What book should I read next?
 

Choose and live.


I own all but the last two (Dracula and The Call of Cthulhu), they are on my list for purchase next time I go to the bookstore

NEW YORK GIRLS by R. Kern.

I voted Brave New World. It's one of my favorites.

I'm going to take Brave New World to lunch with me to pass the time.

City of Glass - Auster

what an awesome book need to read the whole NY trilogy

i voted divine comedy for the simple reason that it's such a cornerstone of western literature that everyone should read & know it.

it's also a bridge between antiquity and modernity: a document of the budding renaissance. sure, some people will say it's still the middle ages, with its fucked theology and geocentric cosmology, but the resurrection of classical antiquity is a renaissance move. this is good shit.

read the inferno, and procure yourself good notes-- the details, the history and the explanation of each character, each myth, each legend, each symbol referenced or created are highly entertaining. his similes are epic-- hailing back to virgil and homer. but way cooler i think. here is where translation fails, especially verse translation-- you'll get better results with a prose translation and a look at the original italian verse.

the purgatory gets a bit dull-- by paradiso, dullness has set in, with all the fucking spinning spheres. but still-- good stuff.

poete maudite malcolm lowry attempted a XX century version of the divine comedy and failed at providing parts 2 & 3, but left us "under the volcano" which was made into an awesome movie by john huston with albert finney as geoffrey firmin-- black magician learning that karma is a bitch.

nietzsche, who saw dante as getting his petty revenge in writing when he couldn't defeat his enemies in real life, called him the hyena who versified among the graves. hyena or not, the man was thoroughly defeated, exiled, heartbroken, frustrated, and took refuge in poetry.

ezra pound makes frequent and constant reference to dante in his cantos.

in the spanish language (perhaps others too) the adjective dantesco is used to describe anything so horrible that defies human imagination, like a concentration camp or a battlefield.

anyway, get that in you and you'll be on solid ground to talk bullshit for many years to come.

the other books you mention are good, but none as essential as this.

I've never read the Divine Comedy, but I really like the band.

You should read some Orson Scott Card. Ender's Game (and the following series), Alvin Maker, Homecoming, Pastwatch... Have you read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series? Hilarious.

Read the Inferno, and then go to Joyce. Life's too short to bother with the Paradiso.

Actually, thanks !$%!@! stuff it, read Inferno, and then go to Pound's Cantos!

Did you hear there's someone writing the sequel to Mostly Harmless?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7619828.stm

Shocking.

I don't know why, but I can never get anybody to add the following excellent books to their list:

Geronimo Rex by Barry Hannah (epic adventure of a white-boy jazz trumpet player who grows up on the cusp of the civil rights movement in the south. Lots of neat adventures, lots of poetry)

Speak, Memory by Nabakov (this book is so pretty. And you don't have to worry this time about someone thinking you're a pedo for reading it)

92 in the Shade by Thomas McGuane (yes, it's bit hippy-ish, and yes, McGuane is a bit too much of a fisherman-cum-Hemingway for most tastes, but this nonetheless is a brilliant novel about a drug-addled Key West skiff-guide wannabe and his explosive misadventures. Great comedy and drama.)

:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:

So, how will he get around all the characters being killed in Mostly Harmless?

the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy is some of the funniest things existing, but why the fuck do you got emmah in your avatar and as your sig?

Another one -- The Centaur by John Updike.

Pure reading ecstasy, I assure you. The prose is gorgeous.

I'm sure they weren't killed. They were killed before. Some sort of accident with a time machine or something. No, that was Beebelbrox... but they all disappeared for no apparent reason. And there was that bit with the flying.

Christ, I can't remember those books at all.

I've read the Infero twice, once in verse, the other in prose. I got halfway through the prose version of Purgatory and stopped. I've been meaning to pick it back up for a year, and I'll have to read the Inferno again before moving on.

The new Hitchhiker's book makes me wary, not sure how it's going to turn out.

John Dies at the End.
Damnit.

Or the Raw Shark Texts.

In the fall I go through 2-3 average size paperbacks a week, so I'll be reading a bunch of stuff.