Can say with a straight face that’s one of the few cool literature related pieces of clothing I’ve seen
1 Like
I saw some chatter from back in October but I just finished Schrier’s Blizzard book and thought the blurb on the back about it being “readable” was on point. It’s hard to imagine someone who didn’t already know a lot or having feelings about Blizzard really getting all that much out of it–it was enjoyable to me but more or less felt like one level above a Wikipedia article
More than anything it made me want to replay the Blizz games I love and also gave me a bit of a sense of (despite being a woman who would definitely NOT have been welcome in those spaces back then) how fun it would have been for a while to work in those scrappy mid-90s game offices (if i were 23 and unmarried and didn’t want a social life)
On the whole I’d recommend it for folks who want an easy breezy read that is more or less a straight telling of Blizzard’s history
2 Likes
went to the comics shop to pick up the new Love And Rockets issue. Important Steve and Guadalupe update. The actual purchase was a minor adventure because some lady was also browsing at the same time and had her about 7 or 8 year old obviously on the spectrum son with her, who started following me around and pointing to each individual book and asking “are you going to buy this one? are you going to buy this one?”. I had to walk around the store and lead him back to his mom so he would leave me alone
7 Likes
I have no idea how you could have thought I was 7 or 8 years old
3 Likes
Dua Lipa is the mortal enemy of videogames that @yeso was warning us about, apparently.
3 Likes
Dua’s got great taste! She seems to be very committed to her projects which I respect. I haven’t seen any of her interviews yet but this has me intrigued. I watched a Kaia Gerber (with Jia Tolentino) interview a while back and it was surprisingly good
I do peruse the celeb book recs Instagram from time to time. More on this in a future post…
Dua Lipa’s book club is 100% a net positive in the world because it’s partially responsible for giving us this image of Pedro Pascal reading her latest recommendation over Christmas break:
addendum:
for months last year I kept saying “Djuah Leepuh” to myself the way this woman says it in this video:
3 Likes
Margarita Perveņecka‘s Aspirantūra getting an English translation 
3 Likes
Thanks for sharing this. It was a thoughtful review of a lot of novels that seem sort of interesting but I probably won’t ever get around to reading if I’m honest. But nice to know what people are trying to do. I think the reviewer did a good job of trying to be receptive to this wave of writers while also critiquing the absurdities/indulgences of the subgenre. The ones he mentioned more favorably towards the end sound like they might be worth a shot.
2 Likes
Okay some quick thoughts before we get into it:
- Camille Rowe is so cool
- Also a fan of Pedro Pascal’s taste
- I’m 5/5 on my future ex-husband’s (Jacob Elordi’s) recs
- Emma Mackey’s fictional character’s (Maeve WIley’s) recs are better than her own
- I remember Andrew Garfield’s 10 things video having a pretty interesting crop of recs that aren’t mentioned on his post
With that out of the way…
Okay, everyone, I present, him:
I have come to the decision that everything I read (and do) in life needs to be in service of the project of inching closer and closer to becoming Jeremy Strong. I love the way he talks about books and literature. I love his ability to drop quotes into every interview response. I love that the stakes of every conversation are life and death for him. He’s locked in. I need to lock in too.
He has a couple posts on the celeb book recs Instagram and also a GQ 10 Favorite things video where he talks about a few more books as well.
What I need to read to be more like Jeremy Strong:
- Proust
- Knausgard
- Ibsen
- TS Eliot
- The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner
- The Brothers Karamazov (not sure he’s talked about this one but he’s talked about C&P extensively)
- Probably a bunch of other poetry + drama
This is just one puzzle piece in my project for self-improvement through reading. I gotta read Hurricane Season to be more like an insert credit poster. I gotta read some Dorothy Parker to be more like Daria. I gotta read The Crying Lot of 49 because the boy I was reading Infinite Jest with told me I should read that too. I should probably read that book that Dua Lipa told Pedro Pascal to read on the beach while shirtless on Christmas. Am I being shallow? No. The author is a noble laureate! I’m expanding my brain
This is all going into a big (WIP) reading list I have for myself, but unlike my perfect, 250 film watchlist I made for myself on Letterboxd or the (WIP) list of 30 games I should play (currently stuck at 24 chosen and 6 blank slots), it’s way tougher to prescribe a reading list to myself where the fiction and the poetry and the drama and the nonfiction all coalesces
Anyway, once again, everyone, I give you, him:
6 Likes
what books would you recommend to Jeremy?
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
2 Likes
I finished Doctor Zhivago recently and found most of the experience (mainly the latter half) extremely frustrating. The novel seems to take place in a Russia consisting of ~10 people who all continuously run into each other no matter where they go, from Moscow to Siberia. The first few times were funny, by the last third I was groaning a little bit. I wouldn’t mind so much if so many of these encounters weren’t completely inconsequential.
There were definitely some great moments, but I felt like the attempt to be an “epic Russian novel” left it feeling bloated and meandering.
I also couldn’t understand how to incorporate the poetry at the back of the book (written by the main character) into my reading, since he was only explicitly described writing a poem once or twice. Maybe the poetry is meant to be the key to understanding Zhivago (the in-text characterization is intentionally indirect), and I just couldn’t get my head into it enough because poetry-in-translation often feels a bit too removed/distant.
After trundling through that, I read The Invention of Morel on Borges’ (personal) recommendation, which I thought was a great little novel. I had for years constantly confused Doctor Zhivago and The Island of Dr. Moreau, so I felt it appropriate to follow up the former with a book clearly inspired (just look at the title) by the latter.
The main difference I found is that Wells’ plots tend to climax in violent action, whereas this novel remained a subdued mystery the whole way through. I think it shows a surer hand to be able to develop a plot such that the mystery itself carries the reader forward, rather than danger and suspense. I will have to see if there are any more of Bioy Cesares’ works with English translations.
Next, I will be looking into another of Borges’ favourite authors – Robert Louis Stevenson. Specifically, his collection of short fiction, The New Arabian Nights. It’s always fascinated me the way European authors latched on to the Arabian Nights in the 19th century, from Dumas to Jan Potocki; and on a broader level, the sort of fantasy realms that they dreamed up based on the scattershot accounts of exotic places that they could get their hands on (hence my love of Jules Verne.) This is perhaps a consequence of growing up reading so many Adventures of Tintin books.
4 Likes
have you read The Manuscript Found in Saragossa?
1 Like
Of course! I discovered it via the Wikipedia page “List of works influenced by One Thousand and One Nights.” I consider it the pinnacle of the story-within-a-story genre. I especially like the beginning sections when it’s so difficult to tell what’s a dream, what’s a hoax, and what’s actually true.
3 Likes
gotcha yeah I wasnt doubting that you’d read it just unclear based on what you wrote if you had, and if not was going to suggest you do bc it’s quite good
And to the subject of orientalist literature - what’s surprised me is how long that was in fashion. It went well into the 20th century certainly if you look at pulp magazines (Arlt was writing in that style in the mid-late 1930s, for example), but then there Frederic Prokosh in I guess a less “crude” way during the same time
1 Like
I feel like it makes more sense if you think of the Orient as a “target” of a more general concept in fiction – which can be put as simply as the “exotic fantasy.” I feel like the dominant modes during the early-novel period were:
-
A European character come across an unknown island while at sea (Mardi, Erewhon, Utopia, etc.)
-
A foreign character is depicted in a mythic-comical version of an exotic country (History of Rasselas, Tribulations of a Chinese Man in China, [that stupid Voltaire story I don’t remember the name of], etc.)
I feel like both of these plot-types were transferred into SF/Fantasy during the 20th century – the racial essentialism and cultural exotification found a much more palatable form being applied to alien/fantasy species rather than human cultures. If Jan Potocki wanted to write Saragossa today, it wouldn’t feature a pair of Muslim women, but elves or aliens or something like that.
For the most part, the authors of these orientalist books were not actually trying to make any particular comment about the culture they’re writing about. For a lot of these stories that feature Muslims (often in the form of Barbary Pirates), it’s like having Russia as the villain in an 80s movie; it’s just the thing to do. There are a few well-known stereotypes/character archetypes to draw from (the vizier, the merchant, the eastern mystic, etc), and free reign to make up whatever else you choose. It may was well be elves and dwarves, really.
So, I think it kind of makes sense that it took a long time to die off, because it was a “tradition” with such a firm foundation and so many easy tropes to grab at. It took the establishment of a new cultural touchstone in the form of SF/Fantasy, and for this new touchstone to become equally as easy and well-known, before orientalism stopped being the de facto standard for the exotic fantasy.
I think Baudolino points toward an older version of this tendency, in the form of the mythical creatures and kingdoms that populated the shared imagination of the Middle Ages. To my mind, it’s all a development/transformation of this same type of “fantasy” throughout literary history.
4 Likes
That seems broad although maybe that’s the point. I say this because the intents and effects seem to scatter across a pretty wide range between Potocki which is esoteric but rooted in historical Moorish Europe vs say components of The Waste-Land attempting metaphysics (and being widely convincing although room for disagreement) vs Mardi being disorganized and unconvincing metaphysics (cool book not knocking it) vs total pulp adventure stories trading just on the exotic setting. Though idk I guess they’re all operating under a this stuff is generally interesting framework. Not a book ofc but you ever listen to Muslimgauze?
2 Likes
Yeah, I was intentionally being super broad. The main question I was thinking about was, “Why write this type of story in this type of setting?” and placing that in a historical/literary context. You’re right that within that framework, there’s a ton of different intents and styles – but I think that supports what I was saying, about picking an easily approachable framework and set of tropes, especially as a foundation for a story that’s otherwise wild and weird.
Haven’t read The Waste-Land though, so I’m not sure of the context there, and tbh less familiar with early 20th c. examples as opposed to 18th/19th c.
2 Likes
And I’ve never heard of Muslimgauze at all.
1 Like
Time for a little check-in!
I finished the two books by Mishima and enjoyed both quite a lot. I deliberately went into the books more or less blind, just reading the little bits about the books and the author you can find on the back of the books themselves.
(The translation of) Mishima’s writing definitely felt more flowery and expressive than the rather neutral styles in Kawakami’s Heaven and Ogawa’s The Memory Police.
Confessions of a Mask
After having read only one short paragraph about Mishima being a “controversial figure” and “ultra-nationalist leader of an attempted coup d’état to restore the divinity of the Emperor which ended in death by seppuku” I wasn’t sure what to expect from the book.
Ready to be surprised I didn’t have to wait long as I did not expect the immediacy with which the protagonist begins the self-analysis of his homosexuality and the mask he created to hide it from the rest of society.
I feel like anybody who ever had to or at least felt like they had to hide part of their core identity in order to conform to social norms of their time can find a lot to relate to here. I certainly did. The omnipresence of the question of how to fit in and the immense mental upkeep required to play a role and fake desirable character traits was well presented and managed to never end up feeling like self-pity.
The second strong theme certainly is the wish for an honorable death, ideally in war. And the nihilistic feeling of meaninglessness when not being granted such death. I feel like it makes sense given the time Mishima grew up in and it certainly was not surprising given the blurb I read about the author beforehand.
I did expect nationalist ideas as well as patriotism and the war to play a more prominent and obnoxious role in the story but the war is mostly treated as a circumstance that just happens. It is described in a less grand way and more in how it affected the protagonist’s everyday life.
Life for Sale
I enjoyed Life for Sale a lot. It had a very strong pulp fiction vibe going the whole way through. It thematically links with Confessions of a Mask in that the protagonist struggles with feelings of emptiness, lack of meaning and purpose. Wanting to die is once again a prominent theme as well.
The story is written in an almost episodic format divided roughly into the different customers buying the protagonist’s life and the situations it leads to, with hints of a through-line that connects all those stories together.
The story gets weird and funny and is also very much looking at falling out of normal society and what that means for a person in both a liberating and isolating way. The protagonist meets a lot of weird people and ends up in strange situations.
The book felt like a video game at times. Having not played any of the Yakuza games I feel like reading this book might be a bit like playing one of those.
My girlfriend found the Japanese edition on her flat mate’s bookshelf and has now started reading it as well. I’m very interested to hear her opinion.
The book about contemporary Japanese literature is a collection of essays about various writers, discussing their role and impact on Japanese and international literature. I mostly read about Mishima so far but want to look into the other authors on my radar as well (Kawakami, Ogawa, Oe, Abe, …).
I read the first couple of pages of A Personal Matter and will start working my way through コンビニ人間 tomorrow. My pace reading in Japanese will be glacial compared to German and English but that’s hardly going to change if I don’t read more. Also my girlfriend started (re)reading it while it was laying on my living room table and I can hardly pass up the opportunity to actually have somebody IRL to talk to about this book.
4 Likes