What are you reading right now?

[Edminster]

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.

[LordRetard]

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.

[mountainmage]

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

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

[LordRetard]

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.

[mountainmage]

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

[LordRetard]

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

[mountainmage]

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.

[LordRetard]

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

[mountainmage]

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

[LordRetard]

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

[Neglected Shoe]

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.

[LordRetard]

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

[smiley_cow]

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

[LordRetard]

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.

[Lethal Interjection]

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.