At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

"this was a great joke"

that "player-specific insults" still makes me laugh. what happens if you remove player-specific? people vaguely swearing about hypothesised opponents?

astonishingly, in a coup of literary style, lanchester then manages just that.

ts: poof vs. french poof

I know I shouldn't expect reason from Lanchester lists, but "catholic nonce" is especially provocatively baffling to me.

I haven't read this book but I'm sure this thread is 100% more entertaining than it could possibly be. I mean, why describe a fucking newsagents, as if there is someone out there reading this book who has never been in a newsagents before and noticed the things that they sell in there?

It's the aesthetic delight of a 100% fabricated quotidian mundane and the way the style effortlessly conveys the content.

i wd still offer the defence, which is really no defence, that i think he thinks he's doing some kind of Martian Sends a Postcard Home alienation affect thing

still makes him terrible, just terrible in a different way

DFW describes things in microcosmic detail too, but it's used as a literary device in which, say, the glint of light off a ballpoint pen suggests an abstract ray of hope in a world of mundanity. Here it seems to be mundanity for the sake of filling up space.

This thread really makes me want to read the book.

Balls to it, it's bought. I'm going to hate this.

It hadn't occurred to me to buy the thing until you posted that. Now I feel gravity inexorably pulling me in that direction.

the whole thing is on some russian site if u search for any of the excerpted phrases itt

If I don't spend cash on it, I'm not committed enough to it.

The last ILB rec I picked up was Alice Munro (thanks Ismael), which I was expecting to love (and did), so intersting to go in the other direction.

i have already seen this book in a number of charity shops (and i think that's where matt dc got his copy), no need to buy new

Yep got it second hand - speculative punts and hatereads always second hand.

Swear to god the intersting typo was unintentional.

" DFW describes things in microcosmic detail too, but it's used as a literary device in which, say, the glint of light off a ballpoint pen suggests an abstract ray of hope in a world of mundanity. Here it seems to be mundanity for the sake of filling up space"

DFW also wrote amazing sentences. Lanchester writes like he's putting together a primary school report about late capitalism.

I finished this on Friday, it doesn't even really have an ending, it just sort of stops. It does clear up the central "mystery" that ties the book together but I challenge anyone to be remotely interested in that.

that mystery isn't maintained in any meaningful way throughout the book - i still haven't finished this, but that description is exactly what i was expecting.

speculative punts and hatereads

was just reading (and cringing with) this thread thinking how alien this concept is to me. i mean i'll do any old film or album for the morbid craic but a whole shitty book seems like an affront to life somehow

i guess i'm not a very cultivated reader tho tbf

i've read as much of this book as i'm ever gonna read on this thread, but i'm neurotic about life being too short

seriously! when i think of the number of books that are actually good (or even just pleasurable) that i haven't read, how could i have time for hatereads?

tbh though that is the sort of thinking that if you transposed it to music would just leave you listening to the beatles and some bits off a wire magazine top 100 weird records list

literary poptimism, is it plausible

there's the simple fact of the time and effort it takes me to read but also i don't actively listen to things i think i'm gonna hate either. and there's plenty of pop/genre fiction i do like, so i dunno, i'm not gonna form a final codified judgement on what i'll waste time on before inevitable death and dissolution

Just have an afternoon off to skim through the "good" bits innit? Sure there are more choice bits to quote on this thread.

By this point its the only reason to read this.

tbh though that is the sort of thinking that if you transposed it to music would just leave you listening to the beatles and some bits off a wire magazine top 100 weird records list

wait, idgi, who is the beatles in this analogy? in the world of literary poptimism, Lanchester is, like, Frank Turner or something. comfortably 6music.

I think literary poptimism is plausible, I have read 50 shades and the novelisation of gremlins and a bizarre forgotten evangelical novel published in the 20s but I'm not gonna read capital by john lanchester

tru kult lit-popism = all urban fantasy all the time

There doesn't, unlike music or film, seem to be enough high-visibility product published (or consumed) on a weekly basis to drive a poptimism.

Otherwise we'd have way more threads here.

Can't read fast enough for one thing, compared to hearing the whole top 20 in an hour

also i think ilb posters aren't super interested in dealing w/ the most populist and formalist genres? i mean: people here do not post about YA novels, urban fantasy, crime, miseryporn, celebrity biography, romance novels, etc. (all of which tend to be much faster reads than contemporary literary fiction)

iirc there was a period where ILB was more poptimist - quite early doors, when there was a larger group of posters.

xp

agree, difficulty of consumption, slow production/turnover makes fiction popism difficult. Feel Harry Potter would be the core of a working lit popism, + YA fiction, maybe fantasy epic (though i think that last has moved in the respectability ratings lately, eg Lanchester on Game of Thrones in recent LRB).

I still think of ILB as being quite YA-fiction friendly, but maybe that's passed.

but otm c#

I am on holiday, which led to me finishing a book I didn't think much of (Americanah) for the first time in ages. Normally I'm ruthlessly life's-too-short about that kind of thing.

This may be a dumb question but what is meant by urban fantasy?

sexy vampire romance

there's something briefly interesting to be drawn from the parallel uses of "urban" as an adjective in pop music and popular fiction

Oh haha of course xp

YA novel?

I recall differently: there were never threads dedicated to anything too populist apart from maybe crime? I think the "50 Shades.." thread was posted in ILE so perhaps it shows this isn't very welcome.

ILB followed on from threads in ILE, back in 2001, where posters would talked about Pynchon, Joyce and the like.

i mean i'll do any old film or album for the morbid craic but a whole shitty book seems like an affront to life somehow

It's actually been both a perversely enjoyable and illuminating experience. I wouldn't do it regularly but, in general, I virtually never read genuinely bad books, so it's reassuring to realise that I can still recognise bad fiction writing.

I also was sort of hoping it would be either undemandingly enjoyable in a bollocks sort of way, or illuminate something about London. Neither of those things came to pass.

Also it's a piece of piss to read, you could probably cane through it in an afternoon if you were so minded, even if it is 500+ pages long.

I find I tend to take roughly the same amount of time over densely-written prose as easy-but-dull fluff. It can take me a strangely inordinate amount of time to read a graphic novel for instance, but I don't find myself necessarily taking lots more time over more complicated stuff. I guess if something's well-written I find it easier to concentrate on but something like Capital I'd probably end up taking AGES over because it's so tedious.

am engaging in my own version of literary poptimism atm - have put Mason & Dixon on hold and am halfway through The Crying Of Lot 49 instead

lol u cad

I've been working summers at the Notting Hill farmer's market for a few years, and our customers are a blend of long-time residents with family money (the kind of middle class who bought fixer-uppers in 1970), expats who nevertheless appreciate the community and participate in local stuff, older people of colour, ageing aristos in mansion flats shopping with their housekeepers, young middle-income professionals, old school BBC, oligarch WAGs, and (occasionally) Terence Stamp. But most are rosy-cheeked middle-class British foodies, and 99.9 per cent are genially polite and genuinely neighbourly to each other.

― aldi young dudes (suzy), Wednesday, 3 July 2013 08:22 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

<3

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarsh

kind of want the context but i think s is generally better at observing these things than john lanchester

high praise