books to read

[AnotherHardDayAtTheOffice]

I know what you mean but I loved Book 3.  It's super atmospheric and I think he does a great job giving you the feeling of what it felt like to be a child in his childhood situation.  That said, I couldn't imagine reading it after Books 4 & 5.  It would definitely be jarring.

Yes. Picking up Book 3 after 4&5 feels like reading a prequel. Which is nice but also doesn't feel like the real deal. Anyway, last night while reading Book 3, I feel like it started growing on me. I see exactly what you mean. Knausgaard does a really good job at describing small details you felt as a kid. Like how every tree in your vicinity acquires a specific meaning. It also helps you to understand the father-son-dynamic more profoundly.

[AnotherHardDayAtTheOffice]

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anyone read 2666 and how does it compares to Savage Detectives? both by Roberto Bolano.

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Reading Bolano? Good on ya!

I'm a big Bolano fan and I've read both. In my eyes, 2666 is very different from the Savage Detectives. The overall writing style is comparable and both share a few themes and motifs, but that's about it. The Savage Detectives is a typical "young Bolano", full of dark humor, the energy and romanticism of youth and covering every topic relevant to 70s and 80s Latin America and world literature. 2666 seems more focused, more mature, more limited but also lacks the energy and fervor of the Savage Detectives. It's a typical "late work" and way darker than the Savage Detectives.

Personally, I liked the Savage Detectives better, but 2666 is still among my favorite books. Both are really good. I'd say, you should go for it! Have fun!

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So far I’ve only read Bolano’s Distant Star and Nazi Literature in the Americas. Two Spanish guys own a bookstore here and they tell me his short stories are his best work.

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I've only ready one of his short story collections and I liked it a lot, but I still think Savage Detectives is Bolano at his best. Distant Star is another favorite.

[close]

yea i read nazi literature in the Americas and third reich. The 1st i wasnt too into until the last chapter or so. But maybe just because I was hoping for something more plot-driven. It made me wanna write again tho so thats a +.

Third reich was good but felt a bit "easy" compared to Savage Detectives, although interesting in alot of ways i.e. How he keeps writing some versions of himself into every novel.

Wanted to buy Distant star instead of Third Reich but was low on money and the latter is more book for the same cash... Was happy Distant star kinda appeared in the last chapter of Nazi Literature, and it really made me want to read all his books to see how they all fit together.

Either way thanks for the 2666 vs Detectives awnswer

I see. The last chapter of Nazi Literature in the Americas covers the very rough plot of Distant Star, excluding character development and atmosphere. Apart from Savage Detectives, Distant Star is maybe my favorite Bolano. This is what made me pick up a copy:

http://www.jenkemmag.com/home/2014/11/10/books-for-lazy-skateboarders-and-people-that-dont-like-to-read/

I also like Third Reich by the way. It's super weird though, even for Bolano standards.

Are you going to start 2666?

[Peter Zagreus]

^ Distant Star for the win. Haven't gotten around to 2666 though. One day...

Revisiting this gem in my spare time. I couldn't recommend it more. Honestly one of my top 3 novels, all time. Dark, Irish absurdism at its finest.

[behavioralguide]

yea dont get me wrong, i liked Third Reich (alot).
and as soon as i get my hands on 2666 (and they're holding any cash, Im not a book stealer, which is in this day and age something completely different then when bolano grew up, with the dissapearing bookshops nowadays) will read yes.

Its a shame I dont speak spanish. South American literature has got me hooked, but so many gems untranslated

[behavioralguide]

also re-read
Yusuf Atilgan's The Loiterer, If you've ever been to Istanbul, you undoubtly enjoy this one; A man alone in a city, contemplating his differences with contemporary (at the time) Turkish culture, while chasing women and searching a woman:

and I read Bill Callahan's Letters to Emma Bowlcut; the story isn't all that much, Its a succession of letters to a woman, but you never get to read the replies. She does reply however, since Callahan refers to them and awnsers her questions in his own letters to her. Its interesting and if you enjoy his songwriting/ observations/ humour then its a good read and I find myself opening the book at random and re-reading letters.

[7 year old]

Bill is so fucking cool. Need to read that.

[behavioralguide]

i can type it out for ya, ts only like 60 pages half filled.

I do that for a living anyways

[tortfeasor]

Havent been reading much lately but my favorites of all time are....
JD Salinger - 9 Stories
Fantastic collection of short stories that are all intertwined the final story "Teddy" is probably one of my favorite pieces of literature of all time.
Cats Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
Ice Nine baby
Philip K Dick - A Scanner Darkly
That quote about stealing insulin or just dying fucks me up every time
The Dark Elf Trilogy - RA Salvatore
One of the first big books I read. My Dad lent me the trilogy when I was 12 and crushed through it in a week.

For Comics...
Transmetropolitan (finished)
Preacher (finished)
Planetary Express (finished)
DMZ (almost finished)
Doom Patrol (just started)
Wanted (finished)

Bunch of others but i'll keep it short.

DMZ it what got me back into comics as an adult.  If you are looking for some really amazing standout comics check out "The Twelve" and the arc of "Rising Starts"


is planetary express the same as planetary?  if so that and transmetropolitan are two of my all time favorite series.  and if you love transmetropolitan give "chew" a read.  very similar in all the best ways, none of the pontificating of transmetropoltian   

[AnotherHardDayAtTheOffice]

also re-read
Yusuf Atilgan's The Loiterer, If you've ever been to Istanbul, you undoubtly enjoy this one; A man alone in a city, contemplating his differences with contemporary (at the time) Turkish culture, while chasing women and searching a woman:

and I read Bill Callahan's Letters to Emma Bowlcut; the story isn't all that much, Its a succession of letters to a woman, but you never get to read the replies. She does reply however, since Callahan refers to them and awnsers her questions in his own letters to her. Its interesting and if you enjoy his songwriting/ observations/ humour then its a good read and I find myself opening the book at random and re-reading letters.

I just got back from a trip to Istanbul. Yusuf Atilgan's novel sounds amazing. I had never heard of it before, but based on your description it should be right up my alley. It looks like the two of us are into similar books. Nice!

[CrumblingInfrastructure]

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Havent been reading much lately but my favorites of all time are....
JD Salinger - 9 Stories
Fantastic collection of short stories that are all intertwined the final story "Teddy" is probably one of my favorite pieces of literature of all time.
Cats Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
Ice Nine baby
Philip K Dick - A Scanner Darkly
That quote about stealing insulin or just dying fucks me up every time
The Dark Elf Trilogy - RA Salvatore
One of the first big books I read. My Dad lent me the trilogy when I was 12 and crushed through it in a week.

For Comics...
Transmetropolitan (finished)
Preacher (finished)
Planetary Express (finished)
DMZ (almost finished)
Doom Patrol (just started)
Wanted (finished)

Bunch of others but i'll keep it short.

[close]

DMZ it what got me back into comics as an adult.  If you are looking for some really amazing standout comics check out "The Twelve" and the arc of "Rising Starts"


is planetary express the same as planetary?  if so that and transmetropolitan are two of my all time favorite series.  and if you love transmetropolitan give "chew" a read.  very similar in all the best ways, none of the pontificating of transmetropoltian

I think its the same, I was given the Planetary Omnibus as a gift so I actually have always been unsure of the original title. Transmetropolitan is so god damn good! I'm pretty far into Dmz but havent been able to to fish up the cash to buy the next few collections. The Authority is another really fucking cool one. Also if your fucked up The Boys is pretty entertaining.

[NeppuNeppu]

Anyone have recommendations for short story collections or novels with short chapters around 3-15 pages? I need stuff to read during breaks at work.

[slappies]

Anyone have recommendations for short story collections or novels with short chapters around 3-15 pages? I need stuff to read during breaks at work.

Raymond Carver's stuff is a good read.

And it's sort of a cliche, but I enjoyed reading these too.

[tortfeasor]

Anyone have recommendations for short story collections or novels with short chapters around 3-15 pages? I need stuff to read during breaks at work.

Have you read "welcome to the monkey house" by Vonnegut? anything by david sedaris?  i like "naked" and "me talk pretty one day" by him A LOT.   "The Bachman Books" by steven king are a little longer but like everything steven king, read really quick.  i loved them when i was a wannabe edgelord in HS, even more now.  He has a lot of other short story books, all of them are pretty much guaranteed to be good. "The Things They Carried" is a classic for a reason.  Some people argue that because its one "story" doesn't count a short story book but i disagree.  if you want to feel smart there is Salinger, Hemingway and Chekhov's short story books, but if i was going to go that route i would pick Poe's "The First Detective" which is a collection of the Dupin Series and really enjoyable

[botefdunn]

sci-fi set in Johannesburg, very good.

[SFblah]

Anyone have recommendations for short story collections or novels with short chapters around 3-15 pages? I need stuff to read during breaks at work.

Try Donald Barthelme. Here’s one of his best known short stories.

https://www.npr.org/programs/death/readings/stories/bart.html

[7 year old]

i can type it out for ya, ts only like 60 pages half filled.

I do that for a living anyways

I appreciate that b-guy but I don't want to be the reason his shit gets bootlegged.

[ShredWilliams]

Tom Wolfe’s “Kingdom Of Speech.” Read it today, was really impressed.

[NeppuNeppu]

Thanks for the recommendations everyone. Started off with a collection from Donald Barthelme since it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. I'm really enjoying it so far.

[Grampa]

Yo, thanks to whoever posted about You Can’t Win. I just started reading it and it’s awesome so far. 

[Thrillho]

I read No Country For Old Men in like 2 days or something. McCarthy wrote it originally as a screenplay, so it's basically just the movie plus a few extra or alternate bits. Chigurh makes more sense in the book. Moss, to me, was less sympathetic also. The movie is a better movie than the book is a book, but if you really liked one the other will complement it well.

[RCB3]

I read No Country For Old Men in like 2 days or something. McCarthy wrote it originally as a screenplay, so it's basically just the movie plus a few extra or alternate bits. Chigurh makes more sense in the book. Moss, to me, was less sympathetic also. The movie is a better movie than the book is a book, but if you really liked one the other will complement it well.

Just read it last month and enjoyed it, especially since the film is one of my favorite movies. I really enjoyed Bell's internal dialogues that were in between chapters. Also, I sort of wish they included in the movie the time Moss was with the young girl he picked up. Seems like that was pretty important part, but I know they can't have everything.

I just finished "The Last Season" this week. It's a fascinating story and if you're into the outdoors, you'll love it even more. I highly recommend it.

[oyolar]

Have you read The Familiar by Danielewski?  It's pretty awesome. The first 5 volumes (out of a proposed 27) are out now but it's on a hiatus.  Amazing experience and while they look massive and intense, word count wise, they're only 200-300 pages long.  It's all of the characteristics of HoL taken to the tenth degree.

[Jagr]

Read my first McCarthy a few days back, Outer Dark. Great stuff, weird I never read him before. Went on to read the Border Trilogy and Suttree. Have liked everything so far.

Did someone on here mention In the Distance by Hernan Diaz? Or maybe I picked it up somewhere else. Unique take on the Western novel.

[Jagr]

Anyone have recommendations for short story collections or novels with short chapters around 3-15 pages? I need stuff to read during breaks at work.

I really like Richard Brautigan, but he's not for everyone. His short story collection "Revenge on the Lawn" is good lunch break reading. All of his novels have short chapters too.

[SFblah]

Read my first McCarthy a few days back, Outer Dark. Great stuff, weird I never read him before. Went on to read the Border Trilogy and Suttree. Have liked everything so far.

Did someone on here mention In the Distance by Hernan Diaz? Or maybe I picked it up somewhere else. Unique take on the Western novel.

I mentioned In The Distance. So good. It just got nominated for a Pulitzer too.

Here’s the NY Times article on him this week.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/books/hernan-diaz-in-the-distance.html

[Jagr]

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Read my first McCarthy a few days back, Outer Dark. Great stuff, weird I never read him before. Went on to read the Border Trilogy and Suttree. Have liked everything so far.

Did someone on here mention In the Distance by Hernan Diaz? Or maybe I picked it up somewhere else. Unique take on the Western novel.

[close]

I mentioned In The Distance. So good. It just got nominated for a Pulitzer too.

Here’s the NY Times article on him this week.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/books/hernan-diaz-in-the-distance.html

Oh yeah, thanks for the tip! I keep a big list of books I want to read, so I'm never 100% sure where the recommendations came from.

I really liked In the Distance, but I felt like it kind of petered off at the end...like it sort of bugged me that the first 3/4 of the book are really detailed and the last 1/4 covers a decade or two or more. I would've liked it to either end around the bit in the Grand Canyon or been quite a bit longer.

Not sure if there's a poetry thread or not, but do any of you guys read any good poetry book or collections recently? I just finished My Vocabulary Did This to Me, a collection of Jack Spicer's poems. Looking for new poetry.

[handsclapanin]

Just finished The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.
Normally, I would probably have passed this up. It's a newer book. I usually stick with the "classics". Or at least older books. Also, it's almost 800 pages. Another thing I usually shy away from.
But my wife recommended it, so I figured I'd give it a chance. She doesn't read all that much. But flew through this book in like 2 weeks. I'd wake up to pee at 3 in the morning and she would be up, still reading it. It took me closer to 2 months to finish. I'd recommend it. Maybe a little slow going. But once I got into it; it was hard to put down.

[RCB3]

I'm halfway through "Endurance" right now about an arctic expedition in the early 1900's and its wild stuff. Really interesting and insane what people can endure, no pun intended.

Also just finished "The Other Wes Moore" and I enjoyed it. It sort of ended abruptly, but lots of good stuff to think about.

[Peter Zagreus]

Just finished reading this one, and I really dug it. Peter Lamborn Wilson is an individualist anarchist writer, probably known best for TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism and his other political stuff from the 80s (mostly written under the pseudonym "Hakim Bey"), but he writes all kinds of weird and very thought-provoking stuff.

This book is his latest (2017). It's fiction--a book of "tales," which differ from short stories in that they are less character driven/psychological and more...imaginative? There's time travel and anarchist hillbilly enclaves and dystopian futures in which people are living on islands formed out of the plastic that floats in the ocean, and with no electricity. At certain points, it's obvious that the tales are serving as sort of display cases for Wilson's utopian ideals, but that didn't bother me so much, as the worlds he envisions are always epicurean (most of his narrators are gourmands or decadents of one sort or another) and primitively dignified/elegant.
I read this one after reading a lot of his more explicitly philosophical/political, "non-fictional" work, but I would recommend the former as a fun introduction to the latter.

[Joust Ostrich]

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/chapters-one-and-two-the-business-secrets-of-drug-dealing

Serialized book, first two chapters are free.  Good so far.  Hesitant to pay for that subscription though.