queerbychoice | Recommend Books, Please

the cosmic serpent by jeremy narby :p i dunno if it's about the sorta stuff that'd interest you, but i loved it.

uhm. uhm...

swedish fish!

OK, I don't know what you've already read plus I'm sure you've already read some, if not all, of these plus these are definitely "nerdy" (i.e. theory and literature) books, but here goes:

theory books:
Eve Sedgwick _Tendencies_
Walter Benjamin _Illuminations_
Foucault _Power/Knowledge_, _History of Sexuality_, and _Discipline and Punish_
Donna Haraway _Simians, Cyborgs, and Women_

literature:
Thackeray _Vanity Fair_
George Eliot _The Mill on the Floss_
Proust _In Search of Lost Time_ (which is really a lifelong reading project in some ways, but still, I _love_ it)

oh, and now I have finally commented in your journal, so hopefully I'm not total sludge anymore! I'm sorry I didn't earlier, but I was very busy sludge ;)

You're ALIVE!!!!

::stares in astonishment, points enthusiastically and yells for everybody in the neighborhood to come look::

I've read (and own) Eve Sedgwick's Tendencies and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I. Now that you mention it, I should probably request volumes two and three. (Yay, I'm out ot my parents now and can actually ask for those things for the first time in ten years!)

A few years ago I bought Donna Haraway's ModestWitness@SecondMilennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse(TM) or whatever the title is, but have been feeling guilty because I just can't honestly get into it or really even much make head or tail of it. Everybody always raves about how great she is and I feel pathetic for not being able to recognize it.

And yeah, I've been Menaing to read Proust's In Search of Lost Time for ages, but have been a wee bit put off by the humongousness of it.

Your literary tastes appear to be surprisingly 19th century-ish. I'm generally more of a late 20th century/21st century kind of person, but I think I'm due for a small dose of the 19th century again now, so thanks!

Hmm, I haven't read the Haraway you mention--I want to, but I'm so pressed for time these days. Zeut. One of my favorite essays of all time is in _Simians, Cyborgs, and Women_--the Manifesto for Cyborgs. Although quite influenced by a cold-war aesthetic (which is sadly becoming more apropos) it is a very vibrant and intriguing work. I don't know if there's any way to get it without buying the entire book, but it's a good piece to start with.

Again, I really recommend Benjamin--the Frankfurt School contains some really interesting ideas, but most of it is overshadowed by relatively non-useful angry German-ness--Benjamin's theories are in the Frankfurt school but more elegant and less marred by bitterness. I found Benjamin to be invaluable in my studies of postmodern theory, for what it's worth.

Yes, I suppose I do have a very Victorian bent, but you see I'm off to Duke this fall to get my Ph.D. in English literature, and I will probably concentrate on late Victorian and early Modern American and British literature, so liking this period is probably a good thing for me. ;)

Anyhow, lastly, I would also recommend(if you haven't read them)

Balzac _Lost Illusions_
pretty much any Faulkner
and, if you want to, you are welcome to join the Heidegger reading club, which has a membership of 1 at this point (me trying to read _Being and Time_ by myself, which is quite a chore). If anyone wants to read along with me I would be overjoyed!

What do you like?

This stuff. All the authors in my userinfo over there.

I was an English major. I'm a literary snob.

Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, etc...?

Have you read all of Arundhati Roy's books? Anything by Sherman Alexie? Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"? Am thinking of what to recommend.

I've only read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy so far. I've read Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as well as her book The Writing Life and, uh, something or other else by her. I've never heard of Sherman Alexie but will look her up.

A request for book recommendations! I live for these. You *must* read Martin Amis - Money if you haven't. And Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. And the new Michael Marshall Smith book, but that's not out until August. The newest Jeanette Winterson book is fantastic but you've probably read that by now, right? And since you liked Harry Potter so much you really really need to read Phillip Pullman - Northern Lights. That's the first one in the trilogy.

When's your birthday? :)

-ink

My birthday is July 20, 1976. It's easily located by reading my LJ userinfo. :P

I have in fact read almost all of Martin Amis's books, probably including Money, although to be shamefully honest, I cannot remember a single thing about any of them at all aside from the fact vthat I thought they were pretty okay and sometimes even pretty good. And I was reading almost all of his father's books at the same time, and thought precisely the same thing about those, and remember precisely as little about them.

You may lecture me now for my bad memory.

I probably haven't read the latest Jeanette Winterson book. Oh wait, I think I know which one you mena. It's sitting on my floor waiting to be read. It's been sitting there for close to six months now. :P

I read some Phillip Pullman since people keep recommending him to me. But I wasn't that impressed. Actually, I wasn't that impressed by Harry Potter either, it's just that they were disturbingly addictive so I HAD to have the next one even at the same time that I wasn't really sure I actually liked them exactly. It was sort of freaky.

Who's Michael Marshall Smith?

How could anyone forget Money? :) It absolutely blew me away.

I had the same problem with the Jeanette Winterson book, it was in my possession for nearly a year before I read it.

To be perfectly honest I'm not crazy about Phillip Pullman either, but people keep recommending it to me too (I got about 3 chapters in then something came up).

Ooooh but Michael Marshall Smith. He's British. And his books are absolutely mind-blowingly fantastic. You need to start on Only Forward and work through his books because they get better and better. The new one is...gee it's just indescribable.

-ink

Any of Sarah Waters' three books - Tipping the Velvet, Affinity or Fingersmith. They're all wonderful.

(deleted comment)

I was forced to read Susan Faludi's Backlash for a Women's Studies class and found her writing style terminally boring. Later when she wrote her book about the hardships that boys endure I was sufficiently surprised and interested by her change of topic to revise my opinion of her and decide she might have something interesting to say after all . . . which is possibly a terribly wrong reason to revise my opinion of her, and in any case I haven't actually sufficiently gotten over my revulsion at her writing style in Backlash yet to have quite dared to try her again.

I haven't read any of those (including Ayn Rand :P) but I've read some really fantastic poetry by Margaret Atwood (on someone's LiveJournal, actually) and have been meaning to go try more by her.

a double reccomendation on howard zinn's a people's history. best general american histoy book ever.

For your birthday list: you should read:
When I Was Five I Killed Myself by Howard Buten
and: everything Amy Bloom has ever written.

Reason:

Best. Blowing. Apart. Of. Mainstream. Concepts. Of. Sexuality. Ever.

EVER.

But those are novels. To accomplish the same thing in nonfiction, I highly recommend Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia edited by Gilbert H. Herdt. Which I haven't actually finished reading yet. But never mind that; it always takes me six months or more to finish nonfiction. Novels are more my thing.

Almost definitely below you to read this, but... a girl I graduated with this year has a poem in this (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=189ZE60R51&isbn=0312290675). She even gets royalties when people buy the book!

hmm i really like
american knees
native speaker

Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee? I already own that. And yes, it was excellent!

i would recommend something by flannery o'connor. wise blood is one of my most favorite books ever. and in one of her books of essays, she references henry james, who is on your "interests" list, fairly frequently. this book deals very strongly with religious themes in a very engaging way.

either that or "perfume: story of a murderer" which was one of curt cobain's favorite books. it reads very well, too.

I was surprised that Samuel R Delany was missing from your reading list. I suggest Triton, Dhalgren, or Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand to start with; although all his stuff's great, I think you'd probably like Triton the best.

Maybe, for a change of pace, you might like John C Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.

I've read Triton, Dhalgren and most of Samuel Delany's novels, actually. They're pretty good. I also had his nonfiction recommended to me by somebody or other on LJ recently (hmm, I think it was

tikarass), but I haven't gotten around to actually reading much of that. The novels were pretty good, although they're the stuff of sexual fantasies and my sexual fantasies, while not immune to small doses of Delany, tend to run more along the lines of Amy Bloom's plots instead. (Note: this is possibly the most outrageously shocking thing I've ever admitted to in my entire life, but ha! I can get away with it and nobody will act shocked, because very few people around here except

illscientist will have a clue what I just said! I love being a literary snob!)

I've read some Boswell that was written later than that book, in which he discusses how social constructionist scholars challenged him for having been too essentialist in that book, and how he changed his views to agree with them. In view of that, I find it interesting that even that book often gets cited as a social constructionist work too. But I haven't actually gotten around to reading it, and I sort of have reservations about doing so because when an author publicly recants a major viewpoint upon which his book was based, I feel like I'd do better to only read all his subsequent books instead.

(deleted comment)

I read Ishmael earlier this year, on the recommendation of

embryomystic. It was pretty good, although it felt distressingly male-centric to me (though I was relieved to note that he later wrote a sequel with Ishmael in dialogue with a female instead).

Not sure if you're into his kind of stuff, but I like Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Choke, Survivor).

For non-fiction, I recommend:
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen.
No Logo by Naomi Klein.
Can't Buy My Love by Jean Kilbourne.
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.

Just a few books I've finished recently, I don't know if you have read them or not...
Enjoy!

transientdyke recommended Lies My Teacher Told Me in a journal entry recently and it sounded great. I should definitely ask for that one. I'm not familiar with any of the others, so I'll look them up.

Quicksand and/or Passing by Nella Larsen.

Recommend Books, Please

no subject

nerdy books

Re: nerdy books

Re: nerdy books

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re:

no subject

no subject

no subject

p.s.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject