Stacking II
Yes, we are stacking once again.
Read since the last stack:
- Moving On (McMurtry) - very good except the ending felt like someone telling you a story at a party and then instead of finishing the story they walk away, leave the building, never return
- Gardens of the moon (Erikson) - fun and silly fantasy stuff
- The Garden of Seven Twilights (de Palol) - ponderous post-modernism :(
- Lime Pit (Valin) - the thing with mystery genre fiction is that in its purest form the prose is spare and elegant and on a plot level it is propulsive and thrilling, and the sad loser detective is Charlie brown trying to kick the football, with the football being hope, and Lucy being the horrific crimes of humanity that pulls the football away at the last minute. Total banger.
New stack:
- Deadhouse Gates (Erikson) - continuing the series. What will the tall blue alien man with the living sword do next? How many silly names will there be? Looking forward to conjuring 80s heavy metal cover imagery with my mind with this one.
- Portable Faulkner (Faulkner) - I have to be honest with myself - I will probably not read this when it reaches its turn in the stack. I like to keep it around though - sometimes you need a book to haunt you for a bit before its time comes.
- Outerbridge Reach (Stone) - Stone is kind of a forgotten man at this point but he's an incredible writer. He'd kind of try to size up the time he was living in and wrangle it into submission via lean and cutting prose with deadbeat dudes. Occasionally profound, bummer masterpieces with, sometimes, excellent jokes. Three of his books - Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, and Bear and His Daughter - are personal favourites. This is supposed to be his masterpiece.
- Seiobo There Below (Krasznahorkai) - Krasznahorkai writes sentences that do not end, so his pages are intimidating walls of text. You don't need to be afraid of it though, like I used to be, because he uses his form to take you on a lazy river of beautiful dark imagery, and he can conjure absolute and otherworldly miracles.
- The War of the End of the World (Llosa) - I had an inkling to read this one, took it out of the basement and was struck by its first paragraph. My basement has since flooded. Sure to be a fun time looking at letters on the page, in that the letters are sure to spell out a towering monument to the futility of man and his endeavors :)
- The Horrors of Love (Dutourd) - identified as an underrated read in an interview posted on https://www.instagram.com/peterbooksnyc/, which is an excellent interview series of bookish nerds with great taste. 2 people wander Parisian streets engaged in a dialogue, talking about one relationship, with many digressions, for 600 pages. Does that not sound incredible to you? Christ, I want to see if the guy pulled it off.
- The Tidewater Tales (Barth) - Barth has written the worst post-modern navel gazing horseshit around when he wasn't writing the best post-modern navel gazing bangers around. High risk for the bottom of the stack.