Summer Reading- Page 2

[lesmis]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 12:58pm

I second the Twilight books by Stephanie Meyer. I also loved The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Updated On: 5/22/08 at 12:58 PM

[husk_charmer]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 1:00pm

Lady Susan is a total soap opera, in 75 pages, and about 49 letters. It's one of (if not the first) novel written by Jane and is pretty drastically different, esp. when she abandons the epistilary format at the end and goes into narration...

[GlindatheGood22]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 3:31pm

I'd recommend Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. Not exactly light reading, but it's very good.

Edit: On the Wicked issue, I'd say don't read it. It's confusing. And boring. And not much else.

Updated On: 5/22/08 at 03:31 PM

[broadwaywriter]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 3:39pm

The Wicked book isn't worth your time. It barely has anything to do with the musical and is really hard to get through.

[sweetestsiren]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 3:47pm

I didn't think it was bad to get through....I wouldn't read it if you're expecting the musical in book form, but it's a pretty interesting read otherwise. I didn't completely love it, but I liked it well enough.

The sequel, on the other hand? Don't waste your time. It wasn't even worth skimming.

[orangeskittles]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 6:02pm

The Wicked book isn't worth your time. It barely has anything to do with the musical and is really hard to get through.

And in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, none of the characters sing! It sucks! No one should ever read books that aren't exactly like the musical!

[Kitzarina]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 6:14pm

And in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, none of the characters sing! It sucks!

Seriously! And he totally ruined the character of Eponine! Instead of a tragically beautiful romantic hero, Victor Hugo wrote her as some kind of creepy stalker. And don't EVEN get me started on the passage about nuns in Paris at the turn of the 19th century...

[Patronus]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 6:43pm

Imagine how I felt when I read The Bible and it didn't describe Joseph's nubile body or his french, country-western, & Jamaican brothers!

[BroadwayGirl107]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 6:45pm

Speaking of Les Misérables--I recommend it. The unabridged one. It admittedly has a section called Waterloo that is almost a disposable 100 page chunk, but other than that, I absolutely loved it.

I enjoyed reading Wicked until that section towards the end called "In the Vinkus" (I think...) after Elphaba left Emerald City.

[Kitzarina]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 6:46pm

Now THAT was disappointing! Or how I felt when I read Phantom of the Opera and Gaston Leroux had the gall to portray Erik as an unredeemed blood thirsty monster who was hideously ugly! Didn't he know that there was a tragic beauty that was sure to make Christine fall for him instead of that prissy Raoul?

[orangeskittles]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 7:39pm

It admittedly has a section called Waterloo that is almost a disposable 100 page chunk, but other than that, I absolutely loved it.

Awww, you didn't like the 100-pages of glorified scenery description?

(It's really only about 50 pages.)

[Plum]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 8:16pm

Speaking of books that go on way too long, I'm going to try to read all of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle this summer. All 2500+ pages of it. I mean, if I could eventually finish Cryptonomicon, I'm sure I'll finish this, too...

Anyway, good books for summer:

Terry Pratchett's Discworld books are fun. Especially the Watch books and most especially Night Watch, but that one's better if you've read at least one or two other books involving the Watch first. They're all satirical fantasy- the Watch books are also satirical crime books, the Witch books take on literature and theater, etc. Maskerade is a big ol' Phantom of the Opera satire, so it might be of special interest here.

Also, I think Em mentioned Jhumpa Lahiri, and she's great. The Namesake is the best depiction of the modern American immigrant experience that I've ever read. There's also...

Seven Types of Ambiguity, by Eliot Perlman
A Free Life, by Ha Jin
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
If on a winter's night a traveller, by Italo Calvino
The Cunning Man, by Robertson Davies (who also writes about theater and opera a lot as someone who really loves them)
Drive, by James Sallis

On top of the Baroque Cycle, I'm also trying to read every Jeeves story ever this summer because P.G. Wodehouse is a genius. I also can't wait until July, when the 10th and final volume of Y: The Last Man comes out- it's the best contained comic book epic I've read since Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It's a crazy premise- a plague kills every vertebrate male on Earth overnight except for one guy (named Yorick) and his monkey, Ampersand. Yorick teams up with a succession of awesome women to try to find the cause of the plague and a way to clone humans to perpetuate mankind. Mostly, it's a witty and wonderful post-apocalyptic road trip story from New York to California to Australia to Japan. Great stuff.

[frogs_fan85]

Posted: 5/22/08 at 8:18pm

"Then We Came To The End" by Joshua Ferris was my favorite book from last year and just came out in paperback. It's basically The Office in novel form. It's pure genius and works even better if you have worked in an office.

I'd also like to second the earlier post about Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, which I love. A working knowledge of classic literature helps greatly in their appreciation.