Authors you will never read

XP I need at least 500 pages to get me going I do.

you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology.

— Moby Dick (@MobyDickatSea) August 10, 2020

mark s otm about M-I as filmmakers, though it's worth noting that almost all their screenplays were written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who must take at least some of the blame for not "adequately reading the books they were recreating".

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

― mark s, Monday, August 10, 2020 2:35 PM (six hours ago)

boring pedantic note: the hyphen in the title was probably a mistake on the publisher's part, given that "moby dick" is not hyphenated in the text

Wow.

M-I made THE REMAINS OF THE DAY.

I am certain that someone involved in making this film had read the novel.

counterpedantry that's also a brag: when I was sub editor at sight and sound I was fact-checking an iain sinclair piece and asked him abt moby-dick vs moby dick and he said "it's what it says on the title page so that's the title" and this is also my position now and the correct one imo

Mark, you told this story on here in about 2001.

Though I have always, perhaps falsely, remembered it as Sinclair saying 'If it was good enough for Melville, it'll do for me'.

he's fun to sub btw because he's always right... "Iain do you want Moby-Dick with a dash it?" "That's how Melville spelled it" "ooer k-blimey-o" etc

― mark s, Thursday, 21 March 2002 01:00 (eighteen years ago) link

evolution of an anecdote

Who needs unreliable narrators when we can do it ourselves.

nude sock here with the meta

Then again, sheer length is the ultimate yardstick for literary difficulty according to most non-readers.

Kinda but then I don't think even non-readers think of, say, George R R Martin in those terms.

robert jordan is surely on my actual will-never-read list (I have done my time in the multi-part fantasy mines)

I have a friend who was going through The Wheel of Time, he was constantly complaining about bits of it (I remember a terrible passage he read me about a female barbarian coming to the city and deciding she loved fancy clothes and makeup), I made up my mind then and there that I wouldn't bother with it, but the poor guy was in too deep and spent another couple of months finishing it.

some misguided fools spent decades

not that I'd know anything about that

counterpedantry that's also a brag: when I was sub editor at sight and sound I was fact-checking an iain sinclair piece and asked him abt moby-dick vs moby dick and he said "it's what it says on the title page so that's the title" and this is also my position now and the correct one imo

― mark s, Tuesday, August 11, 2020 9:59 AM (ten hours ago)

my very clever response was going to be to say we should check the title page on the original manuscript but apparently the manuscript for MD hasn't survived :(

"it's what it says on the title page so that's the title"

Woyzeck vs Wozzeck bears out this reasoning's soundness.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/08/20/climate-emergency-130-degrees/#fn-*

If we are going for non-foc I think books on climate change would be in there. I read enough reporting and reviews like this seem to be enough.

I thought pretty hard about this, but honestly, I’m willing to give any writer a chance if they come with a good enough recommendation from here or from other people/places whose literary tastes I trust. Something I’m more confident at doing in recent years, though, is simply putting something down if it’s not grabbing me after about half an hour of reading. I’m probably missing some good, rewarding stuff by doing this (like, I put down Dead Souls earlier in the year and can’t shake the feeling that I need to have another go at it), but mostly I am pretty trusting of my immediate reaction to things now.

How about writers you thought you would really like but didn’t? Because my first tries at Antrim and Lipsyte weren’t good.

surprised to hear ppl dogging le guin's prose upthread, i loooove her style

Hi Brad!

I like Le Guin's style, but like Delany, there's an obliquity to some of her prose that often gets read as clunkiness. It took me a bit to get into! Same with Delany.

lol fittingly i've been slogging through dhalgren over the past few months. best book i've ever read! i guess i have a type

Both Le Guin and Delany are super smart but stylistic can be hard to digest.

cf. the opening of the dispossessed:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

"instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry": i think this shit rocks!!!!

dhalgren is the only delany i've read so far but i find it unusually clear and easy to read for the most part*, the dense parts are dense bc they're like the poet main character's raw bricks of thought so you end up understanding them more through intuition than actual sense. i've gotten the impression his other books are less like this

*albeit i'm a little over halfway through

I read A Wizard Of Earthsea recently to my kids and it didn't flow easily. The sentences felt chewy and obdurate. Like they were hewn out of something. I wondered if she'd deliberately chosen Anglo Saxon & Germanic words rather than Latin equivalents so that she could evoke a starker texture to things. But there were plenty of Latin words, so it wasn't that. Anyway I felt it was writing meant to be read by oneself, rather than out loud, but no less accomplished than something that trips off the tongue, and maybe more so.

I think 'Dhalgren' (which my phone recognizes as a word with single quotes around it lol) is probably his most complicated book in some ways, yes, but the strange and circuitous nature of his narrative structure is a feature even in his non-fiction. I highly recommend 'Heavenly Breakfast' after 'Dhalgren,' if only because some of what happens in the latter was clearly influenced by the IRL events described quite beautifully in the former.

omg thank you

It was a revelation for me, a former lover gave it to me for my birthday one year long after we'd stopped sleeping together and it remains a prized book...a first edition!

I read A Wizard Of Earthsea recently to my kids and it didn't flow easily.

FWIW I read the first three of these to my kid and she was rapt, and I felt like a good dad for showing her that a prose register higher than Riordan/Rowling existed. Hewn is a good way to describe UKL's style! But if she can appreciate a nice old wooden table, why not Ursula Le Guin's sentences?

It was a revelation for me, a former lover gave it to me for my birthday one year long after we'd stopped sleeping together and it remains a prized book...a first edition!

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table), Friday, August 14, 2020 5:18 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

what a lovely gift

Ray Bradbury.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/26/books-seen-behind-boris-johnson-tell-their-own-story

I'll almost certainly read Bradbury, everything I've heard makes him sound great, but I won't read Fahrenheit 451.

my favourite bradbury is the story where the man who hates his own skeleton has it surgically removed: it feels extremely now tbrr

(i stand with him)

i read a lot of Bradbury in my teens, i thought then that he was very good, i think i'd probably still think that

i will never read Neil Gaiman

Def not Gaiman.

I've never heard anything else about Bradbury besides 451 (a very unappealing book). I might read him, one day.

as i recall Bradbury himself once claimed that 451 isn't "about" authoritarianism or censorship per se. film is good but i haven't seen that for a loooong time and from memory it's not a faithful retelling

he's obviously a grumpy reactionary git now and perhaps always has been but how many writers i have loved etc

ok he said this in 2007

https://www.laweekly.com/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/

but then at the time of publication didn't dissent from the connections drawn with McCarthyism and etc

ppl who have been dead for eight years are allowed to be grumpy imo

There Will Come Soft Rains is such a good story, I teach it in my classes every year

Cosign to Gaiman tho.

xxp

lol bollocksed that up in the edit

I can see myself getting a gaiman out the library some day just to see where all the gaiman ukulele people are coming from

i speedread coraline in order to write a micro-essay on puppetry in movies spinning off of the puppets in the movie coraline

it's ok i guess but the puppetry is much more interesting than the prose or the plot (which is merely "what if alice but too much and also freud 101")

I read the Gaiman/Pratchett effort, Good Omens, having already read a ton of Pratchett. Tried reading American Gods after that and it seemed apparent to me that Pratchett had done the greater share of work on their collab and it was probably his parts that kept me reading.

gaiman's time was a while ago, and i enjoyed it when it was happening. just rebought ebook of american gods, i wonder how it'll be 20 years after the first time.

bradbury is great. short stories moreso, but 451 is perfectly adequate (unlike, say, asimov's long fiction). as said on some other thread Soft Rains, The Scythe and The Emissary pretty much nail the sf / horror short story.

A lot of Gaiman bugs me but The Graveyard Book is great.

ha, one of the few things of his i haven't read.

(just looked at the prices of sandman #1 on ebay and holy shit. i need to put it somewhere safer...)

I have some Sandman trading cards somewhere

I've mildly enjoyed several Bradbury books but never got the love.