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Mr. Squishy posted:All of his novellas are like that, but I think the ones I've read are pretty powerful. Apparently he did plays and such with regular speaking parts and so on, which surprised me given how monomaniacal his books are. His will forbade their production in his native Austria as a final gently caress-you. He also directly inspired William Gaddis' final novel where a bed-ridden author tries to marshal his sources for an essay on player pianos. Yeah I'm familiar with his style, I have also read The Lime Works. I'd like to read Agape Agape but I'm not feeling too rushed because I finished The Recognitions last month, which was a fantastic read but probably enough Gaddis for me to last at least another six months. EDIT: I would love to read some of Bernhard's plays, are they available anywhere? Slackerish fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Feb 18, 2014 |
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Feb 18, 2014 14:59
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Slackerish posted:Yeah I'm familiar with his style, I have also read The Lime Works. I'd like to read Agape Agape but I'm not feeling too rushed because I finished The Recognitions last month, which was a fantastic read but probably enough Gaddis for me to last at least another six months. How did you find it? I'm doing an on-and-off reread of that at the moment, with Steven Moore's monumental annotations and after reading a couple of the source books, and it's dispiriting to see some passages as being pretty much undigested. One of the things that's interesting about Gaddis is how housebound he became. From criticizing the New York art scene as people who've spent their entire lives in room, JR gets stuck in a tiny flat for half the book, and the next 3 books never leave the house. There are still various conspiracies and plots but they're delivered in phone calls and never totally explained to the reader. Also he cut down on the description, apparently as a challenge to himself.
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Feb 18, 2014 16:11
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Mr. Squishy posted:How did you find it? I'm doing an on-and-off reread of that at the moment, with Steven Moore's monumental annotations and after reading a couple of the source books, and it's dispiriting to see some passages as being pretty much undigested. I waited off on reading it for like, a year, because people said it was so difficult. And certainly there are parts, namely the scene where Wyatt returns home where the annotations are pretty valuable but I thought that Gravtiy's Rainbow was a bigger challenge in the realm of the post-war tomes. It's dense, yeah, but if you pay attention it's not that hard. I do feel like I need to reread it at some point to get everything Gaddis was trying to say. I'd really like to read JR, maybe over the summer. I've read the first 50 pages or so like three separate times and I always get lost but I think that's because I don't put focus on it/I'm always reading other poo poo/I hear it gets easier the more you read.
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Feb 18, 2014 17:02
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I suspect that a large reason why people find it hard going is that they get lost in the party scenes. Lots of voices saying lots of snippets of conversations. If you can't follow who's who, not only are you lost for large chunks at a time, you're also missing out on the fun bits.
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Feb 18, 2014 19:10
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Mr. Squishy posted:I suspect that a large reason why people find it hard going is that they get lost in the party scenes. Lots of voices saying lots of snippets of conversations. If you can't follow who's who, not only are you lost for large chunks at a time, you're also missing out on the fun bits. that's true, the other part I found pretty difficult was the scene where recktall brown dies. It took me like four months to read the book and I didn't realize how many characters they recalled from France until I looked over the annotations Also, I've heard that JR gets easier because the fact that it's 95% dialogue makes it easier to pick up on characters' quirks in how they talk, while Recognitions seemed to split it's narrative between large chunks of prose and large chunks of dialogue, so it was harder to pick up on.
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Feb 18, 2014 21:41
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I found a fellow on Goodreads whose reviews I enjoy, and he has a whole shelf for postmodern books. That was my favorite genre in college, if only because it was so entirely bizarre and unlike what I'd been instructed to read in high school. After college I drifted away from it, but now I've dipped back in. In the last month I've read: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, which was not long enough to get tedious, but also was not long enough for me to get into it; The Sea Came in at Midnight by Steve Erickson - almost chokes on its own cleverness, and the author has a definite sub/dom fantasy going on with every female character, but the plot kept me on my toes. Disjointed and interwoven narratives without the mastery of Cloud Atlas, but ultimately an interesting book. I've got the following on my Nook: Exercises in Style - Queneau The Lost Scrapbook - Dara Vanishing Point - Markson Lanark - Gray Which can any of you vouch for? Oh yeah, I finished The Orphan Master's Son yesterday and it depressed the ever-living poo poo out of me, but I can say that it was definitely a well-written way of getting there. I did not know it had won a Pulitzer; I think that would have affected my opinion of it had I known beforehand.
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Feb 19, 2014 08:32
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Vanishing Point's a totally improbable sui generis masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. I even have a couple of copies of it - one a signed galley. Eat your heart out, hypothetical guy who's impressed by that.
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Feb 19, 2014 14:05
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I just finished The Crying Of Lot 49 and now I'm reading a critical analysis of it and also Pale Fire by Nabokov. 
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Feb 20, 2014 21:06
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Here is an interesting article where various authors discuss what 'classic' books they don't think should be considered classics: http://flavorwire.com/439400/what-books-should-we-stop-calling-classics/view-all/ Some of the books in question: Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses (boy does Joyce get a bad rap on this list) Around the World in Eighty Days To Kill a Mockingbird The Fountainhead (does anyone actually consider this a classic besides rabid objectivists? I'll step out on a limb and say that I find Ayn Rand to be quite odious.) I will say that one classic that I just can't get into is The Great Gatsby. I just don't get it. I've tried reading it about 3 times and every time I just can't seem to pick it up again after 40 or so odd pages. It's just so *American*, and I know that's the quality that makes some people really love it, it just has the complete opposite reaction for me.
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Feb 20, 2014 22:31
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The Great Gatsby is all about the American experience. That's what the book is about (well filtered through Fitzgerald's view) so it can not be anything other than really loving American. What specifically through you off of it so badly?
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Feb 20, 2014 23:05
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Stravinsky posted:The Great Gatsby is all about the American experience. That's what the book is about (well filtered through Fitzgerald's view) so it can not be anything other than really loving American. What specifically through you off of it so badly? I didn't like it exactly because it was so quintessentially American, and not being an American, I just find it off-putting and can't relate to it. A lot of reactions to literature happen on a gut level, and for me, on a gut level, I just don't like The Great Gatsby. I actually enjoyed Tender is the Night, it's just this particular novel that doesn't hit a chord for me. You have a very weird, aggressive reaction to people saying they don't like books, it's as if you take it personally.
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Feb 20, 2014 23:17
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What? If you don't like it, you don't like it. I was affirming that it was a super American book. It is all about the American dream and how the basic ideas within of success and wealth (which are concepts that are tied together and can hardly be pulled apart from one another in the american dream) really do not bring you what you really want/happiness. and felt that it was a shame that you are going to miss out on it. I asked because I wanted to know if there was anything that I could explain or convince otherwise so that you might see it in a different light from which you would be able to read it.
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Feb 20, 2014 23:42
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Stravinsky posted:What? If you don't like it, you don't like it. I was affirming that it was a super American book. It is all about the American dream and how the basic ideas within of success and wealth (which are concepts that are tied together and can hardly be pulled apart from one another in the american dream) really do not bring you what you really want/happiness. and felt that it was a shame that you are going to miss out on it. I asked because I wanted to know if there was anything that I could explain or convince otherwise so that you might see it in a different light from which you would be able to read it. I understand what the book is about, I just don't like it - especially considering the movie just came out in the last couple of years I'd have to be living under a rock in the middle of the desert not to know the themes of The Great Gatsby. It just didn't resonate with me. I guess it's similar to how I love Derek Walcott, a Nobel Prize winning laureate, but you didn't like him because you think he paints the same three scenes again and again throughout his poems. I could discuss how he really reflects the clash of European culture with his own culture, how amazing it is that he managed to write a modern day epic poem, how my favourite poem of his, Jean Rhys, manages to capture exactly in a few stanzas Rhys's own struggle as a white woman being brought up in the West Indies and the weird feeling of being alienated in the land that you actually grew up in simply because of your racial background- it's a shame you will miss out on his amazing work, especially Omeros, but if you don't like something, you don't like it. Why don't you, instead, tell me if there's a book that's a known classic that you just didn't enjoy for reasons all your own?
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Feb 21, 2014 00:10
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Of you two it's not Stravinsky who's weirdly aggressive for no reason.
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Feb 21, 2014 00:19
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Poutling posted:I understand what the book is about, I just don't like it - especially considering the movie just came out in the last couple of years I'd have to be living under a rock in the middle of the desert not to know the themes of The Great Gatsby. It just didn't resonate with me. I guess it's similar to how I love Derek Walcott, a Nobel Prize winning laureate, but you didn't like him because you think he paints the same three scenes again and again throughout his poems. I could discuss how he really reflects the clash of European culture with his own culture, how amazing it is that he managed to write a modern day epic poem, how my favourite poem of his, Jean Rhys, manages to capture exactly in a few stanzas Rhys's own struggle as a white woman being brought up in the West Indies and the weird feeling of being alienated in the land that you actually grew up in simply because of your racial background- it's a shame you will miss out on his amazing work, especially Omeros, but if you don't like something, you don't like it. He wasn't saying you were bad for not liking it and he wasn't trying to convert you he was just asking a question amigo.
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Feb 21, 2014 00:21
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I've read the preface of Pale Fire and I laughed (out loud) when the narrator was at a dinner party and he was like "oh no I don't like meat or things that have been touched by other human hands" and he takes out some fruit and starts eating it and then in the text starts congratulating himself on how everyone loves how laid back and cool he is.
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Feb 21, 2014 00:26
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Poutling posted:Here is an interesting article where various authors discuss what 'classic' books they don't think should be considered classics: That's an interesting topic, although I always found the classification of what is a "classic" very vague and it's probably region-dependent as well. I mean, if you ask people here to list literature classics the first names mentioned will be stuff like Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Orwell, Candide, Tolstoy, Beckett, Joyce, Kafka, Goethe, Dickens, etc. I certainly saw almost no American literature whatsoever while in high school (instead authors from the previous list), only much later did I discover writers/books like Moby Dick, Harper Lee, Twain, Salinger, Vonnegut, Heller, Fitzgerald, Ayn Rand*, etc. Most of these were simply never mentioned. I have to admit I was dissapointed in The Great gatsby, but I think I just completely missed too many subtle meanings behind it all and had too high expectations. I think having so little knowledge about the time/place it was set in was very detrimental to me as well. Very good book regardless, just not what I expected. Side note: I really don't understand why Catcher in the Rye is a classic. *) yesterday was the first time I've ever had somebody mention Ayn Rand to me outside of internet.
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Feb 21, 2014 00:26
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Mr. Squishy posted:Of you two it's not Stravinsky who's weirdly aggressive for no reason. Yeah I admit it. Sorry Stravinsky, I think seeing your posts in the reading challenge thread just makes the hairs in the back of my neck stand up, my bad. Guns are now holstered. Walh Hara posted:That's an interesting topic, although I always found the classification of what is a "classic" very vague and it's probably region-dependent as well. I mean, if you ask people here to list literature classics the first names mentioned will be stuff like Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Orwell, Candide, Tolstoy, Beckett, Joyce, Kafka, Goethe, Dickens, etc. I certainly saw almost no American literature whatsoever while in high school (instead authors from the previous list), only much later did I discover writers/books like Moby Dick, Harper Lee, Twain, Salinger, Vonnegut, Heller, Fitzgerald, Ayn Rand*, etc. Most of these were simply never mentioned. I actually love the twenties as a setting I don't know why it's just that particular book that doesn't do it for me. Yeah, probably part of it is high expectations because everyone talks about how AWESOME it is and once I started getting into it I just felt very 'meh'. I admit when someone mentions Ayn Rand and great literature in the same sentence I get hives.
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Feb 21, 2014 00:35
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Walh Hara posted:
If you read it as a thirteen year old boy it's amazing because Salinger did an amazingly good job of putting all the angst of a teenage boy onto paper. If you read it any earlier you don't get it at all and if you read it later you think "why am I reading a whiny teenage brat?" Basically it does what the author meant it to do, really, really well. That doesn't mean it's necessarily something you should feel you have to read.
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Feb 21, 2014 00:56
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Its cool. Plus please make an effort post about Derek Walcott for real in the poetry thread and tell me what I am missing. Not sarcastic about this cause it would be cool if I find out I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective or something. And even if I still leave with the same views as before its worth the discussion. Also I have an almost unreasonable hate for Robert Frost. See every post I have ever made about him.
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Feb 21, 2014 00:59
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Catcher in the Rye was something I read at twenty and I thought it was well written. Did Holden resonate with me? No, but I remembered how it was to be fourteen and totally understood where he was coming from. Also I totally understood he was a self centered idiot who thought he knew everything just like I did at fourteen. Salinger encapsulated what it was like to be a boy at that age so well its pretty amazing.
Stravinsky fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 01:03
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:If you read it as a thirteen year old boy it's amazing because Salinger did an amazingly good job of putting all the angst of a teenage boy onto paper. If you read it any earlier you don't get it at all and if you read it later you think "why am I reading a whiny teenage brat?" This is probably a dumb parallel worthy of scorn (hi PHIZ) but the way people feel about Catcher in the Rye reminds me of the way people feel about Weezer. It's something with strong emotional resonance that you can look back and be embarrassed about relating to so strongly. It's amazing that he so thoroughly encapsulates what it's like to be a teenage boy (I'm told the Bell Jar also does a pretty good job of approximating what it's like to be a jaded female college student but having never been one myself I can't say) but tapping into that sort of feeling means that it's difficult to transcend the subject matter. That's a good thing in some ways and bad in others.
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Feb 21, 2014 01:10
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Poutling posted:Here is an interesting article where various authors discuss what 'classic' books they don't think should be considered classics: Of all those who responded, Miriam Markowitz telling the article why it's poo poo is the best. Stravinsky posted:Catcher in the Rye was something I read at twenty and I thought it was well written. Did Holden resonate with me? No, but I remembered how it was to be fourteen and totally understood where he was coming from. Also I totally understood he was a self centered idiot who thought he knew everything just like I did at fourteen. Salinger encapsulated what it was like to be a boy at that age so well its pretty amazing. I think a lot of people don't like that book because they approach literature as a personal ad. I preferred his 9 Stories more, especially The Laughing Man which I remember as being rather excitingly perfect. I think mostly by how he let the humanist plot in the background be dominated by the essence of pulp. Poutling posted:I admit when someone mentions Ayn Rand and great literature in the same sentence I get hives. I lost a friend because someone mentioned she was reading Atlas Shrugged and I called it an evil book, in a fit of enthusiasm for literary conversation. inktvis posted:I even have a couple of copies of it - one a signed galley. Eat your heart out, hypothetical guy who's impressed by that. Supa-sweet. The only Markson I've read is wittgenstien's Mistress, mostly because he's not very widely read over here and I get my books second hand. He seems really good though. Mr. Squishy fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 01:23
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If you find it hard to sympathize with Holden because he's an immature wanker (he is), then you're simply facing the same problem Holden has sympathizing with all the people he's surrounded by whom he calls phony. The book is about sympathizing and putting yourself in the shoes of people who aren't always the best people. I mean, yeah, if you think everything Holden says is great and oh man he totally captures how you feel, then sure, you're probably 14 or emotionally stunted or something. But if your reaction to the book is "haha! I've realized Holden is just an immature phony and a hypocrite!" then you've failed the same test as Holden.
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Feb 21, 2014 02:02
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Declan MacManus posted:This is probably a dumb parallel worthy of scorn (hi PHIZ) but the way people feel about Catcher in the Rye reminds me of the way people feel about Weezer. It's something with strong emotional resonance that you can look back and be embarrassed about relating to so strongly. It's amazing that he so thoroughly encapsulates what it's like to be a teenage boy (I'm told the Bell Jar also does a pretty good job of approximating what it's like to be a jaded female college student but having never been one myself I can't say) but tapping into that sort of feeling means that it's difficult to transcend the subject matter. That's a good thing in some ways and bad in others. Quoting so I can put it in the scoff thread later
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Feb 21, 2014 04:02
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inktvis posted:Vanishing Point's a totally improbable sui generis masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. Trying to get a copy of this for a decent price...even Amazon has failed me here. How about you send me that less-awesome copy? ehhh?
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Feb 21, 2014 04:10
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Stravinsky posted:Quoting so I can put it in the scoff thread later I accept merciful irony-lite death I've been reading The Pale King by DFW and it's been grueling. I'm used to Wallace's brand of writing but something about passages like this quote:He did another return; again the math squared and there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and I.D. number that some part of him still refused to quite get memorized so he had to unclip his badge and check it each time and then stapled the 402 to the return and put the file in the top tier’s rightmost tray for 402s Out and refused to let himself count the number in the trays yet, and then unbidden came the thought that “boring” also meant something that drilled in and made a hole. His buttocks already ached from flexing, and the mere thought of envisioning the desolate beach unmanned him. He shut his eyes but, instead of praying for inward strength now, he found he was just looking at the strange reddish dark and the little flashes and floaters in there that got almost hypnotic when you really looked at them. Then, when he opened his eyes, the In tray’s stack of files looked to be still mainly the height it had been at 7:14, when he’d logged in in the chalk leader’s notebook and there weren’t enough files in his Out trays for Form 20s and 402s so that he could see any over the side of the trays, and he refused once more to stand up to check how many of them there were, for he knew that would make it worse. are slowly eroding my will to finish.
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Feb 21, 2014 04:22
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I made it through Pale King... somehow. There were a few amazing passages scattered throughout but the majority of the book is like that. Another book I'm struggling through right now is Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet. It has some interesting ideas re: language but the plot is a dreary drag. The premise is that language is becoming toxic and parents can't withstand their children's voices. There's also some thing about Jewish people listening to sermons through a fleshy hole in the ground. It just isn't grabbing me.
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Feb 21, 2014 07:18
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It's funny y'all were talking about Gatsby: The Millions just ran an interesting post on the book this morning.
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Feb 21, 2014 16:35
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Chamberk posted:I made it through Pale King... somehow. There were a few amazing passages scattered throughout but the majority of the book is like that. I'd say stick with it. The interesting passages on language just keep coming. I mean so does the weird dreary depressing plot. That actually gets significantly worse for most of the book, but it's still one of the best books I read last year.
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Feb 21, 2014 16:43
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Declan MacManus posted:are slowly eroding my will to finish. That's a pretty neat paragraph if you ask me though I've not read the book. Captures what it means to be in a job like that, I'm sure.
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Feb 21, 2014 20:36
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Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:That's a pretty neat paragraph if you ask me though I've not read the book. Captures what it means to be in a job like that, I'm sure. This is what I was going to say. It is about something super boring and mundane and tedious and it is written in a way to emphasize the super mundane and tedious nature of it, but at the same time the writing is beautiful and he captures such a simple human moment so perfectly. The numbers are obviously something that I kept glossing over but the part about "just looking at the strange reddish dark and the little flashes and floaters in there that got almost hypnotic when you really looked at them" is brilliant. Then again I am a major DFW fan, if I read that without knowing it was him I might not be as forgiving (although it is so obviously his style that I don't think I would mistake it anyway). The worst thing about the Pale King is how unfinished it feels, and how tragic that is. I mostly read it as a fan, and enjoyed all the little vignettes as isolated bits of writing, but I could see it being tedious because it is obviously not a final, polished draft.
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Feb 21, 2014 21:59
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It's a deliberate artistic statement and masterfully done but that doesn't make it fun to read.
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Feb 21, 2014 22:58
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Mr. Squishy posted:It's a deliberate artistic statement and masterfully done but that doesn't make it fun to read. Thankfully reading for fun is not the only reason to read!
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Feb 21, 2014 23:00
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DFW is a skilled writer (and boy does he really like reminding his readers of that) but the entire book is structured like that. Granted, it's supposedly only a third of the way complete, but it's a lot.Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:Thankfully reading for fun is not the only reason to read! Of course not, but I had four years of reading for reasons other than fun so right now I'm being a shallow fucker and saying that I'm not having much fun reading Pale King. 
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Feb 21, 2014 23:14
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Mr. Squishy posted:It's a deliberate artistic statement and masterfully done but that doesn't make it fun to read. I know, but what I was saying was that (for me, personally, although obviously not for everyone) it was fun to read.
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Feb 21, 2014 23:32
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Guy A. Person posted:I know, but what I was saying was that (for me, personally, although obviously not for everyone) it was fun to read. Well! I've got it on my shelf, but it's far down the list mostly because it makes me sad to even look at it. Does anyone have an opinion on Angus Wilson? He wrote a lot, most famously Anglo Saxon Attitudes and Old Men at the Zoo but he's dramatically fallen out of fashion after his death. He's very good at psychology, mostly of homosexual men who doubt their own motives and seek to rationalize their wish to sever all contact from humanity. I find his prose not as good as it should be, but I've not read Zoo, which is supposed to be his masterpiece.
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Feb 21, 2014 23:51
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Poutling posted:1) Serena by Ron Rash - I think Ron Rash is going to blow up this year the way Daniel Woodrell did after the movie Winter's Bone hit the big leagues since this book is being made into a movie. This is a fantastic book, very much a Southern Gothic with Shakespearean overtones, and Serena is a fascinating and engimatic character. Ordered this today, will report back.
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Feb 24, 2014 18:16
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So where do you guys go to find out about the latest novels? The only release information I can find is about various garbage and celebrity memoir and I don't feel like combing through Simon and Schuster's release schedule to see what authors they're pushing to retain credibility.
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Feb 28, 2014 16:58
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Declan MacManus posted:So where do you guys go to find out about the latest novels? The only release information I can find is about various garbage and celebrity memoir and I don't feel like combing through Simon and Schuster's release schedule to see what authors they're pushing to retain credibility. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/reviews/index.html http://www.theguardian.com/books/books+tone/reviews http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/ If you want more like up-to-the-moment release news just pick out a bunch of literary imprints that publish stuff you like and follow them on Twitter.
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Feb 28, 2014 17:28
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