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Recent Reads #42 | I have Thoughts™ on Lapvona
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- čas přidán 15. 08. 2024
- 0:00 - Intro
0:57 - Animal by Lisa Taddeo ( / 55711559 )
3:33 - Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki ( / 56179360 )
8:21 - What We All Long For by Dionne Brand ( / 153093.what_we_all_lon... )
10:42 - Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh ( / lapvona )
17:42 - The Mad Ship by Robin Hobb ( / 45101.the_mad_ship )
Ship of Destiny by Robin Hobb ( / 45102.ship_of_destiny )
20:26 - Daughters of the Deer by Danielle Daniel ( / 58433168 )
22:17 - Cherry Beach by Laura McPhee-Browne ( / 50268032 )
23:23 - Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo by Hazem Fahmy ( / 60320105 )
24:41 - A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers ( / a-certain-hunger )
26:04 - Love Enough by Dionne Brand ( / 20342500 )
Jake's Review of The Liveship Traders Trilogy (spoiler free): • Liveship Traders by Ro...
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FAQS
→How old are you? - 25
→How long have you been writing? - Since I was 8
→Where do you live? - I keep that private for safety reasons, but I grew up in Vancouver.
→Where did you go to university and what did you study? - I keep my university information private, but I majored in writing with a concentration in fiction.
→What are your pronouns? - They/them or she/her
→Where can I read your books? - None of my books are published yet, but you can read my published short fiction in my linktree (linked above!)
→So when will your book be published? - I don’t know! I’m in the revision process right now, but I can’t predict exactly when I’ll have a book published. But I’m working on it!
→Do you plan to traditionally publish or self publish? - Traditionally publish
→Will you read my book/story/chapter/mentor me? - Unfortunately I cannot accommodate these requests because editing/critiquing is a labour intensive task that I can’t afford to do for free alongside my job, my own writing, and running this platform. If you would like to hire me for paid editing work, contact me privately on twitter or instagram.
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congrats on 100k
Ahh your recent read videos are my favorites!! Keep them up
I totally agree with your thoughts on Lapvona. I liked My Year of Rest and Relaxation and loved Eileen but I read Lapvona this summer and haven't thought about it since. The whole book just felt very pointless, like everything and everyone was awful always, but for no actual reason, at a certain point the grossness just got boring. You simply can't write a book that revolves around society and religion if you have nothing to say about either, and if the book was, in fact, trying to comment on base human nature, I just fundamentally disagree with the conclusions it reached.
this sums up my thoughts exactly!!!
It's always good to hear about possible additions to my TBR. I'm looking forward to _The Bullet That Missed_.
i noticed gods of want and sirens and muses in the top left corner!! theyre both on my wishlist lol they seem really interesting. esp gods of want
i've since read both and loved both!
I haven't read Lapvona, but it strikes me that I had the exact same opinion about Lars Von Trier's Dogville in terms of _I don't know where all this collective brutality is going_ -- whereas I loved Melancholia's portrait of one single person's feeling of hollowness
Yaaas. Been waiting for your take on lapvona 💕
totally agree with your thoughts on lapvona
Shaelin + review of Lapvona = clicking so fast, I've given myself arthritis!
recent reads, my beloved! I've just started Summer of the Cicadas, and I just have to recommend How High We Go in the Dark to you! the most heart wrenching and beautiful short story collection I've ever read!! I know it's already on your TBR but I have to know your thoughts
AHHH I LOVE THOSE VIDEOS
i've never been intersted on ottessa moshfegh but anything set in the Middle Ages is a yes for me
ok I cut this out of the video bc it was getting too long but if you love middle ages books and you haven't read matrix by lauren groff it is medieval and SO GOOD and way better than Lapvona!!
i recently finished American Psycho and your points on Lapvona really rung true with me for that book also. Without spoiling anything, the ending is far from what I expected and sort of unravelled the rest of what I had thought was a carefully calculated narrative on consumerism and misogyny. I have found that the more I sit on this novel and the more I look to analyse it, the less successful the book becomes as with stories like this they need to be left, read in the moment and then put to one side to simmer. This way, when next I choose to return to the novel and to think about it in detail, I have taken significant enough time to really mull the story in my head. I'm not sure if this makes sense but it really resonated with me after hearing you talk about Lapvona. xx
I agree with so much of your thoughts on Light From Uncommon Stars. I actually described it as Monty Python but serious. I think if she wanted to keep the aliens in, it should have been set in the future where aliens were just part of life. How it is now is so incredibly random.
Regarding Light From Uncommon Stars, did Shaelin really say that the Alien is staying in a spaceship disguised as a Doughnut Shop ?
Monty Python writers would have loved that trope. Trouble is Aliens were not on the British menu in 1969, UFO hunters were lone eccentrics.
@@jackhaggerty1066 The spaceship is under the donut shop, but they run the place like a ship w/ ranks and food replicators and such and it's called Starrgate Donut. They also did a spoilery thing to the giant donut on the top of the shop 🍩
@@tamamawrites79 It sounds like a real laugh-in, Starrgate Donut. In Britain we write doughnut.
There was a television miniseries, *Taken* (2002) produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Dakota Fanning.
The ETs were always playing jokes like this, disguising themselves as children's storybook animals. Their agenda was unknowable.
Jackie Gleason rang his ex-wife and told her he was visiting the crashed flying saucer at Roswell in the company of President Kennedy.
Mrs Gleason said she did not know whether he was kidding or not. The flying saucer featured in *Taken* which I have on DVD.
Whitley Strieber thinks ETs are interdimensional entities, not from another planet. French physicist Jacques Vallee thought so too.
I reject that implication that I have the power to make your read books. I and mom convinced you to read Liveship
tbh it was mostly mom sorry
Getting A Certain Hunger RIGHT NOW - September needs a book like this pls
What We All Long For is my favourite book of the year so far, and I hadn't really encountered anyone else who had read it outside of the class I had to read it for, so it was nice to see someone else had read it. It has sent me on a kind of wonderful Dionne Brand spiral, and I've read 7 of her books (non-fiction, poetry and fiction) now. My most recent book of hers was her debut, Sans Souci and Other Stories. It centers Black female stories in both Canada and Trinidad and was really strong. It makes me sad it's her only short story collection.
I also have the bind-up with Love Enough and hope to get to that one soon. Thanks for another great video!
If you loved What We All Long For I think you'll also really love Love Enough - they compliment each other so well!
I ordered Dionne Brand's *The Blue Clerk : Ars Poetica in 59 Versos* in the first year of lockdown.
My Scottish bookseller has still not been able to get it for me. So I envy you your Dionne Brand spiral.
If my bookshop can't get me a copy of Ms. Bishop's first book I shall have to summon up my meagre courage and fly out to Toronto.
Fear of flying has prevented me from crossing the Pond & seeing Canada & the States. It would be a pleasant shock to finally go there.
*Walking Cities : Toronto.* CZcams. British Council Canada. Dionne Brand & Vahni Capildeo journey down on Bloor Street together.
I just read French Braid by Anne Tyler. I really liked it, it's a good family saga.
the books I’ve read recently that i’ve absolutely loved were gods of want by k ming chang, finna by nate marshall, and dawn by octavia e. butler!
I LOVED gods of want!! so good!!
Love these videos. Congrats on 100k bestie
"as soon as Anne Patchett drops a medieval book I will have absolutely no choice but to get a master's degree because that thesis writes itself" I CACKLED
three of my recent reads: pet by awaeke emezi, the tiger's wife by tea obreht, and the wrong end of the telescope by rabih alameddine. pet and the wrong end of the telescope gave me lifee!
The tinkle of ice in your glass reminded me of Jack Lemmon's line in Days of Wine and Roses - 'Waiter, hit me again !'
You wrote such finely wrought Borgesian tales on the imaginary painter Francesca da Cortona, that I want to recommend two books.
Rebecca Birrell's *This Dark Country - Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century* - paperback 2022.
Jennifer Higgie's *The Mirror and the Palette. Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience : 500 Years of Women's Self-Portraits* - paperback 2022.
Both books are delightfully illustrated and the writing is as good as it gets for Fine Art fans.
And two novels. *Unsettled Ground* by Claire Fuller which won the 2021 Costa Book Award - paperback 2022.
*The High House* by Jessie Greengrass* which was shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Award - paperback 2022.
Ms. Greengrass wrote a stand-out collection of stories, *An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It*.
Her stories won her the Somerset Maugham in 2015.
Congrats on 100k subscribers!!!
It's so awesome she made it to 100k subscribers! She so deserves it. One of the best and most helpful writers on CZcams.🙏 I think they give her the silver Play button next!
Your frustration is vividly felt. When something is marketed to you the wrong way, the initial experience is tainted and you can never get it back. There are ways we can fight against this ... fine-tuning our sense of objectivity being the obvious one ... but we are in fact human people stuck in a place and time. Maybe "Animal" is one of those books that'll hit you differently on a reread.
The way you're describing "Lapvona" is telling me that as an author, Otessa Moshfegh is now my most direct competitor. On the next draft of my series, I have to work harder to make my characters and their world much darker. As for Moshfegh saying her work is non-political .... the reality is that every author's politics will bleed into their fiction whether they like it or not. The one thing you can control is how close to the forefront those politics are.
I am generally quite good at separating my expectations for a book from a book's reality, but it was a little different with Animal because that's a case where if I knew what the book was actually about, I don't think I would have picked it up in the first place because I don't really enjoy stories where vulnerable characters are just brutalized over and over.
You definitely told us that, but I was a dum-dum today to whom the point didn't register. That's on me.
Oh my god I had no idea Otessa Moshfegh has another book out??? Eileen is certainly in my top 5 of books I've read over the last 5 years (read it because you've featured it in a recent reads video a while back and fell in love). Death in Her Hands was more... cluttered, I would say. I didn't understand where she was going with it and was quite disappointed. I don't think I'll read her new book now that I know it exists, just wait until she puts out a book like the ones I loved, which are Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation .
“I will have no choice but to get a masters because that thesis writes itself” BaHAHA
Here's my hot take about Lapvona: you know those personal projects you have as a writer, where you work on them just for fun or for distraction, and because you know no one will ever see it but you and maybe a friend or two, you just throw in whatever you want without caring about how the reader will experience or receive it? I just couldn't shake the feeling that Lapvona was a personal project that maybe didn't need to be released.
I was nonplussed at the gross factor, personally. I mean... not to be an edgelord about it, but I grew up in the generation that watched beheadings on the internet. My last president was embroiled in a pee scandal. Two Girls One Cup made the rounds when I was 14. It's not that easy to shock me with depravity. And if I don't imagine it was a personal project and Moshfegh threw in all the poop and cannibalism and horse eyes because *she* was having fun with it, then I'm left feeling like she was doing it to make an impression on the audience, because it didn't seem to be serving a larger purpose most of the time. And if she's doing it to make an impression on the audience, well, it seems to be working for a lot of readers, but I'm in the camp that's just kind of nodding along and going "okay, so we're doing the gross thing. got it. what next?"... and there's something a little pathetic about that experience.
I did see some potentially interesting commentary on wealth, power, religion, maybe even climate change--but this commentary felt incidental, beside the point, if anything proof of Moshfegh's insistence that her work is not political. It didn't feel groundbreaking, and it was included in such a way that I'm not even certain it was intended as commentary. Returning to the idea of a personal project, it feels just as much like it could be the natural byproduct of a kind of creative venting during the particular moment in history that this was written in.
All of that said, I did enjoy the reading process. On a page-by-page basis, I had the most fun with this out of any of the Moshfegh books I've read (which is not the same as saying it's my favorite--Eileen is my favorite). I enjoyed the fast pace and drama of the plot and the absurdity of the characters, and I'm a sucker for a medieval setting. I read the whole book in one day, and it felt easy. But would I read it again? No. Do I think it's a must-read? Certainly not. It was basically exactly what I expected it to be, knowing the setting, the basic plot, and what Moshfegh is into.
I will say, though, there was one moment when the depravity got me... you may remember a grape.....
I totally agree with this, like to me it feels like way too early of a draft. I can't help but feel like maybe, several drafts later, there's a more well-developed version of this story, one that's more purposeful and where Moshfegh has done more work with the story and by that point figured out it's layers of depth and figured out why she's writing this. But the published version feels like she's figured out the plot she wanted to tell--and sure, it's entertaining--but hasn't really figured out any depth below that storyline yet. It's too bad, I feel like she absolutely has the ability to make this book a must-read, but it felt underdeveloped, and like she hadn't gotten to the point where she could really see the difference between what was necessary and what she'd just tossed in to the first draft to see what would happen, for a laugh, because it was a first draft. Right now, it really does read like a personal project because it doesn't feel like there's any distinction between what's present for a reason, and what's there...just because??
@@ShaelinWrites Yes! I think the book has (had?) potential, but it got shuttled through the publishing industrial complex too quickly, before she'd figured out where exactly that potential lies. Idk if you've read Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You, but I feel like that was a similar situation--a book that needed longer in the cooker but was shuttled out into the world before its author had time to figure out what its purpose really was. I suspect these undercooked books from hyped authors are a result of an overly capitalist publishing industry model--I imagine they were under pressure to produce something to capitalize on their clout, and in a vacuum they may have spent the time to turn these into excellent books.
Lapvona's got a fuckin' sick cover, though. I love it.
Could you possible do a video on character flaws? maybe with examples? XD
Someone recommended Lapvona to me recently. I only got a few pages in before I decided it wasn't a before bedtime read lol. Your thoughts on its being (allegedly) apolitical were very interesting. I wonder what Moshfegh's definition of political is.
I hope you don't mind me commenting here about your work. I read Tabula Rasa tonight. I love how it lingers on superficial things and covers its ears, barrelling away from anything consequential. It felt as if Daphne didn't like the real story, so she wrote her own over the top, but she dropped it whenever anyone else was around because it wasn't big enough to share. Fantastic depiction of teen silly brain. I really enjoyed it.
Ohh that was very much what I was going for!! So happy you enjoyed it!!
Heyy I love your videos!! ❤
Animal: the catharsis is in the sequel, Animal 2. It's kind of like Kill Bill. LIght from Uncommon Stars. A can't sympathize with a character who doesn't recognize the trolley problem.
What We Long For/Love Enough: when you have two novels in one cover you have to print one of them upside down. Lapvona: Should have had a twist happy ending. "It was all a dream" might be nice. The Hobb Novels: Uh, that sounds real good. Daughters of the Deer: Haven't read it but sounds like a common idea nowdays. Did colonizers really care about two spirited people? I doubt it, they just wanted to steal. Cherry Beach: No comment whatsoever. I need to watch some paint dry. Waiting for Frank: Poetry is for people who can't write long stuff. I'd probably like the Hobb novels more. A Certain Hunger: You can break rules like "don't telegraph the ending". Or "don't present a wall of disgust". But you have to do something with them. It's like the way certain things are only for adults, but doing doing them doesn't make you an adult. Love Enough: Yeah, there's no market for novellas so jam them together and call it a n ovel
Literature has value because it expands the imagination. Imagination is the best picture of humanity because people are capable of anything, from the purest love, to the vilest torture to the wildest dreams.
I'm 13 and my dream of becoming a writer keeps getting reinforced because of you, and thank you so much for that.
I wanted to ask, what jobs do writers have when they are not full time writers?
Some book recs :)
Inkheart series by Cornelia funke
The sight: premonitions
The book thief
Wrinkle in time
Rick Riordan
Chronicles of Narnia
Non full-time writers have jobs that pay the bills. Stephen King worked as a school janitor for a while before getting Carrie published and going full-time.
To Heer Upadhyay : Edna O'Brien said you must want to become a writer with a passion, and live in written language.
Read the autobiographies of writers. Writers work as teachers, librarians, nurses, doctors, scientists, lawyers, shop assistants.
*One Life* by Australian novelist Kate Grenville is more about her family but it tells us about the ordinary life from which she sprang.
*The Photographer at Sixteen* by George Szirtes is about his tragic mother but we learn about the poet's early years too.
Dannie Abse was a poet and a lung doctor in a London hospital - read *A Poet in the Family* and *Goodbye Twentieth Century*.
Eudora Welty was a great novelist and she wrote a book about herself, *One Writer's Beginnings* which says much in a short space.
Read poetry aloud to yourself even if you only write prose because you will learn about rhythm and metre and rhyme and image-making.
I have William Wooten's *Reading Walter de La Mare* on my desk because I get so much from the mystery of de la Mare's poems.
Readers want to go through the door at the back of the wardrobe and into Narnia. Narnia can be a real place or King Arthur's faerie world.
Read R.K. Narayan, Dickens, Jane Austen, Chekhov, Flaubert, Colette, Carson McCullers, Anne Tyler, Alice Munro and Shaelin Bishop.
*Helen DeWitt's First Time.* CZcams. The Paris Review. 2016,
*Sheila Heti's First Time.* CZcams. The Paris Review. 2015.
*Tao Linn's First Time.* CZcams. The Paris Review. 2015.
*Valeria Luiselli.* CZcams. Coffee House Press. 2014. (She wrote a great book, *Tell Me How It Ends*.)
*Nicola Barker/ False Starts/ Granta Magazine.* CZcams. Granta Magazine. 2018.
*Great Writers : Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Updated).* CZcams. The Solzhenitysin Centre. 2018.
Solzhenitsyn was incarcerated in one of Stalin's prison camps and wrote *The Gulag Archipelago* Vintage paperback.
Nicola Barker denies herself sleep when writing a novel, a very bad idea which I do NOT recommend. You will become ill.
Sheila Heti smokes, a very bad idea. Writers should never smoke, take recreational drugs, get drunk. Green tea is GOOD.
@@nathancrossen2224 Thank you!
@@jackhaggerty1066 Thank you so much for taking effort to write this, it is really helpfull. I'm definitely going to do all this.
P.S: loved how you sneaked in shaelin's name at the end
Lapvona thoughts ~
I found it such a ridiculous and fun read, it felt like cartoonish bleak satire at times, while also poking sticks at the hypocrisy and self-importance of their society's brand of weirdly horny self-serving piety. It almost felt like each character insight was trying to outdo the last in terms of grotesque shenanigans or loathing for another character, but I found that pretty fun too. I bet it was a blast to write, but it also felt like perhaps it wasn't fully fleshed out beyond ~the horrors~. Perhaps I was meant to be shocked or moved (?) at the end but the amount of previous horrors made it kind of predictable. Though, maybe [redacted] was an act of kindness ultimately, whether our wretched protagonist saw it that way or not.
I liked how even characters I thought might be "kinder" were also total assholes (they had every right to be). It sometimes lost me around the wedding though, I found myself subconsciously skipping paragraphs and having to go back. In general, I feel something along the lines of "we came here for the horrific spectacles but the spectacles were so normalized I became jaded," not exactly that but hopefully you understand my sentiment. Now that I think of it, that's kinda weirdly parallel to the lives of the citizens of Lapvona. Not that they wanted spectacles! Their daily horribles were just .. commonplace.
I'm still stuck wondering if it's brilliant or calculated or both. If I've been had, I'm okay with it in this instance because it was a fun weird read :) & thank you so much for your videos & insights ~ your advice is invaluable!
👏👏👏👏
I LOVE Robin Hobb. She's kind of spoiled me for other fantasy books tbh
Since you liked that fantasy trilogy, you should read the song of ice and fire series! I just read the first one and am about to start the second. It's really good.
u looks so pretty❤❤❤❤😻
Ottesa Moshfegh doesn't care about the readers feeling for the characters, its quite insane she does that.
If youre saying this in a negative way towards moshfegh this seems like kindof an entitled outlook.