Help greennui start reading!

[greennui]

I've watched thousands of films in my adult life yet I can probably count the number of books I've read on my two hands. Always found it hard to focus on reading when I could fit several films into the time it'd take for me to finish just one book.

So, I'm looking for some recommendations of books that would be in line with my film taste and yet fairly easy to read. I've made the mistake of jumping straight into way too difficult works way too many times.

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Are you looking for fiction or non-fiction? I almost exclusively read non-fiction, very little fiction apart from cosy mysteries and Wodehouse, so that would be what I'd have to offer by way of recs.

[greennui]

Are you looking for fiction or non-fiction? I almost exclusively read non-fiction, very little fiction apart from cosy mysteries and Wodehouse, so that would be what I'd have to offer by way of recs.

Both, I guess.

[thoxans]

donald barthelme, lydia davis, flannery o'connor (but apparently she's been canceled, which is news to me, and makes me sad... guess i'll have to go watch gone with the wind now to cheer up)

[nrh]

curious about things you have found intriguing but couldn't really get into, just because i think difficulty in books works very differently for different readers.

one writer i often recommend for questions like this is modiano, who won the nobel a couple years ago but still seems a little under the radar in english at least. writes mostly very slim novels, often oblique personal dramas where characters personal past and the murky past of france (especially from the years of the war and occupation) intersect in a kind of noirish way. and the writing is very clear, very lucid, in a way that makes them seem very light to read in the moment. was reminded of his writing, in slightly different ways, while watching both petzold's transit and graf dreileben: don't follow me around this last month, though tonally he is closer to petzold ghostly remove. might suggest honeymoon and black notebook as starting places, both are under 130 pages in the english editions and place the genre elements slightly closer to the foreground.

but don't discount cozy mysteries (which are often far less cozy than they appear) and the great pg wodehouse...

[brian d]

yeah this is tricky without a bit more info. do you have a favorite few novels or other books that you've liked? there's almost certainly a lot out there that you'd like but you don't want to get turned off by bad recs. or maybe just list some of your favorite films if you're looking for novels that are similar.

[flip]

donald barthelme

donald barthelme

the last two things i read were a barthelme short story and a george saunders short story

what kinds of things do you like greennui, either in books or in films? that might help us to suggest stuff

[rischka]

greennui read treasure island and red orm (the long ships)! which maybe you've already read cuz you're swedish

i read fanatically as a kid. now i read slowly but try to keep my hand in

[greennui]

red orm (the long ships)! which maybe you've already read cuz you're swedish

It used to be on pretty much everyones book shelf when I was growing up, always thought it looked intriguing but also daunting, might get round to it!

The last book I read and enjoyed was probably The Stranger, felt like a pretty good level for me.

Here's a list of some of my fav films:

https://letterboxd.com/greennui/list/a- ... avourites/

[sally]

one writer i often recommend for questions like this is modiano, who won the nobel a couple years ago but still seems a little under the radar in english at least.

it's bizarre isn't it? i've never understood why

my go to easy reading was originally a recommendation from a super-hip hilarious finn, and that's always given him a tone he might not deserve but the crime novels of kinky friedman are fun.

[greennui]

I do love the film version of Lacombe, Lucien. Def one my fav French films.

[MrCarmady]

It's tricky because I'm not sure taste is particularly transferable between media (obviously film and literature are closer than, say, books and music, but still, what book would you recommend someone who likes My Bloody Valentine?) but I'm gonna throw a couple of things out there that I've read and been impressed by in the last few months:

- John Williams' Stoner. There's a great New Yorker article on Williams and his slide into obscurity followed by a radical re-appraisal. I haven't read his other stuff yet but the book is very poignant, written in a very direct, evocative style, and has a sad melodramatic quality I can see in a number of your film favourites. To use yet another medium as a comparison point, it feels like an Edward Hopper or Grant Wood painting come to life.

- Rachel Cusk's trilogy, starting with Outline which also has the advantage of being the strongest one (though Transit, the second one, comes close). It's both radically experimental in the way it strips the descriptive fat and internal monologue that most writers and readers take for granted, and it's 200-something pages and readable in a few days, as I did with all three books in the trilogy. There's a lot of talk about how it blurs fact and fiction but what's satisfying about it is Cusk's wit and the way she gets these oral histories across to the reader.

[Holymanm]

literature recommendations are generally a pretty foolhardy endeavour, as people often have quite different "taste" - and every book you'll ever see will have

"AN OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT"

"ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF CENTURY"

"A STAGGERING WORK THAT WILL LINGER"

...on the cover, so everything is great, everything is the best, etc. i think almost every single contemporary book is trash, junk, rubbish that isn't fit to sweep real literature's breeches, but then i might be biased (because i was born in 1826).

what do you like? what are you looking for?

[Holymanm]

greennui read treasure island

i have this boffo hardcover edition of it, and it's maybe the most insane and yet wonderful object i own

[brian d]

haha, i actually hated stoner, but i seem to be the only one so maybe it'll work well.

based on the types of films you've got on your list, i'd recommend: jakob von gunten (robert walser), and if you want a mystery writer maybe friedrich dürrenmatt's the pledge or something by georges simenon (both would ready easy but aren't dumb by any means). those are short and should be pretty straightforward. and there are movie adaptations if you want to check those out after you're done. if you want something trippier that's also fun, the people of paper by salvador plascencia could work too.

[MrCarmady]

oh interesting, what did you hate about it?
if we're talking crime novels, pop. 1280 and the grifters by jim thompson are both fantastic, acerbic, snappy reads. and raymond chandler is who i got my username from and probably my favourite crime author of all time. the big sleep and the long goodbye are both major, i'd obviously start with the former.

[brian d]

i think part of it was the tell-don't-show style, which i suppose kinda matches the life of the protagonist. it spent long passages with a very single-minded focus, so the wife would just disappear entirely for long parts of the book, even though she's sorta central to his dissatisfaction with everything in his life. and the representation of her felt a bit too easy to me, where of course she's dealing with some type of psychological issues that make him distant from her (cause it's all her fault) (if i'm remembering this part of it correctly, it's been several years). so i guess in the end it just felt kinda shallow in a lot of ways, and other books with similar types of characters seem to have dealt with things more interestingly. i'd have rather we get more into the protagonist's mindset instead of just his actions, since there we'd be getting at maybe more of the why to his feeling lost or aimless. (i'm also a lit professor so i don't know if that makes me more or less likely to want to engage it.) i tried reading williams's augustus and couldn't get through it, so maybe he's just a writer who doesn't work for me.

[Curtis, baby]

second jim thompson stuff

also suggest paul auster stuff (moon palace in partic)

[...]

Just, for the love of god, don't read Auster's non-fiction. He's a bit of a twit, to be nice about it. Oddly enough though his wife, Siri Hustvedt, writes some excellent non-fiction, particularly about art and its reception. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women being the best I've read so far. Not sure about her fiction though.

[MrCarmady]

i think part of it was the tell-don't-show style, which i suppose kinda matches the life of the protagonist. it spent long passages with a very single-minded focus, so the wife would just disappear entirely for long parts of the book, even though she's sorta central to his dissatisfaction with everything in his life. and the representation of her felt a bit too easy to me, where of course she's dealing with some type of psychological issues that make him distant from her (cause it's all her fault) (if i'm remembering this part of it correctly, it's been several years). so i guess in the end it just felt kinda shallow in a lot of ways, and other books with similar types of characters seem to have dealt with things more interestingly. i'd have rather we get more into the protagonist's mindset instead of just his actions, since there we'd be getting at maybe more of the why to his feeling lost or aimless. (i'm also a lit professor so i don't know if that makes me more or less likely to want to engage it.) i tried reading williams's augustus and couldn't get through it, so maybe he's just a writer who doesn't work for me.

yeah i see where you're coming from, edith is a horrible character. stoner's defining characteristic is his passivity, though, so i never felt like there was a lack of insight into his mindset, i just took him drifting through life and being shaped by more powerful figures as a given. what books were you thinking of in terms of similar characters? there's so many books about lit professors, must be funny for you to engage with them.

[Mauries]

Best books I read in the last year(s) are both from Polish writers:

-Pornography by Witold Gombrowicz
-Primeval And Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk (she won the Nobel prize last year)

I'm recommending Gombrowicz to all my friends recently - his writing is exceptional. His diary is also very interesting.

[mesnalty]

I had similar problems with Stoner! So you're not the only one.

[wba]

Something easy, nice and melancholy (so maybe for you greenui) which I read this week is Gerard de Nerval's SYLVIE from 1853. Available in a lot of editions (if I'm not mistaken) and merely 50 to 70 pages long (depending on the publisher).
It might be a good starting point. The language is very clear, very precise but also evocative of lots of things, and the whole thing feels quite "modern". It's about a guy who idealizes women or has a female ideal, and isn't able to love or fall in love with actual women when he starts engaging with them and they start expressing ideas of their own - the character lives mostly in his dreams/phantasies and tries to impress/impose them upon the world and his surroundings, is quite a neurotic and there's also some queer readings possible (the obvious one being that he'd like to be that "ideal" woman himself). But I'm digressing...

I'd opt for short(er) books and novels in the beginning, and definitely only read something you're interested in from the outset. If a book doesn't hold your interest, in your case I'd stop after 10 or 15 pages.
I haven't been reading regularly for a span of 20 years in my life (roughly from 15 to 35 years old) and it was difficult to get back to - but I was a vorascious reader throughout my childhood and early youth (over 100 books a year back then), so I guess it's even more difficult if you've never been in love with reading.

Also: maybe fiction isn't your thing (or non-fiction) or you'd specifically love reading poetry or philosophical works (right now or in general). I had phases where I only read fiction for years, and then phases where I couldn't pick up a novel even if I tried and was bored by anything that wasn't non-fiction (also for years).
Definitely give yourself time to discover what it is that your heart and soul might need and what you really covet in literature.


And I agree with everyone here who says it's tough recommending specific books to anyone: I've read some 2000+ books in my life and have recommended and been recommended favorite/great books and authors to and from friends who also love reading (some of them are also writers), but this has seldom worked. I find it much easier recommending films or music to people I know well. And recommending to people one doesn't know very good is almost impossible and probably comparable to a lottery...

[brian d]

what books were you thinking of in terms of similar characters? there's so many books about lit professors, must be funny for you to engage with them.

i tend to skip books about academics, not sure if it's because it seems to be a very narrow experience being presented or they just tend to be written by people (academics) who don't write fiction that well. but for some reason the main example i was thinking of was omensetter's luck, by william h gass, which might be a terrible comparison (definitely a different milieu, not at all about an intellectual), but where there's a lot of focus on internal monologue and a constant searching for how a person relates to the world. coetzee might be one example of a writer who can write well about academics. with williams the problem might be that he's trying to match the style of the work to the vision he has of stoner, but i'm not sure you get more out of it by making the novel fairly one-dimensional, even if stoner is, so it reads more like a memoir by a fairly boring person.

[greennui]

I'll look into some of these recs and see if my local library has got any of them. This might be kinda strange, but I find it slightly strenuous to adjust to reading in my own language, so much of my reading intake on the web, subtitles and whatnot is in English. Does this happen to any other non-native English speaker as well?

[wba]

I know that from living in Germany for a long time, and I find it difficult reading in Slovene cause most of my reading has been in German (and English) for such a long time.
And it happens a lot that I find it easier to read a book or an article in English than reading one in Slovene as well.

[MrCarmady]

I'll look into some of these recs and see if my local library has got any of them. This might be kinda strange, but I find it slightly strenuous to adjust to reading in my own language, so much of my reading intake on the web, subtitles and whatnot is in English. Does this happen to any other non-native English speaker as well?

maybe a bit different for me because i've lived in the uk since i was in my teens but i do find it a bit easier to read in english than in russian at this point.

what books were you thinking of in terms of similar characters? there's so many books about lit professors, must be funny for you to engage with them.

i tend to skip books about academics, not sure if it's because it seems to be a very narrow experience being presented or they just tend to be written by people (academics) who don't write fiction that well. but for some reason the main example i was thinking of was omensetter's luck, by william h gass, which might be a terrible comparison (definitely a different milieu, not at all about an intellectual), but where there's a lot of focus on internal monologue and a constant searching for how a person relates to the world. coetzee might be one example of a writer who can write well about academics. with williams the problem might be that he's trying to match the style of the work to the vision he has of stoner, but i'm not sure you get more out of it by making the novel fairly one-dimensional, even if stoner is, so it reads more like a memoir by a fairly boring person.

'memoir by a fairly boring person' is exactly why i (and a lot of other people, i'm guessing) love stoner. will check out the gass.

[greennui]

curious about things you have found intriguing but couldn't really get into, just because i think difficulty in books works very differently for different readers.

one writer i often recommend for questions like this is modiano, who won the nobel a couple years ago but still seems a little under the radar in english at least. writes mostly very slim novels, often oblique personal dramas where characters personal past and the murky past of france (especially from the years of the war and occupation) intersect in a kind of noirish way. and the writing is very clear, very lucid, in a way that makes them seem very light to read in the moment. was reminded of his writing, in slightly different ways, while watching both petzold's transit and graf dreileben: don't follow me around this last month, though tonally he is closer to petzold ghostly remove. might suggest honeymoon and black notebook as starting places, both are under 130 pages in the english editions and place the genre elements slightly closer to the foreground.

but don't discount cozy mysteries (which are often far less cozy than they appear) and the great pg wodehouse...

Thanks for suggesting Modiano. I just finished Missing Person and it was first book in ages that I enjoyed picking up and reading every day. It did have a similar ghostly feeling to it as Transit. Next one lined up is Dora Bruder.

[nrh]

Thanks for suggesting Modiano. I just finished Missing Person and it was first book in ages that I enjoyed picking up and reading every day. It did have a similar ghostly feeling to it as Transit. Next one lined up is Dora Bruder.

those are actually 2 i haven't read! curious what you think of dora bruder which i think is less a novel than a kind of hybrid fiction/non-fiction thing (which is a form i tend to like but i know can be a little off-putting).

[greennui]

Thanks for suggesting Modiano. I just finished Missing Person and it was first book in ages that I enjoyed picking up and reading every day. It did have a similar ghostly feeling to it as Transit. Next one lined up is Dora Bruder.

those are actually 2 i haven't read! curious what you think of dora bruder which i think is less a novel than a kind of hybrid fiction/non-fiction thing (which is a form i tend to like but i know can be a little off-putting).

The jump from Missing Person to Dora Bruder wasn't that noticeable, both essentially about someone (fictional character/Modiano himself) digging up information about ghostly figures in the murky Occupation past. I'd say Dora's the better book of the two. I'm currently halfway through Honeymoon and it's basically more of the same goody stuff.