/lit/ - Literature

47 Ronin

No Country for Old Men
Revolutionary Road
Reservation Road
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
The Hustler
Sideways
Starting Out in the Evening
The Leopard
The Fire Within
Brothers of the Head

All based on novels.

Some people don't pretend. It's still a great book about being caught between adolescence and adulthood, and not knowing which way to turn.

I'm in the minority on this but I keep thinking a really talented director could make a good movie out of it

"Why They Kill", Richard Rhodes

Amazing book about a sociologist who put his life on the line (literally) to learn about why sociopaths and violent criminals exist.

It's a mixture of an overview of the life of the man and a detailed look at his theories.

Rhodes wrote the books about the A-bomb - this is very different, obviously, but for me it was even more riveting.

YES, Simak is terribly underrated. "Cosmic Engineers", his early pulp-SF entry, is a lot of fun and would make a pretty cool movie IMO.

My favorites remain "Highway of Eternity", "City" and "All the Traps of Earth"

No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai

Get the newer translations, they really make a difference.

The whammy in the last couple of pages had me rethinking everything. The whole thing is an attack on the very idea of literary heroes in the first place. There are no heroes, just people making the best of what they have. But people crave heroes for the same reason they crave stories: it gives life coherence and meaning. Get past that or at least put it into perspective, and that's a step in the right direction. At least, that's my reading.

It's dated but I can see why it was incendiary for its time. And funny, which is always a bonus.

The sequel is not worth the paper it's been stamped on.

>>1247645
No crime there.

Natsuo Kirino's "Out"

Great thriller, too. Everything by Kirino has been excellent and has some aspect of this very topic.

It's "All You Zombies" by The Hooters.

... I'm amazed no one else made that joke.

Here's some stuff from my own recent pile, see what grabs you:

Good Morning, Midnight (Jean Rhys)
The Tattoo Murder Case (Akimitsu Takagi)
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (Carson McCullers)

Why a contradiction? Lit's life, life's lit - they incorporate each other.

"The Space Merchants" is a great, deeply sarcastic take on future capitalism. Still way ahead of its time.

"Last Exit to Brooklyn" - Ironically it gets even more gut-wrenching with every successive read, not less.

Zamyatin's "We" - Best dystopia ever, possibly the best that ever could be.

Daniel M. Pinkwater's "Alan Mendelson, The Boy From Mars" - Long before the vampires came along and made YA novels such retread junk, there was this gem. It's like My First Slipstream Fantasy, except it doesn't suck.

Knut Hamsun's "Hunger" - shook me up from inside out. Gets even more frightening on future reads.

I love the "Great Ideas" Penguin series, which have these fantastic textured covers... and the books themselves are pretty sweet as well.

Love it for the depiction of an American landscape that has all but ceased to exist. Although I'm betting if someone took the same trip today they could describe things that are just as fascinating

Wheel of Time. I made it through the first book but it was so insufferably generic I couldn't remember much about it after that. Didn't bother to follow up with the rest, and lost most of my taste for what passes for current fantasy.

>>let's say that an author wants to write a book about the inherent futility of human endeavor, but he knows that a certain number of people will kill themselves after they are finished reading it

Isn't that reaching a bit? If someone reads a depressing book and then kills themselves, it doesn't follow the depressing book was the sole root cause of their suicide.

Obviously it helps to not do anything incredibly stupid, though. When Chuck P. wrote "Fight Club" he put in recipes for things like homemade dynamite that were deliberately missing a couple of stages. (Besides, it's not like people can't find the real thing if they look hard enough.)

The live version in France, where the audience boos them off the stage, is downright scary.

Merriam-Webster, hard to go wrong there.

I've propped for Accidental Tourist before (I think it's slightly past the 20 year cutoff, though).

I'm prejudiced partly because there's so much good stuff just now coming out in English -- Hans Fallada, unexpurgated, for instance -- or fresh new translations of old classics that I've been paying a lot less attention to what's being written now.

Again, not to slag on people writing today - I'm just discovering that there's a lot more to get caught up with from previous eras than I ever dreamed.

>>1244669

I misread that as "Bring a penguin to a fight..."

The idea of a novelization of "Tetsuo" thrills me to no end.