Fiction & Persuasion

Share this post

Give Me Your Sh*t Book Recommendations

akahinesy.substack.com

Give Me Your Sh*t Book Recommendations

Bring me your printed turds, your verbal filth, your huddled crap no-one should re-read

M.J. Hines
Dec 31, 2022
3
2
Share

As we limp into the final day of 2022, on the off chance that it’s useful I thought I’d share a year in reading and ask for some recommendations in a new way.

For the last few years I’ve been recording what I read purely because it’s a useful output of my state of mind and a way of observing patterns in reading that I might want to break.

Thanks for reading Fiction & Persuasion! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This year there’s been a lot more short stories than any previous years, which is a direct consequence of George Saunders’ Story Club, and of course Substack itself has dramatically improved the quality of my online information diet and reading in a way that I’m massively appreciative of. I’ve mentioned some of the publications that have made me think differently or expanded my worldview or just amused or consoled me in the last year, so please go and pay them all some good attention and subscription groats if you can stretch to it.

I’d like to thank all of these writers, but also make a request of all of you.

In 2023, dear reader, I want your tips for pure verbal garbage

After seeing this from Saint Alan Moore, this year I’m going to do something different and ask for recommendations for absolute crap. One doesn’t become a chef eating only foie gras nor a musician from never listening to dire EDM, and as a good reader it’s high time I worked some utter verbal filth into my diet.

What’s the shittest book you read this year? What noxious dog turd has somehow found its way into print that I should waste a few hours of my life on? What has been so magnificently dire that reading it will be somehow illuminating? What is the written equivalent of the sort of humiliation you normally need a dominatrix for that I should subject myself to?

Fire up those engines and fling me some filth please, I’m all ears. And Happy New Year to all of you.

2022 in Reading

Geoff Dyer - Out of Sheer Rage

Emily St John Mandel - Station Eleven

Raven Leilani - Luster

William Gibson - Pattern Recognition

Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Miklos Banffy - They Were Counted/They Were Divided/They Were Found Wanting

Oscar Wilde - The Decay of Lying

Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and The Sun

Michael Herr - Dispatches

Virgil Abloh - “Insert complicated title here”

Don Delillo - Point Omega, Mao II, Zero K

Akala - Natives

Esther Perel - Mating in Captivity, The State of Affairs

Gillian Tett - Anthro-Vision

Min Jin Lee - Pachinko

Isaac Babel - Odessa Stories

Nella Larsen - Passing 

Benjamin Labutet - When We Cease to Understand The World

Brian Michael Bendis + Alex Maleev - Daredevil: Unmasked

Kyle Harper - The Fate of Rome

Marlon James - Moon Witch, Spider King

Freddy Taylor - Don’t Put Yourself on Toast

Richard Powers - The Overstory

Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon

Sequoia Nagamatsu - How High We Go In The Dark

Alice Rawsthorn & Paola Antonelli - Design Emergency 

Raymond Quenneau - Exercises in Style

William Macaskill - What We Owe the Future

Mohsin Hamid - The Last White Man 

Maggie O’Farrell - Hamnet

Blaise Pascal - Human Happiness

Gabriel Garcia Márquez - News of A Kidnapping

Zadie Smith - Feel Free

Anne Beriault - Stone Boy

Isaac Babel - My First Goose

Tillie Olsen - I Stand Here Ironing

Zora Neale Hurston - The Gilded Six Bits

Anton Chekhov - The Lady with the Dog

Manuel Muñoz - Anyone Can Do It

Jane Austen - Persuasion

Machiavelli - On Conspiracies

Dickens - A Christmas Carol

Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction 

Story Club with George Saunders
The Common Reader
The Novelleist
Adjacent Possible
Today in Tabs
Litverse
Lit Visions
The Convivial Society
The Map is Mostly Water
Thoughts on Writing
Persuasion
Exponential View by Azeem Azhar
Dwarkesh Patel
The Intrinsic Perspective

Thanks for reading Fiction & Persuasion! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

3
2
Share
2 Comments
William Collen
Writes RUINS
Dec 31, 2022

If you really want a good stinker, read no further than "Lo!" by Charles Fort. It's supposed to explain all kinds of weird phenomena with theories such as teleportation and alternate dimensions, and it's written in an insufferably smug, self-satisfied tone. The way Fort cites sources is especially obnoxious; he will "prove" his claims by saying things like "see works by noted alchemists," or something similarly vague. I couldn't get further than ten pages but a very good friend of mine who read it all the way through says it is just as bad till the end.

Expand full comment
Reply
1 reply by M.J. Hines
1 more comment…
Top
New
Community

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Michael Hines
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing