Just finished The Rampart trilogy by MR Carey and I was unavailable to everyone for the week in which I read… no… inhaled the 3 long, juicy books. An absolutely delightful post-apocalyptic adventure that was un-put-downable.
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Gödel, Escher, Bach is amazing.
Just make sure you have pen and paper nearby to jot down some summaries, and most importantly: to do your homework. When Hofstadter asks you to do some simple logic excercises in a minimal formal language, don’t skip over them like I did on my first attempt through this book. It’s so, so much better if you treat it like a fun work-and-study book.
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Might be my favorite book of all time. I got to meet Hofstadter once and talk about it and it was an incredible experience.
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I don’t read thrillers or detective novels that much, but I recently finished Elizabeth George’s In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner and I really enjoyed it. Well-drawn characters, winding and rejoining plot-paths, interesting backstory and setting.
→ Elizabeth George - Wikipedia
Once in a while, when I draw a blank as to which book to read next, I let my son pick one off the bookshelf. He chose perhaps the most boring-looking specimen of them all: worn black cloth-wrapped hardcover with no discerning features except the title and the authors’ names in plain font. No pictures, no colours, no blurb on the back. A second-hand book that most probably had a shiny-paper cover wrapped around it with the blurb and title/picture, which got lost.
The content, however, is fascinating: 1000 pages of intrigue at the Emperor’s Court in 8th century China. Allegedly based in historical fact, but I can only imagine how much fictionalisation it must have taken to squeeze a novel for a western audience out of 1200 year-old Chinese court-documents.
Eleanor Cooney & Daniel Altieri: The Court of the Lion
(first part of a trilogy about the T’ang dynasty)
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I’ve been reading Joe Abercrombie’s First Law/Age of Madness books and really loving them. If you’re looking for a zippy fantasy series with 6 fat books in it, I recommend them.
But the most interesting thing I read this month was a happy accident of going through our personal library and reading all the books in it I’ve never read (in alphabetical order), which are many because Tom & I combined big book collections and because we’re part of a peer group that’s always circulating books that sometimes get shelved and forgotten. Anyway, I’m into the Bs, and found an ancient paperback copy of Blatty’s The Exorcist. So old that it’s pre-movie. Yellowed, brittle pages. And I realized I’d never read it, only seen the movie. And wow, does that movie hew closely to the book. More closely than I’ve ever seen. Dialogue that I remember Ellen Burstyn saying. Images and scenes that were faithfully filmed. It’s really a pretty good book, and it was interesting to see how devoted Friedkin was to his source material.
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I’m reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Before that, I read All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, and Blood Meridian is probably the best. The language and descriptions are fantastic.
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The Mighty Onion by Mark Crilley
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I have finished the Neuromancer trilogy. Was confused during most of the first book (especially the ice bit), very bored during the second one (except with Marley), and liked the last one quite a bit (the Mona Lisa Overdrive)!
Also finally wore down and started The Name of the Rose. It’s… hum… I’m only reading it because I was promised playing Pentiment would be more enjoyable if I read the book first. I’ve spent so far more time whining about the narrator than reading the book. I don’t care that you describing the door of the church is bringing you to ecstasy, just tell me more about the MURDER!
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Eco loves his discursion – and ngl, pre-existing interest in the struggle between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope is definitely helpful – but there is plenty of murder to come!
I just finished Trust, by Hernan Diaz, and really liked it (it won the Pulitzer last year so some other folks agreed). It’s a slightly pomo novel centering on a 20s/30s financier and his wife, kicking off with a novel-within-a-novel that’s a roman a clef about the two of them, then moving into the “real world” with a couple of different perspectives on them. Great prose, including the loving Wharton/James homage of the first part; he also builds things up so that the final section needs to be really awesome to pay off the expectations he’s set, and actually manages to stick the landing.
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I know 
That’s why I hate his Pendulum…
But I’m staying on course for the sake of the game…
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I always considered the book less a mystery and more a medieval semiotics textbook, which is kinda my jam. It also helps to know that Eco was studying for his dissertation and he was a profoundly influential semiotician. I can say my interest in the academic world came from him (now, I sport a useless MSc hidden in my drawers and it’s somewhat unrelated to my current work).
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Yeah, 100% this (both in terms of describing the book, and it being personally appealing). I read it for the first time when I was like 12 and enjoyed it even though 85% of it went over my head, though, so my sense is that it can still just work as a cool mystery with some over-the-top deaths.
This is completely accurate, though I adore that one too 
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18-year-old me loved the book. But that was a very long time ago. I don’t know how it would go now.
My friend Jim and I were obsessed with the Templars (well mostly him) and secret societies in general. He hung out with luminaries from the Church of the Subgenius, if there are such. I’m a much more timid soul.
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I read it at 18 and really liked it, then reread it at 30 and loved it even more (your mileage may vary, but I think there’s a lot to enjoy even if one’s Templar-enthusiasm has inevitably waned over the years).
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I think it’s just his style that I don’t vibe with. Which is wild because if you give me a super descriptive French book, I will devour it. I’m also a big sucker for historical drama/mystery/and so on. But with Eco, I’ve been mainly bored… 
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I’m reading The Annotated Turing, a book-length explication of the 1936 paper that introduced Turing Machines (that name for them was courtesy of Alonzo Church subsequently).
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Proust? Couldn’t get past the first chapter of Swann’s Way.
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Oh no… not him 
Proust put me to sleep.
I was thinking more of the classics like Hugo, Zola, Balzac, Dumas and the like…
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I am sad to hear that Alice Munro has passed away four days ago. She is one of few authors that I have read the complete oeuvre of. Her mastery of the English language is phenomenal, unsophisticated yet precise and without a shred of purple prose. I wonder how many drafts she used to go through for her stories.
My favorite short story of hers is The Bear Came Over the Mountain, about an elderly couple, wife having an Alzheimer and husband caring for her in unexpected ways.
They usually compare her to Chekhov, and I agree with that. Although I find Chekhov’s stories more memorable than hers in general, they are also more sentimental. But that’s only relative to one another, neither of them wrote in kitsch sentimentality. Their stories always remain s firmly grounded in reality and plausability, and their subject matters in ordinary. They both shy away from spectacle and bombastic.
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Right. It’s a popularization of a bunch of philosophy and history by adding sex and violence. 
Pulp that the self-styled highbrow can feel good about! (That statement is to mock the self-styled highbrow, not The Name of the Rose, which I like a lot.)
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