I read several of the books while I was in college ('74-'78). I liked Breakfast of Champions, but it is definitely not a book that you want to start off with. Once you start seeing the recurring characters in his stories and the underlying craziness can you fully appreciate Breakfast of Champions.

I made the mistake of having my girl friend read Breakfast of Champions--she stopped pretty quick and was disgusted.

I might be able to talk her into Cat's Cradle.

The Bell Jar

Pretty much my favorite book of all time.

I just KNEW you were a Sylvia girl...I actually think I thought that from when I first got on this forum... JUST PROMISE ME YOU WILL LIKE HER BUT NOT EMULATE HER!! I would be depressed beyond words if you offed yourself....

^^Don't worry. I won't ever "off" myself. I promise!

GOOD!
I love Sylvia, too, by the way-and Anne Sexton, too.

Beyond Sex Roles: What the Bible Says about a woman's place in church and family

It was for my psychology of gender class. It wasn't as boring as I thought it would be. It was very liberal (i.e., pro women's rights, feminist-y) and I actually enjoyed it.

Currently reading "Five Quarters of the Orange" by Joanne Harris. Only a few pages in, but I quite enjoy it.

Other books I read recently and loved:
a collection of adult geared short stories by Roald Dahl, which were fucked up and delightful and macabre
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz - some good ol fashioned Canadiana
the Stephanie Meyer Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse trilogy...totally a guilty pleasure and almost embarrassing because of the juvenile writing style, but I was in love with Edward Cullen
Brave New World, which I had somehow gotten through high school without reading, and thoroughly enjoyed.
Maeve Binchy's Tara Road.... another guilty pleasure.

I read Brave New World for an English class in high school. Then I bought 1984 this summer (which we never read in high school, and which I think is in the same vein as BNW) and I like 1984 better. I think that BNW is more science fiction dystopian, whereas 1984 is simply dystopian (which I prefer), if that makes any sense.

Totally.. although I (somewhat scarily) found a lot more similarities between Brave New World and our current society than from 1984. Don't get me wrong though, I think Orwell was a genius. I've read so much of his stuff. Totally ahead of his time. Check out Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

fucking two dolphins are burnt I'd rather see an oxygen tank.

I just finished reading A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

stubby its about this chick who thinks shes the universal mother and how she can bare child she ends up being about as stupid as liz.

Just finished reading The End of Mr Y, by Scarlett Johnson... it was GREAT!
Its all about this PH.D student who focuses on this obscure author, and finds this super rare book of his that supposedly has a curse on it, and everyone who's ever been involved with it (publisher, readers, author) has died! So obviously, she reads it, and it starts this crazy story that brings up all these questions about philosophy, and quantum physics, and faith, and linguistics, and time travel and reality.. Frig. I loved it. I recommend it to everyone.

And then right now I'm reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, all about this nine year old boy whose father has died in the 9/11 bombings, and he misses him like crazy - then he finds this key in an envelope with the word Black on it, and goes on this mission to find out what it means. I'm only half way through, but its very sweet. And not at all "rah rah, American's are great post-9/11", which I'm grateful for.

Try to find "Walden 2" by Skinner if you are out used book shopping.

I don't know if that book is still "in vogue" like it was, but you would probably really enjoy it as food for thought. I haven't read it for years.
Also,
Is Castaneda still popular for college reading?

I also recommend W. Somerset Maugham, even though he is supposedly "out of fashion" now.
"Of Human Bondage" is still one of the greatest early 20th Century British Novels

What is Of Human Bondage about? It sounds familiar.

edith wharton - afterward
hmm. it was okay. not house of mirth material in any way. but her writing is beautiful as always, poetic and insightful. afterward is a short little ghos t story.

It is the story of Philip, a young man who falls in love Mildred, a wiatress/prostitute in early Twentieth Century Britain. It speaks a lot about human nature & how we cannot control what we truly desire. It has been made as a movie several times, but the best version is still the 1934 Bette Davis/Leslie Howard version. I love Maugham & the movies that were made from his work-I may post more on him soon.

I choose to skip scary books in my old age. If I had any fame I would comission a biographer to write a biography. Someone as smart as fiona apple could do it.

^^Wow, that post actually made sense. I'm impressed.

starting to read anna quindlen - black and blue
while still finishing dangerous liasons, i can't finish this book!!

^I could never finish that book, either-I tried long time ago. I find it slow.

Philippe Besson - En l’absence des hommes


super extra hyper ultra breathtaking! one of the grestest book that I've ever read


recently I'm into japanese literature, it was inspired by a old time japanese drifter , the man called..........I don't remember, but he spent lots of time travelling around japan, like almost 100 years ago, can you imainge there's nothing offered on the mountain, what can you do?


Akutagawa Ryūnosuke is such a ghostwriter that I'm so crazy about I read his book called Rashōmon and Jigokuhen

Murakami Haruki is the monster mainstream in japan but his early stuff were kind of indie and it's worth to read, I 've already finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, his debut published

guess I'll study more and more japanese novels, interesting!

More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction - Elizabeth Wurtzel

WW, I have to ask...where are you from? I only ask because now that you mention Japanese culture, and Im pretty sure youre from eastern asia of some descent, I'm curious as to your opinion of Kurosawa films. I spoke to one of my prof's once about Kurosawa, specifically with the film Rashomon, and we were discussing how/if japanese people embraced him as one of their own, once he felt the need to come to the states to make money. Or do you even have an opinion on him?

I just finished reading Shoot the Moon by Billie Letts
it was actually really good!!

hehe I'm from China but I lived in Hong Kong and raised in Hong Kong.
well Akira Kurosawa is a quite famous movie director around the world but it's such a shame I've never watch any of his movies, it just my blindness, Rashomon this movie probably his highlight cause everybody knows it, talk of the town, besides Rashomon originally was written by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, I read this short story but it means alot, kinda scary because the background of this story were about the war and does really happend during the period..........
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Kurosawa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_%28film%29

one of my favorite director is Shunji Iwai because of the movie All About Lily Chou Chou
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_About_Lily_Chou-Chou

haruki murakami - kafka on the shore

actually I gave this book to a switzerland man who's red hair but finally I wanna read it again so I bought it from a market, 2nd hand, but it's looks nobody touch it, 99% new, chinese traslation version, okay I'm gonna finished it, very fascinating!

Riding in Cars with Boys by Beverly Donofrio

Interesting, Kafka on the Shore:

"The odd chapters tell Kafka's story as he runs away from his father's house to escape an Oedipal curse and to embark upon a quest to find his mother and sister. After a series of adventures, he finds shelter in a quiet, private library in Takamatsu, run by the distant and aloof Miss Saeki and the androgynous Oshima. There he spends his days reading the unabridged Richard Francis Burton translation of A Thousand and One Nights and the collected works of Natsume Sōseki until the police begin inquiring after him in connection with a brutal murder.

The even chapters tell Nakata's story. Due to his uncanny abilities, he has found part-time work in his old age as a finder of lost cats (a clear reference to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). The case of one particular lost cat puts him on a path that ultimately takes him far away from his home, ending up on the road for the first time in his life. He befriends a truck-driver named Hoshino. Hoshino takes him on as a passenger in his truck and soon becomes very attached to the old man.

Nakata and Kafka are on a collision course throughout the novel, but their convergence takes place as much on a metaphysical plane as it does in reality and, in fact, that can be said of the novel itself. Due to the Oedipal theme running through much of the novel, Kafka on the Shore has been called a modern Greek tragedy."

It's funny I remember reading about a conference I think Jacques Derrida attended in Japan. It was a conference on literature and I think he was expecting the subject matter to be something else entirely but it ended out being about interpretations of the work of Gustave Flaubert. The Japanese seem to be quite keen on Western cannonical texts!

Is that true wirewalker or are those two isolated incidences?

BTW the film of Rashamon is good, but because of the number of perspectives portrayed in the one text, it became ripped off in the West by all sorts of ridiculously bad writers desperate for plotlines. I think there's some situation comedy TV show that actually used it once! But to return to the topic of Kurosawa, I find it very difficult to get into his films because I'm not really into all the swordplay and all that that is such a central film of his films.

Which other directors do you like?

Oh and what am I reading, about 10 articles on the pros and cons philosophically about euthanasia. I'm pro BTW, if a patient is in incurable pain and sufferring and a patient and their physician both have the intention of wanting to relieve that suffering by ending the patient's life, I don't see anything morally wrong and as far as I'm concerned there's no rational reason - I feel - why someone under those circumstances can't ask to be euthanised. (Go Oregon!) All these bizzare arguments about it being that it would be used all the time just to get rid of the elderly is a bit odd, but reviewing the literature from what occurs in Switzerland and the Netherlands, I hear that there's possibly not enough focus on pallative care there and the facilities simply don't exist. It would be a pity to think that its legalisation has made it that it is actually seen as a short-cut for a patient and their physician to a patient's death. Again though, that was one report and who knows when issues of quality of life issues are concerned.

Dig this little nugget o' filth, ferreted from the pages of an obscure classic novel, the author of which was quite obviously insane at the time of its writing. From Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. Translated from Russian.

Tell me, how many hands have palpated the pulp that has grown so generously around your hard, bitter little soul? Yes, like a ghost I return to your first betrayals and, howling, rattling my chains, walk through them. The kisses I spied. Your and his kisses, which most resembled some sort of feeding, intent, untidy, and noisy. Or when you, with eyes closed tight, devoured a spurting peach and then, having finished, but still swallowing, with your mouth still full, you cannibal, your glazed eyes wandered, your fingers were spread, your inflamed lips were all glossy, your chin trembled, all covered with drops of the cloudy juice, which trickled down onto your bared bosom, while the Priapus who had nourished you suddenly, with a convulsive oath, turned his bent back to me, who had entered the room at the wrong moment. "All kinds of fruit are good for Marthe," you would say with a certain sweet-slushy moistness in your throat, all gathering into one damp, sweet, accursed little fold--

I've just finished "The Wind - Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami and am currently reading "Out" by Natsuo Kirino!

I got about halfway through WIBC and set it aside. But I might go back, because Sputnik Sweetheart isn't working for me.

Animal Farm

"TWO LEGS BAAA-AAAD..."
I can't read Orwell any longer-he's amazing, but he depresses me too much.
Though I did pick up a copy of "The Metamorphosis" by Kafka & intend on giving it a read again after many years.

Currntly reading The Complete Illustrated Stories And Poems Of Edgar Aleen Poe

Just finished reading Women by Bukowski!

I'm Reading
We Need To Talk About Kevin
it's lame about to give up on it

twilight by stephenie meyer.....i was skeptical at first because EVERYONE was reading it .. but i finally broke down and got it from the library....i LOVED it!! can't wait to read the next ones.

Are those the books about vampires? It seems like I've heard of them before.

^^yes

I just finished reading In Cold Blood. So good. I love analyzing the book. Looking for hints about Capote's relationship with Perry, looking for bias because of this (both of these aren't hard to spot), looking at how Capote insinuates himself into the story at the end (why?, was it his ego?). When reading, you can't help but make a judgment about Dick and Perry. I also wonder if Perry was telling the truth when he said that he shot of 4 of them. I almost think he was. Perry's pretty much a classic psychopath, so he wouldn't say he did it just to cover for Dick, he hates him, has nothing but scorn for him and everyone else. I think that Perry was the scarier of the 2. For one, he's a psychopath and, as a result, he never shows any remorse. Also, he has this strange ability to have both a superiority complex and an inferiority complex at both the same time. Dick, on the other hand, is less scary. He's fucked up to be sure (what with being a pedophile and all), but he honestly cares about his family (and people, more or less, in general) and seems to be remorseful (to a point) for what he did.

Very cute/cool graphic novel I just finished.

Now I am reading a true crime book called "The Good Wife: The Shocking Betrayal and Brutal Murder of a Godly Woman in Texas" by Clint Richmond

A cute, frothy summer read about Hollywood and Oscar season. It was fun.

i just started reading the x-files: i want to believe.

Entertaining graphic novel I just finished. Any criticism I might have with it is probably due to the fact that I am not it's teenage/young adult target audience.
Marci, you might like this one-it's got some "Daria"-like qualities...
There is a sequel coming out in September I will be looking forward to.

The Little Friend by Donna Tart
It was pretty long (555 pages) but I finished it in about 4-5 days. I was hard to put down; it was superbly written with well developed characters and a more than intriguing story.

Light wieght combat boots in the ally
I gave you chance
Its an Epic novel theres a chapter called Jeremy.
thesecrets of the Italian tower shold be kpt secret.

I just finished reading Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. It was good and scary...but in a weird way.