RRC Archives

marathonmedic wrote: If you didn't like that, stay away from Dracula. I don't remember much about it except that much of it is correspondence and there isn't much point in reading the book if you already know that Dracula is a vampire. They spend a lot of time working up to what is painfully obvious to us today.

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Stoker's novel, par for the course then, had a lot of the content in correspondence. Although I have trouble with the painfully slow pace of a lot of old stuff, I'm still interested in it. The Gothic novel took a significant stance against the Enlightenment and the Romance literature it inspired. Gothic still lives today. I've been wanting to read The Monk, perhaps one of the first Gothics.

Noir literature is essentially Gothic with the castles and dungeons transposed into the dark alleys of the city.

ZSpider

lordjim_2001 wrote:

ReachHigh wrote:Gun Slinger - Steven King

That's one word Gunslinger. My bet is on the revised edition of Dark Tower I.

If you liked it then I suggest reading the rest of Kings books in this order: http://www.thedarktower.net/connections/roadmap

It will bring everything together.

The gunslinger(Dark Tower I) was a little slow and after reading Ghost Rider I need to read something that flows a little quicker for my own sanity.

Also, never to forget, Kurt Vonnegut

The Player Piano
Slaughter House Five
(and the one title that always eludes me but is CLASSIC Vonnegut, any one help a gal out here, it has Ice-9 in it...grrr)

Other Hemingway- Old Man and the Sea

Va: Cat's Cradle

Zspider wrote:George Martin rocks.

I love his writing, but I really hate this trend of not finishing a novel. It seems like a marketing ploy to me. 800 pages is plenty to finish up what you've got to say. His latest has been several years in coming and all I remember of the earlier novels starts to fade.

Wes wrote:....But, lately, mostly I have been into stuff with lots of pictures

I don't think p0rn counts Wes.

Zspider wrote:The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway

One of my favorites, along with For Whom The Bell Tolls. Vonnegut's also one of my favs. The Sirens of Titan and Breakfast of Champions though I need to revisit that one.

Man, I read the articles as well...

VA, wasn't Slaughterhouse 5 one of the most difficult books to follow or am I mixing it up with something else? I remember reading something that just jumped around a lot and didn't seem to have much of anything holding it together in terms of space and time.

At the end of this week I'm planning on digging into two classic fantasy novels I found at a second hand store. I've been looking for them for a while...

The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany

The Well at the World's End by William Morris

meetVA wrote:Also, never to forget, Kurt Vonnegut

The Player Piano
Slaughter House Five
(and the one title that always eludes me but is CLASSIC Vonnegut, any one help a gal out here, it has Ice-9 in it...grrr)

Other Hemingway- Old Man and the Sea

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You liked Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea? Even though he won the big one for it, I wasn't very impressed with it. I thought almost everything else was better, including The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms. I even preferred the rough edges of To Have and Have Not to it. A Moveable Feast was a blast. It's about half documentary, half fiction, near as I can tell. His posthumous Islands in the Stream was good. Garden of Eden wasn't bad, either. True at First Light was sorta "iffy," somehow reminiscent of his worst work, Across the River and Into the Hills. His autobiographical semi-fiction Green Hills of Africa is spectacular, also.

And with all these novels, there are many people (including me) that think that his short stories are perhaps his best work. A few of the best are The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Hills Like White Elephants (what the hell are those two people talking about?), A Clean Well-Lighted Place, and Cat in the Rain. I didn't mention any of the Nick Adams stories yet. They're good, too.

I'm a big Hemingway fan.

ZSpider

meetVA wrote:Also, never to forget, Kurt Vonnegut

The Player Piano
Slaughter House Five
(and the one title that always eludes me but is CLASSIC Vonnegut, any one help a gal out here, it has Ice-9 in it...grrr)

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God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater?

ZSpider