Good books?

[the Talking Can]

Originally Posted by cheeeefs

yeah, I haven't gotten through all of them yet either. It isn't on any of my required readings, and I don't have any time to read anything else now so I had to put them down about 8 months ago.

Wallace is a genious, and he is just an interesting individual, after reading "Good Old Neon" (truthfully the only one I've read :/) I decided to research him a little more, he's got some interesting quotes. I found this weblog that does really nice critiques about midpage they do one on this guy (took me forever to refind this sight) http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading...ental_fiction/

Here's an excerpt that I liked

"DFW: …I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself?

DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis's "American Psycho": it panders shamelessly to the audience's sadism for a while, but by the end it's clear that the sadism's real object is the reader herself."

and

"LM: Are you saying that writers of your generation have an obligation not only to depict our condition but also to provide the solutions to these things?

DFW: I don't think I'm talking about conventionally political or social action-type solutions. That's not what fiction's about. Fiction's about what it is to be a ****ing human being."

that sounds about right...a better place to start might be "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men".....his first collection of short stories, both easier to read and, imho, better than Oblivion...there is a story called, I think, "The Depressed Person" which was orginally published in Harpers and is so brutal and funny I can't describe it...I mean laughing till it hurts funny, written in the voice of a narcissistic young woman whose every thought is about herself and how terrible her life is even though there doesn't seem to be any real problems in her life outside of her incredible self-centeredness...something about the voice is so dead-on, exactly like a person who spent their days watching Ophrah/Dr. Phil etc. would talk

anyways, people were outraged and flooded Harpers with letters claiming he was insensitive and "how dare he make fun of depression" etc...but really they all felt like he was ridiculing them, individually, and their obsessions with their petty problems...and he was, which makes it even funnier.....if you've ever got 20 minutes in book store or library read it, you'll be hooked