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I finished A General Theory of Oblivion and found it to be very cool and good. An entertaining allegory for the strange exchanges colonialism results in. Shouts out to Edward Said for Culture and Imperialism and shouts out to Agualusa for this book. Now I don't know what to read next but I've been digging all the translated lit y'all have been posting about. Though know you're talking about Pynchon and I guess I should give Gravity's Rainbow another try. All I remember is a hilarious madcap scene where some guy has his foot stuck in a toilet or a helmet.
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Apr 19, 2020 20:05
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There are a couple of those, can you be more specific
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Apr 19, 2020 22:15
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TrixRabbi posted:This is the best Classics cover design I've ever seen. would this imply sonny liston is hector
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Apr 19, 2020 22:16
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Turn of the Screw was okay, but Henry James seems like a big nerd. and I can't believe the word 'literally' was used so badly and so often in a book over 100 years old wtf.
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Apr 20, 2020 18:13
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The chapter in Part 3 of Gravity's Rainbow that describes Pökler's backstory is some amazing stuff. This was the most satisfying part of the book so far and well-worth the headaches from Part 1. I'm actually beginning to imagine GR as a multi-volume graphic novel. It suits the material, IMO: cartoonishly ungrounded at times but not so much that realism is out the window.
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Apr 21, 2020 02:03
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I just came here to post that Night on the Galactic Railroad is good.
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Apr 21, 2020 08:08
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I like book
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Apr 21, 2020 09:23
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Lead out in cuffs posted:I just came here to post that Night on the Galactic Railroad is good. I like song true.spoon fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Apr 21, 2020 |
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Apr 21, 2020 17:34
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Hard recs to The Caterpillar by Edogawa Rampo which is anti-war literature by way of body horror in the same vein as Johnny Got His Gun but arguably a bit more visceral Where did you find it? I've been wanting to read that one after another goon recommended it but I have no idea what collection it's in and none of the ones on Amazon actually have a list of which stories they include. Also man that is a top tier pen name.
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Apr 21, 2020 20:41
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While we are roughly on topping, I can also highly recommend the three Kaiki: Uncanny Tales from Japan volumes. The stories are a bit uneven but there are some real gems in each of them (including one of Rampo, which had a charmingly naive touch). @Grizzled Patriarch: Cursory searching brought up "Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination" but it looks like a cheaply made edition, the terrible curse of open domain works.
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Apr 21, 2020 20:56
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Yeah I got it in on Japaness Tales of Mystery but it's a pretty decent quality edition
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Apr 21, 2020 23:25
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Cheers, I went ahead and snagged that since it seems to be pretty much the only way to get most of his non-detective fiction in English.
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Apr 22, 2020 06:30
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Honestly last month I ordered like, four of books which included Japanese Tales so if any other good poo poo pops up I will let you know
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Apr 22, 2020 13:45
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I'm reading The Sluts by Dennis Cooper right now and holy poo poo. I started it last night but am already over halfway through (which is a real nice change of pace as the last few things I read took me forever), but what a gruesome, hosed up and absolutely brilliant novel. Ordered it because it showed up on John Waters' list of favorite books and was very happy to find that my roommate has Cooper's first two novels so now I'm going to dig in after this. It's set on a website for gay male escorts about a group of men identified only by their usernames and other pseudonyms who obsess over an underage boy, who may or may not be terminally ill, who is being passed around for abusive sex. Everyone is constantly accusing each other of lying, even details of what the boy looks like change from review to review. It's absolutely depraved, a world where everyone is a pedophile pervert with a fetish for snuff and murder (though it may all be coming from one deranged user under multiple names). Cooper really nails the nature of online discourse (and this was published in 2004), from a good dramatic story that draws everyone on a site in to the innumerable unreliable narrators that chime in to discuss it.
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Apr 22, 2020 16:14
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TrixRabbi posted:I'm reading The Sluts by Dennis Cooper right now and holy poo poo. This sounds v good, and one to add to the growing thread canon of 'nonce literature'
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Apr 22, 2020 16:41
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Quit loving the child (but do write an online review)
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Apr 22, 2020 16:49
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:The chapter in Part 3 of Gravity's Rainbow that describes Pökler's backstory is some amazing stuff. This was the most satisfying part of the book so far and well-worth the headaches from Part 1. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01FIYK8TA/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_-TCOEb3Y5NZXF
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Apr 23, 2020 18:10
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So I just finished The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen and it was okay I guess. It's got this overwritten style that starts of cute but becomes cloyingly so fairly quickly. The author tries to pass it off as an affectation of the narrator but it's about as believable as you want it to be I suppose. The satire is a bit too on the nose, almost embarrassingly so at some points such that my eyes rolled out of my head a number of times. Its musings on American life and the Vietnam war are all on well trodden ground. Feels like a book that should have been written about 20 or 30 years earlier. Despite that, its competently written and has things to say so long as you haven't heard it all before already.
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Apr 23, 2020 18:21
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I have a copy of this and can confirm it rules.
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Apr 23, 2020 18:55
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Franchescanado posted:I have a copy of this and can confirm it rules. am I crazy or is that by the famous pants making GBS threads rapist Zak Smith edit: lol it is Famethrowa fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 19:00
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Famethrowa posted:am I crazy or is that by the famous pants making GBS threads rapist Zak Smith That’s news to me, but it looks like it. Probably why it’s out of print.
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Apr 23, 2020 19:11
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Famethrowa posted:am I crazy or is that by the famous pants making GBS threads rapist Zak Smith yeah, I have a copy of this too, it does own, and now that I know it was literally painted in human fecal matter on the floor tiles of a chik-fil-a it's even more hilarious Glad I didn't know he was a rapist when I bought it though
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Apr 23, 2020 19:17
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It always confuses me for a second when my forums' worlds collide This might be how rapist Zak Smith felt when the poo poo that was supposed to remain inside his rear end instead collided with the inner lining of his pants while he was standing inside a chik fil a
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Apr 23, 2020 19:50
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just finished the fur hat by vladimir voinovich. a+, loving hilarious, and strongly recommended to anyone craving (late) soviet-era russian lit in the spirit of gogol. or funny russian lit in general. next up: the twelve chairs by ilf and petrov
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Apr 24, 2020 00:32
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Unsure if I've already posted this in the thread but one thing that grinds my gears is Virginia Woolf in 'sentimental' 'I'm just going to write whatever the hell I feel like because being intensely self-critical about my prose is to be fair legitimately mentally debilitating' mode. Orlando is basically rescued by its central conceit, but Between the Acts, which I have to read atm, is so far literally just this mode hung on a fairly limp idea only given meaning by barely-mentioned context (the imminent second world war). I got halfway through last time and gave up, this is still a drudge second time around. It's so far just rich people (lots of names, very little beyond the broadest possible strokes; one guy is gay, one woman is a widow, another woman is very forward, one man is old, that's it) going around their lovely house described in lots of detail. The only way the domestic labour necessary to maintain Pointz Hall is referred to is as something proles take inherent pride in, or otherwise the servants are a superstitious bunch of authentic prole types referred to as a collective. I'm not at all interested in most of the book so far even as irony. I think the problem is that Woolf is basically just very sentimental about ~*England*~, even when she's ostensibly being critical, which is never good news imo. Basically I hope the stupid pageant, which isn't charming or interesting to read, gets rained on
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Apr 26, 2020 02:37
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Does the entire 546 page backlog of this thread count as a work of literature? I even made a cameo appearance like six years ago, when I was younger and asking for advice on how to get into literature within the first hundred or so pages of the thread.
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Apr 26, 2020 02:58
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And how has that turned out?
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Apr 26, 2020 03:01
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University became a real concentration hog in the interim, and I still don't read as much "great" literature as I'd like to, but I've definitely read some stuff since then. To give a random assortment of books and authors on a bookshelf I have sitting next to me, I've read some Mo Yan, a lot of Coetzee, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Yukio Mishima, Orhan Pamuk. I'm reminded that the only thing I've read by Dostoyevsky is half of the Brothers Karamazov around the time I posted in this thread and I never finished it. Just now I've been reading Catch-22 after devouring the Revenge collection by Yoko Ogawa, and I think I'm going to read either The Name of the Rose or attempt White Noise afterwards. I also am kind of intrigued by the novel Grendel, but I don't know if that book is considered genre fiction or not. The Glass Bead Game by Hesse is also coming up in my reading list. I haven't finished the entire backlog of this thread yet, but I was surprised that there's a generally positive opinion of Donna Tartt's novels? I read The Goldfinch when it came out and was fascinated by it, but it really seemed to fall apart towards the end and use up the strength of its narrative. Then I read The Secret History and also felt like it started off strong and just turned a bit too much into a navelgazing drama between college students and I didn't get much from it, despite getting some extra mileage out of the setting because of some passing experience with Classics courses. After that, I read half of The Little Friend and got bored and haven't finished it. I really enjoy a lot of Tartt's prose, but I feel like she can't sustain a narrative over the course of an entire novel or something. Tosk fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Apr 26, 2020 |
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Apr 26, 2020 03:22
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J_RBG posted:Unsure if I've already posted this in the thread but one thing that grinds my gears is Virginia Woolf in 'sentimental' 'I'm just going to write whatever the hell I feel like because being intensely self-critical about my prose is to be fair legitimately mentally debilitating' mode. Orlando is basically rescued by its central conceit, but Between the Acts, which I have to read atm, is so far literally just this mode hung on a fairly limp idea only given meaning by barely-mentioned context (the imminent second world war). I got halfway through last time and gave up, this is still a drudge second time around. Please source your quotes
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Apr 26, 2020 03:43
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whatevz fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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Apr 26, 2020 05:35
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TrixRabbi posted:I'm reading The Sluts by Dennis Cooper right now and holy poo poo. Yeah, Cooper has that effect on people I find. He returns to those themes pretty frequently, with mixed results, in his other work, but when he's good he's really good. I recently read Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, which on the surface is a pulpy pursuit/escape novel, but ends up having some pretty cool things going on with the protagonist stripping away layers of his humanity in order to survive. Plus there was a quote from the Times on the cover so it counts as real literature.
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Apr 26, 2020 14:44
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Gertrude Perkins posted:I recently read Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, which on the surface is a pulpy pursuit/escape novel, but ends up having some pretty cool things going on with the protagonist stripping away layers of his humanity in order to survive. Plus there was a quote from the Times on the cover so it counts as real literature. Living in a burrow like a rodent is prime real literature material
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Apr 26, 2020 15:23
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the library will not let me put a hold on the isabelle eberhardt collection i want so i guess i gotta wait to learn about sufism and/or depression
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Apr 26, 2020 18:50
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idk what i was expecting from wyndham lewis and tarr but an exploration of the psyche of a rape victim was not it
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Apr 27, 2020 18:01
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I went ahead and ordered Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. Doesn't seem to be anyone's favorite but I find the subject matter ("how da fuq did we go from 1960s counterculture to 1980s Reagan era", with northern California as setting) the most interesting. For all I know it will end up on my shelf unread for 10 years like Gravity's Rainbow did, which oh by the way I finished. "What?" - Richard Nixon Earlier ITT 2666 was recommended. Hmm. A little tired of giant novels at the moment. Has anyone read By Night in Chile by same author?
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Apr 28, 2020 02:52
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Mieville's The City & The City is not very good. Wooden uninspired dialogue, poor description and overuse of cliche, an lack of characterization/motivation, and an insipid plot which sucks the wonder out of mystery. I couldn't but keep in mind the Glass Key as I read through (which I didn't like as much as other books by Hammett). Compared, it just lacks so much vitality and life. If Mieville had worked five or six more drafts and had a good editor, he might have been able to shape his not-awful idea into a compelling novel. My recommendation: read other books instead. Labyrinths is the next book on my reading list.
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Apr 28, 2020 03:20
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:I went ahead and ordered Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. Doesn't seem to be anyone's favorite but I find the subject matter ("how da fuq did we go from 1960s counterculture to 1980s Reagan era", with northern California as setting) the most interesting. Vineland is amazing but you have to get into the right mindset. I read it for the first time while tripping balls in Santa Cruz; highly recommended. Edit: also when you reread GR, use the Weinburger companion for a huge mindfuck Edit 2: okay sorry! I know I always pimp weinburger in here
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Apr 28, 2020 03:34
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Just finished William Gaddis A Frolic of His Own, which is a savage mockery of the law and the legal profession. It is dope. Now reading Invitation to a Beheading. Pretty surreal - unlike anything else I've read by Nabokov.
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Apr 28, 2020 04:00
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CestMoi posted:idk what i was expecting from wyndham lewis and tarr but an exploration of the psyche of a rape victim was not it I like how he uses Tarr as a mouthpiece character for some of his opinions but there's also like 3 different scenes where Tarr is just monologuing at people who clearly don't give a hoot about his ideas
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Apr 28, 2020 04:20
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Health Services posted:Mieville's The City & The City is not very good. Wooden uninspired dialogue, poor description and overuse of cliche, an lack of characterization/motivation, and an insipid plot which sucks the wonder out of mystery. I read this before I got into LITERATURE, and I remember liking it pretty well until the end when the bad guy explains his plan in detail while pointing a gun at the good guy. Wtf lol why is it so hard for mystery writers to avoid this
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Apr 28, 2020 04:44
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