/lit/ - Literature

>>11395582
General question for tome-explorers :
Do you usually read a book like this in concurrence with reading smaller books or do you focus all of your attention on the tome?

>>11395712
Curious about this as well.

>>11395712
1 book at a time

The Sot-Weed Factor

>>11395582
All these books are garbage. Read the classics instead.

>>11395840
>classics
>Pynchon
>Gaddis
Retard

>>11396040
suck my peenus weeenis

>>11396040
>pynchon and gaddis = homer and virgil and dante and shakespeare

>>11395582
Recognitions is GOAT

>>11395582
also check out Darconville's Cat.

>>11395582
Maximalism is shit. It's just a torrent of meaningless metaphors and run-on sentences.

>>11397425
inclined to agree- although it's almost the only style I can read now

IJ is genuinely just like TV- the medium DFW reacted against ironically- doesn't mean it isn't fun but much of his writing is ugly, or cringeworthy

Pynchon is a brilliant writer. Still, in terms of substance there are ofc serious messages etc. but it doesn't boil doing to much beyond existentialism or the level of ideas conveyed in a Wallace Stevens poem like Sunday Morning

Gaddis' J R breaks your definition though

there are so many problems with large books for the sake of it- but honestly they are the most fun if you read consistently and quickly- who wants to be done with a book in like a week

I think its sad what maximalism has done to reading though / ofc tech. has affected how much people read but books sales are still relatively decent; pop lit has retreated away from experimentation in reaction to tomes like Ulysses or GV; why bother writing something that is experimental if youll only write a 'lite' version of any of the giants from the postmodern canon

p.s. The Recognitions is shit, even Gaddis says so

>>11396312
Is that good? I've read part of it and it seems interesting but you never see it mentioned on here.

>>11397870
>
p.s. The Recognitions is shit, even Gaddis says so
It is/he did?

>>11398030
no and no, he just didn't feel like he grappled with the impact of simulation in music enough and so wasn't as encompassing and he'd have liked

he was wrong; all that player-piano shit could have been avoided had he only read Benjamin but alas

>>11398048
>had he only read Benjamin
Take the kike stuff to reddit or keep it out of discussions about real writers.

These maximalist books are pseud pieces of rubbish. For most of them you could divide them up in to 20 page sections (1-20, 21-40 etc.), shuffle them up, and the critics would give them the exact same reviews.

>>11398066
That's a strength, not a weakness. Brainlets can't into non-linear structure.

>>11395582

is Franzen maximalist?

>>11398030
(i wrote that)

He said it was a mistake or something to that effect.

Also maybe I take that back- spent the last hour continueing on with TR and enjoyed it.

The big turn off is that you can really tell it's the product of a young man with a grandiose opinion of himself- all the characters are mockeries, the references are often arbitrary, half-jokes (and this didnt actually annoy me but it did stand out)

He basically just doesn't have any of the flare Joyce has by the time he gets to U or Pynchon has by the time he gets to GR- it's an impressive first work but I didn't like it for many of the same reasons I didn't enjoy parts of V. & considering Pynchon was reading TR when he wrote V. you can see were it rubbed off - the mockery of NY intelligentsia / young boheme scene prominent in both - tho V. pulls it off way better w/ at least characters you like

I am only 270 pages in tho to TR so maybe I shouldn't blab- I'm almost expecting Gaddis to develop more of an affection for these characters

Also I went into TR having read JR - a great book - and it's a very different style

>>11398048
He had read benjamin btw he makes specific reference to him throughout J R

>>11397870
>ywn read an old copy of gravity's rainbow and eat pastries in an eastern european hovel

>>11395712
I tend to read the tome alone. But maybe one small book at hte same time max.

I always read one tome at a time. Read a bunch of shorter books so far this year but I'm about to spend the summer with JR, Savage Detectives and a few others. Really looking forward to it.

>not even 4 million words
>maximalist

get good

>>11398023
Why would he tell you to check it put if he didn’t think it was good

Do you think that maximalism is defined purely by size, or also by stylistic elements? Would you consider books like Moby Dick of Don Quixote to be maximalist?

>>11400499
It is defined by substance I think.

>>11395712
when i made my first slog through infinite jest, i would read it in conjunction with nonfiction, typically reading 40ish pages of the nonfiction each night before picking infinite jest back up, as a sort of warm-up i suppose. it worked pretty well for me, though i also generally have difficulty only focusing on one book at a time

>>11400534
go on

>>11398233
you are an idiot to make such rash judgements on gaddis if you havent even read the book, and in the same comment as you saying the book is a turn off because he has a grandiose opinion of himself. Your stupidity is indefensible

>>11398233
its baffling to me that a dumbass such as yourself can even get anything out of reading these great works because you make it apparent even in this short display of your paucity of thought that you lack the mind for such appreciation. Why do you read?

>>11399867
I know of about 6,000,000 words of terribad transformers fanfiction. It might be more now.

>>11398261
doing with the Magic mountain, life's dope

>>11401323
>>11401317
What did you think of the Recognitions? Why do you think Gaddis used allusion the way he did? I'm not the person u replied to btw.

>>11401328
The Recognitions is one of my favorite books. It is a true work of art, Gaddis searching for truth and not knowing where he will end up when he starts. I see it like the 20th century Moby Dick, and people said plenty of mindless shit about that book as well.

By allusions do you mean his references to Faust? or do you mean his general historical, religious and contemporary references? It would be a sizable answer for any of them, though I think the Faust one is more interesting.

>>11401341
the comparison to moby-dick is apt now that I think about it, and I had in mind the general historical etc references that are used throughout the book, which I find to be more interesting, but i'm also interested on your take on the faust allusions

>>11401352
Well, Gaddis loved classic works, Faust being chief among his influences on The Recognitions. He envisioned the book to be the final Christian novel as the Clementine Recognitions was in some sense the first Christian Novel and one of the first true Faustian works. Apart from those more structural influences I think Gaddis was simply a curious person and intuitively wanted to include his life in the book, like Melville or Joyce or any good writer inevitably does.

Another of his influences on the book is the Golden Bough by Frazier and that is a massive work filled with little stories and allusions and I can only imagine that shifted Gaddis to a more expansive and maximalist style. What makes Gaddis truly remarkable is that he of course wrote a complete opposite work, his last work, which is also his shortest.

>what are your top 5 works of maximalist fiction?
1. Culture of Critique
2. Culture of Critique
3. Culture of Critique
4. Culture of Critique
5. Culture of Critique

>>11398233
As someone who’s read the meme trilogy and All of Gaddis’ worK, the recognitions was the least “””fun”””, but the best parody of people who would likely read the meme trilogy
Ya played yourself

>>11401581
>namefag plows into conversation unaware that the meme trilogy has become four books with the addition of CofC
And we allow this. How low this board has fallen.

>>11395582
Moore's Jerusalem

>>11395582
100 pages into Infinite Jest and I already want to kill myself... it's great.

>>11395712
All the go for 1 big book