calculatedChaos Gaming

Are you feeling intellectually flabby and out-of-shape? Getting tired of lame video game and anime plots? Want to challenge your brain? If so, you've come to the write place~! (Kill me)

So anyway, earlier this year I found myself in a rut. I wanted to catch back up on my non-school reading, especially now that I knew my way around literature much more than when I was in high school. I went to go check out books from the library or buy old books from local bookstores but I wouldn't read them beyond a few pages. After a few cycles of this routine, I got really disappointed in myself and felt that I should do better. After some spurring from a good friend of mine, I dedicated to myself to reading a little book called Infinite Jest. After two months, I finished all 1089 dense pages of it. The novel is hella thought provoking, made me reflect a lot on my own life and brought my vocabulary up several notches. (Fantods is now my favorite word ever)

Reading on my own time seriously improved my quality of life, and now I want to share this incredible secret with you. Challenge yourself; read "difficult" books, read literature, not pulp-y self-affirming stuff. I can give recommendations that will help you with this. So, in this topic, talk about books you've read, list out books you're going to read, give recommendations and all that forum jazz. If you want, I'll put your to read/have read list into this OP. Here's mine:

Riftoff's list:

Currently reading
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Recently finished
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

On deck
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

In the future
The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner
The Name Of The Rose by Umberto Eco
The Island Of The Day Before by Umberto Eco
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
*something* by Johnathan Franzen
The End Of The World News by Anthony Burgess
*something* by Philip K Dick
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
and many more

Places to find good books:
Time Magazine's Top 100 books from 1923 to 2005: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packa ... 93,00.html
The Guardian's 1000 books to read before you die:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/ ... ne/reviews

this seems like the bad anime club

only it doesn't scare people off.

Wow, this is actually convenient. I am in the middle of reading multiple books at once..terrible idea when I think about it.

Books I am currently reading

Armageddon's Children- People living in Post-apocalyptic America, original topic.
Re-reading the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
The Strain- Its about vampires.

Currently Reading
nothing since i need to get to the library -_-

Finished Reading

Paper Towns- John Green

Planning to Read (or Reread)

Fault In Our Stars- John Green
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Haunted- Chuck Palanuik
Invisible Monsters- Chuck Palanuik
Diary- Chuck Palanuik
A Thousand Splendid Suns- Khaled Hosseini
Someone Else's Garden: A Novel- Dipika Rai

The only books I have laying around here are Dune and an X-men comic from the 80's I picked up for 3 bucks
So...

On deck
Dune


Also, not sure if you'd consider him pulp-y or not (I certainly don't) but the works of H.P. Lovecraft are available for free reading on wikipedia. Some of the language used is a bit odd for a 20th century writer, but there's some good imaginative, shit right here that made me feel simultaneously creeped the fuck out, vulnerable, and insignificant in the universe. A fun read for the kids.

I'm not a fan of Lovecraft, but he has merit and increasing the ratio of people who have read Lovecraft's work to people who reference Lovecraft but haven't read anything by him, i.e. lol munky cheese cthulu.

Pulpy was a poor choice of words on my part, there is some pulp fiction worth reading. I suppose a better term for what I mean is "airport fiction", empty "pageturners" with recycled plots and settings and terrible prose/etc. The Da Vinci Code and all its godawful derivatives are examples.

I don't really read books, I normally am a magazine reader.

thought I did read a book called He Crashed me, so I Crashed Him Back

Recent

He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back

Currently Reading:

LoTR Book # 1

In the near future:


LoTR Book # 2

LoTR Book # 3 ( Yes i do know the book titles i just don't feel like typing them)

last recent reads
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Prince by Machavelli
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
The Apocrypha
The Torah
Enuma Elis
The Koran (parts)
Walden - H.D. Thoreau


On Deck
Idylls of the king by alfred, lord tennyson
The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
Walden- H.D. Thoreau

Current
Leaves of Grass - W.Whitman
Walden - H.D. Thoreau ( i re-read this book as soon as i'm finished with it.)

Currently Reading

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (Too lazy to look up to see if I'm right or not. :/ )
Give War a Chance by P.J. O'Rourke

Recently Read

Lord of the Rings series


Also, Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of my favorite books ever. Brits are the best

What a coincidence, since i just started getting back to reading just a few days ago.

Finished:

Cross Fire by James Patterson

Reading:

Needful Things by Steven King

plan on reading:

Sounds Of The Beast: The complete headbanging story of Heavy Metal by Ian Christe

Reading

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.

Plan on Reading

Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters.

the last book I read was Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and I've been pretty much breezing through Philp K. Dick's shit for like two months

I'd recommend everything Kurt Vonnegut has ever written for pretty much everyone (he's my personal favorite author). Pick up and read any of his books, you'll probably like it
his best work is Cat's Cradle if you ask me

BAMF wrote:the last book I read was Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and I've been pretty much breezing through Philp K. Dick's shit for like two months

I'd recommend everything Kurt Vonnegut has ever written for pretty much everyone (he's my personal favorite author). Pick up and read any of his books, you'll probably like it
his best work is Cat's Cradle if you ask me

I'll have to agree with you about Cat's Cradle being Vonnegut's best.

I also have been meaning to read some Philip K. Dick/Anthony Burgess for a while now, but haven't got around to it. Probably read some in the fall.

In other book news, I finished The Pale King today, and though it clearly wasn't as dense or finished as Infinite Jest (on account of DFW committing suicide before he finished it), it's still a very intelligent, hilarious and insightful addition to his works. The chapter about the pathologically nice kid makes me smile just thinking about it. I also related a lot to Chris Fogle's character in his monologue about growing up in the 70s (and really growing up in general).

Reading
War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

Have already read
Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
Sunrise over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers - Favorite

Gravity's Rainbow has some fucking great lines:

"A million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it."

"Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity."

"Homosexuality in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper."

Currently reading:
J.D. Salinger by Kenneth Slawenski
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman


Recently finished:
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Depraved by Harold Schechter


Planning to read:
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Currently reading:

the ropemaker
treasure island
dresden files 1


Read in the past month or two:

atlas shrugged
persepolis
consciousness explained
cosmos

Currently Reading:
Rule 34 by Charles Stross
In The First Circle by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn


Recently Finished:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
Lost on Planet China by J. Maarten Troost

Plan on reading:
Lolita by Nabokov
The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne
The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost

Celtic wrote: Read in the past month or two:
atlas shrugged

I feel bad for you

I've just started dual reading The Road and Nueromancer and I'm really digging them both. I'm not as much of a sci-fi fan as I used to be so I'm getting more fun out of The Road.

Riftoff wrote:Gravity's Rainbow has some fucking great lines:

thinking about getting Gravity's Rainbow, would you recommend it?

I don't take anything ayn rand writes to heart. I re-read it recently just to debate with another member on a forum.

BAMF wrote:

Celtic wrote: Read in the past month or two:
atlas shrugged

I feel bad for you

I've just started dual reading The Road and Nueromancer and I'm really digging them both. I'm not as much of a sci-fi fan as I used to be so I'm getting more fun out of The Road.

Riftoff wrote:Gravity's Rainbow has some fucking great lines:

thinking about getting Gravity's Rainbow, would you recommend it?

Get The Crying Of Lot 49 before you get Gravity's Rainbow. Lot 49 is a much better introduction to Pynchon's bizarre prose and general themes of paranoia, mostly because it's a fraction of the length of Gravity's Rainbow, but also because it's less dense with characters and the references are to stuff in 60s California and not the last few years of WW2 in London.

this could help!
http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/

haven't tried it yet but just thought i'd post it here.

bump.

reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green on January 10th.

Currently reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

Tampashrew wrote:Currently reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

lmao, good one

I'm currently reading the complete work of H.P lovecraft

TheBlindKhezu wrote:I'm currently reading the complete work of H.P lovecraft

GALADOOSTAY.


Right now, I'm reading Only a Theory which is a book that pretty much tears apart everything that the ID "theory" has ever proposed.

Going to start reading The Hunger Games. My best friend and girlfriend both say they loved it, so they forced it upon me. But hell, I'll give it a shot.

Currently Reading:
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

Recently Finished:
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
The Invisible Man
Frankenstein

Plan on Reading:
Jurassic Park
H.P. Lovecrafts books
Alice In Wonderland

After taking AP English, I've really gotten into reading and I saw these really awesome books at Barnes and Nobels that I want to buy, Two of which I go for Christmas, Hitchhikers and Jurassic Park