Authors you will never read

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.