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This Fitzcarraldo Edition of Books of Jacob is gigantic. Definitely going to be an at home read.
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Aug 31, 2023 20:50
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Gaius Marius posted:This Fitzcarraldo Edition of Books of Jacob is gigantic. Definitely going to be an at home read. did you get the special limited edition 'volume' one? that is definitely huge. i bought a lectern, lol
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Aug 31, 2023 22:04
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derp posted:did you get the special limited edition 'volume' one? that is definitely huge. i bought a lectern, lol Yep, DHL dude rolled up and I had to try and remember if I'd ordered anything else when I saw the unit of a package. Thought maybe I'd ordered a painting or sculpture or some such, makes a statement that's for sure.
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Sep 1, 2023 04:19
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absalom absalom is exceptionally sick and everyone can read the insanely long sentences about the doom of the south, if you use your brain and believe in yourself
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Sep 1, 2023 07:15
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A human heart posted:absalom absalom is exceptionally sick and everyone can read the insanely long sentences about the doom of the south, if you use your brain hmm, tough one A human heart posted:and believe in yourself Ok, I’m out
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Sep 1, 2023 14:17
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Shouldn't psyche yourself out. It's difficult but hardly insurmountable. Hell I think most the actual questions you might be having are answered roundabout in the index. Beautiful work, the ending being physically two people engaging in a mental exercise of collaborative storytelling, while actually being the single harshest castigation of a society that I've ever seen put to page; and the creeping, palpable dread that fills the room as Quentin realizes that to look in the mirror would reveal not himself but Henry Sutpen, or Thomas Sutpen, or all the South gazing back at him from Hell. Anyways I finished Salammbô. It's not as interesting or beautiful as Sentimental Education, but just as thoroughly researched and set. It's quite funny that he got in so much hot water for Madame Bovary for it's racy content, and then this comes out and is just absurdly hyperviolent and nobody was rankled. Crucifixions, animal mutilation, starvation, flaying, men being trampled by elephants, children being thrown on pyres as human sacrifice, this novels got it all. Out of all the things for it to remind me of the Starz Spartacus series was what kept coming back, and that was a damned good show if you haven't seen it.
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Sep 3, 2023 02:50
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Gaius Marius posted:Shouldn't psyche yourself out. It's difficult but hardly insurmountable. Hell I think most the actual questions you might be having are answered roundabout in the index. Beautiful work, the ending being physically two people engaging in a mental exercise of collaborative storytelling, while actually being the single harshest castigation of a society that I've ever seen put to page; and the creeping, palpable dread that fills the room as Quentin realizes that to look in the mirror would reveal not himself but Henry Sutpen, or Thomas Sutpen, or all the South gazing back at him from Hell. this sounds sick as gently caress. To the top of the list!
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Sep 3, 2023 04:31
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Lobster Henry posted:hmm, tough one stop pretending to be an idiot and read the drat book!
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Sep 3, 2023 12:31
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Finished The Leopard. Beautifully written and translated, a dreamy slice set in a period and place about which I knew just about nothing prior. I live in a city with a big ol' park called Piedmont and didn't even know the word Piedmont was Italian 
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Sep 3, 2023 14:36
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Doc Fission posted:Finished The Leopard. Beautifully written and translated, a dreamy slice set in a period and place about which I knew just about nothing prior. I live in a city with a big ol' park called Piedmont and didn't even know the word Piedmont was Italian The film adaptation is excellent as well.
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Sep 3, 2023 15:18
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Doc Fission posted:Finished The Leopard. Beautifully written and translated, a dreamy slice set in a period and place about which I knew just about nothing prior. I live in a city with a big ol' park called Piedmont and didn't even know the word Piedmont was Italian It's French.
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Sep 3, 2023 19:38
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💀
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Sep 3, 2023 19:47
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started on baron wenckheim’s homecoming. during the first thirty or so pages, a man has yelled at some musicians, and a professor dressed like a hobo has gone mad and started shooting with a gun
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Sep 4, 2023 06:09
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Lobster Henry posted:I read Human Acts by Han kang, like someone else in this thread I think, I didn’t know anything about the historical events this novel is based on, and I found it very moving, frightening, and humbling to think about them. However as a novel I thought this was a complete slog. I really couldn’t get on with it at all. The place, the situation, the people — none of them were evoked in a way that brought them to life for me. Oh well. I love Warlock, I need to read it again. Have you read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry? Also maybe check out The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, and though likely familiar from the movies, True Grit by Charles Portis is worth a read.
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Sep 6, 2023 16:45
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I know you're recommending True Grit because the western connection, but I feel like any Portis recommendation should also mention his opus and definitely goony-est of novels: Masters of Atlantis.
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Sep 6, 2023 18:49
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in memory of memory by maria stepanova, it's so good i feel compelled to recommend it to everyone even though i'm not even halfway through, already my favorite read in a long time. if you like sebald you will like it, read it.
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Sep 6, 2023 19:06
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PlushCow posted:I love Warlock, I need to read it again. Have you read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry? Also maybe check out The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, and though likely familiar from the movies, True Grit by Charles Portis is worth a read. Thanks for the recommendations! “True grit” and “the sisters brothers” I have read, although I guess they slipped my mind. “Lonesome dove” I have heard of but I don’t know anything about it. I’ll add it to the list!
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Sep 6, 2023 22:50
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Lobster Henry posted:If anybody’s got more, let me know! I really liked Butcher's Crossing. And also, yes, Lonesome Dove is a treasure.
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Sep 7, 2023 21:21
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I'll second Butcher's Crossing.
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Sep 7, 2023 21:55
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What's everyone's opinions on James Salter. I simultaneously started A Sport and a Pastime and his short story collection Dusk. I'm enjoying reading it but like certain genres of music, "lofi" dreampop etc, I find it hard to find anything to grasp onto in the writing to coalesce my thoughts around. It's almost purposely tedious or at least ennui laced writing that still maintains a sense of interest. I wonder if that is caused by anything inherent to his writing itself, or it is just the general human interest in the voyeuristic, implicitly in the Dusk stories I've read and explicitly in Sport and Pastime.
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Sep 11, 2023 20:43
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very nearly done with baron wenckheim's homecoming, just under 30 pages to go, and Krasz has an incredible ability to write the most mundane and uninteresting people in a very interesting way, if that makes sense.
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Sep 13, 2023 15:38
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I read it in norwegian, otherwise I'd drop one of a million good quotes from this
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Sep 13, 2023 15:40
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Speaking of Norwegian, any opinion on Harstad? He’s been getting a lot of publicity in my country, but I can’t fathom whether he is any good or just the usual international booker bait.
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Sep 13, 2023 16:41
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never read him, so I don’t really have an opinion
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Sep 13, 2023 16:55
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drat, that door stopper of his looks tempting. I guess I can always borrow it from the library and see for myself before commiting
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Sep 13, 2023 20:22
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I haven't posted in this thread in ages and I feel like I owe it some recommendations. I hope there's something new for people in here: Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri This is a 1999 collection of short stories from Lahiri, who now writes in both English and Italian. The stories all center around Indians and the Indian diaspora in America (mostly in Massachusetts). Lahiri's matter-of-fact prose makes the emotional heart of these stories even more wrenching -- the first one, A Temporary Matter, had me in tears. The Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante I was hesitant to read these after a post in this thread that called them YA for adults, which put me off of them for years. One day, I decided to give the first one a shot and spent the next week and a half feverishly reading the series. These books are angry, half stream-of-consciousness, and richly detailed and textured by the post-war Naples setting. I have to confess -- if these are YA for adults, I'm a YA liker. Angel, Elizabeth Taylor Angel is a quietly comic, bleakly humorous novel from a very underrated author, Elizabeth Taylor, who has been revived in print by both Virago and NYRB. This novel covers the life of narcissistic, irrepressible Angel, a willful teenager who writes a bestselling bodice-ripper -- and embarks on an outrageous literary career. Augustus, John Williams Most people in this thread have likely read Stoner, Williams' campus novel, but here is another perfect example of Williams' remarkable talent. Augustus is an epistolary novel charting Gaius Octavian Caesar -- Augustus's rise to power after the assassination of Julius Caesar. The novel, composed of letters to and from his inner circle and outside observers, paints a picture of a famously inscrutable figure. Augustus had a sphinx as his figurehead and was said to ask, upon his deathbed at the age of 76, "Have I played the part well?" Williams imagines motivations and an inner life for Augustus where history itself has failed to substantiate. The final letter, a 30 page salvo from Augustus himself, is the height of Williams' talents. I, Claudius, Robert Graves I, Claudius covers a later period. Graves was an accomplished scholar of the classics and wrote these fictionalized autobiographies of Claudius, (the emperor after Caligula and before Nero). It's almost Wodehousian in its comic scenes of family shenanigans, and was adapted into a 1970s BBC miniseries that starred pretty much every famous British actor of the time -- including Patrick Stewart! The Greenlanders, Jane Smiley The Greenlanders is a strange book, an over-detailed dirge written in the dry, simple style of a Norse saga and charting the disappearance of the Norse Greenland settlement. It's utterly hypnotic to read these hundreds of pages of family squabbles, weaving, sour milk, and seal skins. I read this while listening to a Dark Ambient playlist on Spotify and was completely transported. The Dry Heart, Natalia Ginzburg A woman shoots her husband between the eyes after he flaunts his affair in front of her too much. As she explains to the reader why she did it, the intensity of this nasty, sharp novella never lessens. Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay Three girls and one governess go missing during a picnic at Hanging Rock, a local natural landmark. The mystery is never solved, though one girl is found later, missing a corset and shoes but unharmed. Lindsay apparently originally had an ending where the girls disappeared into a time warp, and this can be seen throughout the novel, which is deeply obsessed with clocks, watches, time, and cause and effect. It's unclear what happened to the girls but the book is, generously, 80% vibes about the heat of the Australian outback and the dangers of female sexuality when repressed.I unfortunately have not watched the movie yet, but I hear it's captured the book perfectly. O Caledonia, Elspeth Barker This novel begins with lonely, bookish outcast Janet lying murdered on the grounds of her beloved home, Auchnasaugh. It then details her wild and solitary life as a misfit in a strict Scottish family that lives in a crumbling castle. Janet is doomed and desolate, someone more attuned with nature than with people, and calls forth comparisons to Merricat in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The descriptions of northern Scotland are gorgeous and atmospheric, and the darkness of the novel compliments the austere beauty of the highlands. The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead In a not-1950s not-NYC, Lila Mae Watson is the Department of Elevator Inspectors' first Black female inspector. In a society where elevators are the concern of vast city departments, the Mob, and everyone is obsessed with "verticality," this is a position of extreme prestige and danger. When an elevator unexpectedly fails, Watson, an Intuitionist is introduced into the ideological battle between the hidebound, technicality-focused Empiricists and the sensory, po-mo inspectors, the Intuitionists. However, in Whitehead's powerful allegory for race, no one and nothing is what it seems.
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Sep 15, 2023 01:52
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Speaking of Norwegian, any opinion on Harstad? He’s been getting a lot of publicity in my country, but I can’t fathom whether he is any good or just the usual international booker bait. isn't he a children's author
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Sep 15, 2023 23:07
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V. Illych L. posted:isn't he a children's author He wrote a children’s book, but his latest novel is what I’m interested in
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Sep 16, 2023 07:03
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PlushCow posted:I love Warlock, I need to read it again. Have you read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry? Also maybe check out The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, and though likely familiar from the movies, True Grit by Charles Portis is worth a read. I read lonesome dove and maybe I didn’t get it. It seemed to me like perhaps it was a significant departure from the form of the western back when it was written but it didn’t strike me at all.
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Sep 16, 2023 19:28
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Lobster Henry posted:I read Human Acts by Han kang, like someone else in this thread I think, I didn’t know anything about the historical events this novel is based on, and I found it very moving, frightening, and humbling to think about them. However as a novel I thought this was a complete slog. I really couldn’t get on with it at all. The place, the situation, the people — none of them were evoked in a way that brought them to life for me. Oh well. Drop Edge of Yonder by Wurlitzer
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Sep 16, 2023 20:49
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Proust Malone posted:I read lonesome dove and maybe I didn’t get it. It seemed to me like perhaps it was a significant departure from the form of the western back when it was written but it didn’t strike me at all. I think I get what you're saying, the novel isn't hugely different in expressing the american mythological west you'd see in any Louis L'Amour novel and the like; but it does it far better, it's the quintessential cowboy novel. I remember McMurtry saying, I believe in a foreword he wrote for Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, that novel did what he was trying to do with Lonesome Dove.
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Sep 16, 2023 23:43
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I think Lonesome Dove is a significant departure from the form that preceded it but it's so easy to get caught up in the adventure of the narrative that readers end up misremembering how senselessly tragic it is.
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Sep 17, 2023 16:31
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I'm having such a good time listening to The Magic Mountain on audiobook. The narrator is named David Rintoul, and he does such a great job conveying Hans Castorp's  sensibilities, as well as Herr Settembrini's bombastic lectures on humanism. I feel a little sad that I'm listening to it on audiobook rather than sitting down with the actual book in my hands, but the experience is so rich that I can get over my luddism. I was worried that literature would be too dense to appreciate while cooking or driving, but it's really the opposite, livening up the day. It makes me feel like this is the sort of approach that will let me finally work through my backlog of classic literature. I slept on Thomas Mann for too long. Hans Castorp is a great character, and the juxtaposition of pre-war cultural decorum with terminal illness is such a vivid combination.
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Sep 17, 2023 18:38
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Thanks for the continuing western recs folks! Picnic at hanging rock rules Elspeth barker sounds interesting, I’m gonna check that out. I recently picked up the second ferrante at a second hand book stall. I enjoyed the first one a lot, but I don’t really remember much about it beyond “Naples, two girls, they’re friends.” Do you think I’ll be ok with the second one or do I need to restart?
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Sep 17, 2023 22:10
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Lobster Henry posted:Thanks for the continuing western recs folks! You might need to read a summary of the first one since they're so closely tied together and events from the first one are constantly brought up! But I doubt you'll need to completely reread it.
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Sep 17, 2023 23:41
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I am currently reading The Egyptian, recommended by certain posters non grata, and I'm happy to say it's wonderful. Extremely richly detailed historical fiction that conjures its setting like nothing else.
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Sep 17, 2023 23:41
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Speaking of Mann, any opinions on Doctor Faustus? I picked up a copy of it and Death in Venice recently and trying to decide which to read first, I'm leaning towards Faustus purely for love of Goethe's work which I can compare and contrast while reading Mann's. I'll also give an update about Middlemarch, I was enjoying all the characters and their social hierarchy backbiting nonsense. Dorthea and the Doctor both felt very believable in being fiercely altruistic while also being too socially disengaged to actually make the difference they'd like. But halfway through now, and I'm hitting some real political sections and I'm completely loving lost. I don't know what the Catholic question was or who ran what newspaper or anything in British politics besides the Corn Laws. Much as I was enjoying it reading ancient CNN is really not my thing.
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Sep 18, 2023 01:02
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cmon...how can u like old books and not like obscure localized political infighting....
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Sep 18, 2023 03:05
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Gaius Marius posted:Speaking of Mann, any opinions on Doctor Faustus? I picked up a copy of it and Death in Venice recently and trying to decide which to read first, I'm leaning towards Faustus purely for love of Goethe's work which I can compare and contrast while reading Mann's. Faustus depends on how much you enjoy music theory, but the core relationship is very powerful. Death in Venice is my least favourite Mann. Feels like it was overvalued for depicting homosexual desire when that was hard to get. Never mind that desire being paedophilic.
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Sep 18, 2023 03:38
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Thomas Mann was a much better writer of novels imo. his short stories falls a bit flat. he needs a sprawling 600 pages to relish in
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Sep 18, 2023 05:59
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