@yeso I have not read any of M. Manchette! That’s pretty hard hard-boiled, yowza. I’ll be interested to compare to an English version(s), see how that tone is communicated in both. This’ll be cool.
That cover’s hot.
@Moon wtf I read animorphs and I didn’t get to be trans OR a furry, can I get a refund?
I’m reading a book called 12 Rules For Life by Jordan Peterson. It was recommended to me by my therapist last year.
It’s an OK book, pretty entertaining though I do not take the lessons too seriously, however I later discovered the author is actually some prominent right-wing influencer :(
I’ll still read the book. Again, it’s fun to see another person’s perspective on what they believe to be right, and there is some genuine truth to his arguments, but the therapist I was seeing last year was not very good and I have since bounced out of there lol. Maybe if he actually recommended a better book I wouldnt think he was so bad :p
@yeso Ho no.
I have to read first this book first: ESCUCHAMOS Y VEMOS Y SENTIMOS Y ENTONCES PENSAMOS. MANI KAUL. ESCRITOS. It is interesting to see a painter that got into the film industry with success debating some points about art, comunication and cinema and I’m really grounding my perspective as an artist (not because I often agree with him, though).
@p3ters Yup. He’s a big influencer who spread his word into several right-winged Youtubers and such. I don’t take him very seriously but I totally understand your idea while reading the book since it’s something that seems people do less and less.
@p3ters yeah I’d definitely get away from any therapist who suggests you read Jordan Peterson real fast.
@p3ters Inclined to agree with the caveat that, if you find the therapist otherwise helpful and you’re personally able to see that peterson is dumb and a waste of time + personally inured against right-wing indoctrination, then I guess they’re OK. It’s a popular book so if the therapist isn’t a weirdo right-winger themselves, it’s probably just a lazy and ineffective book recommendation. Not a good sign of clinical judgement though for sure
Throwing out another couple of YA books that are etched into my brain as cool:
- The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (Lake Michigan noir labyrinthine murder mystery)
- Dorp Dead by Julia Cunninham (orphan winds up adopted by a weird old man who keeps him locked in a cage)
- The Pigman by Paul Zindell (operates on same socio-emotional register as James Caan’s fucked up prison collage in the film Thief (great moments in narrative art))
Have not read these in 20+ years so may have the details wrong
@thiccnick you need to surround the text with two of the |'s on each side, not just one
@thiccnick absolutely furious, i’m just starting book 54
I flagged the post, mods will handle it
@yeso this place has mods!?
@fridgeboy They think they’re so great with their stupid scooters! * waxes pompadour *
not to sound rude but please don’t flag posts just for spoilers. it’s meant to be used when someone is breaking the rules. you’re all able to not read something or politely ask someone to mark something as spoiler!
I did report the post with animorph spoilers, guilty as charged. However, I didn’t think the flag button actually worked so in that sense I am totally innocent
I read this review of hurricane season
Adam Mars-Jones · Muffled Barks, Muted Yelps: ‘Hurricane Season’
and found the closing paragraph interesting (disagreed strongly)
“The goal of making the reader as powerless to contest the impact of the narrative as the characters are to resist their circumstances is undesirable as well as impractical. Reading can’t and shouldn’t become an ‘ineluctable modality’ (a phrase in Ulysses derived from Aristotle), something impossible to keep out, like the visual impressions received by an open-sighted eye. In literature readerly freedom is not something for technique to overcome but the medium through which technique operates, however extreme the material.”
It’s a mostly appreciative review, but ends with this weird (in my opinion) rejection and claim. I don’t understand when it’s appropriate in sort of a moral sense to withhold sense/experience description from the reader with regard to real world, actually-existing bad stuff. There are definitely questions about taste/effectiveness and exploitation - I don’t think “seriousness” is in question in Hurricane Season. And it’s less “techincal” than eden eden eden which I suppose would be a point of comparison. Another comparison would be those long descriptive passages in theodore dreiser - there are good reasons to build detail after detail in a text even if the effect is upsetting. Not quite getting why an author should have to be concerned with giving the reader a pressure release valve when they have as eminently a “good reason” to be recounting what’s being recounted as melchor does in hurricane season.
Also suspect that the dialed up vulgarity of the english translation might give the impression that the text is less “journalistic” and more “in your face” than the spanish is. So maybe that’s part of the “problem” as the reviewer sees it
thought I’d share my with tape edition of always coming home. Wonder if it’s hard to find or worth anything. Never going to sell it though
I wonder if you can still get a mail in tape?
thinking about getting into young adult fiction again because of this thread. did anyone read “Tangerine” by Edward Bloor. check out this choice paragraph from the wikipedia summary
Shortly afterward, it was found that Antoine Thomas, one of the star players and quarterback on the Lake Windsor team actually lived in Tangerine, causing all of the Football team’s records to be nullified, and destroying Erik’s football legacy forever.
I ended up the book made by Mani Kaul (it has a bilingual edition both in Spanish and in English) and while there are some parts I can’t agree with the film director, I can’t say the book is completely useless, as it grounded me as a person and as I also enjoyed very much his poems, which made me understand why Kaul was so fascinated with Bresson’s filmmaking abilities and also his very sensual approach to cinema -originary from his days in which he hadn’t glasses and was short-sighted, and afterwards when he devoted himself to painting while also loving pretty much Indian folk music).
So, there are some recommendations I wanted to make. Hope you enjoy it:
-Grass on the wayside, by Natsume Soseki: Probably one of my favorite novels. It’s a very autobiographical novel and it has a unique tone. It captures pretty well the “mono no aware” tone while also being like both full of life and completely decaying at the same time. It is, to sum everything up, a novel about life fading away from the eyes of someone who gets more and more embittered. I’m wondering how feel would this kind of stories be adapted into film or even into videogame format.
-Bonsai, by Alejandro Zambra: Very short novel by an author who I appreciate him more for his thoughts than for his work so far, and the novel itself is quite good, so imagine the way he debates about literature in general. I’ve heard him personally and he’s quite the witty and funny guy (in a good sense), yet Bonsai seems like a good introductory novel to me since it portrays the sense of driftiness that he usually has. I also read “No leer” and I have his latest work pending (which is called Chilean Poet), but so far it’s a good introductory point.
-El Entenado, Juan José Saer: It’s the observation of a cannibalistic community and the experiences a Spanish soldier has around that village. It’s a weird novel in which Saer’s style makes it so intriguing and conflicting at some parts (in a good way). Some parts are not easy to digest, but they don’t pretend to, but it’s nice to have something that enigmatic and confusing working out so well as like being the chronical of a very weird situation.
-Hebe Uhart’s short stories are also quite nice. I hope they get translated or you can read it in Spanish (for the folks interested in the language) since it’s very witty and humurous at some parts, yet she also writes about colonianism and other topics too -she was a Chilean writer and journalist and you can see that, but she doesn’t write like lots of journalists do, which is to cut to the chase and be as concise as they could, which I think hurts the medium more than it makes something out of it.
-Stoner, John Williams: Another amazing novel, and one that was 50 years at least ahead of its era. I don’t like his ideas about women (but I’d like to make a fanfic about John Stoner’s wife one day), but at least he got to the chase and wasn’t mysognistic as he was in his first novel -run away from that one, please.
And apart from that, nothing to inform. I can tell you also to read people like Han Kang or Enero by Sara Gallardo, but I haven’t gotten there. Now, let me get to Ulysses, since I haven’t began the book yet and I’m digging the introduction.
@tapevulture I went ahead and Abe booked a few of those Ellen raskin and julia Cunningham novels inspired by the discussion here, they’re like 80 pages long and cost like $2 each - a product of that huge reading rainbow scholastic book club market in the 80s/90s I think
Thanks for the perspective, became interested in this after reading an essay praising it/him as a Lat Am writer finding a way to “escape neoliberalism” along with Bolaño, so good company there
@xhekros are you reading ulysses in English?
Yes, I’m reading it English. It’s kind of a challenge but I’m up for it.
How would one even translate Joyce? I’m picturing someone in 1940 whose boss just throws Finnegans Wake on their desk and says I want it translated by Friday.
I like “A Boy And His Dog” as a subversive “young adult fiction” choice. Its one of those things were the movie is more popular than the book, which is unfortunate because the movie drops the final crucial (and titular) exchange between the boy and the girl he escapes with:
The girl is hungry and the dog is injured. The girl argues that they should eat the dog.
she says, “Do you know what love is?”
Vic asks himself. He then answers: “Sure I know. Love is a boy and his dog.”
It’s also a fun subversion of the “damsel in distress” trope, on a few levels.
Harlan Ellison uses children in his works occasionally, like in “Jeffty Is Five”, a short story about a boy who doesn’t age, but warps the world him so that all the media he consumes is reconfigured to be in a nostalgic style of media from days gone by (when he stopped aging).
Harlan has released a few albums of him reading his own short stories, and while I cant say I think he’s a good guy, personally, he certainly is pretty good at animating his own works in a new way when he reads them. He’s a decent performer. IMO his reading of “I Have No Mouth No Mouth, But I Must Scream” is the best way to enjoy the work.
I’d highly recommend the “Voices From The Edge” collection of him doing readings of his own short stories. I’ve only listened to Vol. 1 & 2 (“Laugh Track” is another favorite of mine, and it shares some funny thematic similarities with “Jeffty Is Five”, but in, like, an inverse way.) Looking at that Wikipedia page now, I’ll probably have to go listen to Vol. 5 at some point. This is a good route to consume some classic sci-fi short stories even if you’re not a big fan of, or dont have time for the act of reading.
As long as I’m on the subject of “audio fiction” I’m going to mention a couple narrative podcasts.
A Twilight World of Ultimate Smoothenss is no contest, hands down the best narrative podcast I’ve ever heard. It benefits immensely from the fact that it’s just a six episode “mini-series”, so it doesn’t drag on endlessly. A R&B DJ whose career is failing watches his world disintegrate.
“THE TRUTH” is an anthology series. Most of the episodes have some kind of “speculative fiction” aspect to them. Its anthological nature is both a strength and a weakness, because the quality, tone, and subject matter of the individual episodes can vary immensely. TBH I haven’t listened to this one much over the past year, because when I stopped driving a long commute, I cut down a lot on of podcasts, so I cant speak to some of the newer episodes, (but I’m sure they’re fine).