For me, it’s the difference between feeling like the author set out to write a weird book, and feeling like the author set out to write a normal book but was simply too weird to do so. Usually with the latter, the strangeness has much more depth, is imbued into the nature of the story itself and how it’s told; whereas with the former it can seem somewhat surface-level and tacked on. When I start to feel like someone is just trying to bewilder or shock me with zaniness, I tend to lose interest pretty quick, but of course this is an entirely subjective judgement because who knows what the author was actually trying to do; it could be that they wrote it from their heart and their heart just contained a book I don’t like.
@yeso thanks. that makes sense to me, and i think (if i understand your take) that i share your fondness for a certain kind of earned or honest weirdness, as opposed to weirdness that is strived for.
today i learned that Carl Sagan wrote about basketball (in The Demon-Haunted World) and this is blowing my mind (i love basketball, and did not know Carl Sagan felt any kind of way about it).
Well, I don’t know if I would say that Wizard of the Crow could be described as not goofy, although, it does seem to be intentional to me. I will say that I think there was a reference to Devil on the Cross directly in this book, and I’d seen the name before so I had a knowing nod. That’s kind of goofy!
I’m still reading it, I read slowly as I mostly read as a bedtime activity, and it’s a bit of a doorstopper. It seems to be getting somewhere now and I am into the premise. It’s set in a fictional African country that is a capitalist, hyper corrupt, totalitarian state ruled by a despot with a cult of personality to end all cults of personality. The titular Wizard of the Crow is a homeless man who assumes the role of a powerful witch doctor, but completely by accident. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten, I expect hilarity/chaos to ensue as I progress.
Thought this might interest some people here
https://twitter.com/ramonkey_art/status/1444698021833412621?s=21&t=feJ6uMnRdR14FcKlc3bOHQ
I don’t read much for my own enjoyment, but I have been reading the Milly-Molly-Mandy series to our kids. I quite like them. Real fun illustrations.
https://twitter.com/HelloMrKearns/status/1527572245735874561
i’ve just finished Horizon, by Barry Lopez.
personally, i’ve never been a religious person, so i don’t know what it feels like to have one’s worldview opened up and expanded by a text in that particular way, but i imagine that sort of awakening to be what i experienced in reading this book. Lopez is capable of exquisitely beautiful descriptions of the natural world as he observes it, encounters with humanity both present and past, and inner reflections on one’s place upon this planet.
if any of the following sounds like something you have seriously considered, or would like to consider, i strongly recommend giving Horizon a try:
- what has led humanity to the circumstances in which we currently find ourselves?
- what is our place on this planet, in relation to everything else that exists here?
- what explanation can we possibly offer for humanity’s capacity to be consistently cruel to one another?
- to where should we look for a source of hope, while facing what appears increasingly likely to be a bleak and violent future?
Horizon immediately enters my very short list of the most transformative reading experiences i’ve had.
sounds great, reading more nature writing is on my list of not new year but life resolutions so I should read this one
I could do with some recommendations from the IC hive mind for short story collections or novellas. I’ve recently been finding that my attention span for reading longer novels is somewhat diminished these days, partly because my eyes are pretty screwed and I’m unable to update my glasses prescription until other health stuff settles down. I’ve been digging short stories and novellas for a while and they seem to be a good remedy for keeping me engaged.
I’m fairly open to any type of genre but I do gravitate to generally weird shit, crime, slice-of-life, and somewhat morbid stuff. I’ve recently been reading Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, and Prefecture D by Hideo Yokoyama for some examples but as I say, I’m game for anything as long as it’s not too highbrow because my brain is like putty at the moment. Thanks!
@LeFish ever read Jesus’ Son?
@LeFish heres one of the stories
Can confirm, it’s a great collection!
@LeFish
Short story collections I’d recommend based on your criteria:
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut - weird fun and goes down easy
Airships by Barry Hannah- fun Southern dirtbag stories with a little sci-fi thrown in occasionally
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges- you’ve probably already read this but Borges is the man so just in case you haven’t, here he is
Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link- how to play around without genre without being stuck up or lame about it
Million Dollar Baby: Stories from the Corner by F. X. Toole - you said you liked crime and these have some of that grittiness. Tough, gruff, and again very readable.
@LeFish I actually just finished a pretty good short story collection:
Horror stories, some of which are VERY mean and fun! The praise on the cover is a lil extreme but it is a really good collection.
These are all exactly what I’m looking for, and I haven’t read any of them - what a heathen I am. Thanks @yeso @rearnakedwindow @sabertoothalex!
@““I thought lethal weapon was safe…yeah.””#p71387 you totally should. i'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
@““I thought lethal weapon was safe…yeah.””#p71387
I redouble my encouragement for you to read "The Spell Of The Sensuous"
@“Moon”#p71683 just looked this one up. sounds intriguing.
@“Moon”#p71683 I must have missed your rec the first time around, this book looks cool!
It's my favorite non-fiction book! I think I mentioned it very early on in this thread. I recommend it all the time and would love to hear what others think about it.
Yesterday I started reading Harrow the Ninth, the sequel to Gideon the Ninth and second in Tamsyn Muir‘s Locked Tomb series. I blazed through all of Gideon in a couple of days during a “vacation” week. I put “vacation” in quotations because it was the first time I had taken significant time off from a particularly emotionally and morally stressful job in three years. It was less fun-vacation-times and more processing. I quite liked Gideon, though the speed at which I consumed the novel left me with a fear of burn out on the series’ writing style and world, so I took a long break. One particular stylistic choice of Muir's I eventually wore out on was the use of anachronisms in the prose. The language is primarily gothic, like Mary Shelley, but with extremely modern language quirks thrown in to break things up. These turns of phrases seem primarily pulled from extremely online queer culture, particularly lesbian culture. They are often to humorous effect, almost as if the author is shitposting in the middle of her own novel.
Now, as someone who left social media in part because, no matter how I curated things, whatever culture formed felt umbilically attached to the ever present monoculture. The perception, to me at least, was that sub-culture is dead, and that made me sad so I left all the big sites. In defense of the anachronisms in _Gideon_, they are more than simple comic relief. They serve to characterize the titular character as an self-aware, self-hating outsider in the world of the book. This is in stark contrast to the morosely serious self-hatred of the other main character, more representative of the world. Gideon hates herself in a fun and relatable way! Which I perceive as the basis of a lot of queer meme culture in the first place, so it's presence makes sense in that way, but remains anachronistic. Which I don't think is automatically a bad thing; it just wore on me after awhile.
I haven't encountered one anachronism in _Harrow the Ninth_ yet. It is so far stylistically different, and the lack of modern in-culture references is one difference I noticed immediately. I'm into it so far. A friend of mine described the world as "gothic bone-punk metal aesthetic" which is about right, and I'm having a blast returning the world so far- not least of which because I'm learning a lot of different types of and states of human bones.