I read for escapism. At least an hour a day, unless I'm ungodly busy and am not even sleeping that night. Usually more. I love Tolkein, Philip K Dick, Jane Austen, especially Janet Fitch right now. Lately got turned on to some May Swenson poetry as well. Basically I'll enjoy anything well-written, in a wide variety of genre.

sorry to tell you but the novel is dead yet again.

Absolutely, but I can't stand Marquez, so I guess I'm out of this thread.

raymond carver - cathedral

you can't stand Marquez Myriam??? how come?

right now i've been into Truman Capote, i like his short stories alot

otherwise some of my favorite include Ray Bradbury, George Orwell. 1984, brave new world, fahrenheit 451 etc. are some of my favorite

i'll read just about anything. totally non-discriminating reader, really. i think because deep down i have a secret desire to KNOW everything.

right now it's a 1000+ pg novel by vikram seth about post-partition india.

While this isn't much, I try to read one, non-architecture book a month.

I love myself some Marquez. And David Sedaris.

Jane Austen makes me cringe.

i used to try and read one non-fiction usually architecture related book and one fiction book at the same time. I found I was able to keep track of both books in my head and allow for a bit of variety. I finished books much faster. all time fav: Catch-22 by Heller.

(what happened to the book club? dead after one book that nobody could buy?)

so, i'm looking for a new book today, perhaps i'll pick from this thread.

haruki murakami's books..
anyone of them

catch 22 is a great book

Khaled Hosseini is a great writer. I also like reading a lot of scientific stuff like Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, etc.

yeah i heard people in school who claimed to read only architecture books, and were also the ones who claimed to read pretty much every book you had heard of cover to cover
i never really believed them

i find it wont make for a very well rounded person if you only will read books based on one thing (in this case architecture)
from my experience, that person is just trying to show you up or make it known that he/she is more dedicated than you or better than you, and will freely throw out catch phrases or building names that he saw for a second in that book and never really comprehended
i usually just nodded, then turned back to my harry potter book

i prefer friction (mdler-esque quote of the day)

@ Bleu,

I was going to post Murakami!

All his books are amazingly realistic and detailed but also so surreal...

Borges, AM Homes, Roald Dahl...and whatever McSweeny's has to offer.

Definitely. In fact, my attention span with "architecture" books is severely limited. I'll buy the occasional monograph, but mostly just look at the pictures.

I prefer fiction and non-fiction that's sort of peripherally architectural (anything by W.G. Sebald, RIP, for example), and find that it does more to enhance my understanding and enjoyment of architecture than most explicitly "architectural" books.

Still trying in vain to slog my way through The Edifice Complex, for example. Wow, you mean Hitler used architecture to validate and cement his power?! Who knew?! Give it a rest already.

bleu i share many of your favorites as well as Isabelle Allande, Christopher Moore, Rudolfo Anaya, Paulo Coelho, Maya Angelou, James Joyce, Sedaris signed my copy of "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim" with a firecracker :) I was happy for a week. If Mr. Koolhaas signed my copy of "Delirious New York" I would be happy for 4 days.

i love ronald dahl too -

my guilty pleasures are the Janet Evonovich Stephanie Plum bounty hunter mysteries because they read like comforting predictable movies, i grew up in NJ, and that girl is badass [you have to have something :)]

I think fiction makes me a better designer. I have friends who only chose non-fiction and they think I'm crazy, I think reading different things helps the creativity [and the soul].

la_la its nice that there are other architects like me.
right now i just finished "absurdistan"-gary styengart
very nice perspective into the modern russian life.
i loved "delirious new york" a lot.
fiction makes me a more complete person..
i do not know if I am a better designer..

I'm just finishing 'Fortress of Solitude' by Jonathan Lethem; a three-part story, (third-person narrative --> protagonist-written article --> first-person narrative). Its about a white kid growing up in Brooklyn in the '70s - '80s; well written, funny, emotional, historically accurate- everything I want in a novel.
Before 'Fortress...' was 'Amongst the Thugs' a non-fiction account of English football supporters (soccer hooligans) written by Bill Buford. There was plenty of sociological arguments thrown in there, but the 'action' chapters are so fantastically violent and devious it could easily have been fiction. I believe this book was the basis of the movie "Green Street Hooligans."
Up next is 'High Rise' by JG Ballard.

3dmax 9 bible is a great read!!!!

Anyone reading Milan Kundera or Jose Saramago? I prefer Kundera's older stuff, but its all good. Bleu is right Murakami is all good. Non-fiction: Naomi Klein's "NOLOGO" looks interesting, finishing "To the Finland Station" by Edmund Wilson about development of socialism in 19th century(written in 1940).

Henry Miller, almost forgot, I think he was 38 when first published, great for rants.

My two favorite books are:

Waiting for the Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee
A great allegorical novel about empire and control and the subjugation of one group of people by another. It's especially profound when read in the context of the Iraq war.

Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy
Probably the most violent novel you will ever read, but McCarthy invents a new kind of quasi-Shakespearean language in it. It has some of the most lucid and poetic passages I've ever read.

I love Jack London, Roald Dahl, Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury, and Norman Maclean. I've also got a love for Jon Krakauer which I have a hard time classifying as non-fiction. I also loved Atlas Shrugged. I love outdoorsy books, witty books, and classic "young adult" reading. My real escape is in financial books and theology. (sorry, I'm an uberdork) Either of those captivate me and I just forget about how crappy my life can be. I've got lots of pretty architecture picture books, but I haven't read too many of them. I read for the escape.

Farwest1 ...

Yeah ... Blood Meridian is a stunning book. It is still one of my favorites. I think part of the popularity of McCarthy's No Country for Old Men is that it exhibits the same energy and dread as Blood Meridian. I know I've posted this in other fiction threads before, but if you like Blood Meridian, you should read Oakley Hall's Warlock -- it's a gothic western set in the fictional mining town of Warlock. Not as violent at McCarthy, but just as rewarding.

I'm kinda just figuring out that I like books with an obvious gravitas. Melville, Faulkner, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, as well as Gravity's Rainbow. I was just discussing Shteyngart's Absurdistan with some friends the other day ... although I think it's funny, I don't like the writing style. Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex is a bit of a surprise for me. I never thought I would ever get into it, but it is one of the most pleasurable, well-written books ever.

Also, I think I prefer longer novels to shorter ones. I like the total immersion and sheer task of reading a long book -- it feels like you've accomplished something.

agree on long books and the sense of accomplishment. also, it's more often/likely with a long and involved book (like the one i'm reading now) that you grow such a relationship with the characters and situations that you know you'll miss them for a little while once it's over.

Try These:

Slavomir Rawicz: The Long Walk

Paul Auster: Moon Palace

Jon Krakauer: Into Thin Air

Sheila Fitzpatrick: The Russian Revolution

these aren't all non-fiction but two of them are "adventure books" and all are great reads. perhaps i need to start a "le bossman book club of the month" thread.

I was introduced to Christopher Moore last year and so far have loved his stuff. I used to do a lot of long distance drives: Barbara Kingsolver's stuff is good on CD.

pynchon pynchon pynchon . i had never read him till just a year or two ago - somehow he was off my radar till then , but i cannot recomend him enough .
Lawrence Durrell 's Alexandria quartet is also fantastic - though probably considered very un pc these days , and not much talked about.
Am a sucker for a lot of russian lit , most recently and a little outside of the obvious must read's is , Sokolov's A School for Fools

recently read non-fiction which i really enjoyed was Taussig's Law in a Lawless Land , an anthropologist who is also a beautiful writer to boot gives a dairy-style account of life in Colombia in light of guerilla
and paramilitary control of the country .

the last 5 books i read:

Andrey kurkov - the president's last love
Salman rushdie - the moor's last sigh
Dustin long – the icelanders
Glen david gould – carter the magician
Jorge Luis Borges - fictions
Georges perec - life: a user's manual

maybe it's because i read them recently but the icelanders and carter the magician are up there on my top 10 of favourite novels...

i agree with stephanie above - anything and everything that comes from McSweeneys or dave eggers

i also like milan kundera and marquez, but you have to be in the mood...

and bulgakov - the master and margarita, which i think has been mentioned elsewhere on archinect, is brilliant

ok, one last one - Lanark, by Alasdair Gray - has anyone read this? i really enjoyed it the first time, but the second time round it was a bit of an effort...

i recently moved house meaning i don't have to take the 45 min tube route to work anymore - i may be the only person in london to say this but i miss it for the reading time!

hm, i have lanark on my shelf but haven't cracked it yet.

one of your more ridiculous statements, meta.

I'm finding that meta is full of self-assured but ridiculous statements. (Kafka is fiction, by the way.)

Smokety,

You and I definitely share the same taste in fiction. Gravity's Rainbow and Man in the High Tower are two of my favorites. Melville's fantastic, too.

If you haven't read it, Don DeLillo's Mao II is amazing. Incredibly prescient about our current obsession with terrorism.

I also recently read Grendel, by John Gardner. Fantastic. It's the story of Beowulf, told from the perspective of the monster, who turns out somehow to be more humane and intelligent than all the humans.

Like you, I didn't like Absurdistan, though I wanted to. There's a certain brand of recent fiction that just sort of irks me: it feels very self-conscious and show-offy. Basically, any young author that has been heralded by the literary scene recently is bound to bother me.

bump because I'm flying tomorrow and need something to read. Criteria: long enough to just about read in 3-4 full days of traveling and some occasional reading while home. Can be a little heavy intellectually, but has to be funny and entertaining enough to pull me in without much effort while I'm trying to kill time on a plane. Not so thick that it's awkward to stuff in my messenger bag.

Previously, orhan pamuk's the black book and Johnathan ferris' and then we came to the end worked well in this capacity.

suggestions

Hemingway, Salinger, McCarthy, DeLillo, Asimov, Garcia Marquez is alright, etc.
nothing out of the norm for me.

and Lovecraft, don't know how I forgot him but I love 'em!

Paul Auster
Julian Barnes
Salman Rushdie

left behind series.






kidding! [ducks.]