I listen to German podcasts every morning during my cardio session, and today they were interviewing the author! Almost all of this interview was in English. The interviewer will often recap parts to the audience in German if he interviews someone in English. But I digress. It was a fantastic interview! And I only knew of the book from this thread. I’ll likely read it at some point. Hmm.. doesn’t appear that my library has it…
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Kismet ! That’s how I feel about finding the book on this thread.
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This is on my “want to read” list. - I can’t wait!!
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By happenstance, I recently read* two stories about kids who steal horses to save them from rendering (slaughter). Both books are written by acclaimed contemporary authors of “experimental literature.” (As near as I can tell “experimental” is a catchall for literature that’s hard to pigeonhole.)
Tom’s Crossing (Mark Z. Danielewski) is an enormous, ambitious, elaborate attempt at Homeric epic. It is also about how a modern day epic might come into being. The main story - an impossible journey by over a mountain by two high school kids, four horses, and a ghost - takes place over 5 days in late October, 1982, in the mountains near a slightly fictionalized Provo Utah. It could probably be described as a western, a crime procedural, a murder mystery, horror, a ghost story, a road (trail?) story, a mystery, mythology, young adult, and/or an exposition on religion, history, naturalism, greed, colonialism, art, and/or identity. It contains multitudes, but I think it is meant as an expansive campfire story. 1200+ pages (58 hours audio). But the trials, tribulations, detours, digressions, and delays are the story, and it is easy to get caught up in that story. As the author notes somewhere in the middle, there is a path through, and IMO it is worth it. This is the only book I’ve read by Danielowski.
Gliff, by brilliant Scottish author Ali Smith, is a near-future dystopian novel set in what could possibly be described corporatist surveillatocracy, I also involves a journey and a horse, but is about (among other things) language, meaning, meaninglessness, identity, conformity, individuality, compassion, humanity, resistance. While Tom’s Crossing self-consciously tells, considers, and reconsiders every aspect of its journey from every angle and perspective, Gliff holds back, providing glimpses, symbols, and allusions, leaving the reader to sort out the ambiguity.
As always, Smith is clever, nuanced, serious, yet playful. Profound insights and bad puns. Her work shift shapes, understandings, meaning. All of Smith’s books are worth reading. I’m surprised they don’t get mentioned here, because to my mind she is among the best. I’ve seen Gliff categorized as "young adult” I guess because the protagonists are young, but like the characters in her stories, her books defy easy classification.
(Gliff is the companion of Glyph, to be released in a few months. That may mean that the stories overlap, or it may not. Despite the potential for another layer of meaning to come, this book stands on its own.)
*I listened to both as audiobooks. I prefer to listen to stories that seem to be written as if for the spoken word, and both these books quality, but especially Tom’s Crossing.
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Just finished Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer. Woman dying of cancer asks her long time husband and caregiver to leave the house in favor of two female friends. Drama ensues. Well-written, interesting end of life issues.
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A freezing cold weekend with no desire to leave the house led me to binge read The Admissions, mentioned up thread. I enjoyed it, but came here specifically to say that I LOL’d at the mention of CC in the book. I wonder if the author was ever a poster here???
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Recently finished Flesh by Tom Szalay, which ended up on my nightstand because it won the Booker. It is a surprisingly easy read. It took me quite a while to appreciate the hollowness of the protagonist, but as the final pages came up, what the author did appeared rather brilliant. The story involves a fair amount of sex, which could be off-putting to some, but it is essential to the story. It Is a rags to riches story, but also of a permanent outsider. I recommend this one; it’s not like anything I’ve read before.
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I just added it to my list. Sounds interesting.
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Just finished The Book Thief (Markus Zusak). Not a happy story, but oh I thought it was such an excellent book. Was surprised to see some Reddit threads of dislike. Now I’m wondering whether to be enthusiastic on recommending to friends. Thoughts?
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I thought that was a fabulous book! My daughter had to read it in 8th grade English and I read it too. Very very well done.
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I really liked the Book Thief. Pretty split among my friends who read it.
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Book Thief is one of my all time favorite books. Keep recommending it, IIMO. 
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Thanks. I saw several reviewers who disliked Death as the narrator… but I felt that gave the book an interesting twist from the many other WWII books I’ve read.
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I agree. I think Death as narrator was effective in reading with a different perspective. I liked it and I don’t usually remember books well.
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My book group recently read Intimacies by Katie Kitamura. It’s about a young woman who is an interpreter and leaves New York to take a temporary job in The Hague where she is an interpreter for the trial of the former president of an African country accused of war crimes, i.e., ethnic cleansing. I was really surprised by the discussion. People loved the book or hated it. Most of the folks who hated it disliked Kitamura’s writing style. The entire book is in the first person and past tense with no dialogue–you’re in the narrator’s head for the entire book. Lots of long meandering paragraphs and very few commas.
I was one of the few who didn’t care for the style, but enjoyed how she explored the role of an interpreter and how even the tone of your voice can affect the person for whom you are interpreting.
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Sounds really interesting! She has a newer book, Audition, that was shortlisted for the Booker. I may need to get these to my nightstand!
My nightstand is about to keel over from the weight of all the books on it.
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Several months ago, I wrote a post about the book Dungeon Crawler Carl, which is linked at One of the best books I've read in the last 6 months is . - #8920 by Data10 , which involves Carl and his girlfriend’s cat Princess Donut trying to survive and thrive in a RPG type dungeon. Since then I’ve read all 7 books from the series, which is a total of 4000+ pages or ~140 hours of audio. I’ve also pre-ordered book 8. All of the books are excellent. My favorite is probably book 5 – The Butcher’s Masquerade; and least favorite is definitely book 2 – Carl’s Doomsday Scenario.
I initially tried to write a post summarizing my feelings about the series, but the post quickly became many pages of text, so I instead tried to make relatively short list of likes and dislikes with little detail and abandoned that too apparently, as I found this draft when opening the thread. I’ll post it now, as I want to write something else in this thread, losing the draft.
Likes: Satisfying Explanations of Key Questions – Example questions include what is the reason for the dungeon? Or how does the AI have god-like power include being able to break down and create the pet cat Princess Donut as a being with human-like intelligence?
Likes: More Characters and Character Development – In the later books, many new characters are added and developed besides just Carl and Princess Donut. My favorite character is Prepotente, who was originally a boer goat on Earth. He may be the smartest and most capable individual crawler in the game, but has aspects of a child-like personality and tendency to fly off the handle when slighted.
Dislikes: Humor Gets More Vulgar – I’ll intentionally skip examples.
Dislikes: More Plot Armor and Tropes – For example, in my earlier post I mentioned that I liked how the first book acknowledges that Carl and Donut were initially nothing special among the millions of dungeon crawlers from Earth who entered the dungeon, rather than starting out overpowered per the usual bland personality power fantasy trope. This changes quickly, with Carl and Donut regularly being among the top few crawlers on the leaderboard, often number 1, or even among the most powerful crawlers in the history the game. The top 10 also includes the few among the millions of crawlers the duo randomly ran into or saved during the early books. It feels unnatural.
It also feels like there is a great deal of plot armor to keep Carl alive, including tropes about being saved on last second of a timer and such. The author acknowledges this with with Carl’s enemies saying that he’d be dead if the AI that operates the dungeon wasn’t playing favorites. Or the AI giving descriptions such as below. While it is a satisfactory explanation for some of the plot armor, again it feels unnatural.
Temporary Effect from Khepri:
Uh, please wait while I look something up…
Nope. This is legit. Okay, so, people are going to think this is some sort of bullsh*t where I saved your ass from this elaborate trap you just walked into, but this is genuinely the temporary effect one receives from being in the presence of this deity.
…
Temporary Effect from Khepri:
You are immortal for the next 90 seconds.
or
New Achievement! Hey Larry, can I borrow your chainsaw?
You have utilized a borrowed skill or spell in battle…
…
Reward: You’ve received a Platinum Have You Goddamned Figured Out How To Use This In Conjunction With the F*cking Voodoo Book Yet? Jesus Christ I Can Only Help You So Much box.
Dislikes: Getting Too Outlandish – The series also gets increasingly outlandish and off the rails with each book. This may be symbolic of the AI going increasingly off the rails with each book to the point where the external world fears the AI, but at some point it starts becoming more of a detraction than a positive. An example quote from book 4 is below. By book 7, the off the rails events become common enough to the point where it is almost normalized.
A few days back I had been chased by a massive, two-headed puppy, and I’d crashed an airplane into the face of a god. I watched a talking goat snuggle up with a vampire after they killed the universe’s largest turkey. I’d just chucked a haunted sex doll head fifty kilometers in order to settle a girl fight between that same head and a makeup-encrusted demon the size of a small town. I’d just reached into the head of a rock monster in order to pluck a parasitic worm from his head. And yet, despite all of this, what she’d just said was the most astounding thing I’d heard since this floor started.
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Based upon many praising it I did read the first Dungeon Crawler book. Although I enjoyed it, not enough to continue reading the rest of the series.
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I too like to try a variety of books. (At our zoom book club, I’ll sometimes say a book was not my favorite… but I’m not sorry to have tried / discussed it. )
On Facebook, I’ve been trying to do fewer political posts… more general lifestyle, non-poloraizing posts. Inspired by a musician on a corporate-retiree thread, I’ve been doing MUSIC MONDAY posts. First one was asking for favorite Beatles tunes. This week I added a FRIDAY FICTION post… I am enjoying having new suggestions from a variety for friends/family (which overlap my readings and suggestions here).
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