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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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You won't regret it. Palm Wine Drinkard is an all timer in pure pace and imagery. But that's the perfect way to describe Famished Road. It's riffing badly on something it can't understand or even emulate well which makes it so frustrating. Also, anyone read some later Rushdie? I've basically given up since Golden House was mediocre and Victory City just plain bad, but I heard Quichotte was good? Last thing of his I enjoyed reading was Shalimar the Clown though I was still in uni then so maybe it's rose tinted. I still think Satanic Verses and Midnight's children hold up well even if they have the start of that attempt at elevated distancing that Rushdie dove far into as he crawled up his own rear end. And Haroun and the Sea of Stories is gorgeous. In terms of his non-fiction I think Joseph Anton, his memoir, is just funny because of how off-putting and bitchy he comes across in what is a very sympathetic situation. You can just tell he was keeping names to settle scores for those who didn't worship him. So I'm definitely skipping Knife.
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Apr 20, 2024 00:04
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i liked victory city fine but quichotte's not great. i think that when rushdie's good he's unmatched (the razing of pachigam in shalimar the clown is probably still my favorite passage in fiction period) but his best days are behind him and the latter half of his bibliography mostly retreads the former, except with weaker presentation and less subtlety - quichotte for example has several commentaries on trumpism that are one step removed from a kelly cartoon
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Apr 20, 2024 00:25
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nice obelisk idiot posted: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. escape artist posted:That's crazy to me! The biggest problem to me is how flabby his prose is. He would just jam in adjectives and adverbs everywhere. His desire to emblazon a single image into the minds of his readers limits his ability to create anything truly striking. quote:It was a pleasure to burn. I've disliked him since I first read Sound of Thunder in middle school and nothing I've read of his has ever done anything but deeper entrench my apathy towards his writing. Although I've heard the writing in Something Wicked is very good. Anyways, I was bored and wanted to find something short to read. Picked up Sound of Waves from Mishima. Really good work, the way he works in the interlocking nature of the society, the sailing and ocean, and the personality of the MC felt effortless which I can only assume means it took a ton of effort. Gotta say, he really had me in a lock for most of the work. Despite the main character being the almost complete inverse of Kiyoaki I could not help but see the parallels between this work and Spring Snow, when the dramatic break happens between Hatsue and Shinji I felt my stomach drop. The fact that this is the only novel of Mishima that I've read that actually has a happy ending did not help and kept me on the edge until the very end. It almost felt cruel of Mishima to include the story of the ghostly widow on the hill and then putting that hill in half the most important scenes in the novel. If you can look at it in contrast with Spring Snow and the Sea of Fertility Tetralogy it become fascinating. You can see that Mishima himself seems to have taken an even farther plunge into the nihilistic. Shinji manages to win by virtue of his manly work ethic and despite or maybe because of his own lack of introspection. Actually I think that is a bad way to phrase it. You know in HEAT when the diner scene happens and you realize Neil and Vincent aren't the masculine meatheads unaware of their own emotions, but are in fact very aware of every feeling they have and why they're feeling it but feel that their duty to their career is more important for what they are going after then stopping. Shinji is like that, he understands why he feels the way he does even though he lacks the vocabulary to actually describe the how and why, compared to Kiyoaki who is theoretically more intelligent and introspective but spends all his time wrapped up on his own bullshit until he's fumbled every chance he's had. The kid from Runaway Horses is just as solid as Shinji but it seems at some point Mishima became convinced that it was impossible to live the sort of simple virtue filled life that he would advocate in a modern world. The coca cola and America of it all had seeped too far into the soil. Only the death of the virtuous could redeem the nation, something that even at the end he seems to have known on an intellectual level was impossible and maybe not even preferable. Other than that there is some interesting gender politics going on. The women's breasts are emphasized the same time as they're compared to men. The great effort Hatsue goes through catching Abalone, and in doing so supplanting the mother, how freudian, happens off screen while the great effort Shinji goes through is the climax. Hatsue is implied to have only been able to win the contest because she is fueled by love for Shinji, meanwhile while she believes the same is true for the task Shinji completed we are assured in the final lines that it was a singular effort from Shinji himself that carried him to victory. You could do some interesting reads if you really pulled it all apart line by line, I will not be doing os.
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Apr 20, 2024 03:32
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funny you mention color, i like the flow of black -> blood (red) -> orange -> back to red -> yellow -> black again that's pretty dope. he used color to good effect here
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Apr 20, 2024 06:48
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Sound of Waves felt like it was a story meant to be adapted into a play.
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Apr 20, 2024 07:06
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Finished Gravity's Rainbow. Many scenes and paragraphs that I'll remember and cherish for years to come, but as a total reading experience I have to say I prefer V. There's a good chance I'll turn out to be one of those who declare Mason & Dixon to be their favorite of Pynchon's oeuvre.
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Apr 20, 2024 08:06
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The inheritance of loss and the famished road and both good examples of drippy generically-lyrical booker-bait lit fic titles, which I find really annoying for some reason. See also: pretty much any title with the word “light” in it. Haven’t read much Bradbury but I think that passage is pretty good. I get what you mean about it being “too much”, but in that instance at least it’s intentional; it reflects the character’s exultation and self-delighting over-regard for his own occupation. I think that works well.
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Apr 20, 2024 16:34
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IMO that was a great example of what I remember liking from Bradbury. It's a feast for the senses, and kind of takes me back towards imagining stuff in the way that I did when I was younger. I like the shades of meaning of the last line. If you've ever worked around fire, it does feel like that, like you're being blasted back, but there's a sort of joy and grit in tolerating it. But it also goes deeper into his character, like his personhood was singed and driven back by the flame of the world in which he lives, and his fierce grin is also from that. Like that's how he copes.
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Apr 20, 2024 16:59
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I don't mind when Bradbury stuffs his prose full of adjectives because he doesn't ever make it purple. Just big, evocative thoughts. His whole thing is vibes.
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Apr 20, 2024 20:24
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I just read A Sound of Thunder for the first time and goddamn what a story.
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Apr 22, 2024 05:18
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German weekly Die Zeit has an article about a retired miner who build up a private library of more than 70.000 books, filling his entire home with it. I wonder what kind of books he liked!  Of course lol. https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2024-04/privatbibliothek-bergmann-westfahlen-literatur Here's the link if people read german or want to google translate it.
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Apr 22, 2024 13:21
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Peggotty posted:German weekly Die Zeit has an article about a retired miner who build up a private library of more than 70.000 books, filling his entire home with it. based
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Apr 22, 2024 16:34
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Peggotty posted:German weekly Die Zeit has an article about a retired miner who build up a private library of more than 70.000 books, filling his entire home with it. I feel like this gravity assisted bookshelves must be bad for the spines??
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Apr 22, 2024 19:02
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thehoodie posted:I feel like this gravity assisted bookshelves must be bad for the spines?? They're all paperbacks who cares
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Apr 22, 2024 19:10
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thehoodie posted:I feel like this gravity assisted bookshelves must be bad for the spines?? it worked for the guy in too loud a solitude, didn't even crush him or anything
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Apr 22, 2024 20:55
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