finished Bright Lights Big City. loved it

Has anyone here read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell?

I found it fascinating. One warning: I read it on a Kindle, which was a mistake. You want to be able to page back and forth easily.

... lol i'm going to go with moonwalking with einstein then. one review in this thread seemed somewhat good.

Don't read blink, don't read the other 2. Taleb's first one is fine.

isnt the first one more focused towards markets though? I'm just wanting a more general applies to anything book

Excellent. I've been dying to go down to half priced books or B&N to get it. Thanks!

started imperial bedrooms

robopocalypse got so meh i had to put it down. should make a fun spielberg movie. there are some good parts, but i'm just really bad at picking science/fiction books I guess. Both this and LUCY (laurence gonzalez) got good (albeit not great) reviews and I didn't finish either, though I might actually try finish Robopocalypse. I just already saw all the Terminator movies and I keep waiting for something interesting to keep me in it and it hasn't happened.

excellent. the book was pretty interesting overall; i enjoyed many of the stories. i think there was talk of a movie for this book iirc.

Yep! Indeed there is. It will have Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Hugo Weaving in it. And it will be directed by the Wachowski brothers (Matrix, V for Vandetta, etc.) which I am excited to see all new effects they might have up their sleeves.

I have both the sense and sensibility not to play this game.

I read current books for fun, but am pretty poorly read when it comes to old stuff like pre 1960's. Im going to start reading some books as part of a generic bryce becomes well read marathon. I am starting with franz kafka's metamorphosis. It is a good starting point for this because since I am well read in current literature like johnathan franzen, dfw, et all I was in a conversation where I pretty much had to admit that I hadn't read kafka, which is inspiring me to do this. I will report back with my borderline ******ed observations of classical literature later.

Just finished The Crippled God, which is the 10th and final book in the Malazan: Book of the Fallen epic fantasy series (I also read 3 books from Isslemont that are not a part of this series per se, although there is much overlap).

I started reading this series in March probably and have been reading non-stop to get to this point (most of the books are around 1000 pages long). There is a lot of story lines that are still completely unresolved, so I am assuming there will be more books at some point, but it is a little depressing knowing I will have to wait at least 1 year in between books from this point on.

This was IMO the best fantasy series I have ever read (and I have read a lot including all the Song of Fire and Ice books so far), although I will admit the author can get long-winded at times and around book 3 I started skipping over a lot of the intros and the pontificating to get to the action.

The first one Fooled by Randomness is very good and its message can be applied to almost anything. The Black Swan is a pretentious mess written to capitalize off of the success of Fooled and should be avoided at all costs.

Yes ^^^^. Or, if you like, read MoneyBall as a half-step towards FBR.

Nice choice, though in an odd way Kafka is more relevant to the fiction that emerges in the 1960s and thereafter than to English-language fiction before 1960.

It was the translation of and vogue for Kafka in the 50s (especially in the US) that helped to break American fiction out of its entrenched realist tradition (and therefore allowed the reassessment of Faulkner as a significant modernist). (The translation of and vogue for Borges in the 1960s also played an instrumental role.) If you find that you like "The Metamorphosis" I strongly recommend that you follow it up with The Trial, the quintessential Kafka work of fiction, and also with a good selection of his short fiction. (Then you can wait on the rest of Kafka until after you feel that you've gotten through all that other good stuff on your new reading list.)

Yes, I have a copy of "Metamorphosis and other short stories by Franz Kafka from B&N. He has a gift at capturing the hopelessness of gregor, I loved the story but I certainly don't have any amazing insight into it.

There are many interpretations of the story possible and no one necessary way to read it: indeed, I would say that insight into some greater meaning isn't what's important in reading this novella or The Trial. Rather, what makes Kafka of such significance is the way he is one of the first voices to capture a new kind of 20th century alienation and the way it has brought into being a sense of estrangement from the everyday world. And he does this in part by making the experiences in his fiction seem more like the stuff of anxiety dreams than like realist representations of the world.

You can see why Murakami, among so many others, pays homage to him.

RussellinToronto, that was really well put. I wish I had an English prof like you when I was back in college. I was a math major and history minor who took some English classes on the side and always read a lot. I identify strongly with SpacemanBryce's uneasiness about how to approach literature.

Started reading a collection of Orwell essays, and I am absolutely blown away by "Charles Dickens". It's a very long essay in which he reviews Dicken's reception, explores how he was used by convervatives and marxists, and how Dickens really displays society and its instututions, which can lead to some lol moments. The most significant point, and well explored by Orwell, is that Dickens almost exclusively focuses on moral improvement and appears to have no actual suggestions for how society and its institutions could actually be improved.

I think you might enjoy The Delighted States by Adam Thirlwell. He's got some very good stuff on Kafka and a host of other writers.

Recently finished:

David Copperfield (audiobook): Amazing.
Snow Crash: Didn't live up to my expectations but it certainly had its moments.

Current reading/listening:

The Lost Symbol (audiobook): Not really sure why I'm bothering.
The Big Short: Seems like it'll be interesting.
I'm also planning on reading the Anna Katherine Barnett-Hart thesis on the subject.

I read a couple of short stories on the plane ride two days ago. The best was Daddy's World by Walter Jon Williams. It is in the "Best of the Best Science Fiction of the last 20 years" anthology and so far, the best I've read in it (I've read about 6 stories in there).

I also read the graphic novel (manga) Crying Freeman: Portrait of a Killer, written by Kazuo Koike and illustrated by Ryoichi Ikegami. The book is fantastic, one of the best graphic novels I've read this year.

Thanks for this recommendation. I've added it to my reading list. I'd already been thinking about reading Zadie Smith's book highly praised non-academic literary criticism, Changing My Mind, so this looks like an excellent complement to that.