I've read the last Dunk and Egg story (I read the adaptations to graphic novels of the first two) and I enjoyed it a lot. It is very different than A Song of Ice and Fire, as the stories focus on just Dunk and Egg, but they are good stories and give you a bit more perspective for Song of Ice and Fire.

You can't go wrong with The Kingkiller Chronicles. Do it! Just read them. You won't regret it. Except for the fact that the final book of the trilogy isn't out yet.

I've only read the thrid one, but it really is superb.

just finished day of the locust, loved it (yeah i know it took me forever)

starting

scar tissue (kiedis autobiography) and glamorama

Point Omega by DeLillo, 117 pages, greatest thing I've read.

"They had to think in words. This was their problem." (page 10)

Could this be your problem too, bookworms of 2+2?

Both of these are excellent.

I would say go with Kingkiller first. Wheel of Time is a huge undertaking from scratch. But if you are in the mood for epic fantasy, Wheel of Time is great. I love it. My favourite series ever.

Also, any of Brandon Sanderson's works are great. Way of Kings, superb. Mistborn trilogy, amazing.

It's a shame it went completely off the rails around book 6 and never recovered. Such a horrid downswing that got worse and worse and worse.

Is there a book around 6 that you can stop and have a semi complete story?

I'm guessing you haven't read the last few.

Sanderson really did revive it, imo. It's just getting from 6 to 12 that would be tough. Even though I enjoy it, I never recommend it.

Edit: Infinite Jest is getting better.

I couldn't connect with Point Omega. Of all the literary giants of our time, Delillo is the one that comes off very sterile and almost lifeless to me. Point Omega was the first book of his I read. What baffles me most is DFW called Delillo his favorite writer (paraphrase), and being a big DFW fan, I thought I'd be able to get something out of Delillo. So far, it hasn't happened.

Just finished Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Enjoyed it a lot. Short read, so I'd recommend it particularly for people who've never read Morrison, because I think it's a good sample of her work.

On the home-stretch of Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth. I like it, though my original opinion on Roth (that somehow through his writing I get the feeling I wouldn't like him as a human being) stands.

Working slowly on Pynchon's Vineland because I've been spending some free time at the library later. This is actually my first dive into Pynchon and I could tell almost instantly that he's going to wind up among my favorite writers.

Started Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Philips, which I can already tell I'm going to be pretty critical of. Feels very premise-heavy, low on substance. There's a local book club I'd like to get involved in and they're reading it so I'm going to stick it out.

I'm kind of an ADD reader, so I'm also reading an old Pelacanos novel, nearing the end of GRRM's Game of Thrones (for the third time), and still picking away at Underworld with all the same hang ups about it. Yeah, ADD reader. This is why it takes me forever to finish a book.

Milan Kundera is amazing. Fwiw, Phillip Roth is easily my favorite writer of the four remaining American OWMs (him, Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy). Motherzucker!

I am currently reading this series, about 2/3 of the way through book 4. I find it to still be pretty good so I would say to read at least the first four books. However that being said, the saga could have ended at book 3 as it gives a "semi-complete story".

I have a grammar question that I figured somebody in this thread would know, tried googling but to no avail yet. The question is about using punctuation outside of quotation marks, as I did in my previous post.

My current college English teacher insists that you always put a period or comma inside of quotation marks, no exceptions. But I think that if you are using quotation marks to place emphasis on a word or phrase, as opposed to specifically quoting a person or thing, it should go outside. For example in my post above I think it would look weird to place the period inside of the quotes, because I only quoted a two-word phrase that is not a complete sentence, and though it was used by another poster, I was not specifically quoting him. I know that a question mark does go outside the quotes if the sentence - but not the quoted part - is a question. So it would seem to follow that the same rule should apply for periods and commas: if they do not make sense with the quoted material alone, they should go outside the quotation marks. Am I right or wrong?