I read a depressing number of them when I was in middleschool/highschool because I was obsessed with the Soviet Union/Cold War.
They're light, engaging books to read as a teen. Michael Crichton books were similar, and I ate those up as a kid.
The other draw was the contrast between these "fun" books, and the more serious "literature" books that you'd be forced to read as part of school.
Crichton was and probably is one of my favorite non-fiction authors
Uhm, dude. That Steven Spielberg film wasn't a documentary.
this guy's bragging about reading 740 pages of video game novelization
spoiler
yes i know the book came first
Hey the 36 Lessons of Vivec are essential theory and no I will not stop bragging.
people here will read Infinite Jest but won't read theory, smh my head
DFW is good. The novels are shit, but "Consider the lobster" is amazing.
His talk of fishes saying "what the fuck is water" was and is unironically an important factor in me getting to be anti-capitalism.
Realizing that we don't live in a pure white canvass devoid of ideology and culture is a major step that we often neglect when trying to convince other people of the evils of capital. In my mind, it should be the very first.
Hey as a quick aside, if you've read it is The Dispossesed a good place to start with her? I was thinking about reading that one because they socio-political angle in it seems v cool...
I'd say depending on your age either earthsea, or the left hand of darkness are better starting points, probably
Is that... the paperback and the hardcover of The Corrections? Overachiever.
Ben did the best Infinite Jest post of the year, wont be entertaining any other posts https://twitter.com/limitlessjest/status/1313528339353624577
So what's the deal with Infinite Jest? (genuinely curious--I've never read it, and I don't know anyone who has, and I've only ever heard of this book in the context of a meme)
It's one of the longest books ever written and takes about 300 pages to get good. It's famously bought and never finished or even started. It's a complicated book about Tennis, drug use, quebec separatists, imperialism, words, grammar and disabled cross dressers with science fiction elements (the world is basically depicted as post-disaster capitalist hell where various companies bid to name the year after themselves "the year of the chewable ambient tab" for example, which everyone uses instead of numbers) and over 400 pages of footnotes that explain the world but make the book even longer. It also doesn't really end, it just... stops - which people have defended as a deliberate choice of postmodernism but David Foster Wallace 's agent and his editor have both said that it ends like that because they literally took it off him in order to publish it and not because it was actually finished.
Basically it's the book every pretentious douchebag you or your girlfriend fucked in college had on their nightstand to try and look clever.
I quite enjoyed it but 99% of people who have read it are insufferable about having read it.
99% of people who have read it are insufferable about having read it
I think it only seems that way because a lot of people who read it don't really bring it up much.
That's a very good point. I don't think I've ever brought it up in conversation except when someone in my family was reading it.
I guess it's like idiots and Nietzche. Gotta let everyone know you read it.
I really only start talking about it after somebody else brings it up, mostly because of the stigma around a white dude bringing up Infinite Jest. Which really sucks because it's a pretty interesting book with a lot of unique perspective on things that are happening today, like entertainment addiction.
I can't take anyone who boasts about reading Tom Clancy and Ayn Rand seriously. Aside from the young adult novels; why are the average American's reading habits so shitty? If they even have reading habits?
this is the only reason I haven't read infinite jest
t. pynchon fan
"Some of us read books for adults," tweets the guy posing with Atlas Shrugged among his reading list.
