He’s an arrogant insufferable prick, and he’s often right, which makes it more infuriating lol

Piranesi (Susanna Clarke) I ended up reading this after stumbling on a description of the book that sounded promising. After reading it, I disagree strongly with the excessive praise; I thought it was borderline tedious. Almost stopped reading multiple times but ended up feeling pot committed in seeing it through. Probably would have been better at half length or even less.

All that being said, I've been reading 25:1 nonfiction:fiction for years and am pretty rusty when it comes to reading fiction, so that probably didn't help. If this is what's winning major literary awards in 2021, I guess I'll stick to older fiction books when I do read fiction.

Disappointing to hear about Piranesi. I'd just got it on audiobook, along with a few others that I'd seen on recent Nebula/Hugo/Locus/World Fantasy Award lists. My understanding was it was already a relatively short book to start with.

Just finishing off Joe Abercrombie's really enjoyable fantasy series, The First Law trilogy. Nothing hugely revolutionary, but great characters and occasionally very funny. Looking forward to cracking on with his others novels and Age of Madness series, all set in the same world.

I enjoyed Piranesi. It starts slow, granted, but that was in some ways the point. It takes the reader a while to understand what is going on and where ...

If it had been much shorter it would have been a novella.

I also liked Clarke's earlier, and much longer, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, though it took me a long while to feel fully engaged in that world. But maybe fantasy is not your thing?

I am reading a book named Japanese Plays. This book explains the beauty of life as much as Japanese theater. It is here that reality is held suspended and emptiness can fill the mind with words, music, dance, and mysticism. A.L. Sadler translated the mysteries of Noh, Kyogen, and Kabuki in his groundbreaking book. Kabuki is a traditional style of Japanese theatre. It is a theatrical style with a very rich history. Originating from the 1600s it’s incorporated the social topics of that time and even after many renditions, sanctions from leaders and changes it is still as popular as ever.

i feel so much better seeing all the taleb hate and can come out of the closet

started a bunch of his books but could never get more than a dozen or so pages in before moving onto something i didn't hate reading

also hate the guy who wrote sapiens, that book trended hard, was commonly seeing people use it to virtue signal on socials with pics of the book but i'd ask "yeah but how far did you get?" and knowing i actually read it they'd readily concede just first few chapters

that guys worse than taleb who's just a bad writer (by the rr pedantry scale he's a published bestseller so obv he's better than the average bear) whereas that harari fella is capable of having an amazing 40 page essay and then just says "ok i have enough" and decides to grind his fingernails on the chalkboard for another 300 pages just to sell it as a book

Agree. I started Sapiens and gave up after 100 pages or so.

I'm rereading Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie, about the Vietnam war. Still excellent after all these years.

I finished both Cloud Cuckoo Land and Lincoln Highway. Liked both of them even if they weren’t on par with their author’s last books, All the Light We Cannot See and A Gentleman in Moscow - but those are two of my favorite books in the last ten years, so that would have been a tall order.

If I had to pick one over the other it would be the Lincoln Highway, even if it wasn’t 100% nailed down in terms of plot and character development. It was incredibly difficult to put down, and Towles is an excellent writer.

On to the new Franzen…

I'm a little over 100 pages into Lincoln Highway. When I started reading it I was sure I had read it before, but now I think I might have just read an excerpt of it.

Towles spins a good yarn, and parts seem written in the style of a children's book. I get the impression that he might be trying to re-write Huckleberry Finn. I keep thinking that I detect the faintest whiff of sentimentality (which would kill the whole project) and I hope I don't, but I'm not optimistic. We'll see.

The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. One chapter in and already a compelling narrative. Love his writing.

As I recall Denis Johnson’s National Book Award Tree of Smoke is a fictive treatment of Vann. Certainly it conjures up the same spooky vibe.

Decided to put together my alltime fave short story list, started with 10-12, ended up with a few more, in no order:

The Overcoat - Gogol
The Semplica Girl Diaries - G. Saunders
Repent, Harlequin, Said the TickTockMan - H. Ellison
The Lemon Drop Kid- D. Runyon
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz - Fitzgerald

Where are you going, Where have you been? J. C. Oates
The Ransom of Red Chief - O. Henry
Girl With Curious Hair - David Foster Wallace
The Snows of Kilimanjaro - Hemingway
The Lottery - Shirley Jackson

On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning - Murakami
The Swimmer - John Cheever
A Perfect Day for Bananafish - J.D. Salinger
The Dead - Joyce
The School - D. Barthelme

Secretary - Mary Gaitskill
The Nine Billion Names of God - Arthur C. Clarke
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
Are These Actual Miles? - Carver
The Razor - Nabokov

Obviously only one per author. Several are ones pretty much everyone has read before in english class. I couldn't pick just one from Munro nor O'Hara but those would be my two needed additions if this were a published collection.

DFW and Carver [and Runyon] were the hardest for me to narrow down. Could easily have gone with Cathedral or The Depressed Person from those 2. Anything by Saunders.

If you're stuck on where to start, both The School and The Razor are very, very short. Most of these are available free online.

ty for the list nd, surprised to see the things they carried, not that i didn't enjoy it but figuring i probably took it for granted as required reading when i was 15 or so

will try to read the others first though before tackling that one again

Diamond as big as the ritz :>

Finished The Lincoln Highway, definitely liked it, but still in love with his first novel.

About 30% into Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Great list, thanks.

My first thought was that I would add Faulkner's "The Bear" (or maybe "Barn Burning").

You're right about it being hard to choose from Munro. I teach "The Progress of Love," and it never grows old.

I'd also add Mavis Gallant. Again, hard to choose one: perhaps "Speck's Idea"?

And William Trevor. I haven't read enough of his short fiction to suggest a title but all the stories I have read are compact gems. See, e.g., his collection Cheating at Canasta.

speaking of great novels

i still can't tell if i loved confederacy of dunces because of the novel itself or just the absurdness of the characters

I pre-ordered this but haven't started it yet. I'm very much looking forward to it!

I thought they were both fantastic, but I think I slightly preferred A Gentleman in Moscow over Rules of Civility.

This novel is a masterpiece without a doubt. Sure, it is character-driven and a little makeshift, but, in the end, Ignatius’s life is all the better for being relatively plotless.

I don’t think they are that comparable. A Gentleman in Moscow’s setting and scale put it pretty far ahead of Rules if Civility, but I loved them both.

All this Gentleman in Moscow hype itt I gotta give it a read.

Reading White Russian atm on recommendation of this thread and really enjoying it about halfway through

You need to stick with a gentleman in Moscow for ~150 pages.

Me of Little Faith by Lewis Black. Expected this to be rants on religion in his character. While there's some of that, it's more his feelings on spirituality. Didn't really resonate with me, but that wouldn't.

Old Man on a Bike by Simon Gandolfi. 73-year-old British self-described "writer of mediocre novels" goes to Veracruz, Mexico, buys a Honda 125 motorcycle, intending to travel to Ushuaia at the bottom of South America.

So far only into Guatemala, but liking it. He knows people in some of the places from previous experiences, and also writes about the new people he comes across.

Interesting, the kind of travel book I enjoy. A regular person traveling around, talking about their experiences.

"The School" is funny as hell. I love teaching it. For Carver, I prefer the emotion of "A Small, Good Thing."

I'm also a huge fan of Gaitskill's short stories. She's a subtle and superb stylist, but never showy.

I also love Tobias Woolf.

And in LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" I find hope for humanity.

Sent from my Pixel 4a using Tapatalk