Name some good books to read on a rainy weekend...

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
what would you recommend as a good book that is thoughtful and entertaining,,,but not 800 pages long...



i'll start:



Pulp Fiction:



The Killer Inside Me...Jim Thompson (almost any JT will be great to read)



The Long Goodbye...Raymond Chandler



if you like those...then any chandler, thompson, Charles Willeford (is God), and Dashiel Hammlett



Sci Fi:



A Scanner Darkly--Philip K Dick...ok, any PKD

A Mote in God's Eye....Niven/Pournelle...ok, longer book, but a fun read





Social/Dramatic:



High Rise..JG Ballard

Jailbird...Kurt Vonnegut

The Painted Bird...Jerzy Kosinski



Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas





....g



[ 02-09-2003: Message edited by: thegelding ]</p>
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 33
    life of pi - yaan martel



    not long, very thought provoking, and the best ending to any book i've read in a long, long time.
  • Reply 2 of 33
    pfflampfflam Posts: 5,053member
    White Noise by Don DeLillo

    Gravities Rainbow by Pynchon well, lots of rainy days!!



    Being and Time Martin Heidegger --for very dark rainy days



    Absolom Absolom Faulkner



    Hard Boiled Wonderland At the End of The World and

    Sputnick Sweetheart by Murakami



    Letters To A Young Poet -Rilke



    Waiting For Godot or

    Three Novels: Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett --for extremely extremely dark long rainy days



    Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan dated, but very thought provoking



    Anything about the philosopher Giambatista Vico including The New Science by Vico

    particularly: Philosphy and the Return To Self Knowledge by Phillip Verene



    All of Joyce's works plus the whole library of guidebooks!!!



    [ 02-09-2003: Message edited by: pfflam ]</p>
  • Reply 3 of 33
    pfflampfflam Posts: 5,053member
    Most of those ARE pretty high-fallutin for a rainy day . . . um so let's see:



    Vernor Vinge books!! good engrossing sci-fi with techno-twists and good old fashioned white-knuckling drama



    Jonathan Letham: Gun with Occasional Music --very much twisted like a blend of Dashielle Hammet and Phillip K Dick

    I hear his other stuff is good too



    Anything Vonnegut

    PKDick

    ....ummm
  • Reply 4 of 33
    pfflampfflam Posts: 5,053member
    oh yeah.... anything by Milan Kundera!!

    particularly Immortality

    and

    The Book of Laughter and forgetting



    also

    100 Years of Solitude by Gabrial Garcia Marquez
  • Reply 5 of 33
    noseynosey Posts: 307member
    Any of the three (or four?) Uplift Trilogies by David Brin.



    You could read them over nad over and still find stuff you missed the first time...



    [ 02-09-2003: Message edited by: nosey ]</p>
  • Reply 6 of 33
    stunnedstunned Posts: 1,096member
    Charlie and the chocolate factory -Roald Dahl



    Its light hearted, short and a classic. For all ages!
  • Reply 7 of 33
    rooroo Posts: 162member
    pfflam: i love your selections-- kundera, garcia marquez, and murakami are some of my favorites!



    i just finished reading "all she was worth" by miyuki miyabe... a really good mystery novel, revolving around identity theft and credit card debt in japan.



    other good books:

    kangaroo notebook by kobo abe

    tender at the bone by ruth reichl

    naomi by junichiro tanizaki

    the elephant vanishes (short stories) by takashi murakami



    oh and any edogawa ranpo short stories-- good slightly creepy things, my favorite so far is "the human chair".
  • Reply 8 of 33
    ijerryijerry Posts: 615member
    Most of James Patterson, my favorite though,"Hide and Seek"



    O'Conner has a great selection of short stories, as well as Chekov.



    Some Dean Koontz.



    oh yeah, Kama Sutra for Dummies!
  • Reply 9 of 33
    murbotmurbot Posts: 5,262member
    The Demon - Hubert Selby, Jr.
  • Reply 10 of 33
    Goodnight Moon.
  • Reply 11 of 33
    A thoughtful, entertaining book for a rainy weekend...



    Where The Red Fern Grows - Wilson Rawls

    The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien



    or, any of the collected works of Berkeley Breathed.



    [ 02-10-2003: Message edited by: opuscroakus ]</p>
  • Reply 12 of 33
    brbr Posts: 8,395member
    Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions
  • Reply 13 of 33
    Kurt Vonnegut- The Sirens of Titan



    And, you know. Everything by Vonnegut.
  • Reply 14 of 33
    pfflampfflam Posts: 5,053member
    the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster --great on a rainy day . . .i think I read all three books in two days, while sick, and just loved them . . .



    Video Night In Katmandu by Pico Iyer . . . it's a travell book and is from the 80s or early nineties but it svery entertaining and fascinating and a quick engrossing read.



    The Unquiet Ghost by Adam Hoschild, is a journalistic book about the history of Stalin's murderous regime and the unearthing of its history after the fall of Communism . . . fascinating and a quick read



    -------



    ANd Roo . .The Wind Up Bird Chronicles is also good by Murakami . . . most people that I know that have read his books think that it is his masterpiece . . . but I just thought it was ok . . . din't have teh same emotional impact as the others I mentioned.



    and Some Preffer Nettles by Tanazaki is one of my favorite books . . . though I read it along time ago . .
  • Reply 15 of 33
    fluffyfluffy Posts: 361member
    Watership Down (long but good)

    All Quiet on the Western Front
  • Reply 16 of 33
    matsumatsu Posts: 6,558member
    Having originally read "for a rainy day" even though the thread title says "week-end" I now have to reconsider my rainy "day" selections, but here they follow if you just want something to pass a "day." Different reading requires a different setting and vice versa, you know.



    For rainy day novels John Irving is great, I don't like to feel encumbered on rainy days, or through the winter either, and must disagree with many of the selections here not for unworthiness but because of their kind of genius. An important part of reading is that you survive the exercise with your witts intact, all depending on how seriously you read. I always feel a little dead at the end of a long book and don't like finishing them during particularly gloomy periods, so I stick to poems because a poem is more like sprinting: leaves you winded, but excited. Maybe it knocks you on your ass, but you still have energy to get up. When a novel clobbers you, you feel broken all over, you want to relive it, master it, much too easy to despair -- never finish novels on rainy days. Now I suppose if we all lived on the Mediterranean we could read novels all the time, any old time, and sun and salt and sea would repair words' wounds, but some of us have to contend with Toronto and worse, and so we must mete out literature at a responsible pace or give up reading altogether.



    Sorry, I've been reading Hemmingway.
  • Reply 17 of 33
    Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. This is the book that inspired both Citizen Kane and Apocalypse Now.
  • Reply 18 of 33
    709709 Posts: 2,016member
    Anything by Will Self, My Idea of Fun and Great Apes being my two personal favorites.



    Right now I'm reading A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain (even after last year's Kitchen Confidential forced me to give up any notion of ever eating Sunday brunch again) and The Complete Fairy Tales of The Brothers Grimm which are pretty...um...grim.



    And as if it hasn't been said enough, anything Vonnegut (hence my sig ).



    [oops! I forgot two really good books for some light rainy-day reading: Towing Jehovah and Bible Stories for Adults, both by James Morrow. Good Stuff.



    [ 02-11-2003: Message edited by: 709 ]</p>
  • Reply 19 of 33
    John Crowley, Little, Big



    Mark Helprin, A Winter's Tale
  • Reply 20 of 33
    thttht Posts: 5,420member
    Hmm... you can probably tell I'm a fan of this guy:



    Science Fiction: Hyperion, Dan Simmons

    Horror: Carrion Comfort, Dan Simmons

    Mainstream Fiction: Phases of Gravity, Dan Simmons

    Novellete Anthology: Lovedeath, Dan Simmons

    Short Story Anthology: Prayers to Broken Stones, Dan Simmons
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