(Part 2) Best products from r/bookclub

Definitley Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami. Its about a dude who's wife leaves him and he has to find her. There is even a talking cat and some dream state scenes. some of it is a retelling of different histories and it has a lot of branching narratives. Kafka On The Shore is another great one by Murakami.

For Vonnegut,you're likely looking for Sirens of Titan, a retelling of Jonah and the Whale through an Alice and Wonderland lens. It's got a character who is very much representative of the Cheshire Cat. He has three different phases. His early books are the best. After (or even during) Breakfast of Champions he start writing a little more autobiographically (Slapstick is about his late sister and Hocus Pocus is about his brief tenure at Rollins college) and it's not as poignant (I don't think). And then later with stuff like Galapagos, he goes back to more philosophical lit, but it doesn't pack the same punch as his first phase.

Finally, House of Leaves is an amazing haunted house book that dramatically alters how you read a book. His other work is good too, but I haven't given any of it enough attention.

Edit: If you want to get meta, check out Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth or If On a Winter's Night a Traveler... by Italo Calvino.

Edit: more readable copy of the essay is here. I left in the stuff below about finding giveaway essays in Amazon because I've found often with classics you can find interesting analysis in the kindle previews.

Yeah, you find the book on Amazon, then get to the page for the kindle edition. When you're there, the "Look Inside" picture on the left has distinctive look, with a little tab that says "kindle edition" - not sure if this link will work.

THen click on the "look inside" and poke around. On the kindle edition, instead of giving you a sample of the text, they often give you just "front matter." Which they do in this case, and it's the essay.

It's an irritating thing in a lot of cases, for example if you're trying to see how they have notes set up on a Shakespeare edition, you typically can't - all the "Look Inside" lets you do is see essays at the beginning of the book. But there are some good essays on things like Blake or Homer or Tolstoy books.

More about kindle that might be of interest to a bookish lot of people...

I've also found so far with kindle books, if I buy something it turns out I don't like the internal formatting (with a lot of poetry for example) they just give me my money back if I go to "Manage your content and devices" and do a return.

More about Anna Karenina - if anyone wants to discuss the essay or anything else about Anna K, it's still fine to do so in this sub, just create a new post with Anna Karenina in the title

Let The Great World Spin by Colum McCann
National Book Award Winner 2009: It's an interesting story that weaves multiple plots together, and even tells the stories through multiple POVs. The plots are all brought together by a tightrope walking feat between the Twin Towers.

General

The Genius and the Goddess by Aldous Huxley

>“Why do you love the woman you're in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God's own definition of Himself; I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representations of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance.”

>One of the greatest books I've ever read. I plan on reading it 1,000 times more.

Let's continue here with a book that should be near and dear to many Redditors' hearts:

• Watchmen, by Alan Moore and David Gibbons
  
  This is somewhat of a new classic in graphic novels, and broke through such that TIME magazine put it in their list of 100 best novels of the past 80 or so years. No small achievement for what many may still consider "just a comic book".
  
  Let's read it by October 1.
  
  Here are a couple good sources:
  
  
• Amazon
  
• Your local library

[Kitchen Confidential] (https://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Confidential-Updated-Adventures-Underbelly/dp/0060899220) by [Anthony Bourdain] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Bourdain)

I read this on Kindle on through their Lending Library (it might still be on there) and loved it. It's a great look inside kitchens and Bourdain is a good writer.

Edit: inserted title and author

I started Russian literature with Crime and Punishment as well! It's still one of my favorite books, and I think I've read it three or four times by now. Dostoyevsky's writing is so rich, and he explores his characters like a psychologist. I'd also recommend his "Note from Underground."

Sadly, I don't speak any Russian, but when I was buying a copy of "The Master and Margarita," I did look at several excerpts comparing the translations. I've done a bit of translating myself (only in academic settings), and it's remarkably hard to try to capture all aspects of the original work - there's the literal meaning, the sense of the language, the rhythm of the line... you can rarely get them all. There's an interesting book called, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which explores 19 different translations of the same poem - it's fascinating how different they are!

I'm about 2/3 through this one:

D DAY Through German Eyes - The Hidden Story of June 6th 1944


If you're interested in WW2, I definitely recommend it. Understandably it does have some pretty graphic content, so just a heads up.

I found InfiniteSummer to be extremely helpful when reading Infinite Jest. Perhaps this site will prove to be just as helpful for Gravity's Rainbow. The site seems to have various resources (chapter summaries, introduction, links to wiki's, links to papers) at our disposal. Happy reading!

Also, I really recommend avoiding Penguin's edition of Gravity's Rainbow. The edges are frayed, which prove to be rather cumbersome when flipping through a 750ish page book :|

"El Garante" ("Collateral Man") - Based on a multiple award winning argentine TV mini-series. The book is much better than the TV series, as it was written as an adaptation for the american public intended to be made into a Hollywood movie.
The plot goes like this: Martin Mondragon, a young psychologist living in New York, is contacted by a misterious man called Joe Sagasti about a will from his grandfather. Upon meeting with the man, Sagasti explains he's an agent for the Devil, and Martin's grandfather made a deal with the Devil and didn't pay the price (his soul). As his first male descendant, Martin is the collateral man for the contract, and must surrender his soul - without expecting anything in return. Great thriller!

PS: Have a look at the reviews on Amazon!

I'll probably have to re-read some of Hero pretty soon and figure out to what extent the stages of the monomyth might be used in the plotline of IJ, but I really like your point about the external/internal. It runs through a lot of Wallace's work and its such an important of IJ because its dealt with across many characters and themes.

I looked at pg. 607, I couldn't see it and I have this edition.

Avril is a total enigma to me. I read up to about 550 last year, and one of the last scenes I read was [spoiler](/s"Pemulis walking in on Avril & Wayne playing football").

General

[The Glass Bead Game] ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/009928362X?pc_redir=1397308069&robot_redir=1 ) by Hermann Hesse.

Had this on my shelves for a while. Seems like it'd be a good one to discuss.

From Amazon:
>In the remote Kingdom of Castalia, the scholars of the Twenty Third century play the Glass Bead Game. The elaborately coded game is a fusion of all human knowledge - of maths, music, philosophy, science, and art. Intrigued as a school boy, Joseph Knecht becomes consumed with mastering the game as an adult. As Knecht fulfils his life-long quest he must contend with unexpected dilemmas and the longing for a life beyond the ivory tower.

I'd really be interested in anthropology, science, and bestsellers as you mentioned. I'm also getting into science fiction. I'm really open to new genres as long as its not too long (under 400-500) and I can get most of what we read from the library.

Lately I've read When Breathe Becomes Air, The Killer of Little Shepherds, and Branded Beauty. All 3 are non fiction, two semi-biographical. Parts of Metro 2033, based on the video game.

I'm really interested in reading [Visual Anthropolgy: Photo as a Research Methos](Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method https://www.amazon.com/dp/0826308996/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_hSaIyb7CP5P64). But understand if its not everyone's cup of tea. :)

The Zamonia-Novels by Walter Moers:
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They are funny, gruesome, surreal and simply brilliant. Look at the reviews on amazon. Especially Rumo and The City of the Dreaming Books were unputdownable.