what are you reading today?

[NESK]

Bae, wait a bit longer and I'll read it with ya and bore the shut out of everyone in this thread. I'm just finishing up a couple other things then we can knock this out.

[bfan]

you guys should read it. it is probably the best thing pynchon has ever written, and that's saying a lot. check out the pynchon wiki for page by page analysis and explanation of hidden symbols and meanings http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

[broneck]

bringing this back?

http://www.superfuture.com/supertalk/showthread.php?t=54944

[conqueror]

[Denton]

Nearly finished this. Loving it

did you read absurdistan? how does it compare?

[Baeyer-Drewson]

Bae, wait a bit longer and I'll read it with ya and bore the shut out of everyone in this thread. I'm just finishing up a couple other things then we can knock this out.

I'm down. Book bros. I just put a note in the book club thread, see if we can't get a few extra people to read.

Thanks for the wiki link bfan! I've also got a companion guide that is about as thick as the novel itself, so between the two I shouldn't miss too much of the esoteric stuff.

This is gonna be gooood...

[alexryb]

just finished this:

A great book by a smart, sharp writer. It's about this mountain in Las Vegas called Yucca where the government was planning to store nuclear waste. Also about the city Las Vegas, suicide, humanity, language.

working my way through this:

[NESK]

just finished this:

A great book by a smart, sharp writer. It's about this mountain in Las Vegas called Yucca where the government was planning to store nuclear waste. Also about the city Las Vegas, suicide, humanity, language.

my bookstore dude rec'd that to me the otehr day, i i picked it up for later on but it seems promising. i might have to bump that ahead in my list.

[alexryb]

It's the best book I've read in a while. I go to the same school that D'Agata teaches at so I took a class with him this summer and am doing another next spring! He's a good teacher, too

[NESK]

i guess what i need to know before i bump it ahead of 10 other books is, is it one of those non-fiction works that takes insane liberties with narrative sturcture and ozmotes out into a million themes or is it more memoirish? im really adamently pursuing short format fiction/creative essays that blur into some sort of hybrid journalistic novel type deal right now. i was told this is where i need to start. t/f?

[Baeyer-Drewson]

[lil brown brother]

[gramps]

About a Mountain is good, but his technique isn't as tight as in the essays in his first book. The subject matter is more immediately compelling, though, if more prone to hyperbole too. Good good book.

Right now I'm into:

[alexryb]

i guess what i need to know before i bump it ahead of 10 other books is, is it one of those non-fiction works that takes insane liberties with narrative sturcture and ozmotes out into a million themes or is it more memoirish? im really adamently pursuing short format fiction/creative essays that blur into some sort of hybrid journalistic novel type deal right now. i was told this is where i need to start. t/f?

I believe the most D'Agata messes with structure is by collapsing his stay in Las Vegas to a single summer. He also uses composite characters. But the information he presents is solid, and I love his style (especially when showing the growth of language over 10,000 years. That part reminded me so much of Anne Carson's translation of Sappho). It's an easy read (because it's well-written and interesting), one that I will read again over vacation at the end of the month as I'm not sure I got everything the first time around.

I definitely need to check out Halls of Fame and his anthologies.

[xpaulinabearx]

is the series any good?

[on-display]

^ First three books were spot on, but the reviews saying A Dance with Dragons is only slightly better than A Feast For Crows. IMO series is becoming books I need to read to find out what happens next .

[gramps]

[broneck]

don't you have a job, or school or something? where does the time come from?

[fade to black2]

^ ha i read this without checking the context of the discussion and yet it spoke to me like no post has in the past month.

[shufon]

[gramps]

don't you have a job, or school or something? where does the time come from?

Ergh I spent five minutes trying to find a picture of the goth guy from Wedding Crashers but I couldn't. Well, myy joke is that I'm that guy.

[NESK]

Whoa, fade to black is back? What up brah?

[Synthetic <3]

Admiral William McRaven's "Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operation Warfare Theory and Practice"

[FranklinCosgrove]

A+ read right there.

[Baeyer-Drewson]

Cormac McCarthy is America's greatest living writer. Discuss.

[broneck]

agreed. /discussion?

[Baeyer-Drewson]

Statement was intended to be facetious. Although, if anyone disagreed, I'd like to know why.

[gramps]

I'm not sure I think it's a productive conversation, or very intellectually healthy to spend any more time discussing the best American anything. I'm not sure how many more laurels I want to place on the head of what remains a predominantly white, wealthy, male canon.

Then again, I don't read much contemporary American fiction, and I'm not sure if you guys are interested in having the same discussion about American poetry. I personally am pretty critical in that I rarely like more than one or two books by an author before I feel my time is better off spent on something new. It's pretty merciless and makes my reading a bit schizophrenic but there's a lot to read out there and not much time. What's frustrating for me about US writers is that because there has developed alongside the lit industry some real blustery critics (Kakutani/Bloom/Gass/Deresiewicz) that it's a real jackpot-culture. The notion of the Great American Novel does not translate very well internationally.

Most of the writers people would consider contenders for the top slot really only have one or two really good books and people are just leasing them enthusiasm for their other work. This is definitely the case with McCarthy for me, (I think some before Blood Meridian is good, and everything after not ) and I'm not sure if him or the writers I imagine him being compared with are saying anything terribly urgent anymore.

But if I was going to play the game using the players typically given by critical circles I still think Gravity's Rainbow is a better book than most anything else American and famous. I think it's still more critical and deeply engaged than Blood meridian, which has a lens of historical criticism but also a lot of male fetishism.

Edit: But also I haven't read any David Foster Wallace and a bunch of others so again, I have a lot of gaps.

[american_hearts]

You said everything I felt, and then some. On top of that, how many writers are we leaving out of the discussion entirely? We're really talking about picking a favorite out of a pre-selected list of around 10 names. It's incredibly limiting.

[Sugar Mountain]

I'm about 250 pages in and really enjoying the novel so far. Prior to this, I'd only read the first three Rabbit books by Updike which I thought were excellent. Memories... is a long way from the content of those books although shares some of the themes explored in Rabbit is Rich. An inventive take on the historical novel mixed with musings on the social climate of mid-70s America.