starred for the last sentence.

dang

So I don’t smoke weed or any cannabis stuff, because I hate the feeling. However, I can be persuaded to smoke it if drunk. “Oh, maybe this time I won’t feel like HELL.” I am always wrong.

nuh-uh

word, and also: amanda palmer

I bet she won’t let this fiasco pug her too much.

fr realz

unlikely story, girl cat.

Guys, have you read Lolly Willowes (1926), by Sylvia Townsend Warner?

Glad I’m not alone.

I haven’t, thanks for the tip!

Nice one! I used to read a lot of Byatt. I think she’s great when she’s not trying to please Iris Murdoch’s ghost or something.

Yeah, I think they kind of broke the mood when they made those two, but I am not really up on contemporary sci-fi. I did read Ann Leckie with a lot of enjoyment, though, and some China Mieville is good (The City and the City!)

It’s not you, it’s them. It’s well known that the politics of the Nobel Prize for literature are very fishy, and at least a good third of the winners have not really stood the test of time, and many amazing authors who did were not winners.

I like him fine, I just find it weird that he was singled out for a Nobel. He always seems to me to be a good, maybe very good, writer, but is that enough?

Some are right-on. I totally support Hilary Mantel’s wins, at least for her long-form fiction.

I’m in the middle of all sorts of things. One is the collected letters of Eudora Welty and Ross McDonald. Another is Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fielder (seriously, a must). I’m still in the middle of the 3rd volume of The Story of the Stone, I plan to get back to it this week, and my before-bedtime…

I also couldn’t read American Pastoral, but when I was younger, I liked Goodbye Columbus and the first third of Portnoy’s Complaint. No idea how that would hold up if I read it as a 40 year old...

I just thought it was very weak, certainly in relation to its length. The story was contrived, the characters were a snooze, and the fancy narratological footwork fell flat. I started hating it after about 200 pages, and because I was abroad with just this one book, I decided to finish it, but I didn’t find that it…

Literally anyone? Like, Jonathan Franzen?