let's_talk_about_books no reason okay? cool. there are lots. so many. too many. and i have a craving to read more of them these days. maybe because it's january and so far i have more free time. but i'd like to try committing to one book at a time, which has been a challenge for me (this is excluding books published by my place of work). but there's so much that i wish i could absorb stories in seconds. what i feel like reading at the moment is a novel, ideally character-driven and about people (rather than historical or place-focused, etc.), not so long that it'll take me forever, and interesting without being super-dense. and, a page-turner. demanding? me? never. if any of you blatherfolk have book info, likes, dislikes, etc., please share. because who doesn't like a book discussion by, let's face it, internet-people who probably have better taste than most? 140106 ... no reason i guess it's already been done/being done over here: http://blather.newdream.net/red/r/reading_now.html and etc. but i suppose what i'm most interested in is recommendations. or maybe i'm just tired. wheeeee. 140106 ... nr i mean over at reading_now. sheesh. 140106 ... raze i don't think there be any serious overlap between here and thar, pirate speakingly. there can never be too many blathes about good books. as for stuff i've recently_read that might fit the bill, i thought "winter's bone" and "we have always lived in the castle" were both pretty great and pretty page-turner-ish, for different reasons. "castle" does this slow-build of creepiness that's a lot of fun and ends in an unexpected but satisfying place, and "winter's bone" actually made me fear for the main character, which doesn't happen often even when i'm engaged. to be married. to an emu. if you like a good dystopia, one i find myself returning to every few years is stephen king's "the long walk". i'm not sure how well his other books would hold up for me now (i was a huge fan as a teenager), but there's something about this one book that's stuck. maybe it's that there's no supernatural business going on and it's all about the characters. some inspiration for "the hunger games" might have been drawn from it, too, now that i think of it. there probably aren't many teenagers alive as articulate and knowledgable as the ones in "the long walk", but i think you kind of get swept up in the story and forget that after a while. i need to read more comedies. all these books are pretty dark... 140106 ... raze and now i've got that salt n pepa song stuck in my head…the one that goes: "let's talk about books, baby let's talk about libraries" 140106 ... no reason thanks for the recommendations. i was actually thinking about "winter's bone" and also "winter's tale" (wait, what season are we in?). i do also like books that are interesting and insightful without being overly dark or overly funny. i read something recently in which someone said it was the sign of an inexperienced writer to add tragedies in a story, like it's a crutch for not being confident in the quality your writing. obviously not always true, but probably at least sometimes true. i'm generally not a huge fan of dystopia (i read the first hunger games, and while it was an interesting read, it wasn't really for me, and i have no inclination to read the follow-up books). i don't rule it out though. the bookish remix of the salt-n-pepa song should be played in school libraries everywhere. 140106 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Something well-plotted, with a social if not strictly sociable cast of characters, is Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (1905) if you're into kickin' it old school. It's the first book I finished this year. Basically, the main character is a single woman, Lily, 29 at the start of the book, middle-class in income but trying to stay in high society. It isn't just pointed in the direction of "Oh, society is superficial." It has smaller points coming out of it in all directions, like a dodecahedron or one of those spiny fish. For example, you also get the sense that Lily's love interest is snobby in a different way since he scorns the "fashionable" set. And the potential feminist points of the fish are that a) thinking that the social contract is men give money, women give sex leads to all sorts of problems (and there are some people who hold to this equation even today) and b) some of the book's conflicts could be avoided if women could call the shots on Wall Street too. Oh yeah, and have decent job training programs. 140107 ... e_o_i "Potential feminist points of the fish." Right. But speaking of Old School, there's also an interesting book of that name by Tobias Wolff. For being written a few years ago, the writing style seems at first old-fashioned, but there are unexpected twists and turns. And a funny, almost surreal scene where Ayn Rand visits the narrator's school (and looks scornfully at him because he has a runny nose, and, you know, survival of the fittest.) 140107 ... e_o_i On the SF front, I enjoyed the first two Hunger Games books, as an exciting and immersive sort of read, but I didn't finish the third. It seemed the author bit off more than she could chew, imaginary-world-wise, and there was more explanation than immersion. But I had the same problem with Arthur C. Clarke's 3001, the last of the 2001 series. Right now I'm reading Flowers of Algernon. Some of its psychology is suspect - I don't think there's any way even a genius could learn 10 + languages in a months - but the concept leaves food for thought, and the fact that I feel like grabbing the narrator by the neck and bashing his head against a wall feels like a good thing. Not a good thing for me to do, I mean, but a good thing that the writer can make me feel successfully frustrated with the character and not the book itself. 140107 ... e_o_i word check No, no, no, it's Flowers FOR Algernon! By Daniel Keyes. (Grabs her intellect and bashes it against a wall.) That's better. 140107 ... e_o_i Oh yeah, and The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky (see reading_now.) But I suppose all this bombardment is counter-productive! 140107 ... no reason not counter-productive at all (at least, not for me -- right now i much prefer looking up these books than doing work). all of these sound interesting, especially the bronsky and wolff titles. thanks for the insight! i went to the library yesterday and got a random selection... hemingway's 'the old man and the sea,' michael chabon's 'telegraph avenue,' anthony de sa's 'barnacle love,' and a book called 'the typewriter girl' by alison atlee that i thought sounded interesting. i also want to read the new neil gaiman novel. baby steps, no_reason. one page at a time. 140107 ... nr i've been vaguely curious about 'flowers for algernon,' but i guess not enough to pick it up? curious to hear your review once finished, e_o_i. 140107 ... e_o_i Cool! I actually left it at Dorval library last week. Apparently I was too lazy to renew it. I'm trying to finish Black by George Elliott Clarke (poetry) tomorrow so I can go to the library to exchange things. You'd think all this reading would give me better grammar. "In a months," indeed! 140107 ... unhinged (the) dinner by hermann koch 140107 ... unhinged (for some reason a lot of the books ive been reading in the past year have been central european historical fictions set during the wwii era; i think it is partially because my heritage smacks me in the face regularly here in seattle. the amount of times people have assumed i speak russian has taken on mythic proportions; to the point where i am inspired to learn...but anyways. if you feel in the mood for historically inspired slavic fiction check out: danilo kis irene nemirovsky andrei gelasimov it seems like there has been a serious english translation effort from cyrillic languages lately. maybe it is a symptom of the iron curtain crumbling...) 140108 what's it to you? who go blather from