Post current/ or much lesser known authors, perhaps with some specific works. NOT authors you find on highschool reading lists, unless maybe if it's a title that is less popular.

Jonathan Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn, Amnesia Moon, Fortress of Solitude

Gary Schroen: First In: An Insiders Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan

This guy was the leader of a CIA team sent into Afghanastin right after 9/11. Pretty interesting read.

[Edited on June 5, 2006 at 2:17 PM. Reason : Schroen]

6/5/2006 2:13:30 PM

Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow, V., The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Identity, The Joke, Immortality

Italo Calvino: If on a winter's night a traveler, Invisible Cities

I play favorites.

I also think everyone should read Nabokov's Transparent Things (if not his bigger things like Pale Fire and Lolita). It's a short and very oddly industrious piece of fiction.

[Edited on June 5, 2006 at 2:37 PM. Reason : .]

6/5/2006 2:17:30 PM

I really like Haruki Murakami's stuff. It's pretty heavy on the Japanese culture, so it's pretty different from english authors.

The nerd in me recommends Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress because it's just a damn-well-written book.

6/5/2006 2:21:35 PM

^ yeah

william hood - mole

6/5/2006 2:26:48 PM

I recently finished Chris Bachelder's U.S.! A Novel and quite enjoyed it. I'm starting [i]The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis now.

p.s. http://www.thewolfweb.com/message_topic.aspx?topic=410293

[Edited on June 5, 2006 at 2:36 PM. Reason : ]

6/5/2006 2:33:09 PM

^ yeah i've seen that and a few other threads. I made this with the intent of avoiding all the same suggestions that come in those threads, for ex. Vonnegut, Keller, Steinbeck, etc.. Nothing wrong with them, they are great books that people should read, but I think most people who read know of them if they haven't actually read them. Also that thread is specifcally asking about a few particular authors so i didn't think posting in it would have accomplished the same. I wanted this to be a thread for people to post more current stuff that they think is worth looking into.


Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife

Love story but with a pretty original twist (at least as far as I know).

6/5/2006 3:06:46 PM

Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections

6/5/2006 4:51:23 PM

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

6/5/2006 4:57:40 PM

snow crash - neal stephenson
guns germs and steel - jared diamond


are for duro, if you liked your cia book, check out

see no evil - robert baer

anything the cia blacked out, he left it as actually blacked out to show the editing process.

i also read fbi director Freeh's memoir but it was too...too full of itself, maybe.

6/5/2006 5:11:03 PM

Just some random stuff I'll throw out there that I have probably mentioned in the other thread:
Local Anaesthetic by Gunter Grass.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel.
Bear v. Shark by Chris Bachelder.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which I'm still in the middle of.
You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
And, if you're not prejudiced againt comics, Y: The Last Man, Top Ten, and The Watchmen all come highly recommended by me.

None of that is particularly obscure, but I'm just not quite the book nerd that I ought to be.

I started on The Thin Place today, and I already kind of hate it. I don't know if this is related to the fact that it's sort of similar to Little, Big, which I am also reading and hating.

6/5/2006 5:31:53 PM

Quote :

"Haroun and the Sea of Stories anything by Salman Rushdie"

6/5/2006 5:38:14 PM

As the bard would say, true dat.

6/5/2006 5:39:03 PM

Anything by Brett Easton Ellis.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon is my favorite novel published since 2000

[Edited on June 5, 2006 at 9:02 PM. Reason : yeah]

6/5/2006 9:02:01 PM

That's a good one.

6/5/2006 10:25:48 PM

Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White - a sort of Dickensian tale of a Victorian-era prostitute in London, this novel is so awesome, michel faber spent like 9 years just researching it.

6/5/2006 11:21:12 PM

Oh, and if you like fantastic (ie related to fantasy) things, try Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke. It's written in a very 1800s style and is amusing in a British way.

6/5/2006 11:24:18 PM

Anthony Kiedis - Scar Tissue

great read

6/5/2006 11:26:58 PM

i second American Gods

6/5/2006 11:30:34 PM

Lew Wallace - Benhur: A Tale of THE CHRIST

6/5/2006 11:45:20 PM

anything orson scott card. seriously anything. favorite author. the ender's game SERIES by him is good. not just ender's game, but the other 7 as well. just wrote a new one, even.

6/6/2006 12:20:27 AM

I did not like Life of Pi. Everyone touts it as this great and wonderful thing. I was bored the entire way through.

Quote :

"The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon is my favorite novel published since 2000 "

I'm really disappointed in that one. I'm 300 pages into it, and I'm still not interested in what's going on.

6/6/2006 3:41:43 AM

I can see Kavalier and Klay being way more interesting to guys, especially since there's basically no real female characters in the entire thing. Pi, I dunno. I loved it.

6/6/2006 11:10:26 AM

^^ Do you actually like any books?

[Edited on June 6, 2006 at 11:14 AM. Reason : .]

6/6/2006 11:14:15 AM

Quote :

"Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow, V., The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland ... Italo Calvino: If on a winter's night a traveler, Invisible Cities I play favorites. I also think everyone should read Nabokov's Transparent Things (if not his bigger things like Pale Fire and Lolita). It's a short and very oddly industrious piece of fiction. "

You have some excellent taste.

6/6/2006 11:16:01 AM

i liked the life of pi because pi is so hXc.

6/6/2006 11:23:50 AM

This isn't fiction, current, or lesser-known, but anything by Oliver Sacks, specifically The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, is great.

6/6/2006 11:44:14 AM

Book titles are underlined. Movie titles are italicized.

P.S. Teenagers From Mars by Rick Spears!!1

6/6/2006 12:09:26 PM

Are you sure about that? I've always been taught that long works were underlined or italicized, and I generally used underlines with handwritten material just because it's difficult to do italics in handwriting. A quick google search agrees with me. I could also point you to at least one current literary magazine which does both movie titles and book titles in italics.

The MLA, for what it's worth, seems to suggest that all long works be underlined to avoid any confusion.

[Edited on June 6, 2006 at 12:22 PM. Reason : ]

6/6/2006 12:20:51 PM

MLA, APA, and Chicago all suggest book titles be underlined. I think it's all a little ridiculous, but if you're gonna format titles in threads....

6/6/2006 12:28:48 PM

Whatever.

6/6/2006 12:29:21 PM

movie titles are underlined as well

6/6/2006 12:33:32 PM

6/6/2006 12:35:18 PM

Different media have different conventions for formatting the titles of different works done in different media. But we're really a mixed-media culture, and the lines have been blurred. A one-shot, self-contained comic book has narrative content of a scope similar to a short story, but it's certainly a printed book, so do you render the title in quotation marks like a short story's or underline it like a book's?

I also suspect that most of these formatting conventions are the result of the limitations on rendering text inherent to some media, like some magazines and newspapers not having access to typefaces with italics in the days of physical typesetting. Since 99% of that shit isn't a concern thanks to publishing software and laser printers and shit, what's the point of preserving them?

6/6/2006 12:35:58 PM

Quote :

"I can see Kavalier and Klay being way more interesting to guys, especially since there's basically no real female characters in the entire thing. "

I'm not sure if you would consider this a spoiler, but I'm about to say something about the book, so anyone who wants to read it might want to skip over me.









Okay, I'm a little more than 300 pages into it, and the part where I'm at is heavily implying (to me) that Sam Clay is gay. They keep talking about how he doesn't have a girlfriend, he catches those two guys making out at the Salvador Dali party, and now he's bringing that one guy home for dinner. Obiviously I'm jumping to conclusions that are possibly wrong, and I'll just have to keep reading to find out. But seriously, this doesn't strike me as a guy's book. Especially since it was recommended to me by a bunch of women.
A book doesn't have to have a female role or a love interest to be interesting to another female.



And yes, I do like other books. Time Traveler's Wife is great. I'll suggest Contortionist's Handbook by Craig Clevenger. I always recommend Chuck Palahniuk. American Gods is a really awesome one. I just mention the books I don't like because I don't understand why people like them so much, and I'm hoping they'll explain what they liked about it, rather than rolling their eyes and saying, "God, do you like anything?"
So there, now you know.
Oh, and I don't give a hell about whether or not those should have been italicized, if anyone cares.

6/6/2006 12:37:59 PM

the moral of the story is

it really has absolutely zero bearing on the thread as the only real point in iticizing in here is to identify where a title begins and ends. for that purpose, it matters not which format is used, whether it be italics, underline or bold. perhaps even strikethough if you are feeling too cornered by those three.

6/6/2006 12:38:39 PM

A lot of comic fans enjoyed the hell out of K&C, and a lot of comic fans are dudes.

6/6/2006 12:42:09 PM

True that.

And just because there's a gay character doesn't mean that guys won't like it. Christ.

6/6/2006 12:43:42 PM

Some of a man's best-loved literature features characters gayer, even, than AIDS. Just look at The Catcher in the Rye or even the Iliad.

6/6/2006 12:50:48 PM

A lot of comic fans enjoyed the hell out of K&C because the book is about two guys who make a comic book series together. Surprise.

Possession of a vagina is not keeping me from enjoying that book. I do think that the author's description of the characters and their actions is fabulous, and I really appreciate his ability to describe scenes. But the consequence is that he drags everything out to the last detail, and that is something I don't enjoy.

Quote :

"And just because there's a gay character doesn't mean that guys won't like it. Christ."

True, and I was wrong for making that assumption.

6/6/2006 1:07:25 PM

Quote :

"You have some excellent taste."

You're damn right I do.

Quote :

"The Catcher in the Rye"

I'm the only person I know who absolutely hated that book. Franny and Zooey was a lot better.

6/6/2006 2:57:17 PM

Maybe you should try reading it again. You know, like after you've grown up.

6/6/2006 3:08:51 PM

Gee, I'm sorry I have an opinion. I'm glad people four years older than me are keen to point out how immature I must be.

6/6/2006 3:50:36 PM

Do you think you could step up your game a little? It's extraordinarily tiring to have to talk down so far.

6/6/2006 3:58:32 PM

I just finished No Surrender: My 30 Year War by Hiroo Onada.

He was the Japanese soldier who hid in the mountains in the Phillipines until 1974. As he tells his story you really get inside his head. Very weird.

6/6/2006 4:00:06 PM

^^Sure thing, as soon as you take your head out of your ass. I really hate saying mean things when I know you aren't listening.

6/6/2006 4:11:36 PM

Why don't you go back to your Toni Morrison books and leave this thread to the big kids?

6/6/2006 4:13:22 PM

Daniel Quinn's Ishmael is one of the best books I've ever read.

6/6/2006 4:13:54 PM

If you didn't find Kavalier's escape from Europe exciting....then put down the book. It's not for you.

To me the book was a coming of age story dealing with two young men who were as close as brothers. What happens to their relationship towards the end is really sad.

They are supposedly making it into a movie:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0366165/

This saddens me. Chabon's wife said a lot will have to be cut out (like an Antartica setting).

[Edited on June 6, 2006 at 4:15 PM. Reason : yeah]

6/6/2006 4:14:36 PM

^^^You're making such a very fine contribution to the thread yourself, big kid. Or are you too busy masturbating over The Elements of Style to bother reading any fiction?

6/6/2006 4:17:50 PM

I'm glad to see the future!

6/6/2006 4:23:21 PM