OT: Watcha reading?

[cheech70]

In Harms Way
About the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. An act of war during a cease-fire that resulted in the deaths of 879 sailors, that happened in the most horrific ways imaginable. Amazingly however 30 something actually survived. True story, amazing read!

jaws captain quint was on that ship​

 

[SnowblindNYR]

History of the Christian Church, Volume I: Apostolic Christianity. A.D. 1-100. by Philip Schaff

Title says it all 8 volumes 600 plus pages each....

I've only read one 600+ page book in my life, haha. It was just over 700 pages. It was totally worth it though. Called "Snowball", it's Warren Buffet's bio. Probably in the Mount Rushmore of books I've read.

 

[eco's bones]

I'm currently proof reading a book by an Indian writer Deben Roy--'Brown Man in White Light' which I think is going to be published some time this year. It's good--I like it lot. Reminds me a bit of Philip Roth. I'm also reading a fictional work by Max Aub--pre Spanish Civil War.

My reading is mostly fiction but there's poetry, plays and non-fiction as well. Today I got a book by Daniele Ganser that I'm really interested in--'NATO's secret armies--Operation Gladio and terrorism in Western Europe'. A friend of mine is working on a book on Gladio. That may be a year--two years away. We're both really interested in the case of Olof Palme--the Swedish Prime Minister who ran afoul of Reagan and Thatcher and who walking home with his wife one night from a movie theater wound up being assassinated. His wife was shot as well but survived. There are a lot of curious things about that--or at least as curious as a lot of the happenings around the JFK assassination.

 

[Sooth]

Oooohh. This is my kind of thread.

I'm currently on a half year stint abroad, so having too many real books around is not an option. But I did find the local scifi bookstore and purchased The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi. So far it has been quite compelling, so I probably need to get the rest of the series (The Old Man's War) as well.

On top of my waiting list is the next book of the Expanse-series, Tiamat's Wrath, due this spring. The Expanse is also probably the best scifi-series in streaming services at the moment. Highly recommended if you're into science fiction!

Apart from fiction, I'm also a sucker for books about society and history. I'm currently listening (can't probably say "reading an audiobook"?) a book about the fall and rise of the Finnish tech-company Nokia. Good stuff. After that I'm probably picking up Antony Beevor's book about the Operation Market Garden.

Oh man, I love reading.

 

[GAGLine]

Amazon bought the rights for it. They can afford a decent budget atleast. Hopefully GoT's sucess of following the books closly (until they ran out of books) will make Amazon do the same for WoT.

A WoT series, if done right, would be amazing, but 14 books that are all 600+ pages is going to be tough.

I've love to see a series based on the Dark Elf Trilogy.

I'm currently reading The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin. I've heard lots of good things about it, but for some reason I've had a hard time getting into it.

If anyone is looking for something good to read, try Dave Duncan's "A Man of His Word" series. One of the best magic systems I've ever read.

 

[CasusBelli]

Fiction: Atlas Shrugged (for the second time)
Non—fiction: Capital in the Twenty First Century

 

[CasusBelli]

Oooohh. This is my kind of thread.

I'm currently on a half year stint abroad, so having too many real books around is not an option. But I did find the local scifi bookstore and purchased The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi. So far it has been quite compelling, so I probably need to get the rest of the series (The Old Man's War) as well.

On top of my waiting list is the next book of the Expanse-series, Tiamat's Wrath, due this spring. The Expanse is also probably the best scifi-series in streaming services at the moment. Highly recommended if you're into science fiction!

Apart from fiction, I'm also a sucker for books about society and history. I'm currently listening (can't probably say "reading an audiobook"?) a book about the fall and rise of the Finnish tech-company Nokia. Good stuff. After that I'm probably picking up Antony Beevor's book about the Operation Market Garden.

Oh man, I love reading.

Capitalism Without Capital is a great read as well.

 

[SingnBluesOnBroadway]

I’m going back and forth between “The Boys in the Boat” by Daniel James Brown and “Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen.

 

[GeorgeKaplan]

Alright, I can’t remember what I’ve read in the past year, so I’m just going to make a list of what’s on my ‘books I love/am currently reading’ shelf and a half:
Martin Amis- London Fields
Martin Amis- The Information
Raymond Chandler- The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler- Farewell, My Lovely
Raymond Chandler- The High Window
Raymond Chandler- The Lady in the Lake
Raymond Chandler- The Little Sister
Raymond Chandler- The Long Goodbye
Raymond Chandler- Playback
Cervantes- Don Quixote
Joseph Conrad- Heart of Darkness and other selected stories
Dante- The Divine Comedy
Elaine Dundy- The Dud Avocado
Elaine Dundy- The Old Man And Me
Jeffery Eugenides- The Virgin Suicides
William Faulkner- The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner- Sanctuary
Joseph Heller- Catch 22
Joseph Heller- God Knows
Joseph Heller- Picture This
Joseph Heller- Something Happened
Ernest Hemingway- The Garden of Eden
Ernest Hemingway- Islands in the Sun
Ernest Hemingway- A Farewell To Arms
Ernest Hemingway- For Whom The Bell Tolls
J.K. Huysmans- Against Nature
B.S. Johnson- Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry
James Joyce- Ulysses
Fran’s Kafka- The Trial
Malcom Lowry- Under the Volcano
Cormac McCarthy- All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy- No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy- Outer Dark
Cormac McCarthy- Suttree
Ian McGuire- The North Water
Henry Miller- Tropic of Cancer
Alberto Moravia- The Conformist
Alberto Moravia- Contempt
Vladimir Nabokov- Ada or Ardor
Vladimir Nabokov- Despair
Vladimir Nabokov- The Eye
Vladimir Nabokov- The Gift
Vladimir Nabokov- Glory
Vladimir Nabokov- Invitation to a Beheading
Vladimir Nabokov- Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov- Complete Short Stories Collection
Vladimir Nabokov- Laughter in the Dark
Flan O’Brien- At Swim, Two Birds
Philip Roth- Sabbath’s Theatre
Kurt Vonnegut- Slaughter House Five
David Foster Wallace- Infinite Jest

There’s more, and I was gonna write a little description for the ones I found the most enjoyable/interesting, but I already don’t want to type more. For the direct future I’m going to try to finish reading all of Nabokov and Heller’s novels on top of one-off books on my ‘To Read’ list

 

[eco's bones]

Alright, I can’t remember what I’ve read in the past year, so I’m just going to make a list of what’s on my ‘books I love/am currently reading’ shelf and a half:
Martin Amis- London Fields
Martin Amis- The Information
Raymond Chandler- The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler- Farewell, My Lovely
Raymond Chandler- The High Window
Raymond Chandler- The Lady in the Lake
Raymond Chandler- The Little Sister
Raymond Chandler- The Long Goodbye
Raymond Chandler- Playback
Cervantes- Don Quixote
Joseph Conrad- Heart of Darkness and other selected stories
Dante- The Divine Comedy
Elaine Dundy- The Dud Avocado
Elaine Dundy- The Old Man And Me
Jeffery Eugenides- The Virgin Suicides
William Faulkner- The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner- Sanctuary
Joseph Heller- Catch 22
Joseph Heller- God Knows
Joseph Heller- Picture This
Joseph Heller- Something Happened
Ernest Hemingway- The Garden of Eden
Ernest Hemingway- Islands in the Sun
Ernest Hemingway- A Farewell To Arms
Ernest Hemingway- For Whom The Bell Tolls
J.K. Huysmans- Against Nature
B.S. Johnson- Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry
James Joyce- Ulysses
Fran’s Kafka- The Trial
Malcom Lowry- Under the Volcano
Cormac McCarthy- All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy- No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy- Outer Dark
Cormac McCarthy- Suttree
Ian McGuire- The North Water
Henry Miller- Tropic of Cancer
Alberto Moravia- The Conformist
Alberto Moravia- Contempt
Vladimir Nabokov- Ada or Ardor
Vladimir Nabokov- Despair
Vladimir Nabokov- The Eye
Vladimir Nabokov- The Gift
Vladimir Nabokov- Glory
Vladimir Nabokov- Invitation to a Beheading
Vladimir Nabokov- Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov- Complete Short Stories Collection
Vladimir Nabokov- Laughter in the Dark
Flan O’Brien- At Swim, Two Birds
Philip Roth- Sabbath’s Theatre
Kurt Vonnegut- Slaughter House Five
David Foster Wallace- Infinite Jest

There’s more, and I was gonna write a little description for the ones I found the most enjoyable/interesting, but I already don’t want to type more. For the direct future I’m going to try to finish reading all of Nabokov and Heller’s novels on top of one-off books on my ‘To Read’ list

An excellent list. A lot of really good writers there. Just going down your list of what I've read and keep in mind I'm 61 and have been at this a long long time:

I've read Martin Amis--but not the ones you have. I have Times Arrow, Night Train and House of Meetings.

Chandler--The big sleep and Farewell my lovely.

Cervantes--Don Quixote, Exemplary stories, The vigilant sentinel (a play).

Conrad's--Heart of Darkness plus several others of his.

All of Dante's--Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

Quite a lot of Faulkner including Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary. If you like Faulkner--Dos Passos might be a good writer for you to check out though. As I lay dying is my favorite Faulkner. Go down Moses, The unvanquished, The Reivers.

Heller--Catch 22, Something Happened, Good as Gold and God Knows.

Hemingway--The sun also rises, The snows of Kilimanjaro, The old man and the sea, The Fifth column, For whom the bell tolls, A farewell to arms and To have and have not.

Huysmanns--Against Nature.

B. S. Johnson--Albert Angelo, House Mother Normal (which I didn't like), Christie Malry's own double entry (his best book) and The Unfortunates which was written with the idea of reading chapters in whatever order the reader decides to.

Joyce--Ulysses, Dubliners, A portrait of the artist as a young man, Finnegan's wake (I had a terrible time with that one and would not recommend), Exiles (a play), Collected poems.

Kafka--Amerika, The Castle, The Trial, Metamorphosis

Lowry's--Under the Volcano

McCarthy--All the pretty horses, Blood Meridian, The Gardener's Son, Suttree, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, No country for old men, The Road (my least favorite), Outer Dark, Child of God, The orchard keeper.

Miller--Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Under the roofs of Paris, The books in my life, The time of the assassins, Moloch or the Gentile World, Quiet days in Clichy.

Moravia-The lie.

Nabokov--King Queen Knave, Despair, Lolita, Laughter in the dark, Mary, Glory, Bend Sinister, Pnin, Pale Fire, The real life of Sebastian Knight, Speak Memory.

O'Brien--Stories and Plays, The poor mouth, The third Policeman, Dalkey Achives, At swim-two-birds, The hard life.

Philip Roth--The professor of desire, Portnoy's complaint, Sabbath's Theater, The ghost writer, Zuckerman unbound, American Pastoral, The human stain, The counterlife, My life as a man, Operation shylock, Indignation, Everyman, I married a communist, The great American novel, Deception, The Plot against America.

Vonnegut--Slaughterhouse five, Cat's cradle, Jailbird, Slapstick, Hocus Pocus.

Wallace--Infinite Jest, Oblivion, The girl with curious hair and the Broom of the System.

Your list hit a lot of bases for me.

 

[GeorgeKaplan]

An excellent list. A lot of really good writers there. Just going down your list of what I've read and keep in mind I'm 61 and have been at this a long long time:

I've read Martin Amis--but not the ones you have. I have Times Arrow, Night Train and House of Meetings.

Chandler--The big sleep and Farewell my lovely.

Cervantes--Don Quixote, Exemplary stories, The vigilant sentinel (a play).

Conrad's--Heart of Darkness plus several others of his.

All of Dante's--Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

Quite a lot of Faulkner including Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary. If you like Faulkner--Dos Passos might be a good writer for you to check out though. As I lay dying is my favorite Faulkner. Go down Moses, The unvanquished, The Reivers.

Heller--Catch 22, Something Happened, Good as Gold and God Knows.

Hemingway--The sun also rises, The snows of Kilimanjaro, The old man and the sea, The Fifth column, For whom the bell tolls, A farewell to arms and To have and have not.

Huysmanns--Against Nature.

B. S. Johnson--Albert Angelo, House Mother Normal (which I didn't like), Christie Malry's own double entry (his best book) and The Unfortunates which was written with the idea of reading chapters in whatever order the reader decides to.

Joyce--Ulysses, Dubliners, A portrait of the artist as a young man, Finnegan's wake (I had a terrible time with that one and would not recommend), Exiles (a play), Collected poems.

Kafka--Amerika, The Castle, The Trial, Metamorphosis

Lowry's--Under the Volcano

McCarthy--All the pretty horses, Blood Meridian, The Gardener's Son, Suttree, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, No country for old men, The Road (my least favorite), Outer Dark, Child of God, The orchard keeper.

Miller--Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Under the roofs of Paris, The books in my life, The time of the assassins, Moloch or the Gentile World, Quiet days in Clichy.

Moravia-The lie.

Nabokov--King Queen Knave, Despair, Lolita, Laughter in the dark, Mary, Glory, Bend Sinister, Pnin, Pale Fire, The real life of Sebastian Knight, Speak Memory.

O'Brien--Stories and Plays, The poor mouth, The third Policeman, Dalkey Achives, At swim-two-birds, The hard life.

Philip Roth--The professor of desire, Portnoy's complaint, Sabbath's Theater, The ghost writer, Zuckerman unbound, American Pastoral, The human stain, The counterlife, My life as a man, Operation shylock, Indignation, Everyman, I married a communist, The great American novel, Deception, The Plot against America.

Vonnegut--Slaughterhouse five, Cat's cradle, Jailbird, Slapstick, Hocus Pocus.

Wallace--Infinite Jest, Oblivion, The girl with curious hair and the Broom of the System.

Your list hit a lot of bases for me.

Most of the books I haven’t read on here are on my reading list. I still can’t tell if I like Roth or not yet, I read Portnoy’s Complaint a year or two ago and didn’t really like it and I think I gave it to my friend, I haven’t finished Sabbath’s Theatre yet but I’ve been enjoying it more than Portnoy so far. Faulkner too, but to a lesser extent. There’s a funny story about Faulkner and Chandler, Faulkner was hired to help write the screenplay for the Big Sleep and at some point he and the other writers couldn’t figure out who killed someone, so they wired Chandler and said something like “hey, we don’t know who killed this person” and he said it was character x (I’m forgetting the specific characters from the story) and Faulkner said “but it can’t be him, he was over here when the murder happened” and Chandler said “well then I don’t know either!” I went back and reread the book to see if it actually didn’t make sense, but it’s all in there

 

[eco's bones]

Most of the books I haven’t read on here are on my reading list. I still can’t tell if I like Roth or not yet, I read Portnoy’s Complaint a year or two ago and didn’t really like it and I think I gave it to my friend, I haven’t finished Sabbath’s Theatre yet but I’ve been enjoying it more than Portnoy so far. Faulkner too, but to a lesser extent. There’s a funny story about Faulkner and Chandler, Faulkner was hired to help write the screenplay for the Big Sleep and at some point he and the other writers couldn’t figure out who killed someone, so they wired Chandler and said something like “hey, we don’t know who killed this person” and he said it was character x (I’m forgetting the specific characters from the story) and Faulkner said “but it can’t be him, he was over here when the murder happened” and Chandler said “well then I don’t know either!” I went back and reread the book to see if it actually didn’t make sense, but it’s all in there

I've read a lot of Roth but he can be hit and miss. There's a standard quality with him that even of his lesser works nothing is really terrible. At least that's my view on him. But Sabbath's is one of his best. American Pastoral and The Human Stain are two other very good ones. I liked Portnoy's though and I absolutely prefer Roth over Bellow.

The first book I read of Faulkner's was As I lay dying. I found that hilarious which is not something that happens all that often in a lot of his work. Cormac McCarthy kind of borrows a bit from his prose style in books like Blood Meridian. As for American crime writing I prefer Chester Himes over Chandler. I don't mind Ellroy either---though the last book of his I read LA confidential I thought was great until the last 50 pages. I have a buddy Rick Harsch whose Voices after Evelyn is just out and reminds me of Ellroy in that it kind of walks the line between true crime and crime fiction which Ellroy sometimes does. Richard Price is another crime writer I like and I believe he wrote some of the episodes for HBO's The Wire and last year's The night of--some of his are really really good but there are a couple that kind of suck. I'd call Selby's Last Exit noir but it's not really a crime novel. International crime writers I like best are David Peace (who doesn't always write in that genre), Jean-Patrick Manchette, Eoin McNamee (he writes young adult books too), Dominique Manotti and Leif G.W. Persson. Leonardo Sciascia is great on the Mafia.

Flannery O'Connor was a terrific American writer and I've always had a thing for Charles Bukowski. It's kind of a prole thing in a way but even his poetry has got this gnarly sense of humor all throughout. Wallace's Infinite Jest is a real trip---a great, great book.

 

[TheDirtyH]

@GeorgeKaplan your list is great. I love Amis, but more his essays than his novels. Money is a great one, but Time's Arrow got old very quick — one hundred pages too long. Nabokov, Joyce, and Kafka are literal Gods.

I rarely read American writers so I don't know first-hand a lot of your list. Vonnegut is a great one. Portnoy's Complaint similarly left me unimpressed. Infinite Jest is just too much book right now. I've had Catch-22 and The Big Sleep on my list for a while and based on you and @eco's bones it seems like I should give them a try.

Personally just finished Sally Mann's memoir, Hold Still, which is very beautiful, filled with amazing images, and surprisingly excellent writing and some legit crazy family histories (shit covered, murder suicide crime scene crazy).

I work at a bookstore and I run a bookclub. I'm working right now on next month's book, Vernon God Little, which has proven insanely topical to 2019, though it's from 2003, and very funny (and at times disgusting). I also have to read like 6 or 7 at a time though. I've got some others on deck: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Great Expectations, One-Dimensional Man, John Berger's Collected Essays, and Confessions of Zeno.

 

[eco's bones]

@GeorgeKaplan your list is great. I love Amis, but more his essays than his novels. Money is a great one, but Time's Arrow got old very quick — one hundred pages too long. Nabokov, Joyce, and Kafka are literal Gods.

I rarely read American writers so I don't know first-hand a lot of your list. Vonnegut is a great one. Portnoy's Complaint similarly left me unimpressed. Infinite Jest is just too much book right now. I've had Catch-22 and The Big Sleep on my list for a while and based on you and @eco's bones it seems like I should give them a try.

Personally just finished Sally Mann's memoir, Hold Still, which is very beautiful, filled with amazing images, and surprisingly excellent writing and some legit crazy family histories (**** covered, murder suicide crime scene crazy).

I work at a bookstore and I run a bookclub. I'm working right now on next month's book, Vernon God Little, which has proven insanely topical to 2019, though it's from 2003, and very funny (and at times disgusting). I also have to read like 6 or 7 at a time though. I've got some others on deck: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Great Expectations, One-Dimensional Man, John Berger's Collected Essays, and Confessions of Zeno.

Over the years I've probably read as much in translation as I have English speaking writers. My gateway many many years ago was Louis Ferdinand Celine---a very controversial writer mainly for kind of throwing his lot in with the Nazi's during WWII--though one could argue that the debilitating injuries from WWI and his medical self treatment left him walking a line between sanity and insanity. A great stylist though. I don't think Heller writes Catch 22 if there's no Journey to the end of the Night.

Raymond Queneau--the founder of Oulipo is another big favorite. Iceland's Halldor Laxness is very important to me. The Chilean poet Nicanor Parra. Roberto Arlt--the writer of the Seven Madmen and the Flamethrowers. There's a number of Latin Americans like Vargas Llosa, Roberto Bolano and Ricardo Piglia. Lots of French writers--J.M.G. Le Clezio. The Belgian Louis Paul Boon. Portugal's Antonio Lobo Antunes.

 

[SnowblindNYR]

@GeorgeKaplan your list is great. I love Amis, but more his essays than his novels. Money is a great one, but Time's Arrow got old very quick — one hundred pages too long. Nabokov, Joyce, and Kafka are literal Gods.

I rarely read American writers so I don't know first-hand a lot of your list. Vonnegut is a great one. Portnoy's Complaint similarly left me unimpressed. Infinite Jest is just too much book right now. I've had Catch-22 and The Big Sleep on my list for a while and based on you and @eco's bones it seems like I should give them a try.

Personally just finished Sally Mann's memoir, Hold Still, which is very beautiful, filled with amazing images, and surprisingly excellent writing and some legit crazy family histories (**** covered, murder suicide crime scene crazy).

I work at a bookstore and I run a bookclub. I'm working right now on next month's book, Vernon God Little, which has proven insanely topical to 2019, though it's from 2003, and very funny (and at times disgusting). I also have to read like 6 or 7 at a time though. I've got some others on deck: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Great Expectations, One-Dimensional Man, John Berger's Collected Essays, and Confessions of Zeno.

Is there something you don't like about American writers? I would have thought a book is a book for the most part.

 

[RangerBlues]

Charles Bukowski is always at my fingertips.

The worst hard time by Timothy Egan

 

[SnowblindNYR]

Anyone can recommend some non-fiction? One type of book I really like is business biographies. But lately, have been expanding. Still haven't been adventurous enough to go into fiction. So something interesting and easy to read in non-fiction would suffice for now.

 

[EdJovanovski]

Fiction: Atlas Shrugged (for the second time)
Non—fiction: Capital in the Twenty First Century

I’m a big fan of the first but not the second
Quite the contrasting duo lol

 

[GeorgeKaplan]

I've read a lot of Roth but he can be hit and miss. There's a standard quality with him that even of his lesser works nothing is really terrible. At least that's my view on him. But Sabbath's is one of his best. American Pastoral and The Human Stain are two other very good ones. I liked Portnoy's though and I absolutely prefer Roth over Bellow.

The first book I read of Faulkner's was As I lay dying. I found that hilarious which is not something that happens all that often in a lot of his work. Cormac McCarthy kind of borrows a bit from his prose style in books like Blood Meridian. As for American crime writing I prefer Chester Himes over Chandler. I don't mind Ellroy either---though the last book of his I read LA confidential I thought was great until the last 50 pages. I have a buddy Rick Harsch whose Voices after Evelyn is just out and reminds me of Ellroy in that it kind of walks the line between true crime and crime fiction which Ellroy sometimes does. Richard Price is another crime writer I like and I believe he wrote some of the episodes for HBO's The Wire and last year's The night of--some of his are really really good but there are a couple that kind of suck. I'd call Selby's Last Exit noir but it's not really a crime novel. International crime writers I like best are David Peace (who doesn't always write in that genre), Jean-Patrick Manchette, Eoin McNamee (he writes young adult books too), Dominique Manotti and Leif G.W. Persson. Leonardo Sciascia is great on the Mafia.

Flannery O'Connor was a terrific American writer and I've always had a thing for Charles Bukowski. It's kind of a prole thing in a way but even his poetry has got this gnarly sense of humor all throughout. Wallace's Infinite Jest is a real trip---a great, great book.

Reading all of Hemingway’s novels and then Blood Meridian was what got me interested in reading Faulkner and I knew As I Lay Dying was like the one to read, so for whatever reason I wanted to start somewhere in the middle before I read it, but it’s definitely going to be the one I read next. Blood Meridian also definitely has my interest at an all time high for reading Moby Dick, but the one thing stopping me from actually sitting down and reading it so far is that I know there’s a bunch of non-fictiony chapters about whaling that I don’t really want to read.

I’m not sure where I stand on crime novels just yet either, those Chandler novels are some of my favorite books, but I don’t like true crime stuff, and I’ve read like five Ross MacDonald books because he’s supposed to be like the ‘successor’ to Chandler and Hammett but there isn’t any character in his books that aren’t completely crooked. They’re all just over the top with cynicism and bleakness and they make me miserable by the time I get to the end of them.

I also read Wise Blood a year or two ago and a short story or two and still want to read all of O’Connor’s short stories at some point. If I’m remembering right, the only reason I haven’t is because they did some weird thing in the edition that’s at the Barnes and Noble near me where all the pages are supposed to look like they’re torn at the right edge and it drives me crazy so I never end up buying it

 

[GeorgeKaplan]

@GeorgeKaplan your list is great. I love Amis, but more his essays than his novels. Money is a great one, but Time's Arrow got old very quick — one hundred pages too long. Nabokov, Joyce, and Kafka are literal Gods.

I rarely read American writers so I don't know first-hand a lot of your list. Vonnegut is a great one. Portnoy's Complaint similarly left me unimpressed. Infinite Jest is just too much book right now. I've had Catch-22 and The Big Sleep on my list for a while and based on you and @eco's bones it seems like I should give them a try.

Personally just finished Sally Mann's memoir, Hold Still, which is very beautiful, filled with amazing images, and surprisingly excellent writing and some legit crazy family histories (**** covered, murder suicide crime scene crazy).

I work at a bookstore and I run a bookclub. I'm working right now on next month's book, Vernon God Little, which has proven insanely topical to 2019, though it's from 2003, and very funny (and at times disgusting). I also have to read like 6 or 7 at a time though. I've got some others on deck: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Great Expectations, One-Dimensional Man, John Berger's Collected Essays, and Confessions of Zeno.

I love Amis’ essays too, his negative review of Hannibal is one of the best things I’ve ever read. On a similar note, Vonnegut’s positive (but depressed) review of Heller’s Something Happened is amazing. Here’s the link if you’re interested: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on 'Something Happened'
Catch 22 might be my favorite book of all time, but I will say the structure of it turns a lot of people off, if you decide to read it, the first 75-100 pages can feel like a chore, but once you get that far you kind of get used to it’s rhythm and it’s a breeze the rest of the way. And I might start re-reading The Big Sleep in a week or so, I have a friend who wants to get into Chandler and I’ve been in a funk of not reading the past two or three weeks so I offered to read along with them to help both of our plights.

 

[eco's bones]

Reading all of Hemingway’s novels and then Blood Meridian was what got me interested in reading Faulkner and I knew As I Lay Dying was like the one to read, so for whatever reason I wanted to start somewhere in the middle before I read it, but it’s definitely going to be the one I read next. Blood Meridian also definitely has my interest at an all time high for reading Moby Dick, but the one thing stopping me from actually sitting down and reading it so far is that I know there’s a bunch of non-fictiony chapters about whaling that I don’t really want to read.

I’m not sure where I stand on crime novels just yet either, those Chandler novels are some of my favorite books, but I don’t like true crime stuff, and I’ve read like five Ross MacDonald books because he’s supposed to be like the ‘successor’ to Chandler and Hammett but there isn’t any character in his books that aren’t completely crooked. They’re all just over the top with cynicism and bleakness and they make me miserable by the time I get to the end of them.

I also read Wise Blood a year or two ago and a short story or two and still want to read all of O’Connor’s short stories at some point. If I’m remembering right, the only reason I haven’t is because they did some weird thing in the edition that’s at the Barnes and Noble near me where all the pages are supposed to look like they’re torn at the right edge and it drives me crazy so I never end up buying it

Read Moby Dick many years ago--keeping in mind that the Pequod sailed out of New Bedford Mass. and that was my first station when I was in the Coast Guard on a pre-WWII seaplane tender (about the size of a destroyer) named the Unimak (after an island in the Bering Sea). It was decommissioned about 20 or so years ago. Really literature is an ocean and it'll be impossible no matter how hard you try to get to everything. I liked Moby Dick but I wouldn't swear by it but I do know plenty of people whose opinions I respect who do swear by it.

One of the places I go to for books is abebooks.com. A lot of the books are used but generally you can save a lot of money through sellers like that and FWIW it's not unusual to buy a book at B&N to find it's banged up or flawed--so that's what I do. It's pretty much an independent bookseller database.

Crime books come in a lot of ways--some are police procedurals--Chandler was basically always a private dick. You get some told from a criminal or journalist point of view. The originator of the true crime book wasn't Truman Capote---it was an Argentine Rodolfo Walsh whose Operation Massacre preceded In cold blood by several years. Walsh was a journalist who ran into this guy in a bar who had a very unique story to tell and then Walsh tracked down other corroborators and it turned out very embarrassingly for the Argentine government. Walsh by the way was murdered and his body disappeared in 1977 during Argentina's dirty war and military dictatorship.

 

[coz21]

Just finished Babylon's Ashes(The Expanse). It was excellent as per usual. Very interested to see where it goes. I'm probably going to do a reread of Brandon Sanderson's work at some point. He's the one who finished WoT after Jordan's death. For those who like ASOIAF and WoT I highly recommend getting into him. He's incredibly prolific and unlike GRRM will almost definitely finish his huge 10 700 page book series.

 

[ColonialsHockey10]

Just finished a great book called Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. It’s about the great wars of Africa in the 90s in the Congo that were kind of swept under the rug. All started as a result of the genocide in Rwanda.

Ive been to Rwanda a few times (and loved it), and most recently visited the Congo, so maybe the book resonates with me more, but anyone interested in the continent should give it a read. The author interviews a bunch of former warlords and corrupt politicians from multiple countries. Makes it real tough to point fingers at the conflict (except the Belgians!).

 

[Crease]

Anyone can recommend some non-fiction? One type of book I really like is business biographies. But lately, have been expanding. Still haven't been adventurous enough to go into fiction. So something interesting and easy to read in non-fiction would suffice for now.

I really liked Shoe Dog, which is the story of Nike.

 

[Crease]

A game changer for me was signing up with the New York Public Library. You qualify if you live or work in the city. Now I can download any book I want into Kindle on a whim, and simply renew it in three week's time if I need. I have sampled so many new writers and genres that I never would have if I had to pay per book. A seriously great public service.