Topic: Nintendo Life Book Club

@upisdown Discworld is brilliant, for me the Vimes Stories (Guards, Guards,Night Watch, etc) are the best, then the Death collection (Reaper Man, Mort, etc)
Best to read them in order a kind of order as there are a few nods back to previous books, but it doesnt really matter for some of them.

@Bunkerneath I've heard good things from lots of people about it (esp. Guards, Guards). So if similar to Good Omens I can expect it to be very character-driven then.
Happy reading!

I finally got around to reading Lolita and the prose is amazing, though I find myself whipping out my phone's dictionary app every dozen pages or so. It's crazy to think English wasn't even Nabokov's native language.

Also, I have no idea how anyone could read it and hold the view that Humbert is meant to be a sympathetic character. I think people approach the book actively wanting to be offended and have a very shallow interpretation as such.

@moomin It's art, you get what you want from it.

True, but I think you can judge one's interpretations on merit.

I find the same thing with Joseph Conrad - their technical brilliance is even more so with it being their second (at least?) language.

Have you read Love In the Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? For me it pulls a similar trick as Lolita, although it's more subtle, due to it being in the third person. I think Lolita is a better novel though.

It's obviously designed to be controversial, but yeah, the only way you could think the novel was sympathetic to Humbert would be if you had not read it - although it doesn't stop some of the passages from being quite icky.

I've only read that and Pale Fire by Nabokov, so this has reminded me to read more by him

Just started The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy.
It's about a history professor in the late 80s who has some sort of road accident before travelling to East Berlin for work, where he starts to experience some strange temporal displacements.

I've loved Levy's stuff since I read Beautiful Mutants as a teenager, and although her recent stuff isn't as mental as her 90s novels (nothing recently from the viewpoint of a steak), it is still fantastic.
Well, Swimming Home was slight, but Hot Milk was excellent, and this is shaping up to be great as well.

@Rambler A told from the viewpoint of a steak? That's not the oddest thing I've heard, sounds like a dream I had once lol.

@Kermit1 - yep!

@Rambler THAT IS WHAT I SAW IN A DREAM.

ARGH!!!!!!

I've been reading Great Satan's rage: American negativity and rap/metal in the age of supercapitalism, and it's been a bit unorganized so far. Like, talking about rap and metal and then going 20 pages into the nature of economic warfare and the theories of Georges Bataille and such.

It's really funny seeing insanely vulgar nu metal lyrics reprinted in an academic work.

Apparently the same author has done a book on black metal and ecology!

Once again I've got too many books out of the library. I've had On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong on order for like forever, and it finally came through this week.
But I've also got Invitation to a Beheading by Nabokov (due to the discussion above) and two Jeanette Winterson novels - one of which I'm sure I actually own and have read, but they're all packed away somewhere.

@Rambler That sounds worth checking out

Have a side gig writing college papers so I had to read Raisin in the Sun, which was great. Also started a book about Deng Xiaoping.

I'm starting to become an armchair historian of the People's Republic of China.

I'm trying to get into more classics and my recent one was The Metamorphises by Franz Kafka. I hope to get into Sherlock Holmes soon. I enjoyed it. Currently reading Like a House on Fire, about a woman having a crises about her life and expectations of her as a middle aged woman. She gets a new job with a great new boss and that's all I'll say lol.

@Summer235
Kafka is mint.

Es war kein Traum.