demagogue on 9/10/2012 at 04:52
What it's lacking is that kind of relentless drive you get in some romantic or vanilla modernist lit, where every bit adds to the momentum of the whole theme... Otherwise you're getting swept left and right by ever more fluff going nowhere fast. The only catch is that the contemporary world doesn't work like that as much anymore. I mean people don't have all these social expectations & taboos to play with like they once did, so it doesn't matter as much what people do or say, if nobody cares all that much.
I was thinking what kind of style I like the most, and looking back at books I've read, I'm going to say Alduous Huxley... with Brave New World actually not being the strongest example. But something like The Island or Chrome Yellow, he just has a playful but compelling style, and it's always entertaining to read how he constructs the scenes, the writing style in itself; and his books still have a point. If I wanted to write a book, I think that's a style I'd want to emulate.
Ulukai on 10/10/2012 at 18:56
Currently Reading George Martin's Clash of Kings. Started with Game of Thrones back in June; I really need to find more time to read. And no, I haven't seen the TV Series.
As an aside, reading on my Kindle Touch which I'm really very pleased with, e-ink screens really are easy on the eye.
Kolya on 11/10/2012 at 08:25
Currently reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night and struggling a bit with it. Although Fitzgerald's short stories were just the work for pay he did to entertain his luxurious wife and lifestyle, I generally like them a lot better. They seem more focussed, pinning their subject and using the craftmanship to do so, whereas in his novels the craft sometimes overtakes getting on with the story. Oh well, I'll have some time on the weekend and probably that's all it needs to get into it.
Thirith on 11/10/2012 at 08:34
I should really read Fitzgerald at some point. I haven't even read The Great Gatsby. In spite of years of studying English and American Literature, followed by years of teaching it, I have a couple of odd, embarrassing gaps in my reading, and TGG is one of them.
glslvrfan on 12/10/2012 at 01:49
Knight of the Black Rose. By James Lowder. Its about Lord Soth a death night from the Dragon Lance series. He gets tranported to the Ravenloft world. I'm also reading At the Gates of Darkness by Ramond Feist. It's book 2 of the Demon War Saga. I finished the 4th and 5th in the Frankenstein series by Dean Koontz a little while back.
Sulphur on 5/1/2013 at 09:39
Quote Posted by demagogue
What it's lacking is that kind of relentless drive you get in some romantic or vanilla modernist lit, where every bit adds to the momentum of the whole theme... Otherwise you're getting swept left and right by ever more fluff going nowhere fast. The only catch is that the contemporary world doesn't work like that as much anymore. I mean people don't have all these social expectations & taboos to play with like they once did, so it doesn't matter as much what people do or say, if nobody cares all that much.
I was thinking what kind of style I like the most, and looking back at books I've read, I'm going to say Alduous Huxley... with
Brave New World actually not being the strongest example. But something like
The Island or
Chrome Yellow, he just has a playful but compelling style, and it's always entertaining to read how he constructs the scenes, the writing style in itself; and his books still have a point. If I wanted to write a book, I think that's a style I'd want to emulate.
Infinite Jest is a book I seem to return to on holiday. So I've cracked it open yet again and read through until the massive filmographical footnote of J. Orin Incandenza. I see what you mean by lack of narrative drive.
But that's okay. I'll admit I'm having fun with its digressions and detours and dead-ends at the moment. I'll even admit that having almost every other sentence punctuated with superscripted footnotes is amusing in how daft it is as a technique; I imagine DFW had an immense amount of authorial fun writing this, scripting out yet another wodge of text in between the odd self-referential and/or inconsequential footnote. I know if I'd been writing something like this, I'd have a huge shit-eating grin while I was doing it.
So as it basically turns out so far, DFW took everything he had and threw it into a massive pot of fuck off, and it's entertainingly schizophrenic, sort of like if you had a verbally diarrhoeic 90s comedy helmed by David Lynch.
However, I'll never understand the propensity for some authors to fashion their work from abstruse constructions of prose that spiral away into pleonastic overindulgence (though it's easy to do, I guess!), and DFW seems to love the run-on even more than I do. I suppose it's what passes for style, or maybe it's just the only way some authors can write, like the mould their thoughts were shaken from onto the page was a single, massive trough of obsessively observed irony.
This is the first book that's made me wish I had a Kindle to read it from, because there's more than four hundred pages of text between where I currently am in the book and where the footnotes are, and zipping back and forth requires judiciously placed bookmarks, which is something that, as far as I'm concerned, can fuck right off. It's also been a while since a book made me wish I had a dictionary by my side. This may or may not be a good thing in terms of quality prose.
june gloom on 5/1/2013 at 12:11
Like all things Warren Ellis does, there's a vicious quality to Crooked Little Vein, which provides quite a bit of the humor. It's quite obvious Warren's experience writing Transmetropolitan has had some influence on him -- and that's good, because Transmet, IMO, is one of the most sublime events in comic bookery with a bitingly sharp political bent that somehow manages to stand the test of time well past the Bush years.
demagogue on 5/1/2013 at 13:41
Right now I'm reading Ruth Millikan's Varieties of Meaning if we're sharing.