“Lincoln in the Bardo” is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It has tons of characters doing rambling monologues, but it also has a distinct story line that is fascinating and original. The audiobook is excellent as well. I loved reading and then listening to that book so much that I eagerly bought his book of short stories “Tenth of December” to which I had a similar reaction as you - didn’t quite get into them at first and found them all-over-the-place. However, it’s been over a year since I read it and I can still vividly remember many of the stories because they have some very original plots. Two of my sisters and my mom read it as well for our short-lived book club and what’s interesting is that we all had some very different understandings of the stories. For instance, half of us thought a character was killed in one of the stories and the other half interpreted the “killing” as only in the main character’s mind.

I love how it captures the way people think and remember stuff, sometimes going in circles, sometimes focusing on seemingly minor details. The whole novel has this incredibly calm and restrained voice, yet it's so utterly captivating.

I think that first point is certainly the most likely outcome. The market for low-effort fanfiction is gonna collapse fairly quickly, I think. But that's generally not something many folks've managed to build a career out of.

Also consider that there's already more fiction out there in the world than any human being could possibly read even in a dozen lifetimes. We don't need any more. So why don't we stop? Why is it, instead, that exponentially more fiction is being written today than at any other point in human history?

It's just what we do. The market may shift and change (as it ever does) but the practice? It's bedrock. Humans've been telling stories since the invention of speech (EDIT: which, honestly, probably predates the evolution of homo sapiens), we're not gonna suddenly want to stop telling them or hearing them any time soon.

With thin paperbacks the spines often remain in good condition but with any thicker paperbacks the spines always get creased no matter how I pre-open the pages. If you want to read the books comfortably, I'd recommend that you either don't focus on the creases or buy hardcover books. With collectors editions you could always get the book and read an ebook version of the same text.

I thought it was okay. I kind of fell out of love with King after Under The Dome and Mr. Mercedes and I read Dr. Sleep around that time and was unimpressed. I find a lot of his newer books are kind of just...meh.

The last King book I really enjoyed was Lisey's Story and The Revivalist but I will admit I haven't read much of anything he's released since.

Genuinely curious why you'd want to avoid these? To me they make the book look read and loved. Maybe you could buy two copies, one to read and one to look pretty??

Liked this book a lot!

I do this too. Sometimes I tear the last page from the book. Similarly to the doctor, I don't like endings. 😁

My thoughts may not be terribly useful.

I have two.

First, why do we write? Is it to make money? God knows there are easier ways. Is it for other people? They'd probably appreciate something less indirect. Or is it for ourselves? This may be a bit unduly biased by my personal experiences -- I've got selective mutism, and found in writing a means to communicate with other people that I was otherwise denied in life -- but I think it ultimately holds true for all forms of art. Art is, I think, a fundamentally selfish endeavor.

Imagine the hubris in thinking, "I want to create something with no material value." It's vanity at its most audacious.

And then putting in the work to actually make it. And the frightful temerity to then release this thing that you've created out into the world, for other people to see and judge.

We create first for ourselves, and ultimately are beholden to no one but ourselves. This can be terrifying and lonely, but also liberating: it means nothing can threaten us but ourselves. No one can take away our capacity to create art but ourselves.

Second, this is hardly the first time existential fears about the future of media consumption have come up. Fiction has been around for millennia, books for centuries. They've survived the radio, the movie, the television, the video game and the smartphone -- and each time some shiny new medium has been invented, people sounded the alarm about the impending death of the book.

Yet we still write, and we still read.

More than writing as a whole no longer being a sustainable industry, I think the average writer has far more to fear from trends and shifts in audience expectations. Westerns used to be a very popular and profitable genre, for example: now, if you want to write westerns, you're unlikely to find much of an audience. What's popular and marketable is constantly shifting, and few if any writers are going to have a broad enough skillset to weather such shifts undamaged.

Books ain't ever gonna go away -- but the kinds of books people are interested in reading just might.

....

Okay, I lied. I've actually got a third thought.

Do you remember last year, and the handful of years before that, when so many media outlets were buzzing about the "incredible potential" of the blockchain, and the futures promised by cryptocurrencies and NFTs? (If you don't, good God do I envy you.) Ya' ever wonder why all of that media coverage just quietly stopped? Or why just as those stories were being phased out, they started being replaced by coverage of AI art generation?

It's. All. Marketing.

All of it. AI generation is: unethical, yes; possibly illegal, true; but more importantly it's not very good. And the language being used to discuss it is carefully constructed to create a false impression of what it can and cannot due. Once more: it's all marketing. Hype. Building up a product by overpromoting it's strengths while simultaneously obfuscating its weaknesses.

We call it "artificial intelligence," but it's not really an AI. At least not by the conventional, pop-cultural understanding. We call it, "generation," but it's not actually creating anything new -- just synthesizing new material. This is why AI generation requires the tools be "trained" by consuming vast amounts of existing art -- the more media they have to synthesize, the more varied their output.

An AI can generate a composite image of a woman sitting a table, but has no conception of what a woman is, or what a table is. It can just reference various other images that have women in them, and tables in them, and mash them together. AI-generated writing functions the same way: it takes existing material whose tags fit the prompts provided and combines it.

Already we've seen many examples of artists finding AI-generated work that was made using their original material (taken without permission) as a base. The illusion of the AI creation being something genuinely new is an illusion easily shattered -- that it can persist is largely due to just how much media exists, and how unfamiliar most people will be with the majority of it.

Don't get me wrong, AI writing is going to be a nightmare for the next few years as techbros try to leverage it into making them a lot of money. And that's gonna hurt a lot of writers -- especially self-published writers who don't have any sort of support or protection or promotion from a publisher. Getting your work to stand out among a flood of cheaply-produced AI crap is going to be a very unique breed of hell.

Because here's the thing: the techbro pulling this shit doesn't need to sell a lot of copies of one book to make money, they just need to sell a few copies of many different books -- books that cost them very little to produce. So expect the eBook market to become, somehow, even worse than it already is.

But at the end of the day, an AI can't create anything new. It can only create material that is very similar to stuff that already exists. And as writers, should the goal not be to push boundaries? To be bold and inventive and surprising? To strive to create something more than the generic or mediocre? To be so selfish as to invest themselves into a text, and then thrust that text into the world? There will always be people willing to do that, and there will always be -- eager and appreciative and sometimes weirdly angry -- an audience waiting.

.....

And, hey, what if I'm wrong? What if everything I've said is bullshit? Look, I'm having a bad night. I'm on painkillers. My present state of mind is not exactly what one might call crystal clear, so I very well could be. What then?

In that case, consider this: you're gonna die.

I'm gonna die, too.

We're all gonna die.

Sucks, right?

So how do you want to live? Do you want to spend your time engaged in an activity you enjoy, that you find rewarding? Or do you want to run away, out of the fear that it might not be so in perpetuity?

How much do you want to let your anxiety over what might be govern your actions and beliefs over what is?

Oh, sorry. I misspoke. When I said, "we're all gonna die," what I meant to say was that the entire human race will eventually, inevitably, go extinct. This Earth we live on, too, will perish. The sun will expand to many times its current size, boiling the very skies, and ultimately collapse in on itself, its fury spent, having erased every last trace of our collective existence. Only a lonely ball of naked rock will remain. It, too, will eventually perish.

And there will be no one around to even suggest the possibility that we might have been.

Nothing lasts forever. Nothing. One day someone will write a book, and it will be the last book ever written. Someday someone will read a book, and it will be the last book ever written. This will happen -- it cannot not happen. Maybe we'll live to see it, maybe we won't.

What's the worst case scenario? That what brings you fulfillment and meaning and helps you persist today might not offer the same tomorrow? Then enjoy what you can today, and seek out something else tomorrow. Let go of the expectation that anything should exist in perpetuity, and do what you can, when you can. What meaning and substance our lives have is ours alone to determine.

Try a writing sub. This is a sub for books

buy the book, put it on your shelf as a nice decoration, and then read the plot from wikipedia

His story settings are frequently near-future dystopic & a bit intentionally disorienting. Just relax, read closely, and you’ll pick it all up. The point is the truth & humanness of the characters despite the foreignness of the setups. His writing is wonderful & frequently euphorically hilarious.

I’m glad I saw this because now I’m really looking forward to picking this book up. I am someone who is very interested in true crime but I recognize it’s issues and I like nuanced discourse around the topic. I read Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka last fall and that book also explored our obsession with serial killers. Highly recommend.

I think there are a lot of reasons why people like true crime- using it as a guide of what not to do is definitely one of them, but I think there’s more to it than just that. I don’t think you can ignore morbid curiosity and how this curiosity is often at the expense of victims.

He never really clicked for me, but I do kind of like his approach to writing. Essentially I think there are really only two approaches you can take when writing something (anything, really): are you writing for yourself, or for your audience? The latter approach is generally going to be more successful, but the former is, I think, often more interesting. And I think Saunders embraces the former category.

IIRC Saunders began as a technical writer, so he presumably has both the skill and the practice to write very simply and clearly. So when he's not being clear, that's a deliberate choice, and it's worth considering why he might make that decision. Personally, I prefer that kind of ambiguity in short fiction, because it gives the text a kind of... longevity and complexity that generally wouldn't otherwise be possible with short-form fiction.

Hopefully that makes sense. I'm having one of my bad days, and my pain medication can make me a bit... rambly and sometimes somewhat, slightly, incoherent.

I think what's about to happen will be similar to the rise of recorded music. There are still musicians, but prior to recorded music being truly accessible being a musician was a much more viable career option since people wanted music in many places, and the only option was live music. As a result, recorded music eventually eroded the profession to the point that being a musician is only a viable career for a fraction of the people it would be if recorded music didn't exist. That being said, the recorded music industry also created a lot of jobs that wouldn't exist without it, so some balancing took place, but when it rose in the first place it was quite disruptive.

I think AI is going to destroy the market for the lowest tier of art and writing. General copy about mundane and soulless things won't need an army of human writers. It will need an AI of sufficient ability to sift through a database and regurgitate information for the task at hand.

What it won't have is the human experience. I'm as impressed as anyone at what it CAN do, but I can see quite clearly what it can't. I'm attending a conference for my industry and one of the presentations was on the place AI has in our line of work. He used chatGPT as an example and asked it to write his wife a letter apologizing for missing their wedding anniversary because he had to attend said conference.

I can honestly say it would be hard to tell that it was written by AI, but what was clear is that it was trite and clichéd. There was no indication of a shared history, of affection or a deep relationship. It was well constructed with no style. It was exactly like someone else doing your homework without knowing anything about you, your style or personality.

So to sum up, I think we're going to see some serious shake-up in multiple sectors of art and writing, but it will be a long time coming before we see anything like truly insightful and original ideas being wholly constructed by an AI.

If I'm trying to decide whether to read a book, I read a random page in the middle. You skip to the book's actual style.

I've been taking a break from the true-crime genre. It honestly wasn't a huge portion of my reading list to begin with, but I had a handful of podcasts and YouTube channels that I enjoyed listening to. That was until I watched a few videos from a specific channel. I can't remember what it's called at this point since I didn't seek it out on purpose, but every episode started the same way. They offered "their deepest sympathies and heartfelt condolences to the victims families" in that almost human sounding AI narrator voice so many channels use now. Its hard to explain why it upset me so, but it kind of reminded me of starting a conversation with "no offense, but..." It was just peak pandering. Once I noticed the pattern I started to realize just how many tasteless tactics that these producers used and its just such a turn off.

I read a lot of biographical works based around dictators, genocide and general governmental folley so nonfiction about terrible events does not bother me. But there seems to be a disconnect in the true crime community between factual presentation and unabashed voyeurism. There's always been books published about particularly horrible or vexing crimes but most of them really go unnoticed unless you're geographically close to were the event took place. Now that any Tom, Dick and Harry can whip out a podcast the market is flooded with tactless people seeming to just want to cash in on the newest craze.

He was a fox hunter and still holds the record for most foxes he was born 1870s and spent a lot of time on the highlands hunting foxes.

Yeah those are the big ones. Everything else is mostly a matter of taste, but when the grammar or vocab are lacking… that‘s just inexcusable.

Khaled Hosseini did an AMA here you might want to take a look :) Here's a link to all of our upcoming AMAs

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I thought the Dr Sleep movie did a great job of melding the book to the Shining movie ending without being untrue to the book.

Yasssss

I really really enjoyed his ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil’ and also read Lincoln in the Bardo, which was odd and hard for me but it was ok.

It gets mentioned when they meet up with the people from the school. They mention that Hailsham was an experiment to try a gentler way but that the country had moved on and went with a “different approach.” I don’t think they came right out and described the horrors of it (because like everything in that book it was just alluded to in gentle language), but my imagination had no trouble putting a disturbing picture together.