Has anyone read Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom? Is it any good?

Finished No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Representative quote: "There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is - other people!"

I just finished Stoner by John Williams. It started kinda slow but by the end I loved it. Such a beautifully written book about an ordinary man's life.

Finished A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Re-read in preparation for a run at Finnegans Wake.

APAYM is a classic of the English language canon; a reason to read it is to experience Joyce's skills at presenting mixed emotions and transitions to and from the physical sensory reality to interior monologs, but it's a good story, well plotted.

I Just finished Crime and Punishment and loved it. I usually only read modern books and have never really read any famous literature.

It's Such a great book which I could not put down It took me to a time and place foreign to me of such hardship and mental anguish yet still showed kindness and love in dire times.

I am now looking at some other books from Dostoevsky and this era in general. I am going to read Notes from Underground but next I think I will try Anna Karenina by Tolstoy.

I would definitely recommend The Double by Dostoevsky and pretty much anything by Chekhov if you haven't read him before, his writing style is amazing albeit what he writes about is incredibly bleak most of the time.

I'm about a third of the way through a few books atm:
A Man's Guide to Women - John Gottman/Julie Schwartz Gottman
The Art of Learning - Josh Waitzkin
Wherever You Go, There You Are - John Kabat-Zinn

The first two were recommended by Fedor Holz on his most recent Poker Life Podcast and third one is recommended by Tommy Angelo, so overall I think it's a pretty GTO set of books to read :-D

+1 to Chekhov's astonishing short stories - great bedtime reading.

Or go to LibriVox and let someone read them to you.

Looking forward to hearing about your "run" at the Wake. Are you going to employ the services of a reader's guide?

Me too...I've bounced off Finnigan more than once. I did read The Dead again the other night...better each reread

Not one, but three:
Re Joyce by Anthony Burgess.
A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake by William York Tindall.
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell.

Salon: “Finnegans Wake” breakdown:A team of valiant friends tackles James Joyce's magnum opus, and one winds up in family court because of it.
http://www.salon.com/2001/03/16/finnegan/

I didn't realised people actually read it.

I think it's partly because it is so notoriously difficult - it's a challenge.

There's a parallel with how some intellectuals learn Finnish, not for usefulness or for pleasure, but because it's reputedly one of the hardest European languages to learn (as an adult).

Without wanting to sound too pretentious (i.e., I really do want to sound pretentious on some level), I believe one has to adopt a different perspective on the experience of reading, when taking a "run" at the Wake. I must admit to naively reading much of it aloud, without the support of a Reader's Guide, and subsequently being somewhat unable to comprehend the text at a semantic level! Subsequently, I took a semester-long course at grad school on the Wake and was well instructed by the professor at the time, an old Joycean, with a thickly annotated copy of the text, who would actually break into song during class, when sonorous passages demanded such of him. Can say, some fifteen years later, that hearing this bona-fide Joycean read the Wake was not only an experience I'll struggle to forget, but also one that convinced me of the text's canonical, and, might I say, unique, status.

NB. Just discovered that the Prof. mentioned above (Edmund L. Epstein) published a Reader's Guide of the Wake in 2009, based on his teaching of the text. It is highly regarded by the James Joyce Quarterly:https://jjqblog.wordpress.com/2012/0...ein-1931-2012/

Finnegans Wake - the prog rock of literature.

I'm not sure about the Prog Rock analogy. Personally, I would favour Free Jazz as an analogous model; it better illustrates the genre-bending, revolutionary impact of the text. We are definitely talking about a boxset rather than a single album, in this respect, I should add (e.g. most Coltrane from 1965-1967).

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters is a fantastic read thus far. I can't put it down. If you're into the whole conspiracy and events surrounding his murder, it's a must.

Halfway through Dark Matter right now. Awesome science fiction "thriller" about multiverses and physics. Highly recommend already.

Also reading book 3 of The Dark Tower series. They are the only King books I have read. Can't wait to finish the series then start some of the suggestions ITT

Heading on a 14 hour flight twice in the next week or so. Looking for a few audiobook suggestions.

I generally enjoy a good sci-fi read, stuff like the Forever War or Old Man's War. Any good post-apocalyptic stuff is also entertaining for me.

Anyone have anything to toss out?

+1 fantastic read.

See the post above yours. Dark Matter is great on audio.

Finished John Vaillaint's The Tiger, a true story set in Russia about a man-eating Amur tiger, its principle victim, and the man assigned to hunt and kill it. I'm awestruck by tigers' intelligence and capabilities after reading this book.

Apparently there's a movie in development starring Brad Pitt as the hunter.

Who is playing the tiger?