quote:Originally posted by kovacs: I would recommend you read Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is genuinely gripping as well as being equally important.
I have just finished reading this at work (which says a lot about my workload!) and absolutely loved it. What a great book! If anyone has any recommendations similar to 1984 they would be most welcome.
Here is an excruciatingly predictable list of top ten dystopian novels. Alternatively, you could read something less obvious, perhaps even written by a woman! Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless is about pirates, paedophiles, suicidal mothers, psychotic bikers, syphilitic prostitutes, whole Western populations ravaged by AIDS, and Algerian terrorists who take over the world. The chapters are called things like 'The Psychosis Which Resulted From Gonorrhoea', 'Algeria's Cock', 'Child Sex', 'Me Equals Dead Cunt'. It doesn't have the drawings of raped red-raw vaginas you find in her other books, but the drawings of skulls, pirate ships and dead fish fucking are quite lovely to look at all the same.
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For relatively recently published novels that are dystopian after a fashion, you could try Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood or Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
I'm working on the wild guess that recently published and/or Booker-shortlisted novels may be slightly easier to come by in Botswana. But perhaps not.
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quote:Originally posted by Fionnula the Cooler: I don't see Margaret Atwood mentioned anywhere in the lame-ass male-only Guardian top-ten list I was referring to, do you?
No, but her book was mentioned as a dystopian novel to check out about six posts earlier in the thread.
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quote:Originally posted by OJ: I'm working on the wild guess that recently published and/or Booker-shortlisted novels may be slightly easier to come by in Botswana. But perhaps not.
Yeah, you would be correct. I could order them online and have them delivered to a bookstore here via South Africa at a 300% markup but Im also poor. There probably isnt much TMO can do about that. Hence the online book thing I mentioned. I have just started Coming Up For Air as suggested by Kovacs. Seems OK so far.
quote: Alternatively, you could read something less obvious, perhaps even written by a woman!
As Thron has said, if you read the last few posts you would see its not easy getting less mainstream literature around here. I ain't likely to come across anything with 'Me Equals Dead **** ' in it.
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Listen up, forum! Nobody pay attention to any of Carter's or OJ's book recommendations. Both of them were full of praise for Louise Welsh's novel The Cutting Room which I subsequently borrowed from the library. Turns out the book is atrocious. So atrocious, in fact, that it reminded me of a novel I wrote when I was fourteen and tanked up on too many Point Horrors. It was called The Ladies of Crippleton Wynd and it was about an iniquitous cult that held weekly meetings in the basement of a Scottish brothel. Like The Cutting Room, every chapter ended with a line about the protagonist walking out into the shadows of the night, and it featured the same abortive attempts at direct-speech Scottish vernacular and 'gritty' descriptions of urban violence - street stabbings, whores dead in skips, a girl-pyromaniac blowing up a petrol station etc. As I say: atrocious. Never again will I trust the opinions of Carter or OJ.
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quote:Originally posted by Fionnula the Cooler: Here is an excruciatingly predictable list of top ten dystopian novels. Alternatively, you could read something less obvious, perhaps even written by a woman!
It's not like something written by a woman is inherently more interesting or "novel", though, is it.
However, I think that list is plain incorrect, rather than predictable. Lord of the Flies is not a dystopia in my opinion. Do Androids Dream... is not a dystopia (neither is Blade Runner.) Idoru is certainly not a dystopia, any more than Neuromancer or Virtual Light.
quote:Originally posted by Fionnula the Cooler: Listen up, forum! Nobody pay attention to any of Carter's or OJ's book recommendations. Both of them were full of praise for Louise Welsh's novel The Cutting Room which I subsequently borrowed from the library.
You dirty lying gypsy. I've never read any Louise Welsh, and the only thing I've recommended on this thread was The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker.
Because it's filthy. And good. And not just because it's filthy.
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Also I think The Fermata is dreadful, like watching the author wank. I say that as someone who enjoyed The Mezzanine and its samey retread Room Temperature but became gradually more repulsed during reading of Vox, Baker's phone sex novel where he gives voice to insanely baroque, unerotic fantasies that he clearly thinks will excite the reader as much as they do him. U and I was also a masturbatory novel, this time with Baker spunking over the books of Updike; the best that can be said of it is that it got me reading more Updike.
quote:Originally posted by Fionnula the Cooler: Listen up, forum! Nobody pay attention to any of Carter's or OJ's book recommendations. Both of them were full of praise for Louise Welsh's novel The Cutting Room which I subsequently borrowed from the library.
You dirty lying gypsy. I've never read any Louise Welsh
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Yebbut, I did second that recommendation and I'd stand by it.
Alternatively I'd lock it in an antique wardrobe in an empty warehouse with only a webcam, some speed cut with rat poison and an extremely twisted fourteen year old for company.
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i am going to give another you- are- allowed- to- recommend- or- read- stuff- by- auster- that- isnt- nyt- arent you- arent- you? recommendation to the young doctor which is moon palace. the lead character is really pointlessly nihilist, and goes down on his girlfriend in a cupboard, and she is HOTT and CHINESE, which is quite modern and popcultural because asian women are arent they yeah. and theres a really unpleasant old man in it who does some stuff i cant remember but i promise you it is really good. it is better than glamorama anyway. okay benway has bought his books already but this being so i think he should join the fucking library where, if they havent got the books you want, you ask them to get them for you. and they send a card to your house saying 'HEY YOU GUY WE GOT YOUR BOOK MOTHERFUCKER COME GET IT WE WILL GIVE YOU SOUP IF YOU COME AND GET THE BOOK ALTHOUGH NOT IF YOUR A HOMELESS BECAUSE WE ARE ALREADY PROVIDING YOU WITH SOMEWHERE TO KICK BACK/ MUMBLE/ RESEARCH FUTURE FANTASY CAREERS IN TREE SURGERY, CHARTERED ACCOUNTANCY/ MAKE WHIFFY NO- GO- AREAS. PLEASE COLLECT YOUR BOOK WITHIN ONE WEEK AND GIVE US 80P OR WE WILL... PROBABLY NOT SANCTION YOU AT ALL BECAUSE WE ARE MUNICIPAL AND FLUFFY AND WEAR BIG JUMPERS THANKS BYEEE.' and then you get the book and its really exciting! its like buying a book without spending very much money and being delivered a parcel, all the joy of both those things, wrapped up in a bow, with a picture of a sausage dog drawn on it by a small child with special needs. its that nice.
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heh heh discodamage. I remember libraries, they were great.
So, tell me...when you find a local library, how do you get them not to approach you upon entry asking if you're a) disadvantaged and b) in need of computer lessons.
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quote:Originally posted by kovacs: Also I think The Fermata is dreadful, like watching the author wank.
Fair enough. I was about to construct an outraged riposte to this, then remembered that I had actually read this 6 years ago. 6!!
I really can't remember it that well, apart from the dirty bits. And I suspect that at 22, that's what I'd have been reading it for. I've grown up since then. Oh yes.
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quote:Originally posted by Carter: curdled waves of boar-suppressed manlust.
This sounds great. Can we have more of this on the boards please?
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quote:Originally posted by kovacs: Martin Amis famously likes
Bellow
Nabokov
Pynchon
Has anyone read these authors?
Bellow - nope
Nabakov - Lolita (fantastic) and some short stories (alright, but I tend to struggle to like short stories anyway)
Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland - really didn'y like either of them - it's almost as if Pynchon is trying really hard to be really vague and let somebody somewhere else argue his narrative for him at a later date - I got little from them.
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Amis also is very gay for JG Ballard, an author I think you might enjoy kovacs. His novels often don't really go anywhere, but are full of very interesting ideas. The Drowned World is a very atmospheric SF novel and a good one to start with. Time's Arrow is a rip-off of one of Ballard's short stories, but I forget the name.
I've never got round to reading any Bellow. It's a very ugly name isn't it? In Dickens Saul Bellow would be some sort of squat, puce-faced butcher who shouted at his apprentice carvers until they cried.
I've read Nabakov's first novel, The Luzhin Defence, which was ok but not great. Pale Fire is like nothing else I've ever read, and (along with If On a Winter's Night A Traveller was responsible for my 3rd year disillusionment with the academic study of Literature. I think it's an amazing book, but it is a bit mad and I can understand if others didn't enjoy it.
I did The Crying of Lot 49 on my Modern American Fiction course. I can't remember much about it, but I don't think I rated it that much.
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I finally finished The Magus, which I felt like I'd been reading for half of my life. As Thorn says, another disappointing recommendation from so-called litxpert, ben.
Other recent stuff include Out of the Silent Planet- odd early SF from CS Lewis and The Maltese Falcon which made me want to spend a week reading proper hard detective fiction.
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quote:Originally posted by Roy: Next will be either Everything is Illuminated
Russell Banks said of Jonathan Safran Foer: Clearly, the author of this first novel is an extraordinarily gifted young man. Rare enough, surely, but this young man also happens to possess something approaching wisdom." Which I stole to write ryhmes for some punk-rock-hip-hop.
I'm sorry to tell you such a boring fact, but when am I ever going to get to mention that in a thread eh? Eh?
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