post itt writers you think are bad

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.

It's funny, Dan S, because I think Maggie Nelson is bourgeois liberal idpol nonsense of the highest sort, totally disposable trash

am afraid to read Gilead because I think I will not like it, but Housekeeping was strange and was memorable to me

Raymond Carver

The jump in quality in his posthumous collection Cathedral was so dramatic, given that Gordon Lish was able to do what he wanted, that I subsequently started reading all Lish's other collaborators and discovered one of my fave short story authors, Joy Williams

joy williams rocks

I think Maggie Nelson is bourgeois liberal idpol nonsense of the highest sort, totally disposable trash

― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Sunday, February 14, 2021 5:13 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

she sucks

i should have started this thread with maggie nelson

the polarized views on Nelson i've encountered periodically make me want to read her out of curiosity, but i could make no headway with The Argonauts.

Joy Williams is great, yes! I love teaching the title story from Cathedral. Otherwise, I kind of think one can sum up Carver pretty easily: alcoholic suburbanites in deindustrialized America fight and converse about their troubles. It's a shtick that gets pretty old pretty quickly.

https://www.theonion.com/ask-raymond-carver-1819583880

marilynne robinson's main problem is her similes. housekeeping would have been pretty good without them and even with them it was quite haunting

interesting to me that maggie nelson argonauts is considered bourgeois liberal idpol by radical poets of ilx. maybe that’s why i liked it so much :) i generally find radical humanities ppl to be totally insufferable and incomprehensible but her voice was incredibly compassionate and thoughtful to me. curious to hear about why she sucks

i wasn’t as crazy about bluets

I'm unable to read Hilary Mantel but I suppose she may not be "bad". But I seriously don't get the appeal.

@flopson: *taps the first post*

I think all but the most callow and insecure Murakami stans would concede that it’s justified to believe he is completely bad

no one cares about my joan didion hot take but - i used to be really into her when i was younger, but the more i read over the years (and the more i grew up) the more i realized she didn't really have much to say. she is very good at reporting and observing though, especially as related to anxiety. just that when she is reporting or observing herself, or the fictional world she is constructing in her novels, there isn't anything very interesting there imo, beyond .. generalized anxiety. i guess i think that's bad writing.

there can be good writing that is only about oneself, but that oneself shouldn't be a nervous uptight celeb or it's bad writing, is how i break it down.

i love joan didion and did not take issue with her first mention on this thread and i even think you're kinda otm map, for instance the essay about california's water systems sings more to me than any of her more personal dwellings (maybe bc her feelings about water are more personal for her than her own history, idk it's possible). i love play it as it lays but it is kind of a narrow and uneven book. i love book of common prayer but it's also... kinda lopsided. her best work that i've read remains miami which embodies the strengths you identify, it's keenly observed

i love didion and disagree that writing that is "only about oneself" is bad. also am totally irrational on this topic.

yeah, the california water stuff is something that often stands out in my mind. i should give miami a shot. xp

maybe i also have some "california as a topic" fatigue though, wrt didion.

I recognize that Adam Gopnik is bad but he’s bad in a way I enjoy

gopnik is good on a very narrow range of subjects and mostly terrible on anything else imo

bolaño

:-(

I think Maggie Nelson is bourgeois liberal idpol nonsense of the highest sort, totally disposable trash

― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Sunday, February 14, 2021 5:13 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Also bad opinion.

Bolano has held up really well I reckon. Savage Detectives is not good as are a lot of the posthumously published matter.

I have only heard Gopnik on R4's A Ppint of View, and have not been at all impressed

Like Solnit, Nelson is a bourgeois striver who dismisses radical members of the working class for disagreeing with her shitty class, gender, and racial politics. They both suck.

She writes a lot less than Solnit for a start (Solnit is a fair regular in The Guardian and in wider conversation), wiki tells me Argonauts was her last book (2015) so she is already far less of a 'striver' and I don't get any Solnit type vibes in her writing, which is just The Argonauts, so far.

bolaño

Yay I'm not alone

I love Maggie Nelson, specifically Jane and Bluets, but just like Anne Carson I get why people wouldn't be into her

Bluets isn't bad as a book, though I think Gass did better with "On Being Blue." (I just really hate the Argonauts, tbqh).

I'm not sure I totally agree with fellow poet K4y G4briel, but any interested in Carson might be interested in this take: https://tripwirejournal.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/tw14gabrieloncarson.pdf

A Separate Peace really impressed me as a kid. It was taught in schools at the time. I was just realizing I was gay when I read it and its content to me felt like a beacon

I later had an amazing experience related to it - I got to meet its author John Knowles by chance, happening to sit next to him at the Alta Plaza bar in SF in the 80s. I told him how much it affected me as a child. He was taken aback but I thought it meant a lot to him, it made me feel good to be able to tell him that

it wasn't very good in retrospect but I will always love it

i have nothing specific against donald antrim but dude has written like 500 words per year for 30 years now

let's go buddy

Oh now I do have an opinion, I've railed against Antrim before on here somewhere.

My work emails nobody reads probably average 500 words and I write at least one of those a week.

read Shuggie Bain recently, had a hard time with it, seems like there is a trend for fiction like this that presents so much suffering, is it good?

thought Shuggie's eventual connection with another child like him redeemed it though

i have nothing specific against donald antrim but dude has written like 500 words per year for 30 years now

let's go buddy

yeah we're aware

ok this isn't quite what the thread is searching for, but

thomas friedman