I could write a great novel if my neighborhood weren't so upscale (book thread)

[jess]

Mother Night and Galapagos were two of my favorites, but I read all of his books in such rapid succession (all of them in junior and senior years of high school), that a lot of them have merged together in my mind.

[coldforge]

I just finished Netherland, the first novel I've read in ages. I liked it.

I'm no good at this book group shit.

[Greg Nog]

Welp, finished Freedom last night.  It was like if NPR was a human being that had been tasked with trying to write a Tolstoy novel.  I recommend that nobody read it.

[davy]

I you twurt that, I'll retwurt it.

[davy]

Holy shit! I think I might have already mentioned that a girl I workshopped with in grad school--Brenna Yovanoff--published her first book this year, a gothic YA title called The Replacement. It actually just hit the shelves this week or last, and she found out this morning that it debuted at #10 on the New York Times Children's List!

[mrwednesday87]

After reading Pynchon's terrific and underrated Vineland (wait--fiction has to be apocalyptic to be interesting? Also, readers aren't finding a little apocalypse in Vineland?) I've been skimming Deleuze and Guattari's 60's philosophical text, One Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Skimming is what you do with this thing, it has a nonlinear organization so you don't have to necessarily read it cover to cover, squares.
Anyone experienced this thing? In Vineland, when the punk rock band Fascist Toejam get enlisted to play a mafiosa wedding, they get ideas about how to pull it off from a "Deleuze and Guattari Fakebook" which turns out to be a reference to this text. Gotta love the oddball encoding Pynchon does, reading one of his books opens up a whole wealth of new things to read.

[elpollodiablo]

Interesting! I haven't read Vineland in five years, but I just read a good whack of One Thousand Plateaus a few weeks ago. I'm actually working on a paper right now that takes up House of Leaves as a failed example of a rhizomatic text. Well, failed example or parody--I'm not quite sure yet. I've got in my reading notes a bit about Gravity's Rainbow and how it basically treats the War as a rhizomatic system and advances the preterite peoples/Counterforce as a kind of tribal nomadism.

[davy]

The new wave of Vonnegut redesigns are out!

http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=32175

Getting the treatment this time around: Breakfast of Champions (I like that they kept the first edition color scheme intact--it was probably the coolest of his first edition covers), Bluebeard (!!), Jailbird, Palm Sunday, and most exciting of all, While Mortals Sleep, the soon-to-be-published 3rd volume of KV's unpublished short fiction!



The only major titles which have not yet been reissued are Player Piano, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Wampeters Foma & Granfaloons, Hocus Pocus, Fates Worse Than Death, Bagombo Snuff Box (his first collection of unpublished short fiction), and Timequake.

[mrwednesday87]

Interesting! I haven't read Vineland in five years, but I just read a good whack of One Thousand Plateaus a few weeks ago. I'm actually working on a paper right now that takes up House of Leaves as a failed example of a rhizomatic text. Well, failed example or parody--I'm not quite sure yet. I've got in my reading notes a bit about Gravity's Rainbow and how it basically treats the War as a rhizomatic system and advances the preterite peoples/Counterforce as a kind of tribal nomadism.

Nice! That's good work, I'm starting to see how the rhizomatic system is really what's going on under the hood of what gets labeled as "postmodern" works. From the other Pynchon books I've read (Gravity's Rainbow, Inherent Vice, Slow Learner) there's a running theme of the preterite/elect, and of course and ongoing breakdown of these Calvinist sorts of concepts. I'm really enjoying this book on an aesthetics level---at some points it loses me but at others it seems to give a little shape (and plenty of words) to the floating detritus in my brain.

[jm]

corntinued here:

http://www.lastplanetojakarta.com/forums/index.php/topic,12854.0.html