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fridge corn posted:I did generally like The Corrections when I read it and thought it was good, however I was unfortunately duped into reading other Franzen books which are just complete dogshit which one were they? winning the national book award obviously broke his mind but surely his debut can't be too bad
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Apr 13, 2024 23:23
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cumpantry posted:which one were they? winning the national book award obviously broke his mind but surely his debut can't be too bad I've read both Freedom and Purity and hell if they weren't so immediately forgettable I would have wished I hadnt
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Apr 14, 2024 00:14
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His newest one is really good
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Apr 14, 2024 03:40
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Nope not gonna fall for that nice try hahha
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Apr 14, 2024 15:32
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Reading the other city by michal ajvaz. I was rolling my eyes going 'yet another luminous dalkey archive translation of an endlessly inventive surrealist central european novel' but it's actually quite a good book about what reading's all about
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Apr 15, 2024 10:22
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is Bradbury considered serious literature? It feels like he might be on the line. Anyway, checking out his collection Golden Apples of the Sun and man, it's so good. Like, every story feels like a fully realized idea, whereas a lot of stories today feel like they are anything other than fully realized ideas.
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Apr 17, 2024 03:30
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Bradbury is among the best short-story writers who ever lived. Careful and generous in his prose. There are pieces of his work that will live inside me forever.
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Apr 17, 2024 03:32
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I've never read a Bradbury story and not thought that it would be twice the tale if it had a different writer, any other writer. He certainly had interesting ideas.
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Apr 17, 2024 03:40
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Gaius Marius posted:I've never read a Bradbury story and not thought that it would be twice the tale if it had a different writer, any other writer. He certainly had interesting ideas. That's crazy to me!
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Apr 17, 2024 04:36
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Yeah, it has been a long time since I've read Bradbury, but I'd say the opposite. His strength was in his intense moment-to-moment imagination, and the lucidity with which he portrayed people and settings. So simple ideas could be satisfying as they are grounded in earthier movements. Some of his ideas would be bad in other otherwise competent hands imo. And his raw talent could make loose thinking a good thing. Like his understanding of Fahrenheit 451 changed as he aged, and not for the better. I feel like the real inspiration and idea was very simple- destroying beauty and meaning is ugly and hurts. And there was a lot of it in the air in the 30s-50s, so the meaning was obvious regardless of who was doing the destroying. But when he tries to square that with the 90s, it turns into 'the world is changing in good and bad ways, i'm old and can't process it. time to use this as a vehicle to complain about the homosexual agenda and being PC' nice obelisk idiot fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Apr 17, 2024 |
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Apr 17, 2024 06:06
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Well I just read two incredibly mediocre Booker Prize winners 25 years apart. Definitely not ever thinking of that award as a selling point again. Kiran Desai's 2006 The Inheritance of Loss is another one of those sprawling multigenerational Indian sagas as the author wrestles with colonialism, class, gender, in lyrical prose. The issue is it uncovers nothing, jumps back and forth through time so haphazardly it destroys any forward momentum, and drags on itself so that it becomes a chore. It does present a cynical view of the identify politics and diasporic exploitation that have only gotten much worse in Modi's India, but the very personal stories of small losses amid a backdrop of big events just feels like the literary equivalent of Oscar-bait. Ben Okri's 1991 winner The Famished Road had me excited, echoing Amos Tutuola's jump-start magical writing that accepts all myth and never pauses for breath. But it becomes increasingly clear over the book's 500 pages that Okri has none of Tutuola's wit or storytelling energy. We follow our narrator who is a young boy split between the spirit world and the real one. He talks with his under-employed parents, goes to the local bar, encounters grotesque spirit people and is attacked, runs away into the magical forest for more dream energy, then returns home. This is the plot of the first forty or so pages. And this exact sequence with minor variations is repeated at least a half dozen times to fill out the rest of the book. There is a very good novel hidden in about 160 pages of this book but the sheer inanity of Okri's logorrhea and repetition just hurt me.
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Apr 19, 2024 05:10
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going to check out tutuola because the famished road felt like a parody of a literary tradition I wasn’t familiar with yet
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Apr 19, 2024 22:00
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