I never finish anything and don’t have much use for fiction. Before you knew me you recommended something I neither remember nor read (that I remember). You know me better now. What should I read?
I know many people think Pearl S. Buck sucks ass, but I’ve been trying to get through more of her stuff.
What, besides “The Good Earth,” is a good choice?
Mystery fan here…just finished the Dennis Lehane series…
Can you throw me a bone?
Thanks
Maeglin: Why dontcha read what I’m reading now? We can discuss it over liquor next time we get together.
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Jan Potocki (1761-1815, a Polish traveller, political activist, ethnographer, and aristocratic adventurer).
This baby is BEYOND weird. It’s a series of tales layered upon layers…the narrator is Alphonse van Worden, a young Walloon officer, diverted into the Sierra Morena and mysteriously detained in the company of thieves, cabbalists, noblemen and gypsies, whose stories he records day by day over a period of months.
And it’s delightfully DIRTY. Alphonse is repeatedly seduced by a pair of lovely young Islamic princesses, who repeatedly attempt to convert him from Christianity. After each night of passion, he awakes to find himself beneath a gallows decked with rotting corpses. And every time anyone ELSE gets laid, they also wake up beneath the gallows.
This is extemely cool shit.
AbbySthrnAccent: Hokayyyyyy…you get Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, a collection of English verse spanning Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, and Wordsworth.
Francis Palgrave made the selection with the aid of contemporaries Matthew Arnold and Lord Tennyson…it’s a nice shot at making Imperial England seem humane and moral. Politics aside, it’s a buncha really nice verse.
dropzone: Don’t care for fiction? I hear ya. How about Jim Jones’s From Here to Eternity? It runs over a thousand pages, so you can feel you’re doing some SERIOUS reading, and it has enough fascinating detail about the U.S. peacetime Army in Hawaii that you’ll sop up the facts without even noticing you’re getting an enthralling narrative at the same time. Trust me; there’s some great stuff in there that never made it into the movie.
CrankyAsAnOldMan: You got me on THAT one. Pearl Buck never got my blood flowing. You’d be better off reading the reviews on Amazon.com.
Did you know that Buck was the only U.S. Nobel Prize winner for Literature that did NOT have an alcohol problem?
beagledave: Have you read Jim Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss (1978)? THE great post-WWII private eye novel.
If you don’t mind PRE-WWII private eye novels, grab up Hammett’s Red Harvest or Chandler’s *Farewell, My Lovely.
[sub]Psssst! Ike! Just in case you didn’t know, it’s fiction![/sub]
If I want to read about pre-war Pearl Harbor I’ll read NON-fiction, thank you very much. Har-umph!
As for Chandler, The High Window,, not Farewell, My Lovely. The writing’s better. And “Red Wind” comes close to the perfect short story. Lou Grant even read the first paragraph to MTM as an example of great writing.
[sub]Psssst! drop! Lou Grant’s fictional, too!
I wish I caught this thread the first time around!!!
Uke you are my hero. If I acquire half the knowledge you have about books and jazz in this lifetime I will die fulfilled.
Now that my semester has just started I won’t be doing any recreational reading for awhile, but while the thread is breathing, what have you got for me? I enjoy witty satire, dark and depressing stuff, intelligent stuff, I especially love good dialogue, umm… well, I’ll just give some examples of stuff I’ve read and enjoyed and let you take it from there (if you aren’t too busy doing Mod stuff): Dosteovsky (my fav), Orwell, Hesse (Steppenwolf), Douglas Adams (of course), Pratchett, Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, Bukowski. Oh, and I also enjoy light pleasant reads like The Princess Bride.
Thanks in advance 
Hi Uke!!
I’ve currently read a few biographies of drug lords (Hunting Pablo which is excellent, **Mr. Nice ** a great autobiography by Howard Marks, and a few others in this vein). Could you recommend a good book about non-Mafiosi American Crime Lords (and I’ve already read Casino, the biography of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal" which was a million times better than the film, and a must read for all thoose interested in the workings of a casino)?
Sorry, I thought I was being fairly clear…I was recommending a novel that offered enough factual detail to be of interest to someone who usually doesn’t read fiction. Hoping to expand your horizons.
(Sorry if that sounded snippy. But if I heard you in person recommending the slender The High Window (aka The Brasher Doubloon) over Farewell, My Lovely to someone who hasn’t read Chandler yet, I’d tip my beer into your lap.)
I recently enjoyed Commander Edward C. Raymer’s Descent into Darkness: Pearl Harbor, 1941, A Navy Diver’s Memoir. If that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat. (Sorry again. Couldn’t resist)
Uke, that sounds perfect. Getting it today.
MR
Moe: If you love Dostoyevsky, plus those other guys, try Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls.
Gogol doesn’t currently have the hipster status of Fyodor, but Dead Souls is an important precursor to better-known late-19th and 20th century Russky literary weirdness. And though its a fat chunk of a novel, it qualifies as fairly light reading…very funny, good narrative drive, etc. Not rough going at all.
TwistofFate: If you want to read a great drug-and-social history, get hold of Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens. All right, it’s not really true crime…LSD “drug lords” have nothing in common with cocaine drug lords. Really good book nonetheless.
(Hmmmmm. Do I get snippy back at someone who can ask that my posting privilages be revoked? Especially since he was doing me a favor by recommending a book he thought I might enjoy? ESPECIALLY since I probably would if I’d get off my high horse about trashy bestsellers? Sure, why not?)
And I thought I made myself PERFECTLY clear that I DON’T read trashy bestselling fiction. Especially fiction in which people have “relationships” AND nobody gets killed until the third act. No, I limit my trash intake to GENRE fiction. Although From Here to Eternity COULD be dumped in the “war fiction” genre. But I’m more likely to read The Thin Red Line were I to read any Jones.
Hmmmmm. Maybe I could pick it up at the library the next time my daughter works. Better yet, SHE could pick it up for me. Thanks for the tip!
(Actually, I appreciate your tips if only to get my brain working in unaccustomed directions, but don’t tell yourself that or you’ll get a swollen head.)
Well, I don’t consider From Here to Eternity to BE trashy bestselling fiction.
In four pages of book suggestions (and yeah, they ARE favors) I don’t think that ANYONE who asked me for a title got a trashy bestselling novel offered to them. Since I don’t read the stuff either, it’d be wrong for me to recommend it.
And don’t be ascairt of being snippy with me…the worst thing I could do to you would be to start a Dropzone Will Recommend a Book to Anyone Who Asks Him! thread. Come to think of it, maybe you should be ascairt.
Hello, Ike. Pleased to make your acquaintance.
I like books about people who are dying to do or say something but can’t because they’re too repressed/reserved. Emotional torment is a must. Take Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, for example.
Any suggestions?
Thanks a bunch Uke. I’m gonna order it right now.
OK, I’m just a posting machine today–I’m sure I just passed whatever paltry postmark I’ve previously set.
And, I’m poaching on Uke’s thread besides! Oooh, I’m bein’ bad.
But I gotta do it, cause I have got THE book for you, gallows fodder, in fact I’ve ranted about this before because the repressed nature of the heroine of this book drives me absolutely freakin’ nuts! I am a Jane Austen geek, but I simply cannot bear Anne Eliot of Persuasion, the simpering little idiot, unable to open her mouth even after all the other barriers to her beloved are removed. I’m not being anachronistic here, I swear, she is just as reserved as a front row center seat at a Dylan concert.
You should love it!
(BTW, I said Ike and I meant Ike. Can’t get all informal on a bruthah without a proper introduction, can I?)
Hah! I’ll just recommend the same book to EVERYBODY! And not even a GOOD book! That’ll kill the thread almost instantaneously.
Perhaps I came to the “trashy bestseller” conclusion because it was a bestseller (and thus suspect) and I have had that image of Lancaster and Kerr smooching on the beach burned into my brain since infancy.
(grumble grumble threaten to tip a beer on MY lap, does he grumble grumble KNEW I’d find one!)
Uke – I’m desperate for a good book to read while bobbing on my pontoon boat over Labor Day. Something with lots of graphic sex, please, but it can’t be obvious from the cover (as the kiddies will be there, too).
Yer fictional friend, Lisa