the mortal enemy of videogames

edward

captain
No but I did just get it from the library. I’ve heard it’s good but sometimes that means it’s actually very bad.

But I’m hoping for the best!

whatsarobot

edward the words “GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD” make me immediately dubious

wickedcestus

Of course that is from the New York Times. Here I was thinking it was from some dumb video game website

yeso

I disavow all association with whatever is going on

DaveedNoo

While waiting for Don Quixote in the mail I started reading Dracula on Libby and it is highly readable! Having a good time.

DaveedNoo

This Dracula guy is a lot like Neclord!

edward

I don’t wanna tell any tales out of school, but I hear that Dracula sure is a real son of a gun.

All the John Hawkes chatter made me finally pick up one of his books. I remember eyeing his books a lot ten or fifteen years ago but never pulling the trigger.

bwood

@whatsarobot I’m doing the same thing! I’m maybe 120 pages into The Orchard Keeper. I’d love to talk about the books with you if you’d like,

I finished reading The Passenger, blew through Stella Maris, and I’m reading The Orchard Keeper and rereading Stella Maris (I love it!) I’ve even picked up McCarthy’s available plays and screenplays. I can see myself rereading the two new novels multiple times this year.

whatsarobot

bwood Whoa! What the heck are the odds! That’s some cool news.

Yeah I’d love to discuss the books with you. I wonder, if we did it right here, whether folks would complain.

soapbox

bwood blew through Stella Maris

Gotta love those all-dialogue books to really blow through some pages! Fully understand re-reading this one as it is pretty “fun” to just luxuriate in (even if it is kinda just marinating in monstrous depression).

Stella Maris definitely seems as much another Sunset Limited as just a chance for McCarthy to riff on ideas without worrying too much about needing to drive a plot and is most pleasant for its riffing rather than really providing much illumination on it’s companion novel (in this manner it very much feels like McCarthy’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in that plot-wise it’s hard to not be like “we already kind of understood that from what the main text hinted at, we didn’t really need to see it acted out directly; we’re not really gaining anything new here!”, but that’s not the point as much as using it a related platform for entirely unrelated ideas).

whatsarobot

Stray thoughts on The Orchard Keeper thus far (I’ve just begun part three of four):

In the past couple of years, I’ve read quite a lot of contemporary fiction (including lots of “genre” fiction, if that distinction means anything anymore) and nonfiction. By comparison, The Orchard Keeper feels less like the reading I’ve done, and more like gazing at a painting, or a series of photographs. It’s all about soaking in the atmosphere and the little intricate details. This is gameplay of the highest and most satisfying order, thank you tim rogers and The New York Times Review of Books (but certainly not yeso).
The narrative moves in quite a liquid (yes, Faulknerian) way, so it’s not always immediately clear who we’re talking about, or how the scene’s perspective has shifted. It’s more about taking in the composite whole.
Only just now are the main characters beginning to interact with one another (and in the process revealing themselves to be, I think, “main characters”), and I wonder whether Sylder will continue to feel like a menacing figure of vague evil after what he did earlier in the book.
Repeated themes I’ve noticed: toadlike people and places, blood and its appearance inside and out of the body, men doing things just because they can. That’s McCarthy!
Overall I’m genuinely in love with the fact that no one in the book is motivated by the bullshit, quotidian tasks we all succumb to in our daily lives in 2023. Sylder is not swinging by the 100 yen shop to pick up a pad of note paper before hopping on the commuter train. The story’s set less than a century ago, but it may as well be fucking Middle Earth for how closely it resembles our current society.

bwood

Either that or PMs. There’s all this talk here of The Orchard Keeper being McCarthy’s weakest book, but I’m digging it. I was drawn in by that description of The Green Fly Inn and its patrons, and riveted by the events that occurred at the inn later in the book.

I’m afraid to write more because of spoilers, but I appreciate how McCarthy creates this ugly world where nobody is especially heroic. I can infer what the boy’s journey is going to be based on his interactions with his mother, and I love it because in other books or films his father would look saintly, but every scene he’s in paints a much different picture.

whatsarobot

bwood Oops well as you can see (above) I made a bit of an executive decision.

Happy to shift to PMs if we (I) get shouted down.

yeso

go ahead and talk about here if you like imo. I’d appreciate the conversation

Gaagaagiins

I talk about way stupider shit to myself on public threads for way longer than that

edward

Same. I mean, what is this thread for if not discussing books with each other?

DaveedNoo

It’s for discussing how wild it is to think about Dracula baking chickens for Jonathan and making his bed cause there’s no staff around.

edward

Just because he sucks blood doesn’t mean he forgot how to rotisserie a succulent bird

whatsarobot

I think people tend to zoom in and focus on the whole blood-sucking thing first and foremost, followed maybe by the immortality aspect. But Dracula was also, “a most wonderful man. Soldier, statesman, and alchemist.”

None of us here is as cool a guy as Dracula.

Let’s all aspire to be Draculas.

My handle on another forum a long time ago was Double Dracula. I really should have hung on to that, it turns out. Oh well! See my above comment about not being as cool a guy as Big D. Bet he’d have a real, noticeably cool forum handle.

Such as… for example… Gaagaagiins?!?!

Gaagaagiins

whatsarobot My handle on another forum a long time ago was Double Dracula. I really should have hung on to that, it turns out. Oh well! See my above comment about not being as cool a guy as Big D. Bet he’d have a real, noticeably cool forum handle.

Such as… for example… Gaagaagiins?!?!

[Gaagaagiins] dramatically swirls around a large wide wine glass full of thick, dark, red liquid. The air is thick with the smell of evil... wait, that's just the smell of tomatoes

bwood

All this talk about Dracula has me craving for a book about Dwight Frye. I’m not sure if a library will have a copy of his biography Dwight Frye’s Last Laugh, but it’s worth a try. I loved his Renfield in the 1931 Dracula. It’s a shame he was typecast after that.

wickedcestus

Gaagaagiins Enjoying some fine Clamato this evening, I see.. Truly a refined palate

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