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First edition - English translation of Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus, from 1948. First edition of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy. Also, ooooold copy of Baudelaire's poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal.

It might have been done already, but The Trial by Franz Kafka would make a great movie. With Nicholas Cage as lead actor! I wouldn't like a modernized version, but one with a modified-20's surrealist style about it would be great. Also, For Whom The Bell Tolls would be great, but I can't...

I do like the book and the writing style. It's just that I am used to having a central narrator to a non-fiction work, I found In Cold Blood a little strange from the lack of one. It read more like a novel than a non-fiction piece.

I read it a few weeks back. It's very well written - almost too well if you're reading it as a non-fiction piece. I got so immersed I had to remind myself every now and again that all of this stuff actually happened. Maybe it's the lack of a first-person character (Capote could have put...

Problem with a Counterculture Canon is that it is CANON. That is, it is accepted. Stuff like On The Road and A Clockwork Orange are standard, but you have to read them remembering that they weren't at the time. What about going against the grain of canon writing? Hemingway, from what I heard...

Good evening, Lightning You come as a messenger Nature still untamed

So pulling a page (not three thousand) from Proust and another from Kerouac, I've decided to write a bit of stuff that, at least initially, will be close to real life. You know what they say, if you have to lie, keep it close to the truth. (By the way, who said that? It's a good quote) Yes...

Reading it right now, and it's great. He seems to go on about New Guinea a bit, but I don't mind - it's a change from all the Europe-did-this of pretty much everything else. Reminds me: I tried to read an abridgement of Toynbee's A Study of History, that was not as entertaining.

Here's one I finished recently, a short story. Actually, it could be part of a series of stories/novel/whatever. To make it a stand-alone story, ignore the last paragraph. Basically what happened here is I took a real life event (someone told me a similar thing that they did) and I modified it a...

It's reeeally slow for me. Interesting, though. I saw the same kind of thing with music. Dostoyevsky (reading Crime and Punishment now) is near authors I have read or want to read.

Finished Ulysses yesterday. 5/5

The sun was shining. At the face of the canyon he stood. Dog by the side, Regulus, dog, Reggie. See him run. Glowing grasses and shrubs and trees passed them; they ran still, turning a curving left and still going. Green plants and time to get up, James. Voice from above or below, it was all...

I do not haiku Minimal form eludes me ._._.

Something from William Carlos Williams - "Danse Russe" If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,— if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my...

So here's the story so far: Three (two seems unreasonable) astronauts are on their trip to Mars, the fourth crew to get there. Main character is new to this, one of the other two has been to Mars before. Their spacecraft is a big rotating one, giving it the feel of gravity. They spend...

Well? How is it done? I can come up with crazy ideas, setting, character, but it takes me ages to actually formulate a storyline. That's kinda why I'm stuck on 1500-word stories. My longest "story" is actually three related stories, 1200 words on average. e.g. I've got an idea for having a...

I remember having read Franz Kafka's "The Trial", it was a very unsettling book. I'm bringing this up because I just borrowed "The Castle" by Kafka and was wondering if it's in the same vein.

I'd read long novels if I had the time, but school sometimes clogs up the clock. I recently read "Notes from the Underground" by Dostoyevsky, and at 90 pages, it affected me as much as a full novel would. I also write short stories and have read Chekhov and Borges, so my bias might...

What are some good dystopian books? Dystopia is a nightmarish society, a utopia gone wrong. We all know the classics: 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World. I am reading Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago", and I find it terrifying. It's about the Soviet "justice" system. It is...

Am I the only one who notices how huge a waste of paper that recently-published books are? I am not commenting here on the quality of the actual stories, but on the printing itself. As an example, I am reading "The Tyrant's Novel" by Thomas Keneally for school. Each page has very heavy paper...