Book Thread

Yeah, I've not really been choosing these enormous books for the sake of having enormous books, they just seem to be appealing to me right now. It might be nice to have something smaller and more easily digestible between these monoliths of post-modernism. Though I do have a few shorter pieces on the shelf for between the beasts (The Odyssey, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, 100 Years of Solitude). But yeah, I'll probably go with Lolita and Pale Fire.

Anyone read Invitation to a Beheading? I read Strong Opinions recently, and the way Nabakov discusses ItaB really intrigued me.

Hey Michael K, could you please elaborate on your Lynch/Calvino comparisons? I'm very curious.

Pale Fire is probably my favorite. You can read that twenty times and still unlock new and wonderful parts of the puzzle each time.

Ada, or ardor is wonderfully strange and great, but definitely only for the committed. I'd say Despair, Laughter in the Dark or maybe Bend Sinister are more accessible gateways to his oeuvre.

Nobody's mentioned Pnin, which is one of his funniest novels by far.

I would have mentioned it if I knew how to pronounce it.

So I finished The Savage Detectives at like 8am today and then passed out. That was the most intense experience. I think I was hard for the last 150 pages.

I don't really know how to talk about it without spoiling all of its magic. I'll try later maybe. I'm going to Barnes to pick up 2666 right now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/books/review/my-life-as-a-writer.html?_r=0

Interview with Philip Roth, of who's work I've still yet to read. He seems a bit obnoxious in the interview, perhaps given his retirement for written has built up a reservoir of verbiage that he needed an outlet for.

I'll still prob read "The Jew Cums Forth" aka 'Portnoys Complaint' though.

I've read a few Roth books. Let's see *checks wikipedia*.
Portnoy's Complaint
The Great American Novel
The Plot Against America

My experience with this guy is that I get involved in and read his books pretty quick but don't really get much out of the experience in the end. YMMV, of course.

reuben wrote:Hey Michael K, could you please elaborate on your Lynch/Calvino comparisons?  I'm very curious.

It really has to do with the space of the media. I don't think it's as interesting or as well thought out as you're hoping for. To me, Lynch is all about the screen. That is, his films are about how film itself moves and reflects upon itself. The boring reading of Mulholland Drive is that it's all some death rattle dream, but I'm more interested by the stacking of images upon images that Lynch employs - no fussing w/ "substance" and "narrative", but instead featuring characters and scenery responding to non-diegetic tonal shifts as if the film is manipulating the narrative rather than the narrative being some sort of core that the "film" exists to promote. That scene in INLAND EMPIRE where Laura Dern walks into the theatre and sees herself is the most emblematic of this idea in my mind. Film watching film endlessly, pure reflection and image multiplication w/o worry about what's real, what's really happening, and what's authentic. Similarly, Calvino is about the page. If on a winter's night a traveler, with it's Rashomonesque erasures and scribblings is like a palimpsest, creating so much noise for the "story" that you're smacked in the face w/ the fact that the writing itself - not some nebulous idea of an "about" - is the story. Same w/ Invisible Cities. Do these places exist outside of the page? Could they possibly? It doesn't matter, because the page - the supposedly neutral medium - is the only thing that allows these images to breathe, to come to life.

My Girlfriend just started 'If On a Winters Night a Traveler' and is enjoying it and your mini-dissertation here actually has made me want to read it next. I read 'Invisible Cities' before I was ready I think and built up a wall warding off all future Calvino but that was has since crumbled and I'm looking forward to checking it out.

It's a quickie, so I strongly recommend it. The initial images of the train station always remind me of Lean's Brief Encounter, which is one of the all-time greats for the screen imo.

Any of you guys ever try writing a book, short story, etc etc?

Yea quite embarrassing in hindsight.

Fuck, I assume you deleted it but if not, I want to read it.

I have non-graphic short stories somewhere around here that I couldn't find if I wanted to.

C-poots wrote:Any of you guys ever try writing a book, short story, etc etc?

Never have but it is something I have always wished I could do. For those of us here who have casually penned some material, what motivated you?

Also, just started 2666. The writing, at least stylistically, seems radically different to The Savage Detectives.

Also, C-Poots, how are you doing with Gravity's Rainbow?

I think I'm too distracted by Lynch's visual preoccupations to get what you're describing on my own. They're not "films about being film" in the same way that a Felini movie would be. Just as Calvino's narrators are not as self-conscious about the act of writing as Don Quixote's. They are more concerned with the medium itself than the process of creating it. Not a comparison I would have drawn on my own but I see it now. Thanks!

Michael K. wrote:

reuben wrote:Hey Michael K, could you please elaborate on your Lynch/Calvino comparisons?  I'm very curious.

It really has to do with the space of the media. I don't think it's as interesting or as well thought out as you're hoping for. To me, Lynch is all about the screen. That is, his films are about how film itself moves and reflects upon itself. The boring reading of Mulholland Drive is that it's all some death rattle dream, but I'm more interested by the stacking of images upon images that Lynch employs - no fussing w/ "substance" and "narrative", but instead featuring characters and scenery responding to non-diegetic tonal shifts as if the film is manipulating the narrative rather than the narrative being some sort of core that the "film" exists to promote. That scene in INLAND EMPIRE where Laura Dern walks into the theatre and sees herself is the most emblematic of this idea in my mind. Film watching film endlessly, pure reflection and image multiplication w/o worry about what's real, what's really happening, and what's authentic. Similarly, Calvino is about the page. If on a winter's night a traveler, with it's Rashomonesque erasures and scribblings is like a palimpsest, creating so much noise for the "story" that you're smacked in the face w/ the fact that the writing itself - not some nebulous idea of an "about" - is the story. Same w/ Invisible Cities. Do these places exist outside of the page? Could they possibly? It doesn't matter, because the page - the supposedly neutral medium - is the only thing that allows these images to breathe, to come to life.

GR is still really good, around page 550 or so. Don't find a ton of time to read recently but I'm still enjoying myself. It was wise to use a little reading wiki which I keep on my phone as the circular/parabolic structure of the novel has hit the downward arc and old characters are starting to come back after having not read anything about them in three- or -four-hundred pages.

520 pages into Brothers Karamazov and the last 15 were the only time I felt blown away by the writing. The pacing of the "drunk orgy" with Grushenka and Dmitri was a master class of story telling but overall this has been disappointing.

WP how far have you made it into 2666 and have you the same excitement for it that you did Savage Detectives?

C-poots wrote:Any of you guys ever try writing a book, short story, etc etc?

I'd like to write a mystery novel about a man who's just a simple country lawyer.  Still spitballin' it.  Feel free to throw some ideas my way.

I'd read that.

He should have a mute client for sure.

C-poots wrote:GR is still really good, around page 550 or so. Don't find a ton of time to read recently but I'm still enjoying myself. It was wise to use a little reading wiki which I keep on my phone as the circular/parabolic structure of the novel has hit the downward arc and old characters are starting to come back after having not read anything about them in three- or -four-hundred pages.

I'm about two hundred pages in. Mindblowing stuff. This won't be the last Pynchon I read.

C-poots wrote:WP how far have you made it into 2666 and have you the same excitement for it that you did Savage Detectives?

I'm only 100 pages in so I don't have all that much to say. It's been enjoyable so far but the structuring makes it less immediately thrilling than The Savage Detectives, which read like basically the greatest Keroauc novel of all time. That book moves at lightning speeds and it is impossible to set it down. 2666 is much harder to penetrate and get into but I am sure it will be equally rewarding once I have more time to devote to it.