The Trial, Kafka
Printable View
The Trial, Kafka
I can vouched for those two, they were both excellent books. Group Portrait with Lady is another great one from Böll, if you haven't already read it and I have yet to read a book by Serge that didn't leave a strong impression.Quote:
Originally Posted by bouquin
Saramango - Blindness. Didn't buy it, actually, borrowed from library as an experiment. What a revelation! A deserved Nobel prize.
Last book I actually bought was "A New History of Western Philosophy" by Kenney. I wanted to take a synoptic view of philosophy after a lot of jumping around, to try and pull it all together! It's actually four large volumes in one massive hardback - actually not too massive, a bit like Dr Who's Tardis, I don't know how they packed so much information in so small space. So far it's going well, really well written and making some good points. Only another 750 pages to go :)
Giles Goat Boy by John Barth...Been stocking up on brick-sized absurdities.
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, cause his commentary on Faulkner seemed so profound, and, being of mixed race (if not black mixed race), I'm fascinated by the Black experience in America. I'm finishing my Baldwin project first, tho, so I have some context. XD
Recent purchases in roughly chronological order: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Rodney Merrill's translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, Frank Ryder's translation of the Nibelungenlied, Christina Hoff Sommers' The War on Boys, Twelve Plays by Shakespeare, The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, and The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky.
Bought 2 used books in Strand Book Store in NYC recently!
Mapping Time by E.G. Richards
Europe: A Cultural History by Peter Rietbergen
I've bought Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell but considering seize of the book I put it aside. I'll try to read it after finishing War and Peace.
The last book I bought was Before the Throne by Naguib Mahfouz. I was just browning through a bookstore, and I came across his section. I had read a bit about him before, but had never come across any of his work. I had a bit of money on me, so I grabbed it and voila! It is sitting on my bookshelf just begging to be read.
I went to a couple of bookstores in Toronto the other day and purchased several books I've been meaning to read like The Secret Agent, Absalom, Absalom!, The Woman in White, The Castle, and The Island of the Day Before. I've got a lot of my reading for the summer already in front of me.
Steve Jobs's biography.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley....
I wanted a dystopian future book as I was feeling a bit glum and wanted something that fit that. And I always figured I ought to read Brave New World, I'd just never gotten around to it before now!
A hardbound copy of Done: The Reformed Soul by John Stubbs. There is no space for books in this house any more. My library of ebooks and audiobooks is growing fast as well but buying physical books is an addiction.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/John-Donne-T...7&sr=8-3-spell
Awe shucks, there's always room for more books - you just have to clear out the food in the pantry.
Today I bought Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. I bought it cold. I know nothing about it, but I read the first couple of chapters in the store and I liked the narrative voice.
Angels and Demons
The Da vinci code
The lost symbol
all by Dan Brown . i bought these all in the same day because i wanted to read the series
De Naam van de Wind (The Name of the Wind) by Patrick Rothfuss because it came highly recommended by some of my friends.
Some people think it's a slow read, but I quite liked it!Quote:
Originally Posted by RicMisc
The Floating Opera and The End of the Road (John Barth)
The Poor Mouth (Flann O'Brien)
Snow (Orhan Pamuk)
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein)
____________________
Currently reading: My Name is Red (Orhan Pamuk)
The Woman in The Dunes (Suna no Onna) by Kobo Abe.
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen.
Both are acclaimed works. The former is a japanese classic, the latter promises some kind of emotional turmoil. Enough said.
Settlers: The Emigrant Novels Book 3 ~ Vilhelm Moberg
Kornel Esti ~ Deszö Kosztolányi
Living Souls ~ Dmitrii Bykov
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich ~ Danilo Kis
I shamefully admit it: The Hunger Games. It's kind of good.
The Lost City of Z by David Grann. I'm in the mood for some non-fiction :)
I've bought "Robocalypse" lately and as I stared reading it I couldn't put it down. Very decent and well written book. And quite surprising. Highly recommend this read!
I looked this title up, but I only found video games. Can you share who the author is?
Picked up a copy of The Celestial Steam Locomotive by Michael Coney from an Op Shop, basically because the cover artwork caught my eye, then the title, lasty the blurb:
Allen Blue-Cloud is pure intelligence, immortal, ineffable, a being who rembers not only what was, but what will be. Set in the year 143,624 Cyclic, in a future so distant man has evolved into five distinct species on an Earth that is but one of many possible Earths. True Humans are few and far remote, and those remaining have withdrawn into the Domes, where with the aid of the Rainbow they dream time away. But there is Manuel, the artist; and an old man; and a sleeping girl. And together with Starquin the Omniscient they will come together to form the Triad, to challenge the age-old forces that hold the Earth - their Earth - in thrall and change the history of the galaxy.
Can't argue with that
Also a '91 edition of The Hutchinson Encyclopedic Dictionary published by Oxford Press apparently, but the illustrations aren't much to write home about, featuring mainly grainy b&w photographs of various famous people in different areas of pursuit - but hey, five bucks...
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Have been thinking about reading it since my days of obsession with Walker Percy 20 years ago.
The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan
and
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
both at the recommendation of a friend (2 different friends)
Finnegans Wake By James Joyce. Because I heard it was a pretty difficult book and I wanted to try it. Unfortunately, I couldn't finish it.
The 1942 edition of "A Conrad Argosy" first published in 1897. This 713 page tome contains 14 of Joseph Conrad's works and hundreds of illustrative woodcuts by Hans Alexander Mueller.
I purchased it because it contains several of Conrad's stories which I haven't yet read and also because its purchase price was a mere 50 cents in the used books for sale section of the Huntington Beach Central Library.
Everytime I am in this part of the library I am taken aback by the cultural shift its contents represent. Persons who in their youth, middle, and old age collected these great books in their home libraries are now dying off in droves and their semi-literate heirs have no use for them. I can practically smell the tobacco smoke and brandy and see the bell-bottoms, turtlenecks and sports-coats of these books' owners in their prime--back in the time when intellectual pretension was widespread amongst the Southern Californian bourgeoisie. Alas all that is gone. As dead as Dick Cavett and Michael Douglas. The great dumbing down is in full effect. Beautiful books may now be had for a pittance. I suppose one might say that the culture's loss is my gain, but it still makes me somewhat sad.
I've read Henry James's Washington Square last. I'm on his What Maisie Knew now, but going very slowly, though it is good. But the language is very demanding, so you need to be in an intellectual flow and not at an intellectual ebb to go through the mental routine that James puts you through: his gymnasium is all jumping through hoops and box splits.
Washington Square was a wonderful story of unrequited love. A beautiful, quiet girl, who the other characters considered unbeautiful and stupid. She was anything but. She was lovely: a picture of sanity and modesty in high society.
I didn't buy either of these books. I'm reading them free on gutenberg.org. Fantastic, the web can be.
I have ordered online The White Noise by Don Delillo after being recommended by people on this very forum on another thread posted by me. I want to explore postmodern fiction. That was why the post.
The Go-Between (by L. P. Hartley)
____________________
Currently reading: The Home and the World (Rabindranath Tagore)
The last thing I bought was Dexter is Delicious in audiobook format so that i can enjoy via my nano while working. In fact, I'm going through the whole Dexter series via audiobook, because I can drive, work, work around the house, take a shower and do a whole bunch of stuff that I couldn't otherwise do if I were just reading a traditional paper bound book (or kindle edition).
I've been watching the Dexter series on Showtime, and while I am waiting for season 7 to air, I decided to listen to the audiobooks and for those who don't already know, the show and the books are quite a bit different. Between the books and the show, I am happily observing Dexter's existence in these parallel universes, and I can't wait to see where they both go.
Dexter is Delicious is read aloud by the author himself, and he does a good job, but I was getting used to and enjoying Nick Landrum's narrative style. I especially enjoyed the last book, Dexter By Design and I've been snickering about the poop van for days now, which I first heard about while working, and I had to stifle the laughter coming from my cubicle, because I didn't want to explain that I was laughing about the "Poop Van." I don't tell stories very well, and it would require quite a bit of lead-up to properly explain "Poop Van" to someone who wasn't listening along with you. So yeah, I am enjoying the Dexter series of books. Poop Van (LOL)
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman by Sterne
Don Quixote by Cervantes
Moby-Dick by Melville (about the third time I've bought it...this time I'm really going to read the ****er)
Why? WHY? Because. They're them. And all that.
I'm also thinking about trading a few things in tomorrow to get -
Madame Bovary by Flaubert
Middlemarch by Eliot
Women in Love - D. H. Lawrence.
Because I just finished The Rainbow.
The Country Girls (Edna O'Brien)
The Enormous Room (E. E. Cummings)
The Waves (Virginia Woolf)
The Humbling (Philip Roth)
If This is a Man (Primo Levi)
The Truce (Primo Levi)
Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
She (H. Rider Haggard)
The Butcher Boy (Patrick McCabe)
The Pursuit of Love (Nancy Mitford)
Krik? Krak! (Edwidge Danticat)
The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros)
Les Braises (Sandor Marai)
Bliss and Other Stories (Katharine Mansfield)
Breakfast of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Trusting and the Maimed (stories by James Plunkett)
Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler)
Little Black Book of Stories (A. S. Byatt)
Divisadero (Michael Ondaatje)
Quartet (Jean Rhys)
The Third Man (Graham Greene)
The Fallen Idol (Graham Greene)
Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
Her Privates We (Frederic Manning)
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco - because it was recommended on the forum
Veggie Burgers Every Which Way: Plus Toppings, Sides, Buns and More by Lukas Volger - because I have a cookbook addiction
I also downloaded the following for Kindle because they were free:
Moby Dick: or, the White Whale
Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
Oliver Twist
A Tale of Two Cities
Wuthering Heights
Dracula
The Old Curiosity Shop
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Three Musketeers
Don Quixote
''World without end'', Ken Follett
Why
I picked it up after finishing ''the pillars of the earth, by the same author. It is a book i appreciated so much, because it made me enjoy English, as a language i still learn (non native)
Samsa, I hope you enjoy Women in Love. I just had a Modernism exam yesterday and used Women in Love as one of my text about about consciousness. The Women in Love thread on here (although quite old now) is really informative and was great for my revision!
I just bought Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley. Bit of a mistake right before exam period, I've had to abandon it halfway through!
I bought it because after seeing the second-hand book fair at uni I figured I needed something new to read to distract me from bogged down with a lot of Modernist reading for my exam revision.
Murder Must Advertise (Dorothy L. Sayers)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Victor Hugo)
The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
The Master of Petersburg (J. M. Coetzee)
The Complete Father Brown Stories (G. K. Chesterton)
Vanishing Point (David Markson)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Trois Femmes Puissantes (Marie Ndiaye)
_______________
Currently reading: BLISS and Other Stories (Katherine Mansfield)