Your Favourite Books

Loic · Your Favourite Books

I swear that we used to have a discussion thread dedicated to bibliophiles of this little community. I searched high and low and ploughed through the archives with little to show for my effort. Alright, we probably talked about it in the previous Langcafe forum, so how about doing a Lazarus by resurrecting this topic?

I have always been an avid reader and never more so in the last week when I dragged myself to the local bookshop and bought a few books.

So I have just finished the final installment of the Adrian Mole diary series. For the uninitiated, Adrian Mole is a fictional invention of Sue Townsend who is a brilliant mistress of comedic parodies as far as I am concerned. I remembered first reading Adrian Mole when he was a pimply 13 and a half year old angst-ridden teenager growing up in the late seventies in a severely dysfunctional family when I was still in primary school. Adrian Mole taught me that groping at girls while going out on dates was not only socially acceptable, but vociferously encouraged as a sign of asserting nascent manliness. Of course, even at the precocious age of 12, I knew that it was a naff idea and I never tried to implement any of Adrian Mole's advice in my entire life. This is not to say that I wouldn't in the near future, though.

Basically, I am recommending 'Adrian Mole and Weapons of Mass Destruction' to anyone whose idea of a great weekend is listening to the wireless while perusing a book on the balcony with occasional sips of a cup of Darjeeling.

I have also finished ploughing through a remarkable book called 'Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets' by a most remarkable man called Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This is a book for anyone whose idea of a great weekend is spending time in intense bouts of melancholic self-introspection; alternatively, it is also useful to stockmarket traders who wonder why the shares they buy always almost seem to plunge in value.

And that's what I have been reading in the past week. A rather congenial way to spend time, don't you think so?

Pete from Peru

I also like reading ever since I was a child. Here in Peru, a common system is this. Sometimes there are special promotions in which you buy certain newspaper and you get a ticket, with that ticket and some extra money you can obtain a good book. That's very common here and usually the books you can get are part of a collection of 10 or so.

Well what I have been reading lately was a precious book called "The Golden Age of Science Fiction II" and a little collection of "Dangerous Visions" divided in three parts. I know it's a bit old-fashioned. But reading those books I discovered I am a Sci-Fi fanatic.

Regards

greg in noord-frankrijk

Excellente idée, loic ! Pour ceux qui lisent le français, je recommande un bouquin assez intéressant, mais il s'agit seulement de linguistique... Donc parfait pour s'endormir sur la plage.

L'ouvrage est court (155 p.), percutant et provocateur. Son titre : « Le français ne vient pas du latin ! (Essai sur une aberration linguistique) ». La thèse centrale de l'auteur, Yves Cortez, est qu'aucune des langues romanes ne descend du latin. En revanche toutes proviendraient d'un cousin du latin qu'Yves Cortez désigne du nom d'« italien ancien ».

Ainsi Cortez remet en question l'intégralité de l'étymologie française qu'il qualifie tout bonnement de « fantaisiste ». N'allez surtout pas croire que Cortez soit un adepte de la "créolisation germanolatine" qui fait périodiquement florès sur Antimoon. Non, l'auteur se gausse des prétendus emprunts prétendument germaniques : « (...) imaginer que nous ayons pu absorber 1.500 mots d'origine néerlandaise est une bêtise san nom ». Cortez prétend que si nombre de mots ressemblent à leurs équivalents germaniques, c'est que l'« italien ancien », dont le français actuel n'est qu'une des nombreuses évolutions, possédait des vocables très similaires à ceux utilisés par les langues paléogermaniques. Cortez explique ce phénomène par l'héritage indo-européen.

Enfin, l'auteur tord le cou au « concept passe-partout » de bas-latin (ou latin vulgaire) qu'il assimile à « une fiction ».

Ça se lit d'un trait, comme un bon polar.

Éditeur : L'Harmattan (14,50 €).

Uriel

Oh, I love sci-fi. I used to read practically nothing but as a child. There, I've admitted it.

You're right, loic; we DID have a book thread once. And it was in this forum, since I think Pauline contributed to it, and she wasn't on any of the other versions. It was in some weird place, though. And then we had another one on Yann's forum, which greg started and gave a lovely Latin name to. Ars something.

Pete from Peru

I find the idea of French not being a Romance language a bit disturbing. It may have had influence from non-latin speaking people, but

When my French is good enough, I'll get that book. It must certainly be very interesting.

Pete from Peru

greg in noord-frankrijk

KSa

Currently I am reading "Selected Short Stories" by Guy de Maupassant - in English. Why in English? Well, my French is not good enough to cope with XIX century French and the second reason is that I take the opportunity to improve my English as much as I can.
I like G. de Maupassant for his pessimism (I'm also a pessimist), irony, for his showing the dark side of life. On the other hand, his stories are filled with humour. I especially like the stories about noble, distinguished, respected and strait-laced men who happen to unintentionally get drunk and wake up on the following day with a harlot in his bed ("His Confession") or completely naked in a studio of an extravagant painter in Monmartre ("Night out").
However, the story that struck me the most was a short, three-pages story I read once in Polish. I forgot the title - it was about a man had never married and who had lead a regular and orderly life full of routine. One day, while walking in the park, he came across a young couple who were behaving in a way young people usually do when in love.
He understood he lost something very important in his life and within a minute he made a decision to hang himself.
I see also how much Maupassant's works were influenced by the French-Prussian war in 1870.

I like the classical XIX century literature. Boleslaw Prus is my favourite Polish novelist, known especially for his "The Doll" and "Tha Pharoah". I don't know if you ever heard of him but he was marvellous! Another one is the Russian Anton Czekhov. Interestingly, I am not very keen on Dostoyevsky.

Two first-class masterpieces of the XIX century literatury are still to come:

Victor Hugo: "Les Miserables".
Lev Tolstoy: "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina"

Liz

I like Dostoyevsky very much, probably more than Tolstoy.

Others:
Thomas Mann (almost everything he wrote)
Alfred Döblin: Berlin - Alexanderplatz
Oscar Wilde
Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
Graham Greene
Martin McDonagh's plays

I also like Nabokov's Lolita (regardless of the content)

and several Hungarian writers whom I don't think you know

KSa

Irrintzi

From Antimoon:
«What makes French Latin?»

It's strange to write that.
Another point of view...
Well, Latin America... Why "Latin", so?
South America never was conquered by Romans from Latium... As well, few Amerindians knew Latin...
Many people of USA assimilate Latin civilisation from the Hispanic one.
You will not find many Romanic church in Latin America, not many Aqueduct and Roman arenae either...
While even in Austria or in Great Britain (which are "Germanic" lands), there are vestiges of the Roman civilization.

Liz

Loic

Greg: Thank you for your recommendations. I would probably struggle quite a bit if I were to read it in French. I already think Le Point is slightly difficult; I much prefer the glitzy Paris Match when it comes to 'French literature' - a picture tells a thousand words after all!

Compared to the hoary tastes of Ksa and Liz (Frederik will like her a lot for reading Thomas Mann), I am really a very uncouth reader. I think I'd read Enid Blyton's The Secret Seven series all over again than touch War and Peace. Somehow, gloomy introspective books only make me more depressed and pessimistic.

When I was in secondary school, I was obliged to read many of the great Chinese classics as part of our curriculum. I worked my way through Journey to the West, a popular tale about a Buddhist reverend, a Monkey God, a Pig in the shape of a human as well as an irascible monk making a pilgrimage to the holy Buddhist centres of India in order to secure religious literature so that Buddhism could be properly disseminated in China. I enjoyed it immensely; you could say that it appealed greatly to my juvenile imagination.

Journey to the West has an outstanding impact on Chinese folk worship. Some believe that it is real; more enlightened individuals see it as a religious allegory. But even today, you can see shrines dedicated to the Buddhist reverend (my mother once loftily said that he is a minor god in the Buddhist pantheon but a major player in the Taoist hierarchy) as well as Monkey God.

Another familiar Chinese classic is A Tale of the Three Kingdoms. I have largely forgotten the plot of the story, but it is basically a story about intense brotherhood forged in an uncertain era where China has broken up into many competing states. Three remarkable men got together to swear a vow of kinship to one another; one of them has been cannonised as a God of Justice and War and he remains a very popular deity till today. In fact, there is an altar dedicated to this particular deity in every police station of Hong Kong (fans of HK cinema would know what I mean).

The classics were written in classical Chinese and that is akin to a foreign language as far as I am concerned. My grasp of classical Chinese or wen yan wen is atrocious: if Confucious were to return today, I would have trouble communicating with the great sage.

Guan Yu, one of the three sworn brothers now venerated by the Chinese as the patron saint of the police force and also ironically, the Chinese gangsters.

Liz

greg in noord-frankrijk

Loic

Mais la politique n’a rien à voir avec notre littérature préférée. Tu sais, j’ai l’impression que Sarkozy est en vacances pour le moment. Je suis sûr qu’il s’en fout de toutes les rumeurs concernant sa femme. Tu crois sincèrement que Sarkozy a le pouvoir de virer n’importe qui? A quoi ça sert la démoratie, alors?

Si ce que tu disais est tout à fait vrai, Paris Match devrait cesser de bénéficier de ce qu’il faut considérer de la complaisance du gouvernement. Toutefois, je crois que tu exagères un peu la situation de la presse. Je fais toujours confiance à la liberté de la presse. Je me sentirais con si je croirais autrement.

Ok, on retourne à parler des livres susceptibes de plaire au grand public. Ça c’est de l’essence dans cette discussion! Donc, à ton avis, quelles sont les plus grandes classiques françaises que chacun doit lire à l’école?

PS: On ne peut pas toujours croire les conneries que l’on entend dans la rue. C’est ce qu’on appele, si l’on ose dire, l’incrédulité voltairienne, non?

Bashar

I've never been much into reading, but...

First, I loved the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels. Douglas Adams was a genius. What I really like was how he phrased things, for example, the Nutri-matic device produced a substance that was "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea." Or even better, in the book Mostly Harmless, after an explosion totally destroys the courtyard outside the Hitchhiker's Guide office building, it says "where there was once..." (insert lavish description of the statuary, bushes, etc.) "...there was now a bit of a pit with nasty bits in it." There's plenty of other memorable quotes, such as "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." And there's also the matter of the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything being "42." I could go on forever but I think I'll change subjects now...

Moving on, the other series of novels I've willingly gone through is Dune, six books written from 1967 (I think) to 1986 by Frank Herbert. Some might tell you that only the first book was any good. I liked all six. The best way to describe them is, novels in the form of sci-fi, not sci-fi in the form of novels. (Get it?) But, I've never bothered with the prequel books written by the late author's son.

In the realm of non-fiction I've recently been reading The Story of English. This is a great book which goes through the history of the English language, showing all the influences on it and all the different varieties of it. It starts with the Anglo-Saxons, continues through the Viking invasions, the Norman invasion, Shakespeare's effect on the language, the Highland Scots, the Lowland Scots, the Scots-Irish, the Irish Irish, Black English in America, American English development and all its influences (from Yiddish-speaking Jews in New York City to cowboys in the wild west) and then back to England where we learn about Cockney, and after that on to Australia and New Zealand and it's around here that I last stopped.

Finally I've also got books on how to write novels. Yes, I'm planning on writing something myself and maybe in a few...years we can talk about it here.

Uriel

I read all of the Hitchhiker books when I was a kid. (Shows you how old I am!) I got through Dune and maybe as far as Children of Dune, although I lost interest and don't remember much about them any more.

I don't know if any of you have read Charles de Lint? A Canadian writer who sets his novels in contemporary Canadian cities, but always has some sort of Celtic magic going on. Interesting juxtaposition. Emma Bull's War For The Oaks was another book in a similar vein, about a fairy war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts being fought in Minneapolis. Complete with a big ol' supernatural throwdown at Minnehaha Falls. Main character is a guitarist for a mediocre bar band.

Jhereg and Brokedown Palace by Steven Brust are interesting in that he is a Hungarian-American and feels that all of his characters should have Hungarian names and as many diacritical marks as possible.

Oh, and if the ahem, older folks here recognize "Brokedown Palace" as being lifted from an old Grateful Dead song, you'll also be amused to know that the fairy tale takes place in the Kingdom of Fenario ... sadly there are no dire wolves, although it could be argued that one of the characters is a friend of the devil. Is the taltos horse (magical talking horse) a real Hungarian myth?

Speaking of childhood books, has anyone else read A Cricket in Times Square or Bunnicula (yes, about a vampire rabbit)? I still love The Genie of Sutton Place (again, a modern-day -- well, probably '70's -- tale of a boy who finds a real genie locked in a rug at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Which I think was also the setting of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, in which a brother and sister run away from home to live in the museum and become embroiled in a mystery involving a small statue which may or may not be a lost Michelangelo.

Books I remember but did NOT read as a child: Across Five Aprils (I guess about growing up during the Civil War) and Bridge to Terabithia (now a movie). Has anyone read those?

Liz

Loic

I never read the Hitchhiker's Books although one of them, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was on our compulsory reading list when I was in secondary 2 (age 14). My rebellious streak (indolent one, more like) ensured that I never touched it.

But from the way Bashar recommended it, I feel as if I might have missed out something by being so obstinate. The pithy descriptions quoted by Bashar exemplify the authoritative magic which Douglas Adams weave into his prose. I think his use of alliterations is awfully clever. Maybe, just maybe, I might be prompted to pick it up.

Most of the books I read as a child are primarily of British vintage: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, all the short stories as well as the Famous Five and Secret Seven canons by Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Robert Louis Stevenson (every boy is weaned on 'Treasure Island'), etc. The few american writers I remember include the authoress of the Babysitter Series (I am rather sheepish to admit that I read them), The Three Investigators series and a few other titles whose names temporarily escape my mind.

Uriel

Bashar

Speaking of Hungarian names that no one can pronounce, just look at my last name (see the end of the "Legacy" section). It's just three letters, no diacritics. There is a similar German surname with an H between the U and N that no one in America ever pronounces wrong. But my name? Half the people I meet thinks it rhymes with "gun." Fortunately, since more and more people with unusual names move to this country and people have to learn how to pronounce them, I'm having less of a problem with it now than when I was in grade school. But, along with this, a lot of people think I am from a southeast Asian country because it's also a common Korean name!

Anyway, back to the books...
If you're brain couldn't handle "Dune," I can understand that. The books are so richly detailed and involved that it's impossible to get it the first time you read them. When I went through the series for the first time, I didn't have a clue what was going on in the third book and after. Then I went through the whole series a second time and it all made sense. It turns out, there are some things there that are impossible to understand if you haven't read the whole book already! Like, in "Children of Dune," there is an early scene where a place called Shuloch is mentioned. This word is not uttered again until well over halfway in the book, and by the time you've gotten there, you have of course totally forgotten that name so when it comes up again it seems new to you. Then, after you've finished the whole book, you read it again and when you are at that aformentioned scene in the beginning, you actually recognize the name Shuloch and you start to feel like you've had an amazing epiphany because it's finally making sense.

Uriel

I'm trying to think of a sci-fi series I really liked as a kid. I read so many. Heinlein, of course -- a lot of his books were thematically related and shared a lot of the same characters, even if they weren't actually a series, per se. Stand-outs that I really liked were (of course) Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and The Number of the Beast.

I like Larry Niven a lot, too, although I took some of his extrapolations on evolution with a grain of salt (he was really stuck in that man-as-hunter mode). The Ringworld series was pretty fascinating. The Protector theme was very interesting -- the idea that the changes that take place in old age were meant to be precursors to a transformation into a superhuman protector form that had to be catalyzed by the consumption of an extraterrestrial plant; without the plant, they just lead to deterioration and death. His real forte was coming up with truly unique and well-thought out alien species that were entirely odd and unusual; not just bipedal quasi-humans. The Pierson's puppeteers were a real standout -- three-legged aliens with two heads and a brain kept sensibly in the torso, who made a virtue out of extreme cowardice.

The helium-based Outsiders were another leap of creativity:

The kzin were fun, but really just mean, overgrown cats.

His collaborations like Footfall were pretty cool. I liked Dream Park. The Mote In God's Eye was okay, but not quite as good, in my opinion.

I liked him because he was all about hard science -- he explained things like tidal forces and antimatter reactions and did the math on the page. Sure, he fooled around with faster-than-light drives, but it was forgiveable since he posited that they weren't a human invention, but alien technology bought from the Outsiders. He didn't try to explain how it worked because no one knew how it worked.

John Varley had a cool series -- Titan, Wizard, and Demon -- that took place on a small world that was itself conscious. And increasingly mentally unstable. Not to mention cold-blooded, calculating, and obsessed with old movies. And it liked to invent its own species. And how can you not love a badass female NASA captain with a name like Cirocco Jones?

Wanderin

OK, my favourite authors:

Erich Maria Remarque
George (?) Orwell
Herbert Wells
Agatha Christie
Richard Bach
Mikhail Bulgakov
Vladimir Nabokov
Jule Vern
Alexandre Dumas

I don't read a lot and I don't like 19th century literature, i.e. classics, though I liked "children books" by Jule verne and dumas, but other franch authors especially Balzak were more like a pain during school years alongside with Dostoyesvsky and Tolstoy...

Uriel

I'm with you, Wanderin -- the only classics I ever actually enjoyed in school were A Tale of Two Cities and Shakespeare.

Deborah

I think I enjoyed just about every book I read in school. But I hated writing about them, so I got pretty bad grades in English.

In the 7th grade (average age is 12), my English teacher started the term off by reading a chapter of Tom Sawyer. It was "The Master's Gilded Dome", and he read it so well that the class was in hysterics and couldn't wait to read the rest of the book.

Bashar

It's hard to like something when you're not reading it willingly. Here's most the books I had to read in high school (Allen, TX), roughly in order:

The Scarlet Pimpernel (liked it)
The Count of Monte Cristo (liked it but didn't read it fast enough to keep up with quizzes and assignments)
Jane Eyre (probably would've liked it if I had been a girl)
Of Mice and Men (it was alright)
To Kill a Mockingbird (quite interesting)
Huckleberry Finn (it was OK but I would never have read it if I didn't have to)
Wuthering Heights (I didn't like it then because it didn't make any sense to me. And I must say, the frequent appearance of the word "ejaculate" was hilarious to the bunch of teenagers we were)
The Scarlet Letter (...eh.)
Siddhartha (It was alright except I had a lot of trouble coming up with stuff to put in those "response journal" assignments)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (not bad, but, once again, I probably wouldn't have read it if I had a choice)
The Grapes of Wrath (pretty good, and I think that even though I didn't enjoy writing those one-page papers on the "interchapters" I was able to pull together a lot of creativity for them.)
Brave New World (fascinating but some parts were just plain weird)
Frankenstein (fascinating)

In college I also had to read Madame Bovary, which I didn't much care for, and Things Fall Apart by Chinoua Achebe which was interesting but just not my thing.

Uriel

To Kill a Mockingbird is an all-time classic, hands down. You might have to be an American to really have it resonate for you, though. But it's a 20th century novel (the author's first and last novel, too -- she won a Pulitzer prize and never wrote another book. I think she was a journalist by trade.)

Pride and Prejudice -- despised every single page. You might need to be English to enjoy that one....

Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer -- couldn't get into them. I also had to read Things Fall Apart in college -- didn't do much for me, either.

Of Mice and Men I read on my own, actually -- my parents had tones of books around the house, so sometimes I read Great Literature quite inadvertently! I had no idea Candide was in that category -- all I remember was giggling when they ate the old woman's butt. I loved Le Mort d'Arthur when I was about 10 -- had no idea it was so old!

I remember reading ALL of the Little House on the Prairie books -- I had no idea you could make houses out of sod or that fever and ague was really malaria. I found them fascinating as a kid -- living out of a wagon, building your own house, growing all your own food, facing wild animals and harsh winters and seeing such marvels as the first railroads and such tragedy as the long lines of Indians being herded away by the army.

But I hated the TV show! Michael Landon was SO not Pa!

I read many of Marguerite Henry's horse books, where she would follow the life of a famous horse (often highly colored) and give you a sense of place and history at the same time. Misty of Chincoteague and Stormy, Misty's Foal were two favorites (Stormy was born in her owner's kitchen -- they had had to evacuate the island of Chincoteague during a bad hurricane, so they had sheltered their heavily-pregnant mare in the only place they could think of where she would be safe -- in the house!)

Brighty of the Grand Canyon was another one I really liked -- unlike Misty, who was a real pony, Brighty was a fictional protagonist whose story was really about the Grand Canyon itself, just as seen through the eyes of an animal, rather than from a human perspective. Brighty was a semi-feral burro named after the park's Bright Angel Falls, and through his travels and antics I was first introduced to such exotic (to an east coast kid) fauna as ringtail cats and mountain lions.

I snaked this cover art from Dawntreader Books, which reminds me that I also read the complete Chronicles of Narnia, including, of course, the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I think my favorites were actually the Magician's Nephew (the prequel to the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), because I loved the image of a magical Wood Between the Worlds, which was a quiet, sleepy place where nothing ever happned -- but if you jumped into the various puddles beneath the trees, you could be transported to other worlds, and Prince Caspian.

Deborah

Uriel

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn featured an alcoholic father, a mother who played favorites with her children, and a shopkeeper who molested little girls! Heartwarming stuff....

Liz

Walker

Wanderin, have you read any books by Orwell and Remarque, other than 1984 and All Quiet on the Western Front?

It's been a while since I read a novel, but after the subject of reading came up at work yesterday I went to the library and borrowed a copy of American Psycho. The guy at work I talked to said it was the most unpleasant novel he'd ever read. Also, my friend's girlfriend couldn't even finish it, so gross she thought it was. I've seen the movie twice and it shall be interesting to read this satire.

KSa

Walker

Josh Lalonde

I've read both, and they're both great. They're often misused though--Orwell was a socialist, but strongly opposed to Stalinism and totalitarianism in general. He wrote a lot of good essays too: "Politics and the English Language" is a classic, and should be required reading in any writing class. I've only read one of his other novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Very depressing. It's about a young man who decides that having a good job and money is stupid, and decides to find the worst job he can and live as badly as possible. I think he says he's living on 3 pounds a week at one point (though that was a lot more in the sixties).

Uriel

Liz

KSa

----> Liz:
I read two books of the "Narnia" series: "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" and "The Horse and His Boy". Both in English.
Well, If I had read them when I was a child I would have probably love the books. Now, well...
Anyway, I try to choose children books from time to time because the vocabulary is fairly simple and I don't need to look up in a dictionary every second sentence

Liz

KSa -
Well, I'm positive that I liked the book, whatever it was. I just can't recall the exact content.

Porthos

Liz

Porthos

Loic

I remembered once reading The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (sic?). Suffice to say, it was depressing although it failed to incite suicidal thoughts, thankfully.

What I noticed about american fiction though is that the prose tends to be 'cleaner', for want of a better word. Convoluted structures are frequently eschewed in favour of a more direct storytelling style. It actually looks easy, but I think that this sort of prose belies the high level of skill that is needed to write in a crisp and concise manner.

PS: I find rappers a really ridiculous group of entertainers. Their favoured speech mannerisms do no justice to themselves; they dress sloppily and revoltingly. Theirs is a misspent life rapping on issues which nobody gives a damn.

Liz

Walker

A couple of months ago I read American Psycho. It was both uncomfortable and funny to read. I guess the uncomfortable part is pretty obvious, you know, like when he tortures girls to death and such. Some of the funny parts were when he, Patrick Bateman, was talking to somebody, but was thinking about something totally different from what he and that 'somebody' was talking about. It'd start with some lines said by the one he'd be talking to, directly followed by a paragraph describing what he was thinking at the time. Some of that I recognized in myself. His colleagues' constant mistaking him (and others) for somebody else was also funny, and a sort of commentary by the author, I suppose. Maybe you who have not seen the movie or read the book have still heard of the scene in the movie where Bateman and some of his colleagues, just before a meeting, compare their calling cards. Bateman shows his new card and everybody's impressed, but another person's card impresses even more and Bateman starts sweating and has like a minor panic attack. There were some more stuff like that in the novel.

Having watched the TV-show Dexter and liking it to the thousand I felt I had to read the novel behind it, I went to the library and grabbed Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Unfortunately they only had a Swedish translation of it. As we all know, 'the book is always better than the movie', but this time it was the opposite (though it's not a movie but a series). The fact that I read the Swedish version probably had something to do with it, though. The story in Darkly Dreaming Dexter is pretty much what happens in the first episode in the series of the show.

And now? Why, I'm reading Mein Kampf! I must say I felt a little weird asking for it at the library. Also, when I told a girl at work today that I'm reading Mein Kampf I made a joke about my well-combed hair. It's one of those books you don't want to shout about. She said: "I suppose it's one of those books it might be interesting to have read... like the Bible". I agreed. I thought it might be interesting to read it, in a way. Has anyone here read it?

Walker

A couple of months ago I read American Psycho. It was both uncomfortable and fun to read. I guess the uncomfortable part is pretty obvious, you know, like when he tortures girls to death and such. Some of the funny parts were when he, Patrick Bateman, was talking to somebody, but was thinking about something totally different from what he and that 'somebody' was talking about. It'd start with some lines said by the one he'd be talking to, directly followed by a paragraph describing what he was thinking at the time. Some of that I recognized in myself. His colleagues' constant mistaking him (and others) for somebody else was also funny, and a sort of commentary by the author, I suppose. Maybe you who have not seen the movie or read the book have still heard of the scene in the movie where Bateman and some of his colleagues, just before a meeting, compare their calling cards. Bateman shows his new card and everybody's impressed, but another person's card impresses even more and Bateman starts sweating and has like a minor panic attack. There was some more stuff like that in the novel.

Having watched (still watching) the TV-show Dexter and liking it to the thousand I felt I had to read the novel behind it, so I went to the library and grabbed Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Unfortunately they only had a Swedish translation of it. As we all know, 'the book is always better than the movie', but this time it was the opposite (though it's not a movie but a series). The fact that I read the Swedish version probably had something to do with it, though. The story in Darkly Dreaming Dexter is pretty much what happens in the first season of the show.

And now? Why, I'm reading Mein Kampf! I must say I felt a little weird asking for it at the library. Also, when I told a girl at work today that I'm reading Mein Kampf I made a joke about my well-combed hair. It's one of those books you don't want to shout about. She said: "I suppose it's one of those books it might be interesting to have read... like the Bible". I agreed. I thought it might be interesting to read it, in a way. Has anyone here read it?

Deborah

Uriel

I think my parents had it, but I never read it. It might even have been in German.

Rio

War and Peace, The Nun, Candide, Le Miserables, Jane Eyre, The Gambler, Crime and Punishment, Perfume, Casino Royale, Diamonds are Forever....those are the ones that are just on my mind.