Authors you will never read

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?

I won't go back to Pratchett for myself, but am enjoying reading Truckers to the kids, such brilliant world-building for a shortish kids book.

rowling is one for the "authors i wish i could unread" thread

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

and there’s a good deal of strangeness in bradbury stories generally as well.

Agree with Fizzles! This is powerful stuff!

It's good, will give his stories a go.

I’ve found Pratchett’s books pretty good comfort reading during the lockdown. Haven’t read many since I was a teenager - I keep expecting them to be full of dated jokes, forced whimsy and clumsy plotting, and then they turn out to be generally delightful (albeit whimsical and dated). Plotting much tighter than I remember, especially on the watch books. Vehemently pro-diversity and anti-fascist, which plays well right now.

Bradbury is easy to make fun of and his authorial persona is maybe some kind of a less pervy or more oblivious Asimov but his best stuff as others have noted, seems to really hold up. And his cousin Malcom doesn't get enough love around here.

yeah Bradbury has obvious flaws but when he's on he's great. Also this is one of my favorite opening paragraphs to a story:

I live in a well. I live like smoke in the well. Like vapor in a stone throat. I don't move. I don't do anything but wait. Overhead I see the cold stars of night and morning, and I see the sun. And sometimes I sing old songs of this world when it was young. How can I tell you what I am when I don't know? I cannot. I am simply waiting. I am mist and moonlight and memory. I am sad and I am old. Sometimes I fall like rain into the well. Spider webs are startled into forming where my rain falls fast, on the water surface. I wait in cool silence and there will be a day when I no longer wait.

Huh, maybe I will read Bradbury again.

Bradbury is easy to make fun of and his authorial persona is maybe some kind of a less pervy or more oblivious Asimov but his best stuff as others have noted, seems to really hold up. And his cousin Malcom doesn't get enough love around here.

― Two Little Hit Parades (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, August 29, 2020 1:09 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

"Ray! Ray! It's Malcolm! Your cousin, Malcolm Bradbury? You know that new sound you were looking for? Well listen to this!"

I think "There Will Come Soft Rains" is great simply because it predicts "smart home" bullshit and places it in the context of world-destroying nuclear war. Really intelligent and interesting writing.

Lol, peace, man.

(Looking at Amazon for a paperback copy of the Bradbury short story collections for possible Christmas present and it's out of print and going for 75 quid)

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=6252125231&cm_sp=SEARCHREC-_-WIDGET-L-_-BDP-R&searchurl=kn%3Dray%2Bbradbury%2Bstories%2B100%26n%3D100121501%26sortby%3D17

?

Emily Gould.

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2701/emily-gould-s-novel-of-music-and-motherhood-in-early-2000s-new-york-city-23943

In a 1994 interview, Bradbury stated that Fahrenheit 451 was more relevant during this time than in any other, stating that, "it works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can't say certain things. The homosexual groups don’t want you to criticize them. It's thought control and freedom of speech control."

No surprise given his folksy 1950sness, but still.

Tom Sharpe was a guilty pleasure for me as a Raymond Carver reading teenager in the 80s, and I've always thought Pratchett's books would have simlar vibe, but with added fantasy, so doubly off-putting.

xp: Well, that's depressing!

Pratchett's not a leering douchebag, though.

tom sharpe has always belonged in this thread

as does bruce dickinson

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/A1eW2U9v8GL.jpg

Emily Gould

Yes, x1000.

Margaret Atwood:

https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/sep/12/margaret-atwood-if-youre-going-to-speak-truth-to-power-make-sure-its-the-truth

Atwood is good not bad, I appreciated her speaking up against TERFS. I really wasn’t that into The Testaments, though, which was terrible as the original Handmaid’s Tale is a masterpiece.

Yeah that was good, though the stuff on bots is terrible, and I'm allergic to most dystopias these days.

that = speaking up for trans rights

Hemingway and Miranda July both firmly on my must not read list

Stay away from Atwood's frankenfood lectures called the maddaddam trilogy, as well as her comics. Otherwise she's written some good stuff.

tao lin, knausgard, osha, hitler

yeah, nothing about tao lin or knausgaard sounds appealing or interesting to me at all

xp I read and liked Oryx and Crake earlier this year - it was pleasingly weird and disturbing and I then bought The Year off the Flood but haven’t read it yet.

I would just humbly submit that people not become confused between Tao Lin and Tan Lin. The latter is one of best writers in the US afaic

Fuck

So JK Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike book (which is 900 pages long! WTF!) is apparently about a trans serial killer. I think we all knew this was coming, though I personally thought that lead times would put this plotline off until book 6.

— Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) September 14, 2020

ffs

The thread (just reading it now) is an interesting discussion of Silence of the Lambs!

it's good and i think gets the flaws in SofL right, except maybe for the authority issue? which is maybe somewhat um *complicated* by the fact that harris's deepest well of authority eats ppl he dislikes

*(a book i also have a lot of time for)

Even if this was translated I think it will be difficult to find the time with multiple novel cycles :-(

Damion Searls told me about a book he wants to translate: "The Office" by J.J. Voskuil (7 vols, 5500 pages — triple Anniversaries, twice Proust, half-again Knausgaard), about 30 years of a man's life working at a Bureau for Dialectology, Folklore and Onomastics.

— Dustin Illingworth (@ddillingworth) September 13, 2020

I may read Silence of the Lambs, however (only saw the film once but it possibly obscures a ton from that book?)

Film is pretty faithful to book iirc but book does a lot of getting inside the killer’s head and the film obviously doesn’t do much of a job of that. Book definitely more sympathetic but then the film was always controversial so not hard.

Demme, being an ex-Corman alumni, dials up the 'horror' aspects of SOTL a bit in terms of performance and (especially) the sets - whereas Lecter's cell in the Michael Mann version of Manhunter is all antiseptic white, in SOTL it's a shitty brown dungeon.

Demme's sensibility is a lot closer to Harris's than Mann's though

mann's launched will graham into the csi-o-sphere

also lecter is called lecktor for some reason