James A. Michener
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Those of you having trouble with Finnegan's Wake -
Have you tried reading it out loud in your best drunken Irish brogue
after taking a drop of military grade liquid LSD in each eye?
Cuz that really opened up the novel for me.
John Updike - Rabbit Run (etc)
Windbag.
Infinite Jest.
Good holy jeebus. Page after page after page after page WITH NO PARAGRAPH BREAKS JUST A SOLID WALL OF TEXT. And utterly incomprehensible to boot.
I don't care if you thought it was the greatest novel of the century. I got through 20 pages and i would rather stick a fork in my eye than read another 20.
I can certainly see and in a limited way appreciate the incredible craft that went into his stuff, and I see why some people like it, but for me I just don't connect with it at all. I only picked up Michener in the first place for a girl who ended up really effing with my head (though at the time I was reading it I still though she was the best thing ever). If young love can't get you through a tough read I don't know what hope there is for anything else :)
I'm really enjoying this. Not sure why esoterica is a hobby of mine, but whatever.
I'll recognize that most of the books here are important, valuable, and treasured by many for good reason.
And none of that keeps them from being long and awful.
It's hard work for the first 150 pages or so, but this is my favorite book of all time. I cream my proverbial postmodern jeans over this book. On the other hand, trying to read his book Infinity and More, which is about the mathematical concept of infinity, was like trying to fit a brick into my ear. Mainly because I'm a product of the public education system of the 1990s and 2000s and have, shall we say, a tenuous grasp on theoretical maths.
You start to get a sense of what the fuck the first 150 pages were about, DFW starts actually writing descriptive background passages, you realize that the events at the beginning (incomprehensible the first time through) actually chronologically take place at the end of the book's plot, you get a sense of the characters so that you don't go "wait, who is this section about?", etc. In other words, an astute reader starts to stitch together relationships between the book's subplots at about page 150. Also, read the endnotes. It's kind of a bitch and I don't think it was entirely necessary to do endnotes and not just footnote stuff, but they go a long way toward making the book sensible. I can totally understand someone reading and comprehending the entire book, and still thinking it's a giant postmodern jerkoff, though. I just happen to really enjoy that.
Anything by Umberto Eco post Focault's Pendulum. Tried to read several, maybe finished one of htem.
Worst sci-fi ever: Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy. I can't imagine why I even bothered. Something like 3000 pages setting up an impossible situation, with a literal deus ex machina saving the day at the end. Unimaginably bad.
John Barth's The Sot Weed factor. Kept waiting for something worthwhile to happen. Never did.
I enjoyed Cryptonomicon, but the ending is a bit abrupt and unsatisfying.
Nation is just sad; a failing man's plea for greater humanity. Pratchett has advanced Alzheimer's.
I also love John Kennedy Toole's classic, but then I loved Ulysses, IMO the last sentence is one of the great joys of English literature, all 4,391 words of it. You can take that how you will.
GO!
The plot is unfathomable.
I feel a hot wind on my shoulder
And the touch of a world that is older
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