misc book thread

[jenkins]

you know, i think there's definitely a positive to the failure of ^that particular bookclub. i both always want to read a crime novel and never want to read a crime novel. so i'm all fuck it anyway and today i bought a poetry book instead. mhmm

http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Babe-Ana-Carrete-ebook/dp/B00C4COMHE/

(edit) you can't ^ on a new page but i'm going to idgaf the situation. have you noticed my day is grumpy? yeah. so, poetry. so poetry, of course

[jenkins]

http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/books-vs-films-the-infographic

not sure how this was "scored" and it's not an important article. someone made this internet fluff and i'm being chatty


with this, mendes was born fucked. did anyone go see james franco's as i lay dying? is it out? does anyone care? i can't imagine someone read as i lay dying and thought "oh this should be a movie" and i can't imagine the same for revolutionary road. i didn't see the mendes version. no part of me felt i had to. i don't care when this is done (franco is making the sound and the fury now........) and i don't become mad. i just don't see them. i just don't care


there could be an interesting conversation about jurassic park the book vs jurassic park the movie. intention and perception. presentation and ability. but idk, i had both around the same time years ago, and both artists have notable talents, but i can't really buy into book over movie here


lol. i've never read or thought about reading lotr. but it's so popular as a book! apparently not as respected as the movies however. hmm


these were my favorite bars. they're both so well respected and i guess no one can figure out who to respect more. nice

[jenkins]

sideswiping my neveralive book topic by asking if anyone knows

the japanese equivalent/similar version of sight & sound or cahiers du cinema? i've been curious about it. haven't found its name. the big cinephile magazine of japan, i feel like one must exist

[jenkins]

with this you get to tell me what to read. i think some of you like bossing around and some are curious about bossing around and some think it'd be funny to boss around (i think it's funny)

please be bossy, tell me what to read:

tampa by alissa nutting
http://www.amazon.com/Tampa-Alissa-Nutting-ebook/dp/B00AXY3GQS
^a middle-school female teacher seduces a student. inspired by true american events. its potential strikes me as irl crazy. people are reading and liking it

lucky man by ben tanner
http://www.amazon.com/Lucky-Man-ebook/dp/B0084OFH16/
^i forget where i heard about this. it's now a $3 gamble. i sampled "Gabe was a god. Well, Gabe is a god, but I was thinking about the first time I saw him. It must have been eighth grade and there they were, he and Jake, wrestling right out in front of the school. It was the kind of sunny day where the haze in the air seems to dance from one ray of the light to the next, and in the middle of all that dancing were Gabe and Jake throwing each other around, rolling in the dirt, bouncing off the statues of long obscure soldiers, and laughing away the whole time like they were on to something that the rest of us were just never going to understand."

low down death right easy by j. david osborne
http://www.amazon.com/Low-Down-Death-Right-Easy/dp/1933929081/
^i like the publisher and this seems kinda random to me so i like it. "It's about meth, fishing, trash American culture and young adult despair. Imagine a Raymond Carver or Jim Thompson for the text message age and that would only begin to get it."--KRIS SAKNUSSEMM, author of Reverend America "

genie by richard powers
http://www.amazon.com/Genie-Kindle-Single-Richard-Powers-ebook/dp/B009ZJ0NUO
^he's called the smartest guy writing, by people who see him as the smartest guy writing. that's not a bad rep. but like, i wonder what his prose is like. i could (tom)cruise for $3

gil the nihilist: a sitcom by sean kilpatrick
http://www.amazon.com/Gil-Nihilist-Sitcom-Sean-Kilpatrick-ebook/dp/B00H3T9GOW
^right away i'm jealous he used screenplay format. worried i'll read it and think "oh i can do that, i should do that." i appreciate your style, kilpatrick. butler wrote about his year's reads for vice, and said "Sean Kilpatrick remains one of my favorite working writers, and this may be his most fucked yet. Set up as the shooting script for a sitcom revolving around three anarchic, misogynistic, desperately horny and beautiful pieces of shit, Gil the Nihilist lays it on thick from the first page and only gets more and more pigged out and black to the heart as it goes. Most any sentence Kilpatrick piles on is one you could get tattooed on your gums: 'I bow to fast food. My smelted teensy ritual. It vacations in your catheter. The animal supplement smacks of copyright. Go on, shine what bucks you. No one takes their vitamins alone.'"

[BB]

richard powers
i wonder what his prose is like.

I read Galatea 2.2 a little while back. Heady stuff. His prose is unflowery, straightforward -- perhaps even surprisingly so. Read him, why not?

[jenkins]

decided. thanks!

[jenkins]

movie people know him as béla tarr's writer, lit people know him as László Krasznahorkai (<-- permanent c+p name for me, tbh)

newly translated book came out recently, i don't read many review things for movies or books, but year end lists do their job. now i'm bubbling with excitement

A novel in 17 episodes, Seiobo There Below explores our insatiable desire to be loved, to achieve transcendence through any means, and to glimpse, however fleetingly, the sacred—and why we continually fail in our attempts to attain satisfaction. A kind of counterweight to Krasznahorkai’s other works so far available in English, which deal in madness and melancholy, Seiobo There Below is my favorite of the five and a major achievement for its author, its translator, and its editor.

I reviewed Seiobo There Below for The Coffin Factory earlier this year, and now can only say that even among Krasznahorkai’s already magnificent oeuvre, this is a novel with very few rivals.

Seiobo There Below is a colossal work that stands on its own, seemingly outside of time. Otherwise known for his dark, apocalyptic visions, Krasznahorkai has pushed himself to the limits of the imagination in this extraordinary study on the nature of the sacred in art and civilization. As the protagonists of these short works of incantatory prose search for a higher meaning in art, they stumble over a luminous immanence they can barely countenance.

(lit critics who made lists for conversationalreading.com)

i have to read this. always knew. now i'm realizing i of course have to read this asap. Krasznahorkai isn't a quick or easy read, but he's a great read, and maybe someone here wants to read this along with me and our sense of community will bolster our reading aspirations. that can happen

[Axolotl]

I'll read it, I've wanted to get into Hungarian literature for a while and it's a choice between this guy or jumping into Peter Esterhazy's 1000-page Celestial Harmonies which interests me a lot. How about february?

[jenkins]

please and thank you(!) february is a great choice

are you reading it in primary language? jealous if so. it's 465 pages translated. let's give it the whole month, february is tiny with days and the book is big. excited for us

[Axolotl]

are you reading it in primary language?

Haha no, I don't read Hungarian.
Have you read any other Krasznahorkai books? I'll hopefully have read Satantango by feb, I ordered it a week or so ago.

[jenkins]

i read the melancholy of resistance. it's like, very impressive. krasznahorkai and thomas bernhard are very impressive i know for sure, and i know i want to read more of them. more and more and more

what's your reading language?

[Axolotl]

what's your reading language?

English.
I've read Concrete and The Loser by Bernhard. I really liked them both, and I'll be reading others of his whenever I need another dose of disappointed, angry virtuousity. Given that he's a favorite writer of one of my favorite writers(Sebald) pretty much guarantees I'll end up reading and liking everything he's written.
Knowing newarly nothing about Krasznahorkai, I was under the(probably wrong) impression he was a very different writer than Bernhard. Like dense, Proustian sentences, multiple, shifting narrative voices, casual surrealims etc.
What similarities did you find?

[jenkins]

english, that's what i read too. that's the only language i know, tbh

mmmm you're a lit person!!(!!) i'm happy. we're 3/3 in lit interests. i mean all you gotta do is say sebald to tether our friendship. rings of saturn has one of my favorite quotes. again and again i read it

Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.

krasznahorkai is quite different from bernhard in themes and focus. they share cognitive grammar and long sentences. i brought up bernhard because when i said i've only read the melancholy of resistance i thought also of bernhard, and i've only read corrections. two writers from the top shelf whom i've only sampled and can't wait to keep reading

[jenkins]

this screencap demonstrates i've made the purchase


andbut the secret evidence here is i had to call amazon. thing is, i spoke to a human with a computer voice.  honestly. the person on the other phone was definitely a human but definitely sounded like a computer. what's the device's name and what are the intentions and is it a personal choice? idk. that was intense future stuff

[Axolotl]

That's probably an offshore call center. A friend of mine is a manager at one of those and he told me the operators are taught some unholy mixture of southern and Boston accent.