Books
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For all those book fans out there, especially genre fiction, I can send some books out if you like - I work as a fiction buyer for UK retail chain, and have an office full of samples.
Re: Vachss, he's great, but bleak indeed! In real life he's run children's correctional facilities and been an advocate for children in need. All the Burke books I've read are about, or touch upon, child abuse or some kind of sexual crime, so they are pretty hard going.
If you like him, I'd recommend reading something by Joe R. Lansdale, a good friend of Vachss and a wonderful storyteller. Mucho Mojo is a good place to start, or one of his one-offs like The Bottoms.
M.
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I'm a big fan of philosophy and how it applies to society.. I just picked up "First as Tragedy Then as Farce" should be a really excellent read.
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Awesome thread. Mostly cause books is awesome.
Jokes is awesome too!
Anyway.
Vachss is great. I can relate because I work with children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral disorders. In that field you see a lot of really bad shit. It can be rough. I've learned how to deal.
Freedom was great. Good read.
Michael Chabon is sort of in the same vein, good as well.McCarthy is amazing. I've read em all.
I would suggest a number of other authors and/or books….
On the easier/more page turning side...
Southern US fiction ala McCarthy...
Jim Brown- Father and Son. Plus a number of other titles. He died recently, was a firefighter in Mississippi.
Wells Tower- Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Collection of short stories. Awesome.
George Saunders- The Braindead Megaphone. Plus anything else he's written. Great.
Mystery/Crime... a la Vachss
Joe Landsdale
George Pelecanos
Jim Thompson
And most especially, maybe more visceral and literate would be
Nelson Algren. I love that author. He is the original Iron Heart of the literary world. Sinatra played a heroin addict in a film adaptation of The Man with The Golden Arm.Others........I'll provide more if wanted/interested....
William Faulkner. Southern Lit.
Chester Himes. Black Lit, plus some pretty fucking awesome mystery/crime novels
Holy shit. Robert Bolano!!!!!!!!!!! Greatest. 2666 or The Savage Detectives. Read em!Well the above involves a lot of mystery, but a little more involved than previously listed authors.
All of them are great.Also.........
William Gibson, old school Sci-Fi, but for a modern age.......
Thomas Pynchon
Sherman Alexie, Native American writer, pretty badass.
Junot Diaz, NYC latino. Again, badass.
I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others as well.Again, I'm nerding out, but awesome thread.
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Stokely:
thank you so much for taking the time to write such a long list of books and authors. Looks like Im a need a second life just to read all the books I NEED to read
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good thread this
I'm a voracious reader - pretty much anything that's printed and bound, but my stick out author is Umberto Eco; would recommend Foucalt's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose by him
Also Vikram Chandra's Red Earth & Pouring Rain and Sacred Games are top notch
Last would second Hectic on the Iain Banks stuff, met him a couple of times - nice guy and a good author
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You guys so need to read Gibson's Zero History - he has some great riffs on the secret histories of denim otaku freakz.
That's how I found Iron Heart - a Zero History inspired Denim trawl through the web! Great book, great author.
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currently reading "Carrion Comfort" by Dan Simmons.
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Recently finished Joe R. lansdale's Vanilla Ride and the much awaited Wise Man's Fear by fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss.
I was talking with someone recently about how much I enjoyed reading Shogun in my teens, so I've now got all the James Clavell's sitting on my desk waiting to be read. It's a big pile of books…
