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neversickanymore said:
I didn’t it got shelved permanently.. because of the structure of his writing style I went over half way through expecting it to get good.. yeah no
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You know when you're loyal to an author and you stick with one of their lesser works so to speak. Will that happen to me with Joseph Heller when I read Catch 22 I was in high school and completely read it on my own you know llooing forward to the next time I could be turning the pages. Filled with great characters with soul and FUNNY... eventually though everything comes to an end and I set about finding what else he had written and it turned out he only had one sophomore novel called Something Happened. Only nothing much happened.

I read it all the way through out of a sense that it was about to turn into an amazing book. But it never did because it was about a dysfunctional family and not a bunch of bomber crews stuck on an island in the Mediterranean during World War II, unless they were in Rome cavorting with prostitutes. But the catch was that if you didn't want to fly any more missions which were highly dangerous and something like a third of all crews died... then you were deemed sane and fit to continue flying more bombing missions the minimum number required for discharge always being raised.
 
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darvocet21 said:
You know when you're loyal to an author and you stick with one of their lesser works so to speak. Will that happen to me with Joseph Heller when I read Catch 22 I was in high school and completely read it on my own you know llooing forward to the next time I could be turning the pages. Filled with great characters with soul and FUNNY... eventually though everything comes to an end and I set about finding what else he had written and it turned out he only had one sophomore novel called Something Happened. Only nothing much happened.

I read it all the way through out of a sense that it was about to turn into an amazing book. But it never did because it was about a dysfunctional family and not a bunch of bomber crews stuck on an island in the Mediterranean during World War II, unless they were in Rome cavorting with prostitutes. But the catch was that if you didn't want to fly any more missions which were highly dangerous and something like a third of all crews died... then you were deemed sane and fit to continue flying more bombing missions the minimum number required for discharge always being raised.
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I hear that. The novel was unfinished when he killed himself. In the pre text Michael Pietsch, who edited the novel together from.. well here is an account "THE PALE KING is a 538-page patchwork of episodes revealing that DFW brilliance, pieced together from notes, finished chapters, and fragments by his editor, Michael Pietsch."
Says that basically this is novel that goes nowhere and DFW has a character.. a substitute Accounting Uni professor that expounds that the accountants and others doomed to mire in utterly mind destroying minotinuose unsatisfying labor are the true hero's.

My review would be this novel is about some of the most mundane, buricratic, tramitcally unfulfilling areas in all of life. It starts that way, stays that way and never even hints at any relief and it goes no ware and does nothing. Its a not a suicide note.. it's a suicide novel. Its brilliant, but its brilliance is so repugnant that it may have caused the final straw that even its creator couldn't escape and decided to lop himself

www.newyorker.com

David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass “Infinite Jest”

From 2009: The sadness over the author’s death, D. T. Max writes, was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
 
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neversickanymore said:
I hear that. The novel was unfinished when he killed himself. In the pre text Michael Pietsch, who edited the novel together from.. well here is an account "THE PALE KING is a 538-page patchwork of episodes revealing that DFW brilliance, pieced together from notes, finished chapters, and fragments by his editor, Michael Pietsch."

My review would be this novel is about some of the most mundane, buricratic, tramitcally unfulfilling areas in all of life. It starts that way, stays that way and never even hints at any relief and it goes no ware and does nothing. Its a not a suicide note.. it's a suicide novel. Its brilliant, but its brilliance is so repugnant that it may have caused the final straw that even its creator couldn't escape and decided to lop himself

www.newyorker.com

David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass “Infinite Jest”

From 2009: The sadness over the author’s death, D. T. Max writes, was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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Good Lord!
 
neversickanymore said:
www.newyorker.com

David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass “Infinite Jest”

From 2009: The sadness over the author’s death, D. T. Max writes, was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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Speaking of Infinite Jest, I'm 50 pages in. I was apprehensive at first but I'm starting to get into it. It's elicited a few chuckles. I appreciate Wallace's Canada fetish. He's a bit sloppy with his drugs, though; I guess Bluelight and Erowid weren't around back then to double check these things!
 
S.J.B. said:
Speaking of Infinite Jest, I'm 50 pages in. I was apprehensive at first but I'm starting to get into it. It's elicited a few chuckles. I appreciate Wallace's Canada fetish. He's a bit sloppy with his drugs, though; I guess Bluelight and Erowid weren't around back then to double check these things!
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Infinite Jest is an astounding work imho.. wait for it though.. on big picture drug overview.. especially the fellowships.. pure $$$.. I don't think I have ever read anyone write it better. But its more than that.. he nails it.. even when he presents the grass addict and the weird thought dysfunction that accompanies addiction. Even tip of the iceberg when he talks about the never ending last fucking time.. $$$.. and every question all of us have had with the fellowships.. he just nails it.

I also love the tennis academy interludes.. and the unprecedented characters he writes in these and the whole novel. Fucking unmatched brilliance. its amazing.. and for sure laughing the fuck out loud at many points..

I think thats why I invested so much pain into The Pale King.. I think thats also why I feel TPK was a brilliant mind trap suiside novel that may have been an attempt to bring the reader into an experience the author faced that ultimately caused him to take his own life.
 
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Next by Michael Lewis: Lewis is best known for Liar's Poker and The Big Short and is my favourite non-fiction writer. Next was published in 2001 and is an interesting piece of Internet history. Lewis tells the stories of several outsiders who use the Internet to stick it to the man. The Internet he describes is naive and hopeful. He speculates on its coming impacts, in some cases being quite prescient (predicting that cell phones would overtake personal computers as our main conduit to the Internet, predicting the massive market power of companies that use surveillance and data collection to target ads) while in others being quite off the mark (he thought TiVo was going to be way more important than it ended up being).

I'm still quite amazed by how completely and bloodlessly the corporate world retook control of music and video from the Internet pirates, and it would be interesting to hear Lewis's perspective today on how things have ended up vs. how he pictured them ending up then.
 
darvocet21 said:
You know when you're loyal to an author and you stick with one of their lesser works so to speak. Will that happen to me with Joseph Heller when I read Catch 22 I was in high school and completely read it on my own you know llooing forward to the next time I could be turning the pages. Filled with great characters with soul and FUNNY... eventually though everything comes to an end and I set about finding what else he had written and it turned out he only had one sophomore novel called Something Happened. Only nothing much happened.

I read it all the way through out of a sense that it was about to turn into an amazing book. But it never did because it was about a dysfunctional family and not a bunch of bomber crews stuck on an island in the Mediterranean during World War II, unless they were in Rome cavorting with prostitutes. But the catch was that if you didn't want to fly any more missions which were highly dangerous and something like a third of all crews died... then you were deemed sane and fit to continue flying more bombing missions the minimum number required for discharge always being raised.
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Catch 22 is immortal claasis especially in the field of"anti-war"style."Something happening-can't finish it.Boring somehow.It did not grab me.For me there are authors,which almost all books are very strong.And lot of other famous authors with lot of books,but inspirwd me really only one.Keruack,Burroughs....and many others-have one great bokkk for me.Others like Remark&Stainbeck-almost true classic.all good....but that are my preferences
 
Nas47 said:
Catch 22 is immortal claasis especially in the field of"anti-war"style."Something happening-can't finish it.Boring somehow.It did not grab me.For me there are authors,which almost all books are very strong.And lot of other famous authors with lot of books,but inspirwd me really only one
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The thing about Heller is that his writing is super simple and so it's probably easy to translate into different languages without losing too much of the humor and anguish of being in a war where you basically told you're going to get shot at hope to see you in about 6 hours. Kurt Vonnegut was like that too
 
Ye man.wish i could read this in original.never tried.but even translated-think all of ideas,humour..etc are feel perfect
 
You got another great american.Ambroce Bierce-"Satan's vocabulary",some short stories....about the civil war too.He lived19th. Century.Funny&Excentric!
 
Nas47 said:
You got another great american.Ambroce Bierce-"Satan's vocabulary",some short stories....about the civil war too.He lived19th. Century.Funny&Excentric!
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Devil's Dictionary yeah a great book interesting translation of title
 
hydroazuanacaine said:
“I always liked those candy cigarettes,” I said. “The ones with the red tips.”

She shook her head and said, “These didn’t have red tips,” like it was the saddest thing in the world.
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that's true there were candy cigarettes with colored ends and ones that were solid white I guess those were the lights
 
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Reading the 4th book in The Demon Cycle series now, so good been a real page turner ever since I picked it up. Have an autographed copy as well, have been reading this series for years since it first came out, read the first 3 books as they were released but then I took a break for some years and then was in a bookstore with my girlfriend recently and decided to pick this one up.

It's a fantasy which is my favorite genre and one of the coolest things about them in particular is the magic system that is used. It is a low-magic style which means that individuals don't have the personal ability to cast spells themselves. Instead it works through a ward system where if you draw a particular design on the ground, weapon, wall or yourself it will now grant that protection or an ability.

In the story the world is over run by Demons that come outta the core/center of the earth at night and they all have different types like for instance rock demons, wind demons etc. And to fight them off and protect them the characters have to use wards against rock and etc. It is a really great storyline as well and is a sun-genre called dark fantasy which means some really graphic and disturbing things take place it's a rated R novel in a sense, this is no book for younger people in that sense. There is sex and extreme violence, it's so cool. Really recommend to start with the first book called The Warded Man, it's incredible.
 
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