How does this one compare to Hurricane Season? I really liked that but man it was bleak

haven't read Hurricane Season yet actually. I read Melchor's Aquí No es Miami which was non-fiction but pretty harrowing too

you could definitely describe Paradais as bleak, about as far as you can get from a feel good novel lol

Now Is Not The Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson

really enjoyed his book Nothing To See Here so gave his new novel a try. it's about two nerdy kids in high school who unknowingly create an artistic movement that gets out of hand and the repercussions they face from it. it's getting a lot of hype, and it was well written and I liked it, but nothing to make it that memorable imo.

7/10

White Noise by Don DeLillo

wanted to give this a read before the Netflix movie came out. it's about a suburban family adapting to post war American dream culture while dealing with national emergencies and an unrelenting fear of death. wasn't a big fan of DeLillo's prose, but he did a good job expounding on the conflicting moods of comfort and dread. not sure about the ending, but I could see why this book has gotten so much praise

8/10

also read The Passenger (9/10) and Stella Maris (6/10) and wrote my reviews in the Cormac McCarthy thread

Dope thread op

dude you should see my bookshelf I'm a s*** for the nyrb

thanks for stopping by. would love for you to contribute when you get a chance

Need to read this one as well.
Started this book a couple of months ago and stopped after 20 pages, need to give it another try.

just finished another Jean-Patrick Manchette novel, my second in a week. These books are amazing. The violence reads like an awful, gory, horrific John Wick. The politics are interesting, but Manchette knows not to steer the plot too far in that direction so that it stalls its acceleration. I was left with lots to google about the workings of French police.

I could read dozens of these. They're quick, they stick with you, and they're grim. I read the entire thing in one sitting, and I think that's the best review I could give it.

Only copped some because of this thread shoutout you guys

White Noise 4/5

Comical and philosophical. We don't see things because we see them. Hyperreality is a thing.

A Natural History of the Senses

"Our senses define the edge of consciousness. They don't just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern."

Seen Michael Gira of Swans dig this book, gotta look into this

That’s crazy that you weren’t a fan of the prose that’s easily my favorite thing about delillo

I would check out libra if you’re interested in reading more of his stuff that book is magic

11/22/63 was really disappointing for me. There were some enjoyable moments (and I did actually cry reading a scene in the middle of it) but the novel absolutely did not justify its 1000+ page length. A lot of the stuff they set up in the opening pages of the novel just goes absolutely nowhere.

And I actually did enjoy stephen’s other two doorstoppers (the stand and IT) quite a lot. IT in particular which is one of my favorite books

It did provide me with a lot of historical information that made me enjoy libra a lot more though so there’s that lol

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”

a classic.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.

To think this is Morrison’s debut! What an incredible writer she is. It’s like reading poetry. It’s beautiful and horrific and honest and vulnerable and endearing and vile all at once. Can’t wait to continue diving into her bibliography.

Just finished Star Wars: X Wing: Wraith Squadron (book so nice they had to name it twice). It's a stupid book, but damn is it fun. Easy character development, easy plot movement, they go to a huge variety of planets. Lots of long descriptions of space battles which can be kind of hard to follow and tend to drag on if that's not your speed. I'll read as many of these as I can get my hands on, they're quick and they're fun

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

This is the only pic I could find sry. I read both this and The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery because I was just so interested in the concept of distributed intelligence, not having all your thoughts happening in one place but, in your arms, independently. I think this book is more philosophical and less focused on the scientific questions of the origins of consciousness which is what I am interested in but I still learned a lot and it was mandatory reading for his sequel "Metazoa" which hopefully goes into that question of where conscious came from in depth in vertebrates at least. I think the most powerful quote and takeaway is "The mind evolved in the sea."

It's such a simple statement but it carries so much weight. This is what draws us to the ocean. Our mind is the product of the ocean, the answers to the deep origins of our conscience are in the sea yet here we are destroying the one place that made us possible. We are deep-sea creatures on the inside, that forgot where they came from even though we spend the first 9 months of our lives in an ocean-like environment inside of our mothers. But, while our conscious forgot all of this, our subconscious never did but I'm going on a tangent and that's just my opinion. It's a good book.

Just finished The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria. Short book about a journalist investigating a series of bizarre unsolved murders years ago in Turin. It's a dark book, and works on a lot of allegorical levels. The story is engaging, and the conclusion is freaky even though it isn't given the gravitas it deserves. I also wish the author had played up the paranoia aspect of the story. Probably like a 4/5

Seb got a interesting way of writing. I really enjoyed this, the change in style from the first half to the second half was stark. The ending left me sitting there wondering if I missed something but I think that's just how this book goes. Beautiful depiction of healing, love, and with such poetry. 4/5

Belongs in the pantheon of all time great westerns. There is so f***ing much inside this book - the frontier town of Warlock is so richly detailed that you end up knowing every little corner of it and the dozens of characters are so well painted that you feel like you're living right there with them. A perfect deconstruction of the myth of the wild west and exploration of the blurred lines between heroes and villains. And yet it reads like a thriller for 500 straight pages, not a single wasted word.

There's an absolutely gushing blurb on the back written by Thomas Pynchon where he calls it one of the greatest American novels and you can't really argue with old pinchy can ya

A nice little 1-2 punch (heheh) to start the year

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Damn this was so good and a super fast read.
Some of the changes from the movie version are very nice, and that ending was super unexpected.
I have to give a big shoutout to the afterword from the author, not sure if it is available on every version or if it's only on the one I have, but goddamn that was as good as the book itself.

It's a shame that the book and movie adaptation have been so wrapped in controversy because of boneheads who can't understand the main point of the story.

I also rewatched the movie after reading the book, and its so so good man f*** what anyone says.

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

You know that feeling when you finish a Murakami novel and nothing in your life seems real? Goddamn what a master at work.
This is my fourth Murakami novel(out of 14), and every single one was amazing.
I found out that this is a third entry in the Rat trilogy with 10 pages left, and I haven't read the other two, but this worked perfectly as a standalone so I don't think it matters too much.
Maybe my favorite author ever

just finished Devil House by John Darnielle s*** was great, one of the weirder, more thoughtful books I’ve read. It’s basically about the moral implications of true crime media and the impact it has on everyone involved, expressed through a fictional narrative about a true crime author trying to research/write his latest novel.

I think I enjoyed this one better than his debut Wolf in White Van. haven’t read Universal Harvester yet tho

Oooh I thought this one was super interesting. I love the 1, 2, 3, 2, 1 pattern of the stories, and how the first time the writer tells the story it's the true crime version, the second time it's the more intimate human version. I just kind of wished more happened. I was a huge fan of Universal Harvester too, spookier than this one and more focused

Just finished this one a few nights ago. It's so interesting to me to read about radical politics in other countries informed by their history and their struggles. I thought the dismissive attitude the author takes towards anarchism was kind of funny and reflected in the characters, even if I don't necessarily agree with it.

Also finished this last night and goddamn. I don't really know what to say except that it kept my interest the entire time which I didn't expect since it's so unconventional. And the last Polo-Khan exchange was incredible