in case anyone was wondering,
i'm reading "all the sad young literary men" and it is a completely intolerable, self-righteous piece of smut. it's the only book i've picked up in a very long time that is so repulsive to me that i don't think i can finish it.
i would really enjoy punching keith gessen in the throat.
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Yeh -- I read an interview with him in the times and a thing he wrote in a Seattle weekly about his book tour, and I decided there was just no way I could stomach the actual book.
May I recommend instead "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"? Totally deserving of the hype. I really think you'll love it.
Also good (thus far -- I'm not too deep into it yet) is Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland," which got a (rather pretentious) blurb from your boy Safran Foer:
"New York is not what most people imagine it to be. Just as marriage, family, friendship and manhood are not. Netherland is suspenseful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read. But more than any of that, it's revelatory. Joseph O'Neill has managed to paint the most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love) in an entirely new way."
Wow, thanks, Jon. I've never had friends, nor a family, nor have I been to New York, nor am I a man -- but it's good to know that my imaginings of those things are altogether wrong.
thanks for the reading advice. i started slaughterhouse five today cause i haven't read it yet -- pretty great so far.
did you know brief interviews with hideous men is being made into a movie, produced by john krasinski aka jim from the office? i'm pretty psyched. though i haven't read the book, i hope the movie's not terrible.
also, yes, that is a ridiculous quote from ma boi jsf.
Wow! It seems like I have to read this book. I'll have to see where I can get a copy.
whoa whoa whoa, please elaborate cait. of course i trust your opinion, but i just keep hearing praise after praise for gessen and i've had all the sad young literary men on hold at the library for weeks. but now, my reading goal is crushed! i'd be interested to hear what you'd have to say about it. i haven't felt that way about an author since jonathan franzen who SUCKS BALLS. but i love to find new literature to hate, so stoke that fire, if you will.
also, perhaps i should comment on your earlier post about quitting your canvassing job, but i wanted to let the weirdness of quitting a job settle before saying bravo/kudos to your bravery and decision. my roommate here in chicago, will huberdeau, just quit a canvassing job (not nearly as high-positioned or broad-sweeping as yours, mind you) and every day when i'd hear about it sounded absolutely soulsucking. i can't imagine doing it for an extended amount of time. especially with an, ahem, uncooperative boss such as yours. there've gotta be limitless options for you, so it definitely sounds good to have gotten outta that when you did.
anyhoo, best of luck in the future! i'll continue blogstalking you on this, but keep in touch and come visit!
BFFOREVERFOREVERFOREVER,
chris robinson
Really? Not a Franzen man? He's top-notch in my book. Granted, the first thirty pages of The Corrections read like some kind of aborted John Cheever novel-fetus, but that turns out to be part of the point, and later on the whole structural oddity is winked at in Chip's dialogue (something about a small hump for the audience to surmount before getting to the good stuff?). In interviews, Franzen (like Gessen) can come off as smug and curmudgeonly, but the dude can write -- satire and psychological realism at the same time. Since his famous/notorious Harper's manifesto back in the late '90s, he's dropped a lot of the elitism; I read an interview in '05 from a German paper in which he was a lot more levelheaded about why he writes fiction.
Plus the questions about literature's purpose raised in that Harper's essay are still relevant almost fifteen years later, because American culture is no less noisy and readerships are still declining. On top of that, the essay is pretty much solely responsible for bringing Paula Fox back into print, and for that I am very grateful.
You know, reading too much fiction can be harmful to a true sense of reality. You ought to start reading literary criticisms about fiction to form a general idea of what the book must be like.
i should check out that book..
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