Books You Will Never Read

[Severini]

Quote Originally Posted by miguel1984

The Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. One of my three sisters was reading it in Spanish and I skimmed through it at the beach, to see if it was as bad as I suspected it was. I could not help it and laughed out loud at how dreadful it was and people were looking at me like I was crazy. I do not know if it was the Spanish translation or if it was already that laughable in English; my guess is the latter.

My girlfriend loves this series and I have to buy her all the books, including the one which is the same story but on the perspective of the male protagonist...

I don´t even get close to them...poison.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Quote Originally Posted by Justin Isis

White Dad-penned

I get the White Man Novels thing but who are the White Dads?

I used to be attracted to harrowing and miserable stuff in general but I've mostly lost the appetite for it (perhaps partially due to having so many problems with Intrusive Thoughts OCD, which has given me enough disgust to last a lifetime), so I probably won't ever read De Sade, Peter Sotos, Dennis Cooper, Aldapuerta, Bataille, Wrath James White (or Deadite Press style stuff in general) or Samuel Delany's Hogg. Probably even Jack Ketchum.
I love Gira's music but I dunno about reading his stories.

Lots of aforementioned novelists, Bellow, Roth, Martin Amis, Norman Mailer, Ira Levin, Brett Easton Ellis, Samuel Richardson and Hemingway. Not saying they aren't ever good but I'm fairly confident I won't enjoy them.

Not decided on Blatty and Palahniuk.

I know he's extremely talented but I avoid Henry James. But if he or anyone is in an anthology, I give it a shot.

I want to give most of the mainstream horror novelists a shot but I know I won't like most of them.

Most of King's novels.

Most comics. I'm very picky about the art. Even when the drawings are good, the colouring is often atrocious. Even in my favourite comics, all the elements rarely come together.

I hugely respect the doors they broke down but I've never much liked Underground Comix for reading. But I'm very much looking forward to Crumb's Art And Beauty collection.

[Frater_Tsalal]

Well, I generally am a big fan of Delany's work but even I've never gotten more than 30 pages into Hogg (a book I've tried to read twice). It really is grotesque, ha ha. A lot of my friends love it though.

Dennis Cooper's work isn't all doom, gloom and violence, though. A lot of his later novels are pretty damn subtle.

American Psycho is one of the funniest books I've ever read, and a great time capsule for what NYC was like at the tail's end of the 1980's.

I'll cop to enjoying Rand's The Fountainhead but three times in the past I've tried to read Atlas Shrugged and all 3 times I never got further than the 100 page mark. It's not so much the length of the book as the actual writing (as I've read some very big books).

Anyway, for myself, I'd probably say:

Joseph McElroy's Women and Men (which I really want to read, it's just so gargantuan and impenetrable)
Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire (tried to read twice, both times quit after around 20 pages... I worry that his upcoming Jerusalem, which is even longer, might suffer the same fate)
Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (have tried and failed to get through this many times)
Kafka's The Castle (Kafka couldn't be bothered to finish writing it, and I couldn't be bothered to finish reading it)
Proust's In Search of Lost Time (another book I'd love to read, just too damn long)
Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine

I'm tempted to add De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom on there, as three times now that book has conquered me, but maybe I'll have better luck with the Penguin Classics edition that's coming out late this year.

Quote Originally Posted by Frater_Tsalal

I'm tempted to add De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom on there, as three times now that book has conquered me, but maybe I'll have better luck with the Penguin Classics edition that's coming out late this year.

This will be one of the more interesting releases this year. The cover art is nice, equally suitable for a black metal or underground EDM/industrial record.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Frater_Tsalal

Proust's In Search of Lost Time (another book I'd love to read, just too damn long)

Go for it.

[Frater_Tsalal]

Quote Originally Posted by Nirvana In Karma

Quote Originally Posted by Frater_Tsalal I'm tempted to add De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom on there, as three times now that book has conquered me, but maybe I'll have better luck with the Penguin Classics edition that's coming out late this year. This will be one of the more interesting releases this year. The cover art is nice, equally suitable for a black metal or underground EDM/industrial record.

Not only that, it's a dead ringer for Coil's classic Scatology album:

Coil - Scatology - Amazon.com Music

 

Coil - Scatology - Amazon.com Music

Quote Originally Posted by Frater_Tsalal

Quote Originally Posted by Nirvana In Karma Quote Originally Posted by Frater_Tsalal I'm tempted to add De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom on there, as three times now that book has conquered me, but maybe I'll have better luck with the Penguin Classics edition that's coming out late this year. This will be one of the more interesting releases this year. The cover art is nice, equally suitable for a black metal or underground EDM/industrial record. Not only that, it's a dead ringer for Coil's classic Scatology album: Coil - Scatology - Amazon.com Music   Coil - Scatology - Amazon.com Music

I admit I don't listen to Coil (though I really should), but if that was intentional on Penguin's part kudos to them.

[Frater_Tsalal]

Actually, the cover of the Penguin Classics is a Man Ray photograph from 1933 entitled Monument à D. A. F. de Sade:

Artwork by Man Ray - Monument à D. A. F. de Sade, 1933, | Artstack - art online

So in this case Coil was probably paying homage to Man Ray, just in a homoerotic sense.

I recommend at least trying to read American Psycho. The nastiness is tempered somewhat by the hilarious satire.

I don't plan on ever reading another Cthulhu Mythos anthology unless I'm in it. All the best Mythos tales I have read would work fine or even better as standalone stories, and the idea of 'shared universes' is something I'm instinctively rebelling against right now as it is dumbing down people's ideas of artistic relationships and thematic connections beyond the most basic useless aesthetic level. The Mythos is a dead end archaic Derleth marketing project largely comprised of dead end writers who have nothing to say as people beyond the fact they really like Lovecraft.

Obviously there is the occasional great writer like Kiernan to be discovered through these channels, but overall I see Mythos anthologies as insular comfort food I no longer find comforting. Hurray for writers like Justin Isis who remind me to never settle for less.

[Frater_Tsalal]

Despite being a big fan of Lovecraft, I've only ever read one Cthulhu Mythos anthology, Arkham House's classic 1990 Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos: Golden Anniversary Anthology, which is in some ways really the only such book on the subject I've ever felt the need to read. None of the others really tempt me.

As a writer who occasionally dabbles in Weird Fiction, I do have a strange sense of pride that I've never had a story appear in any collection that has the word "Cthulhu" in the title. No diss to writers who do, I just have too much respect for Lovecraft to play in his sandbox (though every now and then I will at least name drop one of his fictional grimoires).