new novels and why they suck and whatever

i don't know what's wrong with not wanting to do my own work? i just wanna like what i read.

― Hans-Jörg Butt (harbl), Friday, June 25, 2010 1:26 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i don't think there's anything wrong with that fwiw. personally, i feel like i used to have a near-superstitious fear about getting sucked into reading something "bad" because omg all the good books out there, i don't have any time, fear of death stuff. lately, relaxing that "standard" (which meant in practice that i just reread the same five novels over and over) has been liberating. but yeah, i like to get recommendations, too.

"so you kids want a formally experimental literally magazine where every story is good and that's also totally off the wall and swarming with magic robots."
"also, you should be able to win stuff by reading."

yall have given me so many not answers

that's why it would possibly have been helpful if you had posed the question in the thread instead of the impress me/i'm bored thing you went for.

but you could look at The Quarterly Conversation:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/

and the associated blog Conversational Reading:

http://conversationalreading.com/

but their focus is quite heavily slanted towards work in translation.

i don't know what's wrong with not wanting to do my own work? i just wanna like what i read.

― Hans-Jörg Butt (harbl), Friday, June 25, 2010 1:26 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

nothing wrong with it! theres just a difference between "all modern novels suck" and "im sure a lot of good stuff is out there i just dont have the time to track it down" you know

if there IS a 'crisis' in literary fiction it probably has more to do with the business of publishing and the culture of reading in this country, two things that i remain pretty well convinced arent related, in particular, to the artistic/literary merit of the produced works

I think this is pretty much otm. The cutlture of reading is a big topic and I can't claim to have any real insights, but the number of adults I see reading Twilight on the subway really gets me down. Books are marketed as entertainment (ie as one part of a larger bundle of entertainment offerings), and I think are increasingly consumed as such.

There is plenty of good fiction being written and published these days; I don't keep up on 'new novels' as much as I'd like to but off the top of my head I read and loved 'Netherland' (Joseph O'Neill) and 'The Slap' (Christos Tsialkos) and 'Schopenhauer's Telescope' (Gerard Donovan) in the past year. All amazing literary fiction. That's in addition to the heavyweights, most of whom I've enjoyed at least a bit. And I bloody love Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians is amazing, probably my favourite novel). I tend to get my recommendations from blogs and reviews (and ILB) these days, since I don't have many real life friends who are as into fiction as I am. BUT I need to read more contemporary female writers since I haven't found any to love lately - recommendations welcome.

speaking of which, scott seward, if you stop by this thread, i read a book of joy williams short stories because of you and they were crazy amazing so thank you!

bought gravity's rainbow last week on foot of ilx recommendations in a joyce thread, does pynchon fit in here? (I've not started it yet tbh)

i mean come on guys yr basically asking for an avant-garde oprah

I think Shakey should read Paul Magrs.

specifically this book: http://www.drwhoguide.com/whobbc27.htm

Yes it's a Doctor Who book, but it is also entirely surreal and beautifully written, using the idea of parallel universes in a really fantastic way both in terms of plot and of novel structure.

btw i dont really have a lot of recommendations for like "where to find out about the cool new novels" because unless i hear from friends or ppl i work with mostly i just hear about them from big middlebrow places like the nyt book review or the nyer critics section

i am under the impression that there are several websites out there that "book-themed" though

also I want an avant-garde Oprah, too! Although I'm afraid it would actually end up being Lady Gaga.

but the number of adults I see reading Twilight on the subway really gets me down

I'm reading The Girl Who Played With Fire (pretty overrated imo and I like crime fiction and thrillers, dunno if I'll bother to read the third one in the series) but anyway I ended up in the same subway car with two other people also reading and thought "omg I'm reading the new Da Vinci Code here"

Excellent book blog with A+ recommendations: The Elegant Variation http://marksarvas.blogs.com/

xpost

I just finished Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow, which, as I wrote on the latest reading thread, shows the peril of depending on pages and pages of dialogue to no end.

I don't know if there's any "crisis" in contemporary fiction -- some alarmist is always quick to point to one when technological innovations seem insuperable. For myself, I tend to avoid new fiction that calls attention to itself: a novelist pleased with his erudition (Chabon), or plays a lot of tired narrative and POV games (Foer). Two of the best novels I read last year were written by "traditionalists": William Trevor's Love and Summer and Colm Toibin's Brooklyn. The latter really scored a minor triumph: he took a worn story whose sentimental elements peeked around the edges and purged them.

I think Bolano's The Savage Detectives and 2666 fit the modern and ambitious requirements perfectly.

DMR I know what you mean, but I have to disagree on the overrated bit, I couldn't put it down...

xpost

Yes it's a Doctor Who book, but

lol love ya Dan

Coetzee and McEwan also write novels that are almost always worth reading.

liked the first one better, the second had some things that annoyed me but they're too spoilerish to talk abt (xposts)

a novelist pleased with his erudition (Chabon)

omg I hate this fucking guy. someone else who was recommended to me and then when I actually slogged through it made me want to kill myself

the elephant in the room here is named bill vollmann

bolano's wikipedia page is pretty weird

The old-fashioned ways of picking up interesting novels (and books generally) still works for me: reading the NY Review of Books, New Yorker, and Guaridan; recommendations from friends; footnotes in books I'm reading now.

i am under the impression that there are several websites out there that "book-themed" though

I was on this "Shelfari" site for awhile but got sick of people constantly e-mailing me about whether they should read "The Master and Margarita"

the elephant in the room here is named bill vollmann

hmmm yeah that was an ommission from my list, altho I kinda soured on him. I liked his story collections stuff a lot (Atlas in particular, but also Rainbow Stories)... but his historical stuff made me less interested, and I tired of his odes to prostitutes too. Similar to McCarthy, there's a kind of built-in despair to his stuff that can be oppressive/hard to take

Also, you know, Toni Morrison is still writing great books although i know I'm in the minority for believing that they get better and better. Love and A Mercy are pretty far out imo, i think they are genuinely experimental.

Yep, Larsson can definitely be annoying stylistically.

I haven't read a ton of Vollman but Europe Central was a great slow burner. Loved it.

a novelist pleased with his erudition (Chabon)

omg I hate this fucking guy. someone else who was recommended to me and then when I actually slogged through it made me want to kill myself

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is one of my favorite first novels (perhaps this topic is worth a thread?), but he's spending too much time in libraries learning about Allied expeditions in Alaska in 1943 or whatever. He integrates these historical interludes with a startling lack of finesse.

xxxxxposts jellinek sounds like exactly up my alley btw

Yup. The big problem is not having good new novels to read, it is finding them among the hundreds of new novels you do not want to read. It's easier to find and read decent not-new novels, because the winnowing process of a few decades has caused the great majority of mediocre, not-new novels to vanish.

here's a great article on Bolano for anyone interested.

xp she is one of my favorites

I wish they would hurry up and translate the one she got the nobel for

joy williams's's quick and the dead is pretty good, kind of off the wheels shit. The tricks she has are good but she doesn't have tooooo many tho

javier marias a heart so white was pretty great

The big problem is not having good new novels to read, it is finding them among the hundreds of new novels you do not want to read

^^^this

i feel like this thread is delivering. I really wanna order a shitload of these and come back in a month or two and be like "thanks guys"

i haven't read quick and the dead yet. i read a story collection called "honored guest." it was an intensity.

javier marias a heart so white was pretty great

I'm almost done with the 3rd vol. of YFT & think it's totally incredible btw

yeah, compiling recommendations from this thread for my summer reading list.

but is there anything particularly important about new novels where you ought to read them now versus waiting for the winnowing?
I mean is there some value attached to their currency where it won't be quite the same reading them some years later?

whenever I see any of the yft books I kind of shuffle away quickly

ooh someone else fairly recent I forgot to mention who is obviously a heavy-hitter that I dug: Saramago (RIP)

Yeah, Saramago was good.

sometimes i like to feel like i have a sense for the current moment in literary culture. also, i do like to feel like "aw who the fuck cares if this novel doesn't reflect my superior literary taste" and it's exciting to feel like you're just reading a bunch of uncharted territory stuff. both those things are probably just related to my own reactionary moment against my attitudes toward literature my whole life, though.

xposts to Philip

but is there anything particularly important about new novels where you ought to read them now versus waiting for the winnowing?
I mean is there some value attached to their currency where it won't be quite the same reading them some years later?

― Philip Nunez, Friday, June 25, 2010 1:50 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you wont get invited to any of the good parties

xp what horsehoe said

shakey i would join ur bookclub btw

barry hannah also p good and dead

The big problem is not having good new novels to read, it is finding them among the hundreds of new novels you do not want to read

Another big problem is being broke and relying on an underfunded suburban library system for the majority of your book needs. That might be why I've read Dostoevskey and Proust and Wilde this year instead of the newer writers that the library will never get.

eh you can never read too much Oscar Wilde imho

but yeah I echo plax that this thread has delivered on some interesting recs that I will check out. will be good to have a nice long list for my next trip to Powell's in Portland on July 4th