post itt writers you think are bad

i read this thread title quickly as *post itt when you think you are bad*.

really really bad

This is the discursive level that Oyler remains at for much of the book. Take her defence of autofiction, which spends as much time disparaging the genre’s ‘haters’ who ‘begged [her] not to’ write about it as it does making an actual argument.

big strong men, with tears in their eyes, begging lauren oyler not to write about autofiction

https://artreview.com/things-that-annoy-me-lauren-oyler-no-judgement-review

oyler’s interesting - i read most of fake accounts on a long flight the other day, off the back of the essay on anxiety. extremely fluent, knows their own voice and can jump around like a monkey in the rigging with it. it’s enjoyable to be along for the ride. but i do feel the force of that comment about “suggestive motions that look like arguments.”

i think it’s largely m fine when it’s a breezy “this is how i experienced things” (the more or less “i” of fake accounts) though something about FA that i can’t identify about FA felt slightly off, and becomes less fine in the critical essay imo.

again, the essay on anxiety largely v good. but the bit on antidepressants was… poor. her style allows for the caveat that this is just “how i experience it” but as critical thinking it’s a position that feels like it needs some external reference - studies, another opinion etc. this bit opens up a wedge more generally. why am i reading this? what is its relation to anyone but lauren oyler? how’s the position of privileged view been established?

“skill in execution” is a reasonable answer. can’t make up my mind.

anyway. that’s not why i came here.

CHINE MIÉVILLE.

china ffs.

i read perdido street station a long time ago and thought it was okay but iirc there was *so* much about the city being fetid and rotting and horribly 'organic'

i can’t even remember what i don’t like about him and don’t really care any more, but that post has reminded me of something similar in, well, either kraken or the city and the city and thinking omg this man cannot *describe* things coherently. and also cannot write.

"For the most part, the prose in the book sweats to be chatty, with the result that it often has the slightly plaintive quality of a text message from an older parent intent on using outdated slang."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/03/16/lauren-oyler-no-judgment-review/

ouch!

Had a feeling this thread revive would be about Oyler. I don't like her -- there are lots of other writers in that vein who are miles better, but I presume have worse connections -- but not sure she's well-known enough to deserve such prominent pans.

Mieville though! Unreadable. Sentence for sentence one of the most awful writers I can think of. I'm always befuddled that people can finish his books and -- even -- like and enjoy him.

i've only read (but not finished) un lun dun -- i was interested bcz it's mieville's "children's book", and i wondered where his politics would take it given the specific constraints -- and i absolutely concur re bad sentences

but this reminds me: martin amis belongs in thread (entire body made of tin ear)

Mieville has great ideas and that counts for a lot in the genres he writes, I loved Perdido Street Station.

He recently annoyed me with deployment of a lazy-blurb staple, which I will take to the appropriate thread

Mieville's like the Grateful Dead of SF - whenever you express disappointment to a superfan, they tell you you've read the wrong one.

Can I add an audiobook reader here? I can't stand Simon Vance. He always sounds like an American's idea of an English person, like a sly cartoon lion.

i'm pretty sure it was ilx that tried to get me to read mieville. for some reason i never did but i bought some of the paperbacks. i know maria read a few. they always had the whiff of steampunk dust on them and i think that made me afraid.

with oyler, i don't really remember reading any of her reviews but i read the NYT review of her new book and that led me to her novel online because the nyt review said it was so funny and i kept reading it waiting for the funny but then i gave up. it was a little tedious. at least the first 10+ pages anyway.

there always has to be a new critic you love to hate/hate to love/etc. the bad boy/girl thing. its probably healthy in the end.

I loved Perdido Street Station too though it's The City and The City that has stayed with me. The narrative is unmemorable but I loved the conceptual framework. There's a cracking short story too called "Reports of Certain Events in London", about a group of cartographers in London who are tracking streets that seem to be sentient and move during the night. Good Borgesian fun.

i really liked that Mortal Engines movie so i wouldn't count Mieville out. i know he didn't write that book. i don't even know who did. but if someone has a good enough imagination i can overlook clunky writing in genre fiction. i've been doing it for years!

I still own The City and the City but the other books of his I read — Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council and Kraken — have not stuck with me. I don't remember them being particularly bad, just...ordinary.

is tommy orange bad? i am reading there there and maybe it sucks? i can't tell.

i bought a ton of those Dostoyevsky Wannabe books during the pandemic (my friend's store down the street had them all) because i liked the design of them and they had funny titles but i notice that i never want to read one. and i think it also because i can't tell if they are good or not. some of the fucked up poetry ones are good in a fucked up way. now they sit on the shelf and make me think of covid.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/aGUAAOSw28VkRCUs/s-l1600.jpg

I always liked Mieville's ideas more than his execution (ditto Jeff VanderMeer), but hearing about his alleged shitty behaviour in his personal life just made me think that I'd be aiding said behaviour in some small way by buying his books or publicly praising him. His books need to be covered by a better writer, although cover versions don't really exist in the literary world unfortunately other than the odd formal experiment. So not likely to happen.

well, you can always steal ideas. the world is built on that.

there are enough ideas in one p.k.d. or ray bradbury book to fuel a ton of novels. they just threw out ideas like they grew on trees. its up to other people to pick them up and use them.

Can I add an audiobook reader here? I can't stand Simon Vance. He always sounds like an American's idea of an English person, like a sly cartoon lion.

Mieville's like the Grateful Dead of SF - whenever you express disappointment to a superfan, they tell you you've read the wrong one.

He has an unpleasant ranting quality to his prose on occasion, it leaves me feeling like I need to take a shower.

i’m feeling almost bad now. i was expecting everyone to say “no your RONG”.

i didn’t like embassytown. obv. it really annoyed me in fact. think it might be the wellspring in that respect.

Reviews of Embassytown were what convinced me to stop reading Mieville entirely.

Re Dostoyevsky Wannabe, they're in many ways a fancy vanity press.

Or were, I guess, as googling them shows their website/domain has lapsed.

Can I add an audiobook reader here? I can't stand Simon Vance. He always sounds like an American's idea of an English person, like a sly cartoon lion.

Roffle, but like James Redd, I don't mind what I've heard of him at all -- and indeed, attended a small but spirited event here in SF some years back now where he and Guy Gavriel Kay, who he's read for, were the presenters. Ended up in a brief chat with him afterwards and he was very personable!

I’ve listened to a bit of Simon Vance in my day. Sometimes I prefer other readers for certain books, granted. But I really liked his Viriconium, to name one, not that another recording exist to compare with, and I read once about how he prepares so he almost never mispronounces a word, although I think I caught him exactly once. Maybe not the only thing to judge a reader on but it’s definitely a plus.

That Rothfeld review of Oyler's book is pretty funny as both of them are kinda competitors in the um, literary essay market. I can take or leave them on a case by case basis.

Oyler is still otm re: Sebald's fiction.

she is not

I thought Perdido Street Station was amazing myself, but I had a very hard time caring about the next book or anything else I ever tried to read by him.

is tommy orange bad? i am reading _there there_ and maybe it sucks? i can't tell.

On another note: I hate Mieville, I have tried every book of his recommended to me and abandoned each. Awful prose, as interesting as counting grains of sand in a desert

she is not

otm although I like that her takedown piece makes a point of praising Drndc. but that kinda tells you her priorities. Drndc goes out of her way to really punch you in the face at least once per book. Sebold absolutely does not.

I liked There There, and see that Tommy Orange has a new book Wandering Stars

Speaking of Mieville and science fiction, what books of speculative fiction would you guys recommend? I'm curious because I would like to recommend something to my book club. I was thinking of Kindred by Octavia Butler

she is not

Just saying, but the first post explicitly says: "no need to explain yourself, thread is for catharsis not debate"

Kindred is good but (obviously) bleak as fuck. Try Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor. It's a sci-fi adventure set in Nigeria — aliens land in the water on the outskirts of Lagos and the whole city goes wild. It's a lot of fun and a quick read.

I like the Fractured Europe quadrilogy, a bit of a mix between Gibson and Le Carre (leaning toward the former).

I meant to read those a few years ago. Thanks for the reminder.

also qntm - There Is No Antimemetics Division

interconnected weird fiction stories, so much better than something built on the structure of a copypasta wiki thing should be

Steven Markley, The Deluge, much talked-about novel from last year, I looked through it in the bookstore and the writing was v v bad

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troop_(book)

One of the worst Amazon recommendations I’ve followed

Chu is a bad thinker, imho. My friend Nora sums it up quite nicely in her review of Chu's last book:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/ontology-for-edgelords🕸

Lol I forgot i had posted way upthread about disliking something else she wrote as well!

Maybe ALC is the literary equivalent of LCD Soundsystem for me