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Gaius Marius posted:How is it that everyone feels of Infinite Jest, I'm thinking that as my next novel after I finish Steppenwolf It's really good, one of my favorites. Probably considered a bit overrated here and it's also kind of a meme. But despite that it's still a really majestic and well-written work. It's hilarious. It has some of the most hard-hitting depictions of depression and addiction. And yes you'll probably get made fun of. If you wait until 2026 it'll be 30 years old so that one poster will allow you to read it without losing your Literature card.
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Jan 18, 2023 18:51
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ThePopeOfFun posted:HOWEVER, it’s all buried in a overly huge text. Editor needed a chainsaw. A lot of the footnotes stuff is just plain wrong. Aw c'mon, we can forgive Pemulis for being a math know-it-all who didn't actually know very much. Seems in character to me. quote:Edit: Just remembered the chapter DFW tried to write in AAVE. Lol so bad This is very accurate. In his defense, it was 1994.
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Jan 18, 2023 19:20
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Gaius Marius posted:How is it that everyone feels of Infinite Jest, I'm thinking that as my next novel after I finish Steppenwolf I loved it when I was 20 and it began my brief worship of DFW. I recently tried to read some of it again at 33 and wasn't sure why I liked it so much, but it has charm. Its a wacky, weird book and worth trying to see if you like it!
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Jan 18, 2023 19:30
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mdemone posted:This is very accurate. In his defense, it was 1994. back in the days when writing things that weren't godawful was yet to be discovered
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Jan 18, 2023 20:49
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ij is fine and there are some pretty good bits it's just too long and while some of the incredibly obnoxious ill informed parts can be explained away with "well actually it's the characters who are obnoxious and ill informed, it's really quite genius", there are also a lot of obnxious ill informed parts that just represent how david foster wallace was
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Jan 18, 2023 20:55
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Tree Goat posted:or am i misremembering and for delilo they liked white noise but hated the rest, and it was saunders where we were allied? eh, whatever Wait since when did the thread dislike Saunders? I seem to recall that Lincoln In the Bardo is well regarded, but it might be due to my usual in attentivenes to names I guess I will fight you if you disagree 
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Jan 18, 2023 21:19
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yeah I thought saunders was a thread favourite too
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Jan 18, 2023 21:51
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Some of us aren't interested in contemporary American lit. I'm sure Saunders is good, but I will never find out.
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Jan 18, 2023 22:03
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PatMarshall posted:Some of us aren't interested in contemporary American lit. I'm sure Saunders is good, but I will never find out. There's a lot of great American contemporary literature. None of it originally in English, of course.
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Jan 18, 2023 22:07
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CestMoi posted:back in the days when writing things that weren't godawful was yet to be discovered More accurately, in the days before editors realized that they absolutely had to stop white authors from trying that I feel like Burroughs had some equally awful sections of "jive" dialogue but I haven't read him in a long time
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Jan 18, 2023 22:07
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PatMarshall posted:Some of us aren't interested in contemporary American lit. I'm sure Saunders is good, but I will never find out. His collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline will be 30 years old in 2026, so check it out in three years. The titular story is technically 30 years old already.
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Jan 18, 2023 22:21
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I’m curious. What are the aspects of literature that folks in this thread most value? For me, while I place some value on all aspects of literature, my tops are character and emotional impact, followed by story. I love getting caught up in characters and seeing how they develop and deal with struggle. I get sucked into stories and want to know the outcome. Others might put more value on the intellectual rewards, or in experiencing the perspectives of people who are different them, or just the love of beautiful writing. I appreciate these things very much, but not as much as my tops (i.e., if a book is written beautifully, but I don’t care at all about the character and their story, I’ll probably not finish it)
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Jan 19, 2023 02:56
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blue squares posted:I’m curious. What are the aspects of literature that folks in this thread most value? It's an endless question. I've been thinking about this today after both GR and IJ were brought up, as both are in my top three novels and for very, very different reasons. IJ resonated with me on a personal/historical level that I had not experienced before or since, at that moment in my life. So when other people don't like this or that about it, I'm not bothered because I know about my relationship to the text. GR is a different beast because it's Pynchon hitting you over the head with "look how everything is connected, open your loving eyes" at the same time as he structures an entire fantastic novel around the Christian liturgical calendar and real events that occurred during that year, without ever even bothering to tell the reader about that level of the text. Read the Weisenburger companion to GR, it'll blow you away. I didn't even know someone could be that good
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Jan 19, 2023 03:09
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blue squares posted:I’m curious. What are the aspects of literature that folks in this thread most value? It's a tricky question for sure. All aspects contribute to the whole of the work, and the work itself can either be greater or lesser than it's parts based entirely off some ineffable quality. Personally though of the things I go to literature for I'd rank them such 6.Characters The characters in the novel and their journey therein are important, but I prefer a novel that speaks to Me personally rather than to the puppets it contains, one can write great novels with bad characters or flat maybe is a better term. But the following qualities preclude the quality of greatness. 5.Dialogue Having a witty rapport is always fun and engaging, and I'd prefer if the puppets would say things interesting, but because of the novel as a forms inability to function without scene setting the dialogue takes a back seat in importance in novels compared to say, film where the cinematographer will cover all of that. 4.Prose Obviously one should expect good prose in a work, being able to both enrapture the audience as well as enforce your vision and ideas upon them, it can take many forms but if a novel has bad prose it is almost impossible for me to consider it well. 3.Form More ethereal than the others, I love a novel that in finishing it I can see the form that it has taken in it's binding, consider Ada and it's spiral hurtling towards the annihilation of time, Gravity's Rainbow and it's cyclical calendar of liturgy strapped to the back of a rocket, Pale Fire's series of index cards placed at the perfect right angles. When one can feel the very texture of a novel's composition one can allow it to become sublimated inside oneself in ways that the formless text cannot allow. 2.Aesthetics The superform of Prose and Dialogue as well as Form, the novel should feel clean, and its components all working in unison. One can think of each of the previous as the Trinity and Aesthetics as the whole of the God head 1.Transcendence Every soul has certain ineffable vibrations that react and are reacted to by the completed novel, or any other form of art. To reach this level the Soul and the Art must become completely in sync, to pulse at identical rates towards the bounds of the Truth of nonreality. One can discard each and every component of the previous list as long as this unreal vibration is felt, to quote Hesh from Sopranos. If it's a hit, it's a hit. Gaius Marius fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Jan 19, 2023 |
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Jan 19, 2023 03:41
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i'll agree that 'plot' doesn't make the list
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Jan 19, 2023 03:51
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Plot only.
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Jan 19, 2023 09:22
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I mostly care about the magic system.
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Jan 19, 2023 09:50
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World building
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Jan 19, 2023 10:02
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Good reads rating
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Jan 19, 2023 10:41
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Removed
blue squares fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Jan 19, 2023 |
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Jan 19, 2023 11:50
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Got into an argument with a reddit poisoned guy who almost exclusively reads 'video game theory' doing a master's in narratology in some yank uni and eventually it boiled down to him syaing that he experiences art simply to 'master' it and dominate it completely. Weird guy who likes when a work of art gives you a number showing how complete your experience has been. That's me
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Jan 19, 2023 13:22
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Jrbg posted:Got into an argument with a reddit poisoned guy who almost exclusively reads 'video game theory' doing a master's in narratology in some yank uni and eventually it boiled down to him syaing that he experiences art simply to 'master' it and dominate it completely. Weird guy who likes when a work of art gives you a number showing how complete your experience has been. That's me I stumbled onto a cult of number-worshipping nihilists yesterday. Revolting experience, though not as bad as your guy sounds. I’ve got nothing against people who “love numbers”, it’s just that when they write or try to engage with culture on any level the results are always so grotesque.
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Jan 19, 2023 15:46
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1. time travel logic 2. prose 3. cover art 4. font e - I'll actually contribute to the thread, I'm going to start Umberto Eco's Numero Zero today GNU Order fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Jan 19, 2023 |
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Jan 19, 2023 16:14
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My favorite books expose me to a novel point of view. I don’t care about plot or cleverness at all. Mildly allergic to meta stuff. Bottom line: Is the medium cool? Does it avoid cliché? Did I encounter a strange-to-me perspective? If yes, I probably liked the book a lot.
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Jan 19, 2023 18:08
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i mostly want to read beautiful things. the peregrine is my favorite book of all time for that reason. if it's not beautiful i still love a book that puts me in a strange/new mind state, or shows me something from an alien point of view. for example i don't think anyone would call bernhard's prose 'beautiful' but the head you go into in each of his books is so different/interesting/strange to me that it's fascinating. mishima, another favorite, is the combination of those two things, all his characters are like perfectly detailed aliens, and his prose is soul crushingly beautiful.
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Jan 19, 2023 18:28
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Carly Gay Dead Son posted:I stumbled onto a cult of number-worshipping nihilists yesterday. Revolting experience, though not as bad as your guy sounds. I’ve got nothing against people who “love numbers”, it’s just that when they write or try to engage with culture on any level the results are always so grotesque. I don’t understand, are these people competing over pages-read or something?
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Jan 19, 2023 19:19
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blue squares posted:I’m curious. What are the aspects of literature that folks in this thread most value? https://twitter.com/neonwario/status/1463229426016165891?s=20
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Jan 19, 2023 21:58
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i like when book is good. i dislike when book is bad
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Jan 19, 2023 22:01
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1. Timeline consistency 2. World building 3. Twists 4. Helicopter chases
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Jan 19, 2023 22:51
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8) the words 7) the punctuation 6) the lack of punctuation 5) the margins 4) the white spaces between words 3) the white spaces between the letters of the words 2) the paper onto which all of the above is printed 1) the light reflecting off of all of the above and going into my eyeball
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Jan 20, 2023 00:51
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derp posted:i mostly want to read beautiful things. the peregrine is my favorite book of all time for that reason. if it's not beautiful i still love a book that puts me in a strange/new mind state, or shows me something from an alien point of view. for example i don't think anyone would call bernhard's prose 'beautiful' but the head you go into in each of his books is so different/interesting/strange to me that it's fascinating. mishima, another favorite, is the combination of those two things, all his characters are like perfectly detailed aliens, and his prose is soul crushingly beautiful. Related to strange/new mindsets (with which I whole heartedly agree), I like books that confront me with new ideas, either explicitly or implicitly via forcing me to engage with the text to draw what meaning it holds for me. 2666 is a good example of this for me, the Part About The Crimes took me a while of contemplation to put that together with the rest of the novel, which I adored. Can't really call that chapter "beautiful" (although, having said that, I will fight to the death that Blood Meridian is beautiful. OK maybe the word I am looking for is more "sublime" than "beautiful"). Speaking of, time to reengage with Solenoid.
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Jan 20, 2023 02:56
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This is the Solenoid thread.
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Jan 20, 2023 03:26
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Gorn Myson posted:This is the Solenoid thread. I have to say the protest movement against aging and death speaks to me. I literally had a meeting with a lawyer about preparing my will yesterday. Thinking of taking up a picket sign myself.
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Jan 20, 2023 17:07
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Gaius Marius posted:6.Characters Do you really see characters as nothing more than puppets? For me, while obviously characters are figments of the authors imaginations and everything that happens to them is also not real, the beauty of storytelling is ability to make me forget that I am reading about non-existent people. That's why my favorite writer (who I guess many people ITT dislike) is Jonathan Franzen. When I read his books, his characters become for me completely real, and I connect with them emotionally. Most writers are unable to do this, but the ones that can are a treasure.
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Jan 20, 2023 17:30
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i like characters when they are used to show different facets of humanity. if the book has a lot of plot, though, then it usually ends up that the characters are just there to do things
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Jan 20, 2023 17:48
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I like words that sound nice and make me think and/or feel things. Hope thag helps op
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Jan 20, 2023 18:00
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blue squares posted:Do you really see characters as nothing more than puppets? I am very surprised that this paragraph ended in Franzen. What about Franzen’s work do you think makes this happen for you? Do you have an example?
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Jan 20, 2023 18:03
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ThePopeOfFun posted:I am very surprised that this paragraph ended in Franzen. What about Franzen’s work do you think makes this happen for you? Do you have an example? I attended a (virtual) event with Franzen and another writer after buying Crossroads from my local bookstore (the bookstore hosted the event) and one of the topics he covered a lot was his love of the close third person. I think he is a master of that POV. It's very nearly first person, but using he/she instead of I. He started the reading during that event with the first instance of the Marion character: "Disgusted with herself, the overweight person that was Marion fled the parsonage." He isn't being unkind to his character and making light of a woman who feels overweight; that's how she is constantly thinking of herself as a woman in the 1970s midwest who had a very turbulent late adolescence. I also like what he does with structure. His structure provides a lot of time to get immersed into a character's POV. In Corrections, Chip is the exclusive focus for 122 pages. In his most recent four books (with Purity being the weakest by far) he spends a lot of time with each character before moving on. His multiple character POV books can read like a series of highly interconnected novellas. His writing, I think, does a very good job of conveying the scene infused with the perception of the focus character. And he puts his characters in situations I enjoy reading... very tragicomic situations. As a smart person who is kind of an idiot much of the time, tragicomic is highly relatable to me. Another interesting example would be in Freedom. There is a section of the book (220 pages) that is presented as an autobiography (but in third person) of one of the characters, generated as a therapeutic exercise recommended by her therapist. There is the piece itself, which tells the character's backstory, combined with the knowledge that it is being written by the character herself, and I found it very compelling.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:57
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I appreciate your effort posting. I have the opposite reaction to Franzen. The close third person relating all the thoughts, emotions and reactions of characters kills the humanity for me. A sort of death by psychoanalysis/dissection. Which is interesting to me now thar I think about it because years ago I asked him about his take he had alluded to about Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which interested him for being about shame. In it, if you don’t know, a character named Eustace is transformed into a dragon. God peels all his skin off. Comes off as clinical to me.
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Jan 20, 2023 19:28
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I agree that structurally Crossroads is great. I thought the mother was the only character he remotely got right though. The rest were all caricatural to me, with the genius junkie son taking the cake
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Jan 20, 2023 19:32
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