Interesting I have read two books on that list
Winter's Tale
and parts of
The Things They Carried
I love the pictures created in the first. I've read a number of times, and don't ever seem to keep a handle on the action. It is a very viseral reaction. Ditto the secondToo intense for me too read all at once, but really godd and true.
I might have finished on of the Rabbit books, but it didn't stick. ditto DeLillo. and there are others I started, but never got very far.
But I am always surprised and pleased when something that is in the cannon is liked by me.
Irving novels are commitments.
It is funny how different people are, because the Roth/Updike novels feel like a slog for me, while Irving just flies by.
This is a phrase that will never win me over, I fear. There's only so much that clever wording can do to hide a great gaping lack of anything happening. It's very difficult for me to get into certain types of writing, because the writers don't give a shit about anything happening in their fiction, and it is very hard to get past the lack of anything happening. Things happening is pretty much how I understand the concept of fiction.
To be fair, plenty of things happen in Confederacy of Dunces and it does have a plot. I just thought Matt's plot description missed the appeal of O'Toole's writing.
while Irving just flies by.
I find Irving very easy to read also. But then I feel that way about Roth. And there are certainly other novelists (like Pynchon) that I find to be sloggy.
In Jesse's provocatively equable maxim: Different people like different shit.
I think I got about halfway through
Confederacy of Dunces
and then got distracted and never felt like giving it another try.
I liked the first Irving I read, felt meh about the second, and after the third I hated him violently because I felt like it was the same damn thing every time.
And to echo Corwood, I think there's a difference between "the action is internal" and "nothing happens." But YThingsHappenMV.
I don't know why I don't care more for Irving. There's other novelists who have as few notes in their repertoire that really work for me, like, well, I can't think of any American minimalist novelists I like (short stories are another matter, though), but there's Jose Saramago and Beckett from the European side.
True and poetic.
It makes me laugh at myself every time I think of Jesse's maxim because in the face of such wisdom I still instinctively rail, "Nuh uh! The shit I like is the BEST!"
My wife nearly broke my nose yesterday when we were arguing La Jetee vs. 12 Monkeys. I kept saying that La Jetee was clearly better than the Gilliam movie, trying to get her goat as much as everything with the leading law-talkin' stuff, but jeez, can you imagine being married to an asshole like me? She finally reached the point of "not funny anymore" about 5 minutes before I figured it out.
I read a fair amount of Irving in high school, all at once, and then stopped completely. I liked a fair amount of what he wrote (up to that point), but was never blown away by it or felt it had the kind of significance it ought to have to me.
Actually, although it's not what people usually mean when they say "beach reading," Irving is the kind of author I would read on a beach. He passes the time and has reasonably involving characters and themes, and I forget him entirely when I go home.
