Help me FList!

[pennin_ink]

No, I don't mean  "donate money to me for a new laptop", though I'd never stop you. *wink, wink* (1) This is something far more vital.

There is a woman you may never have heard of called Ursula Vernon. This woman is, by far, my most favourite mind in all of humanity. Seriously, every sentence she types is pure entertainment, and she's an AMAZING

Comments

[kim47]

There are a couple of ways to put stuff on your kindle. The best way, to me, is to download it to your computer, then send the file as an attachment to your kindle email with "convert" as the subject line. That changes it to a .azw file, which is the kindle format, so reads best. I hope that made sense!

[pennin_ink]

It actually did, which is pretty rare for me because outside of my very narrow area of experience, computers are an alien language to me.

[piplover]

Just a few recommendations of various types

[alltoseek]

Recs: Ursula LeGuin, short story collections The Compass Rose and The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

If you've read these and they're not experimental enough or the kind of experimental you meant, let me know. They're more out there than LeGuin's sci-fi/fantasy and other work, which is saying something.

One story called Schrondinger's Cat has what seems to be a more experimental narrative and subject (about entropy, both subject and style). There's another that's from a tree's POV. The trees' job is to make it seem to humans and other mobile critters like they're moving - basically to enact human's perceptions. The narrating tree balks when asked to become eternity for a human that died when he crashed his car into it

[alltoseek]

Was also going to rec works about cultures in transition, or conflict, such as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Those culture clashes can expose the differences in human 'narrative'.

I also like to read myths and folktales from non-Western traditions (Native American, ancient Japan, China, India, etc.) because these were developed to pass on different values and are based on different assumptions than we English-speaking folk are used to. Or Western sources but the original ones, not the ones molded to fit the narrative form we expect now. The Mabinogion is a good example.

Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Jazz and later works. These actually got too experimental for me because I couldn't follow them (Beloved was an earlier work and I love it).

Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses. I enjoy all Tan's work, but this one explores some of those same themes and styles as from Beloved that I find fascinating. Maybe not 'experimental' enough, dunno. Good reads, anyway! Not a waste of your time :-)

for colored girls who have considered

[dreamingrain]

So you wanna venture into the unknown, eh? Well then!

1. Suzanne Buffam - The Irrationalists - see if you can find this cheapside - it's a book of poems that go from a short few lines to long narratives. Very beautiful and compelling.

2. The End of the Alphabet - it breaks the idea of how a story of its type should go because it puts the emphasis on characters. I don't want to say too much and bias you, but it's worth the read.

I'd also say that in terms of form The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time as well as Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water are well worth the investment for a read....

but I worked at a bookstore for four years and I don't want to damn you to the kind of readinglist I could drum up. Good luck!

[ungalad]

I recommend Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. I'm not sure you can buy it for Kindle, but you can get one used copy for like 2USD here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802133908/ref=nosim/completereview I hope you like it! And now I feel like rereading it. :3