the mortal enemy of videogames

[MoH]

+1 for tristram and its wonderful digressions

[Gaagaagiins]

@wickedcestus

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

The Life and Opinions of Tim Rogers, Gamers would be a great name for an in-persona autobio

[wickedcestus]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a “biography” called Biographia Literaria – Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, which is about as to-the-point as Tristram Shandy, and much more concerned with his Opinions (mostly concerning metaphysics and William Wordsworth) than his Life.

[saddleblasters]

I want to talk about some of the less well known books on my list:

Singular Rebellion

This takes place in the late 60s as the student protest movement in Japan is happening, and is sort of difficult to summarize as there is a bunch of political complexities going on that I forget. The main character is a middle-aged executive who comes into contact with a lot of young people via his twenty-something mistress. He turns into a sort of inspiration for them after refusing a transfer at the government-connected massive conglomerate he works at. People keep telling him he is a progressive figure and he keeps trying to insist he is conservative. So, within this framework, the book is essentially about the relationship between these two generations, painting the youth as desperate for older people they can look up to, and the older generation having failed the youth due to their own selfishness – though I’m obviously simplifying things here. It’s one of the most interesting cases of an unreliable narrator that I’ve ever seen. The book touches on a bunch of other issues in Japanese society and postwar economic development. I need to reread it.

Chinese Jetsam on a Tropic Shore

N.I. Low was born in Fujian, but because of some money-making scheme of his father, he ended up orphaned in Singapore, where he grew up. The book begins with some vague memories of the Fujian countryside, but in Singapore he forgets his mother language and ends up studying English literature and becomes the Shakespeare guy at the school he works at. He’s a Christian, so a recurring theme is the mental struggle he has in reconciling Christianity with Chinese philosophy. He also writes a lot about trying to relearn Chinese as an adult.

I didn’t really know much about pre-war Singapore before reading this. He writes about so many everyday things in such a magical way. I enjoy people whose minds are filled with endless contradictions and are incapable of just describing something or narrating a simple event without turning it into a cascade of metaphors for the mystery of the human predicament, as that’s how I am too.

Fortress Besieged

I don’t think this actually qualifies as “less well known” but I don’t really see anyone else talking about this in English much. It’s about a guy who studied abroad in Europe, but, failing to get a degree, had a fake diploma printed to satisfy the parents of his dead wife, who has adopted him into their family. He comes back to Shanghai and engages in a bunch of failed romance, subject of the second chapter, which I think could stand alone as own separate work. It has all the poignancy, ambivalence and regret of a late Sōseki novel compressed into around 10,000 words or so. Then, after the conclusion of that chapter, the protagonist leaves Shanghai in shame and goes on a long journey with a bunch of weirdos and perverts to teach at a school in a small town in the middle of nowhere. (This is all happening as the Japanese invade the country.) So the second half of the novel is about university politics and, to bring up Sōseki again, reminds me of Botchan. Then the final chapter where he returns to Shanghai is absolutely haunting.

Plainsong

The narrator moved out to the Tokyo suburbs into a big house so that he and his girlfriend could be together only for her to break up with him. Eventually the freaks and losers in his life hear about this house and start inviting themselves in to live with him. A lot of the novel is devoted to the eating habits of the stray cats in this new neighborhood he lives in.

[rearnakedwindow]

You’re making me want to read all of these, especially the Singapore one.

[MoH]

@saddleblasters

I enjoy people whose minds are filled with endless contradictions and are incapable of just describing something or narrating a simple event without turning it into a cascade of metaphors for the mystery of the human predicament, as that’s how I am too.

yeah, agreed ^ loved the way you worded this. that book in particular seems to be oop or otherwise hard to get.

i want to write something similar up for my fav books, maybe i will do that this week (said threateningly).

[saddleblasters]

yeah, i just happened upon it at a used bookstore. originally i picked it up because the title enticed me, but i wasn’t expecting to like it as much as i did.

i kind of miss the days where i spent more time reading random stuff. now i have these massive reading lists of important seeming books that i feel the need to read, which leaves less room for impulse

[MoH]

oh yeah back when my time felt unlimited i would just read so much bullshit, both good and bad. now i’m more discerning because i have to be, though lately i’ve had the vague feeling that i should purposefully read even less. can’t quite explain why.

[Bonsai]

@saddleblasters

i kind of miss the days where i spent more time reading random stuff. now i have these massive reading lists of important seeming books that i feel the need to read, which leaves less room for impulse

I have the same exact problem and I somewhat solved it by browsing my local library both online and offline, have found a lot of good surprises through that so far.

it takes the pressure off of reading quite a bit when you can just put stuff back on the shelf for someone else to borrow if you don’t like it. i can’t work it out, but somehow the pressure of a “reading backlog” is only for books i actually own physically.

i think channel surfing books at the library is a good way of expanding tastes as well, on my library app there is a “random” button that will randomize a selection of books that I then pick through and see what I find. Thats how I found The Storm by Defoe which I posted about earlier in the thread. Loved that book and doubt I would have found it otherwise.

[MoH]

rings of saturn - wg sebald

this is ostensibly about a man taking a walking tour around east england, but to say what it’s actually about would feel both impossible and insincere. sebald is often called a writer of memory, but he’s also a writer of morality, history, justice, fiction, melancholy, and time. he’s a master stylist, myopic yet encompassing in his vision. he’s also quite friendly and even funny.

this book is the progenitor of not only my literary tastes, but also how i write and consequently how i think. this might not be my favorite book anymore, but it is the book. before reading sebald, i was mostly reading 20th century american fiction like delilo, pynchon, and wallace as well as stuff like tao lin (which, don’t get me wrong, is still great stuff), but after reading rings of saturn i understood the type of literature that was actually for me.

2666 - roberto bolano

what is 2666 about? i don’t know. everyone remembers the part about the crimes, but i have the most memory of the part about the critics. and what about the part about the boxer? and how do all these parts relate together, let alone how they fit into the rest of bolano’s oeuvre? i don’t know if these questions have or need answers, but they do point to 2666 being a book full of mystery, tragedy, danger, compassion, hatred, hope…

for me, this fills in the other half of the circle sebald created. as wonderful as bolano is on his own, he’s best when he’s talking about literature. the authors he loves, the ones to read, the poets who mean something, etc. he nurtured than infection in me as well.

69 - ryu murakami

this is a bildungsroman set in 1969 during the student protests in japan. it’s not as monumental as the two books above, but like all of ryu murakami’s works, it’s cool, sly, ironic, surprising, and feels close to something real even in it’s extremes. unlike his other books, 69 is not about murder, drugs, or sex. instead it’s about navigating a world full of those things while growing up. i think part of the surprise for me came from reading a book of this caliber from ryu and it opened my appreciation of him as an artist as someone akin to takeshi kitano. a good way to describe this book is it will make you want to write a book of your own.

my struggle - karl ove knausgaard

if you somehow haven’t heard about these books by now, it’s a 6-cycle autofictional novel by a norwegian guy with an ordinary life. he will spend 3 pages on making lunch, 300 pages on a night he went to buy beer as a teenager for a party, but equal attention is given to the abuse of his alcoholic father, his self-hatred, the joy of raising children, the infidelities of marriage, the feeling of a first band practice, the thought of death. reading the whole thing is like living twice.

they were already a sensation in knausgaard’s native norway before they came to america. i remember reading the advanced readers copy sent to the bookstore where i worked at the time, intrigued by the provocative title and the publisher. i was blown away, and eagerly awaited the next volume over the next 7 or so years. probably the best reading experience of my life.

woodcutters - thomas bernhard

this book is about a man observing a party from a wingchair, observing what’s happening around him while simultaneously giving the reader context and revelation. like nearly all of bernhard’s, is an extended monologue told without chapter, page, or paragraph breaks. this can be intimidating when beginning a bernhard book, as can the dark places he goes within the mind of his narrators. however, it would be a mistake to let that deter you for in the end bernhard is a life-affirming author, his books are full of breath, love, humor, and passion. he is, as they say, peak.

for me, this book was a moment of recognition and i suspect it would be for you, too. if you’ve ever felt on the outside circle even amongst supposed outsiders, if you’ve ever felt the things important to you were trampled by others, or if you’ve ever felt like you were the only real in a room full of fakes, this book will give you peace.

your face tomorrow - javier marias

your face tomorrow is a trilogy about spy craft, the nature of power, the power of violence, language, identity, regret, war, and what it means to be moral. it has some of the most evocative scenes, sentences, and characters in all of literature. perhaps the best way to describe this book is it is the best literary exegesis of things like jeffery epstein and what it means to live in a world where those things happen.

seiobo there below - lazlo kraznohorkai

kraznohorkai is kinda a legend. he’s from communist hungary, has lived in places like japan, spain, and etc., but now apparently lives way out in the woods in hungary and is more or less a hermit. a story i like about him is he was giving a reading in new york once and the building suffered a massive power outage but apparently he kept reading without missing a beat. his books, like satantango are sometimes made into long movies directed by a guy named bella tar. i will use this quote from sebald to best describe him: “The universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing”

of all his books, i would vote seiobo there below as his best. it’s a series of vignettes that are sometimes about art, sometimes about history, sometimes about other. it was maybe the first time i realized fiction could be something other than fiction.

heaven - mieko kawakami

this book is about a young japanese boy being bullied at school. it was directly influenced by neitzsche, which is why i originally chose to read it.

this is one of the newest books on my list, and i posted something about it in the forum when i read it. truth told, it feels like a bit of an outlier in a number of ways. however, it might be the most powerful book on this list. i would love to write something with this much force.

the sheltering sky - paul bowles

i read this because ryuichi sakamoto loved it and used this quote from the novel/movie he soundtracked as a voiceover in one of the songs off async. maybe that will make you want to read it too.

american tabloid - james ellroy

if your face tomorrow is the literary skeleton key to 20th century deep state politics of blackmail and deception, american tabloid and the subsequent underworld usa trilogy is the literary door to the american way of life post wwii, where a new brand of thugs, sex addicts, cokeheads, lunatics, and murderers in the role of politicians, policemen, and heroes remade the country in their image. if i was spending more time writing that last sentence, i would reword it so it’s clear america was always like that, it just became more like that after wwii.

anyway, ellroy fucking rules. dripping with style, full octane, full camp, full everything. it’ll put some hair on your chest.

miguel street - vs naipaul

as i understand it, vs naipaul is kind of a piece of shit. he’s also maybe the funniest author i’ve ever read and one of the most brave in some ways, especially when he’s not afraid of being wrong. a house for mr. biswas is probably the better book than miguel street (which, somehow in an astonishing display of talent, was the first book he wrote), but miguel street is just so endlessly readable.

naipaul is able to write about the poor residents of trinidad with pity, compassion, contempt, honesty, dignity, and humor in ways that should be studied as much as they should be envied. pure literature.

stream system - gerald murnane

i think i’ve made my love for murnane pretty clear on this forum. all i can say is that after reading stream system, his collection of short stories, i went on to read every single one of his books in a row. it was the literary journey of a lifetime, giving me feelings i haven’t felt since my struggle, though murnane’s objectives are far different than knausgaards. he’s very idiosyncratic and he won’t be for everyone but if he is for you, there’s nothing else like it.

confessions of a mask - yukio mishima

if all you know of mishima is his seppuku and troubling resurgence as a meme online, i urge you to read confessions of a mask. a profound book from a troubled and tortured mind thats ultimate crime was seeking beauty in an ugly world.

the technological society - jacques ellul

this book elucidates the world on a fundamental and prophetic level. it is dense, difficult, and bleak, but it is essential. i’ll leave it with a quote from the book:

With the final integration of the instinctive and the spiritual by means of these human techniques, the edifice of the technical society will be completed. […] It will not seem insane, for everything will be ordered, and the stains of human passion will be lost amid the chromium gleam. We shall have nothing more to lose, and nothing to win. Our deepest instincts and our most secret passions will be analyzed, published, and exploited. […] Technique exists because it is technique. The golden age will be because it will be. Any other answer is superfluous.

diaries - franz kafka

does anything need to be said?

the box man - kobo abe

funny, filthy, dirty, but crystalline. there’s a moment in this book, maybe about 3/4s of the way through, where everything is reoriented. bowls me over each time i read it. masterful.

confessions - st augustine

a few books have the ability to reach across time. this is one of them. “lord grant me chastity, but not yet.”

selected stories - robert walser

i can’t write like walser. i wish i could, but he is too singular, too pure, too perverse, too curious, too broken, too whole. i will lean on sebald again to better describe what i cannot–he called walser ephemeral, as if his stories disappeared from the page as soon as you read them. and it’s true! they are so meaningful but so light. he’s so unserious, but i can only take people seriously if they read walser seriously. it’s like reading something translated from a different grammar.

the guest cat - takashi hiraide

this is a very “japanese” book in that it’s a quiet, almost plotless book about a young couple moving into a house and meeting a stray cat. however, it’s a rare story about grief and the passing of time that’s told with precision and without sentimentality. the angle and shape of an alley is given equal attention as a neighbor tending a garden after their spouse died. both are important.

god’s fool - julien green

i’ve never met anyone else who read this book. it’s written by a gay american catholic who was the first foreign member of the Académie Française. it’s a biography of st. francisis of asisi. i am of the mind that a good way to god is through the saints. if that sounds like something you’d be interested in, i would read god’s fool. if that’s not something you’re interested in, i would still read god’s fool to see how a biography should be written.

an elemental thing - eliot weinberger

weinberger writes about everything. ancient chinese poetry, oranges, animals, indigenous peoples, border disputes, birds, water, air. he’s a genius. erudite. eccentric. generous. goddamn just typing this makes me want to read more weinberger.

we’re flying - peter stamm

tim parks, a critic i really respect, called out peter stamm as one of the few authors writing successfully in a globalized world. i’m not quite sure what he meant by that, but i think i understand it. stamm’s stories are vaguely european, but overall lifted from a time and place that gives them a haunting quality. his prose is so clean that you don’t realize how sad and tender some of his stories are. it’s like being on antidepressants underwater. reading stamm is very addicting.

sayings of the desert fathers

read the wiki. if it speaks to you, read any edition of this book (my copy is the penguin).

first person singular - haruki murakami

like many, murakami was a gateway drug for me. i devoured all his books once i discovered him. then as my tastes got more refined, i discarded him like the hack i thought he was. there were times i was almost ashamed to admit i had liked him. then, for some reason, i read his new-ish book of short stories. turns out murakami is the real deal. he taps into the magic that is literature. he has a little clunkiness that shows its age, but when he’s at his best there’s nothing else like it. it’s like you’re a child reading a fairy tale again. it’s transporting, it’s moving, you’re a little different coming out of a murakami story than you were going into it.

jfk and the unspeakable - james douglass

so i’m into spooky stuff in ways both literal and allegorical. if you too think the cia and other alphabetical agencies are evil and nefarious but in ways you can’t really quite define, read this book. i don’t agree with all of douglass’s reasoning (jfk was not killed because he was a dove), but i do think it’s impossible to read this book and not find the assassination a cover up. depending on how hard you want to pull that thread, it can take you to a lot of interesting places. it did for me!

[yeso]

Ok I’ll write a few words to explain some of my choices too

• Troilus and Criseyde - Chaucer (~1385)

  • The classic story of doomed romance, only in Chaucer’s telling love is an affliction for Troilus (though no less deeply felt) and an impracticality for Criseyde as a woman in a oppressive, war-obsessed society. I think it has some of the most beautiful line on line poetic writing in English. Reading the original text rather than a contemporary rendering makes it feel ancient and eerie.

• Manuscript Found In Saragossa - Jan Potocki (1805)

  • An 18th century novel that arrived late. The story behind the book is wild: a Polish Count who served as a military engineer across the continent under various flags, hung out with the Knights of Malta, was an early hot air balloon pilot, got heavily into esotericism and secret societies, then sank into mental illness and retired to Ukraine, wrote this book, and killed himself with a silver bullet because he thought he’d become a werewolf. The book was originally written in French, translated into Polish, the complete original text was lost, leaving the Polish version as the only complete version of the work, so subsequent editions have all been patchworks of the French original and close Polish translation. The contents of the novel itself are equally convoluted: During the Peninsular Campaign a French soldier relays stories from the titular manuscript, discovered in Zaragoza, which was itself written decades earlier by a Walloon solider. The Manuscript is a series of seemingly disparate picaresque stories set in 18th century Spain that eventually mosaic into an occult conspiracy story. Has a Polish Golden Age film adaptation by Wojciech Has with a cool soundtrack by Krzysztof Penderecki and starring Zbigniew “The Polish James Dean” Cybulski.

• Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (1847)

  • I have nothing insightful to say about this. Great book. I was born a Brontë sisters man and I’ll die a Brontë sisters man. Get that jane austen out of here. you can keep your george eliot (I’m just kidding)

• The Confidence-Man - Herman Melville (1858)

  • Melville’s last completed novel and somewhat uncharacteristic given the preceding. Seems to me to be the only novel he published during his lifetime not to be inflected by some kind of commercial imperative. Not a negative judgement against earlier novels, just that he seems to have a more focused approach to his subject matter, which is how evil and greed manifest in American society. The novel is a panoramic canvas of a journey on a Mississippi steamboat. It’s got kind of a Robert Altman thing going on, and it’s written more like Bunyan than Ecclesiastes. Makes more sense alongside his short fiction and impending turn towards lyric then narrative poetry.

• Jude, The Obscure - Thomas Hardy (1895)

  • Incredibly depressing novel about poverty and class that’s uniquely convincing in this aspect because it seems to try to avoid being about poverty and class by introducing “bad” characters like Arabella and has characters make mistakes, but everyone is just pulverized by the brute force cruelties of poverty and loneliness. Starkly written throughout then with moving elegaic passages that foreshadow Hardy’s transition to poetry and verse drama.

• Trilce - César Vallejo (1922)

  • Synesthetic alien poetry written in prison. Been ahead of its time going on a century at this point lol

• An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser (1925)

  • The first and last quarters of this novel are overflowing with compassion and sadness and the middle is a Douglas Sirk movie

• The Close Chaplet - Laura Riding (1926)

  • The debut volume from a poet focused on absolute clarity of language to the extent that she eventually lost faith in the capacity of words to have real meaning, then tried to passively remove her work from circulation, so her bibliography is a bit elusive. Thankfully The Close Chaplet has been republished in full. The intro in the University of Trent edition is good. Heavily ripped off during her lifetime (the fugitives, hart crane, robert graves)

• 7 Madmen + The Flamethrowers - Roberto Arlt (1929)

  • I bother people on here about this all the time. Really one novel that was broken in two part because Arlt was trying to make money off the first half while he finished writing the second half (7 Madmen ends with Erdosain’s remark to the Astrologer: “You know you look a lot like Lenin?” and The Flamethrowers opens with his reply “Yes…but Lenin knew what he was doing.”) The author was mostly self-educated having been expelled from school at age 11 (seems harsh) and compensated by studying pulps, yellow journalism, and as iirc Ricardo Piglia has hypothesized, slapdash translations of Dostoyevsky that became popular in Buenos Aires in the 1910s (his earlier novel The Mad Toy is about his upbringing and really good too). In fact the novel partially borrows the plot of Demons, only here it’s given a kind of quasi-verisimilitude granted by Arlt’s personal association with radical political movements. The story follows a Buenos Aires grifter who, after getting caught stealing from his boss, finds himself led into a baroque network of criminal conspiracies. His mental state deteriorates throughout, with some really wild passages describing stranger and stranger hallucinations and thought processes. Includes detailed plans for chemical weapons attacks on Buenos Aires about which the author seems to have given a troubling amount of practical consideration. The standard line of attack on Arlt was (as with Dreiser) that he was “bad” at writing. It’s true he’s a little shaky from time to time, but I think the critique is (as with Dreiser) overstated, and there is some deft, understated, and genuinely surprising structural and meta-textual skill shaping of the entire work. There’s a plot-truncated but still pretty cool and moody 1972 film version available on scans of degraded film. Worth seeking out after reading the book(s). There’s also a long, faithful, but very low budget Argentine public TV adaptation that was supervised by Piglia. We have two solid English translations of the first book (I slightly prefer the Lindstrom version) but unfortunately the only English version of The Flamethrowers is very poor (done by an amateur enthusiast (respect) for a small press (respect) but still an unfortunate disservice in spite of good intentions.

• The Foundation Pit - Andrei Platanov (1930)

  • A Soviet novel with an imaginative fidelity to the ideology, and therefore becomes hyper-realistic. Platanov was an electrical engineer involved in building infrastracture in the rural USSR and his fiction is preoccupied with machinery, engineering, soil conditions, weather etc. This book is about how social relations, work, and the passing of life can change or not with the onset of technological and ideological revolution.

• The Glass Key - Dashiell Hammett (1932)

  • A dreamier, less violent rephrasing of Red Harvest and concerned with the kind of corruption massive wealth enables but just as castigating and jaundiced.

• Light In August - William Faulkner (1932)

  • Both the darkest and most optimistic of Faulkner’s novels because it’s less “gothic” than his other books centering on violence. Convincing on the subject of race from a southern white guy POV because it evinces the insecurity and psychopathy at the core of racism and lost-causism. Optimistic because it castigates the past and looks forward to a future. Deep strange mood throughout

• Call It Sleep - Henry Roth (1934)

  • Beautifully depicted big city childhood and difficult family life ending ultimately in reconciliation.

• The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead (1940)

  • Not a graphically disturbing book, but really warrants a CW concerning its relentless and all-consuming portrayal of psychological abuse of children. The book is about a viciously dysfunctional family sliding into poverty, and its sympathies are with the eldest ugly duckling child and her efforts at internal escape. Sam Pollitt is way more disturbing than judge holden imo. The encarnation of the social basis for american (and also australian) fascism combined with dungeons and dragons live roleplay experience podcasters to come.

• Nightmare Alley - William Lindsay Gresham (1946)

  • Angry American proletarian crime novel with black magic undercurrent. The old film version with Tyrone Power is pretty good, but the recent guillermo del toro adaptation is dog shit sorry

• Under The Volcano - Malcolm Lowry (1947)

  • Sort of an omni-novel trying to encompass all of the author’s preoccupations (Melville, alcoholism, being a richie rich fancy boy who cant do anything right, imperialism). Often compared to Ulysses (which Lowry admitted to never having read) in that it takes place over the course of a single day (de los muertos) and it consists of rigorously and distinctly composed chapters. It’s all unified by the death drive of the central character and atmospheric rendering of Mexico reminiscent of Dr Atl. Pretty decent John Huston film version considering the challenges of adaptation and enjoyable at least for cinemascope 1980s film stock images of Cuernavaca, but it’s one of those not really cinematically translatable books.

• Savage Night - Jim Thompson (1952)

  • Could pick one of a half dozen Thompson novels, but this probably my favorite thanks to weirdness levels. A diminutive, cherubic and also lethal contract killer stalks his sad wino target in a depressing college town. Only the killer in question is in fact a middle aged man with some kind congenital condition that limits his physical development, and he further disguises his age with kewpie doll makeup, shoe lifts, and dentures. The why of it all isn’t really explained. He winds up sexually obsessed with a deformed resident of the town, and of course his job goes pear shaped. They call Thompson “The Dime-Store Dostoyevsky” but I think “Bargain Bin Bataille” better fits this novel.

• Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo (1955)

  • A book that’s just about perfect down to the punctuation mark, and I think literally everyone who has read it agrees. A fractal ghost story about a violence-haunted Mexican town. Written in like laser-etched in diamond Spanish that has traveled well across translations. The 1967 Mexican Golden Age style film version is pretty good and it certainly looks fantastic. I think there have been at least a couple other film adaptation but I havent seen those. I understand there’s a netflix production in the works.

• The Devil To Pay In The Backlands - João Guimarães Rosa (1958)

  • A valiant attempt at translating a wild Brazilian adventure novel that is sort of doing it’s own thing and no one really considers adequate as translation but it’s got a (small) cult following anyway. I can’t honestly say that I’ve read the novel it’s based on Grande Sertão: Veredas for this reason (Alison Entrekin has been working on a new translation for at least a decade and has recently pinned a 2024-2025 eta). About outlaw gangs in the wild-westish northeast of Brazil (think forum favorite movie Bacurau and you’re in the right neighborhood). Lots of knife-combat, sexual confusion, satanic pacts.

• Los ríos profundos - José María Arguedas (1958)

  • Quiet, atmospheric novel about an ethnically hispanic Peruvian child sent away to school in a Quechua region in the Andes. He and his classmates become engrossed in a competitive game involving spinning tops, then a plague sweeps through. One of two Nocturnal Ending style books if you know what I mean (this one, and the even more “Nocturnal” Yawar Fiesta) by an ethnologist who sought to illustrate and preserve Quechuan language and culture. His ethnographic work as been criticized as paternalistic, but his novels, especially this one, YF, and his last Fox From Above, Fox From Below hold up.

• Bodysnatcher + The Shipyard - Juan Carlos Onetti (1960)

  • The Shipyard is about recurrent character in the Onetti cosmology Larsen’s deluded attempt to revive a desiccated, inoperative shipping business on the Rio de la Plata following his expulsion from said cosmology’s major setting, the fictional Uruguayan town of Santa Maria. While working on this novel, Onetti was inspired to pause and then write Bodysnatcher which relates the events leading up to Larsen getting chased out of town (his calamitous attempt at running a brothel.) Onetti has this ability to write daydreams and idle delusions in a way I’ve never encountered outside of his fiction. His characters are chumps, losers, and weirdos either by choice or inclination, and the world around them is formed by whatever seems to take shape in their minds. It’s hard to explain. Has the atmosphere of forlorn neighborhoods and failing, empty restaurants, those things in life that just never worked out.

• Eight Men - Richard Wright (1961)

  • Late short fiction collection about eight different characters situated in different facets of amerikkkan society. Written in his energetic Naturalism-journalism style.

• Dorp Dead - Julia Cunningham (1965)

  • Short and atmospheric children’s novel about an orphan who is adopted by a strange man who has an unusual way of relating to the passage of time, and is ominously seen building a cage in the basement. The orphan escapes into a forest. Odd, hazy fable-like little book.

• The Solid Mandala - Patrick White (1966)

  • The story of brothers Waldo and Arthur who spend their lives linked together in failure and obscurity, at least so it seems to the former, a bookish, self-hating snob, and but not so much to the latter who has some kind of mild intellectual disability and relates to the world quite differently. A book about inner lives and the connections to others or recoiling from these connections.

• New Year’s Eve/1929 - James T. Farrell (1967)

  • A novel about a graceless, unlikable, lonely nurse making a final attempt to be otherwise before a terminal illness ends her life in wintertime Chicago.

• Motorman - David Ohle (1972)

  • Bizarre narrative about a man named Modenke in a strange version of America where the atmosphere is slowly being turned to a kind of jelly, rivers are polluted solid, people are implanted with 4 sheep hearts, all kinds of stuff.

• Dahlgren - Samuel R. Delaney (1974)

  • Total Reality Breakdown in a rust belt midwestern city.

• Reflex and Bone Structure - Clarence Major (1974)

  • Experimental In A Grove type crime story from an artist better known for poetry and painting. American avant-garde that recalls the Noveau Roman but it’s not leaden and dour like a lot of those imo.

• Las muertas - Jorge Ibargüengoitia (1977)

  • Extremely black comedy based on the irl story of mass-murdering sisters who killed as many as 200 people in 1950s Guanajuato. Recounted in a blank, journalistic style that highlights the procedures of said crimes and doesn’t attempt any real psychological forensics, which makes them seem terrifyingly commonplace. Helped inspire Fernanda Melchor’s writing (Hurricane Season borrows the epigraph from this book). Depiction of the border between normal society and industrial murder as paper-thin does not reassure about the world.

• The Westing Game - Ellen Raskin (1978)

  • ”Puzzle book” for children about a labrynthine murder mystery in and around a lakefront mid-century modern high rise apartment building in Milwaukee. Covertly about class conflict and the knife edge between ruin and elusive middle class security. Wonderful Great Lakes atmosphere. Sort of a Wisconsin Pynchon-For-Kids

• Love And Rockets - Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez (1981 – present)

  • Ongoing, voluminous comic series by brothers Gilbert and Jaime (and sometimes Mario) Hernandez. Includes lots of one-offs, errata, you’d expect from the medium, but the main pillars are two continuous narratives, each written and drawn by a different Hernandez brother. Gilbert’s about the residents of a fictional Central American town, running from roughly the 1960s up to the present. The sometimes comedic, sometimes mournful, sometimes terrifying early stories grow more fragmented and formally experimental after (most of) the cast migrate to the USA and are changed and not by consumerist society and the different cruelties on the menu there. Jaime’s is mostly centered on a single protagonist, Margarita Luisa “Maggie” Chascarillo, and her friends in the Oxnard punk scene. Characters in Love And Rockets age and change with the series. Imagine if Archie comics followed Jughead into late middle age. Highlights imo: Gilbert’s “Human Diastrophism”, the immensely complex saga of death squads, strippers, and guys with stomach fetishes “Poison River”, his panoramic, cosmic portrait of immigration and class tension “Love And Rockets X”, the 20th century-spanning story of repressed homosexual love “Julio’s Day”, Jaime’s narrative passages “The Death of Speedy Ortiz”, “Wig-Wam Bam”, “Chester Square”, all the odd, downbeat goings on while Maggie manages an apartment complex in Tarzana, Hopey hitting the big 40 as excerpted in “The Education Of Hopey Glass.” I know it’s asking a lot, but you kind of have to read the whole thing from the beginning.

• Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin (1985)

  • Imagined ethnography of a far future California now regenerating itself in something like a neo-bronze age. Some editions come with a cassette tape of imagined music from this community.

• Savage Messiah - Laura Oldfield Ford (2011)

  • Part text part visual art zine collection depicting the insidious acid breakdown gentrification of turn of the (21st) century London + elegies for the people and places displaced. “There is a class war, but only one side is fighting.”

[Gaagaagiins]

@yeso

Ok I’ll write a few words to explain some of my choices too

Sorry for setting a tryhard precedent, I had nothing else going on that night

[MoH]

i always appreciate the opportunity to explain oneself

[yeso]

Whenever this thread gets another wind, I lose a little interest in video games each time

[rejj]

I hardly ever post in here, but I read every post. This is one of the few threads I have “tracked” so I get a forum notification whenever this thread is updated. A true gem, please continue to tryhard at will.

[yeso]

so looks bad now but I’m sure milei has it all under control

[bwood]

@wickedcestus

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

I’d pay big bucks for an audio version of Tristram Shandy read by Tim Rogers.

[wickedcestus]

might wanna try a cupón

[Gaagaagiins]

Hey man, I bet I can find that book for at least $12,000, do you wanna e transfer me and I’ll get you the book for cheaper

[yeso]

I mean I know it’ll wind up being a normal amount of USD but I’m struggling to click purchase on a dollar sign followed by that many numbers