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Post by whitecomics on Aug 11, 2022 14:37:45 GMT
A "what're you reading today" thread for prose.
I just reread Tom McCarthy's Remainder -- maybe folks remember his Tintin and the Secret of Literature, a close reading of Tintin that has its moments. Remainder is his first book. The plot, briefly: a man recovering his memories after an unnamed accident, for which he receives a multi-million dollar settlement, stages a series of increasingly complex reenactments of those recovered memories. Weirdly similar to the new Nathan Fielder show. It stumbles in a few places but overall is one of the best and most unique books I've read around ideas of repetition, artifice, storytelling, memory...I've read it several times over the years and gone from strongly disliking the end, to loving it, to on this most recent read feeling it was a natural and indeed inevitable ending from the first scenes of the book.
Makes me also want to reread William Gaddis' The Recognitions, another great book that touches on some of these same themes through the lens of art forgery.
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Aug 11, 2022 14:45:42 GMT
I just finished Ottessa Moshfegh's Lapvona and have to return it to the library today. There were mixed-to-negative reviews that were like "this is pretty dark/cynical and super scatological, making it overall unpleasant" which prompted a "OK, square, I'm sure none of that stuff will bother me as I'm an adult" from me and everyone I talk to, but damn if all the unpleasant characters hating each other and the king making people eat poop didn't get a little tedious. Kind of a fantasy thing about religion being used to mislead the populace, with one cool witch character. It's not bad, I wouldn't recommend against reading it, but I didn't get a ton out of it.
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Post by manoopuesta on Aug 11, 2022 16:10:12 GMT
I just finished Ottessa Moshfegh's Lapvona and have to return it to the library today. There were mixed-to-negative reviews that were like "this is pretty dark/cynical and super scatological, making it overall unpleasant" which prompted a "OK, square, I'm sure none of that stuff will bother me as I'm an adult" from me and everyone I talk to, but damn if all the unpleasant characters hating each other and the king making people eat poop didn't get a little tedious. Kind of a fantasy thing about religion being used to mislead the populace, with one cool witch character. It's not bad, I wouldn't recommend against reading it, but I didn't get a ton out of it. I haven't read Lapvona but I read her book My Year of Rest and Relaxation and while it was tedious to continue reading at times somehow this book has stayed with me more than I'd expected. So I was planning to read other books by her. From your comments I may leave though Lapvona for later... And yes, she is very cynical in her writing, it reminds me a bit of Chris Kraus, though Kraus' writing I'd say is more refined.
And the last book I've read is the latest book by Maggie Nelson (On Freedom). It was a bit different from her other books, much more political and less lyrical, but still I loved every bit of it.
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Post by mikesheawright on Aug 13, 2022 14:09:14 GMT
I finished The Overstory the other day which was a genuinely profound reading experience. Best novel I've read in years, it came to me at just the right time and informed/accelerated a lot of things I've been thinking a lot about. Just a beautiful, exciting, perception-expanding book.
Reading Sapiens right now and whoa.
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Post by BubblesZine on Aug 18, 2022 13:21:13 GMT
I've been reading a bunch of poetry lately. I've been into: Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Sappho, Alice Meynell. I'm new to poetry but really digging these, if anyone has more in this vein, let me know!
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Post by yeahokwow on Aug 18, 2022 18:26:36 GMT
I picked up Pattern Recognition by William Gibson at the local used bookstore for a dollar recently as a new book i read at work when it's really slow lol. I'm really enjoying it! I've only read Neuromancer from Gibson but i really like his writing style. Anybody got any good sci-fi recs?
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Post by teemcgee on Aug 19, 2022 11:30:41 GMT
Reading Sapiens right now and whoa. If you really want to double down on the whoa, try Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything - which I've just finished! - which is a radical counterpoint to books like Sapiens, arguing that the narrative that societies inevitably progress from more egalitarian hunter gatherer bands to hierarchical states backed by sedentary agriculture is just that, a narrative, and that what the archaeological & anthropological record actually demonstrates is something much more ambiguous, where there is no linear and inevitable tendency to how societies change. They argue that power structures within societies may move from centralised power in elites to dispersed power relationships and back again, and that the economic circumstances may influence, but does not determine this. I've no ability to assess the competing accuracy of those claims, but as someone who tends to the politically pessimistic, I do quite like the challenge of a more optimistic take on where we're all headed! |
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Post by mikesheawright on Aug 19, 2022 20:57:15 GMT
Reading Sapiens right now and whoa. If you really want to double down on the whoa, try Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything - which I've just finished! - which is a radical counterpoint to books like Sapiens, arguing that the narrative that societies inevitably progress from more egalitarian hunter gatherer bands to hierarchical states backed by sedentary agriculture is just that, a narrative, and that what the archaeological & anthropological record actually demonstrates is something much more ambiguous, where there is no linear and inevitable tendency to how societies change. They argue that power structures within societies may move from centralised power in elites to dispersed power relationships and back again, and that the economic circumstances may influence, but does not determine this. I've no ability to assess the competing accuracy of those claims, but as someone who tends to the politically pessimistic, I do quite like the challenge of a more optimistic take on where we're all headed! neat! i think the Sapiens guy is doing a good job presenting his writing as speculative and not fact but I'm definitely interested in additional takes on this stuff. That being said, there is nothing that will give me any optimism about where we're all headed haha. But optimism isn't what I'm looking for with this stuff, I'm mainly interested in the comfort that comes with an understanding of our complete and total insignificance as a species in the grand scheme of things. Earth existed for like 2 BILLION years before our earliest ancestors and homo sapiens have only been around for like 200,000. I love stuff like that. Our worries are nothing.
Anyway!
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Post by michaelkennedy on Sept 7, 2022 12:24:50 GMT
Just finished listening to Dirty Pictures, the Brian Doherty book on the undergrounds. Found it concise and impartial in a way I hadn't seen in a while. He got to the point with a militancy that I enjoyed whilst gifting me with many perspectives I'd otherwise struggle to find in various interviews etc. The Trina Robbins "arc" throughout was great to have as an "underdog within and underdog story". Accounts about the practices of the printers and publishers seem like a carbon copy of the Riso era of comics printing, publishing and distro... Eery.
The last comics prose non-fic I read was Michael Tisserand's Herriman Bio. Which approaches the story in a "radical" way that I really aligned with creatively, personally and politically. Doherty's writing served as counterpoint to this form of non-fic wherein he doesn't delve too far into interpreting (or even liking) through a contemporary, or even what was a radical-at-the-time lens but finds a balance of perspectives that I found refreshing even as hard left type. Although there was a progressive voice barking at the back of my head demanding him to go further or interview a more vicious critic of xyz cartoonist. Where Tisserand clearly loves Herriman, Doherty keeps a cool distance that reads, at least to me of an Unbiased fascination.
All in all I feel more centered and grounded in the history of the undergrounds after reading it, after hearing him on Vmspod defend a lot of the choices he and the publisher made, I imagine that was for the better.
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Post by mikesheawright on Sept 7, 2022 20:49:53 GMT
Reading some early Cormac McCarthy that I never got to before the new one comes out next month. Child of God is a wild one, I am uncomfortable with how funny I found the first half and how upsetting I found the second half. Great stuff, he just had his thing straight out the gate. Outer Dark is next then I'm all caught up.
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Post by manoopuesta on Sept 30, 2022 16:27:01 GMT
At the pace I'm going, I'm literally devouring The Savage Detectives by Bolaño. It's the first book of Bolaño I read, and I don't know why I thought his narrative style would be more difficult to read -- Borges style -- dunno why, but his narration flows very fast. So at times it feels like reading a --very good-- bestseller. I especially enjoy he is extremely good at narrating in so many different voices and still sounds realistic, which many writers don't achieve completely.
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Nov 6, 2022 13:44:57 GMT
Currently have Alan Moore's short story collection Illuminations out from the library, haven't gotten to the long story about the comics industry yet. It's interesting how Moore is an amazing comics writer, when he's juggling that formal element of the visual, but here he's just a fairly clever writer of weird tales, maybe prone to overwriting or not as evocative as I want him to be on a level of language. Or like... the stuff here is maybe closest to things he'd write at the start of his comics career, in terms of what they're intended to do. (I haven't read Jerusalem.) But I guess I also have a tendency to underrate a Moore work on first read, due to high expectations, and then it later reveals itself as better than I thought upon completion and further consideration.
I'm also reading Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger, which Edwin Turner, of the Biblioklept blog, is also reading and is a little ahead of me. So he makes these posts which I end up agreeing with probably because they inform my take on things. It's cool and enjoyable. I haven't read all of McCarthy's work but this does have some similarities to Suttree which is probably my fave of what I have read. Although it also is more straightforward in a lot of ways, lots of dialogue, pretty moving in parts. I'm having a good time with both of these books.
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Post by mikesheawright on Nov 6, 2022 18:25:22 GMT
I'm also reading Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger, which Edwin Turner, of the Biblioklept blog, is also reading and is a little ahead of me. So he makes these posts which I end up agreeing with probably because they inform my take on things. It's cool and enjoyable. I haven't read all of McCarthy's work but this does have some similarities to Suttree which is probably my fave of what I have read. Although it also is more straightforward in a lot of ways, lots of dialogue, pretty moving in parts. I'm having a good time with both of these books. I'm a huge McCarthy fan and have read them all, about 80 pages into the new one and am enjoying it. It's very dialogue-heavy which is an unexpected development but it's also pretty funny so far? Seems vaguely self-referential but maybe that's because I just read a few of his other ones back to back and they're fresh on my mind. Suttree is my fave, I've read that one twice, great stuff.
Also reading Denis Johnson's essays "Seek", really enjoying his voice and looking forward to digging into his fiction afterward.
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Post by manoopuesta on Nov 6, 2022 23:39:55 GMT
Also reading Denis Johnson's essays "Seek", really enjoying his voice and looking forward to digging into his fiction afterward.
You have to read "Train Dreams", it is an amazing short novel. I have sometimes gifted this book to friends cause I love it to pieces.
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Post by arecomicsevengood on Nov 8, 2022 23:06:29 GMT
Also reading Denis Johnson's essays "Seek", really enjoying his voice and looking forward to digging into his fiction afterward.
I would recommend Angels as my favorite novel of Johnson's. I also really liked The Largesse Of The Sea Maiden, the last book he finished, only his second book of short stories, following up on Jesus' Son, much of it written in an either semi-autobiobiographical (or at least passably so) mode. I am on to the part of Alan Moore's Illuminations that is all about the comics industry, a novella that takes up half the book. Pretty easy reading, mean in its jokes and pretty gossipy, with a lot of "ok this character is that real-life person" inside baseball stuff that would likely make for heavy sledding for anyone not immersed in comics history. Kind of a complicated emotional tone, where its pretty aggressively satirical and filled with pictures of these young people infatuated with comics, who lack social skills, and the sense of identification with those kids is tempered by a regret for how those youthful dreams lure people into an industry which is on the one hand exploitative but on the other hand is just a collection of weird adults deserving of mockery. I'm enjoying it quite a bit, although also sort of blown away by the author's evident knowledge of Reddit boards and Zack Snyder Superman movies you wouldn't expect him to possess. It's dedicated to Kevin O'Neill, may he rest in peace. |
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