I've got the collected works of Lord Byron sitting next to me, any recommendations, thread?

Prometheus

Titan! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.

Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refus'd thee even the boon to die:
The wretched gift Eternity
Was thine--and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in thy patient energy,
In the endurance, and repulse
Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself--and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter'd recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.

I loved both, and Angel's Game might actually edge Shadow for me. But The Prisoner of Heaven was not only disappointing, it pisses me off just thinking about it. Hey, go ahead and crank out a shoddily written return to the characters in Shadow if you just want to milk the franchise or are creatively barren, but rewriting their history in a nonsensical way that ****s with my fondness for the first book is not cool.

Don Juan

I just finished reading Miss Lonelyhearts. Didn't pretty much like it. It had weird undertones of religious nuttery and babbling. I felt the ending was pretty poor also and too obvious and almost lame.

Any suggesting for the next book guys? Love to hear what you guys are into!

I love Miss Lonelyhearts, damn. I can see how it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Rosie Project

Very entertaining book about an aspie who tries to find a wife. Recommended to the analytic types.

I also felt that Miss Lonelyhearts didn't try enough there was no fighting spirit. And came across as a huge *******.

What's an aspie?

A derogartory term for a person on the Asperger's spectrum.

It's pejorative slang for someone with aspergers syndrome, usually nonliteral.

Edit: Beat to it as I was researching the novel.

I don't think it's necessarily pejorative. Some of them self-identify that way.

Started and finished City of Saints by Andrew Hunt. A winner of the Tony Hillerman Prize, it is a fictionalized account of an unsolved 1930's Salt Lake City homicide. A good read but sometimes heavy handed with regard to setting, character descriptions and showing the difference between two particular characters; overall well written.

Started and finished Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman. A former book editor, it appears Bouman got a gushing review from everyone he ever got published. It's mediocre rural crime fiction with a contrived conclusion and surprisingly poor writing; don't bother reading.

Still working on The Man without Qualities.

Early in the book the term is used in what seemed to be a non-derogatory way. Obviously, didn't mean to offend and I would have typed out Asperger's if I thought it was derogatory.

I'd give it a shot, it was a very fun read for me.

Just finished:
The fifteen lives of Harry August

highly recommend it.
Premise:

Started Moby-Dick today. Excited.

Started reading The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness by R. Laing

I worry enough as it is about bringing a child into a world which is only a couple of generations from trucking huge numbers of people into death camps as it is,

I would definitely bring this up at the next pta meeting.

I think this is what McCarthy was aiming at, forcing people to think about how the future is going to pan out, sf without resorting to Tom Cruise saving us all.

Finished The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, both translations, through volume III, but not the posthumous papers relative to a planned fourth volume.

I will post some comments later, but I highly recommend reading the first two volumes to anyone interested in post-modern literature; sections of them seemed to have been used as templates by current writers.

Just finished this. It was excellent. One of the few books I've read that made me want to actually pick it back up and immediately re-read it once I was done.

I read that Columbine book when it came out. Great stuff.


Just finished Cibola Burn. Can't wait for #5. Also finished "the heart is a lonely Hunter". Just didn't do it for me. Too many main characters. Would rather have had a dickens type story starring Mick.


On to Swan Peak by James Lee Burke

Started Molloy by Samuel Beckett.

I also just finished this. Highly recommend.

Ugh i thought the first half was decent, the last half laughable. Not seen the film yet, but there is a reason they changed the ending.

I agree that the second half was kind of dumb, but I still felt that overall it was a really well done thriller.

New ending, eh? Going to have to actually go see this then.