I have done a thing I’ve been scared to interact with for a while. I’ve bought the first Mistborn book. Massive series always unnerve me to start, but let’s see how it goes. 3 chapters in and Kelsier is a very saucy man.
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got through the first 2 books of the Iliad - the second book is mostly just listing out all the various groups of Greeks who are at Troy and naming their commanders lol
not sure I’m gonna like this one as much as the odyssey but Wilson’s translation is great, very readable
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What did you think? Also, Pipeline is on my list as well.
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I really enjoyed it! It was the first book I’ve read by him but I’m a big fan of Jackie Brown, so that inspired me to give him a try. Also, one of my friends whose taste I respect posted a photo with Rum Punch next to his morning coffee a while back.
I’m excited to watch the movie. Three of the books I’ve been reading recently (Out of Sight, The Maltese Falcon, How to Blow Up a Pipeline) are in service of watching their movies at a later date
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Yeah Leonard is very good time. Probably Detroits best writer outside of Phillip Levine….although there isn’t much competition 
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Very interested in that Formation of Hell book. As someone raised by theologians I still care about theology for some reason even though I’m an apostate. The other day I had a thought that was pretty much: Dang Hell isn’t in any relevant book of the Bible. Ain’t that some shit. It should be obvious but I was thinking about it for a while.
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I’m begging someone to read it and tell me how it is!
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I actually recently read Bakemonogatari Vol 1 on it, my first light novel! Was a great reading experience.
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having a strange experience reading the atrocity exhibition, specifically the annotated version. the primary text leaves me cold, but i absolutely love the annotations (somewhere, nabakov laughs). i respect what the book is doing, and in some ways this is more exciting to me than books i actually like, but i much prefer the immediacy of ballard’s thought on display in the annotations.
@yeso you ever read this one? he references b traven by name, which is the only time i’ve heard about him outside your recommendation.
I put on the audiobook for Pure Innocent Fun this morning thinking it’d be a fun book to savor over the course of a week+. I’ve now listened to the entire thing
Pure Innocent Fun is written by Ira Madison who hosts the pop culture podcast Keep It! The book is a collection of essays about various pop cultural minutiae. Some of the essay titles: “Being Steve Urkel,” “Oprah Ruined My Life,” “Whoopi.”
The essay collection is admittedly styled after Chuck Klosterman’s essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, though I find it reads (listens) more similarly to Emily Nussbaum’s I Like to Watch. Neither of those collections are particularly good, so this is better by default.
Interestingly, though Madison is quite positive on Klosterman, he seems to know Klosterman’s shortcomings, even if he doesn’t name them explicitly. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is an exceedingly brittle collection of essays limited by Klosterman’s myopia. There are multiple essays that hinge on not knowing that either or both gay people and people of color exist. Madison, a gay black man, responds to these essays inherently, just by talking about his lived experience and his journey with pop culture. There’s one point that may be a more explicit Klosterman call out, but probably an unintentional one given my differing opinion on him to Madison’s: Madison barbs critics of the 90s/early 00s who celebrated someone like Alanis Morisette not for the sake of interest in any of her music, but only to erect an example of how Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were so wrong.
Madison more directly rebuffs Nussbaum. In Nussbaum’s essay collection on the history of television, she only stretches as far back as The Sopranos and Sex and the City, and also asserts that Tony Soprano and Carrie Bradshaw were the first anti-heroes on TV. This is demonstrably not true, as Madison is able to name check a number of anti-heroes appearing in both daytime soaps like Days of Our Lives and nighttime soaps like Dynasty and Dallas.
For a pulitzer-prize winner, and a critic who writes for The New Yorker, you should expect more from Nussbaum than I Like to Watch. She comes off both uppity and clueless, lacking the more historical perspective of television that Madison brings. She portrays her ostensibly-favorite artistic medium, television, in an uninteresting light, weighed down by her essay topics all but vanishing into dust as soon as they went off the air (Jane the Virgin, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, Behind the Candleabra, Inside Amy Schumer). Nussbaum and Klosterman are both similarly incurious, though with Klosterman you sense that he’s never properly thought about the limits of what he knows. With Nussbaum, she just comes off lazy (and thus more disappointing). Madison’s more incisive than both, which has made this a particularly fun listen.
The… issue (it’s sometimes a positive though) is how unconstrained and unstructured Madison’s thoughts and essays tend to be. For example, I was really looking forward to the essay “I’m Not Daria” because Daria is one of my favorite shows.
The essay “I’m Not Daria” opens with “I’m not Daria. I thought I was, but then I discovered I’m not” and then he leads into describing the premise of Daria, and then there’s an aside about how Daria seemed to have a soft spot for her English teacher, and then it turns into talking about why outcasts gravitate to their english teachers, and then he starts talking about his favorite teachers, and then he’s talking about the teacher he had a crush on and then it turns into buying porn for the first time and then it’s about going to Barnes and Noble to look at (gay) men’s magazines and then it ends on a note of the death of brick-and-mortar stores and third spaces. It never comes back to Daria. Most of the essays are like this - it’s rare for him to return to his original premise. I wouldn’t call the writing dense so much as I’d call it extremely fast-paced, with transitions held together by barely-there topic sentences. The essay “Hero to Zero” (about Hercules but also Disney at large) talks about Disney for 11 minutes and then features the sentence “If you’re a gay millennial man, you were obsessed with either Disney or dinosaurs,” and then he completely drops whatever point he was making about Disney and fully transitions to talking about Jurassic Park and the Jessica Walter sitcom Dinosaurs for the rest of the essay
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no not really much to speak of. May have told this here before (old and repetitive) but hauling Savage Detectives with me along a section of the NCT in Michigan is what inspired me to finally get a kobo (because that book is physically dense and heavy)
yes I have yeah. It’s obviously a difficult text any way you approach it, but I think probably doubly so if you’ve not read a few key pieces of short fiction he’d written beforehand since The Atrocity Exhibition is sort of a compression and distorted version of what he was doing in those. Also yes I think his commentary on his own work is generally pretty interesting. I remember one interview where he was talking about how in the early part of his career contemporaneous with the space race he was convinced that it would lead to like a utopian society of cooperation and peace and how he was totally shocked and disillusioned when the moon landing occurred people were like wow cool, then just mostly stopped caring
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i’d be interested in reading whatever he was writing around that time. small sample size, but kingdom come and the atrocity exhibition were both bleak books, strangely clinical yet angry. according to wiki, he wrote atrocity exhibition partially in response to his wife dying suddenly which reframes some of the stylistic choices for me.
also, a lifetime of reading boomer post-modern authors has given me more than enough literary references to JFK and marilyn monroe, but i have to commend ballard for doing something unique with that material.
I’ve consumed basically all of the anime adapation of that, but haven’t touched any of the light novels. I know a lot of that series, even in the anime, is based heavily on understanding japanese culture, puns, and religion/folklore. How does that fair for an english adaption of the novels that can’t lean on cool visuals to keep attention?
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off the top of my head it would be “The Terminal Beach”, “The Dead Astronaut”, “My Dream of Flying to Wake Island” are the precursors and then there are a few like “Notes Toward A Mental Breakdown” that I think were incorporated or repurposed into The Atrocity Exhibition. What you really want to find though is that RE/Search issue numbered 8/9 on Ballard
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the bookstore i used to work at had this (along with a bunch of re/search stuff) and i’ve flipped through it without reading it. if only i knew then what i know now.
also not sure if i told this story on the forum before but i met that v vale dude behind re/search in SF outside of city lights before, it was awesome.
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they gotta get a room: About 5 — RE/Search Publications
Schattenfroh Erlebnisbericht[1] Teil I
FishHead, 14.05.2025
I’m 177 pages into Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz and want to share some first impressions because this book is long and by the end of it I’ll probably have forgotten what I’m thinking and feeling right now. I haven’t read anything else by this author before Schattenfroh so I can only compare it to other works by other authors. Schattenfroh is subtitled A Requiem and from what I gathered from what little discussion I found online in the German press this is supposed to be a requiem for the father of Michael Lentz.
So far reading the book has been an intense, surreal and disorienting experience. The book opens with an uninterrupted stream of consciousness. We’re in the narrators head and it is implied that that the narrator is also the author. The words written on the page are the thoughts thought by the author. The narrator refers to this process as writing without a pen, typewriter or computer, writing directly into the cerebrospinal fluid.
We start with the author writing things he’s been told to write. […] I’m supposed to write that I’m here voluntarily. And so I write: I’m here voluntarily. And since I’m here voluntarily, I voluntarily submitted to the rules of this society. I write: Since I’m here voluntarily, I voluntarily submitted to the rules of this society. This society demands entertainment. My task is writing everything down from the beginning. […]
The writing is almost claustrophobic in the way it feels so zoomed in on the moment to moment thought process without any broader perspective about where we are and why, except for some cryptic allusions. Eventually we get some vague idea of the author sitting alone in some sort of dark and silent chamber in some secluded place like a cloister. Though any sense of place we get is immediately subject to dream logic as it changes and never really takes concrete shape.
The titular character Schattenfroh joins us early on as a voice in the narrator’s head and is described as a mysterious and vaguely menacing voice in the vein of a demon or the devil. Wherever our author is he has been lured into this place by Schattenfroh […] with his number games […]. The author followed the number 6 on a map around until it formed 666 and this place is where he ended up. Schattenfroh tells the narrator that he needs to become Nobody and give up all sense of self, to start writing and thus achieve some greater purpose or power.
After Schattenfroh got introduced we shift focus onto a somewhat less vague scene in which we explore childhood memories of the narattor about his father. The father is a very kafkaesque figure. He is described as impressive, stern and menacing. Instilling mainly fear and bewilderment in the narrator. The father seems to have a high-raking position in a vague government agency/bureau of non-descript purpose. There is a lot of talk of processes and proceedings. Meetings and rules but ultimately without any context.
In his memory the narrator visits his father in his office as a young child, gets dismissed as a nuisance and taken away by the main secretary of the father. We don’t leave the office the normal way though, but through a hidden exit that leads into a cellar without an exit. Here the narrator gets told by the secretary that his father ordered him to produce a handwritten list of names. If he were to make a mistake he would have to eat the whole page of paper as punishment.
What follows are 74 pages of over 3000 handwritten names of people that died during the allied bombings of the city of Düren during WWII in november 1944.
After this the book continues with the stream of consciousness once again and hasn’t since stopped until page 177. The text uses all the features of the German language that allow it to basically extend a single sentence ad infinitum to represent this thought process in an impressive way.
From what I could pick up there have been a lot of references and allusions to other works of art, religion and history, only some of which I could pick up on. At one point the narrator was hanging on the wall of a cell […] in a T-shape […]while two guards brought wooden beams and nails. I get the feeling that the more knowledgeable you are in all of the various fields the more you would get out of these references and parallels. A good portion of all that flies straight over my head but I’m enjoying reading it and feel like I’m getting something out of it, nonetheless.
The style of writing is definitely unique and hypnotic. All the religious references and images give the whole text a sense of mystique and the less orthodox ways of including different ways text can be represented in a book make the whole thing feel experimental and avant-garde.
I’m really liking it so far. I enjoyed the kafkaesque part about the ridiculous government agency the father works at the most but I’m also intrigued by the more abstract, ethereal and religious themes.
I don’t envy anybody that has to translate this text. The sentences can be quite labyrinthine.
Erlebnisbericht, der - account, or report of an experience of the author ↩︎
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I appreciate the write up about this interesting book!
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i read tender is the night. i thought it was okay but was honestly expecting to like it a lot more. i can see a lot of what I like disseminated down in Salinger or somebody like that, but the actual story of dick diver and nicole warren was not that interestingly rendered. i guess hemingway is the GOAT of rendering american dudes in postwar europe for a reason.
locking in on infinite jest now. about a hundred in. just gonna take this first read on vibes.
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not his fiction but i’ve been meaning to read the crack-up by fitzgerald for a long time and this post makes me want to move it up my list.
also, i was surprised to hear the book @FishHead is talking about was published in 2018 (it seemed like a type of inter-war or post-war type of thing idk). it got me thinking of the last time a big, ambitious american book made a splash like that and….it might be infinite jest. i remember reading that the decision was made to purposefully market the book as difficult and intimidating to give it more cultural cache and i think it worked.
ironically i don’t think the book is difficult at all outside the time it takes to read it, but i think it definitely helped the books reputation. idk, can any non-americans here enlighten me on the perception of american lit overseas (or across borders)?
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