‘My childhood sweetheart was beautiful and we were madly in love. She had large shapely breasts that inspired a deep longing within me. Later, she developed a non-specific mental illness and was committed to an institution. I never saw her again and have forever regretted not tapping that 
’
I think his surrealist stuff is much more interesting.
His surrealist stuff has him playing “man regretful for all the sex he didn’t have in his youth” like a jazz standard, reharmonizing and ornamenting with memory politics and dream visions and digressions about unicorns, kappas, giant frogs, sheep imports, and whale penises until it makes you want to dance dance dance
In Japanese novel, societal changes are often projected through the personal unseemly desires of the writers. Girl is a symbol, a figure that appears in almost every Japanese writer. It’s a manifestation of frustration and meaninglessness in post-war modernity. You can treat it like HER in I used to love her by Common.
In Norwegian Wood, his roommate called Totsugekitai then suddenly disappeared in the dormitory, that’s for a reason.
I started reading my Spanish copy of 2666 again. My pace is picking up and I’m starting to take a “fuck it, whatever” approach whenever I don’t recognize a word. That means instead of looking the word up, I’m just guessing based on context or trusting that I caught enough around it that it doesn’t matter. Pretty soon, it’ll be just like reading in English.
post can’t be empty
I recently started reading Richard Stark’s @Parker books. I finished the second one the other day. I’ve read barely any crime fiction before, and I think I’ve started at the apex. Holy shit, I can’t stop reading this stuff!
any good books for a noob reader? I just finished Hungry Hungry Caterpillar and was looking for more like it.
jk… but for real tho
I am out of the groove with reading recently, I want to get more into The Good Stuff like classic and modern lit fic, important Marxist tracts, things of this nature. every time I read some theory or something with some meat I feel my whole mood elevate. I guess I’ll take a skim thru the thread and see what folks are up to.
Moby Dick’s pretty good
Moby Dick and Don Quixote are both unbelievably funny if you ever really want to read a big old famous book. however I generally find that most people do not want to talk as much as I’d like about more recent literary fiction (I have this problem in conversations about PC games as well) and take more satisfaction in recommending those
the funniest classic literature is and always will be Gargantua and Pantagruel
more modern but still not contemporary litfic that is very funny: eveything Flann O’brien ever wrote, but especially the Third Policeman and At Swim-Two-Birds
oh i’ve read moby dick like three times thru lol
don quixote is a good shout
i tried the third policeman a while ago but got distracted
I always recommend The Manuscript Found in Saragossa to people who want a novel with a bit of everything.
classic, modern, Marxism, English
Jack London
I just picked up the newish Richard Powers book Playground on a whim because I’d be down for some literary ecofiction about ocean life, but I’m now realizing I probably should have bought The Overstory instead because apparently that’s the guy’s masterwork.
i’ve been a bit depressed and reading unchallenging genre fiction:
permutation city by greg egan - pretty fun! even better if you reject the entire premise of simulated brains actually being conscious so it turns into a convoluted struggle between headless processes in cloud server that itself no longer connects to the outside world
between two fires by christopher buehlman - i’m like 50 pages in and could see it going either way in terms of quality but it’s gross goofy sentimental fun so far
I finished reading The Water Margin, and thus I am finally done with all four of the classic Chinese novels.
This one was probably one of the more casually enjoyable of the four, but boy howdy did the author hate women. It got to the point where I was kind of relieved whenever a woman being introduced into the plot didn’t end with her being hacked to pieces by one of the heroes.
I also kind of suspect that the main character, Song Jiang was basically a sort of wish fulfilment / self insert character for the author. He’s a bog standard clerk, described as short and fat and yet everyone he meets is starstruck and calls him the most valiant and chivalrous of heroes. He also viciously murders his wife, which I guess must have been a secret desire of the author.
Of the four novels, I think Dream of the Red Chamber was my favourite by a fair margin.
Both Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms have to be understood as the collations of disparate strands of folk tale, history, poetry, etc into a cohesive narrative (much like the homeric epics, and the finnish kalevala). The author was an undeniable misogynist (through his choice of which stories to incorporate into the narrative) but I don’t think Song Jiang can be understood as a self-insert so much as a composite of folktales loosely based on a real historical figure
Admittedly I don’t really know much about the history, but I figured it could have been both what you say, as a composite of various folktales, as well as Shi Naian punching it up a bit to fit his own ideals. That could also just be part of the storytelling traditions though, with the telling and re-telling by various people over the years, the character might have shifted towards being the heroic everyman that people identified with more.
don’t you mean it was your favorite by a water margin?