Faulkner, "a bunch of rocks in a drying machine"-sometimes, man, you throw out deadly descriptions. Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers. If To the Lighthouse doesn't work for you, try Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves. Orlando is what hooked me to her style, The Waves cemented her brilliance (I'll likely do a video on it soon-ish), and Mrs. Dalloway is masterful (though less personally affecting than the prior two, for me). Thanks so much for following up on the tag! I love your whole selection, and it seems to me you have some fantastic reading ahead of you!
hahaha i’m glad you think so! thanks again for such a great tag. i’m looking forward to your thoughts on The Waves, and i’ll let you know what i think of to the lighthouse when im all finished
hehe my ramblings are turning people onto A Fable more! Awesome list (and awesome tag I might have to take a shot at this tag myself)! Aside from the fact that A Fable is on here, I love the presence of Beloved and Mason & Dixon. Beloved, along with the other books in her Dante-esque trilogy of Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, is actually pretty tough compared to the rest of her works. And part of that is the emotional weight but also the writing style is really rough too. It's not impossible but it can get tiring to read after a while. Mason & Dixon is an interesting choice because, although I haven't read it, I find it a very fascinating novel due to how idiosyncratic it is. Like it kind of has its own language you have to learn, which is something I have only ever really heard from James Joyce, so seeing an american's approach to that style is something I really want to take a stab at. Also thank you for featuring my video in here! And I'm glad I found your channel. You have some pretty incredible taste, I can tell already :) Edit: I also really want that Franklin LIbrary edition. I already have a Franklin Library edition of The Reivers but now I need A Fable. I will have *the* collection of that novel. No one can stop me
Re: Delillo - Be aware that when reading Delillo after reading DFW that the former is writing from the outside perspective of what the latter is in the middle of; DFW is hard and fast into the hyper-post-modern edge-of-the-edge life, Delillo begrudgingly takes note and wonders what's going on with these kids and then returns to his newspaper and coffee. Some of the same ground is covered but at very different speeds.
oh this is such a cool insight i hadn’t thought of before. i’ll definitely keep this in mind when i get to white noise! i think it’ll be a really interesting comparative experience also i love your imagery of delillo peering over his newspaper hahaha
Okay! You really got me thinking with this list. I thought mainly about books I have read in my life, and sorry, have not counted (I'm 59, so I'm guessing it's a good amount). What book excites you because of its COVER? The Bantam Books pbk edition of Little, Big by John Crowley. And...The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective Revised and Expanded. ...because of its AUTHOR? A Wizard of Earthsea: Ursula K. LeGuin Deathbird Stories: Harlan Ellison Fancies and Goodnights: John Collier The Illustrated Man: Ray Bradbury A Dreamer's Tales: Lord Dunsany The Haunting of Hill House: Shirley Jackson The Ends of the Earth: Lucius Shepard ...because of its PREMISE? A Voyage to Arcturus: David Lindsay American Gods: Neil Gaiman Camp Concentration: Thomas Disch ...because of its STYLE? Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: Susanna Clarke The King of Elfland's Daughter: Lord Dunsany The Worm Ouroboros: E.R. Eddison ...because of its INFLUENCE? DUNE: Frank Herbert Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury Don Quixote: Miguel Cervantes ...because of its EMOTIONAL WEIGHT? Captain Corelli's Mandolin: Louis deBernieres Jane Eyre: Charlotte Bronte City of Night: John Rechy Cold Mountain: Charles Frazier Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All: Allan Gurganus ...because of its SENSE OF HUMOR? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Douglas Adams A Confederacy of Dunces: John Kennedy Toole ...because of its DIFFICULTY? Infinite Jest: David Foster Wallace Paradise Lost: John Milton Moonwise: Greer Ilene Gilman I think every reader should think about/write down their own titles for the list. They're really good categories 😊🦄
That’s a beautiful Tolkien set. Reading those books formed me on a deeper level than I think I sometimes realise, like you they feel like home to me. I’m fortunate enough to live close enough to Oxford to go on regular Tolkien sightseeing, still such an important influence on me 🙂 Thanks for your content, Matt
This was a cool assemblage of books. I'm looking forward to reading some of them as well. Mason & Dixon's an excellent example of committing to the bit. The language is definitely the star, but the humor and warmth of the characters, as well as the scope of the novel, make it a special reading experience. Anyway, happy to hear that you're getting into Infinite Jest!
i’ve heard mason and dixon is pynchons most emotionally compelling book, which is so interesting to me… i love books that dive into the dynamics and friendships between two characters (hence why i’ve read LOTR like five times haha), so M&D is the pynchon book that seems most interesting to me
I'm definitely going to hop on this tag in the future. I now have two tags to thank you for putting me on to, so thanks. I cannot wait to see your future Infinite Jest updates in regards to your turnaround mentioned in this video because the last one made me laugh so much. I really like the prompts on the tag although the questions seem like they'll be a ton of work for me. I have now heard about Pynchon so much in the past year that I'm now double curious to read him although I am a bit skeptical because I worry about how deeply American some of these novels might be and hence complicate their accessibility for me. But I guess we'll see in the future. I read Stoner by Williams last year, which I quite liked and although it did not move me so much so to put Butcher's Crossing on an eventual tbr, I just might because Williams is a great storytelling. Lastly, I'd not gone through all the videos on your channel, but I just saw a review of Giovanni's Room which I read for the first time in June and loved so *adds video to cart.* Hope you're well and okay and I hope this is not too long.
Nice video! I'm glad that I found your channel. Cool books in this tag. Probably the most interesting selection that I've seen in one of these videos. Those are some nice editions of Tolkien! I love the illustrations. Mine are paperbacks that I got for 50 cents each from the Library store. I usually find pulps more readable. I don't like holding large books (though I read a lot of doorstoppers so I inevitably do anyway). I like the Michon cover as well. For some reason it reminded me of Steppenwolf. I'll read it in a few days since it's pretty small. Thanks for sharing. Mason & Dixon is super fun! Reading some Henry James prepared me for reading the prose and it's delightful. I'd recommend using the companion by Brett Biebel as you read the book, though it isn't necessary ofc. The Instructions looks interesting. Any writer that has a contributors' history with McSweeney's has usually delighted me. I'll also write that down. Appreciate you sharing it. Gass is one of my favorite writers, but he's a bit too much in large doses (the novel). The Tunnel is pretty unreadable for the first 60-100 pages, and I say that as a huge Gass fan. This book is where his style gets egregious. It's better after that, though, he reels it in. I'd read it in short bursts; Gass himself says that he writes best in "30 page breaths", and for me that's also the best way to read him. I barely made it through Omensetter's Luck, and I wish that I took it slower, since I got desensitized to the interior monologue after a while and everything jumbled up around the third act. I'm still not done with The Tunnel since I'm reading it slowly, though I'm getting close. I didn't really like White Noise. I think it's dated, and I think it's the worst DeLillo offering I've read. Hopefully you enjoy it more than I did! Curious your thoughts about it if you ever do a followup. Not too interested in Woolf and Morrison, for some reason. Am I a misogynist or something? I dunno. I hope not. I read Mrs. Dalloway and thought it was whatever. To The Lighthouse I read in school but don't remember much about it. If you want to try something else for the "Humor" category, the book I've laughed the hardest at was A Confederacy of Dunces by J.K. Toole. It's a comic delight. Wouldn't be surprised if you'd already read it though. Haven't read much Vonnegut, I think just Slaughterhouse 5. Is Faulkner your favorite author? I have Absalom! Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury on my bookshelf but I haven't cracked them open yet. I should probably get to them soon.
any particular books you would recommend as starting points for Gass? i’m unsure if i want to jump into the tunnel for my first book from him lol also, no, i don’t think that inherently makes you a misogynist lol, but maybe i would invite you to sit down and try to identify why they aren’t interesting to you… if you can’t think of anything then that would be a little suspect lol. i do find it a little strange though, bc morrison in particular shares a lot of similarities and is IMO a better writer than most of the people i mentioned on this list haha. so i would be curious to hear why those two in particular you don’t have interest in. and yes! faulkner is my favorite author, tied with morrison. the sound and the fury is absolutely a perfect book and something i wish i could re experience for the first time. you should give it a try!
yeah i'd have to think about it more re:woolf and Morrison and actually give Morrison a shot past sampling 10 pages of one of her books, i don't really know In the Heart of the Heart of Country is a good place to start, the length of the stories suits him well, and you get a small idea of the spite that makes up the emotional backbone of The Tunnel. A lot of people think that Omensetters Luck is his best novel, I think Middle C is his most readable novel with the least egregious stylistic indulgence (but he feels kinda deflated after The Tunnel like he took a big poop writing it or something if you know what I mean, and with Gass the value of the style exceeds the value of the substance so it's hard to say this is even a good thing) the Faulkner I'll read soon for sure then, probably next after i finish my current book. gluck with the reads!
Hi! New subscriber here. I'm a huge John William's fan, have read all of his novels (unfortunately there are only four). I'm vegan and had no interest in a book about killing buffaloes. But because it's John Williams, I gave it a try. Although it is my least favourite of his works, I still love it, because in the usual Williams style, it is a book about looking for a sense in life and the story is just a vehicle for it. Only an author like him could make me reading a story like this.
I've read a few Delillos and he has such a specific writing style you can spot a mile away. White Noise was definitely my favorite, ridiculous and insane but also so so much fun.
loved this! so many books so little time. those copies of Lord of the Rings are beautiful!! (also at 16:16 I really, really feel that pain of the printed-on-sticker. I saw a book at B&N with a circle that read "FAMOUS TIKTOK AUTHOR" - and not to throw any shade on TikTok or the author at all, but it seemed like such a weird thing to permanently brand right next to the title.)
aren’t they so nice! i like refuse to annotate them and mess them up haha. i should get a cheaper paperback edition just so i can mark it up a bit. and famous tiktok artist 😂😅 they must know their audience
Hi Matt. I just finished To the Lighthouse. It's very good. Experimental, but not in an off-putting way. It builds to a fine end point that resonates with the reader. I hope you enjoy it too.
Hearing Faulkner’s stream of consciousness style being compared to rocks in a washing machine is the best thing I’ve heard all day 😂 I couldn’t have put it better
Great novel “To the Lighthouse” so is “Heart of Darkness” by Conrad … my favorite DeLillo was Americana & The Names… I just finished The Rabbit Hutch … enjoyed it … she knocked it out of the park with Beloved … Stoner by John Williams is also a terrific book … yeah Vonnegut is a romp… particularly Sirens of Titan… I also enjoyed Mosquitoes (early Faulkner) … also check out Faulkner’s Sanctuary … rather quirky & disjointed … but not as much as The Sound & The Fury… I needed cliff notes for that…
I’m excited about reading The master and margarita and rereading East of Eden hopefully this year. Also Moby Dick is a book I can’t wait to tackle. The problem is that they are all big books and after finishing The brothers Karamazov I also am in need of a shorter book. One that is apparently also very funny (and quite short) is Three men in a boat. Have it on my bookshelf and thinking it might be a good casual summer read🏕️
