Tallis

>Pynchon - V, GR, MD >McCarthy - Blood Meridian >Salinger - Almost everything, he was good >Twain - Huck Finn >Houellebecq- Submisson, Island >Dostoevsky - The Idiot Could keep going. There are still good books that don't really conclude (ex: Dead Souls), but it's a flaw.

There are some great books that you have to apologize for or equivocate over (The Brothers K is always my example)- but I prefer the perfect ones (Pale Fire, for instance, never *really* ends until you read it like 5 times & figure our what's under all the trap doors).

Sometimes a mess made by a genius can be more entertaining than a perfect product of a mediocrity- I still prefer Dostoevsky to O Henry, even though he ends up pissing me off half the time by clumsily knocking shit over with his slapstick soliloquies etc.

The Great Gatsby for instance is often praised for its formal unity, which does exist, & is quite rigorous- but it bores me horrendously compared to, say, Dead Souls which is only one third complete & ends with a great promise of what never arrives.

The authors I love most are ones who do both. Nabokov is the greatest in this way- most of his works are perfect, & he has so many perfect works that it's difficult to categorize them compared to others, as some of his minor novels are better than our inherited "masterpieces."

>meme philosophy of McLuhan >pop literature of Nabokov >praises both as the summit of the human spirit >knows absolutely NOTHING written before the 19th cent. Is this all an elaborate joke? Or are you just that much of an uneducated pedant?

You don't technically follow me- but here you are- every fucking day lmao. Please find something else to do.

& I read plenty of premodern literature- I just so happen to prefer the great modernists as they uh yknow- stood on the shoulders of giants & were thus enabled to see further. Nabokov is far from "pop" (Lolita is a singular case, it's not like Ada & The Gift are "popular")