Litterater Thread

Runnin said:
The reviews I've read are pretty harsh but I think there's a little Franco fatigue in the air. It's not a Pulitzer winner, has sort of a thrown together in a hurry feel, but the parts I've listened to have kept me interested. I've got it on audio book which is perhaps easier to digest. It's not a novel and not really non-fiction either, just a bunch of sometimes random feeling takes on acting and being an actor. He lampoons actors and can do without 99% of acting, but champions the role acting plays in the "big screen" movie of a person's actual life. Hollywood may be overrun with bad actors but don't be a bad actor in your life, etc.
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Cool. Thanks for that. I am a pretty big fan of Franco. Lots of hate going around for him right now. Envy can be an ugly thing.
 
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I just picked up Ender's Game after I enjoyed the movie.

Glad to be going back to a 6th grade reading level. :rock:
 
Current reading Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson and Gravity's Rainbow in parallel. The latter takes... a lot of concentration.
 
Anybody read The Black Banners? It is written by a Lebanese born former FBI agent name Ali Soufan (sp?) who is the reason why we know as much as we know about Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, etc. The FBI was fine with his finished copy but he said the CIA went through with a LOT of black magic markers and redacted the hell out of it, ala the FBI and J Edgar Hoover's files after his death.

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Such a run of bad books lately. :Sad: Someone please suggest something interesting. Save me.
 
You guys suck.

Recently picked up:

The Abominable by Dan Simmons

Children of Fire by Drew Karpyshyn

Happy Hour in Hell by Tad Williams

Mage's Blood by David Hair

Pretty random. Dan Simmons rocks, so I am hoping that one (at the very least) will put a stop to my run of bad books.
 
Recently finished: Nine Stories. I'd only ever read "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", in early college, so I decided to reread that and finally finish the collection. It's striking how almost cinematic Salinger's dialogue is—something I don't think is on sufficient display in Catcher in the Rye (which I'd read in high-school). He's also very good at crafting the Maupassant-esque, brief-knife-twist-of-beauty conclusions—except that where Maupassan't often felt substantial and pregnant, some of Salinger's almost seem to void the story's immediate substance. My favorite was the underrated "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period", but "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor" is obviously pretty brilliant, and "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" has a tantalizing, weird sort of ineffable mysteriousness; meanwhile, though I found "Teddy" entertaining, rampant with well-crafted, humorous exchanges between the characters (mostly at the expense of everyone but the titular character), the story to me nonetheless felt, ultimately, a tad overrated, somewhat trite and overwrought in its core ideological framework, and even a bit vacuous.

Reading: The Most of P.G. Wodehouse. I'm a huge fan of the several Laurie and Fry series based on the Jeeves stories, but I'm finding these Drones Club stories—which comprise the first section of the omnibus—pretty ****ing hilarious in their own right.

Eyeing for my next endeavor: Alissa Nutting's Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, which received accolades from Ben Marcus, of whom I'm a great fan.
 
If I was able to actually read an entire book I'd read tons of them. However due to my Graves' Disease, my memory retention is absolutely terrible. I can read the same pages over and over for 10 minutes and not be able to remember what I just read. So reading extended amounts of literature doesn't work for me

Sucks too, I used to have the greatest photographic memory before my **** got worse in high school.
 
Recently finished: I took a bit of a break from The Most of P.G. Wodehouse after finishing the Drones Club section to read Heinrich von Kleist's The Duel; besides being quite good, it was noteworthy—having been originally published in 1811 in Germany—for its very modern style and decidedly anti-Romantic character. A rippling, rousing little read that I think compares favorably with the historically-inflected fiction of Djuna Barnes (one of my favorite authors)—though the prose certainly doesn't rise to the heights of hers.

All in all, a nice find: I picked it up on a whim, along with four other novellas all entitled The Duel; the five form a sort of "miniseries" within Melville House's fantastic Art of the Novella series.

Still reading: The Most of P.G. Wodehouse. Up next: the Mr. Mulliner stories.

Still eyeing: Alissa Nutting's Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls.

Revisiting: George Oppen's Of Being Numerous, the first twenty-two poems of which you can access here. Oppen is an excellent, overlooked (quasi-)modernist/objectivist poet, who was closely aligned with William Carlos Williams and (like all American modernists) greatly influenced by Walt Whitman.

I'll post one of my favorites of this cycle, #2:

So spoke of the existence of things,

An unmanageable pantheon

Absolute, but they say

Arid.

A city of the corporations

Glassed

In dreams

And images——

And the pure joy

Of the mineral fact

Tho it is impenetrable

As the world, if it is matter,

Is impenetrable.
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Runnin said:
The reviews I've read are pretty harsh but I think there's a little Franco fatigue in the air. It's not a Pulitzer winner, has sort of a thrown together in a hurry feel, but the parts I've listened to have kept me interested. I've got it on audio book which is perhaps easier to digest. It's not a novel and not really non-fiction either, just a bunch of sometimes random feeling takes on acting and being an actor. He lampoons actors and can do without 99% of acting, but champions the role acting plays in the "big screen" movie of a person's actual life. Hollywood may be overrun with bad actors but don't be a bad actor in your life, etc.
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Should probably go in the movie thread, but I saw the James Franco reference and wanted to tell everybody that Franco's film adaptation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is now available on Netflix. I'm a huge Faulkner fan and his work has never translated that well to the big screen, but this is an exception. Eerie and dreamlike, Franco does a marvelous job with the work. Franco is now working on putting The Sound and the Fury on the big screen.

I really like Franco, but understand that he may have reached the saturation point. But in his defense, I guess all the scorn is the price for actually showing your intellectual curiosity in public instead of just devoting your life to becoming a standard celebrity boor.
 
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