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Sunday Books Thread er... 8?
Can't remember. Didn't do one last week because I was up to my bleary eyeballs in Poznan vodka.
ANYWAY. I'm reading The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano which I'm sure everyone has read already here and decided it's good or rubbish. I enjoyed the first section, and it reminded me a bit of all those stories you used to read about The Others and The Rakes and Pete Coherty, and all their fans hanging out at their houses and stuff, and mistakenly believing that Visceral Poetry (or the music of The Others) is life changing.
More importantly, my dad for some inexplicable reason is driving to visit me in Poland at the end of the month. This gives me a perfect opportunity to buy some cheap books on Amazon in the UK and he can bring them in the car. At the moment I'm looking at a list of about 25. Let me know if any of these are NOT worth £3
Juan Luis Borges - Labyrinths
Steve Sem-Sandberg - Emperor of Lies
Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms
John Barth - Lost in the Funhouse
W Somerset Maugham - The Razor's Edge
Philip Roth - Nemesis
Martin Amis - Visiting Mrs Nabokov
Anthony Burgess - The End of the World News (because of the plot strand which echoes the planetary mayhem in 'Melancholia')
Tibor Fischer - Under the Frog
Jonathan Coe - The Rain Before it Falls
Paul Theroux - The Old Patagonian Express
Julie Salamon - The Devil's Candy (non fiction book about the disasterous film adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities)
PG Wodehouse - Psmith in the City
Iris Murdoch - The Black Prince
Patricia Highsmith - Strangers on a Train
Richard Yates - The Easter Parade
Allan Brown - Nileism (biography of The Blue Nile, out in paperback now)
I'm also going to bite the bullet / stare into the abyss, and order Ulysses and the first part of In Search of Lost Time.
Thoughts? Should I ditch any of these and get something different? What do you recommend. At the moment I like books about Americans and or Brits having some kind of terrible time in mainland Europe (eg the Paris chapters in Of Human Bondage, or The Magus, and to a lesser extent, some war novels). Any suggestions here?
I am taking suggestions seriously. Who suggested Buckminster Fuller a few weeks ago? Which is a good book of his to get?
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