CHICKENS IN A BOOK: BOOK BOOK BGAWK (new book thread)

[elpollodiablo]

What do you hate about it?

[milly balgeary]

i dunno, it's been 7 years or so since i read some of it. maybe it's the best thing ever. it came out when i worked at this insurance agency and would go across the street to this tidy little bookseller who had a very select inventory of books. i picked it up, oh, let's say this was about the time dave eggers released his second book, you shall know our velocity -- and this tiny exclamation point of a book shop surrounded by all these concrete and glass buildings that actually mimicked the title of the eggers book by creating a sort of wind tunnel (our velocity eh) and the owner was this gray gay fellow, who probably made precious little money because i'm sure that the rent downtown was high, and space and stock were limited, and most of the customers who went in there, were, like me, wannabe-writers who were floating through life like dirt specks on a pair of slobbery perspiring glasses, blown from one eye to another. i picked up the eggers book there. hardback. the velocity one. then i picked up the zadie smith book. white teeth. then i remember going home and excitedly getting my read on, my anticipation like a glowing string of white christmas lights, only...only the lights shut off one by one, because both books disappointed me. i never recovered feeling in my heart for eggers. zadie just seemed slightly off to me, pretentious...but man, 7 or 8 years is a long time, and i don't really remember! i have a chip on my shoulder for those two authors who i sort of lump together, like turds in a box, hidden in some loft closet under a bunch of grandma's old yellow newspapers.

[elpollodiablo]

Well you know me and my Eggers complex.

I guess I could see how one might think White Teeth pretentious, but I know for a fact you read & enjoy some stuff that's far more & actually pretentious (Pynchon, for one). White Teeth is just so damn... likable. It's humanistic. It's not crushingly cynical, although it could be--I might even like it more if it were. There's something genuine both in her care for her characters and their care for each other. Possibly I'm guilty of nostalgia in regards to this novel; I first read it at an incredibly happy point in my life (when I should've been reading other things, n.b.). Be interested to see if my take on it alters, especially in context of the Rushdie.

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

coldforge: preeminent scholar of preeminent scholasticism

[Greg Nog]

Got me a copy of The Pale King today!

[coldforge]

coldforge: preeminent scholar of preeminent scholasticism

You name it, I'll dish. I'm really good at making that shit up.

[Bernard]

Got me a copy of The Pale King today!

Oh, let me know what you think! This has been all over the place in my rss reader.

[elpollodiablo]

I'm still pretty deeply conflicted about that one.

[Ignatius]

About it being released as a proper novel/released at all or what?

[elpollodiablo]

Both. I'm pretty much of a mind with our esteemed editor re: posthumous, unauthorized publications. I think the intent to publish/decision not to is one of the areas in which intent really matters in that there's a much clearer rubric for evaluation of it: either the author meant this to be published in this form, or he didn't. When reading a work assembled from drafts and reading notes by another party, I don't know that one can even call it the author's work if she didn't have the last word on its form prior to publication.

Anyway I came here to say that this out of print Vollmann I just got has the worst jacket art I think I've ever seen:

[fishjim]

BLOW ME WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

[davy]

Whoa, that's bad.

[elpollodiablo]

Learned myself some speech act theory this weekend by reading 4 short books. Considering going and trolling the Judith Butler thread, but my eyes rather hurt.

[elpollodiablo]

Lord Jim may be the only assigned novel I don't finish this semester. Fuckin thing SUCKS. Beginning to think I just really don't care for Conrad. His talent seems mostly to lie in making what would otherwise be exciting stories unbearably boring.

[dieblucasdie]

PREACH.

[Greg Nog]

I recall finding it boring, but remembering very little about it afterward.  It's one of my dad's all-time favorites, though, so like once every few years I try it again.

[elpollodiablo]

The intricacy of the multiple nested narratives is pretty amusing/engrossing at points, but Jesus fucking Christ, given this man's documented reverence for the English language he uses it like someone who learned it by reading tax law. \

What's perplexing about this novel is that it gets more boring in the second act, which is effectively an adventure story.

[fishjim]

I haven't read enough Conrad to compare here, but I suspect that his tax-law English is part of what makes Heart of Darkness so terrifying. It's like a vestige of the civilized illusions Marlowe leaves behind after following the Congo River to the interior.

I never finished Lord Jim, either.

[davy]

I quite like Heart of Darkness, and didn't mind The Secret Agent, either. Those are the only two I've read, though.

[RavingLunatic]

I had to read Heart of Darkness in high school and have no desire ever to read anything else of Conrad's again.

[Ah_Pook]

i read The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss the other week and im still basking in the warm afterglow. tinged by the sad knowledge that now i have to wait another interminable 3-4 years for the finale to come out. still though, i cant recommend it enough. if you havent read his two books (the first one is called The Name Of The Wind) and you have even the vaguest passing interest in fantastic fiction you need to go to the book store today and get on that.

[davy]

Hm. I might check that out.

[jebreject]

The Name of the Wind is a piece of crap. I couldn't even finish it. I mostly just hated the protagonist so much that I couldn't bear reading any further. Who knows, maybe there was actual interesting character development in there somewhere. Maybe the protagonist became more than Dude Who Is Great at Everything and Everyone Loves Him, you know, juvenile wish fulfillment crap.  There's some good writing in places, but also some really, really bad prose as well, and, in the end, I have no idea why Rothfuss is getting all of this praise, because he doesn't deserve it.

[milly balgeary]

The Name of the Wind is a piece of crap. I couldn't even finish it. I mostly just hated the protagonist so much that I couldn't bear reading any further. Who knows, maybe there was actual interesting character development in there somewhere. Maybe the protagonist became more than Dude Who Is Great at Everything and Everyone Loves Him, you know, juvenile wish fulfillment crap.  There's some good writing in places, but also some really, really bad prose as well, and, in the end, I have no idea why Rothfuss is getting all of this praise, because he doesn't deserve it.

I wouldn't call it a piece of crap necessarily. It is definitely the kind of stuff that is prominent over some better stuff and is the latest in a series of the kinds of fantasy that Del Ray sort of pushed into bestsellerdom years ago with Terry Brooks and the like, kinda crossed with the whole harry potter thing, but by no means is it a piece of crap. The thing about wish-fulfillment and novels is that it's not wish fulfillment, really, when you start talking novels --

I know it's a common enough criticism among the people who read the stuff that's generally considered to be literary-ish, that the "epic fantasy" thing is real ghetto because of the wish-fulfillment, but I don't see how that can be leveled as an actual criticism, since it's all wish fulfillment, the very act of reading a "novel"... it's just a device to make the reader give a shit. It's a little sugary, but learning from novels is wayyy overrated. Difficult but rewarding novels where complex modern psychological problems are encountered, and human stories are filtered through the gaze of the all knowing genius artist/novelist is a total crapfest and the only thing people learn from novels like that is how to be a bigger tosser.

I mean, we like a likable character that we can identify with, and it can be nice to watch a not-so-successful person become a successful person...but even if you don't have that, and you have a despicable character (DROOD) ... we still like it when good things happen to him, even if he's a fucking asshole who is slowly (humorously) going insane and planning on killing Charles Dickens. Or Celine. Shit, when he starts practicing medicine in the slums of Paris after being a total dick throughout the whole Night novel, I was like YES... and maybe it was with fulfillment because I like to see myself as that lovable cynic, blah blah.

Wish Fulfillment.

Hal Incandenza. WF

James Joyce in Portrait - WF

Jon Snow in A Song of Ice and Fire - WF

JR in... JR - WF

Main Character in Patrick Rothfuss novel - WF

Dave Eggers in HBWOSG - Wank (sorry I can't resist, hate that fucking guy)

Rothfuss seems like a genuinely nice guy, and while that ain't givin him a pass (and I haven't read the 2nd book, and read the 1st Rothfuss book many years ago and remember nothing but a horrible cover) I don't think the wish fulfillment ghetto fantasy thing is an adequate criticism, or it belongs back in high school when the cool kids were reading Catcher in the Rye and acting like Tolken was nerdy and nerds just imagined they were wizards, when meanwhile this cool kids acted like Holden C and all. BLAH. BLAH! Wizards are so much better than Holden C.

I'm not sure where this is going anymore, because I can't concentrate because I feel like I may have the flu. But I disagree with you man. Because if you're gonna lay the hate on one, and burn it because it's not your thing, then you gotta burn em all. BURN ONE BURN ALL.

[elpollodiablo]

I was going to protest that Hal Incandenza's life would make for some pretty fucking grim wish fulfillment, but then again...