Desert Protocol - Atlas Shrugs

originally posted by Otto Nieminen:


And somewhat off-topic: But if I'm still interested in exploring US literature further than the few books I love (Richard Powers, Moby Dick), what should I be reading? DeLillo? Evan Dara? Gaddis?
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There's a lot of territory between Melville and Powers, Otto. How about some Mark Twain? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn vies for classification as the Great American Novel. There's also The Great Gatsby for a picture of American high society in the roaring '20s and Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence for a view of NYC high society in the 1870s (kind of the American Jane Austen). The Sun Also Rises is my favorite Hemingway, but I'm not much of a Hemingway (or Steinbeck) fancier. For a perspective on the South, read anything by William Faulkner and Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. For mid-20th fiction, Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth stands out to me and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is a must. I'd also recommend The Naked and the Dead by Mailer and Herzog or Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow. Then you get into Pynchon (cartoonish burlesque -- quite unique), Vonnegut, Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon) and your canny choice of William Gaddis. I love Gaddis's writing, and would recommend any of his first three novels. Of recent authors, I think that the late David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest stands out.

Come back to me when you've gone through that list, and I'll give you the other 100 authors.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by Doug Padgett:
I'm on board with all (or nearly all) of the above. But, while your reading Mason & Dixon you shouldn't neglect that part of the country south of the Mason-Dixon:
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Flannery O'Connor.

Damn.

Sharon's crazy aunt.
 
originally posted by Yule Kim:
I'm glad to see so much Mason & Dixon love on this board. To me, it's Pynchon's most underrated work, as if people refuse to accept it as a Great American novel just because it doesn't have quite the same amount of ambition as Gravity's Rainbow..
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I never read Mason and Dixon but it seemed plenty ambitious to me.
 
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Yule Kim:
I'm glad to see so much Mason & Dixon love on this board. To me, it's Pynchon's most underrated work, as if people refuse to accept it as a Great American novel just because it doesn't have quite the same amount of ambition as Gravity's Rainbow..
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I never read Mason and Dixon but it seemed plenty ambitious to me.
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It's ambitious. It just isn't as sprawling and complex as Gravity's Rainbow. But not many books are.
 
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Yule Kim:
I'm glad to see so much Mason & Dixon love on this board. To me, it's Pynchon's most underrated work, as if people refuse to accept it as a Great American novel just because it doesn't have quite the same amount of ambition as Gravity's Rainbow..
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I never read Mason and Dixon but it seemed plenty ambitious to me.
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M & D was, for me, the second easiest read of Pynchon's canon (after Crying of Lot 49). It was also, arguably, the most satisfying reading experience of any of Pynchon's novels. V and Gravity's Rainbow were fun, frustrating, boring and epically fascinating, but took a lot of time and energy to consume. M & D I blew through in a week or so, enjoying every moment of it. Disclaimer: I have a penchant for long (>800 pp.) books, so YMMV.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Rahsaan:
originally posted by Yule Kim:
I'm glad to see so much Mason & Dixon love on this board. To me, it's Pynchon's most underrated work, as if people refuse to accept it as a Great American novel just because it doesn't have quite the same amount of ambition as Gravity's Rainbow..
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I never read Mason and Dixon but it seemed plenty ambitious to me.
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M & D was, for me, the second easiest read of Pynchon's canon (after Crying of Lot 49). It was also, arguably, the most satisfying reading experience of any of Pynchon's novels. V and Gravity's Rainbow were fun, frustrating, boring and epically fascinating, but took a lot of time and energy to consume. M & D I blew through in a week or so, enjoying every moment of it. Disclaimer: I have a penchant for long (>800 pp.) books, so YMMV.

Mark Lipton
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I'm on my third try through GR. I actually really like it, but it just gets to be too much, I get busy with other things or lose interest and then I'm back to square one.

If I ever start taking the week at the beach holidays again, this is what I'm bringing. 150 pages a day.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
originally posted by scottwu:
Jeff AFAIK no one was killed you completely miss the point.
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The ghost of Marion Parker disagrees with you.
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"I killed him! I killed Bjorn Faulkner!"
--Sigurd Jungquist, in "The Night of January 16th" by Ayn Rand
 
Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn are pretty impressive American works in my opinion. Oh yeah, and Sherman Alexie as noted above...
 
Nice responses. Thanks. But I missed a crucial word in my question, I see: modern. I included Moby Dick as a slight joke because it seems so modern to me. So, iow, I have read a slight bit of the 19th-early 20th C. stuff: James (What Maisie Knew is great; shamefully I never did get into his other works), Twain (has some fun stuff), Hawthorne (I liked the symbolism in Scarlet Letter but thought it otherwise quite boring, haven't read his others), I liked Light in August very much. What I was more after was the stuff from the past 3-4 decades that I haven't had any exposure to (apart from Auster's NY Trilogy and Powers).

Pynchon sounds interesting.

Anyone read Evan Dara?

Thanks again. I'll be trying quite a few of these suggestions soon.
 
PG Wodehouse lived in the US for much of the 20th century. If he qualifies...

And while this not meant as a defense of Rand's philosophy or writing I will point out that the validity of a philosophy and the quality of art is not dependent on the sanity of the author. Wagner being the classic example.
 
originally posted by Scott Kraft:
Jay, are you testing Godwin's Law?
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There's an xkcd that I've searched for on more than one occasion to no avail which has a bunch of generals planning D-Day and one of them keeps calling Godwins Law on the rest. It must have been really hard to get that war done.
 
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