Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Books, Neil Gaiman...stuff

Alright, well, I haven't posted in a couple of weeks or so, and I'm posting now because I've been looking for new stuff to read. I've been running out of new books to read from my favorite authors because I tend to get obsessive, read everything I can by a person, and then have nothing left to read.

That's what happened to me with Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris. I'm one book away from it happening with Tom Robbins (unless he comes out with something new, which I hope he does) and now that Chuck Palahniuk has just published a new book, Rant, I still have two books by Chuck to read. And then...my resources are exhausted and I need to move on and find other awesome writers to read.

At the beginning of the summer I started getting worried, so I looked at Hugo and Nebula award winners at the library (dork that I am) and saw a book called American Gods by some guy named Neil Gaiman. It was a pretty good book, and it turns out the author is a pretty cool guy, too. He also wrote the books Stardust and Coraline (the latter starring the ever-creepy Dakota Fanning as a voice), which are both being developed into movies. On top of all that, he helped write the screenplay for the movie Beowulf, which has a lot of potential to be really cool since it will be in 3D in some places. He also has a good blog that he updates just about everyday. Enough about Neil Gaiman, already.

On a different note, I'm still slightly mourning Kurt Vonnegut. It sucks that he's not going to be writing anything else, and that I know that I've read the last book he ever wrote or will write, A Man Without A Country. I really liked it, and I've been intending to buy it but still haven't. Here's a cool thing that the Reveille at LSU printed in the opinion section the day after he died. Make sure you click on it so you can actually read his quotes. Printed on Friday the 13th of April, 2007. I thought I might frame it, and I might, just as a cool little shrine to one my favorite authors who was alive during my lifetime, and now isn't. This section of the post is a bit of a downer, now isn't it?


So I'll change the subject with this: I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I read it slowly compared to everyone else, since it took me over a week, but I finally finished it. And it was good. J.K. Rowling didn't screw it up like she could have, and I liked that added depth to several of the characters. The epilogue seemed a bit forced, but it was decent. This book definitely was a good ending to the series, for me. [That last statement is probably completely unnecessary since everybody reading this has already read and formed opinions of the book for themselves.]

Not much else, only that the point of this post is to ask for any recommendations for books or authors to read. So:

Know of any good books I should read?
Know of any good authors I should read?

And just out of curiousity:

What is the most over-rated book that you've read?
What is the most under-rated book that you've read?
(The "ratings" can be from friends, teachers, critics, whatever.)

There. The end.

# Posted by Kevin @ 3:11 AM