(no subject)
Mar. 25th, 2011 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretA mostly unorganized guide to/list of the Macrofictions I have read. I've been coming around to the name Macrofictions as the descriptive term because it covers verse and prose, it covers Post-Modern metanovels of the sort I'm so fond of and it covers colossal traditional achievements like the classic Dickensian novel. It acknowledges that the unifying factor is the ambition of the work, not anything about its form.
Works of fiction, typically I guess I'd say on the order of 500 pages or more in size, with literary ambition to match. In general I wouldn't put the latest Tom Clancy on the list, nor the latest Robert Jordan. This may be snobbery, but it's a snobbery I'm comfortable with. I enjoy reading Tom Clancy, but do not consider his work to be at all macro in ambition. Also, this list would be a lot longer if I had to list the whole Wheel of Time and Jack Ryan series and figure out what's worth talking about in each one.
Read
1) Ulysses by James Joyce
The complicated, stylistically dazzling story of two men and a woman on a single day in 1904 Dublin, as they search for love, fulfillment, happiness, and the future.
I once wrote about it "Ulysses is a novel that will keep on giving... I'll be able to keep revisiting it year after year and keep learning new things about the novel and about its characters and about me. It's exciting that I gave myself the gift of a lifetime of Joyce this semester."
2) Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Obsessively endnoted story about the interrelated struggles for happiness and against addiction, set primarily at a tennis academy and a halfway house located adjacent to each other in Enfield Massachusetts in a chaotic near-future where information is even more all-consuming.
I once wrote "It's funny and amazing that a book so consciously post-modern, so obsessed with intricately constructed literary gadgetry, so off-kilter and hilarious, feels so old-fashioned and especially unironic, but that's how I feel about it. Even when the characters are explicitly exploring irony, there is a deep-seated sincerity at the core of these exchanges."
3) Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Endless stylistic mashups in search of the Great American Novel.
Of Moby Dick I once wrote "The Great American High Fantasy is Moby Dick, which is the most unpure novel you will ever come across. It's as epic as Tolkien, as darkly fantastic as Poe or Hawthorne, as American as Twain, and... as realistic as Hemingway."
4) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
A sort of quest novel, with Oklahoma as its beginning and California its ending, the quest isn't for anything as banal as an object. It's a quest, perhaps, for the American dream, as Steinbeck wonders if it can really be found among the dreamers. It's also a quest, of course, for a home, and Steinbeck masterfully shares every mundane moment of that search.
It's also a story about a family holding together because of bonds so strong they're unspeakable. And I love that so much. I love the Joads beyond everything.
5) East of Eden by John Steinbeck
A multigenerational family saga that is focused on the transmission of tradition and its fight against modernity. I love the way it repurposes the Bible, I love the things it has to say about immigration and the American experience, and I love the characters more than I can say. Especially Lee and Sam, two immigrants whose seemingly unbridgeable cultural gap is shorter than it looks.
6) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Quite clearly the story of a single man's life, and it's a wonder it's as short as it is. Never slow, always growing, it tells of David's search to find family and friends he could trust in spite of a world he couldn't trust. Unflinching in its examination of wrong decisions and misplaced trusts, unstinting in the happiness it delivers.
"Barkis is willing" remains a favorite line of mine. It's so simple, unconfusing, straightforward. And yet it's completely hidden from David. In a novel full of brilliant twists, it's surprising that a telegraphed twist is among my favorite, but the delicious dramatic irony and the pure sincerity of humble Barkis's awkward declaration of love moves me.
7) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The defining portrait of a fictional hero, in many senses, in that it's about a hero the reader is aware is fictional, coming up against the limits of fiction. The great novel for dreamers, too, because Don Quixote is somehow not a joke.
8) The Iliad by Homer
To my mind, the stronger narrative of the two great Homeric epics. Has a tendency to blur into detailed tedia, but in its best moments it is fully evocative of the feel of battle, of heroes and cowards, of triumph and defeat, of fear and the overcoming of it.
9) The Odyssey by Homer
The first half is a glorious traveler's tale, full of wit and adventure and great monsters. The second half is a dull vengeance drama dragged out incessantly. Possibly if I knew Greek and could appreciate it in the full finery of its verse I would get more out of it. But I'm a little doubtful. The Odyssey just doesn't work as well as The Iliad for me.
10) Dhalgren by Samuel Delany
A science fiction writer's attempt at homage to Finnegans Wake, it takes many of Joyce's stylistic innovations and literalizes them, while also Americanizing them, urbanizing them, updating them, and interrogating them. At the same time, it tells an affecting story about an amnesiac man trying to figure out how to survive liminal spaces without a sense of self. And there are stories about family values and friendship and sex and race and transgression and poetry. And crazy proto-cyberpunk adventures, too. Except that they're what I want cyberpunk to have been, not what it was.
11) The Lord of the Rings by J.R. R. Tolkien
These days I find it easier to focus on the negative than the positive when it comes to Tolkien. The honest truth is that I greatly enjoyed reading the saga when it was happening. It's incredibly immersive and a lot of fun. The problem is that the longer it simmers within you, the more that immersivity comes to haunt you. You have this fully realized world that is constructed out of the mind of one man deeply embedded in the life of an early 20th century upper class Briton and trapped in his own biases.
12) 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A book of majesty and unknowable generosity. Also, a book about incest and hatred and aloneness and uncertainty. A book that isn't just magical realism, but pure magic. It's hard to talk in specifics about it, honestly. So much of late 20th century literature lives in its shadow, in ways people sometimes seem reluctant to talk about. I have tried so many times to engage people on the question of what the difference is between South American Magical Realism and North American New Fantasy, but they don't seem willing to have the conversation.
On the other hand, it's a story about a family, and the Buendias do not inspire loyalty and fannish devotion the way the Joads do. There is a realness to their struggle that is deeply moving, yet somehow held at a remove. Perhaps it is the intrusions of the fantastic that achieve this. Perhaps it's just Marquez's skill as a painter of people.
13) Cyteen by CJ Cherryh
The only science fiction novel that ever kicked my ass to the curb and back. Incredibly intense. Genetic engineered supergeniuses engage in complicated political back and forth. Always thinking two or three steps ahead of each other, and five or six steps ahead of the reader. My first read gave me so many headaches I gave up, despite the pleasure the struggle was giving me. I finally did make it through,and it was worth the headaches. The political byplay becomes mere background to a very powerful story about identity and family. And crazily inventive science fictional ideas about how technology reshapes culture on a macro-scale.
14) A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe
A really big book about a really stupid man. A great commentary on how contemporary masculinity takes incredible, distorted forms because of our dislocation from traditional value structures. Also, a great showpiece for all of the mastery of the English language Wolfe possesses and for all of the flaws in Wolfe's world view. It presents a world that is fascinatingly askew because Wolfe himself is fascinatingly askew.
15) The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The great post-modern Sherlock Holmes novel. Transports Holmes to a medieval monastery, makes the stakes of the game a mythical book (and the future of literature), and explores belief and the tensions of modernity in a setting that is defiantly non-modern.
16) Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
An intoxicating tour of post-independence India, with language that feels like a dream, or like two thousand years of Indian history and literature being masterfully welded to 2000 years of Western history and literature, so perfectly that if you don't look closely you can't see the seams.
In Process
1) Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
2) 2666 by Roberto Bolano
3) The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning
Planning to Read
1) Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
2) Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
3) Underworld by Don DeLillo
4) Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
5) Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
6) Middlemarch by George Eliot
7) The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson
8) Anathem by Neal Stephenson
4) PLEASE SUGGEST MORE
In particular, the only female author I've listed is C.J. Cherryh. Surely there must be female authors of macrofiction I ought to be reading. I know I should read Daniel Deronda and probably other George Eliot. Who else?
Works of fiction, typically I guess I'd say on the order of 500 pages or more in size, with literary ambition to match. In general I wouldn't put the latest Tom Clancy on the list, nor the latest Robert Jordan. This may be snobbery, but it's a snobbery I'm comfortable with. I enjoy reading Tom Clancy, but do not consider his work to be at all macro in ambition. Also, this list would be a lot longer if I had to list the whole Wheel of Time and Jack Ryan series and figure out what's worth talking about in each one.
Read
1) Ulysses by James Joyce
The complicated, stylistically dazzling story of two men and a woman on a single day in 1904 Dublin, as they search for love, fulfillment, happiness, and the future.
I once wrote about it "Ulysses is a novel that will keep on giving... I'll be able to keep revisiting it year after year and keep learning new things about the novel and about its characters and about me. It's exciting that I gave myself the gift of a lifetime of Joyce this semester."
2) Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Obsessively endnoted story about the interrelated struggles for happiness and against addiction, set primarily at a tennis academy and a halfway house located adjacent to each other in Enfield Massachusetts in a chaotic near-future where information is even more all-consuming.
I once wrote "It's funny and amazing that a book so consciously post-modern, so obsessed with intricately constructed literary gadgetry, so off-kilter and hilarious, feels so old-fashioned and especially unironic, but that's how I feel about it. Even when the characters are explicitly exploring irony, there is a deep-seated sincerity at the core of these exchanges."
3) Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Endless stylistic mashups in search of the Great American Novel.
Of Moby Dick I once wrote "The Great American High Fantasy is Moby Dick, which is the most unpure novel you will ever come across. It's as epic as Tolkien, as darkly fantastic as Poe or Hawthorne, as American as Twain, and... as realistic as Hemingway."
4) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
A sort of quest novel, with Oklahoma as its beginning and California its ending, the quest isn't for anything as banal as an object. It's a quest, perhaps, for the American dream, as Steinbeck wonders if it can really be found among the dreamers. It's also a quest, of course, for a home, and Steinbeck masterfully shares every mundane moment of that search.
It's also a story about a family holding together because of bonds so strong they're unspeakable. And I love that so much. I love the Joads beyond everything.
5) East of Eden by John Steinbeck
A multigenerational family saga that is focused on the transmission of tradition and its fight against modernity. I love the way it repurposes the Bible, I love the things it has to say about immigration and the American experience, and I love the characters more than I can say. Especially Lee and Sam, two immigrants whose seemingly unbridgeable cultural gap is shorter than it looks.
6) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Quite clearly the story of a single man's life, and it's a wonder it's as short as it is. Never slow, always growing, it tells of David's search to find family and friends he could trust in spite of a world he couldn't trust. Unflinching in its examination of wrong decisions and misplaced trusts, unstinting in the happiness it delivers.
"Barkis is willing" remains a favorite line of mine. It's so simple, unconfusing, straightforward. And yet it's completely hidden from David. In a novel full of brilliant twists, it's surprising that a telegraphed twist is among my favorite, but the delicious dramatic irony and the pure sincerity of humble Barkis's awkward declaration of love moves me.
7) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The defining portrait of a fictional hero, in many senses, in that it's about a hero the reader is aware is fictional, coming up against the limits of fiction. The great novel for dreamers, too, because Don Quixote is somehow not a joke.
8) The Iliad by Homer
To my mind, the stronger narrative of the two great Homeric epics. Has a tendency to blur into detailed tedia, but in its best moments it is fully evocative of the feel of battle, of heroes and cowards, of triumph and defeat, of fear and the overcoming of it.
9) The Odyssey by Homer
The first half is a glorious traveler's tale, full of wit and adventure and great monsters. The second half is a dull vengeance drama dragged out incessantly. Possibly if I knew Greek and could appreciate it in the full finery of its verse I would get more out of it. But I'm a little doubtful. The Odyssey just doesn't work as well as The Iliad for me.
10) Dhalgren by Samuel Delany
A science fiction writer's attempt at homage to Finnegans Wake, it takes many of Joyce's stylistic innovations and literalizes them, while also Americanizing them, urbanizing them, updating them, and interrogating them. At the same time, it tells an affecting story about an amnesiac man trying to figure out how to survive liminal spaces without a sense of self. And there are stories about family values and friendship and sex and race and transgression and poetry. And crazy proto-cyberpunk adventures, too. Except that they're what I want cyberpunk to have been, not what it was.
11) The Lord of the Rings by J.R. R. Tolkien
These days I find it easier to focus on the negative than the positive when it comes to Tolkien. The honest truth is that I greatly enjoyed reading the saga when it was happening. It's incredibly immersive and a lot of fun. The problem is that the longer it simmers within you, the more that immersivity comes to haunt you. You have this fully realized world that is constructed out of the mind of one man deeply embedded in the life of an early 20th century upper class Briton and trapped in his own biases.
12) 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A book of majesty and unknowable generosity. Also, a book about incest and hatred and aloneness and uncertainty. A book that isn't just magical realism, but pure magic. It's hard to talk in specifics about it, honestly. So much of late 20th century literature lives in its shadow, in ways people sometimes seem reluctant to talk about. I have tried so many times to engage people on the question of what the difference is between South American Magical Realism and North American New Fantasy, but they don't seem willing to have the conversation.
On the other hand, it's a story about a family, and the Buendias do not inspire loyalty and fannish devotion the way the Joads do. There is a realness to their struggle that is deeply moving, yet somehow held at a remove. Perhaps it is the intrusions of the fantastic that achieve this. Perhaps it's just Marquez's skill as a painter of people.
13) Cyteen by CJ Cherryh
The only science fiction novel that ever kicked my ass to the curb and back. Incredibly intense. Genetic engineered supergeniuses engage in complicated political back and forth. Always thinking two or three steps ahead of each other, and five or six steps ahead of the reader. My first read gave me so many headaches I gave up, despite the pleasure the struggle was giving me. I finally did make it through,and it was worth the headaches. The political byplay becomes mere background to a very powerful story about identity and family. And crazily inventive science fictional ideas about how technology reshapes culture on a macro-scale.
14) A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe
A really big book about a really stupid man. A great commentary on how contemporary masculinity takes incredible, distorted forms because of our dislocation from traditional value structures. Also, a great showpiece for all of the mastery of the English language Wolfe possesses and for all of the flaws in Wolfe's world view. It presents a world that is fascinatingly askew because Wolfe himself is fascinatingly askew.
15) The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The great post-modern Sherlock Holmes novel. Transports Holmes to a medieval monastery, makes the stakes of the game a mythical book (and the future of literature), and explores belief and the tensions of modernity in a setting that is defiantly non-modern.
16) Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
An intoxicating tour of post-independence India, with language that feels like a dream, or like two thousand years of Indian history and literature being masterfully welded to 2000 years of Western history and literature, so perfectly that if you don't look closely you can't see the seams.
In Process
1) Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
2) 2666 by Roberto Bolano
3) The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning
Planning to Read
1) Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
2) Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar
3) Underworld by Don DeLillo
4) Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
5) Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
6) Middlemarch by George Eliot
7) The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson
8) Anathem by Neal Stephenson
4) PLEASE SUGGEST MORE
In particular, the only female author I've listed is C.J. Cherryh. Surely there must be female authors of macrofiction I ought to be reading. I know I should read Daniel Deronda and probably other George Eliot. Who else?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-25 07:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-25 08:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-25 08:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-25 08:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-25 08:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-25 08:12 pm (UTC)I'll add Swann's Way to the list.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-26 06:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-26 03:12 am (UTC)The Death Gate Cycle, a series starting with "Dragon Wing" by Margaret Weiss (female) and Tracy Hickmann (male). Each book is not particularly long, but the seven novel series is a cleverly wrought whole, with each individual novel having its own important place in that whole.
Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novel series. Originally printed as monthly comic books, I think there were 75 in all, and reprinted in man versions (seven graphic novels, one for each major story line, is the most common way to group them). Although the series starts off with him aping superhero comic books, Gaiman finds his own voice in the second storyline and by the end has wrapped up so many od the minor details that you hadn't noticed the first time around. Don't be surprised if you close the last back cover and immediately pick up the first book again.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-26 03:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-26 06:19 am (UTC)I find it amusing that I've read way more of your futures/in progress than I have of your accomplished list. Do I need to read the Wake before I reread Dhalgren?
I'd also actually recommend something by William T. Vollman--probably Europe Central. It's an achievement and a half, and since it's centered around Shostakovitch I think you'd appreciate it all the more.
As for books by women of this sort...hmm. If you don't mind fantasy, I'd recommend Michelle West, starting with the six books of The Sun Sword. I'll have to think about others.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-27 02:16 am (UTC)I don't mind fantasy- I put LotR on this list, after all- but I am skeptical that most high fantasy deserves to be called Macrofiction. It is often long rather than big, if that makes sense to you? But I'll check out Michelle West anyway- I can read stuff even if it doesn't qualify as macrofiction, after all.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-27 02:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-27 02:27 am (UTC)I've never heard of Timmy Duchamp- thanks for the recommendation.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-27 02:31 am (UTC)I have to say, I don't think Stephenson flubs the ending of The Baroque Trilogy at all; all three books are thrilling, but I thought the third was the best of the lot. This is, in other words, me encouraging you to consider reading it.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-26 04:14 pm (UTC)Have you read A Game of Thrones?
(no subject)
Date: 2011-04-06 05:59 pm (UTC)But I'm still hoping that you'll read it, partly because you're still the only person I can imagine reccing it to -- whether or not you like it for itself, I do think you'll like chewing on it. And then you can tell me everything that I missed in it. ;-)