Just read this:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Sisters-Br.../dp/0062041282

It's a very quick read and was entertaining. It actually made me laugh out loud a couple times, which is rare for a book. The people who give it bad reviews on Amazon "don't care for the violence." Boo-hoo.

Guys
Just finished the Wool Trilogy (Hugh Howey) and Ready Player One (Ernest Cline), both of which I'd recommend. Looking for similar if anyone has any recommendations?

I finished reading Charles Portis's Masters of Atlantis last night, my third Portis novel. (He's published five.) I would rate this behind his first novel, Norwood and well behind the greatness of True Grit, but if you like a whimsical treatment of eccentric characters moving through the American landscape (it's been compared to Confederacy of Dunces) you will enjoy this tale of a handful of self-deluded believers trying to grasp the lost wisdom of Atlantis.

I was led to look back at True Grit this morning. Don't feel that seeing the movie is a replacement for the book. Mattie Ross is a great role model in terms of her common sense, plain speech, and grit, as well as her ethical sense of her own actions combined with a certain amount of reasonable self-interest. It’s a book to give one courage.

I just finished Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It has been on my "to read" list for decades and I finally got around to reading it. I had read The Fountainhead (twice) but the last time was at least 35 years ago.

Atlas Shrugged is about as subtle as getting hit in the face with a sledgehammer. And that isn't a criticism as I liked the heavy handedness! It is a bit long winded however and that is a criticism since it tends to drag in spots as she covers the same ground over and over again. I absolutely love the message though and definitely see it coming even more into fruition as each day goes by. The message makes this cautionary tale a very important book.

As far as novels go I find The Fountainhead to be much better but for the message and importance of Atlas makes it superior.

I know 2+2 is leftyland and you all probably hate this book and Rand in general but no matter which way you lean this book and it's message must be read. Bureaucracy will kill us all in the end!

Just finished this and it was a good read. There were a couple of chapters ommitted that I would liked to have read, especially the tale of Georgi Tenno's escape, but ultimately that's gonna be the case with an abridged version of such a large work. The only minor criticism I have is that it seemed to be a little dis-jointed at times but again that's understandable especially when we also include the way in which the author had to write the book.

Five Families by Selwyn Raab is a great place to start.

Valachi Papers, Honor Thy Father

Those are good ones. Love stuff related to Castellammare del Golfo.. Bonanno family was interesting and most people know little about them other than Donnie Brasco.

I haven't read Ready Player One, nor have I read this, but maybe?

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/...ielle.htm?nl=1

also, have you read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz? Or any of his stuff?

Finished Volumes 1&2 of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle.

Very enjoyable but definitely flawed. The best quality of the books is without question Knausgaard's unflinching honesty. He writes quite directly about his social incapacity, his often ambivalent feelings towards his wife and kids, and his general failure to communicate with others. And never does he make any attempt to make himself look good or bad. I saw that both Zadie Smith, a female british jamaican, and Johnathan Lethem, a hipster writer from brooklyn, both saw themselves in this autobiography from the middle aged Norwegian. I think Knausgaard's total commitment to getting the truth on the page allows the reader to inevitably find passages that he too will have lived. The sections dealing with his father in particular helped me clarify my own thoughts with my family.

The autobiographical sections occasionally give way to meditations about art, death, and the pettiness of the petit bourgeois lifestyle. These are occasionally profound, occasionally a bit worn. The widespread comparisons to Proust are i think superficial. Both men wrote massive, multivolume autobiographical novels. However Proust's touch is far more sensitive and delicate. Where Proust lingers over a little detail for five or six pages, Knausgaard simply plows through. Proust is read slowly; Knausgaard on the other hand is something of a magician: he somehow makes a book that often deals with things like taking the kids to a birthday party or buying records compulsively readable.

I'd recommend it to anyone, though I'm going to wait awhile before I read volume three.

Did you ever feel like you were reading a translation if that makes sense?

I think I understand what you mean, and no, I don't recall any uncanny turns of phrase or passages that seemed mannered or unnatural. I've noticed that curses often translate bizarrely ("****ting son of swine" e.g,) but I didn't remark any of that either.

I do think the prose was a little pedestrian but I'm not sure if that is a symptom of Knausgaard's direct style or if the translation somewhat flattened the poetics of his norwegian.

Finished my re-read of Within a Budding Grove (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower) by Marcel Proust, C.K. Scott Moncrieff (Translator), Terence Kilmartin (Translator), D.J. Enright (Revisions). The more literal translation of the title makes more sense to me than the traditional one. I'll post some comment on Vol.II in a few days. It remains colored by what we learn in the final pages of Vol. VII so it will probably be as a spoiler.

I have come to like the revised translation, but wish it made even more changes to "modernize" and change the language and the style than it does. Proust's style, at the time he wrote it, is described as "natural and unaffected, quite free of preciosity, archaism or self-conscious elegance." (Terence Kilmartin). The original Moncrieff translation did great damage to that style; damage that has never been corrected and has led generations of readers to think Proust wrote in style entirely different than it appears to be in English (which frequently sounds like some 19th century romance). That's not how it was in contemporary French.

Started re-read of The Guermantes Way (Vol. III of In Search of Lost Time)by Marcel Proust, C.K. Scott Moncrieff (Translator), Terence Kilmartin (Translator), D.J. Enright (Revisions).

Under the Volcano

Red Harvest

I strongly recommend, after you finish, that you find Lowry's short fiction collection, Hear Us Oh Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place and read the stunning novella at the end, "The Forest Path to the Spring." For Lowry, British Columbia was Paradiso to Mexico's Inferno.

Started Missing Person by Patrick Modiano.

It's not easy to accept this recent argument about the Moncreiff translation even though it seems to be historically accurate. I read the Lydia Davis translation of Swann's Way (as well her translation of Madame Bovary) and wasn't too disappointed, I must admit. Irrespective of the fact that my French is on the bad side of rudimentary, I did find it useful to compare some translated passages with the original French; I mean, I still cannot believe that Proust wrote in an "unaffected" style, given that he is typically regarded as a decadent and proto-modernist (and especially given that he was so conscious of his own position within late 19th and early 20th century French society).

''Heap House''
Is a treasure of a trash tale by Edward Carey...

It's an intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate book, unflinching in its depictions of casual cruelty and systematic exploitation.
Once I recovered, however, I resolved to read everything Carey's ever written, because Heap House is, its heart of trash notwithstanding, an absolute treasure…

Read it guys!

Certified awesome. Love Valachi papers.

Red Harvest even better.

The Fever - M. Abbott

gonna try The Echo Maker next by Powers

I finished, and greatly enjoyed, Mitchell's Ghostwritten this morning. If you don't know the book, it's his debut and somewhat anticipates Cloud Atlas in its clever interweaving of separate stories. There's a lot of good commentary online about this novel -- and I tells me that I'm not the only one left puzzled by the ending. Since several earlier posters in this thread have also read this book, I'd welcome comments.

George Saunders fans should give Shawn Vestal's Godforsaken Idaho a try.

I'm a huge George Saunders fan and will do this.

I started Patrick Rothfuss' "A Slow Regard of Silent Things" and quit about 1/3 into it. In his author's forward he writes something like "You might not want to buy this book" and goes on to explain why. He's right. It's very well written but it's so far basically about a girl who lives in the sewers and has OCD and collects pieces of trash. I don't know why he felt the need to write this one. It's too bad, because I thought his "Name of the Wind" books so far were fantastic.