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Poutling posted:Honestly, the biggest issue I find with TBB is that everyone reads and talks about the same books, all the drat time. It doesn't matter if it's in a 'no genre' thread or in a thread like cosmic horror, there's like 50 books that TBB reads and talks about ad nauseam. If you look at the Cosmic Horror thread, 90% of the talk in there is about Laird Barron and Thomas Ligotti. Also, Cormac McCarthy!!!! Constantly. Right now, everyone talks about Dictionary of the Khazars. Yes, I read it. Yes, it was good. Yes, I've also read Cormac McCarthy. I wish we could talk about some new books. Also some female authors would be nice. I noticed this as well, but thought this was just the result of a vicious circle that you show yourself. Since everybody talks about a small group of books, it's difficult to talk about other books because it's unclear if anyone else has read it. In other words, people only discuss a few books here because there are only a few books that enough people have read to be able to discuss them. It's why I like the awful book of the month project. This problem happens all the time with pretty much all kinds of media and is probably unavoidable. It's a big problem when I discuss books with friends as well and when people ask me which books I like I will not name the books I like most, nor the books that I'd like to discuss most, but rather the books that I think they are likely to know that I thought were good.
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Jun 18, 2014 23:33
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ZombieLenin posted:To read literature correctly, you cannot rely on translations. Therefore, I call shenanigans on all recommendations in this thread for literature not originally written in the English language. Unless, of course, you are recommending things written in non-English languages to people who already speak (or can at least read) them. Why? Is this some stupid trolling? Have you ever read a good book both in translation and in original language? I actually think it's a very bad thing to only read books from the same background. Anyway, I don't mind people discussing genre fiction really since many of them are quite enjoyable and worth reading. However I have to admit I lost some faith in the fantasy recommendations here (although I've started to recognise posters with the same taste, because so many objectively horrible books keep getting recommended anyway. Especially jarring is when bad or mediocre writing somehow gets described as beautiful. So yeah, of course you can enjoy all the fantasy you want but if you for example describe Rothfuss prose as excellent or consider Brent Weeks' plot writing stellar, or The Iron Druid the pinnacle of humor I think it is good advice to read more kinds of books. Not because it's wrong to enjoy those fantasy books (of course it isn't), but because it's not far-fetched to assume you'd enjoy better books even more. This is not "heh, silly you for enjoying that" but rather "great that you enjoy those, but here are a few books that will blow your mind if you actually try them out" combined with "please recommend actually good books only please!". edit: quote:Reading classic literature in an of itself hold no real value. Of course, as far as I am aware nobody in this thread ever said or implied anything different and you're missing the point. Walh Hara fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Jun 19, 2014 21:41
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For whatever it's worth, my go to recommendation for people who don't read a lot is Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's short, it's a classic, well written and the themes are very relevant despite that the book was written almost 70 years ago. I sometimes recommend "Three Men in a Boat" as well, even though I don't think it's very good.
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Jun 21, 2014 19:28
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Dirty_Moses posted:After reading 100 Years of Solitude and a smattering of Hemmingway, I decided to take a quick genre fiction break and read Neil Gaiman's newest(?) novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Now, I'm a bit unclear about something. If you have to ask if something is genre fiction or not, it isn't. Genre fiction are books that are written and marketed explicitly as books part of a certain genre. Wikipedia definition: Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is plot-driven fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre, in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre. Verne, Wells and all writers that "did something first" are by definition not writing genre fiction.
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Jul 1, 2014 17:45
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Mel Mudkiper posted:If you like Calvino and Borges there was a 30 year old Mexican novel recently published in English as "A Brief History of Portable Literature" I didn't really get into it for the same reasons as before, but if you are into that kind of writing it does a really good job of it. Do you (or anyone else) have more such recommendations? I absolutely love books from both Calvino and Borges and would certainly like to discover more authors like them. (although they're not even that similar)
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Aug 21, 2015 16:56
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Ras Het posted:
Yeah, I loved that one as well. It is a book I recommend often to anyone who is looking for something post-modernistic.
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Aug 21, 2015 17:12
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Tree Goat posted:bolaño, especially nazi literature in the americas and 2666 Is Nocturno de Chile (for some weird reason the title is "By Night in Chile" in English) good as well? I had already read Putas asesinas from Bolano before (which I liked) and I just picked Nocturno in the library on a whim but have yet to read it.
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Aug 21, 2015 18:09
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blue squares posted:So I had to stop listening to the audiobook of A Little Life and buy a hardcover instead, because while the narrator of the audiobook is so drat good, I hear the book gets pretty emotionally intense later on, and I don't feel like crying while running and listening to a book. So my new audio book is the first of Elena Ferrante's 4-part series of "Neapolitan Novels." It's great. The prologue is a very interesting mystery and the first childhood scene, with the rock throwing, is a twist on a classic male youth story. Anyone else read any of these? I think it might be the first Italian novel I have read. I've been to Naples, where it is set, which is cool. Yeah, I read the first novel from the Neapolitan series and it was great. I'll certainly get the others at some point as well. Very strong characters and well written. I did miss the "twist on a classic male youth story", which one do you mean?
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Dec 24, 2015 11:42
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I still got your back bro Cool! Are the other books as good as the first one?
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Jan 5, 2016 21:55
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I've reads book of Bolano, Allende and Zambra and they were all really good. Different styles, but all enjoyable. I'd certainly recommend "The Private Lives of Trees". Never heard about Dorfman.
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May 18, 2016 19:17
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Aquarium is indeed pretty good. Nice pictures of fish. If with noteworthy you mean "which books will people probably still talk about in 2026?" I actually think Between the World and Me is noteworthy. Well written, short, a bestseller and a book that is just very easy to recommend to others.
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Jun 5, 2016 11:06
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Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series is really good.
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Jun 5, 2016 13:33
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Mrenda posted:Apart from a few short stories available for free on some decent websites and a few Irish lit journals (of which there is an abundance, with a resulting quality of writing) I've never read some real literature. My sole attempt in the past year was trying to get through The Castle, but the quality of the prose didn't whip me through it (apart from one early scene) so when I decided it was a bit of a shaggy dog story about a shaggy dog life/situation/pursuit I put it down (also, I was quite ill reading it, so that wouldn't have helped.) Perhaps The Stranger from Camus? It's about somebody who is very detached from reality and is just a very good, accessible and profound book.
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Jul 11, 2017 23:12
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Jrbg posted:This conversation comes up a lot because of the thread title but I was thinking about this recently. Nuancing this, there technically isn't a strong category distinction between genre and 'literary fiction', which is a marketing gimmick for publishers, but there is a noticeable gulf in quality between books that think of language as a simple or transparent conveyor of meaning and books that see language as a manipulable object in its own right. The former category thinks in terms of worldbuilding––you can simply convey an entire world and an entire complex of facts and ideas in simple language, it's all just a matter of efficiency and clarity. This notion often appeals to 'genre' authors but 'literary' authors are guilty of it too. But good books never treat language as a simple thing, and the latter category does 'worldbuilding' through style. Style is more than just conveying your meaning, it's an event on the page, literature as an aesthetic experience is itself reckoned with. But if you're writing a star wars novelization you're not even going to be given the job if you're concerned with this latter notion of language. There are good books that deal with the fantastical and the speculative, obviously there are, just as there are good ones that hew closely to a kind of realism, but no good fiction book prioritises linguistic efficiency above aesthetic experience: good writing wastes your time. Not sure I agree with "no good fiction prioritises linguistic efficiency above aesthetic experience". Writers like Hemingway and Borges clearly do care about linguistic efficiency. It'd be really difficult to make ficciones' text even more linguistic efficient. Do they prioritise it above the "aesthetic experience"? Debatable, perhaps not. But you give me the impression that you think that a writer that spends a lot of effort on linguistic efficiency cannot write great literature, which I would disagree with. Walh Hara fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jan 4, 2021 |
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Jan 4, 2021 16:50
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Shibawanko posted:if you take a classic example of this like hemingway, it's obvious that there's a specific symbolic meaning to be found, like "hills of white elephants" is about an unwanted pregnancy, but if this is the only meaning to be had then (to me anyway) that feels somehow unsatisfactory, i think theres an aesthetic experience to be had from the story that can sidestep or at least doesn't rely on this symbolic meaning, and which makes the story more pleasurable to read which is my main criterion for everything Yes, but whether a book contains symbolism or not is quite independent of whether the writing style is "efficient" or not. And a book can still be great literature without the author aiming for some hidden symbolism. Speaking of Hemingway, a quote: "No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in .... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things."
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Jan 4, 2021 18:01
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Jrbg posted:Even Hemingway's writing isn't a perfectly smooth ride, by which I mean you snag on it, it pulls you up short. There is no such thing as enjoyment without challenge. Any moment you have enjoyed in a book is because it tugs at something in your brain you don't/didn't fully understand, otherwise you're not reading, you're just agreeing with yourself. I used efficiency here to mean the dubious aesthetic aims of 'readability' and 'directness', which I associate more with economic imperatives (hence efficiency)––and yeah I suppose it's not a direct antithesis to 'aesthetics' in general but I'm saying art is not a good way of 'getting a message across' because fundamentally your relationship to a work of literature as a reader is one of evolving mystery. If your statement is "all good literature contains some challenge to read and understand completely. Books that take no effort to read are not good literature" then I agree. If your statement is "all good literature contains prose that is difficult to read or indirect. Books whose prose is written to be as readable and direct as possible are not good literature" then I disagree. Example: ficciones. Very readable and direct prose, still great literature.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:38
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