Authors you will never read

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.