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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There are so many layers of meaning in Nabokov's short fiction, you really can't go wrong. Speaking of trickery, one of his stories ("Vasiliy Shishkov")may be the ultimate literary prank: basically, a critic kept denigrating Nabokov's writing, so Nabokov wrote poetry he knew the critic would like under a pseudonym, got the critic to praise the pseudonym, then wrote a short story with the psuedonym as a protagonist, at the end of which the psuedonymic protagonist evaporates into thin air. I read a Nabokov short story about a young man going mental over jam, an ending which impressed upon me that there's probably some acrostic or anagram going on that I couldn't be bothered to figure out. Poutling posted:5) Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates - For my LitFic reads I've been trying to go as contemporary as possible (sticking to books written in the 21st century) but this book was really gut-wrenching. I was depressed for days afterwards and that says a lot. I don't know if it would have hit me as hard as it did if I had read it in my twenties but Yates does a fantastic portrayal what it's like to be middle aged and to realize that you're trapped and mired in the banality of suburbia. A fun thing to do is get a collection of Yates' short stories (which will be a tome, as that's how he paid the bills) and read a hundred tiny Revolutionary Roads.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:54
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Poutling posted:I read an interview with Abrams and Dorst about S. in the New Yorker. It sounds like it was Abrams' original idea, and he pulled Doug Dorst in. Ugh, do we really need ideas men running around. Chamberk posted:Also, I just found The Leopard in an old used book store and picked it up never having heard of it, so now I'm excited to read that. I picked up an old copy months ago because the inscription promised it to be the Italian Brideshead, then it was the answer on a quiz with the clue being "the Sicilian Gone with the Wind", and now all this made me pull it down from the shelves and I got 20 pages in it before moving on. They were good pages though.
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Feb 15, 2014 18:01
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Slackerish posted:I read Concrete by Thomas Bernhard today. Basically the ramblings of a crazy old german guy in 120 pages with maybe four or five paragraph breaks. Best part was the last 15 or so pages, and when he goes on an absolutely bonkers rant about dogs. 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.
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Feb 18, 2014 12:09
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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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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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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: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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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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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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Does anyone know what the point of The Sot-Weed Factor is?
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Mar 8, 2014 22:16
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It feels like he got really annoyed at all the bashful allusions to or elisions of sexuality in Defoe and the like and decided to put the cocks back in.
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Mar 11, 2014 14:45
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It's a good book but that's fair, I think.
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Mar 14, 2014 12:55
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Maybe they just take a dim view of the concept of love.
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Mar 14, 2014 15:52
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My Penguin Books 1980 edition has a forward by John Ray Jr, PHD which announces Humbert's death and calls him, among other things, "not a gentleman." It's three fairly boring pages in the start of the book, I wouldn't beat yourself up for forgetting about them.
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Mar 15, 2014 16:14
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Everyone should give Conrad a chance and a half, especially with other books than HoD. No disrespect for Heart, it's fantastic, with a couple of perfect moments in there, but it's not his best work (The Secret Agent).
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Mar 31, 2014 23:21
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talktapes posted:I've had to read it twice in an academic context and the historicity was completely glossed over in favor of analysis on a purely literary level, which is really a rote case of missing the forest for the trees. That's insane. You would think they'd at least mention that there were legal worries over the book because of the NDA the company made their workers sign. I'm currently reading Nostromo and it's the most Conrad Conrad I've ever read. The first section tries to convey 50 years of history in a small town, and action scenes will break off for paragraphs describing day-to-day life. It's very disorienting.
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Apr 5, 2014 10:58
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CestMoi posted:if you could tactically place it on a coffee table to impress people you are allowed to post about it in this thread that is the rule. I always feel esteemed to hell when they see my Expanded Universe novels spilling off the table and filling the room.
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Jun 9, 2014 00:03
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