Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton.

What honest, genuine, despicable people.  I found them all to be loathesome to the end, vile creatures unwilling to take a stand on anything, excepting that bitch Zeena, who was allowed to bullyrag everything.  And the final decisive action in Frome's narrative?  I just don't believe it.  I'm not saying that there aren't people out there who wouldn't do things like that, but he's painted as something of a repressed genius throughout the course of the book, only for him to completely turn into a tard?  Bullshits.

1984 by George Orwell.

I never got to it in High School, or the little bit of College I took, so I'm sure I didn't get all the metaphors, and symbolism, and all the other stuff a curriculum would provide. Still, I think this is probably one of the best pieces of literature I have ever read in my life. I'm sure everyone who had read this book since it's release has been able to see parallels within it, and whatever time period they are in, but I think I can honestly say that right now, 2007, is probably as close as we're going to be.

Especially the people who read it  23 years ago.

I lent that to a friend, and I haven't got it back. Either he totally digs it or hasn't read any of it.

Anyways....

Fight Club

It was interesting. I wouldn't say its life changing like some people do, but I liked it, Palahniuck has a way to just strap you in and not let go.

I'd already seen the movie, and relative to that it was just as good. Let me say that again, I already knew what would happen, and I still found the book to be a great novel.

Hell House, by Richard Matheson

Yeah, Matheson seems to hate women. One of the major female characters is pretty much constantly naked for the last half of the novel, gets raped by a ghost, possessed, then dies of internal hemorrhaging when a giant crucifix with a giant boner falls between her legs. And the other one is a repressed drunken lesbian. Not really a fun or scary book. It gets a rating of One bitten, infected breast.



The Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Hollland

If you're like me, you think HBO's Rome is too inaccurate and flamboyant to be worth your while. This book, on the other hand, is an extremely informative and thorough telling of the Republic's downfall. Prefaced by a crash-course in Roman psychology—constant competition for power checked by collective suspicion of those with too much merit—it gives you all the context you could want in an introduction to Roman history. After I finished I really wanted to look up the writings of Cicero and Cato. I wish I had read this before I, Claudius because it puts the events of the novel and Claudius's mindset in perspective. I give it a rating of Four Golden Eagles.

I just went on a quick JD Salinger session.

Franny and Zooey, I went into knowing literally nothing about (Zooey's a guy?), and it's essentially three long conversations, Franny and boyfriend Lane as she gives out about how fake people are, Zooey and his mother as she worries about Franny and he just acts like a dick about it (but we know he cares, really, so it's ok), and then the two title characters as Zooey tries to find out what's wrong with his sister and instruct her on life at the same time. I liked it, the conversations flowed and it was a good depiction of pretentious people coming to terms with being pretentious. Also spiritual crises and family and such. Then The Catcher in the Rye was something I wish I had read when I was younger, because for a lot of it I felt like smacking Holden Caulfield upside the head. Though that's probably mostly because I remember what it's like being a depressed teenager who thinks he's better than the world, and this was a damn accurate portrayal of it.

The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
I had previously read The New York Trilogies, which was one of the creepiest, most astoundingly odd books I've ever read.  It's not horror; it's more accurately described as an existential detective story, but it still spooked me and stayed in my mind for weeks.

The Brooklyn Follies is his most recent novel, and pretty much a completely different kind of book.  It kind of reminded me of John Irving- there's a lonely, older, male protagonist who divides his time between interacting with his maladjusted family and reflecting on his own life.  It was pretty entertaining, although he had a tendency to give away everything that happened about a paragraph before he actually describes it in detail.  I think I want to read more of his earlier works before I make up my mind.

JPod, by Douglas Coupland.

I love Coupland's writing - he employs the first person narrative, which really lets you inside a person's head and state of mind, and his style is laconic, observant, witty, and just smart. Usually, his books have a more or less apparent melancholic undercurrent, and as far as I can tell deal with people trying to find their place in life.

So it was an utter surprise that JPod ist just straight fun. It's about the narrator and his group of colleagues/friends who work as programmers for a gaming company (which for legal reasons is not EA). There the protagonist has to put up with crazy demands by the executives to improve the skateboarding game they work on (by implementing a wise turtle and later switching it to a fantasy setting), while on the homefront he has to deal with a mother who jumps from fling to fling while maintaining a marijuana operation, a Chinese businessman who specializes in spreading (tough) love, and Douglas Coupland, who turns out to be quite the asshole.

And it's very funny. I didn't know Coupland could write just plain funny books without dealing with some existential crisis in them, but indeed he managed to delivered one, so I was pleasantly surprised by every witty remark or highly amusing scenario he wrote - of which there are many. It's still very Couplandian - there are dozens of pages just filled with silent witnesses of the google age, from spam mail over long forgotten search results to thirty pages of pi written out, and it's filled with details that put the story firmly in a very specific epoch (just like Microserfs did with the startup boom of the nineties).

I think it's the perfect starting point for people who never got around to read any of his stuff before, and I think it's his best book yet.

Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner


Without giving too much away, this was one of the best books I've read in years. By the end of it, the tears were falling so freely that I could barely read - all this from a book that I thought I'd have trouble identifying with.

"The First Man in Rome", by Colleen McCullough.

I am a huge fan of Roman history, and this is the single best book on the subject I've ever read. It is an intensely accurate piece of historical fiction written about the rise of Gaius Marius and Marcus Lucius Sulla. McCullough's knowledge of Roman politics and history is mind-boggling, and her grasp of dramatic flair is fantastic.

I urge any of you interested in Roman history to pick up this, or her books on Caesar.