Some books I like!

[Ken]

Hello. I'm new here, and was very happy to find a forum that wasn't soley concerned with 'Wheel of Time' and 'Lord of the Rings', so I decided to register, and at least post some books I've enjoyed.

My scope of reading is still fairly narrow, and you'll find that the novels I bring up are those that have long been considered "mainstream" or "classic". I'm only a senior in high school. :P

I'll spare the explanations and descriptions for now, because I'm sure that these will be familar to most people.

In no particular order, then!

-- Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
-- The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
-- Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
-- Dracula (Bram Stoker)
-- Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
-- Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
-- The Trial (Franz Kafka)


And I'll stop there. A lot of English-class caliber stuff, obviously, but it's all I really have to work with so far. :P I've read the other traditional 'high school' reads (Catcher In The Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc.), of course, but I particularly enjoyed these.

Bye!

[Wavid]

Hallo Ken. Pleased you like the site - we try and be as eclectic as possible!

Crime and Punishment I am a big fan of. I read it as a slightly worthy 17 year old and loved it, then again a couple of years back and enjoyed it as much again. Never got round to The Brothers... though.

Slaughterhouse 5 always seems to be in the 'Cult' section of Waterstones, but I don't know anything about it - can you give us a quick precis?

Lord of the Flies is a real gem. I did it first at school, but have a well worn copy on my book shelves now.

[Ken]

Slaughterhouse 5 always seems to be in the 'Cult' section of Waterstones, but I don't know anything about it - can you give us a quick precis?


S-5 is about a former soldier named Billy Pilgrim, who was in Dresden during the firebombing of World War I. He has become unglued from time. He frequently jumps back and forth from points in his war experience, his life as an older man back in the U.S., and the planet Tralfamadore, where he has been taken by aliens. Yeah, it's weird. Vonnegut's writing is blunt and hilarious.

One of the main ideas is that the Tralfamadorians believe that people don't actually die or cease to exist -- they are always existing, just in different periods of time. They have the ability to see in the 4th dimension -- they see every moment of someone's life as if every moment is the present, so, even if someone has passed, they still exist permanently in the moments they were living.

It's pretty interesting stuff.

[wshaw]

"Blunt and hilarious". What a great description.

That Slaughterhouse 5 is in part science fiction allowed it to be missed off the the "serious literature" list. That and Vonnegut's irreverent style.

But it's actually a very personal response to the bombing of Dresden - the single largest slaughter of civilians in any war. Vonnegut was there at the time as a prisoner of war and had to help clear up the awful mess. I think it's a brilliant book that was far ahead of its time.

[Wavid]

I might pick it up then, though my backlog of "To Read" books is getting larger and larger since joining this forum.

Damn the internet!

[bloodpixie]

have read a lot of Vonnegut's stuff and really enjoyed it. MOther Night and Galapagos where two of my favs. He has great insight and a fantastic , cutting sense of humour.

He has a fanatstic understanding of the American psyche.

Vonnegut for president!

[John Self]

Yes, Vonnegut for President - but I wonder whether I am alone in (a) being an enormous KV fan, and (b) not actually liking Slaughterhouse-Five much? I tend to agree with John Carey, who used it as an example (in the introduction to his excellent book Pure Pleasure) of a book where the subject matter is more important than the writing - and that just ain't my bag.

My favourite KV's are Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to the Monkey House (stories), Slapstick and Timequake. I think most would agree that his earlier work outshines his later work by several multiples. (All my choices, except Timequake, were from 1973 or earlier.)

If you only read one Kurt Vonnegut book make it Breakfast of Champions. Or The Sirens of Titan. And if you have no idea why people like Ken, bloodpixie and I think he's so good, and you've got just five minutes to spare, click below (tried to do this as a URL link but couldn't...) and find out.

http://penguinppc.org/~hollis/personal/bergeron.shtml

[amner]

That's the first ever Vonnegut I've read and I enjoyed it immensly. Now, one thing, I have at home a book of short SF stores which I got from my school library in the 70s and never took back (in error, but it's a little late to rectify now). I'm no SF fan, but the stories in the collection are terrific:

Chronopolis (http://users.ev1.net/~holliser/Prescience/Text/Chron.html) - J. G. Ballard
Encounter in the Dawn - Arthur C. Clarke
Lenny - Isaac Asimov
The Man Who Rode the Saucer - Kenyon Holmes
The Murderer - Ray Bradbury
Quest - Lee Harding
The True Worth of Ruth Villiers - Michael G. Coney
A Walk in the Dark - Arthur C. Clarke
Who Can Replace a Man? - Brian W. Aldiss

(the Coney story and the Ballard in particular are very memorable) and what the Vonnegut story there does is remind me strongly of all of these. They're all 60s tales, and all written with great verve and aplomb. It must have been a time of great confidence in the genre, because certainly a lot of the names have a great deal of credibility these days ... is that case now?
.

[John Self]

I've been told that Ballard is more or less Vonnegut without the laughs, but I haven't read any. I think the reason for the fluidity of stories in the 50s and 60s was simply commercial - in those decades there were dozens of magazines publishing X stories each Y times a year - Vonnegut does a rough calculation in the intro to his (vastly inferior to Welcome to the Monkey House) collection of early short fiction, Bagombo Snuff Box. Suffice it to say that it really was a writer's market then. Where the availability exists, more people will put effort into writing stories and there will be more high quality ones to be collected and published in collections such as yours at a later date.

[wshaw]

I know John puts Slapstick in his top Vonnegut shelf, but having just read Slapstick for the first time, I was majorly disappointed. To me it seemed the laziest of his books.
Hi ho.

[Jerkass]

You know, the last time I decided to start reading again, several years back, I picked up Slaughterhouse...and, despite the fact that I'm extremely interested in the subject matter, I stopped reading it.

It could just be that I immediately became much more busy at the time I stopped reading (right about when my first daughter was born)...but I think I remember disliking it. Might have been Vonnegut's style...might have to give it another chance at some point, though.

Oh...hiya Ken. Welcome.

[Jerkass]

er...ok...so most of this thread is from 15 months ago...right

in any case, I'm glad John posted that link to Harrison Bergeron, because I was going to say, "I remember reading something by Vonnegut when I was 12 or 13, and it had a character named Harrison Bergeron..."

saved me the trouble of tracking it down