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Do people really read nothing but genre fiction? I'm reading Wheel Of Time but I'm also reading Plus by Joseph McElroy and I've read loads of literature - stuff by Calvino, Pynchon, DeLillo... I'd like to recommend Niebla by Miguel de Unamuno and The Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo but I rarely visit TBB and don't know if anyone has read these or if everyone has.
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Jun 19, 2014 21:10
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Talmonis posted:Really, aside from TBB and other such gathering places of readers, it's hard to determine what's worth reading outside of "genre" fiction, as everything else in a bookstore or god forbid the supermarket is just "Fiction". From Nora Robets schlock to Tom Clancy's military fetishism and everything in between. At least with genre fiction, you have a somewhat decent idea of what sort of book topics you'll find in that area. That's to say nothing of the quality of said books, just the means of narrowing down the search. This makes a lot of sense. If I pick up a fantasy book I can be relatively certain I'm getting a Tolkien-esque heroes journey but " Fiction"is both the Scarlet letter and the tropic of cancer.
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Jun 19, 2014 21:45
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Pessimisten posted:That's Swedish grammar finding it's way in to my English writing. Where English splits almost all words Swedish tends to write a lot of words connected as single word. In my head "no one" is spoken as single word and therefore i make mistakes like that. Although my writing is generally bad and sloppy. Maybe Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy?
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Jun 20, 2014 03:27
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Iamblikhos posted:"If on a winter's night a traveler" or "The Baron in the Trees" perhaps? Cosmicomics might also be a good starting point; the short stories in there really capture his style.
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Jun 21, 2014 03:44
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If people are looking for something modern and reminiscent of Calvino, you could do worse than read "The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards" by Kristopher Jansma.
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Jun 21, 2014 05:57
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Mr. Squishy posted:Does anyone have recs for what, if anything, is good by Joeseph McElroy, Richard Powers, Cynthia Ozick and Maureen Howard. McElroy: Plus, Women and Men. Good luck finding cheap copies though.
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Jul 25, 2014 18:56
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I have both of the McElroy books from my library on an indefinite checkout. One day I might actually read them.
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Jul 25, 2014 20:55
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Blind Sally posted:In my experience that only remains true if someone else doesn't request that specific book. This is true in my case. Fortunately, McElroy isn't really a hot commodity and they have two copies of the books. When I was in college, I had JR checked out for two years.
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Jul 26, 2014 05:50
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pixelbaron posted:The reason I am reading this cookie cutter fantasy series for the third time in two years is because I am training myself up to fully appreciate Charles Dickens, you see. Yeah but one of those was written with purple prose because the author was paid by the word and the other is generic fantasy.
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Jul 31, 2014 19:40
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All Nines posted:For what it's worth, I feel like I've been doing most of the complaining about him; most of the talk about him in this thread seems to be favorable, and I'm pretty hard to please in general. On the other hand, none of the samples I've seen in reviews of his work have endeared him to me any more than his public statements. Though it doesn't help that even when he's translating another writer he can't help observing that he and this writer are both angry people and using those essays as springboards for more ranting. Wait, you've been doing the most complaining about him and all you've read of his work are samples in reviews? goon.txt
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Aug 8, 2014 01:44
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Can't talk about absurdist theater without mentioning Edward Albee and Eugene Ionesco. I'd recommend Zoo Story and The Bald Soprano.
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Aug 8, 2014 20:21
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Wraith of J.O.I. posted:^read Disgrace a few years back and thought it was real good, although, of course, depressing. Minimalist style can be so great when done well. Makes me want to dive back into some Carver. If you haven't read Huck Finn before I would go for that first. It ranks alongside Moby Dick in terms of important American literature and it's short and funny.
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Aug 20, 2014 18:19
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Speaking as someone who's read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, they're crap. Simplistic writing with boring characters and it's just a vehicle for her to shove her political views down your throat. I've heard one writer that she tried to model herself after was Victor Hugo and she managed to pick up all the wrong lessons from his work - her didactic rants add little to the story and her large casts of characters are largely indistinguishable window dressing that exist around the main boring schmoes. The one thing that I liked about Atlas Shrugged was that the family dynamic for the non Galt main guy mirrored Arrested Development and I could imagine that while I read.
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Aug 31, 2014 23:51
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Ernest Hemingway is the poor man's Stephanie Meyer. Are we done with this now? I just read We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas. It's pretty good, a portrait of a family across three generations (although it's really focused on the middle one) as they struggle with social position and illness. Reads like Franzen without all the "I'm smart, look at me" stuff he does.
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Oct 4, 2014 15:55
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Smoking Crow posted:I would never unleash those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune upon them It would be an infinite jest though if he memorized all those words, words, words.
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Oct 24, 2014 20:59
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JackKnight posted:I did not make any assumptions about the relative IQ between a person speaking simply and a person speaking in sesquipedalian sentences. A person's facility of diction taken by itself has naught to do with his cleverness, though relatively speaking one could make the reasonable inference that a person using such language could be a clever person, because clever people often need a more concise vocabulary to express their concepts and ideas in a manner that precisely represents their thoughts to their satisfaction. I will endeavor handily to express myself in the most concise manner, eschewing rodomontade and the blusterous braggadocio of a twiddler or twaddler: Communication isn't about vocabulary, it's about making sure the other person understands what you're saying. Speak to an audience that exists and not your imaginary scholars tut-tutting from their learned thrones.
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Oct 25, 2014 01:02
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jonnykungfu posted:My second request is for some contemporary writers (preferably the last 5-10 years) that are experimental (or at least fun), engaging and have at least some humor (or soul-crushing bleakness) to their books Michael Chabon? I'm not sure how people feel about his works but he's one of my favorite authors. Haruki Murakami is also pretty good and experimental. I'd recommend Kavalier and Clay and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
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Dec 9, 2014 05:33
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Guy A. Person posted:Non-fiction is really cool, I have been trying to read more this year. Since I am a big dumb baby who needs facts spoon fed in the form of easily digestible narratives, here are some of the authors I have read multiple books from and liked: Bill Bryson is great. Life and times of the thunderbolt kid is one of the few books I can recommend to people who rarely read.
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Dec 20, 2014 03:49
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WAY TO GO WAMPA!! posted:What's this threads thoughts on Swamplandia? I've got it sitting at work and sort of want to buy it cause the cover looks cool. I read about three quarters of the way through it before stopping because I thought it was needlessly brutal. There was cool imagery but I don't think the story was that great.
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Jan 3, 2015 18:13
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mallamp posted:Make it "Spaceship has epiphany about loneliness" instead and you'll get goon support and ebook publishing deal within 2 weeks That's just Plus by Joseph McElroy
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Jan 21, 2015 03:53
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My high school performed Shakespeare pretty exclusively so I got to be in Macbeth, Twelfth Night and Midsummer Night's Dream. Much better experiences than reading Hamlet and Othello but performing the others definitely helped me get those two more.
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Feb 15, 2015 05:39
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I finished Even Cowgirls Get the Blues a few days ago and I didn't really like it. A lot of it was interesting and I enjoyed the central narrative but it seemed to me that the author was infatuated with himself and found himself endlessly clever which really took away from my enjoyment of the novel. After that I started Bleeding Edge and I'm about halfway through. It seems somewhat like a second draft of Inherent Vice which isn't a terrible thing - I'm impressed at how much Pynchon gets about the era he's writing about, especially stuff like the vending machine only Pokemon cards. One minor quibble - he mentions Final Fantasy X which came out right around the period he's writing about in Japan but not in the US so I assume he's referring to the Japanese release.
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Jun 17, 2015 23:38
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It seems like I was being somewhat needlessly pedantic - I really appreciate how Bleeding Edge is acting as a skeleton key for the way Pynchon normally uses references in his work because I actually understand the ones in Bleeding Edge without a companion book.
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Jun 18, 2015 19:46
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Shibawanko posted:Dragon Ball Z is not garbage. Dragon Ball is much better in terms of having a story that's not just "gotta be the strongest punchman" but probably because the earliest part borrows rather liberally from Journey to the West.
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Jun 19, 2015 01:59
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Mel Mudkiper posted:EL Doctorow Now someone can write a book with him in it.
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Jul 22, 2015 04:31
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What are some good books for me to read if my favorite authors are Chabon, Pynchon, Franzen and similar? I'd be open to stuff that isn't written by straight white males as well. Also, I have the Black Snow because Mel Mudkipper mentioned it at one point so I should probably read that next.
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Aug 30, 2015 21:19
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blue squares posted:Those are some of my favorites as well. I've read Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System, Consider the Lobster, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot and liked all of them. I've been meaning to read White Teeth for years and have had Donna Tart recommended a ton but was always hesitant for some reason I can't pin down... Mel Mudkiper posted:I am Radar Love The Art of Fielding, I'll check out the others. Thanks for the recommendations.
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Aug 31, 2015 00:40
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Mel Mudkiper posted:You might also like "& Sons" I've read The Normals, I'll add that to the list.
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Aug 31, 2015 01:15
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mallamp posted:Chabon -> Jonathan Lethem, Neal Stephenson Thanks, I'll pull Snow Crash and The Fortress of Solitude; I've also been meaning to read the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Read half of the Recognitions before I ducked out, I'll probably pick it up again in the future. I think I've read all of the better books by Updike - Garp, Owen Meany, Cider House and Hotel New Hampshire.
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Aug 31, 2015 05:46
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Sir John Feelgood posted:That's John Irving. Ah. Well, I've read Updike's Falconer and a bunch of his story stories, like the enormous radio.
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Aug 31, 2015 18:37
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Zesty Mordant posted:is this a game? Enormous radio is Cheever. Yeah, I'm just being dumb. I've read a few of Updike's novels but I wasn't a huge fan. It might be because I read them in high-school and couldn't really connect with a restless Rabbit.
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Aug 31, 2015 23:57
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Finished The Black Snow. It's a wonderfully written book. Captures perfectly the Irish feeling of always looking backwards instead of forwards. "[The] smoke mapped the wind's movement so that the shape of it became visible, a calligraphy of violence that rewrote itself a capacity endless for its own pleasure."
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Sep 3, 2015 02:50
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Don't read the "sequel", it's definitely not something that was ever supposed to be published. I've almost finished Between the World and Me and I don't think I understand what is meant by white in the book. Is it supposed to be the national white zeitgeist - the spirit that looks at problems and addresses them from a privileged position where they can only be seen as part of a universal problem and not something inflicted? It's a good book but incredibly depressing. I'm Jewish and my family was only given the position of white in the previous generation - I don't find myself at the severe end of the aggressor but I do feel like I could be doing more.
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Sep 13, 2015 18:34
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Mel makes some pretty good recommendations but his frank nature is easy to take as trolling. I've been reading through the books everybody recommend - The Gone Away World was pretty good and I got my brother a copy of it for his birthday, The Secret History was incredible and I'm now going to read all of Donna Tartt's novels and Carry the One was a great read, it really reminded me of Franzen. I'm currently reading I Am Radar and it reminds me a lot of Chabon's style.
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Sep 29, 2015 00:27
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A friend's brother-in-law is an addict and the portrayal seems very true to what he's told me.
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Sep 29, 2015 01:26
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The key to understanding Pynchon is watching Marx brothers movies and doing  .
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Oct 8, 2015 16:35
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Kraps posted:Dresden Files is fine! Not really.
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Nov 2, 2015 01:42
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Mel Mudkiper posted:what is Dresden Files Yeah man alt-wwii fiction is only good if somebody is wearing a pig suit and they fight with pies in airplanes
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Nov 2, 2015 01:55
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Mel Mudkiper posted:what on earth are you talking about Gravity's Rainbow
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Nov 2, 2015 03:12
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David Mitchell seems like a really great technical writer but Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks were way too sterile for me.
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Nov 2, 2015 18:46
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