That's fucked.

Twain may have been different (similar is some ways too), than, say, Faulkner, but he is great in his own way. Poor guy was an atheist though.
I love The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and I'm sure Mr. Faulkner did as well. As did Bret Harte *& Flannery O' Connor probably.


Dickens is also great in his way. He's not Dostoevsky, but you just know he loved the Russian lit. (fantastic characters..Dickensian, even!)
In all of British 19th c. lit, what other prominent literary figures are there?
(there's) Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Austen, Fyodor fan Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (others I'm forgetting)
rtemembering some minor figures (should I i=nclude>>>???)
Spurgeon, who is a very noteworthy theologian.
hmm...
Shelley
oh..Lewis Carroll...Robert & Elizaberth (elizabteh um try again,) Elizabeth Barrett Browning,

A lot of these are very great (especially blake), but Dickens can hold his own with this crowd rather nicely.


Oh shit...ignore the tangent.

I'm not going anywhere. Letterman is on now. Much to fucked-up to go anywhere anyhow. Sonic Youth in the baja. Cloudy here, but the stars are out somewhere.

Hack author Anne Rice moved to La Jolla, CA, after Katrina to be near her son.
Although, La Jolla is a great place. Just the right size. Just too rich for my blood. Bear in mind that I live in Charlottesville, VA.

I grew up for the most part on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in Gulfport/Biloxi near New Orleans.

Got MS BLUES in my blood.

Love the Cajun cuisine. It's the best.

Me either. Although that book of short stories (mentioned previously) with the Stand by Me material in it is good. I checked it out from a library once a long time ago and read most of it. Stephen King uses some mental mad-lib technique.

Now he does editorials for Entertainment Weekly which are mostly entertaining, I confess, (primarily 'cause he's a nutty crank), but sometimes they are particularly very askew. In his feature for this week's issue, he leads-off by affirming that his favorite song right now is Amy Winehouse's "Rehab." Dorkus ignoramus. And you just know he's trying to be hip, at least a little bit, the poor, pathetic loser.

Who the hell has time for Amy Fucking Winehouse?
I don't know how the fuck someone like that even has an audience or dares to get in front of one. King or Winehouse.

Totally befuddled here.

Steinbeck's Cannery Row is something I love to read in the summer in the same way that Dickens is always perfect tucked up in bed on a freezing cold night.

freezing cold...yeah Dostoevsky and Dickens
argh
um
...
Can you imagine shamans in Siberia?
Talk about yr hardcore.

--

i can sympathize about the boy band explosion timing-thing..ouch!
irrepairable damage, even
when will the political philosophers pay for their crimes?

yeeoow

LOL. This summer I think I'll take Crime and Punishment to the beach.

This Summer I will Read A Clockwork Orange, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Maybe Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment whilst drinking a pina colada, with some salsa playing on your iPod.

HAHA, I will be working and Summer School.

Crime & Punishment is the greatest work of fiction by any author, ever.

I don't want to start a whole thread on this, but just a sort of related question. Has anyone here ever actually managed to finish Don DeLillo's Underworld?

don't know the author or the book...the name sounds like I may have read it before though.

On the contrary, it was awesome.

Oh shit, I just looked him up. My friend typset White Noise. Also Geek Love and a Lorca volume.

fuck the underlining

luxinterior, all empathies, but you probably even find something you like about the Bullet Boys.

=On the flip side, I watch Entourage.

White Noise is OK, but Underworld...sheesh.

Has the French author Michel Houellebecq hit the states at all? Atomised and Platform are definitely two of the best contemporary novels I've read in a long time.

Even I can do better than Bullet Boys. Honestly. What do you take me as? Some sort of tramp?

I enjoyed reading Atomised and The Possibility of an Island.
Don't know if I'd like his rapping though.

I know A Separate Peace in high school impacted but only in the "I hate this fucking novel so damn much" kind of way.

As for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I read that years after it was released (snagged my brother's copy) so I wasn't aware of any trend around the book. However, I thought the "Quality before subjective/objective distinction" was an interesting concept and influenced my own metaphysical theories (although not as far as he takes it).

You don't have to. Reading is over-rated. Just watch TV and movies. Oh, and also, buy your clothes at Abercrombie :)

All kidding aside, I have very little patience for a novel. It truly may have something to do with watching a lot of TV as a child; this probably killed my attention span. As much of a creative mind as I (like to think I) have, I can't get through an entire novel. It has to either be something serious (i.e. a biography, or like this cool book I read about the number zero), or a book written by a comedian. I've read Al Franken's "Oh, The Things I Know!" too many times. I think I like these because I can put them down anytime I want. I like a lot of poetry as well, which is a pretty new thing for me, since I used take pride in my mocking of the entire idea of poetry. But I think this is once again linked to my lack of an attention span, since they are usually pretty short. Unlike this post :)

and

I know where my loyalties lie.

Elmore Leonard! Have you read Charles Willeford?

I modestly think "The Brothers Karamazov" is deeper.

I've read the book. It's not that long and it's an easy read. But I wasn't blown away by it. There are many many better books out there for the effort.

I take my hat off to you sir.

Hmm, novel with the biggest impact. Either 1984 or the Picture of Dorian Gray

All Orwell, especially 1984. This one books has had such a n impact on me and my idealisms...

All the Calvin & Hobbes comics I read from such a young age, possibly lead me into my interest (obsession) over human psychology, philosophy, etc.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Really recent, but it made me, and continues to make me question what is right and what is wrong, what is real and what is fake... and most of all, what will die, what is just "kipple"...)

Fuck, YES! I must spread rep. That story can move me to tears, it fucks me up.

I attended the Los Angeles Festival of Books today at the UCLA campus and I saw Ray Bradbury's presentation this afternoon. I would say "Farenheti 451" had a great impact on me, its one of my favorite novels, and this afternoon seeing Bradbury in person was such a treat. He did not read any of his work but instead talked more about influcences, things that influcenced his writing and his experiances early on as a writer. As a unpublished writer myself I found his stories insightful and entertaining. I was throughly impressed with him this afternoon, and experiance I will not soon forget.

since people have been posting non-novel stuff, i'm going to say that this is the book that has had the greatest influence upon me:




i have an older edition with nietzsche's picture on the cover. why was this the most influential book for me? it was a great cleanser-- it help me get rid of the poisons of christian and communist morality (instilled upbringing & education), and the many inner conflicts they had created. i had always been struggling with these things but this book allowed me to make a clear break. it saved me, in this sense.

--
a warning for fools: no, nietzsche wasn't a nazi, if you think so it's because you haven't bothered to read him.

That's right, he was a beautiful soul. Reading "Thus spoke Zarathustra" almost killed me. He was a giant.