You should buy the Bandini Quartet.

Four books about one character, Arturo Bandini.

The first, Wait Until Spring Bandini and the third, Ask The Dust are absolutely fantastic.

The second in the quartet (although I believe the first he actually wrote?) is The Road To Los Angeles, and it's a bizarrely sadistic tale, with Bandini really displaying his twisted bitterness. By no means the best of the four books, but a really strange tale.

You can get all four novels as an omnibus in the UK.

i read a small bit of brotherhood of the grape and enjoyed that. have to get some more. its going on the list!

If you haven't read Ask The Dust and you don't want to read all four of the Bandini novels, then this one is the one to start with.

i like American Phsyco, the movie, i want to read the book. I also want to read the book Blade Runner is based off of

A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby.

I'm about 430 pages into Ulysses and I like it quite a bit, but man, it is a beast of a book.

re: Drugs Are Nice...Lisa writes about me in there. I'd better get off my high horse and go bake a meat loaf.

I've been reading a lot of crime/mystery fiction lately. Full of violence and sex and drugs. I wouldn't even know where to begin, if you haven't read Charles Willeford then you can start there. Pelecanos is pretty great, and several of his novels talk about the old WDC punk/new wave scene. I've read everything Vachss has read. Great stuff to borrow from the library. Archer Mayor is a lot of fun cuz most of his stories take place in Vermont. Tthe Ken Bruen "white" stories are as crisp as a slug of whiskey. And if you like sci fi and haven't read Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon you're missing out.

i find these threads usually quite useless because the taste of the requester and the imprecision of the request are a sort of russian roulette of bookshopping.

i suggest you open an account with amazon or barnes&noble and allow the machine to pick stuff for you once it finds out what you like.

otherwise, i recommend this!

No way! Who are you?

-Perks of being a wallflower
-Stargirl
-The Life of Pi

yes???

fuck... what???

nothing UNHAPPY about THIS!

I'm reading Jeff Hoke's 'The Museum Of Lost Wonder:A Graphic Guide To reawakening The Human Imagination' and i'm thoughraly enjoying it.

Recommended:

nuther

If you have never read it,i'd reccomend Hermann Hesse's 'Demian' because it's a fantastic book.

a perfect book for geeky & strange teenagers

i swore by it when i was 19; i could not read it today, but it was life-altering back in the day

i'd recommend "steppenwolf" as a 2nd course

well, finally the porkie got me to make a serious recommendation

I was totally bewitched by it as a teen.I read it over and over again.

I heard Lee Ranaldo drop this title in the interview someone posted of him with Watt. It sounds interesting it was called Sheltering Sky or Skies by Paul Bowles. I may go pick it up tonight.

yes! i sort of worshipped abraxas for a while.

now that i remember i was 17 not 19. it's just that my memory of those times is rather shot.