Daily Deals: Books you should buy even if you don’t plan on reading them right away
The Secret History by Donna Tartt. $ 2.99 AMZN | Google Play
From the Jacket Copy:
Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch, established herself as a major talent with The SecretHistory, which has become a contemporary classic.
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Anyway, the rest of these books are price matches from a Google Play sale that is celebrating books of the 90s. Amazon usually price matches all of these. Other titles include Prozac Nation, Stardust, White Oleander, and Dangerous Angels.
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Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. $ 2.99
From the Jacket Copy:
In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years in the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.
Kaysen’s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a “parallel universe” set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties.
Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
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Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. $ 2.99
From the Jacket Copy:
The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.
In his debut novel, Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist. ?Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret boxing matches in the basement of bars. There two men fight “as long as they have to.” A gloriously original work that exposes what is at the core of our modern world.
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. $ 2.99.
From the Jacket Copy:
Japan’s most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria.
Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.
INTERVIEWER
You wrote a significant portion of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the U.S. Did living there have any clear effect on your writing process or on the text itself?
MURAKAMI
During the four years of writing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I was living in the U.S. as a stranger. That “strangeness” was always following me like a shadow and it did the same to the protagonist of the novel. Come to think of it, if I wrote it in Japan, it might have become a very different book.
My strangeness while living in the U.S. differed from the strangeness I feel while in Japan. It was more obvious and direct in the U.S. and that gave me a much clearer recognition of myself. The process of writing this novel was a process similar to making myself naked, in a way.
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I loved The Secret History, mainly for Tartt’s writing.
ETA: Girl, Interrupted is an excellent book too.
Sadly, the Murakami is not on sale on Amazon now.
On Amazon, Kele Moon’s Battered Hearts box set is on sale for 6.99. I read and enjoyed her first book, and this price is all 3 for the price of 1. I think it’s worth it
None on sale at BN.com. Curses. Again.
The Secret History is one of my favourite books, hands down. For a benchmark: two of my other faves are Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco and Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy, and they’re all shelved together in my mental library as making the same sort of deep, lasting impression. When I first read Secret History it felt like I was reading about my own college (less the actual pivotal event)…when I read it again, less under the influence of college, I still loved the voice and complexity. I think it’s time for another reread to see if it still feels as strong. I enjoyed her latest, The Goldfinch, though there was a section that sagged and I thought the narrative could have been tighter (not necessarily shorter, but less…drifting).
Just last week I’d put The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle on my TBR list. Good timing.
I listened to Fight Club on audio several years after the movie came out. For the most part – the movie stays very true to the book. They changed a couple of minor things, but nothing earth-shattering. I felt like the filmmakers stayed very true to the “feel” of the book, if that makes any sense. One thing I thought worked better in the book though was the haiku. I remember finding the Narrator’s weird little haiku poems a lot funnier in the book than in the movie – in a black humor sort of way…..