Recommend Books on This Thread

10 posts

Niccolo and Donkey
Cornelio
Roland popfop niccolo and donkey , @ 250 pound secretary reading 50 Shades of Grey Porkchop Holocaust Drieu Thoughts Bronze Age Pervert Misologos

Some books I have read in the last few months:

I am Charlotte Simmons - Tom Wolfe
Abject artistic failure by Wolfe. An incommensurably stupid book. I predict none of the stuff this old fool has written will be read in 10 years time.

The Painted Word - Tom Wolfe
Another idiotic, irrelevant essay by the gloating fossil. Remarkable for its ability to present vapid, unexceptional ideas as groundbreaking cosmic revelations.

A Man in Full - Tom Wolfe
An artificial, moralistic excrement of a novel, proposing salvation via cardboard, out-of-context stoicism. Its greatest merit would be making said ancient roman philosophy appear even more cretinous than the original. Essentially a book for very unintelligent readers.

Lo Prohibido (The Forbidden) - Benito Pérez Galdós
Galdós is supposed to be the spanish answer to Zola, and this is more than correct: both are equally unnerving, and the stench of their moralism ascends to the skies with equal pungency. From all the works of Galdós I have read this is by far the worst, in that he's not even using his own (untalented) voice, but plagiarizing the french literary currents of the day. By all means avoid like the plague.

Narraciones - Jorge Luis Borges
Delightful little gems selected by the master himself for this volume. Immortal art, the short narrative form in its highest expression.
Drieu

Agreed about Tom Wolfe, though "radical chic" is a good coinage.


I haven't read this one, but are you familiar with Fortunata y Jacinta ? That's usually considered his masterpiece.


Have you read Leopoldo Lugones? Borges credited him with the invention of modern Argentine literature. His short story collection Las fuerzas extrañas contains many of the fantasy elements that Borges would later popularize. He was also a talented poet and one of the chief literary voices of Argentine nationalism.

Borges's personal selections for the Library of Babel and Personal Library bring attention to many worthy titles. :thumbsup: next to the ones I have read and recommend.

The Library of Babel
Jack London, The Concentric Deaths
Gustav Meyrink, Cardinal Napellus
Léon Bloy, Discourteous Tales :thumbsup:
Giovanni Papini, The Escaping Mirror :thumbsup:
Oscar Wilde, The Crime of Lord Arthur Savile
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, The Guest at the Last Banquet :thumbsup:
Pedro de Alarcón, The Friend of Death
Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener :thumbsup:
William Beckford, Vathek
H. G. Wells, The Door in the Wall
P'u Sung-Ling, The Tiger Guest
Arthur Machen, The Shining Pyramid
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Island of the Voices :thumbsup:
G. K. Chesterton, The Eye of Apollo
Jacques Cazotte, The Devil in Love :thumbsup:
Franz Kafka, The Vulture
Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
Leopoldo Lugones, The Statue of Salt :thumbsup:
Rudyard Kipling, The House of Desires :thumbsup:
The Thousand and One Nights, according to Galland
The Thousand and One Nights, according to Burton
Henry James, The Friends of Friends :thumbsup:
Voltaire, Micromegas
Charles H.Hinton, Scientific Romances
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Great Stone Face
Lord Dunsany, The Country of Yann
Saki, The Reticence of Lady Anne :thumbsup:

A Personal Library
Julio Cortázar, Stories
& 3. The Apocryphal Gospels
Franz Kafka, Amerika; Short Stories :thumbsup:
G. K. Chesterton, The Blue Cross and Other Stories
& 7. Wilkie Collins, Moonstone
Maurice Maeterlink, The Intelligence of Flowers
Dino Buzzati, The Desert of the Tartars :thumbsup:
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt; Hedda Gabler :thumbsup:
J. M. Eça de Queiroz, The Mandarin
Leopoldo Lugones, The Jesuit Empire :thumbsup:
André Gide, The Counterfeiters :thumbsup:
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine; The Invisible Man
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths
& 17. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons :thumbsup:
E. Kasner & J. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination
Eugene O'Neill, The Great God Brown; Strange Interlude; Mourning Becomes Electra
Ariwara no Narihara, Tales of Ise
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno; Billy Budd; Bartleby the Scrivener :thumbsup:
Giovanni Papini, The Tragic Everyday; The Blind Pilot; Words and Blood :thumbsup:
Arthur Machen, The Three Imposters
Fray Luis de León, tr., The Song of Songs
Fray Luis de León, An Explanation of the Book of Job
Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether; Heart of Darkness (he has better works)
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Oscar Wilde, Essays and Dialogues
Henri Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia :thumbsup:
Hermann Hesse, The Bead Game
Arnold Bennett, Buried Alive
Claudius Elianus, On the Nature of Animals
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Anthony :thumbsup:
Marco Polo, Travels
Marcel Schwob, Imaginary Lives
George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra; Major Barbara; Candide
Francisco de Quevedo, Marcus Brutus; The Hour of All :thumbsup:
Eden Phillpots, The Red Redmaynes
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling :thumbsup:
Gustav Meyrink, The Golem
Henry James, The Lesson of the Master; The Figure in the Carpet; The Private Life :thumbsup:
& 44. Herodotus, The Nine Books of History
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
Rudyard Kipling, Tales :thumbsup:
William Beckford, Vathek
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Jean Cocteau, The Professional Secret and Other Texts
Thomas De Quincey, The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories
Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza :thumbsup:
The Thousand and One Nights
Robert Louis Stevenson, New Arabian Nights; Markheim :thumbsup:
Léon Bloy, Salvation for the Jews; The Blood of the Poor; In the Darkness :thumbsup:
The Bhagavad-Gita; The Epic of Gilgamesh
Juan José Arreola, Fantastic Stories
David Garnett, Lady Into Fox; A Man in the Zoo; The Sailor's Return
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels :thumbsup:
Paul Groussac, Literary Criticism
Manuel Mujica Láinez, The Idols
Juan Ruíz, The Book of Good Love
William Blake, Complete Poetry
Hugh Walpole, Above the Dark Circus
Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, Poetical Works
Edgar Allan Poe, Tales :thumbsup:
Virgil, The Aeneid :thumbsup:
Voltaire, Stories
J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time
Atilio Momigliano, An Essay on Orlando Furioso
& 71. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; The Study of Human Nature
Snorri Sturluson, Egil's Saga
The Book of the Dead
& 75. J. Alexander Gunn, The Problem of Time
popfop
The Tom Wolfe books I've read are The Painted Word , From Bauhaus to Our House , and The Pump House Gang . The best, by far, was Pump House which is just a series of portraits of various counterculture types. I originally read it for "The Noonday Underground", an account of the British Mod scene, and I find that essay as well as "The Mid Atlantic Man" are the best in the book. Of course, Wolfe is a pop-middlebrow writer so his strengths are in light wit, descriptiveness and occasional humor. George W. Bush famously stated that Wolfe was his favorite writer and this coupled with the fact that he is seen as the preeminent fiction author of a conservative persuasion are reason enough to find him synonymous with vapidity.

Bauhaus to Our House contains some amusing anecdotes about International Style architects holding the beauty of their buildings in higher esteem than the enjoyment of their residents but this doesn't change the fact that I would happily live in a house designed by Le Corbusier or Richard Neutra if I could afford it. Wolfe, on the other hand, seems to equate high living with ridiculous suits and " painted ladies ", which is to say his tastes are identical to those of upwardly mobile, cornball homosexuals.

As you mention, The Painted Word is by far his most moronic as he presents the obvious: that modern artists uses academic opaqueness to mask their lack of ideas, as populist iconoclasm. Staying true to such middlebrow sentiments, not the mention his role as an American conservative, Wolfe proposes that art remain narrative in order to appeal to the masses. Of course, it would never occur to Wolfe that fine art needn't appeal to the mass to remain relevant as one may notice that contemporary art is irrelevant in terms of it's cultural influence despite desperate attempts to either appeal to or academize low brow and popular forms of culture.
Cornelio
Cornelio
Moonlight Mile - Dennis Lehane

From time to time I use some genre literature for entertainment and to get away for a while from deeper or more aesthetically elevated subjects. I like my genre fiction to be mindless, but I think this time I went too far.

You cannot accuse the publisher of cheating potential buyers, though. If I had read the back cover of the book with attention, I would have "never" bought this novel. Unfortunately I recognized Lehane's name as the author of "Shutter Island" (which Scorsese took to the screen), and thought it might be worth a try, and I didn't pay much attention to the back cover:



And this is high art in comparison with what we are going to find on the inside. A random example:


All the novel is like this: a carnival of unintentionally hilarious paragraphs, one on top of the other. The descriptions are bland, the characters are lifeless stereotypes, the plot is predictable, and the dialogues... you have already had a taste of them.

To add insult to injury, Lehane's remarkable inability to write a single good sentence is coupled with his liberal, feminist politics. One shouldn't expect much from an irishman, but this book is worthless even by mick standards. Avoid.
popfop
The list you mention was originally written for a specific person who, as far as I know, was not familiar with art theory. As an introductory treatment of modern art theory, The Painted Word works which is why I suggested it to my Tumblr friend. I also suggested Lost in the Metitocracy for its accurate description of how intellectual knowledge is degraded in colleges but this doesn't change the fact that I find Kirn to be an unimpressive middlebrow.

Of course, I can afford to be more discerning and critical in my attitude when discussing these matters with an artist such as your yourself. Do I wish to ingratiate myself to you? Certainly. If forum posters were Art Stars you'd be Jeff Koons.

In addition to this, it is important to stress that what may be good for certain individuals on certain networks may not be appropriate for others on other networks. This is akin to Malcolm Gladwell making two separate arguments which when put together contradict each other but individually serve to deflect blame from the tobacco industry. Hence my blog post sought to introduce an individual to a work critical of academic obtuseness while I found it more relevant to denigrate a respected American conservative for his pedestrian attitudes on Salo.

Is it so wrong to want to be all things to all people? Does the derailment of cohesiveness not entail the beginnings of a final and ultimate liberation? To quote Kojeve:

CLAMOR

Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March.

O'Zebedee

Geez - I, uh, enjoyed The Painted Word .

I'm going to go have a glass of cheap Malbec in the corner over there and sulk.

O'Zebedee
Byssus - I also greatly enjoyed The Pump House Gang .