Boo! It's October. From Which Books Shall You Never Return?

Swing Low by Mirriam Toews.

A daughter writing about her father's suicide from his point of view. There will be tears this month.

88 Killer by Oliver Stark.
I'm reading a lot of the ashy thrillers lately since my concentration is shot.

I am reading A Christmas Carol.

I first found out about how awesome Dickens was two or so years ago, I was reading Hard Times and just fell in love with every bit of everything, but Eddy ruined it for me by going around posting "Fie! Dickens!" for a good week or whatever after everything I wrote after saying how much I was enjoying the book.

So, I am finally over that enough to say i am reading Dickens again out loud.

Quickly reading Dexter is Delicious by Jeff Lindsay before I start watching the new season.

The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle. I have a feeling this book is about me.

For those who have read Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, would it be very bad if I read Mona Lisa Overdrive without reading Count Zero first? I've already read The Neuromancer, so I guess that makes it okay.

A book I found from the masons.

Are you worried they're gonna hunt you down if you post the title?

Clearly.

It is quite awesome.

Wieland; or the Transformations by Charles Brockden Brown. It's late 18th, early 19th Century American Gothic literature. He's considered as, if not the earliest, probably the most important novelist of his time. He basically is responsible for the beginning of the novel as a form of writing in the United States. ANYWAYS, I'm about 20 pages in, and the book is pretty damn good!

A Feast For Crows. I haven't been at this series in over a year, except in HBO form, which has soiled it a bit for me. I keep picturing Cersei as the girl from the show instead of what she looked like before, and now I forget what she looks like as I had imagined her. Spoilers, muhfucka.

This book is kinda weak. The whole series has been themed on plays of power, fit for the Game of Thrones name (a better series name, I think, then Song of Fire and Ice), and being a power struggle in a fantasy world, like every good fantasy novel it's perverse and filled with rape, castration, bloody murder, betrayal, and all manner of incest. But it's like he's not even trying anymore, or it's all expected. At this point you can pretty much guess that every non-main character is going to be beheaded, castrated, or raped, and it just goes on like that, like rape isn't enough now, niggas gotta be chewin' bitches tits off. To bend a knee to a lord and lose a wife or daughter or son or maidenhood to them isn't degradation enough.

I'm convinced of two things: If the man dies (a distinct possibility), lots of people can finish this series as long as they have an outline to work with. Two, Stephen King could have written this, all of it. Stephen King could have written it and handed it to R.R. Martin for publishing, it's that simple. All leather is boiled, all wine is choicest, half the characters are described as being comely. The vocabulary seems limited, and the expression "since you were sucking on your mother's teat" has been used three times, as of 500 pages in.

Four times, he's ended a descriptive paragraph with the character comparing their thoughts to one of the narrator's similes; "The people moved like ants below. If only they were ants, whatshername thought."

Stephen King does this--it doesn't flow, to me. Are we to accept that the people moving like ants is the character's thought, and if so, is the rest of that descriptive paragraph also the character's thoughts? Are we to accept that, in the same paragraph, the narration of things the main character doesn't know can turn into a narrative figure of thought that is, only as the paragraph ends, coming from the character, with no inclination of such until the opening line of the following paragraph? No, it's a mechanism to return to the character after jumping to a description of a town or person or thing, and it's lazy, like these forays into the history of Westeros that seem more and more to be made up on a whim, like mentioning with every mention of leather armor that the leather is boiled, like introducing half a dozen characters by saying they're comely, or telling us for the fiftieth time that Brienne is big, or introducing yet another and another king, to the point where any addition to the series could as easily (or in some cases, more rightly) be called A Clash of Kings. If you were to take every description of a crow eating the dead, from throughout the entire series, and put them together, you'd have forty pages of crows eating strips of skin and eyeballs.

Stephen King could have written this while drunk out of his mind, but I still like it. I just wish it didn't follow all of the boring characters. Jamie, Cersei, and Brienne are half the novel so far, with no entry involving Khaleesi or Jon Snow. Littlefinger is boring, Sam Fatass is probably most boring, and of all the kingdoms, the Ironborn are the least interesting. Their religion is too silly to be believable; I don't mean to believe the religion, I mean to believe that people could believe it, follow it. Their industry and economy make as little sense; conquerors do not live on barren rocks at sea.

I opened this novel hoping to read of The Wall, Jon Snow, Daenerys, Arya, Bran, dragons and the Others. In book two, introducing a new guy who wants to be king was an interesting development. Not so anymore, and that's been the brunt of this novel, the kingsmoot of the Iron Islands. Otherwise I get Brienne and nobodies, searching for Lady Sansa, and how does one go about giving a fuck whether she finds her? Sansa's parents are dead, so who is to rejoice? She has no birth right, and she has no ability to sway any of the wars going on. Brienne exists to find Sansa who exists to be sought by Brienne, which has so far played out like a snake eating itself. I feel like I could have skipped this novel, so far, and not missed very much.

Wait til you get to the "soldier pines and sentinels".

Every time a group of trees is passed, and these people spend a lot of fucking time walking through forests, they aren't trees, woods, forests, or any other goddamn thing, but soldier fucking pines and goddamned sentinels.

I reiterate that I am convinced that - after the first book - he hired a couple of high-school sophomores to crank books out based on his notes, paying them each five bucks a page. And not talented sophomores.

"Soldier pines and sentinels". At least once per page. For six hundred pages.

I foresee Nightrious punching a hole through a door.

What a lazy writer is George Really Rotten Martin. Shame because he's a good storyteller.

See, your argument falls apart when you say "crank out". You don't "crank out" a book in 5-6 years.

Procrastinating sophomores. If there'd been no due date for my high school assignments, I'd still be putting them off.

No, see, Martin wakes up from his Big-Macs-and-Twinkies coma, cobbles together his notes from the scrawlings on the many various cheeseburger wrappers scattered on the floor of his car - a monkeyshit brown Ford LTD with a broken 8-track player - and puts them in an empty Kleenex box that a private courier delivers to the sophomores at their detention room. He then begins another 5 year Feeding Cycle.

I'm reading The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick DeWitt.

Derek, The Night Cicus was wonderful and you should read it.

The Castle by Kafka.

Moved to the Must Read SOON shelf!!!

Thanks Alecia.

What In Gods Name by Simon Rich. Really good book so far.

reading The Odyssey, which I haven't read for years and years. seems more enjoyable this time.

It's my favourite Classic.

I am reading The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling. It's not as bad (so far) as some of the reviews have said but it also isn't great. Cliche packed, she gives a running weather report, unnecessary brackets, too much boring detail, an abundance of unlikeable characters and no one yet I actually like. I'm not so sure. It's also mind numbingly readable at times, like comfy Sunday night TV dramas or something.

The Book of Revelation by Rupert Thomson. It's very good so far.

Reading The Stand for the second time. The first time was during elementary school. And I also read the complete and uncut back then. Not this time since there's always too much padding in King's books. One of my facebook friends mailed me the original edition. Man, if Stephen King books weren't so padded the guy would be one of the greatest authors around.

That's the Cocaine.

I'm back to Twain for a bit. The Prince and the Pauper.

Little bit. I'd like to think they have more important stuff to do, than hunt a stay-at-home mom. I didn't get to read it, I never get time to read. There are so many books that aren't read, here. Don't even know where it is. Maybe I got tired of it, and stuck it back. That's something I would totally do. Unsteal.

So, I guess its misleading, that I never came back from this book. However, last month, I sponsored the sweetest little buskers for an entire week, and the fiddler girl(her knapsack was half filled with books), from the band gave me a book, "Women Who Run With Wolves", to read. God knows we aren't rich (middle class mentally with ramen noodle bank rolls like rest of America), but I sure love me some acoustic bluegrass punk. They were so earnest to change the world, it really tugged my heart strings. Real deal train kids with fiddle, banjo and guitar. Sweetest people I ever met. Felt like karma shaking my hand, a chance encounter finally gone cosmic. Great energy. I wish I could have gotten them more gigs.
I'm totally going to read that Wolves book. I think I'm starting to see a pattern with the wolf thing here. Perhaps, its my totem.

finished "rant" in two days. started with "wild sheep chase". it`s my first murakami and I´m already hooked after 20 pages

The Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Marilyn Manson w/Neil Strauss.

I just finished reading the last of the Sookie Stackhouse books. Now I don't know what to read. It's taken me 6 months to read 12 very easy books. I need something else mindless and fun .

The Enormous Room by E E Cummings.

Did you just do it as a teacher to better understand what the kids are into these days? Because I can understand finishing ONE book you hate out of some bookworm machismo... but THREE?

I mean I read the first one and liked it plenty. Not enough to read the other two though.

The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe)

Ferdinand Von Shirach- The Collini Case.

I'm really surprised at the number of adults, whose opinions I used to respect, told me to read it. Many told me that the last book made the whole series.

And I'm OCD about finishing things.

Seriously? The LAST book made the series? The last book was the worst one.

I respect that. But did you read Twilight? If so, you need a metal.

I read it. And enjoyed it. What?

What? This guy hated the Hunger Games. And the Hunger Games is like Twilight but with a main character who actually does shit.

Also, you have the same taste in literature as a small girl. JUST SAYING.

Metal, metel, medal, medel... I'm a relatively smart person but I am physically incapable of seeing any difference between these words.

I actually stared at that and thought, That doesn't look right. I google searched "gold metal". I did not consider the possibility that although google did not correct me, it misunderstood my intentions.

And? o.o wanna fight about it?

As a former small girl, I understand the appeal.

But my instinct right now is to take your lunch money. So hand it over, Bella.

I'm, uh... yeah, I'm gonna side with the bully on this one.

Fixed for accuracy.

Let's open up this pit!