books

[huncamunca]

so how many of you have a copy of One hundred years of solitude on yer bookshelves ?

[Moos]

Ooh, I like this game. Guilty. And Love in The Time of Cholera. And the Autumn of the Patriarch.

On The Road, Jack Kerouac?

[huncamunca]

OTR is terrible toss.

Junky By Burroughs a far better reed

[*Bob*]

I haven't read a single book on our bookshelves.

Not even the ones that look nice.

[StraferJack]

*Bob* IS Davinia Taylor

[Huguenot]

Hmm...

Sophie's World?

[mockney piers]

can't we just call this thread 'overrated x episode 453'.

At least it's not bands with umpteen people telling us how awful the Beatles were.

Aaaanyway, with you on OTR, I'd add most of Burroughs' output in there too, terribly dated and very dull.

I did try a GGM novel a while back but got bored very quickly, a latin american Henry James if you ask me. I am rather partial to Mario Varga Llosa though. La Ciudad y Los Perros (I think it's The Time of the Hero in English) is well worth a read, right up your street snunks, all having a pop at the establishment and revealing societal hypocrisy and stuff.

Reading Karl Marlantes Matterhorn at the moment; was initially reluctant as Vietnam's a bit done isn't it, but any book that took 35 years to write has to be worth some attention if just to appreciate the sheer bloody mindedness of it all.

[Moos]

A Brief History Of Time, of course.

Bob, the books that look nice are not for reading. They're for looking at. The books that are for reading are the colourful ones by your bed by Andy McNab / Freya North (select as applicable).

[Moos]

Hmm. But then, I like Henry James too.

[Moos]

And Mockers, this is a snorky thread so I think the topic is what you think your bookshelves say about you vs. what they actually say. Oder?

Or have I got that wrong, OP?

[Ted Max]

my taste in books > your taste in books.

[huncamunca]

I tend to judge books by their cover.

[Huguenot]

I had *Bob* down as more of a Tom Clancy guy. I've seen him in jeans and a bomber jacket with a tiger's head on the back.

[Huguenot]

And I thought that this thread was some kind of post ironic middle class piss-take?

[Ted Max]

http://images53.fotki.com/v440/photos/9/127099/8282594/101UsesforDeadCat-vi.jpg

[Annette Curtain]

I have, but somebody bought it for me.

( he checked into the Priory shortly after )

Does that count ?

[Moos]

You could well be right. And how about you, did you have a Jay McInerney phase?

Edited to correct spelling and to say @Huguenot re: Bob

[Otta]

Does liking a particular type of book, make you clever / cool / sad / boring? I read every day, but most of it is not very challenging, because I find the rest of my life challenging enough. I read to get away from that stuff.

[*Bob*]

Actually, I have read one of them - 'Fred and Rose'. A friend of mine lent their copy to me whilst on holiday and it proved to be an excellent beach read.

Indeed, I enjoyed it so much I bought it for Mrs *Bob* as a Christmas gift. Needless to say she was delighted.

[Huguenot]

For some reason I didn't, so I shall make amends.

A JG Ballard phase?

[Ted Max]

Is there a Boden-approved reading list for the summer?

From past catalogues I'm going Beevor's Stalingrad. Amsterdam and Atonement, from Ian McE. Nothing from Richard & Judy's sales promos, obv.

This summer's "most-packed on top of the iPad charger before hitting the A303" will be The Crimson W@nk Fantasy and the White, but not with the BBC cover pic, clearly.

[Moos]

Me or you?

Me, no. But I'll admit to John Grisham.

[Moos]

Anyway, Otta has a point. Very few of us have the mental capacity to be true polymaths, even if we had the time, so there isn't much justification for the bookish to look down on those who get their intellectual kicks elsewhere. The rule does seem to be the usual nonsense about the obscurer the better. Oh, and liking reading poetry makes you either super-cool and intellectual, or a pretentious twonk.

[Huguenot]

Any of these from this purported Top 50 books of the last century? I'm embarrassed to admit that I've read precious few on the list...

1. Ulysses by James Joyce

2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

6. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

7. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

8. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

9. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

11. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

12. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

13. 1984 by George Orwell

14. I, Claudius by Robert Graves

15. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

16. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

17. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

18. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

19. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

20. Native Son by Richard Wright

21. Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

22. Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

23. U.S.A.(trilogy) by John Dos Passos

24. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

25. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

26. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

27. The Ambassadors by Henry James

28. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy by James T. Farrell

30. The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford

31. Animal Farm by George Orwell

32. The Golden Bowl by Henry James

33. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

34. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

35. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

36. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

38. Howards End by E.M. Forster

39. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

40. The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

41. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

42. Deliverance by James Dickey

43. A Dance to the Music of Time

[vol 1] [vol 2] [vol 3] [vol 4] by Anthony Powell

44. Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley

45. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

46. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

47. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

48. The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence

49. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence

50. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

[mockney piers]

Ah I see moos, yes of course you're right, what's on the guardianistas' coffee tables and all that.

Jonathan Livingstone Seagull anyone?