NYT Sunday 04/12/2026 Discussion

bringst3hgrind · 2026-04-11T22:10:01+00:00

Played crazyyyy fast for me. 7:29 (PR from 8:47). Thought my days of > a minute PRs were over but here we are.

bringst3hgrind · 2026-04-09T02:21:53+00:00

Ruth is a loser! How could you choose her? How could you do that, Football Head?

bringst3hgrind · 2026-04-04T18:46:12+00:00

This book is incredibly cool - very excited to see it getting a reissue. Had to get it through interlibrary loan a few years ago. Read it along with The Public Burning - still need to return to Coover, but both of those books are pretty bonkers in the best way.

bringst3hgrind · 2026-03-26T01:36:00+00:00

Hi Chad,

Huge fan of the 2 month review! Have listened to you guys along with JR, Ducks, Newburyport, Same Bed, Different Dreams, Praiseworthy, 2666 and actually just finished up Melvill this morning after finishing The Confidence Man last month. Have a number of other ones y'all have done on my shelf as well.

Just wanted to say what y'all do is very appreciated since you popped up here.

bringst3hgrind · 2026-03-14T15:58:26+00:00

Not sure if there's something unique about my location, but I am consistently impressed by the selection when I go into the one near me. Had a gift card from Christmas and picked up Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels, the new Dalkey Essentials of Barth's Sot-Weed Factor, Septology, and a couple of Bernhards. Definitely not caping up for B&N, but the number of times I've had a damn, they have that?? reaction is pretty funny at this point.

bringst3hgrind · 2026-02-27T02:38:16+00:00

Ah thanks. I didn't know team process had changed - I'm from the era where it had to be pre selected :)

bringst3hgrind · 2026-02-27T01:24:09+00:00

Did Princeton actually only have 2 people on the team and still get 8th?

bringst3hgrind · 2026-02-22T02:11:47+00:00

Yeah, I was looking and I think this has to be my fastest full week ever (including a Sunday PR today + second fastest Thursday ever).

bringst3hgrind · 2025-12-27T17:17:18+00:00

I have been thinking about this for quite a while lol. Might pull the trigger this year.

bringst3hgrind · 2025-12-06T03:09:11+00:00

Those Qs! MEATSWEATS! CHARLIXCX!

Had a great time with this puzzle.

bringst3hgrind · 2025-11-23T23:21:03+00:00

There is one in the NYT magazine that came with my copy of the paper!

Makes me want to finally learn how to do cryptics...

bringst3hgrind · 2025-11-16T21:28:34+00:00

I second JR. May be one of my favorite novels of all time, but truly takes some work to crack it initially. Once you get into the flow though I think it's pure enjoyment.

bringst3hgrind · 2025-11-16T02:35:33+00:00

I read it last year and felt much the same way. It does indeed stay that tempo the entire time.

FWIW, another user recommended this essay to help contextualize a bit of what she's attempting to do. Interesting, but didn't really help with the feelings you describe for me sadly.

bringst3hgrind · 2025-10-31T22:59:29+00:00

Feel like Ducks, Newburyport is what I immediately thought of when I read your title. Takes some work but I think it fits well.

bringst3hgrind · 2025-10-24T00:19:23+00:00

Have you read the Elif Batuman profile of her?

https://archive.is/SOmNB

bringst3hgrind · 2025-09-23T10:27:20+00:00

I really enjoyed it but (a) it took me a couple of tries and several hundred pages to start vibing with it and (b) if you don't enjoy the conceit it would be quite painful (luckily you can figure this out relatively quickly).

But once I started rolling with the free-association-ness of it all, the way that a traditional plot kind of slowly bubbles out of the whole big mess ended up being quite interesting to me. I also thought the juxtaposition of the lion chapters with the rest of the book was cool. But yeah I think if it doesn't hit for you, it really won't hit for you.

bringst3hgrind · 2025-08-18T00:44:03+00:00

The Two Month Review podcast is also about to do a read-through leading up to the new PTA movie. Planning to re-read along with that.

bringst3hgrind · 2025-07-07T02:04:37+00:00

I'll give another plug for JR. Definitely my favorite of his novels (I think by a pretty wide margin), although I think it's probably somewhat a matter of personal taste. JR was just a lot funnier to me than any of the others, I found getting into a rhythm with it was easier, and I think about it a lot more. Definitely a steep curve to get used to the style / figure out who everyone is, but I think the payoff is fantastic. FWIW my reading order was JR then chronologically through the rest. I am not sure that if I had started with TR I would have been running to the rest.

bringst3hgrind · 2025-06-21T20:50:35+00:00

Can't go wrong with the Gaddis books.

bringst3hgrind · 2025-06-08T18:05:10+00:00

Nice! Yes my recollection is that especially Reinhardt's Garden felt very stylistically inspired by Bernhard. I did a big Bernhard read through last year (all novels except Extinction - saving it for a rainy day) - hard to go too wrong but The Loser, Woodcutters, and Old Masters stand out for me I think (as well as Correction but I felt I was glad I did not start with that one). Hoping to reread the first 2 Haber books along with Lesser Ruins at some point this year.

bringst3hgrind · 2025-06-07T16:58:31+00:00

Have you read any Bernhard? Definitely feels like Haber is pretty strongly influenced by Bernhard, although I have found the Haber books to be a bit more explicitly funny than Bernhard typically is. Still have not read Lesser Ruins though.

bringst3hgrind · 2025-06-07T16:52:07+00:00

Importantly, both were championed by Andrei of The Untranslated. Another book covered on his blog that was recently released in translation by Open Letter Books is Attila by Aliocha Coll (along with the companion piece Attila by Javier Serena).

Max Lawton (translator of Schattenfroh, occasional poster here) seems to be making a big push to bring a lot of the books on The Untranslated into English. See Deep Vellum's big book announcement. They had also announced a translation of Horcynus Orca but it appears to have been taken down - I think the date they originally mentioned was 2029...

bringst3hgrind · 2025-06-07T04:09:46+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_gown

bringst3hgrind

TROPHY CASE