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I've just bought José Saramago's recently published autobiography, which will make a wonderful Christmas gift for my mom, an even bigger fan than me :D

I was marginally interested in this because American Born Chinese, a graphic novel, was competing against real novels in the younger literature category. It lost, of course, much to the chagrin of all the comic book nutters who are desperate for respectability :D

Ok, perhaps my choice of smilies was unfortunate. Apologies if I seemed sarcastic :D My point was magical realists are popular in the West; hence readers should have no trouble accepting Rushdie's fantastic flights of imagination.

Only Philip Roth's American Pastoral.

I think you underestimate the popularity of such magical realists as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luís Borges, Italo Calvino, Günter Grass, José Saramago, etc, in the West ;)

Interesting that the Portuguese editions tend to be published with the UK covers. Lucky me :D I wouldn't know whether European graphic designers are better than US graphic designers, but for some years now I've been noticing that European comics have a lot better art than their American...

It's hard reading science books written before the 20th century (it can also be a waste of time, because most are out of date with modern progress, or have been disproven) because the idea of popularising science didn't start until then with people like Bertrand Russell, who believed in the...

This thread is depressing: I see my life reflected on it. My dad always thought my 'reading phase' would eventually go away, except it didn't, and then I enrolled in university, studied literature (a useless course, as my dad so delicately calls it), and graduated a few months ago. My parents...

Just the first? You mean he plans to write more books where he fantasizes about killing his wife? :D

Not a single one :o The Selfish Gene, The Origins of the Species, and One, Two, Three... Infinity, however, are on my non-fiction list.

You entropy-junkies will find any excuse to worship this guy :D

I think the problem is that 'writing meant to illustrate a point' isn't very respected; and rightly so, I might add. If you want to 'illustrate' something, get yourself crayons. If you want to develop a philosophical theory, stick to non-fiction. If you want to write literature, have something...

Too bad hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection programmed the human brain to process information linearly, dually and literally :rolleyes: but I applaud the post-modernists' belief that they can change human nature. I'm constantly postponing my immersion in Pynchon's work. I bet...

I'm glad to say I have pretty obedient little books, who never go wandering alone and never accept rides from strangers. If I'm gone for a while, I know they'll still be there when I come back. They usually know how to take care of themselves, and I can even leave them alone all morning that...

Ah, Libre is just exaggerating. Hawking's life would have been terminated before he could have developed a moral conscience to shudder at such a concept :D What worries me is that this topic seems based on the assumption that retarted children are, well, too retarted to appreciate the fact...

Will freedom fries taste better or worse after this?

Now, you see, if I had to choose I'd say James Joyce or William Burroughs. They're laudaded as great writers and put on the same pedastal as writers I worship, like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luís Borges, and that irritates me because I consider them literary frauds without the ability to...

I think the purpose of Dracula's trip to London is lost in the complex network of a rather long and slow-paced plot. I think John Sutherland devotes a chapter to the Count's motives in Is Heatcliff a Murderer?: Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. But the love story was added by the...

Neil Gaiman has signed my Doll's House volume.

It's not Moon's ideology or politics; I mean his ability to unearth a USA that usually doesn't appear in movies, TV series and books, and that non-Americans who think the USA is New York and Los Angeles know nothing about. No one gives a damn about a little town in the middle of nowhere called...