Gravity's Rainbow has been sat taunting me for a couple of moths now, but other books that don't require the same investment of time & concentration keep getting in the way...

^ Ditto'd on that, same with Atlas Shrugged and Finnegan's Wake. Those 3 are going to be my fall and winter reading.

Long story short - there was a girl on the tube, reading de Sade's Justine. She wasn't interesting, in many regards.

Lolita's a good book, but I reckon Bataille is, content-wise, vastly more subversive while ostensibly just being weird.

I have a summer of Heidegger in front of me, plus the qu'ran.

The pile that I've assembled has: The Book Of Disquiet (Pessoa), The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, In Search Of Lost Time: Sodom and Gomorrah (re-reading the whole thing, very slowly) and Artificial Paradises (Baudelaire). I'll also read everything by Jean Rhys that I haven't read already, and probably some Edward Bunker novels as intelligent page-turners inbetween the the heavier stuff.

True, Lolita isn't really about sex with children at all. Nor is Bataille for that matter - although I suppose his logical conclusion would at least suggest the idea. Either way, you're far less likely to get evils from tracksuit wearing mothers if they see you reading 'Eroticism' than if they see you reading 'Lolita'.

Lolita isn't a subversive book at all. It's just cursed with a pretty inflammatory title.

NWRA: I'm finishing off In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower right now, keeping on track with my one Proust book per year till I'm done.

After that maybe some Henry Miller. It's almost synonymous with Summer for me at this point.

Summer's posts are more than enough. Why would anyone want to read a Summer Book???

Read it! It's more fun than you would think. After I finish Moby Dick I think I'll read that again. And maybe V. too.

Meh, I've dragged it out in public and never had anybody give it a sideways glance. Most people are too embarrassed to take obvious looks at what anybody is reading anyway. Besides I've had people give me weird looks for aking tthings like Naked Lunch and Junky out into the light of day. But they didn't beat me up over it so, you know, what the fuck.

I read the entirety of Lolita over the course of like 6 nights in the library, full view of the public, I didn't feel weird. The only book I have that I wouldn't read in public would be Mein Kampf, which I own strictly for objective reading because I am a history major and am fascinated by the inner workings of Hitler's mind.

I bought this one a few months back but keep chickening out on it. I know it's a daunting read, I think I'm afraid to find out I am not smart enough to read it.

Just finished Tortilla flat by Steinbeck though, that's a good book.

Best book I have read in the last few months is "Ham on Rye" by Bukowski. Can't recommend that one highly enough.

Lolita is one of the best books ever written.

"Lolita" is definately on my to read list.

This summer, I shall be more spontaneous with my reading. No grocery lists this time, no sir. One book at a time.

Yeah, and to be honest I'm sure nothing would happen regardless of what I read. Ultimately, having already read lolita I'm not desperate to read it again, especially considering the amount of books I haven't read. I dunno, Henry James' The Wings of the Dove has been gathering dust on my shelf for years now. Might be an idea to get that out of the way. Other than that, probably follow pbrabley's lead and just play things by ear.

Noel Edmonds - the Nietzschean Ubermensch.

I want to read Susan Greenfield's book 'ID: The Quest For Identity in The 21st Century'. I've got stacks of books to read. I want to finish Nietzsche's 'On The Genealogy of Morals' and get through the TS Eliot's collected works.

That's my favourite of them, I think, specifically the Balbac section, and the descriptions of the girls. That or the Swann In Love mini-story, for its descriptions of 'the little phase' in the music, Swann's love which is near madness (uncomfortably intense at points) and the great bathos at the end. I could read it again, now.

I think I managed one Proust book every six months (and for a lot of that time, I was unemployed, so I had an advantage haha). Not only is it very long, its so dense that I kept on needing to re-read pages as I went along - either to admire the brilliant descriptive writing, muse on one of his observations or philosophical points or to keep track of what he's talking about at times (got lost during a tangent about art or music - albeit an interesting one - then when he returns to the subject of four-pages ago!). And what's more: reading the entire thing again is so rewarding as you are probably already noticing that there are loads of allusions to future events in the beginning of the book, and so much of it rests on people changing throughout time in surprising ways (or the narrator’s perspective of them changing). Yeah... it's my favourite book.

The weather has been fantastic since saturday so i've been reading in the garden alot. I finished Vampire Vultures by John Fahey, I read Cats Cradle on a very sunny day and now I've started slaughter house 5 which I think will be better than the cradle.

I want to get some more hunter s thompson books this summer; still haven't read hells angels.

I'm thinking of reading some Shakespeare too. I feel that, as an English student, I need to know more about the plots and characters (I've only read Romeo & Juliet at school) as reference-points. But I find it very difficult to sit down and read a play as you would read a novel. Does anyone else have the problem? Can you get used to it? or should I buy the Laurence Olivier DVD collection.

like you, I find myself having to go back and re-read Proust simply because of the sheer density of his writing. As a result he's probably the only authors I can quote purely from memory. Well, Proust and Fredrick Forsyth maybe, although in his case it's for entirely different reasons.