Joan Didion’s 19

[Z_TheWriter]

I have a better question: if these authors are good, how come people all over the continent prefer to read foreign authors; English-speaking authors translated to Spanish instead of their own? [...]

I'm not saying you're wrong about them being pretentious. I don't have the knowledge to claim one way or the other. But there might also be a cultural thing at play.

Post ~1990 Danish/Nordic movies have mostly always bored me, same for a lot of TV shows. To me they're the same tired stories about shitty and sad people having a shitty and sad time, look isn't it shitty and sad?

They're quite popular around the world in recent years though - not that everyone here hates them. But I think maybe the novelty/interest factor of something culturally different from your own background can do a lot. And conversely something intrinsic to that background can seem dull.

 

[yowser]

I am also a bit surprised JD was so unknown here. Personal booklists are almost always problematic, but also oddly intriguing.

From an earlier thread, on AHer's top ten most influential books, the inspiration came from physicist Oppenheimer's list, a bit different as you might imagine.

 

[Lector77]

To promote the glory of lightly moderated blogs, I offer a bit of TTD, or Thread Topic Drift.

In regard to a poet likely unknown to some, or many, or most, or damned near everyone here, Richard Eberhart, upon the auspicious occasion of his winning the Pulitzer prize for poetry…

I was working part-time for a small radio station near Eberhart's home
when he won that Pulitzer in the late 1960s. I rushed to the nearest town with a decent book shop and bought his Selected Poems, 1930–1965 and read a sample. Then, as brazen as I was naïve, I looked him up in the phone book, called his house, and invited him to come to the radio station for an interview. He accepted the invitation.

He was quite modest at first, and answered my bumbling queries with candor and courtesy. When the engineer ouside the studio window signaled that time was nearly over, I said something like, “Mr. Eberhart, perhaps you could read your favorite poem for us…” I offered my newly purchased copy of his book.

I'll never forget his reply. Ahhh,Mr. _________, that's difficult. You see, I've written so many poems, and I like them all so much.”


Edited to add- Snippets from Wikipedia. (1) His wife was heir to the family that produced Butcher's Wax, in case you are old enough to remember such things. (2) His grandson is GM of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team. “Béisbol jas bin veri gud tu mí.” (3) One of his daughters wrote a book in which she accused Deare Olde Dad of sexual abuse.

 

[Alora_Swain]

Personally, I'm a big fan of Guerrillas.
Clint Eastwood is one of my favorite songs.

 

[Alora_Swain]

I've been meaning to read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I normally read 20+ books a year, and STB was on the to-read list for 2025, but I ended up only reading one thing the whole year.

 

[Paul_Chance]

I've been meaning to read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I normally read 20+ books a year, and STB was on the to-read list for 2025, but I ended up only reading one thing the whole year.

One of my favorites. I highly recommend it!

 

[KittyOfSteele]

I'm not saying you're wrong about them being pretentious. I don't have the knowledge to claim one way or the other. But there might also be a cultural thing at play.

Post ~1990 Danish/Nordic movies have mostly always bored me, same for a lot of TV shows. To me they're the same tired stories about shitty and sad people having a shitty and sad time, look isn't it shitty and sad?

They're quite popular around the world in recent years though - not that everyone here hates them. But I think maybe the novelty/interest factor of something culturally different from your own background can do a lot. And conversely something intrinsic to that background can seem dull.

I would say yes to the cultural thing, but that's not the issue. In fact, it's a very long story.

See, we Latinamerican authors are fighting against a group of people who have been writing for much longer than us. Not only they have pushed more books, but we've read them far more often than our own authors, and we've also read their translations first before we read our own translations, and at least in my country, their translations are more easily found than our own translations. I'm talking about the Europeans. The Spaniards have been playing this for far much longer, and they are a whole lot better than us. Just Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer alone is considered the Edgar Allan Poe of our language by some Spaniards, yet no one in Latinamerica has been considered that. In fact, in our genre alone, there are more erotica authors who are Spaniards than Latinamerican. The entire collection of La Sonrisa Vertical was a Spanish effort.

What happened to Latinamerican literature? It was good at the beginnings, especially during the times in which the countries started to become independent from Spain. The way we used the language started to be studied without the scrutiny of the crown, poets started to rise, countries started to have their own identity... it's very similar to what happened in Galicia in the 19th century: the rexurdimento, when the Galician language came back to life after being forbidden for so long. Then, the 20th century hit, and the Latinamerican Boom begun... and we got stuck there.

Why did we get stuck here? Ironically, due to the same pretentious authors that started the boom to begin with. Borges was a damn good writer, but he is, by far, one ruthless critic, to the point that it makes looks the unmentionables here look like babies, and that got stuck to the industry. In fact, the generation who read these authors demanded more authors to write like them, but if you've been playing this game long enough, you'll know that what readers want is not often what they say that they want. The industry understood that readers want more copycats, and to this day, that's what the industry in Latinamerican is looking for: people who do the same as what they did. Problem is that these books don't sell because the readers have changed. In fact, dare I say, plenty of the readers who read them dearly are dead, and a lot of the things that people look for are found in authors that aren't from here. Much can be said about the magical realism of Gabo, or the surrealism of Cortázar, but if you're a writer from here, and you dare to write about that on your own terms, what happens is that you'll be mocked by the very same readers and the very same industry who supported the authors who did it. And if you dare to be a copycat, you'll also be called out. Either way, you're screwed.

I believe that Spain is still going strong, but here, you're lucky to find a Latinamerican author who doesn't follow the same pretentious authors. I only mentioned two authors who don't because I'm not aware if there are others in the market, but if there are, I haven't seen them. And I'll speak for my country in this part: people here want to support the local talent; they really do. We're very proud of our country, even if it is a shithole, it's our shithole, and there is quite a lot of talent here that doesn't get support because either you have to get out of the country to grow, or kneel down and lick the red boot that stomps us all, and make sure to keep it clean. I've known from other authors that, in spite of being one of the countries with the biggest readership in the entire continent, with just only one banned book that probably got banned due to its name, and it was banned during the times in which this was an actual free country and not a dictatorship that looks pretty, the government has a huge grip on what gets published and what doesn't. I mean, a journalist was about to expose a gang with ties to the government, and before releasing that book, they were threatened by both to cancel the release. The book isn't banned though, but for the life of me it's very hard to find it on sale. I mean, if the government is willing to resort to this type of violence...

But going back to the talent, yeah, that's what we are: pride people. even if we hear that some celebrity has 1% of our heritage in their bloodline or family tree (or in-law's), we nearly give that celebrity citizenship just for that. People here are craving for homemade art, but both the media, and the industry, are giving them the same refried thing, and they are eating it all up. I for sure am aware I can't grow in my own country; just The Woman at the Speakeasy alone is enough to put me on a list of the feds. Nevermind that it is erotica; a genre that lives in a legal contradiction since porn here is banned, but what porn is isn't defined in the law, said law is enforced sometimes, then it isn't, but it is heavily used against the LGBTIQ+ community... not to mention that erotica is the least popular genre here. A very tiny minority reads erotica far beyond what 50 Shades is, and most people here read 50 Shades out of curiosity, and they either consider it a joke, or just too much... and yet you can still find in the market the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and 1984, exposed one next to the other, and I wish I was joking, but I saw that at the biggest book market in my city, and I swear the vendors were trying to say something.

 

[stxjimmy]

I would say yes to the cultural thing, but that's not the issue. In fact, it's a very long story.

See, we Latinamerican authors are fighting against a group of people who have been writing for much longer than us. Not only they have pushed more books, but we've read them far more often than our own authors, and we've also read their translations first before we read our own translations, and at least in my country, their translations are more easily found than our own translations. I'm talking about the Europeans. The Spaniards have been playing this for far much longer, and they are a whole lot better than us. Just Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer alone is considered the Edgar Allan Poe of our language by some Spaniards, yet no one in Latinamerica has been considered that. In fact, in our genre alone, there are more erotica authors who are Spaniards than Latinamerican. The entire collection of La Sonrisa Vertical was a Spanish effort.

What happened to Latinamerican literature? It was good at the beginnings, especially during the times in which the countries started to become independent from Spain. The way we used the language started to be studied without the scrutiny of the crown, poets started to rise, countries started to have their own identity... it's very similar to what happened in Galicia in the 19th century: the rexurdimento, when the Galician language came back to life after being forbidden for so long. Then, the 20th century hit, and the Latinamerican Boom begun... and we got stuck there.

Why did we get stuck here? Ironically, due to the same pretentious authors that started the boom to begin with. Borges was a damn good writer, but he is, by far, one ruthless critic, to the point that it makes looks the unmentionables here look like babies, and that got stuck to the industry. In fact, the generation who read these authors demanded more authors to write like them, but if you've been playing this game long enough, you'll know that what readers want is not often what they say that they want. The industry understood that readers want more copycats, and to this day, that's what the industry in Latinamerican is looking for: people who do the same as what they did. Problem is that these books don't sell because the readers have changed. In fact, dare I say, plenty of the readers who read them dearly are dead, and a lot of the things that people look for are found in authors that aren't from here. Much can be said about the magical realism of Gabo, or the surrealism of Cortázar, but if you're a writer from here, and you dare to write about that on your own terms, what happens is that you'll be mocked by the very same readers and the very same industry who supported the authors who did it. And if you dare to be a copycat, you'll also be called out. Either way, you're screwed.

I believe that Spain is still going strong, but here, you're lucky to find a Latinamerican author who doesn't follow the same pretentious authors. I only mentioned two authors who don't because I'm not aware if there are others in the market, but if there are, I haven't seen them. And I'll speak for my country in this part: people here want to support the local talent; they really do. We're very proud of our country, even if it is a shithole, it's our shithole, and there is quite a lot of talent here that doesn't get support because either you have to get out of the country to grow, or kneel down and lick the red boot that stomps us all, and make sure to keep it clean. I've known from other authors that, in spite of being one of the countries with the biggest readership in the entire continent, with just only one banned book that probably got banned due to its name, and it was banned during the times in which this was an actual free country and not a dictatorship that looks pretty, the government has a huge grip on what gets published and what doesn't. I mean, a journalist was about to expose a gang with ties to the government, and before releasing that book, they were threatened by both to cancel the release. The book isn't banned though, but for the life of me it's very hard to find it on sale. I mean, if the government is willing to resort to this type of violence...

But going back to the talent, yeah, that's what we are: pride people. even if we hear that some celebrity has 1% of our heritage in their bloodline or family tree (or in-law's), we nearly give that celebrity citizenship just for that. People here are craving for homemade art, but both the media, and the industry, are giving them the same refried thing, and they are eating it all up. I for sure am aware I can't grow in my own country; just The Woman at the Speakeasy alone is enough to put me on a list of the feds. Nevermind that it is erotica; a genre that lives in a legal contradiction since porn here is banned, but what porn is isn't defined in the law, said law is enforced sometimes, then it isn't, but it is heavily used against the LGBTIQ+ community... not to mention that erotica is the least popular genre here. A very tiny minority reads erotica far beyond what 50 Shades is, and most people here read 50 Shades out of curiosity, and they either consider it a joke, or just too much... and yet you can still find in the market the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and 1984, exposed one next to the other, and I wish I was joking, but I saw that at the biggest book market in my city, and I swear the vendors were trying to say something.

Wouldn’t be arranged that way by accident!

 

[TheRedChamber]

Although for the record the first half of Down And Out In Paris And London is fun.

I was coming to say that there wasnt a lot of fun on that list. But you are right - The first half of Down and Out in London and Paris being the most fun permitted on the list is somehow funnier.

 

[SimonDoom]

I've never heard of Joan Didion, but these kinds of lists always strike me as less "these are books I really enjoy reading" and more "here are some books that I've read that I think will impress others with my intellect."

Although for the record the first half of Down And Out In Paris And London is fun.

I don't read her list this way at all. It looks perfectly genuine to me. She was a .major figure in the American literary scene in the sense and half of the 20th century. She was particularly good, imo, as an essayist.

 

[SimonDoom]

I never heard of Joan Didion, so I assume it's someone you admire.

But, going to the reason of my quote here, I'm going to be the first one to sin against my own people here, and believe me, I am not the only one who thinks this way: I, utterly, truly, completely, clinically, despise the modern Latinamerican authors, whether they belong to the Latinamerican Boom or not. I just do, and here's why: the majority of those books give me the feel that they were written in a lab. They feel like they've been written by academics who are trying to impress other academics in a dick measuring competition. I know that people love them. I fucking love Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar as authors, and some of the things they put about writing too. It's just that they are so overrated, so overhyped, and people keep talking about them like nothing can be better than them. They aren't authors to me, they are brands. Overpriced brands. Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez are, by far, the worse of them. I don't criticise people for reading them, but I am SICK of having Gabo talked about everywhere, and I really want to punch Mario Vargas Llosa for making a stupid essay about Story of the Eye that was longer than the actual length of Story of the Eye, and the Sonrisa Vertical printing of Story of the Eye has that essay that takes up more than half of the book, while the actual novel is padded with the exquisite Hans Bellmer illustrations for the novel, plus a scan of Bataille's plans for making a sequel to Story of the Eye, as well as a transcript of said plans, and his own essay reflecting on the story.

That's all I'm saying about this list. What hurts me the most is that most Latinamerican authors are seeking to follow on those steps, and the industry doesn't help either. I can only think of one author who isn't doing that, and it's not me, it's Lucas García. Payback is the first anthology of pulp vignettes I've ever read in Spanish, and no one has written something like that in our beautiful language. Maybe Jonathan Jakubowicz has, but I never read the Juán Planchard series, and I really want to.

I don't entirely agree with you, but I appreciate your interesting perspective. I have not read enough latinamerican lit to state a strong opinion. Way ba k when I could read it in Spanish, but those days are long past.

 

[AG31]

I tend to favor authors of series, rather than individual books. I can't really think of any classic fiction that became a favorite of mine, although Crime and Punishment did leave an indelible impression on my fifth grade mind when my uncle left a paper back copy at our house. Here are the authors that I look forward to re-reading, now that I've totally forgotten the plot of every single one of their works.

Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, Elizabeth George, Lawrence Block (Matt Scudder), Joseph Hansen, Louise Penney, Peter Robinson, Louisa May Alcott (probably won't re-read her now, but I read Little Women at least 5 times in my childhood.)

 

[Lector77]

Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, Elizabeth George, Lawrence Block (Matt Scudder), Joseph Hansen, Louise Penney, Peter Robinson, Louisa May Alcott (probably won't re-read her now, but I read Little Women at least 5 times in my childhood.)

James was a total prig about language. She would contort her words into a pretzel rather than split an infinitive.

 

[StillStunned]

TIL that PD James isn't the one who wrote Fifty Shades.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I'm reading (trying to) Asimov's first Foundation novel. Fuck me, all he has is chaps smoking cigars and reading papers, sitting around talking for hours on end. Nothing happens. Not a single woman in the cast, either.

It's amusing (being written in 1953) that the knowledge of atomic power separates the haves and the have nots (even with trillions of people on millions of planets), and the knowledge of electronics is also pretty cool.

The chat about space cruisers and battleships is as daft as Star Wars and Dune. If it was steam-punk, set just before the First World War, the yabber yabber about navies might have made sense, and there might have been a chance of a woman in a gorgeous Edwardian gown. As it is, the golden era of Sci-Fi certainly had it's limitations.

On the other hand, his I Robot novels were much better, but they're basically LA Noir, with the detective R Daneel Olivaw.

 

[THBGato]

I've read 8 of those, but none would make it onto my own list of 19. I had heard of Joan Didion, but haven't (to my knowledge) read anything by her.

Hemingway, or Faulkner, or Melville, or Steinbeck

I have, and I'd only bother with Steinbeck if I were you. Pretty much everyone educated in the UK between 1990 and 2016 was taught 'Of Mice and Men' at school, but 'Cannery Row' is my favourite.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I'm shocked that people don't know Didion. She's one of the few writers who could do it and be the best in multiple mediums. She was one of the most influential figures in modern journalism, an acclaimed writer of fiction and an award-winning screenwriter and memoirist.

 

[THBGato]

She

Key word.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

steam-punk, set just before the First World War, the yabber yabber about navies might have made sense, and there might have been a chance of a woman in a gorgeous Edwardian gown.

Now I have a plot bunny running around in my head lol

 

[Z_TheWriter]

I'm reading (trying to) Asimov's first Foundation novel. Fuck me, all he has is chaps smoking cigars and reading papers, sitting around talking for hours on end. Nothing happens. Not a single woman in the cast, either.

Yeah that's Foundation. Doesn't change much from that - at least in the first 3 books, which are all I've read. It's a somewhat strange way to write, and you really have to find the right mindset to get into it. I still liked them though, even if I do agree 100% that the robot stories are better.

This is why I was astonished that they were doing a Foundation TV show. There are like barely actual characters in Foundation guys... What?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Now I have a plot bunny running around in my head lol

Several years ago the wonderful holliday1962 left me a challenge to write a steam-punk novel. It's on my to do list.

 

[THBGato]

This thread made me re-read some WH Auden. So, thank you. Time well spent.