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Steve V. wrote:The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.

I think she/he(?) is pretty damned good, myself.

kerble wrote:

slincire wrote:Anyone on here read The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin?

I've read it a few times, and I'm the only person I know who has. It's just sort of weird and surreal, a guy wandering around 15th century Cairo and encountering mad prostitutes, leprous knights, creatures from an alternate dream reality. It's good, and I highly recommend it. Be interested to see what other readers have thought.

this looks great. thanks for the recommend. I'll grab it next!



Faiz

Let me know what you think of it. I've had bad luck getting people to read this, not cause of quality, they never even opened it. Lent it to one friend, he just hung onto it for a long ass time until I took it back. Then lent it to another and he gave it back after a little while without cracking the cover. Lent it to my dad a few weeks ago, but he got caught up in some old science fiction or something, but he tells me he's gonna read it. You might be the first though, and I'd be interested to hear what you think of it.

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:I don't think he's been mentioned yet, but I love Daniel Woodrell's novels. They've been called "country noir," and many involve small-town crooks and law enforcement officials, so they could be classified as crime writing. But they're beautifully written, and the characters are thoroughly developed. His latest, Winter's Bone, just might be his best. Its protagonist is a sixteen-year-old girl whose meth cook-father wrote a note on their house for bail and promptly disappeared. She has a month to find him before she, her insane mother, and her two little brothers are left homeless in the Ozarks winter. It's a great book.

I'd like to second the Woodrell. I've read Give Us a Kiss, Woe to Live On and another one that took place in New Orleans, the title of which escapes me. Having grown up in Kansas City actually gives me even more appreciation for some of his stuff.

I just re-bought this book after a couple of years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boomer_Bible

it's hysterical if you want to waste tons of time.

rayj wrote:

Steve V. wrote:The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.

I think she/he(?) is pretty damned good, myself.

If you like that, you'll love Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy."

ive recently read "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman which is basically about globalization... its interesting to learn how small our world is getting from the advances in technology... it explains how when a tax return is done someone in India could be helping you out making more jobs globally... through this book it did make me feel like the world is smaller but i think that it might be good thing.. i found it interesting the benifits of almost any kind of job can be improved through this globalization process

a specific would be how doctors can now communicate any time with other doctors world wide allowing more efficient hospitals... before everyone had to rely on the doctors in the hospital and what if they were all busy and someone couldnt get a second opinion

There's a very dark side to the phenomenon too, one to which Friedman pays uneven attention. Some of it is good, deep reporting, some is a little breezy. My biggest problem with the book is that it's way too long. A lot of the business anecdotes are repetitive and amount to nothing more than what was appearing on the business pages of newspapers at the exact same time. He needed a better editor on that book, but it is a decent look at some changes both incipient and ongoing.


I started Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow recently. Jesus christ. Profound, challenging, breathtaking in scope and power of language.


And fucking BORING. I just want something to happen! And I was a Faulkner and Hemingway guy in grad school, so it's not as if I'm ill-equipped to handle a lot of words and no action. But for fuck's sake, the book's around 700 pages long. When I'm more than 100 pages in and I still don't even know what the fuck the story is, other than the loosely related actions of a large group of characters, that's a problem. I don't need a point A to point B plot, but so far, it's vignette after vignette, episode after episode, with no momentum. Only Pynchon's incredible gift for layered theme breaks the stifling inertia.

I'd never contend this isn't an important book. Maybe my patience for this kind of thing ran out about the same time my patience for academia did as well.

Doris Lessing has won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature.

But I guess she's kind of a prick:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071011/ap_ ... g_reaction

Ty Webb wrote:

I started Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow recently. Jesus christ. Profound, challenging, breathtaking in scope and power of language.


And fucking BORING. I just want something to happen! And I was a Faulkner and Hemingway guy in grad school, so it's not as if I'm ill-equipped to handle a lot of words and no action. But for fuck's sake, the book's around 700 pages long. When I'm more than 100 pages in and I still don't even know what the fuck the story is, other than the loosely related actions of a large group of characters, that's a problem. I don't need a point A to point B plot, but so far, it's vignette after vignette, episode after episode, with no momentum. Only Pynchon's incredible gift for layered theme breaks the stifling inertia.

I'd never contend this isn't an important book. Maybe my patience for this kind of thing ran out about the same time my patience for academia did as well.

For me, reading it under the influence of the ganja, it was much like 'Naked Lunch'...in the sense that you had to read about 3/4th's of it unconditionally, and then all the elements crash into each other majestically. Sometimes, you gotta pay to play...

Just finished The Road. It was pretty OK. It was an Oprah book. I was leary. It worked out ok. Finally a book about the apocalypse that isn't afraid to bring up baby cannibalism.