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I've got House Of Leaves, but not read much of it, more through boredom than terror - I'm currently half way through Revenant Gun, the third of the Machineries Of Empire books.

House of Leaves was a really cool book and I always recommend it to people looking for the spooky reads but I must admit I kind of have no drive to seek out anything else that he has written. Friend of mine is way into his work and when we chat about his latest book I'm always reminded of how draining his shtick can be to actually read. This is all said with the utmosts respect as he approaches literature in a way I find fascinating.

Dapper Bandit wrote:House of Leaves was a really cool book and I always recommend it to people looking for the spooky reads but I must admit I kind of have no drive to seek out anything else that he has written. Friend of mine is way into his work and when we chat about his latest book I'm always reminded of how draining his shtick can be to actually read. This is all said with the utmosts respect as he approaches literature in a way I find fascinating.

I don’t remember the name of the book he published after House of Leaves but you had to read a chapter, flip it and read a chapter from a different perspective. Was a chore and the story, so far as I got, was pretty boring.

odontophobia wrote:
I don’t remember the name of the book he published after House of Leaves but you had to read a chapter, flip it and read a chapter from a different perspective. Was a chore and the story, so far as I got, was pretty boring.

That book is up to part 4, I think and every book follows the same flip method. The aforementioned mate loves them, I get tired just hearing about them. But he went to art college which may explain it.

Dapper Bandit wrote:

odontophobia wrote:
I don’t remember the name of the book he published after House of Leaves but you had to read a chapter, flip it and read a chapter from a different perspective. Was a chore and the story, so far as I got, was pretty boring.

That book is up to part 4, I think and every book follows the same flip method. The aforementioned mate loves them, I get tired just hearing about them. But he went to art college which may explain it.

Feel like art nerds /// type&layout nerds may be into danielewski. Guy is not a literary virtuoso. Enjoy House of Leaves a lot but it seems like Palahniuk part two. :shrug:

Palahniuk is OK, I can kind of see the similarities now you mention it. Danielewski is the literary equivalent of prog rock to me. I can see what they're doing, it's very impressive and hard to do but it doesn't tickle my balls.

A Tale Of Two Cities is IMO Dickens' most readable "classic," and one of my favorite books despite its rather lamentable reactionaryl stance. ironically, it's Madame Defarge, one of the antagonists, that's the character who's lived forever. i don't know if it's true, but i read back in the 1970s that Tale had yet to be translated into French.

I don't find this more or less readable than the others I've read

And no spoilers!

I read so much all the time that I don't really bother with this thread, 'cos I'd be posting daily. But I recently (last week) read a book that really shook me to my core in a way that *very* few books do. It made me put it down mid-paragraph and go out into the world and effect change! And it had me pausing numerous times to let the words envelop me. It is an absolutely gorgeously written, and singularly profound, book, so I recommend it wholeheartedly. It's called Ich und Du (usually translated as "I and You" in English, I think), and it's by Martin Buber.

Interesting! Did you read a translation or the original? I can't read German and wonder if the magic is all about the writing style if it would be lost with a less than great translation.

I also do not post everything I'm reading because it would get boring for everyone.

I can read German, but I actually read a Norwegian translation, because that's what I was handed. I cannot speak to the English translations (although in my experience German→Norwegian works a lot better than German→English), but there's two well known ones, and I haven't really heard anything bad about them.

typically seen in English as "I And Thou." i read that...it must have been 45 years ago. i remember it being pretty good compared to a lot of the later "new age" nonsense.

VREEEEVROOOOOW wrote:I can read German, but I actually read a Norwegian translation, because that's what I was handed. I cannot speak to the English translations (although in my experience German→Norwegian works a lot better than German→English), but there's two well known ones, and I haven't really heard anything bad about them.

Cool!

I'll check out one of the english versions.

I've started Iron Council, the third China Mieville Bas-Lag novel. As usual, great world, interesting characters and plot, etc. I really like Mieville.

But damn, he obviously bought a geographical terms thesaurus before writing that book and it's annoying as hell to have a new word describing yet another fucking tree group or fissure in the ground or small elevation or whatever every fucking page or so. At least I read it on Kindle and can check quickly but it's really not a smart move.

Apart from that, it's good so far .

there was a Penguin Books Nietzsche translation i tried to read back in the 1970s that was like that. after i had to stop and look up a word for the third time in the introduction--and i have a pretty large vocabulary--i said "fuck off, Penguin." my friend Dan commented "i didn't know penguins had that large of a vocabulary."