Catcher in the Rye, apart from being an accurate depiction of adolescent confusion, did nothing whatsoever for me.
I suspect that was the point, but ever since I came to TTLG, I've felt like I'd relate more to surprise buttsex comics featuring gay unicorns, six-limbed cats, and the unhealthy tendency to shove pictures of questionable-looking dildos in unlikely places, so my opinion might be slightly coloured.
Celestine Prophecy.
Painful shit to wade through, that.
Summary: I...uh...fuck it, I don't remember really. The characters mentioned ENERGY a lot. And coincidences. Or something along the lines of "dude are you digging this energy?!"
I'd probably have liked it better if I was high or something.
Just starting Sandman, my room mate has all the volumes and I've never read any Neil Gaiman.
Enjoy Sandman - I recently reread it (mainly because I got the four volumes of Absolute Sandman) and think it's by far the best thing Gaiman's done. It's got its ups and downs, and it only really takes off at the end of volume 1, but it's well worth it.
Just finished China Miéville's The Scar, which I enjoyed a lot, although I prefer his more politically minded novels (this one was more of an escapist romp). I've now started on historian Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, which I'm hoping will be an interesting way of becoming less ignorant about economic issues. Ferguson's pretty good at writing readable books.
I saw his Ascent of Money documentaries when they were broadcast here in the UK; if the book is anything like those, it should be pretty interesting.Originally Posted by Thirith
An ex-girlfriend lately gave me "Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded" by Marquis de Sade as a present... Sort of late hint I guess. Anyway, it's an entertaining mix of explicit sex and philosophical musings. The latter aren't much of a revelation for a modern enlightened atheist, but then they're delivered by nuns in-between fucking the hell out of each other. Good read for a train ride.
Justine is better.
My impression, based primarily on second-hand information and bad films, was always that de Sade's writings were of the kind that shocks the easily shocked but is pretty boring to everyone else exactly because it's obvious he's trying to be shocking, and relatively facile philosophically. From what you're saying it sounds like I might want to reconsider.
(By the way, Kolya, is your name based on the film of that title? I only saw it recently, which is why I'm probably a decade late with the question.)
I'll see about Justine once I'm through with Juliette. Even if it's the wrong way around, it's just that I have Juliette now.
(My name is the regular shortform of my real (Russian) forename. I'm not Russian myself but was named after one of Dostoevsky's Karamasow Brothers. I heard good things about that movie 'Kolya' but haven't seen it myself yet.)
Books don't catch me easy, I'm reading a book called piraatit (Pirates), wrote by Ilkka Remes. I'm not really fast about it since I've read just about 80 pages within 2 months, and propobly will take me another lightyear to read it.
If there would be a book based on Thief series, you bet I'd read it in a day max.
I'm pretty sure there are a few medieval novels about thieves. Like this one.
It's well worth checking out. I definitely like its combination of gruffness with heartfelt sentiment; the former keeps the latter from getting saccharine, the latter provides a highly effective contrast to the former. And the acting is beautiful, especially by the kid (no comparison to phony precocious kids in so many Hollywood productions).
There's plenty of books with dashing rogues in them if you can stomach the romance novel variety
You could always go dig up the Thieves World books. The character Hanse is more or less that setting's version of Garrett.
Last book I read was Snail on the Slope by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (they are probably best known for their novel Roadside Picnic which was turned into a movie Stalker by Tarkovsky). I must say that this was one of the strangest books I ever read. Hard to make out what's really happening in the book or what's it about.
I've just finished everything we had in the bookcases of Hella Haasse, in my opinion one of the only living Dutch writers which books deserve to be translated.
Anyone of you ever read something of her?
Just finished The Big Time by Fritz Leiber: Soldiers in The Change War (time travel war) get some R&R at a rest stop (the location for the entire story), and the collected characters need to deal with a crisis. Much complaining ensues about how much this time travel stuff sucks. Much exposition ensues about how a time war works. Much talking in pidgin English generously sprinkled with foreign lingo and anachronisms ensues. Characters are assholes to each other repeatedly, and form little cliques.
It plays out a lot like The Boys In the Band, but with time travel instead of homosexuality.
Finished The Road. That was some cheery December reading!
Yes, but I am a bit surprised you are being so hard on dutch literature, there is an absolute wealth of talent.
I finished it this weekend (after taking a brief break into a Data Warehousing book for work), and I think it is an excellent novel. I really did not find the violence disturbing or the like - although it was certainly shocking at times, but I think the shock factor was the casualness of the violence... the seeming acceptance of it by everyone in the geography of the story. The richness of the history in the story is quite well done... you can tell McCarthy did his homework.
I do like books with an interpretive ending as this one has... after some very good discussion regarding violence and mankind's perpetuation of it, the ending thus leaves quite a bit of room for guesswork as to what happened.
I also liked how the story was initially told from one character (the kid) and then zooms out so to speak to show the nature of crowd violence with the scalp hunters marauding through the desert. It really gives a sense of being sucked up into crowd violence, and the kid's individuality only comes out again at the end. The contrast between the kid, who is anything but a hero, and the judge, who is both incredibly villainous and charismatic at the same time, is remarkable.
I liked this book so much that I read through The Road this weekend. The Road is so much more simply written, and I really liked it. Very simple and easy but refreshing. The scene in the middle of the book where the two men and the pregnant woman are marching down the road and what happened next was very shocking to me... much more so than anything in Blood Meridian. The Road offers a great look at humanity from a different angle. I haven't felt such sympathy for characters in a while.
I'm thinking of staying with McCarthy for a while and picking up All the Pretty Horses.
Almost finished with The Hellfire Conspiracy, fourth book in the Barker & Llewelyn series by Will Thomas.
Nuth how are those? Never heard of them until you just posted. Look interesting.
As best as I can figure I'm about halfway through the third book in the Ciaphas Cain omnibus. So far it's been a great read, and I'm beginning to suspect that almost all the 40K fluff is Imperial propaganda of some sort, and that the 40K universe as seen through Cain's eyes is the real thing.
Maybe I'm being too hard, but when I look in shops I rarely see anything new that sounds good. Most of the time just simple thrillers. The last dutch book that was recently written and that I enjoyed was Het diner (The diner) by Herman Koch.
I think it's just me and I guess I'm more a fan of the ideas written in books some decades ago. It just feels for me like literature in Holland is dying.
They're not bad. Not a lot of depth to them, but Will Thomas spins a decent tale. If you enjoy Sherlock Holmes, you'd probably like them. The two lead characters are pretty well-done. Barker(the Holmes of the series) has spent time in Asia, and the author mines that aspect of the character to good effect. Llewelyn(Barker's Watson) has been psychologically damaged by tragedy in his recent past and is recovering from that.
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