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The Belgian posted:It's mainly notable for tricking a whole bunch of people into killing themselves. It's not a trick.
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Dec 25, 2016 03:13
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at the date posted:David Foster Wallace's consistent gimmick was pushing self-deprecation to an irritating level, like wondering aloud what it must be like to be one of those geniuses you hear about and insisting he was just a regular Joe, as if he avoided a career in furniture sales only by the constant patronizing indulgence of the reading public. In retrospect, obviously, he may have been sincerely convinced he was a moron, given his evident depressive tendency. In any case, that reading list fits the pattern. what kind of freakazoid would put books people would make fun of him for liking on his list of favorites i mean jeez CestMoi posted:It's not a trick. 
Solitair fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Dec 25, 2016 |
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Dec 25, 2016 03:46
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I read Faust as the story of a beta who gets ladder theory taught to him so he can finally grab the pussy through some sick value signaling.
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Dec 25, 2016 06:22
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The Belgian posted:It's mainly notable for tricking a whole bunch of people into killing themselves. i can respect that
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Dec 25, 2016 16:22
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Goethe's science is more interesting than his writing
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Dec 27, 2016 00:42
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Goethe's Science Fiction is even more interesting.
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Dec 27, 2016 09:32
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Also real talk why is 90% of fantasy about knights and dragons and elves I genuinely think the reason is because Lord of the Rings was taken as the template for modern fantasy, rather than the far superior Hobbit imo. I know The Hobbit was technically written for his children, but as a story goes it's an actual story. It's Tolkien being somewhat fun and actually trying to write something that people would find entertaining. Lord of the Rings is not that. Lord of the Rings is the work of an archivist who tacked a story on the end. It's a very long, very boring genealogy of a bunch of people literally nobody cares about, because they don't loving exist, with a generic "good vs. evil" story tacked on out of a sense of obligation. Unfortunately for the genre as a whole, it became the template for most of what followed. The reason why Fantasy isn't actually fantastical is because it's a genre that attracts the kind of autists who would rather create an entire world and catalog it rather than actually tell a story. They lack creativity because creativity is not something that benefits their goal, to create the most perfectly structured, orderly and definitive world of dragons, knights and elves. I mean, there are actual good authors that have done something similar and managed to make it entertaining, but these people sort of approached it differently by wanting to tell a good story first and the rest springing up from that. Big Breasts, Wide Hips by Mo Yan, War & Peace by Tolstoy, 100 Years of Solitude by Marquez etc all have pretty huge amounts of characters with a lot of backstory, but that's just a means to an end, not the actual end itself, because these were good writers.
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Dec 27, 2016 14:15
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Ras Het posted:I googled this and found a really funny and dumb blog post http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/01/why-doesnt-fantasy-sell-in-japan/ i'm the judgement that historical fiction doesn't count as "real fantasy" because reasons (i guess only medieval western europe counts?), and also the psychoanalysis of the japanese mind
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Dec 27, 2016 23:20
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249 bad pages
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Dec 27, 2016 23:25
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cryme posted:249 bad pages That's my review of Jonathan Franzen's latest
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Dec 27, 2016 23:33
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The new Lethem novel is kind of clunky and bad. It reminds me a lot of Telegraph Avenue. It's overwritten and has big important SYMBOLS with awkward dialogue and exposition.
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Dec 28, 2016 04:36
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Rush Limbo posted:a generic "good vs. evil" story tacked on out of a sense of obligation. my dude are you familiar with the basic tenets of christianity
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Dec 28, 2016 05:48
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make an effort in 2017 to only read books that are free of the manichean heresy
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Dec 28, 2016 05:59
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it's strict pelagianism for me
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Dec 28, 2016 06:04
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How 'bout all you
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Dec 28, 2016 07:42
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actually my lsat reads of the year are proving to be p. good. Anna Kavan and Julian Barnes are surprisingly good, Pamuk's Snow was at the expected (high) level, Aira's Conversations were funny and even the Latvian stuff was good. only d'Annunzio is boring with his endless descriptions of expensive trinkets. then again, the translation is quite poor, so.
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Dec 28, 2016 08:22
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Jerome Agricola posted:How 'bout all you Probably the coolest book I read this year was Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling, which features a 900 page long bus ride and has no plot. Burning Rain posted:actually my lsat reads of the year are proving to be p. good. Anna Kavan and Julian Barnes are surprisingly good, Pamuk's Snow was at the expected (high) level, Aira's Conversations were funny and even the Latvian stuff was good. only d'Annunzio is boring with his endless descriptions of expensive trinkets. then again, the translation is quite poor, so. which d'Annunzio? i liked the penguin classics translation of Pleasure but I think most of the other English translations of his books are old censored ones
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Dec 28, 2016 08:46
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A human heart posted:Probably the coolest book I read this year was Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling, which features a 900 page long bus ride and has no plot. This is already on my reading list due to one of those "authors no one reads but should" articles. Clearly they were lying.
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Dec 28, 2016 09:20
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Aces. My chrissy pressy to myself, Man in the Holocene, just arrived. And it's a pretty one too with lovely understated Dalkey Archive Press covers (you can actually tell what it says on the front). I'm pretty drat excited about this one. After all it's Real Literature with pictures of dinosaurs in it. Surely it can't be a miss. At least it's short (with pics of dinos). e: drat double post sorry
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Dec 28, 2016 11:09
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A human heart posted:Probably the coolest book I read this year was Marguerite Young's Miss Macintosh, My Darling, which features a 900 page long bus ride and has no plot. Pleasure as well, but in a Latvian translation from 1928, which isn't all that great to put it mildly. When the biggest attraction is supposed to be the language, that's important. also, I'm not a visual reader at all, which made it even more of a pain. i'll give it another go - i'm 80 pages in atm - but i suspect i'll just give it up.
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Dec 28, 2016 11:28
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I WARNED YOU ABOUT TRANSLATIONS
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Dec 28, 2016 12:08
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Burning Rain posted:Pleasure as well, but in a Latvian translation from 1928, which isn't all that great to put it mildly. When the biggest attraction is supposed to be the language, that's important. also, I'm not a visual reader at all, which made it even more of a pain. i'll give it another go - i'm 80 pages in atm - but i suspect i'll just give it up. You should at least flick to the part near the end where a degenerate Englishman shows the protagonist his porn collection
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Dec 28, 2016 12:26
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the best books i read this year are the plains, the left-handed woman, and the charles portis anthology
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Dec 28, 2016 13:04
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I've read a lot of good books this year. Aquarium, The Art of Fielding (both recommended by Mel), Pale Fire, My Name is Red, The Moviegoer, The Vegetarian, Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives, The Man Who Was Thursday, Room, In Cold Blood. I've been reading Stephen Crane's short stories, which are hit-and-miss. The Blue Hotel and His New Mittens were notable. I'm also 200 pages into Infinite Jest, which is pretty boring with some great moments popping up at random.
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Dec 28, 2016 14:17
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The best books I read this year were all the Chekhovs that I re-read during the summer
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Dec 28, 2016 14:20
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I had this sorta, I dunno, nihilist groove, I guess you could call it this past year and some of the more enjoyable reads were by Thomas Bernhard and Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Especially Bernhard's nightmarish The Lime Works and Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance. Still probably the top text of the year was Jack Cox's Dodge Rose, which I've tried to horn in on pretty much every post I've made in TBB. I particularly love its extended passages of Australian property law that, at best, brings to mind the prose of Gaddis. I found myself immersed in wikipedia for extended periods of time every now and again while reading it. This is a good thing, in my book. It also has those pleasantly plain DAP covers.
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Dec 28, 2016 14:51
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Best book I read this year was easily At Swim-Two-Birds
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Dec 28, 2016 15:08
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fridge corn posted:Best book I read this year was easily At Swim-Two-Birds ...contains one of my favorite lines of prose: "The mirror at which I shaved every second day was of the type supplied gratis by Messrs. Watkins, Jameson and Pim and bore brief letterpress in reference to a proprietary brand of ale between the words of which I had acquired considerable skill in inserting the reflection of my countenance. " Oh, so purple. Be sure to check out O'Brien/O'Nolan's The Third Policeman also if you already haven't.
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Dec 28, 2016 15:20
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I read some good books. Kosmos probably wasn't the best, but it's the one I actually remember reading.
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Dec 28, 2016 15:25
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My book of the year is PUSSIFICATION by DOUG GILES
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Dec 28, 2016 15:27
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fridge corn posted:Best book I read this year was easily At Swim-Two-Birds Same here. If we're not counting re-reads, then Wittgenstein's Mistress, followed by the actual Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, followed by maybe Tristram Shandy, although I read a lot of good loving books this year. Speaking of, I haven't kept up with updating my reading challenge. I guess I know what I'm doing for the rest of the day.
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Dec 28, 2016 16:01
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Jerome Agricola posted:Be sure to check out O'Brien/O'Nolan's The Third Policeman also if you already haven't. Yeah I also read that this year
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Dec 28, 2016 16:02
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at the date posted:Same here. v excellent reading
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Dec 28, 2016 16:04
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Jerome Agricola posted:I had this sorta, I dunno, nihilist groove, I guess you could call it this past year and some of the more enjoyable reads were by Thomas Bernhard and Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Especially Bernhard's nightmarish The Lime Works and Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance. Last year I read Melancholy, War+War, and Satantango right after another and goddamn that was emotionally exhausting. I had to read some trashy romance stuff after that just to recover. Best book I've read this year is probably The Adventures and Misadventure of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis, though I haven't actually finished it yet, been putting off the last novella cause I don't want it to end yet.
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Dec 28, 2016 17:00
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really good books read this year. I started off with war and peace which is hard to top, but I think my favourites after that was probably Never any end to paris, Concrete, Labyrinths and Mourning Diary Skylark was pretty decent too
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Dec 28, 2016 17:00
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If we're shooting from the hip and saying just what we remember I liked that bit in the Prime Minister where someone got hit by a train.
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Dec 28, 2016 17:03
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hope and vaseline posted:Last year I read Melancholy, War+War, and Satantango right after another and goddamn that was emotionally exhausting. I had to read some trashy romance stuff after that just to recover. Ditto. Only I topped it off with Dennis Cooper's Ugly Man and other short stories. I made it a third of the way through the DC collection before I called it quits and tried to read some generic sci-fi. Jerome Agricola fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Dec 28, 2016 |
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Dec 28, 2016 17:07
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Jerome Agricola posted:Dennis Cooper's Ugly Man Gay sex and cannibalism, huh? Go on...
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Dec 28, 2016 17:17
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In good conscience, I can't recommend Dennis Cooper. At least not his short stories. They heavily feature violence, rape, torture and pedophilia. At worst it's reminiscent of some seedy fetish forum posting. I The funny thing is that despite their silence and refusal to address any of the questions they raise (or maybe just because of that), the texts made me think about and analyze them quite a bit. Maybe I needed to find something there to ease the anxiety they caused. All in all, it's pretty disturbing stuff. Whether it's just fetish porn or has some deeper meaning is up to you, I guess.
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Dec 28, 2016 17:53
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Jerome Agricola posted:How 'bout all you One of my favorite passages in Agains the Day posted:“They may not wish to harm us. They may even in some way love us. But they have no more choice than your own sled dogs, in the terrible, to them empty, land upon which they have chosen to trespass, where humans are the only source of food. We are allowed to live and work until we fall from exhaustion. But they are suffering as much as we. Their voices will be gentle, they will administer the pain only when they must, and when they bring out the weapons, objects we’ve never seen before, we stare, wordless as dogs, we don’t recognize them, perhaps we think they are toys or something else to amuse us. . . .” He fell silent, sat and smoked and presently slept. Sometime after midnight he woke, rose, and walked away into the Arctic emptiness.
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Dec 28, 2016 22:46
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