good stuff, keep em comin,we should start a book club here!

thanx everyone who did not mention architectural books, I'm trying to prove to my sister that architects aren't so dull.

not sure if this has been said, but,

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

by David Eggers

sartre's nausea

Various writings by Fyodor Dostoevsky.... in particular Notes From Underground

The Rule of Four

By Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason

It's about the Hypnerotomachia anyone heard of it? No one knows who wrote it for sure and a lot of people say it was Alberti.

devil in the white city is a great read

just finished palahnuik's Lullabyn and garcia-marquez's No One Writes to the Colonel
starting on mike davis's Dead Cities

i wanna read that book about rats

Just finished Rule of Four - was just OK for me. Have been doing some research on Hypnerotomachia recently and thought i should check it out. For my money, LeFaivre's book, which argues for Alberti as the author, was more interesting.

Gravity's Rainbow is great, though it's a serious undertaking - you'll probably want to have a reader's guide (fowler's is best) nearby to keep track of it.

danielewski's House of Leaves is also worth a look. Might seem a little gimmicky to some, but it raises some interesting theoretical issues. HEre's a great essay about it, though you'll have to access it from a university: link

Also, check out David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, as well as his short stories.

The Histories.
Herodotus

M+1 ... I read the hypnoerotomachia poliphili .... pretty baroque stuff. i think that the authorship issue is debatable (liane le faivre says LB Alberti wrote it; everyone else seems to think that it was Francesco Colonna).

for science fiction folks:

dhalgren -- samuel r. delany

the stars my destination, the demolished man, or GOLEM100 -- alfred bester

the diamond age -- neal stephenson

Also, for all Nabokov lovers, read "Transparent Things". It was his last novel.

Nabokov's Pale Fire is also great.

and Houellebecq's Elementary Particles and Sebald's Rings of Saturn have both made the rounds in architectural circles.

TG this thread is free of anything architecural, thanx

Eggers was mentioned above - after 'heartbreaking work' read 'you shall know our velocity' - two guys try to travel around the world giving away $33 000. Deft.

Read Hamlet again. You can never read Hamlet too many times.

i was done with atlas shrugged last week.

spiderdad, monkey- how did you guys find it? i found fontainhead better than this one. oh dagny=SLUT.

btw anybody using objectivism as a way of life? just curious..

currently reading 'psychology of visual isslusion' by j.o robinson. i picked it up for a different reason, but found its not all tat interesting.

a great one especially if you are unemployed is georgie orwell's down and out in paris and london.

objectivism is a philosophy for children who like to believe that the world revolves around them.

didn't read it lately, but it occurred to me that some here would find it interesting:

'a void' by georges perec, translated by gilbert adair.

mindwarp 1: an entire novel, almost 300 pages, a parody/thriller of sorts, in which the french author uses not a single 'e'. a challenging read, but actually well done and consistently intriguing.

mindwarp 2: this novel was written, without 'e's, in french. adair translated it into english, also with no 'e's!

sounds gimmicky - and is - but also a compelling read.

one of my favorites in "dubliners" by james joyce. a very nice collection of short stories. it is well written and i often read a selection just before going to bed to get my mind off of things.

The latest McSweeney's, Egger's and friends are a wacky bunch....

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, like Hamlet, can never be read too many times.

I also read Guns Germs and Steel some time ago. It was a great book.

Lately I read Hacker's Ethic by Pekka Himanen. It is all about the imposed social structures and rules, scholastic way of leading a life. Two thumbs Up!!!

Paris: Both elementary particles and Rings of Saturn are novels with no explicit architectural content. Just turns out lots of architects have turned up reading them. . .

i'm re-reading Voltaire's Candide

TG, and others who like David Foster Wallace, try "Fool on the Hill" and especially "Sewer, Gas, & Electric" by Matt Ruff. Fantasy urban mythologies, very funny and smart. The latter is thick, like Infinite Jest (which I never got all the way trhough), but intense. Great characters and funny visions of future cities.

Rita, I enjoy reading your ruminations on Kahn. If you haven't read it yet, "Green Grass Grace" is an amazing read, written by Shawn McBride who grew up near Tacony Park. Anyone would enjoy this book, it's one of the most laugh-out-loud funny books I've ever read, but Philly residents should absolutely read it. Matt Ruff, mentioned above, is also a Philly guy, BTW.

agfa8x, I have to agree about Snow Crash. If you are interested in some better cyberpunk reading, stick to William Gibson. Burning Chrome is a great collection of short stories that explore people rather than tech.

Libertbell, all of TC Boyles books are fantastic reads. I love his short stories, but my favorite novel has to be East is East.

As for my current reads:

William Gibson - Pattern Recognition
John Steinbeck - The Pearl
Neil Gaiman - Coraline
Ursula KI. LeGuin - The Left Hand of Darkness (signed by the author and falling apart from reading it over and over)

you guys should read the book maximum city. its about bombay, therefore its relevant in all sorts of ways.

also bombay related, i thought that "shadow cities" by robert neuwirth? was excellent. it focuses on squatters as the generators of city growth and also rethinks some of the assumptions that most of us in the west take for granted, i.e., that ownership of land/real estate is more important than possesion or use.

slide009 -- "The Left Hand of Darkness" is one of my faves as well. I've read it twice, and it has this incredible sense of melancholy to it.

Good choice!!!!!

Arthur Nersesian -- Suicide Cassanova

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

Pastoralia - George Saunders

slide009: hows pattern recognition? I haven't read any gibson, but I have neuromancer about two books down in my stack-of-books-to-read.

so-so... typical gibson. lotsa flash, not a lot of substance. quick and decently fun read though. i think stephenson is much better.

I agree, Pattern was a good, fun read, but not much more than that.

Cryptonomicon was the only Stephenson book I really enjoyed. Most of his work tends to be more pulp oriented. Gibson's earlier novels go a little deeper into exploring ethical issues in technology. He's also had some good articles in Wired mag.

Neuromancer was the best of the series, but it's always been his short stories that stood out to me.

It's all pretty much pulp though. Sci-fi is a great vehicle to explore human existence. However, very few authors really use it. Ursula K LeGuin is one of the few that has really pushed the genre to it's depths.

well, if you're right, I might just read neuromancer and then move on to leguin. is 'left hand of darkness' the right place to start?

harlan ellison has also pushed the boundaries of where scifi/speculative fiction might go, in addition to being a right cranky old bastard... and occasionally phillip k dick reaches the heights too. (especially with valis)

george saunders is the best-- civilwarland in bad decline is one of my favorite collections. its the perfect subway post-work read. ditto for anything by chuck klosterman. and jumpa lahiri's short stories are captivating as well, but for (obviously) completely different reasons.

yesterday i picked up "Super Cannes" by j.g. ballard

Left Hand of Darkness was my first read of hers. There's a reason it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards when it was first published.

i'm a long-time umberto eco fan. first got hooked on 'name of the rose' before the movie came out. so...

picked up his new one, "the mysterious flame of queen loana", last night. still in first edition! flipping through it, looks like an intriguing mix of text and comic-esque color graphics. cool.

jt leroy-the heart is deceitful above all things
if you can handle it that is

oh my another good one is persipolis marijane sarapi
its a comic book on her childhood in tehran during the 79 islamic rev. and what not.

yeah whatever like you not skimming over this anyway

The Power of Now

Construction Funding

has no one discovered murakami?

also i'm surprised not to see kundera. isn't it funny how kundera and garcia-marquez seem to be standards that are often mentioned together?

murakami is the king. windup bird chronicle makes my top ten. that book made the rounds amongst my social circle a few years ago. i read about half his stuff after that. all kinda samey after two or three books. but if you have to pick just one...

kundera is all i read when i was 18/19. i'm interested in rereading a kundera, but i'm unable to break that book's connection with the young romantic idealistic me and unwilling to revisit that long dead part of me.

can anyone tell me what to expect from manuel de landa's "a thousand years of nonlinear history"? i've had it on my amazon wishlist for a year and finally decided to interlibrary loan it to test drive it. is it good? bullshit?

it's good, even if you don't buy into the underlying biological metaphors. purely as a history lesson it's fascinating, and he does have some penetrating observations.

kundera, 'the unbearable lightness of being' has several passages that stick with me, but I read it in a particularly un-romantic way.

i find eco going downhill in his novels. 'name of the rose' was great, i haven't read 'foucault's pendulum', i thought 'the island of the day before' was good and built well, but went limp at the end. the first part of 'Baudolino' really had me (quite calvino), but the whole journey east excursion was just not enjoyable, to be honest. It seems like Eco overcorrected for the fault of 'island of the day before'. As a writer of fiction, I find him uneven compared to Calvino, and more prone to a slightly clumsy tricksiness. His critical essays, though, I find valuable.

I'd be interested to know how 'mysterious flame' goes, steven.