Those were on my list but after my recent experience with Jack London I am enjoying a light read from Star Wars. I’ve read a few from Dostoyevsky and while enjoyable you really have to be diligent with those Russian writers.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

I thought Anna Karenina was great and had a story that absolutely pulled you through the book. On the other hand, I tried to make it through Crime and Punishment in high school, but couldn't do it. T-Bone, what happened with Jack London?

I loved Crime and Punishment but it’s tedious. We have a bunch of neighborhood little libraries near where I live and people put books in and others take them. It’s fun to see what is in there. Anyway I was looking for something to read and there was a London book called The Sea Wolf. I read the jacket cover, it wasn’t particularly long, so I figured sure. I loved Call of the Wild and White Fang. It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve read but for a275 page book it took forever to finish. Turn of the century seal hunting on a large schooner in the Pacific Ocean. The characters were well written especially the captain, but overall I just couldn’t get totally into it. I got halfway through and decided I was finishing this thing no matter what.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

Dostoevsky is best read in the presence of an expert. I had a class on him and Dostoevsky was pretty much my favorite writer for ten years. But without the guidance and background--or knowing what ideas served as background to Dostoevsky--he would have been tedious indeed.

I mean, you can say that about a lot of writers, but when you go back to the C19, and read from translation from a profoundly different culture, that guidance is essential.

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I took two books with me on vacation to Mexico two years ago. The hardest books I own, but wanted to tackle them. I’d leave them on the beach chairs by the pool because I know no one in their right mind would ever steal them. One was The Inferno by Dante and the other was the full collected works of Edgar Allen Poe. There was a lady who sat by us one day and noticed the books. She asked if I was actually reading them. I told her I was sure trying my best. Turns out she was a professor at the University of Virginia where Poe went to school a while. She said she wouldn’t have attempted reading either of them Poe wasn’t horrible because his stories are relatively short. The Inferno is a book that you really need to take a class to digest. I couldn’t read more than a paragraph or two without having to reference the footnotes to know what was being talked about.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

Poe's not only easy but enjoyable. Strange that anyone would balk at reading Poe.

Always thought Mulholland Drive made more sense if viewed as Lynch's rough take on Dante relocated to Hollywood.

Dostoevsky was a degenerate gambler who wrote such long books to finance his gambling--when not otherwise occupied sucking the toes of his various wives to get them to part with rubles to cover his gambling losses.


(inspiration by Markson)

I've been frustrated quite a while now over the quality of writing coming out. I used to never give up on a book. Now I just kindle through the library and go through a half dozen before I can finally settle on something. I think it's been 6 or 7 years years since I ended a book thinking, "that was awesome".

I've been putting off Dostoevsky all my life but I guess it's time to pick up The Brothers Karamazov

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Wattabout Kodak Black?

HS aged SS was a bigfan of that novel. Wonder how it holds up to a re-read.

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Poe(and weed) got me reading. I followed up Tell Tale Heart with "The Stand". Quite the indoctrination to the art of "movie in my head".

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Wattabout Kodak Black?

@Nardi: Same thing here. I was getting a lot of horror and history non-fiction recommendations off Reddit, and they all sucked. Maybe 7 out of the last 9 books I put down.

@T-Bone: Try John Ciardi's translation. Really clearly written and has footnotes and a little synopsis at the beginning of each canto. You'd be surprised how much of Dante's depiction of hell had in common with what nuns in the late 70s and early 80s taught us. Apart from the dizzying number of allusions, little in his imagination was new to me.

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My go to for fiction has always been mysteries or detective fiction. But, it seems like many of the writers that I have liked feel they have to weave woke narratives into their work these days. Or they create some fictional version of Trump or maga as their villains. I've started reading a lot of British mysteries from the 1930s as a result. The British Library Crime Classics series has 112 books in it and will keep me busy for a while.

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"I give you my word as a Biden"

Have you tried the early American hardboiled detective writers?

Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest is one of my all-time favorites. I'm a big fan of The Big Sleep and most of Chandler's other work as well. I read The Big Sleep as a transitional work in which he rejects the conventions of the classic British detective novel and the narrative goal of mystery-solving in favor of a modern conception of "policing" where the only goal is to keep the "criminal element" under surveillance (which often results in compelling storytelling but deliberately incoherent plots). In any event, I also very much like the work of the second-generation hardboiled writer Jim Thompson. A lot of his books are great, but many consider The Killer Inside Me to be his masterpiece as its psychopathic anti-hero serves as an implicit critique of the emerging hardboiled tradition.

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Great suggestions, thank you. I've read some and agree that Red Harvest is a great book. I haven't read as much of Hammett, Thompson or Chandler as I should.

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"I give you my word as a Biden"

Cool, I also really like early hardboiled/noir novels like The Big Clock, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Double Indemnity (which I think is even more interesting than the terrific movie adapted from the book).

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I tried Philip Marlowe. Doesn't age well, was my take. It's not Chandler's fault obviously. Years pass, and Marlowe ends up being a stereotypical private dick, you know? I'll give The Killer Inside Me a try.

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Wattabout Kodak Black?

I've read Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, neither of them do it for me. James Ellroy used to really light my candle but, despite the fact that you can often find his work filed under "Mystery," his books really don't work as mysteries and he's also favored style over substance over his last handful of books.

I've read The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye and Farewell, My Lovely. There were all easy to read, but the themes all run together, so his ouevre just melds into one big gloop of noir. Also, I always get him confused with Raymond Carver, whose short stories I enjoy much more.

I'm on page 1075 out of 1462 in Les Misérables. I wish I read this in a class with an expert, like mentioned above. I put this one off due to its length and seeing those annoying commercials for the musical when I was a kid. Never forget Harold Bloom's credo, "Stick to the classics. Screw contemporary fiction.".

Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) and John D. McDonald were two of my favorite authors. Both have passed and I have read all off their work. Parker and Travis McGee are two of the best characters ever in fiction for my money.

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"I give you my word as a Biden"

If you don't like Chandler, you probably won't like The Killer Inside Me since it is a response to the hardboiled detective archetype established by Hammett and Chandler.

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I agree that all of Chandler's work kind of blends together like it is just one long novel. The Big Sleep introduces his major ideas, and the rest of his writing is more or less a reiteration of that book. Chandler and Hammett are very interesting to me vis a vis labor history and fears of white working class social decline. The noir tradition is established in the context of declining social expectations (brought about by the rise of monopoly capitalism, mass production, and scientific management), and noir itself can, I would argue, be best understood in terms of a newly discovered discomfort with the fluidity of class and racial boundaries.

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Been really enjoying the first Thrawn novel. I bought the trilogy for myself as an Xmas gift but had to dig into it and truly has been fun. Anyone that might be interested in these after I am finished I would consider mailing them to you. If you are into Star Wars I think they'd be a good read.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

Did not regret The Grifters. Good, quick read.

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Wattabout Kodak Black?

Look up Blain L Pardoe. He is writing thillers for the right.

Do not know if I ever nammed these but if you want some light Fantasy look up the Guardians of the Flames series.Basic premise is a bunch of D&D players get ported to the world in their characters,physical is the character brain is them.

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When I am stuck and need to figure something out I always remember the Immortal words of Socrates when he said:"I just drank what?"

That's the premise? I'd rather read interracial gay Muslim porn, without pictures.

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A grad school friend of mine was in town and brought her extremely unpleasant and insanely feminist friend with her. Yes, she hated men, but mostly, she hated white people. (You know what race she is, of course.) Anyway, she was raging against Willa Cather and her "bitch white feminism," and it reminded me that I always wanted to re-read the Prairie Trilogy again. It's been three decades. Halfway through this one:

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Willa Cather has some of the most simple and elegant prose I've ever read. She's evocative without beating everything to death.

That's a good way to put it. It's what I have been enjoying this past weekend. It's funny; I read a few books about the Dust Bowl and life in general on the plains, and I kind of have to laugh because Cather described everything first.

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Been a long time since I read those. Not sure I ever got to Song of the Lark (My Antonia was a school book and O Pioneers was on my parents' book shelf that I got sent to whenever I uttered the phrase "I'm bored".) My recollection of them is not great so I imagine it would go much like my rereads of other books I was assigned back then.

I've read My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Both of them are just okay in terms of story, but I absolutely love the way Cather writes.

Finished the first of trilogy and onto the second last night. Thrawn and Vader on a joint mission so that should be interesting. They don't really like each other much.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami