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shout out to whomever recommended The Big Goodbye and You Can't Win.
Working through those two now
I just downloaded You Can't Win cause it was referenced a few times in that opium book I just read. I love books about crimes & drugs, and that sounds like a good one.
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Started reading The Fire Next Time on recommendation from @Deputy Wendell on this very page. It's good. Short too, I'm almost finished. Makes me feel like a braniac. Also picked up Confederacy of Dunces but it's way longer than I expected. I'll give it an honest try. Picked up a compilation of Groucho Marx letters, that one I'm really looking forward to.
Confederacy of Dunces is funny cause if Ignatius was born in the 90s and skated, he would totally post on Slap.
I thought the same about Confederacy of Dunces, not necessarily about being a Slap Pal, but he reminded me of disillusioned skaters from my generation.
This is a bit of an older post but I thought I’d respond nonetheless. I read CoD a couple times in college, and actually got the chance to go to New Orleans on this “research grant” to look at Toole’s old haunts and sort of connect Ignatius’ experiences to the actual city. After that, and reading some
biographies about the author (which is an interesting story in and of itself, not to mention the convoluted process of getting CoD published) the book got a lot sadder for me. Almost like the tears of a clown, if that makes sense—using irony as a way to really mask a lot of discontent or Weltschmerz.
On another note, after almost four months of reading, I’m down to the last fifty pages of the last volume of In Remembrance of Things Past. My god had it been a journey of a book. I feel like Proust has just totally hijacked my brain and revamped my thinking and the general structure of my thoughts. That being said, I already know I’m going to have to give it another perusal in a couple years; there’s just so much going on, so many things throughout the book that connect seemingly innocuous yet intricate ways. Anyone read Proust and have any takeaways from their experience? I’m keen to hear what other people got out of it.
I recently read the first book that Toole wrote, The Neon Bible, and the forward to it has a description of all that his mom had to go through to get his writings published posthumously. Considering that he was only 15 when he wrote TNB, it's really impressive. Basically about a weirdo loner teenager who was mostly raised by his eccentric aunt and kinda-crazy mom, I'm assuming a lot of it was semi-autobiographical.
Other stuff I've read & enjoyed this past month:
Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer
Harold Schechter's latest true crime book, about the Bath, Michigan school bombing in the late 1920s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disasterThe thesis of the book is essentially that this incident is both weirdly forgotten in modern times, but also oddly prescient to our current world. Couldn't find an online copy yet.
Foe
https://1lib.us/book/5031065/3c14faIain Reid's follow up to I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Like IToET, it deals with issues of memory & identity, but this time within the framework of a SF story. I stayed up stupid late reading it, cause I didn't wanna go to sleep before I figured out what happened in it.
The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers
https://1lib.us/book/733790/99ce43A collection of essays by different writers (mainly academics) analyzing the themes and messages of Coen bros movies. For example, one is about the role of shame in Fargo & another looks at No Country for Old Men as "The Coen's Tragic Western".
There's another book I really liked in the same series, that's on Charlie Kaufman's movies:
https://1lib.us/book/1196749/2f63d9