Das Book: the very new reading thread

[Andrew_TSKS]

dude, milly, what you're hearing is the voice of people who do not read in order to experience a good story but instead to admire the proficiency with which individual words were formed into sentences. you know, the type of people who are totally stoked when the way a story's written makes it harder to figure out what the story's about because you keep getting lost in the sentences.

you and me, we like a good story. we're philistines.

[miles and davy-- ]

[alistarr*]

speaking of which i started the latest terry pratchett and it's been pretty good thus far. i wish there weren't little summaries of everything that's about to happen at the top of each chapter heading though. i mean, they're funny, but reading them before the chapter kind of spoils things for me, and reading them after just isn't going to happen.

[davy]

dude, milly, what you're hearing is the voice of people who do not read in order to experience a good story but instead to admire the proficiency with which individual words were formed into sentences. you know, the type of people who are totally stoked when the way a story's written makes it harder to figure out what the story's about because you keep getting lost in the sentences.

you and me, we like a good story. we're philistines.

[miles and davy-- ]

listen! dudes, it's not that i don't fucking TRY. i don't sit around all day with derrida in my left hand and benjamin in my right and my feet on an upholstered footstool. i LOVE a good story! but if a book is written with bad grammar and repetitive prose, etc (like neverwhere was, and some stephen king is...i wish he would just fucking drop the internal monologe italics, already!), it just gets in my damn way and it pisses me off. it takes away my enjoyment of whatever story happens to be inconvenienced by it. it's not that i turn my nose up at it, it's that i want it to work for me and when it doesn't, it creates frustration.

my only qualification for writers is that they be pretty good writers. george r.r. martin, dan simmons, ray bradbury (It was a pleasure to burn.), bill bryson, philip pullman...these are examples of good, popular storytellers who can fucking write a shining sentence when they want to. shining sentences get me off, yes, but they get me off a lot more if they're moving along in service of a cracking plot!

i'm on the team, guys! honest!

as for "pure literary worth"...yeah, it's a pretentious catch phrase, but it's also what a stephen king book needs to have if it wants to get taught in an american lit course. i didn't say i enjoyed misery more for it, just that i thought it had some. after the shining--which i did read for a "novel in film" class as an undergrad--it is a strong 2nd place for me.

[davy]

and now, to completely contradict that post, my latest library haul:



(probably the snobbiest thing i've read in years...but i do like this guy)




(used to love this guy when he was writing sci-fi for hippies)




(been loving this cover for years...time to see what's inside)

[slow west vultures]

u read bks about boys in little dresses.  clearly we can't take you're opinion seriously.  hater.   

[C of heartbreak]

Austerlitz was actually the book I was referring to up thread when I mentioned "300-page books that gave me a lot more trouble than Infinite Jest," though I think it was actually around 400 pages, and to be fair the professor whose class I read it for had a fog of boringness that sunk around everything we read.

[davy]

i had a jittery, sweaty, brilliant professor teach sebald's vertigo, and i don't remember enjoying it immensely at the time, but in retrospect, it was strangely readable. it really stuck with me and i remember it fondly. so i knew where to turn when i felt that my brain needed some exercise.

[rockmeamadeus]

I just finished reading the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (read it several years ago, just bought a el cheapo copy from Borders so I read it again).  That is some breathtaking shit. 

NICE. I used that a lot in my thesis on populist revolutions... mainly the part where he's like ''industrial proletariat is where it's AT! the peasantry are merely a rural sack of potatoes! BAH!''

One of my favorite marx throwdowns. Rural sack of potatoes? HARSH.

I'm still reading The Brothers K (David James Duncan) and it's AWESOME. Like Thomas Wolfe and Tom Robbins collabed on a book about baseball and God.

[YojimboMonkey]

dan simmons

Dude are we the only 2 people on the Dan Simmons train in this joint?  Seems like every time I drop a Dan Simmons recommendation on someone here it falls on deaf ears.

Guys, the dude can straight-up write.  And tell a story.  And build a world.  And scare the fuck out of you in a way that Stephen King used to do.  And if you don't like science fiction, read his horror novels.  If you don't like horror, read his hard-boiled crime thrillers.  If you don't like any of that, read some historical suspense or a collection of his short stories.

[guanajuato]

ooh, i loves dan simmons.

[andronicus]

I just finished reading the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (read it several years ago, just bought a el cheapo copy from Borders so I read it again).  That is some breathtaking shit. 

NICE. I used that a lot in my thesis on populist revolutions... mainly the part where he's like ''industrial proletariat is where it's AT! the peasantry are merely a rural sack of potatoes! BAH!''

One of my favorite marx throwdowns. Rural sack of potatoes? HARSH.

Definitely one of Marx's harshest burns and that's saying something, considering in Capital he tended to end each chapter with a mad sick burn of some shitty economist.  I read the German for something or other project a few years ago, and the quote you're referring to is one of a handful of phrases of Marx that sticks with me even now, something like: So the mass of the French people [the Parzellenbauern, free-holding petty farmers] build their power only by simple addition... "...wie ein Sack von Kartoffeln einen Kartoffelsack bildet."

I mean, come on guys.  That is sick.

[guanajuato]

dude, milly, what you're hearing is the voice of people who do not read in order to experience a good story but instead to admire the proficiency with which individual words were formed into sentences. you know, the type of people who are totally stoked when the way a story's written makes it harder to figure out what the story's about because you keep getting lost in the sentences.

you and me, we like a good story. we're philistines.

[miles and davy-- ]

listen! dudes, it's not that i don't fucking TRY. i don't sit around all day with derrida in my left hand and benjamin in my right and my feet on an upholstered footstool. i LOVE a good story! but if a book is written with bad grammar and repetitive prose, etc (like neverwhere was, and some stephen king is...i wish he would just fucking drop the internal monologe italics, already!), it just gets in my damn way and it pisses me off. it takes away my enjoyment of whatever story happens to be inconvenienced by it. it's not that i turn my nose up at it, it's that i want it to work for me and when it doesn't, it creates frustration.

my only qualification for writers is that they be pretty good writers. george r.r. martin, dan simmons, ray bradbury (It was a pleasure to burn.), bill bryson, philip pullman...these are examples of good, popular storytellers who can fucking write a shining sentence when they want to. shining sentences get me off, yes, but they get me off a lot more if they're moving along in service of a cracking plot!

i'm on the team, guys! honest!

as for "pure literary worth"...yeah, it's a pretentious catch phrase, but it's also what a stephen king book needs to have if it wants to get taught in an american lit course. i didn't say i enjoyed misery more for it, just that i thought it had some. after the shining--which i did read for a "novel in film" class as an undergrad--it is a strong 2nd place for me.

gaiman has more crossover potential into the 'literary worth' folks world than he knows what to do with...

[elpollodiablo]

Yay economics

Woo

[Ah_Pook]

i dunno if this is super old or what but this is hilarious

[andronicus]

Yay economics

Woo

I'm going to practice simultenous hugging/cock-punching so I will have the appropriate greeting to hand in case we ever meet.

You cock.

[elpollodiablo]

[auto-da-fey]

I'm still reading The Brothers K (David James Duncan) and it's AWESOME. Like Thomas Wolfe and Tom Robbins collabed on a book about baseball and God.

Oh man, I've been meaning to read that ever since being assigned his The River Why my first semester of college about a decade ago, but even though I've had a copy since before Monica blew Bill, I have yet to get around to it. It's pretty sad to think about how many books I have packed away in my mother's basement that I'll probably never read unless I wind up paralyzed or otherwise confined to a bed for the rest of my life.

[rockmeamadeus]

read it! you bastard! it's awesome!

[Andrew_TSKS]

i dunno if this is super old or what but this is hilarious

you might be really surprised to find out how often people come into my store and ask about "renting books". and there's even a library two blocks away.

[davy]

gaiman has more crossover potential into the 'literary worth' folks world than he knows what to do with...

but oddly, in my experience, it's more for his sandman stuff than for anything without pictures.

[girl]

dan simmons

Dude are we the only 2 people on the Dan Simmons train in this joint?  Seems like every time I drop a Dan Simmons recommendation on someone here it falls on deaf ears.

That's not true. I have a bunch of Dan Simmons in the "books" section of the lists on my phone. I'm just not allowed to buy any more books until I read the ones I already have at home waiting to be read.

[davy]

THE TERROR THE TERROR THE TERROR!

(probably the best 4 million page book i've ever read.)

[girl]

That's on the list already!

edit:
(. . . and I just ordered it from Amazon because I have no willpower whatsoever. While I was there, I also ordered Hardcase, because that was also on my list. Now I really, really can't buy any more books until I read the ones I already have. Seriously. No more buying books!)

[Ah_Pook]

the terror would have been better without the fantasy element. or if that part of the storsy was... better i guess? i dunno, it was ok overall but it just never really gelled for me.

i like his sci fi work a lot, but i have some reservations with it. i mainly like more hard sci fi, and his stuff is basically fantasy novels that happen to have robots and whatnot in them. plus large helpings of whatever random literary analysis/bizzare shit he feels like throwing in there. they always make for an interesting read though, so yknow. the ilium/olympos books are totally batshit insane, for example. i would highly recommend reading through them, if even just for wtf value.

Carrion Comforts was also very good, on a horror tip. i've been meaning to check out some of his other horror work, but most of it seems to be about vampires and that is about the last thing i would ever want to read about personally.

[davy]

the terror would have been better without the fantasy element. or if that part of the storsy was... better i guess? i dunno, it was ok overall but it just never really gelled for me.

fantasy element? are you talking about the ritualistic stuff? because that was awesome.

everything else about it is either A) historic narrative of arctic exploration (also awesome), or B) the very scary monster (way, way awesome).