hiphop-elements.com

honestly...

suggest a few books or stories you've read or want to read... comment if you've got one in common. if possible link up to stories or poetry on the web so others can read it without trypping to B&N.

http://www.centenary.edu/~balexand/goodman.html
-- Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

(it's a short story that takes like 5 minutes to get thru....)

suggestion for a fuckin' brilliant novel...

Blindness by Jose Saragamo. if you've seen 28 Days Later, it's alot like that movie. Also won Portugal a Nobel Prize for Literature a few years back.

honesty.

I have just finished "To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. It is very deep and insightful in principle but very easy to understand. If you haven't read it i suggest you do.

I also want to read "Life of Pi" anyone read that?

One of the best I've ever read was The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks....

Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid

White Teeth by Zaidi Smith

The Pursuit of Urdu Literature by Ralph Russel

Everybody was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity by Vijay Prashad

The Clash of Fundamentalisms by Tariq Ali

I think instead of creating new versions of this same thread every month or two we should just ressurect the old one so (a) people don't repeat themselves and (b) the recommendations are all in the same place.

All of these are excellent books and I would recommend them to anybody:

A Suitable boy by Vikram Seth. It's 1,474 pages long but it's so good that by the end I wished it was longer.

All of the Easy Rawlins series by Walter Mosely.

Underworld by Don DeLillo.

The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh.

And I want to read Brick Lane by Monica Ali cause it's got good reviews.

7 habits of highly effective people.
stephen covey.

Things Fall Apart
The Alchemist

Domes of Fire David Eddings
Everything's Eventual Stephen King
recent readings I finished the Eddings novel
the king book is full of shorts
As an emcee reading is like new batteries nah mean???

the doors of perception by aldous huxley

and

the Qur'an

-Greek Myths
and just like NOBEL wrote: alchemist by Paulo Coelho(that book is amazing)
-The Godfather... better than the movie

That book is superb. If you have seen the movie - read the book. The author of the Godfather (Mario Puzo) actually did the screen play with Coppola to the movie. The book is Godfather One and the Vito Corleone story of Godfather II. A fantastic book imo.

Honestly...

Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) is an amazing writer. He says a lot in very few words... a very good lesson for anyone to learn. Check out his poem "Refugee Mother and Child".

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~lavie ... hebe1.html

Also, to get a different POV of the emperilization of Africa -- no clue how to spell that ; ) -- check out Joseph O'Connors Heart of Darkness. It's kinda long & tedious but if you can get through it, you'll really like it. It's sorta like a grown up Lord of the Flies. Or just watch the movie Apocalypse Now.

Honesty.

My brother was given this book when he was in Bangkok and its really deep -not for the squeemish or fainthearted. The imagery sticks in your mind for time-its called 'The Damage is Done' written by Warren Fellows-a true story of the brutality and terror he endured for 12 years in Bangkok's notorious Bang Kwang prison.

'The prison is a place where sewer rates and cockroaches are the only nutritious food, where autocratic prison guards laugh as they deliver pulverising blows and where the worst punishment is the khun deo-solitary confinement Thai Style.'

This book is written in painful honestly and is from the heart-the stuff this guy had to see and do is unbelievable and i couldn't believe how anyone could survive it.

You wont be able to put this book down and you definately wont forget about the stuff you have read in a hurry>


i think you can buy it from http://www.asiabooks.com written in '97.

'The Famished Road' by Ben Okri is a really good book too-set in Africa. I read it 5 years ago so cant remember much of it. Its quite a thick book but you wont be able to stop reading after you have turned the first page. It's a deep book and really forces you to sit back and THINK.

Mr Nice - Howard Marks,

I'm reading it now, its an autobiography of one of the worlds biggest cannabis smugglers who went to oxford uni with none other than Bill Clinton.

Chopper - Mark Read,

Another autobiography, this one is about one of Australias most notorious criminals, who claimed not to be a murderer but a "waste disposal expert". He has never served time in prison for murder despite allegedly killing about 19 people.

here are some books...

Never At East by Chinua Achebe. this is the follow up to Things Fall Apart. If you liked Things Fall Apart, you will thoroughly enjoy this read.

i've just re-read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. i swear there were so many things that i missed the first time around. that's almost the beauty of books.

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow.

read any book by James Baldwin, bell hooks.
The Cornell West Reader was good but it was almost too scholarly for its own good.
The Noam Chomsky Reader

How to read and why by Harold Bloom

just to name a few. more to come...

I'm in the middle of Hearts in Atlantis...but i plan on reading..

1984
A Brave New World

"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess was one of my earliest and most favorite books. I was siked when Cage made a song based on it.

That book is dope^^^