I have never read any Updike.

but I definitely have a Latin American Ball-sac

Post of the day.

You need to read Updike. The Centaur. Rabbit, Run.

Essential, in my opinion, if you have any love for prose and what can be done with it.

I suffer from non-fiction addiction.

I

Try reading just one novel, either Centaur or Rabbit, Run. Those two along with Nabakov's Lolita are probably the three best books of the last 100 years, in my opinion. I say that just based on the beauty of the prose, not because of the stories.

you too? which history do you prefer? i've read hundreds of history books, but only a few dozen novels, particulary by a few authors, lately its been Clive Barker, Patrick Suskind and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez..

pussy

Art History, science history.

mostly straight science and art and music and philosphy and shit like that.
Most of my book (around 80%) are physics related in some way.

I know he doesn't fit the edgy junky bohemian author profile that appeals to most of you scum here, but Updike, unlike Burroughs and Keroauc, but like Nabakov, was a true master of modern American prose. As far as I'm concerned, his genius far exceeds that of any other fiction writer of the last half of the 20th century.

I'm not sure what I didn't like about Updike's fiction. It's very hard to pinpoint, because I can't exactly say there's anything specific I didn't like about it. I just didn't overall. He's clearly a good/great writer; it just didn't strike me.

GMKU^^So where would you put someone like Bellow?

If you're looking for great stories, I have to agree that he's not that compelling--aside from the two novels I mentioned. He's mostly great as one who provides outstanding models for what the language can be. He said once that he's not so much interested in plot as in describing as best he can what things and experience look and feel like. That's the beauty of his prose. His words create almost a sensual equivalent of the thing.

He's up there with Updike and Nab. But I don't "feel" him as much.

sciene, that is really non-fiction, even more boring than what I read! kudos!

whoa i almost lost track of this. exactly. sure garcia marquez is probably our greatest writer, and sure he was a "magical realist", but the equivalent would be to claim that all british literature is elizabethan drama.

anyway, i was listening to garcia marquez's speech to the swedish academy the other day, and it's briliant, it was mostly a collection of numbers and statistics, and it was more fantastic (the number of deaths, the level of carnage) than any "flying abuelitas" (as some people would say).

there is the other problem that a lot of latin american writers seeking to get famous jumped on the bandwagon & produced horrible imitations of our great monster-- im thinking of people like isabel allende, for example-- terrible.

but yes, we are generally freer with imagination-- one of my problems with most of american fiction is that it gets stuck in this sort of mundane realism where the world is taken for granted-- it's all about the individual psychology in the world, and i find that utterly boring: like hollywood movies. the character goes shopping, then watches tv, then has a fight with his wife, and it's the same all shit over and over. boring.

if garcia marquez achieved something with the way he wrote *some* of his books (not all of them), it's that he provided a mythical dimension to history-- but he deal mostly with history-- endless wars and government abuses and massacres that perhaps could not be told in another way. while a lot of people blame him and point the finger at him for exerting such strong influences, i think they are throwing the baby with the bathwater... out of jealousy mostly.

that is precisely why I like authors like Garcia-Marquez or Patrick Suskind, because their work is the perfect mix of that boring, everyday hollywood cinema bullshit, mixed in with some truly imaginative and extremely metaphysical shit.. it is like eating mushrooms, a blend of wiping your ass to keep it clean, mopping the floor, and experiencing the cosmic oneness of the universe at the same sentence..

in fact, I get many of own epiphanies and religious moments while doing perfectly mundane things like housework (after all, in Ethiopian Christianity we pray to the Virgin as Imebetachin which means "Our Housewife or literally, "Woman of the House who is Ours") and standing around waiting for a bus (hence the subhumans song, "REALITY IS WAITING FOR A BUS")

Hmmmm...that's...not quite...the same.

The story of a second rate teacher, working at a second rate university. It resonates!

I'm yawning through this one...