post itt writers you think are bad

really didn’t like sally rooney

lol me neither, but i only read Conversations with Friends. also i feel like she is somewhat a victim of the marketing/hype machine--Kazuo Ishiguro recommended that novel in some NYT book review which is why i read it. that's like Jane Austen recommending Ann M. Martin or some shit! why did he do it? she seems smart enough, but it is not a good novel! she could definitely write one someday.

feel like there is a phenomenon where olds (people my age, i mean) look to rooney as some kind of oracle of young people, which is dumb.

the Ishiguro rec is related to a problem where it seems like everyone in the book world is friends, so reviews are...lies.

the Oyler trick mirror hit piece had some bars but didn’t really have an overarching point even though it was structured as if it did, which was confusing

CWF worked as a mass market paperback thing, and I found the sexual fluidity decently presented.

i don't think it was unskillful in structure (Conversations with Friends) but it was morally unserious and the descriptions of physical landscape and stuff were BAD. she said grass smelled "allergic" at some point or something wack like that.

maybe "allergenic"? shit like that drives me crazy.

i was primed to enjoy a trick mirror takedown and it’s almost all unreadable garbage imo. check out her defense of dan savage or her pan of lady bird for more sick unreadable garbage. she’s what we refer to in the industry as a bad take machine

re: oyler

Haven’t ever read this person but with that pedigree I have to assume she’ll be going full terf any day now

oh my posts just reminded me

rachel syme

steve hyden, obv

maybe too obvious, i need more scorching takes for the intended tone of this thread

FUCK homer j/k

lol. i could pretend i think Ishighuro is a bad writer for that purpose, but it would be a lie.

he is an insincere recommender of novels, though. or maybe he likes Conversation with Friends because it makes him feel superior?

So, like, an orgy?

2xp

another bad book in the Muslim minstrelsy vein (there's a market for it!) is the play Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar. his new novel keeps getting praised everywhere, but i refuse to be taken in because that play is poo.

So if this was Patricia Lockwood’s first novel then Priestdaddy was actually non-fiction?

Priestdaddy is a memoir, i believe? i haven't read it but her thing on Updike in the LRB was amazing.

Yeah, but it’s so crazy it seems like it might be fictionalized.

every new American novelist from the past 20 years prob, maybe even 50 years

re: Ishiguro, remains of the day is insanely bad but the unconsoled rules

uh

Remains of the Day is perfect

a writer i’ve never managed to enjoy is murakami but i get the impression i’ve read the wrong stuff

bongo that is an amazingly hot take on ishiguro, props

I read Never Let Me Go, which I thought was trivial at best, and am not really interested in more

lotta people like remains of the day but it just comes off like a bad parody of what being British is to me

You people really need to stop reading literary fiction. It's a bottomless sewer. Try reading nothing but crime fiction for a year instead. Tana French is a fucking amazing writer.

i don't like the Murakami i've read (Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), but i just put him in the "not for me" category. like Cormac McCarthy.

i love tana french; reading literary fiction hasn't gotten in the way of my devouring her novels.

agreed that tana french is amazing, not what thread is for

wild sheeps chase is pretty alright re: Murakami but never liked anything else

whenever i finish a tana french i feel despair at having to wait 2+ years for the next one.

wind up bird chronicle was one of the worst reading experiences i’ve ever had

yet the dude had such a profound influence on wkw i can’t write him off

i have friends who love Murakami; i'm assuming i'm missing something, but yes, i did not enjoy Wind Up Bird Chronicle

I find laszlo krasznahorkai (translations) to be unreadable besides war & war, which is a completely astonishing work, plus all the work he's done for Tarr I guess

(also, unperson if the lit fiction thing was directed at me, i like a lot of it, too! it's just not what the thread's about.)

I don't remember anything from wind up bird chronicle except the description of how to make spaghetti that read like it was from an esl book. I'm guessing a lot of works by venerated authors I don't like have just been poorly translated

Raymond Carver

Ooh a juicy one!

How do you know if Carver's any good or not, though? I've never read the de-Gordon-Lishified versions of his stories, have you?

Obvious nominee: Tom Wolfe. Liked him in high school, but his right-wing crankitude became clearer and clearer over time (see also: Joan Didion).

I read Krasznahorkai's Satantango because I loved the film so much, but it didn't give me anything the film hadn't, and the prose was nothing special.

feel like there is a phenomenon where olds (people my age, i mean) look to rooney as some kind of oracle of young people, which is dumb.

― horseshoe, Sunday, 14 February 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Some of the crit around Rooney feels insane for this reason. Almost want to giver her a go.

Krasznahorkai's Seibo There Below is really good though. True he is up and down, but his engagement with an eastern strand is worth giving a go.

thought Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts was interesting but maybe violated a few accepted boundaries. I bought a copy for a friend who is an avid reader and immediately regretted it.

Lord of the Flies was the first adult book I read, I was a middle-schooler, my mother took us to the library every Friday night and I picked it out for some reason. I was really impressed by it and felt like an adult reading it, and think in retrospect it was the book that ultimately hooked me on reading novels

Here's one:

I think Marilynne Robinson isn't very good, people gave me her novels for years, and every time I just couldn't get into them at all, mostly because I think Calvinism is rank bullshit of the highest sort.