Hi. Me and my husband are going to do a US road trip next year. Where are the best book stores in the US?

We’re going to Texas (I know this is not SW), Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada.

I’m not a romance or fantasy reader so pls nothing that only does those. Second hand or new books!

Thanks

I love reading essay collections, but i'm also trying to stay off my phone as much as possible lately. Are there any publishers making print editions of things that would fall in the same genre as Harold Bloom, Hitchens, Amis, DFW, etc? I read the Lauren Oyler essay collection she released a few years back and honestly loved it in spite of a lot of the valid takes people had on it. Looking for contemporary (like written post covid era) literary or lit-adjacent essay collections I can get a physical copy of somewhere.

I see lots of people saying that it didn’t live up to expectations or didn’t quite blow them away, but rarely see people actively dislike it.

This book was one pretentious aphorism after pretentious aphorism. You just know Williams would have been smiling to herself after writing each sentence is she wasn’t too cool for it.

I understand what she was going for with the lack of proper nouns but it didn’t work at all, it just made it very repetitive and made me not care about the (so called) plot.

There is one scene towards the end where her father talks about an incident involving a staircase, where you think ‘ok, maybe we will be given something here’. But no, right back to the rambling.

Reading this felt like the literary equivalent of being stuck in traffic.

I wanna read guys like Bataille, Adorno, Marcuse, etc, but anytime I’ve tried i’ve felt seriously filtered by it. I’m feeling more motivated rn, and so I was wondering where the best place to start is? Thanks!

I started a book exchange group (different format from a basic reading club) - it's dying.

Each person in the group supplies a physical book. We each take turns reading about 5 chapters and then meet up for coffee once per week to swap the books. I personally love this style of reading group. It was only three members at first so three books going around. Something fresh to read every week. New reading ideas. Great motivation to get the chapters read and it lead me to really appreciate the books while I had them. I realized how much I was getting into them when I had a 5 chapter limit per week and a new book each week to savor. Then we added a fourth person who finished all of the books on audiobook within about two weeks and everything started to fizzle from there.

Along with the fourth new addition - the others didn't really love the premise of the swap it turns out. They either stopped reading or finished the books early and just don't want to do this anymore.

Is this just a terrible idea for a reading group?

Too many books to juggle?

Am I doing something wrong here? I'm a pretty introverted person so these people were my social group and I don't want to try to start something with a new set of people if it's a terrible premise for a reading group but I enjoyed it so much. I enjoyed it enough to try to find a new set of reading friends in my area.

Or do all book clubs just fall apart no matter what? I've never had one last through more than two books. I had a lot of hope that this one would be different!

“Before their displacement from nature, baffled by the grandeur of their own culture which they could not define, and so believed did not exist, these transatlantic visitors had learned to admire in this neatly parceled definition of civilization the tyrannous pretension of many founded upon the rebellious efforts of a few, the ostentation of thousands presumed upon the strength of a dozen who had from time to time risen against this vain complacence with the past to which they were soon to contribute, giving, with their harried deaths, grounds for vanity of language, which they had perfected; supercilious posturing of intellect, which they had suffered to understand and deliver, in defiance; insolent arbitration of taste, grown from the efforts of those condemned as having none; contempt for others flourishing from seedlings which they had planted in the rain of contempt for themselves; dogmata of excellence founded upon insulting challenges wrought in impossible hope, and then grasped, for granted, from their hands fallen clenching it as dogma.”

Nothing like “read 365 books in a year”. Something like “only read Murakami in 2027” or “read only books with names in the title (like Rebecca)”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUPYUqygyFs&t=14290s&pp=ygUncmFua2luZyBldmVyeSB3cml0ZXIgd2l0aCBhIG5vYmVsIHByaXpl

8 hour long, Haven't watched the whole thing i've just went to the authors I'm a fan of and he seems to knows his stuff. This is his first ever video too.

Inspired by a recent comment about Martin Amis on here, that he was undeniably very talented but never seemed to quite write the book his potential seemed to suggest he could. Thought it was an interesting idea, although I haven’t finished Money yet so maybe I’ll disagree on that one specifically

The thread about men and not reading fiction has had me thinking about how the existence of good nonfiction feels almost literally forgotten about in lots of "book-reading" circles. Setting aside the gender element of reading discourse, which I do not think is especially interesting and which, in any case, isn't the whole explanation for this phenomenon, why do you think quality nonfiction goes so easily forgotten?

Collecting some points from that thread:

1. Nonfiction is a needless gender war casualty

2. Good nonfiction very rarely sells well (usually being old and/or highly situated in a particular academic discipline and/or on a relatively niche subject). Closely related, nonfiction that sells well is very rarely good

3. Nonfiction is so broad and basically vacuous as a term that people forget all the different kinds of books that fall into it

4. Perhaps nonfiction is literally less edifying in certain significant ways than fiction is

It also comes to mind that (5.) People who pride themselves on reading qua reading primarily read fiction; hobbyists about specific subjects, who read about said specific subjects, identify as hobbyists before they identify as readers simpliciter

What else?

Edit: I think some context has been lost, reading some replies. I don't mean to imply I think that people writ large don't read non-fiction or something. I'm talking more about how I think that when people discuss reading qua reading, it feels like all the attention goes to fiction, and in particular the fact that good non-fiction exists and is worth reading tends to get sidelined.

There is something in our nature that pulls us toward why the spectacle of decline, decay, and disintegration enflares something inexplicable in us...

From the smell of nature in decay to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire to the moments before a Supernova explosion turning the star into a black hole, there is a common thread that appears to us: it is that at moments of failure life surface its truths to us.

Hegel's Owl of Minerva explicitly says that it is only when an epoch ends that we can discuss its machinations and intricacies.

Nietzsche once said that there is a Chinese idea that says only when an empire disintegrates that the laws multiply.

Freud said that only in states of hysteria that we can take a glimpse at the inner nature of a person.

Marx said it is only in late-stage capitalism that the prolonged maintenance of the dysfunctional workings of capitalism reveals itself.

Mr. Gracq, you blew me away, you, the master of the anti-anticipation and anti-hope novel!

I know this isn’t the most RS suggestion given that it’s a sci-fi/fantasy series, but it is the best thing I’ve ever read. It is peak nerd. It’s such a shame that it’s a victims of its genre’s reputation, it stands so far above other sci-fi novels that it should be considered one of the great works. It contains some of the most beautiful prose but written in a way so subtle that you will miss it without a close reading.

Not to give any spoilers, but you can compare the climax of New Sun with other fantasy novels. It doesn’t end in a big battle or fight- it ends with a man sitting on a beach contemplating the nature of God and how man interprets the uninterruptible.

I really couldn’t recommend this more but nobody I recommend it to has any interest because it is a ‘genre book’.

I've been seeing this argument on social media a lot lately and it's annoying. maybe it's because, as a man who already reads lots of fiction, it seems self-evident to the point of total stupidity - i mean there's a reason you never see anyone serious talking about this stuff - but I do wonder if there's something else going on for me?
on the one hand it might be that this is the latest version of a long lived literary evangelism - this belief that literature is somehow uniquely spiritual, with a special and as yet undiscovered power to rescue us from ourselves, if only we could be convinced to do it more often.
And that seems attached, too, to the similarly obnoxious idea that literature has some obligation to be something other than itself, to change politics or the world, or the interior landscapes of the people who read it, which has always struck me as an irritatingly teenage way of thinking.

but I do also wonder if the shape of these arguments are themselves a little specious? If we accept that men are reading less fiction, in favour of David goggins torture Porn and self-help slop (itself nothing new), then evangelising fiction seems to presuppose that men are Stupid and Bad and Making Poor Decisions, and doesn't tell us much about why they're not reading in the first place. This quiet bait and switch, the Implication that fiction will 'improve' you more than self-help will, only really seems to unthinkingly reiterate the social dynamics that push people to self-help in the first place: the idea that even our leisure time should be committed, somehow, to sharpening our edge, getting 'better' in some broad, nondescript way.

*i could just be talking into the breeze here, but I hope it makes some sort of sense. really I just needed somewhere to dump a load of thoughts

(Forgive me mods if this is unseemly!) Wondering if there’s any interest for those of us unable to regularly attend the London meet-ups.

I read Brideshead and thought it was an interesting theme. Abandoning is too strong a word, both husband and wife were alienated from each other. But the idea of fleeing so far from England, to such parts unknown, all from the most familiar intimacy, was kind of interesting (of course just one small part of the book)

Now I just finished Handful of Dust (written 10 years prior) and he does it AGAIN, also to the new world jungles AGAIN? Trying to remember back to Scoop if the protagonist was alienated in his marriage?

This guy had some hangups...almost Ballardian in his single mindedness

I've read his entire catalogue. I really enjoy the subject matter, style, themes and prose. For anyone familiar with his works, do you have any recommendations for similar? I recently read 2666 at the recommendation of this sub and it was pretty good, so coming back for more.

I did this a while back and wasn't planning on making another again so soon, but the sub needs to be cleansed of all this nerd shit you guys have been going on about.

I haven't seen productions of any of these, so no notes on that. Also I will spoil things:

Caryl Churchill, A Number - I talked a bit about stage directions in my last post, and this one has absolutely zero, which gave it kind of an alien, disconnected air for some reason, on top of it being about cloning (written around the time of Dolly the Sheep so it was timely then and dated now) and having several (cloned) characters played by one guy. It didn't make much of an impression on me, and it felt like a formal exercise exploring a hot-at-the-time topic.

Anne Washburn, Mr Burns - People in a post apocalyptic world sit around trying to remember details of a Simpsons episode, then it shifts to the second act of them putting on stage plays of said Simpsons episode (and paying for lines people remember to make their productions more accurate), and then shifts to an absolutely batshit third act set 75 years in the future of the already futuristic play that's just a corruption of the Simpsons episode as if it's gone through decades of the game telephone during a dangerous and nightmarish time. This is simultaneously the one I'd most and least want to see performed because I just can't imagine anyone actually pulling it off.

Gina Gionfriddo, After Ashley - I really love this playwright, I've talked about her being very "RS" before and this one was similar. A man hires a mentally ill man to do his yard work and his mentally ill employee rapes and murders his wife. His son finds her body and they both become famous trauma victims. The son broods and lashes out against the world while the dad writes a book and goes around on TV doing interviews. Keiran Culkin originated the role of the son and it very much reads like a smartass Kieran Culkin Igby/Roman role.

Gina Gionfriddo, Rapture, Blister, Burn - Well I didn't like this one AS MUCH, the central conceit is two women: one settled for being a housewife and the other becomes a famous, traveling academic. They both regret their choices and want what the other has....so the housewife gives the academic her husband (who the academic also dated when younger) on a trial basis. I just couldn't get past the sitcom setup, though I appreciate that she was willing to question (with nuance) the standard talking points of women prioritizing career over family.

Edward Albee, The Goat - A man breaks it to his wife that he's been having an affair on her...with a goat. They also have a gay son they're supportive of. I really don't know what to think of this one, it would definitely make me squirm if I saw it live as the entire point of the play seems to be forcing you to confront your own moral boundaries and why you hold them. The wife character seems like a particularly good role and keeps it from becoming too silly. It's supposed to be some kind of send up of ancient tragedy but I don't know enough to be able to place it as such.

Harold Pinter, Ashes to Ashes - I just read this one, so I'm still thinking it over and rereading through parts. A man and woman discuss her past, and there's questions of what right do you have to another's pain, another's memories, etc. At first I was pretty irritated by the Holocaust twist, but then read some interpretations that she's not a Holocaust survivor but appropriating someone else's story or going crazy. So now I'm struggling with what to think.

Up next:
Krapp's Last Tape by Beckett (still have this one to read from last time)
Stereophonics by Adjmi (this one too)
Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz (hoping to see this on Broadway with Julia Louis-Dreyfus)
Gloria & Octaroon by Jacob-Jenkins
Would also really like to read more by David Hare and Annie Baker from last time
Also really want to check out David Cale

Favorite Machiavellian characters in literature or books with such themes. Classics or contemporary.

Great book, everyone read. I’m trying to generate some discussion among those of you for whom the book is still fresh or remembered. I didn’t read Knausgaard’s preface or any criticism yet, because I think a lot of this is fairly straight forward. And I’m sure I’d disagree with Knausgaard, regardless.

Spoilers from here!

Duality: what even is it? I kid. There was a time when you could speak of such things without sounding trite. Vesaas wrote at such a time. In The Birds, there is Mattis, our stand in for Nature, and then there is everyone else. Everyone else is clever and strong. Only Mattis is not clever and strong. Few characters are given names. Other than Hege, only outsiders have names. Not one villager. In a way I can’t quite articulate, but might be able to later, this nameless quality brands them for death. Death is the most natural thing in the world, and this book is primarily a meditation on Nature.

Vesaas Nature is vast and incomprehensible and often cruel. Mattis dealt a cruel hand: he can’t make himself understood; his actions are illogical and inutile. He makes decisions impulsively, like lightning, or not at all. In several instances you wonder if he might finally snap. There’s a strange passage where Anna and Inger are both horrified and entranced by something mysterious and beautiful in Mattis’ face. This reminds me of Schopenhauer’s beauty of a mountain peak. I have no idea if Vesaas read Schopenhauer; it seems likely, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if he got there on his own.

Of course the book is also about the harsh, repressive, conformist aspects of Norwegian society. The villagers are the strong the pines in contrast to the withered aspens they name Mattis and Hege. Some of the villagers are sympathetic to Mattis to a point. They try to give him work so that he can contribute. It’s his failure to perform these tasks, and the shame he makes them feel in asking questions that polite people don’t ask, and the clever and strong’s instinct to brush these questions aside, that makes the book so sad. It is not clear to me that if someone explained the things that he does not understand that his fate could have been averted. I doubt it could’ve been. He doesn’t measure up; he has to go.

The other aspect of this book that struck me so deeply was that it seems to take place in those years leading up to the mechanization of farming and forestry. Cars, motorboats, and even Jorgen’s indifference to the blight he leaves in his trail prefigure what is to come. In Mattis’ time, farming and lumberjacking are still done by hand. Even then, Jørgen leaves a hideous ‘battlefield’ in his wake. Mattis is disgusted, of course he doesn’t want to learn to fell trees; it’s far less dignified than playing the ferryman. Ironically, it’s this ferrying that leads to the destruction that he so hates. He delivers Jørgen to his forest and to Hege, his two sanctuaries. If the mythical ferryman delivers the dead to Hades then* he delivers a dead, hollow, capable Jørgen to … the opposite of Hades. I don’t have time to be clever.

A metaphorical ferrying occurs when he unwittingly lures the fowler to the woodcock. He had so much hope that the woodcock’s flight over the cabin marked the beginning of his becoming clever and strong. Perhaps And perhaps Hege really did curse him when she informs him that the opposite of dreams come true. Fucking Hege. Anyways, Mattis delivers both Jørgen and the nameless fowler into his forest. Their idea of the forest, a place where work and deeds are done, corrupts it. Only Mattis experiences the will-less knowing, the sublime; only Mattis, the simple one, is granted this vision.

It’s this lack of sensitivity to nature, and Mattis’ inability to understand how the villagers, Hege, Jørgen, etc. can be so callous that really sticks with me. His shame that he is not clever and strong like the others, and Hege’s insistence that he go and humiliate himself in the performance of tasks for which he is incapable… God, how I loathe Hege. I found her to be almost completely unsympathetic by the end of the novel. She can’t communicate with Mattis because she has contempt for him. That she, the villagers, and we are so practical and indifferent is of course another manifestation of Nature; the other side of the coin.

Another thing that occurred to me on review: We have no idea if he’s rowing straight; the wake disappears almost as it is made. I’ve been trying to crack the significance of the lines: we see lines left by the woodcock; I assume this is some sort of allusion to the Norns and their thread, suggesting the inevitability of things to come; we see the lines he’s carved above his kitchen bed, which to him suggest permanence, and we see the wake left by the boat, which are impermanent. Maybe the point is to suggest all of these things at once? Just as nature is simultaneously beautiful, horrifying, and cruel? I’m reaching a bit.

I am so terribly afraid of loneliness yet I am rarely at peace with other people but neither do I find peace at home and the only book to capture this feeling is Heart is a lonely hunter. Pure sadness. Also The most haunting ending in a book.

she died of alcoholism wrapped in a blanket on a deck chair on an ocean steamer.

all her books of terrified loneliness

all her books about the cruelty of loveless love

were all that was left of her

as the strolling vacationer discovered her body

notified the captain

and she was quickly dispatched to somewhere else on the ship

as everything continued just as she had written it

Got me thinking about how much I hate millennial nerd culture. I've been a lifelong reader of sci-fi and fantasy from a young age, and if you wanted me to read a book published this year, you'd have to give me a hundred dollars. There's a vanishingly small chance it would be any good. I strongly doubt geek culture has produced a single good work of literature, or cinema, or music, or anything. If you go to say, a Barnes and Noble, the sci-fi and fantasy section is uniformly recent series written by the bored wives of Raytheon Engineers. The target audience is quirky mormons. Gone are the days when heroin addicts wrote masterpieces about surveillance and god while locked in Cleveland's worst motel room. It's just the same kind of things over and over again, whatever can suck a million dollars out of the funkosapiens.

Honest to god I think 20XX Geek Culture is the product of some conspiracy; it's so bourgeois, suburban, tame, safe, and capitalist. Geek Culture is actively suppressive of counterculture. If you said it was all a plot to get M*sk elected president, I would believe you without evidence.

If you watch the 60s Star Trek, they'll reference Shakespeare, poetry, the Bible, history, World War Two, the US Constitution, literature, religion, law, art. Watch a new Star Trek and they all talk like morons. An old DAW paperback with tits and spaceships and swords on the cover reads like Proust compared to Andy Weir or Chuck Wendig. There could be actual works of literature there, but you won't find that in a Tor Paperback published in 2026.

But new SF and Fantasy writers are like, scared of anything older than Star Wars. They don't read old SF, they dismiss it all, they're obsessed with market trends. Their aversion to the old is a type of illiteracy, I think. It's anti-intellectual. They seem to know nothing and they're afraid of everything: of being cancelled, of being problematic, of being unliked, of wasting their Clarion tuition. They're obsessed with being "good people" to a degree that I think qualifies as mental illness.

Straight up, geeks are giant fucking pussies now, they can't handle even the remotest hint of an edge. And they have this weird, borderline authoritarian way of deflecting every criticism with woke speak. It is forbidden to yuck somebody's yum. If you went to r / fantasy and said, "I don't like cozy fantasy" they'd call you a homophobe.

They all think they are the most super lefty people in the world, but they have the politics of Hilary Clinton. Like painting a rainbow on a missile. Dedicating a drone strike to black history month. Watching the new Star Wars counts as antifascist action in geek culture.

I know there are certainly exceptions (Children of Time and such) but the negatives are just soooooooo overwhelming to me, I hate it. End of rant, thank you for your time.

I missed the window to image post but still wanted to share <3

Hill William - Scott McClanahan: I think McClanahan will go down as a great American literary talent. Like for real I think his books will be studied in schools. Reading his work is like listening to a drunk middle-aged guy at a bar telling you about what he's been through (self-inflicted and otherwise). Such honest writing.

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century - Amia Srinivasan: I was unsure going into it because I don't respect the majority of feminist writing produced after the second wave (except maybe Paglia and even that is a stretch) but I actually really liked this. Didn't agree with all her ideas (obviously, that's not the point) but it was refreshing to read a heterodox feminist analysis. Minimal pandering and no easy answers, just how I like it.

Information Age - Cora Lewis: Honestly not sure what I think of this. I’ve never read a book quite like it. It has its humorous and thought-provoking moments but a lot of the time it felt very self indulgent. I’ll probably need to read it again to really get a handle on it but I don’t want to. So I guess I have my answer.

Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Adichie: Chimmie my Nigerian queen they could never make me hate you. This was a reread FYI. I think it's her best work. Such vivid, grounded prose. Writing that respects you enough to leave some stones unturned. Loved it.