Authors you will never read

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!