Authors you will never read

But how do we know that eg: G.R.R. Martin is bad?

It does sound trite to me, but maybe it's actually well done? I don't know - have never read a word nor seen a minute of the TV programme.

I think it makes sense to say 'I'll never read him' but not so much sense to be certain that he's bad, without reading him.

I fear that I am coming round to DC's position!

Tolkien is very good as children's fiction - THE HOBBIT a key book for me, as for many, at the age of perhaps 8. Lovely stuff.

So I can't dismiss that either.

There is no certainty of course. Ian McEwan might turn out to be excellent. Lots of shitty people are writers I enjoy, after all. But he is in a class of what Bernhard would call a state approved novelist.

I will list out more of my assumptions later.

But how do we know that eg: G.R.R. Martin is bad?

It does sound trite to me, but maybe it's actually well done? I don't know - have never read a word nor seen a minute of the TV programme.

I cannot know if he's a bad writer. I shan't equate "will never read" with "it's a bad writer", but fantasy, hobbits and elfs and whatnot bore, nay actively annoy me. It's just not for me. I'm dismissing a whole genre here and I feel fine.

It's different for me to say I'd never read McEwan of Franzen (I've read both but they were mentioned above); I'd at least have to have read *something* in order to be put off imo. Though public appearance increasingly takes care of that, I suppose.

The Rowling/Coldplay comparison to me works more in that it's pretty much taken as a given that the sort of person who posts on lit threads on ILX won't be interested in Rowling, much as it's a given that yr average ILM poster will have no time for Coldplay.

I get what you're saying OL, but honestly it's probably better for your soul to read Kerouac at an age when you can see the gender dynamics clearly and not be influenced by them

To be fair to Kerouac one of the things that I remember from reading On The Road is the passage where he visits a couple and the woman is so pissed off that her dude is going off on some shenanigans, and he has this moment of going "oh wow all of us dudes are treating women like shit for the sake of our kicks, huh?". Not that that makes him change his ways in any way, but dude does spell it out.

Anyway, I'm with treeship. I will eventually have read all authors, much as I will eventually have seen all films and listened to all music, for scientific purposes.

It goes without saying that even if you are the most widely-read person in the world, there will be many, many more authors you haven't read and never will than those you have.

So when you're singling an author our as someone you will never read, you're talking about yourself rather than the author really. "I don't enjoy fantasy/sci-fi/horror" is an honest appraisal of your tastes (you might watch a film in those genres obviously, but watching a film is a lot less time and effort-intensive than reading).

"I won't read this person because I think of them as a state-approved novelist" DOES feel like personal brand-building, or wearing a badge of honour, especially because it throws open a load of complications and contractions. (Who is a state approved novelist in modern day Britain? Is there anyone who ISN'T? How many excellent novelists that the person in question enjoys and rates are also state-approved novelists?) etc etc.

Even novelists I'd feel naturally dismissive of, I'd need to see at least an extract first. I read a page of Sally Rooney expecting to completely hate it, but I'll give her this - she captures internet dialogue really well. She should write an online epistolary novel; I'd totally read that

Also if you're defining yourself against something ideologically then it helps to engage and understand it. I've never read Ayn Rand and am 99% sure I would hate her and maybe reading her becomes more necessary b/c her badness is so widely influential on a lot of people's thought?

Granted there are few similar imperatives for reading, say, Ian McEwan, who I have read and even when he's good is pretty much straight-down-the-line literary fiction. (Although you could perhaps get something more out of him approaching him as, say, a thriller writer).

lol I feel like there's a divide in this thread between people who've already read McEwan and Rowling (hi!) and those who haven't and are feeling extremely smug about it

co lol Matt I was going to ask whether you had read McEwan.

State-approved is a tad obscure a reason to be deemed as brand-building to me.* But in terms of what it involves there is a class of novelist that gets a lot more light on them, who are published more easily and get onto the literary prize ladder too so what they actually write gets obscured. In someone who is good and attracts that kind of attention I'd expect the writing to come through at some point, but in this case it has not.

* wrt Bernhard it's ironing because he got every prize in the German language world.

co = XP lol autocorrect

"Even novelists I'd feel naturally dismissive of, I'd need to see at least an extract first."

Lol to be young!

Interesting thread.

Pom, I won't read 'Hatred of Poetry' because the premise seems... factually incorrect, and also rather disingenuous of Lerner to write a screed against the very thing that got him to where he is. He certainly didn't get where he is by being a good teacher, by all accounts.

I've never read Roth, or Rowling, and never read more than an Oates story or two.

Much of what is considered mainstream literary fiction bores me to tears, so I dismiss much of it outright when I probably shouldn't. Evidence is my recent realization of my love for Alice Munro.

Also re yr comment, for the past few years, poetry book sales have been increasing at a rapid clip, so while it's drops in the bucket numbers-wise, I'm not so sure that poets are universally ignored in the way that you characterize. Not that I'm big on being valued by a disgusting and depraved society, but y'know...

I have been told to read Cheever my whole life and I never have but I should and probably will
I will probably read Infinite Jest at some point

I've read many authors and wish I hadn't-- Murakami, Franzen, Bolano, Pynchon all spring to mind
Same for many poets, none more glaring than Berryman

I love Nabokov

I have never read Ezra Pound and never will

I guess this is just literature you're talking about? Because I will never read Freud. It just doesn't seem worth the bother in 2020.

I certainly will never read another Shusaku endo book, his bloviating Catholicism was pretty tedious in the Samurai and I’ve since learnt he’s a massive racist so that’s two reasons to wish I’d never read that book and have no desire to read any others.

Murakami, Franzen, Bolano, Pynchon

Two of these are not like the other two imo!

None of them are like any of the others.

Pom, I won't read 'Hatred of Poetry' because the premise seems... factually incorrect, and also rather disingenuous of Lerner to write a screed against the very thing that got him to where he is. He certainly didn't get where he is by being a good teacher, by all accounts.

Thankfully, it's not I Hate Poetry, it's The Hatred of Poetry, i.e. an inquiry into why some people loathe the art.

Does anyone care about Ian McEwan outside of the UK? I doubt he elicits any strong feelings one way or another in North America.

pretty sure McEwan exports

Oh he most certainly does, I just have never seen him referred to as anything other 'that dece British novelist', the subtext being that his writing is quite forgettable.

Is there a name for people like Ian McEwan who write a few good books (First Love, Last Rites; The Cement Garden; In Between the Sheets) then spend many decades churning out vastly inferior work which is for some reason still wildly successful? Last thing of his I read was Saturday, without hyperbole one of the worst novels I've ever read, and certainly the last of his I'll bother with. Will say that his novels often lead to film adaptations which significantly improve on the source material.

IDK, Don DeLillo's work fits that as well, the new millennium was absolutely disastrous for him. Maybe this is the case with most novelists.

Murakami, Franzen, Bolano, Pynchon

Two of these are not like the other two imo!

― imago, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

None of them are like any of the others.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Don't think the poster was attempting to make a distinction beyond listing a bunch of 'literatute' that was tried and disliked.

Re: Rowling, I quite like high fantasy and am inordinately fond of the genre's classics, but a setting that revolves around posh children at a totally-not-English boarding school is one of the most off-putting premises for a fairy tale that I can imagine. The only fictive boarding schools I have any interest in are more firmly rooted in historical reality, such as the (partial) backdrop to Louis-René des Forêts's semi-autobiographical, fragmentary probes into the nature of memory, mendacity and unavowable childhood trauma in Ostinato. I've always found the very concept of such schools oppressive from the get-go so any bowdlerized take on it, no matter how 'innocent', gets my hackles up.

I guess this is just literature you're talking about? Because I will never read Freud. It just doesn't seem worth the bother in 2020.

― Joey Corona (Euler)

Not gonna fully try to sway you, but some Freud is good and interesting reading, and much better taken when the ideas are not informing treatment.

Is there a name for people like Ian McEwan who write a few good books... then spend many decades churning out vastly inferior work which is for some reason still wildly successful?

Yeah, the name is "white men".

yes, they do always seem to be middle/upper class straight white men.

Agreed, Freud is far more fruitfully read as a philosopher (one who was very much of his time, at that) than as a psychoanalyst.

xp

"The Rowling/Coldplay comparison to me works more in that it's pretty much taken as a given that the sort of person who posts on lit threads on ILX won't be interested in Rowling, much as it's a given that yr average ILM poster will have no time for Coldplay."

I think more people on ILX (lots of books discussion on ILE before ILB) would engage with Rowling and children's books in general (because they read as kid lit while growing up, then there are the films) more than an ILM-er would with Coldplay as ILM is more its own thing -- people had specific histories with indie already so by the time Coldplay comes along ILM is kinda done with it?

xps to pom: I used to read Enid Blyton books about boarding school as a child and love them, but I was bluntly dissuaded from the idea by my dad, whose experience at boarding school was hell. Definitely inculcates with some dodgy ideas.

Reading Molesworth definitely made me want to go boarding school (so I could learn about gerunds!) And is Harry Potter a 'posh child'? I always thought his name was partly an attempt to make the 'wizard school' premise more egalitarian (as it is in Wizard of Earthsea, the most obvious precursor to Potter).

Freud still offers plenty of metaphoric juice and insight, especially when applied to cultural products from the Freudian 20th-century. It's hard to discuss film noir, just for example, without getting Freudian.

Freud -- not that I've read much -- is more of a reader/critic to me.

My overall feeling about McEwan now is ... It's easy to perceive him as an irritating (or even offensive) person, or commentator, or 'personality' ... But ... he's actually often good at writing fiction. So it's OK to read that, in its own right, and see what you feel about it.

Almost exactly the same with Franzen. Very irritating persona; fiction often well done and interesting.

It's absolutely true that writers do off a cliff, and DC is right to point to DeLillo - but FWIW I don't see McEwan as an example of this. Amis much more so!

xps to gyac: your dad is a wise man.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but the fact that a boarding school is called an 'internat' in Romanian (and French) is quite ominous, since it can also function as an adjective (not in French, however) meaning 'hospitalized' (e.g. committed to a psychiatric ward) or simply 'locked up'. I also get the sense that it's a far more common 'educational' arrangement in Britain/ex-British colonies/Commonwealth countries.

Funnily enough I'd even say the same about Zadie Smith. Some good non-fiction, some really bad - enough to put you off her, from a distance.

But the work - On Beauty, NW - can be really serious and ambitious and impressive; it maybe renders the badness of the essays irrelevant. A 'trust the tale not the teller' factor.

... All of this seems a good reason for the occasionally noted strategy of a writer being a recluse and not putting their 'personality' out there at all; just letting any sense of it arise from the fiction.

And is Harry Potter a 'posh child'? I always thought his name was partly an attempt to make the 'wizard school' premise more egalitarian

Such nuances are lost on yours truly, a foreigner.

I very much enjoy A Wizard of Earthsea, by the way. If memory serves, Ged's passage through wizard school is quite brief and very few details are provided about its 'culture'. Le Guin depicts the experience in a more muted and archetypal light, which I prefer.

"Also for real saying you're never going to read JK Rowling or even someone like Ian McEwan is like ostentatiously stating that you've never heard a Coldplay record.

― Matt DC"

statements which probably mean different things in the us than they do in the uk

i still for some reason have never managed the ability to consistently differentiate ian mcewan and iain m. banks

i tried reading banks but i didn't much like his writing style

i've never _knowingly_ heard a coldplay record

"I will probably read Infinite Jest at some point

― flamboyant goon tie included"

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

Murakami: I'm a fan of the hyper-politicized post-war Japanese lit theatre (Oe, Mishima), and found Murakami's apoliticism unappealing, kind of a Superflat-esque shruglit. That said, I adore David Mitchell's homages to Murakami
Franzen: felt defensive at all times
Bolano: I guess I liked The Savage Detectives but 2666 just left me wanting to stop reading fake-Flaubert and re-read real-Flaubert
Pynchon: idk I just don't like it

Endo was recommended to me over a decade ago, I read "Silence", I hated it, but I still wanna watch the movie adaptation for whatever reason

I'm still gonna read Infinite Jest
And Coldplay rules what are you guys talking about

What is great about Earthsea imo is how "Wizard" is told-slant male-protagonist fantasy fiction but the series shifts tone and focus along with Le Guin's increasing radicalization over the years

Harry Potter is a public schoolboy who lives off a trust fund and is popular because he's good at sport, he marries his high school sweetheart and becomes a cop after dropping out of sixth form.

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, 6 August 2020 14:32 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the absolute fuck is this post

xps to gyac: your dad is a wise man.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but the fact that a boarding school is called an 'internat' in Romanian (and French) is quite ominous, since it can also function as an adjective (not in French, however) meaning 'hospitalized' (e.g. committed to a psychiatric ward) or simply 'locked up'. I also get the sense that it's a far more common 'educational' arrangement in Britain/ex-British colonies/Commonwealth countries.

...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.

Heh, I've been meaning to read that one!

Is Murakami apolitical? I haven’t read all his stuff but Wind-Up Bird did definitely write about the Japanese in Manchuria and it didn’t come across as neutral to me. You have to take that in the context of Japanese politicians seeming to constantly play down their history too.

Murakami wrote that book on the Tokyo gas attack. But that was a few years after I read a bunch, enjoyed it ok then stopped.

But if you are coming at him from Mishima and Oe it would be disappointing.

Oh yeah of course, he goes a bit further in his interviews.