BOOKS OF COURSE

[MR No.6024038]

So, let's have a thread about one of your favorite books.
Doesn't have to be number 1 (I for one couldn't tell you what my favorite favorite book is), just a book you really, really enjoyed for whatever reason that may be.

Tell us the name of the book and why you think it's great.
Doesn't have to be too fancy, you can write how much you want about it. I'll start (please excuse how I write; structuring my thoughts and writing in general was never a strong suit of mine).

One of my all time favorites is Brett Easton Ellis' "American Psycho".

I love the way this book is written. You get a direct view into Bateman's psyche and his inner workings. You also get to see firsthand how he gradually succumbs more and more into insanity, thanks to chapters ending midsentce for example.
It's also the only book that had me laughing out loud and a few seconds later feeling sick to my stomach.
Overall a great book. It may seem a little dry sometimes, courtesy of the fact that Bateman tends to describe stuff like suits and business cards in agonizing detail, but that again is one reason why I love the book's style. We get to see what our protagonist cares about, or at least what he seems to care about. Moreover, him describing his gruesome murders in the same dry detached fashion, shows again what kind of a person he is (psychopath), without appearing lazy.

So I ask you, what's the one book you want to tell us about?
You may also post books you hate, books you wanted to be great but couldn't get yourself to like them, or books that couldn't live up to their hype in your eyes.

I'm looking forward to your participation.

[Anonymous No.6024829]

Plus by Joseph McElroy is quite unlike anything I've read. The novel follows the process of being born again human for a man that was turned into a robot. The book opens with him achieving sentience, and follows a stream of consciousness style of writing but in the third person. The protagonist, Interplanetary Monitoring Platform Plus, or Imp Plus for short, goes through the motions of becoming human and re-experiencing memories and such. However, being a robot he doesn't quite understand some of the things he's seeing, so it's up to the reader to get what Imp Plus is describing.

It's very unique, and very "postmodern" for lack of a better term to use, but not in the same sense as Pynchon or Vonnegut is. If you want something that's original and mentally taxing, check it out.

[Anonymous No.6024949]

I read this because it was on the starter kit. Through the first couple of chapters I thought I would hate it because the slang was nearly incomprehensible. Once you can decipher it a bit it really becomes a positive aspect of the novel. Very unique. And the way Alex's manner of speech changes with his state of mind struck me as brilliant, O my brothers. Grotesque scenes that you can feel.

>And then Chapter 21 nearly ruined the whole novel

[Anonymous No.6025121]

Pnin is probably not the first, second, or even third book most people think of by Nabokov, but it might be his best. The first few sections are almost the literary equivalent of sketch comedy: Pnin loses his papers on the train, Pnin makes a painful visit to the dentist; Pnin moves out of his noisy apartment; Pnin has an embarassing run-in with his shameless and cruel ex-wife. But somewhere about halfway through the book, Pnin's humanity starts to show through the cracks in Nabokov's writing, and he becomes not just a figure of fun but a deeply tragic and human character. The stakes get raised and the last few chapters, shot through with a greater level of humanity, are both deeper and somehow even funnier than the first few. The narrative twist at the end is somewhat tame by Nabokov's standards, but raises some very basic questions that interest me, about the relationship between tragedy, comedy and truth. A wonderful novella you can read in a weekend and will think about for months afterward.

[MR No.6025231]

Snake Oil Science is a book I just recently read by biostatistican R. Barker Bausell, on the placebo effect, complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) and the quality of clinical trials.
While it's more of a "I'm interested in that topic" kinda book than a "I'm going to read this for fun"-work, it's very well and entertainingly written and never bores the reader, no matter how detailed and scientific the explanations.
The main question of the book is this "Does any alternative treatment have a stronger healing effect than the corresponding placebo effect kight have?" (I'm not going to spoil the obvious), and while this, coupled with the books title, may seem like a work from someone with a strong bias against CAM, it actually makes a reasonable case for alternative medicine, while being scientifically sound and well thought-out.
Anyone even remotely interested in any of the named subjects should read this book.

[Anonymous No.6025234]

>>6025121
Lolita is better, but Pnin is the second best. Pale Fire, which people usually cite, is masturbatory.

[Anonymous No.6025238]

>>6025231
You might like Ben Goldacre's books

[Anonymous No.6025253]

The Odyssey is my favorite piece of literature ever and if you don't read Fagles you're a fag.

[Anonymous No.6025268]

fucking Rilke man...

it's just letters between two poets but it's just so fucking intense at times and sensitive and romantic and intimate, the bad thing is that you feel like you're invading their privacy while reading it

it's also short so i read it like once a month

[Anonymous No.6025294]

>>6025234
I like all three, and Invitation to a Beheading, and Ada. I don't really know if Pnin is the best but I really enjoy it and I always feel the need to stick up for it.

[Anonymous No.6025300]

Shake Hands With The Devil

I've read a ton of books in my life, and that one is the one that shook me to my core. It's the autobiography of the force commander of the NATO troops stationed in Rwanda. He details the start of the Tutsi/Hutu genocide, his absolute powerlessness, the bickering and slowness of politicians, the stupid brutality everywhere, and the crushing of his soul.

There's a passage in which he has to meet some of the main guys behind the genocide and he describes how he stood there and contemplated for a few minutes to just shoot them right there, and how he struggled with himself to put down his gun. It's powerful.

[Anonymous No.6025309]

This is probably the funniest thing I've ever read, and it's for sure in my top 3.

I love it's depiction of old school New Orleans. It really paints the seediness, the vulgarity, the weirdness, the colorfulness, the history of the place.

I also love the twisting, complicated cast, and how they all wander around the story, tickling at each other's existence, and then all coming together for the climax. It still slays me that he could write such a diverse crew of made up people that seem so damn real.

[MR No.6025314]

>>6025238
Thanks a lot mate, I just ordered one!

[Anonymous No.6025325]

I like the ending

[MR No.6025334]

>>6025234
I feel Lolita lacks strongly in the story-telling-department if that makes sense.
I love Nabokov's style (and Lolita is so far the most beautiful written book I've ever read, seriously), but his story telling seems to be lackluster (I've only read Lolita & Pale Fire so far though).

[Anonymous No.6025348]

>You may also post books you hate

Dancing Naked In The Mind Field

The guy who shared the Nobel Prize for the invention of PCR wrote this as his autobiography.

As the book shows, he's an idiot completely full of himself - there's AIDS denialism, global warming denialism, stories of his sexual conquests, how he's smarter than the Tenno's wife, that one time a telepathic glowing racoon talked to him, how horoscopes really work, and how he's generally the smartest guy around. A completely retarded book, but fun to read if you can stomach it. I facepalmed more than a few times.

[Anonymous No.6025359]

>>6025348
I've thought about reading this for a while, and your post kinda makes me want to read it more.

[Anonymous No.6025360]

>>6025294
I agree. Pnin often needs to be defended. People mistake the lightness of the plot for poor plotting. The stories and the poems are often underppriciated.

I need to start reading his translated works.

>>6025334

Some of the book drags because of the plotting, I agree, but I think its failures are failures at a higher general level than most works; the book is doing a lot conceptually, thematically and stylistically.

You should try Pnin and the stories.

[Anonymous No.6025368]

>>6025325
we all do friend, we all do.

[MR No.6025383]

>>6025360
I will, thanks for the in depth answer.
I'm tackling Infinite Jest right now and reading lighter stuff on the side, so that will take some time.

[Anonymous No.6025399]

>>6025359
It certainly is unique

[Anonymous No.6025427]

Excession is my favorite book, although I do find it hard choosing out of a few of Iain M. Bank's novels. I know /lit/ is probably going to hate me for it seeing as it's not particularly high brow, but I really enjoy his particular sense of humour and his writing style. Anyone else have any thoughts on this or any of his other stuff? I prefer it to a lot of other sci-fi because it doesn't really pretend to be anything that it isn't.

>inb4 I'm called a pleb for not listing one of the "classics"

[Anonymous No.6025449]

>>6025253
>tfw I read Butler

[Anonymous No.6025492]

>>6025427
I would like to try Banks, what's the best Culture book to start with? Some other anon recommended a short story cycle of his with some Culture stories, I figured I would either do that or Phlebas

[MR No.6025530]

>>6025427
Have you read Ender's Game? It's a very nice read and overall pretty amazing.
Wolfe apparently liked it a lot, so that's like a big "Fuck you." to anyone not liking this book, because it's not "high brow" enough.

[Anonymous No.6025549]

>>6025530
It's not high-brow, it's just pure wish fulfillment and self-insertion for assburger idiots who think they're misunderstood geniuses

stay the fuck away from ender's game

Banks is better

[Anonymous No.6025562]

>>6025492
Tbh, I'd say Excession is a really good one. He'd been writing them for about 10 years at this point so his style had developed a lot. You could read them in order of being written, but I find personally that Consider Phelbas is trash. Skip it, never read it, and start with Player of Games if you want to do it chronologically.

[Anonymous No.6025566]

>>6025530
Yea, I've read Enders game but I much prefer Banks because it effectively reads as a non-pretentious space opera, and I love space opera a lot more than Enders game style stuff.

Enders game was still really enjoyable though.

[Anonymous No.6025570]

This sometimes gets posted on /lit/, "Hard Rain Falling"

It's practically
>feels central
about an orphan trying to live his life, befriending a few small-time gangsters, going on a shitty heist and then off to "reform school", and nothing in his life works out the way he would like it to be, and there's nothing he can do about it. There's been a recent surge in interest in this book starting with NYRB re-publishing it, which it completely deserves.

[MR No.6025577]

>>6025549
Going to disagree. It's just a nicely told, easy to read and enjoyable story.
It's not taxing or intellectual or anything, but it's nit trying to be. I think it's quite self aware on what it is and what not.