Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Fence Reading List

In each issue of Fence they usually get the contributors to submit a reading list of books they are reading and books they love. I sent mine but it got lost and wasn't received in time to be printed. Oh well. Here it was:

CURRENT BOOKS I'M READING:
The Famished Road by Ben Okri
The Hour Sets by Michael Boyko
Our Ecstatic Days by Steve Erickson
No Real Light by Joe Wenderoth
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

BOOKS I LOVE
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Other Electricities by Ander Monson
Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson
Omensetter's Luck by William Gass
Two Brothers by Brian Evenson
The Twits by Roald Dahl
you are a little bit happier than i am by Tao Lin
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
I. by Stephen Dixon

Now I'm done reading all of those and I'm looking for something new, but nothing on my to-read pile sounds good right now. Suggestions?

SOMEBODY TELL ME SOMETHING TO READ I AM BORED AND/OR DISINTERESTED IN ACTUAL LIFE.

16 comments:

Josh Maday said...

Nice reading list, Blake.

I'm reading Robert Coover's "Pricksongs and Descants" right now and really enjoying it. There's some fairy tale porn for you. Also, a posthumous collection of 45 more Donald Barthelme stories came out this past October, too, called "Flying to America." Have you read much by Alfred Jarry? "Supermale" and "Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician" are worth a look. Roy Kesey's "All Over" is good, too. Sorry I don't know of any hot-off-the-press books at the moment besides Kesey's collection, but I thought I saw that you were reading that for a review. oh well whatever nevermind.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

pricksongs and descants has some ridiculous stuff in it. i read it on a plane once and was snorting and giggling in the aisle.

i want that new barthelme. shittt.

kesey's book is excellent. i have a review for it in rain taxi i think in the next week.

i have never read Jarry. it looks crazy. i'll have to peek.

mike jauchen said...

try skip fox's "At That" (it's from ahadada books)--a type of improvisational collection of lists, prose poems, dirty proverbs, etc. Might be something you'd be into.
mike jauchen-->

ryan call said...

i am reading the wavering knife right now, just started it



the recent issue of gulf coast had a neat little section of barthelme's collage art that i enjoyed

Anonymous said...

apostrophe

eunoia

AVATAR

BLAKE BUTLER said...

at that sounds good. i'll peek it out.

i love all evenson. the wavering knife has one of my favorite shorts of all time in it.

i played with apostrophe for a while, prathna. i like it. strange. i don't know why i've heard of christian bok but i will look at him as well.

thanks everyone

Gene said...

today i decided to read super flat times by matthew derby, again. i don't know if you have read it. i assume most people have, for some reason.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

weird alignments: after this post today i started reading william gass's ON BEING BLUE, then got emailed about it by someone as a rec. then after that i took SUPER FLAT TIMES< which i'd read years ago> and reread a bunch of it while in the bathtub. then gene.

i am thinking of a number.

it's my credit score.

it's my scrotum weight.

jereme said...

I am rereading Journey to the end of the night. For some reason I felt like rereading it.

Have you ever read anything by Osho?

Love is a good one. Or Awareness.

He had a fairly good sense of humor.

He was villified by the various religious zealots. So he can't be all bad.

Rushdie should thank Iran for creating a fervor to read his garbage prose.

I can download books/audio books that aren't too obscure for free. Let me know if you want me to hunt for some titles.

I go to www.bartleby.net when I am bored and read various books/poems.

It is a good site.

jereme said...

Oh and the Hagakure. I reread that book about once every few months.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

journey to the end of the night has been on my amazon wish list for a long time. i need to buy it. i should fill in some gaps.

bartleby is pretty nice. i used to use it when my friend worked midnight shift at kinkos before they got bought by fedex and we could print whatever we wanted. fuck that was awesome.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

jereme is connected

ryan call said...

"the wavering knife has one of my favorite shorts of all time in it."

which shor tis it?

BLAKE BUTLER said...

the intricacies of post-shooting etiquette.

Lyndall-O said...

if you haven't read it, read steppenwolf by Mr H. Hesse, it will make you feel alive and hopeless! The most articulate account of what it is to be a grumpy, unpleasant misanthrope.

JpKing said...

Some of Kobo Abe's work would make a nice addition to this list. -The Box Man- is great, -Kangaroo Notebook- is a bizarre hallucination of underground medicine in Japan after some guy starts sprouting radishes from his legs.

Henri Michaux's 'Plume' stories are great. as are most of his short prose poems.

I've just been reading Gil Adamson's -Ashland- , something between Ben Marcus and Cormac Mcarthy, really good.