Good thread, btw
― Kiitën (admrl), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:00 (thirteen years ago) link
plax, re: excellent historical fantasy, try anything by Tim Powers (except for his lone vampire one). Anubis Gates and Last Call particularly recommended.
― Loathsome Dov (Jon Lewis), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:01 (thirteen years ago) link
There was a contemporary Chinese novel reviewed in the Times last year, I believe the title was 'Living And Dying Are Getting Me Down', which sounded hella awesome, subversive talking animal stuff.
― Loathsome Dov (Jon Lewis), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:02 (thirteen years ago) link
my older sister has 2666. it is big.
it's easy to read, though. i've read half of it in less than a week.
― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Friday, 25 June 2010 19:05 (thirteen years ago) link
I started The Savage Detectives but it really annoyed me
― Kiitën (admrl), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:06 (thirteen years ago) link
what about it?
― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Friday, 25 June 2010 19:07 (thirteen years ago) link
Too meta? The wrong kind of meta?
― Kiitën (admrl), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:08 (thirteen years ago) link
Definitely willing to give it another try
huh, i guess i find his kind of meta to be fairly subtle. or well integrated into the story/characters.
― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Friday, 25 June 2010 19:09 (thirteen years ago) link
Too many characters to keep track of in that second section (says the guy reading Dickens).
― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:09 (thirteen years ago) link
i think i'm gonna end up liking 2666 a lot more than The Savage Detectives
― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Friday, 25 June 2010 19:10 (thirteen years ago) link
Sorry, missed this. Thanks! Google search not turning anything up, sadly.
― Kiitën (admrl), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:11 (thirteen years ago) link
What I want is the literary equivalent of an Apichatpong film.
― Kiitën (admrl), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:12 (thirteen years ago) link
would read ^
― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Friday, 25 June 2010 19:12 (thirteen years ago) link
ah:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Spence-t.html
Thanks, JL!
― Kiitën (admrl), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:16 (thirteen years ago) link
Ha, yes, 'Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out' was it. It's good for me to be reminded, I need to track that book down.
― Loathsome Dov (Jon Lewis), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:21 (thirteen years ago) link
The good parts of Pound's Cantos?
― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:21 (thirteen years ago) link
alice munro is the only living author i truly love. now that muriel spark is dead. and janet frame. and saul bellow. i feel like a grouch when it comes to new books. i'm mostly happy with old ones. i'm sure there is a ton of great stuff out there. hopefully i will get to it before i'm ancient. i can't remember the last "new" book that i've read that i thought was GREAT or a WORK OF GENIUS or EARTH SHATTERING.
― scott seward, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:28 (thirteen years ago) link
people watch too much t.v. these days!
(hahaha, that's my theory on the lack of genius writers out there.)
― scott seward, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:29 (thirteen years ago) link
Also are who are the good contemporary authors from Asia? I am particularly interested in South and Southeast Asian authors.
the couple things I've read (Mian Mian's Candy, for ex.) I was not impressed with, unfortunately. Murakami doesn't appeal to me, at least not as much as say, Kobo Abe did.
― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:29 (thirteen years ago) link
i liked "tree of smoke" but long-form is definitely not johnson's strong suit.
scott i thought you liked mary gaitskill, too. but perhaps not "truly love."
― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:30 (thirteen years ago) link
I missed this and posted something shouty to the other thread. Too bad I have a bunch of work to finish up today.
But Shakey, immediately upon reading your description about the formal qualities of novels, my first thought was ... David Markson just died. Have you read or heard of Wittgenstein's Mistress?
Also, since I was talking about the interior nuances of fiction on the other thread ... I think there is an argument that could be made that the kind of formal inventiveness you're describing was a very big thing in America through the second half of the 20th century, but might be considered a little exhausted and "over" now, by some people.
I think most people here would sorta mercilessly mock anyone who came to ILM and was like "modern music is terrible -- I listened to the radio in the car, and no one's doing anything like X, Y, or Z." You'd remind them that there's more music in the world than that. If someone said "I really liked music in the 90s, nobody does that stuff anymore," you might remind them to ask what music is doing today, instead of demanding something it did before. Right? I don't expect anyone to know or care about modern fiction, seriously, but I really want to stress that it has the exact same complexity of taste as the music people talk about here. Like if you'd tear into someone or consider them a clueless moron for saying something about music, think twice before saying it about literature.
― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:37 (thirteen years ago) link
^^ btw that third paragraph is not intended to really say formal invention is "played out" or something. It's just interesting that plenty of music geeks here would happily say "I am so sick of every act doing this or imitating that." Because you follow music. Modern fiction is obviously less quick and trend-driven than pop music, but if you followed it, you might have some similar feelings in terms of what you were sick of or thought was getting old or imitative!
― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:42 (thirteen years ago) link
I think there is an argument that could be made that the kind of formal inventiveness you're describing was a very big thing in America through the second half of the 20th century, but might be considered a little exhausted and "over" now, by some people.
yeah, this seems true to me. and i identify with it as a reader. there's more than one kind of formal inventiveness, too.
― horseshoe, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:43 (thirteen years ago) link
the kind of formal inventiveness you're describing was a very big thing in America through the second half of the 20th century,
I wouldn't limit it to America at all fwiw
― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:43 (thirteen years ago) link
Plus, the idea that we could return to the narrative hanky-panky of Coover-Barthelme-Pynchon is itself a conservative notion.
― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:43 (thirteen years ago) link
a third of the authors I listed are Latin American, for ex
Barthelme and Pynchon were largely too dry for me to get into (altho I do love Crying of Lot 49)
― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:45 (thirteen years ago) link
"I really liked music in the 90s, nobody does that stuff anymore," you might remind them to ask what music is doing today
also I don't think this is really an accurate analogy because it's not like a lot of popular literature TODAY is doing anything new, tons of it is still stuck in, as I said, forms that were popularized in the 19th century.
― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:46 (thirteen years ago) link
xp The most recent Pynchon, Inherent Vice, is worth a look if you liked Lot 49
― Brad C., Friday, 25 June 2010 19:49 (thirteen years ago) link
that's not true, Shakey!!! i mean i guess it depends on your definition of "popular" and "tons" but it's still not really true.
― horseshoe, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:50 (thirteen years ago) link
also depends on your definition of "new" sorry to be pedantic but lol
a more accurate analogy for music would be like, despite tons of groundbreaking, genre-shattering, formal innovations in the 90s and 00s, a majority of popular music was still being produced to sound like it was 1965, with small live combos augmented by orchestras doing 2 1/2 minute songs about teenage love.
xp
― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:50 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah this is on my list, what I read of it sounded really promising
― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:51 (thirteen years ago) link
Omg Music is still made with guitars!!!! AND RHYTHM
― max, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:52 (thirteen years ago) link
okay you're on your own shakey
― plax (ico), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:52 (thirteen years ago) link
Yeah, Shakey, that is one of those things that makes you sound like you don't know or care much about fiction. I don't mean that in a mean way. It's just a bit like saying music today is the same as in the 1800s, because it's basically the same scale and harmonic rules and ballad formats and such. I.e., it seems truer the less you care about particulars.
Fiction does have more continuity with its long-term history than pop music, but I tend to consider that a good thing.
― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:53 (thirteen years ago) link
"I'd read more modern novels but authors are still stuck on archaically using WORDS."
― Opinions are a lot like assholes. You've got LOTS of BOTH of them. (HI DERE), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:53 (thirteen years ago) link
Like, I don't even read any decent fiction and even I know that you are completely talking out of your ass in the most ignorant manner possible.
― Opinions are a lot like assholes. You've got LOTS of BOTH of them. (HI DERE), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:54 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah I know I'm making some horrible strawman generalizations
― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:54 (thirteen years ago) link
Da Vinci Code gets a lot of deserved hate, but it's formally interesting -- every part of the narrative is broken into almost uniform chunks of bite-sized pieces, and he's very disciplined about it -- that story about Wesley Willis once hearing about the perfect length of a song being however many seconds, so he makes EVERY song that long -- i feel like maybe Dan Brown heard something about the perfect length of words where a human being can digest a discrete idea is 43 words exactly.
― Philip Nunez, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:55 (thirteen years ago) link
(Naturally I rate Wesley Willis a better formalist than Dan Brown)
― Philip Nunez, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:56 (thirteen years ago) link
The Lost Symbol is even worse in that way. He has multiple 1/2 page chapters for no good reason beyond a point-of-view shift.
― Opinions are a lot like assholes. You've got LOTS of BOTH of them. (HI DERE), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:56 (thirteen years ago) link
^^^good piece of evidence for the argument that formal inventiveness is not inherently to be wished for
xpost
― horseshoe, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:56 (thirteen years ago) link
about the davinci code though i'm kind of an asshole since i've never read it
― horseshoe, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:57 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah, 2666 >>>>>>>>> savage detectives
― (e_3) (Edward III), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:57 (thirteen years ago) link
a thread called "new novels and why they suck" is like a bug light for dan brown.
― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:57 (thirteen years ago) link
you know who else blows? grisham. man does he blow.
― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:58 (thirteen years ago) link
savage detectives started out great but became a bit of a slog
― (e_3) (Edward III), Friday, 25 June 2010 19:58 (thirteen years ago) link
Yeah, I kinda thought the move away from overt formal trickery was considered a "thing" now. I think there is a vibe in the air of a sort of synthesis of modern formal invention and story/characters you can sink your teeth into, rather than just a supposed return to good old fashioned story-telling. Like elegantly enfolding the psychological truthfulness of formal complexity into the characters themselves, rather than the formal qualities being what the book is about. I don't really read enough contemporary fiction to know what I'm talking about though.
― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Friday, 25 June 2010 19:58 (thirteen years ago) link
i think my favorite bolano is still "nazi literature in the americas" but maybe i'm just a sucker for politicized borges rip-offs.
― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, 25 June 2010 19:59 (thirteen years ago) link