Finding good books today isn't all that easy. I created this page to record what I've thought of the books I've read. Reading it should help you get an idea of how similar our tastes are. If we like the same things and I've missed one of your favorites, then what are you doing still sitting there on your hands? E-mail me already! Even better, create a page like this and bring civilization closer to a state of perfect literary harmony.
icons next to books to jump to my book log and see my comments on the book and what I was reading at around the same time.
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Microserfs
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Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
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Hey Nostradamus!
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End Zone
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Libra
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The Names
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Underworld
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White Noise
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Great Jones Street
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Americana
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Players
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Mao II
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Cosmopolis
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The Body Artist
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Ratner's Star
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Running Dog was much less intellectual than the above and much more "plot-centered"/"pulpy". It was still "good," but not really my style. I think this book and Ratner's Star show DeLillo going too far to opposite extremes.
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The Last Samurai
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David Copperfield
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Great Expectations
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The Idiot |
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Demons/The Possessed |
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The Brothers Karamazov |
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Crime and Punishment |
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The Adolescent/A Raw Youth |
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The Gambler |
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Netochka Nezvanovna |
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The Village of Stepanchikovo |
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The House of the Dead |
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Notes From the Underground |
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Short stories |
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The Double is horrible. Anything else is worth reading. |
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Foucault's Pendulum |
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Baudolino |
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The Name of the Rose |
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The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
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The Island of the Day Before |
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Invisible Man |
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American Gods |
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Anansi Boys
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The Sorrows of Young Werther |
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Faust |
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Faust: Part Two |
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Elective Affinities |
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Catch-22
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Something Happened
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Closing Time
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Picture This
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Now and Then
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Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man
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God Knows
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Steppenwolf |
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Demian |
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Narcissus and Goldmund |
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Gertrude |
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Beneath the Wheel |
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Peter Camenzind |
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Rosshalde |
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The Glass Bead Game |
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Siddartha |
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Journey to the East |
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Strange News from Another Star
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The Hotel New Hampshire
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A Prayer for Owen Meany
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The Cider House Rules
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A Son of the Circus
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A Widow for One Year
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The Water Method Man
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The World According to Garp
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Until I Find You
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The 158-Pound Marriage
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Setting Free the Bears
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The Fourth Hand
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Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
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The Imaginary Girlfriend
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Sexus
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Plexus
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Nexus
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Moloch
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Tropic of Cancer
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Mason and Dixon
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Gravity's Rainbow
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Vineland
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V.
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The Crying of Lot 49
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Slow Learner
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Against the Day
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The Human Stain
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I Married a Communist
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Portnoy's Complaint
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Operation Shylock
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Zuckerman Bound
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The Ghost Writer
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American Pastoral
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The Counterlife
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Sabbath's Theater
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The Plot Against America
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The Great American Novel
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The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography
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Letting Go
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The Catcher in the Rye
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The Reprieve |
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The Age of Reason |
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The Wall (American collection of short stories) |
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Nausea |
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Troubled Sleep |
Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
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Illuminatus! |
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Schrödinger's Cat |
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War and Peace |
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Anna Karenina was rather disappointing. It was full of absurd Christian conversions and pointless and detailed descriptions of social activities, without the redeeming qualities of War and Peace. |
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Rabbit is Rich
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Rabbit Redux
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Rabbit, Run
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Rabbit at Rest
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Licks of Love
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Infinite Jest
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Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
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Oblivion
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Girl with Curious Hair
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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
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Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
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The Bonfire of the Vanities
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A Man In Full
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I am Charlotte Simmons
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy |
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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe |
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Life, the Universe and Everything |
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So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish |
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Mostly Harmless |
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Young Zaphod Plays it Safe |
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World's End
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Radio Free Albemuth
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The Man in the High Castle
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Billy Bathgate
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The Waterworks
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Tender is the Night |
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The Great Gatsby
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The Mind-Body Problem
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The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind
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The Power and the Glory
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The Scarlet Letter |
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The Blithedale Romance |
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The House of the Seven Gables |
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The Marble Faun |
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Dune |
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Dune Messiah |
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Children of Dune |
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The Castle |
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The Trial |
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Short stories |
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On the Road
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It Can't Happen Here
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John Barleycorn
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The Sea Wolf |
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Life of Pi
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All the Pretty Horses
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The Defense |
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Pnin |
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Pale Fire |
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Invitation to a Beheading |
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Lolita |
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Nabokov's Dozen
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
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1984 |
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Burmese Days |
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Keep the Aspidistra Flying
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Homage to Catalonia is really journalism and not an attempt at fiction, so don't expect otherwise! |
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Animal Farm |
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Fight Club |
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Survivor |
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Invisible Monsters |
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance |
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Lila
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Ishmael
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The Story of B
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My Ishmael
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God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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Mother Night |
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Slaughterhouse-Five
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Breakfast of Champions
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Hocus Pocus
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Cat's Cradle
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Timequake
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Wuthering Heights
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The Big Sleep
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Carpenter's Gothic
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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Ringworld |
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The Ringworld Engineers |
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The Ringworld Throne |
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Doctor Zhivago |
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The Diary of Malta Laurid Brigge |
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Villa Incognito
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Fathers and Sons |
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Short stories |
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Rudin/On the Eve
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I'm not going to bother comparing these books to each other. I'll just say that I found each worth reading.
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Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
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The Tao of Physics |
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The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture
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Keeping the Rabble in Line |
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Necessary Illusions |
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Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order |
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The Selfish Gene |
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The Ancestor's Tale
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The God Delusion
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The Underground History of American Education
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George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez
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Where Mathematics Comes From |
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Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
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Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows
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Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
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The Language Instinct
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Fortune's Formula
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Walden |
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The Outsider |
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Religion and the Rebel |
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The Occult: A History |
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The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries with Damon Wilson |
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Alien Dawn |
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A People's History of the United States |
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You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train |
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Declarations of Independence |
J.G. Ballard
Crash was not my kind of book. I felt all shock value and nothing poetic.
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita really underwhelmed me. It read like a children's story, except less organized than you'd expect. The introduction with the edition I read revealed that it was the attempted combination of two different stories after they'd both been under development for a while. There was practically no characterization; just weird happenings.
Albert Camus
Seeing some of my favorites, you might expect I'd like this guy, but I've found the three novels of his that I've read to be very dull.
Nikolai Gogol
I really didn't like Dead Souls.
Ernest Hemingway
I gave For Whom the Bell Tolls a try recently, and the macho stuff turned me off, despite some of the nice non-shallow content.
Aldous Huxley
I've only read Brave New World, but it struck me as being very unsatisfying, with all the characters being very flat. Maybe this is the effect Huxley wanted, but that's not something I like in fiction.
James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man didn't resonate with me much. Maybe I'll try another of his books some day.
Ayn Rand
I read all of her novels in high school and became obsessed with Objectivism. However, like most such people, I grew out of it, and now I have a rather low opinion of her fiction and her philosophy.