Great book! Highly recommend Butcher’s Crossing as well. Totally different subject matter, but that same fantastic prose style.

Just finished Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time. Incredible book, loved so many different aspects. Love the way this article brings in the AI discussion, it’s really incredible Pynchon wrote this thing when the internet wasn’t even really an idea yet:

> need no longer to be run by the Invisible Hand, but now could create itself—its own logic, momentum, style, from inside

Highly recommend it to folks. It has a difficult reputation but honestly most of it is pretty approachable.

What’d you think? Read that one last year actually

Ehh I don’t think that’s fair to say. The way we think today is different than the way we thought 100 years ago - this is quantifiable in the case of things like attention span. So it’s reasonable to try and adapt the form of the novel to reflect what the author feels are new patterns of contemporary thought.

That said, I don’t think Ellmann necessarily achieved her goal. But you can point to authors like Gass or Morrison or even Faulkner and see how they use stream of consciousness in a way that’s unique and innovative vs the European modernists.

I mean, Ducks is actually very straightforward (imo that’s it’s problem) and readable if you meet it on its own terms on the structure. It’s sort of stream of consciousness in the sense that:

1. Our thoughts are cyclical. We build connections between ideas or memories by repeatedly revisiting those ideas or memories with context from new ideas, memories or experiences. So the book flows in a big circle of retreading old ground with new context.
2. The dominating feeling of contemporary America is anxiety. The news and the internet and the economy and the culture make us anxious. And our big anxieties (ie gun culture) interface with our small anxieties (ie how many pies can I sell today). The book is trying to assign form to that feeling.

You gotta commit to understanding how the prose supports these central ideas to get the benefit of the effect Ellmann is creating. Ultimately I think it’s a little too long but it’s very easy to read if you get that rhythm.

So many posts on here with absolutely non-sensical ways of displaying information

William Gaddis, one of America’s great under-read novelists, used to rage against Carnegie as a symbol of everything wrong with our “culture”. This description from The Recognitions is one of my favorites:

> Here was no promise of anything so absurd as a void where nothing was, nor so delusive as a chimerical kingdom of heaven: in short, it reconciled those virtues he had been taught as a child to the motives and practices of the man, the elixir which exchanged the things worth being for the things worth having. It was written with reassuring felicity. There were no abstrusely long sentences, no confounding long words, no bewildering metaphors in an obfuscated system such as he feared finding in simply bound books of thoughts and ideas. No dictionary was necessary to understand its message; no reason to know what Kapila saw when he looked heavenward, and of what the Athenians accused Anaxagoras, or to know the secret name of Jahveh, or who cleft the Gordian knot, the meaning of 666. There was, finally, very little need to know anything at all, except how to “deal with people.”

Borges! Arguably the greatest short story writer of all time, any of the stories from “The Garden of Forking Paths” will give you a great sense of his style.

Colleen Hoover is the number two most discussed author on TikTok. Sure everyone’s individual feed will look different, but she and similar authors are the most broadly represented on the platform

I don’t personally use TikTok

I don’t think this is a useful comment considering this:

> they aren't both segmented dripfeeds of current pop culture and criticized in their day for it.

Isn’t accurate. Oprah was recommending works based on their literary value, not on their relevance to pop culture.

Oprah’s book club brought a lot of great literature to the forefront of American contemporary culture in a way that no other outlet really has. Morrison, Whitehead, McCarthy, Franzen, JCO, Mistry, Tolstoy, Faulkner, GGM, McCullers, Robinson etc

Comparing that to the rape fantasy garbage that gets pushed on tik tok is ridiculous.

For Morrison, Beloved is the most famous but Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon are also great

I really loved it, although I get why some readers and critics are put off. Definitely get those Pynchon / Delillo type conspiracy notes, although it does have some moments that are classic McCarthy prose: > They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

Enjoy Stella Maris, it’s good reading too!

I mean, Pynchon is totally readable for a lot of people. And I’d argue several of his novels are easily approachable for anyone reading above a high school level.

>It's more about the relationship between the murders and the broader society.

100%. I think it’s a really masterful way of looking at crime - although a lot of time is spent on the individual victims and (potential) perpetrators of the crimes, the real focus is on the global economic, cultural and political systems which create the environment for these crimes to occur.

The Tunnel by William Gass really challenges you to wrestle with what makes an individual evil, sort of how the everyday unfairnesses of life can create a hateful ideology. It’s also at times challenging prose so it’s “tough” in that sense as well.

I think a true /r/books list would actually look drastically different than this.

Looks like standard 4chan fair - relatively safe list of good and probably “deserving” books outside of the meme stuff, but obviously underrates women and non-white men.

Between Two Fires was a fantastic concept for a book (sort of hallucinatory type horror set during the plague years in France) but the prose was painfully bad and the plotting a bit ridiculous.

Are we really gonna pretend “woke bad” is a useful contribution to a thread?

I don’t think this would be a great starting point, in many ways it feels like an advancement of ideas he’s introduced throughout his career.

Lots of good starting points - The Road and No Country are his most approachable, Outer Dark and All the Pretty Horses would be good too

I absolutely loved it, and think it just got better and better as it went along. It’s definitely different than his other stuff, more Pynchon and Kafka in it pthan we’ve seen previously, but the central themes are still very much McCarthy. I’m putting this one up with Blood Meridian and Suttree as one of his best works.

I just fundamentally don’t think you can force a love of something on a student. Like yes, if a teacher can help foster a love for lit while also teaching it, that’s great. And I think that will often be a natural by product of an educator who’s passionate about their subject and a student with a predisposed inclination to the subject. But it should be taught regardless, and instilling those skills is the higher priority. Not every student is going to love lit, and that’s totally fine.

What I dislike about post like this and the idea that kids need to “love” the subject, is it inevitably leads to changing the curriculum to allow for the path of least resistance. Yes, if kids just get to read their favorite Stephen King novel or Marvel comic book in a literature class I’m sure more of them would love it, because most kids (and people really) love entertainment more than education.

I don’t necessarily agree. Just going off a basic wiki definition: > Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.

There are plenty of books that don’t hit this standard of “art”. And even if it’s true, that any written work is “literature” then yes there is a distinction between art from which it benefits to have a formal education to understand / appreciate / learn and “art” which can be easily digested at face value. Like there’s no way anyone actually believes that The Great Gatsby is just as easy to understand as Star Wars: The Novel #23 or whatever. > no book is going to unlock Nirvana for you or summon a heavenly host to bear you straight to St. Peter's pearly gates.

I don’t really understand this weird straw man or how it’s relevant to the discussion. Learning the periodic table or WW1 history isn’t going to cause you to transcend either, but no one goes around arguing that those aren’t appropriate for a highschool student to learn. There is value in learning to understand literature regardless of whether you end up personally enjoying reading as a hobby, and that’s why it’s taught in school.

Sure and I read lit primarily for pleasure as well. But you don’t need a highschool course to teach you to read for pleasure, just like you don’t need teaching to watch Netflix or listen to a catchy song. You (generally) do need some guidance to learn to understand literature as an art form, to understand context and theme etc