What should I read first??? I'm 17 and value style over content.

[dfw]

I currently have Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, Train Dreams, Lolita, Naked Lunch, Suttree, Omensetter's Luck (DFW-recommended), Reader's Block (DFW raved about Wittgenstein's Mistress, but it was checked out), Ulysses, The Corrections, Middlesex, and Joseph Andrews (mainly because I always see Tom Jones being used for lit exams). I still need to finish Infinite Jest, but had to return it to the library with 200 pages to go. I'm 17, a senior in high school, and I really love lyrical and difficult prose. I attempted the first few pages of Suttree, but it was so incredibly difficult to read. Maybe that was because I read the italicized opening. I'm the type to look up every single word I come accross with which I am not familiar. There must've been 20 words per page of that opening of Suttree that I didn't know.
Words like (at random) "pinchbeck," "dogwhelk," "bolos," "murenger." I love this type of writing though. I was absolutely wowed by Nabokov's prose in Lolita (reading it again).



what about all this contemporary stuff

i don't know how well known it is
but

one example (random)
joshua cohen's Witz (dubbed the Jewish Ulysses (even though Ulysses is about a jew i think)

the intstructions- adam levin
zadie smith
pynchon
gaddis
martin amis
ben lerner
delillo
robinson
krasznahorkai
cortazar
eggers
safran foer
murakami
houellebecq
banville
chabon
vila-matas
egan
danielewski
harbach
saunders
mitchell
bolano
roth
updike
lydia davis
walser
shteyngart
lipsyte
st aubyn
tobias wolff (wolfe?)\
colson whitehead
barnes (djuna and julian)
denis johnson
coover
perec
vollmann
celine (louis something)
sebald
waugh
wodehouse
hitchens (not a novelist, but still good)
atwood
rushdie
eco



and what about the books/novelists on this list, many of which/whom are quite obscure and unfamiliar to me


^am i missing many contemporary novelists of great literary merit? i'm sure i am, i haven't read very much, but i've read stuff about all of those authors above
and there are many others who i'm forgetting

also

am homes
calvino
erickson
daitch
pessoa
lethem
dyer
d'agata
diaz (not sure about this one)
nicholson baker
colm toibin
auster
edmund white
leyner

moore
kundera
carson
shirley jackson
oh ya, barth
alice munro
coover
carver
cheever
will self
ellroy

hunter s thompson
didion
borges
saramago
dos passos
beckett

coetzee
winterson
mcinerney

[mal4mac]

It takes a hundred years, at least, to get a consensus on what has great literary merit. Of course it's usually possible to spot some early contenders, and you seem to have listed most of them :)

I don't like difficult prose, and can do without "lyrical", so I will refrain from making specific suggestions in that vein.

A lot of the authors you list aren't difficult; like Roth, Coetzee, Julian Barnes, Saramago, Waugh... These would also, surely, be near the top of many people's lists... they would certainly be at the top of mine. Why do you want difficult? Why not go for great? Great can be difficult, but it can also be easy.

[dfw]

ok
so who are the difficult contemporary

i hear banville is a lot like nabokov

[kelby_lake]

Ian McEwan is not difficult but he does prize style above content.

If you want difficult prose, try the slang of A Clockwork Orange, or Trainspotting. They have quite a male appeal I think.

[breathtest]

Delillo has an attractive style. Very smart prose. Expresses small things in a way that makes you wish that your own writing could accomplish such ease and elegance.

Beckett is the king, in my opinion. The style of his later prose, particularly, is very intricate and complex, and ultimately rewarding. Pieces like 'Ill Seen Ill Said', 'How It Is', and the shorter prose like his collection of 'fizzles'. One of the 'fizzles', for example, is about a man who sits silently in a chair, apparently lifelessly, but on closer inspection Beckett makes us see that he is teeming with life, describing his minute movements in such great detail. Very Avant-Garde writer. And very humorous at times as well.

[dfw]

^thx

are most of those authors i listed worth reading, though
even if most of them aren't difficult

[Jassy Melson]

Try reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray--for both style and content.

[stlukesguild]

I agree with the suggestion of Oscar Wilde. I'd also look into other writers of the art pour l'art movement: Theophile Gautier, J.K. Huysmans, Comte de Lautréamont, Walter Pater, etc...

[londonhector]

i love the title of this thread "i'm seventeen and value style over content"

i would reccommend calvino's invisible cities. beautiful book! it was the only present i got on my 19th birthday and i enjoyed it immensely

[dfw]

thank u for the responses everyone

i'll look into wilde
i have read about pater a bit
i'll check out the other guys
i suppose pater's main work on the renaissance would be best,

ill look into calvino also
i've heard a lot about his if on a winter's night a traveler

[dfw]

ill look into beckett and delillo also

according to harold bloom

the 4 contemporary authors who have touched on the sublime are delillo, pynchon, mccarthy, and roth


i currently checked out dubliners, lolita, the sea (banville), a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, and the lottery (shirley jackson)
from my local library, i just picked up what there chanced upon

[kelby_lake]

If you want Wilde, go for the plays. The Importance of Being Earnest is the big one.

[Jassy Melson]

Wilde also wrote three collections of short stories--most of them in the fantasy realm. All his stories and plays make for good reading.

[breathtest]

Bury yourself in books! It's the best way to die

[miyako73]

If you want entertaining wit and unique writing style, try arundathi roy's the god of small things.

[Delta40]

I love coetzee and winterson. Winterson especially.

[dfw]

kkk


have u guys heard of
joshua cohen, adam levin, shteyngart, or lipsyte

[dfw]

let's get some more responses up in here

[blazeofglory]

I side with style, yet not to the extent of appreciating ulysses. Nabokov is alright and i even hate Faulkner. In fact simplicity also is not an impediment and by being simple also we can make a good style

[dfw]

what about sam lipsyte's the ask
danielewski's house of leaves?

[dfw]

joshua cohen's witz

[billl]

I'm not sure if this will help, please don't blame me if you think I'm way off base, but I think Nicholson Baker might be worth a look. Any student of my posts on this site will recognize that I can be counted upon to throw out a flurry of recommendations for this guy every couple years or so. Sometimes his content can be at least a little, uh, compelling, at least for some of us probably (e.g. The Fermata), but something like The Mezzanine (his first novel) has only as much substance as one wants to put in it, I think. If you're really lazy, it's remarkably shallow--but nevertheless fascinatingly broad. And, while structure might be a rather obvious quality of the book, I really loved it for its style as well, in much the same way I love Nabokov's writing for the style. (I do know where you're coming from, in the OP.)

But he isn't like Nabokov, he's got a particular angle of his own, I think. Maybe you can find a way to give one of his earlier works a shot, maybe via a preview on Amazon or elsewhere on the net. (Check the first four books, or maybe you can find an essay somewhere. His work after 1994 should be approached with great caution, though--it is generally a great step down from the earlier stuff.)

[ennison]

Style over content? Hmm. Joyce Carol Oates! But that makes her sound shallow! Stephen King. Frequently there is only the desire to shock and be bizarre so if it's style WITHOUT content then he's your huckleberry

[dfw]

anyone else care to respond

[Lykren]

Don't look for another Nabokov; authors are individuals. That said, for glittery style, try Fitzgerald and Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Tolstoy wrote immensely entertaining novels which are beautifully written. Ulysses, if you don't get frightened by the difficulty, is an epic masterpiece, one that will stay in your mind for a long time.

I've see you mention on other threads that you don't want to read non-contemporary writing: if true, that is an absurd and arbitrary requirement. The stuff that's survived the wear of time endures for a reason.

[islandclimber]

For contemporary writers...

Pynchon is brilliant. My favourite writer. Provocative, surreal, disturbing, difficult. Time is irrelevant, place is a forgotten notion, feverish dreams slip into absurdist awakenings, and there are many brilliant rivers of words flowing from page to page. Gravity's Rainbow is his best work in my opinion. Of his long works, Against The Day is maybe the most accessible. Incredibly entertaining too.

Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual is one of the most brilliant books of the past 50 years. It is an Oulipo work though, so the constraints held within make for some interesting content at times. A unique writer, with an interesting style.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai. The Melancholy of Resistance. James Wood said "Reality examined to the point of madness." This explains Krasznahorkai's writing quite well. His sentences feel at times endless. His prose like some perpetual motion machine. Until it stops, without warning. His characters balance on a precipice between despair and revelation, but rarely take the plunge either way. The only writer I could think of to compare him to, would be Beckett. That same, haphazard, yet tightly structured prose, sentences that cut circles of random size, a content filled with half-apocalypses, and enigmatic revelations that even the characters don't understand. I'd highly recommend The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, Satantango. His new work, a collaboration with artist Max Neumann, Animalinside, looks intriguing.

William Gass' The Tunnel. Grim, desolate, depressing, but wonderfully lyrical spirals of prose, hypnotic. It vacillates between l'art pour l'art, and dark psychological truth.

Joseph McElroy's Women and Men. It's baffling, it's humbling, it's profound. It sucks all genres into an infinitely dense ball and then explodes them, like a literary big bang. I don't even know how to describe this book. One of the best, surely.

Péter Nádas' Book of Memories. If you were to go by the recommendation of Susan Sontag... It is "the greatest novel written in our time." And it is brilliant. Intricately linked and interwoven stories. A discarding of rules and laws and an attack on all boundaries.

But I suppose, all these books I mention have a style inextricably linked with the content. One cannot have one without the other. That's what makes these great works of literature. The style puts a microscope to the content and makes it that much more profound, and the content elucidates the style to make it really live, breathe, dream. They are inseparable.

[The Truth]

Finish Infinite Jest before you do anything.

[dfw]

hey thanks

islandclimber, i really liked ur response
that's exactly what i was looking for
and those r exactly the types of writers i was looking to hear about

[islandclimber]

Cheers.

I hope you enjoy. Post-modern literature is a fantastic journey.

[dfw]

islandclimber
can u tell me your 10 favorite books

[islandclimber]

I don't know if I could ever narrow it down to just 10, yet... I can offer 10 of my favourite books. (Most of the writers listed have multiple books that could make a list of my favourite books, yet I shall stick to just one each) I'm assuming you only want somewhat modern works... So...

Gravity's Rainbow ~ Thomas Pynchon
The Melancholy of Resistance ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai
2666 ~ Roberto Bolaño
Parallel Stories ~ Péter Nádas
The Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) ~ Samuel Beckett
Women and Men ~ Joseph McElroy
The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffmann ~ Angela Carter
Infinite Jest ~ David Foster Wallace
Ficciones ~ JL Borges
Hopscotch ~ Julio Cortazar
Pale Fire ~ Vladimir Nabokov
Tunnel ~ William H Gass
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle ~ Haruki Murakami

So it appears that I managed to meander my way out to 13. There you have it. 13 of my favourite books.