I started Finnegans Wake on the basis that my college has a whole shelf full of books trying to explain it so I might as well make use of them to get the fucking thing out of the way early / spend rest of life reading agatha christie without guilt. The language is actually a lot of fun at times once you get into the flow but it's still kind of a struggle and I have to keep flicking between it and the CliffNote things by Joseph "Star Wars" Campbell which is basically just a plot summary/translation of everything in the book. "Verisimilee thrau bellingtons bay a cruk, a crux done dithers for thine din" => He opened the door.

Also yeah Trash Head 2 I haven't read Life of Pi but kind of assumed the same thing! I might have to check it out now

serious question: why are your reading finnegans wake?

the reason i asked is because i've routinely heard that the story is just not interesting enough to warrant spending such a ridiculous amount of time and effort in order to even be understood

whoa super late but that was the first bradbury i ever read and i did indeed like it, and it's why i am willing to read other bradbury books.

i've been reading a lot of philosophy and stuff! I have some Camus, The Plague which I'll be starting soon, and The Fall which I read and LOVED. Such a fantastic book, there are just so many good lines in it. It's one of those that I will end up reading over and over again. I'm still looking for The Stranger (I can get it off amazon or w/e but seriously I haven't found it any bookstores, new or used, it's crazy) because it's like THE Camus book.

I've read a bunch of Kafka, I have a collection of his stories and I read them in between longer books. Kafka is fucking awesome, I think I like A Hunger Artist the best so far (Metamorphasis was good, really good, but A Hunger Artist just struck a chord with me).

I'm reading Sartre's The Wall right now (5 stories, I've finished The Wall, The Room, and Erostratus so far). Sartre is an excellent writer, and The Wall and Erostratus were both AMAZING. I'm still liking the other stories, and I can't wait to start the last one... Childhood of a Leader, sounds fucking intense. Intimacy is good but a little dry so far.

I also have Walden by Thoreau which im so psyched to start! I found it in a used bookstore after searching B&N and Borders, it was like 4 bucks.

I also have Meditations by Marcus Aurelius which is very nice but not really a novel.

If anybody has any good philosophy, especially existentialist philosophy novels, I'm all about it right now!

I'm also looking for some Anton Chekhov collections, haven't found any yet and I've heard he's like the master of short story writing.

OH! I read The Old Man and the Sea a month or so ago. Incredible book! I read it in one sitting, it was so gripping and intense. I was literally tired after reading it. Hemingway is the man!

You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they are of unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into molecules and atoms passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy.