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Anyone into Ottessa Moshfegh? I found her work through a short story on The Paris Review podcast and got sucked in from there. I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation this time last year--now painfully relevant--and Eileen is next up on my list. She's a huge fan of Gary Lutz; I think that's in large part where the grotesqueness, and the invention of new ways of thinking/writing/narrating in order to escape the disgusting world, comes from. A choice quote from an interview with her in Harper's Bazaar:quote:I'm a snob when it comes to reading. It's very depressing to read lovely books. And worse are books that don't know that they're lovely—they're praised and awarded and puffed up. They lower the standard for excellence for us all. It's terrorism. Not that everything has to be a masterpiece—that's impossible. I like Anne Tyler—I read almost all her novels within a few months last year after I stumbled across two of her early novels, A Slipping Down Life and Earthly Possessions. Those were fantastic and so different. I fell in love. I made a little study of her development and discovered something therapeutic in her work. She writes really banal, domestic novels and I feel safe in her hands. She's not going to try to wow me. That's what I hate the most when I read. A lot of people confuse desperation and bloated ego for genius. It's embarrassing to read. I can kind of sense those books in a physical way. I stay away from them in the bookstore.
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Feb 5, 2021 18:10
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So not only is everyone in this thread intimately acquainted with Yukio Mishima, but he was also a big fascist??? drat  I read Confessions of a Mask solely because of my Saint Sebastian obsession (which led me down some other deep rabbit holes, including back issues of the surrealist magazine Minotaure and The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, which is his autobiography but might as well be literature by the flagrancy of his inventions). I had never heard of him in any context up to that point. Can't I just fetishize male armpits and develop a choking shame about my own perverse sexuality in peace, without keeping company with nationalists??
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Feb 19, 2021 03:45
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Get real, I'll read any author unless I get too nauseated by their viewpoint to physically continue (e.g., Pentti Linkola). I'm just surprised that TBB namechecks him as the fascist author while I know him as the "jerk off to my adolescent neighbor doing chin-ups" author lol. If anything, his ethnonationalism casts a whole new light on his fetishization of the perfect male Japanese form! All those dudes love the Mannerbund, womanhood is too inherently soft/corrupted/corrupting to act as a true object of eros
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Feb 19, 2021 07:53
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Sham bam bamina! posted:"keeping company" I would certainly recommend Confessions of a Mask to anyone; it was one of the best books I read that year. I don't choose which books I read because of the viewpoints or political attitudes of their authors. I was just surprised that 1) other people had heard of him at all and 2) he had such a crazy personal history and eventual death. About Faulkner, I've never read him but I have read the short stories of Flannery O'Connor. Boy, was that a fun and appropriate choice I brought to read on break from working the polls alongside Fox-brained racists.
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Feb 20, 2021 07:12
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Thanks for the Wayne Booth rec, PeterWeller. It'll be interesting to see its relationship with Sontag's Against Interpretation, which I was way into at the same time as my Saint Sebastian fixation.Idaholy Roller posted:books by LGBT people Weirdly, most of the books on my to-read list that deal with LGBT topics are nonfiction--memoirs and essay compilations and things.
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Feb 22, 2021 04:37
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ulvir posted:i’m reading Levi’s periodic table, and it’s really good Have you read If This Is A Man? Equally good, heartbreaking.
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Mar 1, 2021 22:26
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TychoCelchuuu posted:Sputnik Sweetheart
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Mar 17, 2021 02:22
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Just finished Kim Scott's Taboo as part of my "reading writers of color 2021" challenge. Wow, unbelievable! I love when a book can make you smell the dust and the waterholes of its natural settings. Using that sudden evocation of nature as a device to show when the Noongar group was fleetingly/stumblingly getting back in touch with their ancestry, and when nature was the only true thing left behind for them to understand their great loss, was really effective too. But I think the most remarkable part was how the passing-on of "the old language" and the old people sharing words and expressions with the young people was the majority of their connection with each other, but the author used almost no actual Noongar words, just wrote "He said the old word for xyz." Felt like there was something being kept secret and passed along, something that if it were written and seen by outsiders would be diminished. In the afterword, Scott writes "There is little literal Noongar language in Taboo. I would have it speak to a wider audience and do more than posture difference." His mind...................
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Apr 8, 2021 21:30
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Apr 14, 2021 19:37
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smug n stuff posted:I’m most interested in the characterization of the prose as bland, though. I’m wondering if you’ve read any of Ishiguro’s other books, and how you’d compare the prose of Klara if so—critics (both those who like the books and those who don’t) often describe the prose in pretty much all of his books as “flat,” and I have a hard time discerning whether that’s a euphemism for boring, or whether they intend it to be a value-free descriptor. That totally makes sense, and I feel that it's a constant trait of his prose throughout his books, which can work either for or against him. In The Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World, the flatness acts as characterization for both Stevens and Ono and their self-silencing, self-excusing histories, and I thought it was a brilliant character move. But in Never Let Me Go, that exact same flatness (in my view) stifles the emotional impact of Kathy's life and the shocking revelations she experiences, and I was like, what function is this boring-rear end prose serving here?? And I just fell asleep less than 100 pages into The Buried Giant. I think that one style is just how he writes, and depending on what he's trying to make the narration say about the narrator, it's either brilliant or a snoozefest. Maybe if I had read The Buried Giant first, instead of the others first, I'd have been more impressed by the flatness as a tool.
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Apr 16, 2021 22:00
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Antivehicular posted:I respect your opinion, but I feel like it's definitely serving a purpose -- it's a banality-of-evil thing, with the idea that Kathy and everyone else at Hailsham has been raised to treat their hideous situation as completely normal, almost beneath mention, and that Kathy hasn't been given an emotional toolkit to really process anything she experiences, so she's fumbling with her emotions. (It's also, I think, an indictment of the Hailsham "experiment" -- the concept that the students are being given a high-class cultural and artistic education, to demonstrate their "souls," but that education is still designed to normalize and dull the horror of their situation, because it's too dangerous to the overall project to allow them to become emotionally well-rounded human beings.) 
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Apr 19, 2021 19:24
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derp posted:it's been a while since i read it, but i remember a palpable and unsettling sensation of the 'walls closing in' - his world is constantly shrinking, he can't go outside anymore, then he can't leave his room anymore, then all the furniture is removed and it's just bare walls, then he's just under the bed hiding in a blank empty room, listening to his family live on without him outside his door. strong feelings of isolation and being an outcast, cemented at the end by his family smiling cheerfully with relief when he finally dies. I got similar feelings of claustrophobia and helplessness from the castle and the trial, too. it must be his 'thing' snailshell fucked around with this message at 02:00 on May 29, 2021 |
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May 29, 2021 01:58
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If you like tracking your reading history/recommendations but hate Amazon (who owns Goodreads), try The Storygraph! Instead of having five different text documents/notes on my phone/written lists for books I plan to read, it's all in one place. And it sorts your already-read and to-be-read piles by genre, length, pacing, and MOOD (reflective, informative, lighthearted, dark...). And you can search with extreme granularity for new recommendations by saying "I want to read a <400 page slow-paced speculative fiction book that does not mention child abuse." And the algorithm gives you freakishly accurate recommendations too. Unbeatable.
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May 31, 2021 04:34
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:Makes me wonder what other lit is out there with a similar treatments of aliens (i.e. its otherworldly incomprehensibility). Lovecraft's Colour Out of Space, the short story the movie Arrival is based on, and I guess 2001? Surely there are others. I'm so glad to see people enjoying Storygraph! I loving love little graphs and databases. I made a reading challenge for 2021 about reading writers of color if anyone would like to play along.
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Jun 2, 2021 19:19
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A few novels by women I've read in the last 12 months, so that this thread has some books by women in it
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Jun 25, 2021 05:34
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Mokelumne Trekka posted:I read her short story collection which included The Birds* and Don't Look Now. Both were good. However, everything else was unmemorable. In retrospect I would've just gone with Rebecca, though I may check it out in the future. *this may have been a rip-off of an earlier story, actually.
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Jun 25, 2021 21:11
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Idaholy Roller posted:What are the thread’s opinions on the goldfinch. I just finished the Nevada chapters and I’m loving it. Characters feel so raw and authentic. I also loved The Secret History, which I think does a lot of what The Goldfinch does but in a more uncontrolled/erotic/wild/unpolished way, so that knowledge may inflect your interpretation of my answer lol Also, once you're done reading it, or for anyone else who already has, check out this bitchy review in Vanity Fair
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Jul 22, 2021 05:22
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Just finished Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf. ... wow. I can't believe this was the darling of the Litstagram scene when it came out in 2019--it's quite unfriendly to the reader, and demands a serious investment (100+ painful pages) before beginning to repay it. It's unrelentingly and inventively violent, with opaque time jumps and betrayals/realliances throughout, a thousand characters with multiple names each, and monsters/fantastical beasts/witches from dozens of African mythology traditions. Someone on da internet said, "My advice would be to relax when it comes to trying to keep close tabs on all the plot links in this one," which I found helpful. The most frustrating thing is the multiple pages of tagless dialogue, so you have to go back to who said what last and follow it from there. It all jells eventually. The love stories Tracker lives with the multiple lovers throughout his life are heartbreaking. It explores who deserves victimhood and innocence, the consequences of political ambition on human lives, and what justice, family, and love mean in a life you have had to remake yourself, over and over again. Amal El-Mohtar writes for NPR that the book is like "if Toni Morrison had written Ovid's Metamorphoses: Painful and strange, full of bodies shifting from personhood into meat, and somehow, always, still, upsettingly beautiful." I can't even imagine what the sequel will be like. Apparently it's going to be a Rashomon situation, with the same events of the first book told through the perspective of another unspecified character. Also check out this marvelous New Yorker profile of Marlon James by Jia Tolentino. Very revealing. I'm excited to read his other novels based on the power of this one, but considering that The Book of Night Women has been described as even more inaccessible, e.g., it's a novel about six enslaved half sisters on a Jamaican sugar plantation plotting a rebellion against their white overseer/father, which is also "written entirely in eighteenth-century patois." I still haven't gotten through Beloved on account of its brutality so maybe I'll save that one for another time. snailshell fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Aug 15, 2021 |
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Aug 15, 2021 04:16
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LionArcher posted:the actual messaging of those books lofted as "great" and "mature" are more often than not is shallower than the works of "lesser genre's". LionArcher posted:FW deals with a much smaller cast and relies on the complexity of linguistic tactics (something fans of "real literature" often eat up, and again, on it's own I have no problem with. I have a problem when this is considered superior to more common vernacular and prose) to sell itself. Also, I would argue that The Goldfinch, while beautiful, is actually quite sloppy in a lot of its prose, and cares a lot more about the story and "messaging" than delivering a sublime prose experience on a craft level, and many critics would put it closer to Wheel of Time than to Finnegans Wake in terms of its "quality"... but then I'd just be participating in a pile-on 
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Sep 16, 2021 22:06
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