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I recently finished Deception Point by Dan Brown and Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. I gotta say, Red Dragon is better and even creepier than the movie. You learn a whole lot more about the bad guy, from his childhood experiences (which are probably the most fucked up part of all) and what made him a monster, to a material difference in his character during the story. I bought Silence of the Lambs yesterday and I'm going to read that as well, since I've always heard it was better than the film.

I also finally bought a bilingual book of German stories. I took 3 years of German in school, and have been wanting to get something like this to dust off my reading comprehension, and learn the language better in a practical way. It's called Deutsche Erzählungen (German Stories): A Bilingual Anthology; translated and edited by Harry Steinhauer, with stories by Goethe, Hebel, Kleist, Hoffman, Stifter, Keller, Fontane, Schnitzler, Mann, Kafka and Böll.

I'm also nearly finished with Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. What an awesome book -- thanks MKJ!

Maps of Meaning (Jordan Peterson) hasn't gotten a lot of reading time yet -- only about 60 pages or so. It's tough going, it reads a lot like a textbook, and it's a LOT of book.

Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul :icon14:

Got some Chuck Palahniuk books from the library but didn't have time to read any of them...

Part 2:

Ordered "Jaguars Ripped My Flesh" by Tim Cahill. I read the first few chapters and thought it was good enough to buy.

reading the latest issue of Skeptic.

Taking a break from my marathon of short fiction anthologies to (re-) enjoy the guilty pleasure of Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park." The prose isn't exactly James Joyce or Rohinton Mistry, but it's perfectly serviceable (unlike, say, Dan Brown's syntactical bowel movements), and the story line is the height of thrillerdom. There are few books that better epitomize the words "page-turner," and the entire idea is just so brilliantly conceived I don't find it the least bit surprising that an auteur such as Spielberg could turn this material into one of the best movies ever made. GG Mike.

Do slight grammar problems really bother you that much in a fiction novel?

I haven't had any problems reading the two Dan Brown books I have.

I've thought about picking up Angels and Demons, but from what I've read it sounds like it's just The Davinci Code with different names and places.

1. Yes. Except when grammar is intentionally incorrect to reflect point of view (as with the idiot's perspective in The Sound and The Fury), I find it not only annoying but insulting when an author apparently expects me to spend time and money on prose he hasn't even polished.

2. It goes beyond correct grammar. Dan Brown has no grasp of simple literary concepts like point of view. (His use of italics to convey thought, which is a throwback to the pulp crap of yesterdecade, betrays this.) No one who appreciates literature appreciates Dan Brown, just like no one who appreciates cars buys a Honda Civic if they have real options, no one who appreciates meat orders a steak well-done, and no one who appreciates designer denim would be caught dead in a pair of Old Navy jeans. I hope that's clear.

I read a few Dan Brown books because i was amazed at how incredibly shallow he manages to write, characters with no depth at all... that sort of stuff. They read like scripts for B movies.

Which i think is a talent, in a way.

The Rum Diary Hunter S Thompson

Dan Brown's ability isn't in classical writing or character development.

His biggest asset, IMHO, is the way he takes complex issues and makes them not only understandable, but compelling in a way that draws average readers into his yarns.

He does it with cryptography in The Davinci Code, and with pretty complex scientific ideas in Deception Point. They're not necessarily extremely accurate, but that's not really the point either.

A better comparison of an avid reader enjoying Dan Brown's books I think, is an avid film fan watching an action movie.

R00k wrote:He does it with cryptography in The Davinci Code

No. "Trite and disingenuous" is not compelling. He did not make cryptography compelling; he used it as a cheap gimmick to help propel an absurd and so-high-concept-as-to-be-dull plot from one idiotic vignette to the next. The so-called puzzles, from anagrams to rose lines, were rubbish. Especially since he claims that it's all factually true when it's not at all.

A better comparison of an avid reader enjoying Dan Brown's books I think, is an avid film fan watching an action movie.

The only way this analogy holds up is if you are talking about an Uwe Boll action movie -- and they are universally reviled.

Dan Brown is not a "guilty pleasure" of an intelligent reader. He writes in a way that is genuinely insulting to anyone who has read Notre Dame de Paris or A Fine Balance or Blindness or 100 Years of Solitude.

What are you, a bitter Literature professor or something?

Dan brown is pretty awful IMHO...

currently reading:

master and margarita by bulgakov
and anna karenina by tolstoy.

both = fucking incredible


and short history of nearly everything is also wonderful.

next on the list: fear and loathing, crime and punishment, the gambler, 100 years of solitude, don quixote, snow crash, clockwork orange, and a stephen king short story called The Long Walk

If you're going to read The Long Walk, read the rest of The Bachman Books as well.

running man :lub:

the long walk left a deep impression on me. I remember the moment you finally realize, with horror, what the true nature of the competition is - the description of the "angular, pimpled, head exploding" was quite vivid to me. I read this about a decade ago, only once, and I still remember that line.

and yea - not a dan brown fan, though only read one of his books (davinci code).

I've never read 400 pages that fast in my life before - i read the entire book in under 48 hours i think.

It was coz it was like cheap crack - keeps you hooked but leaves u feeling empty.

I did like the idea of the divine feminine, though.

i'm on the third book of the riverworld series - the dark design.

(philip jose farmer)

bout to start into Guy Gavriel Kay's "Fionavar Tapestry" trilogy. I love all his other books, but they are purely fantasy, and this one starts off in modern day Toronto and somehow involves U of T students being sucked into a fantasy universe or something -- I hope he pulls it off cuz I generally hate that kind of thing right from the get-go.

Agreed, I've always hated that thing where "ordinary" people from today get sucked into a fantasy/sci-fi setting (ever since I tried reading C.S. fucking Lewis and hating him when I was a kid) except for the books about Thomas Covenant which were tolerable and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere which was very good.

Eric Hobsbawm - Globalisation, Democracy & Terrurism. it's a relief to read something about our times with depth and scope and insight instead of the usual shallow rubbish. guy's a marxist, but he doesn't let that get in the way

Grudge wrote:Agreed, I've always hated that thing where "ordinary" people from today get sucked into a fantasy/sci-fi setting (ever since I tried reading C.S. fucking Lewis and hating him when I was a kid) except for the books about Thomas Covenant which were tolerable and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere which was very good.

That's funny, I assumed it went without saying that the Narnia chronicles were an exception to my comment: I think the kids aren't "modern" enough for it to bother me -- if they had iPods and Nike running shoes it would piss me off, but good old middle-of-the-century Brits are already half way between my conception of [north american] modernity and the average innocuous fantasy world, so taking them the other half doesn't push me back out of the story.

I consider the Narnia books brilliant for kids, since they generally lack the discernment necessary to point out that Lewis is "a little heavy on the Jesus." Haven't read a narnia book since I was about 14 and while I bought myself the entire 6-in-1 volume (or however many there are) because it was $7.99 at a University of Toronto book sale, I don't really plan on reading any of them again until I have children to listen.

I think the problem was that I had read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings first, and after that the Narnia books felt very old, stuffy and childish compared to Tolkien. Maybe they're aimed for younger children, I was around 10-11 at the time.

Also, I've always hated having children as main characters. For as long as I can remember, I've always preferred grown up protagonists.

I started on the Narnia series when I was around 13, and I thought they were overly simple books even then.

They're pretty worthless, except to deliver Christianity in a child-digestible package. They don't hold a candle to the richness and complexity and interesting storylines and characters of the better books in the fantasy genre, even for a young kid.

I picked up The Wheel of Time series in middle school instead, and never looked back.

I just finished neuromancer, that was pretty good.
Also, this collection of HP Lovecraft stories (brushing up on my quake mythology)
and c++ for dummies