That was my nominee for the worst book I ever read.Originally Posted by ennison
That was my nominee for the worst book I ever read.
Last edited by Pompey Bum; 11-20-2014 at 09:02 AM.
Seems like we have similar tastes in comic strips, and for similar reasons. For fellow fans of Peanuts, I can't recommend Patrick McDonnell's Mutts highly enough.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Good thinking with the comic strips, Ecurb. I think Calvin & Hobbes is a fantastic work of art. However, my sympathies are rather limited when it comes to Peanuts. I don't see much of either pathos or humor in that strip, let alone intriguing art work.
So, beyond Calvin & Hobbes, I haven't read a whole lot of contemporary literature since I give up reading children's/young adult literature about 8 years ago. I'm reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead right now, though, and it is quite fascinating, though sometimes I find it difficult to forgive the narrator's sheer narrow-mindedness as a mere tactic of the author. Although most of his unlikeability is actually a quite interesting sort of vice.
Other than that I don't know that I've even read any contemporary novels that I've enjoyed in the last eight years. I hope I'll remember something soon after I post this.
So maybe I'll propose something from the Polish contemporaries - the first author that came to my mind and which makes quite a good option here is Dorota Masłowska, and particularly her book "Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną" (translated as "White and Red" in UK and "Snow White and Russian Red" in US). This is a brilliant, a little sarcastic and grotesque image of a group which in Poland is know as 'dresy' or 'dresiarze' - unemployed, aggressive and anti-social youth of a working class background ('dres' is a Polish word for track-suit).
I personally love stories related to some kind of a social analyzing. The author is currently quite popular in Poland mostly because she recently released an album with experimental music, also dedicated to the criticism of Polish society. I'd also recommend to check it out.
Modern classics: I'd go with:
- The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
- Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt
- All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
- H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
- How to be Both by Ali Smith
- Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa
- the Neopolitan series by Elena Ferrante (nominated on strong recommendation of a trusted source, though I have read Ferrante's Days of Abandonment which was powerful and disturbing).
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
Actually it strikes me that Antipodean women are producing some amazing literature: Eleanor Catton, Hannah Kent and Evie Wyld have all been standout reads for me over the past year or so.
Overlooked classics: EVERYTHING by Tove Jansson. She wrote for adults and children, fiction and non-fiction. She is clever, profound and funny and not read nearly widely enough.
Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset - though it won her the Nobel, it's still not widely known.
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer.
There will be others, I'm sure.
Murakami is overrated. His work is patchy, and 1Q84 is baggy, cartoonish and poorly executed. The female characters and 'sex' scenes are truly cringe-worthy. His early works showed real promise, but lately he's been well off the boil. For Japanese writers, Yoko Ogawa is vastly superior.
Want to know what I think about books? Check out https://biisbooks.wordpress.com/
The only problem I had with Beyond Black was that it didn't have much of a plot, at least not in a conventional sense. Actually there was a plot--it involved facing memories of things too awful to remember--but a lot of the book was peripheral to that. What I liked about the novel was its rollicking black humor and vision of an afterlife no better than the life you've got--in fact, probably a little worse. In Beyond Black, being dead is like finding yourself in the wrong part of town and unable to get a cab. Some of the dead are dangerous, some vain or stupid, but most just confused. I remember a particularly hilarious scene in which the none-too-swift shade of Princess Diana materializes briefly and proves unable to remember the names of her own sons. "Kingy and Thingy" is the best she can manage. (I still call them that).
I thought Beyond Black worked best as a road story. The over long satire (in the second part of the book) of life in the English Home Counties, though scathing, wasn't necessary to the plot and slowed the book down a bit. I guess it was a little uneven in that respect. Beyond Black wasn't a suspense novel, either. Obviously it was never intended to be, but I have occasionally heard misdirected Stephen King fans complain that Beyond Black "wasn't scary at all."
The other two Mantel books I mentioned are also black-humored ghost stories. Every Day is Mother's Day is the better novel of the two. Like Beyond Black, it is a satire of middle class English life. Mantel's characterization is deft and disturbing. There's a gloomy tone to the novel that works well for a ghost story but won't necessarily lift your mood (as Beyond Black did for me). My only problem with the book was the plot was largely driven by the implications of an adulterous affair that happens early on. While I am personally a proponent of fidelity, it rang a little false for me that people today wouldn't be able to shrug off an extra-marital affair more easily than these characters did--especially someone as shallow the male character.
Vacant Possession is the sequel to Every Day is Mother's Day. I don't really see that it needed be written. I imagine a publisher was trying to cash in on the success of the previous novel. Early attempts to actually make the story chilling aren't very effective or believable. But the comedy is ratcheted up in this one and the book does have its moments. If you liked Every Day is Mother's Day, it's worth a read. If not, don't bother. But don't read it as a stand alone.
Speaking of ghost stories, has anyone read (and could anyone recommend) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters? I read a positive review of it by Hilary Mantel, but she focused mainly on Waters' Socialism and the books context in British social history. It's not that politics isn't an important topic to me, but I'm not British, and I fear that a book with a British Socialist agenda might not have much meaning for me--as Mantel's satire of the Home Counties in Beyond Black left me a little cold.
I suppose that raises a question about whether an emphasis on politics lends itself to a book's longevityor not. Not only do political fashions come and go, but whole historical landscapes can and will give way eventually. (Does anyone care about "Socialism in one country" anymore?) Writers in particular are notorious for attaching themselves to political movements--Communist, Fascist, etc.--that later prove quite embarrassing to their reputations. LitNet doesn't do a lot of politics. Maybe there's a good reason for that.
Anyway, should I read The Little Stranger?
Last edited by Pompey Bum; 11-21-2014 at 09:42 PM.
I had noticed PB but that didn't deter me. I guess there are folk who don't like Moby Dick. I myself would not take Joyce with me to a desert island but I see his cleverness. I'll fling in some others gradually. I'll try to avoid diahorrea-drinking homosexual Nazis in my next few choices.
You don't have to. I have nothing against people disagreeing with me. I gave that book a chance. I even read it to the end of its 975 pages. But at some point--I think when the narrator was doing his sister in the guillotine--I just said to myself: This is such trash. I'm glad someone liked it, though. It won a big literary prize in France.
Last edited by Pompey Bum; 11-20-2014 at 02:36 PM.
Here's a second candidate. It's by a South American called Llosa. I am not what you would call well read in South American literature but I have dabbled and La Guerra Del Fin Del Mundo impressed me. The scale was big; the canvas wide and it held my interest. It is not that I think a large canvas and a long text with multiple scenes and characters are in themselves enough but when everything seems to fit together, when there is an apocalyptic vision, when there is a writer who is intelligent and interesting then that generally impresses me and I'd say this has all of these.
Last edited by ennison; 11-20-2014 at 04:18 PM.
You probably know that the Glanton party and its horrors were historical events and that many of the characters in Blood Meridian, including the Judge, were fictional versions of real people. (I think parts of Child of God may have had some basis in fact, too--creepy). A few years ago I was looking at prehistoric cave art among some weird rock formations in west Texas, near the Mexican border, and I remembered a similar setting from a scene in Blood Meridian. Later I checked and sure enough the spot was closely described by McCarthy (who I assume went there while researching the book).
In my view, the mythic quality of the Judge is tied to the perverse creator archon of Sethian gnosticism. (Harold Bloom wrote a well known essay about gnostic thought in Blood Meridian, but I've never read it, so I'm innocent of any plagiarism there). Gnostic themes are also found in The Road, but for some reason McCarthy drew more from the (slightly gentler) ideas of Valentinian gnosticism in that book. It's not that The Road lacks a mythic quality. It's just a rather obscure mythos.
And yes, by the way--I think that's exactly the way people would act if the food ran out.
Last edited by Pompey Bum; 11-21-2014 at 02:55 PM.
I could, but that just my brain ofcourse, thoughts doesn't work at all.
It seems to me that identifying modern "classics" involves (a little bit, at least) a lack of confidence in our own taste. When we admire Joyce, or Tolstoy, or Nabokov, we feel pleased with ourselves, because our taste resembles that of educated readers (and writers) who have preceded us. We wade through "Ulysses", in part at least, to justify our taste and ability as an educated reader.
Awards serve a similar purpose. If we dislike Nobel Laureates, or Booker winners, or National Book Award recipients, we think twice about admitting it, even to ourselves. Our self-images as educated, insightful and sensitive readers are at stake.
The canon does serve other purposes: nobody can read everything and awards and critical acclaim help us decide what to read. In addition, it's more fun to read books that other educated readers have read, so we can have someone to talk to about them. Nonetheless, one of the joys of reading new books is that we can reach our own opinions about them, unfettered by our self-image, or by professional critical judgment.
When we go to an art gallery or minor art show, it's fun to judge the quality of the paintings. We can also do this at famous art museums, where the paintings are (of course) better. But seeing a painting that is surprisingly good at a gallery remains a different kind of joy. I suppose that's what people are attempting in trying to identify "modern classics". Those mentioned here, however, are not sufficiently modern -- they're already well known and critically acclaimed.
I expressed similar concerns on another thread when Paul suggested this one. They were resolved for me by his suggestion that we would be trying to predict future classics by assessing the aspects of a book that would lend it to survival or oblivion. That sounded like fun--and it has been so far, at least for me. The thread has also turned out to be a good source of recommendations for new book purchases (thanks to Ennison, Hart Noiz, and others for that).
I appreciate your concern about the newness of the books discussed (or the lack of it, rather). The problem--at least the one I mentioned at the start of the thread--is that there may not be much discussion of book that is too new, simply because not many people may have read it yet. That shouldn't discourage people from talking about new books, of course. But again, the idea (at least in theory) is to identify potential longevity, and that can be done for currently recognized books as easily as cutting-edge ones. After all, novels and authors sometimes fall from favor over time. There are also many currently read books which may or may not be well regarded, depending on who you ask. In my view, there is no reason to restrict ourselves.
Added: And in fairness to Paul, I think he's off reading a new-ish and very long book called The Kills right now. It sounded like he wanted to finish that book before starting this thread, but I talked him into doing it, specifically saying that the books didn't necessarily have to be that new. So my bad, but I still think it's a good thread the way it is.
Last edited by Pompey Bum; 11-21-2014 at 09:45 PM.
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Under the Skin - Michel Faber
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
Snow - Orhan Pamuk
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Not bad at all - I was convinced by your argument and the number of posts and discussions which justify the thread.
I have finished The Kills- 1033 pages but well worth it.
Will it be a classic? I doubt it because of its size and some features of the book such as the threads of stories whose endings are at best are implicated. It doesn't finish off, confirm or follow through to a normal denouement.
That's why I think it won't be a classic, but in my opinion it is one of its strengths. House lays out his aim at the end of the book.
The narrator comments about the final heroic fatalism of one of the characters:
"... what she is finding is that there is no single starting point, only multiple threads that seem to bind because of distance but only ever run parallel."
The whole book is a series of parallel stories with well described characters and situations. We find we are dropped into situations where there has been violence, disappearances, murder, or situations where these are developing. We have to repeatedly get to know characters and suddenly leave them. We have implied reasons and speculations about events from multiple perspectives. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is finished. Nothing is satisfactorily explained. This is what I like about it. It is the most realistic thriller with all the uncertainty, obfustication and false trails.
It is also very well written.
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