books to read

[oyolar]

People were probably worried they'd be put on some watch list for being fluent in both German and Japanese.

[twinskates]

Pic is rad twinskates, cool to see someone else on here read that. I have the double book that has Satori in Paris with Pic and I was worried because Satori in Paris was terrible. all I could hope reading Satori was that Pic wouldnt suck and was pleasantly surprised!

I'm a big fan of Kerouac, just started reading Big Sur right now.
It's also sick that I had some of the same feelings that had Pic from going to the city from the countryside. I'm from Sicily, an island located in the south of Italy, and about last year I made it to Philadelphia. Usa is a very different reality from Italy and I really enjoyed reading some of the same feelings that I had experienced there!

[7 year old]

Big Sur is a good one too, nice. Desolation Angels is my favorite of the ones ive read, you should check that one out at some point too.

(if you haven't already, that is)

[twinskates]

Haven't read that one yet, do you have other books to advice me other than Kerouac's ones anyway?

[7 year old]

there is a book called Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan which is amazing if you're interested in NYC in the 1940s - 50s or San Francisco in the 60s. a bunch of the same people from Kerouac's books turn up in it, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy, Gregory Corso etc.. if you like Kerouac you'd probably like it.

[shark tits]

'you can't win' by jack black. he was a yegg which wwf doesn't let me play as a word but it meant safecracker back then. also, like a solid dude, not a snitch, willing to escape prison and so on. he did some hoboing, participated in some high crimes and misdemeanors before ulitmately trying to play it straight as a sort of secretary as i recall [haven't read it in close to a decade and i poured whiskey on the first 4 yrs of said decade].
scott bourne and william burroughs both recommended it to me and my roomies when i lived in sf.
jean genet's books were fun to read, theives journal is the only one i remember the name of. i found 'portrait of dorian grey' in a laramie dumpster, dug that one ok.
i hope i am not repeating posts i made 2 yrs ago, i've read a few books recently but i mostly look back on older books for recommendations.
are there any decent italian books we need to find translations of?

[7 year old]

wait, what? you met William Burroughs? how?

[twinskates]

are there any decent italian books we need to find translations of?

I haven't read anything from an Italian autor yet. I'm into reading from just some months..
And I don't know why but they don't get me stoked that much ahah

[shark tits]

wait, what? you met William Burroughs? how?

nah, i meant scott bourne to me through skateboard media and william burroughs, through whatever media to my hippie sorta roommates. we each had an interest in the book independently of each other and there was a bookstore on the richmond side of the sunset w/ a 'hobo' section. hope they're still in business next to all the pho shops.

[7 year old]

hobo section sounds rad, more bookstores need to have that.

[AnotherHardDayAtTheOffice]

People were probably worried they'd be put on some watch list for being fluent in both German and Japanese.

"What did you say you'd been doing during the war again?"

[Blue Fescue]

a great book about an extended road trip.  such a good writer.

[Alan]

That looks interesting. I've been thinking about reading something in the vein of "Travels with Charley", and this looks like it might be it.

[Alan]

Sick, thanks!

[DavidxBowie]

Haven't been doing much reading outside of class recently. Has anyone here read Paul Beatty's The Sellout? Genius satire of race in contemporary America. Just getting into it.

[SFblah]

Haven't been doing much reading outside of class recently. Has anyone here read Paul Beatty's The Sellout? Genius satire of race in contemporary America. Just getting into it.

Yes! Every sentence is geniously written.

[botefdunn]

The adventures of a Montana boy left to wander and fend for himself at about 13, during the dirty 30's.

More telling of the Great Depression than of hobo culture, its appeal is probably mostly for the more avid train nerd, but I am that and enjoyed it a lot.
Short chapters make for good bedtime reading, out loud or otherwise eg. "Chapter 13: A night in Havre jail" (not a real chapter, but basically they're all little snippets like this).

[shitsandwich]

What's your guys' take on audiobooks? I've heard some people consider it cheating

I'm currently listening to 1Q84 on youtube right now and i think its great. I'm knocking out so many pages while doing the dishes or other chores. I do plan on buying it after I've completed it though.

[shark tits]

What's your guys' take on audiobooks? I've heard some people consider it cheating

I'm currently listening to 1Q84 on youtube right now and i think its great. I'm knocking out so many pages while doing the dishes or other chores. I do plan on buying it after I've completed it though.

it's definitely not reading but i've spent hours on youtube listening to prodigy [of mobb deep] read his book to me. some kind soul has edited out the boring parts and uploaded all the gunplay, fights at the tunnel and beef w/ nore and disses from nas.
a friend sent me mushrooms and 'the teachings of don juan' by carlos castaneda and i ate the mushrooms but having a hard time getting into said book. decades ago my roommates had that book on tape and some goony timothy leary book 'you can be anything.... this time around'.
if you get the story through movie, book or radio it's better than missing it entirely.

[oyolar]

I've found I can only do non-fiction books via audiobooks.  No real desire to do fiction on them.  i think it's because I feel that fiction puts more emphasis on wording, phrasing, and individual sentences whereas the primary focus of non-fiction is getting a message/idea across with less of an emphasis on construction.  With that in mind, I'm on my fourth audiobook for this year right now and it's going alright.

[AnotherHardDayAtTheOffice]

What's your guys' take on audiobooks? I've heard some people consider it cheating

I'm currently listening to 1Q84 on youtube right now and i think its great. I'm knocking out so many pages while doing the dishes or other chores. I do plan on buying it after I've completed it though.

Can't do it. It's not that I consider it "cheating" (what a strange point), but I'm a visual learner and I can't listen to longer speeches on audio only.

[20matar]

It's been ages since I finished a book. Changing jobs does that to me. The last book I've read was The Magic of Tidying Up, by a "tidying-up guru" named Marie Kondo. She mostly teaches you how to identify useless stuff, and how to get rid of it. A less-is-more kind of thinking. As much as I try not to hoard things, there's a lot I took from the author.

[handsclapanin]

I've been meaning to get some more audiobooks on cd from the library. I'm stuck in rush hour traffic every day. It usually takes about a hour to get home (13 miles). So they are perfect for that. Been a few years since I got one. The 3 I've done most recently were Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway; The Gambler, Dostoyevsky; and Wind up Bird Chronicles, Murakami. I feel you miss out on something. But like Sniffer said, it's better than missing out on the whole thing.

Currently reading this book Lies my Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen. Off the Dill rec list. It's alright. A few interesting tidbits here and there.

[shitsandwich]

I listened to tina fey's book and it was really entertaining to hear it in her voice so I'm probably going to check out other autobiographies. I also started reading trainspotting and its super cool so far. A bit different than the movie but hard to follow the Scottish accents at times.

[lampshade]

a great book about an extended road trip.  such a good writer.

I tried to grab that from the library yesterday, but it was checked out.  I got another one of his books, "Here, There, and Elsewhere."  It's a collection of short stories.  I'm only about 50 pages in.  It's Ok so far.  The stories are only about 10 pages longs, so if one is boring, you can just skip it. 

Just re read Dharma Bums for like the tenth time.  Such a good, fast read.

[Alexactly]

Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue. Easily my favorite book released of 2016. Highly recommended for fans of Borges, Pynchon, Calvino, and Bolano. Good review by Alberto Manguel here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/30/sudden-death-by-alvaro-enrigue-review

It's coming out in paperback in February, keep your eyes peeled.

[SFblah]

Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue. Easily my favorite book released of 2016. Highly recommended for fans of Borges, Pynchon, Calvino, and Bolano. Good review by Alberto Manguel here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/30/sudden-death-by-alvaro-enrigue-review

It's coming out in paperback in February, keep your eyes peeled.

I keep seeing this getting high praise everywhere but haven't picked it up yet. I like Bolano so I'll have to check it out. I currently have Bolano's Nazi Literature in America on deck after I'm finished reading The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz.

Also, picked these up.

[Alexactly]

The Vegetarian is dope, and all Sebald is incredible. Among Strange Victims is def on my list. I was just gifted The Revolutionaries Try Again by Mauro Javier Cardena, excited to start it soon.

[AnotherHardDayAtTheOffice]

Lots of great recommendations on this page! Alvaro Enrigue is right up my alley. I'll probably be picking up Sudden Death real soon. The Vegetarian sounds incredible, too. I did the opposite from the protagonist last summer and started eating meat again after being a vegetarian for 8 years (which wasn't exactly met with joy by some of my "progressive" friends either), so the topic hits kinda close to home... albeit in a very different, and definitely less tragic way.

I loved The Emigrants and Sebald's writing in general. It's grim and sad, but in a beautiful way. I bought a copy of Austerlitz at a second-hand store the other day and will pick it up soon.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is a strange little book. And I mean that in the best way possible. It's typically Bolano, but totally unlike everything else I've ever read.

Speaking of Bolano, I still haven't finished 2666... I don't know, I was really busy for a while and had to lay off reading for a while. I really like 2666 though. It's Bolano's bleakest work by far (which says something) and it's very different from, let's say, The Savage Detectives, but it's still quintessentially Bolano. I'm almost done with the infamous "Part about the Crimes", which details every single femicide in a fictionalized version of Cd. Juarez, but I'm not as repulsed as some readers have been. It's cruel, it's brutal, but it's hardly worse than Blood Meridian, for example. At this point, 2666 seems to circle around certain themes, some of them concrete - such as female homicides and chauvinism in Mexico - and others more abstract - like lunacy and evil. A recurring motif are abysses. It's very dark, it's very complex, but it's not a Pynchon or DFW novel, where every detail matters. Rather, it seems to be more about atmosphere (if that makes sense).

[shitsandwich]

Has anyone read Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk? This shit is so goddamn hard to read. The narration is written in broken english and that would be somewhat bearable if the story was at least a little interesting. I just want to hurry up and finish this shit