Ian Taylor > Recent Status Updates

the che monologue from the oujia board good god!

goes down easy

holy crap!

Pissed off that I'm enjoying this. Excited for the Dostoyevsky collection I've queued after so I can get back to being depressed.

"Alan's smile was intensifying into serenity."

The various deus ex machina of the plot just tumble out unadorned until Starritt tries to get prose-y and writes a line that makes no sense whatsoever.

For now though I still want to know what's gonna happen

Awkward prose (that line about "He felt in a way that only a 21 year old could" came out of nowhere. Who is our narrator here?) And I do not think I'm equipped with the right class background to really care about either protagonist.

That said, I'm not fully bored yet, so we'll see where it goes.

intro is pissing me off but i still have high hopes

wow it's like what if those ra lafferty stories didn't suck, and i'm only on the early stuff!

Her technique is so good but feels so effortless! The way the transition from Obinze's aunt's to the Chief's house happens is so simple but I would have fretted and overthought writing it myself. Adichie just switches settings without addressing it at all and you're along for the ride.

Learning much.

Loved Half of a Yellow sun and think I'm going to love this more.

oh hell yea

amazing holy cow

This mf think he soooooo smart lmao

Mailer shouldn't have called this "abominably written." It's quite good at the macro level. But Baldwin did just use the word 'boyish' three times in a sentence when describing someone lol.

First!

oh man

reads like a cooooooooooool glass of water

Finally looked up 'Avuncular' and realized he's been calling himself a chopped unc this whole time

Ok, still mostly bloviating but Ben can be really funny. The sperm donation scene was great. Would love something fully comic in this voice. Maybe it is, and that's what I'm not picking up on.

Book length substack post about the author's own literary celebrity. Reads smoothly at least. Perhaps there are some profound meditations on life and art buried in here, but I'm finding the window dressing tedious.

el maestro regresa...

I like that this is like a management textbook for guys who think they're too smart for management textbooks.

Getting kind of demented

Subject matter is whatever but his prose is so good. Minimalist in a dreamy way instead of a curt and aggressive one.

LOVE rambly Russian prose like this. Dead Souls really got me into it, and either Dostoyevsky is a better writer than Gogol or this translation is better (probably both are true) because it's even more enjoyable here.

70 pages in and almost nothing has happened but I'm enraptured. How can you be bored when the sentences flow so nicely!

Like a hard-boiled Dubliners set in Los Angeles. A bit over the top sometimes but I fw it