i finished Bring Up The Bodies, and as powerful as it was in parts, I was a bit underwhelmed. The plotting of the book seems awkward - it's rushing the whole way to the clear goal and that just makes it feel like rolling down a hill, and it's far from clear to me that we get any real picture of the central character, cromwell. On the whole I'm not sure that Wolf Hall/Bring Up The Bodies are really that earth shattering.

I tried a song of ice and fire, it seemed terrible so I canned it, I'll try the TV series.

Now I'm on The Patagonian Express(?) by Paul Theroux. I like how unapologetically judgemental Theroux is about his fellow passengers, and he does the boredom and the missed connections especially well, i think.

One could imagine he was trying to create a book so "good" yet so "difficult" that he was trying to reveal to the reader that life is better lived as an intellectual than as someone dependent on easiness and entertainment. The difficulty of the book was (i think) at least partially supposed to mimic the overwhelming amount of information we have to process as members of the late 20th century. If one realized that all of the pleasure of the book (and understanding) was possible to attain if you just became a hard worker and more focused, perhaps you would realize that daily live must be treated the same way. Bettering yourself and how you perceive large amounts of information in order to actually be able to handle it and be a bit more like . I think that's one of the "structural defenses."

This may not have been one of the author's intentions, just my .02

I think that making something that requires work by the reader was definitely one of his goals. As I understand it, there is a lot of literary allusion going on which almost entirely passes me by.

I'm convinced that the title refers to it being one big emperor's clothes circle jerk and somewhere buried in the ebonics gibberish on page 3,790 it tells anyone who made it that far to spend the rest of his life proclaiming it to be the best book since Ulysses.

Unless you've actually read it and have chosen to be disinterested in forming your opinions as persuasive and intelligible, this statement makes you an idiot.

Dfws bio states ij was much written over many previous Years and beers and then put together. It wasn't a singular planned effort over bounded time

I don't think anyone is arguing for or against this? Unless you are implying that given your statement what follows is that it can't have ambitious themes?

Agreed.

DFW was seen as a major & intense literary talent even before he finished college. They don't give out those O.Henry and Paris Review prizes for nothing, you realize - many of his short stories are utterly masterful.

Any 'Emperor's New Clothes' references, if not meant in jest, are lazy, absurd, and uninformed, no serious literary mind would deny DFW's huge talent.

I read IJ well before the hype machine kicked into high gear, during the summer it came out. I found it brilliant then and more brilliant when I re-read it 2 years ago and understood it better. It is a major, major work of art.

It does take effort, which turns off a lot of people. As does post-modernism. As does understanding some of the literary allusions and inside jokes and mechanics of junior tennis. The first 300 pages are slow going but the later set pieces at ETA, or with Gately, or with others are 5***** brilliant.

Often the criticism sounds like 'This book is hard for me, therefore it sucks, therefore it is a big joke, omg it's in the title* i'm a super geniuz.' The satiric portions seem quite lost on many uninformed readers.

It may be too hard for you. It may not be your cup of tea. It is definitely uneven [wildly] in parts. It is an imperfect novel, as anything 1,079 pages would be. But it clearly all hangs together. The dual ETA/AA track works well, and at least 3-4 of the characters are so well-written and believable you feel like not only have you met them, but you know them in real life.

Not to rely on critics, particularly one DFW himself wasn't a huge fan of, but nevertheless:
'As for "Infinite Jest" the novel, it, too, is the work of an experimental artist, and it, too, is often compulsively entertaining,...It also shows off the 33-year-old Mr. Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything, someone who can write funny, write sad, write serious, write satiric, ...a pushing-the-envelope postmodernist who's also able to create flesh-and-blood characters and genuinely moving scenes...

Hal's story -- set down in an engagingly personal voice that adeptly communicates both his anxiety and highly tuned sense of the absurd...There are some frighteningly vivid accounts of what it feels like to be a drug addict, hilarious satires of men's movement meetings and psychiatric consultations; ...dazzling asides about videophonic stress, clinical depression and jail-house tattoos, and a bravura set piece about the attempts of a former addict in the hospital with horrible injuries to tough it out without any pain medication.

All these characters are tossed out by the word machine that Mr. Wallace has assembled here, their grotesque, willfully bizarre lives somehow rendered palpable, funny and affecting.' ~M. Kakutani


FWIW, my vote for Emperor's New Clothes winner of the past 10 years goes to The Art of Fielding. So, different strokes and all that.


* The title, like Eco's The Name of the Rose, has at least 5-6 different levels of meanings. There's no reason/I don't get why so many people get stuck on the first level, the obvious reference to the named video/McGuffin by Hal's father.
That's like getting baffled by Rusty Sabich not being presumed innocent [by anyone!] in Presumed Innocent, even though he's a DA.

Not an idiot, just someone who reads for pleasure and relaxation, and I don't find IJ in any way pleasurable. My comment was obviously in jest.

Harold Bloom said IJ sucked

Google franzens comments on bloom

I'm currently reading The Center Holds: Obama and his Enemies by Alter. About a third of the way through and nothing particularly earth-shattering, but it's a decent summary of the historical background on the '12 election so far. I'm hoping to learn more when he gets into the election. Author has a pretty unconcealed bias in favor of the dems.

As best as I can tell, franzen seems to dislike everybody.

When i used the phrase emperor's new clothes it was a comment explicitly about the cult of the book and its status as a hipster shibboleth, rather than the book itself. As much as there might be people who say 'it's hard to read therefore its no good', there also seems to me to be a strain of argument that runs 'it's hard and complex and big, therefore it's great'. That to me seems to be a bit of a non sequitur

Don't get me wrong, i did find the book great, but a lot of what i have read about it (not ITT, elsewhere) just doesn't accord with my experience of it and seems hollow. For example, the introduction to my copy of the book makes me want to throw my kindle out of the window. Perhaps i respond more to emotional engagement than cleverness when i read - for me its power was as a meditation on the difficulty of really being in the world, of engaging with the act of living, whilst (again, to me) bigness and complexness and hardness are qualities only insofar as they are doing something with it. I dunno.

it's funny, i don't recall finding it a super hard read, but just going back and reading posts i made whilst i was reading it reveals that it was a real roller coaster ride.

You're definitely right that there is a cultural hysteria behind the book. Most of the early reviewers almost definitely didn't even finish reading the book, and these were the hype-generators. The hipster novelty intellectualism of music seems to be transitioning into the same kind of thing with literature, where you pretend to have smart cred if you "appreciate" certain kinds of things. At least people are reading good books.

That being said, there are probably a comparable number of people to the one's who more or less equate completing the book with automatic initiation into some abstract class of intelligence who despise the book and the author and refer to any admirer of IJ as "pretentious" or unable to form their own opinions. And those are the ones who are worse than the hipsters, fueled by their own insecurity, their inability to receive anything from the work, or seeing a bit of themselves in the hipster mentality.

And if you're referring to Eggers' preface I wholly agree with you - I thought it was crude and insulting.

I was not insulting you before, it was more of a conditional insult, the conditions of which you haven't met.

Oh, and anyone claiming the book was not emotionally powerful doesn't know how to read imo.

You seem rather closed minded to the notion an intelligent person might simply not like IJ

Incidentally I JUST bought Ij on kindle $1.99. Even though I have it in paperback (if you will)

About halfway through Taipei. Tao Lin's genius comes through fully

This is just not true.

I don't think anyone here has said that, however. Many, many books are overly long or complex and suuuuuuuck, just ask Dan Brown. Or simple, trite and awful like 50 Shades of I'm Going to Claw Out My Eyeballs.

Anytime one spends talking about a book as 'short and simple' or 'long and complex' but not talking about the skill or talent of the writer/novel is just avoiding a true analysis or criticism of the book.

Usually, because they are unable to make a coherent argument against said 'complex' book in the first place. The fact that we are forced to debate the 'cult of IJ' as opposed to IJ itself is an indicator of this. As you mentioned, people hate hipsters, who like IJ, so decide to hate IJ like it's MLS Soccer or something.

The #1 complaint of those here [and elsewhere] voiced against IJ is that it is: 1] Difficult and 2] Not short. Those are not skill-based arguments.

It is no different than those saying Lolita was a 'bad' novel because it made them feel icky [and they likely didn't finish].

I know these aren't your complaints, kokiri, just referring the the popular ones.

Serious suggestion: Since IJ doesn't have a plot that's integral to understanding the novel, per se, we just should list the pages for the 5-7 best set pieces of the novel, or like 5 set pieces and 4-6 stretches of description/dialogue so that people who don't want to read 1097 pages, but for $1.99 on Kindle will gladly read the 'highlights' and then can decide they want to finish the novel or are just happy enjoying those parts. [Or hate it regardless].

Eschaton, the description of depression, the climax/'ending' with Gately, some of the parts talking about the IJ video itself are hilarious, etc. {obvs I have not put in the page numbers which is the end goal.}

To be perfectly honest, I think some of the slings and arrows cast at IJ come from people who read DFW's critical look at popular culture and the things we [all] like, and didn't like how that made them feel about themselves.
Just like when we see a depressed person we know and think to ourselves 'Snap out of it...go to the gym or something...take a pill, geez' and then read his mind-blowing descriptions of what dark depression is actually like.

I've always agreed with the VLS reviewer who said that DFW is the funniest writer of his generation. Of course, that can only be true if you get the jokes.


"'Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."

Well put.

In the Plex - Terrific book on Google. Highly recommended.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold- Good spy novel. What are his next best books?

Tinker, Tailor - Probably his masterpiece.
Smiley's People. The follow-up.

The rest range from meh to okay to fine. The other 3 are pretty darned awesome.

Recently reread "All the king's men". I liked the book a lot the first time I read it (probably in my early twenties) and I loved it this time (I'm almost 30 now). It was very interesting to see how my reaction to the book has changed. When I read it the first time, I was intrigued by the story, but also sometimes frustrated by how slowly it was moving forward at times.
This time I still like the story, but I also enjoyed the slower moving parts, the descriptions of people and places etc. To me, his language has a distinct down-to-earth feel, even when he's talking about philosophical topics.
I suppose it's a popular book in the US, so you probably all know about it. But over here in Switzerland, I've never heard of Penn Warren before randomly watching the movie and then picking up the book. Are there any other books by Penn Warren that are worth reading?

I'd also heavily recommend "What money can't buy" by Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel. It's a very easy read because Sandel builds his argument using a lot of different examples. It's basically a book against free-market economists who claim that the markets distribute things optimally. There's two different arguments against that claim:

- Obviously there are huge differences in what people can afford to pay for certain goods, so the premise that the person that pays the most is the person that wants a thing the most is just wrong.

- The second - and maybe more important - argument is that putting a prize tag on certain things changes it's quality and corrupts it.

I really recommend this book to everyone who's interested in economics, politics, sociology, philosophy, etc... It's a short book that's very interesting to read but still gives the reader a lot to think about. If you like that kind of book, also pick up "Justice" and "The case against perfection". All short and easy to read, but very interesting.