https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/60593-tmb-book-club We don’t use it since we have TMB but most of us are in it, there’s a thread on there where some of us have identified ourselves. Add us!
Just finished Flicker In the Dark. Really enjoyed it and really liked how it was written. Always like to enjoy a book by an author I haven’t read
Like 70 pages into age of innocence. It is excellent I really like the feel of the babes and noble classics. The penguin classics all feel really cheaply made in comparison
What was it about being born in the 30s? Reading an appreciation on Cormac and they mention this: Toni Morrison (1931) John Updike (1932) Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Cormac (1933) Joan Didion (1934)
Got an email saying this was ready for pickup. Walked over at lunch and will be starting asap So stoked Spoiler
Halfway through the book. It’s not a 0/10 because the first 100 pages but wow this is racist great white hope drivel
A “magnificent” and “forensic” account of the policy decisions leading up to the Grenfell Tower fire, Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen by Peter Apps, has won the 2023 Orwell prize for political writing. Meanwhile, Tom Crewe won the prize for political fiction with his historical novel The New Life, which dramatises the struggle to change Britain’s laws related to homosexuality in the 1890s.
Getting super high and reading In the Distance by the pool over the course of two gorgeous afternoons will be a highlight of this summer
The Guardian with a brief Q&A with Hernan Diaz Spoiler The Pulitzer prize-winning author on the punk rock provocation of his writing, an epiphany at the gym, and working with Kate Winslet on the HBO adaptation of his novel Trust Hernan Diaz, 50, was born in Buenos Aires and lives in Brooklyn. A finalist in 2018 for the Pulitzer prize in fiction with his debut In the Distance, which the New Yorker called “an offbeat western”, he is the joint winner of this year’s award – together with Barbara Kingsolver – for his second novel, Trust, out now in paperback. A slippery story of a Depression-era tycoon and his late wife as told four different ways, it made the longlist for last year’s Booker prize, whose judges called it “sly, sophisticated, insistently questioning [and] determined to rob us of every certainty”. What led you to tell (and retell) the fictional life of a Wall Street financier? Almost no novels in the American canon talk about money-making. Many American novels revolve around money, but the money’s already been made and the books are only about the adjacent symptoms bubbling up around money: the corseted manners of the wealthy and so on. Money has this almost transcendental place in American culture, yet it’s also taboo – we don’t talk about it and we don’t even understand it. That seemed bonkers and fascinating. On one hand, money resists narrative because it is coated in this rhetorical varnish of pseudo-science in order to be purposefully impenetrable. We’ve all had these experiences negotiating a loan or a credit card; like, it isn’t meant to be understood. But on the flipside, money is very reliant on storytelling: look at how desperately those who amass any kind of fortune try to account for how it was accumulated so they can present it in a legitimate way to the public. Why did you avoid dialogue almost entirely in the novel’s first half? The first section is written in this hyper-careful turn-of-the-century prose, but there’s a punk-rock provocation at its core. My editor said: “Do you realise there are no physical descriptions in the first part?” And I was like, yes, it’s very intentional: nobody has a body, nobody has a face, and in the first 160 pages there’s only one line of dialogue – one word, one letter, “I”. It was a formal dare, almost like an Oulipian constraint. As the book moves forward, we end up inside a body and a mind, and I thought that journey would be more powerful after a highly abstracted opening. The novel is about who has a voice: who, throughout history, has been given a megaphone. Who has been gagged? Rather than thematise that in an expository way, I thought it would be more vivid – and fun – for readers to be presented with this polyphonic arrangement of four voices in succession and gently ask them to question why we trust one over the other. That word “trust” resonates throughout the novel, not least in defining the relationship between you and the reader as you jump from one version of the story to the next. When did you know it should be the title? It came to me on an elliptical trainer at the gym! I was two-thirds into the writing and I was desperate because I didn’t yet have a title, but I knew I wanted it to be as layered as the book. It was like an epiphany; I typed it into my phone, very excited. Are you deliberately moving forward through US history one novel at a time? No, the connection with In the Distance dawned later. I didn’t think, oh, I’ll do the territorial and institutional consolidation of the United States in the 1850s and then I’ll do its financial consolidation and imperial expansion. But I suppose I am drawn to how the US is obsessed with presenting itself as a fiction. The genre of the western exoticises America for Americans themselves, and I see that too in depictions of the Roaring 20s and the ensuing Great Depression. Drilling into the ideological strata of these fossilised tropes is what fascinates me. I have no interest in sharing my own lived experience and I’m not into the testimonial turn literature has taken; I find the premise of immediacy suspicious. Literature is mediated – by language – and I’m more interested in doubling down on that mediation. I find the impossibility of us truly touching one another through language not only heart-rending but aesthetically more interesting than the [notion of] immediate connection. If ever I find myself on the page, I view it as an immense failure. For me, writing and erasing myself are one and the same; a sentence succeeds because it conjures up something other than me. How involved are you with HBO’s forthcoming adaptation of Trust? Kate Winslet is producing it; we’re closely in touch and she has all these amazing ideas. At first I was excited to write it, but I realised I’d be better off as an executive producer after a couple of really big sleepless nights deciding what to do. It seemed creatively more honest to write a new book rather than stay a year or two more with Trust. So I’m fully engaged and have a say, but I’m not writing it. Tell us what you’ve enjoyed reading lately. Caoilinn Hughes’s The Alternatives [out next year] is a big philosophical novel that’s super fun and unexpected at a sentence-by-sentence level. It’s about four orphaned sisters in Ireland who are now adults, and one of them is having a sort of meltdown, but it’s all around climate change – it’s very engaging and non-didactically done. Which writer first inspired you? I started out by writing bad imitations of Jorge Luis Borges. Now I can only take him in small doses because every time I go back to him I find he colonises my mind. Reading his story The Library of Babel in my early teens was the gateway, for sure. In every living room of certain middle-class households in a certain period in Argentina you’d see the thick green tome [of his collected stories]. I was pretending to read it, then one day I actually did. The ground opened up under my feet and I was staring into an immensity I didn’t know was there.
I watched Slow Horses on AppleTV and so I picked up the first two books and I'm really enjoying them. Also watched Silo and so I'm going to pick up Wool and Shift soon.
i think i have a new hobby thriftbooks doesn't do an awesome job of identifying rare books a lot of the time. can hunt for first editions on there. just bought a 1930 copy of vile bodies by evelyn waugh for $10. the cheapest online is like $300. i'm a nerd
I recently saw something about Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones having an incredible collection of rare books that'll be auditioned off in the months ahead. Dude was a huge fan of elite fiction apparently
Not rare but I’ve got a collection of coffee table books going that’s pretty choice. You find them cheap in stores. I’ve got a wall of art/architecture and travel/places
taking advantage of thriftbooks using computers to sort shit. listened to a podcast. they use computers/AI to sort books when they receive them, and from receipt of a pallet of books on an 18 wheeler it takes them 1 hour to have it for sale on their website. pretty wild
I wanna check out Tessa Hadley's work, this new short story collection After the Funeral is getting wonderful reviews apparently Lauren Groff has a new book coming out pretty soon. As do Ann Patchett, Jesmyn Ward and Anne Enright https://themillions.com/2023/07/most-anticipated-the-great-2023b-book-preview.html
Reader's Digest with a 100 best books list. Seems like a really good resource https://www.rd.com/list/books-read-before-die/
Wake County used to do a huge in-person book sale yearly. 250k+ books, had to be at the expo center in the fairgrounds. Covid killed it so now, they just sell everything through Thriftbooks. I imagine other localities are doing the same thing. They must be processing a ton of books.
Yeah they buy mostly from libraries, good will and the Salvation Army. Sellers are required to pack all their books on a pallet and shrink wrap them they have 9 Costco sized warehouses that are just filled with books. Pretty cool
I bet the triangle area has some great used book stock. Lots of brainy types selling back books. Went to Hyde park in Chicago, same concept there with the u of Chicago students and faculty around