Literature

[Seraph]

Looking for recommendations.
Out of all the books you've ever read, if you had to choose one of them to be the ONLY book you've ever read, which would it be and why?

[hitogoroshi]

Re: Literature

I can't really imagine how I would percieve books if I haven't read other books. And, anyway, that question allows stuff like textbooks to enter the mix. I think a better way to ask that is, "What book do you see as having the absolute best storytelling?" By the title, I assume you're looking for a story and not a scientific book.

Anyway, to my amended question...well, a week ago, I would have said All Quiet on the Western Front. But now, I'd have to say World War Z by Max Brooks. There are a lot of zombie stories out there, but this one is just perfect. And, more importantly, it's told entirely from first person perspective interviews (with a few "editors notes" for clarity.) So you learn about the outbreak, from "Patient Zero" in China to "present day" from first person snapshots at each stage. You get enough information to trace the whole event, start to finish.

But the truly remarkable thing is HOW it's done. Just saying "first person perspective" doesn't mean anything, but Brooks did it better than any author I've ever read or heard of. You get all the information, you see how each thread pulls one another in subtler ways, but while he's doing all that he's giving you a believeable speech that sounds completely natural. It never once sounds like the characters are talking for the readers benefit - each have the perfect blend of sounding 95% natural with the 5% of cinema that makes them entertaining. As I write pure dialogues more than anything else (though mine are generally 50/50 sorts, instead of the monologues-with-prompting that this book demands), I'm on the lookout for that, and this book surprised me with that element.

And there are almost NO repeating characters! There are dozens of these dialogues, some are only a few pages long. (Though, as the story goes on, the stories get deeper and the dialogues get longer.) We're introduced to someone, and in a few short pages, we already have a well defined character. But instead of using that person, Brooks just creates another well defined character for the next one. And does it again. And again. This is not necessarily always a good thing - I'm not saying that All Quiet on the Western Front would have benefited from this approach - but the sheer fact that he had all these balls in the air and never slipped up is nothing short of amazing.

Also, zombies!

[edit: it has a website. If you click "World Map", you can hear a bunch of little excerpts from the book. The voice acting is kinda meh, in my opinion, but whatever. Might not be safe for work - there are swears in the book and I'm not gonna check each world map entry and see if it's clean. :/]

[madcopper]

Re: Literature

The Curse of Lono by Hunter S. Thompson. But really anything by Hunter S. Thompson is bound to be pleasing. (Rum Diaries, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hells Angels.)

[John Mora]

Re: Literature

we've had like a few topics like this lately

[Garr123]

Re: Literature

Blood Meridian or Evening Redness In The West
by Cormac McCarthy


I've read Faulkner and Salinger and Hemingway and Twain and this, this is the great American novel. Based on an actual scalping party that rove through the Mexican republic in the 1840's it is the most poetic meditation on the nature violence and violent men I've ever encountered, horrid and beautiful. Its ending is near mythic and the character of Judge Holden is one of the most brilliant and horrifying characters I've ever seen put to paper.

I actually took to writing out chapters from this book to figure out how McCarthy crafted his prose, so just for the hell of it here's the first passage in all its glory:

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.

The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the garden. Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing a mule and harrow down the rainblown bottomland toward the night.

A year later he is in Saint Louis. He is taken on for New Orleans aboard a flatboat. Forty-two days on the river. At night the steamboats hoot and trudge past through the black waters all alight like cities adrift. They break up the float and sell the lumber and he walks in the streets and hears tongues he has not heard before. He lives in a room above a courtyard behind a tarvern and he comes down at night like some fairybook beast to fight with the sailors. He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands. His shoulders are set close. The child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent. They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. Men from lands so far and queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind itself vindicated.

On a certain night a Maltese boatswain shoots him in the back with a small pistol. Swinging to deal with the man he is shot again just below the heart. The man flees and he leans against the bar with blood running out of his shirt. The others look away. After awhile he sits on the floor.

He lies in a cot in the room upstairs for two weeks while the tarvernkeeper's wife attends him. She brings his meals, she carries his slops. A hardlooking woman with a wiry body like a man's. By the time he is mended he has no money to pay her and he leaves in the night and sleeps on the riverbank until he can find a boat that will take him on. The boat is going to Texas.

Only now is the child finally divested of all he has been. His origins become remote as his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. The passengers are a diffident lot. They cage their eyes and no man asks another what it is that brings him here. He sleeps on the deck, a pilgrim among others. He watches the dim shore rise and fall. Gray seabirds gawking. Flights of pelicans coastwise above the gray swells.

The disembark aboard a lighter, settlers with their chattels, all studying the low coastline, the thing bight of sand and scrub pin swimming in the haze.

He walks through the narrow streets of the port. The air smells of salt and newsawn lumber. At night whores call to him from the dark like souls in want. A week and he is on the move again, a few dollars in his purse that he's earned, walking the sand roads of the southern night alone, his hands balled in the cotton pockets of his cheap coat. Earthen causeways across the marshlands. Egrets in their rookeries white as candles among the miss. The wind has a raw edge to it and leave lope by the roadside and skelter on in the night fields. He moves through small settlements and farms, working for day wages and found. He sees a parricide hanged in a crossroads hamlet and the man's friends run forward and pull his legs and he hangs dead from his rope while urine darkens his trousers.

He works in a sawmill, he works in a diptheria pesthouse. He takes pay from a farmer an aged mule and aback this animal in the spring of the year eighteen and forty-nine he rides up through the latterday republic of Fredonia into the town of Nacogdoches

[jvrlopez]

Re: Literature

On The Road by Jack Kerouac.

It'll make you want to runaway from everyday society.

[DBtheProdigy]

Re: Literature

I've only read about 8-ish books. That weren't for school. I enjoyed Full Tilt and the Artemis Fowl Series.

[SheepThursday]

Re: Literature

Candide by Volatire was a very enjoyable to read, and is also shorter if you're looking for a quick fix. Otherwise, I recommend The Zombie Survival Guide, The Lovely Bones, Girl with a Pearl Earring, or my all time favorite: Alice in Wonderland (Through the Looking Glass).

[Patryn]

Re: Literature

Watership Down by Richard Adams.

Yes, it's about rabbits. But it's done so that it can appeal to all ages, and there's a lot going on under the surface if you but look for it.

[Seraph]

Re: Literature

Thanks for the suggestions so far guys.

Patryn, I've read Watership Down when I was a kid. But that was quite some time ago, so I was probably too young to have spotted all the hidden tidbits.
Thanks for the suggestion, I think I'll pick this up again.

I decided to start with some more popular books that I missed out on in school. I just borrowed The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird from the library. I figured it might be good to start with some of the "required reading".
I think I may also re-read Animal Farm since I was also very young when I first read it.

Thanks, and keep the suggestions coming.

[Big Country]

Re: Literature

http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=1


I thought it was kind of lame at first, but I read to about chapter 4 or 5 in one sitting and I was hooked. Infact I've read them all to this day.

[Ryner]

Re: Literature

Christ, is this a new weekly trend?

[Magus]

Re: Literature

The Batman Forever novelization.

[John Mora]

Re: Literature

The Batman Forever novelization.

The Mega Man II novelization.