I'm trying to learn how to read again.

If you could write a little blurb about why you like it and what it's about, that'd be awesome.

Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

It's about a "private detective" who has Tourette's Syndrom and is trying to unravel the mystery behind the death of his shady employer. The story doesn't even matter so much, because the main character is so odd and engaging you spend most of the book analyzing you're own tics till your sure you've got Tourette's.

I am currently reading the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. There are 7 books total, and I'm 2/3 through number 6. It's intriguing if you: (a) like Stephen King's writing style (some people don't), (b) are looking for a fantasy book a la Lord of the Rings with a little bit of Western thrown in, and (c) have the time to get through them all.

My other recommendation would be Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke. It's on my to-read list once I get through with the DT books. For more info, see this:
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?i ... 82344167-3

Feed by M.T. Anderson

A wonderfully inventive satirical novel about being a teenager in consumer-driven America. It presents some very thought-provoking ideas and had me laughing out loud on many occasions. Great read.

seconded.

Strangely enough Dana, my husband is reading the Dark Tower series and I was just about to start Jonathan Strange. Probably tonight.

Josh just finished reading it and said I'd absolutely love it.

I personally made my way through three of the four Gregory Maguire books that are pretty much fractured fairy tales. Or rather perverse versions of them.

I love Gregory Maguire! I've only read Wicked and Lost, but I know he released a new one recently about Snow White.

Mirror Mirror. That's the one I have to read next. Lost took too much out of me, it was seriously one of the most painful books I"ve ever read.

I didn't care for it at all. Confessions of an Ugly Step-Sisterthough, was really really good. Highly recommended!

Dude, go get a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Possibly the funniest book I have ever read, and just great writing. Try to look past the drugs ans such and see what he's really talking about.

Or a twofer: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe...about Ken Kesey.

I don't think any three books have had a bigger impact on me.

Running with Scissors
and then
Dry

I'm going to start RWS this week but both come highly rcommended. Sex, drugs and advertising... some of my favorite things (except for the advertising part).

Tad Williams, the Otherland series -- it's got everything, sci-fi, virtual reality, adventure, intrigue, monsters, action, comeraderie, friendship, love of various kinds -- longass books in a longass series, though. Took me like a total of 2 months to read all four.

I recommend it because it's enthralling without being overly high-falutin' in its language.

If you want something literate, I recommend Clive Barker -- pretty much anything he's done.

If you want something shorter, I highly recommend either Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman or American Gods by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Those are just plain entertaining, yet still capture the "epic struggle".

Also, I can't believe I almost missed an opportunity to pimp American Tabloid and The Cold 6 Thousand both by James Ellroy. A 'fictional' retelling of the seedy underworld of the 50s and 60s. JFK, RFK, King, Hoover, Howard Hughes, the mob, the CIA and hired goons and lawyers. Riveting. I rarely reread anything, and read both of these atleast 5 times a piece. Even have Cold 6 on my iPod.

i've read both of these three times.
one of the few instance where i love the book AND the movies.

jitterbug perfume - tom robbins

part historicaly based religous fantasy, part real. and odd mix of ancient and new. very playfully written and a pleasure to read. his writing is lyrical and odd and often will make you laugh out loud.

One of my favorite books ev-uh.

The best book I read in 2004 was the Loogar recommended American Tabloid. Sorta a fictional(maybe, probably) account of the criminal underworld from the 1950's through the Kennedy assassination.

there's a great collection of harry crews' works, which includes his autobiography, a few short essays, and a couple of stories, that is well worth picking up.
i also recommend anything by jim thompson.

Bloor and I have become convinced that this book is 100% true...especially after we saw an MSNBC Headliners and Legends about Freddy fucking Otash.

I'm glad you liked it Steve...now go get Cold Six Thousand. If you get it today, you'll be done by Christmas.

Lamb is the first book since Nelson Demille's Plum Island where I had to put the book down because I was laughing so hard.

On a whim, I picked up the new novel from Steve Martin. (yeah, that Steve Martin).. Looked interesting... Called "The Pleasure of My Company"

Amazon.com
Readers expecting something zany, something crudely humorous from Steve Martin's second novel, The Pleasure of My Company, will discover much greater riches. While the book has a sense of humor, Martin moves everywhere with a gentler, lighter touch in this elegant little fiction that verges on the profound and poetic.
Daniel Pecan Cambridge is the narrator and central consciousness of the novel (actually a novella). Daniel, an ex-Hewlett-Packard communiqué encoder, is a savant whose closely proscribed world is bounded on every side by neuroses and obsessions. He cannot cross the street except at driveways symmetrically opposed to each, and he cannot sleep unless the wattage of the active light bulbs in his apartment sums to 1,125. Daniel's starved social life is punctuated by twice-weekly visits from a young therapist in training, Clarissa; by his prescription pick-ups from a Rite Aid pharmacist, Zandy; and by his "casual" meetings with the bleach-blond real estate agent, Elizabeth, who is struggling to sell apartments across the street. But Daniel's dysfunctional routines are shattered one day when he becomes entangled in the chaos of Clarissa's life as a single mother. Taking care of Clarissa's tiny son, Teddy, Daniel begins to emerge from the safety of logic, magic squares, and obsessive counting.

Martin's craftsmanship is remarkable. The tightly packed novella paints rich portraits with restraint and balance, including nothing extraneous to Daniel's world. The book does not try for pyrotechnics but is contented with a Zen-like simplicity in both prose and plot. Avoiding the crushing bleakness of much contemporary fiction, Martin insists through Daniel--a man haunted by horrors of his own making--that there is possibility for compassion, that broken lives can actually be healed. --Patrick O'Kelley

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time seems like a fun, easy read. It's a muder mystery novel about the murder of a dog.

The way I find new authors is by grabbing a book of their short stories... That way, I invest a few minutes reading a couple stories, instead of a few weeks reading a horrible book with a crappy ending. That said:

Barrel Fever or Naked by David Sedaris. Hilarious confessionals, family just as bad as yours, indeed.

After the Quake by Haruki Murakami. Lovely Japanese writer. I love everything he's written, novels and short stories. Some day, you MUST read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut. Goverment-supported assisted-suicide.

Also, I've been picking up The Best American Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers. 2003's was great (I've read it two or three times) and I just bought 2004's, and Viggo Mortensen writes a very rambling introduction. Plus, the kids of 826 Valencia select the stories going into the collections, and the editor's share of the profits goes to them, an EXCELLENT cause.

This is awesome. Thanks guys and gals. Keep em coming if you've got em.

Chuck Palahniuk (sp) - Diary

I borrowed it from someone recently and like all his novels this one is getting finished by me at a quick pace. Just so readable, at the same time light and intense.

This is one a bit complicated and hard to get a grip on as it's written from a strange perspective, your own. Except you don't really know who you are. It's kind of a schizophrenic diary that changes voice so often.

The story is interesting, although not too much is actually happening plotwise. He's still setting up characters 100 pages into it. It's basically about a chick who went to art school, married some loser, and now works as a waitress on a Hamptons type place where rich people vacation.


I would also recommend Mark Twain's Letters From The Earth. These are essays of his that he thought would never get published because of how blasphemous and controversial they were for when they were written. Great witticisms about the uselessness of religion and humanity in general.


My mother found a copy of Motherless Brooklyn somewhere and I kind of just wrote it off, I'm not usually into detective type stories, but maybe I'll find it and pick it up for a bit.

Whoa, loads of great book being mentioned. I'll defintely 2nd Lamb. It's sorta a coming of age story about....Jesus! Hilarious.

Next on my List to read;

"The Moon in Our Hands" by Thomas Dyja

From the author of the award-winning novel Play for a Kingdom comes a masterful story inspired by the early life of Walter White, a dynamic but now all-but-forgotten figure in the history of civil rights. The twenty-four-year-old White was recruited in 1918 to work for the NAACP. Just weeks after he began, a horrible lynching took place in a small town in Tennessee and White was sent there to pose as a traveling salesman. His mission was to stay as long as it took to pry the secrets out of the town. Dyja paints a complex portrait of shifting identity as White, a blonde, blue-eyed, and very light-skinned African-American, moves back and forth between white and black, working his way into both the good-old-boy network of the town and the besieged African-American community. Forced to rethink his assumptions about what really happened in the town of Sibley Springs the night of the lynching, he struggles to establish guilt and innocence in a foreign landscape, confronting as well his own questions of identity. When another lynching looms, White must decide if he will risk everything to save a black life and the white souls of Sibley Springs.