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comment by prostheticfourhead
prostheticfourhead  ·  3349 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Looking for good reads

I'd read pretty much anything, just not books with a picture of Fabio and a woman with heaving bosoms on the front.

Thanks for the suggestions. And gen.lib.rus.ec looks great!





tacocat  ·  3348 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Read Stoner. It's a delicately constructed portrait of an ordinary man and his mundane tragedies and victories. It's not for everyone but it has emotional punch if you don't require a sweeping melodrama with your fiction. I have an ePub of it somewhere

lil  ·  3337 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Isn't that a surprising little book? A friend of mine in Haifa of all places found stacks of this book in a used book store and sent me a copy last year. Another novel on a similar topic (with South African politics thrown in) is Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (Nobel Prize for Literature, 2003).

tacocat  ·  3337 days ago  ·  link  ·  

New York Times Magazine or somebody rediscovered it a few years ago so I knew it was well regarded. But it's surprising in that nothing really happens and you can't put it down (if you're into quiet books with no lazer gun battles). It's a series of minor dramas delivered in such a tender way that it invites you into an ordinary life that parallels your own struggles. I can't say enough about it and can't explain why anyone should read it because the plot sounds so boring.

Those stacks might be worth something if they aren't the 2003 reprint.

b-612  ·  3349 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Plenty of good recommendations here. I would like to add Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, you can find it in the link Creativity gave you.