Oryx And Crake - Margaret Atwood
Let The Right One In - John Ajvide Lindqvist
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
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Oryx And Crake - Margaret Atwood
Let The Right One In - John Ajvide Lindqvist
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Love in the Time of Cholera
A Tale for the Time Being
Little Women
The Giver
The Night Circus
(I was going to say The Handmaid's Tale, but Alive-Man has got that covered. I'll second that motion!)
I have never heard of any of yours, I will order them from amazon when I have money for that purpose next!Quote:
Originally Posted by Jinx
Harry Potter
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Game of Thrones
Emily of New Moon
Left Behind
My reading library isn't that big, I'm afraid.
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
Siren Promised - Jeremy Robert Johnson
Angel Dust Apocalypse - Jeremy Robert Johnson
The Stranger - Albert Camus
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
Yes. This is beautiful.Quote:
Originally Posted by Alive-Man
I'd also recommend:
The Snowman - Jo Nesbo
The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Fevre Dream - George R. R. Martin
Doctor Sleep - Stephen King
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
The Waves - Viginia Woolf
The Stories of Breece D'j Pancake - Breece D'j Pancake
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Obvioulsy isn't going to jive with everyone, but I feel like if you like any one of these novels then you'd probably like the others.
How is Lovecraft? I've been on a short story kick for awhile so I've been thinking of checking out his stuff. I've heard it's very dialogue-sparse, is that true?Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
/cheer mentions of Atwood, Angela Carter, Terry Pratchett, and Dostoevsky
Also, screw the 5 book limit. =P
With quotes/favorited passages!
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious. (72)
kneeling down to atoms"Maybe the knowledge is too great and maybe men are growing too small," said Lee. "Maybe, kneeling down to atoms, they're becoming atom-sized in their souls. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses--the whole world over his fence." (538)
The Book of What Remains - Benjamin Alire Saenz
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
commonplacenessWhat is an author to do with ordinary people, absolutely "ordinary," and how can he put them before his readers so as to make them at all interesting? It is impossible to leave them out of fiction altogether, for commonplace people are at every moment the chief and essential links in the chain of human affairs; if we leave them out, we lose all semblance of truth. To fill a novel completely with types or, more simply, to make it interesting with strange and incredible characters, would be to make it unreal and even uninteresting. To our thinking a writer ought to seek out interesting and instructive features even among commonplace people. When, for instance, the very nature of some commonplace persons lies just in their perpetual and invariable commonplaceness, or better still, when in spite of the most strenuous efforts to escape fromt he daily round of commonplaceness and routine, such people acquire a typical character of their own--the character of a commonplaceness desirous above all things of being independent and original without the faintest possibility of becoming so. (423)
Storm Front - Jim Butcher
The Invention of Solitude - Paul Auster
For if words are a way of beingin the world, he thought, then even if there were no world to enter, the world was already there, in that room, which meant it was the room that was present in the poems and not the reverse. (122)
If the voice of a woman telling stories has the power to bring children into the world, it is also true that a child has the power to bring stories to life. It is said that a man would go mad if he could not dream at night. In the same way, if a child is not allowed to enter the imaginary, he will never come to grips with the real. A child's need for stories is as fundamental as his need for food, and it manifests itself in the same way hunger does. Tell me a story, the child says. Tell me a story. Tell me a story, daddy, please. The father then sits down and tells a story to his son. Or else he lies down int he dark beside him, the two of them in the child's bed, and begins to speak, as if there were nothing left in the world but his voice, telling a story in the dark to his son. Often it is a fairy tale, or a tale of adventure. Yet often it is no more than a simple leap into the imaginary. Once upon a time there was a little boy named Daniel, A. says to his son named Daniel, and these stories in which the boy himself is the hero are perhaps the most satisfying to him of all. In the same way, A. realizes, as he sits in his room writing The Book of Memory, he speaks of himself as another in order to tell the story of himself. He must make himself absent in order to find himself there. And so he says A., even as he means to say I. For the story of memory is the story of seeing. And even if the things to be seen are no longer there, it is a story of seeing. The voice, therefore, goes on. And even as the boy closes his eyes and goes to sleep, his father's voice goes on speaking in the dark. (154)
The Father - Sharon Olds
I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died
I wanted to be there when my father died
because I wanted to see him die--
and not just to know him, down to
the ground, the dirt of his unmaking, and not
just to give him a last chance
to give me something, or take his loathing
back. All summer he had gagged, as if trying
to cough his whole esophagus out,
surely his pain and depression had appeased me,
and yet I wanted to see him die
not just to see no soul come
free of his body, no mucal genie of
spirit jump
forth from his mouth,
proving the body on earth is all we have got,
I wanted to watch my father die
because I hated him. Oh, I loved him,
my hands cherished him, laying him out,
but I had feared him so, his lying as if dead on the
flowered couch had pummelled me,
his silence had mauled me, I was an Eve
he took and pressed back into clay,
casual thumbs undoing the cheekbone
eyesocket rib pelvis ankle of the child
and now I watched him be undone and
someone in me gloried in it,
someone lying where he'd lain in chintz
Eden, some corpse girl, corkscrewed like
one of his amber spit-ems, smiled.
The priest was well called to that room,
violet grosgrain river of his ribbon laid
down well on that bank of flesh
where the daughter of death was made, it was well to say
Into other hands than ours
we commend this spirit.
Head Off & Split - Nikky Finney
from "Red Velvet"
...
A woman who believes she is worthy of every
thing possible. Godly. Grace. Good. Whether you
believe it or not, she has not come to Earth to play
Ring Around Your Rosie on your rolling
circus game of public transportation.
A woman who understands the simplicity pattern,
who wears a circle bracelet of straight pins there,
on the tiny bend of her wrist. A nimble, on-the-dot
woman, who has the help of all things, needle sharp,
silver, dedicated, electric, can pull cloth and others
her way, through the tiny openings she and others
before her have made.
A fastened woman
can be messed with, one too many times.
With straight pins poised in the corner
of her slightly parted lips, waiting to mark
the stitch, her fingers tacking,
looping the blood red wale,
through her sofly clenched teeth
she will tell you, without ever looking
your way,
You do what you need to do &
So will I.
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Tell me things I won't mind forgetting, she said. "Make it useless stuff or skip it."
I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana--you see it looking full, you're seeing it end-on.
The camera made me self-conscious and I stopped. It was trained on us from a ceiling mount--the kind of camera banks use to photograph robbers. It played us to the nurses down the hall in Intensive Care.
"Go on, girl," she said. "You get used to it."
I had my audience. I went on. Did she know that Tammy Wynette had changed her tune? Really. That now she sings "Stand by Your Friends"? That Paul Anka did it, too, I said. Does "You're Having Our Baby." That he got sick of all that feminist bitching.
"What else?" she said. "Have you got something else?"
Oh, yes.
For her I would always have something else.
"Did you know that when they taught the first chimp to talk, it lied? That when they asked her who did it on the desk, she signed back the name of the janitor. And that when they pressed her, she said she was sorry, that it was really the project director. But she was a mother, so I guess she had her reasons." (29-30, from "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried")
Omeros - Derek Walcott
AFOLABE
No man loses his shadow except it is in the night,
and even then his shadow is hidden, not lost. At the glow
of sunrise, he stands on his own name in that light.
When he walks down to the river with the other fishermen
his shadow stretches in the morning, and yawns, but you,
if you're content with not knowing what our names mean,
then I am not Afolabe, your father, and you look through
my body as the light looks through a leaf. I am not here
or a shadow. And you, nameless son, are only the ghost
of a name. Why did I never miss you until you returned?
Why haven't I missed you, my son, until you were lost?
Are you the smoke from a fire that never burned?
There was no answer to this, as in life. Achille nodded,
the tears glazing his eyes, where the past was reflected
as well as the future. The white foam lowered its head.
(138-139).
Books? I don't know. Interstellar Pig, Legend of Nightfall, The Dresden Files, The Wars of Light and Shadow... there was also a book I was lent to read in school. I remember a soldier or former soldier perhaps, who at one point had a "disagreement" with a troublemaker. He pulled a "putty knife" and thought he could make "quick work" of the guy using just that. But they were raising trouble in a shop and the shopkeeper pulled out an "air gun" if I remember correctly. The soldier assured him he could handle it. If the shopkeep used the gun, he would vaporize both the soldier and the troublemaker... apparently. I don't remember the name of the book. I wonder if it could have been Farenheit 451... but still I'm sure the guy was a soldier not a fireman.