morosemocha wrote:

Giovanna wrote:

morosemocha wrote:

I've been rereading Hannibal by Thomas Harris for possibly the umpteenth time, I love it soo, soo much.

Hannibal You must be reading up in time for Hannibal Rising! And if you're not, well obviously you should be! Hannibal, both the book and the movie, has to be one of my worst guilty pleasures. Mmm. Classy, intelligent, psychotic cannibal snobbing it up in Florence.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! HANNIBAL RISING! SOOOOOOOOO READY FOR YOU! /fangirling.

I cannot believe I am talking to people who actually read Thomas Harris. Everybody else has just "seen the movies". I absolutely LOVED Hannibal, as well as The Silence of the Lambs. Red Dragon was good, but not my favorite as much as the former two. Still haven't seen the movie for RD, actually.

We're going to have to have a Hannibal Rising party when we all finally read it.

At the moment, I am currently reading Idoru  , the second book in William Gibson's Bridge Trilogy. He is an absolutely astounding writer; in the company of so many other excellent books I've seen mentioned here, I cannot believe he has not been mentioned. Or I missed him. He is highly recommended not only to cyberpunk fans, but to anybody with a penchant for brainy books. Nice gritty sense of realism, too, slangy, not a lot of pretentious bullshit in the prose.

Other favorite authors and books would include:

--Terry Pratchett (Discworld! I've seen some fans.)
--Phillip Pullman (His Dark Materials Trilogy is absolutely spectacular. I fell madly in love with it, couldn't put them down. And the movie is coming out soon. Daniel Craig (the new James Bond) will be a main character! It better kick ass.)
--China Mieville (Perdido Street Station is absolutely astounding, and highly recommended. I can't wait to read his other stuff. He's a newbie on the block, but goddamned amazing. Neil Gaiman endorses him! That's gotta be worth something.)
--Thomas Harris (of course)
--Hermann Hesse (Demian, my eighth grade love, right after I got into Utena)
--Garth Nix (The Abhorsen Trilogy is freaking badass)
--Tamora Pierce (Whaat? I grew up on her, and I still love to re-read the old favorites, In the Hand of the Goddess being the favorite. This is some fun pulp fantasy. Girl power!)
--Dan Brown (He's a blast.)
--Neil Gaiman (Good Omens, much?)

Only to name a few... I'm a bibliophile.

I can always be counted on to toss the staples your way. I love the staples.

Stephen Baxter - He digs the global catastrophes. I love his writing.
Neil Stephenson (previously mentioned) - The father of cyberpunk. This is not as bad as it sounds.
Kurt Vonnegut - A pretty direct influence over a lot of quirky British scifi/fantasy authors. Everyone with two brain cells should read at least one book by him even if it's God Bless You Dr. Kovorkian, which is readable in two hours and pretty much awesome. It's basically Chicken Soup for the Bizzaro Soul.
If you want quirky british Scifi/Fantasy authors, you can't go wrong with Pratchett and Gaiman.
H.G. Wells/Jules Verne - Both of these doods were the earliest recognised SciFi authors. A lot of their work (especially Verne) has a pretty distinctive romantic feel to it. Think the music video to Tonight, Tonight
Samuel R. Delany - Writes Scifi like only a big gay black man can. A lot of speculative work (like Baxter).
Heinlein - Yeah, he's a dirty old man but goddamit he wrote Stranger!. If you only read three Heinlein works you read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and Stranger in a Strange Land. You should probably read three Heinlein works.

I haven't yet, but that has less to do with my intimidation and more to do with the fact that I can't find the damn thing.

I'm sure at some point I'll get it off an online book shop, but the library and second hand shops are a billion times better.

Related: Has anyone tackled House of Leaves yet? I'm on the waitinglist for it at the library and I'm basically reading it because of all they hype, but I'm still a little scared of anything that's embraced wholeheartedly by 4chan.

Hinotori wrote:

Heinlein - Yeah, he's a dirty old man but goddamit he wrote Stranger!. If you only read three Heinlein works you read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and Stranger in a Strange Land. You should probably read three Heinlein works.

I'd say Time Enough for Love, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.  For continuity and weirdness.  ;)  But if you only read 1, it's gotta be Stranger in a Strange Land.

Reading Heinlein in high school totally blew my mind.  Yeah, he was a dirty old man, but he was damn smart.

I have a friend who really wanted me to read House of Leaves, but when I took a look at it on Amazon, the description irritated me so much I put it out of my mind.  I'm judgmental.

Last edited by rhyaniwyn (12-11-2006 12:37:37 PM)

Hinotori wrote:

My main interest in House of Leaves is keeping up with the literary jonses. It's what all the kewl kids are reading these days...

Haha.  You may have noticed my comment that I have an aspiration to read Vonnegut because it's so fashionable.  You'd think, with as much reading as I do, that I would have read far more "literature" (imagine that being said with a bit of a snobby accent) than I have.

*shrug*  I read Fantasy and SciFi.  And I'm sufficiently snobby about that.  Now, this could easily be a question of personal taste, but I have snobby lit-reading friends who like Buffy...and I will go on a tangent about the disservice shows like Buffy and Charmed (which I will occasionally watch with a sense of pervading guilt) do to the genre.  ...Though I suppose it's more the medium and the attitude of American TV executives that should get the blame and upon whom I should cast aspersions...

Anyway, I mentioned my distaste for House of Leaves to an English-major friend of mine...who began talking about post-post-modernist fiction with awareness of its own fictional nature.  And, I confess, I tuned out.  Some part of me doesn't want to like it.  I try to pretend I just don't want to be playing that "the bookshelf in my living room makes me look smarter than you" game, but it's really a stupid, reactionary prejudice on my part.

Is it true that some pages are printed upside-down and backwards? -_-;  When I'm reading a book, I wanna read it, not do gymnastics.

I suspected as much about the pretentious bullshit thing, but I'm pretty good at ignoring things like that if the story's good enough.

rhyaniwyn wrote:

Hinotori wrote:

My main interest in House of Leaves is keeping up with the literary jonses. It's what all the kewl kids are reading these days...

Haha.  You may have noticed my comment that I have an aspiration to read Vonnegut because it's so fashionable.  You'd think, with as much reading as I do, that I would have read far more "literature" (imagine that being said with a bit of a snobby accent) than I have.

Completely missed it and I have a hard time picturing Vonnegut in that fine literature kind of way. If he's *literature* then he has to be the only member of the club who's books include hand drawings of crude anuses. Either way, in all honesty he's been my favourite author ever since I could get my grubby hands on his books. I think I'm more adventurous with literature than most people because I'm a relatively fast reader. Even if something turns out to be pretentious crap there isn't much time lost because I can easily put away a 200 page novel in less than two hours.

Television and movies, however, are a completely different story. I have a hard time being able to justify wasting the time on those I want to watch, and I don't think I've sat through an entire episode of Buffy regardless of what anyone thinks of it.

Could be. I try not to associate with too many smart people though.

But yeah. At least you won't find any backwards text in his books. He saves his creative liberties for fucking with the editors.

Purely fluff, but I'm reading the Dresden books right now, and waiting for Hannibal Rising to come out in TPB. Has anyone picked it up yet? I know there's Hanniphiles on here, so I'd be surprised if the answer's no. I really want to hear if all the negative words are deserved, though...

I agree with Yasha on House of Leaves, to an extent. If you're willing to suspend any sort of disbelief going in, the whole story becomes sweet, and a little simplistic, but still something I very much felt empathy for.

That said, I absolutely adored the way Danielewski fucked with the reader's heads constantly. I still remember the great Hall of Text that starts around page 130, and being dragged backwards and forwards across it only to find dead-ends just made me laugh. Yes, it's pretentious, no it's not really that deep, but God it's fun. Plus, Camile Paglia hitting on a fictional character = inexplicable hilarity.

I just finished Demian and A Brief History of Time (oh my god awesome books), and am about to tackle Ulysses starting this afternoon.

Outside of that, my favourites are;
Haruki Murakami - I've only read Kafka on the Shore, but it's such a fun ride
Patrick White - an Australian author, long maligned here, who writes these loving, soulful works that make my heart fill up,
David Zindell - Pretty awesome author who mixes modern interpretations of transcendence with fantasy/sci-fi elements. Fun, if blunt about philosophy.
Umberto Eco - because Foucault's Pendulum is a wanky, know-it-all, hilarious novel. And The Name of the Rose is just as good.

Oh, and Leonard Cohen. Beautiful Losers is so absolutely lovely a book.

I've been so bad with reading the past two years... and yet I've still managed to accumulate about 60 books since moving out of home. Poor wallet, you just don't get a break.

EDIT: Oh, and definitely listen to Poe. Haunted is a whole new dimension that gives a lot of insight to the book, and also gives you a look at the situation that brought her brother to write the thing in the first place. That, and the last track almost always puts tears in my eyes.

Last edited by Almaser (12-13-2006 12:35:34 PM)

Please consider this post NWS in its entirety.

I just read American Psycho, and my feelings are very mixed. On one hand, this is a funny, funny book, especially if you have a strong stomach for things like ***NWS*** this ***NWS***. The guy goes from noting clothing designers for every item a person wears to talking about how he drilled through a girl's teeth until her jaw was a gaping black hole, and is so disconnected from reality that he won't set a rat trap without sprinkling dill on the brie. His obsessiveness is really hilarious, if you can get into the mindset to appreciate it.

Unfortunately, although it's a well-crafted book, Patrick Bateman is very unsympathetic. I'm an empathetic person, and I could not connect with Bateman. I only felt amusement, pity, and contempt for him, and I felt it made the book shallower than it otherwise could have been. This may be the problem, however-- I may be too empathetic to connect to a character that has no empathy. Also, I can't stand a person who has no appreciation for sensation, such as the taste of good food, and determines its worth by the price tag. Bateman is amusing enough to get beyond that, but still, if you want a killer that enjoys life, stick to Hannibal.

Although the mental image of Bateman getting all happy over being able to walk around with his dick so hard that a severed head can hang on it is just absolutely hilarious.

Personal_IceQueen wrote:

Yasha have you read Ellis's Lunar Park? If not...anyone who has read American Psycho or felt that it was lacking substance should check out Lunar Park, the book addresses American Psycho and how Bateman haunts Bret Easton Ellis.

Along with being a Douglas completist, I'm terribly fascinated with Bret Easton Ellis. For my college's newspaper I was able to participate in a conference with him and ask him questions, he is a funny, funny man. If I were not crushing on Gio, and if he was not Gay, I'd totally want him.

I haven't, American Psycho was my first shot at his books. While I feel ambiguous about the character of Bateman, I thoroughly enjoyed the book-- maybe I'll check out Lunar Park. I don't know much about the author, really I only know the one book and that's it.

Melusina -- you have another Anglophile Victorian fiend over here.  Ever so delicious.

Favorite books of mine would have to be Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red -- an amazing retelling of Stesichorus' Geryoneseis as a novel in verse with a decidedly homoerotic bent.  It is a gorgeous read, if not terribly melancholy.  It's certainly one of those books that put you out of your own mind, as if you're watching yourself from above.  It's been in my bag for months now; I often pull it out to read over when I have a moment.

I'm also a cliche of an Utena fan in that I adore Hesse's Demian.  But I really just love Hesse in general.  The exaggeratedness of his writing takes some getting used to, but it seems most social commentary is structured that way, and it makes the archetypes forgivable in that you realize you must take them as such: as archetypes.

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead is such a mentally sensual book to me.  Rand's eroticism is so psychological, hence why I find it so enjoyable.  Though the objectivism is bound to get heavy-handed, it's nonetheless a wonderfully structured book, and one I don't mind sloughing through when I'm afforded the time.

Also a Thomas Harris fan, though I've heard Hannibal Rising received nothing short of terrible reviews.  A shame, that.

Lastly, the bulk of this semester's reading has imparted me with a new love of the ancient Greeks.  Anything with the Atreides has me enthralled.  It's a bit sad that I now have a full psychological profile of Agamemnon from my obsessive cross-referencing.