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After a while of not reading a ton of novels for various reasons I've started back up again. I read Philip Roth's The Human Stain which was fine. It's the only Roth I've read - I started American Pastoral many years ago but put it down after less than 100 pages because it kind of felt like he was writing about Judaism for outsiders or something and I wasn't really feeling it (I'm Jewish). Anyways The Human Stain (2000) is about a professor at a small liberal arts college in the northeast US in the Clinton years who is railroaded out in disgrace in his twilight years over a misunderstanding according to which he is falsely accused of racism. The book was pretty good, in part I guess because it is practically a cool drink of water in today's climate to read a nuanced story about "the PC police" rather than what you might expect from a relatively aged novelist (some sort of diatribe against political correctness for instance). There's a near-caricature young French literature professor but she's not in the novel very much and she gets a chapter devoted to her which fells her out enough to keep her from being entirely a joke, and all the other characters have enough depth to make them interesting. Overall I enjoyed it. Next I read Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood (1987), the first of his novels that I've read (previously I had only read some short stories). It's about a Japanese college student in the late 60s in Tokyo and his romance with the former girlfriend of his childhood friend. I only finished it a couple days ago and I am not really sure how I feel about it. I certainly know I didn't dislike it. I guess as I reflect on it I like how the characters were very evocative and intriguing, and I like the tremendous melancholy that suffuses the whole thing. As it marinates in my head more I'm sure I'll come up with more things to say. I have more Murakami on the "to-read" list - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Sputnik Sweetheart, and the 1Q84 trilogy are among the batch of books I bought. Right now I am reading Milkman (2018) by Anna Burns which is about a young girl in 1970s Northern Ireland. I'm not very far in but it's interesting so far. It perfectly captures the ways in which various social mores (mostly patriarchal ones, but others too, like nationalist ones) generate injustice and other ills, and it's written in a bit of a strange style (few proper names, for instance) for reasons which are not yet clear to me, and both of those do not yet stick in my craw, which they certainly could if they were handled with a less deft touch. So we'll see how the book turns out.
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Mar 16, 2021 09:56
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shirunei posted:Hello, so I've only ever read web serials, science fiction, and fantasy. If I wanted to dip my tow into this real lit thing what would be considered the kiddies pool? I don't want to overload my mind right off the bat obvs
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Mar 20, 2021 06:43
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blue squares posted:Has this thread spent much time discussing Philip Roth? I just read American Pastoral in a week and was blown away. I loved the writing, the deep dive into these characters, and the tension in some of the key conversations.
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Mar 26, 2021 08:38
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apophenium posted:I finished Homer's Iliad and it was good. Is Virgil's Aeneid the next step? Should i jump forward to Herodotus? Maybe take a break from Classics and read Cormac McCarthy?
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Jun 27, 2021 12:58
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Some stuff I've read recently: Milkman (2018) by Anna Burns. Nothing much to add beyond what I said earlier. The strange style contributed to a sense of alienation and anomie. All in all a pretty affecting book. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994) by Haruki Murakami. Most of the mental space I have about this book is taken up with rage at the translation, which I learned made some modifications to the book when translating it into English, which for my money is up there with the Holocaust in terms of very bad, don't do that, etc. If you want to gently caress with a story just write your own, don't pick someone else's. Obviously translation always requires making choices and it's not a rote process but there's a difference between a judgment call about a rough translation, on the one hand, and chopping stuff out, rearranging chapters, and other misconduct. I think some of this was at the publisher's behest but whatever, it's all awful. Anyways the book is fine. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman. 1,000+ pages and almost entirely a single sentence stream of consciousness from a housewife/baker in Ohio some time during the Trump presidency. It's pretty long so it touches on a lot of stuff but some of the main themes are the environment, America and guns, and her relationship with the rest of her family, especially her mother, aunt, children, and husband. It's all pretty anxious, as befits the times I think, and for my money it's a masterpiece. I can imagine people thinking that its portrait of America is somewhat thinly sketched and stereotypical but as far as I'm concerned it's just playing the hits, baby. Highly recommended if the idea of a sentence about America that goes on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages does not turn you off. Currently reading Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) also by Murakami.
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Aug 11, 2021 07:14
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Heath posted:I've heard mixed things about Murakami but knowing that the translators mucked about with his books makes me wonder if that isn't casting him in a more negative light than he deserves.
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Aug 11, 2021 09:45
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SimonChris posted:I do think the Murakami hate on these forums is overblown.
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Aug 12, 2021 02:39
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Anyways Ulvir which Proust translation did you read, or were you reading in French? I read through the new Penguin translations a while ago and really liked them. I checked them out from the library and it seems like it's kind of a pain in the rear end to actually buy them outside of the UK, though, so my dream of buying them and re-reading the whole sequence every ~5 years or so has not come to fruition.
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Sep 17, 2021 08:43
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lost in postation posted:As sceptical as I am of the reports of classics being auto-da-fé'd by communist teachers, it should be noted that his guy's project is kind of comically unhistorical garbage, complete with framing Tiresias as neurodivergent and gender-fluid, which sounds like a satirical right-wing canard
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Oct 13, 2021 04:59
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Meaty Ore posted:So my copy of The Sun Also Rises has a rather major printing/binding error that I ran into earlier today. Chapter 12 gets cut off about halfway through, followed by the last page of chapter 9; chapter 10 and 11 are printed again in their entirety, then chapter 12 comes up again and it proceeds normally from there. Almost as good as the copy of Brave New World I had in high school, which was bound upside-down. I recently read Luster by Raven Leilani, which is pretty hilarious. I'm presently almost done with The Sellout by Paul Beatty which I am not really enjoying. It feels like a very pale imitation of Catch-22's tone and Invisible Man's topic with social science swapped in for Existentialism. It also feels like it's afraid to actually follow through on its attempts at transgression: the setup of the book is that it's about a black man who is on trial for violating the 13th and 14th amendments to the US Constitution - those are the slavery and equal protection amendments, so, that's definitely what we'd call a "high concept" plot. But it turns out it was all done with the best of intentions and so on. Maybe in the last ~50 pages the book will turn itself around but for now I'm not a fan.
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Mar 13, 2022 06:53
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