7/18 recs and thoughts

Two people asked for recs this week, the first being

Do you have recs for any books that are like Disco Elysium the crpg game. Doesn’t have to be 1:1 but maybe books about failure, drug addiction, and the Inland Empire

I actually am just wrapping up the book that most reminds me of the two hours of Disco Elysium I played at a friend’s house, which is Geoffrey D. Morrison’s The Coffin of Honey — his first book, Falling Hour, is one of the all time “guy is sitting or walking somewhere and thinking about stuff” novels, in line with W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn or Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, but here instead of maximalistically exploding out a bunch of thoughts, he’s done so with plots, characters, riffs, etc. Good! Another answer for a book about “failure, drug addiction, and the Inland Empire” would be David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which, while I’ve never read him myself, I am friends with a lot of queer women who love him.

The second was,

Hi Isabel, we were twitter mutuals ages ago. I’ve enjoyed both your novels, they’re really quite good, and I find your essays really quite amazing. Anyway, I need recommendations for books. Specifically, I would like recommendations for books that might help me to learn how to write better essays. I don’t know if that means collections of good essays (as exemplars), bad essays (as examples of things to avoid), or something else entirely.

Oomf! I am happy to narrow it down depending on what kind of essays you want to write — adventure essays, literary critical essays, etc. — so DM me your handle and say hi, but some general recs:

Even if I disagree with them, which is often, I pretty much always learn something about writing nonfiction when I’m reading James Baldwin (Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name), Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader, Selected Essays), and, though I don’t often hear his essays talked about, Philip Roth (Why Write?). These are all people who write with such force, conviction, and skill that whatever they discuss becomes alive, and what else can an essayist hope for, at the end of the day.

In terms of essays about literature, Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, and Tom McCarthy’s Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish are all collections with stuff I’ve come back to over the years. Batuman has two loose essays I also like quite a bit, “Get a Real Degree” in LRB and “Short Story & Novel” in n+1. If you want to read good contemporary essays, I think n+1 is by far the most consistent place I find them — please read this Frank Guan essay about Drake, “Gone Guy,” as well as many others, and also other stuff by Frank Guan, who rocks (here he is in The Point on Elif Batuman’s first novel, for example). Tobi Haslett is another great contemporary writer, and he also has a phenomenal n+1 essay, and all of my favorite Andrea Long Chu essays are in there, too.

Dislike is interesting because an essay like Jonathan Franzen’s “Mr. Difficult,” which I fucking hate, I still have gotten a lot from thinking about, and I do like his famous “Harper’s essay” — in general, if the only way you can relate to literature is approval, take a lap and hit the stacks, and if the other way you decide to relate to literature is that you want to write essays that aggregate a bunch of Google searches you did to conclude that whatever you’re writing about is a phenomenon of capitalism, and capitalism is bad, remember to trust that your readers live in the world, know how to Google, and otherwise:

Some music:

• Been listening to a lot of Djrum this week, Under Tangled Silence, Portrait With Firewood, and Broken Glass Arch.

• Can’t go wrong with a little bossa nova from Os Gatos . . .

• I saw Los Amigos Invisibles play at ACL when I was 13, and it’s still one of the most fun shows I’ve ever been to, so just yesterday, I went back to their Arepa 3000, which is also fun.

Also I got to play Slayyyter’s “I’M ACTUALLY KIND OF FAMOUS” this week because:

Holy moly! Okay, submit more thoughts and questions, please!

and also