queerbychoice | Feeding My Six-Books-a-Month Addiction

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Feeding My Six-Books-a-Month Addiction

I'm going used-book shopping online again and I need more recommendations because I get free shipping if I spend $50 and I'm not up to $50 yet. I already looked through all the books previously recommended by people on my friends list, but lots of you weren't around last time I asked and anyway, I need more suggestions now so please recommend stuff.

As a guide to my literary tastes: authors listed on my LiveJournal interests list include: Alice Walker, Allen Ginsberg, Anchee Min, Arundhati Roy, Audre Lorde, Banana Yoshimoto, Bertha Harris, Caryl Churchill, Christopher Isherwood, Don DeLillo, e. e. cummings, Edmund White, Edwidge Danticat, Emily Dickinson, Gayl Jones, Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal, Haruki Murakami, James Baldwin, Jeanette Winterson, Joanna Russ, Julia Alvarez, Kate Millett, Kobo Abe, Langston Hughes, Leo Tolstoy, Leslie Feinberg, Li Yu, Milan Kundera, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Pablo Neruda, Quentin Crisp, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, and Tony Kushner.

But don't recommend any of those because obviously I've already read them.

Also, recommend mostly fiction because if you recommend nonfiction I probably won't be in the mood to buy it right now. Though if anyone here has read Jonathan Ned Katz's The Invention of Heterosexuality, which I've been putting off buying for a couple of years now, I'd love to hear that one reviewed.

P.S. to Raven: Don't worry, Stranger in a Strange Land is already in my shopping cart.

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Aimee Bender: the girl in the flammable skirt. I was in love with her after like one sentence; this one's a collection of short stories. She's at the front of this "new American Magical Realism," or something, but that kinda fills your head with things she's not- she's just really good at knocking you off kilter then poking you in the exposed emotions. Or at least she's good at doing that to me.

an invisible sign of my own is her novel, and it's also very, very good, but I'd recommend the short stories, first.

Amy Bloom: I don't know what exactly to say about her, and I can't remember the titles of her short story collections, but both were fucking amazing; she's got this way of expressing the whole world in one non-obvious word. Her novel, love invents us, was pretty good- I mean, i read it in a day, and I seldom do that- but the story collections are better.

Also? Junot Diaz, Drown, if you haven't read it. More short stories. Worth the price of the book, just for the story "Aurora." (I think that's what it's called.)

Look at me, I'm captain short story. Hurrah! There you go.

A few random thoughts... American Skin by Don DeGrazia, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg, Crash by J.G. Ballard, The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts by Louis De Bernieres... I could throw in some really excellent old standbys but you've probably read them already... I do have to mention Being There by Jerzy N. Kosinski, though. Then again, you might find all of these to be very awful books and I'm not making sense. It's late.

Have you, perchance, read Siddhartha?

hm.

Is It Utopia Yet?, by Kathleen Kinkade. Twin Oaks book.

erm.

Titan; Wizard; and Demon, by John Varley. You might find them in a three-book set or a combined volume or something.

The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, by Marilyn Manson. Just buy it, dude.

Patti Smith Complete. And that poetry book by her. Early Work.

Wicked: the Life & Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn.

Ok so I'm a sci-fi nerd, but I adore Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchet. Anything at all by either of them is great, you just have to be in the right mood. When you are up for non-fiction, try The Archaic Revival by Terrence McKenna, it's amazing. I can't really describe, but you should try reading it sometime.

Smoke and Mirrors, Good Omens, Neverwhere, Stardust, by Neil Gaiman. Well, Good Omens is cowritten with Terry Pratchett, and I haven't read Stardust yet.

if you're going to read Gaiman, you should start with either American Gods or Dream Hunters (in my humble opinion)

Neverwhere or Smoke & Mirrors is a better starting point, in MY opinion. haha. *poke*

hmmm:

books you might find interesting that i haven't already mentioned to you.... (you know most of my absolute favorites already, so this should not be considered a list of those)

henry james midnight song (carol de chellis hill)
coin locker babies (ryu murakami)
the lives of the monster dogs (kirsten bakis)
the cement garden (ian mcewan)
exquisite corpse (poppy z. brite)
the place of dead roads (william burroughs)
the amazing adventures of kavalier and klay (michael chabon)
His Dark Materials series (philip pullman)
native speaker (chang rae lee)
the reader (bernard schlink)
white teeth (zadie smith)

this list has been pretty random. let me know if you have any questions.

my favorite gaiman is actually his kids book with dave mckean: the day i mistook my dad for two goldfish. it's amazing.

morgan--
have you read Borderliners by peter hoeg?

I think I've heard of that. I wonder if my local library has it.

Rebecca West's _Black Lamb and Grey Falcon_ is very very very long, and technically non-fiction--it's a memoir of her trip through Yugoslavia in the late '30s. But it reads like fiction, and the writing is mindbendingly great.

Close to Spider Man by Ivan Coyote is this amazing collection of short stories. They're very short and very stunning, they are all connected, and go pretty much in chronological order.

I'm lazy so I'll just quote from the publisher:

"Close to Spider Man marks the debut of an exciting new literary talent: a collection of connected stories whose female narrators seek out lives for themselves amidst the lonely, breathtaking landscape of the Yukon. The young women in Ivan Coyote's deeply personal stories are looking to make a break from their circumstances, but the North is in their bones: so is their connections to family, friends, and other women. Like the protagonist in the title story, a waitress whose attempts to help a young co-worker saddled with a lunatic father finds her running across rooftops and climbing ladders; by getting close to Spider Man, she gets closer to freedom.

Startling in their intimacy, the stories in Close to Spider Man make up a moving scrapbook of what it's like to be a young queer woman in the North, journeys imbued with the colours of a prescient sexuality and an honest heart."

I take it you're ordering from Powell's? I love ordering from them, free shipping, lots of used books, cheap!

Funny you should mention Aimee Bender; I actually just bought The Girl in the Flammable Skirt last month. I haven't even finished it yet but I did read several of the stories in it and yeah, she's definitely good. And apparently Wynn on LJ is a friend of a friend of Aimee Bender's.

Generally I prefer novels over short stories, but I do like short stories on occasion. If you haven't read it already, check out Haruki Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes.

Very interesting - I've never heard of any of those authors, and it's pretty unusual for me to hear any list of five literary authors and not have heard of any of them. I'll be sure to look them up.

I have, indeed, read Siddhartha. In high school. I still own it. It was pretty good, though I wouldn't call it one of my all-time favorites.

I also read a bunch of John Varley's books while in college, probably including all or most of those, though I don't remember for sure. I hardly ever read science fiction these days, but during that particular year of college I decided to go looking for every progressive/feminist utopian science fiction book I could get my hands on, because Joanna Russ's The Female Man had left me dizzily ecstatic and desperately hoping for more. I didn't really find anything that could match her, though. Read The Female Man if you haven't yet.

I've already read and own Bernard Schlink's The Reader. You're right though, it's very good.

You should read Gertrude Stein's Ida: A Novel and Anchee Min's Red Azalea.

Also, I notice that large numbers of authors on your list here have also written children's books. Is there some reason you're into so many authors who write children's books? It seems to me there aren't all that many crossover children's/adult authors and you've managed to name a larger number of them than mere random chance would account for.

Funny how you can always recognize a good reader by their ability to identify Powell's from a mere description of its shipping policy!

I'll definitely look into Ivan Coyote's book.

But Dream Hunters appears to be a comic book, which it's almost certainly not a good idea to start me off with.

American Gods is probably good, but it's far too expensive for me to start out with it.

I do, however, intend to purchase The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish.

I read Herland in college while going through a brief obsession with utopias. Also read and loved a few poems by Olga Broumas - I've been meaning for ages to get around to reading a full book by her.

I think I've already read pretty much everything Douglas Adams ever wrote. Nothing by the other two yet, though.

James gave me the leatherbound compilation of all of Douglas Adams' stuff for X-mas last year. I don't actually read it, cause I have it all in paperback, I just like the fact that I have it.

Dream Hunters is more like a novella with paintings.

though i'm not really a huge sci-fi fan, i've just finished reading 'the dispossessed' by ursula leguin. it was excellent (but complicated and has a slightly confusing format as many sci-fi novels tend to). when (or if) you read it, be thinking of statehood, freedom, and conflict resolution. it's message is particularly meaningful during these times of conflict. (also, i think it succeeds it driving home it's message w/o being overly moralistic - that's important to me.)

i'm surprised you've never heard of ballard, particulary crash and empire of the sun.

he's pretty good.

the day i SWAPPED my dad for two goldfish...

i'm a dumbass.

I haven't yet... I keep meaning to, and it's been reccomended to me a couple of times.

I am in love with his writing style. It's so... quiet and beautiful

Wow, I hadn't even noticed that little word change. Actually, I think your title is more interesting. You should rewrite the book accordingly.

Hmm, I read her book The Left Hand of Darkness while in college. It wasn't too bad but I didn't fall in love with it either.

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Feeding My Six-Books-a-Month Addiction

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another suggestion

ivan coyote

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more good sci-fi

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