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A human heart posted:huh, haven't heard this literary term before We Americanists refer to it as "Quentin Compson nonsense".
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Dec 3, 2019 01:00
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chernobyl kinsman posted:every professor who loses their mind on twitter because a student called dostoevsky "kind of dry" should follow through on their threats to resign and free up space in the academic job market This.
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Feb 18, 2020 17:49
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Bilirubin posted:Relatedly, I'm seeing in another thread mel talking about Three Kingdoms' best translation being a video game That sounds like a pretty room temperature take. The novel absolutely sprawls across four volumes, and the highly acclaimed two-part film adaptation covers like one third of one of those volumes. A video game may be the only other form of media that can adequately adapt the scope of Three Kingdoms.
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Feb 18, 2020 19:51
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Mel Mudkiper posted:it was also a joke It's funny because it's true.
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Feb 18, 2020 20:32
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:This sounds cool and it did remind me of something I thought this thread could answer. I'm partial to Jennifer Egan.
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May 14, 2020 00:22
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LinYutang posted:You'd probably enjoy The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie if you enjoy magical realism and multigenerational epics. I find it one of the more accessible books by Rushdie. I just finished Midnight's Children, my first Rushdie, and it would fit the bill as well.
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Jun 1, 2020 01:43
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nut posted:Does Steinbeck have horny? I read so long ago I dunno Not really, but you got people who will read horny into the ending of Grapes. anilEhilated posted:Good idea, I've only read Cyberiad, Solaris and some of his (rather generic) short stories. I guess he didn't occur to me because of the genre trappings. I know you're trying to branch out, but if you like genre and want to read more Lem, read Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. It's totalitarian state satire of the highest and funniest caliber.
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Jun 4, 2020 21:29
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Carly Gay Dead Son posted:Is Cormac McCarthy horny? I ask, yet hope I never learn the answer. All the Pretty Horses gets a little horny, but sadly not in the way the title implies.
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Jun 5, 2020 00:31
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Kindred by Octavia Butler.
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Jun 6, 2020 18:50
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I started and finished The Silence last night during WS breaks. It's that short. But it was nice condensed DeLillo--put some slightly eccentric characters in a strange situation and sparsely narrate them saying interesting dialog at each other. I'd recommend it for anyone who's already a fan or anyone who wants to test the waters of DeLillo's style with something you can read in a sitting.
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Oct 26, 2020 00:44
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ulvir posted:Bulgakov is great, early 20th c Seconding this The Master and Margarita is a must read.
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Jan 28, 2021 16:55
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snailshell posted:I don't think it's untrue that you're "keeping company" with an author when you read their works, although certainly not in the way you would be if you had dinner with them or had a written correspondence. You're in the company of their ideas and the products of their mind. You're having an aesthetic reaction to the words placed on the page by them. That's not inherently endorsement, but it's also not nothing - it's a relationship! You're "keeping company" with the text, not the author. You don't form your understanding of the text from the author's ideas. You form your understanding of the author's ideas from the text. The "author" you relate to in this process is an implied author, another textual construct like the narrator. There's a whole book about this by Wayne Booth. It's called, appropriately enough, The Company We Keep.
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Feb 21, 2021 03:12
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snailshell posted:Thanks for the Wayne Booth rec, PeterWeller. It'll be interesting to see its relationship with Sontag's Against Interpretation, which I was way into at the same time as my Saint Sebastian fixation. You're welcome. As a bonus, you'll also get the original definition of the unreliable narrator from the guy who invented the concept. I've only read the title essay, but I suspect Booth would agree with Sontag about the false division between form and content and probably little else. quote:Alison Bechdel has two famous comic memoirs that reference classic literature and psychoanalysis to deal with her parental relationships. Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms is beautiful. Anything by Virginia Woolf. Alexander Chee. Willa Cather, believe it or not (I love My Ántonia). I've heard a lot of buzz about Real Life by Brandon Taylor. Jeanette Winterson, if you like that sort of thing. And another all-time classic, Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle! I've only recently discovered Cather was gay. Her Death Comes for the Archbishop is an all-time favorite of mine and a text I try to work into as many reading lists as I can. I learned she was gay from her being included in a list of lesbian writers and thinkers in the story "Mothers" from Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties. That's all to say your recommendation of Cather reminded me that I should recommend Machado. Her second book, In the Dream House, is sort of CNF memoir about an abusive relationship and meeting her wife through the lenses of different genres.
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Feb 22, 2021 18:38
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apophenium posted:The little catch phrases are so cute and I guess were included to help keep every character straight in the original work. The proper term for them is heroic epithets. They are indeed awesome and something I wish we still did. They serve a few purposes in the text. Keeping everyone straight is one. They also serve as quick characterizations and make the names flow with the verses' rhythm.
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Mar 31, 2021 17:49
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I just finished Cities of the Plain, and good Goddamn was that a wonderful way to tie together and continue All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. The restrained McCarthy in these novels is the best McCarthy.
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Jul 14, 2021 02:36
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The North Tower posted:That moment when I realized it was 2 favorite protagonists was great. I think I need to reread the trilogy—I remember being enchanted with the idea of going back in time and to Mexico for a while after ATPH. I recalled John Grady immediately, but it took me a bit to remember Billy. Once I keyed in on that, I began to see all the parallels with their previous journeys and relationships.
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Jul 19, 2021 18:24
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I read The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea on thread recommendation. I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it. The thing I enjoyed most about it was how much Mishima let us see into the minds of these characters who are all ultimately pretty shallow and pretentious. I cracked up when Fusaku goes from admiring to loathing Yoriko in a span of moments because Yoriko gave her good practical advice about marrying Ryuji. I thought the ending chickened out some, but I guess I can appreciate the bit of ambiguity it creates.
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Jul 22, 2021 18:27
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That's cool and all, but what's even better is that Ryuji imagines himself as the same sort of heroic sailor as Norubo and his gang do, but then he gets laid and just wants to settle down.
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Jul 22, 2021 23:29
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derp posted:ambiguity? you know exactly what they are going to do to him because they already did it to the kitten earlier in the novel. the fact that he can make me feel so horrified at the ending without describing a single thing is what makes it so amazing Yeah, a bit of ambiguity, not much. It is a novel where nobody lives up to their idealized selves and where Noburu botched his last plan. So while mostly I thought, "yep they're doing it," a part of me thought, "nah, this as close as they're gonna get to actually doing it."
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Jul 23, 2021 17:38
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Heath posted:Ryuji is one of the few sympathetic characters in any Mishima. Dude just wanted to settle. Compared to like every other Mishima character, he's positively Regular Yeah, I can't speak to his other novels, but while Ryuji is a bit of a doofus and a weirdo, he doesn't deserve to be dissected by a pack of kids with dumb ideas.
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Jul 24, 2021 04:26
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Franchescanado posted:It's an amazing, sprawling experience. I keep meaning to read Cholera. I dunno if I've read a book as intricate and expansive as 100 Years, and I already feel like rereading it, only three years later. I loved both when I read them some years back. If I remember correctly, Love in the Time of Cholera is more tightly focused and less sprawling and intricate than 100 Years of Solitude, but it has been a while.
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Aug 12, 2021 18:12
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Famethrowa posted:it's fascinating to me, as jewish diaspora, that my people share so many common characteristics with Catholic immigrants when it comes to faith. These aren't particularly modern, but I'd suggest Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene and Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. Also, it's tangential to this, but The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic is a great novel about a young Methodist pastor who takes a post in upstate New York and becomes obsessed with what he sees as the exotic and sensual faith of the Catholics he meets.
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Aug 26, 2021 18:46
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Docetic Mountain posted:I hope this is the right place to ask. I'm looking for some recommendations for shorter works (200 pages or less). I just don't have the time to read how I used to. My taste isn't relevant as getting out of my comfort zone could only be a good thing. Just throw anything at me as long as it's brief enough to red over a couple of days and in English. Muchly appreciated. Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera I think all Hererra's stuff is short. The Moon is Down by Steinbeck
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Nov 17, 2021 19:46
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:I love talking about that book. The descent into the underworld is one of the most memorable chapters ever. Make sure to read up on the ancient Mexica myths explored in the book. The entire book consists of adapted mythology. I love how--I want to say--phantasmagorical the whole novel becomes when she crosses the border. I ordered the collection that includes Kingdom Cons and The Transmigration of Bodies, and I am very excited to read those as well.
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Nov 19, 2021 19:43
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:I should read more Herrera. My thought exactly. 
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Nov 19, 2021 20:13
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Yeah, it really does. Also her brother’s new life, how about that for a plot twist. I should read more Herrera. I read Kingdom Cons and The Transmigration of Bodies, and they were as surreal and excellent as Signs Preceding the End of the World had led me to expect. Cons follows a folk singer who becomes the court musician for a drug lord and writes corridos in his honor. Transmigration follows a lawyer in the aftermath of a sort of Romeo and Juliet affair while navigating a pandemic lockdown. In both, Herrera avoids using many given names, and instead most people are just known by their titles, like "the Heir", or their defining characteristic, like "the Unruly". It adds this sort of mythic quality to what are otherwise sort of low-key stories about peripheral characters in criminal organizations.
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Dec 27, 2021 19:30
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Antivehicular posted:I feel like half my posts in the Book Barn are just recommending the same book, but I'll say it again: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop is a really good "start reading literature" book. It's fairly short, with lovely lucid prose, and not hugely challenging but still a very rewarding read. I want to second this. It's a beautiful novel with a wide emotional range and an interesting perspective on an often overlooked period in American history. E: for more content, I'll also add a suggestion to read some Steinbeck, specifically East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck is another great source of relatively easy yet still beautiful and rewarding prose.
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Jan 2, 2022 20:46
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Tree Goat posted:his short novels are good too Agreed. Pretty much everything he's done is worth picking up.
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Jan 3, 2022 01:51
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Tree Goat posted:the werewolf novel is mediocre, unfortunately I thought that was unavailable.
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Jan 3, 2022 02:27
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stereobreadsticks posted:I particularly enjoyed the distinctive patterns of speech employed, especially the widespread use of the past continuous tense where most American and British writers would use other tense. It somehow lends the book a sense of timelessness, like, these events didn't just happen once, they were happening for essentially forever. Whether that was an intentional decision or just a matter of the way Tutuola's Nigerian English accent/dialect works is hard to say for someone who's never been to Nigeria, but it's really cool. You might also enjoy the "rotten English" in Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy, a dark comedy about a child soldier in the Nigerian civil war. On an entirely different note, I just finished Charles Portis's Masters of Atlantis. It's a comic novel about a secret society and the motley group of true believers and con-men who run it. It's fun sorting out who is which as you follow their misadventures. It can get a little dark and mean-spirited at times, but that's mainly directed towards the con-men characters, while the true believers are treated more with pity.
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Mar 17, 2022 14:14
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Gaius Marius posted:Has anyone read Bleeding Edge? I don't think I've ever seen someone talking about it I enjoyed it. It's exactly as paranoid as you'd expect a Pynchon techno-thriller about 9/11 to be. It reminded me most of Vineland. I also felt like it was sort of Pynchon doing for 9/11 what DeLillo did for the Kennedy assassination.
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May 11, 2022 22:45
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thehoodie posted:Though Libra is undoubtedly a better book. Maybe Delilo's best Yeah, it's probably his best, but I read Underworld when I was getting back into baseball and so I'll always love it most. Gaius Marius posted:I rec Crying to many many people in my life, and many bounce from it. It kills me, it's short and snappy, but still distilled Pynchon. And these fools bounce from it That's a bummer. Everyone I recommend it to loves it.
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May 12, 2022 04:51
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mdemone posted:It's just occurred to me that the movie adaptations always make the classic mistake of assuming a novel's narrator is fully reliable. Kubrick played with that a little bit but in general it is not the same effect to have a film that shows the unreliable parts -- because the audience can only assume what is shown is actually real. That's amusing because HH is the original unreliable narrator, the example Wayne Booth used when inventing the term. One thing I think is important to note is that Booth didn't invent the term to describe a narrator who lies to you about what happened. What makes a narrator unreliable is that their judgment, specifically their moral and ethical judgment, is suspect. So there are no actually real parts hidden by the unreliable parts. Everything HH says that happens happens. It's just that he presents it all as something beautiful and romantic when it's actually disgusting and predatory. Booth made this important distinction for two reasons. One, you really can't say the narrator of a work of fiction is lying to you unless you have another narrator to put them straight, and then why would you trust that second narrator over the first? Nevermind that we're talking about the truth value of fictional statements. Second, you can have a narrator seemingly make stuff up and still be completely reliable. Booth uses Nick Carraway from Gatsby as an example of a reliable narrator who relates to the reader something he cannot himself know: the argument in the garage that he is not present for.
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Jun 2, 2022 22:51
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Franchescanado posted:What are some other novels that can be described as “incredible prose, but the subject is depressing / disturbing / horrific”? Faulkner's Sanctuary comes to mind. McCarthy's Blood Meridian is probably the next best example after Lolita. Yuri Herrera's short novels Kingdom Cons and The Transmigration of Bodies are in this vein. Egan's Look at Me is pretty hosed up in a lot of ways. And if you want more of the "humorous but everyone is terrible" vibe, Portis's The Masters of Atlantis is a good pick.
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Jun 17, 2022 19:13
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HaitianDivorce posted:There's some dialogue in Spanish, but it's on the order of lines, not entire paragraphs or pages. Translations are pretty readily available online. Don't let them scare you off--the Border trilogy is absolutely worth your time. Seconding this. Borosilicate, you can usually pick up the general gist of the Spanish dialog from context.
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Sep 20, 2022 15:24
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The Crossing has that one scene focused on the interior of the buried wolf.
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Dec 7, 2022 20:18
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Tree Goat posted:"ramshackle" is not the word i would use for east of eden, or steinbeck in general. i think maybe it is meandering because it is about a place and a people instead of a person in a particular moment in time, if that makes sense. it also helps to have the relevant old testament stuff in mind so the allegories and sequences of stories pop a little more. I'd say you have to keep Cain and Abel in mind because the story revolves around interpreting that story.
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Jan 12, 2023 19:57
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ThePopeOfFun posted:Cathy seemed more of a mechanism for conflict than a character to me. Really dug the rest of the book though. Inverted nipples aren't enough characterization for you?
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Jan 12, 2023 23:48
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I want stuff that is beautiful or weird or both. The Corrections is alright. The prose is fine. The plot has an alright bit of absurdity to it. Franzen strikes me as sort of a GoBot to DeLillo's Transformer.
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Jan 20, 2023 23:45
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CestMoi posted:i thought the secret agent was cool too, though i would've preferred a more orthodox marxist critique of anarchism. Why would you want The Secret Agent to be a boring polemic instead of the absurd comedy it already is?
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Aug 3, 2023 16:34
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