since we don't have a recent "what are you reading thread?" let's have one now: WHAT ARE YOU READING THIS SUMMER, 2005 (and into the beyoooooond)?!?

I'm reading books on bread baking and books on chess. I have some books on bicycle repair in the stack waiting to be read, but we'll see if I can tear myself away from all I ever read these days, which are books on bread baking and books on chess.

See also I just moved, which threw my reaidng out of whack. I am also reading "Huge Haiku" by McAleavey, which seems pretty great, and which I think anyone here with any interest in poetry would enjoy. It hits a broad range of poetry pleasure receptors.

finished camera lucida this morning

Waiting for a li'l bunch of books about music to arraive in the mail sometime soonish.

Now reading: A Wordsworth Classics compilation of Kipling short stories. Mostly good stuff, tho I doze off whenever he gets to talking about life on the high seas (actually checked if there's a Kipling thread on ILE - there isn't, but there *are* some great mark s posts about the guy. Also, apparently one time mark s thought Ally was using Kipling-bred brit-slang because she said "wicked".) "Bone", which *really* lets itself down halfway through, don't think I'll even finish it. The first "Krazy Kat" Sunday strips anthology, which is an utter delight. Also, just loads of random poetry: Dickinson, Keats, Yeats, Wordsworth, Bukowski.

Will be reading soon: the first Moomins book. A friend wants me to read G.K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday", should I? Also, more portuguese stuff that ain't translated to english. :(

So true, sadly. Though the last couple of collections make sort of an improvement, but not really.

The first "Krazy Kat" Sunday strips anthology, which is an utter delight.

Are there English collections of the Krazy Kat daily strips? I've read them in Finnish, and they're almost as good as the sunday strips, but I'd like to read the originals as well,

Will be reading soon: the first Moomins book.

I hope it doesn't let you down; not all of the Moomin books are classic. "Dangerous Midsummer" and "The Magic Winter" (or whatever they're called in English) are where it gets good.

There's a few companies in the U.S. trying their hands at this, but from what I've heard they're quite hard to get. Will ask my local comic dealer, tho (if he thinks he can get 'em, I'm sure comic stores in Finnland will, as well.) Meanwhile, there are 30 pages worth of daily strips in the latest "Krazy Kat" sundays anthology (to make up for lost sunday strips.)

I've a friend who's read - and enjoyed - some Krazy Kat in portuguese, but frankly I can't imagine doing so myself, it seems such an utterly untranslateable thing. "carrying bricks to the count of trois, as they say in France, or tres, as they holler in chiuhaha", laffo.

I hope it doesn't let you down; not all of the Moomin books are classic. "Dangerous Midsummer" and "The Magic Winter" (or whatever they're called in English) are where it gets good.

I got "Comet In Moominland", which has a promsiing title if nothing else. But I've a bit of Moomins experience, mainly from the animated series, which I watched as a kid (and yes, I went through the obligatory Moomin-Fan rite of passage of staying up nights scared of the MORRA!)

My swedish friend recommended me one about this lonely little creature that lives all by itself in a forest. He swears that its use as a "children's classic" perfectly explains scandinavian suicide rates.

in progress:
hartmann reproductive rights and wrongs
sheehan anarchism
rulfo pedro paramo

should i bother?

should i bother?

It's *good* in its genre. It's just a trashy thriller. You'll finish it in about two/three days.

Anthony, what did you think of Camera Lucida? I loved it. Should read it again, but alas my brain is melting into puss.

Am currently reading:
*Goethe - Faust

Am about to read:
*Cervantes - Don Quixote
*Umberto Eco - A Theory Of Semiotics
*Milorad Pavic - Dictionary Of The Khazars
*Plato - The Republic
*Julio Cortazar - Hopscotch

Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons
M. John Harrison - Anima (The Course Of The Heart and Signs Of Life in one volume)
Homer - The Odyssey (Robert Fagles verse translation)

All very good indeed.

East of Eden (after renting the movie)
Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close-Up by Bob C.
Baquiat: A Quick Killing in Art
The Art Dealers
The Adoring Audinece (collection of essays about fandom)
The French Quarter (H. Asbury's look at New Orleans' history)
Shop GIrl by Steve Martin
Waterfront (about Nyc's) by Philip Lopate
Rats (about Nyc's)
I'll be Your Mirror: The Andy Warhol Interviews
All Yesterdays' Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print
A Cook's Tour by Antony Bourdain
plus a lot of pretty artchitecture/design books that I browse through when 'working'

Good book.

I'm still reading a lot of magazines, mostly. Par for the course. Short attention span theater.

Atlantic Monthly
The New Yorker
Arthur
Entertainment Weekly (Don't laugh! It's really good!)
The Economist
Foreign Policy
Metropolis
etc.

xpost, sorry

For me, I started Oryx and Crake this morning. I might read Captain Alatriste next... not sure. (My wife bought it because of a certain ixationfay on Iggovay Ortensenmay.)

lucky!

Maritime museum ahoy! Are you blogging this experience somewhere? I love maritime museums. There's a tiny Cook museum/local heritage centre in Staithes in Yorkshire that has great ye olde fishing pictures. And some of the local maritime museums in New Zealand are great.

Try also Trawler by Redmond O'Hanlon. There's a little too much author in it, but it's a quick read and has some great stuff about the North Sea and the effects of sleep deprivation on modern fishing vessels.

And if you're only reading Melville for the facts, I'd recommend In The Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Phibrick instead. It's shorter and gorier and true. But of course I am telling you your job, which is rude.

I'm currently reading a book about Hans Christian Andersen, which is very good, and will then be reading a biography of James Cook.

I need to check out the library's Foucault selection.

So Phil, how is it?

I'm reading the new Preston & Child book, Dance of Death (or something). It'll be finished in a few days. I think I need something more intellectual after this, probably Susan Sontag's book on horror.

I've been reading for conventions lately: Portnoy's Complaint and Eudora Welty last week, Seize the Day and the massive complete-Cheever this week. I was working on Sterne but it got rained on and now it smells funny.

I Love Books is both awesome and neglected: please everyone lets post on it!

liz--muriel spark is one of my favourite writers, and i think that her stories are what she does best, enjoy them (why doesnt she have a nobel yet?

i got an interesting looking orwell biography the other day. it may have to wait until after quixote, tho.

What great book.

http://images.overstock.com/f/102/3117/8h/www.overstock.com/images/products/muze/books/0375758119.jpg

(Although not that edition.)

Anthony, I'm not so far into the Cheever yet -- working through the early stories and very much into them, but not so far as to have overarching opinions yet. The main thing that's struck me thus far is how unexpectedly modern a lot of them are in their premises / conceits.

Two weeks ago I found a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes novels/stories that my roommate left behind when he moved. I thought they'd be great comfort reading, but they're actually quite terrible in spots. The first novel's big reveal and deduction is just ridiculously clumsy -- like as bad as if Holmes had said "I figured out it was him because he stopped by and confessed while you were in the tub" -- but on the plus side it's weirdly ALL ABOUT MORMONS, with Brigham Young himself making a brief appearance.

http://www.sibelius.fi/suomi/ainola/img/noel_coward.jpg

"In a way, his speech seemed to show the liberal credentials of a true London citizen. The conciliatory and orderly spirit, the firm constitutionalism of the english way of thinking, and the adherence to the interventionist principles of his country seemed, extravagantly, to have extended themselves in his case to his use of portuguese syntax, thus leading Mr.Richard, in an excess of harmonizing tendencies, to try to make nouns and verbs agree with each other despite the absolute and unsurpassable rules of number and gender; and to modify an allied country's grammatical constitution in the same way that England likes to modify its allied country's political constituiton."

Reading now: "The Riddle Of The Sands" by Erskine Childers, a 19th century spy yachting novel that I picked up at a swedish used books store because it was a Penguin Popular Classic that I didn't know about, and that set off my curiosity. It's a great read! Better than Buchan. Also, I dip into Woody Allen's "Complete Prose" every now and then.

Planning to read: "O Delfim" (José Cardoso Pires), the first Corto Maltese book (in french, which should be an interesting challenge), and I wanna reread Forster's "The Longest Journey".

On the horizon: Narnia, Steampunk, more Moomins, Elric.

Yerselves?

Which is just making me ever more depressed and feel even more alienated. Sigh.

Steven Goldman, "Forging Genius: The Making of Casey Stengel"

in the midst:

John O'Hara, "BUtterfield 8"

Because there are so many bits of Being English that I don't really understand, and possibly never well. Trapped between two cultures, and all that.

(Though, that said, the bits on class-speak make me laugh like a drain.)

Currently, the Gastronomical Me, Devil in the White City, Oh the Glory of it All and the collected works of Flannery O'Connor.

I am going to Halifax soon. If one more person tells me to read The Shipping News I will punch them.

lords of chaos: the bloody rise of the satanic metal underground
barrel fever
lynch on lynch
excerpts from visionary film: the american avant-garde 1943-2000
our lady of the flowers

right now i'm reading arundhati roy's the god of small things, finally. it's good, but i think it's just not my kind of book.

The Blood-Dimmed Tide
Die a Little
Words on Fire
A Monstrous Regiment of Women
Outwitting History
Sin and Syntax

Is Bob Colacello's Warhol bio as good as Victor Bockris's? Bockris, IMHO, is the most classic of all the Warhol bios I've seen thus far. I mean, Colacello's bio must be worth trying out, particularly since Colacello worked with Warhol for all those years. Does Colacello gripe in the book about Warhol's being a faithful Democrat? I know Colacello was supposed to be a HUGE Republican supporter who was really the reason why Warhol showed up at a White House function during the first Reagan administration, and Colacello lobbied to get Nancy Reagan on the cover of Interview, so I don't know if he said snippy stuff about Warhol's deep dislike for Nixon in the book, for example.

(This Andy Warhol fan geekout brought to you by....)

Since then I've read "O Delfim" by José Cardoso Pires (ponderous murder mystery centered around a portuguese village in the late 60's, complete with macho degenerate VIP character - highly recommended), "The Man Who Was Thursday" (great fun, though Michael Moorcock's summing up of Chesterton as a middle class status quo tory writah made me more paranoid about political text and subtext than I probably should've been) and "The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe" (in anticipation of the movie - I must say C.S. Lewis' stuff reads a lot more hectoring and even sometimes condescending than, say, the Moomins. Still, there was a big FITE, so I'm happy.)

Right now I'm rereading "The Longest Journey" by E.M. Forster.

On the comics front: "Buddy Does Seattle" by Peter Bagge (awesome), "La Ballade De La Mer Salle" (first Corto Maltese volume - all chock full of WWI tragedy and mysterious sailor types and highbrow namedropping. What's not to love?), "L'Heritage" (classic Spirou & Fantasio, before they hooked up with the Marsupilami: a lot more absurdist than the more well known stuff), the first volume of "DC: The New Frontier", and right now I'm raeding the 2nd volume of "Love & Rockets".

Dee, sorry I didn't see this before. BC's book is good, I think, for showing the stress and machinations involved in working for the Warhol machine; overall you get the sense that Warhol is a business (as AW himself would have said), but it's all dinners and parties and hunting for portraits. Politically, BC shows AW to be a bit of a fool in his dealings with the Shah of Iran and so on, still trying gain commissions from the court as they near being overthrown. BC doesn't touch on his own politics at all, but rather shows AW trying to get the big money portraits, however politically incorrect, and then backtracking to try to get some liberal cred. AW wants the $ and glamour of the shah, but fears risking the backlack of the liberal press. It's also a bit sad in that it shows AW late in life sort of getting off (literally) during certain photo shoots--this is from VB's perspective of course. Definitely read it--it's very detail oriented, not as artful as the VB, but perhaps more fly-on-the wall.

I haven't read that in years, but I remember it fondly. There were lots of dreamlike parts. And I don't recall it being at all D&D-ish.

need to finish Pamuk's Istanbul. Started Ismael Kadare's Pyramid when the power was out, but in the post-Katrina fallout, it's hard to concentrate.

I liked God of Small Things fwiw, I read it in college and maybe I was a little overly wowed since it was one of my earliest exposures to multiculti stuff, but "boilerplate" plot aside I do remember it being pretty beautifully written.

Currently reading "A Stranger Here Myself" by Iain Pattison, which is a fictionalised autobiography of the childhood of Rab C Nesbitt. And it's totally spot on as a view of growing up in a rapidly de-industrialising and subsequently poor neighbourhood.

(Taking politics courses for my year at Georgetown)

I'm just reading bitd from the Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories really. I did start a Paul Auster book, a few weeks ago, but I can't get into it.

About to start "Ways of Seeing" by Berger

Good luck

Currently reading:

Nadja - Andre Breton
Antes Del Fin - Ernesto Sabato

It seemed quite *easy*. Not like Ruskin. :-( I felt dumb when I read his book.

Figured it was about time I read the other of that Foucault that never get as much attention. Also reading some stuff on Zen, kind of scattershot..

I almost checked out the Karl Lagerfeld diet book from the library because it's totally ridiculous, maybe next time.

I don't understand one word of what he's saying but I am determined to finish it. I'm at page 100 or something. Another 1000 pages to go.

I only read books set in California that also have "road" int the title.

The Madams of San Francisco - Curt Genrty
and William Claxton's biogrpahy of Steve McQueen

both set in California but without "road" in the title.

I am so ashamed of myself.

I always more than one book at a time.

kinda obsessed with the albany cycle right now.

also, the al franken is good. funny & dense with material.

I am reading/have just read:
Gotham Central
The Rabbi's Cat
Howl's Moving Castle
Dubliners

I just finished John Horgan's Rational Mysticism and it's a knockout read. I'm going to start on some Susan Blackmore stuff soon, I think.

Last week I bought Wislawa Szymborska's Poems New and Collected, which is really good in spite of a few clunky entries.

Before bed each night I tackle a few pages sections of Sam Delaney's Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia without particularly enjoying it.

I'm also reading "In Wonderland" by Knut Hamsun, it's a travelogue of his trip to pre-Soviet Russia, he spends a lot of time slagging people off and talking about banal stuff.