new novels and why they suck and whatever

joy williams's's quick and the dead is pretty good, kind of off the wheels shit. The tricks she has are good but she doesn't have tooooo many tho

javier marias a heart so white was pretty great

The big problem is not having good new novels to read, it is finding them among the hundreds of new novels you do not want to read

^^^this

i feel like this thread is delivering. I really wanna order a shitload of these and come back in a month or two and be like "thanks guys"

i haven't read quick and the dead yet. i read a story collection called "honored guest." it was an intensity.

javier marias a heart so white was pretty great

I'm almost done with the 3rd vol. of YFT & think it's totally incredible btw

yeah, compiling recommendations from this thread for my summer reading list.

but is there anything particularly important about new novels where you ought to read them now versus waiting for the winnowing?
I mean is there some value attached to their currency where it won't be quite the same reading them some years later?

whenever I see any of the yft books I kind of shuffle away quickly

ooh someone else fairly recent I forgot to mention who is obviously a heavy-hitter that I dug: Saramago (RIP)

Yeah, Saramago was good.

sometimes i like to feel like i have a sense for the current moment in literary culture. also, i do like to feel like "aw who the fuck cares if this novel doesn't reflect my superior literary taste" and it's exciting to feel like you're just reading a bunch of uncharted territory stuff. both those things are probably just related to my own reactionary moment against my attitudes toward literature my whole life, though.

xposts to Philip

but is there anything particularly important about new novels where you ought to read them now versus waiting for the winnowing?
I mean is there some value attached to their currency where it won't be quite the same reading them some years later?

― Philip Nunez, Friday, June 25, 2010 1:50 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you wont get invited to any of the good parties

xp what horsehoe said

shakey i would join ur bookclub btw

barry hannah also p good and dead

The big problem is not having good new novels to read, it is finding them among the hundreds of new novels you do not want to read

Another big problem is being broke and relying on an underfunded suburban library system for the majority of your book needs. That might be why I've read Dostoevskey and Proust and Wilde this year instead of the newer writers that the library will never get.

eh you can never read too much Oscar Wilde imho

but yeah I echo plax that this thread has delivered on some interesting recs that I will check out. will be good to have a nice long list for my next trip to Powell's in Portland on July 4th

oh i have to buy everything, public libraries in ireland, i mean i don't know what they're like elsewhere but they always sound better than the decayed donated 70s paperbacks that bulk out the galway city library

okay i should stop being so chickenshit about recommendations. i have been listening to the lol new yorker fiction podcast lately. obvs this is more for people who aren't looking for experimental stuff, but i have recently enjoyed stories by Leonard Michaels and Andrea Lee and I plan to search out more by both of them.

is there anything particularly important about new novels where you ought to read them now versus waiting

Books mean different things at different times and at various ages when you read them. A perfect book for a younger person may not speak to you in middle age. Also, there's the exciting sense of discovery around newer work. No one bothers to write ponderous Introductions to recent novels; the appeal is straight from the author to you.

Look, I started Bleak House yesterday, and it's such an unfamiliar world that it feels "new." Read what you want when you want at your own pace.

of course if it's a new novel about now or an historical novel that's sort-of about now then now can be the most interesting or, if it's less good, the only interesting time to read it.

how would you guys characterize the current moment BTW? I was flipping through the Raymond Pettibon reader which is compiled from excerpts from Plato to Charles Manson and pretty much could not tell what era any selection was from without looking at the author.

Alfred is right, of course. You should always read exactly what you feel like reading. There's no merit points for slogging through something you hate.

in the thread on "The Tale of Genji" someone posts about the world of the novel (11th C Japan) being so alien it's really like reading some quasi-sci-fi novel. that kind of piqued my interest.

i mean it's impossible to characterize the current moment in a way that is accurate; these things are only possible in retrospect and then they're always kind of lies. also i am trying to come up with a useful lie about right now and i can't.

It does suck for me that a lot of friends who love Foer, Murakami, Palahniuk, etc won't touch anything written before, say, 1930; it's baffling!

There's no merit points for slogging through something you hate.

― Aimless, Friday, June 25, 2010 2:01 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

for sure. that's why i asked upthread how recently people who don't like modern fiction have read a lot of fiction. when i have felt that way it has usually been during periods where i wasn't reading much fiction at all. which fucked with my sense of identity, but i mean, whatever. sometimes you don't feel like reading fiction. it's okay.

by "felt that way" i mean "felt like, 'god everything that's being written these days sucks'"

people who love palahniuk are generally best avoided ime

uh oh

Tell me about it. He's one of my closest friends and he wrote his masters thesis on Palahniuk's work.

But you had a good point above, Aimless. Netherland, for example, struck such a chord with me partly because it's the first post-2001 novel I've read that deals with 9-11 in a completely honest and real way. I don't think someone who was born in 2010 will be able find the same resonance when they read it at age 25 or whenever. That said, they'd likely find their own resonance from their own perspective, but sometimes I just want to read fiction about NOW.

xxxposts man, I type slowly.

plax: if you loved Infinite Jest I'd highly recommend Bolano. he's the first *contemporary* author I really got into after reading everything by DFW. I read Savage Detectives a while ago and enjoyed it a lot, now I'm almost halfway through 2666 and loving it.

yeah I don't have any time for Palahniuk either

i was really into palahniuk when i was in school and i would probably still enjoy his first few if i read them now, i lost interest around the time of diary though

i read something by him in HS, don't remember the name of it. hated it.

I'm really glad the dude exists though. If only to endlessly misspell his name. Also he seems really earnest.

yeah he is, but invisible monsters explained felching to me and is intercut w. descriptions of different kinds of vaginal construction surgery and recreational uses for prescription drugs

I have some knee jerk reaction against new fiction and I can't exactly say why. The writers always seem like people I don't want to spend much time with, but of course who's to say that wouldn't also be true of Christopher Isherwood or W. Somerset maugham or Mikhail Bulgakov or whoever?

all my favorite old-timey writers kind of seem like they would have been horrible to be around.

I quite liked that Michael Chabon book about comics and I liked Stephen Millhauser's "Martin Dressler".

xp - yes, sure

I have a similar knee-jerk thing that I consciously try to overcome. Threads like this help, also I find reading good, thoughtful interviews with living writers gets me excited about trying their stuff.

I am reading Under The Volcano now, which is great, but by all accounts Malcolm Lowry was a prick, yes?

yeah he sounds crazy

Speaking of which, wasn't there some profile (The New Yorker, I think) that mentioned his incredibly small penis

that profile is my source for thinking he was bonkers. strangely didn't recall the thing about his penis.

more importantly, did he eat any truffle fries

sometimes i read things that are not the new yorker btw :/