r/RSbookclub

or maybe ween, the Grateful Dead. he’s jam band-coded. he noodles

tried for years and just can’t get into it. too goofy.

William Gaddis is the velvet underground. when I watched the VU doc and found out they hated Zappa and all the west coast hippie stuff it warmed my heart

also feel like pynchon is for people who smoke weed (I.e. regards)

Both fiction & non-fiction.

“And also? I’m pretty sure I love you and (of course) would do anything for you?”

I just finished the abridged version for the second time and loved it just as much as the first read. It has got me thinking I should dive into the unabridged version (via e-book, I don't have 1.5k lying around unfortunately), but the length is intimidating. I was wondering if anyone has read it. If so, what did you think?

Along side "To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee" the most famous thing Ahab says is "Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."

This is nested within a broader speech Ahab is giving. I was wondering, what are your impression of what he says throughout this speech? What do you think Ahab, as character, is conveying here? What is Melville?

If it's your first time reading it, what are your impressions?

What triggers the speech is Starbuck saying this:

>"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

To which Ahab responds:

>"Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines"

Though a lot of these lines are famous, the context around might be less understood, and have taken on different meaning in culture.

For instance the very concept of "White Whale" as something illusive you spend of energy chasing or trying to master. Additionally, this understanding often has a component of time, as in something spend a long time, or even a lifetime chasing.

Whereas, Ahab is attacked by Moby Dick on his previous voyage, recovers, and finds him on his very next voyage. They find Moby Dick within a year of setting out. It is an obsession but a fairly recent one. Some more details about this timeline. I think for some people, the whales legendary reputation, which precedes the events of the novel, is conflated into how long Ahab has personally been invested in it.

There's also a bit more nuance to what Ahab thinks in regards to Moby Dick, as he demonstrates in his speech. It's often seen as entirely vengeance, at this specific whale, for attacking him. Reading it, you can see Ahab is speaking on a pretty sophisticated level, about what Moby Dick represents to him.

So, yes, what are your thoughts?

Going to be in Montreal for a few days next. Looking for some cute used (preferably) book stores to bop around in.

Thanks

For the last year and a half or so, I seem to have been stuck in an endless loop of fiction written in first person. Most of it is good, but I'm gradually getting exhausted. Anyone else with the same feeling? I'm not trying to prove first-person is inferior to third-person (though, admittedly, I do think this way), but reading "Death In Venice" and some Nikolai Leskov short stories recently felt like a cold shower after a hot summer day out. I think I just need to stop dealing in half-measures and pick up a fat brick, written entirely in third person.

I struggle to follow what I'm reading even when there is subtle background noise, so I've been trying to build a library of music that lets me tune everything else out. It's been a real challenge to find stuff that is the right balance of stimulating and flow-enabling. I started with 'classic' ambient stuff: Tim Hecker, Tokyo B.G.M. Corp, Kenichiro Isoda, Coldcut, Takumi Yoneyama. But lately I've also been listening to a lot of ambient Americana: The Dead Texan and Hank & Slim. Some ambient jazz hits but a lot of it is unfortunately too distracting. I've also been experimenting to mixed results with looping the same ambient track over and over to induce a trance like state. Anyone else in the same boat as me and perhaps further down the stream?

Alright since yall really delivered last time, does anyone know of any good books about botany? Non fiction, but literary bent is always a plus

What are your favourite literary journals these days?

I’m a regular reader and am subscribed to good number of them.

The ones I (not an American) most enjoy are the London Review of Books, New Left Review, Cleveland Review of Books, Harper’s, New York Review of Books, Point Magazine and the Boston Review.

Travelling this summer across the Balkans (going to Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo and Albania). Any recommendations for female authors from this region? Spending my year reading only women authors so thought I’d combine that with my travels.

Has anyone read: The Palm House by Gwendolyn Riley and Big Kiss, Bye Bye by Claire Louise Bennett

I went in blind for both of these books written by British female authors. Neither are the types of books I would usually gravitate towards.

There was something that viscerally angered me about the Palm House. I rarely don’t finish books but I was 30 pages away from the end and just couldn’t bring myself to finish it without skimming. Most of the book takes place through mundane dialogue. None of the characters are interesting, nor are the conversations. The book is about her friendship with a middle aged man who quits his job as an editor of some kind of pretentious political / literary magazine. There’s no romantic or sexual tension between them for any kind of intrigue. She recounts memories with her mother as well as being randomly being groomed by a stand up comedian when she was a teenager. Nothing happens throughout the book and then it just ends abruptly. It depressed, bored, and pissed me off from beginning to end.

BKBB, similarly, is narrated by a female protagonist and her on again off again relationship with an older man throughout the decades. Thematically has similarities with TPH but the way it was written is a lot more stream of consciousness and less structured than TPH. Reading about it felt like falling into a nap and waking up and over and over and over again in a good way. Would I read it again, no. But I’m glad I experienced it.

Would love to hear your thoughts if you’ve read these books.

Just completed two bestsellers this week: I Who Have Never Known Men and Theo of Golden. They’re Zoomer and Boomer darlings, respectively. Everyone I’ve known who has crushed hard on Theo has been over 60. Everyone I’ve known who has stanned for I Who Have Never has been under 30.

1.      ToG is about seeing a fictitious man “truly live” and then wishing that a man just like that would visit your town.

2.      IWHNKM is about what it’s like to have access to nothing modernity offers so when you finish reading the book, you can appreciate everything you take for granted (like TikTok?).

3.      ToG is castlebuilding at its most extreme. The title character is an octogenarian analog of the manic pixie dreamgirl. He listens! He loves art! He makes art! He SEES! In these troubled times, we seek a model for what it looks like to live, so thank you, Theo, for helping us learn to live and love again!

4.      IWHNKM is speculative fiction about a character writing speculative fiction. The narrator is a child born into a world where she will never have access to, much less experience, much of what we take for granted. So we see her as a nascent novelist: asking questions, writing stories, and exploring.

5.      Both books are episodic and essentially plotless. “Just like life!” = the generous reading.

6.      I wanted to kick Theo several times. There are at least two points in the book where his obliviousness is inexplicable given how preternaturally insightful he is the rest of the time. Then the ending gave the entire game away. Plus, his artistic medium is visual, and we don’t get to see any of the portraits he obsesses over or the landscapes we're told he rendered to worldwide acclaim.

7.      I had sympathy for the nameless narrator of IWHNKM but found her character inconsistent and disingenuous. However, the narrator is a more successful communicator than Theo. From the novel's final section: “I am writing [these words] for some unknown reader who will probably never come…But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them.”

8.      Does this mean that I (a Gen X / Millennium fencesitter) am at heart more sympathetic to the Zoomers than the Boomers? It is I Who Have Never Known Generational Affiliation.

Anyone read this book? What are your thoughts? It won the National Book Award, all I’ve heard were rave reviews, it was sold out of all the bookstores in my city for weeks. A copy finally came into a store I visited yesterday; I took a peek at the writing on a random page and it felt a bit… corny? I want to know if I’m wrong about my first impression and if it’s actually worth picking up

now that it's been a few months since it came back in print, im curious to see what everyone thinks.. personally i despised it, especially its humor. all of my least favorite tropes of postmodernism/20th c. literary fiction: penises, farts, I Hate My Pig Wife, a molasses plot, endless references to Smart Writers, Hitler.. all of the gimmicks featured in the first ~150 pages are quickly abandoned forever.. it felt very overworked; the 25 years spent working on the novel are perhaps too apparent. however, i've found myself thinking about it every now and then, particularly w/r/t The Fascism of the Heart, a solid diagnosis of how easy it is to fall into fascism. didn't love the novel but it's an interesting topic of discussion. hopefully this doesn't come across as a lazy inflammatory Actually, This Revered Book Sucks post

I don't usually read horror or sci-fi but The Simpsons led me to Jerome Bixby's It's a Good Life which I found quite engaging and a good way to spend a train journey when I couldn't be bothered to read the longer novel I'm on at the moment.

Does anyone have any recommendations for shorter stories like this which are unsettling/creepy but not too focused on being overtly shocking or violent? I know "Stephen King" is probably the default response here but I think I've only read one of his short stories too so welcome any input.

Also would enjoy any comments on the Bixby story itself if anyone has read or wants to read.

The story, for reference: https://graemearkell.weebly.com/uploads/3/8/4/8/38485229/its_a_good_life.pdf

I have three that I really love. The first is Henri Troyat's biography of Tolstoy. I think Troyat may have made a conscious choice to write in a style that feels vaguely similar to Tolstoy's own writing, or maybe he just absorbed it through all the deep research and reading he did, and it's really beautiful to read this sweeping epic of the artist's life in a novelistic style that is reminiscent of Tolstoy's own. What I love about Tolstoy's life is his contradictions. He preached a kind of selflessness and altruism, but was very selfish and horrible to so many people close to him. Yet, through his hypocrisy, I do think he truly believed in the ideals he preached, and wanted to be good, only he couldn't fully find his way.

My second is a biography of the ballet dancer, Rudolph Nureyev, by Diane Solway. I don't know if it's really a great biography because of the writer, but Nureyev's life is just so insane and cool. He is someone who I distinctly feel had a destiny, and he never wavered from it from a very young age.

The last is a multi-part biography, Simon Callow's biography of Orson Welles. I love Orson Welles' life because even though he achieved so much, and was so talented, he was a failure, and he would say this himself. He also had such an insane life, he was a true prodigy, directing his own theater at 19 years old is wild, and he ending up so far from where he started. The book made me feel that Orson Welles was not purely a genius of the cinematic art, but that he could have done many different things and been world class at them, and that at the end, he felt regret that it was cinema that he chose, maybe because of all of the personal failures and struggles for creative control, or maybe because in the end he felt cinema was perhaps a bit more frivolous than the transcendent art he'd hoped for. It's amazing that even with all his failures, he was widely considered the greatest film director ever until falling a bit out of favor in the last 20 years or so.