What Are You Reading Right Now?

Oh, nice. His stuff is one of a handful of things I'm an effusive evangelist for, IE: I'll completely burn my rec cred, such as it is, in a way I won't with most things, so I hope this is the case.

I have not, but if Chiang's work made you think of Saunders, that's reason enough for me to give him a shot. Thanks.

Yay, so glad you're liking it so far! I'm most of the way through Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These, so our Irish literature exchange program is well underway!

So mostly Saunders is not sci-fi, and the connection for me is that I simply think they are both very evocative writers who do a great job at both setting up memorable premises, and then also populating those stories with deeply-felt characters. (I feel like many writers can do one or the other well, but doing both is rare and delightful). Literally whenever I see or think of the title Lincoln in the Bardo, I can almost feel physically the way I felt listening to it for the first time.

Yeah, no worries on the sci-fi thing. I like sci-fi, but mostly I like the memorable premise thing, which just happens to show up a lot more in speculative fiction.

I've already bought one of the short story collections, will give it a try.

Small Things Like These was alright, which is about as enthusiastic as I can get about anything that has been written in the last forty years.

i recently started Ulysses and this shit is way above my pay grade.

i've also been plucking away at Ducks, Newburyport for forever now as the book i read a few pages of during my commute. surprisingly readable for a book that's mostly one run-on sentence for a thousand pages.

Great, I hope you like it! Tenth of December is one of my favorite books to catch a glimpse of on my shelf.

I think you need to read I Cheerfully Refuse.

I didn't make it either.


My memories are it starts pretty dry, then has a really great bit where a guy is walking down a beach watching a dog piss or something, then goes into a long slog of newspaper people sitting around talking about newspaper stuff and I bailed.


Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is the Joyce that does a lot of his fun weird amazing stuff without feeling like a Latin/Gaelic Encyclopedia being dropped on your head

Dubliners is really good too, even if it's a little standard compared to his rest.

And Finnegan's Wake....I didn't finish that one either, but at least with it and unlike Ulysses, you don't even have to pretend that you know what is going on. It's basically like reading a completely new language so it's sort of fun to just pick up and just read chunks of from time to time. He makes up some great sounding words.

Never heard of it, probably since I like to pretend no new books have been written since 1965

yeah i'm not too far in yet but it's been getting more fun as it goes. i do look forward to Finnegan's Wake for the stated reasons i love just ripping through fun prose without a thought.

You know what else I bet you would like: Creation Lake.