what are you reading today?

[Baeyer-Drewson]

^Should be read in a single sitting, two at most.

[fruitbrute]

Yeah, I read half the book in one sitting. Will probably finish this evening.

[NESK]

just started last night. kakutani's review is accurate on so far.

as in this review? http://themarkberman.com/2011/03/31/michiko-kakutani-reviews-the-pale-king/ . that review sucks because half of the body of it is quotations. my copy hasnt come from amazon yet. ill probly fo through it in two nights and report back here as soon as it arrives.

[american_hearts]

Kakutani is an insufferable bore. Couldn't possibly be less relevant as a critic. Even when she manages to gets things right, it's because she blundered into it by accident. Total nonsense. It's like reading a grad school term paper.

While not particularly useful or insightful as criticism, the essay on GQ's site right now by John Jeremiah Sullivan is miles more fun to read, particularly as a DFW fan, and that should be the whole point anyway.

[american_hearts]

It's worth reading. I read when when I was bit more wide-eyed and willing to forgive its excesses (and there are a lot) but it's still a lot of fun.

I disagree, but if you're in high school or college, I guess you could do worse. It doesn't really set any goals for itself, which I can't respect, and it's a gimmicky style of writing that I'm afraid to support because god forbid it spawns a legion of even lesser copy-cats.

[bfan]

this is really good

this is all right, the end is the most interesting part about relativity and new theories in physics

[into the rain]

can i just say: mccarthy has books other than the fucking road and blood meridian. just saying. those two are the only ones i see in this thread.

and fuck Kakutani.

[Baeyer-Drewson]

can i just say: mccarthy has books other than the fucking road and blood meridian. just saying. those two are the only ones i see in this thread.

To be fair, Blood Meridian is pretty amazing. Only book I have felt like re-reading in a while. I think my next McCarthy will be the All The Pretty Horses, followed by the rest of the border trilogy.

"He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower."

I love the sort of archaic phrasing McCarthy uses in Blood Meridian (and all his older works). Much more enjoyable style than the sort of minimalist approach he takes in No Country and The Road. The man is brilliant. One of America's greatest living writers. Makes me all nostalgic for a time I never even lived in.

[Baeyer-Drewson]

Just started this. Trying to fill the Russian lit gap in my book collection. Had a few failed attempts at Dostoyevsky so I went for some shorter, more accessible novels and short story collections.

Russian prison camps ain't no joke. Fuck Stalin. I hate how the analogy to Hitler is such a common, extremely offensive insult when Stalin slaughtered so many more and only slightly less systematically.

[broneck]

^ i'm intrigued

[NESK]

Kakutani is an insufferable bore. Couldn't possibly be less relevant as a critic. Even when she manages to gets things right, it's because she blundered into it by accident. Total nonsense. It's like reading a grad school term paper.

While not particularly useful or insightful as criticism, the essay on GQ's site right now by John Jeremiah Sullivan is miles more fun to read, particularly as a DFW fan, and that should be the whole point anyway.

yo, thanks for the heads up on that GQ piece. that was brilliant.

[automaton]

Yo Dr. BaeyerD if your into Russian gulag lit then I cannot recommend Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales enough. It is absolutely brilliant and is based on first hand accounts by the author. It is a full length book but is organized into shorter stories and some of them are incredibly brutal. Fuck Stalin indeed.

Apparently when Solzhenitsyn was doing research for his Gulag Archipelago he wanted to speak with Shalamov about his experiences and Shalamov was having none of it. I guess writing Kolyma Tales was his way of dealing with the absolute fuckedupness that he went through. Once that was done he didn't want to talk about it anymore.

[m00bz]

Opinions on Freedom by Jonathan Franzen? Reviews on it seem to reside on the two extremes.

@ Baeyer-Drewson: I second your thoughts on Blood Meridian. Put McCarthy as one of my favorite authors. Wasn't as keen on The Road as some are, though.

[gramps]

I disagree, but if you're in high school or college, I guess you could do worse. It doesn't really set any goals for itself, which I can't respect, and it's a gimmicky style of writing that I'm afraid to support because god forbid it spawns a legion of even lesser copy-cats.

Well, that's when I read it, but I still think that as far as an aesthetic project, it's pretty airtight. Difficult to ignore the gothy pop stuff, yeah, but otherwise it's to me a sort of book version of the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

And to be fair, I don't believe in regarding book based on what sort of following it may (or may not) engender.

Anyway, I'm rereading this. It's still great.

[YoungM]

Just started this. Trying to fill the Russian lit gap in my book collection. Had a few failed attempts at Dostoyevsky so I went for some shorter, more accessible novels and short story collections.

[/img]

It's regularly wild to me how the whole corner of the internet I spend most of my time on seems to move as some sort of bizarre collective mind. I literally just added this book to my Amazon wishlist, the result of hearing it mentioned many times in a UC Berkeley course on American diplomatic history I've been listening too in my free time. Pretty amazing to see it show up here.

Personally, I'm almost finished with this, which has been delightful, and particularly informative. If you're interested in history, or in memoirs of the more scholarly, less personal variety, it's very worthwhile.

[broneck]

Opinions on Freedom?.

I'd say worth reading. A little heavy handed WRT the environmentalism (or a lot heavy handed) but I read it in four days or so. It's that Lost-esque style of storytelling which is satisfying in a fairly empty way, but the story itself is great in parts, and it tackles some interesting ideas. Check it out if for no other reason than it'll take so little time.

[NESK]

im waiting til after i read pale king to come in here with a wild theory about freedom. its pure tin foil hat madness.

[mmg]

If you're having trouble getting into Russian lit, and gulags are getting you down, you can also try Gogol. Fewer Americans read him but he's great, and funny. Plus his personal history is crazy.

[m00bz]

@clopek: Thanks, wanted to make sure the little free time I have at the university wouldn't be entirely wasted

[Dead_Wizard]

Looks like most stores broke street date on The Pale King, snagged a copy at the campus bookshop today.

Loving it so far. Far more "human" than Infinite Jest. First chapter alone had me sold though; was like a beautifully updated version of the intro of Suttree.

[NESK]

its been on sale in toronto all week. fuck amazon! ive learned my lesson.

[LiberationFrequency]

[broneck]

i am reading pale king. sporadic stuff.

[NESK]

im about to start that too.

[fruitbrute]

Camus' Pest and Kafka's Trial - school reading.

edit:

shit, i mean "The Plague" ofc., not Pest

[bfan]

I sat down in the library today next to a computer and this book was just lying there

[broneck]

First reflection on the Pale King:

Parallels between this and Nabokov's Pale Fire run so much deeper than the title (though I think the title itself adds weight to these observations). The Editor's Forward reads as an explanation for how and why he tackled the task of organizing and (in one sense at least) "completing" DFW's last work, an appeal for readers' understanding that echoes the arguments put forward in Pale Fire for the editor's completion of the 999 line poem.

I might be reading too much into the idea, but the similarities in title and situation seem to run too deep to be merely coincidental.

(Pale Fire being about a poet who passes away and has his final work published posthumously by a friend who claimed to know the author well enough to have authority over the final draft of a work. A particularly meta-joke to follow was the posthumous publishing of Nabokov's final work "The Original of Laura" on punch-out cards that allowed the reader to have full authority over the story's flow and meaning, a pretty big "fuck you" to old Vlad who wrote an entire novel about how people shouldn't claim to know what an author does or does not intend for his work to say (which is a mindfuck in and of itself.).)

[lil brown brother]

[NESK]

Clo: you may have just mindfucked me for the novel. That's the kind of thing I hate knowing going into a novel because now I'll be reading it through an ironic filter, as if it being a DFW work, and being post-humous and incomplete wasn't enough. God damn the exponential layers of post modernism. I feel like I should wait a year so it's not such am existential can of worms. Did you finish it already?

[broneck]

Well, you would've read the preface regardless I imagine...had a busy weekend so no, not even close. Just that whole concept of it's even being published as a giant multilayered literary prank is totally awesome to me. It's like a meta-post-modern-existentialist parfait.

Nabokov and DFW are snickering together at a bar in limbo.