Kind of beyond The Pale King: newest book thread

[auto-da-fey]

My lady and I just finished reading Charles Baxter's The Soul Thief out loud to each other, and . . . it was a really bad book, all overwritten and sophomorically allusive and ultimately just plain meta-narratively fucking stupid.
Which is weird, because his Feast of Love is one of her favorites, and from the section she read to me last summer while we drove across Indiana at 2am, I can see why. This one, though, is grad-student wankery of the highest order.

Now we're reading Raymond Carver, and that's a billion times better.

[auto-da-fey]

then again, my lady also just finished Franzen's Freedom and absolutely loved it, so she might not get much cred around here. gotta say, from the parts she read me, I was digging it too. even the Bright Eyes concert scene.

[elpollodiablo]

That's a joke, yes?

[auto-da-fey]

that is not a joke. Freedom is a novel about our times, and what defines our times more than Conor Oberst.

[auto-da-fey]

I mean, questions of whether one should include a Bright Eyes concert scene in one's novel notwithstanding, as I'm pretty sure LPTJ (and my lady) would achieve a rare unanimity on the issue, I will say, Franzen does nail the experience.

I know. I have seen the Bright Eyes.

[Greg Nog]

Like so many things in that book, the Bright Eyes concert scene just made me want to put a blanket over Franzen's cage so that he would fall asleep, or, at the very least, quietly gnaw on sunflower seeds instead of writing any more.

[davy]

The "blanket over cage" thing doesn't work half so well as you'd hope. Better have a back-up plan.

[elpollodiablo]

I cannot imagine an experience I would less enjoy seeing nailed in prose. Just... yikers

[elpollodiablo]

And it's not just my personal distaste for Oberst. Call it a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm having trouble seeing what narrative or dramatic purpose that would serve except to horribly date your work. I thought Franzen was supposed to be a serious American novelist... Maybe he actually just wants to be Lethem?

[Antero]

He's trying to address the reality of contemporary America in all of its glorious shallowness, pollo!  This - he - is us!

Franzen makes me want to punch something over and over and over.

[Greg Nog]

I seem to recall the preciousness of the Bright Eyes fans being used as a "Well golly things sure are different now than in my day" contrast to the aging 70s punk guy (with the implication that kids today are weak and dewy-eyed rather than politically-engaged), but I'd have to double-check to see if that is indeed the narrative function of the scene.  To be honest, a lot of that book has already pushed its way out of my mind like half-masticated corn fragments from a rectum.

[Nick Ink]

Well, I finished The Master & Margarita and in the end I decided it was amazing. I really enjoyed the notes at the end too, and it certainly gave me a lot to think about.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. Tomorrow I'm off to Spain for 2 weeks, so I hit the bookshop and bought these:



And for Ellie, as it was great value (she's already read the first of the four books it contains):

[Good Intentions]

I'm surprised to see collections of 4 HHGttG novels around, given that the fifth one (and collections including it) have been around for... 2 decades? A long time, anyway.

[clare]

yeah, that does seem weird. is it a judgement on the 5th book somehow? Or a way to make more money off the punters?

Thanks for the reminder Nick - I'm going to wave it in front of the big boy who is sick in bed, and bored.

[Good Intentions]

The fifth book is a bit of a downer, for sure, but it's a really funny downer.

[clare]

I just looked for #5 on the bookshelf and it wasn't there...perhaps I don't even own it? I waved #1 at the boy and he looked at it in a desultory manner and said "oh. yeah. I've seen this....it was kind of boring" I resisted the urge to slap him and left as he was muttering "it's got a robot in it. and a dude. and a girl. and another dude..."

edit: no, hang on. i found it mis-filed. lucky enough. I might have to read it again!

[Good Intentions]

Forgive him, Clare, he's young and he doesn't know what he's saying.

[Little Sixes Little Nines]

I'm surprised to see collections of 4 HHGttG novels around, given that the fifth one (and collections including it) have been around for... 2 decades? A long time, anyway.

it is interesting - it's probably because of the 8 year gap, and massive change in tone, that some people don't like to consider it as "part of the series".

[Good Intentions]

I quite often think of the Arthur Dent in that novel, his daughter Random, and Stavros Mueller Beta. There's quite a bit of flesh to the story in there.

[clare]

yes, I think that because of the gap, I haven't re-read it as many times as I did the first four. I'm about a third of the way through it, and it's ringing lots of bells...

I tried again to convince the big boy by saying "so much of what we say and do has been influenced by this series of books, you'll totally get it and love it" to no avail. But it's true - its popularity, mainly I guess with nerdy science types, but not only them (us?) means that it's totally ingrained in my peers heads. People think like Douglas Adams writes. The internet is The Guide.

[jebreject]

Mostly Harmless is the only one I've only been able to re-read once. It's too much of a downer; on subsequent re-reads I've made it through maybe halfway and usually give up.

The other four, on the other hand, I've read probably a dozen times.

[clare]

It's true that it's not a great re-read, once you remember where it's going. I wonder if Adams had just had enough of it by then and wanted to kill it once and for all. Also I haven't re-read So long and Thanks For All the Fish in a while either. I might have to go backwards after this.

[Maaik]

It's true that it's not a great re-read, once you remember where it's going. I wonder if Adams had just had enough of it by then and wanted to kill it once and for all. Also I haven't re-read So long and Thanks For All the Fish in a while either. I might have to go backwards after this.

I recall reading in an interview somewhere that he at some point had hoped to rewrite the last book of the series--that when he wrote Mostly Harmless, he was going through a pretty dark, unfunny time in his life and he felt that reflected negatively in the book.

[alex]

I did find one book that I was pretty enthusiastic about: Samuel Delany's Einstein Intersection

I finally read that this weekend, and I must say I was a bit disappointed. I mean, there's no doubt that Delany is good at using language, but I didn't care for the plot or setting and all, I thought the various ways in which he broke conventional narrative were mostly rather pretentious, and the various references to icons of then-contemporary pop culture having entered mythology were really rather lame. I reckon that all of that was supposed to serve some larger purpose, but I was too irritated to get myself to care. It was okay, overall, I guess, but I liked Nova a lot better and am not sure whether to bother with any of his other fictional writings.

I enjoyed the other book I read last week - a monograph about the construction of authenticity in country music - quite a bit more.

[jebreject]

So Neil Gaiman isn't actually a very good writer turns out