From Listverse: (images and ecommerce links removed, if you want to buy a new copy of these, by all means visit their site!)

Anyone who has read this book will appreciate its inclusion here; if for no other reason than the axe scene (in which the protagonist chops off one of his feet with an axe - this is the hobbling scene in the movie). That scene aside, the pages upon pages of descriptions of the pain suffered by the bedridden main character, coupled with the psychological torment as he tries to move through the house unnoticed, make this a much deserved entry.

In 18th century France, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born with no scent of his own, but with with a supernatural ability to detect the scent of others is driven to murder in order to create the perfect perfume. The book is a bizarre tale, but it is also lyrical and hypnotic–almost a fairy tale of terror. The ending is utterly vile and if you like disturbing literature, that alone makes this book worth a read. You won’t be disappointed, I promise you.

Upon anonymous publication, this book so scandalized France that Napoleon ordered the arrest of the author, stating that the book was “the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination”. The plot concerns Justine, who is presented with vice and abuse everywhere she turns. For example, she seeks refuge and confession in a monastery, but is forced to become a sex-slave to the monks, who subject her to countless orgies, rapes and other abuses. This is a must-read for anyone interested in French literature, the history of sadism, or disturbing literature.

This is one of the only books that I have not finished reading. I was so horrified by a scene early in the book (involving a dog, a bum, and a very sharp knife) that I could not go on. It was my first introduction to truly disturbing writing. I have since learnt to cope better and will, eventually, give this book another go. In the novel, people are sawed in half, gutted, sliced, diced and quartered in every imaginable form. What is striking about this novel’s violence is how emotionally unattached the protagonist is to it all, he has lost all feeling for anything but the thrill of the taboo. This book will change you.

The ‘Painted Bird’ is a holocaust novel that mentions the concentration camps only in passing, and rarely details the Nazis and their terrible work. This is the story of a young boy who gets separated from his parents when they send him to the (perceived) safety of the countryside when World War II breaks out in Eastern Europe. What happens to the boy - the things that are done to him, the things he sees and endures - is staggering. It’s a shocking description of hell on Earth. This book is a carnival of torture.

Straddling the borderlands between realism, fantasy and horror, “Geek Love” deals with the remarkable Binewski carnival family: Arturo the Aqua-Boy, born with flippers but no limbs; the musical Siamese twins Electra and Iphigenia; the telekinetic boy-wonder Chick; and the long-suffering Olympia, our narrator, who is a bald hump-backed albino dwarf. The story progresses through the family’s relatively innocent conception into much darker territory, primarily concerning Oly’s megalomaniac brother, Arty, and eventually culminates in a catastrophic event which claims the lives of all but a few Binewskis.

Kevin is a 15 year old mass murderer; a child who’s been emotionally unstable all his life. This book is written from the perspective of his mother, Eva. She, too, is emotionally disturbed. Shriver does do a creepily good job of highlighting all of the real school shootings that have taken place in America in the last few years, making We Need to Talk About Kevin not just disturbing in the far-off sense, but in the sense that although this particular story isn’t real, Eva could be any number of mothers in this country whose children have done the unthinkable.

The book is told entirely by Frank, a 17 year old who manages to sound perfectly sane and rational as he explains how he killed 3 people while he was still just a child or as he performs the rituals of the Wasp Factory (bizarre rituals that need to be read to be believed). The casualnes with which violent and unpleasant events are described is possibly more horrible than the events themselves and the irony that Frank considers himself the sanest person he knows is understated throughout. “I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me.”

I normally restrict these lists to one book per author. Today I am breaking that rule. Glamorama definitely needs to be on this list (along with the other Easton Ellis book, American Psycho) because of the gut churning violence depicted throughout the entire second half of the novel. There is a poisoning scene which you will never forget, a scene involving dismemberment (and described in every detail as is always the case with this author), and a plane crash. The book does have many elements of humor (for example, the main character, a male model, thinks that Global Warming is a type of shampoo) and I found it to be an enjoyable read, but it is definitely up there as one of the most disturbing books I have ever read.

Haunted is truly one disturbing but entertaining book of short stories. The first story is about a guy who loses some of his organs - it is the perfect example of “disturbing” literature. This is possibly the most blatantly twisted of Palahniuk’s novels; Haunted pushes the borders of what is considered socially acceptable. The book tells the story of 18 or so struggling writers who sign up for a “workshop” that involves being locked inside a dilapidated mansion for several days to develop story ideas. The chapters are the consequences of their brainstorming. One review sums up the gruesomeness of this book (and illustrates why it is item 1): “I thought that if I made it through story #1 (eating your way through your own prolapsed rectum) that I could get through anything, but I was wrong.”

Wow, two BEE books. Must have been those cold Bennington nights.

Labels: Books, lists

Pretty neat!

Labels: Books, Video

Frankfurt book fair seeks hope in Web's embrace

I think big (and small) businesses are starting to get it.
From the page:

Online bookselling is the most important development in publishing in the last 60 years, according to a survey carried out by organizers of the world's biggest book fair, which begins on Tuesday and runs for a week.

It doesn't take a genius to see the potential that's here on the web. Hopefully, some of these publishers and authors will begin to see the light.

Labels: bookselling, business, online bookselling, web

I'll give you the first 100, without comment. From infoplease:

1.	Call me Ishmael.	Herman Melville	Moby-Dick	1851
2.	It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.	Jane Austen	Pride and Prejudice	1813
3.	A screaming comes across the sky.	Thomas Pynchon	Gravity's Rainbow	1973
4.	Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.	Gabriel García Márquez (trans. Gregory Rabassa)	One Hundred Years of Solitude	1967
5.	Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.	Vladimir Nabokov	Lolita	1955
6.	Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.	Leo Tolstoy (trans. Constance Garnett)	Anna Karenina	1877
7.	riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.	James Joyce	Finnegans Wake	1939
8.	It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.	George Orwell	1984	1949
9.	It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.	Charles Dickens	A Tale of Two Cities	1859
10.	I am an invisible man.	Ralph Ellison	Invisible Man	1952

I laughed.

Labels: humor

From abebooks.com:

New Features

• Real time inventory management: HomeBase 3.0 will automatically send listings and wants to Abebooks as they’re entered or edited with no need to e-mail or FTP files. The FTP option will be retained to accommodate users who don’t want to be online when they work. You may still export a listings or wants file and e-mail it as an attachment via your e-mail program if they choose.
• Multi-select: Up to 100 listings or wants may be selected and edited/deleted at once. For example, if you realized you mis-typed an author's name on 5 listings, you could select them all and make the update once, and the edit would be applied to all 5 listings.
• Improved Price Partner: Price Partner is built into HomeBase 3. Booksellers may select a sub-set of their listings and increase or decrease prices by a fixed amount or a percentage on only the selected listings. They can also update all selected listings to the same price.
• ISBN LookUp: ISBN LookUp will now return more than one result if we have several matches to the ISBN in our database. The bookseller can choose the best match from the list. In addition, many more fields may be returned by ISBN LookUp.
• Quantity: If you have more than one copy of a book, you can use the quantity field and we'll automatically decrement the quantity online when a book is sold; no more manually re-listing!
• More Import Options: HomeBase 3.0 can import almost any type of file, so getting set up is easy.

I like the improved import/export features so far, but I am a little put off by the automatic updates to the website. For those of us who list on several websites, this can create a problem. I will be doing a full review of the software once I've had enough time to use all of its new features.

Labels: abebooks, database, homebase, software