Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 06:10:45 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Any good recent novels in the Moby Dick encyclopaedic vein?

Started by Astronaut Omens, August 11, 2020, 07:02:10 PM

Previous topic - Next topic
I really like long rambling encyclopaedic novels with lots of digressions, like Ulysses, Moby Dick, Tristam Shandy, Gravity's Rainbow etc, are there any really good post 2000 novels people have read in that style?

buttgammon

You could put Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann in this category; it's very focused on one character, but it packs in lots of digressions over its 1000 or so pages, and owes a bit of a debt to Joyce, albeit one some people have perhaps exaggerated to the detriment of the book's originality (mainly because her dad literally wrote the book on Joyce - namely the flawed bastard of a biography that has never been surpassed).

Peru

Novel Explosives (Jim Gauer)
City on Fire (Garth Risk Hallberg)
The Book of Numbers (Joshua Cohen)
A Naked Singularity (Sergio De La Pava)
The Pale King (David Foster Wallace)
Jimmy Corrigan (Chris Ware)

buttgammon

I refrained from mentioning this before because it's from 1998 but fuck it: Don DeLillo's Underworld is a brilliant brick of a book that sprawls across a few decades of American history.


Famous Mortimer

#5
Quote from: Peru on August 11, 2020, 07:39:31 PM
Novel Explosives (Jim Gauer)
I just had a quick look at Goodreads, and wow does one of the main reviewers not like it. Having struggled with many of the pomo generation (with the exception of David Foster Wallace, who was too good a writer) I'm not sure it would be my cup of tea.


Wet Blanket

2666 by Roberto Bolaño is as encyclopaedic and digressive as they come, although be warned it goes to some very dark areas.

I haven't started it yet but Antkind by Charlie Kaufman seems to be in this vein too.

spaghetamine

I can't believe nobody's said Infinite Jest yet, probably the meatiest footnotes section of any book I've ever read