SMBC Comics Forum

If you really want you can skip half of GEB and just read the plays. That's what I did when I first picked it up over a decade ago.

But it's really heavy and I don't want to carry it with my texts! Actually come to think of it I'll be pretty busy with those, since I have to buy two more this week.

I have a good suggestion if you don't mind non-fiction.

Confessions of a Yakuza. A light book, and a very interesting read.

I don't read a lot of non-fiction honestly. A lot of people seem to think it makes you more educated but I dunno. I don't normally read any non-fiction that's not about mythology or language, although I bought a Murakami lately called Underground which is about the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway. I also really enjoyed reading the bios of nazi war criminals when I was doing an assignment on them, which sounds like an awful thing to say but some of them are genuinely interesting people.

Neither do I, which just goes to show how much I enjoyed the book, since I'm recommending it.

Maybe you just haven't found a lot of non-fiction that you like!

Nah, it's just from the considerably smaller list of non-fiction than fiction books I've read, this one ranks right up at the top.

Exactly. You need to make that list longer to lend support to your claims!

How about I just never recommend books to you anymore? A much simpler solution, in my opinion.

You've really made this conversation take a depressing turn, Mage.

I'm reading House of Leaves. I'm about 80 pages in, and I'm not enjoying it as much as I thought I would.

I'm going to be perfectly frank, I heard about House of Leaves, and I leafed through it once, and it looks really dumb.

I've never heard of it. What's so bad about it?

It's "postmodern literature". The idea is that it's a very experimental work that flaunts a lot of the conventions that ordinary books have, but in such a way that it's really not coherent or easy to read. And I don't mean that like "confusing in plot" because I haven't read it, I mean that it's hard to look at the pages and figure out what is being said. Everything's all over the place and the pages are really sparce, which I do not like at all. Example: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... age134.gif Try to think about what is going on here. It just gives me a headache. The writing is also intentionally poor. It's a stark reminder that sometimes, convention and style exist for a reason.

A better and more entertaining version of postmodern lit might be Rant by Palahniuk. Fiction written in the style of an oral biography. And it is fantastic.