Authors you will never read

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.

― American Fear of Scampos (Ed), Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Its more about not ever reading a writer's book in the first place, but if I had one of these its Julian Barnes. I read Flaubert's Parrot for the ILB book club and it was short and fine (maybe if it was longer it would not have been) and I cannot remember much about it now. Years later I read his piece on Lydia Davis' translation of Bovary and his displeasure at Davis' trolling amused me a lot!

xps = ok Pom, if I see it I'll give it a go.

there's always so many books about psychic amphibian overlords sucking each others buttholes.

Recommendations?

I know that kind of thing exists but I sadly haven't got around to it yet.

tfw you are strengthening up the brand

https://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01929/falk_1929983c.jpg

self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. 

I understand this position, and would heartily agree if it wasn't for the massive importance Knausgaard has for me. His writing his way through - not out of - shame was something I hadn't known I needed.

Maybe there are other writers who handle that everpresent, causeless suppression without falling for the "just a lonely guy thinking about things" trap that Knausgaard certainly does, open to suggestions. But there is a flavor to his work I have found unique so far.

I guess what I mean is - I know there is a massive literature of shame, I find Knausgaard's approach to it, in which it is the constant never-spoken background, uniquely speaks to me.

Knausgaard is one I won't touch with a ten-foot pole.

fwiw i haven't read knausgaard and wasn't talking about him

didn't read the new yorker article at the beginning of the thread either. tried reading it in private mode, the site told me i couldn't do that, i decided the article wasn't worth reading.

I bailed out on Karl Ove after volume 2. At this point in my life I can't do with a 1st draft anymore. But yeah its had enough of an impact on people, and I love Archipelago.

Since we are talking about him I want to mention that Linda Bostrom Knausgaard might be well worth reading, from the one short intense book of hers. More is being translated and I will look at picking it up.

and lukas, that wasn't meant to bash on you, and sorry if it came off that way.

I just read some reviews and learned a bit about Knausgaard when those books were really popping off and the whole thing just turned me off permanently.

To me, auto-fiction and auto-theory are genres that have arguably always been done best by queer people, and to be frank, I just don't give a fuck about some white straight twat from Norway...but that's a very, very personal take.

Oh didn't take it that way at all, but appreciate you and Kate clarifying things. And I definitely understand being turned off by Knausgaard.

xp

yeah after experiencing an upbringing that worshipped the nuclear family, as in literally ascribing it supernatural power and authority, i just have no interest in an author writing about his wife and kids no matter how sharply - realize that's a personal hang-up but so it goes

i did like a sample of knausgaard i tried when he was in the spotlight but at this point i doubt i'll read more

this thread reminds me I have to finish the my struggle novels. I'm sure the library will re-open one day

you know now that i think about it, i was kind of surprised by how engaged i was by the sample of kgard i read. so maybe i actually will try again lol

Ohh i thought of a good one...

Edward Abbey

i worked at a bookstore in moab and successfully avoided reading that asshole and plan on doing so for the remainder of my days. same with john muir. really hate most american naturalist writing tbh.

SO DO I!!

I thought I was alone in this regard.

The only one I remotely like, actually, is among those whom I feel most ambivalent about, and that's Gary Snyder. "Practice of the Wild" is quite good, but jesus, he is an asshole.

i'm honestly curious if any other women will be mentioned in this thread besides rowling and like mary higgins clark or w/e. i definitely feel more visceral disgust for male authors and their chauvinism. it even extends to more celebrated types like william s. burroughs, who i'm definitely less interested in reading now than i used to be. maybe unrelated but there's something that's always been off-putting about philip k. dick to me, like his books sound great in theory but the few times i've flipped through a few pages i've had a strong "nope" reaction. idk i'm a bad case study for this because i'm extremely lazy, moody and arbitrary when it comes to reading.

xp oh gary snyder is ok, yeah

snyder is still a little too 'rugged' for me tbh. table do you rate merwin? i'm pretty unschooled about poetry but i .. love his poems, for the most part.

Some people I know love Merwin. I've never read much because what I have read seemed too typical lyric poetry to me, and I have very particular tastes when it comes to that genre. But hell, Merwin is loved by a lot of people, even the feel-bad Marxist poets I know, so I should probably give the work a try again.

feel-bad Marxist poets ftw

I do think yr right, tho, about the white male chauvinism thing. Other than Prynne and Ligotti and some scattered friends, I hardly read white dudes anymore. Too much misogyny, too much machismo.

i'm honestly curious if any other women will be mentioned in this thread besides rowling and like mary higgins clark or w/e.

Women authors besides Rowling mentioned as fitting the original context of the thread title: Kate Zambreno, Ayn Rand, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Auel, Donna Tartt, Leïla Slimani, Angela Carter, Deborah Levy, Jenny Diski, Lauren Oyler, Lorrie Moore, Helen Fielding (indirectly), and Bronte (which one left unspecified).

About five or six other women authors, like Anne Carson or Zadie Smith, were also mentioned in passing, but not as authors the ilxor would never read.

Jane Austen.

got to love the delicious "humour" in Austen though.

or maybe not.

and maybe English people shouldn't be allowed to write

wtf austen is a goddamn all-time champ

tbf it's more that I don't read many novels anyway and Jane Austen is someone I can never imagine getting around to reading.

i've never read dante, apart from the first few verses of inferno. i feel kind of guilty about this, he seems like someone i should have read by now, but i'm not sure how much patience i have for intimidatingly long epic poetry at this point in my life.

If you are looking for a female writer whose an arsehole and can be left unread, there"s always Ottessa Moshfegh.

Inferno good to read. The rest of it is just okay, tbh.

i could see myself getting through that one, at least. i think i have the john ciardi translation.

I'm not sure I've heard anyone say a bad thing about Gary Snyder before! Why is he an arsehole?

I'm not sure I'm pathologically opposed to anyone I've not yet read but there are plenty I don't think I'll go back to: McEwan, Martin Amis, Kundera, Updike, Mailer, Cormac McCarthy (all overtly masculine, all sold as 'major writers of the 20th century etc). Dickens is a major one, I suppose: I feel like I'm waiting for the right age to overcome my repulsion.

Yeah, there are lots of authors that I should like, then I started reading and thought "NO" and stopped after less than 50 pages. Iris Murdoch springs to mind immediately. Dennis Cooper also, although I've tried with him a few times.

Might be unfashionable to say so but I think Cormac McCarthy is terrific and I will always re-read Blood Meridian

Chinaski, I am unable to find the document at present, but his abusive and misogynistic behavior toward Joanne Kyger (his first wife) has made him a bit of a persona non grata in certain circles, particularly those in the Bay Area where Kyger was a mentor and friend to many. I mean, he literally stole into her room and edited her private journals without her permission! He's no Ted Hughes, but he's kind of a prick, by all accounts.

I only came to Murdoch this year and loved her. Given that I was expecting 'dons with neuroses' I was pleasantly surprised: I didn't expect existential folk horror.

With McCarthy, I'll always have a place for that visceral gut-punch I got from first reading Blood Meridian but not sure I'll go back all that often.

xp

Murdoch a good example of a woman I'll never read, despite attempts. The descriptions of her work and the reality of it on the page are so disparate that I felt insane during every attempt I made, tbh...

And xpost, what's funny is that I don't get the existential folk horror at all from her work. And the prose is clunky.

Thanks for the Synder story, the table. I'd not heard that before. Ugh.

Unfortunately that's my ish with Murdoch as well. The prose is unreadable.

Oh yeah I read the first half of Local Anaesthetic and thought it was OK but I doubt I'll ever return to any Grass.

If we're talking about "female authors that just don't work for us" it's Renata Adler for me. I think it's impossible not to enjoy Joan Didion but I'm probably the least-enthusiastic of all the people I know. Unhip female authors I unabashedly love: Heti and July.

I feel a desire to type my favourite authors, scanning through my bookshelves just now: Baldwin, Barthes, Borges, Bowles (Paul and Jane), Calvino, Carson, Carver, hooks, Joyce, Le Guin, Lovecraft, Melville, Mishima, Nabokov, Flann O'Brien, O'Connor, Oe, Strugatskys, Vidal, Joy Williams, Wolff.

Fave ever is prob Barthes and Joyce, Mishima continues to rot in my brain I still love that horseshit, O'Brien and Gore Vidal less so but still important, Joy Williams is my go-to "recommend something new to people" choice. Any holes? I could use an intervening recommendation these days, I'm looking at my "next up" pile and it's a re-read of Lydia Davis short stories and a couple Hollinghursts I haven't read. I could use a recommendation. Maybe I should finally read Cheever like people have been telling me to

Constance barnett, or at least so far. Still wondering how accurate a translation it is in terms of mood etc.
May eventually rethink but have never progressed far into her work cos it just seems so genteel.
Wish I read russian though

Which Murdoch have you attempted? There's an awful lot of it and the quality varies wildly.

The Black Prince

Yeah, just from experience, I've read two Murdochs - Under The Net and The Sandcastle - and would never have guessed they're even by the same writer. Sandcastle very much is dons with neuroses - Under The Net is a madcap comedic novel.

Speaking of clunky prose tho I soldiered through The Disposessed, and did enjoy it for its ideas, would never dismiss LeGuinn entirely she's such an obviously great figure, sci-fi is full of writers with less than stellar prose styles, disclaimer disclaimer, but anyway on the evidence of that book a great stylist she wasn't.

Oh good, so I'm not alone in failing to gel with Le Guin's prose style. I'll give Left Hand another try sometime. Maybe I was expecting something different.

I tried my first McCarthy like a month ago (All the Pretty Horses), and bounced off of that too. Another time.

Yeesh, the aura around this guy in his time is hard to comprehend.

The reaction to the incident in the literary community to which Mailer and Morales belonged has been judged by many observers to be remarkably mild. As Mailer later noted, his friends "closed ranks" behind him. He remarked to New York Magazine in 1983 that "the reactions were subtle as hell. Five degrees less warmth than I was accustomed to. Not fifteen degrees less—five."[8] Many of his counterparts saw the assault as an artistic, even literary act; James Baldwin a writer and friend of Mailer, characterized it as an attempt to free himself from "the spiritual prison he had created with his fantasies of becoming a politician," "like burning down the house in order to, at last, be free of it".[9] Diana Trilling later recalled being told by her husband, critic Lionel Trilling, that the stabbing was a "Dostoyevskian ploy" allowing Mailer to "test the limits of evil in himself."[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabbing_of_Adele_Morales_by_Norman_Mailer

See also the killing of jean vollmer constantly described as something Burroughs “never got over”, like - I would fucking hope so tbh! People always talk as though it’s something that happened to him

Norman Mailer’s son was a guest at one of my best friend’s wedding. He was married at the time to the sister of the bride. He stood up to make a toast, I think he claimed it was going to be in French but really what he said was “I have two words for you: couples therapy.”