Black Belt Jones
Player Valuation: £25m
I've just started Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu, a Romanian author. I see @sdk mentioned it on this thread earlier.Yeah, I don't think I'm after a masterpiece in any book (and I certainly don't go into any book with great expectations) - I want to enjoy it, which is ambiguous as everyone likes different things. What I've read about it online is that it's pretty good and it is genre-defining for Cyberpunk, which is just a damn cool concept and as far as I know it deals with a drug/'virus' of sorts, which we're close to making in reality! Yay! It's also how I learned of the book.
I'll bump it up on my list Thanks mate!
Bleak and/or dystopian is basically all of Russian/Eastern European literature mate. Sci-Fi is more Russian though, we just deal with normal, every day, tragic bleakness
The brothers apparently have some much better books than Roadside Picnic - I've not read any obviously, but a friend said he enjoyed a few others more. I might ask for recommendations hah.
I'd happily recommend some of our own literature too but we don't have a lot of it translated into English, and the ones we do are mostly about a very specific period of time - Under the Yoke by Ivan Vazov is an all-time great book but suffers a bit from having to know the period and people/regions well to truly understand it - it paints a picture of the most troubled times for our nation - the Ottoman enslavement - and the preparations for the eventual Uprising and freedom fight. It's also the most translated Bulgarian book and essentially Magnum Opus for Vazov himself, who is since known as "the Patriarch of Bulgarian literature" because of it (and other very time-set pieces).
We have an author - Georgi Gospodinov - who won some awards with his book Time Shelter a few years ago, but I met him and he's a knobhead in real life so I'm putting off reading anything by him
Has a very high reputation, got a recent English translation. Only a few chapters in so early days.