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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 11, 2009 22:15:35 GMT
By "good book", I mean something with literary worth that you enjoyed and would recommend to others. This question occurred to me because I realized for how long and how much the novel Wolf Whistle has resonated for me. This was one of those books you pick up in the library, read the jacket flaps and think, "Not for me!" I wound up reading Wolf Whistle because a friend who knows me and my reading tastes quite well firmly insisted that I read it. It's a marvelous and surprising book whose magic can't really be described. Even after you finish it and attempt to discuss it with anyone else who read and loved it, words fall short. It takes a special, rarefied goodness to write a novel like this, a novel with so much compassion for the flawed human spirit that it inspires sorrow for the malefactor rather than odium. But what elevates the book into its own singular, strange realm is the humor running throughout. When expressing why I didn't want to read the book, I told my friend that it was impossible for a book about a lynching to be funny. Wrong. In real life, humor runs concurrently with tragedy. Norden manages to get this across in a way that almost re-invents humor. How else to describe a character's logorrheic truth-telling? That lofty subtlety goes hand-in-hand with broadly Southern gothic moments of zany wrongheadedness, which when stirred with the events leading towards a heinous crime, create a novel like no other. As I said above, the book is indescribable, but for more information, you might read this review.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 13, 2009 14:26:13 GMT
When I know that I have enjoyed something "strange," I refrain from recommending it to other people. I don't care what they think of my taste, but I don't want to be accused of making them waste their time.
I find it much more interesting to encounter people and find out by accident that they loved the same strange book as I.
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Post by spaceneedle on Dec 22, 2009 6:15:28 GMT
The song of Kali...
Very scary stuff.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 22, 2009 6:26:19 GMT
Rediscovering this topic, the novel Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany immediately sprang into my mind for some reason.
Wikipedia has this introduction to the plot:
A singularity, enveloping Bellona, prevents all radio and television signals, even phone messages, from entering or leaving the city. A rift may have been created in space-time. One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the darkness. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times the size it ordinarily appears rises to terrify the populace, then sets—and the same featureless cloud cover returns, with no hint that it was ever otherwise. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other. It is their reactions to (and dealings with) the strange happenings and isolation in the city that are the focus of the novel, rather than the happenings themselves.
The novel's protagonist is a drifter who suffers from partial amnesia: he can remember neither his own name nor the names of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian. He wears only one sandal, shoe, or boot. (Characters in two other Delany novels and one short story dress the same way: Mouse in Nova [1968], Hogg in Hogg [1995], and Roger in "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ Move on a Rigorous Line" [1967]). Possibly he is intermittently schizophrenic. Not only does the novel end in schizoid babble (which recurs at various points in the text), but the protagonist has memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of the "changes in reality" sometimes differs from that of the other characters. Also he suffers from other significant memory loss in the course of the story. As well, he is dysmetric, confusing left and right and often taking wrong turns at street corners and getting lost in the city.
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Post by spaceneedle on Dec 22, 2009 6:32:06 GMT
Another favourite that comes to mind is FIGHT CLUB
before the film version, of course.
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