Recommend me some books...
 

I need some books to read... recommend me some shit!
I just read Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and it was magnificent... I think I'm going to get a Chuck Palahniuk book... my friend is always talking about how good he is. Anything goes, give a recommendation and maybe a brief (BRIEF!) synopsis!
Thanks!
G'night!

invisible monsters by palahniuk is really a fun read.
the joke by milan kundera- i just know that this guy plays a "joke" that screws up history. it's 3 am. i'm not googling stuff.
microserfs by douglas coupland- a bunch of microsoft workers circa 1993 quit their jobs to find a new life

William Gibson's Neuromancer.

about a guy who can maneuver in cyberspace but gets involved in a bad deal and is crippled. he's offered a chance to regain his status by some shady characters. the guys who wrote The Matrix stole a bunch of ideas from this book (but The Matrix isn't nearly as good as this is). inspired the lyrics to a few SY songs.

also, anything else written by Gibson. Pattern Recognition is excellent.

So far I like David Copperfield by Dickens, and The Sea Wolf by London.

Not sci-fi, but they have some ideas that are just boss. The Sea Wolf is cool for those who aren't materialists or spiritualists, but somewhere in the middle.

But then again these are probably children's books to the stuff you read or whatever.

My favourite author is Douglas Coupland, i'm reading Hey Nostradamus! at the moment.

J.G. Ballard and William S Burroughs! Anything by em.

A few books I've read lately:

Walkabout by James Vance Marshall
TWOC by Graham Joyce
Frank Black And The Pixies by uhh... forgot the name

"Kes" by Barry Hines.

thats right, if youre gonna gibson do i recommend going chronological, as some characters tend to reapper

neuromancer is the place to start

but if you want a "prequel to all", burning chrome is truly the place to start. some great short-stories to introduce you to this world.

Can anyone recommend any good horror books? (preferably some maniac killer story, the more dark, disturbing and gruesome the better!)

fuck, no, i hate that shit, but if you look into the "true crime" genre you could find a lot of material for your nightmares.

you could probablyeven read about these pricks:

I have to say, I'm not a big fan of the true crime genre, I was thinking horror fiction or dark poetry maybe. No horror fans here?

I'm sick of recommending my favourite books.

I pick four books that happen to be sitting next to each other on the shelf above my computer:

"An Autobiography" by Igor Stravinsky
"The Dedalus Book of Absinthe" by Phil Baker
"Rebecca" by Daphne Du Maurier
"The Intellectuals & The Masses" by John Carey

I loved that book. I really need to read it again, though, so I can get a better understanding of all of it.

I recommend Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gogol, Nabokov, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn. You get the idea.

Good recommendations, nomadicfollower.

k-krack,
Here's a hint:

if you search for "burroughs"
http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/sea...earchid=477249
haha, of course :rolleyes:

you'll bring-up all the previous book threads, and with any ingenuity, will be able to avoid egotistically starting new topic-after-topic about the same subject! Now you might have to poke around for a couple of minutes through the seach results, but you owe that to the community, now don't you?

anything but Time Quake by kurt vonnegut
my faves are galopogus and breakfast of champions

agreed. The Belonging Kind is one of my favorite stories.

and i second Vonnegut.

Just read that. I've read Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey Nostradamus! Even though both are essentially (obviously not really...) the same story, awesoem books both.

I ended up buying Palahniuks "Choke" and Lewis Carrol's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass," and looked at a few William Gibson books. (I forgot to check this thread, so it was kind of pointless haha. Thanks for the ideas anyway, though!)
I think next time I will be buying a William Gibson book, or another PKD.

I read Slaughterhouse Five... great book. I'll look more into him, as well.

Honestly atari... suck my fucking dick. You've started thread after stupid thread, so don't start with me. Fuck you.

Currently reading:



Next:

I suppose it's cliche for a Sonic Youth fan to dig Phil Dick, but I've read a number of his books and I've usually found them great. Unfortunately his endings tend to let him down a little from time to time, but...

Try 'A Scanner Darkly' (the movie was good, this is better), 'Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said' and 'The Man In The High Castle'. People seem to fall over themselves to praise 'VALIS' but to be honest I thought it was too aimless and full of tangents.

Get this:

Try "Les chants du Maldoror" by Isidore Ducasse AKA Le Comte de Lautréamont. He was a Montevidean from French descent who spent his short life in Paris, writing.
Really dark poetry.

Really? When?

i just started reading Flow My Tears and i received The Man In The High Castle for Xmas. Flow My Tears is so far excellent.

The Dice Man is an easy and absorbing read if youve not come across it yet.

READ THIS


HOUSE OF LEAVES
by
Mark Danielewski


read it and tell me how it fucked up your brain

I'm reading that now. I'm enjoying it. Ah! I loved that book! I lent it to a friend. He hasn't read it yet, and hasn't given it back. Douche. I want my book back!

Today at school, we had the journal topic of "What story would you want to be turned into a ride?" (we have to write a page on some random topic every day). I chose House of Leaves.

I started reading Only Revolutions, but I can't find the motivation to finish it.

Right on. I'm going to investigate Neal Stephenson's 'Snowcrash' when I'm done with what I'm on now. Dystopian bizarreness all over the place. Yeargh!

P.S. I've only NOW got 'round to starting Alec Foege's 'Confusion Is Next: The Sonic Youth Story'. It's actually quite hard to find in England...

I think The Elements of Style by Strunk and White should be required reading for everyone. There ought to be a law. You should have to read it and be able to pass a basic grammar test before getting your driver's license.

Hubert Selby Jnr's Last Exit to Brooklyn

It's basically a series of short stories set around Brooklyn in the 50s. Incredibly bleak. Like a book version of Swordfishtombones and early Swans. Amazing stuff.

seconded.
its one of my favorite books.


I think it must be one of Antony's [& the johnsons] favorite books too, actually no... i know it must have been, he practically built his whole i am a bird now concept upon Georgette (Ref. The Queen is Dead "Last Exit to Brooklyn")

Georgette:

• A Drag Queen
• Recites/Reads Poe (while on bennie of course.)
• Constantly alludes to bird imagery and lakes/water.

Bennie in the bullion!

I've been on a pretty big Alistair Reynolds binge lately. You've got to like space opera type science fiction to at least some degree to get into him, but he's taking the genre to some pretty new places.

I love China Mieville, especially Perdido Street Station and Iron Council. I don't read much "fantasy" other than him, but he's great. He brings in elements of SF and horror too, so maybe that's why it works so well for me.

I'll echo the votes for Burroughs (especially the Naked Lunch which is a book worthy of all the hype), Ballard, PK Dick (though Valis is one of my favorites), and Gibson. I'd add Michael Moorcock to that bunch too, though he's most famous for the sword and sorcery Elric books (which are great) he's also done a lot of experimental SF/fantasy/surrealism stuff.

I read a lot of less experimental science fiction as well. David Brin, C.J. Cherryh, Stanislaw Lem (well, he's actually pretty damn experimental), Octavia Butler, Kathleen Goonan.

Pretty much the only horror I'm into (aside from the classics like Poe) is H.P. Lovecraft who is also one of the originators of science fiction really.

I might get that last exit to brooklyin.