ok look i’ve spent a pot of my time on my phone or playing zelda lately coz i’ve been too tired to do anything else with my downtime. but like … it sucks. i wanna read more. what’s good for getting back into it?
recently i did read Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood trilogy which was occasionally a little dry but quite compelling and thought-provoking. i guess fiction is an easier on-ramp than a lot of non-fiction here …
also been quite into Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series the last year or two, it’s fantastically readable and in conversation with the medium of fanfic in an interesting way
currently i’m trying to read McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? which, while her tweets about the thesis were compelling, is making my eyes glaze over. maybe not recommended
what else do we have? Moby-Dick is on my list too and i have no idea which way that’ll go
to my shame that’s one of the megathreads i absolutely lost track of early on in the life of SB2.0 and since it hasn’t rolled over i’ve not had an easy re-entry point but will do!! ('_')7
I have a recommendation!! an essay collection on fiction, bodies, and other weird things called Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk, It is basically brand new. and a short fiction collection by Izumi Suzuki called Terminal Boredom, stories all written in Japan in the early 70s I think? I think that you will enjoy these two, or at least find them worthwhile.
recently read The House on the Borderland and it kicks ass. Absolutely wild how much this presaged Lovecraft shit by a couple decades, and is also better than most of his output.
Also the author is a body building formal navy guy with a fear of water who made most of his money in fitness.
here are some books i go to specifically for scratching the same shortform and readable itch as posts… not saying they’re necessarily the best of their types but these are my personal go tos when i’m bored and just want to pick something up, dumping here in case any seem interesting
watch out
essays - max beerbohm is maybe the perfect essayist for the ability to be funny, surprising, perverse etc in a conspicuously limited format, there was a good recent collection of his stuff as “the prince of minor writers”… borges’ nonfiction incl a funny stint as pulp novel reviewer and movie critic for women & home magazine. jenny diski’s nonfiction writing (my fave is the booklength ‘stranger on a train’), aj leibling’s old new yorker columns on boxing(!) and old timey scams (“the jollity building”). there was a book recently collecting some pre-russian revolution columns by “teffi” which were great esp the one about being hit on by rasputin. gore vidal is always fun and bitchy
criticism - greil marcus’s “real life rock top 10” column is good semi-random popculture snapshots from the 70s to now. david thomson’s biographical dictionary of film is fun to open to just any page and start rifling through. chris kraus’s art criticism is good… i want to get that gigantic gary indiana tome of old art reviews as well. mark fisher’s old blog which now also exists in tome form.
funny stuff - sj perelman - if you ever read any of those old woody allen short stories before well, you know, all the good parts of those are basically recycled perelman. the newspaper columns flann o brien did as “myles na gopaleen” are great and delirious experiments with the form. “the stuffed owl” is a collection of the most wretched english language poems the curators could find at the start of the 20thc and is as simultaneously funny and weirdly inspiring as that implies
short fiction - donald barthelme’s short stuff i am rereading now and is really great, rangy and unexpected, avoids that horrible sense of “gear up, theres an Epiphany coming” that mars a lot of short writing. stanislaw lem’s comic work like the star diaries and cyberiad. tove jansson’s non-moomin fiction i always find weirdly addictive.
diaries and things - clarice lispector’s newspaper column. jules renard’s diary is always good to just rummage around in. lichtenberg’s “waste books” are just collections of random thoughts which range drastically in quality in pretty fun ways. beckett’s letters are weirdly engaging at least the first two volumes.
miscellanies - those charles fort books about rains of frogs and stuff are always surprisingly satisfying to just dip into. thomas browne’s “dictionary of vulgar errors”, the yahoo answers of its day. brewers dictionary of phrase and fable is like a giant stack of weird doggerel to sift through… similarly walter benjamin’s arcades project (sort of a big collage work of intriguing quotes and fragments from old 19thc texts) is maybe best appreciated as a big pdf you just scan around at random
been a while since i’ve read actual novels too. recently i got through j. g. ballard’s ‘crash’ for the first time, it’s p fun.
maybe it’s an out-there recommendation because i only read the book in portuguese but recently-ish there was a new international release of machado de assis’ ’ the posthumous memoirs of brás cubas’ in english that people in the anglophone literary world have been praising. the original is one of my favorite modernist novels
patricia lockwood is also a really enjoyable writer if you want to literally bridge the twitter to page divide, her poetry scratches the short form absurdity itch and Priestdaddy was a fun read about her deeply weird and idiosyncratic father
Red and The Black/Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal I think is good for poster mindset cuz its gags, gossip, constant shit-talking from somebody who is clearly not as self-aware as they think they are, trashy emotional indulgence, and like every three pages there’s a chapter break that starts with some sort of slanderous quote. This is probably the book thats been read the most by ppl I’ve recommended it to
Another one that idk how easy it is to find but i got on a whim and have lent out to a couple people is A Contrived World by Jung Young-Moon, there’s an interesting flat affect going on in that one & its primarily sort of loosely believable travelogue anecdotes connected through a detached/slightly bizarre attitude. I think it also scratches a similar itch.
Passing by Nella Larsen maybe has the least in common with doomscrolling formally (does not feel or look like posts per se) but it’s a novella that’s a relatively easy read and not too long, which I find can be gratifying as motivators when I’m trying 2 get back to reading. I also really like it personally & JCO tweeting about it has it on my mind.
This is maybe kind of an annoying strat but also, if you’re looking at nonfiction, sometimes I find things just by like searching something I’ve already engaged with on Jstor and seeing the discourse or following those citations down to other things. Which I find kind of easily conforms into the internet-addicted mindset of getting lost in meaningless discursive study but can feel a bit better since im engaging with things that have been thought over a bit more & fit into a more defined conversation