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Genre novels tend to get megathreads because they're the only books that equal the addiction-forming buy-more endless-series junk that video games can offer. Their only match is "urban fantasy," which as far as I can tell is a genre in which buff men are aggressively bare-chested at each other.
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Jun 18, 2014 00:21
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I have recommended Salman Rushdie to everyone I know, including strangers, cats, plants, and dead people. I might make a thread on him one of these days, probably not because effort
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Jun 18, 2014 17:12
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Ratedargh posted:I'm debating on starting Midnight's Children soon...I haven't read Rushdie yet but I picked up a copy. I have a couple other books lined up first, but is that a decent place to start with his work? Midnight's Children is sort of Rushdie's work writ large - lots of historical fiction, identity crises, magical realism, etc, etc - but it's also one of his densest, and I've chewed through pretty much his whole bibliography. If you're in the mood for a loving battleship of a novel then full speed ahead, but if you'd rather start with something lighter then Fury or The Enchantress of Florence might be better, even though the prose of the former isn't as impressive and the latter's completely historical fiction instead of a timeline-jumper like a lot of his other books. Pretty much all of Rushdie's books deal in part with Indian expats angsting their way through British society, so if you haven't educated yourself on that particular social complex then you sure as poo poo will have been by the time you finish a few of his novels. Midnight's Children is literally the entire history of India as a nation personified in the life of a single man, so you'll be running into that identity commentary a lot.
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Jun 18, 2014 17:26
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People are having fun talking about books they like, please take your persecution complex elsewhere. Like the Bad Thread. I literally grew up on Stephen King novels and have an entire shelf dedicated to Terry Pratchett. Two shelves down from that are contemporary Irish novelists and McSweeney's magazines. I have Ramsay Campbell's The Doll Who Ate His Mother parked next to my McCarthy collection and the Scott Pilgrim series leaned up against about four Pynchon books. The collected works of Ray Bradbury rub spines with The Satanic Verses. The Harry Potter series is skulking in the closet but only because they take up too much shelf space. Expand your boundaries a little bit or don't, but don't begrudge people with the wherewithal to do so. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Jun 19, 2014 21:53
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David Foster Wallace was a poo poo dude, hell yes I said it, fight me
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Jun 20, 2014 18:08
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If people are looking for "literature" that's gruesome as all get-out for some reason then Tom Franklin would be right up their alley. He's got a brisk, robust prose style that's kind of like McCarthy's (clipped dialogue, lavish descriptions, often brutal imagery) but without the typography gimmicks, and his stories are generally action-driven which keeps them moving at a good pace. Poachers is a short story collection of his - mostly modern-day realistic fiction taking place in the Alabama bayou - and a good place to start. Hell at the Breech is historical fiction about a vigilante group gotten out of hand that casts a pretty uncompromising eye at the attitudes in turn-of-the-century Southern towns. Smonk is an almost pornographically violent Western (seriously, there's poo poo going on in that book that would make Blood Meridian take a few polite steps to the side) about an aging, syphilitic outlaw's campaign of vengeance on a small town that attempted to execute him. They're all good stuff, though Smonk is really not for the faint of heart.
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Jun 21, 2014 01:54
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Bigup DJ posted:If you want a cool, fantastic bunch of books read Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Was that supposed to impress me, that quote was dogshit. Unless it was supposed to be ironically purple or something, which would just make it silly. Speaking of purple prose, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is a historical/magic realism novel taking place in Napoleonic France and Venice that bravely straddles the line between profundity and farce. I've tried her other stuff and found it tilts way too far into the latter direction, but The Passion's imagery (particularly where it concerns abnormal space, I'm a big fan of that kind of thing and I loved her descriptions of Venice) meshes with events well enough to keep it from being distracting.
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Jul 7, 2014 17:19
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Barlow posted:I never liked "Crime and Punishment," though that might be partly because I find Dostoyevsky's intense hatred of atheism hard to stomach. I don't think it's a hatred of atheism so much as an over-abundance of piety. Tolstoy had the same problem. Jesus had a real hunger for Russian intelligentsia of that time and he snuck in their rooms at night and ate all their brains. I found Dostoevsky really loving tedious and I don't know how much of that is due to the stodgy translation. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 13:56
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Borneo Jimmy posted:Reminds me of this essay Oh man, I remember this loser from when he ripped apart Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. I knew just from that article he'd be the type to hold up some ridiculously obscure, kitschy sub-genre as his ideal, and sure enough, he's into Australian crime fiction. Dude's a cliche.
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Sep 22, 2014 17:19
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Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:It is a funny book and I read it without looking up references and really enjoyed it though I am sure I missed a ton. A book like Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow is fine to read, as well, without help but I have found that books like that seem all the more brilliant and wonderful when reading something to help you get a better grasp on some of the allusions. I pretty much gave up on Baudolino because it's just a somewhat stodgy adventure story if you're not familiar with all the history the title character's Forrest Gump'ing his way through.
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Mar 6, 2016 16:56
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unao posted:Hiii! question time! Amerikkkans, What are your most wanted contemporary poets? (Within a loose definition of contemporary, maybe eighties and onwards) Denis Johnson's The Incognito Lounge and Joshua Beckman's Shake are two of my favorite collections but I don't know poetry from a hole in the ground.
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May 26, 2016 14:28
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The Stranger is actually really good and can be polished off in an afternoon, don't let blue squares' tragicomic life choices put you off. e: it might also help to know what these "thousands of books" you read actually were, in the general sense, since I've gone through library shelves like Pac-Man since I was old enough to walk and I still wouldn't peg my personal record that high. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Jun 9, 2016 |
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Jun 9, 2016 21:00
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Horns had a terribly written but interesting premise for the first 30 to 50 pages and the rest made me want to bite my Kindle in half.
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Jul 24, 2016 03:27
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Zorodius posted:I think Joe Hill was hungry to prove himself as a younger man, and so he pushed himself to do some really great work, but as he got older he fell into contentment with the idea of following his father's footsteps, so now he's writing King-style listless fantasy horror. This except the opposite. If it weren't for his dad then Hill would have trouble facing an undergrad BA class.
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Jul 24, 2016 05:31
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A little over halfway through Aquarium and golly gee shucks did it go to a personal and super uncomfortable place! Caribou Island bored me less than fifty pages in. I guess it's all about how you connect with the subject matter.
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Sep 3, 2016 04:46
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Aquarium was a great book and an unflinching examination of the cycle of emotional abuse and domestic troubles but it also made me realize that I am officially tired of lesbians.
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Oct 7, 2016 16:45
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Solitair posted:I'm always interested in this sort of thing. What is it that he's doing, exactly? Lot of florid imagery, lot of burnt tongue. He's probably one of my favorite writers despite not really writing anything very good on the whole since Scorch Atlas - Three Hundred Million starts off well but disappears up its own butt halfway through, and There Is No Year is flashes of coherence in a sea of vague bad-feeling. He does do things you wouldn't see from most other writers, though. Three Hundred Million starts as an epistolary horror/crime novel but I'm pretty sure it's eventually about a man achieving enlightenment by sublimating humanity's collective Thanatos impulse. e: if you have Kindle Unlimited, you can get a decent taste of his style in the short story "We Witnessed the Advent of a New Apocalypse During an Episode of Friends" in this collection. Most of the other stories in there are kind of a mess, though. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 17:37
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Solitair posted:Oh, I've got that Bizarro Fiction collection on my list already. If I wanted to see Butler at his best without any other author weighing him down, should I just get Scorch Atlas, then? I'd say so. They're all short stories so he doesn't have as much time to completely vanish into abstraction like he does with his novels.
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Jan 15, 2017 18:32
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david crosby posted:It's good, but not as good as it's reputation would suggest, much like Infinite Jest Midnight's Children was Rushdie's breakout Big Important Novel and feels like it, it's ambitious and sprawling but has trouble settling on any one topic long enough to do it justice. Stylistically I've always said his best work is either The Satanic Verses or Shalimar the Clown.
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Mar 3, 2017 02:06
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WAY TO GO WAMPA!! posted:Not sure if too many of you guys were into him, but Denis Johnson died: Johnson was one of my favorite authors and The Incognito Lounge was loving revelatory to me when I was younger. I'm in mourning.
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May 29, 2017 07:52
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derp posted:that dinosaur example of poetry is what has always confused me about what poetry actually is. I remember i had a creative writing class in like, 10th grade and i couldn't get my teacher to explain to me what makes something a poem. so for a poem i had to write for an assignment, i just wrote out a paragraph about how i didn't understand what poetry was, spaced it out to have the shape of a poem, and turned it in and got full credit for it. I was kind of hoping he would explain to me why it wasn't poetry but i guess it was. bukowski might be more your thing then i'm not crazy about him but sometimes he doesn't give a poo poo about anything so hard it wraps back around and becomes incisive
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Jan 28, 2018 03:41
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Finished A Land More Kind than Home and The Snow Child over the last week. The former was a decent page-turner with a strong voice but it kind of came and went without anything leaving much of an impact on me in terms of story or imagery (only evocative scenes I can recall were the snowy mountain trek and the house full of snakeskins). The sheriff also felt a little too reminiscent of Bell from No Country For Old Men for my tastes, but maybe that's just archetypes at work. Anyone else who read and liked it should check out Tom Franklin, particularly Hell at the Breech and Poachers. His stories are based in about the same region but the actual descriptive prose is IMO way stronger. The Snow Child wasn't my thing at all. Some decent naturalistic images but the whole thing came off as insufferably gentle and quaint. Also chewed through Tenth of December in a couple of days at some point last month and George Saunders does third-person limited perspective in a way that brings shame upon his contemporaries, it's the best short story collection I've read since Scorch Atlas. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 16:57 on May 11, 2018 |
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May 11, 2018 16:30
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When I think bleak I think something like McCarthy's The Crossing or Outer Dark, ALMKtH certainly wasn't sunny but it didn't have nearly as much bite in comparison. I think it was the more prosaic depiction of the novel's events that did it - there isn't a really obvious sense of thematic or cosmic significance to the violence in Cash's novel, just ordinary people struggling against basic human meanness with a not-entirely-convincing uplifting note at the end. e: also not gonna lie Aquarium had me thinking "oh here we go with this poo poo again" when the penitent grandfather character was introduced Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 17:08 on May 11, 2018 |
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May 11, 2018 17:05
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Mel Mudkiper posted:It was a few years ago but I dont remember there being a hopeful ending as much as "everyone you love is dead, kid" Jess' grandfather takes him in and the final chapter consists of Addie narrating how the church is slowly purging itself of Chambliss' influence and how she hopes it'll lead Jess and the other kids towards a better future. Which is, like, jfc cue the violins already
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May 11, 2018 18:01
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Strongly doubt it. Addie's introduced by the novel as its moral compass, being the only one to abandon Chambliss even before the incident with Stump, so the sincerity of her take on events probably isn't meant to be called into question. The only place where she's not 100% on the ball is her interpretation of why the Halls' marriage started to crumble, and that was more due to her views being that of a pre-Depression era midwife than any lack of moral clarity. The sheriff's narration ends on a similarly hopeful note despite having closer proximity to the gruesome events at the end. Like I said at the start, the book struck me as a solid page-turner but not much else. There's nothing particularly clever in how it goes about its plot. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 18:58 on May 11, 2018 |
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May 11, 2018 18:55
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in this day and age dostoevsky and his tediously pious contemporaries are better read as comedies than anything else
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May 15, 2018 15:59
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notes is his only worthwhile book imo
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May 15, 2018 16:30
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and tolstoy
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May 15, 2018 16:54
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Well, if you want to say Tolstoy, you're entirely welcome to actually say Tolstoy instead of putting your foot in your mouth. i mean them both crime and punishment on top of being a stultifying sleep aid of a novel expresses a morality and sentiment so incompatible with modern society as to be laughable
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May 15, 2018 16:57
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then again the only religious dissertation in a work of fiction that i've ever found even a little bit compelling was the padre's story in The Crossing and even that doesn't ascribe any sort of morality to god in itself
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May 15, 2018 17:00
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the idea that belief in a higher power, whether god or state, can offer recognition and recovery from moral turpitude is the kind of idea that i can't look at anymore without hearing a rimshot at the end, it's true, it's true also it's been a while but i remember reading that a character in the brothers karamozov commits suicide at the realization of his own spiritual depravity in the vein of svidrigaïlov and between that and javert i wonder if it was some sort of trend in nineteenth-century literature for antagonistic figures to just self-destruct when faced with knowledge of wickedness as opposed to, as everyone knows, the complete opposite
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May 16, 2018 01:41
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Sham bam bamina! posted:If that's what you took away from Smerdyakov, you might not have actually read the book. i didn't, notes was decent and then crime and punishment turned me off the man the only russian author even born in the 1800's that hooked me was krzhizhanovsky and he barely counts for the purposes of this conversation because a) he started publishing almost half a century after dostoyevsky and b) he was basically one step removed from a speculative fiction author anyway Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 01:59 on May 16, 2018 |
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May 16, 2018 01:57
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Sham bam bamina! posted:You might like The Idiot, actually. i might got any translations you'd recommend
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May 16, 2018 02:06
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Heath posted:What specifically about C&P turned you off? I thoroughly enjoyed it but like someone earlier said I read with more of a comedic eye than Dostoyevsky probably intended mine was constance garnett because i didn't have much money to spend on books at the time and that was the cheapest edition in retrospect that may have been for a reason
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May 16, 2018 02:09
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Garnett isn't terrible like a lot of public-domain translations but is only actively good in revised editions. in the case of that interpretation i would retort that his self-imposed imperative to "surmount" the basic evil of human nature would be what made his resolutions come off as so facile to me but now we're getting at the point where i'm trying to spin deep argumentative analysis out of a book i last read in 2012
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May 16, 2018 02:17
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WatermelonGun posted:Philip Roth just died. I hate today.
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May 23, 2018 06:00
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tsar of love & techno is excellent so far, to whoever first brought it up often reads too much like an american's idea of a russian novel (lots of grim and stoic pithiness) but the prose itself is still tight
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Jun 3, 2018 04:12
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jagstag posted:stfu dumbass i think it's very progressive that the book subforum has its own pet neo-nazi
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Jun 8, 2018 01:11
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child of god is a decent page turner and doesn’t aspire to be much else only book of McCarthy’s I couldn’t stomach was Suttree I still finished it but it was just page after page of tedious meandering word games
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Sep 10, 2018 00:28
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Mel Mudkiper posted:like, oh boy the new 800 page book full of tedious overlong descriptions and hundreds of pages of irrelevant fluff i don't know if you've ever read Michael Chabon's The Wonder Boys but one of its few memorable bits consists of examining how a novel can bloat beyond the point of all reason if you whittle away at it long enough
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Nov 12, 2018 16:58
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