toni cade bambara’s the salt eaters is mostly just making me feel bad about work. it’s v good
I am reading The Lathe Of Heaven. I’ve just started.
i was going to read some bizarro fiction but itnturns out its mostly just gorepunk written by rednecks
What did you expect?
Nothing, honestly!
It looks like Carlton Mellick III may be the only guy making anything interesting in the genre, and he’s basically like a body horror fetishist version of Chuck Tingle in terms of output.
I hate B-movie aficianados.
Knausgaard 6 is so much worse than the prior five volumes I put it down before I even got to the really stupid part
However the new Sally Rooney is even better than last year’s so that’s something, just a bolt to a boarded up part of my heart.
Really enjoyed the new Amitava Kumar too, it’s like a much more interesting and less obviously laudable Junot Diaz
re some of the other stuff in this thread since I’ve never posted in it:
Jitterbug Perfume is tons of fun and probably the best Robbins (I certainly wouldn’t read more than a couple), I read it at 18 and loved it
The best Vonnegut is, hands down, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. Also probably my favourite book about postwar American society, honestly. He repeats himself a lot otherwise and his 70s and 80s stuff in particular is pretty bitter and dire.
w/r/t Russian literature, I’ve never read War and Peace but Anna Karenina is great for what I’ve always assumed to be similar reasons and if you love Notes From Underground it’s more or less the Crying of Our Lot 49 relative to a lot of Dostoevsky’s bigger minor works like The Idiot or The Double. I don’t like Crime and Punishment or Karamazov nearly as much, his moralizing is far less interesting than his panicking. Elif Batuman’s The Idiot is also great.
I liked Dune a lot better than The Dispossed but I read one of them at 17 and enjoyed it primarily for its expansiveness (I can certainly understand the criticism that a lot of the exoticism is fairly cheap) and the other at 28 and found it too obvious.
what else, um
Paul Beatty’s The Sellout was probably the best and funniest book I’ve ever read about American Blackness, if you like Atlanta at all I can’t recommend it highly enough
new Moshfegh was good, she rules. I can’t think of another contemporary female writer who’s as immediately digestible to the lonely affectless Auster set, and she’s much better spirited.
Hari Kunzru’s White Tears was angry and brutal and excellent
I’m reading Dune right now. I’m maybe 1/4th through it and I’m honestly enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. The worldbuilding is nifty, and I like all the stuff about hyper-talented empath spies who seed mythologies around the galaxy with little prophesies they can later capitalize on.
is this a good time to ask for the origin of the No Dune Threads meme?
I was wondering about that too, because… I was considering making one.
NO DUNE THREADS
I think it was just that for awhile, everything became a dune thread, and certain SB people were always on board for talking about dune.
I started reading Racecraft yesterday and goddamn there is a lot to think about in this book.
This is hugely interesting to me
He releases three novels a year and some of them are around thirty pages. There’s one about a Kaiju being killed in portland and then its giant toxic rotting corpse amd the filth it leaves behind.
Then there’s Bio Melt, which is pitched as novel version of 80’s melt movies.
The whole Bizarre Fiction movement was meant to be novel versions of 80’s splatterpunk and gore movies that take place in worlds full of filth and trash and every novel i’ve read besides this guys are awful
bizarro fiction is deeply boring
its wacky ‘john dies at the end’ shit
I mean, ‘john dies at the end’ is literally the most famous part of the genre
Its all amateurish “campaign notes from my gurps horror game” writing