Book Of The Year So Far: 2016

For me, pic related.

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I wish I had the time to read new shit but I don't even have the time to read a tiny percentage of the books that I have a 90% confidence that I'll love.
If I worked in the field I would, but I got a job mate. I gotta focus on Moby Dick and shit.

I think The Vegetarian was released this year? I could be wrong. It's great though.

...

>The Vegetarian
what's so good about it? I'm 1/3 in and find it pretty shallow and forced. The work diner where she refuses to eat meat and everyone freaks out? Crap. The family meeting where the father rapes her mouth with food? Crap. There's no subtleties in the book, it's all "She's not eating any meat!! GAAAAAAAAHHHHH!! DIE YOU BEAST!!!!!"

Seriously, can you tell me why you like it?

I didn't think I was going to like it when I was at that point, though the melodrama of those scenes was fun, but the next two perspectives create this triumvirate of others projecting onto her and constructing her as they see fit, that she bizarrely becomes this autonomous entity that defies their characterizations of her by rejecting the "requirements" imposed as the conditions of humanity/life.

I can't remember the precise word, but there was a recurring awkward word that made me doubt the quality of the translation during the first third, but by the end of it i felt like some strange word choices contributed to the eery loss of humanity going on.

I have it on a shelf but I really don't like the cover, probably going to have to remove the dustsleeve if I want to read it. Like one of the Greeks frozen in carbonite.

I got the new Yuri Herrera translation, hoping it'll be good. Igoni Barrett's Blackass was flawed but had some really interesting things going for it. In the middle of Alvaro Enrigue's Sudden Death, and I liked it at first, but it feels like a shitty pomo novel written by a semi-competent writer. Louise Erdich's book is the one of the few that came out so far that sounds decent.

I'm just waiting for the new Nell Zink at this point.

Chase? Is that you?

This is the best book to be released this year, and is the most slept on book to be released this year. Some super positive reviews came out of it, The New Yorker having an incredibly strong one, but my god the fucking plebs who read this book and were too challenged by it is incredible.

Going through the amazon book reviews and the goodreads accounts talking about this, it's as if none of them have ever read a book challenging and innovative in language.

Sport of Kings has better use of language than anything I've read since Moby Dick (so, within the past like year). There were moments after reading certain passages I was in shock of their beauty, moments I had to put the book down because of how stunning certain events or scenes were--read this fucking book. Even though it's I dunno 600 pages or whatever, I read the whole thing in three days because I could not stop until I had gotten through it all. My whole copy of it I marked up and underlined and marginalia'd.

If it takes more convincing for you Veeky Forumsizens, it's in a similar format to IJ with characters' narratorial perspectives being expressed through their language i.e. the text takes the form of what vocabulary and syntax and dialect the character narrating would use.

I love it. Go buy it, chumps.

you dont like the cover? I happen to think it's great. Unlike a lot of contemporary releases, it actually has something to do with the book and it carries DeLillo's themes of angels and art in his previous books. either way it's not a big deal, I hope you enjoy it.

If i'm starting with Zink, Wallcreeper or Mislaid?

Wallcreeper is without a doubt superior literature, Mislaid is a flawed but fun satire, so I'd say Wallcreeper, but Mislaid if you're in a light mood. Though most people on Veeky Forums only seem interested in INTENSE reading. Wallcreeper happens to be fun too, that's just not its main draw.

that's cheating, this was released in 2015. Still, can I have a link?

>Igoni Barrett's Blackass
>Furo Wariboko, a young Nigerian, awakes the morning before a job interview to find that he's been transformed into a white man. In this condition he plunges into the bustle of Lagos to make his fortune. With his red hair, green eyes, and pale skin, it seems he's been completely changed. Well, almost. There is the matter of his family, his accent, his name. Oh, and his black ass.

Quick, somebody get this man a Noble Price.

Hmm strange. I see release dates for both 2015 and 2016; I think it may have had a broader printing in 2016 with a kinda soft opening in 2015 so, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To where do you need a link, friend?

Buying Wallcreeper, thx!

>To where do you need a link, friend?

To a site where I can illegally download an electronic copy (mobi format preferred) of the book in question, friend.

(Dickhead in charge of asking questions): Why write about race and what for? And, more particularly, why enter and inhabit race from both black and white perspectives?

>C.E.Morgan: I’m not surprised at this question, because notions of permissible vs. non-permissible speech regarding race pervade academia, but frankly I’m frustrated that this question still gets so much traction. The idea that writing about characters of another race requires a passage through a critical gauntlet, which involves apology and self-examination of an almost punitive nature, as though the act of writing race was somehow morally suspect, is a dangerous one. This approach appears culturally sensitive, but often it reveals a failure of nerve. I cannot imagine a mature artist approaching her work in such a hesitant fashion, and I believe the demand that we ought to reveals a species of fascism within the left—an embrace of political correctness with its required silences, which has left people afraid to offend or take a stand. The injunction to justify race-writing, while ostensibly considerate of marginalized groups, actually stifles transracial imagination and is inextricable from those codes of silence and repression, now normalized, which have contributed to the rise of the racist right in our country. When you leave good people afraid to speak on behalf of justice, however awkwardly or insensitively, those unafraid to speak will rise to power.

>I was taught as a young person that the far political right and the far political left aren’t located on a spectrum but on a circle, where they inevitably meet in their extremity. This question always reminds me of that graphic because its central irony is that it tacitly asserts a fundamental difference, an ineradicable, ontological estrangement, between the races. It establishes race as such a special category of difference that the writer needs to approach it apologetically, even deferentially, without the real agency, power, and passion that define mature artistry. That approach is servile, cowardly, anti-artistic. It’s also anti-novelistic, because the project of the novel is founded on the inhabitation and depiction of the Other. And the Other is everywhere and every thing, including the so-called self.

>I will also say this: I have both experienced and witnessed a great deal of suffering in my life, and that has informed my art. I’m here today, because I’m a fighter. I didn’t survive my life to ask permission to write my books.

Good to see some writers still got balls these days.

To that effect, I cannot be of assistance. I got mine off Amazon, I promise you won't regret buying it. Really the negative amazon reviews serve to guarantee that: "I thought it would be more about horses"; "too long"; "hard to read."

Plebs to the highest degree. I guess there's some kind of book reviewing program for writers early in their career that gives free advance copies to members of certain websites like goodreads in exchange for a review so as to gain attention to the soon-to-be-released work. This novel really suffered sales-wise from idiots reading it.

Oh hello fellow CE Morganite!

lel hope you're not the author shilling for your own book. Even so, I'll give it a try.

Ha, if only she came on here. This board could see an uptick in intelligent conversation about books (this thread's rocking with regards to that so far!).

Don't bother reading her debut though, All the Living, really not much to write home about.

Found a link, if anybody's interested.

The Sport of Kings - C. E. Morgan.epub
u.pomf.is/igzpiz.epub

From reading her interviews a bit, she sounds pretty cool. Working-class girl, studied a bit at Harvard, not an SJW drone, not an MFA clone.

Also, here's a pepe to keep the intelligent conversation flowing.

I feel like Steinbeck's the Red Pony soured me to horse narratives for most of my life, though I've just broken from my aversion with Hawkes' Lime Twig, so I would probably try out this book too...

I haven't read a book that was written in the past 50 years.

read 15 pages of Wallcreeper and it's really trash. You atually liked it?

>twee twee

lol

Congratulations, mail me your address and you'll get your reward by mail.

Might have to check this out, especially since she appears to be from my home state

Congratulations? Fuck you nigger. I haven't read a book in the past 50 years because of my glaucoma.

>I was taught as a young person that the far political right and the far political left aren’t located on a spectrum but on a circle, where they inevitably meet in their extremity.

I don't know, user, she's working class scum from Appalachia, she's probably correct.

Holding out for this.

Read Hawkes' Sweet William if you want to completely and permanently be soured on horse books. It's totally bonkers.

Interesting, I'll probably wait a bit before I get to that one though...

Is it really necessary to approach Hawkes work in a specific order? I started with Lime Twig because it's supposed to be his most accessible, but I also have Death, Sleep, and the Traveller, which was the middle of a thematic trilogy of his on the chart I've seen on his stuff. I get the impression that there's less a necessity for progression and more a need to be in the right headspace for immersion into his language.