Authors you will never read

A negative thread.

I thought of it while reading this (good) review.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/kate-zambrenos-present-tense

Ben Lerner and Kate Zambreno.

I've read him but I try to avoid Nabokov.

Ayn Rand
Nicholas Sparks

Dave Eggers

J.K. Rowling

At this point in my reading life I presume I will never read Steven King or John Grisham, despite each having reputations as decent authors. If they've never tempted me up until now, I think I'd have to be imprisoned with only their books as reading material before I'd start one.

In a more literary vein: John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates.

Not to forget Jean Auel, who wrote a wildly popular series of best selling novels about the adventures of a paleolithic heroine, most notably Clan of the Cave Bear. My mother was an enthusiast and tried to graft her enthusiasm onto me. I lasted about four paragraphs. To my ear her prose was as grating as a dental drill.

weirdly, grisham and king are both authors i've met. grisham is the nicer guy of the two but king is also nice, just aloof.

i am going to read every author before i die.

Ben Lerner

You're missing out.

J.K. Rowling

Very much so, yes.

Jonathan Franzen

i didn't even see the lerner comment. he's very worth reading. the most recent two novels were flawed but in ways that were instructive. he writes about literature--and language--in a way that is worth grappling with

he writes about literature--and language--in a way that is worth grappling with

Yeah, this is the crux of it. The Hatred of Poetry is one of the pithiest encapsulations I've read of why no one pays attention to poets, especially those of the living variety.

I mean, most authors, probably.

But yeah, fuck JK Rowling - I doubt I would have read her before, but I'm sure as fuck not reading her now.

Donna Tartt

donna tartt is good though

Leïla Slimani

Basically, all authors whose writerly expertise is limited to psychosociological explorations of upper middle-class specimens and most authors who are utterly uninterested in the formalist challenges posed by modernism and its precipitates to this day.

Most authors, of course, but this is ppl you come across enough times, like its on your radar...but the answer is just a flat no.

Yes to Dave Eggers, Franzen, Updike, Oates and Rowling lol (although I would like to read more children's books when I am older)

Ian McEwan
Martin Amis
Angela Carter
Deborah Levy

LOL a ton of LRB/NYRB people's fiction. Most of it is because I don't particularly care for what they write

John Lanchester
Colm Toibin
Andrew O'Hagan
Adam Mars-Jones
Tim Parks
Adam Thirwell
Jenny Diski (I like her essays but I reckon she doesn't have fiction in her)
Lauren Oyler (same as above, even before she publishes anything)
Lorrie Moore (aka the Sally Rooney discourse)

every Tartt novel could be more tarttly written.

Also: novelists that have been dissed by Gabriel Josipovici.

Btw there's some overlap between this thread and

People You Suspect Are Frighteningly Overrated But Don't Actually Know Enough About To Say So

I somehow doubt that I'm ever going to get to Norman Mailer.

David baldacci
Dan brown

Philip Roth

The one novelist whose work everyone reads, and cites, and praises, and always sounds tedious, self-obsessed, and offensive, and which I have so far managed never to read, is ...

Philip Roth.

So I like to think of it as a lifelong ambition to maintain this record, but not sure I'll manage it.

Remarkable simultaneous posting with Lily Dale! :D

I have wondered a few times lately how The Human Stain reads in 2020...very poorly I would guess

ill let you know im thinking of reading the human stain soon-ish

have you read other Roth? If nothing else, I certainly wouldn't start with that one.

Do we have a "Authors you regret reading" thread? (I'm not thinking of Roth btw)

Do we have a "Authors you regret reading" thread?

Not that I know of, but I had the same thought.

yea ive read lotsa roth xp

william luther pierce
lew wallace

I read loads of Amis as a teen, and will never find reason to read any more, and wish I'd spent the time reading something else.

pomenitul will appreciate that I read The Orenda literally about a week before the scandal broke as a first step to learning more about indigenous literature

Je est un autre is evergreen for a reason.

Ian McEwan. I hate English novelists almost as much as I hate English comedians. Some of the dead ones are pretty good though.

I like Tom McCarthy.

He's probably got some Irish in him, that would explain it.

Good thread, but I haven't been able to read in recent times so I recuse myself.

Lee Rourke’s another good’un.

See my previous post.

I know, ‘twas on purpose.

I trudged through 70-odd pages of Embassytown so technically he doesn’t count but: China Miéville.

When I read Updike, I needed a deep cleaning.

i'm probably never going to read cormac mccarthy at this point

Hitler

Which one?

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387748142l/521675.jpg

Bridget Hitler’s Diary

I think David Foster Wallace would be a good candidate for never reading, if one had not yet started reading him.

God

Feel like there's a number of 'you should probably read these dudes in your twenties' dudes (like Kerouac and Hesse) who I haven't read and probably won't get around to now that I'm long past my twenties.

Tbf both are great midlife crisis reads, especially Hesse.

I get what you're saying OL, but honestly it's probably better for your soul to read Kerouac at an age when you can see the gender dynamics clearly and not be influenced by them

When I read Updike, I needed a deep cleaning.

great midlife crisis reads, especially Hesse.

Hesse's Steppenwolf is basically a mid-life-crisis-themed book and was written based on his own mid-life insecurities and reactions. Whether it would cast a helpful light on anyone else's mid-life crisis is highly speculative.

Lol on Roth being CIA:

Enlisted for the army but was exempted for 'special training'. Long association with the neocon faculty of the University of Chicago. Habit in the 80s of 'discovering' writers from the Eastern Bloc, none of whom actually lived there.

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) August 5, 2020

I think there's a difference between "authors you are never going to be interested enough to get round to", "authors whose work strongly repels you morally" and "authors you have assumed are going to be terrible and/or don't fit your self-defined personal brand".

The first makes total sense - no one can read everything after all - the second does as well. The third is an impulse to be challenged and interrogated.

Also for real saying you're never going to read JK Rowling or even someone like Ian McEwan is like ostentatiously stating that you've never heard a Coldplay record.

tbf - and i don't disagree with the implied critique of *this* thread and its endless iterations - but on a purely practical note you have to choose to engage with a book in a different way to your potential environmental exposure to music

Dickens
Tolstoy
Bronte

Is it though? For one it's very hard to avoid hearing a Coldplay song in a shop or in passing (I think that's the only way I've heard this group). And then it's easy to endure 3 minutes. Whereas with a book you can quite easily avoid it as it won't be 'forcefully' put in front of you.

I think your third can also be split. I've been around the block long enough but also am older AND have less energy/patience to put into reading something that I think I know how it's going to go. So assuming that a thing will be terrible is ok? Maybe one day your assumptions will be interrogated.

I agree that don't fit your brand is terrible, but that can be a separate thing that has very much come along with social media? xps

"*this* thread and its endless iterations"

Lol have we done this before with books (I did something like this w/film, on ILF)? My memory has gone to the bin.

Also for real saying you're never going to read JK Rowling or even someone like Ian McEwan is like ostentatiously stating that you've never heard a Coldplay record.

Why?

I suppose its the difference between making a point about fiction or music and making a point about oneself, and often not an especially interesting one.

Still don't get it.

Lol have we done this before with books (I did something like this w/film, on ILF)? My memory has gone to the bin.

i don't think we've done this specific version but it's definitely possible.

and that's fine, it sent me on an internal digression about how we all run down the clock and what difference the way we choose to do that might make, tho i'm personally sure it doesn't, and maybe there was the germ of a conversation in that but most likely it was just me having a woolly head day.

then i got distracted by the pee dream of Mandane and gave it no more thought.

xp srsly Tom since we're coming back to the ways people choose to spend their time the point Matt was making was that Individual X proudly telling the world "I like sausages" and "I hate cabbage" is not the most riveting of conversational gambits

you can develop layers of interest by expanding

I like sausages - because they connect me to the broader inner world of meat products - and I appreciate that because - I feel a greater sense of communion with the outside world - Sausages are one of the best meat products at doing this - cabbage is really bad at it tho - because cabbage is a conservative and a child molester

etc

just liking sausages and hating cabbage tho, what's that? loads of people like sausages. loads of people hate cabbage.

I don't want people to think of me as the kind of person who likes cabbage.

Cabbage is for basic bitches

god imagine being the sort of person that likes cabbage

Or to put it another way, I would straight up interested in reading the Pinefox's take on reading Roth for the first time, or Xyzzz's on Angela Carter, what fits their preconceptions, what surprises them, whether they regret reading them. Some of the best posts on ILB are the Pinefox engaging with Zadie Smith (another novelist you would expect to pop up under this thread's original premise), what he does and doesn't like about her.

Obviously there are thousands of other worthwhile authors to read so no one has to do anything, but "I will never read them" is not interesting unless there's a good reason behind it.

just liking sausages and hating cabbage tho, what's that? loads of people like sausages. loads of people hate cabbage.

― À la recherche du scamps perdu (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Aside from the fact I've got more out of eating Cabbage than anything to do with McEwan it sounds more like what we are reacting to is that people aren't giving their reasoning for ever trying something than just the statement that they will never try something.

XP yeah ok

xp srsly Tom since we're coming back to the ways people choose to spend their time the point Matt was making was that Individual X proudly telling the world "I like sausages" and "I hate cabbage" is not the most riveting of conversational gambits

Don't read the thread about liking or not liking sausages then.

well yeah that's where i come back round to the "equally valid forms of pishing the time away" thought

TBF I have been listing some of the assumptions (based on output in literary magazines, or a critic is often a bad practicioner of the thing they are paid to write about) but assumptions is all they can ever be because, as the thread says, engagement will not occur.

wrt McEwan is the guy's pronouncements and how he comes across.

I'm not sure that 'I won't read x', minus much further reasoning, is much worse than a lot of ILB which is 'I am reading x'.

I think 'I will never read x' is an OK premise for one thread because it goes against the general idea that 'reading is good' in a positive-thinking Guardian-review-section way. It's maybe a useful challenge to have an 'against reading' space.

I think one can give reasons for not reading, but it's a bit of a paradox as someone can always say: well, you need to read it to find out what it's really like.

I think it makes some sense to say: I've read this and I advise others not to bother - as I am somewhat tempted to do with DFW.

Like XYZ I don't see the parallel with Coldplay, for the reasons he states. Reading a whole J.K. Rowling novel sounds like a big effort. I have not read one. I certainly don't intend to read her children's books, but TBH I am slightly attracted by the idea of reading her adult books - thus wouldn't rule her out. I actually have a fond memory of seeing THE CASUAL VACANCY on BBC TV! This was, I suppose, some time after Adam Mars-Jones' harsh review of the novel.

Most of us have now heard Coldplay at some point but how many of us have heard a whole LP, or know any tracks beyond a few big hit 45s?

It's very generous of DC to say that he'd be interested in a post for me (but I don't intend to post about Roth, of course), and especially that he liked my ZS posts. re the latter I *think* he must mean my reading of NW, which was earlier this year and which, on the whole, I really admired. It's true that this is a writer about which I have mixed feelings - in the odd sense that I think she has produced bad books and good books: WHITE TEETH I think is bad and ON BEAUTY tremendous! I have SWING TIME waiting to read so I hope one day to interest DC in reporting on that!

Specifically I think it was your posts on On Beauty actually. But I'm saying this because ZS is exactly the sort of author that people write off without having read (although I don't recall you ever doing this).

Also for real saying you're never going to read JK Rowling or even someone like Ian McEwan is like ostentatiously stating that you've never heard a Coldplay record.

― Matt DC, Thursday, August 6, 2020 11:28 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Lol, no. I will never read anything by JK Rowling because the very idea of Harry Potter bores me to tears.

Also: Tolkien, George RR Martin and all that trite fantasy shit. Thing is: it's easy if you try, to avoid seeing the movies, series and reading the books!

My superficial engagement w/ Harry Potter - knowing a few of the character names and the very basic plot points - is p much on a par w/ my superficial engagement w/ Coldplay - have heard the big hit singles, nothing else.

wrt McEwan is the guy's pronouncements and how he comes across.

I've got no interest in reading authors who are part of the whole smug, self-congratulatory, incestuous English literary establishment, that might be mistaken but that's how it is.

Lol, no. I will never read anything by JK Rowling because the very idea of Harry Potter bores me to tears.

Also: Tolkien, George RR Martin and all that trite fantasy shit. Thing is: it's easy if you try, to avoid seeing the movies, series and reading the books!

Same here. Add Tolkien to the list.

But how do we know that eg: G.R.R. Martin is bad?

It does sound trite to me, but maybe it's actually well done? I don't know - have never read a word nor seen a minute of the TV programme.

I think it makes sense to say 'I'll never read him' but not so much sense to be certain that he's bad, without reading him.

I fear that I am coming round to DC's position!

Tolkien is very good as children's fiction - THE HOBBIT a key book for me, as for many, at the age of perhaps 8. Lovely stuff.

So I can't dismiss that either.

There is no certainty of course. Ian McEwan might turn out to be excellent. Lots of shitty people are writers I enjoy, after all. But he is in a class of what Bernhard would call a state approved novelist.

I will list out more of my assumptions later.

But how do we know that eg: G.R.R. Martin is bad?

It does sound trite to me, but maybe it's actually well done? I don't know - have never read a word nor seen a minute of the TV programme.

I cannot know if he's a bad writer. I shan't equate "will never read" with "it's a bad writer", but fantasy, hobbits and elfs and whatnot bore, nay actively annoy me. It's just not for me. I'm dismissing a whole genre here and I feel fine.

It's different for me to say I'd never read McEwan of Franzen (I've read both but they were mentioned above); I'd at least have to have read *something* in order to be put off imo. Though public appearance increasingly takes care of that, I suppose.

The Rowling/Coldplay comparison to me works more in that it's pretty much taken as a given that the sort of person who posts on lit threads on ILX won't be interested in Rowling, much as it's a given that yr average ILM poster will have no time for Coldplay.

I get what you're saying OL, but honestly it's probably better for your soul to read Kerouac at an age when you can see the gender dynamics clearly and not be influenced by them

To be fair to Kerouac one of the things that I remember from reading On The Road is the passage where he visits a couple and the woman is so pissed off that her dude is going off on some shenanigans, and he has this moment of going "oh wow all of us dudes are treating women like shit for the sake of our kicks, huh?". Not that that makes him change his ways in any way, but dude does spell it out.

Anyway, I'm with treeship. I will eventually have read all authors, much as I will eventually have seen all films and listened to all music, for scientific purposes.

It goes without saying that even if you are the most widely-read person in the world, there will be many, many more authors you haven't read and never will than those you have.

So when you're singling an author our as someone you will never read, you're talking about yourself rather than the author really. "I don't enjoy fantasy/sci-fi/horror" is an honest appraisal of your tastes (you might watch a film in those genres obviously, but watching a film is a lot less time and effort-intensive than reading).

"I won't read this person because I think of them as a state-approved novelist" DOES feel like personal brand-building, or wearing a badge of honour, especially because it throws open a load of complications and contractions. (Who is a state approved novelist in modern day Britain? Is there anyone who ISN'T? How many excellent novelists that the person in question enjoys and rates are also state-approved novelists?) etc etc.

Even novelists I'd feel naturally dismissive of, I'd need to see at least an extract first. I read a page of Sally Rooney expecting to completely hate it, but I'll give her this - she captures internet dialogue really well. She should write an online epistolary novel; I'd totally read that

Also if you're defining yourself against something ideologically then it helps to engage and understand it. I've never read Ayn Rand and am 99% sure I would hate her and maybe reading her becomes more necessary b/c her badness is so widely influential on a lot of people's thought?

Granted there are few similar imperatives for reading, say, Ian McEwan, who I have read and even when he's good is pretty much straight-down-the-line literary fiction. (Although you could perhaps get something more out of him approaching him as, say, a thriller writer).

lol I feel like there's a divide in this thread between people who've already read McEwan and Rowling (hi!) and those who haven't and are feeling extremely smug about it

co lol Matt I was going to ask whether you had read McEwan.

State-approved is a tad obscure a reason to be deemed as brand-building to me.* But in terms of what it involves there is a class of novelist that gets a lot more light on them, who are published more easily and get onto the literary prize ladder too so what they actually write gets obscured. In someone who is good and attracts that kind of attention I'd expect the writing to come through at some point, but in this case it has not.

* wrt Bernhard it's ironing because he got every prize in the German language world.

co = XP lol autocorrect

"Even novelists I'd feel naturally dismissive of, I'd need to see at least an extract first."

Lol to be young!

Interesting thread.

Pom, I won't read 'Hatred of Poetry' because the premise seems... factually incorrect, and also rather disingenuous of Lerner to write a screed against the very thing that got him to where he is. He certainly didn't get where he is by being a good teacher, by all accounts.

I've never read Roth, or Rowling, and never read more than an Oates story or two.

Much of what is considered mainstream literary fiction bores me to tears, so I dismiss much of it outright when I probably shouldn't. Evidence is my recent realization of my love for Alice Munro.

Also re yr comment, for the past few years, poetry book sales have been increasing at a rapid clip, so while it's drops in the bucket numbers-wise, I'm not so sure that poets are universally ignored in the way that you characterize. Not that I'm big on being valued by a disgusting and depraved society, but y'know...

I have been told to read Cheever my whole life and I never have but I should and probably will
I will probably read Infinite Jest at some point

I've read many authors and wish I hadn't-- Murakami, Franzen, Bolano, Pynchon all spring to mind
Same for many poets, none more glaring than Berryman

I love Nabokov

I have never read Ezra Pound and never will

I guess this is just literature you're talking about? Because I will never read Freud. It just doesn't seem worth the bother in 2020.

I certainly will never read another Shusaku endo book, his bloviating Catholicism was pretty tedious in the Samurai and I’ve since learnt he’s a massive racist so that’s two reasons to wish I’d never read that book and have no desire to read any others.

Murakami, Franzen, Bolano, Pynchon

Two of these are not like the other two imo!

None of them are like any of the others.

Pom, I won't read 'Hatred of Poetry' because the premise seems... factually incorrect, and also rather disingenuous of Lerner to write a screed against the very thing that got him to where he is. He certainly didn't get where he is by being a good teacher, by all accounts.

Thankfully, it's not I Hate Poetry, it's The Hatred of Poetry, i.e. an inquiry into why some people loathe the art.

Does anyone care about Ian McEwan outside of the UK? I doubt he elicits any strong feelings one way or another in North America.

pretty sure McEwan exports

Oh he most certainly does, I just have never seen him referred to as anything other 'that dece British novelist', the subtext being that his writing is quite forgettable.

Is there a name for people like Ian McEwan who write a few good books (First Love, Last Rites; The Cement Garden; In Between the Sheets) then spend many decades churning out vastly inferior work which is for some reason still wildly successful? Last thing of his I read was Saturday, without hyperbole one of the worst novels I've ever read, and certainly the last of his I'll bother with. Will say that his novels often lead to film adaptations which significantly improve on the source material.

IDK, Don DeLillo's work fits that as well, the new millennium was absolutely disastrous for him. Maybe this is the case with most novelists.

Murakami, Franzen, Bolano, Pynchon

Two of these are not like the other two imo!

― imago, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

None of them are like any of the others.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Don't think the poster was attempting to make a distinction beyond listing a bunch of 'literatute' that was tried and disliked.

Re: Rowling, I quite like high fantasy and am inordinately fond of the genre's classics, but a setting that revolves around posh children at a totally-not-English boarding school is one of the most off-putting premises for a fairy tale that I can imagine. The only fictive boarding schools I have any interest in are more firmly rooted in historical reality, such as the (partial) backdrop to Louis-René des Forêts's semi-autobiographical, fragmentary probes into the nature of memory, mendacity and unavowable childhood trauma in Ostinato. I've always found the very concept of such schools oppressive from the get-go so any bowdlerized take on it, no matter how 'innocent', gets my hackles up.

I guess this is just literature you're talking about? Because I will never read Freud. It just doesn't seem worth the bother in 2020.

― Joey Corona (Euler)

Not gonna fully try to sway you, but some Freud is good and interesting reading, and much better taken when the ideas are not informing treatment.

Is there a name for people like Ian McEwan who write a few good books... then spend many decades churning out vastly inferior work which is for some reason still wildly successful?

Yeah, the name is "white men".

yes, they do always seem to be middle/upper class straight white men.

Agreed, Freud is far more fruitfully read as a philosopher (one who was very much of his time, at that) than as a psychoanalyst.

xp

"The Rowling/Coldplay comparison to me works more in that it's pretty much taken as a given that the sort of person who posts on lit threads on ILX won't be interested in Rowling, much as it's a given that yr average ILM poster will have no time for Coldplay."

I think more people on ILX (lots of books discussion on ILE before ILB) would engage with Rowling and children's books in general (because they read as kid lit while growing up, then there are the films) more than an ILM-er would with Coldplay as ILM is more its own thing -- people had specific histories with indie already so by the time Coldplay comes along ILM is kinda done with it?

xps to pom: I used to read Enid Blyton books about boarding school as a child and love them, but I was bluntly dissuaded from the idea by my dad, whose experience at boarding school was hell. Definitely inculcates with some dodgy ideas.

Reading Molesworth definitely made me want to go boarding school (so I could learn about gerunds!) And is Harry Potter a 'posh child'? I always thought his name was partly an attempt to make the 'wizard school' premise more egalitarian (as it is in Wizard of Earthsea, the most obvious precursor to Potter).

Freud still offers plenty of metaphoric juice and insight, especially when applied to cultural products from the Freudian 20th-century. It's hard to discuss film noir, just for example, without getting Freudian.

Freud -- not that I've read much -- is more of a reader/critic to me.

My overall feeling about McEwan now is ... It's easy to perceive him as an irritating (or even offensive) person, or commentator, or 'personality' ... But ... he's actually often good at writing fiction. So it's OK to read that, in its own right, and see what you feel about it.

Almost exactly the same with Franzen. Very irritating persona; fiction often well done and interesting.

It's absolutely true that writers do off a cliff, and DC is right to point to DeLillo - but FWIW I don't see McEwan as an example of this. Amis much more so!

xps to gyac: your dad is a wise man.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but the fact that a boarding school is called an 'internat' in Romanian (and French) is quite ominous, since it can also function as an adjective (not in French, however) meaning 'hospitalized' (e.g. committed to a psychiatric ward) or simply 'locked up'. I also get the sense that it's a far more common 'educational' arrangement in Britain/ex-British colonies/Commonwealth countries.

Funnily enough I'd even say the same about Zadie Smith. Some good non-fiction, some really bad - enough to put you off her, from a distance.

But the work - On Beauty, NW - can be really serious and ambitious and impressive; it maybe renders the badness of the essays irrelevant. A 'trust the tale not the teller' factor.

... All of this seems a good reason for the occasionally noted strategy of a writer being a recluse and not putting their 'personality' out there at all; just letting any sense of it arise from the fiction.

And is Harry Potter a 'posh child'? I always thought his name was partly an attempt to make the 'wizard school' premise more egalitarian

Such nuances are lost on yours truly, a foreigner.

I very much enjoy A Wizard of Earthsea, by the way. If memory serves, Ged's passage through wizard school is quite brief and very few details are provided about its 'culture'. Le Guin depicts the experience in a more muted and archetypal light, which I prefer.

"Also for real saying you're never going to read JK Rowling or even someone like Ian McEwan is like ostentatiously stating that you've never heard a Coldplay record.

― Matt DC"

statements which probably mean different things in the us than they do in the uk

i still for some reason have never managed the ability to consistently differentiate ian mcewan and iain m. banks

i tried reading banks but i didn't much like his writing style

i've never _knowingly_ heard a coldplay record

"I will probably read Infinite Jest at some point

― flamboyant goon tie included"

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

Murakami: I'm a fan of the hyper-politicized post-war Japanese lit theatre (Oe, Mishima), and found Murakami's apoliticism unappealing, kind of a Superflat-esque shruglit. That said, I adore David Mitchell's homages to Murakami
Franzen: felt defensive at all times
Bolano: I guess I liked The Savage Detectives but 2666 just left me wanting to stop reading fake-Flaubert and re-read real-Flaubert
Pynchon: idk I just don't like it

Endo was recommended to me over a decade ago, I read "Silence", I hated it, but I still wanna watch the movie adaptation for whatever reason

I'm still gonna read Infinite Jest
And Coldplay rules what are you guys talking about

What is great about Earthsea imo is how "Wizard" is told-slant male-protagonist fantasy fiction but the series shifts tone and focus along with Le Guin's increasing radicalization over the years

Harry Potter is a public schoolboy who lives off a trust fund and is popular because he's good at sport, he marries his high school sweetheart and becomes a cop after dropping out of sixth form.

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, 6 August 2020 14:32 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the absolute fuck is this post

xps to gyac: your dad is a wise man.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but the fact that a boarding school is called an 'internat' in Romanian (and French) is quite ominous, since it can also function as an adjective (not in French, however) meaning 'hospitalized' (e.g. committed to a psychiatric ward) or simply 'locked up'. I also get the sense that it's a far more common 'educational' arrangement in Britain/ex-British colonies/Commonwealth countries.

...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.

Heh, I've been meaning to read that one!

Is Murakami apolitical? I haven’t read all his stuff but Wind-Up Bird did definitely write about the Japanese in Manchuria and it didn’t come across as neutral to me. You have to take that in the context of Japanese politicians seeming to constantly play down their history too.

Murakami wrote that book on the Tokyo gas attack. But that was a few years after I read a bunch, enjoyed it ok then stopped.

But if you are coming at him from Mishima and Oe it would be disappointing.

Oh yeah of course, he goes a bit further in his interviews.

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, 6 August 2020 14:32 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the absolute fuck is this post

― imago, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

A reason to drop DFW was that piece on Federer which is a bit of a horror show. He is the one for the tried it in a lit mag corner.

But I also think the trend for dropping people for being white and male and middle class is good and funny work, and I'm here for it.

I have never read a Murakami novel, despite trying. Gotten about twenty pages in to a few of them and tossed them aside. Don't get the hype— writing seems flat?

Tbh, I've never read a lot of the supposed "greats" of literary fiction in English and don't plan on it. I find too much of it excruciatingly boring, as if many writers are writing novels the way they think they should be written instead of how they want to write them.

(I am speaking, of course, about mostly 20th century greats like Roth, Rushdie, etc)

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

my experience of Murakami is that he has two English translators and I love the one and find the other dull and lacking in character

Yeah, I think I might have had bad luck! But oh well. There are too many books in this world that I am excited to read, and Murakami's don't make the list lol.

Re: DFW, I admire his non-fiction writing, tbh. Loved this essay when it first came out, have no idea whether it holds up: https://genius.com/David-foster-wallace-tense-present-democracy-english-and-the-wars-over-usage-annotated

Re: Stephen King— he's actually quite a good writer. The Shining in particular is an excellent book about alcoholism and cultures of misogyny...I often teach a story of his that was in the New Yorker about 20 years ago, "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away." It remains one of my favorite short stories of the past quarter century, at least.

Coldplay >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> J.K. Rowling

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

― imago, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Disensitised to suicide banter ever since Hofmann laughed at Zweig's suicide note.

I find too much of it excruciatingly boring, as if many writers are writing novels the way they think they should be written instead of how they want to write them.

This is a fairly common gripe when you tend to favour poetry (or 'the poetic') over teleological narrative structures (we're in the same camp).

Which is perhaps why I'm really obsessed with Brossard right now— never have I read novels that read so much like poetry.

Hofmann on zweig is v good and the sort of thing that if I hadn’t already read some zweig might make him an author I will never read

So yes, agreed.

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

― imago

fwiw "flippancy" wasn't the angle i was coming at it from

my engagement with the works of dfw is an important and deeply personal part of who i am

my post probably didn't make that apparent

But I also think the trend for dropping people for being white and male and middle class is good and funny work, and I'm here for it.

― xyzzzz__

i also don't recommend against dfw on the grounds that he is "white and male and middle class". the parts of his identity that were so destructive, to himself and to others, are not, i would argue, _intrinsic_ to the white, male, middle-class experience. i think it is important to disentangle the abuse paradigm, which was a paradigm that was, uh, _deeply embedded_ in dfw, from cis white maleness is valuable work and work that is worth doing; since those flaws are so abundant in dfw's work, he makes a good vehicle for the interrogation of that paradigm.

xps to table

A paradigmatic moment for me is when the narrator of Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies begins spinning the yarn of a man named Saposcat (etymologically: know-shit, or some such), presumably to alleviate his own boredom, by way of a thinly veiled parody of the 19th century realist novel. As one sentence pointlessly follows the other, it is repeatedly interrupted by the selfsame burst of self-commentary: 'What tedium'.

ty for clarifying rusho

Probably won't read this guy: https://newrepublic.com/article/158761/learned-worst-novelist-english-language

Ya thanks for the clarification, rushomancy. I was gonna post "well, I'm not gonna touch that!" but instead I actually decided not to touch that

I get what you're saying, extremely. This is why I don't fuck with Franzen (or Roth, and Coetzee is kind of a long shot) I think there is a particular position of defensiveness with these guys that doesn't really wash with me. Not that I don't adore the work of many many old white guys, just not this particular approach and I don't really have the faculties to actually nail down why

Or the reviewer (any relation to whiney?).

xp

Which is perhaps why I'm really obsessed with Brossard right now— never have I read novels that read so much like poetry.

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table)

I don't know if you've been discussing this elsewhere, but this intrigued me... do you mean Nicole Brossard (I'm guessing so but there are other authors with the surname)? Just skimming some descriptions of her work and it sounds quite up my street.

Yep, can confirm on table's behalf.

Re: old white dudes, I read Berryman's The Dream Songs and felt irritated but couldn't say why and then followed that up with an Anne Carson book ("Plainwater") that began with some translations of Mimnermos and there was one poem in there that made me go "ah see this is where Berryman should've aimed hisself toward and didn't":

A Sudden Unspeakable Sweat Floweth Down My Skin

He gazed, perhaps he blames.

Sweat. It's just sweat. But I do like to look at them.
Youth is a dream where I go every night
and wake with just this little jumping bunch of artieries
in my hand.
Hard, darling, to be sent behind their borders.
Carrying a stone in each eye

Quoting Plainwater is kinda cheating though. Nothing she's written since has left as much of a mark on me.

Is it completely invented? I've never been sure, I'm not a classics person so I never actually figured out (aside from looking at wikipedia to confirm the existence of her sources) if Carson just wrote that Mimnermos/Stesichorus shit herself or if it was actually translated from classical fragments

And come on her Sappho translations are god-like and every faggot loves Red

Carson's best book of literary work is "Short Talks." Nothing else matches it.

emil.y, I'd highly recommend Brossard. 'Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon' and 'Mauve Desert' are exquisite, and the deeper one goes the more weird and experimental she becomes.

Well worth reading trans poet and classics scholar Kay Gabriel on Carson: https://tripwirejournal.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/tw14gabrieloncarson.pdf

Thank you, table and pom. Definitely going on my list.

Also cool that a thread about authors you will never read has given me a new author to read!

Re: Carson, yeah, those Sappho translations are top-notch. I'll have to revisit Short Talks – I read it 15 years ago… As for Red, I distinctly got the feeling that it was Not for Me, but that's just my short-sightedness talking.

I loved Red as an undergrad. Re-read it a few years ago and was not very enthused.

But I also think the trend for dropping people for being white and male and middle class is good and funny work, and I'm here for it.

― xyzzzz__

i also don't recommend against dfw on the grounds that he is "white and male and middle class".

---

Part of the premise behind the thread is to make a sorta informed guess. Been around the block, the nose is pretty good etc. So I'm making a short cut and if I see a white and he's acting and talking a certain way I might dismiss it as that and move on. That's just how it's gonna go. It's about knowing when to think on and when not.

even if you are the most widely-read person in the world, there will be many, many more authors you haven't read and never will than those you have.

perhaps we could ask James Morrison to verify this for us since he qualifies in that category.

Whenever I see James Morrison's name I start singing

you are not alone in this

I start bellowing

Like I was Delmore Schwartz

From the piece I linked at the start of this thread:

Genius is a touchy term, with its overtones of great-white-maleness. It was her brother who was considered the family’s genius, Zambreno’s protagonist says, though she and her sister were just as “tiny, oversensitive, and intense” as he was. Then, in September of 2015, “a prominent writer of so-called autofiction, with a half-million-dollar advance on his last book, wins the so-called genius grant.” This is Ben Lerner, unnamed and pleasurably resented: “All day, friends contact me to complain. This writer’s name had become synonymous for the type of first-person narrative we also wrote, and yet no one found our struggles worthy of reward.” Zambreno’s protagonist is irked by her own lack of prestigious recognition—is it because she’s a woman?

That’s impossible to know, but impossible not to wonder. She’s also suspicious of what Lerner is doing, publishing a book (the novel “10:04,” which came out in the fall of 2014) that is set in the previous year: “How did this writer have the confidence to write his novel seemingly in real time, over a year?” While he has written his book, she is still consumed with making notes for hers.

re: Ben Lerner and Zambreno. I don't want to wonder? There is something downright repulsive about all of this especially since auto-fiction is a well worn out path (Genet, got it), but at this point I am sorta irritated about how easy this is to consume and read (and seemingly, to write). Like this class of people talking to themselves in a way you don't ever find it in music as much -- or more to the point if you did you could get hold of other voices somewhere else.

Read Atocha as a penetrating treaty on poetics, forget the rest. You’ll find it’s worth your time.

If Joss Whedon or Aaron Sorkin or Ken Loach ever has a book I wont read it.

Tony Parsons.

I used to write off the possibility of ever reading Roth, Mailer etc until I saw some intriguing reviews recently but realistically I'll probably never get around to them because there's always so many books about psychic amphibian overlords sucking each others buttholes.

I will try most things fantasy but Rowling is so low priority I will never reach her. Jim Butcher just doesn't seem like my kind of thing, I really don't like the supernatural detective format (even though some of my favorites have written in that genre). Most military SF like John Ringo will probably never get a go.

I certainly will never read another Shusaku endo book, his bloviating Catholicism was pretty tedious in the Samurai and I’ve since learnt he’s a massive racist so that’s two reasons to wish I’d never read that book and have no desire to read any others.

― American Fear of Scampos (Ed), Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Its more about not ever reading a writer's book in the first place, but if I had one of these its Julian Barnes. I read Flaubert's Parrot for the ILB book club and it was short and fine (maybe if it was longer it would not have been) and I cannot remember much about it now. Years later I read his piece on Lydia Davis' translation of Bovary and his displeasure at Davis' trolling amused me a lot!

xps = ok Pom, if I see it I'll give it a go.

there's always so many books about psychic amphibian overlords sucking each others buttholes.

Recommendations?

I know that kind of thing exists but I sadly haven't got around to it yet.

tfw you are strengthening up the brand

https://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01929/falk_1929983c.jpg

self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. 

I understand this position, and would heartily agree if it wasn't for the massive importance Knausgaard has for me. His writing his way through - not out of - shame was something I hadn't known I needed.

Maybe there are other writers who handle that everpresent, causeless suppression without falling for the "just a lonely guy thinking about things" trap that Knausgaard certainly does, open to suggestions. But there is a flavor to his work I have found unique so far.

I guess what I mean is - I know there is a massive literature of shame, I find Knausgaard's approach to it, in which it is the constant never-spoken background, uniquely speaks to me.

Knausgaard is one I won't touch with a ten-foot pole.

fwiw i haven't read knausgaard and wasn't talking about him

didn't read the new yorker article at the beginning of the thread either. tried reading it in private mode, the site told me i couldn't do that, i decided the article wasn't worth reading.

I bailed out on Karl Ove after volume 2. At this point in my life I can't do with a 1st draft anymore. But yeah its had enough of an impact on people, and I love Archipelago.

Since we are talking about him I want to mention that Linda Bostrom Knausgaard might be well worth reading, from the one short intense book of hers. More is being translated and I will look at picking it up.

and lukas, that wasn't meant to bash on you, and sorry if it came off that way.

I just read some reviews and learned a bit about Knausgaard when those books were really popping off and the whole thing just turned me off permanently.

To me, auto-fiction and auto-theory are genres that have arguably always been done best by queer people, and to be frank, I just don't give a fuck about some white straight twat from Norway...but that's a very, very personal take.

Oh didn't take it that way at all, but appreciate you and Kate clarifying things. And I definitely understand being turned off by Knausgaard.

xp

yeah after experiencing an upbringing that worshipped the nuclear family, as in literally ascribing it supernatural power and authority, i just have no interest in an author writing about his wife and kids no matter how sharply - realize that's a personal hang-up but so it goes

i did like a sample of knausgaard i tried when he was in the spotlight but at this point i doubt i'll read more

this thread reminds me I have to finish the my struggle novels. I'm sure the library will re-open one day

you know now that i think about it, i was kind of surprised by how engaged i was by the sample of kgard i read. so maybe i actually will try again lol

Ohh i thought of a good one...

Edward Abbey

i worked at a bookstore in moab and successfully avoided reading that asshole and plan on doing so for the remainder of my days. same with john muir. really hate most american naturalist writing tbh.

SO DO I!!

I thought I was alone in this regard.

The only one I remotely like, actually, is among those whom I feel most ambivalent about, and that's Gary Snyder. "Practice of the Wild" is quite good, but jesus, he is an asshole.

i'm honestly curious if any other women will be mentioned in this thread besides rowling and like mary higgins clark or w/e. i definitely feel more visceral disgust for male authors and their chauvinism. it even extends to more celebrated types like william s. burroughs, who i'm definitely less interested in reading now than i used to be. maybe unrelated but there's something that's always been off-putting about philip k. dick to me, like his books sound great in theory but the few times i've flipped through a few pages i've had a strong "nope" reaction. idk i'm a bad case study for this because i'm extremely lazy, moody and arbitrary when it comes to reading.

xp oh gary snyder is ok, yeah

snyder is still a little too 'rugged' for me tbh. table do you rate merwin? i'm pretty unschooled about poetry but i .. love his poems, for the most part.

Some people I know love Merwin. I've never read much because what I have read seemed too typical lyric poetry to me, and I have very particular tastes when it comes to that genre. But hell, Merwin is loved by a lot of people, even the feel-bad Marxist poets I know, so I should probably give the work a try again.

feel-bad Marxist poets ftw

I do think yr right, tho, about the white male chauvinism thing. Other than Prynne and Ligotti and some scattered friends, I hardly read white dudes anymore. Too much misogyny, too much machismo.

i'm honestly curious if any other women will be mentioned in this thread besides rowling and like mary higgins clark or w/e.

Women authors besides Rowling mentioned as fitting the original context of the thread title: Kate Zambreno, Ayn Rand, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Auel, Donna Tartt, Leïla Slimani, Angela Carter, Deborah Levy, Jenny Diski, Lauren Oyler, Lorrie Moore, Helen Fielding (indirectly), and Bronte (which one left unspecified).

About five or six other women authors, like Anne Carson or Zadie Smith, were also mentioned in passing, but not as authors the ilxor would never read.

Jane Austen.

got to love the delicious "humour" in Austen though.

or maybe not.

and maybe English people shouldn't be allowed to write

wtf austen is a goddamn all-time champ

tbf it's more that I don't read many novels anyway and Jane Austen is someone I can never imagine getting around to reading.

i've never read dante, apart from the first few verses of inferno. i feel kind of guilty about this, he seems like someone i should have read by now, but i'm not sure how much patience i have for intimidatingly long epic poetry at this point in my life.

If you are looking for a female writer whose an arsehole and can be left unread, there"s always Ottessa Moshfegh.

Inferno good to read. The rest of it is just okay, tbh.

i could see myself getting through that one, at least. i think i have the john ciardi translation.

I'm not sure I've heard anyone say a bad thing about Gary Snyder before! Why is he an arsehole?

I'm not sure I'm pathologically opposed to anyone I've not yet read but there are plenty I don't think I'll go back to: McEwan, Martin Amis, Kundera, Updike, Mailer, Cormac McCarthy (all overtly masculine, all sold as 'major writers of the 20th century etc). Dickens is a major one, I suppose: I feel like I'm waiting for the right age to overcome my repulsion.

Yeah, there are lots of authors that I should like, then I started reading and thought "NO" and stopped after less than 50 pages. Iris Murdoch springs to mind immediately. Dennis Cooper also, although I've tried with him a few times.

Might be unfashionable to say so but I think Cormac McCarthy is terrific and I will always re-read Blood Meridian

Chinaski, I am unable to find the document at present, but his abusive and misogynistic behavior toward Joanne Kyger (his first wife) has made him a bit of a persona non grata in certain circles, particularly those in the Bay Area where Kyger was a mentor and friend to many. I mean, he literally stole into her room and edited her private journals without her permission! He's no Ted Hughes, but he's kind of a prick, by all accounts.

I only came to Murdoch this year and loved her. Given that I was expecting 'dons with neuroses' I was pleasantly surprised: I didn't expect existential folk horror.

With McCarthy, I'll always have a place for that visceral gut-punch I got from first reading Blood Meridian but not sure I'll go back all that often.

xp

Murdoch a good example of a woman I'll never read, despite attempts. The descriptions of her work and the reality of it on the page are so disparate that I felt insane during every attempt I made, tbh...

And xpost, what's funny is that I don't get the existential folk horror at all from her work. And the prose is clunky.

Thanks for the Synder story, the table. I'd not heard that before. Ugh.

Unfortunately that's my ish with Murdoch as well. The prose is unreadable.

Oh yeah I read the first half of Local Anaesthetic and thought it was OK but I doubt I'll ever return to any Grass.

If we're talking about "female authors that just don't work for us" it's Renata Adler for me. I think it's impossible not to enjoy Joan Didion but I'm probably the least-enthusiastic of all the people I know. Unhip female authors I unabashedly love: Heti and July.

I feel a desire to type my favourite authors, scanning through my bookshelves just now: Baldwin, Barthes, Borges, Bowles (Paul and Jane), Calvino, Carson, Carver, hooks, Joyce, Le Guin, Lovecraft, Melville, Mishima, Nabokov, Flann O'Brien, O'Connor, Oe, Strugatskys, Vidal, Joy Williams, Wolff.

Fave ever is prob Barthes and Joyce, Mishima continues to rot in my brain I still love that horseshit, O'Brien and Gore Vidal less so but still important, Joy Williams is my go-to "recommend something new to people" choice. Any holes? I could use an intervening recommendation these days, I'm looking at my "next up" pile and it's a re-read of Lydia Davis short stories and a couple Hollinghursts I haven't read. I could use a recommendation. Maybe I should finally read Cheever like people have been telling me to

Constance barnett, or at least so far. Still wondering how accurate a translation it is in terms of mood etc.
May eventually rethink but have never progressed far into her work cos it just seems so genteel.
Wish I read russian though

Which Murdoch have you attempted? There's an awful lot of it and the quality varies wildly.

The Black Prince

Yeah, just from experience, I've read two Murdochs - Under The Net and The Sandcastle - and would never have guessed they're even by the same writer. Sandcastle very much is dons with neuroses - Under The Net is a madcap comedic novel.

Speaking of clunky prose tho I soldiered through The Disposessed, and did enjoy it for its ideas, would never dismiss LeGuinn entirely she's such an obviously great figure, sci-fi is full of writers with less than stellar prose styles, disclaimer disclaimer, but anyway on the evidence of that book a great stylist she wasn't.

Oh good, so I'm not alone in failing to gel with Le Guin's prose style. I'll give Left Hand another try sometime. Maybe I was expecting something different.

I tried my first McCarthy like a month ago (All the Pretty Horses), and bounced off of that too. Another time.

Yeesh, the aura around this guy in his time is hard to comprehend.

The reaction to the incident in the literary community to which Mailer and Morales belonged has been judged by many observers to be remarkably mild. As Mailer later noted, his friends "closed ranks" behind him. He remarked to New York Magazine in 1983 that "the reactions were subtle as hell. Five degrees less warmth than I was accustomed to. Not fifteen degrees less—five."[8] Many of his counterparts saw the assault as an artistic, even literary act; James Baldwin a writer and friend of Mailer, characterized it as an attempt to free himself from "the spiritual prison he had created with his fantasies of becoming a politician," "like burning down the house in order to, at last, be free of it".[9] Diana Trilling later recalled being told by her husband, critic Lionel Trilling, that the stabbing was a "Dostoyevskian ploy" allowing Mailer to "test the limits of evil in himself."[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabbing_of_Adele_Morales_by_Norman_Mailer

See also the killing of jean vollmer constantly described as something Burroughs “never got over”, like - I would fucking hope so tbh! People always talk as though it’s something that happened to him

Norman Mailer’s son was a guest at one of my best friend’s wedding. He was married at the time to the sister of the bride. He stood up to make a toast, I think he claimed it was going to be in French but really what he said was “I have two words for you: couples therapy.”

Another illustrious guest at the wedding was Alfred’s favorite, Billy Collins.

Shame on you for not killing Collins when you had the chance.

If you only knew.

There were lots of creepy old dudes of his age there, hard to single out one.

I'll give Left Hand another try sometime. Maybe I was expecting something different.

It might help to know that the second half of Left Hand is vastly different from the first half. The first half is all politics and world-building and serves to set up the second half, which is much faster-paced and more emotionally charged.

one of my best friend’s

xp The last 100 or so pages of Left Hand are extraordinary - as good as anything I've ever read.

That does help to know, thanks. I didn't get to the second half.

I will never read Richard Ford or Elizabeth Strout; they look so deadly dull.

I've only read some Ford short stories, but I thought they were pretty decent.

The Lay Of The Land and Independence Day are both incredible imo. Terrible endings iirc. But the observation and language are just tremendously pleasurable.

Elizabeth Strout is not dull. She's good.

I changed my mind about this thread.

I agree with Matt DC.

This is the second spike I’m worried about pic.twitter.com/TUQQkWLENj

— Sebastian Milbank 🥀 (@JSMilbank) August 7, 2020

Patrick O'Brien. I think he's a terrific writer but I can't get through the sailing jargon.

I think a less snotty way of looking at this thread would be "Authors you will never read again", because then at least you've tried and failed, rather than dismissed without evidence -- but I wouldn't want to prudishly deny anyone the true pleasure of snottiness.

Authors I wouldn't want to read again: McEwan, Ford, Chia Melville, Hemingway, Barnes, Scott Lodbell

If I'd only read "The Man in the High Castle", I probably wouldn't want to read PKD again; thank god for Ubik

Inferno good to read. The rest of it is just okay, tbh.

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table),

Purgatory's the dullest part, but I loved each one of the blessed's description of how h/she earned a place in it.

*earned a place in Paradise

the thread-shift to "authors you will never read again" is doubtless inevitable but distinctly less interesting, kudos chairman alph for asking the real questions

Agreed.

Never read? I'll be real: I've never read Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, or Jonathan Franzen.

I will never read them. With the exception of Mailer, whose macho aura repels me, the remainder of them just seem to write novels that are lauded by critics but aren't actually very good, as not many people I know have read through them...and I don't really hang out with a lot of people who don't read a lot, for better or for worse.

uh oh gooblar to thread

I'm curious though, if you've never read Rushdie/Roth/Franzen, yet know they are lauded by critics, how do you come to the conclusion that they aren't actually very good? Esp when you don't know people who read them! No trust in the critics?

Rushdie is such a dickhead it's hard to imagine him writing anything worth reading. And, yes, I know dickheads have written great novels in the past.

Never going to read a novel by anyone who appeared on Late Review

Now you're talking.

I think w/Rushdie...I've yet to a see a sentence from him that tells me this is good shit (and on twitter any ppl will screenshot a page or make a bot and I haven't seen anything, and if I have it certainly hasn't resonated w/me because I don't remember).

Sadly the noise of his circumstances needs to clear up, too. Wouldn't surprise me if one of the early novels might be ok. But at this stage in proceedings I'm not looking for ok either. I have a good pile of stuff and I know the voice I'm looking for.

You're missing out not to read The Ghost Writer, at least

Rushdie has a fun tendency to invent words iirc, but otherwise did not need/enjoy

Reading Rushdie is like an exhausting Robin Williams routine

There are a few Late Review / UK literati writers who I like on the page but can't stand as celebs (of course there more I dislike in both cases) - so I'm glad I didn't dismiss them all out of hand.

Only writers I have not read anything by and never would are the writers of epic multi-part series which I don't have the time for - Robert Jordan, Catherine Cookson, James Ellroy, etc.

I'd stan for Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe novels. Their politics are questionable and there is a dullness about them but still. And Roth is a hoary old fucker but I'm glad for Sabbath's Theatre, American Pastoral and The Ghost Writer.

I had a like/hate relationship with the Late Review Show and it was hilarious reading that thread on here and I wish I had been here back when the show was on (though really, a good internet diet cancels out my television watching). But I do plan to read China Mieville, Kim Newman and Jeanette Winterson (admittedly they weren't regulars) and wouldn't be against John Carey because I found him quite likable and he once pulled the best look of exasperated bewildered disdain that I've ever seen and I wish there was a gif of it.

Tom Paulin was kind of funny too. I liked how his eyes blinked separately.

Would like to try Hari Kunzru too.

I've recommended paulin's essays on northern ireland to ilxors before now, a novel is going way too far tho

I read Disgrace and said "Coetzee is kinda bad" to a friend and he gifted me a copy of Waiting For The Barbarians and I got halfway through it and called him and said "no he's actually really bad"

I'm ashamed to admit that I read The Elementary Particles and Platform and Possibility Of An Island in my early/mid 20s and enjoyed them but when I think about reading them again I shudder

I can't make shitposts without balancing them with some positivity: pulpy authors I adore include Hollinghurst and Iain Banks

This thread has become: "Authors, of every kind of writing, that you have read, or not read, or that you like, or don't like, or a bit of both".

Authors, why are they so bad and hated, or are they?

Rushdie is such a dickhead it's hard to imagine him writing anything worth reading. And, yes, I know dickheads have written great novels in the past.

― Udo Starmer (Tom D.)

i haven't either but i will rep for the disco song he wrote for the burnley building society in 1979

Philip Roth I think of as Celine but not as good. Sabbath's Theatre is a book that I would've read at 25-30, maybe. But I did not, so there.

Mailer I think I will read. I've said once on ilx that Harlot's Ghost has potential xps = my thread...my beautiful thread

I'm curious though, if you've never read Rushdie/Roth/Franzen, yet know they are lauded by critics, how do you come to the conclusion that they aren't actually very good? Esp when you don't know people who read them! No trust in the critics?

― Scampidocio (Le Bateau Ivre), Sunday, August 9, 2020 5:01 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Very little, tbh. I will read NYRB or LRB on occasion, and read a number of poetry reviewing sites, but if I see that it received a good review in the Times, I generally assume it's garbage.

Why would I trust reviewers that spawned the careers of people like Curtis Sittenfeld?

A lot of it just seems like manufactured acclaim at a certain point, and upper middle class people with the money to blow on hardback literary fiction lap it up. It's fucking gross, and most of it is just bad.

how much serious literature is untainted by the touch of the upper middle class?

I mean you can just not feel like reading them without projecting or concocting a whole thing about it

Curtis Sittenfeld's first novel is good.

If some reviewers liked it, good for them.

Literacy is tainted by the touch of the upper middle class iirc.

There are not many upper-middle-class people in the UK.

Maybe the term means something different in other countries.

That's because you have as many words for class as the Inuits do for snow, amirite.

I think there are quite a lot of them, by the way.

I mean, how else to describe Frank Turner?

Kidding aside, Wikipedia informs me that approximately 15% of Americans are upper middle class, which I assume is a higher percentage than in the UK. There can only be one upper mississippi sh@kedown, however.

Tom D: I had to look him up. Apparently he's a punk born in 1981. Don't think I'll be investigating further.

Pomentiful: I'm surprised that wikipedia is able to give data on something so contentious. But insofar as this is possible - yes, it's very different (and higher in the US), because 'middle class' means something different here.

Pomentiful

:D

Let this henceforth be the Anglicized version of my ILX handle.

Women authors besides Rowling mentioned as fitting the original context of the thread title: Kate Zambreno, Ayn Rand, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Auel, Donna Tartt, Leïla Slimani, Angela Carter, Deborah Levy, Jenny Diski, Lauren Oyler, Lorrie Moore, Helen Fielding (indirectly), and Bronte (which one left unspecified).

About five or six other women authors, like Anne Carson or Zadie Smith, were also mentioned in passing, but not as authors the ilxor would never read.

― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless), Friday, August 7, 2020 11:58 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

thanks shitbird

strange reaction

Are there writers you have specifically been talked out of ever reading?

When I was a teenager my older cousin told me not to read D.H. Lawrence. On pressed for a reason all she would say was "Phallic bridge to the future." I didn't like being told what not to read, and I didn't think this was an adequate argument, and yet - I have still not read any D.H. Lawrence.

I've also avoided Paul Theroux, and probably always will, because my mother dislikes his writing intensely and I trust her judgment.

your cousin otm on D.H. Lawrence, or the little I've read anyway

avoiding authors specifically because critics like them still counts as trusting critics, imo

In my late teens I was quite taken with his poetry, but I read Lady Chatterley's Lover 75 years too late.

I had a like/hate relationship with the Late Review Show and it was hilarious reading that thread on here and I wish I had been here back when the show was on (though really, a good internet diet cancels out my television watching). But I do plan to read China Mieville, Kim Newman and Jeanette Winterson (admittedly they weren't regulars) and wouldn't be against John Carey because I found him quite likable and he once pulled the best look of exasperated bewildered disdain that I've ever seen and I wish there was a gif of it.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, August 9, 2020 4:27 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Just gone down a rabbit hole looking for this, did not find it, but did find this interesting 1994 clip, they are all loathsome, but of course Tony Parsons manages to outprick everyone else, why was this man allowed into the cultural life of our country?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndti5YlxxlI

Sorry, this is massively off-topic, I know.

Why hate Mark Lawson? I thought he seemed harmless enough.

Once he was interviewing Jilly Cooper and she asked him if he hated anyone and he replied "oh yes", it was a possible motherfucker-with-dark-secrets moment.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Be8AAOSwB-1Y3-H8/s-l300.jpg

i didn't hate him until i just watched that clip, to be fair

He was not harmless.

Why?

known cenobite, see picture

Lawson's connection with Front Row ended in March 2014 for "personal reasons" in a joint agreement with the BBC.[2] An internal report completed in January investigated claims of bullying within the BBC Radio Arts, which produces Front Row, and identified one producer and presenter as responsible. While Lawson has denied bullying,[8] The Daily Telegraph reported on 5 March that Lawson was the presenter involved and he had been accused of "browbeating junior staff" who are often young freelancers.[9] In Lawson's 2016 novel The Allegations,[10] a lecturer at a fictional English university faces disciplinary action and dismissal for "B&H" (bullying and harassment). The charge sheet faced by Dr Tom Pimm includes such heinous crimes as sighing during departmental meetings, "divisive social invitations" and "visual Insubordination (sic) towards senior management". Pimm's Kafkaesque hearing during which he is told by his chief persecutor that "if someone felt you were being insensitive then, to all intents and purposes, you were", might be read as Lawson's satirical comment on his own treatment at the hands of the BBC, though the author is careful to distance himself from any such interpretation in his Afterword.

one of our leading public intellectuals there

A talentless hack... so, yes, par for the course for the UK literary scene.

DOCTOR TOM PIMM

brb reading ALL of lawson's novels

one of my treasured memories is when michael "iggy" ignatieff and roger "scrotum" scruton punished (I think) debut novels in the same months and private eye hate-reviewed them for the flimsy but telling mary-sue nonsense they were

I want to say I will never read these novels -- the fashion scruton is dead and in hell, iggy is a global laughing stock -- but this is probably a lie, I am a gemini and my aesthetic impulse control is as rotten as my cultural motivation tbftm(tbkof)

don't do it mark you've still got so much to live for

(ffs fashion = FASH, this borrowed laptop is the real orwell)

Itt people telling me that my reasons for not wanting to read certain authors are poorly constructed while asking what my reasons are.

Shut the fuck up! Curtis Sittenfeld sucks!

I've thought of a second 'author' that I really will never read - I'm more likely to manage this than I am with Philip Roth.

Nick Cave.

Of course anything literary has the stain of the upper middle class on it, but no one I trust about such matters reads or gives a fuck about Rushdie, Sittenfeld, or any of the others I mentioned. So, who is reading those books? I can only assume the demographic, but I doubt that there are tons of adjuncts or low-level office workers just fiending for the next Franzen tome

And here's where I say 'And the Ass Saw the Angel' is worth the read.

I read Sittenfeld's first novel last month. I liked it.

I have read a few Rushdie books - as have half the people I know.

Lots of people read those authors, and Franzen.

Basically just ordinary people who quite like reading.

If one were making an argument about 'class', it would actually be more plausible to say that those authors are somewhat middlebrow, and read by ordinary office workers, etc, and that more truly adventurous, avant-garde writers, etc, are typically read by people of higher social class.

But I won't bother doing that as it's not what the thread is about.

We just move in very different circles then, pinefox.

One interesting thing about this thread is that no one has given an answer like Proust or Joyce or or Woolf or Faulkner, archetypal examples of writers that even avid readers never get round to, in part due to their reputation for being difficult. (This is probably a good thing, in Britain right now you can't move for self-congratulatory broadsheet columnists telling you they aren't reading Proust in lockdown). And only a couple have answered with Austen or Dickens or the Brontes. No one has said Toni Morrison or James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison, and alarm bells would be ringing here if they did.

Overwhelmingly the answers come from a certain type of writer - predominantly post-1980, largely white, predominantly male literary fiction writers with hefty reputations. Public personas maybe play a part here but it feels like what people are reacting against is the idea of a current literary establishment. Maybe that manifests itself differently according to which side of the Atlantic its on (for McEwan read Franzen), but either way as an impulse perhaps its healthy.

Fwiw, I love MacEwan's 'The Child in Time's and will stan for him based on that book alone, despite my somewhat ambivalent to rather disappointed reaction to other books of his.

I think there's something to your point, Matt, particularly because so many of the names mentioned DO have such public personas. I haven't read Richard Powers' name, or Vollmann, but tbh, I just assumed that's because people either don't recognize their names or understand that they're good writers they may not have gotten to...but Vollmann, for example, is huge with the McSweeneys crowd that takes up a significant amount of space in terms of other writers mentioned.

I've only read Brontes' poetry and Dickens' Night Walks (an essay). Read my first Austen a few weeks ago.

Plan on reading Middlemarch sometime in the next few months however the 19th century English canon has been the toughest nut to crack, partly because I hate the way English culture treats these writers via film adaptations (Henry James has actually been far better served, and yes Merchant Ivory is good not bad) and general reverence but it's also a feel I do not have proper reading skills to tackle a lot of it.

(This is probably a good thing, in Britain right now you can't move for self-congratulatory broadsheet columnists telling you they aren't reading Proust in lockdown)

Man, it annoys me that Proust in particular has this reputation for difficulty. It's overstated, if you ask me, and probably does cause many people to avoid those books. Even the plethora of guides on How To Read Proust sets the reader up to expect something profoundly hard. He may make particular demands on the reader's willingness to follow a sentence, but it's nothing like puzzling through William Gaddis or something.

Merchant Ivory is good not bad

chairman alph is cancelled serves imperialism

Victorian fiction is near the bottom of blind spots I plan to make up for.

Proust is considerably more accessible to the casual reader than Woolf, Faulkner and Joyce (in that order), although lack of grammatical gender in English translation likely makes the internal logic of his purportedly interminable sentences less transparent than in French. Then again, sheer length is the ultimate yardstick for literary difficulty according to most non-readers.

Merchant Ivory is good not bad

chairman alph is cancelled serves imperialism

― mark s, Monday, 10 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

My cover of Wings of a Dove has a still from the Merchant Ivory film and the middle of the book is a few pages worth of stills from this I will never log off!

Sad! The William Gaddis reissues are bringing out that Franzen essay on him. Someone whom I loathe on twitter was praising that one the other week!

Do people read Moby Dick? I read it a couple times and it's in my "yes, my friends, you must read it" list but it seems avoided for reasons

The size of it probably most obvious reason? I enjoyed Moby Dick a lot but will probably not read it again.

Incidentally a far more demanding read than the Recherche ime.

Wholly agreed.

xpost

Neither film version of The Wings of the Dove is by Merchant-Ivory!

MD is great and Melville is generally loved here I reckon (in the last few years I have been good at filling in the gaps genrally: Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Cervantes)

Lol I assumed it was!! xp

I didn't find Moby Dick intimidating-- aside from its length, and adjusting to the fact that the reader will be deprived of narrative for long stretches, and accepting the fact that every other chapter is a NatGeo article. Confidence-Man was far tougher-- but I found it really rewarding to read twice back-to-back. The first time, I pored over the Dalkey edition footnotes, the second-time I skimmed through a footnote-free version online. Very very rewarding!

I've never gotten further than Swann's Way, I read the Enright and then the Davis. Proust doesn't appeal so much to me, dunno why

He's massively self-indulgent, massively verbose and not very interesting.

moby-dick (call it by its name) isn't remotely difficult to read and is good and funny and interesting, I will never stop reading it

"every other chapter is a NatGeo article" —— lol really really important in a novel written from the perspective of an early mid-C19 whaler to erase the perspective and understanding and knowledge and if you will hard-won science of the mid-C19 whaler, just get rid!

moby-dick (call it by its name) isn't remotely difficult to read

If that's not bragging then I don't know what is.

I will never not brag

I have never heard anyone say anything bad about MOBY-DICK.

It is the one book that literally everyone, always, talks about with unlimited enthusiasm and reverence.

many books and authors mentioned up-thread I do in fact find difficult to read (gemini)

the brag there is being a gemini (praiseworthy)

He's massively self-indulgent, massively verbose and not very interesting.

― the pinefox, Monday, August 10, 2020 2:33 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, yes, and rong, respectively

Proust is lovely

I generally refrain from judging writers noted for their style (or poets, for that matter) when I have no choice but to read them in translation. See also: Pushkin.

xp Hard to deny that he's self-indulgent, but to me that translates into an incredible generosity towards the reader.

I didn't find Moby-Dick challenging except for the aforementioned reasons. It is jarring and wonderful to have that protracted final chapter arrive, makes you feel that you've been becalmed for 500 pages and suddenly sucked into a narrative maelstrom

I haven't read much Proust, but what I read of Swann's Way was impressive (and not at all difficult) and convinced me to properly undertake his full undertaking when I feel sure that I can go the distance.

New and recently-discovered candidate for this thread: Jessica Beck, author of a series of fifty donut-based murder mysteries.

I was pleasantly surprised after first reading Moby-Dick a few years ago to see all the enthusiasm on the thread here on ilx. It's really fantastic. Totally surprised me, was a lot stranger and more interesting than I anticipated.

Proust is my favourite of capital M modernist people by some distance, apart from Musil and Borges, although I want to read more Faulkner and I think Woolf's Diary will be a lot of fun (got a vol of it last week), otherwise I am done with her fiction.

It is the one book that literally everyone, always, talks about with unlimited enthusiasm and reverence.

― the pinefox, Monday, 10 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Lol ok but many people have said MD is a book about whales and can be very unenthusiastic about it. I read The Confidence Man first because of this xp - then yes ppl on here for me to read it over xmas a couple of years ago I think.

Agree re: merchant ivory at least to the extent that they often undermined the very thing they were most often accused of being (reactionary, conservative figureheads for an English postcard culture industry) and their post-Curtis successors are such comparative Philistines it's easy to be nostalgic.

Who is unenthusiastic about MOBY-DICK?

No-one that I have ever read or encountered who has read it.

Sure I have seen this unenthusiasm for it on ilx or maybe The Guardian

Another Moby-Dick fan here. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

i bought it two weeks ago and it's sitting about 4 books back in my list.

Jessica Beck, author of a series of fifty donut-based murder mysteries.

Wow, culinary mysteries are a whole subgenre, huh

Plax (ico), mentioning philistines, makes a good point: Merchant-Ivory films were (are) criticized for being 'literary' among other things - but our society is not very literary; doing anything literary in it can be a struggle; M-I were actually, definition, more intelligent, well-read and thoughtful than much of what else was going on.

not the thread for it really, but M-I were not in fact more intelligent, well-read and thoughtful: they were generally incompetent film-makers (meaning incompetent AS film-makers) who also generally hadn't adequately read the books they were recreating

you can make the argument I guess that this double-flaw did double-distance them from the kind of glozed fetish that the "literary film" is assumed to entail

(lol the word "fetish" twice autocorrected to the word "Keith") (I note again that this laptop is BORROWED)

M-D is the only library book I never returned, opting instead to just pay the library for the copy. It was the Norton Annotated, and boy was that worth it.

(I should note— I'd moved out of state, and it had become a treasured tome by the time I realized it wasn't my book! Big yucks at tabes in his early 20s)

We just move in very different circles then, pinefox.

michael "iggy" ignatieff and roger "scrotum" scruton punished (I think) debut novels

I don't think this autocorrect was adequately appreciated.

borrowed laptop just calling balls and strikes here (sometimes very correctly)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcY7AkN1X8Q

^^^the only good novel (film version)

I find it a bit scary when seasoned readers still get intimidated by huge books because I'd like to think the intimidation goes away eventually.

Looked at the M-I filmography earlier and haven't seen enough either way to know their worth. I do like Christopher Reeve in The Bostonians, the suicide bantz in Le Divorce is bizarre given who it's coming from. They do bring a bunch of authors like Ishiguro and Forster to the screen, both of whom I doubt I'll read (maybe Maurice aside, wonder if M-I treat it well or not).

Coming back to Matt's point earlier it's true that mostly anglo, white and male is a thing that is coming out as avoidance but actually the British comic novel is something I've gotten into in the last couple of years. Early Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh, and a couple of Kingsley Amis novels too. Interested in this old Tory novelist and I may yet read Dance to the music of Time in time for no deal Brexit.

XP I need at least 500 pages to get me going I do.

you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology.

— Moby Dick (@MobyDickatSea) August 10, 2020

mark s otm about M-I as filmmakers, though it's worth noting that almost all their screenplays were written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who must take at least some of the blame for not "adequately reading the books they were recreating".

moby-dick (call it by its name) isn't remotely difficult to read and is good and funny and interesting, I will never stop reading it

― mark s, Monday, August 10, 2020 2:35 PM (six hours ago)

boring pedantic note: the hyphen in the title was probably a mistake on the publisher's part, given that "moby dick" is not hyphenated in the text

Wow.

M-I made THE REMAINS OF THE DAY.

I am certain that someone involved in making this film had read the novel.

counterpedantry that's also a brag: when I was sub editor at sight and sound I was fact-checking an iain sinclair piece and asked him abt moby-dick vs moby dick and he said "it's what it says on the title page so that's the title" and this is also my position now and the correct one imo

Mark, you told this story on here in about 2001.

Though I have always, perhaps falsely, remembered it as Sinclair saying 'If it was good enough for Melville, it'll do for me'.

he's fun to sub btw because he's always right... "Iain do you want Moby-Dick with a dash it?" "That's how Melville spelled it" "ooer k-blimey-o" etc

― mark s, Thursday, 21 March 2002 01:00 (eighteen years ago) link

evolution of an anecdote

Who needs unreliable narrators when we can do it ourselves.

nude sock here with the meta

Then again, sheer length is the ultimate yardstick for literary difficulty according to most non-readers.

Kinda but then I don't think even non-readers think of, say, George R R Martin in those terms.

robert jordan is surely on my actual will-never-read list (I have done my time in the multi-part fantasy mines)

I have a friend who was going through The Wheel of Time, he was constantly complaining about bits of it (I remember a terrible passage he read me about a female barbarian coming to the city and deciding she loved fancy clothes and makeup), I made up my mind then and there that I wouldn't bother with it, but the poor guy was in too deep and spent another couple of months finishing it.

some misguided fools spent decades

not that I'd know anything about that

counterpedantry that's also a brag: when I was sub editor at sight and sound I was fact-checking an iain sinclair piece and asked him abt moby-dick vs moby dick and he said "it's what it says on the title page so that's the title" and this is also my position now and the correct one imo

― mark s, Tuesday, August 11, 2020 9:59 AM (ten hours ago)

my very clever response was going to be to say we should check the title page on the original manuscript but apparently the manuscript for MD hasn't survived :(

"it's what it says on the title page so that's the title"

Woyzeck vs Wozzeck bears out this reasoning's soundness.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/08/20/climate-emergency-130-degrees/#fn-*

If we are going for non-foc I think books on climate change would be in there. I read enough reporting and reviews like this seem to be enough.

I thought pretty hard about this, but honestly, I’m willing to give any writer a chance if they come with a good enough recommendation from here or from other people/places whose literary tastes I trust. Something I’m more confident at doing in recent years, though, is simply putting something down if it’s not grabbing me after about half an hour of reading. I’m probably missing some good, rewarding stuff by doing this (like, I put down Dead Souls earlier in the year and can’t shake the feeling that I need to have another go at it), but mostly I am pretty trusting of my immediate reaction to things now.

How about writers you thought you would really like but didn’t? Because my first tries at Antrim and Lipsyte weren’t good.

surprised to hear ppl dogging le guin's prose upthread, i loooove her style

Hi Brad!

I like Le Guin's style, but like Delany, there's an obliquity to some of her prose that often gets read as clunkiness. It took me a bit to get into! Same with Delany.

lol fittingly i've been slogging through dhalgren over the past few months. best book i've ever read! i guess i have a type

Both Le Guin and Delany are super smart but stylistic can be hard to digest.

cf. the opening of the dispossessed:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

"instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry": i think this shit rocks!!!!

dhalgren is the only delany i've read so far but i find it unusually clear and easy to read for the most part*, the dense parts are dense bc they're like the poet main character's raw bricks of thought so you end up understanding them more through intuition than actual sense. i've gotten the impression his other books are less like this

*albeit i'm a little over halfway through

I read A Wizard Of Earthsea recently to my kids and it didn't flow easily. The sentences felt chewy and obdurate. Like they were hewn out of something. I wondered if she'd deliberately chosen Anglo Saxon & Germanic words rather than Latin equivalents so that she could evoke a starker texture to things. But there were plenty of Latin words, so it wasn't that. Anyway I felt it was writing meant to be read by oneself, rather than out loud, but no less accomplished than something that trips off the tongue, and maybe more so.

I think 'Dhalgren' (which my phone recognizes as a word with single quotes around it lol) is probably his most complicated book in some ways, yes, but the strange and circuitous nature of his narrative structure is a feature even in his non-fiction. I highly recommend 'Heavenly Breakfast' after 'Dhalgren,' if only because some of what happens in the latter was clearly influenced by the IRL events described quite beautifully in the former.

omg thank you

It was a revelation for me, a former lover gave it to me for my birthday one year long after we'd stopped sleeping together and it remains a prized book...a first edition!

I read A Wizard Of Earthsea recently to my kids and it didn't flow easily.

FWIW I read the first three of these to my kid and she was rapt, and I felt like a good dad for showing her that a prose register higher than Riordan/Rowling existed. Hewn is a good way to describe UKL's style! But if she can appreciate a nice old wooden table, why not Ursula Le Guin's sentences?

It was a revelation for me, a former lover gave it to me for my birthday one year long after we'd stopped sleeping together and it remains a prized book...a first edition!

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table), Friday, August 14, 2020 5:18 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

what a lovely gift

Ray Bradbury.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/26/books-seen-behind-boris-johnson-tell-their-own-story

I'll almost certainly read Bradbury, everything I've heard makes him sound great, but I won't read Fahrenheit 451.

my favourite bradbury is the story where the man who hates his own skeleton has it surgically removed: it feels extremely now tbrr

(i stand with him)

i read a lot of Bradbury in my teens, i thought then that he was very good, i think i'd probably still think that

i will never read Neil Gaiman

Def not Gaiman.

I've never heard anything else about Bradbury besides 451 (a very unappealing book). I might read him, one day.

as i recall Bradbury himself once claimed that 451 isn't "about" authoritarianism or censorship per se. film is good but i haven't seen that for a loooong time and from memory it's not a faithful retelling

he's obviously a grumpy reactionary git now and perhaps always has been but how many writers i have loved etc

ok he said this in 2007

https://www.laweekly.com/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/

but then at the time of publication didn't dissent from the connections drawn with McCarthyism and etc

ppl who have been dead for eight years are allowed to be grumpy imo

There Will Come Soft Rains is such a good story, I teach it in my classes every year

Cosign to Gaiman tho.

xxp

lol bollocksed that up in the edit

I can see myself getting a gaiman out the library some day just to see where all the gaiman ukulele people are coming from

i speedread coraline in order to write a micro-essay on puppetry in movies spinning off of the puppets in the movie coraline

it's ok i guess but the puppetry is much more interesting than the prose or the plot (which is merely "what if alice but too much and also freud 101")

I read the Gaiman/Pratchett effort, Good Omens, having already read a ton of Pratchett. Tried reading American Gods after that and it seemed apparent to me that Pratchett had done the greater share of work on their collab and it was probably his parts that kept me reading.

gaiman's time was a while ago, and i enjoyed it when it was happening. just rebought ebook of american gods, i wonder how it'll be 20 years after the first time.

bradbury is great. short stories moreso, but 451 is perfectly adequate (unlike, say, asimov's long fiction). as said on some other thread Soft Rains, The Scythe and The Emissary pretty much nail the sf / horror short story.

A lot of Gaiman bugs me but The Graveyard Book is great.

ha, one of the few things of his i haven't read.

(just looked at the prices of sandman #1 on ebay and holy shit. i need to put it somewhere safer...)

I have some Sandman trading cards somewhere

I've mildly enjoyed several Bradbury books but never got the love.

I would expect never to read Terry Pratchett tbh

Same. Give me suspension of disbelief or give me another genre altogether.

i have a great deal of fondness for bradbury but i wonder if it helps to have read him when you're young? not sure why ppl are specifically objecting to F451 without having read it, though.

Re Bradbury, another good thread would be "Authors you've read a lot of but will never read again"

Pratchett is probably aaiwnr here too. He's the kind of author that gets recommended by people who over-quote Monty Python.

(Douglas Adams is another but I've read all those already)

Lol

Michael Dirda recommends Pratchett, but then Mikey, he likes everything.

I've tried Pratchett a few times. It made me want to replace my eyes with hot coals.

i have a great deal of fondness for bradbury but i wonder if it helps to have read him when you're young? not sure why ppl are specifically objecting to F451 without having read it, though.

not sure why ppl are specifically objecting to F451 without having read it, though.

interested in creepy horror tales and sci-fi about Mars, not interested in handwringing dystopian fiction about anti-intellectualism

my best pratchett story is when two friends were walking by the canal in north west london, and someone in an expansive hat was approaching, and -- perhaps inadvisedly loudly -- one said to the other, "that could be terry pratchett if he wasn't dead!" and when he got nearer they realised it WAS terry pratchett and not yet dead, and as they passed, being genuine fans, they were in knots worrying if he'd heard them and been upset

He would probably have seen the funny side of that.

I have a weird level of respect for the Pratchett estate that they've been living for years now with a big lever 'Tolkein/GRRM money pull this and make loads and loads of cash for the rest of yours and your ancestors' lives' that they have so far resisted pulling. Maybe they still make so much money off the books that they don't have to.

Didn't they have his hard drives fairly spectacularly destroyed by tractor to obey his wishes to avoid that cashing in?

read the new zambreno book mentioned at the top of the thread and, considering i hardly ever read recent books, was taken a back by how much i loved it. helped that i have been sharing her fascination with walser's delicate, strange notation like writing recently.

I don't know much about Pratchett so I don't understand this. How could his estate have been making money off of Tolkien/GRRM? I can't find any connection between them.

xxp

I mean Tolkein/GRRM level money, the temptation to cash in on an enormous blockbuster movie or TV franchise must be immense.

Pratchett's been done on UK TV plenty of times already

I don't think his tone would really work in a blockbuster TV/movie franchise (I have no idea if the Good Omens show was a hit or not)

oh but i guess it's happening anyway lol

https://variety.com/2020/tv/global/terry-pratchett-discworld-endeavor-content-motive-pictures-1234591561/

"not sure why ppl are specifically objecting to F451 without having read it, though."

F451 gives me Orwellian vibes, which I am allergic to.

tbf to Orwell his fiction has been badly served by his fans *cough*

pretty sure the guy himself was a melt tho

my best pratchett story is when two friends were walking by the canal in north west london, and someone in an expansive hat was approaching, and -- perhaps inadvisedly loudly -- one said to the other, "that could be terry pratchett if he wasn't dead!" and when he got nearer they realised it WAS terry pratchett and not yet dead, and as they passed, being genuine fans, they were in knots worrying if he'd heard them and been upset

Orwell would be considered a dangerous extremist by the standards of current political boundary policing.

"tbf to Orwell his fiction has been badly served by his fans *cough*"

Never liked his fiction very much and these days dystopia is where all novels (and films based on them) go to die.

You want a society where books are outlawed? Any newspaper piece on library closures and the debate on free broadband at the election last year would explode Bradbury's brain.

Bradbury's silence on this has indeed been puzzling.

Just lazing it up in LA, typical.

i could not stand kate zambreno's earlier work but maybe she's good now

F451 is as much about technology as it is about censorship, though. Screens everywhere, people wearing earbuds at all times.

Bradbury only tells his lovers about this stuff, and they are few and far between.

Speaking of Terry Pratchett, what's the deal with Ann Patchett?

Her deal is that she is in every single charity shop/used bookshop I have ever been to and that is all I know

Different people on different occasions have explained the plots of Pratchett books at me interminably, my main takeaways were i) this sounds like the worst kind of sophomoric shit imaginable, ii) Terry Pratchett is for the type of annoying person who will explain the plot of a book at you interminably

She used to be a popular crossword clue.

Pratchett, whom I've never read, is the Zappa of high fantasy and nothing you can say will lead me to believe otherwise.

I've never read Terry Pratchett because there's a lot of Douglas Adams I'd like to unread and I don't want to make the same mistake twice.

Lol, pom.

I never liked the sound of Pratchett in the past but I was impressed by some excerpts that he does actually go for genuine spectacle. Was quite surprised that a lot of the new generation of young writers generally seem to love him and I've yet to hear any complaints of dodgy-old-man-isms about him. He seemed like a great guy too.

when my kids are 14 i will be a million times happier if they glom on to pratchett instead of rowling. which reminds me, in response to the thread title: rowling.

I've never read Rowling, either, and never will.

Gaiman has a lot of good bits, good influences that he is happy to promote (I think he's the reason I knew of R. A. Lafferty and The Saragossa Manuscript), not great with endings or making the good bits add up to something more. Pratchett I read a couple of novels when I was a teenager that I barely remember, I get the impression that he was a genuinely nice guy who found a receptive audience for something that doesn't quite work for me.

Ann Patchett - I remember Bel Canto being pretty good?

I won't go back to Pratchett for myself, but am enjoying reading Truckers to the kids, such brilliant world-building for a shortish kids book.

rowling is one for the "authors i wish i could unread" thread

F451 is as much about technology as it is about censorship, though. Screens everywhere, people wearing earbuds at all times.

and there’s a good deal of strangeness in bradbury stories generally as well.

Agree with Fizzles! This is powerful stuff!

It's good, will give his stories a go.

I’ve found Pratchett’s books pretty good comfort reading during the lockdown. Haven’t read many since I was a teenager - I keep expecting them to be full of dated jokes, forced whimsy and clumsy plotting, and then they turn out to be generally delightful (albeit whimsical and dated). Plotting much tighter than I remember, especially on the watch books. Vehemently pro-diversity and anti-fascist, which plays well right now.

Bradbury is easy to make fun of and his authorial persona is maybe some kind of a less pervy or more oblivious Asimov but his best stuff as others have noted, seems to really hold up. And his cousin Malcom doesn't get enough love around here.

yeah Bradbury has obvious flaws but when he's on he's great. Also this is one of my favorite opening paragraphs to a story:

I live in a well. I live like smoke in the well. Like vapor in a stone throat. I don't move. I don't do anything but wait. Overhead I see the cold stars of night and morning, and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was young. How can I tell you what I am when I don't know? I cannot. I am simply waiting. I am mist and moonlight and memory. I am sad and I am old. Sometimes I fall like rain into the well. Spider webs are startled into forming where my rain falls fast, on the water surface. I wait in cool silence and there will be a day when I no longer wait.

Huh, maybe I will read Bradbury again.

Bradbury is easy to make fun of and his authorial persona is maybe some kind of a less pervy or more oblivious Asimov but his best stuff as others have noted, seems to really hold up. And his cousin Malcom doesn't get enough love around here.

― Two Little Hit Parades (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, August 29, 2020 1:09 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

"Ray! Ray! It's Malcolm! Your cousin, Malcolm Bradbury? You know that new sound you were looking for? Well listen to this!"

I think "There Will Come Soft Rains" is great simply because it predicts "smart home" bullshit and places it in the context of world-destroying nuclear war. Really intelligent and interesting writing.

Lol, peace, man.

(Looking at Amazon for a paperback copy of the Bradbury short story collections for possible Christmas present and it's out of print and going for 75 quid)

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=6252125231&cm_sp=SEARCHREC-_-WIDGET-L-_-BDP-R&searchurl=kn%3Dray%2Bbradbury%2Bstories%2B100%26n%3D100121501%26sortby%3D17

?

Emily Gould.

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2701/emily-gould-s-novel-of-music-and-motherhood-in-early-2000s-new-york-city-23943

In a 1994 interview, Bradbury stated that Fahrenheit 451 was more relevant during this time than in any other, stating that, "it works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can't say certain things. The homosexual groups don’t want you to criticize them. It's thought control and freedom of speech control."

No surprise given his folksy 1950sness, but still.

Tom Sharpe was a guilty pleasure for me as a Raymond Carver reading teenager in the 80s, and I've always thought Pratchett's books would have simlar vibe, but with added fantasy, so doubly off-putting.

xp: Well, that's depressing!

Pratchett's not a leering douchebag, though.

tom sharpe has always belonged in this thread

as does bruce dickinson

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/A1eW2U9v8GL.jpg

Emily Gould

Yes, x1000.

Margaret Atwood:

https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/sep/12/margaret-atwood-if-youre-going-to-speak-truth-to-power-make-sure-its-the-truth

Atwood is good not bad, I appreciated her speaking up against TERFS. I really wasn’t that into The Testaments, though, which was terrible as the original Handmaid’s Tale is a masterpiece.

Yeah that was good, though the stuff on bots is terrible, and I'm allergic to most dystopias these days.

that = speaking up for trans rights

Hemingway and Miranda July both firmly on my must not read list

Stay away from Atwood's frankenfood lectures called the maddaddam trilogy, as well as her comics. Otherwise she's written some good stuff.

tao lin, knausgard, osha, hitler

yeah, nothing about tao lin or knausgaard sounds appealing or interesting to me at all

xp I read and liked Oryx and Crake earlier this year - it was pleasingly weird and disturbing and I then bought The Year off the Flood but haven’t read it yet.

I would just humbly submit that people not become confused between Tao Lin and Tan Lin. The latter is one of best writers in the US afaic

Fuck

So JK Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike book (which is 900 pages long! WTF!) is apparently about a trans serial killer. I think we all knew this was coming, though I personally thought that lead times would put this plotline off until book 6.

— Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) September 14, 2020

ffs

The thread (just reading it now) is an interesting discussion of Silence of the Lambs!

it's good and i think gets the flaws in SofL right, except maybe for the authority issue? which is maybe somewhat um *complicated* by the fact that harris's deepest well of authority eats ppl he dislikes

*(a book i also have a lot of time for)

Even if this was translated I think it will be difficult to find the time with multiple novel cycles :-(

Damion Searls told me about a book he wants to translate: "The Office" by J.J. Voskuil (7 vols, 5500 pages — triple Anniversaries, twice Proust, half-again Knausgaard), about 30 years of a man's life working at a Bureau for Dialectology, Folklore and Onomastics.

— Dustin Illingworth (@ddillingworth) September 13, 2020

I may read Silence of the Lambs, however (only saw the film once but it possibly obscures a ton from that book?)

Film is pretty faithful to book iirc but book does a lot of getting inside the killer’s head and the film obviously doesn’t do much of a job of that. Book definitely more sympathetic but then the film was always controversial so not hard.

Demme, being an ex-Corman alumni, dials up the 'horror' aspects of SOTL a bit in terms of performance and (especially) the sets - whereas Lecter's cell in the Michael Mann version of Manhunter is all antiseptic white, in SOTL it's a shitty brown dungeon.

Demme's sensibility is a lot closer to Harris's than Mann's though

mann's launched will graham into the csi-o-sphere

also lecter is called lecktor for some reason

ONLY good thing about Manhunter is the good Brian Cox

The bit where In-a-Gadda-da-Vida is playing is so bad my toes have still not uncurled since 198whenever

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n22/martin-amis/football-mad

(it's from 1981, just email boosted in their "diverted traffic" series of unlocked pieces from the past)

ONLY good thing about Manhunter is the good Brian Cox

lies

in any movie or tv show featuring william peterson there is also the good thing of keeping an eye out for his incredibly bandy legs

both red dragon (the book) and manhunter (the movie) are good

Voskuil's magnum opus deserves to be translated into English. It's a lot but a lot of it is great.

LBI delivering as usual

lol <3

Amazed it hasn't been translated tbf. Dibs on an abridged Bildts version!

I'd like to know more! What's the experience of reading it?

Amazed it hasn't been translated tbf. Dibs on an abridged Bildts version!

― Monte Scampino (Le Bateau Ivre), Tuesday, 15 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

It's longer than Proust, but yeah a volume would be good. Looking at this overview and his debut sounds good.

http://www.letterenfonds.nl/en/author/194/jj-voskuil

Amazed it hasn't been translated tbf. Dibs on an abridged Bildts version!

― Monte Scampino (Le Bateau Ivre), Tuesday, 15 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

It's longer than Proust, but yeah a volume would be good. Looking at this overview and his debut sounds good.

http://www.letterenfonds.nl/en/author/194/jj-voskuil🕸

apologies for that, office life is getting to me it seems.

🚨Giveaway alert🚨 We have two proofs of Jon Fosse's I IS ANOTHER (tr. Damion Searls) to give away. Reply to this tweet with your favourite notable doppelgangers or twins and be entered to win a proof. Giveaway ends tonight at 6 PM BST. pic.twitter.com/kGvtndJRDa

— Fitzcarraldo Editions (@FitzcarraldoEds) September 15, 2020

This series of books by Jon Fosse. Nothing I've read about it strikes me as something I'd like. Sounds like a post-Knausgaard cash-in tbh.

Someone told me everything I have said about mental health is meaningless because it doesn’t continually address the class struggle. And I am thinking back to when I nearly fell to my death and genuinely believe a treatise on structural inequality would have been a bit too heavy.

— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) September 20, 2020

wanker

andrea long chu

Lockwood as novelist is probably going to be ok, but not as good as her tweets, which is where the magic happens

xxxp that's a crazy assumption, that Jon Fosse would ever be influenced by Knausgaard. if there's one author who fully has his own thing it's Fosse, and this new septology is very much still that 'own thing' he's been doing for decades.

Not influenced so much as a cash-in. Let's get someone who is male, middle-aged, Norwegian..

His translated novels have been well received for a while. He's also one of the most performed dramatists in the world for the last couple of decades. So I don't know that a modest push behind his new, major work (which is winning prices and rapturous praise back in Scandinavia) can be construed as a cynical cash-in. But sure, I guess all promotional efforts will look for synergy with another trend in some way.

I think my problem here is an association with an author I don't like much, but also it encourages bad reviewing to say this is like Knausgaard when I'm sure there are worthwhile differences that are never explored.

All I'll say is a dislike for Knausgaard is no indication of whether or not you like Fosse, their writing styles couldn't be more different

All the authors whose work has been lost due to war, disasters or just the inevitable march of time. Never reading any of them.

They sound like a buzzkill anyway.

What's the best "Internet novel"?

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) February 15, 2021

All I'll say is a dislike for Knausgaard is no indication of whether or not you like Fosse, their writing styles couldn't be more different

― abcfsk, Monday, 15 February 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Cool I'll have a go and see how I get on.

Writers I primarily encounter being tits on social media: Roxane Gay, Matt Haig, etc

now imagine nabokov on twitter

be fun spotting his alts

https://www.shared.com/content/images/2017/03/timthumb--2--1.jpg

Best internet novel is Jarett Kobek's 'I Hate the Internet.'

Piers Anthony
Terry Goodkind

it’s fun to imagine nabokov composing his tweets on index cards and then passing them off to someone else to post

Lol, sinkah

xp Véra no doubt

Voskuil's magnum opus deserves to be translated into English. It's a lot but a lot of it is great.

― Monte Scampino (Le Bateau Ivre), Tuesday, 15 September 2020 bookmarkflaglink

8000 words on Voskuil. Sounds really great.

Here's the teeniest taste of my JJ Voskuil piece in @readliberties: https://t.co/kKk2fr1vJw

— Adrian Nathan West (@a_nathanwest) October 5, 2023

Looking at his Wikipedia page I see he published a 'scientific work' entitled 'Hanging the Afterbirth of the Horse'. I'm in!

I have a bias against Franzen because of the kerfuffle over his comments on Edith Wharton. He's probably a gifted writer, but so are a lot of others.

My brother is a huge fan of William T. Vollman, I have a hard time believing anyone who writes that much can write all that well.

I'll add Scott Adams to the list, even though that's fish in a barrel.

William Vollmann’s historical novels are very good.

I love Bill Vollman but that is because I respect a person who gets interested enough in a subject to become an expert in it through sheer force of intellect, chance, and economic privilege. Imperial, Train Dreams, the newer ones about peak oil— I mean the guy isn’t necessarily the best stylist, but he makes up for it in terms of research and “experience”.

Vollmann also has a disturbing origin story that probably explains his unique drive

I'll take y'all's word for it, I don't have that many years left on Earth.

He doesn’t either!

haven’t read any of his fiction yet but enjoyed both volumes of carbon ideologies. currently wrapping up part 1 of the abridged rising up and rising down, which is pretty good. as table says, his obsessive attention to detail is immersive, love all the historical threads he brings up and the sort of “dialogues” he constructs between the ideas of eg Trotsky and Lincoln or whatever. I enjoy his deadpan understated sense of humor as well.