Keeping up with books

I thought Goon Squad was not good and in particular the last couple bits were embarrassing for the author.

A very silly thing to have been a buzzy book overall.

modern literature is mostly terrible so i do not keep up on purpose. the book that put me off keeping up forever was a visit from the goon squad

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Wednesday, November 25, 2020 2:34 PM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

basically same except exclusively for anglo writers

really impressed by flopson's routines

wow yeah

i should block ilx from 8am-10pm

I thought the PowerPoint chapter of Goon Squad was pretty good! The rest sucked, I agree.

i should block ilx from 8am-10pm

Works wonders:

https://getcoldturkey.com/

i'm not even sure that 'life is that which is in front of you' is even trivially correct, but i'm certain it's more wildly wrong than it is right.

Strongly Disagree

What next, Life is like a box of chocolates?

I do read a lot less current fiction than I should, partly because, with all ILXish caveats about canons and subjectivity and all that, if you mostly read books that have stuck around for a century or two at least, the drop in quality amongst books that people have been excited for a few months is quite steep. There's also always a certain need to Have An Opinion when it comes to recent books which gets in the way of enjoyment, which isn't there so much with the canon - like, do I believe this Dickens novel is as good as its standing? Doesn't matter, it'll be there regardless.

The idea of "keeping up with" current lit, be it genre or literary, in the way ppl keep up with music or cinema sounds frankly terrifying. It would take so much time, and so much of it spent reading total rubbish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDzB-Eu8YeQ

Anyway, good two posts, Daniel_Rf

To echo what others have said, the idea of "keeping up" with books seems utterly absurd to me, and I teach literature and facilitate creative writing workshops for a living. If I read every fiction book that made an appearance on the NYTimes bestseller list, or even every starred review in Publishers Weekly, I would have little time for much else, and I'd also read a load of absolute bullshit that holds little interest for me.

What is better to do is to find one's interests and plunge into them, while also allowing for detours and pleasurable whims to take hold, too.

i should block ilx from 8am-10pm

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Wednesday, November 25, 2020 6:10 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

the content blocker includes ilx haha

really impressed by flopson's routines

― superdeep borehole (harbl), Wednesday, November 25, 2020 5:42 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

helps to be in 4th year of phd, no coursework and minimal duties other than to “work” on my “research”

although ironically the other best reading year of my life was the first year i worked a real 9-to-5 office job. i lived an hour and a half long bus ride to work (i don’t drive) and read the whole way there and back every day. i worked that job for 2 years but the second year was the year i bought a smartphone, don’t think i finished more than 4 books lol

I’m already several millennia behind on books and I can’t see myself getting caught up.

I take the Stoner quote as characterization; some people argues w Stoner rather than Stoner. Also I've never understood ilx objections to Goon Squad.
tables keeps up w modern poetry better than most of us, but some good prose that comes to mind right away incl. Helen DeWitt'sThe Last Samurai, Miranda July's The First Bad Man, Colson Whitehead's Zone One, Ha Jin's Waiting, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, David Grossman's A Horse Walks Into A Bar, Luc Sante's Maybe The People Would Be The Times, Franz Kafka's The Lost Writings, Franciso Cantú's The Line Becomes A River, Ronan Farrow's Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, Kelly Link's Get In Trouble, Karen Russell's Vampires In The Lemon Grove, Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and Mary Gaitskill's Because They Wanted To.

oh some people *argue*, sry!

*Francisco*!

I think part of what keeps up the idea of Keeping Up is the awards, lists and the general conversation per genre. I would like to keep up with my favourite genres and publishers.

Sort of unrelated question: I don't follow the realist literary stuff but it always seemed from my distance that booker prize kind of stuff was dominated by major publishers. Is this the case?

this quote by lydia davis seems like the correct approach to keeping up with contemporary fiction:

Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

one of the things im an anti-woke dad about is i think hyper-contemporary literature (like, since 2015 ish) has been ruined by woke strictitudes. i once met a young novelist who quite candidly admitted that he writes autofiction because it’s deemed too problematic in the current market to write about any identity other than your own

he also read a steady diet of contemporary literature to the exclusion of anything else contra davis, and his writing is quite bad

The idea of "keeping up with" current lit, be it genre or literary, in the way ppl keep up with music or cinema sounds frankly terrifying. It would take so much time, and so much of it spent reading total rubbish.

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 26 November 2020 11:52 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

TV is like this now basically too imo

i once met a young novelist who quite candidly admitted that he writes autofiction because it’s deemed too problematic in the current market to write about any identity other than your own

the only possible downside to this is more books by white dudes about white dudes.

TV sucks complete ass now. the end of the ‘golden era’/prestige tv ended so swiftly with the rise of netflix and now everything is like hallmark movie quality and yet we just lap it up

Yes

you should be totally stressed about books and it sucks we’re going to die before we read all the stuff we want to. there is a notional me who is reading all the stuff i’m buying or is going on my list and they are an intellectual titan and plugged into an omniscient knowledge matrix of wisdom. rather than being someone who can’t even recount the contents of the book they read before the last one.

dow, I haven’t seen you comment directly on Stoner yet, or Stoner even.

At least TV is less likely to unfold in a starless vacuum, whereas the vast majority of published written material will forever languish in quasi absolute obscurity. The light that is periodically shed on recognizable authorial figures and their works is microscopic when set against the boundless dormant library that makes up the space of literature, which is less and less distinguishable from a virtual garbage dump with each passing year. Major publishing houses, prestigious prizes, interviews with established authors, academic canons, etc., all exist to put a face on the anonymous abyss where creative works go to die as soon as they come into being. And while a handful of remarkable specimens do indeed rise to the top, it would be risible to assume that ours is a literary (or artistic) meritocracy.

Keeping up with seldom read books, while impossible, is therefore a moral imperative, and any dent made in the writerly institutions that be (especially their more venal manifestations), any gaze laid upon their invisible margins, is a small triumph. Or so I tell myself in my more seditious moods; the fact of the matter is that it’s best not to worry about what lies beyond your control and simply go about your solitary business, which is toil enough.

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

otm

Great post

i somehow got a few mutual follows in a p cool corner or contemp lit twitter. mostly poets and somewhat experimental young writers. ive read some stuff by them. honestly it’s very good! mostly published by small presses i would otherwise never hear of. couple good ones i read this year:

‘not i’ and ‘49 venezuelan novels’ by sebastian castillo. both can be read in one sitting; the latter is very borges, calvino, barthelme style funny short stories, the former is like an oulipian exercise

‘alice knott’ by blake butler. blake is husband of poet molly brodak who died this year tragically at the age of 42, and who wrote an incredible memoir about growing up with a father who was a bank robber. anyways ‘alice knott’ is bizarre and kind of miserable, but also super brilliant. kind of like a mix of ‘picture of dorian grey’ and a tom mccarthy novel

Excellent post, pomenitul.

It's worth noting, for example, that when a poetry book sells more than 500 copies these days, it is considered "successful." (And no, I'm not talking about crap like Billy fucking Collins or major award winners).

I will honestly say that I just don't find much of interest in a lot of popular literary fiction— most of it is utter crap, with probably one exception on a list of 20 bestsellers every week. (Non-fiction has a higher ratio, from my ken). One of the big problems with popular literary fiction in the US, at least, is that the hegemonic power of Iowa really has infected and inflected everything, so that finding books that are actually innovative, interesting, or daring is ultimately a difficult task. But that's just me.

flopson, Sebastian is amazing, we trade emails back and forth sometimes. He recently sent me an excellent story by another writer that was composed entirely of phrases from bumper stickers.

dow, you liked that Cantu book? a friend of mine has been waging a war of words against him and getting his events cancelled wherever possible lol.

the fact of the matter is that it’s best not to worry about what lies beyond your control and simply go about your solitary business, which is toil enough.

― pomenitul, Saturday, November 28, 2020 10:34 PM

I'd like to add to this that I'm not as pessimistic as most readers about spreading the word about books we love. I'm tired of seeing people hoping for a movie adaptation as their ticket to more readers, that just keeps people relying on films but more documentaries on youtube and video essays would be nice.

flopson, Sebastian is amazing, we trade emails back and forth sometimes. He recently sent me an excellent story by another writer that was composed entirely of phrases from bumper stickers.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table), Saturday, November 28, 2020 5:56 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

nice :)

i really enjoyed this recent story of his http://magazine.nytyrant.com/local-favorite-sebastian-castillo/

that old n+1 piece by elif batuman where she destroys mfa-style contemporary lit while going thru ‘best american short stories of 2006’ is one of my fav essays ever

this one https://nplusonemag.com/issue-4/essays/short-story-novel/

poet molly brodak who died this year tragically at the age of 42, and who wrote an incredible memoir about growing up with a father who was a bank robber.O SHIT Molly Bordak died?! I felt like I knew her, from reading Bandit: A Daughter's Memoir, which was even more about her and her sister and mother than him and how he (maybe) got that way: pellucid and fluid and affecting---I haven't found my way into her poetry per se, but can see how her training and other experience w that came in handy prose-wise. Also some excellent tweets, her photos etc. O shit.
Came back to add The Neapolitan Novels and 2666, also Cather and Woolf and Dusty and Melville and some outcat genre heads like Simenon and Cordwainer Smith.
James, I haven't commented on Stoner because haven't read, but that quote and others I've seen do read like characterization rather than lecturing the reader etc.
Yes I liked the Cantu book; it's like the title says.

BRODAK, sorry, fuk

ya. real sad :(

Neapolitan trilogy kinda sucked imo? i loved ‘the days of abandonment’ but i really don’t get what ppl liked about the trilogy

still gotta read 2666

Not really keeping up, just forever catching up, to whatever extent, and all the ones I mentioned were read in the past 8-9 years or so. (Oh yeah and In Search of Lost Time, series ed. Lydia Davis.)(Several by Borges too.)

Neapolitan Novels=quartet. If it sucked for you, so be it.

I think i read it’s going to be 5 now?

In a feature on NPR's All Things Considered, Brodak described the ethical process of Bandit's subject, which detailed her experience as the daughter of a multiple felon bankrobber in Detroit, Michigan: "Every family has darkness and heaviness that people would prefer to not talk about. And when you choose to become the person who's going to bring light to the dark family secrets, you can sometimes be perceived as the betrayer."[5] An excerpt from Bandit appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016.[6] In 2018, she was a recipient of an NEA fellowship for prose.[7]

Brodak's poems appeared widely, including in Granta, Poetry, Fence, Map Literary, NY Tyrant, Diode, New Orleans Review, Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Bateau, and Hayden's Ferry Review.

Brodak was also the founder of Kookie House, a baking company that specializes in unique cookies and cakes. In 2018, she appeared as a finalist on the Great American Baking Show.

Death
Brodak died on March 8, 2020.[8] According to the New York Times, her husband, Blake Butler, gave the cause of death as suicide and she had struggled with depression since childhood.[9] I didn't get that kind of major depression from the book, maybe because the writing seemed such an exemplary way of dealing w such experiences, incl. thoughts. But now I almost feel guilty, like a friend who didn't see enough. I don't think of myself as naive about the curative powers of art, or anything else, but goes to show once again that you can never be too sure of these things. No great lesson learned, it's just another loss. But I'm gladder than ever for the book, that she was able to get that far (also w the relationship and baking).

(Also meant to mention Richard Wright and W.E.B. DuBois.)

I didn't read the question as 'keeping up with contemporary lit' so much as maintaining a healthy amount of reading full stop. Whatever 'healthy' means in that context. But as the conversation has taken a turn toward the existential, in the scheme of a life, will I look back and wish I'd read more? I genuinely think I will. I mean, it's on a continuum with spending time with the people I love and walking in the hills but it's definitely right up there.

Had a convo w/ my mum some time ago where she talked about how when she was a young philosophy student she got the complete works of Kant, thinking "when I'm old I'll be able to give these my full attention" and now she knows that's So Not Gonna Happen.

At least TV is less likely to unfold in a starless vacuum, whereas the vast majority of published written material will forever languish in quasi absolute obscurity. The light that is periodically shed on recognizable authorial figures and their works is microscopic when set against the boundless dormant library that makes up the space of literature, which is less and less distinguishable from a virtual garbage dump with each passing year. Major publishing houses, prestigious prizes, interviews with established authors, academic canons, etc., all exist to put a face on the anonymous abyss where creative works go to die as soon as they come into being. And while a handful of remarkable specimens do indeed rise to the top, it would be risible to assume that ours is a literary (or artistic) meritocracy.

Keeping up with seldom read books, while impossible, is therefore a moral imperative, and any dent made in the writerly institutions that be (especially their more venal manifestations), any gaze laid upon their invisible margins, is a small triumph. Or so I tell myself in my more seditious moods; the fact of the matter is that it’s best not to worry about what lies beyond your control and simply go about your solitary business, which is toil enough.

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

― pomenitul, zaterdag 28 november 2020 23:34 (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Putting this on my wall in a golden frame, so otm. I'm way more 'relaxed' about 'keeping up' with literature or books than with music, with which I get something akin to fomo way earlier and more stressful (which is daft, but.. true, at times). I don't ever feel 'out of the loop' with literature or books though. Where with music I'd like to keep up with what happens in at least some genres important to me, I just don't feel this w/ books. Perhaps it's also to do with the vast amount of books of yore I'd still like to read, books that are written hundreds if not a thousand years ago.

Music feels too much at times because we're (trapped) in this yearly cycle that's being rushed on by aoty-list-season (which I enjoy!) and being on the pulse way, way more than literature. Or at least that's how I perceive it.

I subscribe to five or six literary magazines (the usual suspects plus some Dutch ones), read the supplements in various papers, and on top of that get a lot of reading tips from other books! (a side-project of sorts is working through the books lauded in Huysmans' 'A Rebours', for example, I'm about to start 'La Faustin') Those will lead to other books I want to read again.

It's not 'keeping up', but knowing I won't run out of books I'd like to read, and knowing also that I probably won't even be reading the book I thought I'd be reading after 'La Faustin', because so much can entice me before I pick it up I will have changed course, is just a pleasant feeling.

Tl;dr what Pom said, learn to stop worrying and embrace the infinite amount of books, and see where it takes you next, one book at a time.

I'm way more 'relaxed' about 'keeping up' with literature or books than with music, with which I get something akin to fomo way earlier and more stressful

cosign

Part of it for me is that it's easy to absent-mindedly 'listen' to music as I go about my daily business, so I fall prey to the quixotic call of exhaustivity because it almost seems achievable, whereas with books it's so obviously a non-starter that I'd rather not go down that route at all. That said, every once in a while I will manically devour as many acclaimed contemporary-ish (published in the last five years) books as possible so I can get a better sense of what the current 'scene' looks like and tbh it does actually quench my latent FOMO because it makes me realize I don't care for the majority of it, whereas with music, gluttony just gives rise to more gluttony.

xxxxxxpost, thanks for the link, flopson! It is a grueling read, but I think I understand better now. What a brave and eloquent writer. I'll check more of his, incl. the novel, Alice Knott.

He's...okay.

What he writes about Molly is more than okay.

But if not for you, so be it.

No, I like his writing on Molly.

His other writing is just okay.

I just want to put it out there that while this isn't the case with Butler's writing on Brodak, just because an established writer loses someone in a tragic way doesn't make them writing about it "good writing." Case in point: the J0yelle McSweeney book about losing her infant daughter, which is...really rigid, unfeeling, boring even.

As someone who usually reads books fairly quickly, I would be a hell of a lot more anxious if I only read say 6 or so a year. How the hell do you decide what to read next when there are so few opportunities to choose?

i don't understand this question! there are fewer opportunities but so many books available that it's the same difficulty regardless. but times i have read only a few books in a year i've been so busy/tired/destroyed that everything was difficult so it made no difference. people who read less for other reasons such as not caring about reading as much could also have an easier time because they just never feel anxious about how many books there are.

i'm about to finish a 500 page book i started last week though so things are going much better

the number of books i’m currently “reading” but haven’t finished has risen dangerously over the last couple of weeks

just reviewed this stat myself. disastrous. utterly disastrous.

every year i say finish before you move onto the next one and every year i do that for two short books and then it all falls apart.

Happy to read multiple non-fiction books simultaneously, but can only manage one fiction at a time - except *maybe* if I have some short stories on the go.

I'm a book monogamist but that hardly keeps the fomo away - if anything it's worse with all those shelves of unread books staring at me.

finishing a book is part of what motivates me to read another so i have learned not to pick up multiple books so i don't end up with 10 half read books and finish 0 of them, also do best when i finish something faster

I often read one longer fiction or non-fiction book at the same time as reading one poetry book. Multiple books within the same genre is a but much for me!