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This thread is hilarious and I love it. Also, what would you all say is the most noteworthy literature published from 2012 to now, and why? Do your best to sell me on these newfangled smartybooks.
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Jun 4, 2016 22:47
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Carry the One by Carol Anshaw - Next to Aquarium, my favorite book of the decade. It deals with what I always think is the greatest challenge of literature, to explore the human reaction to impossible tragedy. Every character is exceptionally crafted, and the depictions of the costs of addiction are particularly potent. I've actually already read Carry the One before. I used to work as a library janitor, and I took home a copy that was marked to be thrown away. What I love most about it is that the characters don't dwell on the accident for the entire duration of the book. They usually try to get on with their own lives and the memory only occasionally resurfaces. They'll never get rid of it, but it doesn't completely define them. I just got samples of all the others, and when I'm not backed up with other business I'll check them out.
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Jun 5, 2016 03:05
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A human heart posted:Why is it that the dudes in this thread who are all about contemporary fiction only read the most boring middle brow anglo american stuff? Good point. I'm still open to suggestions, so if you want to recommend anything that's not that I'm all ears.
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Jun 5, 2016 12:49
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Burning Rain posted:what kind of stuff do you like? if you want to lose yourself in sentences that would make henry james red from envy, pick up the whatever has been published last by Marias or Krasznahorkai. want a short, powerful book balancing on the edge between reality and metaphysical space? Kadare's 'The Fall of the Stone City', Yuri Herrera's 'Signs Preceding the End of the World' and the current TBB BotM 'The Vegetarian' by Han Kang will trip you up. short stories? try Yoko Ogawa's 'Revenge' or Hassan Blassim's 'The Iraqi Christ' My favorite literary works that I can think of at the moment are Pale Fire, Gormenghast and Catch-22. I also really liked the Eschaton scene from Infinite Jest and parts of Gravity's Rainbow. You've actually managed to guess pretty well what I want right now: surreal tone and examples of high-tier prose. Out of all the aspects of writing you can consider about a book, prose quality is the one I have the loosest grasp of, and I feel the need to educate myself on how to distinguish it.
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Jun 5, 2016 18:07
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at the date posted:In my experience, good prose is like porn: you know it when you see it. It's remembering how it goes after I'm done reading the book that's the trick.
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Jun 5, 2016 19:39
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Nanomashoes posted:The embarrassing shut in hacker says embarrassing shut in things. But after MGSV I'd be looking askance at anyone who called him a god.
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Jun 11, 2016 20:31
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Nanomashoes posted:The book came out before MGS5 and was set in 2001 so it doesn't matter. Interesting. Is that the time when MGS2 first came out and everyone was riding high on it, or when people started to say it was pretentious garbage (and wrongly so)?
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Jun 11, 2016 20:35
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I think the world would be a better place if more genre writers had influences outside their preferred genres.
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Jul 7, 2016 16:57
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Remember when the literary fiction thread was for talking about literary fiction, and when the people in it who liked fantasy realized there was a time and place for that? Those were good times.
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Jul 7, 2016 19:43
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Mel Mudkiper posted:One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is interesting because it posits a pretty strong "burn em all" position on mental health institutions but post-Reagan we did burn em all and we discovered its a terrible idea. Yeah, I watched the movie and I was firmly on Ratched's side before that one guy killed himself. If someone like Jack Nicholson's character got in my face like that I'd really want him to gently caress off. Edit: Don't get me wrong, I get how horrible mental health institutions used to be, but McMurphy was portrayed as one step above Robin Williams' portrayal of Patch Adams. If he had triumphed instead of getting lobotomized, the story would be almost completely insufferable. Also, doesn't Chief have really intense hallucinations that aren't apparent in the movie? Solitair fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Jul 7, 2016 |
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Jul 7, 2016 21:31
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Franchescanado posted:But the movie always makes her seems so goddamn stoic and evil, and I always found it obvious that she's completely disregarding the well-being of her patients just to gently caress with McMurphy because she can, just to prove she's in charge. McMurphey's doesn't begin as a hero, but his rivalry with Ratched ends with him having good intentions (with poor execution). Maybe I'm a sociopath, because it came off to me (at first) like she was just unwilling to put up with McMurphy's bullshit. Anyway, the book sounds better and I should read it sometime.
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Jul 7, 2016 22:15
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Talk about the communiss.
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Jul 7, 2016 22:44
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mdemone posted:Have read, ah, Generosity, The Echo Maker, and I think one more but I can't remember which. It wasn't GBV though, I've been wanting to get that one for years. So where do I start on Richard Powers? I looked up all his books and it seems like Plowing the Dark and The Time of Our Singing interest me the most conceptually.
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Jul 8, 2016 11:10
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Lightning Lord posted:That guy is the worst, I don't blame you. The Player's Handbook of Laughter and Forgetting
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Jul 8, 2016 21:50
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I read half of The Plot Against America while I waited for my computer to get fixed, and I'm tempted to finish it. It's interesting to see Philip Roth take a detailed, autobiographical take on how his childhood could have gone.
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Jul 12, 2016 22:16
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CestMoi posted:The first chapter of that book was insanely bad and the rest was pretty good. My fav part was people in this forum being like "it's very pertinent to today's society because Donald Trump is friends with Hitler" I'm not entirely sure what you mean. That first chapter is slow going with more setup than emotion, sure, but it's not awful.
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Jul 13, 2016 14:57
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I really liked 11/22/63. Worst book I've read in a while is The Darkness Between the Stars by Kevin J. Blanderson. Almost forty loving POV characters and only a few of them have any sort of personality.
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Jul 23, 2016 22:29
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Schmischmenjamin posted:Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill I read that one too, it got pretty doofy by the end.
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Jul 24, 2016 00:16
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at the date posted:Diamond - Guns, Germs, and Steel Ras Het posted:what at the date posted:I'm sorry. Good. 
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Jul 24, 2016 23:11
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Smoking Crow posted:this isn't what i wanted Let's all go back to being loving children.
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Jul 25, 2016 07:08
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Does Ovid make a continuous narrative out of a whole bunch of Greek myths in Metamorphoses? That was the thing I heard that made me put it on my list.
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Jul 26, 2016 05:26
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blue squares posted:Um excuse me but it's FEWER money "Money" isn't a unit of measuring currency like dollars, so he was right the first time. 
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Jul 31, 2016 03:49
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Abalieno posted:Gaiman's comic book stuff up to the end of Sandman is excellent. Notoriety destroyed his talent. But Sandman: Overture was also excellent. Maybe he just needs to stop writing things that aren't Sandman.
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Aug 1, 2016 12:41
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skooma512 posted:I started Middlemarch, a version I suspect is abridged. I thought you were talking about Middlesex when I first read this post.
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Aug 2, 2016 16:19
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rest his guts posted:Also, Vonnegut is rad and Cat's Cradle is probably the funniest book I've ever read When I was in high school I had my first exposure to Vonnegut with Cat's Cradle and Hocus Pocus. I adored the latter book at the time, but I've never heard anybody else talk about it. Does it hold up?
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Aug 4, 2016 23:09
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Since someone asked about Journey to the West translations recently, how about Romance of the Three Kingdoms? What's the best translation of that?
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Aug 19, 2016 18:41
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House Louse posted:Moss Roberts. He's done a huge complete translation and an abridged version. There's also an older translation, but I haven't read it because it's in Wade-Giles; it's probably cheaper though. You don't get much cheaper than available for free online. I got ahold of the Moss Roberts one too, and I guess I'll see how different they are soon enough.
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Aug 20, 2016 08:06
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If you're reading Gravity's Rainbow for the first time, I advise you to go along for the ride and not try too hard to understand everything that happens for now. That's how I did it.
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Aug 21, 2016 08:24
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david crosby posted:I think that the Pudding scene is much less disturbing, because he seems like sort of a bad dude + eating poop is funny. The Bianca scene is really messed up, to me, becuz Slothrop is our main character, whom we've been rooting for and want to see succeed like a normal 'good guy'; and the tone of the section is pretty ambiguous in like a moral sense. Plus Pynchon describes the stuff really vividly so it reads as pornography, it's freaking gross dude. I feel the reverse. That scene with Pudding is what convinced me, at the time, that I liked reading Infinite Jest better than Gravity's Rainbow. I don't even remember the Bianca scene, even though I finished the book. I can't believe I didn't notice (or forgot) that it was treated as pedophilia by the narration
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Aug 21, 2016 23:31
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david crosby posted:it wasn't, and that's why it was disturbing. He just says her age a lot, so it uh obviously is pedophilia, but it's written in like an 'erotic' way. That would explain it. I'm getting in the habit of skimming over sex scenes because I don't trust most people to write sex scenes that are actually erotic, so if it was just a number that got brought up, as opposed to a detailed description of a man literally eating poo poo, also in the context of sex  , I can see why I wouldn't notice.
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Aug 22, 2016 00:14
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Mover posted:I know Kingsley Amis experimented with genre stuff, doing a trippy ghost story in The Green Man and some heavily PKD inspired alternate history in The Alteration. Most of what I know about Kingsley Amis comes from him making GBS threads on Gormenghast. He'd be right at home in this thread. (I say this as someone who loves Gormenghast.)
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Aug 31, 2016 02:00
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Twerkteam Pizza posted:Lmao if you don't think of Atwood as an SF writer "I can't possibly be a sci-fi writer. My books are too deep and good to be in that genre."
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Aug 31, 2016 21:30
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hog fat posted:this thread, by which I mean its composition and the opinions authored herein, is doggedly vitriolic and miserable To be fair, it's also pretty hilarious a lot of the time.
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Sep 1, 2016 10:51
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Burning Rain posted:... ...... Well, gently caress. That's egg on my face if true.
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Sep 1, 2016 20:57
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Schmischmenjamin posted:i've never seen someone referred to as both "loathsome" and a "retard." that's a special combination. i work at a school for kids with disabilities, and while they certainly have their behavioral issues, i wouldn't say that any of them are particularly "loathsome." "loathsome" implies more malicious presence of mind than any of my students could muster. they mostly just want you to let them watch their favorite 5 seconds of Sesame Street over and over. No, he said "retrard." It's a new slang word for those blinded by nostalgia, especially nostalgia for a time they never knew, combining the words "retro" and "retard." I dunno why he used it here, unless he things we only like old literature.
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Sep 2, 2016 02:38
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Can someone remind me which translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey are worth reading? I'd prefer rhyming translations if possible; earlier in the thread C'est Moi quoted a section of Pope's Iliad and I liked the way it sounded, plus I think I can stick with it longer than CM can.
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Sep 6, 2016 04:08
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CestMoi posted:Pope's Iliad has some staggeringly gorgeous passages, read it for sure, but I wouldn't read it as "the Iliad", it lets too much slip which is weird for me to complain about because I really wish Pope had hacked apart the story to turn it into his own thing. Why do you want rhyming? The original doesn't rhyme, it's just in meter which the really excellent translations by Lattimore and FItzgerald preserve. I thought that the original did rhyme in Greek, that it would be interesting to read such a long piece of rhyming verse, and reading it that way would remind me of Pale Fire, one of my favorite books. Since you put it that way, I'll try Lattimore's version, too. What about The Odyssey? Lattimore and Fitzgerald translated that, too; would they also be your first choices?
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Sep 6, 2016 16:05
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how 'bout that new Jonathan Safran Foer book then
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Sep 10, 2016 04:32
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Not sure how much I want to read that. It looks like it has the same aspects of Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow that made me want to read them, but OTOH Century ended on such a bum note that I haven't read any comics he wrote since.
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Sep 11, 2016 20:27
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blue squares posted:Good movie I heard otherwise.
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Sep 13, 2016 19:43
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