what else do you do besides playing chess?

before chess I held the title of GM-bater

Life.

As far as Amerivan novelists go, I really like John Irving, A prayer for Owen Meanie and The Cider House rules were great, I think.

I do a spot of reading myself, especially sci fi...

Spock: Admiral, may I ask you a question?

James T. Kirk: Spock, don't call me Admiral. You used to call me Jim. Don't you remember "Jim"? What's your question?

Spock: Your use of language has altered since our arrival. It is currently laced with, shall I say, more colorful metaphors-- "Double dumb-ass on you" and so forth.

James T. Kirk: You mean the profanity?

Spock: Yes.

James T. Kirk: That's simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays any attention to you unless you swear every other word. You'll find it in all the literature of the period.

Spock: For example?

James T. Kirk: [thinks] Oh, the complete works of Jacqueline Susann, the novels of Harold Robbins....

Spock: Ah... The giants.

I still have to explain hermaphrodites to adults.  And how they are not the same as transexuals.  It should be a great segue to get your students interested in reading.

Anyone who goes on and on and on about landscape descriptions is cumbersome.  It's like...okay, thanks for sharing how beautiful you find the vibrant autumn leaves...wow, your attention to detail of the tree trunk is astounding...NEXT.  And then authors trying to establish the tree trunk as a metaphor for god knows what...  I suppose I just find a lot of writing to be very "put on".  I guess it's a matter of taste.  

Oh dear god, has anyone here read Bret Easton Ellis?  He pulls off this "I can describe material things for weeks because by describing it at length I'm mocking it" sort of trick to fill up the pages of his book. I feel the urge to call him and tell him "you made your point by page 20".

It's really so hard to judge literature.  Poor editors. 

The only sci fi I think I've read is A Wrinkle in Time?  I was pretty upset when it ended...but I don't know what qualifies as high quality sci fi.  Brave New World was good...though I would have cut out some of the Shakespeare. 

Apparently Catcher in the Rye is imbued with lots of meaning...I also never got any of it, but it was a pleasant read.  I'm a sucker for gender segregated prep schools in literature. 

Is anyone a fan of the book?  Maybe they can clarify.

I didn't enjoy reading it.  Maybe it suffers somewhat from age.  Supposedly it was unique when written as far as it's portrayal of teen disenchantment and feelings of futility, but now there are plenty of such works available from the past few decades.

--Cystem

Bill Faulkner is indeed the king of American writers, but he's also hugely popular in the outer-northern suburbs of Melbourne, where I grew up.

After school my friends and I would act out our favourite scenes from the Faulknerian corpus: the suicide of Quentin Compson, the disastrous crossing of the Yoknapatawpha River with Addie's coffin, the decapitation of Joanna Burden, the negro butler's rejection of the young Thomas Sutpen at the door of the Virginia plantation house, Lucius Priest's knife-fight in the Memphis whorehouse, you name it. All the boys wanted to play Chick Mallison, and all the girls wanted to be the lovely Eula Varner. Some of the skankier girls would want to play Temple Drake, but my mother warned me about them. You never knew when someone in the classroom would cry "Caddy!", only to be answered by a chorus of idiot bellowing, full of sound and fury. LOL!

Those summer afternoons would just fly by....

 I actually was a fan of Catcher in the Rye when I read it but I don't know if I would enjoy it so much now on a second reading.  That happened to me with Anna Karenina also.  I related to Anna when I read it the first time but I just read it again last summer and this time I just though she was stupid and selfish.  When I read Catcher I wanted to take Holden under my wing and tell him that mostly his perception of the world is accurate but that he has to continue to be as good as he can be himself and screw all the fakes and liars.

 Help! Help! I'm being lampooned! Could you share the names of those skankier girls in case I find myself in Melbourne with nothing to do?

i am cook

i read newspapers

i read horror, science fiction

i dive for clams, snails...30, 35 ft deep water, with only mask

ride my bike

i love watching baseball!

i play golf once in a while

a litttle agriculture, tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, yuca, melons...

and i absolutely loooove art!  picasso, dali, reubens, diego rivera, diego velazquez, van gogh, gaguin, goya.....

Invisible Man!  Holy cow.  The first time I read that book, it was like grabbing hold of a live wire!  What a wild novel...and scary.

I'll second (or third) the praise for Kerouac.  I also can't get enough Vonnegut (which is unfortunate since I'm done reading his books and he's done writing them).  In a similar vein (as Vonnegut), what about Heller?

Also, no love for Norman Mailer yet?

I liked Catch22 and Catch as Catch Can, but even I'll admit ol' Heller gets a litte repetitive.  I guess the same could be said for Vonnegut.

"I'm going to live forever or die in the attempt."  Yossarian

Catch 22 was a very unusual book.  It sort of reminded me of a cross between MASH, Hogan's Heros and I am American and So Can You.

 Here's some love for Mailer. The Executioner's Song was a very long but very good book written along the lines of Capote's In Cold Blood.

How about some historical stuff?  He's been tainted by a couple plagiarism/failure to credit incidents and has his share of critics alleging inaccuracies, but I still enjoy Stephen Ambrose's books.

And for historical/fiction mixes, I really enjoyed Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

Someone earlier mentioned Micheal Crichton.  I enjoyed his earlier works a lot, before he got all preachy and self-righteous.  Quite a few of his later works made my "I'm really sorry I spent my time reading this" list.

--Cystem 

I mentioned Crichton and I agree that in his latest works the spark was gone. Next and Prey sucked bigtime. Timeline was OK.

I got duped into buying Celestine Prophecy.  I feel like I could throw a rock and hit a fifth grader who could have written that book with a little editing help.

That took no. 1 on my "If I could beat the author with his own book for the waste of my time" list.  And it's a little OCD but I have a hard time not finishing something if I start reading it so...it's really annoying when the book is bad.