Authors you will never read

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.

I would expect never to read Terry Pratchett tbh

Same. Give me suspension of disbelief or give me another genre altogether.

i have a great deal of fondness for bradbury but i wonder if it helps to have read him when you're young? not sure why ppl are specifically objecting to F451 without having read it, though.

Re Bradbury, another good thread would be "Authors you've read a lot of but will never read again"

Pratchett is probably aaiwnr here too. He's the kind of author that gets recommended by people who over-quote Monty Python.

(Douglas Adams is another but I've read all those already)

Lol

Michael Dirda recommends Pratchett, but then Mikey, he likes everything.

I've tried Pratchett a few times. It made me want to replace my eyes with hot coals.

i have a great deal of fondness for bradbury but i wonder if it helps to have read him when you're young? not sure why ppl are specifically objecting to F451 without having read it, though.

not sure why ppl are specifically objecting to F451 without having read it, though.

interested in creepy horror tales and sci-fi about Mars, not interested in handwringing dystopian fiction about anti-intellectualism

my best pratchett story is when two friends were walking by the canal in north west london, and someone in an expansive hat was approaching, and -- perhaps inadvisedly loudly -- one said to the other, "that could be terry pratchett if he wasn't dead!" and when he got nearer they realised it WAS terry pratchett and not yet dead, and as they passed, being genuine fans, they were in knots worrying if he'd heard them and been upset

He would probably have seen the funny side of that.

I have a weird level of respect for the Pratchett estate that they've been living for years now with a big lever 'Tolkein/GRRM money pull this and make loads and loads of cash for the rest of yours and your ancestors' lives' that they have so far resisted pulling. Maybe they still make so much money off the books that they don't have to.

Didn't they have his hard drives fairly spectacularly destroyed by tractor to obey his wishes to avoid that cashing in?

read the new zambreno book mentioned at the top of the thread and, considering i hardly ever read recent books, was taken a back by how much i loved it. helped that i have been sharing her fascination with walser's delicate, strange notation like writing recently.

I don't know much about Pratchett so I don't understand this. How could his estate have been making money off of Tolkien/GRRM? I can't find any connection between them.

xxp

I mean Tolkein/GRRM level money, the temptation to cash in on an enormous blockbuster movie or TV franchise must be immense.

Pratchett's been done on UK TV plenty of times already

I don't think his tone would really work in a blockbuster TV/movie franchise (I have no idea if the Good Omens show was a hit or not)

oh but i guess it's happening anyway lol

https://variety.com/2020/tv/global/terry-pratchett-discworld-endeavor-content-motive-pictures-1234591561/

"not sure why ppl are specifically objecting to F451 without having read it, though."

F451 gives me Orwellian vibes, which I am allergic to.

tbf to Orwell his fiction has been badly served by his fans *cough*

pretty sure the guy himself was a melt tho

my best pratchett story is when two friends were walking by the canal in north west london, and someone in an expansive hat was approaching, and -- perhaps inadvisedly loudly -- one said to the other, "that could be terry pratchett if he wasn't dead!" and when he got nearer they realised it WAS terry pratchett and not yet dead, and as they passed, being genuine fans, they were in knots worrying if he'd heard them and been upset

Orwell would be considered a dangerous extremist by the standards of current political boundary policing.

"tbf to Orwell his fiction has been badly served by his fans *cough*"

Never liked his fiction very much and these days dystopia is where all novels (and films based on them) go to die.

You want a society where books are outlawed? Any newspaper piece on library closures and the debate on free broadband at the election last year would explode Bradbury's brain.

Bradbury's silence on this has indeed been puzzling.

Just lazing it up in LA, typical.

i could not stand kate zambreno's earlier work but maybe she's good now

F451 is as much about technology as it is about censorship, though. Screens everywhere, people wearing earbuds at all times.

Bradbury only tells his lovers about this stuff, and they are few and far between.

Speaking of Terry Pratchett, what's the deal with Ann Patchett?

Her deal is that she is in every single charity shop/used bookshop I have ever been to and that is all I know

Different people on different occasions have explained the plots of Pratchett books at me interminably, my main takeaways were i) this sounds like the worst kind of sophomoric shit imaginable, ii) Terry Pratchett is for the type of annoying person who will explain the plot of a book at you interminably

She used to be a popular crossword clue.

Pratchett, whom I've never read, is the Zappa of high fantasy and nothing you can say will lead me to believe otherwise.

I've never read Terry Pratchett because there's a lot of Douglas Adams I'd like to unread and I don't want to make the same mistake twice.

Lol, pom.

I never liked the sound of Pratchett in the past but I was impressed by some excerpts that he does actually go for genuine spectacle. Was quite surprised that a lot of the new generation of young writers generally seem to love him and I've yet to hear any complaints of dodgy-old-man-isms about him. He seemed like a great guy too.

when my kids are 14 i will be a million times happier if they glom on to pratchett instead of rowling. which reminds me, in response to the thread title: rowling.

I've never read Rowling, either, and never will.

Gaiman has a lot of good bits, good influences that he is happy to promote (I think he's the reason I knew of R. A. Lafferty and The Saragossa Manuscript), not great with endings or making the good bits add up to something more. Pratchett I read a couple of novels when I was a teenager that I barely remember, I get the impression that he was a genuinely nice guy who found a receptive audience for something that doesn't quite work for me.

Ann Patchett - I remember Bel Canto being pretty good?