new novels and why they suck and whatever

kinda Dickensian-level ridiculous

this is a good thing, right?

totally imo

huh thx scott sounds innarestin!

xp

or kobo abe. every school child should have abe on their reading list. one abe book beats most american half-ass pomo crap to a pulp.

fwiw I don't really appreciate being cast as an illiterate on this thread, it's fairly insulting.

― Master of the Manly Ballad (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, July 9, 2010 3:59 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no one is casting you as an illiterate! i totally believe that you can read words

kinda Dickensian-level ridiculous

this is a good thing, right?

oh yeah, not knockin it at all. Midnight's Children, Shame, the Moor's Last Sigh - all great

scott seward you should have a literary recommendations newsletter!

I've read a fair bit of Abe - Woman in the Dunes, the Ruined Map. the one about the guy who lives with a box on his head was fun

"I said Bennigan's instead of Applebee's"

They're not interchangeable?

On the spicy food analogy - I might have missed some stuff upthread, but isn't the realist/anti-realist thing here more like someone in, say, the Britain of the 1960s trying to explain that i) they like Indian, Thai and Mexican food (I mean let's say they've travelled a bit) and think it can be as delicious as any recipe printed in Family Circle or a meal at any top London Restaurant and ii) they feel frustrated that when people talk about 'fine food' in newspapers, magazines, etc, they exclusively mean French haute cuisine and perhaps Italian cooking? I can imagine a range of weak responses to the proselytising - 'I don't really like that foreign muck', 'I don't like spicy food', 'It's interesting, but c'mon the European tradition is what matters', 'Yes, but European food is popular for a reason', 'I've tried a Findus curry, didn't like it' etc, etc; and there are serious responses - having tried a good version of the spicy cuisines and not being that interested, being open to the idea of trying it, etc etc. I get frustrated with the dominance of polite realism in English fiction, but I'm less het up about it nowadays because the old three way structure that cleaved to that sort of fiction - big booksellers/big publishers/broadsheets - is in trouble, plus the web has opened a lot of alternative space. But much of this has been said upthread, and better.

as an exercise, let's review the NY Times current best-seller fiction list:

1. SIZZLING SIXTEEN, by Janet Evanovich. (St.Martin’s, $27.99.) The bounty hunter Stephanie Plum comes to the aid of a cousin with gambling debts.

*yawn*

2 THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST, by Stieg Larsson. (Knopf, $27.95.) The third volume of a trilogy about a Swedish hacker and a journalist.

*more yawns*

3 THE OVERTON WINDOW, by Glenn Beck. (Threshold Editions/Mercury Radio Arts, $26.) A public relations executive and the woman he loves fight to expose a conspiracy to transform America.

okay this is probably pretty funny

4 FAMILY TIES, by Danielle Steel. (Delacorte, $28.) A woman who raised her deceased sister’s three children must juggle their needs, her business and the new man in her life.

um

5 THE LION, by Nelson DeMille. (Grand Central, $27.99.) John Corey, now a federal agent, pursues a Libyan terrorist who has returned to America bent on revenge.

spy shit. do not care.

6 THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett. (Amy Einhorn/Putnam, $24.95.) A young white woman and two black maids in 1960s ­Mississippi.

Let me guess, everyone learns important lessons about racism.

7 THE PASSAGE, by Justin Cronin. (Ballantine, $27.) More than a hundred years in the future, a small group resists the vampires who have taken over North America.

good god kill me now.

8 WHIPLASH, by Catherine Coulter. (Putnam, 26.95.) The F.B.I. agents Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock help investigate misdeeds at a pharmaceutical company.

more spy shit.

9 FRANKENSTEIN: LOST SOULS, by Dean Koontz. (Bantam, $27.) Book 4 in the reimagining of the classic tale.

why is this necessary.

10* DEAD IN THE FAMILY, by Charlaine Harris. (Ace, $25.95.) Sookie Stackhouse is exhausted in the aftermath of a Fae war.

I dunno what a fae war is..? dunno about this one.

11 LOWCOUNTRY SUMMER, by Dorothea Benton Frank. (William Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99.) In this sequel to “Plantation,” a woman returns home after her mother’s death to encounter old secrets and lies.

family melodrama. no thank you.

12* THE SPY, by Clive Cussler and Justin Scott. (Putnam, $27.95.) In 1908, a detective investigates spies who are trying to keep America from developing dreadnought battleships.

No.

13 MISSION OF HONOR, by David Weber. (Baen, $27.) Honor Harrington defends the Star Kingdom of Manticore as it is besieged by many enemies.

sounds like a terrible sci-fi novel.

14 BROKEN, by Karin Slaughter. (Delacorte, $26.) There is friction between the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Grant County Police Department when Dr. Sara Linton calls in Special Agent Will Trent from Atlanta.

booooring.

15* 61 HOURS, by Lee Child. (Delacorte, $28.) Jack Reacher helps the police in a small South Dakota town protect a witness in a drug trial.

no

Complain about the poor tastes of the masses all you want, but this is what gets stocked on bookshelves at your average bookstore.

sooooo much realism on the ny times bestseller list

cant believe how much literary realism dominates that list

Weber's space opera books are actually great; the real problem is that there are too many of them and he started writing the same story over and over. If you only read two or three, it would be fine, but trying to read all of them is an endurance exercise I recommend to no one.

I dunno what a fae war is..? dunno about this one.

Sexy vampires

You're laughing at people choosing a Dean Koontz novel?

conversely, let's survey what's currently being reviewed in the NYT. None of this fiction interests me in the slightest, and I think most of them could be accurately categorized as realist novels to some degree.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/

Anthony Lane and Gore Vidal each have essays poking fun at the NYT list.

i feel like i am finally catching on to this game where stuff you dont like is "realism" and stuff you do like isnt "realism"

do you want a medal or something

honestly "realist" is kind of slippery here, in a way where i think you could endlessly argue that contemporary fiction is too "realist" for you, example by example. you seem to be using it kind of arbitrarily yourself, and even though i agree with scott and Alfred that Henry James novels could be considered experimental in form, he wrote about human consciousness, which counts as pretty realist to me.

xpost oh never mind, max covered it

currently on review at the nyt:

biography
thriller
biography
BOOK ABOUT A HALF-APE GIRL
non-fiction about anti-semitism
kidnapping book
**REALISM ALERT** book about relationships in new york

kinda bummed i read that possible true blood spoiler

nonfiction = realism duh

like how can you look at either the nyt bestseller list OR the nyt recently reviewd books and say "literary realism dominates the landscape"?? all the books are about spies or fairies or fucking half-ape teenagers

AND YES I WOULD LIKE A FUCKING MEDAL

biography
thriller
biography
BOOK ABOUT A HALF-APE GIRL
non-fiction about anti-semitism
kidnapping book
**REALISM ALERT** book about relationships in new york

way to include non-fiction dude. now who's being disingenuous. If you think the books about spies and fairies garner the same critical attention as, say, the book about the kidnap victim or the book about a young woman dating an older man, you are bonkers.

would categorize the thriller and the kidnap book as realism fwiw

also the book about Facebook, probably

for one thing, I do not want to read a book about fucking Facebook

so "realism" = takes place on Earth.

Shakey you're arguing so all over the place! do you want the books about spies and fairies to be accorded more critical attention? or do you despise the masses for liking them? i seriously am not sure what that nyt bestsellers post is doing on this thread.

it was just an exercise to lay out some concrete examples about what's out there, since people were giving me so much shit for apparently being ignorant of the market.

way to include non-fiction dude. now who's being disingenuous. If you think the books about spies and fairies garner the same critical attention as, say, the book about the kidnap victim or the book about a young woman dating an older man, you are bonkers.

um I think it's more likely that you aren't paying attention to what people are actually reading

spies, kidnapping = realism

noir = not realism

white teeth = realism

dickens = not realism

fairies = not worth talking about

i think, given your expressed tastes, people were trying to let you know that avant-garde experimental-in-form stuff is still being published, and pointing you to some. nyt bestseller list stuff seemed sort of definitionally irrelevant.

this thread

, people were trying to let you know that avant-garde experimental-in-form stuff is still being published, and pointing you to some.

which is great! I am thankful for the people on this thread that are doing this (scott, for example)

woof, the point of the analogy is that the dimension Shakey's been talking about for much of this thread isn't as broad of a dimension as "food from the entire rest of the world beside this continent," it's a rather specific quality that is, in my personal opinion as someone who's not even very well-read, comparable to wanting everything super-spicy and shrugging at a whole variety of others things food might attempt to do. or possibly lumping all other not-super-spicy food together in one bundle like "realist" food, or something, as if there's no real difference to be discovered between seafood and cake. (if neither's spicy.) it also feels like a weird reason to be generally negative about modern literature, for the same reasons "why isn't it spicy" would be a weird reason to be negative about modern restaurants -- there are plenty of places around to get spicy food.

part of why I harp on this is that I think I used to have flashes of the same feeling, when I was heavy into some of the stuff Shakey likes (even if that didn't lead me to the conclusion that fiction as a medium is lacking), but I think there's an element to it of focusing on broad stylistic gestures -- this is something I think music warped me into, actually! -- and I think my life has been generally enriched by getting more in touch with all the other things fiction can and does do. this is not picking on shakey or calling him an illiterate -- I find that idea especially funny because, as I've said, I think he would be a billion times meaner to anyone who was like this about music, or some other topic he felt closer to?

shakey, I'm not sure what ongoing misrepresentations of your reading habits are happening -- I'm more concerned about the ongoing misrepresentations of literature! -- but I think people are being pretty nice on this front? you're getting loads of good recommendations, if nothing else!

xpost -- also this has led to Glenn Beck being described as a "realist!" GO ILX! seriously, though, dude, that exercise right there would be like someone who only loved 77-79 punk rock posting the Billboard top 10 and going THIS IS WHY MUSIC IS WORTHLESS -- you would roll your eyes at that person so hard you'd go BLIND

dickens = not realism

didn't say this, said it was debatable in regards to SALMAN RUSHDIE

fairies = not worth talking about

didn't say this either.

I dunno why I'm bothering with you tbh, you seem to be doing a lot of snarky baiting in bad faith.

also this has led to Glenn Beck being described as a "realist!" GO ILX!

no one said this

sometimes I wonder if any of you can actually read

well dismissive attitudes toward realist fiction, whatever the hell that is, are probably always going to make me defensive. this thread is clarifying to me why we are mortal enemies wrt The Wire, also.

"I do not want to read a book about fucking Facebook"

I read some of the book about fucking Facebook. It's pretty far from realism, at least stylistically, because it is written in the same way as an x-files novelization, which the guy also wrote.

btw I just posted on the rolling lit ILB thread with this list of significant upcoming releases, which would probably be a better place to survey the levels of "polite realism" or whatever else

this thread is clarifying to me why we are mortal enemies wrt The Wire, also.

lol

hug it out bro

btw I just posted on the rolling lit ILB thread with this list of significant upcoming releases, which would probably be a better place to survey the levels of "polite realism" or whatever else

just glancing over this now but yeah a fair amount of this makes me roll my eyes

"I do not want to read a book about fucking Facebook"

I read some of the book about fucking Facebook. It's pretty far from realism, at least stylistically, because it is written in the same way as an x-files novelization, which the guy also wrote.

― Philip Nunez, Friday, July 9, 2010 4:28 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

is this the new jennifer egan novel? can i admit that i really loved her second novel look at me? she seems v interested in writing about social media, it's true.

Discussing the novel, Cunningham told Entertainment Weekly, “Peter is the central character. He’s an art dealer and he finds that he is increasingly drawn to his wife’s very much younger brother, who evinces for him everything that was appealing about his wife when he first met her. He’s not gay. Well, he’s probably a little gay because we’re all a little gay, right? But it’s certainly eroticized. It’s not because he wants to f— this boy. The boy is like the young wife.”

this person is paid to write books

but, again, i think she was cited in this thread in a lol-experimental-isn't-always-good way when she writes novels that could v much be classified as "polite realism" even though that designation makes me want to punch everyone.