BBC Radiophonic Workshop by William L Weir. Part of the 33 1/3 book series. Good read.
G
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It’s fascinating what horrendous shit gets swept under the rug when its your side thats benefiting.
Same here, he’s definitely been in a league of one for the past twenty/twenty five years.
He was on that Smartless podcast a while back, came across as a super down to earth guy, worth a listen if you haven’t heard it.
With Pynchon I think that the really long segues and different strands/timelines etc. make me lose track of who everyone is and what’s happening and eventually lose interest. Same goes for the likes of Infinite Jest and Ulysses, just get on with the goddam story dude!
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Gravity is a pretty tough read, well worth its difficult reputation. Besides Inherent Vice, I usually steer new Pynchonites towards Against the Day and Bleeding Edge. They’re much more accessible, and can get you more clued in to Pynchon’s ideas and style, but they’re a lot less messy than V or Lot 49.
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Thanks for the recommendations.
I think the older I get the less interested I am in tackling ‘difficult’ books, way prefer some sci-fi with a good concept and writing that the literati turn their noses up at.
I don’t know if Iain Banks/Iain M. Banks makes it on to many college reading lists but for me he’s one of the absolute best to ever do it.
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I hear you. As an English teacher, I always tell students that “hard” and “easy” aren’t useful ways to think of reading: I am perfectly happy and absorbed reading challenging Pynchon novels, but I struggle to even flip through popular murder mysteries that my wife reads by the dozen.
As for Banks, I don’t know if any of his novels are short enough for university courses anymore, but those are increasingly becoming places where people avoid reading anyway. But i do know that The Culture series has been trending lately with people at the intersection of art and tech. The Folio Society recently made a luxe version of Consider Phlebas, which for an old writer usually means that BookTok has found out about them.
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Fwiw I’m a university writing prof here in the US, I assign many entire books, and I like Banks! In general genre fiction is no longer remotely frowned upon in academia, I teach a crime class to freshmen and teach SF all the time. A few MFA grad students of mine have written SF novels as their theses.
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Most of the old english dept taste gatekeepers are gone, we all grew up reading whatever struck our fancy. Might be different at some institutions, but that’s my experience
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I’ve been slowly making my way through Deleuze and Guitarri’s Anti-oedipus and hopped over to this brilliant book that’s helped me grasp the more difficult parts: Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis: Holland, Eugene W.: 9780415113199: Amazon.com: Books
D&G are thinkers that feel more relevant now than even in the late 60s, early 70s, to me.
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Anyone got Banks recs, with or without the M?
Think I read or started WASP FACTORY years ago, that’s it.
Hydrogen Sonata
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Thanks for the Hydrogen Sonata rec.
Guess I’ll start there, or with the beginning of the series (Consider Phlebas).
Unless you are already committed to reading the entire series, I’d recommend starting anywhere except Phlebas. It is a good story, but it is told from the perspective of someone fighting against the Culture and is sort of an exposition-heavy dungeon crawl.
Hydrogen Sonata covers a lot more ground, includes a lot of Culture Mind Philosophizing as well as Cool Space Stuff. Finally, the protagonist is a hobby-musician who has committed her life to playing a particularly difficult piece of music on a particularly difficult instrument. There is some great dialog on the utility/futility of such a quest between her and a Culture Mind (which could easily play the piece perfectly the first time).
If you don’t love Hydrogen, then Culture is probably not for you. If you do love it, then even Phlebas will be interesting.
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I can’t do the ‘M.’ ones - I have aphantasia and the hard science in them really requires (or I would imagine so) conjuring up mental imagery to try and understand and admire what he is creating.
The ‘normal’ literature books I have LOVED from Banks are the coming-of-age ones:
The Crow Road
Stonemouth
The Steep Approach to Garbadale
The Quarry
I seem to have read most of these 4 during travel/holiday times, and they are brilliant for that. Real page turners.
And of course, The Wasp Factory is a classic - the first one I read and had the wow/WTF factor to hook me in.
I still have plenty to read - but my takeaway from having had a few false starts at stuff like The Bridge, Transition, The Business… is that there is sort of a 3rd pool of his books that could really do with another variation of his name as an alias, if you really wanted to know what you are getting in to. Some of them straddle SF and more abstract or postmodern styles.
To actually answer with a more succinct reccomendation - The Crow Road and Stonemouth
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Interesting. So the “Iain Banks” books really are a different deal than the “Iain M. Banks” books—from what you’re saying, he’s two writers, or maybe three.
Good, a lot to check out here.
I think my favourite of the Culture Series is The Player of Games, so I’d recommend that one - it’s a lot of fun.
And I just finished reading The Business which is an Iain Banks one, enjoyed it too.
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This thread has introduced me to a lot of stuff I would have likely otherwise not come across - it’s my new Goodreads. Thanks for all the good recs, folks. 
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Out of curiosity, what is your preferred nomenclature? Certainly some books are more dense than others. Less direct prose, more heady ideas, more complex narrative structure. A John LeCarre spy novel is a different animal from a Ken Follet spy novel.
I’m also coming to terms with the fact that maybe I’m just a slow reader. My Kindle said that the average read time for LOTR Two Towers (my current read) was 9 hours, but my current pace has me clocking in around 14. Tolkien uses flowery prose and archaic language (or as I’d put it, “dense”). I don’t know how the hell you read that book that quickly unless you’re skipping every other page or just letting the text wash over you (aka reading for the vibes)
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Good question! Obviously there is such a thing as difficulty–that’s what Lexile scores try to get at with vocabulary range, syntactic structures, and all that fun stuff–but there’s also loads of research that suggests our reading capabilities differ drastically based on subject matter and interest.
I’ve had students reading four grades below level (I teach high school) when we’re reading articles about Shakespeare but surge up several grades when we read about football. Suddenly they’re making inferences, drawing connections to other texts, challenging the author’s point of view, and all the other things that make my crooked teacher’s heart glow. That’s why independent student reading is making a surging comeback in recent years: when you let students choose what to read, they actually tend to choose harder texts, not easier ones like you might expect.
So when it comes to choosing texts, I always tell students that the most important thing is if it’s interesting or not. Everything else is secondary.
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