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The Idle Book Log: unofficial recommendations for forthcoming Idle Thumbs Book Clubs.

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I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned any Cormac McCarthy. I've read quite a bit, though I think some of his better known books--The Road and No Country for Old Men--are not really his best (though good).

I'd love for you guys to read Blood Meridian. I sincerely put it in the cannon with books like The Sound and the Fury and Moby Dick. One of the best novels of the last 50 years.

I'd also throw A Sport and a Pasttime in there. James Salter is also one of the greatest living writers, also difficult, but without being dense. He and McCarthy both manage to be difficult by omission not complication. A Sport and a Pasttime is one of Salter's best.

As for a podcast suggestion: not to add more work, but I feel like a short mid-point book podcast would be fun, a sort of check in with your impressions of the book so far, things that are bothering or thrilling you guys, questions about what's to come. To compare to the game podcasts, quite frequently you discuss games while you are engaged with them, not after (which I realize is because games frequently don't have the arc, defined size, and coherency of a novel, but still...). It would also fuel good mid-reading discussions on the board, I think.

I've read the two you've mentioned and I'm sufficiently intrigued to read some earlier McCarthy. Alex Navarro (of Giant Bomb) has talked about "Blood Meridian" in relation to the film "The Proposition", so I've been curious about it for that reason. So, I second this gent's vote.

 

I'm also interested in checking out some sci-fi, particularly Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series and maybe some Arthur C. Clarke, so if the Thumbs are curious about those guys too, we could go on that journey together. 

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I'm also interested in checking out some sci-fi, particularly Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series and maybe some Arthur C. Clarke, so if the Thumbs are curious about those guys too, we could go on that journey together. 

 

For all of his own little quirks, I'd still recommend anything by Clarke over the Foundation trilogy. I reread the latter a couple years back and, like most of Asimov's long-form work, it has not held up whatsoever as anything other than a vehicle for clever ideas.

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I dunno if I've wandered in here to recommend any of it before, but Roberto Bolaño's work is worth checking out.

 

Of the two I've read, The Savage Detectives is more approachable (kind of a bohemian road trip by way of Cortazar's Hopscotch, minus the weird formal experimentalism), but his magnum opus is 2666 (wikipedia, spoilers though).

 

If you do try out 2666 (and at 900 odd pages, it's daunting to be sure), be aware that the first entire section (~1/5 of the book) makes it difficult to give a shit about the characters, but on the other hand, it's kind of intentional?

 

I've heard good things about Nazi Literature in the Americas and By Night in Chile also, but haven't read them.

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Nazi Literature in the Americas is awesome, but stylistically very different from Savage Detectives and 2666. It is a collection of fictional biographies of right-wing extremists in Latin America and the United States. The autobiographies interlink, and are sometimes funny, sometimes quite unsettling. 

 

I would recommend kind of the opposite of Bolano. Charles Portis is most famous for "True Grit", but he actually wrote a handful of very short, very funny novels set in modern day America. "Dog of the South" is my favourite. It is about Ray Midge, a total crank and neurotic, as he attempts to track down his wife who has left him for another man and fled to Mexico. Ray is kind of despicable but also intensely amusing, a lot like Ignatius in "A Confederacy of Dunces" or Misha in "Absurdistan".

 

It's a great, partly-forgotten comic novel, and I think it would be a good palate cleanser after some of the heavier stuff the book club has been reading. It's also an easy read so if you all hated at least you won't have wasted a lot of time. 

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I'd like to propose a debut novel: it's called A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, and is by Stegner Fellow Anthony Marra. It centers on the Second Chechen War, and based on the amount of buzz surrounding it in the literary world, has to be one of the most talked about first novels in quite some time. It also has the "... dubious fortune of appearing just after [the] terrorist killings in Boston", which may or may not weigh on it commercially - even though its similarities are simply coincidence - but nonetheless, it looked interesting enough to me that I think it warranted a recommendation. Read an excerpt here.

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I'd like to propose a debut novel: it's called A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, and is by Stegner Fellow Anthony Marra. It centers on the Second Chechen War, and based on the amount of buzz surrounding it in the literary world, has to be one of the most talked about first novels in quite some time. It also has the "... dubious fortune of appearing just after [the] terrorist killings in Boston", which may or may not weigh on it commercially - even though its similarities are simply coincidence - but nonetheless, it looked interesting enough to me that I think it warranted a recommendation. Read an excerpt here.

 

Well, I will give any book a read if it engages with Russia/Russian, so I will definitely be checking this out. Thanks for mentioning it!

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Well, I will give any book a read if it engages with Russia/Russian culture in anyway, so I will definitely be checking this out. Thanks for mentioning it!

 

I personally haven't read any of the sort, so I'm looking forward to it, even though it's technically a Russian book written by an outsider. Do you have any endorsements for a reader interested in Russian literature, asides from the usual Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? I'm looking for works that are a bit more obscure.

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Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is my favorite Russian lit from the 20th century and I would highly recommend it. It's bizarre and you'll probably need to be a little familiar with early Soviet history (and Faust), but the book is really worth reading. Unfortunately, I don't know that much about post-Soviet literature, so I can't recommend anything more modern than that.

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Unfortunately, I don't know that much about post-Soviet literature, so I can't recommend anything more modern than that.

 

I've heard nothing but good things about Vladimir Sorokin's work, which includes some post-Soviet stuff like The Ice Trilogy and Day of the Oprichnik. The Aleksandar Hemon-edited Best European Fiction series translates a lot of European fiction into English for the first time, and includes some Russian stuff AFAIK. N+1 just published It's No Good, a collection of Kirill Medvedev's poetry and essays.

 

As far as other obscure Russian lit goes, NYRB Classics is an imprint with impeccable taste, and one known for both publishing out-of-print books and commissioning new translations of foreign lit. And honestly, just making your way through Pevear & Volokhonsky's collaborative translations would be a good way to dive into Russian lit.

 

If you want non-fiction, let me know and I can pull together some recs.

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Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is my favorite Russian lit from the 20th century and I would highly recommend it. It's bizarre and you'll probably need to be a little familiar with early Soviet history (and Faust), but the book is really worth reading. Unfortunately, I don't know that much about post-Soviet literature, so I can't recommend anything more modern than that.

 

This was one of those books that made me extremely unsure whether the particular style of the prose came out of the author's original words, or the translator's. There was a particular tone whose effect on me I could equally imagine being a result of different cultural perspectives, deliberate affectation on the part of the author, or deliberate affectation on the part of the translator. It drives me bonkers.

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Viktor Pelevin is a contemporary Russian writer that I really like. I've read a few of his novels, and liked them all. "Omon Ra" is an allegorical account of a child brought up in the Soviet space program. If I remember right, it's novella length and I found it pretty affecting though difficult. "Life of Insects" is billed as a novel, but is really more of a collection of vignettes. The characters are either insects with human-like properties, or humans with insect-like properties; they shift from one to the next as the novel progresses. Most recently I read "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf", which is more of a conventional novel (though at times still very abstract). That book is about an immortal zen-Buddhist fox spirit living in Moscow. I think "Homo Zapiens" is his most well-known book in North America, though I haven't read it. 

 

Anyway if you like Bulgakov and are interested in contemporary Russian literature, I'd give Pelevin a try. 

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It's not literature exactly, but I found the Metro 2033 novel to be very interesting. The Night/Day Watch books by Lukyanenko are also fun to read. There's just something alien about Russian fiction that fascinates me.

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This is sort of a general recommendation too, but I just finished The New York Trilogy and I think y'all (casters and readers alike) would enjoy it. Imagine By Blood mixed with Cloud Atlas, to put it in terms of previous selections.

I talk about it more on Goodreads, but I'm very careful not to reveal even the opening premise. Part of the book's appeal was the sense of discovery and surprise, and I don't want to ruin that for anyone else.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/619798896

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Trivia: that book inspired Hideo Kojima in developing Metal Gear Solid 2's story, although whether that's a good thing or not is up to you.

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For all of his own little quirks, I'd still recommend anything by Clarke over the Foundation trilogy. I reread the latter a couple years back and, like most of Asimov's long-form work, it has not held up whatsoever as anything other than a vehicle for clever ideas.

I concur. "Oh Cool Look At This Neat Science Fiction Idea" works great for short stories, where the brevity of the form allows that to be a work's only asset, but in a novel you also need strong characters and plot, both of which aren't exactly o' Asimov's strong suit.  

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The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner. Because if speed, motorcycles, art, and radicalism in 1970's Rome and New York isn't interesting to you, then you might need to be checked yo. Seriously though, this writer is the real deal.

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The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner. Because if speed, motorcycles, art, and radicalism in 1970's Rome and New York isn't interesting to you, then you might need to be checked yo. Seriously though, this writer is the real deal.

My local bookstore still doesn't have this in stock. I'm getting impatient.

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Her first novel is quite good as well. I'm still reading the rest of it, so I need some more time to gestate actual coherent thoughts on it, but I'd still recommend it.

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The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner. Because if speed, motorcycles, art, and radicalism in 1970's Rome and New York isn't interesting to you, then you might need to be checked yo. Seriously though, this writer is the real deal.

 

I read this and loved it. Some of the best writing on being a youngish woman that I've read in a long time.

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I'm about to get a new audible credit, do you think the Flamethrowers would make a good listen? It was on my list to read. 

 

I'm generally pretty averse to audible, just because I don't have the mental capacity to listen to a book vs. actually reading it, but I think The Flamethrowers is one of the few books I could imagine listening to. The prose is fairly basic, very clean and nothing too fancy, so it would be pretty easy to follow along with. Plus, it's just a great story and I want everyone to read it. So, yes.

 

Edit: If enough people read this, maybe we can start a separate thread for it. It was one of the more interesting books that has come out in 2013 so far, and there's been a lot of insightful commentary around Kushner and women's writing in general.

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I'm generally pretty averse to audible, just because I don't have the mental capacity to listen to a book vs. actually reading it, but I think The Flamethrowers is one of the few books I could imagine listening to. The prose is fairly basic, very clean and nothing too fancy, so it would be pretty easy to follow along with. Plus, it's just a great story and I want everyone to read it. So, yes.

 

Edit: If enough people read this, maybe we can start a separate thread for it. It was one of the more interesting books that has come out in 2013 so far, and there's been a lot of insightful commentary around Kushner and women's writing in general.

 

I agree with all of this. 

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I've been sitting here looking at my book shelf & kindle library for the past half hour thinking of a book that I would most recommend. After I've been mourning the passing of Ryan Davis over at Giantbomb for the past few days, the book which most stands out to me presently is one which I love dearly but is profoundly dumb. That would be The Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd. It's a short piece of speculative fiction that is all together preposterous, cliche, campy and at it's very core a good 'bad' science fiction. The book operates on a conceit that Jesus, instead of dying on the cross, instead lead an assault on Rome toppling the government changing Christianity from being a religion about self-sacrifice & changing it to be a religion about action. Everything in the story is completely unearned, Boyd cheats you by throwing curve balls the entire book but I wouldn't have it any other way. It's his debut novel and it got people like Arthur C Clarke to admire him for it.

 

He once said his ideal reader "should have the mentality of a Southern stock-car racer, be a Baptist with a sense of detachment, have a well-developed sense of the absurd, and be fascinated with the quirks and accomplishments of the human animal."

 

With that, I feel like he knew exactly who his audience was and he didn't care how absurd his premise was for something like The Last Starship From Earth. All he cared for was the aesthetic, the pure unadulterated unnatural camp of the speculative fiction that came before him. I honestly believe he was influential in a lot of the good 'bad' science fiction we now have today, and since Ryan really liked good 'bad' science fiction I figured I would make that my recommendation in this thread.

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