadness finding their way out of her system though elaborate illusion and self-deception. Her highschool experiences (as we learn from Mitsuru, quite different than what we heard) and her issues with womanhood are embodied in Yuriko and Kazue, with Yuriko as a bonus representation of her miserable family life and Kazue of her professional disappointment and poverty.
I'd say that Zhang and Yurio represent opposing desires in her. Yurio represents her all but extinguished desire for love, beauty, and life - something pure and innocent that she knows she'll never attain, just as Yurio will never be her son. Zhang, on the other hand, represents her desire for the void, for death and release - a monster without reserve to whom nothing is sacred, through whom she'll be able to cast aside all that binds her in her life. I'm unsure who the real Zhang is, but I think everything we hear from Kazue about him is based on the narrator's hope that such a man exists. She believes herself to be beyond saving and longs for such a person to put her out of her misery.
The arrival of Yurio gives a little hope of fixing this, but it ultimately fails. Her grandfather, possibly her only anchor to reality, dies, and the second break happens, the final one. Yurio's suggestion of going to the streets could be interpreted as the 'light side' of her finally giving up on her. The final lines of the novel have her as a streetwalker (or fantasizing of being one) on the lookout for Zhang. The man she's with is probably not him, the Zhang she thinks she needs never existed. But she's desperate to meet him. Death is now her only desire, and there's no hope left for her.
Depressing, but a logical conclusion to the novel.
]
I wish I made more sense, but it's late

Despite my asexuality and his marriage to Ayelet Waldman, I am fairly certain that if the opportunity arose, I would marry Michael Chabon. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union were two of the best books I've read this year, and manage to be both delightfully fun and full of Heavy Things. Who knew I would be so heartbroken by gay, nerdy Jewish comic artists?

Snow wrote:

What did they change? Everything I managed to find on the topic is quite vague about what exactly was edited out or changed.

All I could find about it was that there was an underage male prostitute in it that was entirely written out of the translation. Given the gritty nature of her style and the effect shock was meant to have, I definitely feel like they lost something important. Awesome insights by the way! It's been so long since I've read it, I'll have to give it another visit. I was never entirely sure how literally I wanted to take some of it, but her other novel seemed fairly literal as well, like the circumstances were enough to do the high-minded stuff as it is. So I'm inclined to think she wasn't fantasizing in the end. But again, it's been a while...

Nocturnalux wrote:

I'm presently reading Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian and loving it just as much. It cannot help but remind me of I, Claudius in its confessional tone and subject matter but I prefer's Yourcenar's take. Her profound knowledge of classical themes really shines and she manages to convince the reader that these are indeed the reflections of the Emperor Hadrian.

Oh oh this is right up my alley. I love ancient Rome and as much as I enjoyed I, Claudius, I have to admit when I tried the novel it was prohibitively dry a style of prose. I might look better on it now than I did back then, but I'm always in the market for Not Shitty historical fiction. Because man there's no shortage of the shitty kind.

I ended up listening to a bit of an audiobook version of Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House a few days ago, and I can definitely see why he's considered one of the great American novelists of the 20th century. There's a sense that he gets the human mindset well, and even when he's not working with science fiction and other high concept works, he can take a plot and get as much as he can out of it.
Out of the odd 25 short stories collected in there, I only managed to catch about 4 of them, but they were enjoyable. I started off with Long Walk to Forever, which wasn't honestly my favorite, but had a general air of wistful melancholy that fit well. The Foster Portfolio on the other hand was amazing. On the surface it's a story about an investment consulter trying to manage one particular job, but it ends up being a really good character study. I honestly didn't know where it would go, and the ending, even if it might be a little obvious in hindsight, is just handled so well! Even if you just read one thing from this, I'd suggest this one.
Miss Temptation is good too, with more of a focus on gender politics and the mindset of the self-righteous. It defiantly feels like it was written in the late 50s, but it still feels relevant today and would be something I might recommend someone to check out if they wanted to look for something to think about.
On the other end of the spectrum is All the King's Men. It's still a pretty psychologically driven piece, this time dealing with war (especially the Cold War) and the disconnect with leaders and the people they govern and control. But it so reads like a pulp war story, with it's exaggerated gender and racial depictions. It's more of a thriller than the other stories I listened to, and it did do it's duty at that, actually making me anxious and engrossed with what the characters would do next. It saddles the line between patriotic war blockbuster and a psychological anti-war piece, but I still found it fascinating. I could easily see it adapted into a stage play or a retro-styled comic, with a few tweaks or not.
If I can find the audiobook again, or even get the actual book version, I'm sure I won't regret going through all of the stories. (I know Harrison Bergeron is one of the pieces on there, and I know I found that one interesting when I read it a few years back.) I know they're online, but having them in one place could be useful.

Just finished Chosen Soldier by Dick Couch.
Just started The Last Chapter The Facts about the last days of Grumman by Jake Bussolini.

I'm rereading Spenser's The Faerie Queen with some hilariously outdated and condescending footnotes. I love how absolutely mad allegorical works could be back then, and how much appropriation was just a standard thing in English, so there are snatches from, echoes of other works regularly present. Just makes the whole thing feel like swimming in waves.

Snow wrote:

The Gernsback Continuum. I'm starting to really like Gibson.

The less I pay attention to that it's Gibson's work, the more I tend to like his work.

Though paying attention and playing Gibson-bingo can be fun, too.

In a different excellent thread, Gio called out Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as one of the two books (along with The Little Prince) that she wished someone had made her read in high school.  I had never even heard of it; as far as I knew, it was one of the Canterbury Tales.  And that's how I read it, without knowing anything about it except that Gio liked it and thought it dealt with deep moral questions.  I'm glad I did.  I'm weirdly fascinated by dystopian fiction in general, both serious and unserious, but The Handmaid's Tale is exceptional, pulling off that feat of making you worry it could really happen.  Or that in some ways, in symbolic ways, that it describes what is already happening.  That's before we even get to the part where its dystopia is deeply tied up in gender, and manages to talk about gender realistically, frighteningly, and yet without demonizing or exonerating anyone.  It's a book about real people, not devils or saints; that's why it's believable.

Highly recommended.

Giovanna wrote:

I recently read The Picture of Dorian Gray. I've avoided that entire era of writing like the plague since I was a child because I found it so horrifyingly dull, but this was not at all what I expected. It's an easy read, fun, and lets the story speak for itself instead of beating you senseless with the morals. In fact, it's hard to find the moral since the characters spend most of the novel being FABULOUS and BITCHY AS HELL. The conversations are pwn after pwn, to the point where they're unrealistic in how they depict people, but fun to read anyway because god damn what a catty bunch of clever fucks. I can't really say why, since they're not at all alike in personality, but for some reason, I kept thinking of Touga the entire novel.

Well the thing is, it's Oscar Wilde so it pretty much can't have any morals or it goes against his own mantra that 'all art is quite useless'. I think that the idea of Dorian Grey has become so ingrained in the public consciousness as having these specific set of morals (like a Christmas Carol for example) when the truth is that point of the story is, as you say, catty people being clever fucks.