Recommended reading

[gdconway]

I recently finished The Long Emergency by James Kunstler. In short, it's about the end of oil and the inevitable effect on our economy/society. Really fascinating.

I'm trying to read less beach fiction and moe biographies and other nonfiction. Unfortunately, I spend much of my day reading boring documents, so nonnfiction has to be pretty interesting to hold my interest. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[maimezvous]

Originally posted by gdconway
I recently finished The Long Emergency by James Kunstler. In short, it's about the end of oil and the inevitable effect on our economy/society. Really fascinating.

I'm trying to read less beach fiction and moe biographies and other nonfiction. Unfortunately, I spend much of my day reading boring documents, so nonnfiction has to be pretty interesting to hold my interest. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Very interesting. Here's a link to Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060938455/102-2060921-4344146?v=glance&n=283155) . If you have read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, and liked that, then you will like this too. I enjoyed both very much.

[MiMac]

Something in the same vein as "Fast Food Nation" (and by the same author) - "Chew On This".

Read it recently. Very interesting and a quick read.

Link. (http://www.chewonthisbook.co.uk)

[maimezvous]

Originally posted by MiMac
Something in the same vein as "Fast Food Nation" (and by the same author) - "Chew On This".

Read it recently. Very interesting and a quick read.

Link. (http://www.chewonthisbook.co.uk)

It sounds like a condensed version of "Fast Food Nation". I'll probably pick it up sometime this summer. Right now I'm reading "The Count of Monte Cristo" and after that I'll be reading "Catch-22".

[benzene]

Originally posted by maimezvous
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Oh my. I read that when I was about 13, and still can't look at ground beef the same way.

[midwinter]

Chip Ward, Canaries on the Rim

Anything by John Krakauer. Under the Banner of Heaven is good, as are Into Thin Air and Into the Wild.

I like Nicholson Baker's essays.

Go buy EVERYTHING by EB White that's not Charlotte's Web. He was an amazing writer.

Richard Clark's book will scare the pants off you.

You might consider getting a copy of the Common Reader catalog (http://www.commonreader.com/) and looking through their recommendations.

[a_greer]

Originally posted by midwinter

Richard Clark's book will scare the pants off you.
. In that same veign, revisit George Orwells "1984" for a look at the 2.5 remaining years of the Bush reign and maybe beond

[Aquatic]

Count of Monte Cristo is quite an archetypal work. I want to read The Jungle and Catch 22.

However, the most profound, and I MEAN it, piece of writing, is The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. I challenge anyone to find a more profound piece of work. Especially in like two pages (yes that's right, so everyone click that and read it and share your thoughts.) It makes me all reflective on the second law of thermodynamics and stuff...deep stuff. What will happen, in the end? Will there be an end? Was there a beginning? Make your mind explode, read it here:

http://infohost.nmt.edu/%7Emlindsey/asimov/question.htm

[BRussell]

Originally posted by midwinter
Chip Ward, Canaries on the Rim

Anything by John Krakauer. Under the Banner of Heaven is good, as are Into Thin Air and Into the Wild.

I like Nicholson Baker's essays.

Go buy EVERYTHING by EB White that's not Charlotte's Web. He was an amazing writer.

Richard Clark's book will scare the pants off you.

You might consider getting a copy of the Common Reader catalog (http://www.commonreader.com/) and looking through their recommendations. Did you see that article in the Times a few weeks ago about "the best American Novel?" Here it is. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/fiction-25-years.html?ex=1305864000&en=d3f9cc79ce4c01b7&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss)

THE WINNER:

Beloved
Toni Morrison
(1987)
Review
THE RUNNERS-UP:

Underworld
Don DeLillo
(1997)
Review
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
(1985)
Review
Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels
John Updike
(1995)
Review: 'Rabbit at Rest'
(1990)
Review: 'Rabbit Is Rich'
(1981)
Review: 'Rabbit Redux'
(1971)
Review: 'Rabbit, Run'
(1960)
American Pastoral
Philip Roth
(1997)
Review
THE FOLLOWING BOOKS ALSO RECEIVED MULTIPLE VOTES:

A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
(1980)
Review
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
(1980)
Review
Winter's Tale
Mark Helprin
(1983)
Review
White Noise
Don DeLillo
(1985)
Review
The Counterlife
Philip Roth
(1986)
Review
Libra
Don DeLillo
(1988)
Review
Where I'm Calling From
Raymond Carver
(1988)
Review
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
(1990)
Review
Mating
Norman Rush
(1991)
Review
Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson
(1992)
Review
Operation Shylock
Philip Roth
(1993)
Review
Independence Day
Richard Ford
(1995)
Review
Sabbath's Theater
Philip Roth
(1995)
Review
Border Trilogy
Cormac McCarthy
(1999)
Review: 'Cities of the Plain'
(1998)
Review: 'The Crossing'
(1994)
Review: 'All the Pretty Horses'
(1992)
The Human Stain
Philip Roth
(2000)
Review
The Known World
Edward P. Jones
(2003)
Review
The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
(2004)
Review

[midwinter]

Originally posted by BRussell
Did you see that article in the Times a few weeks ago about "the best American Novel?" Here it is. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/fiction-25-years.html?ex=1305864000&en=d3f9cc79ce4c01b7&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss)


Yeah. I *believe* it was the Best novel since 1980, wasn't it?

Morrison deserves to be at the top of that list, but I think it's interesting that it's basically the same names: Morrison, Roth, DeLillo (White Noise as a runner-up? Are you kidding me?!), McCarthy, Updike.

I think it suggests not how strong these writers are, but how generally weak the American field has been for 25 years. If they'd done this list for British novelists since 1980, the fights would have been huge, I believe.

[Bergermeister]

- The Fate of the Earth by J Schell

[ronaldo]

Team of Rivals (The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln) by Doris Kearns Goodwin

[Asaph]

Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey.

Seriously, read it. It's so quick and easy... and really is a must read.

[BRussell]

Originally posted by midwinter
Yeah. I *believe* it was the Best novel since 1980, wasn't it?

Morrison deserves to be at the top of that list, but I think it's interesting that it's basically the same names: Morrison, Roth, DeLillo (White Noise as a runner-up? Are you kidding me?!), McCarthy, Updike.

I think it suggests not how strong these writers are, but how generally weak the American field has been for 25 years. If they'd done this list for British novelists since 1980, the fights would have been huge, I believe. You don't like DeLillo? In high school, a friend of mine's dad, an English prof (Tom LeClair), was a buddy and advocate of DeLillo's, so I was reading those when they were coming out in the mid-1980s. I haven't read Beloved. I make it a point not to read anything Oprah has recommended.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by BRussell
You don't like DeLillo? In high school, a friend of mine's dad, an English prof (Tom LeClair), was a buddy and advocate of DeLillo's, so I was reading those when they were coming out in the mid-1980s. I haven't read Beloved. I make it a point not to read anything Oprah has recommended.

Oh no. I enjoyed White Noise a great deal, although my experience was colored just a bit because I read it back to back with Jose Saramago's Blindness which is the most goddamned disturbing thing I've read in a long, long time.

My point was that, of DeLillo's ouvre, White Noise doesn't rank, for me, with the other stuff.

And don't get me wrong. I'm by NO stretch of the imagination an expert of any kind on American novels post-1950 or so. But my sense is that they're mostly kind of hollow inside (with the exception of Morrison). This is, no doubt, an effect of pomo sensibilities. How much of Pynchon's Vineland must one read before throwing up hands and saying "I GET IT!"? It's a real problem for me as a reader of late 20th and 21st century novels...while I'm on the pomo train, I don't particularly like to talk about it, and the art that it creates is, for me, too ironic, too self-aware, too hipper-than-thou. And if it's not, it's so angst-y that I might as well be reading Goethe.

Maybe that's why I like David Foster Wallace so much.

But again, I just don't see anyone other than Morrison (with the exception, perhaps, of McCarthy) really walking with the swagger of Faulkner or Wright or Welty or Fitzgerald or any of that generation.

[addabox]

Originally posted by midwinter
Oh no. I enjoyed White Noise a great deal, although my experience was colored just a bit because I read it back to back with Jose Saramago's Blindness which is the most goddamned disturbing thing I've read in a long, long time.

My point was that, of DeLillo's ouvre, White Noise doesn't rank, for me, with the other stuff.

And don't get me wrong. I'm by NO stretch of the imagination an expert of any kind on American novels post-1950 or so. But my sense is that they're mostly kind of hollow inside (with the exception of Morrison). This is, no doubt, an effect of pomo sensibilities. How much of Pynchon's Vineland must one read before throwing up hands and saying "I GET IT!"? It's a real problem for me as a reader of late 20th and 21st century novels...while I'm on the pomo train, I don't particularly like to talk about it, and the art that it creates is, for me, too ironic, too self-aware, too hipper-than-thou. And if it's not, it's so angst-y that I might as well be reading Goethe.

Maybe that's why I like David Foster Wallace so much.

But again, I just don't see anyone other than Morrison (with the exception, perhaps, of McCarthy) really walking with the swagger of Faulkner or Wright or Welty or Fitzgerald or any of that generation.

You know, I kind of like Vineland, but it made me wonder how much of the sense of, well, gravity around Gravity's Rainbow derived from encyclopedic ruminations within a corpus of information most people aren't very familiar with. Like Vineland is the same trick but because I know the milieu it feels sort of, I dunno, daylight to Gravity's Rainbow's labyrinth shadowland, and less important for that. I would no more tackle Mason & Dixon than I would eat tacks.

Also, I seem to do better with Wallace's essays than the novels. I'm not sure what it is, I can't seem to get through Infinite Jest to save my life, and while I found The Broom of the System to be an easier read, I never felt terribly drawn in (carefully calibrated alienating effects I suppose being sort of part of the deal). I mean, I really want to like them cause I totally dig his whole authorial persona and declared intent, and I actually do love them, page for page, but the whole carrying forward part eludes me.

On the other hand, the title essay from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is straight up the funniest thing I have ever read in my life, and the piece on TV and US fiction is really terrific.

I like George Saunders a ton right now. A little like Barthelme but it feels like there's more at stake, and bitterer.

[Gene Clean]

Unholy Alliance (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/158544183X/sr=8-18/qid=1151818505/ref=sr_1_18/104-5929126-3072766?ie=UTF8) by Takis Michas.

A very interesting read on nationalism, xenophobia, political schizophrenia, business anarchy, and educational disaster in Greece during the 90's (and continuing today). Perhaps not everybody's cup of tea as it deals with pretty 'foreign' issues (if there are such issues in today's socio-economic climate), but nonetheless instructive of how governments (and people) use nationalist/religious ideology to justify their own pitfalls and shortcomings.

It's also a very intellectual book, dealing not only with Greek nationalism, but with other, philosophical questions concerning society in general.

[addabox]

Oh, and a little pot-boilerish, but I'm enjoying The Devil in the White City for it's vivid evocation of the swirling hell-hole that was Chicago at the turn of the century.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by addabox
You know, I kind of like Vineland, but it made me wonder how much of the sense of, well, gravity around Gravity's Rainbow derived from encyclopedic ruminations within a corpus of information most people aren't very familiar with.

Well, that's the ultimate gag of weak pomo lit, isn't it? It's an inside joke that only a select few are privy to.

As an aside: a friend of mine (who is the fiction writer at one of the schools in NC) spent a couple of years poring over Finnegan's Wake, decoding the jokes and inside information with all the enthusiasm of a Star Wars vs Stare Trek nerd or a "Jesus Nerd" pouring over the Bible, and concluded, ultimately, that it was a failure.

I just have little truck with the various iterations of "there is no center," "look at the ninja attack squad in the middle of this novel for no apparent reason," "HAHAHA I'M BRINGING IN POP CULTURE TO DECONSTRUCT ART!" or "I'm gonna be weird, you know, just to be fucking WEIRD."

With that said, I thought that If on a winter's night a traveler was a hoot. Playful in all the right ways.

Also, I seem to do better with Wallace's essays than the novels. I'm not sure what it is, I can't seem to get through Infinite Jest to save my life, and while I found to be The Broom of the System an easier read I never felt terribly drawn in (carefully calibrated alienating effects I suppose being sort of part of the deal). I mean, I really want to like them cause I totally dig his whole authorial persona and declared intent, but.....

Well, frankly, I like his shorter stuff, too. Although I REALLY dig the footnotes in _IJ_.

On the other hand, the title essay from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is straight up the funniest thing I have ever read in my life, and the piece on TV and US fiction is really terrific.

Have you read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men? The one about the guy with the flipper arm? And vasoline he lubes it up with? RIOT. What I'd give to hang out at Pomona during a dept. meeting!

[addabox]

Oddly enough, I am even now doing a really horrible job of trying to distill Wallace's Everything and More in a thread (huh, the thread immediately below this one at the moment) about why decimal quantities can go on forever but things in the world collide.

E & M is a little discussion on the vexed history of the concept of infinity, which apparently has haunted a great deal of the evolution of math, and, big surprise, Wallace is a major math nerd who breaks out the pages of dense calculations like it was an aside about tennis.

Now, the interesting thing here is that he gets to bring his "hold many things in mind at once" discursiveness-- lengthy footnotes, mid-paragraph interpolations, and emergency glossaries and all-- to a topic that is nothing but rigor.

The results, while often way over my head, are surprisingly funny, entertaining and metaphysically provocative (just wish I had more math).

[tonton]

Not a huge fan of contemporary American Lit. Prefer British. Yes, I read Beloved and I thought it was so-so.

Michael Chabon, for one, is a far better American author, but his topics just aren't mainstream or "mature" enough to allow him onto the list.

In the vein of "Beloved", a far better American "ghost" story with political implications is "Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold. Not only that, her own story is heartwrenching, having recorded a memoir of her own violent rape in her first book, Lucky.

[Aquatic]

Black Like Me and Lucifer's Hammer were good...

I haven't heard of any of those books on that big list. They sound like the typical coffee table books by the titles. You know, the ones that are really thick, in a way that reminds me of Tom Clancy books.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by tonton
In the vein of "Beloved", a far better American "ghost" story with political implications is "Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold. Not only that, her own story is heartwrenching, having recorded a memoir of her own violent rape in her first book, Lucky.

We just brought her in to speak/read. She's pretty good and very, very nice.

[Fangorn]

Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes

It was published in the late 20s/early 30s. If you want to know how much things have changed (or where some of the resentment comes from), read this.

[DanMacMan]

I am currently reading Suskind's One Percent Doctrine. Fascinating nonfiction written in narrative form. Very entertaining page turner.

[MiMac]

If you are interested in fiction with a factual base you might like to read "Darkness At Noon" by Arthur Koestler.

A classic written in 1940 interpreting the Russian Revolution and the nature of Stalin's regime. Dark and tense though a fascinating read.

[West]

A Brief History of Time by Steven Hawking

It will change the way you look at life and the universe.

[ricksbrain]

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West.

Native Son by Richard Wright.

Canterbury Tales by Chaucer (if you can handle middle english).

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

The Roaches Have No King by Daniel Weiss.

Practically anything by Twain or Faulkner.

Can't wait to have time to read what I want... thanks for the thread.

[rufusswan]

Flatland by Edwin Abbott. Used to be required reading for college level logic and philosphy class. Should be required for all grade schools kids, assuming they still teach children to "think".

Aquatic, glad you liked the Assimov short.
Virtually any collection of SF shorts or novellas will be probably more exciting than a full novel. For full novels try Cyril M Kornbluth, even if you enjoy him you might have nightmares.
Anything by Ray Bradbury. His 'Illustrated Man' was also IMO the absolute best SF movie ever made. Stars Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom, mindblowing as the book.
"Stranger in a Strange Land" or anything else by RAHeinlein.

Paz

[709]

Speaking of SF shorts, I'm just finishing re-reading Bible Stories for Adults by James Morrow. He's always great for a few belly laughs.

After that I'm on to Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. Honestly, I don't know what to expect.