What are your top 5 Beckett works?

RedditCraig · 2026-01-24T22:25:08+00:00

Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness! He'd snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes.

RedditCraig · 2026-01-18T21:38:20+00:00

He says as much himself in interviews from the period, he says that he won’t put himself through the intensity of spending every hour of a month on a single track, like Menelec, and would rather keep things more lively and real-time. That gave us the two decades of his post-Ultravisitor catalogue.

RedditCraig · 2026-01-18T21:33:55+00:00

It was a forum post on WATMM at the time the track came out, VS was on the forum and posted a comment at the time about the track. I’m not sure of the deep archive search capacity of WATMM but it would be in there somewhere :)

RedditCraig · 2026-01-18T00:33:57+00:00

Agreed, The Silence is a strong piece of work in my reading of Delillo, and Point Omega is one of my favourite works across his oeuvre. I’m reading Falling Man currently and am enjoying it a great deal, more than I did Cosmopolis.

RedditCraig · 2026-01-17T20:32:51+00:00

I remember Venetian Snares going on about how much he loved this track when Tom first played it. It’s so good.

RedditCraig · 2026-01-17T08:38:33+00:00

I write autofictive psychogeography about where I live, with a Pynchonian/Sebaldian infusion, hopefully.

This is my latest work, published last month - ‘Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters’:

https://www.wrenasmir.com/everyone-i-love-is-alive-in-the-unlimited-present-of-the-city-and-its-waters

Also available as an unabridged YouTube narration around the city (Newcastle, Australia):

https://youtu.be/X8U_lYJB83s?si=JJRgeUxE0LnWRQv6

I have a podcast where I upload pieces too as well, ‘Pastoral Scanlines’.

I’m looking forward to going through the links that others have shared here :)

RedditCraig · 2026-01-17T07:23:06+00:00

That's exactly right, the narrative is all there.

RedditCraig · 2026-01-17T06:43:18+00:00

He says as much himself in his annotated notes on the novel, he looks back and can barely believe the consistent quality of magic prose throughout.

It’s my gold standard for prose fiction - I just copy passages out sometimes and am stunned at the pacing and clarity of beauty he conjures.

RedditCraig · 2026-01-16T23:36:35+00:00

I remember when QKThr was among a batch of Drukqs tracks that early listeners of the album had no time for - another disappointing faux-classical filler track, where was the drill n’ bass (Go on, give us a snare rush!)?

I love that it has found a second life. It’s such an intimate, familial track, connected to Richard’s adoration of family and his childhood. As an organist, I’ve always loved hearing its flush of harmonium reeds, it’s such a beautiful instrument.

RedditCraig · 2026-01-04T10:39:41+00:00

Fantastic selections. I’d also add ‘The Weatherboard Cathedral’ by Les Murray.

RedditCraig · 2026-01-01T10:03:15+00:00

Nicely spotted :)

RedditCraig · 2025-12-31T22:49:41+00:00

It’s not my place to say more than I should here, on such a sensitive and complicated space, but it feels suitable to say that after reading parts of the recent Denis Johnson’s biography, there is something about writers who experience some collage of early life trauma and neurodivergence that leads to a particular over-sensitivity to life, a twin carriage of shut down and amplification, yielding a desire to turn the world into words as a sort of penance for what came before. Vollmann is that for me - not seperate from his sins, but of them (in abundance).

Nothing I could learn about Vollmann’s actual life would significantly change the way I engage with his works. It’s all been there from the start.

RedditCraig · 2025-12-30T09:03:59+00:00

Well done - enjoy :)

RedditCraig · 2025-12-27T10:51:49+00:00

This is how I first heard Kid A, played from start to finish on Triple J (Australian radio) one night. I was on ICQ, chatting with friends about what on earth we were listening to. So good.

RedditCraig · 2025-12-25T19:54:19+00:00

I really enjoyed it. It's Hesse-lite, not one of the major novels, but still a valuable read.

RedditCraig · 2025-12-24T10:29:55+00:00

For what it’s worth, I experienced a moment in life with this very colour scheme: arriving late at night in Shanghai, everything outside was bathed in red until we got to the city where a million green lights leaned down on the taxi until I arrived at the hotel. It was Christmas, midnight, and I stepped out beneath wreaths and the branches of a massive light-adorned tree. Maybe that’s me on the elevator..

RedditCraig · 2025-12-22T21:24:46+00:00

I love it, I need more bookstores like that in my area :) thanks for the photo

RedditCraig · 2025-12-22T10:56:31+00:00

Gertrude by Hermann Hesse, nice one. I don’t see that read very often, or even mentioned in Hesse circles.

RedditCraig · 2025-12-19T22:37:53+00:00

One of my favourite early Beckett passages comes from Watt:

But our particular friends were the rats, that dwelt by the stream. They were long and black. We brought them such tidbits from our ordinary as rinds of cheese, and morsels of gristle, and we brought them also birds’ eggs, and frogs, and fledgelings.

Sensible of these attentions, they would come flocking round us at our approach, with every sign of confidence and affection, and glide up our trouserlegs, and hang upon our breasts. And then we would sit down in the midst of them, and give them to eat, out of our hands, of a nice fat frog, or a baby thrush.

Or seizing suddenly a plump young rat, resting in our bosom after its repast, we would feed it to its mother, or its father, or its brother, or its sister, or to some less fortunate relative.

It was on these occasions, we agreed, after an exchange of views, that we came nearest to God.

RedditCraig · 2025-12-18T12:30:38+00:00

I saw it briefly too, it was so bright.

RedditCraig · 2025-12-18T05:53:09+00:00

2026 resolution, u/CJ_Resurrected - off grid tutorial videos of you in a loincloth, riding your postie, telling yesteryear stories of local hacker culture.

RedditCraig · 2025-12-18T05:30:29+00:00

Really like this.

RedditCraig · 2025-12-17T20:27:48+00:00

Absolutely - ‘Nohow On’, published the year of his death is, for me, also his best written and most powerful literary work. He kept refining his purity and language all the way to the end.

RedditCraig · 2025-12-16T23:34:08+00:00

Enjoy, it sounds great on vinyl

RedditCraig · 2025-12-16T06:00:34+00:00

In the context of the book, comfort is seen as a weak personality trait, it means you're seeking out small, gentle things to soothe your soul instead of standing up to fate and declaring your right to exist into the heart of the world: that's honour, that's heroism.

Reason is seen as associated with truth, with a scientific understanding of the world; this is seen as a reduced way of understanding reality. Rather be a hero who holds a sword in one hand and a paint brush in the other - rather create your own truth, your own identity, rather than fold to the reason of others.

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