• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

I just finished reading...

Status
Not open for further replies.
Murakami

Thea, I'm glad you read Murakami because I like his books, too. I've just read South of the Border,West of the Sun, I'm not sure this is the right title in English as I read a translation. The title is the beginning of a Nat King Cole song, Murakami's characters are always music lovers. It is a magical and mysterious love story, I don't want to reveal anything ofthe plot , read it if you find the book.
 
I agree with you completely Jenem, about "From the Dust Returned". I read it...oh geez, probably 5 or 6 months ago. I've just recently finished Girl With a Pearl Earring, which I vaugely remember someone mentioning last week or so, but I can't remember who it was or what they said about it. I thought it was a great book. Now I have to go out and see the movie...
 
liv said:
I agree with you completely Jenem, about "From the Dust Returned". I read it...oh geez, probably 5 or 6 months ago. I've just recently finished Girl With a Pearl Earring, which I vaugely remember someone mentioning last week or so, but I can't remember who it was or what they said about it. I thought it was a great book. Now I have to go out and see the movie...
Click to expand...

That was me. I enjoyed Girl with a Pearl Earring, the imagery was incredible. I almost rented the movie the other day, I'll actually have to manage next time.
 
Just finished The Lake House by James Patterson. It started out being pretty interesting, but the ending seemed too predictable. Still, I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a little light reading. It's a sweet/cute story with suspense thrown in. It was about 100 chapters long, so each chapter was about three or four pages, with two of those being half pages. So I guess the book could have been about 100 pages shorter if it had normal length chapters.

I'm just starting Dream Park by Larry Niven. Recommended to me by a friend after I'd complained that I just couldn't get into Ringworld. It's more interesting so far, but still... Eh, I'll give it a chance.
 
Finished The Sirens of Titan , and loved it as I usually do Vonnegut's books. I had to read Candide again after it with all the talk of meaning in life and purpose....Great combination..

With school starting again now I hope I'm able to keep up with my reading on the side, it looks as if it's going to be quite difficult.
 
Just finished Remember Me by Lesley Pearse, and it was great. It's about a young woman who is sentenced to hang for a petty theft, then her sentence is commuted to transportation to Australia. The book follows her determination to survive and get back to England and see her family again, and apparently it's based on a true story. It was a real page-turner, so I might read some more of her books. :)
 
I just finished Dandelion Wine (Ray Bradbury). What a beautiful book! Magical! It brought me back to the summers of my own youth when I lived in a very small town; everyone knew eachother and the sun set in a golden blaze across the fields every night. I haven't thought about that in years. The book had some very enlightening things to say about age and life and family. Wonderful wonderful wonderful!
 
Finished 'We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin' recentely. Was on my TBR list for ages, and i kept hearing it was brilliant.

I found it to be marginaly better than average, but nothing special. I would stick to books it 'inspired' like 1984 and Brave New World.

btw, Does anyone know if the lead character was supposed to be autistic? His thoughts reminded me of Speed of Dark (Elizabeth Moon) and Curious Incident of the Dog... I don't know anyone in the real world that is obsessed with timetables and think they are better than Shakespeare. The fact he was a mathemetician is no excuse!

Yobmod X
 
Jenem, Dandelion Wine has always been a "magical" book in my mind also. Some people lament the lack of a plot, but the quality of the book is in the writing, the nostalgia, and the human feelings. I`ll bet you like it better on your second reading (Yes, you`ll read it again!). I`ve been through bouts of serious depression, and this book was better for me than any medication! The vignettes are unforgettable. Another book, on a similar plane, and quite as well written is "Cannery Row", by Steinbeck, although the magic just doesn`t seem to "click" for some people. :(
 
I just finished Running With the Demon by Terry Brooks. It was an awesome book. I very much look forward to reading the next one!
 
Well, whilst in Switzerland I read:

'On Liberty' by J.S. Mill: If you are prepared to penetrate his verbosity and rather pompous style, it is thoroughly interesting and a philosophy that I feel a lot for.

'Nausea' by Jean-Paul Sartre: Entertaining wiffle, followed by amusing wiffle, followed by frankly bizarre and utterly nonsensical wiffle, with a bit of emotional wiffle, until I actually found something really worthwhile in the last two pages.

'The Demolished Man' by Alfred Bester: Great story, an effective marriage of pulp fiction and more serious literature, wonderfully psychotic, yet charming, anti-hero, and pre-crime in all but name, well before Minority Report. Not a classic by any means, but well worth reading.

'Notes from Underground' by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Classic Dostoevsky, as ever his comprehension and portrayal of the human psyche is penetrating and accurate, if a little unsettling, the almost-rambling, but nonetheless eloquent prose and dwelling on matters of the mind rather than events, it's excellent.

'The Double' by Fyodor Dostoevsky: Not-so-classic Dostoevsky. His second novel, I found it a prosaic premise, executed poorly, with bland dialogue, poor description and a central character about whom I could not make my mind up. Not a recommendation.

'The First Circle' by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: This one, however, is a bona-fide masterpiece. Solzhenitsyn manages to adapt the style of his Russian literary predecessors to a more modern, snappier, 20th century bent, one certainly suited to the story. A plethora of characters inhabit the title, some amusing caricatures, others you might liken yourself to. A simultaneously hilarious and damning inditement of the paranoia of Stalinist Russia, the book contains everything from cutting satire to serious philosophical considerations. Mavrino really is a microcosm for the entire world, with the variety of dispositions and personalities contained within.

'Utilitarianism' by J.S. MIll: Exactly what it says on the tin. I really appreciate and agree with what he's saying, but see comments for 'On Liberty.' The same applies here.
 
Just finished Alice in Exile by Piers Paul Read and Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, both recommended on this site, and Children of the Arabat by Anatoli Rybakov. Enjoyed them all and laughed out loud while reading Three Men in a Boat. Enjoyed Children of the Arabat enough to go online and order a used copy and am now reading the second of Rybakov's trilogy, Fear.
Nancy
 
Today I finished Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49." It's a short book, and I had some time on my hands yesterday, so I read it very quickly, which may in part explain my strong reaction to this book. Of course it is well written and of course it is clever and imaginative, fulled with the darkly comic surrealism that is Pynchon's signature. However, my reaction to this book was very personal, eerily personal. Like the singer in the old pop song "Killing Me Softly (With His Song)" I had the strangest feeling I was reading my own life through the filter of Pynchon's warped, looking glass, near-reality. By the end, I was truly crying, for Pynchon does not offer easy answers or tidy solutions.

Irene Wilde
 
i just finished reading "Try" by Dennis Cooper. he is my favorite author and a very scary one too, before i read Try i read Frisk which was so disturbing i had to watch cartoons when i finished or i would have gone to bed with nightmares. :p

my favorite work of his is "My Loose Thread" and i've read four of his books, Try is now my second favorite, the characters really appealed to me in this one, but one of the amazing things about Dennis Cooper is the fact that many of the characters in his books are BAD people... but his writing is so, intuitive? that you just relate to one of them no matter what, and it's really an insight to the human condition.
 
Finished The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner last night. It's Very good. Can easily imagine the world becoming the kind of distopia he describes. So many of the predictions from the sixties have already come true too and the presidents speaches are scarily similar to G W Bush's.
(According to the afterword its become some kind of environmentalist's bible, but as i biochemist i found most of the afterword to be overexaggerated propaganda - so i'll take anything he says with a pinch of salt.)

Still only halfway through 100 years of solitude - it's good but loads of the characters have the same (spanish) names. Every time i start a chapter i have to look at the family tree in the front to try work out who has done what.

Planning to start Solaris bt Stanislaw Lem (sp?) tonight. Heard it's very good, but I've avoided it til now cos the libraries copy has George Clooney all over the cover. :confused:
 
"Dust and Ashes"(Arbat Trilogy, Vol 3) by Anatoli Rybakov. Enjoyed all the books in this trilogy which is about the generation that grew up in the Stalin era.
 
I just finished Rabbit Redux by John Updike. I'm working my way through the series (backwards for some reason) and with every book, I depise Rabbit Angstrom a little more. I'm not sure what I'm reading next.. but it's going to have some strong women characters in it!

buddi
 
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. This is a story about a young girl who had lost her mother early in life, her life with an abusive father, and her search to find her mother's past. This book shows how a mother's love can withstand almost anything.

I liked this book, it's not one of my favorites only because I not really into the whole female empowerment deal, but if you are looking for a read that will boost your feminism and make you feel that women can do anything, then this is the book for you.
 
Just finished reading Antipodes Finished it not because I have reached the end but because I am giving up on it. It's just not very good.

This is a collection of short stories. The stories seem, to me, to be about nothing! This would be fine if the prose were beautiful or interesting, it's not. If each story was a thoughtful metaphor, they arn't. I think they are supposed to be, but they arn't. Maybe I am missing something? Just fed up with it now and moving on to something, hopefully, better :)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top