post itt writers you think are bad

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

re: tommy orange & Wonder what you are not liking about it?

i don't want to be a dick b/c a lot of people seem to get a lot from the novel but, for example, a character with fetal alcohol syndrome keeps referring to FAS as "the Drome" and it feels very dorky and MFA-ish, like something a david foster wallace character would do, except embedded in an otherwise very serious (almost po-faced) novel

No titans walk among us anymore, wtf

Perfect thread to see at the top of sna when im trying to find something. who is the modern british writer who has a thread dedicated to his really inane, long winded sentences?

John lanchester

thx bbz

adam, I can see that. I think the issue is that there are literally so few depictions of contemporary indigenous people living in urban environments that some of the more MFA-ish or unlikely stylistic and tonal choices are overlooked. I think that’s fine, personally, but could see how it could irk

I read them all for college, so I feel like I can comfortably say Alice Walker is bad, very bad.

The early stuff is bad but you at least get the sense of what she's refining and working through to get to The Color Purple. Everything after TCP is just irredeemly indulgent.

Obviously she's an important figure for brining FGM to public awareness, but unfortunately her FGM books are also very bad.

reading that sebald thing. the first paragraph, which is, i guess, supposed to be somewhat sebaldian, although she mentions bernhard, is really boring and this is what people who do sebald perhaps don't understand. he wasn't boring. in fact, he was a page-turner for someone who wrote the kind of thing that he wrote.

this made me laugh. "Anytime you encounter a text that involves what the novelist Sam Pink calls “the dreaded tidbit”—“the recently popular thing of doing like, little book reports in the book”—you have Sebald to thank."

duh, you have Google to thank! how someone could not mention that is just silly.

i agree with this though:

"The most beautiful aspects of Sebald’s work have little to do with his enigmatic scene-stealing alter ego and the tricks he plays on anyone searching for autobiography; his great strength lies in the conventional narrative pleasures he offers with sensitivity, texture, and emotion, allowing subtle details to accrue so patiently that the realization, when it comes, feels like memory."

yes, I liked that bit. but the other thing about "little book reports in the book" -- this is a writer who either has not read, or is not calling to mind, a whole ton of last-forty-years Spanish literature. Vila-Matas, Pitol for starters. But also throughout European literature there's an allusive thread that's very appealing to me. feature not bug

"I thought of an essay by Patricia Lockwood about the work of Rachel Cusk, whose writing is so influenced by Sebald that you could swap their sentences without anyone noticing"

no...