Absolute genius book! Not least because it keeps creeping on you well after you've finished. I read it back in 2020 and I've read well over 400 books since then and Negative Space is now in my top 5 books of the last 5 years because it just bloody haunted me. I just couldn't stop thinking about it! I now recommend it to anyone who will listen lol

You had me at, "a darkness will invade his tone" - I heard that and knew I needed to read Willaim Gass. I've just finished "The Pedersn Kid" and I don't think I'm exaggerating to say I feel transformd. Gass is putting down on paper exactly what what I'm feeling today living in the United States: isolation, hostility, supressd violence, physical danger, emptiness, uncertainty. But what lifts me up is the willingness of the three men to face all that fear, dread and horror to do what they feel is right. I had never heard of Gass before your reivew. Thanks.

He failed at being a failure.🤣

"Camille Paglia, the paedophile?"

Post this in Swedish. Better than food och Dr Cambell och nåra till som jag tillfälligt glömt bort. . skit samma! Pandemin var inte helt bortkastad tid, den här snubben fick mig atr köpa George Batailles "Ögats historia" och Camille Paglias "Sexual personae", så står i viss tacksamhets skuld.

My top 5 reads of 2024 are: 1. Tolstoy - Anna Karenina 2. Bolaño - 2666 3. Alberto Moravia - Two Women 4. James Baldwin - Giovanni's room 5. Alejo Carpentier - The recourse of the method

Just finished it. Seemed like everyone was spooked, but didn’t know why. Maybe the governess let the ghosts into Bly.

I served with a guy that was from NYC. He reminded me of Henry Miller, had a way with words and a feel on things. I always wonder what happened him.

I absolutely LOVED thia book! What a treasure!

I didn't grok this book when I first read it in the 80s. Also it didn't jive with the computer programming and hardware hacking that I was doing at the time. I enjoy it more on each reread.

Brother like honestly, the comparison to Salo is such a great one!

Thomas Pynchon is another crass American making fun of the tragedy of the Blitz. They wouldn't do it with the Shoah.

I like listening to you, enjoy your thoughts, but the excessive movements and drop-stop edits are annoying.

Nice chair. Just bought one.

Thank you for the recommendations! I first read the german translation of the book when I was 14 and instantly fell in love with it, despite knowing nothing about the environment it is set in. It was like a fever dream, because I had no idea which parts were actually realistic and which surreal. Now at 35 I have re-read it countless times and still love it.

This is a really good review. I am deeply disturbed by the sticker on the mug now, but still great review :D

Just finished reading this and I’m in awe of it. I don’t know if you’ve seen First Reformed, but Reverend Toller with the barb wire on his chest was exactly like Hazel Motes. Turns out Schrader listed Wise Blood as one of his favorite books in the past. A great homage.

Can we get a review of your reading chair

Great review. While Blood Meridian is thematically in the spirit of Moby Dick, I would say this book is the follow up to Moby Dick. The prose is inferior to both those books but the encounter with nature and the building of America is in line with the two, however Melville names the buffalo as the last untapped great species that we have not despoiled, and sadly he mused that they were too numerous for us to deplete like we did the whale. I wish he were right I saw this as a sort of gold rush novel except instead of an untapped vein on this one guy knew about it was an un-hunted herd in a pristine hidden valley. If you love this book and Blood Meridian I can’t possibly recommend “Empire of the summer moon” highly enough

Favs of the year : -east of Eden -dune -Juno loves legs

Hi. Why did he join the Italian army and not the US Army? Thank you.

Oh, come on why can’t I just read all 20 of my books in my desk for School I have like 40 books on epic I’m reading right now

I feel like I'm the only person who wasn't impressed by this book. I found the attempt at teenage vernacular to be out of touch and the characters were one-dimensional. You can quite literally predict what each character will do based on their demographics. All good characters are exactly the same and almost every bad character is bad without motivation. They're just evil because they are. What little interesting horror elements there were are overshadowed by the author's need to have an extremely simplified moral landscape.

Great ending to this video, brother.

Yeah..Major Mosquito with his squinty babies eyes😮

Great to hear Uniform mentioned. Michael Berdan, the singer, is a big book guy. Search for an interview with Books of Some Substance podcast. Michael discusses Hubert Selby Jr.

My personal top five: 5- The Invention of Morel (Adolfo Bioy Casares) 4- East of Eden (John Steinbeck) 3- Giovanni’s Room (James Baldwin) 2-The Stranger (Albert Camus) 1- Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman) Honorable mention to Daytripper by Fabio Moon, a gorgeous graphic novel with beautiful and moving themes surrounding life and its end

Hi! Enjoy your videos. Now finishing "The waves" by Virginia Woolf. It differs from "To the lighthouse" and is also completely in monologues. I like "The waves" much better. You may like it too.

In case anybody has or hasn’t noticed, this is happening right now…Hollywood is burning.

2:13 There’s an annotated edition of The Bridge by Crane scholar Lawrence Kramer which I highly recommend for just that reason.

his book amygdalatropolis is also interesting but you have to be very acquainted with 4chan to get into it

It was a difficult read but it rang true for me. Looking in the mirror will never be the same again.

Garbage like every American attempt to handle a subject, what a decadent cuture, keep yourself away from classics please

This is a terrible book Review my God.

I agree on the drug point, but i am on Terrance McKennas' side with psychedelics

Homie looks clammy like he's coming down himself and I respect the hell out of that.

I read Stella Maris first, not knowing the outcome. I kept hoping that Alicia would find the key to escaping her torment, then lead a happy life. But, Cormac McCarthy is not exactly known for happy endings.

I regret spending time, and 40$, on this book 😑

book sounds corny

I'm not sure I have a top 5. It took me a while but I had to finish Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar before going to Paris for my birthday, followed by a trip to Argentina for the holidays. I adored it! I didn't use the map but just read straight through to from chapter 1 to 56. It was amazing. Especially the second half in Argentina.

My five favorite books of the year: 1.Louis Ferdinand Celine- Death on the Installment Plan (I will never forget how this book made me feel, and we've no shortage of overcoats...) 2. William Faulkner- The Sound and The Fury (Dilsey- They endured) 3. Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian (He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.) 4. Vladimir Nabokov- Invitation to a Beheading (and there stood beings akin to him....) 5. Louise Glück- Averno (my favorite modern poet, sadly now deceased, still writing here at the top of her powers) Honorable mentions/special shout-outs: - Bret Anthony Johnston- We Burn Daylight (literary fiction meets true crime, 2024 masterpiece imo) - Thomas Pynchon- The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon- Vineland - Dostoevsky- Devils - Dostoevsky- Notes From Underground - Cormac McCarthy- The Orchard Keeper - Cormac McCarthy- The Sunset Limited - Cormac McCarthy- The Passenger - Jake Skeets- Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers: Poems - Diane Seuss- Modern Poetry: Poems - Henry Miller- Tropic of Cancer - J.D. Salinger- The Catcher in the Rye - Gabriel Garcia Marquez- Of Love and Other Demons - Joseph Benner- The Impersonal Life - James Allen- As A Man Thinketh - Claire Keegan- Small Things Like These

The earlier novel, A Happy Death, is far superior in my opinion. In this novel, he’s showing that life does have meaning and purpose. You cannot read The Outsider (Stranger) without reading this first.

Absolutely loved this book

The "tchau" in the end was amazing! Cheers from Brasil 🇧🇷

Appreciate all these thoughts on the book, certainly see where you're coming from. I might've come away with the same opinions if I hadn't had the unique experience of reading all of his previous 7 novels, one after the other, up to the release of this one. An intense experience, to say the least, but I actually found this to be an incredibly cathartic closure to his body of work. To have the Houellebecq-ian protagonist here not be obliterated by the world in the same way as all the others - maybe save for Jed in The Map And The Territory, probably the closest tonal partner to this work - made this a really moving experience and antidote to the cumulative poison that I had been (willingly and happily) drinking. Yes, Paul is annihilated in the sense of mortality, as we all are, but not succumbing to annihilation of the spirit in a France, Europe and world in which meaning has disappeared is a turn that was deeply felt for me after sitting with all of these previous incarnations who we've watched drown in it to varying degrees of acceptance. If you ever do give it another shot, I'd recommend it immediately after steeping in some of this other works again. Variations and developing shades of theme, character, voice, on-going since Whatever, both enriched and subverted here, reveal themselves with a startling clarity.

So excited to see this book on your channel. It ruined me for about a month after reading. It affected to me to such a degree that I started becoming paranoid at night, wondering whether or not the prose infected me in real life in somehow. Ickiest horror I’ve read. It sticks to you like a nasty cursed honey. 10/10.

Please do a book review on beyond good and evil by Nietzsche

I've been haunted by Alicia Western recently since I had a dream about her on goddamn Christmas Eve, same day she killed herself. Although Alicia had always struggled with suicidal ideation, it feels hard to accept from Alicia that she killed herself without waiting for Bobby to either "fully" die or wake up. And the fact that if he woke up with less brain function, she would consider him gone... You think Bobby would have given up on Alicia if she had woken up with less brain function from a coma?

book was great, loved the ending. read it right after the wasp factory, which i think would also make for a great review on this channel.

thanks for keeping reading alive.