What are you reading right now?

MF ALBERT said:
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Hoping to get the physical version of this book before Thanksgiving comes around town.
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I find Palahniuk hit-or-miss because each of his books is a collection of about 5,000 different ideas that may or may not cohere all that well. (For instance, "Survivor" includes: a suicide cult, a butler who has to teach his inept upper-class employers various etiquette rules, a character who steals fake flowers off graves, a psychic woman, a landfill of porn, a celebrity televangelist, erotic fantasy sequences involving zombies [if I recall correctly] and a sequence where the main characters live in one of those prefabricated houses as it's transported down the highway. The entire book is dictated by the main character into the flight recorder of a plane in the hours before the plane crashes, so the book's pages are numbered backward, counting down to page 1.)

I think "Fight Club" is the great Palahniuk novel because its swarm of ideas work well together -- they do feel like part of a coherent whole, and not just the result of an author jamming every interesting idea he has into a book whether those ideas belong together or not.
 
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Andrew Neiman said:
I think "Fight Club" is the great Palahniuk novel because its swarm of ideas work well together -- they do feel like part of a coherent whole, and not just the result of an author jamming every interesting idea he has into a book whether those ideas belong together or not.
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And unfortunately we live in the real world where swarms of ideas just get you rendered "problematic" or some shit. We need to fight back as if that would ever work.
 
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It's my turn to recommend a book for my bi-monthly book club. Any suggestions?

So far we've done:
Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain Metamorphosis by Kafka
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Only requirement is that it not be too long (I think we said under 400 pages). Any genre, era, style welcome. All I would say is that everyone has suggested pretty "safe" classics so far, and while they've all been pretty good I kind of feel like choosing something a bit left-field and edgy to shake things up a bit.

Not really got any ideas at the moment. I might go with Salinger's Nine Stories (which I saw on the previous page) if nobody replies to this.
 
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Andrew Neiman said:
I think "Fight Club" is the great Palahniuk novel because its swarm of ideas work well together -- they do feel like part of a coherent whole, and not just the result of an author jamming every interesting idea he has into a book whether those ideas belong together
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Fight Club was a great read and I REALLY wanted like Palaniuk's other work. I read three of his novels and just... Didn't feel it. It's almost as though he just sits down and starts writing instead of coming up with even a loose outline. It's like he gets these great ideas for lines or situations, but he can't bring it all together coherently.

Glad I found this thread though! Y'all have good taste. Chewing my way through War and Peace currently. I've got 300 pages to go, so I'm almost finished with it haha.
 
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Hi Cats said:
Fight Club was a great read and I REALLY wanted like Palaniuk's other work. I read three of his novels and just... Didn't feel it.
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Did you try “Lullaby”? It’s one of Palahniuk’s least all-over-the-place novels. I also liked “Survivor” a lot.
Hi Cats said:
Chewing my way through War and Peace currently.
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What translation?
Clem Fandango said:
It's my turn to recommend a book for my bi-monthly book club. Any suggestions?

So far we've done:
Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain Metamorphosis by Kafka
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Only requirement is that it not be too long (I think we said under 400 pages). Any genre, era, style welcome. All I would say is that everyone has suggested pretty "safe" classics so far, and while they've all been pretty good I kind of feel like choosing something a bit left-field and edgy to shake things up a bit.

Not really got any ideas at the moment. I might go with Salinger's Nine Stories (which I saw on the previous page) if nobody replies to this.
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“Nine Stories” is one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read. If you want something edgy, ”Lolita” or Roald Dahl’s “Kiss Kiss” would certainly fit the bill. (I don’t know if “Kiss Kiss” is really a classic, but it’s excellent.)

Let me know if you do read “Nine Stories”; I’ve been trying to find someone else who’s read it to discuss it with.
 
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Clem Fandango said:
Not really got any ideas at the moment. I might go with Salinger's Nine Stories (which I saw on the previous page) if nobody replies to this.
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That's a pretty good choice actually. I liked it more than Catcher in the Rye. It annoys me when someone's Great American Novel actually kind of sucks compared to their other work, and Salinger wrote so little.

Also say what you like about Truman Capote as a person, In Cold Blood is really amazing.
 
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Andrew Neiman said:
Did you try “Lullaby”? It’s one of Palahniuk’s least all-over-the-place novels. I also liked “Survivor” a lot.

What translation?

“Nine Stories” is one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read. If you want something edgy, ”Lolita” or Roald Dahl’s “Kiss Kiss” would certainly fit the bill. (I don’t know if “Kiss Kiss” is really a classic, but it’s excellent.)

Let me know if you do read “Nine Stories”; I’ve been trying to find someone else who’s read it to discuss it with.
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Haven't read Lullaby yet!

The War and Peace copy I'm reading is a Signet Classic translated by Ann Dunnigan. I have another copy translated by Constance Garnett but the one I'm reading is A-Ok. I love the old Russians so I'm enjoying it. Especially liked the really gruesome scene where Prince Andrei is fatally wounded and the doctor has to do emergency surgery. It ends with "As soon as he [Andrei] opened his eyes, the doctor bent over him, kissed him on the lips, and hurried away without a word" hahaha I always get a kick out of the amount of male-on-male PDA in Russian lit.

Also read Nine Stories years ago! It had a strong effect on me... Read most of it while hiding in the women's locker room at a factory I temped at. I'd recommend it. Also second Lolita - the writing is beautiful without being disgustingly purple. I have a heavily annotated copy that illustrates just how intricate Nabokov's writing was.
 
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I'm reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR) now. Is a Harry Potter fan fiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Before that, I read one of the strangest but no less interesting books in my life. This is a Trick 22 book. You can Discover more information about this book. Catch 22 is a social satire that is used for humor and is mainly used to damage reputation or make fun of important aspects of society. I advise you to read this book.
 
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I'm re-reading Desperation (Stephen King) and when I finish I'll read The Regulators. I'm not a huge fan of SK's recent stuff but alot of his older work is pretty good.
 
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Andrew Neiman said:
Have you read any of Palahniuk's more recent (i.e., written in the last 15 years) books? I stopped after "Haunted."
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I've read Choke, Rant, Haunted, Lullaby and a couple others...none of which were written "recently". I lost interest with his stuff and moved on to other authors. He's not a bad author by any means but his books kind of feel "samey" after a while, kind of like how Stephen Kings books tend to feel "samey".
 
All this talk about Palahniuk got me re-reading the Fight Club II graphic novel. It really would have been better in novel form, if ya ask me. The plot moves way too quickly and a lot of Palahniuk's brilliance is muted.
 
Andrew Neiman said:
Did you try “Lullaby”? It’s one of Palahniuk’s least all-over-the-place novels. I also liked “Survivor” a lot.

What translation?

“Nine Stories” is one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read. If you want something edgy, ”Lolita” or Roald Dahl’s “Kiss Kiss” would certainly fit the bill. (I don’t know if “Kiss Kiss” is really a classic, but it’s excellent.)

Let me know if you do read “Nine Stories”; I’ve been trying to find someone else who’s read it to discuss it with.
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Lullaby is pretty coherent which is good for Palahniuk but his haphazard writing style (he's very fragmented in writing chapters and only assembled them at the end) and this really shows by the last quarter of the book where it had really worn out my patience.

Anyway Palahniuk is a guy I love listening to his interviews or just him talking but I struggle with his novels. They usually have a clarity issue or the ending peeters out.
 
Fortunato Brown said:
Anyway Palahniuk is a guy I love listening to his interviews or just him talking but I struggle with his novels. They usually have a clarity issue or the ending peeters out.
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I have very similar thoughts, I find when re-reading his/other authors that suffer from this I end up skipping through the endings.
 
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