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my slow and ponderous process of reading faulkner continues. sanctuary is a breeze compared to absalom, absalom. but so is the rest of literature.
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Dec 28, 2017 10:56
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I think i got just over halfway into Norwegian wood before putting it down anyway that's my murakami story
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Dec 28, 2017 12:06
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true.spoon posted:Murakamis Underground is very good. it is yeah derp posted:She thought of Ayumi Nakano, the lonely policewoman who, one August night, wound up in a hotel room in Shibuya, handcuffed, strangled with a bathrobe belt. A troubled young woman walking toward the abyss of destruction. She had had beautiful breasts as well. Aomame mourned the deaths of these two friends deeply. It saddened her to think that these women were forever gone from the world. And she mourned their lovely breasts—breasts that had vanished without a trace. hieronymous id appreciate it if you could change my username to this entire quote unrelated, but i've only recently discovered the I'm an English professor thread in A/T and it's really good. i've just been reading through the OP's posts, and he's got some great ones. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Dec 28, 2017 |
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Dec 28, 2017 15:05
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Ryu Murakami owns though. Don't sleep on him.
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Dec 28, 2017 15:08
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Shibawanko posted:Akutagawa owns and is better than either Soseki or Mishima imo. His stories and characters have a very archetypical form, sometimes bordering on a certain kind of kitsch but you can clearly feel that he is an author struggling to bring his vision to paper. Whith magical results when he succeeds. true.spoon fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Dec 28, 2017 |
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Dec 28, 2017 15:46
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true.spoon posted:Akutagawa is good indeed but my favorite author of that period is Izumi Kyouka. He is not very well known nowadays but he was the leader of an antinaturalistic group of authors at the time (Akutagawa included). If memory serves right Akutagawa actually lamented in his suicide note that literature like Kyoukas was vanishing. I've never read Kyouka, but I'll read him. In a Grove by Akutagawa is one of my favorites. It's usually read as a story about the inaccessibility of truth, like the murder in the grove was an event that is distorted by people's different subjective perceptions (this is what Kurosawa made of it too), but reading the story I got the sense that it's actually supposed to be something different, like there's something fundamentally indeterminate or spectral about the murder itself.
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Dec 28, 2017 17:43
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here's the books i read this year and what i thought of them.
Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler good Replay by Ken Grimwood good parts, but annoying The Disappeared: A Retrieval Artist Novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch stupid, no mystery, boring, dumb The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois Mcmaster Bujold – no tension, meh Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami – dull, annoying Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell loving amazing Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood pretty good The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood meh The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse long, dry, boring, almost redeems itself then doesn’t Borne by Jeff VanderMeer – dumb, missed opportunities, boring The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber loving amazing Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov loving AMAZING The Trial, by Franz Kafka drat good Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem drat good Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky loving AMAZING 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami long, boring, too long, long, and needs about 300 pages cut out. Somewhat interesting in some parts. Odd John by Olaf Stapleton meh Peace on Earth by Stanislaw Lem too much moon robots, not enough split mind The City and the City by China Miéville interesting, meh ending For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway pretty unprinted good Orlando, by Virginia Woolf interesting, good The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith pretty good The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, by John le Carré very good The Looking Glass War, by John le Carré good The Peregrine by J.A. Baker loving BEAUTIFUL Great Expectations by Charles Dickens meh Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez drat GOOD The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde wow, good Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka WOW, GOOD Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov loving HELL YES GOOD Despair by Vladimir Nabokov WOW GOOD Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders WOAH GREAT
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Dec 28, 2017 20:18
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This year I read Hospital of the Transfiguration, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Highcastle, His Master's Voice, Chain of Chance, Futurological Congress and the Cyberiad by Lem. Of these, His Master's Voice (which I think is a variation on Kafka's Investigations of a Dog) was best because I prefer serious philosophical Lem to whimsical 70's Lem, I thought Highcastle (his autobiography) was very interesting to read alongside his other works. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub was probably my least favorite, although I still liked it. It was obviously a take on the Castle by Kafka and that made it feel a bit predictable after a while. Other stuff I read... Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H., which was incredible. Remainder by Tom McCarthy, good but not mind blowing. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugresic, which I liked. Kafka on the Shore, which left me feeling I'd just watched a Netflix series instead of reading a book. Part of Zadie Smith's N-W, forgettable. Teju Cole's Open City, I like modernism but this felt like a middlebrow version of it. Also had to read The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson, which I thought was clever garbage written to one day fit a bad movie script starring Scarlett Johansson. Kafka's Investigations of a Dog, which is exactly the kind of thing I love. Not a lot of Japanese authors this year, I want to get back into Japanese lit a bit, and maybe read some stuff in Dutch.
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Dec 28, 2017 22:27
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Ouch, 2017 hasn't been a good year for me. A few good books: Pet Sematary: a reliable Stephen King The Road: no idea what to make of it, but I liked it. It's crazy to think that it came out the same year as Cell Candide: hilarious. An unexpected gem Piccola ControStoria Popolare (non-fiction): life and works of early Italian anti-fascists of the Maremma region, reconstructed through news articles, police files, declassified intelligence reports and more than a little imagination on the author's part. Pros: not a hagiography. Cons: not a hagiography. To say that the guys were no angels is an understatement, but the book makes a convincing point that fascist blackshirts were that much worse (in no small part because they were quietly supported by police and capital). A very hard read: literally starts with a captatio malevolentiae and rarely attempts to present its subjects as anything but the lesser evil Little, Big: would only that all fantasy novels were written like this. Beautiful, terrifying, inexplicable - and will I ever leave Edgewood? I'm only about halfway through it Many, many bad books: Technology of the Gods (non-fiction... technically): how hard could it be to write a book of lies? boring, trite, worst of all utterly unimaginative, and not even competently edited. Why do I do this to myself? The Planiverse: a worldbuilding tour de force, so vivid to actually give me dreams in 2D for a while, but christ, maybe scientists shouldn't write anything with characters or a plot. At least, after over a decade, I can finally check it off of my to-read list Nevada: ended on my list as a "must read" for transwomen. A Bildungsroman where no one learns, improves or listens. Worse than worthless, may even hurt our cause, our public image and our self image Three Men in a Boat: "you can't go home again" - hilarious when I read excerpts in grammar school, but excruciating on re-read. The novella and travel guide bits alternate very clumsily and each makes the other feel like an afterthought. It isn't even a good travel guide Ignition! (non-fiction): scientists can't write, exhibit B. An informal history of liquid rocket propellant research in the 50s, it was not the cavalcade of witty anecdotes of discovering and dealing with the most volatile chemicals known to man that I was promised. The anecdotes were there, and they were witty, but most of the book was excessively detailed chemistry that flew way over my head. The kind of book that everyone quotes but nobody has ever actually read Olmo e Frassino: the author of this collection of two novellas believes he's writing Borges-inspired fiction. He actually writes poo poo Milano 2020: collection of shockingly bad short stories from a writing contest And a couple middling books too: La fabbrica: a... socialist love story? of workplace dangers, agitators on the lam, "dishonored" women and wily capitalist villains. Written in the late 19th century by a woman under a male pseudonym. The story of the book, sadly, is more interesting than the story in the book Assassinio in libreria: murder mystery. I'm indifferent to the genre and I wasn't impressed with the writing. Distributed for free by my city to encourage reading, together with (among other books set in Milan) Milano 2020 and La Fabbrica, and I have little hope that the other books are good Rules for Radicals (non-fiction): powerful but kinda rambling and self-defeating in parts. lovely editing, it's pretty much four essays mashed together. It would probably benefit from a Little Red Book treatment hackbunny fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Dec 29, 2017 |
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Dec 29, 2017 01:12
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I lost track of all the books I read this year. Most enjoyable literary work I can remember right now was Against the Day by Pynchon. It had a lot of fun and/or poignant moments in it, but I can't say for certain that it needed to be eleven hundred pages long.
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Dec 29, 2017 01:29
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my favorite books i read this year were the sickness unto death good argument for reading the bible the subtitles for urusei yatsura 2: beautiful dreamer which, due to their length and thematic complexity, are arguably a novel. i probably read other books this year but they pale in scope and importance to these two. also i've read those things before so they weren't new to this year. good luck to all readers and writers in the next year. i hope you all have an exciting reading season.
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Dec 29, 2017 02:12
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Burning Rain posted:i'm waiting for steve doneghue to do his: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2013/12/worst-books-of-2013-fiction/ Thank you for telling me about this guy. Stevereads Worst Fiction of 2017 posted:4: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich He has interesting, if sometimes baffling, opinions.
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Dec 29, 2017 02:16
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The best book I read this year was Ulysses. I might make a habit of reading it every year.
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Dec 29, 2017 03:21
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Bandiet posted:The best book I read this year was Ulysses. I might make a habit of reading it every year. i was at the national book fair in dc over a decade ago and there was a guy who asked neil gaiman a question that was like "so, i re-read ulysses every year (i've read it over 8 times already), and i noticed that that in your newest book one of the characters says 'yes' a lot. is that a reference to ulysses?" and it was just such a stupendously self-aggrandizing and stupid question that i remember it to this day. i think somebody asked salman rushdie a stupid question as well, but it paled in comparison.
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Dec 29, 2017 03:30
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I literally have no idea if the books on my shelf are books I read this year or three years ago. e: Bandiet posted:The best book I read this year was Ulysses. I might make a habit of reading it every year. hard literal same
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Dec 29, 2017 03:31
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Tree Goat posted:i was at the national book fair in dc over a decade ago and there was a guy who asked neil gaiman a question that was like "so, i re-read ulysses every year (i've read it over 8 times already), and i noticed that that in your newest book one of the characters says 'yes' a lot. is that a reference to ulysses?" and it was just such a stupendously self-aggrandizing and stupid question that i remember it to this day. i think somebody asked salman rushdie a stupid question as well, but it paled in comparison. I asked Jonathan Franzen if the scene in Purity (or maybe it was Freedom) in which characters have sex on top of a bomb was a reference to Tyrone Slothrop's sexual affinity for rockets. He made fun of me
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Dec 29, 2017 03:49
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blue squares posted:I asked Jonathan Franzen if the scene in Purity (or maybe it was Freedom) in which characters have sex on top of a bomb was a reference to Tyrone Slothrop's sexual affinity for rockets. Getting owned by the franz of all writers is a pretty bad look
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Dec 29, 2017 05:12
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Maybe Franzen didn't get the reference and was just trying to deflect
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Dec 29, 2017 06:11
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Ya, that's it, he never thought to even pretend to have read GR.
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Dec 29, 2017 10:01
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blue squares posted:I asked Jonathan Franzen if the scene in Purity (or maybe it was Freedom) in which characters have sex on top of a bomb was a reference to Tyrone Slothrop's sexual affinity for rockets. You deserved it
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Dec 29, 2017 10:04
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ulvir posted:isn’t 1Q84 the one where the solution to some problem is to have psychic sex with a 14 year old it's the one where murakami makes it very very clear that his buff author protagonist definitely does not want to have sex with the beautiful 17yo with huge knockers he's banging
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Dec 29, 2017 14:32
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I'm always incredibly upset when I have sex with large titted women
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Dec 29, 2017 14:49
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I finished reading The Sun Also Rises today. I like Hemingway's writing style but his book left me with an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and discontent. Thank you to those of you who recommended him to me.
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Dec 29, 2017 15:13
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The Count of Monte Cristo is sucking my will to read
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Dec 29, 2017 17:15
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CestMoi posted:I'm always incredibly upset when I have sex with large titted women In this John Cowper Powys book I'm reading there's at least two characters who like boyish androgynous women with small breasts and apparently Powys himself liked women who looked like that
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Dec 30, 2017 00:15
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fridge corn posted:The Count of Monte Cristo is sucking my will to read Did you like the part where the Count shows off his renaissance man expertise on everything? Well there's more coming 
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Dec 30, 2017 00:29
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Did you like the part where the Count shows off his renaissance man expertise on everything? Well there's more coming He just spent an entire chapter talking about poisons
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Dec 30, 2017 00:32
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fridge corn posted:He just spent an entire chapter talking about poisons this sounds good though
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Dec 30, 2017 00:59
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fridge corn posted:The Count of Monte Cristo is sucking my will to read Well then drop it, enough people have read the count.
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Dec 30, 2017 01:20
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It won't count in the long run.
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Dec 30, 2017 01:45
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J_RBG posted:this sounds good though that's just the thing, it wasn't
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Dec 30, 2017 07:44
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just finished rings of saturn. wasn't expecting that wrap up, holy wow. one of the favs of the year for sure.
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Dec 30, 2017 08:02
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First off: A Gentleman in Moscow was a nice read. Low-key, pretty, enjoyable, simultaneously imaginative and competent. It's almost cute, if "cute" didn't sound so condescending. "Smooth," maybe, like an old whisky a bit on the sweet side. I'm shocked it's only this guy's second novel. It reads like he's been cranking these out for decades. Since I talked a big game about 1Q84, I ought to at least follow up on my poo poo talking while it's fresh in my mind, even though it's the last thing I want to do right now. derp posted:She thought of Ayumi Nakano, the lonely policewoman who, one August night, wound up in a hotel room in Shibuya, handcuffed, strangled with a bathrobe belt. A troubled young woman walking toward the abyss of destruction. She had had beautiful breasts as well. Aomame mourned the deaths of these two friends deeply. It saddened her to think that these women were forever gone from the world. And she mourned their lovely breasts—breasts that had vanished without a trace. Yeah, this seems like a good place to start. Gross: There is not a single named female character in the book whose breasts are not described in detail, ten-year-olds not excepted. For some reason, in addition to noting that a character is loving ten, Murakami needs to point out that they also have a completely flat, undeveloped chest. Two ten-year-old girls appear in the novel, a younger Aomame and a minor character named Tsubasa. Both of them, we are informed, have no breasts to speak of. Fuka-Eri, a major character, apparently has perfect breasts. In fact, Murakami basically cannot introduce this 17-year-old in a chapter without describing how fabulous her breasts are. It gets repetitive real fast because Murakami writes repetitively. I was actually willing to give Murakami a little leeway here. I ain't a prude or nothin. For the first two volumes, the story alternates between only two perspectives: Tengo, a horny straight male loner, and Aomame, a horny (bi!) female loner with medium-sized, asymmetrical breasts. It makes some sense that they might notice, and even guiltily fantastize about, this girl's perfect knockers, which are, we are repeatedly informed, "disproportionate to her slim frame." It gets repetitive real fast because Murakami writes repetitively. But the third volume introduces a third perspective, a hard-boiled private eye famous for his singlemindedness, an almost pathological tenacity. He is middle-aged, unattractive, divorced, but not obviously lonely so long as he's on a case. HE takes one look at Fuka-Eri and we get, from this brand new perspective, the identical description of her flawless mondo boobs, piercing gaze, etc. that we got from Tengo and Aomame. At that point I wanted to stop reading. That was the last shred of credit I had given the author. But I wanted to know how the story ended (c.f. "pointless," below). Similarly, I can count the number of named female characters who escape being hosed on two fingers. One is a nurse with unexceptional breasts who never speaks, to my recollection. Of the flat-chested ten-year-old named Tsubasa and the surprisingly firm-breasted 70-year-old, I will let you guess which one does not get her uterus ruined by a big dick in a religious ceremony that the author made up. That just about covers the highlights of what I meant by "gross." "Unstylish": open the book to any page. The prose (granted, in English translation) is flat and repetitive. Sometimes Murakami repeats expository information within the same paragraph. He continues to repeat basic information about the premise of the book all the way to the end of the third volume. "Pointless": weighing in at >400 pages, the third volume of 1Q84 is the longest, and yet practically nothing happens. And this isn't a complaint about a lack of action per se. Murakami shifts gears fairly abruptly between II and III to focus on one specific plot of at least three, and pretends that this was the main plot the whole time. He ignores everything else. It really did seem like he just ran out of ideas and banged out an ending for the easiest plot of the bunch to finish. In Vol. III he repeatedly namedrops Proust's novels. Aomame is reading In Search of Lost Time in order to kill time while she literally just waits for this main plot to wrap up. Both main characters take a lot of time to think, reflect, and remember, much like Proust's narrator. The conclusions they reach at the end of all this reflection are shallow and trite, and—wait—don't I remember them reaching this conclusion via internal monologue back in Vol. I? Yes, actually: Murakami, apparently rudderless and editorless, paraphrases much earlier passages, which were hardly mindblowing to begin with, and acts like he is imparting a new revelation about the human condition or something. This pointless navel-gazing, we are obviously meant to think, is just like that thing with the madeleine from that other book. Vol. I and II set up a suspenseful, weird thriller, disgusting in parts, but inventive enough that I was willing to give Murakami a lot of rope. I don't demand that Vol. III answer the many questions of the first two with a shootout and a few pages of exposition. But I do want a competent book. A legitimate choice is to leave questions answered: "I hinted at a vast strange mythology and an imminent clash of deities via their human proxies, and I'll leave it at that. Our protagonists left the field of battle hand in hand, and that's also an ending." That seems like what he was going for. He could have done that in two volumes. I don't know what the hell he was thinking with that third one. Jesus Christ. e: look at that. rage moves me to effortpost about books Eugene V. Dubstep fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Dec 30, 2017 |
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Dec 30, 2017 09:40
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i've never read murakami but referencing more celebrated works is an age old method of injecting some Literary Prestige and Intertextual Production of Meaning into your work. but it's so old that shakespeare took the piss out of it relentlessly, and i'm sure it goes back way further than that. e: that is, directly referencing them by having their characters acknowledge the work. i'm not talking the sound and the fury or something like that. Foul Fowl fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Dec 30, 2017 |
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Dec 30, 2017 10:21
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Yeah that sounds terrible. I've only read Kafka on the Shore and his first two novels (which I actually liked a little bit more), in Kafka on the Shore there's a girl with nice breasts who invites our protagonist to her home and conveniently jerks his dick. While reading this part I assumed this would somehow come back to haunt the protagonist as there's a superficial oedipus plot going on, but there's never any payoff for reading this and the girl is otherwise inconsequential. There's the annoying namedropping and stupid rear end jazz and baseball references I don't give a gently caress about and which are simply distracting. I hate references and I wish every author would cut that poo poo out. If you want to write a book that's like another book, just write it and don't bother to namedrop the author. Murakami is best when he's describing some dumb lonely guy's feelings and how they walk around and encounter something weird, the first few books are still like that and don't have as many masturbatory references and sex scenes yet, then again they're also just forgettable and I might simply be misremembering what they were like. I hope they'll give the nobel prize to some more obscure Japanese writer and bypass Murakami so all of Japanese media goes apeshit. Shibawanko fucked around with this message at 13:13 on Dec 30, 2017 |
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Dec 30, 2017 13:08
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at the date posted:He continues to repeat basic information about the premise of the book all the way to the end of the third volume. I think he repeats everything to make sure his audience "gets it." Hes' writing books intended to let his audience feel smart, and so he has to make sure they "get it" by pointing out the punchlines repeatedly.
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Dec 30, 2017 16:53
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Are the punchlines the lines that make you want to punch him?
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Dec 30, 2017 16:55
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Safety Biscuits posted:Are the punchlines the lines that make you want to punch him? With Murakami, every line is a punch line
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Dec 30, 2017 16:56
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"I hate references" lol
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Dec 30, 2017 17:28
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Mr. Squishy posted:"I hate references" lol Yes, as in the kind of literary reference Murakami likes to make, namedrops and references to other books and tangents about jazz that make every character (every male character anyway, the girls never like jazz) sound like an author vehicle.
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Dec 30, 2017 17:45
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