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Blueprint for change
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]deadliftgoal500 wrote:
Either The Lords of the Flies by William Goldberg or Animal Farm by George Orwell.[/quote]
I love how you don’t even know the title OR the author of your favorite book. It’s Lord of the Flies by William Golding.[/quote]
Try having read the books that people claim to be their favorite books.
Especially when they try to explain the life lessons they have drawn from them.
There is a reason why, if I carry a book around in public, it most likely is a zombie novel.
Alas, even the irony is wasted…
[quote]orion wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]deadliftgoal500 wrote:
Either The Lords of the Flies by William Goldberg or Animal Farm by George Orwell.[/quote]
I love how you don’t even know the title OR the author of your favorite book. It’s Lord of the Flies by William Golding.[/quote]
Try having read the books that people claim to be their favorite books.
Especially when they try to explain the life lessons they have drawn from them.
There is a reason why, if I carry a book around in public, it most likely is a zombie novel.
Alas, even the irony is wasted…[/quote]
Very true!
I see a lot of people who are friends and they all seem to take turns reading the same books. I think they’re just trying to keep up with each other and look smart. They had to make sure they were reading a book that others had read or that was popular among college kids…so not a Dan Brown pot-boiler.
It seems like they thought that if they read a book that no one else had heard of then they’d be wasting their time as how can they brag about the latest cop thriller paperback?
I read The Brothers Karamazov a couple of years ago, mostly because I’d heard that Hemingway thought it was the greatest novel(I think I heard that on Lost!) so I picked it up and it was quite good. I was happy not to have to analyze it though. I had enough of that in university and it’s good to read one of the ‘great works’ without having to think about what every character means.
My point is that I didn’t feel the need to push the book on any friends. It didn’t change my life. It didn’t change the way I see anything.
I think some people that don’t read enough may do that. They feel such a huge sense of accomplishment after finishing something more than 300 pages that the world has to know about it.
Hmm…
Some books that I feel had a big influence on me:
Stephen King:
-The Dead Zone (best S.K IMO)
-Apt Pupil (in Different Seasons)
Charles Bukowski:
-Women
-Ham on Rye
Red Dragon- Thomas Harris
Catcher in the Rye
I’m really late to this thread but I was really surprised to only see one or two people mention Ender’s Game. I’d have to say for me it’s a toss up between Ender’s Game and Sirens of Titan.
Just working my way through the Ender’s books now, after reading the recommendation here, earlier.
Really enjoyed Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow. Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide not so much - but still readable. Not to hijack, but what do you think of the prospects for the movie? Gonna take child actors of considerable talent in great numbers to pull it off I think.
perhaps the finest genre fiction i have read was Clive Barker’s Weaveworld
at the time , i had read his complete shorts to that point and ‘Cabal’ and he certainly had unique imagination
Stephen King called him the future of horror writing and after reading Weaveworld i knew i had witnessed the work of a passionate artist
King i had read a great deal of, but he admittedly is a bit of a plodding technician, who gets up and sits down and gurgitates on the page for a certain number of hours and then keeps his appointments etc.
Barker wrote in a fever it seemed: a driven, true visionary who created a believable universe spun right under your nose. He didn’t expect you to pay for his words by the pound simply because he had filled up that much paper in that much time and needed to buy a boat. He actually had written something worth your time and consideration, something he had lived and had the right to exploit. Something he brought back as a souvenir of an expedition that made him ill.
Peter Straub’s Ghost Story has merit but seems dated.
Barker’s WEaveworld is part of the future, and has doubtless been imitated ad nauseum in the interim.
[quote]Irish Daza wrote:
Just working my way through the Ender’s books now, after reading the recommendation here, earlier.
Really enjoyed Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow. Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide not so much - but still readable. Not to hijack, but what do you think of the prospects for the movie? Gonna take child actors of considerable talent in great numbers to pull it off I think.
http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=32651[/quote]
They’ve been trying to make a movie for years now but ironically enough Orson Scott Card keeps cancelling the projet. But this time it looks like it’s finally going to happen in 2013. They have most of the cast together and the director is selected and screenplay is already written.
Lets hope this doesn’t fall through like previous iterations.
I liked Speaker for the Dead, while most people didn’t. I haven’t read Xenocide, but I just finished Ender’s Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon and liked both of them a lot.
the Belgariad series.
great read for a time when I was into fantasy.
Wuthering Heights- an old-fashioned ghost story about love-turned-hate.
Facebook.
(If it hasn’t been said alreadys. Long thread is long)
just got my english translation.
anybody a fan of murakami?
never really liked reading fiction, but loved all his books.
finished ‘the Bell Jar’
it is printed “the brag of my heart”
not ‘bray’
in the book (auto-biographical novelisation)
makes more sense
someone with a crush on her has committed suicide and her reaction is:
“i listened to the brag of my heart: I am; I am; I am.”
(she didn’t punctuate it properly, though)
reading ‘the Journals of Sylvia Plath’ now
purchased as a Valentine for someone on the wrong page
so i’m reading it myself
so far, full of good stuff about how lucky she is to be so gorgeous
lucid avowal to forever hold something back from loving a man
because she is jealous of men (says it straight out)
plans to cock-tease men to feed her ego at their expense etc.
conscious decision to maintain malignant self-love spelled-out explicitly
also, jealous of girl even gawkier than her who shows her some writing that makes her prize-winning stuff look absurd by comparison
decides to cozy up to her to steal some of her chops
For me, it’s a toss-up between “Happy Hour is for Amateurs” by The Philadelphia Lawyer and Charles Bukowski’s “Ham on Rye”
I’d have to say Bukowski is my favorite author overall.
[quote]ThEmetrius wrote:
Hmm…
Some books that I feel had a big influence on me:
Stephen King:
-The Dead Zone (best S.K IMO)
-Apt Pupil (in Different Seasons)
Charles Bukowski:
-Women
-Ham on Rye
Red Dragon- Thomas Harris
Catcher in the Rye
[/quote]
Just scrolled up and saw this… you, sir, are the man. “Women” is a close third for me.
[quote]bigmac73nh wrote:
“Women” is a close third for me.[/quote]
Any love for Post Office? I read a few of his in high school, really liked them, but was slightly annoyed by how much overlap existed between books. Then I found Run With The Hunted. It’s a sort of ‘best of’ that does a pretty fine job of sewing together all his stories.
[quote]forkknifespoon wrote:
[quote]bigmac73nh wrote:
“Women” is a close third for me.[/quote]
Any love for Post Office? I read a few of his in high school, really liked them, but was slightly annoyed by how much overlap existed between books. Then I found Run With The Hunted. It’s a sort of ‘best of’ that does a pretty fine job of sewing together all his stories. [/quote]
I’ve yet to pick up Run With The Hunted. I’ve read Post Office, Women, and Ham on Rye and am actually reading Factotum now. I certainly enjoyed Post Office, but I just liked Women and Ham on Rye much better.
I actually like the overlap between his stories. I really like how he writes, it just comes off as raw and natural- no contrived bullshit there.
I’m only on page 209 at this moment but I’m very much enjoying American Gods.