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I read Miller's The Dark Knight - I could see the dark humor in there. Missed it in Sin City, I suppose... Maybe I am too easily put off by this kind of over-the-top violence these days. Not that The Dark Knight was really that much less violent, but it seemed much less sadistic. With Sin...

I cheated: I had my Danish partner sitting next me. Together we played to 740 and reached 49. I am confident we are going to bump up the donation level some time soon (probably not the vocab level, though).

These days, religious fights are no longer about our metaphysical well-being anymore - they are about down-to-earth issues like food. I guess that is progress of sorts. Having said that, I find the whole industrial production of meat (battery chickens etc) really disgusting. I cannot...

You look different today, Aquablue - or is it just that I not wearing my glasses? My favorite character in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is probably the narrator. It's been a while since I've read the book, but his habit of starting to iron when he felt stressed stayed with me. Difficult to...

I'm with you on the "not meaningful" - the ultra-violence is imaginative, but entirely gratuitous. It's certainly not funny, if anything, it seems to take itself way too seriously. Dark & disturbing, yes. Frank Miller has awesome talent. I would not go so far as to call it "beautiful". I found...

I just followed that link - bull's eye. To coin a phrase, I nearly bust a gut reading it.

I suspect it is the kind of book one "knows" and possibly quotes, but does not really read anymore: the story itself has almost become a cliché. Like Don Quijote, say. I had to read it for school, which tends to add a special taste to any reading experience. Put differently, I am probably biased.

Congrats on the A+. Has your teacher read Faust? Puzzling that a Christian school would have reservations about Faust - unless they haven't read the book, of course. Speaking of the devil: may I suggest Dante's Inferno or Jeremy Leven's Satan?

For me, LOTR and Narnia were completely different trips. I really enjoyed both - but for myself, I cannot compare the two. In my perception, LOTR has a rather heavy-duty undercurrent, a preoccupation with war and death - grown-up stuff, really. Narnia, on the other hand, seems to be directed at...

Spot on. Even darker, weirder, blacker humour, more allusive: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (of course). And there is always Iain Banks, The Bridge.

Witchcraft, wizardry and magic - if my old German teacher heard you :D ... I certainly agree, the book is quite a trip. I admit that I never managed to finished Faust II, though: too weird and high-brow even for me.

The name unfortunately does not ring a belļ but then, it's a long time ago and the story sounds both familiar and really intriguing - thanks!

I am rather awed, actually. What made you read Faust? And did you enjoy it? Maybe I am not so much thinking of judging people by what they read per se, but rather by what I see them reading in public. Or is that the same thing? Would I read everything I read for the rest of the world to see...

Reading is being somewhere and somebody else - as far as I am concerned, that is the deal with reading. I like movies a lot, but in terms of being transported, they don't even come close. Maybe because movies really are somebody else's imagination, whereas the world created when reading a book...

If you can get hold of a copy, try William Hallahan's The Search for Joseph Tully. It is not Stephen King type of horror, nothing flashy, but seriously creepy. The story is set in winter in an underheated house scheduled for demolition, and the chill seems to come out of the pages. The most...

You might want to try the rest of Donald Westlake's stuff as well, if you like his R. Stark books - the Dortmunder series (under his own name): comic burglar novels. Or, at the opposite, rather more serious end of the spectrum, the private dick stories he wrote as Tucker Coe. Incidentially...

Sartre might be a good author to start reading in the original - the language is fairly no-fuss. Looking at the other stuff you mentioned, I think you'd like his plays (try Les Mouches or Le Diable et le Bon Dieu) or his early short stories (Le Mur). Sartre, incidentially, is one of the very few...

As a Portuguese speaker, it should take you very little effort to pick up enough French or Italian to read books in those languages. Russian is a different story altogether. I did it for a few years in high school, and that IS a lot of hard work. I guess the question boils down to how much you...

Are you asking us to boycott The Golden Compass? I guess you have a point: we should stand up for Northern Lights.

Just possibly, the question should not be Why Do People (Not) Read?, but rather, Why Do People get so much out of imagining other worlds (I won't say better worlds, because I don't think that is the point of escaping through books, movies etc.)? This urge is clearly not modern, and I am quite...