|
So I'm getting ready to start in on a reread of The Corrections. I first read it when I was stupid and like 13 or 14, and liked it probably about as much as a young teenager who thinks hosed up family dynamics are intrinsically fascinating could. Still, I'm sure I missed a lot. I remember that back when it first came out everyone was acting like it was the second coming of Jesus-in-book-form or something, though it was also hyped all to hell with the Oprah Book Club bullshit. Basically I am asking if this book is actually as good as people were saying it was, and if a reread now will be beneficial, because if not, I've got plenty of other backlog to work through.
|
#
¿
Aug 11, 2010 01:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 23:00 |
|
|
There used to be a Simmons/Drood thread, but it apparently hit the archives. I haven't read Drood because Simmons's historical fiction tends to be ponderous and pretentious (his older stuff is just pretentious, but that doesn't mean I don't like him). He spends pages and pages mapping out character psychologies and historical info, but he also throws in monsters, so nothing feels fully explored or utilized and nothing really comes together in the end. He wants to be "Henry James... but with murderous creatures!" and it doesn't work out so well. Of course, this is all based on The Terror, which was not without its good bits, but the sum was less than its parts, so to speak. I heard similar criticisms about Drood, that it's overlong and it never really jives, which is a shame since Wilkie Collins going on opium binges and hallucinating Charles Dickens tracking serial killers sounds like a recipe for fun if I've ever heard it. (Of course, Simmons recently came out with Black Hills, which is yet more supernatural horror/historical fiction, though it's shorter and so maybe lightens some of the faults of the longer-form stuff.)
|
|
#
¿
Aug 19, 2010 19:39
|
|
|
rasser posted:I'll stop derailing and ask a question instead: How do you BB goons deal with the loneliness of your literaty taste, which I believe must be common for most of us? I guess it's all about striking some sort of equilibrium, or finding a common ground. I'm lucky enough to have friends who are pretty good in their own fields, even though they're not mine. One of my best friends is a comparative lit dude, specifically Japanese/English, while I'm mostly a Renaissance English (or Early Modern, if you prefer) guy with some very specific Americanist focuses. We usually end up having involving conversations based on mechanics of things rather than content. For instance, I'll talk about some trend in scholarship regarding Ben Jonson and what this means for satire of the time period, and that'll remind him of something similar in Japanese satire of some other period, and we'll outline the positions and see if we can make any neat (if harebrained) conclusions/arguments based on that. My math-oriented friend, on the other hand, is a different case. He'll talk about some highfalutin paradox, and I'll keep up as best as I can. When it comes to reading he is mostly a sci-fi dude, big on Neal Stephenson and similar authors. So, like, when we discuss Stephenson I use it as an opportunity to segue into influences -- Pynchon, DFW, and so on -- and when I give him book recommendations that he likes then I give him other non-sf writers who have similar modes and sort of explain why those people are worth reading in and of themselves (eg, if you like Gene Wolfe, then you'll like Borges/Joyce/Proust). I don't expect him to read all of this stuff (though I've gotten him to look at some Borges and Joyce, at least) but he doesn't expect me to entirely understand how dismantling the volume of a pea and reorganizing it will give you the volume of the sun or whatever the hell, so we learn from each other to a degree and it feels like we both benefit from the discussions.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2010 05:09
|
|
|
When I was younger, like maybe 14 or 15, I read The Fountainhead because hey, scholarship money. I started reading Atlas Shrugged later on for the same reason, though I never finished it. (Incidentally, I never got a scholarship from the Objectivists, either, so I have no problem damning Rand.) Anyway, at the time I was dumb enough as a reader not to really process how batshit repulsive Rand was, or could be, yet I still kind of disliked the books on an instinctive level. In retrospect I find myself agreeing a lot with that article, if not exactly. For me the most compelling element of The Fountainhead was the villain Toohey, who has this sort of Marlovian love-to-hate-him thing going on. I suppose this was a precursor of my current academic interests in grotesques. Also, quote:endless gushing about their exalted feelings, Rand’s attempt to steal with treacle what she has not earned with character development heh.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2010 00:21
|
|
|
7 y.o. bitch posted:Or, we can talk about it in the ongoing chat about anything thread. While reading White Noise, I constantly had the feeling of vomit attempting to escape past my epiglottis. So much so that I decided to devote a large portion of my dissertation toward epiglottal references in postmodern literature. I was able to get my committee advisors - Professors John C., Catherine B., and Marianne A. - so excited about the project that they even began a Center for Pharyngeal Studies in Comparative Literature the following quarter. The sign for the new center was printed by Big AND Luscious Graphix, Inc. I would often watch the new undergraduate students, with their Michael Jordan AIR high-tops, North Face backpacks in pinks and blues, pink and faux-diamond studded Nokia GLAMOUR phones, sideways Red Sox caps, purple jeggings, and Dulce and Gabbana Space Pimp sunglasses, walk past our little diminutive center near the Middle Earth (sponsored by Coca-Cola and Verizon) dormitories, and think to myself: How little are they aware of? How little do they know about the real world? In fact, what was there to know except the sighs of one million corpses as they exhaled the toxic dust of a large Southern California metropolis?  Since I don't think I can get away with an emoticon only reply here, I'll toss out a question: I just grabbed a copy of the current Penguin edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is the Screech translation, but I've had trouble finding opinions on how good/bad it is. I've been less than impressed with the most recent Penguin translations of Borges and The Táin, and Rabelais translations are a grab-bag anyway, so I'm wondering what I should expect. Anyone have thoughts in either direction?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2010 21:47
|
|
|
I really like Their Eyes Were Watching God, for what that's worth. I find it profitable to discuss it, or anything by Hurston for that mater, in a historicist context by tossing it against anything by Wright. (He and Hurston famously despised each other, but I think their concerns were more similar than they realized.) Of course I am really goddamn busy with senior stuff and grad school application crap, so if that conversation happened on the forums I'd only be able to maybe drop by and spout a few buzzwords if even that. On the subject of African-American authors, though, I recently read The Known World by Edward P. Jones and it really threw me for a loop. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for the book club, but I find the novel to be a grand failed experiment: what would happen if William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, and Toni Morrison all got together and wrote a history book? Probably something like this, though it sounds cooler than it turns out. The novel's really overlong and in a lot of places overdone, but in retrospect I find a few elements of it to be extremely powerful, and it made me anxious about my own mortality in a way that nothing else has done recently. So despite its power, I'm pretty ambivalent about it, since it's sloppy and I'm kind of unhappy with the finished product. Has anyone else read this thing? I'm interested in getting some responses other than those of the "this book won a Pulitzer let me smash my big old literature boner in between its pages over and over" variety.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2010 01:41
|
|
|
I personally like to imagine that The Stand miniseries ends after the first episode's opening credits, but that's just me.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2011 02:23
|
|
|
Jive One posted:Does anyone know where in the world I can get an English translation of this novel? I've searched high and low but can only find it in French. Wikipedia says it was translated into a variety of languages so there must be an English one out there still. It probably depends on what sort of translation you want. If you have access to databases, particularly Early English Books (eebo.chadwyck.com) you can probably find something. (In fact, you will -- I just checked, there's a three volume translation published 1657-58. The downside is, of course, this is a 17th century translation, with all the issues that implies.) I've poked around and am not finding a newer translation, strangely enough. If that's what you need, hopefully someone with a wider breadth than I for French lit can step in here.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2011 23:28
|
|
|
penismightier posted:I got a gorgeous uniquely illustrated and gilded copy of the Complete Shakespeare. It's old, though, and cover is starting to crumble, so I want to replace it. How much should I expect to pay for that? If you want it done nicely, it'll be pricey and will likely depend on who's doing it. However, I would encourage you not to replace it if the book is a rare or particularly well regarded edition, as a new cover will depreciate the value. You might find someone willing to try a restoration, which could be even pricier. Of course if you want to actually read it and the thing is literally falling apart then you're in a bit of a catch-22. Mostly unrelated question: does it have marbled endpaper? I wish marbled endpaper was not a thing that books stopped having.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2011 03:29
|
|
|
The thing that hurts you when you try to scope some cheap secondhand Ligotti are the comic/graphic novel editions that came out a while ago and no one seems to want. So if you start looking at used book dealers, just a warning there. Also Subterranean is slowly working through his backlog (first two volumes sold out already), and while they don't go for cheap (the next one is I think $45) they're at least going.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2011 06:14
|
|
|
The Puppet Master posted:Is there a thread for plays/dramatic works? If not, would anyone be interested in one? I can certainly start one as most of my reading is plays and theatre texts. This might be interesting, and I'd be all for it. Of course, my professional scope in drama is limited to the Renaissance/early modern, but I read what I can manage outside of that timeframe. I've considered making a Shakespeare thread before, or something like "Let's Read Hamlet" as a sort of general introduction, but with school work I don't think I have enough time to monitor it (not that it would necessarily be hopping).
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2011 18:16
|
|
|
Ornamented Death posted:I got My Own Private Spectres by Jean Ray. Unless there's a recent reprint I don't know about, I am guessing you got the 1999 limited run, in which case, drat, nice. On my own front I got The Golden Bowl by Henry James (ugh, but it's for a class), Wilderness Plots by Scott Russell Sanders, and Brad Gooch's biography of Flannery O'Connor. I also got a Kindle Fire, which I can't wait to fill up with public domain stuff I'll never get through. To that end I'm currently reading the public domain Morri translation of Soseki's Botchan, and it leaves something to be desired. There's a more recent, ebook exclusive translation by Matt Treyvaud that looks promising for a reread, though, so there's that to look forward to.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2011 23:41
|
|
|
The thing about Bovary is that it's an intentional sendup of a "romantic" outlook on life. The point is that Emma B. ain't ever getting to Paris, but Bella never has to leave Forks. Ever. And it's supposed to be a good thing! I've drawn this comparison on the forums before, but I think Twilight stands a better chance at being something like Samuel Richardson's Pamela or Clarissa in that the work is simultaneously commercially popular and reviled, and it demonstrates a completely idiosyncratic and wild view of human (sexual) relations that, I think, will be an interesting thing for culture studies folks in ~100 years.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2012 23:37
|
|
|
thegloaming posted:Is there a decent sci-fi series (or single book) with multiple well-developed fictional religions? My gut here tells me Dune but it really comes down to how you're defining "multiple" and "well-developed." Other people might have a better sense for what you want, as I'm a bit out of the loop genre-wise at the moment. (Thinking more recently, Stephenson's Anathem has some of this going on, too. And if you want to be liberal with your definition of 'religion' then his book The Diamond Age is so incredibly about this kind of thing.) And if you're a sci-fi noob and you want to read about sci-fi in religion and you haven't read Dune then you probably should because it's pretty fundamental for the genre in that respect.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2012 04:13
|
|
|
crankdatbatman posted:
There have been some good recs so far. I will particularly back Chesterton's stories -- Father Brown, but also his short novel The Man Who Was Thursday, which is sort of like what would happen if Kafka wrote Christian literature. Also, I suppose Evelyn Waugh's mid-to-later stuff has religious points (he's like Graham Greene, only incredibly more farcical/spiteful). My utmost recommendation, however, would go to the stories of Flannery O'Conner. She's one of my favorite writers ever and has a very counter-intuitive sense of Christianity. So counter-intuitive that in an argument I greatly surprised one writer, a Catholic convert who was convinced her stories represented the evils and excesses of modern fiction, with the fact she was an ardent Catholic herself and wrote quite a bit on faith in modernity.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2012 17:54
|
|
|
timeandtide posted:Dan Simmons I haven't read Black Hills so you're up the creek there, but I just wanna say I very much agree with your take on the bizarre turn in Simmons's career. Summer of Night is still one of my favorite horror novels. I remember a few years back when he posted some trollish blog entry about meeting his time-traveling grandson who was fighting against sharia law and the new global caliphate (what), which caused a poo poo-storm in its own right. Since then his more recent works have been rife with a sort of reactionary reification of the Great White Writers, as if he feels these folks are in serious danger of being underappreciated. (And for the record, my grad work focuses on Shakespeare, so it means something that even I was angered by Olympos.) There's a certain puerile satisfaction in the way Simmons works his intertexts -- a sense that behind the novel Simmons is saying to the reader, "Well you probably haven't read Henry James, but I certainly have!" But I have, Dan, I have! And even if I didn't like him all that much, at least he didn't constantly name-drop himself in order to feel important.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2012 03:55
|
|
|
bengraven posted:Isn't Kali considered one of the finest works of modern horror? People say this but I'm not quite sure where it comes from, other than the book won a World Fantasy Award. I actually found Kali to be predictable and underwhelming, and rather poorly written. The narrator is very hammy and the whole novel is racist in a Heart of Darkness kind of way. I still think Simmons's strongest horror work is Summer of Night, though others may disagree. He has some good short stories, too -- "This Year's Class Picture" is a very interesting zombie apocalypse tale, for instance.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2012 20:39
|
|
|
Well yeah I have some bad news for you about Murakami... He's definitely the sort of writer who is interested in exploring the permutations of his idiosyncratic interests. I wouldn't go so far as to say he's writing the same book over and over, but there's a certain homogeneity to his characters that I think jives very well with the intentional blandness of his style. Like ShutteredIn said, Wind-Up Bird is the book where everyone generally agrees he's at the top of his game, so if you want to discuss him with random folks in the future that's probably the one to work your way through, though for what it's worth, Kafka is personally my favorite novel of his.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 27, 2012 13:04
|
|
|
Food Court Druid posted:Crying of Lot 49 is basically the Pynchon sampler platter. I don't remember it having amputation bits in it, but it's been a while, and that book has a lot of crazy poo poo in it This was going to be my suggestion as, yeah, it basically gives you a version of everything you can expect from Pynchon but in 160 pages instead of 800. It's a good test to see if you should venture further, anyway. Also, there are no amputations.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2012 05:14
|
|
|
elbow posted:I asked about this in the recommendation thread but didn't get a response, thought I'd try it here. There's no Shirley Jackson omnibus or anything, which is a shame considering how prolific she was. But the Library of America volume on her is quite good and contains an assortment of novels and short stories. It's also a bit pricey, as LoA often are -- but it contains what is probably the most essential Jackson collection, The Lottery and Other Stories, which is widely available as a standalone paperback as well as in a Kindle edition.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2013 14:17
|
|
|
nefarias bredd posted:I bought a second-hand copy of The Stand a couple of weeks ago and I've only just realised that it's the original, shorter version rather the Complete & Uncut one. Has anyone read both? Is it worth waiting to get the longer version? You might wanna swing by the Stephen King thread to get a good spread of opinion on this, but I'd say it'd be worth it to read the original, unedited version just because it's a really solid book no matter the edition. Off the top of my head, there's really only one big subplot you'd end up missing, but other folks in the thread might have more to say on the matter. Then again, it's not like it's difficult to get the re-edition used, either, if you want to read both for some reason.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2013 23:44
|
|
|
Sphinx posted:Has anyone bought books published by Dover Thrift Editions? Their books are very cheap, ranging from around $2 to $5 depending on if they are giant versions. I've read that the paper and binding is of poor quality. Would I only get about one sitting out of these books before they fall apart or is that an exaggeration? I would say it depends on how big the book is, I think, and how liable you are you crease the spine, dog-ear pages, etc. It's true they're quite cheaply made, but I have some Dover Thrift editions of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and his translation of Ovid's Elegies which are, at this point, about five years old and still going strong. (I'm pretty delicate with my books, but not obsessively so.) Another point to keep in mind is that if you're reading something that you want a lot of explanatory notes and editorial material for, a Dover edition is not going to have that. Likewise if you plan on making marginal notes yourself, be careful, as a sharp pen-tip will probably rip right through the page.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2014 01:11
|
|
|
Ornamented Death posted:A question to Americans that have purchased books through Amazon UK: how well did they package the book(s)? I'm thinking of ordering a book, but I"m worried they'll ship it in one of the lovely envelopes that Amazon US loves to use. I've ordered books and gotten them in boxes. But for full disclosure, the last time I did that was three years ago, and I don't remember Amazon US uniformly using lovely envelopes until fairly recently, so maybe that's changed.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2014 21:45
|
|
|
I've always been of the opinion that in a few centuries King will be read the way people read Charles Dickens today -- incredibly popular in his moment, with a great knack for encapsulating or representing a particular time and place, along with a wealth of information about material culture, etc. Like Dickens, King's novels aren't all masterpieces, mostly due to the writers' proclivities to write far more than is necessary about a given thing and make up the plot as they go along, but they're shot through with moments that are either iconic or just some really crackerjack writing.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2014 00:48
|
|
|
Declan MacManus posted:Stephen King will likely not be remembered that way since his creative prime came just as Raymond Carver and Kmart Realism came and took the piss out of the exact sort of "overspecific cultural guidestones as scene-setting" that you mention. He'll likely be more appreciated by academics, for sure, but I don't think he'll ever be held in the same esteem as Dickens; more like a Francis Beaumont type that's overshadowed by a literary giant. Yeah, I think through things in an academic (and, well, specifically cultural materialist) lens, so I tend project that stuff into the future. I do think you're dead-on in that King probably won't persist with the same esteem as Dickens, though I don't know if Carver will be remembered that fondly either -- part of what helped Dickens was his populist appeal in an age where fiction was a primary form of entertainment. King's career likely wouldn't have taken off if not for De Palma's film version of Carrie, and the close relationship between his fiction and cinema is probably what did the most to cement him in the cultural consciousness. Carver doesn't have that going for him, though he was overall a better and more respected author. This is where the author-analogy barometers really start to fall apart. The circumstances and mechanisms that determined the adoption and persistence of a writer as A Writer have changed so much that I wouldn't even feel comfortable saying King's relationship with popular cinema would guarantee him a future Dickensian cultural cachet. I appreciate the Beaumont comparison (Knight of the Burning Pestle works precisely on the overspecificity we're talking about) but at the same time considering the megalith of Shakespeare and the many lengthy historical processes that contributed to making him not only A Writer but The Writer of the time, I don't think we could push King that far into the archives (or at least, any further than we might be tempted to push all print fiction, period).
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2014 04:40
|
|
|
Bentley Little novels are amazing because each one has structurally the same plot concerning the incredibly rapid escalation in the scope/powers of some supernatural evil, inevitably losing all impact on the reader as it becomes increasingly absurd and fragments the tone and narrative arc. I'd wager Little was a satirist, or at least aimed to be a comic writer, if his output frankly suggested he is not that self-aware.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2014 20:39
|
|
|
Okay, then here's the article those two tweeters are building their cases on, published last year: http://www.vulture.com/2014/07/decline-of-harper-lee.htmlquote:In responding to Lee’s new letter last week, Penguin Press released a handwritten letter Alice Lee wrote to Marja Mills in 2011. It read, in part: “When I questioned Tonja” — her onetime protégé, inheritor of A.C. Lee’s firm — “I learned that without my knowledge she had typed out the statement, carried it to [Nelle’s apartment], and had Nelle Harper sign it … Poor Nelle Harper can’t see and can’t hear and will sign anything put before her by anyone in whom she has confidence. Now she has no memory of the incident … I am humiliated, embarrassed, and upset about the suggestion of lack of integrity at my office.” The author of the Jezebel article, while not linking to the Vulture article, doesn't seem to me to be implying the book wasn't written by Lee. Neither is @theshrillest. Go Set a Watchman has been rumored for a long time (I remember reading about it while doing research for a TKAM paper in middle school) and it's been clear that it wasn't released because Lee didn't want it to be. Now, suddenly, the narrative has changed -- the manuscript was miraculously "rediscovered" after being "lost" and is being published scant months after her older sister, who fielded all her legal issues, has passed. EDIT: To back up the claim I made, here's a history of TKAM from 2010 that mentions Go Set a Watchman: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/harper-lees-novel-achievement-141052 quote:Ater she moved to New York City in 1949, she struggled for years with a hodgepodge of anecdotes about small-town Southern life, first called Go Set a Watchman and then Atticus. She received encouragement from an agent, Maurice Crain, and an editor, Lippincott’s Tay Hohoff, who had seen the work-in-progress, but one night in 1957 she flung the unfinished manuscript out the window of her Manhattan cold-water flat. After a teary phone call to Hohoff, Lee charged down the stairs, recovered the forsaken pages—and then began a title-on-down revision that resulted in a book that would become a Literary Guild selection and Book of the Month Club alternate, and that the New Yorker would call “unpretentious and totally ingenious” and the Chicago Tribune would hail as “a novel of strong contemporary national significance.” This is the general understanding: GSAW contained flashbacks that would become TKAM. The remaining material, while providing potential for a sequel (since it covered Scout returning home as an adult), wasn't up to Lee's standards, and she never intended to publish it. EDIT 2: And heck, here's a fairly comprehensive Mallory Ortberg writeup on all the really questionable stuff that's hanging around this incident. H.P. Shivcraft fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Feb 4, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2015 16:13
|
|
|
I don't know I think resisting imperialist conquest of your country by intervening in historiographic production is actually a little different from making imaginary action figures late capitalism put in your mind screw tbh
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2015 04:12
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 23:00 |
|
|
anilEhilated posted:I really had no idea that Wright was such a raging rear end in a top hat before this one. I used to be an active reader/commenter on his LJ way back in high school. At some point he had a heart attack and a vision of the Virgin Mary, so literally overnight he switched from being an Ayn Randian hardcore atheist to a monarchist Catholic. Some sense had been trickling into my head for a while then, but it was at about this point that I fully checked out. A weird thing about the Hugos debacle is being reminded of that moment and realizing he's just been digging deeper and deeper for the subsequent decade. Of course, I recall checking his blog one time since then, and the most recent post was insisting that The Last Airbender was the pinnacle of cinematic entertainment and all the bad press was just liberal Hollywood backlash against whitewashed casting. So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2015 03:10
|
|