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Seldom Posts posted:content: I recently read The Curfew by Jesse Ball. He's a poet, and his prose is heavily influenced by that. It's also (gasp!) about a dystopia, so it might be a good intro for someone who wants to move out of genre and try something more literary. ShutteredIn posted:I really like this guy. Check out Samedi the Deafness. Plays around with form in interesting ways. The book is phenomenal and takes like two hours to read, everyone should find it.
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Jul 11, 2014 15:08
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 00:57 |
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Seldom Posts posted:We already had this thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3608062 I like this thread more. Sorry.
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Jul 11, 2014 15:52
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trash opinion
rest his guts fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Jun 24, 2019 |
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Jul 11, 2014 20:41
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pixelbaron posted:I like this thread more. Sorry. I also like this thread more, I think it's hilarious. I also think it's hilarious that the people that were complaining there weren't enough literature threads are now complaining that people are not following Strunk and White's Elements of Style and are bolding book titles instead of underlining or putting them in italics in aforementioned 'good literature' thread. Goony goons will never stop gooning! I purposely didn't bold, underline, or italicize my book title because I'm a rebel like that.
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Jul 11, 2014 20:58
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Lowly posted:St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves - Karen Russell (short stories) Swamplandia is amazing as well. Should have won the Pulitzer that year, drat it!
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Jul 11, 2014 21:08
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Actually it's just funny that people format their posts so viewers can read as little as possible, in a forum about books. "Give me your book recommendations, no time to read!"
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Jul 11, 2014 21:10
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When I see twenty posts about DragonLance: the Reckoning I want to be able to skip to the next actual good book more easily.
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Jul 11, 2014 21:12
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Poutling posted:I also like this thread more, I think it's hilarious. I also think it's hilarious that the people that were complaining there weren't enough literature threads are now complaining that people are not following Strunk and White's Elements of Style and are bolding book titles instead of underlining or putting them in italics in aforementioned 'good literature' thread. Goony goons will never stop gooning! The idea of people following Strunk and White is also funny because that book's horseshit
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Jul 11, 2014 21:19
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Poutling posted:I also like this thread more, I think it's hilarious. I also think it's hilarious that the people that were complaining there weren't enough literature threads are now complaining that people are not following Strunk and White's Elements of Style and are bolding book titles instead of underlining or putting them in italics in aforementioned 'good literature' thread. Goony goons will never stop gooning! Guys I have been reading "The Master and Margarita and boy has it been great. My biggest problem is that when I go sit down on the river walk outside of my building people always smoke by me and I hate the smell. How do I get them to stop doing that??
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Jul 11, 2014 21:22
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Guy A. Person posted:Guys I have been reading "The Master and Margarita and boy has it been great. Get your giant cat to sic 'em.
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Jul 12, 2014 01:19
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Actually it's just funny that people format their posts so viewers can read as little as possible, in a forum about books. I like when people do it cuz if its something I plan on reading then I don't want to read too much about it before I finish it and it makes it easier to find when I'm done and do wanna talk about it. Why does it bother people so much, does it violate some form of typing etiquette?
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Jul 12, 2014 01:34
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The biggest problem I have with finding new "good" books to read is the fear that I'll invest time reading something that sucks and/or I'm somehow too stupid to understand why it's supposed to be good. I love Don Delillo but hate Pynchon and I have a hard time pinpointing why that is as the former was clearly influenced by the latter. Compounding the issue are the tools available. Goodreads, which admittedly is a great way to find new books and track the ones you've read, is slanted by the groupthink whims of morons in reviews and rankings. Almost every book suggested in this thread is between. 3.5 and 3.9 stars while garbage like Twilight sit as one of the highest reviewed books on the site. Anyway to contribute thought I'd throw out Sailor Song by Ken Kesey. One of my favorite books by a great American Author. That and Delillo's Libra are the best two books I've read in the past year
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Jul 12, 2014 03:50
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This thread is pretty funny, but some people are honestly too wound up about how people format their posts and what types of books they read. Just read whatever, man, who gives a poo poo. Edit: yeah, Libra is a goddamned brilliant book.
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Jul 12, 2014 05:18
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To throw out more suggestions, I've really been enjoying the work of John Edward Williams. This past year I read Stoner , which chronicles the life of a long-suffering English professor named William Stoner in Missouri during the early 20th century. The book does a good job exploring questions about what the purpose of a life is, and uses fairly mundane existence of the central character to inquire into what constitutes a life worth living. It's perhaps my favorite American novel. Another of William's books Butcher's Crossing is a very realistic western set in the 1870s. There are no gunfights or indian raids, it's about young man from back east that gets convinced to fund and go on a buffalo hunt. The hunters search for an untouched mythical valley of buffalo but this becomes less heroic than the easterner had imagined and winter approaches. The book has a similarity to Moby Dick, in that both works are about men struggling against animals and nature while sucumbing to their urges to do violence. I was surprised it was written in 1960 as it seemed like a much more modern take on the brutality of west.
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Jul 12, 2014 05:20
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oxsnard posted:
Goodreads method: Pick a book you really like. Go to its page. Look at the highest rated reviews. Look at that guy's profile. Compare their books to yours. Do the books they read seem interesting to you? Follow them. That's how I find most of my books from goodreads. Their recommendations are poo poo. Some of the super popular reviewers actually read good stuff. I follow that Karen chick she has a good mix of modern lit-fic and other genre stuff. Plus I think she actually works in the industry and the popular ones get a lot of good stuff off net galley since they are big name reviewers.
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Jul 12, 2014 06:34
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Peel posted:More people should read literary fiction but leading off with 'I did a literal university degree in this and I can't believe how low your power levels are???' is a bit daft. If it helps any the entirety of my academic literature experience is a 101 community college class and I can't believe how low you guys power levels are. Fly McCool posted:Is it more or less daft than relegating anything not written by Joyce or "The Beat Poets, man" as poo poo literature? More because the beats are mostly poo poo.
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Jul 12, 2014 08:27
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Wolpertinger posted:The Great Gatsby, Fahrenheit, Animal Farm, 'simpler' stuff like that. If I try to open something like War and Peace I'm lost by page 2. dogg you should read some short fiction. Literature doesn't always have to be in novel format. Many of your canonical or semi-canonical authors never got into the novel game, or didn't get far into it. Your Flannery O'Conners and your Raymond Carvers and so on. Also, most of the authors who have written big, imposing novels have also written short fiction, so if you want to be exposed to Tolstoy but don't want to commit to War and Peace or AK, you could read Father Sergius (admittedly the only shorter Tolstoy work I have experienced) or something. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 09:26 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 08:59
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Barlow posted:To throw out more suggestions, I've really been enjoying the work of John Edward Williams. This past year I read Stoner , which chronicles the life of a long-suffering English professor named William Stoner in Missouri during the early 20th century. The book does a good job exploring questions about what the purpose of a life is, and uses fairly mundane existence of the central character to inquire into what constitutes a life worth living. It's perhaps my favorite American novel. You and everybody else last year, jesus it felt like every published author got a circular saying "btw we're plugging Stoner." I guess it's nice because it shows that they're friends 
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Jul 12, 2014 11:16
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I'm reading Don Quixote and it's actually pretty entertaining. To counter that I am also reading a warhammer 40k book.
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Jul 12, 2014 13:21
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I'm sure Mo Yan is brilliant in Chinese, but in English he reads like a teenager penning a story for his remedial creative writing class.
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Jul 12, 2014 13:52
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Lmao if you somehow can't see that bolding the titles of books in posts is a blight on the world IMO.
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Jul 12, 2014 13:55
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PupsOfWar posted:dogg you should read some short fiction. Literature doesn't always have to be in novel format. Short fiction's awesome, and a good way to judge whether or not you'd like something longer by an author when you just have to commit to a dozen or so pages versus hundreds.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:05
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I like genre fiction but it'd be nice to have one or two threads that aren't about it at all times. I think its a bit silly to try to separate "proper" literature from genre fiction. Any kind of fiction belongs to some genre, so really the people who do this are just trying to exclude genres they happen to dislike. To me what makes something literature is passing the test of time, in the sense that generations of people who weren't even alive at the time of writing still find the work compelling. Much of the literature of future generations will consist of what we might call genre fiction today. Look back in time and you will find lots of novels involving the supernatural, or science fiction that we consider to be classics of literature today. Excluding science-fiction and fantasy from the category of literature just because they involve situations more removed from reality compared to regular fiction seems very arbitrary. You are not taking into account the quality of the writing or the impact on the reader, which to me are the true measure of a book's worth. Is Vonnegut's Mother Night a better book than Slaughterhouse 5 just because there were no aliens in it? (not knocking Mother Night at all, its pretty great) Is Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita less compelling because it has a talking cat and Satan as characters? If the determination of being true literature is the degree to which a fictional scenario resembles reality, then should I be looking down my nose at those reading any kind of fiction because I happen to spend more of my time reading actual history? Mr.48 fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 16:15
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Generations as yet unborn will revere Halo novelizations as high art.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:19
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You should look down your nose at bad prose and overwhelmingly conservative themes, which happen to coincide with sf/fantasy nine times out of ten. When I talk about genre fiction (and I'll be honest, I talk about it a lot more than I do real literature) I pretty much concede from the start that it isn't going to achieve any kind of technical mastery and just focus on the message and politics. The exceptions should be treasured of course but it's not hard to get goons to do that in the first place, while it's incredibly hard to sustain a thread about anything else.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:22
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Mr. Squishy posted:Generations as yet unborn will revere Halo novelizations as high art. Probably not, but neither will they revere 99.9% of the other garbage out there not involving pew-pew lasers or elves.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:24
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ASoIaF is definitely the current hotness around town but will people be talking about it the way they talk about Hemingway or Twain or Faulkner? I highly doubt it.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:27
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mango gay touchies posted:ASoIaF is definitely the current hotness around town but will people be talking about it the way they talk about Hemingway or Twain or Faulkner? I highly doubt it. That honor is reserved for the Magic: the Gathering Time Spiral block novelization.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:28
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mango gay touchies posted:ASoIaF is definitely the current hotness around town but will people be talking about it the way they talk about Hemingway or Twain or Faulkner? I highly doubt it. Thats exactly my point, we revere those authors whose works still hold meaning to us generations after their publication. This is what makes them classics of literature, not their genre.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:29
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Smoking Crow posted:That honor is reserved for the Magic: the Gathering Time Spiral block novelization. Obviously it's gonna be that and the eventual Homestuck novelization.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:29
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Mr.48 posted:Thats exactly my point, we revere those authors whose works still hold meaning to us generations after their publication. This is what makes them classics of literature, not their genre. If you are writing expressly with the purpose of "wouldn't it be sick if rthere were dinosaurs in Chicago" then you work is less likely to endure the ages than someone who is writing to cpnvey a brutal image of the human condition IMO
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Jul 12, 2014 16:32
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CestMoi posted:If you are writing expressly with the purpose of "wouldn't it be sick if rthere were dinosaurs in Chicago" then you work is less likely to endure the ages than someone who is writing to cpnvey a brutal image of the human condition IMO Ephemeral lit studies a hundred years from now are gonna be hella rad, though.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:35
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CestMoi posted:If you are writing expressly with the purpose of "wouldn't it be sick if rthere were dinosaurs in Chicago" then you work is less likely to endure the ages than someone who is writing to cpnvey a brutal image of the human condition IMO I'm pretty sure that Butcher doesnt have any aspiration higher than making a buck with his books, just like the vast majority of the authors guilty of filling shelves with forgettable pulp.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:39
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Mr.48 posted:I think its a bit silly to try to separate "proper" literature from genre fiction. Any kind of fiction belongs to some genre, so really the people who do this are just trying to exclude genres they happen to dislike. To me what makes something literature is passing the test of time, in the sense that generations of people who weren't even alive at the time of writing still find the work compelling. Much of the literature of future generations will consist of what we might call genre fiction today. Look back in time and you will find lots of novels involving the supernatural, or science fiction that we consider to be classics of literature today. This is a good point. Alexander Dumas' works were seen as pulp serialized garbage among many scholars at the time they were released. The Count of Monte Cristo is hands down my favorite novel of all time. In particular the depiction of life in France at the time along with the characters and observations of human nature still get to me every time I read it. While there's no doubt much of today's popular fiction is destined to be forgotten in the future, there are plenty of books the future will see as classics, perhaps for reasons we can't currently foresee. I think GRRM will be considered a legend in future generations, for example
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Jul 12, 2014 16:43
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mango gay touchies posted:Short fiction's awesome, and a good way to judge whether or not you'd like something longer by an author when you just have to commit to a dozen or so pages versus hundreds. well, with some caveats. Plenty of folks adopt different stylings when they write short fiction versus novels, as the medium requires a different level of economy. Enjoying Joyce's short stories probably should not be taken as invitation to plow into Ulysses, for instance, as that would be very different.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:44
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Mr.48 posted:I'm pretty sure that Butcher doesnt have any aspiration higher than making a buck with his books, just like the vast majority of the authors guilty of filling shelves with forgettable pulp. Nothing wrong with trying to make a living, after all Dickens padded his works across the board, while also describing the human condition.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:47
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Mr. Squishy posted:You and everybody else last year, jesus it felt like every published author got a circular saying "btw we're plugging Stoner." I guess it's nice because it shows that they're friends Yeah, I definitely jumped on that bandwagon as well, but it is definitely an excellent book. It's such a quiet and subdued book on a somewhat dull subject, but Williams really brings Stoner to life. It's a book that will linger with me for a while, I think. He's got another book being reprinted by the NYRB line about Caesar Augustus, and I'm very interested in checking it out. I forget who recommended Giuseppe de Lampedusa's "The Leopard" in that last thread, but I'm almost done with it and it's really good as well. It follows a Sicilian noble during the time of Garibaldi, and how the unification of Italy eventually led to the downfall of his class. I'm not sure if it's an apologia for the noble class - the rustic priest is a more sympathetic character in my eyes - but it's very well written, regardless.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:48
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Furious Lobster posted:Nothing wrong with trying to make a living, after all Dickens padded his works across the board, while also describing the human condition. Sure, you can be writing well and trying to make money off of it, or you can just crank out huge quantities of low-effort pulp. All depends on the authors personality I guess.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:51
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oxsnard posted:I think GRRM will be considered a legend in future generations, for example I think you meant to say Gene Wolfe there
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Jul 12, 2014 16:57
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 00:57 |
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Speaking of, I picked up his Peace cheap the other day because of a vague recollection of the name (probably from a post of yours) and a lack of rocket-ships on the cover. Should I get round to it sooner rather than later?
Mr. Squishy fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 18:41
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