books?

[peaches]

i get into book phases where i'll read like 2 books in a day and be buying books for a week then i'll stop and i won't read anything for awhile....it's kinda said cos i bought like 5 books and i haven't read one of them...and i bought htem like in the summer....anyways, here is my recommended reading list:

Go Ask Alice - excellent, excellent book....i loved this...kinda depressing, sad, a bunch of stuff....it's a really great read tho

Kissing Doorknobs - i read this when i was like 12...but i know that it's a great book even though i've forgotten like details....

Love and Four Letter Words - i read that a long time ago too, but it's a good book

The Subtle Knife
The Amber Spyglass - these two are in a series, i'm not sure what the series is called but it's reallllly good...it's like fantasy/adventure

Alice, I Think - that book is quirky....it was okay in my opinion but it stood out in my mind because the story and writing was unique

and yeah, that's all i can think of right now...

[Mandy]

The Subtle Knife
The Amber Spyglass - these two are in a series, i'm not sure what the series is called but it's reallllly good...it's like fantasy/adventure

yeah that's from the series i was talking about earlier, His Dark Materials Trilogy.

[Dayna]

I love go ask alice, it soo sad.

What happened to mary-anomous
The Outsider-
A clockwork orange-hard to read, but is good
The invisible man

[Mandy]

I love A Clockwork Orange.

[Suzanne]

flygirl00 said:

It's so hard for me to find good books! I'm get very clueless when I enter a bookstore! I really enjoyed the Dan Brown books though. I agree, not the best writer, but the subject matter in each of his books is very fascinating! It makes you question things. Also, I don't care if I'm 23, I am obsessed with the HP series! J.K. Rowling is a genious!

Hey Suzanne, what is "A Confederacy Of Dunces" about!?

Hi blue- eyed- struck



I read this book when I was in college...this is a fantastic description ;D (I didn't write this.)


The comedy of A Confederacy of Dunces is writ large in and between its many lines: a grand farce of overeducated white trash, corrupt law enforcement, exotic dancing and the nouveau riche in steamy New Orleans. The Pulitzer committee thought highly enough of Toole's comic prowess to give his only novel the Prize posthumously. Therein lies the tragedy of this huge and hugely funny book: John Kennedy Toole didn't live to see this now-classic novel published. He committed suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. It was his mother who was responsible for bringing his book to public light, pestering the hell out of Walker Percy, who was teaching at Loyola in 1976, to read it until finally that distinguished author relented. In his foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces, Percy laments the body of work lost to the world of literature with the author's death, but rejoices "that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers."

At the center of A Confederacy of Dunces is that contemptuous hypochondriac, that deadbeat ideologue, that gluttonous moocher Ignatius Reilly. A mountainous college graduate living off his mother's welfare check in her home on one of New Orleans seedy back streets. He spends most of his time waxing melodramatically philosophic, hiding out in the squalor of his bedroom, filling Big Chief writing tablets with his unique brand of Luddite/medievalist/anti-Enlightenment thought and penning incendiary letters to his sex-crazed ex-college-girlfriend Myrna Minkoff. His beleaguered mother by turns dotes and turns on him in their schizophrenic dance between adult child and aging parent.

Waiting on Canal Street for his mother to come back from an arthritis consultation with her doctor, Ignatius gets hauled off by a cop (who thinks the mustachioed mountain in tweed trousers, plaid flannel shirt and trademark green hunting cap looks suspicious). Thus begins a tailspin into one misadventure followed by another and another ad infinitum. Ignatius and his mother, traumatized by the event, step into a sleazy strip joint and drink themselves silly. As they leave, Mrs. Reilly promptly plows her Plymouth into a building.

The dollars in damages they need to pay for their little accident cannot be met by Mrs. Reilly's meager welfare check. So it is that Ignatius grudgingly begins a series of jobs that suck him ever-deeper into the seamy underbelly of 1960s New Orleans. Ignatius' impact leaves the poor souls in his wake insensible and gaping. His work at Levy Pants (file clerk) and for Paradise Vendors (hotdog-pushcart man) bring Ignatius to lead a workers' revolt and become an unwitting soft-core-porn distribution stooge. His arrogance (and flatulence) touch the people he encounters in horrible ways, yet his indignant, malicious blunders make it possible for those he's injured (intentionally or not) to come out better at the far end of the story.

Ignatius Reilly has got to be one of the most off-putting main characters in modern literature, but this hygenically-challenged intellectual oaf has something in common with a soap-opera vixen: you love to hate him. And he's got something in common with a train wreck: he makes you rubberneck and then you find you just can't look away. Ignatius' long-suffering but increasingly independent mother is the novel's unsung heroine. She's by turns insufferably dumb and surprisingly sly. Patrolman Mancuso's decline, fall, and eventual rise all derive from his brush with Ignatius, and his degradations at the behest of his police superiors has readers laughing behind their hands. You feel sorry for the guy, but (sblack person) it's so damn funny! The black vagrant Jones is the only character in the whole bunch of idiots who can really see clearly, nevermind that he's forever looking out at the world through dark glasses and a cloud of his own cigarette smoke. A Confederacy of Dunces is simply and insistently a great, perfect comedy of errors and airs, a farce of Olympic proportions.



I was LMAO just reading this, I hope this helps. ;D

[Dayna]

jrtrobotdance said:

I love A Clockwork Orange.

i've seen the movie and half way through the book. its pretty good

[blue-eyed struck]

Thank you Suzanne! The description itself was funny! I think I'll find and check that book out next time I go to Barnes&Nobles.

[oxobleachoxo]

I read far too much--Here are some current faves:

Life of Pi
The Lovely Bones
American Psycho
The Handmaiden's tale
Cloud Atlas (ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT)
The Time Traveler's wife (A heart breaker :/)
The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime
Norman Bray in the Performance of his life

Those are my picks.

[ontheedge]

Any Patrick McCabe novel. His novels are so interesting.

[Dayna]

the lovely bones!! how could I forget!!!!!, (susie is a great character whearter dead or in an other girls body )

a density of souls
shattering glass, good but VERY confusing
you don't no me
city of ember
the giver
what my mother doesn't no
a tree grows in brooklyn
Ashes of Roses
Valiant making sure I don't fotget any

[tsuki]

My current favorite book is The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. It takes place in pre-revolutionary China so I recommend it to anyone who likes historical fiction.

[peaches]

my friend recommended hte lovely bones to me but i never finished reading it...i'm at like page 50....

but i think most people have read htis book in school or at some point or another, to kill a mockingbird,....at first, i had to read hte first page over like 3 times because it didn't make sense....but i think it's a really great novel...definitely something to read

[hell0sunshine]

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys... by Chris Fuhrman.

and

The Virgin Suicides... by Jeffery Eugenides.

[Mandy]

^ahh! i read, "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys" in seventh grade and i was so freaked out, i was such a immature seventh grader though. my friends and i would read the racey parts out loud, lol.

[lemonade]

I'm reading Eldest at the moment. It's the second in the Inheritance Trilogy by Christopher Paolini. Eragon is the first book. They're fantasy (Dragons, Elves, magic) and you can really tell the author likes Lord of The Rings and Star Wars because it draws from both.