Surrounded by Richard Buckner

You just won’t lie down. Even closing your eyes, you can’t let it go, Surrounded inside. Leave it alone. You don’t get it back Undoing the scenes you can’t explain, Whatever you dream That you’ve buried away. It seems like you’re there as someone removed And left in their place with nothing to do. Bound to the switch. Railing again at the thought of the fight For well-earned dissent Undeserved at the time. As you’ve been shown, the motion has gone A shade of the night, only leading you on.

Yes. Swans have several beautiful crushingly dark songs. God Damn the Sun is one I go to.

The benefit of living in NYC (I recently moved after living there for nearly 25 years)! I remember one show where they didn’t have a full band and Oren played drums and guitar at the same time. The space in their music allows for that sort of thing, but it still was pretty cool to see.

I saw them several times live in the early-mid aughts. They’re great!

Terrible summary, bot. This is a pretty interesting list though, and though the title doesn’t mention it, all authors are women. I’ve added a few to my reading list. The list:

1. The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy

2. Bluets by Maggie Nelson

3. Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik

4. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

5. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

6. Look at Me by Anita Brookner

7. Accident: A Day’s News by Christa Wolf

8. Assembly by Natasha Brown

9. The Years by Annie Ernaux

10. The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

I’ve only read Solaris. Thanks for these.

Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve read Lem and love his work. Will totally check out their work. I think I’ll start with Roadside Picnic as Stalker is easily one of my favorite movies ever. I just saw Hard to be a God and loved it! You just made that connection for me, so I’ll definitely dig into their books. I really love all of Tartovsky’s stuff too and I even got to see Nostalghia in the theater about a decade ago. I’m American but I love that era of Soviet cinema.

I am unfamiliar! Tell me more!

I would say that VALIS is up there by PKD. I’m into that sort of crazy rabbit hole type of thing. I also read his Exegesis and several other novels and shorts, but I think I’m not done with him - I think I need to read Flow My Tears… The Interface thing on Reddit by mother horse eyes was really great and in the same vein.

Recent good science fiction: I really adored the Southern Reach trilogy which has some deep inscrutable undertones to it. There’s also a book called Shades of Grey that I very much enjoyed and I hope it gets some follow up. Station Eleven was good, part of a book club I was in. I very much like and respect Michel Holloubeq’s speculative fiction novels but he’s not for everyone. The whole 3 Body Problem thing was amazing but a bit outside of what I usually read.

I also was surprised to get obsessed with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Min Kamp sextet. I thought the last novel of the series was a genius piece of work, but I can’t remember if it was book 2 or 3 that I really didn’t enjoy.

I also like classics and I fucking adored War and Peace by Tolstoy. Someone mentioned Steinbeck in this thread and East of Eden is stunning. I also really really enjoyed Tortilla Flat. Is Bolano considered a classic? He should be. Some “classic” outliers that you may not have heard of: Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side. The War of the End of the World by Llosa. Oh, also anything by Hermann Hesse is going to be great.

Both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stevenson’s the Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde are fantastic.

The Name of the Rose by Eco is a wonderful mystery set in a medieval monastery.

William Gibson is a solid go-to for sci-fi.

I’m much in love with the strange ridiculousness of Samuel Beckett’s stuff too.

Nonfiction: Arctic Dreams by Lopez is stunning. Anything by John Muir. Nature/environment/ecology stuff which I like.

“Translated, with introductory essays, comments and notes by Wing-Tsit Chan”

Ooh! I’m gonna put that on my list. I have an old Prentice Hall one from 1963.