The Brave by Gregory McDonald. I think I will never finish that book.
Just take a look at the reviews.
That would actually be rather consistent with the starvation level diets implied in the poorer Districts. Even Katnis who is probably getting more protein than most people because she hunts isn’t getting a lot of the high-fat factory farm protein that have helped pushed the onset of menses age down so low in the West.
Silas Marner. I can’t remember anything about it except that it was as unrelentingly grim as it was boring.
I can’t actually recall the title of the book that depressed me enough to quit reading it, but it was about two people who stumble across a plane wreck (?) and a huge amount of presumably drug money in cash. people start killing each other for possession of the cash. I believe there was a movie made of this, but I just couldn’t keep reading after the killings started to snowball. Just nope, nope, nope.
A Simple Plan?
THAT’S IT! Dear God, I hated that book, as evidenced by the fact I blocked out its title.
As a stand-alone book, I have to go with an obvious, and already mentioned, choice: The Road. Probably amplified by reading it as a young father. Close second would be A Map of the World, by Jane Hamilton. Probably amplified, now that I think of it, by reading it when I was a young father…
That hadn’t occurred to me! That’s a possibility.
However, I didn’t really notice the apparent lack of menstrual cycles until Katniss mentions in the 2nd book that the boys and men had no beard growth in the arena, but didn’t address anything about periods, which I found peculiar in a book written by a woman.
I don’t remember anything about menstruation in the “Divergent” book either. Didn’t read any of the follow-ups, however.
We had to read that in school. Has anyone voluntarily plowed through that unrelenting tedium? When it was written, did it immediately go into the arsenal of sadistic English teachers?
yup!!
Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
So dark but so good. Couldn’t put it down.
I did. After I graduated college (where one of my majors was English) I decided to read some “classics” that I hadn’t read in school. Silas Marner has the virtue of being a lot shorter than some of them. Not one of the better ones, though.
I was traveling thru Greece and Turkey while reading Angela’s Ashes. Reading it filtered my observations so that all I could see was the poverty in those countries. Just finished The Fault in Our Stars. So damn depressed now I need a Carl Hiaasen book or something to fix me.
The Trial by Franz Kafka. He packs it chock full of meaningless bureaucracy to make a point. You thought waiting in line at the DMV was bad…
“Sarah’s Key” and “The Book Thief.” “The Book Thief” for the win. I am a very fast reader. But I put off reading the last of “The Book Thief” for two weeks because I knew how devastating it would be. And it was.
I’ll second Dreiser, except mine is “Sister Carrie”. It’s a very sad, focused depressing…Hurstwood’s decline and end and Carrie’s complete indifference to anything other than her comfort and ambition just threw a pall over everything for me for weeks.
I have heard that both books are very good. I have not seen the movie “The Book Thief” but I heard that it wasn’t very good; I have seen “Sarah’s Key” and it wasn’t either.
I was just thinking about this thread the other day, after I watched the well made but depressing-ass film The Claim. Looking it up, turns out it is loosely based on yet another Thomas Hardy novel ( The Mayor of Canterbridge, which I happily never read ).
Fucking Thomas Hardy, again. Somehow I hope in life he was one of those irritatingly cheery people, always upbeat and optimistic. But looking at his portraits, I kinda doubt it ;).
Beautiful Boy by David Sheff about having a meth addict son
AND
Tweak by Nic Sheff, the son
I read them both back to back. :eek:
Bleak fucking House