3bogs said:

[Edited 8/30/04 2:06am]

AzureStarr said:

[Edited 8/30/04 2:07am]

flipwilson said:

2the9s said:

CarrieMpls said:

lovemachine said:

IstenSzek said:

Thankyou.

Lleena said:[quote]

Which is the most amazing bookstore you ever visited?

I love browsing in second hand bookshops. There's something about these books that have character and the shared experience of somebody having read the very same book as you. Dust makes me sneeze, but I like the idea of the old dusty bookshop with the old guy raising his glasses as I browse his books. There's usually a cat in the corner too.

I sooo love you right now

I think we should read the following book for our book club!

http://www.amazon.com/exe...4?v=glance

The Storyteller's Daughter, by Saira Shah!

She did that documentary about how fucked up the Taliban are/were.

And you can get cheap used copies here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/...dition=all

After finish the 9-11 report, I'm going to read that. I've already orderd mine!

2the9s said:

Bump! You fools!

I used to read a fair bit before children came along and took up so much of my spare time. I dont collect books and usually pass them on amongst family members.

I'm a sucker for thrillers myself.

I know I'm late on this but I'm just starting The Da Vinci Code which I hear is very good.


.
[Edited 8/31/04 16:50pm]

2the9s said:

hey i might get this book hon.
let do the book club again. it may be just you and me...but hey!!!
i'm actually reading...well about to read "brick lsne" by monica ali first.
but i will get this book

msserendipity said:

Dear msserendipity,

Please do not encourage 2the9s.

Many thanks

bkw

msserendipity said:

After two weeks I have started compiling books I really want to have...

It's a bit of an ecclectic bunch...text lifted from Amazon.com

Out by Natsuo Kirino
A suburban Tokyo woman fed up with her loutish husband kills him in a fit of anger, then confesses her crime to a coworker on the night shift at the boxed-lunch factory. The coworker enlists the help of two other women at the factory to dismember and dispose of the body. Readers beware--Kirino's first mystery to be published in English (it was a best-seller in Japan) involves no madcap female bonding. The tenuous friendship between the four women, all with problems of their own even before becoming accessories to murder, begins to unravel almost immediately. Money changes hands. The body parts are discovered. The police begin asking questions, and a very bad man falsely accused of the crime is determined to find out who really deserves the punishment. The gritty neighborhoods, factories, and warehouses of Tokyo provide a perfect backdrop for this bleak tale of women who are victims of circumstance and intent on self-preservation at all costs.

I love thrillers/mysteries when they follow non traditional forms or styles. This seems to be the one for this year.

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things by J.T. Leroy
LeRoy rose to considerable notoriety as the teenaged author of last year's Sarah, a novel about a gender-confused kid whose mother is a truckers' prostitute. In his latest work, a rawly written, riveting series of 10 interlocked stories that read fluidly as a novel, LeRoy returns to the themes of guilt and sin in the first-person voice of a boy so viciously abused by his caretakers that he is left with barely a sense of his own identity. Jeremiah is a child nobody wants, and he passes swiftly from foster parents to his angry and vindictive teenaged mother, Sarah, to his fanatically Evangelical grandparents. Sarah, herself badly wounded by her punishing, Bible-obsessed parents, gave birth to the boy when she was only 14; she returns at 18 to claim him. "Nobody takes what's mine," spouts the foul-mouthed, pill-popping, paranoid young woman. It's soon clear that Sarah cares nothing for her son, who becomes an unwelcome tagalong on her transient cross-country misadventures in hooking louche sugar daddies, stripping, turning tricks for truckers and cooking up explosive "crystal" in one boyfriend's cellar. The boy, who begins to crave Sarah's punishment as a way of keeping his life in balance, is frequently whipped for bed-wetting and is raped by her unsavory boyfriends; his denial of his sexuality becomes a pathetic attempt to identify with his tormentor. LeRoy depicts his ill-begotten characters as tenderly as Jean Genet, and delineates their acts of sadism and self-mutilation as unsparingly as A.M. Homes. Yet the stories resist spiraling into mere sensationalism. While Sarah becomes almost cartoonish in her savagery, the characters of the trucker child prostitute Milkshake and the lumbering biker Buddy are poignantly understated. Jeremiah, conflicted, emotionally bled but never self-pitying or defeated, elicits a gratifying sympathy. LeRoy's work is a startling achievement in his accelerating mastery of the literary form.

J.T. Leroy has been a writer whoms essays and articles I always enjoyed, as he is always one to seek out so called misfits.

The Coma by Alex Garland, drawings by Nicholas Garland
Proclaimed "a gifted storyteller" by The New Yorker and "a huge literary talent" by Kazuo Ishiguro, Alex Garland, the internationally bestselling author of The Beach, The Tesseract, and writer of the critically acclaimed film 28 Days Later, returns with yet another gripping page-turner that blurs the edges of reality and probes the boundaries of consciousness. A man is attacked on the Underground and awakens to find himself in a hospital, apparently having emerged from a coma. Or has he? Garland's brilliant tale is illustrated with forty haunting woodblock print illustrations by his father, Nicholas Garland, a well-known political cartoonist for the Daily Telegraph (UK) and noted artist.

This book gets alot of bad press, but the book is just a small one and I rather make up my own mind. Again, I like the way he twists the plots in his stories.

The Giving Tree, words and pictures by Shel Silverstein
To say that this particular apple tree is a "giving tree" is an understatement. In Shel Silverstein's popular tale of few words and simple line drawings, a tree starts out as a leafy playground, shade provider, and apple bearer for a rambunctious little boy. Making the boy happy makes the tree happy, but with time it becomes more challenging for the generous tree to meet his needs. When he asks for money, she suggests that he sell her apples. When he asks for a house, she offers her branches for lumber. When the boy is old, too old and sad to play in the tree, he asks the tree for a boat. She suggests that he cut her down to a stump so he can craft a boat out of her trunk. He unthinkingly does it. At this point in the story, the double-page spread shows a pathetic solitary stump, poignantly cut down to the heart the boy once carved into the tree as a child that said "M.E. + T." "And then the tree was happy... but not really." When there's nothing left of her, the boy returns again as an old man, needing a quiet place to sit and rest. The stump offers up her services, and he sits on it. "And the tree was happy." While the message of this book is unclear (Take and take and take? Give and give and give? Complete self-sacrifice is good? Complete self-sacrifice is infinitely sad?), Silverstein has perhaps deliberately left the book open to interpretation.

A small book, as far as I know Silverstein's only one with a colored cover (all his others are in b&w), which drew me to it. As it is a children's book I read it, in like seven minutes and it left me crying. It reminded me of my mother, who passed away earlier this year.



Girl, 15 Charming But Insane by Sue Limb
Life was tragic enough before this spring started. With a distinct lack of boobage and an arse so big that birds of prey could nest within its shadows, Jess Jordan is saddled with the Goddess Flora for a best friend, a Britney Spears look-alike so gorgeous that one grain of her divine dandruff could make the blind see again. Jess knows that her soul mate is Ben Jones, a divine mixture of Leonardo diCaprio, Prince William, and Brad Pitt who oozes mystery and charisma. But the campaign to get Ben to notice her brings on a cavalcade of mortification and disaster, including, but not limited to, a minestrone soup explosion that takes place in her bra and a schoolwide viewing of a videotape that features a topless Jess referring to her breasts as "Bonnie" and "Clyde."

Meanwhile, Jess’s death-obsessed Granny moves into her bedroom, along with her grandfather’s remains; her hypochondriac dad, who sends her daily "horrorscopes" like "You will fall asleep with your mouth open, and a family of earwigs will move in," acts strange about Jess staying with him this summer; and her longtime friend Fred, a television violence addict and closet thumbsucker, has decided that he can’t stand being around her. Jess is determined to make things right . . . but with her offbeat sense of humor and her wildly active imagination, things get complicated along the way.

Just reading the titles of each chapter had me laughing out loud. A hilarious look on teenage obsession. Can't wait to read it.

Checkpoint; A Novel by Nicholson Baker
Checkpoint is a work of fiction by acclaimed author Nicholson Baker, a novella that explores the peculiar angst many Americans are feeling right now about their country and their president. The book is set up as a conversation between two old high school buddies. One of them, in despair about the direction the country is going, is convinced he must kill the president; the other tries to talk him out of it.

Baker wrote Checkpoint in response to the powerless seething fury many Americans felt when President Bush decided to take the nation to war. "How do you react to something that you think is so hideously wrong?" asks Baker. "How do you keep it from driving you nuts? What do you do with your life while this wrong is being carried out? What are the thoughts—the secret thoughts, the unpublishable thoughts, so to speak—that go through your head?"

Some people have rational responses. Others do not. Baker’s book does not suggest violence is ever an appropriate response. But in order to understand the reasons why a violent act is always a mistake, one must first look at the contemplation of such an act.

The dialogue in Checkpoint is angry, funny, pointed and absurd. All of it has relevance to our world. And it is through the conversation in this novel that Baker hopes to raise important questions about how we react to violence—both individually and as a nation.

Working in an American book store that registers the expat voters (and urging all Democrats) has got us stocking up in tie-ins. This one seems the most easy one and the most entertaining.

Mr Paradise by Elmore Leonard
Roommates Kelly and Chloe are enjoying their lives and their downtown Detroit loft just fine. Kelly is a Victoria's Secret catalog model. Chloe is an escort, until she decides to ditch her varied clientele in favor of a steady gig as girlfriend to eighty-four-year-old retired lawyer Tony Paradiso, a.k.a. Mr. Paradise.

Evenings at Mr. Paradise's house, there's always an old Michigan football game on TV. And when Chloe's around, there's a cheerleader, too, complete with pleated skirt and blue-and-gold pompoms. One night Chloe convinces Kelly to join in the fun, along with Montez Taylor, Tony's smooth-talking right-hand man.

But things go awry and before the end of the evening there will be two corpses, two angry hit men, one switch of identity, a safe-deposit box full of loot up for grabs, and, fast on the scene, detective Frank Delsa, who now has a double homicide -- and a beautiful, willful witness -- to add to his already heavy caseload.

With a cool cast, snappy dialogue, and all the twists and turns fans crave, Mr. Paradise is Elmore Leonard at home in Detroit and sharper than ever.

The back flip is already enough of a plotline to have me wanting more.

Aspects Of The Novel by E.M. Forster
Collection of literary lectures by E.M. Forster, published in 1927. For the purposes of his study, Forster defines the novel as "any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words." The seven aspects offered for discussion are the story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. The author compares the form and texture of the novel to those of a symphony. As for subject, he expects the work "to reveal the hidden life at its source." Human nature, he concludes, is the novelist's necessary preoccupation.

Forster's wit and lively, informed originality have made this study of the novel a classic. Avoiding the chronological approach of what he calls "pseudoscholarship," Forster freely examines elements that all English-language novels have in common: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern and rhythm. The reader comes away with a deeper appreciation for the novel in general, also for Forster, himself a distinguished author (HOWARDS END and A PASSAGE TO INDIA).

Forster's novels were heavily featured on my father's shelves, so I am well known to his work. But not this one. wWorking in a store introduces me to books I never knew excisted, as I normally do not easily venture outside the fiction corner.
I am really curious how someone like Forster tackles his own medium, just like the next book.

Plotting And Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith, author of Strangers On a Train, The Talented Mr.Ripley, Found In The Street, and many other books, is known as one of the finest suspense novelists. In this book, she analyzes the key elements of suspense fiction, drawing upon her own experience in four decades as a working writer. She talks about, among other topics; how to develop a complete story from an idea; what makes a plot gripping; the use (and abuse) of coincidence; characterization and the "likeable criminal"; going from first draft to final draft; and writing the suspense short story.
Throughout the book, Highsmith illustrates her points with plentiful examples from her own work, and by discussing her own inspirations, false starts, dead ends, successes, and failures, she presents a lively and highly readable picture of the novelist at work.

Anyone who wishes to write crime and suspense fiction, or who enjoys reading it, will find this book an insightful guide to the craft and art of a modern master.

Highsmith always was one of my faves in the crime genre. Her stories alwasy sophisticated, she lifted her own books out of it's genre.

Oh, Play That Thing by Roddy Doyle
Oh, Play That Thing is a fast-moving picaresque sequel to Roddy Doyle's novel about the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, A Star Called Henry. On the run from his former commanders, IRA assassin Henry ends up in the USA and copes indifferently with the gang-dominated New York of the early 1920s, and the worlds of Chicago jazz and the migrant workers of the Depression. Henry is a charming chancer, and a survivor, but this does not mean that he has an especially nice time for more than moments--his own ruthless past continually returns to haunt him.
Doyle does a nice line in memorable unpleasant images--a bunch of homing pigeons swollen and dying from bathtub gin; a wooden leg smouldering unnoticed from closeness to a campfire. There's also a strong sense of the changing language of immigrants trying to belong; this is, among other things, the story of how his Irish hero learns to think and speak in the American vein. The vignettes of real people--notably Henry's friend the young Louis Armstrong--are more than just decoration. In the Depression chapters, Doyle writes powerfully about the way folklore grows up. In places, this is a jerkily structured book, but it is always a highly intelligent one.

A new book by one of my favest writers in the world. Without even realising he was the one I wanted to have everything of.
This is the follow up to A Star Called Henry, one of the books I had to get into more than others (his books phonetically transcribe Irish dialect), but I am sure I will find it thriving with direct characters with more humour in their pinky than many in their entire body.

IstenSzek said:

Get this version of The Imaginary Girlfriend;

Then start reading;
Setting Free The Bears
The World According To Garp
The Hotel New Hampshire
A Prayer For Owen Meany

I think these novels hold alot of the things you seem to go for. Alot of your early posts (I remember a shoppingcart) reminded me of Irving.

I somehow thoroughly dislike his latest three efforts. Don't know exactly why, but it seems his latest efforts seem contrived in finding weird characters or persons that try hard NOT to be.
While he was always very good in describing people who were just who they were, no matter what.

BOOKS

I would attempt to answer these wonderful questions... although I am beat. Beautiful Night...


[Edited 8/31/04 23:02pm]

Freespirit said:

Sleep tight. Dream beautiful dreams.

gooeythehamster said:

I want to read that one too! I've known about this book for years now and although I read
all of Forster's fictional work, I never tackled this one. Simply because in the past, I never
was too keen on non-fiction.

IstenSzek said:

Same here! About non fiction in the past, I mean, except maybe the bible n stuff.

But we even have two different prints of Aspects...

Oh, and Gooey, here ya go mate:

IstenSzek said:

I LIVE on triple espresso's lately...

gooeythehamster said:

Have you ever read Grunberg's story about Patricia Zwaardvis and Adriaan Miele??

They just bought a new espresso machine and Patricia makes him an espresso,
so strong and condensed that when he looks into his cup, it seems more like she
forgot to do the dishes than a real cup of espresso.



I could use one of those right now. In fact, I could use a stand-in at work now lol.

IstenSzek said:

I boycot him. Like most the so called Dutch literature.

Tjonge young! What a lieverd is those IstenCzek also! Terrible reporting on Org and deliciously much concerning books! And still coffee also!

Translated by http://world.altavista.com/

gooeythehamster said:

Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek

Didn't Thea Beckman recently die?

SpcMs said:

Yes, she did.
May she rest in peace.