I just finished 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison and really really liked it, although I think it could have been stripped down a little! Like there was a symbolic aspect I guess where the main character is not meant to be taken as just one guy but kind of emblematic of black consciousness at the time or whatever and I think part of it too was one of those things where an entire era is meant to be invoked by a single person's experiences (like those historical novels where the hero accidentally meets every single important historical figure of the time etc *bumps into some guy its abe lincoln!! they shake hands*) but this didn't mesh too well with the more realist style of the writing and parts of the plot. The shock therapy part especially seems thrown in there. It was a good book though I want to read more black fiction now!

I've started 'Cousin Bette' by Balzac and am enjoying it, although I'm not liking it as much as 'Cousin Pons'. Maybe that's because it all seems very mannered after the Ellison book though. Middle-class french people with problems!! I'll keep going.

finished 451. it was really good

now crying of lot 49

i loooove books

what are some good lighter reads you guys like

i dont think 49 is clicking so much..

currently reading persepolis by marjane satrapi. very excellent, heartwarming/breaking account of growing up in iran during the islamic revolution.

49 owns, it's kinda confusing in the beginning but gets a lot better. keep going ... let radiohead guide u

i'm enjoying hesse's the prodigy atm, you could try that

im following the plot really well. i actually reread from like 20 to 100 to get a better feel for the chain of events cuz they can seem so random if you dont catch the links.

some passages are really enjoyable but i just dont think it's as interesting stylistically as GR was. i like all the jacobean allusions and it WORKS i guess but thank god it's short

i guess this is just what micropynchon looks like.

I keep meaning to check out Lot 49 since I loved Gravity's Rainbow but idk I tried it once and it felt like a smug, bad parody of that whole style. I don't even remember what it was about it but a lot of that kind of US postmodernism kind of walks a fine line for me between kinda gleefully anarchic and obnoxiously indulgent and self-absorbed. It's been a couple years though so ???

I finished the Balzac one it was good although holy shit none of those french dudes could end a novel to save their lives. Every time I read one of them you get the impression they say everything they want to 50 pages before the end and the rest of it just kind of goes on until someone dies and then there's a funeral and then there's what happens after the funeral and so on until every conceivable loose end has been tied up. Like there was this bizarre bit at the end with a secret ring of assassins (?!) in an otherwise pretty down-to-earth novel, and it exists only to kill off a couple characters and then is never mentioned again. And there's the philandering father who runs off in disgrace and then turns up again by a weird coincidence and then rehabilitates himself before running off again. It doesn't add anything it's just sort of distractingly there to drive home what we've already picked up over the course of the whole book beforehand. Also all of Balzac's books are kind of part of one big series and you have characters recurring in different roles over different books etc, which is fine on paper but in the book it's kind of weird having these incredibly colourful and rounded people just pop in for a single scene and disappear again. It's like watching a film and having some scene-stealing minor character come out of nowhere in the third act and then leave suddenly without doing anything. Actually I liked it and his writing style a whole lot because I enjoy reading books by people who seem actually interested in life and people instead of just viewing them as props but yeah the endings are always frustratingly dragged out.

I've started reading 'Maldoror' by the Comte de Lautreamont which is great but heavy-going so I'm also reading the Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens and liking that a lot too. You can uh definitely tell he's being paid by the word and the whole thing is like 800+ pages long and mostly improvised so I'm kind of dreading that part of it but it's also pretty funny and the writing style works well with the characters and humour so.

what are some good lighter reads you guys like

i dont think 49 is clicking so much..

i mainly read essays or detective shit (chandler 4 life) if i just want something light to chill out to but if you want something thats uh more worthwhile as well as light you should check out 'invisible cities' by italo calvino. it's really short (you could finish it in a couple hours) and uh deliberately disconnected in a sense that a lot of it is just broken up into page-long descriptions of different cities which are basically standalone prose poems but it's a really great and beautiful book so maybe that??

i just picked up infinite jest again for another attempt and i'm mostly liking it so far at about 150 pages in. there are some really hilarious parts with Don Gately or the Erdedy guy and the pot obsession. anyone get through this book?

Also DietCoke or someone what's a good place to start with Slavoj Zizek? I picked up 'The Metastases Of Enjoyment' today and am kind of enjoying it and liking a lot of the ideas but as I don't know Hegel or whoever at all a lot of passages are kind of beyond me. Is there some kind of entry-level BABBY EDITION of this stuff with chewable cardboard pages and bright pictures of balloons or should I try to suck it up and start trying to read the dudes he references?

Zizek is really readable and does a good job of relating a lot of lofty shit to everyday life examples, but if you want to really "know where he's comin' from" you'd have to be familiar with Lacan and Hegel.... and if you want to really know where they're coming from you'd have to be familiar with Freud and Kant... and on and on and on. It's all incredibly boring and I wouldn't recommend digging too deep into it, leave it for the vultures in philosophy departments who've resigned themselves to picking at those corpses for a living. Zizek's writing kinda provides a 'good enough' understanding of lacanian psychoanalysis and hegelian bullshitting since he's a respected scholar in both schools of thought you really don't have to go further unless a particular reference intrigues you enough to do so.

The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Ticklish Subject, The Fragile Absolute, The Plague of Fantasies, In Defense of Lost Causes, and The Parallax View are all really good books by him that I'd recommend reading if you're into this kinda shit but you're unlikely to find anything in his work that's particularly groundbreaking. When you get right down to it, he's an old wishy-washy E-bloc hegel-obsessed Marxist who likes to tease away at politics, religion, and culture with lacanian psychoanalysis and a dirty sense of humor.

His buddy Alain Badiou has been writing some pretty interesting stuff lately, but it's French continental philosophy translated into english so keep that in mind if you ever choose to give him a whirl.

Yeah I am cautious about getting into philosophy shit because so much of it seems to make sense only as a response to or elaboration of other philosophy shit, I just feel like a dummy when I like some of the ideas in this stuff but am only grasping them on the shallowest possible level. Superegos Are Bad!! I Am Eight Years Old. It's mainly the Lacan stuff that goes way past me though so idk. I've been meaning to check out Badiou too mainly because he seems to make everyone uncomfortable.

do you know if Deleuze is good or not, he was gonna be next on my list because he seems to be brought up a lot in this context and the capitalism & schizophrenia thing sounds interesting but if it's just uh french philosophy with added marxism then nah im good lol

I ma reading Sight of Proteus by Charles Sheffield. It's a sci-fi centered around the exploits of the Office of Form Change. People who control legal and illegal forms a century from now. Forms being the physical remodelling of people to have special abilities or a given look.

do you know if Deleuze is good or not, he was gonna be next on my list because he seems to be brought up a lot in this context and the capitalism & schizophrenia thing sounds interesting but if it's just uh french philosophy with added marxism then nah im good lol

Everything I know about Deleuze or Guattari has been second hand. I have almost no interest in reading them any time soon because the excerpts I have read were stilted as hell and filled with all that pomo jargon. I don't know if it's just the way people in France talk or a conscious effort on the part of translators to ensure nobody reads it, but it comes out sounding like unreadable garbage in English.

Frankly, my position on the whole lot of them is similar to Chomsky's: It's a big cult, not particularly useful, and basically autofellatio for academics. Zizek is at least fun to read and only sometimes a pain in the ass.

Currently reading The Two Towers.... after I'm done with LOTR it's time for either Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche of The Metamorphosis by Kafka

That Chomsky thing rules but I find some of this stuff kind of worthwhile on a strictly personal level! I mean I'd hesitate to call any of it true (or........"true" heh) or valuable at all but just taken as stuff to think about/argue with it can be fun. iirc you pointed out in the old lit topic that all those situationist guys were just rich kids messing around and I do think a lot of the psychogeographical stuff they talked about is stupid and unhelpful on any practical level at all but it's fun to think about. I wouldn't trust these guys in terms of ideas to live by at all so much as how much shoptalk I have to slog through to find interesting thoughts (this is a very collegekid thing to say but whatever!)

That Chomsky thing rules but I find some of this stuff kind of worthwhile on a strictly personal level! I mean I'd hesitate to call any of it true (or........"true" heh) or valuable at all but just taken as stuff to think about/argue with it can be fun. iirc you pointed out in the old lit topic that all those situationist guys were just rich kids messing around and I do think a lot of the psychogeographical stuff they talked about is stupid and unhelpful on any practical level at all but it's fun to think about. I wouldn't trust these guys in terms of ideas to live by at all so much as how much shoptalk I have to slog through to find interesting thoughts (this is a very collegekid thing to say but whatever!)

the situationists were definitely revolutionaries who's ideas(at least Debord's) should be taken seriously, I just like to poke fun at them being trust fund brats because a lot of people I know who claim to be "influenced" by the situationists are themselves a bunch of white upper middle class kids who've never had to support themselves for a day in their lives. It's funny to me that the folks shouting "never work" are always the ones who've never had to.

Currently reading The Two Towers.... after I'm done with LOTR it's time for either Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche of The Metamorphosis by Kafka

go with Kafka