1 more: Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dryer. Great short travel stories.

reading this right now. i just started but have been worried this might happen.

harry potter and the half-blood prince also right now.

try haruki murakami. v, v good.

Here's (literally) what's on my nightstand right now:
*Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita - just started it... highly recommended by people whose taste I trust.
*Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven - interesting non-fic about fundamentalist Mormons.
*American Elf: The Complete Sketchbook Diaries of James Kochalka - autobiographical comics that are alternately hilarious and touching.
*Charles Schulz, The Complete Peanuts: 1950-1952 - I find the Peanuts comics to be one of the most soothing things in the world.
*McSweeney's Magazine issues 15 and 16. I never seem to be able to read these quickly enough. I am always behind an issue or two.

Newish authors that I would recommend to anyone under any circumstances:
*Paul Auster - probably my favorite author of all time. Lots of people say to start with The New York Trilogy, which is fantastic. My favorite might be The Book of Illusions. Strong, minimalistic works that are equal parks Kafka and Carver.
*Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist will probably go down in history as the only interesting book ever written about elevator inspectors.
*Zadie Smith - White Teeth is fantastic, and very British. People get down on her second book, but I think that's only because the bar was set so high with the first.
*Jonathan Lethem - While I've liked pretty much everything he's written, Fortress of Solitude really stands out from the rest. A Super hero coming of age story based in brooklyn during the punk/hip hop heyday of the late '70s/early '80s. Actually, Motherless Brooklyn was pretty great too - I'd put that as a close second to FOS.
*Michael Chabon - The fact that Seth from The OC talks up Kavalier and Clay is no reason for you not to like it. It won the Pulitzer and for dang good reason. Then again, I love The OC. The Mysteries of Pittsburg was really good too, and if you have any affinity for kids' books and/or baseball, Summerland is a nice, light read.
*Jon McGregor - As far as I know, he's only written one book - If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - and I think it either won or was nominated for the Booker Prize. In either case, it's one of the best first novels I've ever read.
*Banana Yoshimoto - Simple, minimalist, poetic stories.
*David Foster Wallace - Smartest man on the planet. Infinite Jest is worth the effort. If you don't feel like getting into something that immense, his books of short stories are equally as rewarding. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a good place to start. I like footnotes, though... YMMV.
*Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated is a great book. No doubt. You should probably read this soon, before the movie comes out and it gets harder to find a copy without Elijah Wood's faceon the cover.
*Yann Martel - The Life of Pi was beautiful and heartbreaking, and his earlier novel, Self, is just as good. IIRC, Pi made me weepy, which doesn't happen very often.
*Ron Rege Jr. - My favorite comic artist. Skibber Bee Bye is required reading.
*Helen DeWitt - As far as I know, she's only written The Last Samurai, which has nothing to do with the movie of the same name. This book is amazing. It deals with the relationship between a disfunctional genius mom and her disfunctional prodigy son.
*Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time deserves all of the praise it had heaped on it.

I'm sure there are things that I'll be kicking myeslf for leaving off this list, but I guess that's why there's an edit button.

m.

interesting, but not without spin.

it already is out, no? that is a good good book.

seconded.

Here's a nice piece by Haddon that appeared in The Guardian last year.

mcatano, if I lived where you lived, I think we would be good friends.

let's get more women represented in this thread!

octavia butler - wild seed
angela davis - women, race, and class
toni morrison - beloved
judith butler - gender trouble and undoing gender
donna haraway - simians, cyborgs, and women
gayatri spivak - a critique of post-colonial reason
gloria anzaldua - borderlands/la frontera

and some men, too:
jaques derrida - of grammatology
michel foucault - discipline and punish
roland barthes - mythologies
david harvey - the condition of postmodernism

hey, what's alice munro--chopped liver? :)

ok--

marge piercy: woman on the edge of time / he, she, it
mavis gallant: (short stories)
nicola griffith: slow river
lorrie moore: birds of america
thisbe nissen: good people of new york
jhumpa lahiri: the namesake / interpreter of maladies (stories)
annie dillard: the living (contains bicycles! anyone in the pac NW should read this one!)

and one sci-fi-guy: kim stanley robinson's Mars series, just to geek out on how it could be...

sci fi...methinks that's a whole 'nother thread...

blöödhäg!

WHOA, habitus. that's super intense. you need to read some harry potter, dog.

PS- you forgot Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. :D

I'm in the middle of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. Wow, for once I don't have a million books being read at once. Probably because I'm waiting for a bunch on inter-library loan.

Despite Everything: A Cometbus Omnibus
Jimmy McDonough-- Shakey (Neil Young biography)
Philip K Dick-- A Scanner Darkly
Thomas Pynchon-- The Crying of Lot 49
Richard Brautigan-- everything.

i'll take harry potter over that stuff any day! seriously, though, it helps when your interests and academics overlap.

and weed eater, have you seen bloodhag play? love 'em. came home from one of their shows with an asimov. ha!

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: should've been left in the 70s newage self-help bin it was born out of. Either that or replace the boring parts with more on motorcycling. PS: LOOK OUT!! PHAEDRUS IS RIGHT BEHIND YOU!!!

I find Dave Eggers' "heartbreaking work" to be incredibly uninteresting. Way to live an intersting life, write a few hundred pages on it and manage to say nothing. Feh.

But I like The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature.

i second james joyce, but then again, finnegans wake is my favorite book and the source of my screen name....

tim o'brien's "the things they carried" is sitting at home waiting to be read as soon as i finish "the professor and the madman: a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the oxford english dictionary" by simon winchester...an interesting bit of history small enough to be nonessential and interesting enough to be worth reading. also have dorothy allison in the on-deck circle; i've heard great things about "bastard out of carolina".

i second douglas adams as well. hhgttg is one of my favorites. also recommend.
the chronicles of narnia
william faulkner-as i lay dying
any flannery o'connor you can get your hands on
why dogs chase cars-george singleton
pablo neruda
sylvia plath (the bell jar if you want something depressing)
dylan thomas
allen ginsberg
gregory corso
jack kerouac- my favorites are on the road and desolation angels
johnny cash-man in black or cash
tom robbins--fierce invalids home from hot climates, half asleep in frog pajamas, another roadside attraction, still life with woodpecker

Here are some great fiction reads:

"The war of don emanuel's nether parts" - louis de bernieres

This is the first part of a trilogy the entire trilogy is worth reading.

"The Glass Bead Game" - Hermann Hesse

"Magic Mountain" - Thomas Mann

"Trainspotting" - Irvine Welsh

"No Beast so Fierce" - Ed Bunker

"You can't win" - Jack Black

"Underworld" - Don DeLillo

"High Fidelity" - Nick Hornby

"A 100 Years of Solitude" - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

"The Corrections" - Jonathan Franzen

Here's one for the angst filled- fixed bike rider in you:

Graeme Obree's The Flying Scotsman is one of the better written cycling bios by one of the greatest track racers to come 'round. The downward spiral he encounters due to his fight with depression is fascinating and inspiring.

Other great winter titles:

Gurdjieff's 'Beelzebub'
Leonard Peikoff's 'The Ominous Parallels'
Various, 'Dark Water'
H.P. Lovecraft's ' The Colour Out Of Space'
C.S. Lewis' 'The Chronicles Of Narnia' (series)


Winter reading for those cold, chilly nights...

"Fear is the mind-killer."
-Frank Herbert

Virtual Light by William Gibson

Bounty hunters chase down a bike messenger in futuristic california after she steals some weird virtual sunglasses.

this is one of the most brilliant pieces of fiction i've ever read. (nine, i think i remember your old user title: 'sheepman in a sheepsuit', right?)


yes.

There are many, many good suggestions in this thread. I'll add the most enjoyable thing I've read recently: Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson

nonfiction:

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families by Philip Gourevitch (account of the genocide in Rwanda - shocking and brilliant)

Air America by Christopher Robbins. (stories of the CIA's secret war in Laos - just unbelievable. really.)

Among the Thugs by Bill Buford. (ethnographic account of British football hooliganism in the eighties - scary)

An Empire of the East by Norman Lewis. (beautifully crafted travel writing about Indonesia)

fiction:

Blindness by Jose Saramago. (amazing. up there, for me, with murakami.)

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem. (i can't count how many times i did a spit-take reading this. funny as a *****.

*edit* i can't believe i almost forgot Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

wow lots of good reads here. I'll second or third murakami and banana.

Awesome. Where are you and where's your list?

m.

I totally second White Teeth.

I think Thoreau's Walden relates very well to the fixed gear minimalist aesthetic.

Also, I love Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces.

If you're into plays, read Ubu Roi. Not that it has anything to do with anything.

Second that, also Mona Lisa Overdrive from his Neuromancer trilogy, great cyberpunk stuff.

For short stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Sanders, and his second collection which I can't remember the name of is great too.

Thomas Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49" is an excellent read.

Underworld by Don Delillo (of White Noise fame...) is sitting on my nightstand. It's one of those I've read many times, and often read given passages over and over.

I'm currently in the midst of Mike Davis' "Ecology of Fear" a rather disturbing history of the astoundingly awful urban planning decisions made over the 20th century in Los Angeles.

I quote - "What is most distinctive about Los Angeles is not simply its conjugation of earthquakes, wildfires, and floods, but its uniquely explosive mixture of natural hazards and social contradictions. Not even Miamai, that other fallen paradise, can approach the conflagrationist potential of Los Angeles."

Pretty heavy stuff.

Also, for anyone truly interested in alternative viewpoints, there's always Robert Anton Wilson's hilarious and engaging Illuminatus Trilogy.

I second nightfly's description of Wallace's Infinite Jest.