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⫸STICKY⫷ Books - Authors & Books Discussion

charlie clean said:
Good taste. Read 'em all, I'm old enough to have had time to do so. On Pychon, what about Vineland?
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That was my first Pynchon book. Holy shit that was some dense reading. It was all worth it in the end, but no writer has ever frustrated me the way Pynchon does.

I believe he can get all of the genius of his message across without being so fucking pedantic and esoteric about everything.
 
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino (novel)

I have been reading Italo Calvino’s “book” titled Invisible Cities. I hesitate to call it a book though, its more of a long poetic conversation between two people. Each city description offers some type of philosophy or insight to life, humanity or even to the nature of words themselves.

It took a second to get use to the form, and get an idea for what he was going for, but this book is highly enjoyable if you read it maybe 2-3 pages a day. One or two city descriptions to start you off in the morning and plant an intelectual conversation in your head about life. then do the same the next day, almost like a diary but in reverse.

anyone else read this or any other of Calvino's works. Just wondering about others thoughts.

the dude oozes aesthetics and meaning in every sentence.
 
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Just finished Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp. I'm currently reading her book Appetites now. She's really helped me come to terms with a lot of stuff going on in my life and head; I'd recommend her to anyone.
 
Diane Ackerman: i like mentioning her, or buying multiples of ' Natural History of the Senses ' to give away - shes that good.
 
grimble crumble said:
I have been reading Italo Calvino’s “book” titled Invisible Cities. I hesitate to call it a book though, its more of a long poetic conversation between two people. Each city description offers some type of philosophy or insight to life, humanity or even to the nature of words themselves.

It took a second to get use to the form, and get an idea for what he was going for, but this book is highly enjoyable if you read it maybe 2-3 pages a day. One or two city descriptions to start you off in the morning and plant an intelectual conversation in your head about life. then do the same the next day, almost like a diary but in reverse.

anyone else read this or any other of Calvino's works. Just wondering about others thoughts.

the dude oozes aesthetics and meaning in every sentence.
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Moved to author and books discussion.

BUMP
 
Haruki Murakami - Blind Willow - Sleeping Women.

Just love this guy.

Was not to fussed on the Wind up Bird Chronicles.
All others brilliant.
 
Hemmingway is a freaken genius. I'm reading his collection of short stories: The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemmingway

This is a great read for anyone who likes to try and figure out puzzles. The idea behind his writing is minimalism, and you gotta try to piece together all the emotional implications and subtext that's going on given just a bare bone description of the place, the mood, and the mannerisms o the people talking. It's great stuff. I love the way he starts his stories off, he's so masterful with his ability to get you involved with as little effort as possible. His first sentences are legendary. Something like this: "At the lake shore was another rowboat drawn up."
That's just so cool to me! Such a regular seeming sentence, IF that was somewhere in the middle of a story, but as a way to kick start a story that's pretty brilliant if you ask me. Right away it gets the mood set for something out of the ordinary, maybe some trouble ahead, yet it also paints a pretty clear picture of the setting.

I'm also reading through a compendium of Japanese haiku that collects all the known writings of the 3 most prominent haiku artists of that culture. Basho is the classical forefather of the art form. Busson is the moody predecessor of Basho. And Issa is the irreverent comedian who really expands the boundaries of the style. It's a very cool read, and it is right along the same vein as Hemmingway's stuff, now that I think about it. It's funny that I never conflated the two books until I just made this post, but the principle of minimalism is called upon strongly in both books. This is a good read if you want to try and expand your writing, to say as much in as little a space as possible. The one liners it has are great.

My grandma picked it up one day, and she opened to Issa, and he had her in stitches! That was the first time she ever really related to what I was into in a while, and that was a great conversation piece. Thank you Issa!

Speaking of Haiku, does anyone have the Jack kerouac American Haiku spoken word album? The one with jazz music playing in the background, punctuating his words?
 
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just read Life of Pi by Yann Martel last week, great great book, heres my review of it for those who havent read it and my analysis with of the underlying themes and messages for those who have read it in NSFW because it contains spoilers

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A boy of many faiths and a 450 pound Bengal tiger sharing a life boat waiting for rescue in the Pacific Ocean after a shipwreck… sound like an interesting story? Then read on.

First off let me say Life of Pi is a great great book. Its one of the few books that even though I didn’t necessarily agree with the final premise, I still wholeheartedly enjoyed the book. Not because if was written very well, was suspenseful and made a tiger come to life in my mind (which it did all of these things) but because it made me look at the underlying debate differently. As I said, I may not have agreed with the final premise but it gave me a new perspective on it, and that is what I think good books should do.

If your looking for an emotional survival story mixed with light waters of man vs. nature and faith vs. knowledge look no further.

NSFW:
ANALYSIS *has spoilers*

Life of Pi is really three books

The first and most obvious is a survival story. A survival story that by itself is extremely moving seems to be impossible, how can a boy survive a shipwreck at sea with a 450 pound Bengal tiger? Yann Martel really has mastered describing how a persons thinks and feels. he articulate Pi’s sufferings, fears, and even scarce joys with precision that inspires fits of laughing, sadness or wonder. Emotions will rise and fall like the waves of the pacific.

The second book that life of pi represents is, a book which uses a survival story as a device to compare what is human and what is animal, what is the difference between man and beast. This angle is one I’ve found to be the least discussed regarding this book but to me every page dripped with insights on this. Pi goes from being a vegetarian holy man who couldn’t bare to kill a fish to a skillful hunter eating everything from the eyes of fish to the livers of turtles, knowing just how to secure and kill these turtles, and just how long he has to drink their blood before it coagulates. Pi repeatedly shows the reader that mankind at its deepest core is just another animal in jungle, that beasts which we never knew lived inside will come out in the efforts to cling to any speck of life it can when stripped of the conveniences of daily life.

This angle of man and animal is also emphasized when at the end of the book, in the third section Pi tells an alternate story to the one you have just read which is exactly the same, except each animal from the previous story represents a human, and pi chooses the Bengal tiger to represent himself. Could it be that this Bengal tiger named Richard parker really is just a symbol for Pi’s inner animalistic instinct to survive at any cost? It certainly sheds light on the brief section of the book where Pi is so hungry he becomes blind as well as delusional and hallucinates his boat meeting a fellow castaway who is also blind. In this hallucination the fellow blind castaway tries to kill Pi, only to have Richard Parker spring into action and kill him thus saving Pi. To me this fellow castaway represents a part of Pi himself which is emphasized by the unifying factor of blindness. When Richard Parker kills the blind castaway that is strangling Pi. It represents Pi’s animalistic instinct taking over and saving Pi from giving in and succumbing to death. This is almost a mini paraphrase of the entire survival section of the book.

Finally the third is that, Life of Pi is a religious/philosophical story about how to view existence. Early in the book when learning of how Pi came to be 3 religions simultaneously he discusses his views on atheists, agnostics, and believers of God. Pi reveals that he feels a kinship with atheists because at their core atheists must take a leap of faith that there is no god because there is no way disprove his existence just as believers take a leap of faith because there is no way to prove gods existence. It’s the agnostics that bother Pi, saying that both are possible but not believing in either. The reason why this bothers Pi can be described in an example: A believer views a mountainous scenery and marvels at gods plan at work, an atheist views this same scenery and marvels natures science and randomness in action, but does the agnostic ever truly marvel at this scenery, never deciding on either truth because both are unknowable?
Pi says this as “choosing immobility as a mode of transportation.”

After we read about Pi’s amazing and improbable story of survival at sea Pi then is rescued on land and speaks with two Japanese engineers who want to hear his story to report on the sunken ship. When the two don’t believe his story Pi echoes the same sentiments from very early on in the book about beliefs with quotes like this “don’t bully me with your politeness, love is hard to believe ask any lover, life is hard to believe ask any scientist and God is hard to believe ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe. That quote represents again that both believers and atheists must have faith, it becomes very apparent that Pi is speaking not just to the two engineers but to all agnostics with quotes like that and emphasized he says “I know what want you want an immobile story.” this again references the first section of the book when talking about the atheist, the believer and the agnostic. Pi then gives an alternate story with no animals and says “Neither story makes a factual difference to you … you can’t prove which story is true and which is not, so tell me which story do you prefer. Which is the better story”
This is essentially one of the main purposes of the book, Pi has offered the men and the readers a choice between atheism and believing, totally pushing them against agnosticism. He also urges the path of believers by saying since both require faith why not put your faith in the more beautiful story.
 
Currently reading Naked Lunch by one Mr William S. Burroughs. Not quite sure of the authors's intent yet, so I'm just kind of hanging in for the ride for now. Definitely a lot of stream-of-consciousness type writing, whether drug-influenced or otherwise. He is pretty bold in his writing, blatantly describing disgusting sexual acts and drug consumption. But I can dig it.
 
I've wanted to read Naked Lunch.. I hear it's good.

Right now I'm reading Dave Egger's A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, again, and I must say that I really do love him. His prose is so funny and eloquent. I also love his approach to writing, how aware he is of the fact that he is a man writing a book. Any suggestions similar to this?

I'm also reading The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Suggestions based on this would be cool, too. :)
 
dhcdavid said:
Notes from the underground - Dostovevsky
Anna Karenin - Tolstoy
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That's wassup. Throw some Nabokov in there and you have the holy trinity.

CoffeeDrinker said:
Hemmingway [sic] is a freaken genius.
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He's one of my favorites and his terse style is why.

CoffeeDrinker said:
Speaking of Haiku, does anyone have the Jack kerouac American Haiku spoken word album? The one with jazz music playing in the background, punctuating his words?
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Nope, I have this one though.
 
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let's see:

charles baudelaire - artificial paradises: on wine and hashish
basically a long essay on drink, thc and opium. absolutely beautifully written.

robert o'connor - buffalo soldiers
novel about a g.i. stationed in germany at the end of the eighties, who cooks heroin from morphine base and moves it bulk. really funny and bleak.

john niven - kill your friends
set in the mid nineties, story about an utterly misanthropic a&r guy for a record company. the kind of novel that made me cackle maniacally in the train and have everyone look at me like i'm sort of idiot retard.

philip k. dick - a scanner darkly
dick's roman a cléf about his years of drug abuse, set in a then-future 1994. brilliant book, equally funny and sad.

malcolm lowry - under the volcano
the story of a heavily alcoholic consul in mexico. the best book on serious alcohol addiction i've ever read.

thomas dequincey - confessions of an english opium eater
seminal work. the title is quite self-explanatory. probably the first book on addiction that i'm aware of.

robert stone - dog soldiers
hicks, a soldier at the hight of the vietnam war smuggles a substantial amount of heroin into the states for a friend. pretty soon things get very fucked and he's on the run with the painkiller-addicted wife of his friend.

kingsley amis - everyday drinking
amusing anecdotes and articles on alcohol.

there's probably tons more but those are the ones i can think of at the top of my head
 
Just finished reading Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.

This book is probably one of the best steampunk books out there. Mieville creates a dark, yet beautiful world. The book is also quite fast paced. A real page turner!
 
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