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TrixRabbi posted:I'm reading The Sluts by Dennis Cooper right now and holy poo poo. Yeah, Cooper has that effect on people I find. He returns to those themes pretty frequently, with mixed results, in his other work, but when he's good he's really good. I recently read Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, which on the surface is a pulpy pursuit/escape novel, but ends up having some pretty cool things going on with the protagonist stripping away layers of his humanity in order to survive. Plus there was a quote from the Times on the cover so it counts as real literature.
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Apr 26, 2020 14:44
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J_RBG posted:Started reading Augustine's Confessions, which is great. It's full of genuine sentences like 'Kids today are obsessed with learning their ABCs ... but not learning about divine justice "bene butiosenex"* closest cod-Latin me and my dictionary could get to "ok boomer"
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May 1, 2020 20:19
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Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons is some of the most pleasant word salad I've read. How representative is it of the rest of her work?
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May 28, 2020 05:03
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Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods has a similar theme of "bizarre idea is taken seriously and gets way, way out of hand", so my brain puts it together with The Sellout. Both are great imo
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Jun 6, 2020 18:42
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I haven't posted in this thread in a long while, I kept forgetting to and also I was intimidated and felt like a big stupid faker who has no business discussing Literature. I did read a few titles that qualify for the thread recently though. I read Suttree (thanks BOTM!) and it was really good, and A Brief History Of Seven Killings might belong here being a 700-page epic set across 25 years and a dozen POV characters. Also some Gogol and all of Jerusalem so uh AMA about Alan Moore's megabook
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Aug 7, 2023 09:32
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Bilirubin posted:Welcome back! Really bloody good. If I'd known even more about Moore's life and work than I already did (which was quite a bit) then I'm sure I would have been even more engrossed. Strip out the fantastical parts and it's a biography of a parallel him, and his parallel family tree. It's also a dense and heartbreaking paean to Northampton's past and the decline of working-class Britain. But it's also a grand millennia-spanning journey in block time where everything happens at once, every event stacked on top of each other. And it's also also an exploration of "madness" and a dozen other things too. It's also very, very long, and if I hadn't been listening to the audiobook then it would have taken me two or three months to read, rather than one. mdemone posted:What did you think of Book Two? Definitely not as gripping as Books One or Three, but had some fantastic parts to it. The Dead Dead Gang weren't very interesting to me but I liked how they blundered through all these other stories and were the conduit for Moore to pour out details of his cosmology. And it's clear that telling those stories is important to the greater whole of the novel, given the echoes back and forth. But also it can be a bit of a slog when it's just the kids.
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Aug 24, 2023 16:41
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Well, I slogged through Infinite Jest in two and a half weeks. I liked it more than I thought it would but gently caress me was it exhausting.
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Oct 30, 2023 21:19
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mdemone posted:It works a lot better on a reread because you can just hit the highlights or just leaf through it at random. I spent much of the afternoon going through analyses and other discussion pages about it and flipping back through relevant passages and going "Oh okay this major plot point actually got resolved here but I didn't notice".
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Oct 30, 2023 22:36
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Cephas posted:I picked up The Summer Book and Fair Play by Tove Jansson. Halfway through The Summer Book now. It's really lovely. There's a sort of dignity and equal regard that the writing gives to the natural world--while not quite being "nature writing"-- that I find compelling. The closest comparison I can think of (which some of the jacket blurbs mention as well) is the way nature is treated in Hayao Miyazaki's works. It's also interesting to read a book by an experienced visual artist, because so much of the language of the book is carefully-constructed imagery. I loved The Summer Book, it's beautiful and bittersweet and further drove my want to read every piece of Jansson's writing. (I've also read the first two Moomin novels, which are great too)
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Dec 4, 2023 07:38
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Jrbg posted:"Personally I find it beautiful that people have always loved stories" read the sluts by dennis cooper Given the book is in part about how online culture is a self-perpetuating spiral of extremes, with each new retelling adding deeper sickness while obscuring the humanity of the subjects/victims under discussion, I think it makes sense that this would come up during a fanfiction derail. Speaking of which, Darryl by Jackie Ess is a little bit of a The Sluts fanfic.
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Dec 9, 2023 08:50
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Every good book cave needs a cumrag. How else are you going to mop yourself up after a five-hour Sloterdijk binge?
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Jan 19, 2024 09:58
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mdemone posted:Nobody can read Sloterdijk for more than about 20-25 minutes at a time. It's never happened. There's an extremely funny and disgusting joke here about "Foams" but it only works in the original German
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Jan 20, 2024 06:50
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Are there any really good stories written by adults about how Kids These Days are actually great and adults are total fuckup squares?
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Feb 2, 2024 03:02
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Read some Literature lately. Hogg by Samuel Delany is wall-to-wall gore-horror-porn-abuse-filth-neglect abjection that I'm still chewing on. The Free-Lance Pallbearers by Ishmael Reed is a very silly and fun satire of 60s New York under a living-god dictator who's been locked in the bathroom for thirty years. I definitely recommend the latter, not so much the former.
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Mar 15, 2024 01:30
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Natsume Souseki's I Am A Cat has a lot less cat stuff and a lot more gentle social satire of middle-class Meiji culture than I expected.
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Mar 27, 2024 06:22
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