To sum it up, the point of this thread is to post one of two things.


One - Book Reviews : A detailed review of a book you either recently read or feel like writing a review for. The idea is for the reviews to be somewhat lengthy and give a decent overview of the book, as well as your opinion of it. Try not to spoil the book for a person reading the review, and if you must reveal things, try and black them out and warn people.

Two - Book Recommendations : A list of at least three books you would recommend to someone, with a little blurb next to it as to why you would recommend them that book. The longer the list, the better.

I'll keep a running check of book reviews here in this first post and I plan on updating it weekly. I'll pin the thread as well and hope this idea takes off!

I don't feel like writing a review, so I'll just recommend a few.



"The Stranger" by Albert Camus -- after reading a significant number of books, this one's still the favourite. Has to count for something.

"Another Country" by James Baldwin -- it's congested with experience. Nice, simple narrative and ordinary, yet interesting, characters.

"Wolf Moon" by Charles de Lint -- a fantasy novel which doesn't include saving the world. It is about a man who solves a personal problem, which is a bit refreshing for fantasy writing.

The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. A book about a guy who finds a book written by a blind man about a movie about a house that is physically impossible, ie: bigger on the inside, but smaller on the outside. Random hallways that you can't see from the outside that run into the middle of the garden. The book makes copious use of footnotes, in some sort of twisted parody of graduate student theses, where some footnotes go on for pages, and some are a whole other story by the man who finds the book. A totally ##### up experience, since the book totally messes with you by messing with it's format, whole passages have to be read with a mirror, the book has to be turned upside down, or you'll have to turn the pages very quickly. Has numerous cyphers. Has over 400 footnotes (not all of them at the foot of the page) and some footnotes have footnotes. A work so post modern, John Ashbery couldn't match it with two Self Portraits in Convex Mirrors, with the use of Pulp Fiction's chronology and absolute demolition of fourth wall.

=)

There's a lot of ##### you wouldn't expect in that book. But it's 700 pages that Ayn Rand could never match.

(1) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.

Fiction, taking place around the time frame of the Napoleonic Wars. Pretty much it’s about Mr. Norrell, a true magician (and not just a “scholarly magician”) whose goal is to return magic to England. Now, it’s not the fantasy magic you’d find in Harry Potter, but more of the “sophisticated”, if you’d call it that. Jonathan Strange becomes Norrell’s apprentice, and they eventually become competing magicians against the other. Tied into all of this is also the Raven King (John Uskglass), and fairies (more like elves in a sense) and their world.

But it’s not fantasy. It’s a fiction book. A very good read, it is also one of the only books I have ever truly enjoyed reading footnotes, which sometimes take up nearly an entire page in their little font. Very good book.


(2) The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield.

This is one of those books where I really didn’t want to put it down. It’s the story of a biographer who is called to the mysterious (and famous) writer Vida Winters, who, because she is dying, then reveals her past (her “thirteenth tale”) to this young biographer for her to write it down -and she picked this biographer for a very special reason (spoilerific if I say why). As Vida says in the book, her story is a “ghost story”. If I say how it’d really spoil things, but it really is quite gripping. It’s not a conventional ghost story, so it’s not “horror” or something like that.

Not sure how to explain it beyond that. But I really would recommend this too. It’s also fiction.


(3) The Three Musketeers, by Alexander Dumas.

This book truly isn’t for everyone, but if you’re into the Signature Classics like Treasure Island, Scarlet Letter, etc., and other fiction, this would be good. I realize that for the most part everyone knows about the three musketeers anyway, but usually not in the context of this book (at least from my experience). It starts out rather slow, but if you stick with it it gets really good near the middle until the end. In the beginning it revolves around D’Artagnan when he was younger, then as the story progresses he meets with Aramis et others.



I’m going to start H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds next, so once I’m done with that I’ll try getting an actual book review up. Would have for some of these, but I don’t remember enough (at least, not in the right order of events I don’t think), so I’ll just recommend them for now. ^^.