What are you reading today/book club

[fen]

Just got finished with Idoru by William Gibson. Had only read Neuromancer before this and kind of expected more amph fueled technobabble. This one turned out to be surprisingly grounded tbh. The story was 3/5, but some of the ideas were pretty interesting.

Firstly, this book kind of predicted the rise of the darknet, which I think is impressive in 1996. But idk I was a kiddo in 1996, maybe the internet was more developed by that point than I think. Also got into a lot of issues re: internet anonymity, how to present yourself when physical limitations are removed.

The cooler concept was the Idoru themselves, which are synthetic/animated popstars. I feel like this must have been the inspo for Gorillaz, but I think the immediate recognition of Damon Albarn kind of ruined it. I hope musicians play around with this more in the future. We're already seeing music becoming way more visual, with artists spending more time creating strong consistent imagery for their albums/branding. E.g Kanye, Tyler, A$AP Rocky for sure (sorry i don't know much outside of hip-hop). Seems like the jump to creating animated representations/avatars for your music would open up a lot of cool creative space.

[Ques]

a friend of mine met the translator of the vegetarian, apparently she only learned korean because she thought she could make more money translating korean than with any other language, and her korean isn't actually that good

[Ques]

can anyone explain the gist of benjamin's the task of the translator to me in basic english

[Cowboy]

Read Grapes of Wrath it was fantastic

[dakaf_fal]

I just finished reading The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag. I've been meaning to read some Sontag for a while and picked this up when I found a copy at my local bookshop. Sontag's a great judge of human nature, it was a pleasure to see how she developed the personalities of the novel's characters. The plot came off a little flat, but I didn't mind too much because the writing was so enjoyable. This read like Sontag's response to magical realism, it maintains a level of absurdity that you'd expect to find in a Salman Rushdie or Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel only without the more fantastic elements. I'm not a huge nonfiction reader, but I think I might give one or two of Sontag's essays a try.

I found a copy of Banana Yoshimoto's [img]Asleep[/img] in a used bookstore when I was visiting Philadelphia a couple weeks ago, so that's next up!

[rjbman]

Does anyone use goodreads? Would love to follow folks!

[brlmski]

[rjbman]

- from TED.

There's a lot of interesting books here, added about 10 to my Goodreads.

[vehk]

can anyone recommend something good and relatively recent (like the last 40 years or so) that's written in english? feel like i'm mainly reading translations which is fine but obviously not the same experience as reading in the original language

[wogbog]

otessa moshfegh - eileen if you want something weird
katherena vermette - the break if you want something sad
paul beatty - the sellout if you want something goofy

i wanted to finish this with "____ if you want something glad" but i can't think of anything lol (robert fulghum maybe??)

[rjbman]

infinite jest is basically recommended so often so as to be overblown but i found it fantastic, hype notwithstanding

obv will shill every gibson book written but i'm an especially huge fan of the Blue Ant trilogy

if you like short stories, try Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie

[soko]

Anne Carson - Canadian poet, possibly best living poet, a classicist academic as well as translator of epics, plays, creator of original works, Autobiography of Red, Decreation, Plainwater, others
Maggie Nelson - poet, academic, essays and poetry, brilliant intertextuality, theory applied to examine and make sense of lived experiences, Argonauts, Bluets
Joan Didion - California writer, journalist in 60s,70s, novels and plays but essay collections better, New Journalism, personal accounts of broader cultural moments, issues, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album

[CMYK]

Stuff I've enjoyed:

Redeployment - Phil Klay
10:03 - Ben Lerner
Remainder - Tom McCarthy
White Noise - Don DeLillo
All The Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy

(I'm horribly white male based in my fiction reading :( I'm sure others will have more divers recommendations though.)

[cormac]

I'm an English major who's thought for a long time that Victorian flaxy (and premodern literature in general) is really boring to read, and not able to be connected to my interests in current political theory and cultural stuff. Read Jane Eyre earlier this summer and I think I was definitely wrong on the first point, probably on the second too. It was just really well-written prose--I can definitely see that era of literature's general occupation with historical and purely aesthetic methods. Would recommend.

I also finally finished Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, and I'm trying to finish Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition in the next month (this topic isn't restricted to fiction, is it?). I will momentarily be starting to crusade to prove postmodernism can be revolutionary, stand by

[rjbman]

We haven't had a "book club" choice in a while - does anyone have suggestions for the next book we should consider?

[wogbog]

i havent done any care tags book clubs but i just bought kafka - metamorphosis

[Cowboy]

I've read God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater twice now and loved it both times.

Has changed the way I see the world in that I try to be like Eliot a lot.

[cormac]

I made the timely choice to start The Handmaid's Tale this morning, and the first few pages have drawn me in more than most books do, excited for it now.

do you read books more than once very often? I've found it a personal quality that I do not, really ever.

[Cowboy]

Nope never

Nice prof pic that's a good album

[INNIT]

[Bobbin.Threadbare]

Just got through all of the Dark Tower series (started last November) did not enjoy Stephen King's writing style here that much and slogged through it because Katy and I were both reading it. That said I really enjoyed some of the books and overall it was really positive.

Halfway through (an audiobook of) The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman which a few people have recommended to me. It's a kids book but I'm really enjoying it and Neil himself narrates.

[wogbog]

[INNIT]

[cormac]

[rjbman]

Our book for August(ish) will be: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

Why don't we try to finish this by the end of Labor Day weekend? September 5th or so

[talkin2snakes]

anyone read any octavia butler? or samuel delaney?

[INNIT]

lol... looks like i'll be doing research for a victorian literature database this fall.... many victorian novels on the horizon

[dakaf_fal]

I'm a little late, but just finished reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness last night.

I've been interested to read this because it's the first fiction Arundhati Roy has written since the Booker prize winning The God of Small Things two decades ago. While The God of Small Things took a more personal scale, telling the story of a single family, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes a grander, national scale. The narrative is disjointed, switching between multiple narrators, proceeding in a non-chronological order, and often digressing into lengthy tangents or flashbacks. It feels intentional rather than sloppy, reminding me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie novel without the magical realism. Roy also channels some of the humor and absurdity I expect from Marquez or Rushdie, though it's much darker. Her use of humor is mostly sardonic, used for the purpose of criticizing capitalism, wealth inequality, Narendra Modi, and the Kashmiri conflict.

While I recognize that her work is closely tied to her politics, at times I felt like the book suffered from trying to do too much in an effort to make the political statement that Roy wanted. It's not politicized to the extent of say, a Rand novel, but there are moments when the narrator is acting as a two-dimensional stand-in for Roy. I won't spoil anything, but the ending also seemed uncharacteristically uplifting considering the bleakness of the rest of the novel. Overall it was an enjoyable read, though perhaps didn't live up to my high expectations. Thoughts from anyone else?

[Cowboy]

I read Crime and Punishment and enjoyed it.

Reading 100 years of Solitude now

[rjbman]