These are all books I've read more than once:
The Bond novels by Ian Fleming, especially Goldfinger, From Russia With Love, Octopussy
Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by Le Carre
Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
Genius, by James Gleick (biography of Richard Feynman)
Bird Lives! by Ross Russell (biography of Charlie Parker)
Recently I reread Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog - I remembered it as being kind of a grim story three years ago when I read it, but this time I thought it was hilarious !
I also liked Definitely Maybe, by the Strugatsky brothers. These are books way beyond most stuff I've been reading lately - or maybe it's just that they approach in a different way.
And Jorge Luis Borges. One thing, by no means the most important thing I like about him, is that he's amazingly well-read in areas I don't know at all ... like Schopenhauer ! ... I read him and I get a glimpse from an outlook I don't know I would ever find on my own. This is kind of how I feel when I read Harlan Ellison. Because he writes of and through America, the America of the sixties and seventies and eighties that I know a little about, through my mom, through TV, through films, through books, but he introduces me to aspects I never saw. I'd heard of My Lai but when he writes about it the television was just beginning to show the pictures. One of his columns, about a talk he gave to students in Dayton, Ohio, is called "Poisoned by the Fangs of Spiro": Spiro is Spiro Agnew, vice president under Nixon; I didn't know that ! Now I think about television writing and shooting and protests and long-haired students in a way that is more varied and layered than the way I did before. I am not describing it very well ( I do not describe ANYTHING very well), but Mr Ellison has been an education, and a great one, that's all I can say. And he knows how to write. Even when he writes strange scenes, praises things I have no basis for, chooses approaches I find difficult to appreciate and doubt that they even should be appreciated, I am not sorry I let him threaten me with his gargoyles heading towards the Vatican, or his demented computer AM, or anything else that hints of chaeng.
All of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and novels. I picked up some of Dashiell Hammett's stories the other day, and read his biography ... I didn't know he was a Pinkerton man
... and then I tried to remember where I'd read about Pinkerton's, the famous American detective agency; first I looked up Felix Leiter in Goldfinger, but he's CIA - which I remembered, but Bond says something about his Pinkerton card, so maybe he's both after all? But I think I got it from Sherlock Holmes, from one of the novels, the one about McMurdo and the Masons.
So after reading about Dashiell Hammett and how he wrote with Lillian Hellman, I realized I didn't know anything she'd written and aimlessly wandered over to the DRAMA section of the bookstore a few days later and read "The Children's Hour," 1934.
Edward Albee, I actually met him at a play reading a few weeks ago - I was crazy about his play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" when I was in high school
I like Richard Matheson too, and Dorothy Fontana, and William Goldman, and John D. F. Black, and and Gene Coon, Jerome Bixby. They wrote a lot of screen- and teleplays. Between William Goldman and Harlan Ellison I think I'm learning a lot about screenwriters ... David Gerrold wrote some interesting stuff about that too. After reading his nonfiction I thought he was a writer I wanted to watch out for, but then I read one of his stories published in the magazine Fantasy&Science Fiction ... and it was ... ehh. I must be missing all of the good issues of these magazines, by the way - I keep getting the ones with stories with no point. Although on the other hand I haven't been reading all the stories, just the ones that look most interesting for whatever reason. But it's crazy that people would actually pay money for some of the things out there that get published
Sorry, I don't know how to stop talking about these books I read - I have very few friends who like to read and discuss books, and those who do have no time to read or don't want to read the things that so catch my attention ... most of the people I know ... place a book into their already framed reference of "like" and "dislike"; they work it into what they already know and understand ... whereas I try not to do that
It reminds me of Huxley, I liked Point Counter Point especially
Has anyone read a lot of D. H. Lawrence? I'd been reading stuff on the level of Octavia E. Butler (not that she is bad; she's OK) and then started thumbing through one of his novels, something like Plumed Serpent - and the jump in the quality of the writing was something unbelievable. It reminds me of when I used to look at some stories on the web - which I still do if I'm in the mood to look at relatively mindless stuff and zone out
- and I remembered one story in particular that I thought was pretty good, and managed to find it again. And when I set down to reread it, enjoy it again, I realized with a shock that
there was no story - all the good characters, the tension, I'd imagined all of it in my head from a few sentences and suggestions in the story. There was no point rereading: it was badly written, fake all the way through ... I'd read a few days before that that was the difference between bad writing and good writing: with bad writing you have to make it all up yourself, and disregard, if you have to, where the author is trying to lead you, his emphases, his phrasing. And it's hard work to simultaneously block out and create for yourself - which is why when I found Lawrence, it was a relief; I couldn't believe what I'd gotten used to.
I don't read all the time; I read fast, is all - faster than I type
Today, for example, I've hardly read anything, just a few Twilight Zone scripts. Anyway, I don't mean to ruin everyone's party with this and these ridiculously long posts ...