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phantasmagorovich wrote:Pynchons Inherent Vice is awesome! He concentrated on everything I love about his writing (idiotic songs, long lists of whatever seems to cross his mind) and left out the stuff I find annoying (historic background, lots of different strains of action). It's really cool and if you like his stuff at all (especially the earlier ones) then this should be good for you.

Thank you!

I thought I was the only person on the planet that like that book.

As "serious fiction" it doesn't hold a candle to a lot of his other stuff, though (Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon)

after Gravity's Rainbow i vowed never to read Pynchon again. the total collapse at the end of the book and retreat into the grey world of postwar destruction and DP camps was clearly his whole point, but as a reader it was a total ripoff. ESPECIALLY after 600 pages of buildup to nothing.

'brave new world' for school
slow start but im beginning to dig it

Selected reading for my trip to Disney.

greyscales wrote:
Equal parts interesting and boring. It's pretty much a medieval England law review.

i read a book called "life in the middle ages" a while back. so interesting to me... and kinda magical. i imagine wizards, too.

on my third murakami book... one of my favorite authors.

Starting Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

dubkitty wrote:in fiction i require writing that can successfully draw me into the world the writer is depicting...otherwise the suspension-of-disbelief thing is ruined.

If you haven't, read The Road. I'm a bit nervous to watch the movie because of the imagery created with my imagination. Never have I read a book so visual.

dubkitty wrote:and devour Tom Wolfe books though i haven't read his novels.

You gotta go find Pump House Gang and Electric Kool Aid Acid Test old paperbacks somewhere in Chicago...

Book Mission #1... You could get out and walk around and...

stripes wrote:Equal parts interesting and boring. It's pretty much a medieval England law review.

i read a book called "life in the middle ages" a while back. so interesting to me... and kinda magical. i imagine wizards, too.[/quote]

Halfway in, I'm still waiting for wizards to appear.
There is some interesting philosophical stuff in there, especially about serfdom vs. slavery. Life in the middle ages sounds a little more fun than this. The title is totally misleading.

Just got this -- read it years ago, did a small project as an undergrad with the guy who wrote it.
Interesting idea, and he makes a good case for an inorganic replicator. Cool weird science.

those aren't novels, those are his early New Journalism works. i grew up on The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which sparked my interest in psychedelics and the Grateful Dead back in 1971 when i was knee-high to a SVT stack. i've read all his non-fiction other than From Bauhaus To Our House; having not read Bauhaus is odd considering my interest in architecture and design. anyone who cares about the history of space exploration should read The Right Stuff.

it's the fiction that i haven't read: Bonfire, Charlotte Simmons, or the new one. i was put off of Bonfire by the early revision that was serialized in Rolling Stone before the book was published. i think of Wolfe as the non-self-destructive Hunter S. Thompson, HST also being one of the early New Journalists...his Hell's Angels and his early magazine articles are very Wolfe-esque.

Kurt Vonnegut; Slaughterhouse Five.
love this. i'm 44 and have been reading it since i was 17. i find something new every time.

SO IT GOES.

dubkitty wrote:those aren't novels, those are his early New Journalism works.

I read them every couple of years... I got ELAT when I was 14 and was off from there...

Bonfires is good but its been about 15 years since I read it... He's a great Simpsons character too...

betacloud wrote:Kurt Vonnegut; Slaughterhouse Five.
love this. i'm 44 and have been reading it since i was 17. i find something new every time.

SO IT GOES.

probably my favorite Vonnegut book, and one of my favorites of all time

not much on Vonnegut, who i think steadily got worse from the days he was writing short stories like "Harrison Bergeron." i liked "Cat's Cradle" and "Sirens of Titan," but his nothing-matters-and-what-if-it-did worldview leaves me utterly cold.