This isn't the first Irving book I've read, but I've avoided him for a long time since whichever one irritated me last. This is for book club.

I've never read Irving, but I did see the movie of The World According to Garp so I blame Robin Williams.

Actually the fact that Robin Williams was perfectly cast might indeed be a clue.

Irving is irritating because he writes characters with a bunch of body hair?

I fought through about 2/3 of The Cider-House Rules when I was in college because it was a gift from a girl into whose pants I wanted to get, but I couldn't make myself finish it.

Preciousness, reliance on terrible accidents as plot devices, general tediousness. This opinion comes from having read Garp in middle school (found it kind of confusing), A Widow for One Year on a transatlantic flight (totally misjudged what 'good enough for plane reading' means), and flipping through enough of Owen Meany to observe the caps lock problem.

Preciousness,

They are, aren't they. His writing always seems smug.

The cover art on this one isn't helping.

Pregnant women John Irving books are smug.

By extension, pregnant women are John Irving.

They seem trashily exploitative to me without actually being fun -- a lot of titillation for shock value that doesn't turn into being entertaining. On the other hand, I haven't read anything by him for fifteen years or so, so I wouldn't really defend that in detail.

Terrrible things happening gently to quirky people. Is "manic pixie dreamworld" a named trope?

11 crystalizes it quite well, I think (from my limited JI experience). I still remember several horrible details from A Widow for One Year (like the mom pulling her son's severed leg out of the wrecked car), and also the feeling when I read it that the book was just a terrible slog.

They seem trashily exploitative to me without actually being fun

This is exactly what this current book is. EXACTLY. 1950s kid is bisexual and falls most passionately in love with transgender women. Lots of description of how manly the women he loves are. Lots of boring conversation.

I'm thinking of Hotel New Hampshire. All the football-team-rape / lesbian hookers / dressing up in a bear suit to rape the rapist / brother/sister incestuous therapeutic fuckfest wasn't enough excitement to make the book not kind of dull. (This may not be a fair or accurate plot summary -- I read it a very long time ago.) If you're resorting to material like that and you're still boring, you're doing something fundamentally wrong.

Now I sort of want to read it to see how you manage to do all that be boring.

Note: I'm not going to read it.

Is there a rape in every John Irving book?

I'd completely forgotten his existence. I think I tried to read "Garp" when it was trandy and gave up rather quickly.

Lots of boring conversation.

I've never bothered to read any John Irving so that could be an entirely accurate description. But based on entirely unrelated discussions here, I have also gotten the sense that you have a much, much lower threshold for boredom than most.

20: I have a better attention span for books than I do movies or baths.

If you find baths to be boring, try adding more bath salts.

Yeah smug. Irving judges the world, and finds it morally wanting. The first couple small books before Garp are a little better.

I was trying to figure out why Stephen King's random tragedy, in Dead Zone for instance, is somehow more tolerable.

For King, shit happens.

For Irving, shit happens, and shame on shit.

I thought the Dead Zone was really good.

For King, shit happens and then it reanimates and wants to kill you, and then people sort themselves into Good and Evil and the book unravels.

Maybe I'm thinking of a different book.

I looked it up. The Dead Zone is the one where the guy touches people and sees their future. That's what I was thinking of.

15: Pretty fair and accurate, actually.

I actually just started re-reading Garp (trying to take particular note of how Irving collapses a lifetime into a few hundred pages, for possible use in NaNoWriMo this year), and still enjoy it, but I recently read The Fourth Hand and it read like a parody of Irving.

25: Are you talking about The Stand? I've been thinking about reading that but never got around to it.

18: I think so, and that plus everything LB has said would be my answer. I really, really hate John Irving's books. I've heard there's a dressmaker's dummy in all of them, but I don't know if that's true.

Based on the thread so far, I may have read as much of Irving as anyone here. Read Garp when it first came out in '78 and was intrigued enough by it to plow through his first three books (each of which had counterparts mentioned in Garp--I was/am a sucker for the kind of self-referential thing). I quite liked (and still liked on re-reading many years later and would recommend) one of them The Water-Method Man but was tiring of him. Hotel New Hampshire was so dreadful it retroactively made Garp bad except for "The World According to Bensenhaver" and maybe "The Pension Grillparzer".

Many years later somebody insisted I read Owen Meany which may be the most preciously awful book in the English language. The whole nature of the ending telegraphed through most of the book, yet when you get there it is even stupider than you even imagined--Vietnamese children saved in an airport bathroom by slam-dunking a grenade on a high windowsill. Oops, *SPOILER ALERT*.

The only John Irving book I've read is The World According to Garp, and that was back in high school. I didn't exactly like it, but it did make a strong impression on me.

"That's awfully nice of you, but I'd really prefer if you didn't do that while I'm driving. Umm, yes, I know we're parked now, but actually I'd rather you didn't do that while were in the car at all."

True fact: My father once got into a fistfight with John Irving. I liked Garp well enough and Cider House rules OK but didn't finish the latter, and am with Stormcrow on HNH and Owen Meany, which I couldn't even begin to get through.

33: He knew enough not to let him get in close enough for a wrestling hold, right?

Irving, who was a wrestler of course, decisively won the fight.

I'm very curious to see how my book club plays out, since there seems to be basically widespread comity here.

Well, Irving's been a successful writer for a long time, so there must be people who think well of his stuff. Maybe they're in your bookclub.

I've read Garp and HNH, and possibly Cider House Rules, or maybe just saw the movie, or maybe just saw something else where Toby McGuire was smirking and pretentious. Toby McGuire may be the best personification of a John Irving novel.

36: Irving is genuinely a very popular writer. I think he's just in that middlebrow territory that doesn't play well on Unfogged.

OTOH I'm very much enjoying (and almost done) with Murder Must Advertise. I'm thinking it will be my bookclub choice. (I have a faint fear that it will turn people off, though, and they won't bother to read it and then not show up either. Like I've mentioned, this is an irritatingly flaky group of friends.)

I've only read Garp and HNH, both over a quarter century ago in my early or mid teens. I vaguely remember liking Garp a fair bit, and finding HNH a mix of occasional fun stuff interspersed with a fair amount of meh. I wasn't inspired to read any more since then.

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I just realized that the state park near here is Lost Maples and not Los Maples, which really didn't make much sense, but seemed like something plausibly stupid-Texan. I blame the Texas twang.

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I think he's just in that middlebrow territory that doesn't play well on Unfogged.

I remember when Garp first came out a guy I knew used to write people off as too dumb to talk to if he saw them reading it. This made me go out and buy a copy, but I still couldn't finish it, even to spite him.

I'll be contrary. I liked Owen Meany. It is relentlessly manipulative and normally I hate that. But this I liked. His other stuff, meh to awful. A Widow was awful.

The Dead Zone is plausibly not Stephen King's best book, but the movie is by leaps and bounds the best adaption of a Stephen King book (eat it, Shawshank).

45: Misery? Carrie? The Shining?!?

I didn't think The Dead Zone was that great a movie. Not much happens in the damn thing and the "evil future president" thing is sort of all jammed in at the end. Being filmed during actual heavy snow helped a lot, though.

The Langoliers?

Maybe not The Longoliers because it was a miniseries, but Bronson Pinchot does a job as a man being eaten by bad special effects.

46: I initially misread "Carrie" as "Christine" and was reminded that I really want to see a Love Bug/Christine crossover.

50: write some Love Bug/Christine slash and ride the 50 Shades wave to seeing that dream made real, dude.

51 reads like some kind of entry in a 'most implausible sentence' contest.

Then instead of turning a vampire into a stockbroker, you just have to turn a Volkswagen into a dinosaur.

I'm very much enjoying (and almost done) with Murder Must Advertise.

Hooray! I didn't keep track of whether anyone answered your question on the other thread about reading them in order, but the only ones that matter, chronology-wise, are Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, and Busman's Honeymoon, and then not even so much.

52: John Irving is going to write some Love Bug/Christine slash and ride the 50 Shades wave to seeing that dream made real, dude.

John Irving is going to write some Love Bug/Christine/bear slash and ride the 50 Shades wave to seeing that dream made real, dude.

John Irving is going to write some Love Bug/Christine/bear slash and ride the 50 Shades wave to seeing that dream made real ... in New Hampshire!

53 is great.

Anybody have any thoughts about the 'ten most difficult books' thing?

Anybody have any thoughts about the 'ten most difficult books' thing?

You mean the thread over at LG&M? That was fairly interesting.

I agree with what SEK said about catching the "rhythm" of a book. There are books that are not only not difficult but damn enjoyable if you get the rhythm of how they work, but are sheer drudgery otherwise. Gravity's Rainbow was like this for me. I read it before I was really aware of its outsized reputation and it was a blast.

Proust on the other hand, I've never made it past the first 20 pages.

There are books that are not only not difficult but damn enjoyable if you get the rhythm of how they work, but are sheer drudgery otherwise. Gravity's Rainbow was like this for me.

I agree with AL. I loved the book, but I had to immerse myself in it.

Any science fiction recommendations?

Someone gave me a jump drive with a gazillion science fiction ebooks, but I do not know where to start. It has so many that I prob have it if you recommend it.

59, 60: I flat-out don't believe that Finnegans Wake is not difficult for anyone. I don't disagree that there are people who enjoy it, but even for those who do, it's work.

I bounced off of Proust several times before I caught the rhythm of the thing one summer. I made it through four and a half volumes completely intoxicated by what may be the most intense pleasure I've ever gotten from literary fiction. I then stopped because I had too much to do and haven't been able to get back into it since. However, even when into it, the sentence structure and endless paragraphs combined with the meandering digressive nature of M's narrative made it a slow read.

On the other hand, I read Musil around the same time as Proust and I don't see why it would be considered all that difficult. Just plain awesome until you get to the unfinished draft stuff.

Someplace in the thread someone mentions tedium versus other forms of difficulty which I think is absolutely right.

There's also some books where the reward to effort ration just isn't good enough. I tried reading Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral a few years ago, and gave up a third of the way with no intention of ever trying again. Same goes for Clute's Appleseed which SEK mentions someplace in the thread. If I'm to engage in a reading equivalent of regular intense exercise I have to get regular doses of that high from it.

Proust! Booiiiiing. Proust! Boooiiing. Proust! Boooooiing. Proust! Proust! P to the R to ooust-a-ouust-a-ooust-a-ooust-a

So this thing where people talk about posts on other blogs like this is just an extension of a thread on another blog is kind of stupid, but yes, byzantine, I suspect your thoughts about the municipal sophistication when it comes to hedging long term risk in bond purchasing are correct, but I'm not sure that's germane to the core of the post.

I keep "In Search of Lost Time" on the tank of the toilet in case I ever get ultra-constipation.

Not only that, it's about a blog post which is about an online article on another site about a poll on yet another site, thus violating all internet traditions about not commenting on what people write elsewhere, and the most sacred of unfogged rules against not diverging at all from the narrow post topic in the thread.

67: A la recherche du dumps perdu? I used to keep a copy of GR in the bathroom; any little bit of that book is special in one way or another.

44: I too loved Owen Meany, but nothing else Irving's written.

I have all his books up to the Fourth Hand here - have no recollection of Hand or Widow, and haven't reread any of them in a decade. Son of the Circus I remember not liking much (when my dad first got an email account and started telling me how cool the web was, I asked him whether it was actually useful. So he offered to find out something useful for me, and I asked him when the next John Irving book was coming out, and the next day he told me that SOTC would be out in September). But I read Garp at 10 or 11 and it was one of my favourite books for years, and my fondness for it rubbed off on the others. And I read some Joseph Conrad because of Irving, so that was good too.

One thing I find odd about my children is that I read all sorts of stuff from my parents' bookshelves, but (with a few exceptions) they don't. I guess there is more decent material aimed at them these days, but their lack of browsing always seems weird to me.

I read Garp and HNH in my mid teens and liked them, although he is almost as repetitive as Iain Banks in his tropes/obsessions. When I tried some of his others later I didn't enjoy them at all. I haven't reread him so don't know if I changed or the books did.

And yes re: reading. I hoovered everything on my parents shelves. Not just the literary fiction, or thrillers and sci-fi but also whatever 'women's' books my mum had. While my niece is a keen reader I don't think any of my younget relatives show an interest in the books in their homes (or mine when they come here).

Mine don't seem to browse off our shelves much either -- they read quite a bit, but mostly unfortunately age-appropriate stuff.

Tom Robbins is the John Irving of X, solve for X?

73: I think I was already doing the "stand-with-head-tilted-to-the-right-to-scan-people's-bookshelves-to-determine-whether-they-had-good-values" thing when I was about 11 or so. Sadly, most of my in-town relatives only had junk, although my grandparents had a bunch of ancient YA stuff that I sometimes got into.

62: William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Joanna Russ, Samuel Delaney, Ursula Le Guin, L. Timmel Duchamp, James Tiptree, Steven Gould, Walter Jon Williams, Terry Bisson, Eleanor Arnason, Alfred Bester, George Alec Effinger, Stephen Baxter, Phillip K. Dick, Octavia Butler -- that ought to get you started.

Hrm. I haven't read Tom Robbins since college, but I remember him as more fun than John Irving -- John Irving is kind of trashy nonsense written as if it were dully serious and improving, and Tom Robbins is more just trashy nonsense. I could see finding Robbins too instantly annoying to read any of -- I was right on the line between finding him amusing and annoying -- but I wouldn't judge anyone for liking him.

75: ...smart LUGs who study marine biology and then become carpenters?

62: who do you like in other genres, or in literary fiction? On Tor.com, Jo Walton has been doing re-reads for some years of good stuff which has mostly been around for a while. Her lists of where to start with particular authors http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/04/ok-where-do-i-start-with-that would be a good place to poke around.
A few random suggestions: Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor (romance & ethical dilemmas). Debra Doyle & John McDonald, The Price of the Stars (space opera science fantasy, lots of fun). Ken McLeod, The Star Fraction.

Any science fiction recommendations?

I haven't read science fiction in many years, though I did read China Mieville's Perdido Street Station while I was at the beach. I guess people who care might object that it's not SF, but rather urban fantasy or some such. Whatever genre it is, I really enjoyed it and am in the middle of the 2nd book in the series, The Scar, which I'm also enjoying. I recommend!

I believe the technical term is 'New Weird'. Not that I'm dead sure who else it applies to.

I liked PSS, thought The Scar was absolutely great, and wasn't crazy about the next one, Iron Council.

I thought Garp was pretty brilliant, and liked HNH, and Cider House, too.

I'm willing to consider the possibility that this makes me a bad person. In retrospect, it seems to me that Irving is the sort of writer who appeals to young men who want to be sympathetic to women, but who don't actually read female authors.

Ultimately, I read all of his novels up through Owen Meany, and decided that he had used up all of his narrative tricks and wasn't coming up with any new ones.

I'm also fond of Irving because he got involved in a public spat with Tom Wolfe about the proper role of the novel. Even though in that particular debate, I think Wolfe was largely right, I was grateful to see him given shit in public.

In retrospect, it seems to me that Irving is the sort of writer who appeals to young men who want to be sympathetic to women, but who don't actually read female authors.

Heh. Yeah, I do have the sense that all the rape is a plot device to give his male characters something to be sensitive and tortured about.

75: I'm trying to remember who said, "Tom Robbins writes like Dolly Parton looks*." (It seems to be ascribed to a "British critic".) He may be a bit more fun at times than Irving, but I think he really gets pretty tiresome, particularly for anyone over 25 years old. If I had to recommend one of his it would be Another Roadside Attraction although it has some extremely dodgy sexual politics which are basically Norman Mailer-esque stuff in a hippie context (not so uncommon in life or literature at the time (published in 1971)).

*My new throwaway line for him: "Tom Robbins writes like an unhip person's version of what a hip person writes like."

I remember them as an undifferentiated mass -- read four or five in college, but couldn't tell you which bits were from what book. I do still remember that the word "CHOICE" oriented appropriately and reflected in a mirror does not appear reversed.

ha, Tom Robbins - I had a bit of a Tom Robbins phase, mostly because people I liked liked him. The main thing that will forever be associated in my mind with him is reading the one that looks like a pack of Camels? If only there were some way of finding out what it's called! and thinking "lunaception? That sounds cool!", realising that my cycle was completely out of phase with the lunaception idea, and over the next 3 or 4 months it lengthened (or shortened) by a few days each month until I was all lined up with the moon. So there you go, Tom Robbins changed my periods. Weirdorama!

81 PSS is what put the New Weird on the map. Another good author who writes New Weird type stuff is Jeff Vandermeer who aggressively proselytizes for it. Try City of Saints and Madmen and then Shriek: An Afterword.

85: Same for me except for Roadside Attraction (his first and not so well-known) and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (sort of his masterpiece, I'd say and the one that got him noticed). Although I do recall that the Camel pack cover was Still Life With Woodpeckers--not that I recall what it was about.

There was a lot of sex in it. And red-headed alien Egyptians.

A friend, who was also a big Robert Anton Wilson fan, pushed Robbins on me. I read Even Cowgirls .., Still Life .. and one other, and enjoyed them at the time, but not enough to read anything else.

I read ECGTB at 16 which was about the right age for it, but can't imagine reading it now. Also produced one of the worst film adaptations of all time.

Hey Asilon, they were paging you in the Algebra thread.

Which was the one about an immortal guy trying to develop a perfume based on beets? I remember liking that one. Although not enough to remember more than immortal, perfume, and beets.

I have a lot of affection for Tom Robbins, though, as writing great books for teenagers.

Has anyone else here been reading Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim books? I haven't seen the new one yet, but I am excited for it. I can't imagine that I would like very much else that could be described as "urban fantasy", but Kadrey's pretty awesome.

I guess those Nicholas Meyer Sherlock Holmes books are kind of urban fantasy in a way, and I like those when I was 12 or 13.

Thanks Halford; I emailed Tedra.

I liked Owen Meany and Cider House Rules

Irving is just Faulkner with shorter sentences, less booze, and fewer swamps.