What Are You Reading Now?

[SteelBlue]

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel. I loved Station Eleven and liked The Glass Hotel so I'm confident this will be a good one.

[SteelBlue]

I’m half way through Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. It has 6 character storylines across different times lines. It took a bit to get interesting, but it’s now to the point where I am invested in the characters and storylines. There are just enough hints to build anticipation on how they will relate to each other at the end. And I like Doerr’s lyrical style of writing.

I just hit the halfway mark and am very much enjoying this novel. Structured a bit like Cloud Atlas so the reader has to do some of the heavy lifting which I always take as a sign of respect. Doerr's positivity in the face of overwhelming sadness is evident throughout and seems to be what he gets criticized for the most. I can see why it was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Edit: finished yesterday and the verdict remains that this is a great read. You will especially enjoy it if reading was a big part of your childhood but this is certainly not required.

[SeattleUte]

And ditch the footnotes.

Absolutely

[SteelBlue]

Cutting the Quebecois bullshit would be a good start. But figure out a way to keep Marathe.

And ditch the footnotes.

[SeattleUte]

Cutting the Quebecois bullshit would be a good start. But figure out a way to keep Marathe.

[SteelBlue]

There is also a lot of just plain silly stuff in infinite Jest. I expected the novel to be funnier than it was.

I think Infinite Jest could have been a great novel with a more assertive editor who cut maybe 60% of the novel. Still, in a way the novel doesn't feel finished. There is no wrapping up, though everything can probably be surmised.

I have read it twice over the last 10 years, fictional footnotes included and I strongly agree with the bolded portion here. I heard an interview with the poet Mary Karr who once was DFW's girlfriend and fairly recently shared that he was abusive to her. She opined in a NYT panel that the book needed more editing and when the interviewer asked astonished (my recollection) "what would you have cut?" Mary Karr said "all that Quebecois bullshit."

To me the novel as a whole feels like something DFW had to get out. Like he had no choice. I can feel the OCD/ADD throughout and it's clear most of the time that you're dealing with someone with special gifts who doesn't always know what to do with them. It's a weird book. Lots of it doesn't hold up. It's become cool now to dismiss it totally because DFW was apparently kind of a dick. In the past 5 years I've seen it trend on twitter multiple times as a "red flag" book for women. As in "if you meet a guy and he has Infinite Jest on his shelf beware." I think this is because of what you sensed with it being a "very male book." But there's something I've liked about swimming around in his head in the month or two it takes to read it. It's like you get to sense his madness and his genius, but there's an escape hatch, just close the book.

[SeattleUte]

In the end, I didn't think Infinite Jest was worth the amount of time required to wade through it. But I think his Kenyon College speech ("This is water") is one of the best commencement addresses I've listened to...

Of course DFW is right. I tell my children that college is to save your soul. The fact it will enbable you to win more bread is a bonus.

‘There Are Two Americas Now: One With a B.A. and One Without’
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/o...e=articleShare

I also agree that there is great power in timeworn sayings, if you examine them and drill down. The ones he focuses on are some of the best.

The fish in the water allegaory that gives his address its name comes from "Infinte Jest." I enjoyed it and tweeted it. Maybe because of the passage of time, it has come to mean to me something somewhat different than DFW described in his speech. I think "what is water?" is like Millenials and Gen Z denigrating their human predecessors, while oblivious to the culture created by their human predecessors that is to them literally what water is to fish, whether they know it or not.

As in Infinite Jest, in this address DFW talks at some length about suicide. He is pitiless here; people who commit suicide have been dead for some time, he says.. Can't help but feel some really sad irony about that.

Yes, we all worship something. I worship the same things that DFW did.

[Pelado]

I need to listen to this. Thanks.

I think you'll like it.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

[SeattleUte]

In the end, I didn't think Infinite Jest was worth the amount of time required to wade through it. But I think his Kenyon College speech ("This is water") is one of the best commencement addresses I've listened to...

I need to listen to this. Thanks.

[Pelado]

In the end, I didn't think Infinite Jest was worth the amount of time required to wade through it. But I think his Kenyon College speech ("This is water") is one of the best commencement addresses I've listened to...

Thanks for mentioning it. I just went and read it and I liked it a lot.

[PaloAltoCougar]

In the end, I didn't think Infinite Jest was worth the amount of time required to wade through it. But I think his Kenyon College speech ("This is water") is one of the best commencement addresses I've listened to...

[SeattleUte]

I read several books at once. My goal has been to constantly be reading something that I tell myself is among the best books I've every read, preferably at least one of them for the first time. I've been on a roll. Just finished Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo, am totally into the Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes--which covers everything, the science, the perpetrators, the backstories, with unflagging artistry--and am now finally reading Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar cover to cover.

I finished Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace sometime ago. It's definitely one of the weirdest books I've ever read. It handles substance abuse and addiction in a timeless and artful way. It is a great novel in that respect. A weird thing about it is the book has a mood and voice that feels cartoonlike, Frank Milleresque, which I regard an achievement. It's a very male book, which to a certain extent is fine with me. What I mean by that is that while the book has a lot of omniscient POV where it's in a character's POV it's always male and often involving male tropes and male attitudes toward women of various characterizations--from great beauties to diminutive elderly Asian women carrying shopping bags. There is a lot of male jock milieu; and there are some ways of interacting with women and judging them that feel anachronistic. The same is true of Zeno's Conscience, but it's always the characters acting and talking that way; in Infinite Jest, you feel more like it's the author talking and therefore the kind of thing that could get the author in trouble nowadays.

There is also a lot of just plain silly stuff in infinite Jest. I expected the novel to be funnier than it was.

I think Infinite Jest could have been a great novel with a more assertive editor who cut maybe 60% of the novel. Still, in a way the novel doesn't feel finished. There is no wrapping up, though everything can probably be surmised.

I am not ready to join the David Foster Wallace cult.

[SteelBlue]

The Nobel Prize in Literature goes to French novelist Annie Ernaux
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10...ize-literature

[SteelBlue]

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I really enjoyed his last short story compilation. But I hated Lincoln in the Bardo—never finished it, and shan’t. Is this closer to the former?

The former.

[Donuthole]

Was lucky and got galleys for the new George Saunders short story collection Liberation Day, and the new Adam Sternbergh novel The Eden Test.

Saunders collection is good. Nine stories but only 4 that have never been published. My favorite was Ghoul which you can read free on the New Yorker website. The titular story, Liberation Day was also strong. I liked them all, but I am admittedly a Saunders fanboy. I'd say if you like Saunders you'll like the collection and if you don't there's nothing here that's going to move the needle for you.

I really enjoyed his last short story compilation. But I hated Lincoln in the Bardo—never finished it, and shan’t. Is this closer to the former?