Poster Children Fan Favorite Book List

The characters in this book are really quite terrific. The book is about a family of circus freaks...true circus freaks. A cojoined female siamese twin...joined at the waist. A flipper-boy named Arturo...he has flippers for arms and legs. A frog-like, humped-back, little midget girl...she's the narrator. A Chick, a mild boy who has intense psychic powers. When I first picked up the book and read the back cover, it seemed that the book had nowhere really to go except to show how freakish this family could be. There really didn't seem to be that much a of a detailed plot. I was surprised, however, when the back of the cover was fully realized and dealt with after only a hundred pages or so. There's an entirely different story in there within the last 200 or so pages! The character development is amazing! Dunn treats the people in the book just like normal folk who have the same problems and concerns that other families have. My synopsis may seem dull and thick, but I can't really portray the greatness of this book inside the space provided. You'll like this book if you like to read about more macabre subjects...surely there are plenty in this book. You'll like this book if you're into really nice writing technique. You'll like this book if you appreciate plot development, character growth, overall story fluidity. Good lord, people, it's a damn good book. I would issue a quick warning, however: The first 100 or so pages go pretty slow and I had trouble wanting to continue to read. But the last 200 or so pages read faster than greased lightning. It probably took me less than two days to read those 200 pages compared to the week it took me to read the first 100. Really and trully give this book it's fair shake of the lamb's leg.

submitted by Jarvis McNikid
Magic Land, C.L.O.D. Local Universe - Saturday, January 30, 1999 at 02:01:10 (PST)

This book is really hard to sum up, so here are some keywords: an enormously fat man as lead character, New Orleans, pants, a gay revolution, a workers revolution, hotdog vendors, lutes and lute strings, old senile women, excercise machines, hippies, Boetheus, and the largest pirate costume known to man. There's much much more, but I'll let you read it. The second posthumous Pulitzer prize ever given and the writer's only novel published that he wrote after his 15th birthday. My favorite book. I read it once a year. Enjoy!

submitted by Stephen
http://www.crackinthesidewalk.net/exray/
Lafayette/Wash. D.C., Louisiana/ D.C. USA - Thursday, January 28, 1999 at 18:52:03 (PST)

A method has been developed to record dreams onto a playable medium. A feather. A VURTual state. People soon realize that this VURTual world, however bizarre and fantastic, is just as real as our own. During the trip from reality to VURT, or vice versa, things can go wrong. Objects lost from reality are replaced by objects from the VURT of equal value. A sister is swapped for a Thing from Outer Space. It's up to a brother to come to her rescue. What is the price of the exchange? .... Set in a future Manchester's rave scene. Very aggressive ideas along with nonlinear grammatical concepts made this book a true original.

submitted by Johnny Bravo
Redlands, Ca USA - Tuesday, January 26, 1999 at 01:41:33 (PST)

City of Truth - Imagine a town where everyone tells the truth, the whole brutal truth, all the time. A place where people CAN NOT LIE. Now imagine you're kid's been bitten by a rabbit at Camp Ditch The Kids and is infected with a rare and certainly deadly disease. His only hope is to belive he can get better. Towing Jehova - God is dead. Dead and fallen into the sea. The Vatican comissions a Super Tanker to haul His Corpse to the arctic. Only Begotten Daughter - the story of God's daughter, Julie Katz, Jesus' half sister. All of Morrows books are brillian, funny and irreverant.

submitted by DevilCrayon
- Monday, January 25, 1999 at 12:21:26 (PST)

This is a wonderful story of how a little girl in a book helps another to learn the history of philosophy. There is an intriguing and delightful twist to the story, of which I will not ruin. This anecdote is an easy and comprehensive guide to philosophy for anyone needing or wishing to further their knowledge on the art of philosophy and its contributors. I recommend this work by Serbonich over auditing a philosophy course, after all the book will be free and the chair will most likely be more than some plastic or wooden plate attached to metal appendages. I listened to it on tape and found it intellectually soothing. Go ahead, open the door, and step inside Sophie's World...you'll want to stay for a cup or two.

submitted by dustAnjel
cleveland, tn usa - Wednesday, January 20, 1999 at 09:10:14 (PST)

The book is 900+ pages full of the collected short stories written over the past 20-25 years by Boyle. The book is remarkable because of the range of writting style, subject matter and themes expressed in his works. Some stories show insightful humor, while others display love and loss, and just how far a person will go to further a romance. The large # of stories makes this a great book to read piece by piece. It is alo very heavy and thick, making it perfect to serve as a paper weight or booster seat.

submitted by Noah
Chicago, IL USA - Saturday, January 16, 1999 at 17:21:33 (PST)

A young man awakens to find himself shipwrecked...on a ship. He is in sight of an island, but is unable to swim and therefore trapped aboard. Very dense yet brilliant writing by the same author as "The Name of the Rose," which was turned into a movie starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater.

submitted by Scott
http://www.lfc.edu/~richast
- Saturday, January 16, 1999 at 13:11:41 (PST)

Stream of consciousnes has never be less pretentious! Loosly (or perhaps stictly) affiliated with so-called "cyberpunk" literature, the only thing "cyber" about this is that its connections between words and even chapters work somewhat like links on the WWW. The beauty of that is that you never know exactly where you are going to go when you start, but once you get there, it seems like the only place you could have wound up. My english teacher in High School compared it to stand up comedy??

submitted by Matt
http://www.mindspring.com/~urad/sloth.htm
- Friday, January 15, 1999 at 11:24:49 (PST)

You should read this book because it ROCKS. Over the past few years I have been reading newer sci-fi/cyberpunk/nanotech and the 2 authors who are head and shoulders above the rest are Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. Sarah Zettel is ready to join them. This book is never what it seems, the plot twists are electric and the action is fast. If you are interested in artificial intelligence (AI) and what could become of the net, you'll like this book.

submitted by Mike Ahern
www.primenet.com/~xman
New Orleans, LA USA - Thursday, January 14, 1999 at 11:38:30 (PST)

I feel this book is an amazing re-thinking of the contemporary theories of evolution. Dawkins shifts the focus away from survival of the fittest in regards to species, and individual, down to the genetic level. Arguing that the lowest living self replicator is indeed the key to the biological evolutionary process, Dawkins sheds new light on theories of life itself. By applying the idea of the "meme"-theory, one may start to see "life" outside the organic. Concepts of self replication span the gamut from the generation and distribution of ideas, to the the self sustaining "meme-complex" systems ranging from art, religion, and scientific inquiry.

submitted by Coco
http://www.astroman.com
Atlanta, GA USA - Wednesday, January 13, 1999 at 15:32:22 (PST)

This is an increadable sci-fi novel about a planet that is covered by an ocean that acts as a giant brain. The lead character, Kelvin, is haunted by a being resembeling and claiming to be his dead girlfriend. Some say that Solaris is the russian answer to 2001, but upon reading it you will find that the two are as diffirent as night and day. Great book... go read it.

submitted by Kyle Crane
Baton Rouge, LA USA - Monday, January 11, 1999 at 22:45:56 (PST)

I first decided to read this book when i read somewhere that it was about an undercover police drug agent that was assigned to spy on himself. I nearly died laughing with the absurdity of that notion, but when I read the book, I was amazed. It was exceptionally well done and just a fantastic book overall. It is the book that got me into more of Dick's stuff, and now he has grown into one of my favorite authors. Check it out!

submitted by Scott Daddy-o
Mesa, AZ CHIMPOland - Saturday, January 09, 1999 at 08:12:44 (PST)

A hilarious satire about the Second World War. Yossarian, an Assyrian pilot fighting for the Americans, no longer wants to fight, but he is prevented from quitting active duty by Catch-22. Funny, even the second and third time around, because you keep catching new stuff (it's loaded with satire). Characters such as Major Major Major Major (who was named by his father as a joke; the Army immediately promoted him to Major and refused to promote him further), Major Scheisskopf (who was later promoted to become a General Scheisskopf), and Nately. Well written - I couldn't put it down. I think I'm going to go read it again now . . .

submitted by Amanda Fontanez
IL US - Thursday, January 07, 1999 at 12:31:13 (PST)

Whereas William Gibson's Neuromancer provided a pretty clincal, if at times lifeless (and ya, that was probably one of his main points) near-future, Stephenson speeds through his breakneck visions of a closer, darker, and well, more interesting future like a drag racer with one eye looking into a microscope and the other watching everything else going on like it was being processed through a vcr stuck on fast-forward wired right to his optic nerve. Snow Crash is the more immediate of the two books, centering mostly on a mafioso pizza delivery man/hacker/real samurai, an (at the time) very forward-looking vision of virtual reality before it became a PR gag for game companies with lousy ideas, and a plot to match. The diamond age is much more baroque in nature, (it _is_ subtitiled "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"), and focuses initally on the life of a corporate engineer named Hackworth, playing with nano-technology in an extremely class and cache ordered "Neo Victorian" world which I think occurs in the same "world" as Snow Crash, just later. Imagine if every household item and accepted production technology was simultaneously designed by Xerox PARC in their heyday and caught on immediately, that's the level of saturation technology has in this book, to the point where it isn't the specific technology per se but it's the immersion level Stephenson creates in the book that stuns me. The plot builds to one of the most MASSIVE disorienting finishes I've ever read-- really, the aural equivelent of it would be like if every car stereo in new york city during rush hour started playing different Atari Teenage Riot songs at the same time extremely loudly, while bombs exploded in the distance, new elements are discovered, weapons fall from the sky, and yet off in the corner there's Neal Stephenson, scribbling away some arcane theory or devising a sociological calculus that somehow explains a little of the chaos without reducing it's effect one bit. Fine by me!

submitted by Tony Stanfa
Bloomington, IL USA - Tuesday, January 05, 1999 at 18:17:44 (PST)

Umm.. sorry for this being so long... This girl is telling a story in a way either like it happened last summer or like a memory she is reliving it to a psychologist. She still tells it from her childhood's point of view. The emotions ring true: embarrassment, terrifying, boring. I love how the girl knows that all of the gifts of childhood will rot away during her teenage years. She fears the future. What really kills me about this girl is her undying love for her brother. The girl would not give up her brother for anything. She will curse the day when she will grow up being a teenager flirting with boys and all that rot deserting her brother alone with her neglecting parents. The Rest of Her Family: Her mother is a very attractive woman. I think she stops trying to find meaning to her life. I guess she thinks it isn't taking care of her kids or being a wife, yet I don't think it really should be all that. Her father only tries to keep her mother happy by lighting her cigarette or making her a drink. I guess in all, this is about a girl and her decaying family. And after looking at the picture (the girl is in a lake. Her face is peering up through the surface looking at the camera.) the girl's emotion might be look a of... um... help?

submitted by David Garcia
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/6309/
San Angelo, Texas USA - Monday, January 04, 1999 at 13:48:55 (PST)

This is a wonderful sci-fi/fantasy series involving (each in seperate books)stories from the point of view of God, The Devil, Death, Time, Nature, War, and Fate. These books are all very complex and detailed in terms of storyline and deep characters.

submitted by jacob
silsbee, tx usa - Sunday, January 03, 1999 at 22:45:27 (PST)

Brautigan is simply a great author to read. This book chronicles slices of life on stops along the Tokyo-Montana Express, loosely reflecting aspects of Brautigans life including a visit to Japan, life in beatnik San Francisco, and growing up in the Pacific Northwest. This is the first book I read by Brautigan, and I was hooked. Most of his books are out of print, though there are some three volume anthologies available. A good place to start might be the library - pretty much every decent sized library I've looked in (from Sacremento, CA to one in Ireland) usually has one or two of his books. Anyway, if you can't find this one any of his others are equally entrancing. Not that I'm any great authority, but highly recomended.

submitted by Arthur Bernstein
La Crosse, WI - Sunday, January 03, 1999 at 20:09:23 (PST)

This is a very intricate and involving tale of a secret conspiracy organization that has existed since the dawn of human existance. Fans of William Burroughs and Frank Herbert should really enjoy this riviting epic...science fiction/mystery/adventure/bizzare...Wilson and Shea would have you believe that George Washington, the Dealy Llama, and J.Dillinger(to name but a few) actively play a part in a secret society that constantly threaten human existence. Another organization is assembling to stop it fronted by a Nemoesque submarine captain. This whole story is absolutely fascinating...amazingly written and researched. Secret cults, magic, technology, crazy plot twists, the missing city of Atlantis and believe it or not, rock and roll.

submitted by Nathan
http://www.auburn.edu/~uptaijb
Auburn, Alabama U.S. - Wednesday, December 30, 1998 at 23:38:52 (PST)

This is far and away the best series I've ever read. Donaldson, an uneven writer at best, managed to construct this epic five book series while he was in his genius phase. It's based upon Wagner's Ring Cycle, only it's set in a futuristic sci-fi galaxy where Earth is a mere holding-ground for giant mining industries. Engrossing to say the least, I know a series is time-consuming, but it's definitely worth it.

submitted by Alex McCown
St. Paul, MN USA - Wednesday, December 30, 1998 at 22:19:35 (PST)

If you've seen "A Christmas Story", then the title may seem familiar to you if you watch the opening credits. The book is revolves around Ralphie going back to his hometown and going to this bar where his old pal, Flick runs the place. They get to talking and recalling old times. The movie is based on one chapter of the book, yet there are so many more tales to tell. All in all it's a funny recollection of growing up,growing older and dealing with life in general. I found myself laughing throughout the book.If you've seen the movie and liked it, you might find yourself laughing throughout the book also.

submitted by frank g
dallas, tx - Wednesday, December 30, 1998 at 13:11:33 (PST)

A true story told in a very thinly-veiled, albeit somewhat exaggerated, work of fiction. The poet Charles Bukowski wrote a film called Barfly, which was directed by Barbet Schroeder and starred Micky Rourke and Faye Dunaway. The film is, more or less, Bukowski's autobiography, and "Hollywood" is his account of the writing of and making of that movie. It's absolutely hysterical and is a very quick read.

submitted by bob donlon
new york, ny - Tuesday, December 29, 1998 at 22:24:27 (PST)

If you like the way Kurt Vonnegut writes his sentences, you'll love the way Don Delillo writes. This was one of the first books I read when I started reading again after college.The book is about a college professor, a toxic chemical spill, elvis, hitler, a new drug, postmodernism, and a bunch of other stuff. Recommended if you like Pynchon and Vonnegut.

submitted by rose
champaign, il usa - Tuesday, December 29, 1998 at 11:55:52 (PST)

This book will change the dimensions of your brain. Without falling into the usual trap of inventing global conspiracies, it explores the ways in which people fail to work together to improve the general situation of humanity all through the story of a family dealing with the mysterious illness of their father. When I read this book there was at least one passage in every chapter that made my chin hit my neck. Read this book!

submitted by Bob Chapman
Boston, MA - Tuesday, December 29, 1998 at 08:07:46 (PST)