Which JG Ballard book would you suggest reading first? A bunch

Actually, maybe not Crash after seeing this trailer....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNi80K5sTco

High-Rise is a crash course in Ballard so I typically recommend that to the curious. Crash would work too.

>>8626902
I'll definitely consider High-Rise then. Is the book v. of Crash as cheesy as this trailer makes it seem? >>8626898
It's a 90s movie trailer so maybe it's just a product of the times, but even the philosophy of "Crashing is sexual release" sounds realy dumb.

>>8626909
Nah, it's much better than that. I recommend starting with Crash cos its better than High Rise.

If you want more conventional sci Fi go with the drowned world or the day of creation

Yesyesyes this thread

Ballard didn't really ever write a duff book, all of his novels have something to offer. The three Ballard novels that ought to be read first are High-Rise, The Drowned World and Super-Cannes. They will do a great job of showing you the different sides of Ballard as a writer. While Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition are the more meme choices, they are much more easily understood after reading High-Rise. The Drowned World is there to show Ballard's roots as a science fiction writer, and if you've read High-Rise you'll be able to pick up on the typical Ballardian themes in their embryonic or primitive forms in The Drowned World. Super-Cannes is added because it shows the application of Ballard's ideology in a more contemporary setting. It's also more explicit about the relationship between late capitalist society and violence in Ballard's work, plus some insight into the psychology of mass shootings that is classic Ballard at his insightful best.

>>8627225
Are you the other Ballardian that I've been seeing around here?


OP:
Most of his books are pretty good and >>8627225
has a pretty good handle on it.
Other than that I would recommend getting the book of his complete stories (it includes Atrocity Exhibition and one of my favorites, Vermilion Sands) to browse at your leisure. I highly recommend The Concentration City.

>>8626902
>but even the philosophy of "Crashing is sexual release" sounds realy dumb.
That does sound realy dumb, but it's important to remember that dumb people tend to arrive at realy dumb interpretations of art

>>8626902
High Rise is my personal favorite. Atrocity Exhibition is a close second, but it can be a strange read.

>>8626892
>>8627225

I am a big fan of Ballard's style, and though I started with Crash, I would have to reccomend Super-Cannes as the best intro book. It's not quite so visceral and hard to get out of your psyche as Crash, as complex as High Rise or as experimental as Atrocity Exhibition, but it is definitely his most openly emotional book. It left me so drained but it wort it for every drop of tortured empathy and sympathy it forced out me with it's depictions of the bad faith and disturbing lack thereof in the upper echelons of society.

>TL;DR
>Read Super-Cannes first
>Then do the rest

High-Rise was good. I couldn't even into Crash.

File: the-drowned-world-book-cover.jpg (412KB, 720x1106px) Image search: [Google]

412KB, 720x1106px

I thought about getting into J.G. Ballard, because I read a lot of SF, and enjoy other British new wave sf writers like Brian Aldiss. However, I have a preconception that Ballard's prose is too forbidding and cerebral, and generally difficult. Am I right on this?

And, how is his The Drowned World rated?

>>8627303
>>8627225
Thanks to all that posted! I think I'll check out his science fiction stuff with Super-Cannes or The Drowned World first. Excited to check out this author that I know so little about!

>>8626892
High Rise is the best place to start. The movie is a pale copy of the original, so don't assume you already know it after just watching the adaptation.

The Drowned World is another good option to start with - it's the first Ballard I read.

I am gonna read his complete short stories first
i am retarded by doing it?

>>8627254
Yeah dude, I'm the Drowned World/Super-Cannes/High-Rise guy. I've posted a Ballard thread once or twice and I always comment on them. I've read everything the man has published. Would definitely recommend that OP or anyone interested in Ballard buy his Collected Stories Part 2, it compiles most of his best stories and all of 'Vermilion Sands', probably the most famous individual collection he published. It also has great stories like The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D.

The Draught and Drowned World are brilliant post-apoc visions - truly quality literary works with genre readability. Ballard is a genius.

>>8626909
i actually think what might be as good or even better than the books for you is that there is a book out there which is basically interviews with him. its really good and like has all his thoughts about society and shitt.

I watched High-Rise and was so intrigued but though Ben Wheatley only just missed the mark. It got lost in itself, with too much going on and I think it was a near miss cinematically.

I picked up the book because i was so curious how it actually is and my lord it is a great piece! It got me into literature again

>>8628035
No. Although insisting on reading all of them before trying anything longer might be strange.

For some top banter search for "Ballard film" on YouTube and you should find a weird as fuck arty film thing he made in the late 60s in which he reads extracts from The Atrocity Exhibtion and Crash in his nasal upper-class voice while a softcore porn actress with an eerie stare exits and enters cars or in one scene, crashes.

>>8630542
Sounds fuckin awesome. Gonna check that out after work. Cheers anon.

I am kind of suprised no one mentioned empire of the sun. Distant from his 'postmodern' work, sure, but a pleasant entry none the less.

>>8631820
Aye, I think its because it doesn't sit well with the rest of his œuvre. Still a great piece of work nonetheless. I'd tell you to read Somme Mud (EPF Lynch I believe) if you liked Empire of the Sun. Great memoir. That or (it may be cliché) Homage to Catalonia. It is to Orwell as Empire of the Sun is to Ballard; it informs all of the other works but differs stylistically and in focus/tone.

>>8631825
Huh, I always preferred Homage to Catalonia and To Kill an Elephant than his other, more famous, work. Only in those two can I see him as a sincere human rather than a distant prophet.

>>8631820
Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women sit outside of his oeuvre in style and content, but both are also stonkingly good. Empire is referred to as "conventional" in practically every article that mentions it, I think this goes back to a then-contemporary review that used that word, anyway, that's bullshit, Empire of the Sun is not a "conventional war novel" at all. The highly successful Spielberg film turned it into a sentimental piece of schlock, this definitely colours the general perception of the book, which is unconventional in a fistful of ways - no obvious moral centre, a complete absence of sentimentality, acts of searing violence described as routine, not a single one-dimensional character and of course, the whole underlying Ballardian thesis stewing in the background: the constant insinuation that humans are fundamentally brutal, and when the rudiments of society collapse, as in a war, all hell breaks loose. The Kindness of Women opens with young Ballard watching two Japanese soldiers strangle a Chinese civilian to death with wire for fun. Anon who said that Empire/Kindness are to Ballard what Homage to Catalonia is to Orwell's oeuvre is spot-on, if you read Empire and Kindness you quite abruptly understand where Ballard's worldview comes from. Martin Amis said that it was almost sad to read Empire of the Sun because it demonstrated so clearly the roots of Ballard's psyche.

>>8632015
holy fuck, it all makes sense now, thank you.

>>8632113
>>8632015
I'm OP and I know more about the movie than the book and this is pretty much how I feel towards the book because of it.

Might be good, but that movie doesn't really make it seem appealing.

>>8631820
"Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund."

>dat opening

>>8632113
Enjoy Ballard anon, he's top draw.
>>8632867
Visited Shanghai this year almost entirely because of my love of Ballard's work. I visited Lunghua (the camp he stayed in) and spent three nights on the Bund, Shanghai's main street, a dazzling blend of colonial and Chinese architecture with a few buildings preserved just as they were in Ballard's day. You can visit the 'Long Bar' in the Waldorf Hotel and drink cocktails and smoke while listening to a jazz band in the same 30s bar that British colonialists used to chill in. Ballard's vision of an atomised postmodern cityscape corresponds pretty eerily to modern Shanghai. I'm sure he'd enjoy the irony.