Warlock

This sounds nuts

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Found it to be a darkly humorous ride and largely unpredictable. As I was coming towards the end I figured there were one or two ways things played out and while those assumptions were correct. The journey getting there was wholly surprising.

Grenouille was an interesting protagonist, funny as he is cold. The whole cave sequence was so funny and unexpected. Dude was a real sicko.

All the side characters were fleshed out enough and then disposed of once they served their story purpose. I particularly loved hearing what misfortunes befell everyone that houses and used him for one reason or another after he left their company.

I’d give it a 4.5/5. Has anyone else here read it?

I read it last year. It was a pretty good read. The ending was wild

finished King Oedipus by Sophocles

ancient greek tragedy exploring the roles of free will versus determinism in human experience

Bruh I just read goodnight punpun. What the f***

reading Neuromancer with a preexisting understanding of it's place in culture and sci fi I was shocked at how well it was written in addition to being groundbreaking. Like usually something that invents a new genre doesn't have such believable and exciting characters. It's gotta be in my top 10 even outside of basically inventing cyberpunk

Trying to get into the hobby.
Can anyone recommend me some starter books. Definitely interested in Indiana Jones/Uncharted type adventures. Stuff like Harry Potter is cool too. Any good recs?

Indiana Jones is definitely indebted to King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard and probably a ton of obscure dime novels from the 19th century. Closest I've read is probably something like Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The biggest name writing like that in recent decades is probably Michael Crichton? Like Jurassic Park is kind of his spin on an old Arthur Conan Doyle adventure book called The Lost World. Spielberg directed Indiana Jones as well as Jurassic Park for a reason. All pulling from those old comics and dime novels and what not.

Awesome thank you! Any other random fiction recommendations are welcome!

The Ruins by Scott Smith maybe. A bunch of tourists go to an Aztec temple where something is waiting for them. Real fun page turner

Going in blind. All I know is that it’s a western and I rarely read westerns. s***s fire?

It's amazing

anyone read Don Quixoite?

or Uyliss or however it spelled should i read homer before that?

been meaning to read that for a long time

i’m doing a Murakami deep dive rn but maybe i’ll get to it afterwards

At Night, All Blood is Black by David Diop.

It's a short read, about 145 pages but it is dense. Set in WWI, the novel explores the trauma of a Senegalese soldier dealing with trauma because he couldn't bring himself to perform an act of coup de grâce on his injured brother in war, who died slowly and painfully.

You get to watch the soldier's mental state deteriorate from being a "war hero" to a brute that everyone is wary of. It's pretty graphic in terms of the violence, especially in the first half, but it then explores the backstory of these two men and how they became brothers in the first place.

I can see why it won the International Booker Prize, and this might seem like I'm s***ting on the book, but a few of the Booker Prize winners that I've read love their repetitive literary devices. In this novel, there is a repetitive usage of the phrases, "God's truth," "I know, I understand," "My more-than-brother." Depending on your mileage, this will probably intrigue or irritate you but there's a whole lot of it.

Also, the narrator tends to describe trenches in a sexual manner or personalize an abstract feeling into a "loose" woman, if those sort of descriptions makes you feel icky, but yeah it's also there.

I liked it but I didn't love it. The prose started off poetic but then grated on me by the end. It's still good tho.

3/5

Love when a classic lives up to its reputation. This is probably the funniest book I've ever read and a genuinely unique take on the insanity of war. So many memorable characters and scenes and it flips seamlessly from hilarious to heartbreaking and back again in the blink of an eye. Legendary s***

It gets surprisingly dark by the end too

Almost all of those really dark bits have already been mentioned in quite a blasé or funny way. But when the story doubles back round to them and reality sets in the tone changes completely and it hits like a ton of bricks. Masterful writing

Lol I read The Lost World when I was a kid. Completely forgot about it

I only read some Sherlock shorts and Hound of the Baskervilles. Do kids even read old s*** anymore lol

Don't really think so but idk if I can blame them. Most s*** I read as a kid was before I was like 12 or so, after that me and most kids got smartphones and playstations. Now kids are basically born w s*** like that so. I only picked reading back up during covid.

4.5/5

Not much more needs to be said bout this classic. In the hellish of landscapes, The Judge is closest thing to evil incarnate

Would still give the nod to Suttree as my fav McCarthy