bookworm

exactly what i think, comparing the two books. Dan Brown's is a pale, populistic, fashionably shallow babble. Eco's is deep, rich, effort demanding (and his book deserves the effort) and as Jack-Cade said brilliant.

i loved pynchon's "cry of lot 49" and "vineland", both are in my personal pantheon of books, and i enjoy returning to them and giving them as presents to my friends. "mason $ dixon" was different for me. although i love the characters and pynchon's storytelling style, i "got stucked" during the book too many times, eventually to abandon it in the middle (it still awaits another attack-but it will be a new one). the plot is not evolving fast enough, it's too cumbersome, there's not enough good pynchon's atmosphere in between (though there are some bursts here and there).

pure pleasure for the mind and the senses. recently "cat's cradle" wondered into my hand, to be hungrily re-red (after more then a decade). it's masterly written, and conveys the wisest ideas, so rarely encou?tered anywhere today (including books), clad in the most colourful and fun apparel.

antique pulp

i had similar experience with this one, but i dropped at chapter 3. i wander is this an intelligence test or an endurance test (astrophysicist excluded) ;)

One of the best children's books ever. You don't need to find the newest hit for your kids, just find them moomins. And you will not suffer from reading it to the offspring, too.

a surprizingly succesfull hybrid: a refreshing story, elegantly jumping between eastern (china: contemporary as well as tradition)and western (freudean psychology) perspectives, swiftly interchanging dream and reality in the plot as well as in mr. muo's attitudes. pure pleasure

thanks to everyone in this booktalk, i saw the movie and felt insulted by it's shallowness, and pretence to be deep. plus the movie's end just sucks. you've just saved me from getting dissappointed from reading the book, as i often suspect the book being totally different from a bad movie. there are a few interesting ideas in "The Da Vinci code", but just underdeveloped and thrown around carelessly. in the same genre Eco's 'The name of the rose' is a much better choice (the movie is not brilliant, but less abominable

a great, flowing biography, gives a good overview and avoids the obvious stigmata connected with the historical figures. Zweig succedes in telling the tale of one of the most horrific turmoils in history with humane grace.

unreadable. i have it for about a year, the book's format is not easy, no narrative/chain of ideas to follow. i tried reading the "statements" in their order few times, and i could not make sense of the ideas, therefore i left it after just few pages each time. when i tried to pick "statements" without order they've struck me as surreal ideas without any connection to reality. is it me? or is it one of those books, people keep at home to appear very intelligent, but just few of them have actually read them (like Hawking's "brief history of time" - that gets too technical after the first chapter).