Buddha
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Nick Hornby needs to write an audiophile centered novel.
smejias
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Glad you're enjoying the book, Buddha. Hornby, I think, is a master at revealing the weaknesses and insecurities of the common dude. Shit embarrasses the hell out of me because it's as if he's in my own stupid head.

I just finished Paul Auster's Man in the Dark, which the critics seemed to just love. I thought it was good -- certainly a nice story with a sweet ending, hope for humankind and all -- but it was also totally heavy-handed and littered with pretty lousy, cheap, unrealistic dialogue.

I was expecting better.

I also recently read David Foster Wallace's Girl With Curious Hair, and Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect. Wallace, in one sentence, could have me cracking up and then shocked and ashamed at my own laughter. Brilliant stuff. And Vonnegut still rules.

I'm saving Juliet, Naked for my brief trip to Puerto Rico next week.

linden518
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Some more music-centric novel recommendations for you book-reading dweebs:

Arthur Phillips' The Song Is You. This guy can flat out write.

Jonathan Lethem's excellent Brooklyn novel The Fortress of Solitude has excellent passages about soul music, etc.

Kaz Ishiguro's new work "Nocturnes" is supposed to be structured musically (haven't read it yet, too new); mentioning Ishiguro b/c he's a huge audiophile, supposedly has a killer hi-fi at home.

My favorite Ishiguro novel is the weird "Unconsoled," a Kafka-like novel about a concert pianist in a fucked up situation.

Richard Powers, who's probably our brainiest writer, has a novel called "The Time of Our Singing," contains some of the most beautiful and amazing novelistic writing on music and musicians.

And of course, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus features the most imaginatively created fictional composer ever: Adrian Leverkuhn. Some awesome writing on late Beethoven in here, which is actually Adorno's ideas on late Beethoven...

Murakami's new, huge novel "1Q84" (not yet published in the U.S.) is based on Bach's Well Tempered Klavier. Murakami's written a lot of audiophile-ish personal essays about how he hates audiophile behavior (not translated here either). Especially cables. The best one was his obsession with buying phono cartridges (Victor L100 or L10) and how sneaking in carts by the wife is the easiest but leads to calamitous disasters, as you always want the phono pre amp to go with it. Things like that.

God, there are many more, but am blanking out for some reason, will write more later.

smejias
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Quote:
Jonathan Lethem's excellent Brooklyn novel The Fortress of Solitude has excellent passages about soul music, etc.


One of my favorites. I've been trying to get JA to read this for almost a decade, but he's too busy reading metaphysical hoohaw and measuring amplifiers.


Quote:
Kaz Ishiguro's new work "Nocturnes" is supposed to be structured musically (haven't read it yet, too new); mentioning Ishiguro b/c he's a huge audiophile, supposedly has a killer hi-fi at home.


I've been meaning to get into Ishiguro, and I definitely want to pick this one up. Five short stories, I think.


Quote:
Murakami's new, huge novel "1Q84" (not yet published in the U.S.) is based on Bach's Well Tempered Klavier.


Oh, boy. Thanks for the heads-up on this one!

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Iffin's you reeds Sci-fi, you gots to reed Alfred Bester's 'The Demolished Man'. A short read but it is the kernel of all that came afterward and much of what came before. Allrighty then. So how is it rememberkle if all it does is jus' sits in the middles?

Read Buddha's siggie to know why.

j_j
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For audiophiles, I think "Bimbos of the Death Sun" author Sharyn McCrumb would be more appropriate.

linden518
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I forgot to add Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being," a book which tries to mimic late Beethoven in feeling. Its 7 chapters follow, at least in spirit, the 7 movements from Beethoven's C-sharp minor Quartet, Op. 131.

Buddha
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Quote:
I forgot to add Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being," a book which tries to mimic late Beethoven in feeling. Its 7 chapters follow, at least in spirit, the 7 movements from Beethoven's C-sharp minor Quartet, Op. 131.

Es muss sein!

In my top rank for books - top three!

I think about that book frequently watching how current politicians behave and recall how Kundera wondered how they could do anything other than what Oedipus did when he saw what he had done.

That is such a great book.

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