NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

i don't want to read them you read them.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html

i think i might actually read The Count of Monte Cristo next...

I was so obsessed with Bolano there for a while. Not sure if I would love it as much today but I should drop back in

(I don't have a subscription, only found a link to 100-20).
A Brief History of Seven Killings and Secondhand Time are class A masterpieces.

They haven't posted the top 20 yet.

This was too long but mostly otm.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/new-york-times-book-review?s=09

The pictures of the books splayed open, pages down, hurt me.

Michael Robbins voted for his own book, I notice.

so did Stephen King

Anyway, the top 20 is now up. My Brilliant Friend is #1.

Lady Joker from Paul Tremblay's list sounds interesting. An 1100-page Japanese crime novel. I may actually check that out.

I'm very mainstream and have read 30 of these. Very few regrets, some would make it into my own hypothetical list - The Line of Beauty, Gilead, Outline, Wolf Hall, maybe My Brilliant Friend.

no lanchester no credibility

I've read 20. Or maybe 21. I can't actually remember if I've read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go or just watched the movie.

no lanchester no credibility

― Daniel_Rf, Friday, 12 July 2024 13:26 bookmarkflaglink

kept on going down thinking.... *shit* if it's not in the top twenty it *must* be in the top ten.... wait top *five*? top.... *three*?

v disappointing and as your say daniel, no legitimacy at all rly

Michael Robbins voted for his own book, I notice.

― jmm, Friday, 12 July 2024 12:21 bookmarkflaglink

so did Stephen King

― jaymc, Friday, 12 July 2024 12:35 bookmarkflaglink

looool great spot

other than that it's... ok? lists are fun, create discussions like this etc. i think the main observations i'd make are how these are mostly of the same cloth - there was nothing here that made me go 'oh *wow* you included that... ok!' i know it sounds daft of me to say this but it's very NYT book review... the only excuse i can give is that given a quarter of a century you'd like to see a bit of a wider experience of reading. instead it just feels like distilled NYT. there are some things that i do think should be on there (higher/lower), some that i very much feel shouldn't be. mostly a case of 'i have read this so have no way of saying' (which is obv the main purpose of this sort of list - it's a promo/sales thing and absolutely fair enough).

the saunders and ferrante love is *interesting*. what does it say about current literary gatekeeping? Saunders feels of the same world - a friend. Ferrante, less so. what's going on there? Relationship trauma of the NYT classes? European critic holiday vibe? (dgmw - she's good imo, but ferrante's presence is notable)

no michon no cred obv.

i'll be honest. i got bored of the ferrante books. i read the first...two? maybe one & a half. the first one had some nice moments but the writing itself lulled me a little. it didn't sweep me up.

i do wish there was more japan/korea/china on here because i'm always looking for recommendations.

was very surprised to see Pulphead on this list! but that's a very cool inclusion. i did love that book and was totally jealous of that guy while reading it because he's so good. and i don't get jealous easily!

i liked pulphead! but yes generally lack of global books is rly poor.

they're not going to trick me into reading the corrections

The Corrections sucks.

I have read a dozen, including Ferrante. Nice that 2666 and Last Samurai are in there too.

The blurbs are so boring, nothing jumping out at me.

Really funny how they allow books in translation that were written pre-21st century. Would cover 90% of a list I would make

lol Thomas Chatterton Williams was one of the voters, his list has 3 Bolaño novels and The Coddling of the American Mind.

every day the NYT will add 1 book to its best books of the 21C until its demands are met

— Hadas Weiss (@weiss_hadas) July 13, 2024

Thinking about the best books of the first 25 years of the 20C...and then looking at this. Guess its unfair.

max was one of the voters:
https://maxread.substack.com/p/my-25-favorite-books-of-the-21st

If you’re making a best-of list, you have to start some obvious choices--the books that everyone agrees are good, that are so widely beloved it feels almost embarrassing to love them, but which are ultimately so good as to be basically undeniable. These are the books that gain you credibility with your audience; if you don’t have at least a couple of them on your list, you may give off the impression that you are pretentious, tasteless, “up to something,” or are possibly not taking the project seriously.

Hmm, I disagree. This doesn't seem even slightly worth worrying about. Highlighting interesting books should be the goal, whether they're obvious choices or not.

tbh i think a list is whatever the hell you want it to be, that’s the fun of lists, working out the categories, assonances and dissonances etc.

interesting to read max’s selection reasons. v much agree on pynchon, hard disagree on jacob de zoet v cloud atlas.

i like lists, they’re fun and i feel a bit harsh complaining about lack of wider lens but it all felt *so* NYT. its a paper that’s got a lot of heft, a theoretical capability to reach more widely, so a list felt broadly predictable and lacking in adventure or ambition resulted in a fairly “meh” response (tho obv plenty to enjoy there)

on 20th C Q1 v 21st C Q1 comparison being “unfair” - why is that?

i guess time hasn’t done its sifting, and history hasn’t done its “these categories and paradigms are significant” stuff. it feels like there’s a comparative lack of formal experimentation maybe. i’m not sure i really trust all of the 20th C Q1 canon as a comparator either!

i mean i think wolf hall - indeed the trilogy - is a masterpiece and would deserve to be on such a list in 100 years, but what context will it have? critically or historically. canon can obv overplay those elements at the expense of less “significant” works.

rambling in public here, apologies.

this list just seemed very book club and i can already picture the barnes & noble display. i'm sure there is lots of good stuff on it. i am just a weird reader. i'm glad Last Samurai was on it. but i really have read hardly any of the books listed. unlike with music, i was never very zeitgeist-y when it came to books even when i was young. i like old stuff.

is there a good place to go to see book lists from different countries? that's what i need to find. i know what bookish nyt readers like to read. #kingsolver4lyfe. i want to know what's hot in other places.

I've finished reading 11 of these. started many more. I haven't been able to finish many novel-length works recently.

some of those blurbs say very little about the books: "Set primarily in a 1980s New York crackling with brittle glamour and real menace, “Veronica” is, on the face of it, the story of two very different women — the fragile former model Alison and the older, harder Veronica, fueled by fury and frustrated intelligence. It's a fearless, lacerating book, scornful of pieties and with innate respect for the reader’s intelligence and adult judgment." -- i have no idea what this book is about.

I've read twenty-some of these. Max Read's "despite the pathetically basic taste that indicates" about his vote for Ferrante is just something I can't relate to at all. My experience reading that book is that it just transcends all these fundamentally stupid issues of "what kind of person am I if I like this, are the people who like this better than the people who hate it or vice versa."

crackling with brittle glamour and real menace... a fearless, lacerating book, scornful of pieties and with innate respect for the reader’s intelligence and adult judgment

great example of blurbical nonsense

I've only read 6 in full. I do want to finish the Ferrante series, and read Wolf Hall. (After I finish my Austen marathon, and Tale of Genji, and playing through the Metroid games. So maybe in 2027.)

props to Max for including Tana French, I was wondering if one of her books would show up on the main list and The Likeness is the one I would have picked.

i guess time hasn’t done its sifting, and history hasn’t done its “these categories and paradigms are significant” stuff. it feels like there’s a comparative lack of formal experimentation maybe. i’m not sure i really trust all of the 20th C Q1 canon as a comparator either!

― Fizzles, Saturday, 13 July 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Yes, though I was thinking that the novel was fairly young (the novel as I think of it started in the 1850s) and so there's more space for interesting things to happen than now...

But its more to do with this list, which is fairly boring to look through and read up on.

goon squad really holds up for ppl? did they just cobble their lists together from sort of remembering what was acclaimed in past years or???

bc that's the only reason i can think of for detransition baby placing yet no nevada?????

i wonder what my list would be, i aggressively try to not read modern literature tho

period and the marbled swarm, dennis cooper
the last samurai, helen dewitt
nevada, imogen binnie
paul takes the form of a mortal girl, andrea lawlor
zazen, vanessa veselka
austerlitz, w.g. sebald
if i ever finish a book by claire-louise bennett it would probably be on this list, she has a real voice
line of beauty and outline of course
too early to tell but i read girlfriends by emily zhou twice already this year and even though it's a debut story collection it will probably become an all-time favorite

my list is even worse than the nyt's in terms of being western-centric and wayyyyy too white, something i gotta work on!!!!

lots of nonfiction on this list, and pulphead was super influential on my writing so i'd probably include it, but also:
let's talk about love, carl wilson
how to wreck a nice beach, dave tompkins

I've read 11 of these books, and given up on two others halfway through (Visit From the Goon Squad and Brief History of Seven Killings). Three or four of them were bad enough that I never read anything else by that author (The Corrections, Kavalier and Clay, a couple of others). I like how they made sure to shoehorn in 21st century work by authors whose best work was in the 80s.

Scrolled down, got excited around 40-20, then pretty wtf about the top 20. Oscar Wao and Ishiguro and The Corrections and 2666 are books I dislike.

Still haven’t read any Ferrante, guess I’ll fix that immediately

I really liked The Line Of Beauty, prob too much. Gave me dying-of-AIDS nightmares for a week but man if it’s not the best-written book about gays ever attempted

I gotta say, while I've only read one of his books since and didn't love it, The Corrections was really good. I don't remember a single thing about it except that it was really good. But I do remember that.

I really liked The Line Of Beauty, prob too much. Gave me dying-of-AIDS nightmares for a week but man if it’s not the best-written book about gays ever attempted

― Europe, where they eat flowers (flamboyant goon tie included),

otm

<3

And actually yes I did like The Corrections, I just confused it with Freedom. Got the two mixed up

Yep, Freedom is the other one I read! Not terrible but I didn't feel it ever figured out what to do with itself, and everything after that just didn't appeal to me at all from the surface description.

I’ve read 40 of these.

what was the best one? of the 40. or the one you liked the most.

i’d read 11 of 100-21 and 11 of the top 20

sorry the numbers were actually 13 and 9

what was the best one? of the 40. or the one you liked the most.

For fiction:
Train Dreams
the short story collections by Lucia Berlin, Lydia Davis, Alice Munro (Amy Hempel would have fit nicely in that group too)
I really liked Stay True.
I thought When We Cease to Understand the World was fascinating.
Gilead had a big impact on me.
The Last Samurai is something else, though I don't know if I'd be as big a booster as some are for it.

I think adding the nonfiction titles just kind of muddies things; that should have been a separate list because as it is, all the ones I've read were exceptional but it feels kind of like when they throw in Miles Davis or A Love Supreme on a list of rock records. But I think The Warmth of Other Suns earns its high placement.

Somewhat mixed:
Tree of Smoke -- I think I prefer Denis Johnson when he's writing about regular weirdos rather than geopolitics.
Postwar by Tony Judt
I was into George Saunders at the time but I think he's starting to feel dated in that 2000s/Obama era way

Most skippable:
The Goldfinch

I haven't given much thought to obvious snubs but Milkman by Anna Burns comes to mind.

Oh, and speaking of Denis Johnson, I would have replaced Tree of Smoke with The Largesse of the Sea Maiden. A powerful final work.

Oh, and Stay True is a memoir, not fiction; sorry.

A quick count: 87 English-language novels, and 13 translated novels (including the Ditlevsen from the 70's...) I honestly didn't think that kind of thing was acceptable anymore.

I was into George Saunders at the time but I think he's starting to feel dated in that 2000s/Obama era way

i've definitely expressed this on ILB before, but i kinda think he's lost it, which is depressing, bc he's one of my favorite writers. would've put in persuasion nation on this list over tenth of december (can't think of a single story i liked in this) or bardo

i splurged on new books today. the two-story bookstore NEXT TO MY HOUSE (i never get tired typing that) had a bunch of McNally Editions and i just had to get some. these are the kinds of things that excite me when it comes to books. got Lord Jim At Home by Dinah Brooke with a foreward by Ottessa Moshfegh. originally published in 1973. got Twice Lost by Phyllis Paul. originally published in 1960. got The Girls by John Bowen. originally published in 1986. and Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott. originally published in 1929.

I want to read Lord Jim At Home.

The only Saunders I’ve read is Civilwarland which didn’t make this list. My favorite part of that book was the introduction where he writes about how he came to write the book. It wasn’t bad but didn’t send me off immediately to find his other work.

By “it” I mean the stories.

For Johnson I loved Jesus Son but haven’t read anything else. Sometimes I pick one up but always put it back on the shelf.

His last book of stories was terrific! I'm a fan of Train Dreams too.
,

xps ivy have you read darryl by jackie ess? i forgot if we talked about it on here

i haven’t but it’s definitely come up before

Truly surprised that none of My Struggle made it. 1 and 2 and 2666 would be my top 3.

And no Chris Kraus or any Semiotext(e).

Apparently votes were split among the various volumes of My Struggle.

I looooove Darryl and I can imagine it putting it on my list if I had to write a top 20 list of the 21st century, not so much because I have in mind a metric along which it's "better" than almost all other books (though it's certainly very good on every standard metric!) but rather because it's AUTHENTICALLY DIFFERENT from everything else I read

I was wondering if vote splitting might have kept My Struggle out. Although it doesn’t seem to have hurt My Brilliant Friend.

yeah i agree darryl feels like something different entirely. such a wonderful book

I've read 15. Some were good, some were ok, some were mediocre. I guess I also actively avoid contemporary lit.

A quick count: 87 English-language novels, and 13 translated novels (including the Ditlevsen from the 70's...) I honestly didn't think that kind of thing was acceptable anymore.

― Frederik B, Sunday, 14 July 2024 07:38 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

You are correct to point it out but nothing in the current Anglo American literary market makes me surprised that this is how it shook out.

Finally read the actual list. I've read 10, so nyah to all would-be disregarders of modern lit that have read more.

Meanwhile I'll get on my old hobbyhorse and say: comics are a medium, not a genre, sticking two into yr list makes as much sense as putting two plays into a list of best films, and literary critics do not have the skillset required to evaluate a graphic novel.

i've read 9 on that list. if you count the lydia davis. don't know if i read EVERY story in her collected stories.

i wish lit fiction readers would read more science fiction than never let me go and the road.

We/they read Station Eleven and Oryx and Crake, not sure if you count those

Oh or do you just mean books on that list. But both of those books could have easily been on that list!

Station Eleven is on there.

oryx is another pretty bad one! reactionary nonsense. new thing bad.

Of the titles I'd never heard of at all, the one that looks the most interesting so far is Hurricane Season.

I liked My Brilliant Friend fine but didn’t feel the need to continue w/the series, Days of Abandonment otoh I thought was way superior & maybe would have made my top 10.

I’ve read 13, plus bailed on 3 others that I disliked. Of the books I know, even with the picks I disagree with there’s nothing that jumps out to me as like utterly having no business on a list like this. Maybe I like lists and am a soft touch but idk, its hard for me to get super worked up about it, it’s the Times, of course its gonna be a lot of middle-of-the-road zeitgeisty books. It’s not what my list would have looked like but if someone drew their reading off this list for a year or two, in most cases I can think of a lot worse shit for them to read.

The titles I'm writing down have all come from individual ballots. Max's list is making me want to delve into M. John Harrison's recent stuff (I adore Viriconium.) And that Lady Joker book, if I ever have time.

Are the individual ballots paywalled?

Days of Abandonment is the Ferrante I recommend to friends.

There's a selection here. I absolutely do not recommend using Internet Archive to get around the paywall.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/authors-top-books-21st-century.html

The individual ballots are interesting. Scott Turow used 4 of his 10 votes to vote for all the books in the My Brilliant Friend series. I've also only read the first one. I suspect I'm not the only one (which probably helped that one beat the vote-splitting). The discussion about the list by the 3 Times book reviewers is also interesting.

use 12ft.io to get around the paywall

people actually voted for harry potter ;_;

There are definitely a few lists on there akin to voters in a film poll having a top 10 of Shawshank, Forrest Gump, Usual Suspects, American Beauty, etc

Just browsed the individual lists and there's maybe 3 ballots I trust lol (Knausgaard, Lucy Sante, Anthony Doerr's was pretty good).

this was the tip that i will follow up on. did not know about this guy. i really enjoyed the movie version of Winter's Bone though.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/books/review/favorite-books-stephen-king-megan-abbott.html

Megan Abbott
author of “Beware the Woman”

Daniel Woodrell might be America’s greatest living writer, and WINTER’S BONE shows you why. The haunting tale of a young woman’s search through the poverty-riddled Ozarks for her father, the novel risks being weighed down by the sorrow and stunning violence of its world. But instead it’s luminous, every page shivering with feeling, mystery and a keenly rendered humanity. And no one writes a sentence like Woodrell — he can make you gasp, weep, ache. A true master still at the peak of his powers.

i like a good local color artist.

I'm intrigued by Jonathan Lethem's ballot (I've read three of them).

he can make you gasp, weep, ache.

That's a lot of body stress!

xp I've heard The Employees is good, will look into some of the others.

McNally Editions seems great, I bought The Girls as a gift for a friend who really liked it, and I read Ex-Wife and was pretty impressed by it.

I liked John Irving's ballot. He has a lot of interesting-looking books I didn't see on any other list.

I've heard The Employees is good, will look into some of the others.

― Chris L, 15. juli 2024 17:50 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The Employees is very good, but the Olga Ravn I'd recommend is My Work.

And the Danish novel I'd wager will be added to this type of list in a few years is Solvej Balles 'On the Calculation of Volume', a seven volume retelling of Groundhog Day. Five volumes out in Danish, about a 1000 pages,, and yup, it's still October 18th. First volume out in English this november!

You are correct to point it out but nothing in the current Anglo American literary market makes me surprised that this is how it shook out.

― Daniel_Rf, 15. juli 2024 11:16 (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't know if I'm surprised, but if I was a prestigious newspaper trying to make a canon, and somehow ended up with such a laughable result as 87 English language novels and 13 translated ones, I would be embarrassed to put it out. I mean, nobody thinks that English-language writers write more than six times as many great novels as the rest of the world combined, I think everyone agrees it's because the people polled don't know better. And then why would anyone trust the list? It's worthless.

don't all countries do that kind of thing? i'm guessing a french newspaper would have had 85 french novels on it. haha! because they love french novels over there. but anyway you get what i mean. if you ask hundreds of americans to name books kingsolver wins. its just the name of the game.

The Nobel prize is supposed to be more international in outlook. It looks like only a few of the 23 Nobel prize for literature winners since 2000 are represented in this list.

i mean i agree that by objective scientific/statistical standards the list is worthless, but I also think that “I trust this list is truly accurate” is a weird thing for an adult to expect to be able to say abt a list of books. again maybe i'm biased bc i like lists, but i think a decent enough job is done to present it as the results of a poll and not the empirical final word on books of the world. they're not giving out a cash prize

(which, as an american, i believe in cash prizes as the only true measure of value)

Scott, most countries read more in translation - certainly when I go to France I am always impressed by the amount of Portuguese authors that are available there but not in English. Plus "in translation" includes English and, as with anything, ppl in most places read a lot of American fiction.

Depressingly enough, I think that if the same poll was made in Portugal there'd be more US books in there than Portuguese ones.

also these lists/sites/papers can't resist the clickbait of GREATEST and BEST. they can't just be 100 good/great books. which sets up any list for failure. high expectations. overall the whole thing is about what i would expect.

"Scott, most countries read more in translation"

i believe it! it is only at this late date that i can go to a bookstore and buy a new-ish novel from Korea or Japan in translation by an actual living and working writer. it has never been a big priority here outside of world classics. contemporary fiction from elsewhere has always been scarce. crime novels from other countries more easy to find years ago than most other fiction here.
so, hopefully, this will mean more interest in the outside world. sci-fi has helped too. the Chinese SF boom. more than ONE Chinese SF novel in a bookstore? even ten years ago you would not have seen it.

shout-out to manga too. i feel just having a huge wall of the stuff at B&N is some sort of triumph for the American consumer.

I'm curious about these "cheat sheets" that they sent out with the survey to "jog" the memory of voters. I'm guessing it was a list of books to consider, maybe taken from the Times own annual Best Books lists? That could have been a factor in shaping the vote.

The Nobel prize is supposed to be more international in outlook. It looks like only a few of the 23 Nobel prize for literature winners since 2000 are represented in this list.

― o. nate, 15. juli 2024 20:28 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Tbf to the voters, the Nobel is often given for books written, like, 50 years ago. I think the list is missing a couple obvious Nobel-names - Pamuk, Tokarczuk!! - but the Nobel isn't meant to reflect what is going on in literature at the time.

And I still think a list with 87 English-language novels on it is like making a list of the 15 best pop-albums, and there's 11 Taylor Swift albums on it. Just make a list of Taylor Swift albums then, just make a list of English language novels. Otherwise you just look dumb.

lol but Fred a list of the top15 best pop albums could very likely have exclusively Anglo artists on it and no one would bat an eye? they should tbc.

That's not at all the same thing. Pop is tied to the language and the country is from in ways that translation is not able to bridge.

But yes, any list of novels has to have a lot from countries other than the anglosphere in the same way the canon for novels has works from all over Europe.

There has been more than enough in translation.

I'd be curious to know what percentage of books reviewed in the NYT Book Review are works in translation. I doubt that it's more than 13%.

That's not at all the same thing. Pop is tied to the language and the country is from in ways that translation is not able to bridge.

I don't think that's true, English language Pop is wildly popular around the world including countries that don't speak English, if anything music is less tied to country than literature is.

With both mediums English language stuff is popular everywhere, non-English stuff largely ignored amongst anglos, and the reasons have nothing to do with being tied to anything and everything to do with American cultural hegemony.

That's from the other side but from the POV of someone in England non-English pop is seldom consumed as something other than something either exotic or a joke (when I paid attention to music).

I'd be curious to know what percentage of books reviewed in the NYT Book Review are works in translation. I doubt that it's more than 13%.

― jaymc, Tuesday, 16 July 2024 bookmarkflaglink

And that's a joke. LRB is also very bad at this. NYRB is better but I suspect that's due to NYRB books.

That's from the other side but from the POV of someone in England non-English pop is seldom consumed as something other than something either exotic or a joke (when I paid attention to music).

Well yes I never argued against that, merely pointing out this is the case for the same reason anglos don't tend to read as much in translation, it's the same disease.

Anglo pop is a lot more popular than anglo lit, though. Make a list of pop albums featuring only Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Kanye West, etc, and people everywhere would nod their heads. But I doubt any non-anglos think Patrick Radden Keefe, Paul Beatty, Edward P. Jones etc are better or more popular than Houllebecq, Knausgård, Murakami, Kehlmann etc. Not that I miss any of those, though, just using them as examples.

Not sure, now that I think of it the market for literature is a lot more niche than pop to be equating both.

I guess if S&S did a "best films of the 21st century" I'd expect to see a lot of foreign film. 50%+ xp

Well, more than one French film, that's for sure.

Also, apparently translated fiction is big in Britain at the moment: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/29/its-exciting-its-powerful-how-translated-fiction-captured-a-new-generation-of-readers

producing a translation requires much more effort and expense, relatively, than dubbing/subbing a film, and of course pop doesn't need another version to be produced.

there IS so much more available to a u.s. reader than there has been in the past. Archipelago Books and Open Letter and all these smaller imprints getting their books into regular bookstores not just small niche city stores. its cool. i'm very happy to see it. and they are getting reviewed too. that's the hardest thing for a small press.

though i was just next door at the bookstore and my pal ray said they sold five copies of Hillbilly Elegy online and that people are selling them online for a hundred bucks. so, maybe people need to read that first and then they can peruse the Open Letter catalogue...

Apart from the relatively small number of translations it’s interesting to see the early 2000s heavy hitters who went missing, e.g. Dave Eggers, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace.

Also the Jonathans: Safran Foer and Lethem.

Also Joseph O‘Neill‘s Netherland

Readers' list:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/reader-best-books-21st-century.html

Authors with multiple entries on the readers' list and zero on the main list: Anthony Doerr, Amor Towles, Abraham Verghese, Khaled Hosseini, James McBride, Haruki Murakami.

nonfiction in the readers' list:
Educated - memoir
The Warmth of Other Suns
Say Nothing
The Year of Magical Thinking - memoir
Between the World and Me
Caste
Braiding Sweetgrass
Evicted
Just Kids - memoir
The Devil in the White City - more urban legend than nonfiction
Killers of the Flower Moon
Know My Name
Crying in H Mart - memoir
Just Mercy
Sapiens
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
When Breath Becomes Air - memoir
The Glass Castle - memoir
In the Dream House - memoir
Empire of Pain

nyt was correct to exclude murakami (though i imagine he got very votesplit actually)

Spoilers ahead (Jordan wondered if translation might be a problem in this one:

I'm only about 50 pgs into Kafka on the Shore now and I'm enjoying it, but all of the dialogue involving the (inevitable) girl read like bad RPG scenes!

I never felt this way about Dance Dance Dance...could it be a function of the translation? Does it get better? Is he subverting Japanese cultural tropes or something?

Only one here I have read is Kafka On The Shore: also the title of a song that became legendary, the sole single (backed w instrumental version) of a girl who then disappeared. Fun w the 00s Uncut/Mojo-type idolatry, then a 15-year-old boy flees something with a Dad-like penumbra, deep into the boondocks, finds a big sister figure, whom he fucks in a moonlight flight, not settling for her handjobs, finds the Kafka chick, who turns out to be his mom, so he fucks her too. By this point, I'm rooting for the Dad-like penumbra to squash him. I won't spoil the ending though. Is Murukami always like this?

― dow, Tuesday, October 19, 2021 10:47 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Cats, jazz, spaghetti, characters who art writers or editors, weird sex shit

Yep, that’s him

― Legalize Suburban Benches (Raymond Cummings), Wednesday, October 20, 2021 12:14 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Are, not art

― Legalize Suburban Benches (Raymond Cummings), Wednesday, October 20, 2021

The Danish novel I'd wager will be added to this type of list in a few years is Solvej Balles 'On the Calculation of Volume', a seven volume retelling of Groundhog Day. Five volumes out in Danish, about a 1000 pages,, and yup, it's still October 18th. First volume out in English this november!

― Frederik B, 15. juli 2024 20:07 (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Now nominated for a National Book Award. Read it before your newspaper :)

it's not out yet?

No, still a couple of months away.

Looking forward to the Solvej Balles becoming available in a month or so. Frederik, how does it compare to her earlier work? Looks like According to the Law was translated in the 90s.

I really want to read it but each slender paperback volume is going to cost more than $40 in Australia, meaning it'll cost ~$300 for what is basically one big book.

I might read a volume or two, now I know its short (I mean I really don't find this 'Groundhog day retell' appealing)

I've never read anything else by Balle, so I don't know. I was told it's more straightforward, as much as telling this type of story over more than a thousand pages can be called straightforward.