i've read "fear and loathing in las vegas", really funny book..
author killed himself recently.. did it while his wife was home..
she just heard a pop and though that a book fell off the shelf..
no, an author..
i've read the book long time ago though,.. you know how memories are.. colored in pink..
and if you are russian.. read "master and margarita".. another funny one..
"contempt" by alberto moravio. the Godard movie of the same title was based on this book. translated from italian, so no "crazy language". also will earn you immediate respect from the "Architecture theorists" types.
hitchhikers guide to the galaxy series is great. Started reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and it is really good. Author is Douglass Adams. I have read a lot of Vonnegut as well, sirens of Titan is my favorite. Paul Autere is another one of my favorite authors.
"the fountainhead" by ayn rand.. about two architects/rivals and their struggle to rise to the top, has an unconventional love-story side plot. it's a long book, but a great read! one of my fave books..
pasha, i believe thompson killed himself while on the phone with his wife. him killing himself had been a point of discussion between the two for some time.
don't know any love stories, but Vonnegut is on my list too.
Book review time:
Farenheit 451 is a great book that I couldn't put down, it's a written-in-the-past-about-the future story about a society in which books are horrible and TV is not just a box in your living room, but all four walls glow with images full size. Everyone is dumbed down. Point of view is from a fireman whose job is to burn all books... Some have drawn correlation to modern times and Bush administration...
Another is Girl in Hyacinth Blue - a story following a Vermeer painting from WWII back in time, through all the families it touched. Verrry interesting.
Prey is another recent read of mine - a fictional story about nanotechnology, creating entities which act with swarm mentality, like insects, and a lab in Nevada developing this technology - opened my mind to the wonders of science yet to come and future technologies better than any movie could.
I second "the fountainhead" ... dominique francon is one of the most amazing fictional characters of all time.
Also "survivor" by chuck palahniuk; there's an unconventinal love story in there. and "the unbearable lightness of being" by milan kundera... in fact any of kundera's books deal with realtionships, love and so much else. read and become addicted...
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Amazon.com Review:
The Alchemist presents a simple fable, based on simple truths and places it in a highly unique situation. And though we may sniff a bestselling formula, it is certainly not a new one: even the ancient tribal storytellers knew that this is the most successful method of entertaining an audience while slipping in a lesson or two. Brazilian storyteller Paulo Coehlo introduces Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who one night dreams of a distant treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. And so he's off: leaving Spain to literally follow his dream.
Along the way he meets many spiritual messengers, who come in unassuming forms such as a camel driver and a well-read Englishman. In one of the Englishman's books, Santiago first learns about the alchemists--men who believed that if a metal were heated for many years, it would free itself of all its individual properties, and what was left would be the "Soul of the World." Of course he does eventually meet an alchemist, and the ensuing student-teacher relationship clarifies much of the boy's misguided agenda, while also emboldening him to stay true to his dreams. "My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy confides to the alchemist one night as they look up at a moonless night.
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself," the alchemist replies. "And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."
I know this sounds really cheezy, and it is a little, but give it a shot. It's a good story and a quick read.
Sounds difficult, but it's really not. His books are amazing, I LOVED it... and I disagree about it being too metaphysical, but check it out for yourself.
From Amazon, below:
Starred Review. Previous books such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood have established Murakami as a true original, a fearless writer possessed of a wildly uninhibited imagination and a legion of fiercely devoted fans. In this latest addition to the author's incomparable oeuvre, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home, both to escape his father's oedipal prophecy and to find his long-lost mother and sister. As Kafka flees, so too does Nakata, an elderly simpleton whose quiet life has been upset by a gruesome murder. (A wonderfully endearing character, Nakata has never recovered from the effects of a mysterious World War II incident that left him unable to read or comprehend much, but did give him the power to speak with cats.) What follows is a kind of double odyssey, as Kafka and Nakata are drawn inexorably along their separate but somehow linked paths, groping to understand the roles fate has in store for them. Murakami likes to blur the boundary between the real and the surreal—we are treated to such oddities as fish raining from the sky; a forest-dwelling pair of Imperial Army soldiers who haven't aged since WWII; and a hilarious cameo by fried chicken king Colonel Sanders—but he also writes touchingly about love, loneliness and friendship. Occasionally, the writing drifts too far into metaphysical musings—mind-bending talk of parallel worlds, events occurring outside of time—and things swirl a bit at the end as the author tries, perhaps too hard, to make sense of things. But by this point, his readers, like his characters, will go just about anywhere Murakami wants them to, whether they "get" it or not.
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez' "Chronicle of a Death Foretold"
An absolutely wonderful novella with compelling language, structure, and relationships/love stories. Read it as a precursor to One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is arguably (and I do also think so) the best novel ever written. But "for starters" begin with Chronicle. Also, since it is a novella, it shouldn't take you more than a day or two. Definately worth at least that much time.
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez - Chronicle of a Death Foretold
-Great magical realism that's classic Garcia-Marquez. Mouthwateringly beautiful prose. It's VERY short and easy to read. Takes a day or two at most. Traces the aftermath of a mysterious death of an groom murdered by his brothers in law.
Hemmingway short stories are amazing as well. Try the Snows of Mt. Killmanjaro.
Kafka - the Metamorphosis
One day the narrator wakes up as a giant bug.
Nabokov - Lolita
Also a classic and beautifully written. Nabokov writes virtuostically. You get sucked into this story. Everyone knows what it's about by now, thanks to Sting.
Huxley - Brave New World
Great futurist dystopian story. Easier to read (my opinion) and less politically charged than 1984.
Watershipdown mentioned earlier is good but is a bit on the long side for a "starter".
--The 'perfect' man's struggle to understand how his family life went terribly wrong.
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
--A young man travels to Eastern Europe to learn about his family's past and becomes entangled with another man's history. This one is at turns hilarious and extremely emotional.
Ann Patchett's Bel Canto is also pretty good, and more of a traditonal love story, about a group of people being held hostage and the love relationships that form between them. And Chuck Klosterman's essays Killing Yourself to Live are, on the surface, an epic trek across the country to the places where rockstars died, but is really a look into his life and relationships with 3 women. It is really light, you can read a chapter at a time and not feel bad, and one of those books where you go 'that's so true!" all the time in between hysterical laughs.
Other titles: The River Midnight, Daniel Deronda, and I second The Invisible Man.
abracadabra - my name is red is a great book but it's not really in the 'for starters' catagory!
i definately second the master and the margarita though, i read it while in moscow and really enjoyed it. pasha if you liked that you may like lanark, by alasdair gray - it also had a coded political slant conmined with surreal aspects...
All the pretty horses: cormac mccarthy
hemmingway/faulkner styled tragic love near the mexican border.
(forget that this was made into a film.)
wide sargasso sea: jean rhys
love, insanity and a little voodoo in post-colonial jamaica. after you read this, graduate to reading jane eyre by charlotte bronte, gothic love in victorian england (longer).
(also ignore that this became a film)
literature-fiction
i need suggestions on a good fiction book for starters...preferably with a great love story. a short description is appreciated. thanks
i've read "fear and loathing in las vegas", really funny book..
author killed himself recently.. did it while his wife was home..
she just heard a pop and though that a book fell off the shelf..
no, an author..
i've read the book long time ago though,.. you know how memories are.. colored in pink..
and if you are russian.. read "master and margarita".. another funny one..
someone who hasn't read a whole lot of literature...no shakespearean type literature with crazy language...
well, there's harry potter. for starters.
literature as opposed to fiction, though. that's different. how 'bout 'of mice and men'?
confederacy of dunces - excellent funny story set in new orleans
watership down - about rabbits!
catch 22 - set on an island off the coast of italy during ww ll
"contempt" by alberto moravio. the Godard movie of the same title was based on this book. translated from italian, so no "crazy language". also will earn you immediate respect from the "Architecture theorists" types.
hitchhikers guide to the galaxy series is great. Started reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and it is really good. Author is Douglass Adams. I have read a lot of Vonnegut as well, sirens of Titan is my favorite. Paul Autere is another one of my favorite authors.
"the fountainhead" by ayn rand.. about two architects/rivals and their struggle to rise to the top, has an unconventional love-story side plot. it's a long book, but a great read! one of my fave books..
pasha, i believe thompson killed himself while on the phone with his wife. him killing himself had been a point of discussion between the two for some time.
yeah, he wanted to go out while he was still on top!?!?!?
I know one of the guys in charge of shooting his ashes out of a civil war canon.
don't know any love stories, but Vonnegut is on my list too.
Book review time:
Farenheit 451 is a great book that I couldn't put down, it's a written-in-the-past-about-the future story about a society in which books are horrible and TV is not just a box in your living room, but all four walls glow with images full size. Everyone is dumbed down. Point of view is from a fireman whose job is to burn all books... Some have drawn correlation to modern times and Bush administration...
Another is Girl in Hyacinth Blue - a story following a Vermeer painting from WWII back in time, through all the families it touched. Verrry interesting.
Prey is another recent read of mine - a fictional story about nanotechnology, creating entities which act with swarm mentality, like insects, and a lab in Nevada developing this technology - opened my mind to the wonders of science yet to come and future technologies better than any movie could.
I second "the fountainhead" ... dominique francon is one of the most amazing fictional characters of all time.
Also "survivor" by chuck palahniuk; there's an unconventinal love story in there. and "the unbearable lightness of being" by milan kundera... in fact any of kundera's books deal with realtionships, love and so much else. read and become addicted...
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Amazon.com Review:
The Alchemist presents a simple fable, based on simple truths and places it in a highly unique situation. And though we may sniff a bestselling formula, it is certainly not a new one: even the ancient tribal storytellers knew that this is the most successful method of entertaining an audience while slipping in a lesson or two. Brazilian storyteller Paulo Coehlo introduces Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who one night dreams of a distant treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. And so he's off: leaving Spain to literally follow his dream.
Along the way he meets many spiritual messengers, who come in unassuming forms such as a camel driver and a well-read Englishman. In one of the Englishman's books, Santiago first learns about the alchemists--men who believed that if a metal were heated for many years, it would free itself of all its individual properties, and what was left would be the "Soul of the World." Of course he does eventually meet an alchemist, and the ensuing student-teacher relationship clarifies much of the boy's misguided agenda, while also emboldening him to stay true to his dreams. "My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer," the boy confides to the alchemist one night as they look up at a moonless night.
"Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself," the alchemist replies. "And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity."
I know this sounds really cheezy, and it is a little, but give it a shot. It's a good story and a quick read.
'Kafka on the Shore' by Haruki Murakami
- his latest
Sounds difficult, but it's really not. His books are amazing, I LOVED it... and I disagree about it being too metaphysical, but check it out for yourself.
From Amazon, below:
Starred Review. Previous books such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood have established Murakami as a true original, a fearless writer possessed of a wildly uninhibited imagination and a legion of fiercely devoted fans. In this latest addition to the author's incomparable oeuvre, 15-year-old Kafka Tamura runs away from home, both to escape his father's oedipal prophecy and to find his long-lost mother and sister. As Kafka flees, so too does Nakata, an elderly simpleton whose quiet life has been upset by a gruesome murder. (A wonderfully endearing character, Nakata has never recovered from the effects of a mysterious World War II incident that left him unable to read or comprehend much, but did give him the power to speak with cats.) What follows is a kind of double odyssey, as Kafka and Nakata are drawn inexorably along their separate but somehow linked paths, groping to understand the roles fate has in store for them. Murakami likes to blur the boundary between the real and the surreal—we are treated to such oddities as fish raining from the sky; a forest-dwelling pair of Imperial Army soldiers who haven't aged since WWII; and a hilarious cameo by fried chicken king Colonel Sanders—but he also writes touchingly about love, loneliness and friendship. Occasionally, the writing drifts too far into metaphysical musings—mind-bending talk of parallel worlds, events occurring outside of time—and things swirl a bit at the end as the author tries, perhaps too hard, to make sense of things. But by this point, his readers, like his characters, will go just about anywhere Murakami wants them to, whether they "get" it or not.
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Trial - Kafka
nick hornby's hi fidelity is the book you want.
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez' "Chronicle of a Death Foretold"
An absolutely wonderful novella with compelling language, structure, and relationships/love stories. Read it as a precursor to One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is arguably (and I do also think so) the best novel ever written. But "for starters" begin with Chronicle. Also, since it is a novella, it shouldn't take you more than a day or two. Definately worth at least that much time.
I second The Alchemist and think I'll pick up 'Kafka on the Shore' sounds good.
The Brothers Karamazov
I second DB
Gabriel Garcia-Marquez - Chronicle of a Death Foretold
-Great magical realism that's classic Garcia-Marquez. Mouthwateringly beautiful prose. It's VERY short and easy to read. Takes a day or two at most. Traces the aftermath of a mysterious death of an groom murdered by his brothers in law.
Hemmingway short stories are amazing as well. Try the Snows of Mt. Killmanjaro.
Kafka - the Metamorphosis
One day the narrator wakes up as a giant bug.
Nabokov - Lolita
Also a classic and beautifully written. Nabokov writes virtuostically. You get sucked into this story. Everyone knows what it's about by now, thanks to Sting.
Huxley - Brave New World
Great futurist dystopian story. Easier to read (my opinion) and less politically charged than 1984.
Watershipdown mentioned earlier is good but is a bit on the long side for a "starter".
these are egghead books read some nicholas sparks you elitist eggheads
I second meversusyou. But is it really for beginners? Most people I know have to reread the first half of Dostojevskij's books four-five times.
2 unconventional love stories:
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
--The 'perfect' man's struggle to understand how his family life went terribly wrong.
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
--A young man travels to Eastern Europe to learn about his family's past and becomes entangled with another man's history. This one is at turns hilarious and extremely emotional.
Ann Patchett's Bel Canto is also pretty good, and more of a traditonal love story, about a group of people being held hostage and the love relationships that form between them. And Chuck Klosterman's essays Killing Yourself to Live are, on the surface, an epic trek across the country to the places where rockstars died, but is really a look into his life and relationships with 3 women. It is really light, you can read a chapter at a time and not feel bad, and one of those books where you go 'that's so true!" all the time in between hysterical laughs.
Other titles: The River Midnight, Daniel Deronda, and I second The Invisible Man.
sartre - intimacy
what about the DA VINCI CODE?
abracadabra - my name is red is a great book but it's not really in the 'for starters' catagory!
i definately second the master and the margarita though, i read it while in moscow and really enjoyed it. pasha if you liked that you may like lanark, by alasdair gray - it also had a coded political slant conmined with surreal aspects...
easy reads, easily in a day on vacation...
All the pretty horses: cormac mccarthy
hemmingway/faulkner styled tragic love near the mexican border.
(forget that this was made into a film.)
wide sargasso sea: jean rhys
love, insanity and a little voodoo in post-colonial jamaica. after you read this, graduate to reading jane eyre by charlotte bronte, gothic love in victorian england (longer).
(also ignore that this became a film)
i can't believe i forgot The Story of Avis. one of my favorite books of all time.
SIDHARTHA - herman hesse
john fante's ask the dust.
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