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Rogue Pages

@rogue.pages

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Post Bro-dernism Lit Bro
Southern Gothic is my favorite sub-sub-sub-genre
Umberto Eco is my spirit animal
Don’t take me too seriously 😜
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📚 New Chapter 📚 It’s my birthday! 🥳 § § What’s up everyone? Another revolution on this tiny rock in space 🙌 Thank you all for the fellowship and good times! Glad to be on the internet with you all and sharing our love of books 🫶 by @rogue.pages
71
2 years ago
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✨ Infinite Jest ✨ § § It’s been 30 years since the world received David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece ‘Infinite Jest’. The great part is that it’s still relevant today. Wallace predicted our internet-dopamine-addiction in the mid 90s and how it would rot not just our brains, but our ability to actually have genuine relationships and be human. That’s what this book is about. A thousand page meditation on the future of consciousness in late stage capitalism. Yes it’s dense, at times overwrought, and occasionally cringe, but Wallace is doing his best even with his crippling anxiety. Infinite Jest has this intensity that I’ve rarely found in other books, and that’s why it stands so high above other novels. He painfully cared to help others with their loneliness even if he couldn’t figure out a way to help himself. § Wallace wrote something not just to be read, but to hopefully impact the reader to consider what is meaningful in their lives. And how do exist and maintain our humanity in a culture where everything seems designed to numb us. #litbro #davidfosterwallace #bookstagram #books by @rogue.pages
41
8 months ago
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📚 Collections 📚 + Here is the complete Vintage International “gold” set of Faulkner’s. This isn’t all of Faulkner’s catalog, but Vintage has been publishing a few of the other novels as well in a newer style. Reading and book collecting are the different hobbies, right? 😅 + #qotd : what ‘collections’ or special editions do you have? #literature #southerngothic #williamfaulkner #bibliophile #bookstagram by @rogue.pages
32
3 years ago
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✨ Allow me to introduce myself ✨ § § Been a while since I’ve randomly put my face here, and did a little introduction. But it felt like a good time for a ‘shelfie’ 🤷‍♂️ It might be obvious, but I love reading. I love literature for its ability to get inside the human condition, wrestle with the big existential questions, and make the familiar world feel strange again. I’m drawn to ambitious, complicated books that demand something of me. I may talk about classics, the western canon, the literacy crisis, and the death of the novel like they’re matters of personal concern, but I promise I’m a regular chucklehead, and I probably don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m less interested in being entertained than in being challenged. I want literature that wrestles with meaning, consciousness, identity, and all the other impossible questions we spend our lives trying to answer. I’m not necessarily looking for a good time. I’m more interested in a book that makes me feel like I’ve come into contact with something larger than myself. Which, admittedly, is a very ‘lit bro’ thing to say. And honestly, I don’t care. § I also really enjoy the chats and community here. There’s not a lot of places in my local area that is conducive to talking about these bigger ideas, so the internet is where I am. DMs are always open to talk books. And special shout out to all the peeps I’ve done group reads with! Each of you are amazing and I’m so glad you’re here! #whatdoidowithmyhands #bookstagram #bibliophile #booksbooksbooks by @rogue.pages
43
3 days ago
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✨ Lit Bro Starter Pack ✨ ✨ Millennial Edition ✨ § § Have I taken this too far? § § Consider this your introduction to the novels that taught a generation of dudes how to be literary. Before I started reading Gaddis, Gass, Pynchon, and the single-book-long-paragraph-translated European novels, this is where I started. These are the novels I read in my late teens and early twenties and suddenly started having opinions about literature. The gateway drugs to the indie bookstore, the tote bags, and the annotated paperbacks. These books are actually pretty good, even if they fit a specific time in history that is often cringe. Books of complicated families, doomed romances, friendship, cultural identity, and quarter-life crises. These books allowed for discussions about complicated feelings, toxic masculinity, falling in love, and all from modern writers experiencing the same period of time we were. And do you remember the late 90s and early aughts? What a strange pop culture to live through. § The cultural critique of men reading waxes and wanes. Before the Lit Bro backlash and memes deriding a certain type of ‘male intellectual’, there was a brief sincerity and earnestness to reading books like these. Being introspective and even obsessed with literature without suspicion was possible. Right now I can’t tell how society feels about the ‘reading man.’ It seems more acceptable, but yet there’s the constant accusations of ‘performative reading.’ I can never tell because bookstagram is essentially an echo chamber. Obviously the majority of the people in this corner love to read, but then there’s constantly news articles about the lack of reading in society as whole. So it’s anyone’s guess… § Anyway, happy reading friends! ✌️ Which would add to the list? Which have you read? Which books impacted you in your early 20s? #bookstagram #bibliophile #booksbooksbooks #litbro by @rogue.pages
54
10 days ago
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✨ In my Classics era ✨ § § I’ve always loved ‘classics’. Generally I maintain a strict rule that a ‘classic’ must be at least 100 years old. Sorry if you don’t agree with me, it’s okay that you’re wrong 😜 I abide by this guideline based on the idea that classics are the books that have survived the noise. They’ve been argued over, reread, stolen from, adapted, misunderstood, and rediscovered for generations. It’s a bit hard to do that for a novel that has only been around for a few generations. I enjoy reading classics because it’s like getting in the room with the writers who helped shape how we think about love, death, power, morality, identity, and what the hell it means to be human. They’re filled with insights to our modern selves. § A few of these I’ve read before, and a few I haven’t. Anna K is one of my favorite books because of the nostalgia factor. I found a tattered paperback the first week I moved to NYC many years ago (outside on a stoop!), and it was welcome companion for the first few months. Most of us get Dante’s Inferno assigned in school, but I’ve never read the entire Divine Comedy, and it’s just such an important work to literature that I know I need to knock it out. The Age of Innocence another great NYC that I’ve been wanting to re-read. Wharton is one of our Great American Writers, and I truly believe her work deserves more recognition here on the gram. And the other 3 will be first timers! 🙌 hoping to read Little Women around the holiday season, and the epic Paradise Lost! § What are some classics you’d like to re-read? Also are we still saying ‘era’? 🤣 #bookstagram #bibliophile #booksbooksbooks by @rogue.pages
31
12 days ago
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✨ Experimental Novels ✨ § § More sh!t posting § What is an experimental novel? What’s considered experimental to me may not be experimental to you and vice versa. Does stream of consciousness constitute an experimental novel? Probably yes. But what I’d like to showcase here are novels that play a little more with form and structure of what we generally consider to be a ‘novel’. § My division of categories is less official and really just my personal feeling of these books when I read them. Here’s a little on how I grouped them: - Beginner: these novels are pretty easy but break the traditional narrative structure we usually expect. Short interviews of Employees, or the metafiction of Calvino. Getting comfortable here prepares you for the longer challenges. - Intermediate: these are a bit more challenging, but follow a more traditional flow. They do something more with the ‘form’ of writing. In HoL you’ve got a book in a book, Khazars is laid out in encyclopedic type entries, Naked Lunch is a bizarre group of chapters you can read in any order - Advanced: not only do these novels lean heavy on the stream of consciousness, they won’t provide any hand holding along the way. They were written with a purpose to be ‘different’ and to provide a unique experience for the reader. Everything you know about books is challenged here. - WTF: Why are you even reading this? Seriously. You think I’m going to explain these books to you? And now I’m supposed to reduce all of that insanity into a little paragraph that makes sense? Absolutely not. Read them yourself. I’ll be over here pretending I understood the 2 that I barely made it out of. § Share your favorites or other books that you think are considered to be ‘experimental’ #bookstagram #bibliophile #booksbooksbooks by @rogue.pages
217
17 days ago
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✨ what was your 1st BIG book? ✨ § § I clearly remember my first big book, and that book is…The Lord of the Rings. That’s right, LOTR is not a trilogy (don’t @ me). The first truly BIG book I ever read, and I guess that’s where I got the bug for massive novels. Pictured a few more of the BIG books that I read early in life that really impacted me as a reader. There’s something special about that first giant book. The feeling that you’re not just reading a story, you’re moving into a whole world and living there for a while. LOTR was probably the book that taught me that a novel could be a huge epic and still extremely entertaining and engaging. And apparently I’ve been chasing that high ever since. § Tell me what your first BIG books were! Was it LOTR as well? #bookstagram #bibliophile #lotr by @rogue.pages
50
24 days ago
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✨ Arendal ✨ § § I’ve read five books in the Morning Star cycle now, but don’t ask me to tell you what it’s about. I’ll probably give you some expansive answer like ‘everything,’ and you’ll roll your eyes and go back to reading something else. But honestly, that might be the most accurate answer. The premise starts out simple enough, an enormous, mysterious star appears in the sky, and something about reality begins to shift around it. The star is a metaphysical disturbance, a way of opening up and interrogating death, consciousness, religion, evil, and human nature. Each novel gives you something different, and I suspect every reader takes something different away from the cycle. Some will connect more with the philosophical digressions, others with the domestic realism or the increasingly strange supernatural elements. But I don’t think the hierarchy matters all that much. § We have connected with this strange Norwegian author and his extraordinary willingness to indulge himself, and eventually his indulgence becomes our indulgence. We accept the digressions. We accept the thousands of pages. We accept that a book might wander somewhere completely unexpected and simply trust that there is something worth finding there. We wait patiently for the next translation and when it finally arrives, happily drop whatever else we’re reading to see what Knausgaard has decided to give us. We’re along for the ride. § What I love about the series is that Knausgaard never really separates the cosmic from the mundane. A philosophical meditation on death can emerge from a completely ordinary conversation. A domestic scene can suddenly feel existential. Something as insignificant as a person’s daily routine can sit alongside questions about God, mortality, and the nature of reality. It’s about consciousness and religion and relationships and boredom and desire and the possibility that reality is much stranger than we’re capable of comprehending. Simply, if you’re not reading Knausgaard you’re missing out on of the greatest living writers exploring what it means to live in modern times. Do yourself a favor and take the dive. § Thanks to @penguinpress for the arc!! by @rogue.pages
29
a month ago
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✨ Fosse appreciation post ✨ § § For me Fosse is what you get when you make the perfect pairing of Beckett’s stream of consciousness and Dostoevsky’s spiritual musings. His writing strips away almost everything and leaves us with a kind of mysticism and existentialism. That’s the magic of Fosse. His prose is radically simple on the surface but incredibly deep underneath. He asks the big questions. What is a self? What makes one life different from another? Where does memory end and identity begin? What does it mean to believe in something you can’t prove? § Fosse writes about memory, faith, death, loneliness, art, and the strange experience of simply being alive. Sentences circle back on themselves. Thoughts repeat, shift slightly, disappear, return. A character can spend several pages thinking about essentially the same thing, and somehow it never feels redundant. That’s probably what I love most about him. Fosse understands that our minds don’t really move in neat narrative arcs. We remember something, lose the thread, return to it, think about something else, remember someone we haven’t thought about in years. His books reproduce that strange, recursive quality of being a person. § His books seem to exist somewhere between novel and meditation. And sometimes the most interesting thing literature can do is simply make us sit still and pay attention. #bookstagram #bibliophile #jonfosse by @rogue.pages
17
a month ago
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✨ The Odyssey ✨ § § What you’ve all been waiting for! My completely unqualified opinion on the translations of The Odyssey ⚡️ I spent most of August comparing Wilson, Fagles, and Mendelsohn’s translations, which is a dangerous thing to do when you’re a chucklehead on the internet because some people might think my personal preference constitutes a scholarly position. It does not. There are good reasons to recommend each of them because each one foregrounds something different in the narrative. So here’s my thoughts.. § If you’ve seen the movie, and have never read Homer before, and want a more casual read to cross this classic off your list, then Wilson is absolutely a great choice. It’s clean and contemporary, very modern, but isn’t dumbed down at all. Wilson made a very stylistic choice, and I think for your modern reader it absolutely nails the epic without giving you flashbacks of homework. Fagles also very contemporary but is a little more faithful to the original. Though the translation came out in the mid-90s it has a slightly more ‘literary classic’ feel to it, but manages to never be stuffy. After all the Odyssey is this grand adventure story, and Fagles is able to convey that energy. And then we have Mendelsohn. To me reading Mendelsohn almost felt like if Homer had actually composed the epic originally in English. Much denser, much more faithful in the translation. In the intro DM writes about how he wanted to maintain the poetry of the epic, and I think he succeeded, it’s amazingly lush. It’s still compulsively readable as well. Definitely for the literary nerd that wants to get deep into Homer. § Translation is interpretation, blah, blah, etc., etc. (you get it). Rather than declaring one definitively superior, I think there’s something particularly rewarding about reading a passage in all three, the divergences reveal the translators’ priorities, and if you’re sufficiently obsessive, a virtue of us book nerds, then it’s a very normal way to spend a Saturday. ✌️ Tell me which translation you enjoyed?! Did you like the film?? #bookstagram #bibliophile #litbro #emilywilson #theodyssey by @rogue.pages
42
a month ago
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✨ Turtle Diary ✨ § § I could say this is one of those books that is ‘vibes only’, but I think I’d be selling it short. There’s a bit of plot, yet beneath the surface this a deceptively deep little novel. Two lonely middle aged people decide to free a few turtles from an aquarium. This sounds like it would be high stakes, but what the novel brilliantly portrays is the ordinary despair and terrifying banality of life. There’s no true dramatic moment. Neither of the protagonist have suffered a catastrophic loss, but their lives are an accumulation of tiny disappointments, routines, memories, awkward interactions, and missed possibilities. § Hoban gives the reader existential despair without some grand tragedy. Sometimes it’s just the creeping realization that this is your life, and tomorrow is probably going to look remarkably similar to today. The novel’s alternating diary entries let us watch two consciousnesses obsessively interrogate the most ordinary aspects of existence until the ordinary has become too much to endure. The thing is, after the adventure ends the characters are still left with the problem of being human. As the reader, I understand life is mostly made up of apparently meaningless instances, but we must look for the joy in these small occurrences that make life worth living. § Turtle Diary was a good little book. It’s melancholy without being melodramatic, philosophical without being too weighed down. It also has some funny moments that had me laughing. Definitely would recommend this book. #bookstagram #bibliophile #booksbooksbooks by @rogue.pages
24
2 months ago
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