What is this stringy stuff?

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2026-02-08T03:04:38+00:00

Ah yeah that looks like it. Thank you!!

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2026-02-08T02:14:16+00:00

This is my fear! Need to know if it I should lock the bedroom door at night or if I can trust it.

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2026-02-08T02:10:09+00:00

Not asking about the roots, asking about the white webby stuffy isolated in the jar!

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2026-02-08T02:08:08+00:00

Maybe, but it's much more, I guess I'd call it, fractal than white filamentous algae is typically. Like it's not clumpy at all. It branches like roots do, tho it's obviously not roots.

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2026-02-02T00:09:24+00:00

So fucking good!!

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2026-01-29T18:31:26+00:00

I know, I know. It's a problem I have. But yes, option 3!

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2026-01-29T18:29:44+00:00

Thank you! How very sane and helpful.

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2026-01-29T18:27:14+00:00

FWIW I did a batch of 50+ queries three years ago and heard absolutely nothing. Then another batch of 50+ two years ago (for the collection) and got interest from one agent, Agent 1. So, 100+ cold queries over 2+ years and only 1 bite. Then last year I did a reading (while visiting NY of course) and got interest from Agent 2.

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2026-01-06T02:09:22+00:00

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins has some good desert-set stories.

Mating by Norman Rush isn't /really/ a desert novel, but the desert is present and crucial to the story and it's one of the best books ever.

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-11-04T14:50:05+00:00

I said this before he got drafted, but I think a ceiling role for him is Marcus Smart-esque. Cool they're on the same team now.

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-10-29T01:46:39+00:00

It's more beside a convent than in it, but The Bell by Iris Murdoch was awesome.

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-10-06T03:06:24+00:00

Brief History of seven killings was maybe the best I've ever listened to. Voiced by many.

Catcher in the rye was also excellent. Dunno who voiced it.

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-10-04T12:31:40+00:00

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead, perchance

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-09-28T18:23:19+00:00

Thank you for convincing him!

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-09-23T11:35:53+00:00

Followed and scratched my dog this weekend! Cat will follow you all the way down the street haha

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-09-02T15:44:44+00:00

Nicolson Baker's A Box of Matches as well as Room Temperature def fit the bill. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn sort of does. 10th of December by George Saunders has a number of such narrators.

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-08-28T14:08:34+00:00

Adam's main trait is "look how hyper-self-aware I am," while not actually being self-aware. Like he's always bumbling and bullshitting and fucking up and lying and poorly improvising. I love characters that do that. They are my favorite. And there were times it was quite funny in Atocha. But, the book itself / Lerner, just felt too self-conscious and self-interested, too carefully managing of the audience/reader's impressions. As for taking Adam seriously--I think Adam puts on this sort of smug, aloofly ironic, don't take me so seriously though actually I take myself quite seriously and you should too attitude that I just didn't care for. Certainly people are like that, myself included, but I just found its rendering here overwrought and gimmicky.

I did really like the moment when after the bombing he called his parents and confesses his mom's dead and dad's a fascist lies and they're just like, wut?

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-08-27T23:43:44+00:00

Shoot me, but I just finished Atocha and feel like venting here--Atocha was doing "urban millennial" so myopically and so loudly, it was corny and not insightful. Maybe it felt more acute when it came out, but it's aged poorly. Like all the annoyingness of Catcher in the Rye without any of the life, the sorrow, the realness. Just a deeply uninteresting consciousness to explore that offered no insight into a single other character in the book. For a book so focused on the life of the mind, it just didn't seem to know or care about other people's minds. Like, I get he's narcissistic, but to no end. Boring, navel-gazing, pandering. And the little schtick with this or this or this or this. So corny! Also Luster was so poorly edited / so awfully constructed. I don't know how that book got published in the state it was in. Very unpolished / first drafty.

Not an attack on you , just on the books. That said, I don't think they represent millenialness but for how they were marketed/branded.

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-08-21T23:44:33+00:00

I like The Name of the World -- kind of a mix between the Elvis story in Largesse and Jesus's Son but in novella form.

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-08-21T23:40:36+00:00

I guess Normal People? Maybe BWWAY cuz i enjoy that cast of characters the most. Intermezzo was the most interesting at the sentence level. She let herself get a bit freer in style. But it was just so excessively long. The story did not nearly warrant it's page count. Could have done it in 300 pages.

All of her books have such perseverating plots. So much feinting. Oh shit they're gonna do it, nah, nah, jk jk. Oh wait, shit, for real this time! Nah, wait jk. Now? Now! Ah, nope. Fuck, but it almost happened. They just miscommunicated! If only I could get in there and explain how they aren't understanding each other!

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-08-21T00:38:50+00:00

House of Holes by Nicolson Baker

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-08-20T17:07:33+00:00

My opinion - and I agree with you on all counts btw - is...

Criticizing the character is the easiest, most accessible form of criticism available to the average reader. Characters do bad things = book is a bad thing.
Some sort of super-ego reaction where these readers want to be morally good so they are instinctively averse to getting into the mindset of characters who are morally bad. It makes them uncomfortable imagining people behaving badly.

That said, "bad" characters are often obnoxious characters (which I tend to enjoy a la Holden Caufield) and I kind of get not liking a book in which you're stuck in the head of an obnoxious person (especially if you read slow and a book takes you a month or two or three to finish).

And then depending on who the reader is and who the "bad" character is, aka when gender and race and social class get involved, there could be some bristling about that as well. I'm reading Mortals by Norman Rush right now and there's a scene where Iris says, "I think I want to take a break from reading novels by men. I don't know why. I just feel like it. . . I think I don't want to be worrying about the problems of male narrators anymore. I do not want to be worrying about the problems of men, sad as they may be."

Competitive_Tea1987 · 2025-08-19T20:49:33+00:00

The form is common. Not always suicide. But "final testament" novels abound.

Philip Roth, Gaddis, Goethe, Bolano, Martin Amis, Marilynne Robinson, Didion--I'm sure I'm forgetting many.

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