When did America Stop Writing Good Books?

[NOIRTRASH]

I pin the date at 1967. It was the year we integrated the schools where I live.

 

[ChloeTzang]

I pin the date at 1967. It was the year we integrated the schools where I live.

Oh no, there's still good books being written, its finding them amongst all the trash that's hard.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Oh no, there's still good books being written, its finding them amongst all the trash that's hard.

I'm on a Quest to find them. I buy lotsa books. And I lose no sleep when I kill my darlings or other people's darlings. I killed one this morning. It has marvelous reviews and scores, and fails. Pulitzers and Nobel Prizes don't impress me. Books must be entertaining, interesting, as real as death, and assembled with pride.

 

[TxRad]

Good books? By your standards or the rest of the worlds standards?

 

[JustaSCOUNDREL]

When Tom Clancy died.

 

[ChloeTzang]

I'm on a Quest to find them. I buy lotsa books. And I lose no sleep when I kill my darlings or other people's darlings. I killed one this morning. It has marvelous reviews and scores, and fails. Pulitzers and Nobel Prizes don't impress me. Books must be entertaining, interesting, as real as death, and assembled with pride.

Depends what you're interested in. Outside of Romance novels, I read a lot of SF and some history. For SF I mostly go to Baen Books authors - there's far too many left wing SF authors for me (Scalzi for example - one or two of his books are okay but I can't stand his politics so I buy them used...). I have this feeling you might like Tom Kratman - try "A Desert Called Peace" - the nice thing about Baen is they make a lot of their books available for free as e-books so you can take a look at them - and some are available in their entirety so you can see if you like the author - they say they sell more books that way.

Anyhow, IMHO Kratman is one of the best around these days altho those of the leftist persuasion would likely not agree. and aside from him, Baen have a lot of other good authors.... but that's only if you're interested in SF.

Lets see. For SF. My picks.
Tom Kratman and the Carrera series starting with "A Desert Called Peace."
Michael Z Williamson - "The Weapon"
Lois McMaster Bujold - The Vorkosigan series - all except the last
John Ringo - "Ghost" and its sequels

So what genre's are you interested in? Lets do some recommendations here. I'm always looking for good books to read.... but I'm like, my SO has about 8,000 books, I move din with him 3 years ago and I've read about 500 of them. Got 7,500 to go which should keep me for a few years..... and I got him hooked on Georgette Heyer! He's read all of them. LOL.

Now there's a recommendation. She is to Regency Romances what Raymond Chandler is to PI novels. In a class of her own. Try one (maybe "These Old Shades.....)

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Depends what you're interested in. Outside of Romance novels, I read a lot of SF and some history. For SF I mostly go to Baen Books authors - there's far too many left wing SF authors for me (Scalzi for example - one or two of his books are okay but I can't stand his politics so I buy them used...). I have this feeling you might like Tom Kratman - try "A Desert Called Peace" - the nice thing about Baen is they make a lot of their books available for free as e-books so you can take a look at them - and some are available in their entirety so you can see if you like the author - they say they sell more books that way.

Anyhow, IMHO Kratman is one of the best around these days altho those of the leftist persuasion would likely not agree. and aside from him, Baen have a lot of other good authors.... but that's only if you're interested in SF.

So what genre's are you interested in? Lets do some recommendations here. I'm always looking for good books to read.... but I'm like, my SO has about 8,000 books, I move din with him 3 years ago and I've read about 500 of them. Got 7,500 to go which should keep me for a few years..... and I got him hooked on Georgette Heyer! He's read all of them. LOL.

Now there's a recommendation. She is to Regency Romances what Raymond Chandler is to PI novels. In a class of her own. Try one (maybe "These Old Shades.....)

I'll check Kratman out. I'll even give Heyer a whirl. All the female writers I admire are few in number. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings can do no wrong. Ditto Florence King. Dorothy Uhnak is enjoyable.

I cannot read my library of print books, and otherwise limit my Kindle to 300. Hard crime noir is my thing. Horror is second. History. Hard science. Medicine. Westerns. But I'm an impossible critic. Science Fiction I know nothing about tho Michael Crichton generally pleased me.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Hard crime noir is my thing. Horror is second. History. Hard science. Medicine. Westerns. But I'm an impossible critic. Science Fiction I know nothing about tho Michael Crichton generally pleased me.

Mostly genre's I don't read except for history and I'm all over the map on that. Right now I'm working my way thru 2 or 3 books on Poland in WW2 (one of my great-granddad's was in the Polish Army and ended up here after the war)

- "No Greater Ally" by Kenneth Koskodan is the one I'm reading now and its pretty good, along with "Franco's International Brigades - Foreign Volunteers and Fascist Dictators in the Spanish Civil War" by Christoper Othen - along with a bio of Martha Gellhorn. Always been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War - seems to me that there are many similarities between that period and now.

Michael Crichton? You might like "The Martian" then. I saw the movie a while ago and just read the book and couldn't put it down. Lots of hard science in that one for you.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Mostly genre's I don't read except for history and I'm all over the map on that. Right now I'm working my way thru 2 or 3 books on Poland in WW2

Have you read Antony Beevor? He has books on Stalingrad, Berlin, the Normandy invasion and the Ardennes (the Bulge), all well worth reading. Others too, but these are his best, I think. The first two in particular - the description of the push into Berlin is the best representation of absolute chaos I have ever read. His description of the street fighting in Stalingrad is visceral and beyond belief.

Back in '84 I crossed Russia by train (from Beijing to Moscow via Irkutsk). All along the Grand Siberian Railway there are small towns and villages, so every couple of hours or so the train stopped. The War Memorials were always by the station.

Here in Australia war memorials in small towns list the names of the soldiers who died during the world wars. Mostly, all of the names fit on the stone column, sometimes just initials and a surname if there were "high" numbers. In Russia - "10,000 from this district fought for the Motherland, 2,000 returned." "From this town, 1,000 left for the front, 200 returned." Never enough room on the stone for their names, just huge, incomprehensibly huge numbers. There were no old men, plenty of old women.

Beevor gives a sense of the slaughter.

 

[Tottee]

Good books? By your standards or the rest of the worlds standards?

Appreciate!

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Have you read Antony Beevor? He has books on Stalingrad, Berlin, the Normandy invasion and the Ardennes (the Bulge), all well worth reading. Others too, but these are his best, I think. The first two in particular - the description of the push into Berlin is the best representation of absolute chaos I have ever read. His description of the street fighting in Stalingrad is visceral and beyond belief.

Back in '84 I crossed Russia by train (from Beijing to Moscow via Irkutsk). All along the Grand Siberian Railway there are small towns and villages, so every couple of hours or so the train stopped. The War Memorials were always by the station.

Here in Australia war memorials in small towns list the names of the soldiers who died during the world wars. Mostly, all of the names fit on the stone column, sometimes just initials and a surname if there were "high" numbers. In Russia - "10,000 from this district fought for the Motherland, 2,000 returned." "From this town, 1,000 left for the front, 200 returned." Never enough room on the stone for their names, just huge, incomprehensibly huge numbers. There were no old men, plenty of old women.

Beevor gives a sense of the slaughter.

I'm unfamiliar with Beevor. I'll see what Amazon has of his. Thank you.

My historical reading tends to be memoirs and diaries of participants. Such sources expose factors and conditions scholars ignore. Like what I just read about Hitler. His German Workers Party merged with the German Socialist Party. He opposed the merger because the German Socialist Party was, in his opinion, too anti-Semitic. The merger happened to try and force Hitler out. WTF Hitler was the most anti-Semitic human possible. I wonder. I wonder because of bits and pieces of info that points to his ambivalence about Jews. Any Jew he liked had no better friend. Any communist was doomed, and many German Jews voted communist. Memoirs expose the anomalies.

 

[jaF0]

Literacy in general is dead. Joking around a bit in slang is one thing, but general writing skills have diminished with the advent of 'chat' and 'texting'. People have forgotten how to read and write in everyday communications.

Review a few eBay listings and you'll see what I mean. The company doesn't care either and refuses to do anything about it.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Mostly genre's I don't read except for history and I'm all over the map on that. Right now I'm working my way thru 2 or 3 books on Poland in WW2 (one of my great-granddad's was in the Polish Army and ended up here after the war)

- "No Greater Ally" by Kenneth Koskodan is the one I'm reading now and its pretty good, along with "Franco's International Brigades - Foreign Volunteers and Fascist Dictators in the Spanish Civil War" by Christoper Othen - along with a bio of Martha Gellhorn. Always been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War - seems to me that there are many similarities between that period and now.

Michael Crichton? You might like "The Martian" then. I saw the movie a while ago and just read the book and couldn't put it down. Lots of hard science in that one for you.

I'll look for the Crichton book.

I lived in Spain when Franco ruled. I formed my opinion of fascism from what I experienced and observed. It was totally safe for a woman to walk anywhere, anytime. The rule was, don't bring your fun out on the street. But a woman could sell her body so long as she worked from the right area. The police protected her and she got paid. For example, the woman cost $10, the room cost about the same, and the maid got a dollar. In America maids made minimum wage, say $2 an hour. At a brothel she got around $3 to $4 an hour.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Literacy in general is dead. Joking around a bit in slang is one thing, but general writing skills have diminished with the advent of 'chat' and 'texting'. People have forgotten how to read and write in everyday communications.

Review a few eBay listings and you'll see what I mean. The company doesn't care either and refuses to do anything about it.

Sure. I noticed the decline while working the government. College grads were almost illiterate by 2006. I had to pass literacy tests to advance from my sophomore to Junior year of college. Competency is a microaggression today.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

To TAXRAT

DIRTY BIRDIE OVERHEAD
YOU DROPPED SOMETHING ON MY THREAD
THE AH MOD WONT WORRY, LAUREL SURE WONT CRY
BUT' I'M REALLY GLAD PILETTE DONT FLY.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Sure. I noticed the decline while working the government. College grads were almost illiterate by 2006. I had to pass literacy tests to advance from my sophomore to Junior year of college. Competency is a microaggression today.

No kidding. I finished college three and a half years ago and I'd say over half the students I was there with could barely put a sentence together on paper. Me, I didnt think half of them should have graduated, and I'm no genius. Nursing exams were tough tho. Guess if you can kill people with a mistake they still want to make sure you have a good idea of what you're doing.

 

[jaF0]

I challenge people to go here and take posters to task for their writing style:

http://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/bd-p/selling-db?nobounce

Serious ... no joke. See what happens when you do.

 

[jaF0]

Yes, I use slang, but in limited doses.

My writing style is far from text book perfect and I make a great many mistakes. But I never 'text' or 'chat' even when in a chat style window.

I have a phone that is probably smarter than I am, but I also bought a wireless keyboard for it so I can at least try to type full words.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

No kidding. I finished college three and a half years ago and I'd say over half the students I was there with could barely put a sentence together on paper. Me, I didnt think half of them should have graduated, and I'm no genius. Nursing exams were tough tho. Guess if you can kill people with a mistake they still want to make sure you have a good idea of what you're doing.

When I went thru college long ago, literacy was required, and we were tested before graduation. I suspect literacy got tossed for PC reading exposure. In my time we read Tolstoy, and diverse American female authors. Plus most courses had writing requirements.

 

[jaF0]

Plus most courses had writing requirements.

And now, they don't even teach most kids how to write in long hand or cursive.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

And now, they don't even teach most kids how to write in long hand or cursive.

Soon enough an American diploma will be worthless. I expect someone to create a post graduation exam like most post grad programs require to practice your profession. The old diploma becomes a certufucate of attendance.

Back in 1971 I got a chauffeirs license and could drive anything with wheels. Today that same license is almost useless.

 

[jaF0]

Go to the link I posted above and see how Americans 'write'.

Then take them to task for it. See what happens.

I dare you.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

I got a question, Jim. I haven't read any James Lee Burke that I can recall. I may have a while back but it has not left a strong impression. Is he any good and if so, in what ways...

I really love the movie 'In The Electric Mist' but I just don't see how this movie isn't a result of the on-screen charisma of the particular actors - I mean they are just so dripping with idiosyncratic personalities that I can't see the final end-result being an effect of the original book or screenplay.

And I don't see how the denouement would even work on paper/in the written form - it seems like a 'so-what-seen-it-before' thing.

?

 

[NOIRTRASH]

I got a question, Jim. I haven't read any James Lee Burke that I can recall. I may have a while back but it has not left a strong impression. Is he any good and if so, in what ways...

I really love the movie 'In The Electric Mist' but I just don't see how this movie isn't a result of the on-screen charisma of the particular actors - I mean they are just so dripping with idiosyncratic personalities that I can't see the final end-result being an effect of the original book or screenplay.

And I don't see how the denouement would even work on paper/in the written form - it seems like a 'so-what-seen-it-before' thing.

?

Burke wrote two stories I like a lot, and I cant get interested in his novels. In my opinion some of us fail at one thing and triumph with another. Ilove Chandler novels and don't care for his short stories

Napoleon totally failed as a naval warrior. while the best army commander of all.

 

[jaF0]

I think the last book I read was 'The Choirboys' shortly after it came out.