modDB Book Club group

I've recently read

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingways.

It was a very captivating read, I started it and simply could not put it down. I don't want to give away too much of the book, but the main character (Frederic Henry)is a volunteer ambulance driver from the United States, who gets wounded on the Italian front during WW1 and is sent to a hospital in Milan. There is life is changing, as he meets a range of interesting characters and has to make some tough decisions.

As far as I'm aware it's a semi-autobiographical novel, which made the read even more interesting. Give it a shot, I promise you, you won't be disappointed!

Well I said I would post a bit more in here.

I just finished another book a few hours ago. The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson is not a book for the light hearted. While I immesley enjoyed it, I still have almost no idea as to what it was all about. Well I do. It was about the Illuminatus, but the way the book was written was very unconventional indeed.

It would flit between characters and time and tense without the usual breaks you would expect to find. And while the book itself is a work of fiction, it is based on a lot of true facts. One thing I did specifically find hard about the book was that there were a lot of refferences to people and events that were before my time.

I think overall I would recommned this book to anyone who likes a challenge, but it really isn't one for someone looking for a casual read.

I recently just finished a book called "Blue War" by Jeffery Thomas. It was awsome. It centres around the main character, a man called Jeremy Stake who is hired by a friend of his in the Colonial Forces to investigate the apparence of three clones in a city which is growing out of control.

There is this whole multi-storyline angle, much like "Deadstock" the first novel in the series. But this time around it fitted in so much closer with the main storyline which was great. Jeffery also brings back Thi, the main characters love interest. In the first novel we don't really get much on her, but in "Blue War" her mystery is revealled some more.

One thing that I really did like was that we got far more into the character of Jeremy this time around, and what it was like for him in the Blue War (a previous event in his life). It does help that we have many of the characters being Blue War vets themselves. Also I found the characters be better this time around, I really just did like them a whole lot more. Especially Yengun.

I really do recommed it to anyone. Solaris as a publisher, really are pulling out all the stops in their range.

Hey guys just thought i would join up, here are some of my personal favorites...

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
When the Lion Feeds - Wilbur Smith

again i would say these are the perfect books, in face i have read the entire series of books by Wilbur Smith in regard to the Courtney tree line.

All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy
Western-ish

Just got started on this one, but so far, so good. I'm really getting into McCarthy's Faulkner-esque style. Pretty Horses tells the story of John Grady, a boy of 15 who is the last in a long line of ranchers. John Grady packs his bags and begins a journey south to Mexico with a buddy. The pair manage to pick up some other companions on the way. Seems to be shaping up to be a surprisingly powerful adventure tinged with romance and action.

I'll keep you updated.

Currently Reading: Jpod by Douglas Coupland

sourced from Amazon.ca

Already dubbed Microserfs 2.0 by some pundits--a winking allusion to Douglas Coupland's previous novel Microserfs, which similarly chronicled pop-culture-damaged twentysomething misfits flailing, foundering, and occasionally succeeding in the high-tech sector--JPod is, like all of Coupland's novels, a byproduct of its era and yet strangely detached from it. Only this time with a bold and very crafty narrative device: Douglas Coupland, novelist, is a character in Douglas Coupland's novel. Which, when you think about it, makes sense since the type of people Coupland depicts are precisely the type of people who consume Coupland novels. As the once-great comedian Dennis Miller might holler, "Stop him before he sub-references again!" Readers familiar with Coupland's oeuvre know what to expect with the characterizations here. They also know that Coupland on a roll is both savagely observant and laugh-out-loud funny: "Bree was showing someone photos of her recent holiday visiting Korean animation sweathshops. She was bummed because she couldn't get into North Korea: too much legal juju. [She said] 'I just wanted to know what it's like to be in a society with no technology except for three dial telephones and a TV camera they won from Fidel Castro in a game of rock paper scissors.'" Much of the book is like that, built on granular and meandering exchanges between characters about . . . stuff. While JPod's flow is hobbled by some preposterous twists and character traits and by random words, phrases, and numbers splattered gratuitously across successive pages in oversized typeface, it's hard to imagine Coupland fans walking away disappointed. --Kim Hughes

The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert
Non-Fiction / Instructional

Title: Rant
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Genre: Fiction, Science Fiction, and pure insanity.

For those of you who haven´t read anything from Chuck Palahniuk I highly orecommend you hop on the train of this guys literature. If anyone has seen the film Fight Club this is the guy who wrote the novel off of which the movie is based. What is fascinating about reading this man´s work is that not only does he construct unconventional and complex stories filled with twist and powerfull plot turns, but he also incorporates this creativity into every aspect of the writing process. Essentially, he toys with the English language like no other and you find yourself reading sentences and phrases that utlize altered meanings of words and convey highly discriptive images using irregular sentence structure. (I´m sure this guy is every english teachers Freddy Krueger) I really can´t explain his style only to say that there is no other author out there like this guy. But for the newbie to his work I wouldn´t recommend starting with Rant since it pretty much is a rant and totally chaotic. Try his novel Fight Club or Choke these are slightly more traditional and also conventionally thought of as his better novels.

Check this guy out!