Naturally, being something of a contrarian, I decided that it’d be nice notion to look into the possibility of an Alternative World Book Night - i.e., to ask a number of writers, poets et al to nominate a recently published book that they consider to be unjustly overlooked by the critics and public alike. The result was published in the Irish Times on Saturday, with the most fascinating / totally bonkers answer coming from poet David Lordan. To wit:
CYCLONOPEDIA: COMPLICITY WITH ANONYMOUS MATERIALSFor the rest, which includes nominations from George Pelecanos, Aifric Campbell, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, China Miéville, Sara Paretsky, Mark Billingham and more, clickety-click here …
By Reza Negarestani (re.press, 2008)
“I’d like to plump for the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s genre-bending ‘Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials’. It’s one for active readers and fans of “difficult work”. A continuously inventive and artistically ambitious work that, like many great literary refoundations, is simultaneously a reimagining of reality and a reorientating of literature against currently dominant trends. Negarestani draws on a polyglot engagement with contemporary theory and on a schizophrenic, inhumanist literary heritage including Lovecraft, Stein, Burroughs and Pynchon, to give us an astounding depiction of history as a minor subplot within a struggle of much older, more vast forces. Cyclonopedia refreshed my paranoia and left me more doubtful and contemptuous of things-as-they-are than ever before, something the most sustaining works of art have always done for me.” - David Lordan
2 comments:
Our store participated enthusiastically in World Book Night, but personally I felt a bit meh about it. I'd be happy to stand out on a corner giving away a copy of a book I'd chosen as a favorite, but the way it was presented here, it was a list of twenty or so standard contemporary bestsellers. Nothing against the books in particular, but why was Q is for Quarry chosen, even for the biggest Sue Grafton fan in the world? Wouldn't you want to start your potential addicts at A is for Alibi? And why would you start Michael Connelly readers on Blood Work instead of the first Harry Bosch?
For me, I do enough flogging of someone else's idea of what makes a good book to do this in my free time too.
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