Book Thread. I have nothing good to read.

[Zerocious]

was recently handed the book 'the shack', only few chapters in but looking to be a good one. great reviews. Story of a father of five who has his youngest daughter abducted while saving another child from drowning in a lake. I havent gotten much further than this but the story supposedly continues to where they find the child murdered in a shack. years later an anonymous note is found in the fathers mailbox inviting him to come hang out with 'papa' at the shack for a weekend. apparently it is a note from god himself for him to get closure at the shack, gets to talk to god etc. anyone else read it?

[barelyawake]

was recently handed the book 'the shack', only few chapters in but looking to be a good one. great reviews. Story of a father of five who has his youngest daughter abducted while saving another child from drowning in a lake. I havent gotten much further than this but the story supposedly continues to where they find the child murdered in a shack. years later an anonymous note is found in the fathers mailbox inviting him to come hang out with 'papa' at the shack for a weekend. apparently it is a note from god himself for him to get closure at the shack, gets to talk to god etc. anyone else read it?

My aunt raved over that book. 'Course, she told me the ending. And I think she told me about it to get me to church.

[He Hate Me]

Dude, forget every recommendation that has been made here and just go out and buy Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Trust me on this one.

[Ruzious]

I don't know if the Doc found this thread helpful, but I just ordered "Cloud Atlas" and "The Shack" (only after verifying it has nothing to do with a basketball player). Thanks guys.

[W. Unseld]

Way, way WAY out there but brutally honest non-fiction that could be classified as fiction:

http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Open-Hea ... 767907434/

[doclinkin]

I don't know if the Doc found this thread helpful, but I just ordered "Cloud Atlas" and "The Shack" (only after verifying it has nothing to do with a basketball player). Thanks guys.

I put in requests on seven titles that were not available at my local library. And snatched up a paperback copy of sfam's suggested sci-fi troopship series as a summertime popcorn chomper of a book.

I have to go back for a second round to follow up on new suggestions. Though -- good and bad-- I've already read a ton of what folks have posted. 'Good' because I can trust the recommendations of folks with similar taste. Very few rejects on here of books I read and hated.

More please. It's summer, I get voracious for knowledge.

[doclinkin]

For heavy reading, yet at also simple in structure, Cormac McCarthy is awesome. No Country for Old Men and The Road are both great novels.

For lighter a lighter read all together, I suggest Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Hilarious.

On Cormac McCarthy--- I really liked his book Suttree, I read many years ago. Riverboat slacker and drunk wandering through life at a bend in a river, in a sleepy Tennessee town. Sort of Huck Finn as a grown up wastrel, older but not any more settled down. Loved that book. I might go back and re-read it since it's been a while. See how it holds up.

Anybody on here ever write any fiction? Willing to drop a paragraph or so on this-here piece? Anything already published?

[mls737]

I don't know if lighthearted is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the Slaughterhouse Five.

If anyone is interested in Books about Basketball, I'll suggest three that are completely different from each other: Heaven is a Playground (http://www.amazon.com/Heaven-Playground-Rick-Telander/dp/0803294530), The Breaks of the Game (http://www.amazon.com/Breaks-Game-David-Halberstam/dp/0345296257), and Looseballs (http://www.amazon.com/Loose-Balls-Terry-Pluto/dp/0671749218).

Heaven is a Playground is for my money the best basketball book ever written.

I'm about to dig in to 'Harpo Speaks!', the book by Harpo Marx (http://www.amazon.com/Harpo-Speaks-Marx/dp/0879100362). Based on the Amazon reviews, this is the most excited I've been about a book in a long long time. I'll let the group know what I think when I finish.

Edit - Meant to add that I am defintely going to check out some Cormac McCarthy's work based on this thread.

[charlie32]

I'm big fan of John Irving (World According to Garp, Owen Meany...) and Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day) which is convenient because they're right next to each other in the bookstore/library.

[doclinkin]

Finished: The Lost Fleet v.1: Dauntless.

Decent/okay interstellar armada plot, jumps right into the action. Thumbnail sketch: Jumpship navy battalion has overreached in a strike at the enemy homeworld, has been suckered into an ambush, and now has to either surrender or fight their way out. Complicating factor: protagonist has just gotten promoted to fleet commander after he's been rescued from the old 'unusually long hypersleep'. Apparently he won a battle 100 years ago (in the same war) and has been drifting in suspended animation in a tumbling survival pod, while his legend snowballed into navy Lore. Now he has been coincidentally scooped up and upon re-wakening is clearly the most 'senior' officer the doomed fleet has. His archaic skills --knowledge, chutzpah-- help the fleet escape, temporarily. Now they have to fight the long way home in short jumps from deep behind enemy lines.

Not bad. The protagonist is a bit namby pamby, always worrying about what people will think of him and trying to live up to his own Legend. The battle descriptions could use a bit of sizzle, though I like the long-range chess match and careful thought about organizing ship to ship battle at significant percentages of the speed of light. reminds me of tabletop tactical gaming. The plot drives along hummingly, you can rip through the book at buzzsaw speed. I'll definitely pick up the second in the series. May look into the Honor Harrington cite. Thanks sfam. You got anything else like this as good or better?

Similar books/authors: Lois McMaster Bujold. Minnesota housewife-looking lady writes tense interstellar combat and fleet politics. Strong characters, careful chess matches and vivid action. Even better are her fantasy works, cf. Curse of Chalion (et al) about a worn out veteran returning from long war to his homeland and somehow getting dragged into the slow knifework of statecraft. The Spirit Ring was pretty good too.

I recall liking similar Ship to Ship combat in CJ Cherryh's 'Chanur' cycle, long years ago. (Pride of Chanur, et al.). Concept was: a human is found scuttling around the docks of an orbital trading station. No one has seen one before which begs the questions: 'what the hell is it, and where did it come from, and if he's from a starfaring race does that upset the delicate balance of power?' In this series Cherryh balances well alien perspectives and differences in biology- thus attitude, decision-making etc. Tense plot, 'us-against-them', trying to survive against long odds when technologically overmatched and only gumption and wicked tactics can save your fur from the fire. Yeah 'fur' the primary protagonists are uh, like, uh, well call 'em 'leonine sapients'. Big kitty cats. Lions, like. But if you can get past that part the plot-work is pretty strong.

Used to read a ton of scifi as a kid. Every rare now and again I check back in and burn through a few. If anyone is interested I'll let you know a few old favorites.

Still waiting on 'Lamb' & 'Wettest County'. I guess I've hit a fiction jag.

[Josh]

Regarding Christopher Moore, his recent Fool is hilarious. My all-time favorite novel is Shogun. It sweeps you in and doesn't let go until the last of its roughly 1,500 pages. Updike's Rabbit quartet is sublime. Best book I've read recently is the memoir, Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And I cannot resist touting my own work. You might see my recently released The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East. It's a serious book, but it's all about people, and I guarantee it's highly engaging.

[DallasShalDune]

On Cormac McCarthy--- I really liked his book Suttree, I read many years ago. Riverboat slacker and drunk wandering through life at a bend in a river, in a sleepy Tennessee town. Sort of Huck Finn as a grown up wastrel, older but not any more settled down. Loved that book. I might go back and re-read it since it's been a while. See how it holds up.

Anybody on here ever write any fiction? Willing to drop a paragraph or so on this-here piece? Anything already published?

I'll have to look into Suttree. McCarthy's Blood Meridian is going to be one of my next reads after I finish Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I hear Blood Meridian is his best, from fellow English majors of mine, so I'm excited to read it.

I have a poem published in a student mag at my university, but that's about it. I'd LIKE to get some fiction published, but that is always easier said and done. I love writing, and most of the time, what I write in story form is much more coherent then me babbling like I am now ha!

[DallasShalDune]

I don't know if lighthearted is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the Slaughterhouse Five.

Ha! You're right, Slaughterhouse Five isn't lighthearted, but Vonnegut does have a searing sense of humor that causes me to chuckle a bit, at least compared to, let's say, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. What Vonnegut is trying to say is dead serious, but his method of tale-spinning is at times hilarious. His satirical abilities are amazing.

[badinage]

Great thread, Doc.

Some of what I've been reading the last couple of months ...

The Believers, by Zoe Heller. Very funny, very unsettling book about a family whose patriarch, a prominent socialist attorney, goes into a coma after a stroke. Heller wrote What Was She Thinking: Notes on a Scandal, which was also funny and unsettling.

The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead, by David Shields. Interesting, and very readable, but not a tremendous amount of meat on the bones. N/F, by the way. ... I really liked Black Planet, a much more focused, provocative book. To me, it's one of the best books about the NBA -- and about race -- ever written.

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz. There's probably about four paragraphs to the entire book (I'm not kidding) and that's deeply offputting. But there's an amazing fluidity to the writing, and you're immediately plunged into a very specific, very moody consciousness for several weeks while you work your way through it. It's really the story of Europe post-War, in novel form.

How Fiction Works, by James Wood. I like Wood, and I don't like Wood, and I feel that way about this book. Good, but disappointingly slight too.

Netherland. Loved the first fifteen twenty pages, felt I was reading a lost classic. It's good, and engrossing, but didn't live up to its enormous promises.

Ghost Map. It's an interesting examination of London and its 19th century responses to a terrible epidemic.

Old Man Goya. Julia Blackburn. Not for everybody, but I really liked this blending of memoir and history. Blackburn, by combining the two, is able to bring Goya to life, and at the same time move the book beyond the narrow limitations of biography.

Patrimony by Philip Roth. Just a devastating book about losing his father. Very honest, and full of searching. I'm a huge fan of Roth generally, and you don't often hear about this one from the critics and reviewers who are so enamored of his work, but I think it's one of the best things he's ever done.

Frederick Seidel. Ooga-Booga. My favorite contemporary poet, I think. Funny, scatological, tough, provocative, really insightful at times.

[Ruzious]

Used to read a ton of scifi as a kid. Every rare now and again I check back in and burn through a few. If anyone is interested I'll let you know a few old favorites.

For folks who are into "Lord of the Rings" style fantasy and good vs evil theme, I highly recomment James Donaldson's (not the big 7 footer) Thomas Covenant trilogy. It's tons of fun to read, but stay away from his second Covenant trilogy. He tried to get introspective on the characters, and it was just awful.

[doclinkin]

Used to read a ton of scifi as a kid. Every rare now and again I check back in and burn through a few. If anyone is interested I'll let you know a few old favorites.

For folks who are into "Lord of the Rings" style fantasy and good vs evil theme, I highly recomment James Donaldson's (not the big 7 footer) Thomas Covenant trilogy. It's tons of fun to read, but stay away from his second Covenant trilogy. He tried to get introspective on the characters, and it was just awful.

The first in the series twisted my fragile little mind when I read it at age 12-13-ish. Something about the leper who rapes a girl and becomes self-hating messiah... curdles impressionable brains. [So there's your explanation]. Great epic battle scenes though.

If you're looking for epic adventure I have a couple under-appreciated series high in my pantheon that I will foist on anyone not immune to the concept:

Many-Colored Land (et al) by Julian May.
The Galactic Milieu ain't for everybody. Humanity has spread out into the stars and solved most of the problems of Rebellion great and small. The last great war was the Metapsychic rebellion where a few powerful grandmasters tried to take over the universe on the concept that homo superior ought to rule lesser minds. Fortunately their coup was snuffed by other Big Brains. Peace reigns.

But some folks aren't comfortable with a life that's safe, secure and so on. There will ever be atavistic urges for more primitive times. An escape hatch opens when 30th century science opens a one-way time gate to what carbon dating confirms is the Pleistocene epoch. (You can send something back then return it to the present but it will suffer 6 million years worth of time all at once on the return trip.)

So begins the exodus. A small trickle of slackers, rejects, small time crooks, or romantics who gear up, spend a week at the bed and breakfast the Rhione valley training on skills that might be appropriate in the era just prior to the Dawn of Man, the age of great mammals. And undergoing sterilization treatment for the ladies, so as not to jump-start humanity too early. They step into the one way time gate, then are gone.

The story follows the thread of Group Green. A small band of humanity's rejects who take the step through the one-way gate into prehistory. Problem being that the disoriented travellers find out swiftly that while the past is a primitive place, humanity isn't alone back then.

Julian May laces the story with the seeds of human folklore, but always with an eye towards a possible scientific explanation for our racial memory of the Fair Folk and goblins and the like. Gods and monsters. Myths of the great flood, etc. All with an archaeological and anthropologist's eye for society and plausible politics, detail.

Remarkable creative density of ideas per page. Plot that weaves in and out, Tolkeinesque in it's ability to follow the threads of various characters spread far across continents. Battles epic and personal. You come to care about the character's realistic emotional drama. But always the story chugs forward. Great summer read. Not mindless, but the plot moves. Word of warning the first hundred pages or so are slow while the plot gathers momentum. After that you won't put it down.

Lyonesse Trilogy, by Jack Vance.

Never one to use a 10 cent word when a five dollar one will do. Jack Vance was (is?) a curmudgeonly sci-fi author from the age of pulp. His protagonists tend to be amusingly amoral con-men, with very little 'sci' in the 'fi', but psychologically twisted individuals and alien mindsets. Mostly I don't have a taste for it. There's much weirdness for weirdness' sake.

But he meditated on the fantasy genre and wrote a series crackling with wit and brilliance like fuzzy wool socks fresh from the dryer. His very footnotes drag you off the path into the tangled woods of imagination and abandon you. And his love of language is besotten like drunken debauchery.

I'm not so big on elves and faeries and the blablabla. Fantasy. (Though I loved Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit as a kid). But Vance understands how the wicked little sociopaths would think and behave. And the man has a fierce and violent sense of humor. As for the Plot. Well mostly it involves two Kingdoms and their respective rulers. A prophesy says that the son of one shall rule the united Isles, the other is volcanic with rage at the concept --and sets about his assassins and spies and best chess game machinations to ensure that it shall never ever happen. By their feud someone stirs up the hornets nest of a third kingdom of emotionless viking types the Skaghane, who set about to destroy everybody, and so on and so forth. But the bit-part characters in the story become the primary protagonists, driving the engine of destiny in continually surprising ways.

I'm reading Fool right now by Christopher Moore (thanks for the recommend) and have laughed myself assless so far. Jack Vance has a very similar wit. Madouc (the 3rd book) is the best of the three, the second book bogs a little, the first is quite good. Probably my wife's favorite series ever.

So. Two relatively unknown series far as I can tell. But if you need cheap light amusement I'd highly recommend 'em, for whatever that's worth.

[Ruzious]

Used to read a ton of scifi as a kid. Every rare now and again I check back in and burn through a few. If anyone is interested I'll let you know a few old favorites.

For folks who are into "Lord of the Rings" style fantasy and good vs evil theme, I highly recomment James Donaldson's (not the big 7 footer) Thomas Covenant trilogy. It's tons of fun to read, but stay away from his second Covenant trilogy. He tried to get introspective on the characters, and it was just awful.

The first in the series twisted my fragile little mind when I read it at age 12-13-ish. Something about the leper who rapes a girl and becomes self-hating messiah... curdles impressionable brains. [So there's your explanation]. Great epic battle scenes though.

Oh boo hoo. Yes, if you're a 12 year old who likes pretty fairies and elves that dance about merrily, then the 1st Covenant trilogy is not for you. The main character is supposed to be an extraordinarily flawed man - so be prepared. And be prepared to be amazed and intoxicated liquor-free when you read it - especially the 2nd and 3rd books. You can tell the writer's a little green - ala Javale McGee - in the 1st book. But by the 3rd book, you can see he's evolved to Dwight Howard level. But again, stay away from the 2nd trilogy - as the author seemingly turns into an over-the-hill Shaq asking Kobe how his arse smells.

[doclinkin]

Oh boo hoo. Yes, if you're a 12 year old who likes pretty fairies and elves that dance about merrily, then the 1st Covenant trilogy is not for you. The main character is supposed to be an extraordinarily flawed man - so be prepared. And be prepared to be amazed and intoxicated liquor-free when you read it - especially the 2nd and 3rd books.

You misunderstand me. That was a recommendation. I've come to like my curdled brains quite well.

[Zerocious]

Haven't really had much time to read, but i am about halfway though 'the shack' but it doesn't really get interresting until about 100 pages into it. you can pick a few interresting paragraphs here and there, but for the rest pretty mediocre. have not yet finished it yet, so i'll come back to it when i am done.

[doclinkin]

Finished:

'Fool' by Chris Moore. Funny retellign of King Lear from the perspective of the fool. Often witty for wit's sake, ends up fairly slight, but I laughed throughout, enjoyably crass.

The first three of the 'Lost Fleet' series by Jack Campbell. (sfam: does Cap'n Jack ever stop whining? Good tension and all but dang what a whiny sissy-pants, scared of his own shadow. How was this guy supposed to be a naval commander?)

Now reading:
The physics of the impossible, by Michio Kaku. One of the premier quantum physicists (wrote the first papers discussing string field theory) here he discusses common tropes of science fiction, breaking them into tiers of impossibility. I'm still in the first third:
Tier One: currently impossible given available technology, but not in defiance of known physics and potentially within reach in our lifetime. (Force fields. Matter transference/teleportation. Telepathy.)
Tier Two: not proscribed by known physics, but so far outside the bounds of our current scope of technology that there's no chance we see it within the next 100 years or so.
Tier Three: impossible under known physics.

Just started:
Tobias Wolff's memoir of the Vietnam war: In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War. So far remarkably written. I'll drop an excerpt later since I can't do him justice. This is a writer. I'm not sure I can perceive my own emotions as clearly, as humorously, as honestly as he can describe his life then, and that war.

Later for now.