"I live in an immense activity, in which everything becomes morning" -- but what are YOU reading Summer 2014??

Been dipping into Juniper Fuse, by poet/translator Clayton Eshleman, a strange hybrid work interweaving personal essay, free verse, academic writing, and plenty of pretty pictures into an exploration of cave art and the phenomenology of creative imagination.

Also continuing to plug away at Bleak House, though with increasingly frequent "Who the hell was that character again?" moments, which means I'm either going at it too slowly or not slowly enough.

Nearing midway in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Hofstadter maintains the neutral stance of an impartial historian about 99% of the time, but he inserts delightful little digs every once I a while, when the nonsense gets too ripe for him to resist.

btw a courtesy link to the previous 'what are you reading?' thread.

well, that didn't work as planned. here's another attempt.

This piece on Gordon Lish is largely a rehash of the controversy over his editing of Carver, with a welter of links and quotes---a few from the man himself, in what may have been a brief or briefly productive interview, but long enough to get the money shots at Roth, Franzen, Lethem, Lydia Davis, the New Yorker, n+1, and, oh yeah, Carver---but it does have me wondering about his own fiction, especially the early novels, which DeLillo and others here highly recommend. Anybody read Dear Mr. Capote, for instance?http://www.newsweek.com/2014/06/27/angry-flash-gordon-255491.html
Also wondering about these writers, mentioned in Wolcott's comments on the Newsweek:
I'm not faulting Nazaryan, his profile got the evocative job done, but I wish someone someday would move beyond the Raymond Carver overhang and revisit the fiction authors published at Knopf and The Quarterly under Lish's tutelage and aegis--writers such as Mark Richard, Noy Holland, Yannick Murphy, and Nancy Lemann, among others--from a literary perspective, not through a Twilight of the Gods frame on the glory that was once publishing and the preeminence of print. That might be a nice project for some university press.
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2014/06/captain-fiction-episode-six-the-lash-of-lish

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2014/06/captain-fiction-episode-six-the-lash-of-lish

(The Newsweek piece was worth reading for some of the links and quotes, actually, though they made it kind of an eyesore, but that's the Web for you.)

late to the bolaño party: sped through the savage detectives, not entirely sure i liked it that much... but now starting on 2666

and whoever it was who made the claim on the jacket that the savage detectives was the novel borges would have written: i really don't see it.

I found Savage Detectives somewhat undercooked compared to 2666. There was no doubt in my mind as to which was better conceived and executed.

Check the Bolano thread too.

i was left wondering if that last image was some kind of representation of absence/presence...

can't stop won't stop

I've not read Detectives but the 'final image' of 2666 was just about perfect...

Been reading the second half of Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel. Mostly good to great, but the one about the dragger captain kinda, well, drags.

Really like the long story in that about the guy writing the vast, endless book: Joe Gould's Secret, I think it's called.

I found that story horribly depressing. I can't look at it again.

i have that in a little book of its own

i bought it because i read a thing tao lin wrote about it

Just finished Susan Choi's My Education. Immensely readable, but need to process it a bit.

Ian McEwan - Sweet Tooth
Max Hastings - Catastrophe 1914

Just finished:

Megan Abbott, Dare Me (noir lit + high school cheerleaders, the in-genre luridness earned me some raised eyebrows from my gf but the prose is really excellent & lyrical)

Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief (it's definitely a Teju Cole book)

Cheer up, Alimosina, Joe Gould actually did write this other little thing (a diary), which my contacts among the lumberjacks assure me is quite readable, in its own peculiar way--just like these reporters say:
http://www.villagevoice.com/2000-04-04/news/joe-gould-s-secret-history/

Joe Gould actually did write this other little thing (a diary)

Thanks for that. I guess his life wasn't entirely futile.

I went camping for a couple of days. I didn't want to bring a big hardcover book like the Hofstadter, so I took a crappy mass market paperback of an old Len Deighton spy thriller, Berlin Game. It was a quick read, and exhibited a very high level of craftsmanship for what was basically schlock. I always find that combination to be interesting, if it's consumed at long enough intervals.

What do you think of Le Carre? The only one I've read is The Little Drummer Girl, and don't remember that very well (was dense, but he was a convincing tour guide; got me grudgingly going along in some sketchy directions). Much enjoyed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and A Perfect Spy--original miniseries of both--and some barely remembered movies.

It's been a decade at least since I last read LeCarre with any attention and about two decades since most of my exposure to him. But I recall reading seven or eight of his books in the span of maybe four years, so I know I must have derived some enjoyment from him.

My general sense, looking back, is that LeCarre's prose style isn't flashy, but it isn't altogether barren of interest. The pacing is deliberate rather than fast and furious, the psychology is fairly sound, the plotting holds together without noticeable creaking at the joints.

His characters don't stray far from the standard-issue set of world-weary spies drinking bad coffee, having trouble with the KGB, their bosses and other human relationships, but he constructs them with better than average detailing. In fact, you could say LeCarre invented that character set in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. It's the book that made his name, and set a whole new direction for the spy genre, which was stuck in 007 mode at the time.

So, one thumb up, I suppose.

Many le Carre books are really enjoyable dark office politics stories--it's just that the outcomes of the power-plays in boardroom meetings are usually some poor pawn being sacrificed overseas rather than somebody getting stuck writing a report

responding to something upthread, it seems (after a quick search) that I was the one who made the Borges/Bolaño comparison...? in reference to 2666, though; and on further reflection it's a very strange thing to have said

really, the only way it even makes sense in the context of my own personal reading history is if you flip it into "huh, 2666 is a lot more Borgesian than the other Bolaño novellas I've read"... and even that mostly boils down to 'deconstructed detective fiction + fictional writers'

"other Bolaño novellas I've read" = an inelegant way of saying that I've not read Savage Detectives

it's not like Borges invented writing-stories-about-fictional-writers FFS

sorry I'm not sure what I was on about

ha, no: wasn't directed at your comment (still need to read the bolaño thread, but avoiding *spoilers*), that bolaño/borges thing is a quote from the jacket on my copy of savage detectives. all the blurbs on it seem like they were just reaching for any comparisons to other latin american authors, relevant or not. sorry for the confusion!

Stephen Donaldson The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever which I picked up cheap in the Omnibus edition from a charity shop a couple of weeks back. I read the first couple of chapters 20+ years ago when somebody had a copy lying around while I was in Belfast but hadn't read any further in the interim. Finding it pretty interesting but I don't read massive amounts of Fantasy outside of the classic Tolkien, Peake, Pullman which I dip into occasionally & whatever is in 2000AD.

Anyway am enjoying this , not sure how fast I'm going to read it though. Or at the moment if I'm going to go through all 3 books in here.

Just read Bathed In Lightning the Colin Harper John Mclaughlin bio which was very good and makes me want to read some other bios of him.

Need to find a book on repairing sewing machines cos my main pastime has ground to a major slowing down at least. My LIDL job won't interlock the threads from either side, so it doesn't work. I think I should be able to fix it myself but just can't so far. But am still handstitching and reading various books on making clothing. latest one being a thing on Tailoring by writers for CPI

If you're curious about an overview of the recently completed Chronicles, and don't mind possible spoilers (mostly re vol. 10), I pasted a piece by Tom Shippey into or onto the Speculative etc thread.

Elias Canetti - The Voices of Marrakesh. Not read much travel writing in my life, so I love Canetti's range as a writer and how he seems to pull it off. Its a short record, he seems to integrate, never too naive to the sounds and colours thank goodness.

Frank Wedekind - Diary of an Erotic Life. This is very non-literary, pared down descriptions. The problem is there isn't enough happening, his allegedly monstrous libido not on show (and we've all read the Kinki biog by now..) Into the Paris section, and it might change.

Rilke - Duino Elegies tr. by Stephen Cohn. Good set of notes, not too much explaining.

Nearing the midpoint of Bleak House... the scene with Chadband preaching & maintaining uncomfortable eye-contact with Mr. Snagsby while the latter's wife scrutinizes his reactions is a minor masterpiece of zany domestic comedy.

I just want to go on record as saying I haven't read it in a few years but I still think Savage Detectives is prob good but that the money scenes (the duel, Lima & Paz) matter less to me than say the gallery of Spanish writers who all show up one after another near the end of the long middle section, or incidental characters like Luscious Skin...

Very appealing Caleb Crain piece about Stephen Crane's life and art, with a new bio by debunker of previous:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2014/06/30/140630crbo_books_crain

Read about 100 pp of selected essays of D. T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism last night. His aim is merely to introduce a general idea of Zen to westerners, using history and explication, but he does tell enough zen stories to give a very clear idea of the kernel of zen as direct personal experience, and repeats frequently that the techniques of zen (meditation, koans, etc.) are not the substance, which can only be grasped through satori.

reading the art of fielding chad harbach book -- started v avg/dull but it has gotten better tbh, cannot see it earning all its hype, the whole bidding war etc but ima def stay with it

Colm Tóibín - The Testament of Mary

Last night I bounced around reading here and there in The Goliard Poets, a book of translations by Geo. Whicher (1947, New Directions). He is very clever at his rhyme schemes, which could not duplicate the schemes of the originals, but he manages to bring across the meaning of the Latin while retaining formal rhymes that it impart some of the original flavor. The Goliard subject matter is rather slight: drinking, eating, and carousing, so a light, entertaining touch is U&K.

i am reading 'children of clay' by raymond queneau

it started out hilarious and has modulated to curious and regularly amusing

i feel something like i am watching a foreign film and unable to judge the story for what it is because of the atmosphere of classy european manners, but it seems like a kind of book that americans don't do

i've also been rereading philip kerr's bernie gunther books because i got a couple newer ones and wanted to get back into them from the beginning. the prose is harder to gobble up this time, sometimes seems like an impediment to just getting done as fast as possible (since it's not quite prose to savor). i'm looking forward to the next one because he starts out much more miserable during post-WWII interzone kinda stuff.

I didn't finish Wedekind. Its not pornographic enough.

Now onto Hamburger's translation of Holderlin. This obsession with Greece would wear you down except its contrasted with Germanic "weak in deeds, strong in thoughts" despair.

There is more, and Holderlin's preoccupation with the ancients is never a mere fetish, its something that occupies every fibre of his being - as if he transported himself back in time in his poetry with every mention of grape and lyre and wine and song.

You just reminded me of
Texts within texts.

trollope /:

I was reading "confederacy of dunces" but I put it aside with 100 pages to go as it wasn't doing it for me. I'm reading a book called "The Cult Film Reader". The term "cult film" is so encompassing, I'm not even sure it means anything anymore tbh. The book seems to focus on the audiences reactions and expectations to certain movies. I've only read the pieces on "El Topo" and "Ichi The Killer" so far.

I am reading War and Peace (mostly in the evening) and Capital in the Twenty-First Century (mostly during the day). Could someone please explain on page 68 of the latter how he got to "nearly 20 percent of African capital is owned by foreigners"? I've been plugging numbers into various equations with no luck. It is fine if it is a matter of accounting; I have given up on trying to be intelligent.

i really did not find 'confederacy' amusing

Reading a few stories:

Pessoa's The Anarchist Banker, in a collection of his writings (which I stopped and started since Spring). A Plato-like dialogue. The title is v promising (every banker you could say is an anarchist) but the modern meaning of the title is lost in the story itself, inevitably. The repetitions annoy.

D.H. Lawrence's The Sun (from a colleciton of short stories I picked up yesterday). Plenty of self-loathing (playing the inadequate husband with the stuttery dialogue and shy demeanour), as oposed to his rival (silent, 'animal' like Italian peasant, of the earth, with the obligatory ample member, of course). The sun-baked wife: well, you know what she likes...this is all provocation. I think the Ken Russell 'hysteria' surrounding his adaptations has put me off somewhat and I never considered reading him. Now I feel I'll be spending something w/Lawrence. Here he has repetitions too but they pay off in these quasi-mystical visions that have a hint of the fascist to them. Sensuous too.

Pavese's The Suicides - blow by blow account of a psychologically destructive relationship. Prizes all round. Pavese can write of these prisons like no other.

Back from vacation. Read the first volume of Sodoma and Gomorra (vol 7 of the new 13 vol edition of In Search of Lost Time - I'm halfway through!!!) Garcia Marquez' The General In His Labyrinth, Fitzgeralds translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khartoum, GRRM's A Dance With Dragons and Zweig's Chess Story. Proust was perfect reading for sitting in a Norwegian cabin without electricity, made me sad I didn't have more volumes with me. Some day I want to take a month off in a cabin somewhere, and just read Proust.

And now I'm reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, inspired by many positive mentions on here. It's great, pulpy history a bit like ASOIAF. Also reading Herman Bang's Stucco, which is absolutely amazing, one of those few Danish novels that can stand with anything of it's time.

Gave up on Hilton Als' White Girls during the interminable intro to the Malcolm X essay. I don't doubt his enthusiasm for his subjects (many of which I'm interested in), I just doubt how much he cares about communicating that enthusiasm to me. I'm trying to remember a quote that someone said once about how there's "personal writing" and then there's "private writing," and I think this collection falls into the latter. Still, the unanimous acclaim for this thing has me feeling that the problem is me, not Als--and I just might have to check it out from the library again later on just to read the essays on Michael Jackson and Richard Pryor.

> Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

is this the one they are reading in Our Mutual Friend?

i'm currently reading Swing Hammer Swing for the first time, a book i bought in early 90s on the back of it winning the whitbread prize. this was before i realised that i don't actually share the tastes of the various prize panels...

I have started The Comforters, which was Muriel Sparks' first novel. Most of her strengths as a writer are already evident from the beginning, though not in their complete glory.

I'm stsrting to feel the need to go hardcore Henry James: the thickest thicket, the most amazing maze, abtruse truth, all of that. What would y'all recommend? Preferably novels, but shorter forms if you must.

'wings'

The Ambassadors: a marvel of architecture, chapters within terse "books," colorful supporting cast.

if you want a thick cream of James, may I suggest The Golden Bowl?

J. and Alfred's recommendations are otm; of the three, The Golden Bowl is the densest and the most chilling, while The Ambassadors feels more tonally varied.

Thanks for those; think I'll start with The Golden Bowl. Meanwhile: a summer reading list, appealing to me more than most such: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/title-menu-12-hot-summer-reads/

> Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

is this the one they are reading in Our Mutual Friend?

― koogs, 8. juli 2014 19:08 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Dunno. Probably. Pretty famous. It's pulpy and lurid and fascinating.

unlike alfred and o.w.s. i don't know what i'm talking about, since i've never finished 'wings', but it is most assuredly a taxing and masterful use of commas and what one may have formerly believed were mere auxiliaries to the english language, incapable in themselves of conveying anything like the substance of a narrative, but there he went and ding dang did it

is that an excerpt from William Dean Howells' review?

D.H. Lawrence's The Sun (from a colleciton of short stories I picked up yesterday). Plenty of self-loathing (playing the inadequate husband with the stuttery dialogue and shy demeanour), as oposed to his rival (silent, 'animal' like Italian peasant, of the earth, with the obligatory ample member, of course). The sun-baked wife: well, you know what she likes...this is all provocation. I think the Ken Russell 'hysteria' surrounding his adaptations has put me off somewhat and I never considered reading him. Now I feel I'll be spending something w/Lawrence. Here he has repetitions too but they pay off in these quasi-mystical visions that have a hint of the fascist to them. Sensuous too.

Lawrence's short stories are often really really good, despite their problems. In his novels he has too much space to belabour his points for fear anyone might miss them, but the stories don't seem to have that problem.

When I used to teach more freshman lit, I never tired of introducing "The Blind Man," "Odor of Chrysanthemums," and "The Prussian Officer."

william ding dang howells

I haven't read The Golden Bowl (but now plan to do so). I recommend The Beast in the Jungle (and before the thick cream, dreams, drawing rooms, libraries, romantic beaux -- The Portrait of a Lady -- which you've probably already read).

Stories that, maybe, could be taught:
- Something that Needs Nothing by Miranda July
- Doctor Mom by Matthew Sharpe

Giving my first serious attention to Lydia Davis.

Let us know how that turns out.

Samuel Johnson is Indignant is wonderful. I read "The Silence of Mrs. Iln" three times today.

the fears of mrs. orlando is a pretty memorable one.

J Michael Lennon Norman Mailer: A Double Life
Adam Begley Updike

Prefer Mailer as a writer - and perhaps as a person - after reading these. Norman projects a generosity of spirit along with his overarching ego & ambition while Updike comes across as a prickly uptight climber. Both biographies are subject-sympathetic to a fault, but not fatally. Worth it if you care about either guy.

Philip Roth Sabbath’s Theatre
Philip Roth I Married A Communist
Philip Roth The Human Stain

Mickey Sabbath is Portnoy as a mentally unstable middle-age sex fiend, just as pathetic as that sounds and well, I laughed and thought of some real-life guys. Gulp. Communist was superb, my favorite of these and arguably Roth's best American period piece AND family narrative. The exquisitely named Coleman Silk, on the other hand, seemed a bit contrived as a character compared to the brothers in IMAC and I didn't 100% buy into the titular biracial secret-identity plot.

Rose George 90 Per Cent Of Everything
Anna Funder Stasiland Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall

Either I'm losing my taste for narrative non-fiction books or these two worthy/overlong efforts, on the shipping business and post 1989 East Germany respectively, would have been way better as long-form pieces on the internet.

I'm with you re The Human Stain and especially Sabbath's Theatre. The Plot Against America and the first third of American Pastoral strike me as best period piece + family narrative.

Wow, so Lynne Cheney's James Madison bio is sober, lucid, and scholarly.

Alfred, have you been reading jacket blurbs after several glasses of merlot?

I've read a hundred pages as sober as a deacon.

Madison was among the least doctrinaire of the founders, and among the least consistent and coherent, too. The idea that Lynne Cheney, who presented herself as a rabid ideologue in her recent bid for election to Congress, would find Madison a proper subject for lucid scholarship merely unmasks the deep hypocrisy of her electoral politics.

But by all means let us know if it's worth reading. Always on the prowl for a good bit of historianship.

No less than Gordon Woods peaised in the NYT!

funder's stasiland rules

I think about Madison and his peers like Foner does, in his review of Ellis's Founding Brothers:
http://www.ericfoner.com/reviews/042901latimes.html At best, anyway.

> Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

is this the one they are reading in Our Mutual Friend?

― koogs, 8. juli 2014 19:08 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes - I can't remember who it is, but he teaches himself to read using it. it's quite an affecting image, with that Dickensian knack for getting a thing to stick in your head. I don't know whether a small history of auto-didactic literacy has ever been written, but my intuitive feeling is that the bible is the book most often chosen for this task, which also makes the choice off-beat and secular, which may have been what made me keep on wondering about the effect of doing this - a sort of strange whorfianism, an innate assimilation of the cadences of the writer, and a vast, encyclopaedic, but necessarily limited sense of rereferncevpoints and structural metaphor for articulating the world.

Dude... you're (f)actually blowing my mind right now.

The bloke who inherits the dust pile (Boffin) hires the bloke with one leg (Silas Wegg) to teach him to read using it. So it's not really an auto-didact thing.

My curiousity was rather whether it was the same book given that it was probably old when Dickens was referencing it. Edward Gibbon, published 1776-89.

Wazzabout the Dickens appreciation in A Handful of Dust, how does that fit in?

ah, that was it. and yes, definitely the same book. it had a totemic status well after its publication.

tempted to poll how many ilxors have read the decline and fall of the roman empire

can you give me a few months or so?

So does the new reader seem influenced by Decline and Fall? Especially since he also inherits a dust pile in the heart of the British Empire?

Been reading Octavia Butler's Kindred. Very good so far. I like it even better than Parable of the Sower. Can't remember reading a better fictional evocation of life under slavery.

Miklos Szentkuthy - Marginalia on Casanova

Just started so not sure where this is going. It is essay-novel, which is totally my tastes. And yes it is very Hungarian fic - kind of a philosophy of sensuality that runs through it is in this, too.

It is the first of 10 vols (my impression is that all vols are quite short-ish like this one). Has an interesting history: Miklos wrote half of it in two years then a thirty year break (to escape suppression and all that business) to then nearly finish it in the 80s, although he adds a preface (a biog of a saint) to each of the prev published volumes when the first vols were reish.

This is the first to be tr. into English.

@James Morrison/alimosina - have you read it?

It looks v intriguing. Is there a lot of Casanova in it? I like Casanova.

Never read Casanova. But it does what it says in the title.

Miklos got the idea from reading this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epistle_to_the_Romans_%28Barth%29

every time i see this thread title i think, well geez can't you find another apartment?

I'm exactly halfway through Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, which I am enjoying. She is able to convey great depth of perspective in language that is both simple and precise, which is a pleasure to read.

The only problem I am having with it is that the first-person narrative voice is pitched somewhat in a monotone. This tone fits the character's quiet and contemplative personality, but he narrates every sentence of the book and there is almost no reported dialogue, so there is no relief from it. This is a minor difficulty compared to the overall excellence.

Still working through The Sea of Fertility. Also started up The Spire by William Golding.

The expanded edition of Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love, complete with additional essays by at least two ILXers. Still great, and--with the exception of the endless Marco Roth piece--most of the essays are enjoyable and illuminating.

@James Morrison/alimosina - have you read it?

No, but it looks like just my thing. I've read the first 5 vols of Casanova's 12 vols of memoir--must read the rest, as they're great

Yep, second/third Casanova's memoirs - they're excellent.

Finished Marginalia on Casanova. I read the first para of Alain De Botton's piece on Hegel (linked by woof last week) and wonder if -- pathetic as that piece is -- the um lack of seduction in much philosophy that Miklos Szentkuthy talks about is the actual complaint.

This is a bit like Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, a diary of very heated reflection. They share that complaint. Except Miklos talks more about women -- the somewhat broken relationships between men and women, how the distrust and deception between is an integral and vital part of the love. In terms of Hungarian fic its meat to the bone on Krudy's Adventures of Sindbad.

As more vols are translated it may come to be seen as a big-ish event in the last few years. Like to think this will last whereas the Knausgaard's of this world will fade. Not that this is an EP of wacky races.

Curzio Malaparte - Kaputt.

For some reason I really like the sound of Marginalia on Casanova, although I've read virtually no philosophy - does it presuppose some knowledge of the field?

No, its in essayistic mode. Unlike Man Without Qualities it has almost no plot or character btw.

Its Philosophy in a play on ideas sense. People who like philosophy in a more formal way might have little time for it.

Bruce Allen Murphy: Scalia: A Court of One. Marred by copy editing mistakes and an appalling factual error about a case.

Deborah Eisenberg's Collected Stories. She's so good, isn't she?

Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century

v doubtful I'll finish in 3-week loan period

Zorba the Greek at the moment. I'm finding I have a weakness for sultry Mediterranean settings.

I read Lethem's THEY LIVE. I thought it was one of his best books of the last decade.

I started Lorrie Moore's BARK. She seems to be doing here just what she always did, hardly any better or worse than ever, really.

Deborah Eisenberg's Collected Stories. She's so good, isn't she?

I have that collection too. I really enjoyed the stories from her first book, a little less so the second. Still need to finish the next 2 books. In the second book I was kind of distracted by the more political themes, the stories set in Central America with CIA agents as characters for instance. It seemed like those kind of elements were an awkward fit with her style. It didn't seem to quite work as political analysis or as a relationship study.

The third collection is my least favorite, but the second has "A Cautionary Tale," maybe her best story? Hard to choose.

"Cautionary Tale" is great, yeah - one of the gems of the 2nd collection. "Presents" is good too.

alternating between 'jane eyre' (finally) and robert dallek's JFK bio 'an unfinished life.'

finished maria semple's first book, found it better than 'whered you go bernadette' so if you're into that sorta thing

also reading evan osnos's china book

alternating between 'jane eyre' (finally) and robert dallek's JFK bio 'an unfinished life.'

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.),

get ready to hurl, a little, reading the second.

my favorite bit so far is ike grumbling "that boy doesn't know what the hell he's doing. he doesn't even know where laos is."

"Its Philosophy in a play on ideas sense. People who like philosophy in a more formal way might have little time for it.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, 21 July 2014 13:51 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink"

Sounds good, I've been reading about the memoirs so I might read some of those first though.

when did ben marcus get so shitty and bad

ben marcus is putting me off the act of reading altogether

you will be reborn!!

finished Lethem, THEY LIVE. I quite admired it.

Lorrie Moore, BARK.

I apologize for repeating myself.

Let me repeat myself

James Redd and the Blecchs
James Redd and the Blecchs
James Redd and the Blecchs
James Redd and the Blecchs

Sorry, just wanted to post on y'all's thread since I can't be at FAP.

Ha, wrong thread anyway.

Finished Malaparte's Kaputt. I think the imagery is the thing that gets made most out of in reviews you do see. But I'll also point out what I think is its deep affiliation with Italian literature -- the narrator becomes a Boccaccio-type storyteller, with his tales alternating between macabre humour and the brutal realism, and its a mid-way between the Proust who talks and subtly points out the deep moral corruption within the aristocracy that is about to vanish, then makes a leap to the derangement of Salò.

Gyula Krudy - Sunflower.

Halfway through Sunflower: like Lermontov on acid!

I can't seem to get through MOOMINVALLEY IN NOVEMBER.

Gyula Krudy is amazing.

Pinefox, because of the weird bleak twilightness and freaky abscence of the central characters?

Am reading Peter Weiss's 'Leavetaking', whic at the halfway point is pretty tremendous. If the rest of the Aesthetics of Resistance is ever published, I'll have to tackle it.

Olivia Manning's The Levant Trilogy. Any fans?

On the NYRB thread. Unless that was you.

James - don't deny yourself the 1st Volume of Aesthetics.. just because the other two vols have not been published (if I'm reading you right). This is such a ILB Group read, but its expensive..

I didn't know of Leavetaking, have to get round to this.

Krudy is so compulsive - nearly finished. Full circus of duels, gamblers, love lost and found, games with both love and death - love as ghostly figures that return that haunt and linger. Absorbed a bunch of Russian and French novels in his bloodstream and pulpified them, feels written at lightning speed in between bouts of heavy red wine drinking.

Also started on: Malaparte - The Skin. Set in Naples, where Kaputt finishes off. I never liked the idea of war books unless they have this blank existential shine to them. You can smell the decay, the only thing that is cheap is human life. Funny 'cause its true.

JM -- no, I wanted bleak twilightness. It's more that it feels stodgy. I find it hard to progress. This is absurd as it's a children's book. It's probably me, not the book, in this instance.

The Lady in the Lake by Chandler

my first chandler. my parents had them in these editions:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Z9MUn4wdAuo/Tg-JA-Pa4dI/AAAAAAAAUiU/-E9y7S0aVNE/s1600/Penguin-867-g+Chandler+Lady+in+the+Lake.jpg

I can recall the feeling very strongly without being able to articulate particularly - that LA felt like a new world with objects and language so alien that in retrospect I wonder whether some of the thrill I got was the same thrill as fantasy. certainly it involved a lot of working out on my part - car names, drink names, street names, gun slang were all complete unknowns, almost baroque in their strange detail. and so seemed to have an immanence in a world whose main forces were lying, money, murder and sex. and whose main good forces were telling the truth (even if it earned you a punch in the face), solving crimes (even if it earned you no money at all) and sex. oh and everything progressing through error and jealously and incompetence.

and so much professed weariness, but actually nothing weary in either the pace of the stories or the taut prose.

making me want to read it now in fact but worryingly I don't seem to have any to hand.

well said Fizzles.
the weariness vs the lack of weariness of the writing for instance.
I agree about LA. My sense is that this isn't the real LA, or it isn't my imagination of LA. It's some other, stranger thing.

pinefox - the thing that always gets me is the extended metaphor with Toft and the nummulite. A lot of the book is Tove (Toft) mulling over where she might have gone wrong in the previous books - made the Moomins too perfect, made Snufkin too cool, made everything too big. I don't even think of it as a children's book, really.

Just finished The Bone Clocks (new David Mitchell), it goes pretty spectacularly off the rails and then manages to pull itself back together by the end. If you didn't like the business about the souls in Cloud Atlas or the Zookeeper in Ghostwritten you might hate this but I thought it was great.

I haven't got that far, JS! As I say, I've struggled with it. I wouldn't have guessed that Toft was meant to be the author.

I really admire David Mitchell and am a bit thrilled that this book is already available.

I did just reread Lethem's AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE. What struck me this time was the emotional reality; that as well as being a science riff or DeLillo pastiche, it's really about pathetic love and loss. It's surprising that I didn't really see this before, considering how much of my adult life has been about pathetic love and loss.

it's not actually available yet, my g/f got me an advance copy

Finally out:

http://cdn-media.downpour.com/b/c/bch9/bch9-square-400.jpg

interesting post JoeStork, like the pinefox, looking forward to reading The Bone Clocks.

finished Gold, or the Marvellous Life of General Augustus John Sutter by Blaise Cendrars. enjoyed it by and large. it's fabulistic, so the scenes have the quality of spiritual states: his greasy pole climbing to get to California, the establishment of paradise, the discovery of gold, the political, social and mental derangement and destruction that follows. despite its title it's not a character study - AJS is an everyman - courting fire and destruction in the pursuit of paradise.

really enjoyed The Crisis of the European Mind by Paul Hazard. The free-indirect style is exhilarating. I think my favourite bit came in the chapter on Natural Law, where he takes the part of the Divine Right with appropriately imperious bombast, before transitioning to the forces and writers arguing against Divine Right via a wonderful passage on Louis XIV:

If, now, we look about us for a visible example which shall do justice to the pomp and splendour of this power, and soar to the height of this well-nigh superhuman majesty, the image of Louis XIV rises spontaneously to our eyes. It haunts us with its very splendour, this symbol of regal state; it pursues us across the gulf of time, it is with us, here and now; it is living still. There yet linger in our memory the famous words which the *Grande Monarque* - we can almost hear him saying them, as on the day he signalized the inauguration of his personal sway - *l'état, c'est moi*: I am the State. We know how he made up his mind to fulfil to the letter the motto: One King, One Faith, One Law; how he crushed every attempt at resistance; how, in the presence of the Pope himself, the helmsman of Christ's Church, he upheld the rights of the captain who is responsible for the Ship of State; the captain being, of course, himself. He is the commanding exemplar, the hero, of the Monarchy. At Versailles we wait to see him pass through the halls and the courts, we follow him as he enters the Gallery of Mirrors surrounded by courtiers eager to interpret and obey his slightest gesture; and when, as the shades of evening beging to fall, we prepare to leave the groves and alley-ways laid out in accordance with his sovereign pleasure, we seem, as we retrace our steps twoards the Château, to behold at one of the windows the figure called back for us by La Bruyère from the land of shadows: "He himself, in a manner of speaking, is his own Prime Minster. His mind forever dwelling on his people's needs, there is for him no leisure time, no hours that he can call his own. Night draws on, the guards have been relieved at the approaches to his palace; the stars come out in the heavens, and proceed on their appointed way; all nature sleeps, buried deep in shadow, now that the day is done; and we too, take our rest; not so the King; quitting the balcony, he retires within his chamber, there, with sleepless eye, to watch over us and all his realm."

It's a spectacular passage. There is something of Borges or Marienbad in its images of mirrors, windows and onlooking shades, and in the tyranny of the minutest gesture having the most extensive consequences. Some of the French is worth quoting:

Elle [l'image] nous obsède par sa splendeur même, cette royale image; elle nous poursuit à travers le temps, elle nous rejoint, elle là, elle vit

the decreasing length of the terms as the image of Louis approaches over time, producing a peroration, culminating in that elle là, elle vit is superb, and 'nous la suivons dans la gallerie des glaces' has the quality of a dream.

But most of all it's the image of one who has aggregated all power to himself, and who as a consequence exists outside nature (toute la nature repose/tandis que le Roi), hagridden and hollow-eyed.

So Hazard portrays the fall of the Divine Right, in the shades of evening, and unsustainable burden of its aggregation of power into a single weak human vessel in a wakeful twilight world.

It reminded me of the description of the role of Cæsar de Quincey:

The emperor de facto might be viewed under two aspects: there was the ma, and there was the office, the very sanctity and privilege of the character with which he was clothed might actually be turned against himself; and it was here, at this point, that the character of Roman emperor became truly and mysteriously awful.

alfred, when you're doing with that thing will you write back to us and let us know if it's any good or not?

done, not "doing"

I won't let you know what I'm doing with the thing.

hah

Was Louie really that conscientious?

Louie C.K. XIV

“I could never visualize Eisenhower even kissing his wife. Not on the mouth anyway. He didn’t even go to the toilet either, he just stood there. He didn’t even go to bed, he just sat up all night, with his clothes on, worrying.”---Lenny Bruce

Supplying the black laughter, and how I need it right now:

Helen DeWitt - Lightning Rods

Celine - Rigadoon

Started running w/some Dickinson's poetry. Letting it wash, need a sensible selection but I'll go through as much of the Complete... as poss, certainly all the stuff from '62/'63

Reading Andras Pelyi's 'Out of Oneself' a pair of novellas by a Hungarian writer.

The first one had me all excited, thinking I'd discovered a reincarnated Gyula Krudy, all unmoored-in-time fleshy hedonistic narrated-by-the-dead grooviness. But the second one is really sexually nasty and misogynistic, almost to the point of 'Do I even want to keep this book?'

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/B004D9FJDM.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Long flight to Sydney next week. Need to think about entertainment/reading matter. Feel something intellectually tough/academic, possibly history + novella + short stories (maybe the Tales of the German Imagination of which I've only read a couple) + some poetry. Poetry will probably in book form (maybe Matthew Gregory, maybe Karen Solie), but the rest will probably be ipad/kindle.

Post recommendations! Not Pelyi by the sounds of it.

I'll have a look through the shelves at the LRB shop (10% off night tonight) and think of recommendations. Certainly Krudy's Adventures of Sindbad if you haven't got round to that just yet.

Trying to decide if I want to read Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow or just cut the crap and get stuck into Infinite Jest.

oh I need to get that Krudy - thanks xyzzzz__!

A massive collection of stories, like the recent complete Elizabeth Taylor from Virago, or Calvino's the Complete Cosmicomics, would be hard to beat for a really long flight

What about Elizabeth Bowen?

I'd forgotten those E Taylor short stories had come out. Maybe I should do Taylor *and* Bowen. hmmm. <checks luggage allocation>

I tend to admire lit short stories more than enjoy them most of the time. (Exception was Leskov earlier this year, but that's also true for Chekhov and Gogol). VS Pritchett, who is clearly great, often left me cold, likewise Raymond Carver. Time for another go tho.

will do a final list here.

I have been away hiking in the mountains for a couple of weeks. Several considerations must be incorporated in my reading material on such a trip. I need cheap used paperbacks, because a nice copy would get grimy and ruined. They must weigh under 5.5 oz. And I am fatigued in the evening, so the material must not be too dreary or intellectually intricate.

Accordingly, I read:

Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Our Game, John LeCarre (which I have not quite finished, yet)

Briefly, I was very happy with Kidnapped, and although the amazing breakneck pace did slow down about midway, it was quality work through and through. There's no need to relegate this as a children's book.

Gatsby was a bit disappointing. FSF's prose was trying very hard to be evocative, but most often those evocative phrases contained nothing one could come to grips with. It was filled with the faux wisdom of a well-educated, worldly youth and was much too pat.

Heart of Darkness was a bit of a puzzlement. It suffered from too much redundancy and could have made all its points while being cut by a third. Conrad made a very fine personage in Kurtz, but spoiled his effect at the very end by reducing Kurtz to a Symbol of a Certain Type of European Thought and effacing much of the power of what he'd accomplished in the first 100 pages. The narrator's easy fluctuation between liberal sympathy with the African's situation under colonialism and casual racism was probably an accurate reflection of the times, but still irritating.

Our Game is shaping up as a novel where LeCarre went into his test kitchen and tried to add some new ingredients to his old formula, but some parts came out too fluffy and other bits too sodden and lumpy. It is edible, but only just. Maybe he'll pull off a big finish and impress me, but that seems a rather remote possibility.

Making good progress with War and Peace (description of a hunt -- wolves and foxes, hounds and horses and hunters). Got back into Capital in the 21st Century (never thought about the relative importance of inherited wealth in terms of overall growth) while volunteering for the blood drive (also enjoyed talking to undergrad and grad students doing lab research over the summer), but really need to set aside time during the day to read this.

Gatsby was a bit disappointing. FSF's prose was trying very hard to be evocative, but most often those evocative phrases contained nothing one could come to grips with. It was filled with the faux wisdom of a well-educated, worldly youth and was much too pat.

er

You gotta problem with that, buster? Tell it to my lawyer. (/newyorkishness) More seriously, for me, Gatsby just didn't seem to punch with the weight of a champion. It wasn't a bad book by any means, but its rep is much, much bigger than that. I thought The Last Tycoon was the better book, but, of course ymmv.

Lionel Trilling - The Middle of the Journey (his only novel)
Rick Perlstein - The Invsible Bridge

Wow. There's no way that The Last Tycoon is a better book. Structurally it's a disaster. First off, it's not a book -- it's an unfinished draft of a book. I'll grant you that Monroe Stahr's exchanges with screenwriters are sharp, but as soon as Kathleen walks in the book stops dead. At least in Gatsby Fitzgerald refracted Daisy's boringness through point of view; I don't understand what Gatsby saw in her but I believe what he saw in her.

on the other hand a century's worth of criticism breathing down your neck about a book's greatness will bore anyone.

I don't understand what Gatsby saw in her...

There was one brief line in the book that was well out of line with anything else Gatsby said in regard to Daisy. In regard to Daisy's voice, the qualities of which are repeatedly emphasized, he says "She sounds like money." This seemed to explain more of the attraction than all the rest of his mooncalf delusions put together.

It's pretty clear we're supposed to regard her as a mooncalf.

gatsby is so much better than the rest of FSF's work it's almost hard to believe he really wrote it.

I've only read two Fitzgeralds: Gatsby and This Side Of Paradise. I liked 'em both about equally. Maybe Gatsby's rep is a bit overhyped. I don't really buy it as a grand metaphor for our times or anything like that, but some parts of it were quite nice, like the impromptu road trip to the City that ends in drunken chaos. I remember enjoying that bit.

I recently finished John K. Galbraith's American Capitalism which was not as fun to read as his The Great Crash.

I grant that The last Tycoon was a mess, structurally, but the same can be said for a great many excellent books. And it was a mess where I could believe that the characters had actually lived something of life. The Gatsby characters were all purposely shallow or empty, which simplifies matters for the author considerably.

You can say that the point of the book was to capture that shallow emptiness, and Fitzgerald did that stylishly, but capturing shallow emptiness is not that interesting to me and the style, while notable, was not of a sort that endears a book to me. Nick, who is the voice of the book is an instinctive romantic, while the substance of the book is anti-romantic, and FSF plays these elements against one another slyly. But to me this displays the insight of a young person and its not exactly a shattering one to someone my age.

capturing emptiness an intrinsically interesting thing I think - an aesthetic challenge doubly difficult through in many ways an essentially 19th c approach (this is not modernist futility). as a portrait of fatigue gatsby is unequalled.

It might be interesting to compare Denton Welch and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Did they care about the same things? (It has been so long since I read Fitzgerald that I can't remember what he was like as a writer.)

gatsby is so much better than the rest of FSF's work it's almost hard to believe he really wrote it.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

I'd agree, but the essays in The Crack-Up were definitely written by the same guy.

I think J.D. meant the novels.

I'm sure he did.

capturing emptiness an intrinsically interesting thing I think - an aesthetic challenge doubly difficult

Not so much, as I see it.

People rarely manifest interior shallowness as a sort of anguished or paralyzed ennui, as with so many Sam Beckett characters. It is only necessary to have them say vapid things and engage in pointless activity, express shallow opinions, and demonstrate a certain thoughtlessness, which often manifests as a somewhat infantile selfishness or utter helplessness in the face of a difficult decision. Repeat until the reader understands that there is not much there there.

By making one's characters born wealthy to the point where such behavior has never been disciplined by dire necessity, you provide a simple and sufficient explanation of why they have reached adulthood with all these traits intact and unpunished by circumstance. In order to demonstrate how insulated your characters are from the usual requirements of responsibility, you merely have their selfish and thoughtless actions culminate in some senseless tragedy and show how they leave it behind as if it were a broken vase. QED.

What makes Gatsby's basic plot different from all those nineteenth century morality plays about wealthy playboys ruining poor factory girls is that the 'factory girl' in Gatsby was not a paragon, but a floozy with flagrantly bad taste, and there is no retribution delivered by a stern providence to punish anyone for her ruination. Gatsby dies, but pointlessly. In my view he was almost as childish as the other characters, but he was endowed by his creator (FSF) with a certain quixotic romanticism that tends to obscure what an ass he is.

Just my $0.02, obviously. There are plenty of people who admire this book extravagantly, who will bite their thumbs at me and turn their backs. For them, I shall repeat, it is not a bad book, or without art or merit, just not a deep book or great one in the way I think of depth or greatness.

Gatsby -- important is the amount of indirection, things unsaid and left out, gaps, loose connections, implication, murmuring mystery. That's one way it's not just a 'morality tale' or whatever, but something stranger or more impressionistic.

i read gatsby several times in college (was never forced to read it for skool before then) and i was transfixed by the prose despite having very little idea what any of it meant

ended up getting the Krudy (thanks xyzzzz__) out of the library. +Eleanor Smith's Satan's Circus. See the obscure books thread:

A rare collection of macabre short stories about circus and gypsy life .. unusual and polished tales

read a bit of LTC Rolt's A Clouded Mirror - not one of his railway safety/engineering works, but not (sadly) his ghost stories either. a look at good and evil, split into four essays the first about the power of the atom bomb just after the end of the Second World War. he takes his cue from trahern and the silurian vaughans - light v dark etc. didn't have time to finish as went to see planet of the apes, but it was quite attractive. pastoral. the presence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the context of Bredon musings, possesses an exotic force that stops it being pure pastoral, and I would have been interested to see quite how an inner light pastoral mystic construed the evil of the atom bomb. (that it was a force of megadeath and darkness he is quite clear).

lol that Eleanor smith was last taken out 22 years ago.

the presence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the context of Bredon musings, possesses an exotic force that stops it being pure pastoral, and I would have been interested to see quite how an inner light pastoral mystic construed the evil of the atom bomb.
That's some of my take on finally reading The Lord of the Rings(didn't say it was an original take). The ring is as dangerous as the hovering Bomb, with momentum increasing in its secret travel (an Unholy Grail for the baddies, an AntiGrail for the good guys, who want to be rid of it). Its destruction is a pyrrhic victory, in terms of taking magic out of the world (but Man will finally rule, and what could possibly go wrong?)

ended up getting the Krudy (thanks xyzzzz__) out of the library.

Enjoy the long flight! The film is great and on youtube

John Le Carre The Looking Glass War
John Le Carre Call For The Dead
John Le Carre The Honourable Schoolboy
John Le Carre A Small Town In Germany

I binged on cold-war spy fiction before & during our Berlin vacation last month. JLC's style really took me awhile to absorb but I'm finding it less convoluted and inconsistent now - even thinking it suits the political intrigue and bureaucratic infighting (duh). Looking Glass War was probably my favorite, the hapless spy sent on a doomed mission was tragic. Small Town In Germany I threw aside a few years ago only to enjoy it this time. Like I said JLC's prose takes getting used to but I'm still wary of his post cold war output.

Edward St Aubyn Lost For Words

No great claims to make for this publishing satire but I laughed. More interior amusement than audible lolz.

Justin Torres We The Animals
Lorrie Moore Bark: Stories

Two ends of the spectrum in what I think of as creative writing class fiction. Well, obviously Moore is more than that. Torres' first book is too short to be a novella even; it's a series of vignettes or anecdotes about his troubled boyhood. Involving and carefully rendered, though at times the writing dips into this overly descriptive pretty-for-its-own-sake mode that I attribute to the MFA thing. Certainly it's pleasurable to read if not always efficient in narrative terms (IMO). But the end feels really rushed and inconclusive, not sure why his teachers & editors didn't push Torres to complete a novel rather than publish what is a brilliant work-in-progress. If he writes edgy YA fiction with an autobiographical slant at this point in her career Lorrie Moore is the master of MA (middle age) fiction. This is praise not a put down. I found the best stories in this collection moving and yeah recognizable. After her disappointing last novel, Bark is a solid return if not a great leap forward.

John Lanchester The Debt To Pleasure

This is a parody (I hope) of foodie snobbism w/secret ingredients (no spoilers). Perhaps not the Nabokovian feast the author intends but light & digestible.

Philip Roth The Counterlife

His most complicated and ambitious novel, at least that I've read. I found it about 75% awesome and only slightly disappointing at the end. The Israel section was alarmingly spot-on and provocative (written in the mid 1980s) given what was going on in the news a couple weeks ago.

Currently gobbling up Alan Furst's Midnight in Europe, feels like his best yet. Next is another foodie satire, Cooking With Fernet-Branca by James Hamilton-Patterson and of course Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge.

John Lanchester /The Debt To Pleasure/

This is a parody (I hope) of foodie snobbism w/secret ingredients (no spoilers). Perhaps not the Nabokovian feast the author intends but light & digestible.

yeah debt to pleasure is fine. as you say doesn't quite hit the nabokovian mark it seems to be aiming for but then it would be a lenten version of V even had it hit.

lenten version of V

love that, otm

good book summaries M. Coleman !

I read sections of Terry Eagleton, CULTURE AND THE DEATH OF GOD, this week.
As 'serious' TE books go it has to be one of the worst.
Basically a pro-religious book as far as I can see.
I am not really in sympathy.

Last vacation week of the summer and I've vowed to finish up The Savage Detectives, which I started years ago but then stalled out on with 150 pages left.

Henry Green:-

Concluding
and now Doting

Probably the most frustrating writer ever for me, so subtly difficult and awkward, yet with so many moments of perception, so I pursue it. I never say things like '...you have to be in the mood for this' but I started Doting this morning and, well, just wish I hadn't.

Yeah, I have to be in the right mood for Green too, as he pulls you in and makes you somehow part of the story, like you know more about the characters and situations than he, the author, does, so you've got to be willing to jump right in. Party Going is my favourite of his as it's funny and perceptive and sensuous, as well.

Concluding my favorite Green: so many laugh aloud moments.

Philip Roth The Counterlife

His most complicated and ambitious novel, at least that I've read. I found it about 75% awesome and only slightly disappointing at the end. The Israel section was alarmingly spot-on and provocative (written in the mid 1980s) given what was going on in the news a couple weeks ago.

after rereading it a few years ago I concluded it's his best

I have been reading my copy of the Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes. I've finished Eric and Enide and have moved on to Cliges. So much more civilized than the Niebelungenlied or Icelandic sagas. Everyone is unfailingly polite; even the conflicts seem to be conflicts of purest honor, not dark deeds of revenge.

Burton Raffel is the one translator for those romances I have read. Really good.

After getting the frustrations w/Green out of my system I went to the pub and there is nothing a drink or two can't solve as I ended up quite late and pretty much finished Doting in a sitting. Think it was tackling the first ten pages early in the morning didn't agree w/me somehow. He is really funny, yes, loved all of the double-crossing, how characters block access and by doing so open their way to others at the same time. The pile on of unintended consequences.

Mostly dialogue so you do miss some of his wilder turns of phrase that occur over a paragraph.

Reading Calvino's 'Cosmicomics', which is absolutely charming. Murukami's new one arrived today (with bonus stickers!) and I just finished 'The Last Empire', which was great, both historically and to understand current events. Got 'Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness' and Ancillary Justice' (is that meant to be any good? I know the awards, but the cover puts me off) to read, and I'm halfway through 'Hegemony and Socialist Strategy' by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.

christ, i've barely gotten over the last murukami

murakami

i gave up on it : /

This is a lot shorter than 1Q84, it's about 300 pages. (Though I really liked 1Q84...)

I keep making the Murakami => Murukami error. Don't know why; perhaps I'm making a pun a language I don't understand.

More Henry Green, can't stop now:

- Nothing
- Pack my Bag

Although I'll have to as I don't have anymore here.

Also half way thru Qiu Miaojin: Last Words from Montmarte. Taiwanese novelist who killed herself at 26. Structured as a series of letters to two former lovers. Its like a Live Journal novel yet it was published just before the internet ever became a thing.

When I say LJ novel it could put people off but I think its very, very good. Full of digressions on suicide (I read a lot of writers who have a preoccupation w/this in some way), cinema (Theo Angelopoulos), art, Lit, politics, disconnection & vocation. She always manages to be interesting because she brings an intensity and an intimacy to all that she manages to say, its never merely self-pity/slash of the wrists on the page.

still reading age of ambition - evan osnos -- feels a lil too anecdotal but its also compelling

also working on:

to rise again at a decent hour - Joshua ferris -- kinda middling, though some funny stuff and not difficult to get through - part of the plot involves the protagonists online presence being taken over and he gets pissed off abt "weak shit" that hed never write himself that gets posted under his name on a red sox message board

solstice - joyce carol oates -- this is v good

the studio - john Gregory dunne -reportage @ 20th C fox in 1967, funny stuff abt the ramp up and marketing for dr doolittle

When I say LJ novel it could put people off but I think its very, very good.

I mentally nodded my head as this caught my eye. Then I discovered you were referring to Live Journal.

I'll bite: you thought LJ stood for--?

LJ's novel has yet to emerge from chrysalis

you thought LJ stood for--?

The ilxor currently posting as imago, but who identified himself as L***s J****r during his controversial first phase of ilx existence.

Yes, I quite liked Last Words from Montmarte too, but was glad it wasn't longer--that style of thing could easily outwear its welcome.

No danger of an outstay of welcome, for its a highly controlled performance. What is unique is how Miaojin makes the reader aware quite quickly she won't survive much beyond this book. Indeed if she had I'm not sure she would've published it. It is a as close as I've seen to a suicide note as literature. Compare this to Pavese's diaries (which tbf I don't think were meant to be published, this was only became one of the great books by accident) where it turns from a diary of despair at his relationships (oddly crossed with incisive notes on what he is reading)...but then something in him breaks leading to the diary itself having broken off suddenly - unlike this.

93% done with Moby-Dick. they finally found the whale.

shh don't tell us the end

Got 'Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness'

I started this one today. Some of these plays I'm not very familiar with. I do know Cymbeline has flamethrowers.

D.H.Lawrence - a volume of short stories: read The Sun earlier in the month and came back for more: Mother and Daughter must've been the prototype for Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, which is that + Adorno and Schubert.The Blue Moccasins is another 'good one'.

I've been reading Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's book of essays around the black radical tradition in relation to problems of anarchism and contemporary politics, The Undercommons, which is stylistically bewitching but frustratingly averse to discussing concrete situations (it's free online, and one could probably read "The University and the Undercommons," "Logistics, or the Shipping," and the long concluding interview, and skip the rest--I'm expecting more from Moten's In the Break when I can get around to it); Tracy K. Smith's Life on Mars, which is as poignant as HOOS and bernard snowy claimed; Ariel Schrag's Adam, which reads a little too much like a screenplay and generally fails to do anything interesting with language, but at least depicts its trans characters in a way that, if superficial, doesn't make my skin crawl; the comics artist Ulli Lust's Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, a memoir of hitchhiking, squatting, and collisions with rape culture in mid-80s Austria and Sicily; Geneviève Castrée's more visually and structurally sketchy comics memoir Susceptible; and Maggie Nelson's Bluets, which is often lovely but feels a little too mannered to evoke the kind of lust and mourning that concerns the author--I'll see whether it gains resonance on rereading.

At the moment, I'm mostly reading Proust (coming into The Prisoner, which is powerfully claustrophobic) and a few pages a day of Beckett's Molloy, Lydia Davis's Can't and Won't, and Clarice Lispector's Selected Cronicas.

Shakespeare - As You Like It (reread)
Alice Adams - Stories (meh so far: she won O. Henry awards for such conventional fare?)

Finally finally reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and loving it. My first Spark, of all things. Constantly boggling the simple male mind of course, even when I think I know the uh lay of the land. For one thing, the way she moves ahead for a moment, five or 15 or 28 years, so survivors can briefly refer to the aftermath of events which haven't turned up yet (in the early 30s, that is). Will prob rec it to spoiler-wusses, without a warning. Meanwhile:
Mr. Lowther, short-legged, shy and golden-haired, no longer played with Jenny's curls. The bare branches brushed the window and Sandy was almost as sure as could be that the singing master was in love with Miss Brodie abd that Miss Brodie was in love with the art master. Rose Stanley had not yet revealed her potentialities in the working-out of Miss Brodie's passion for one-armed Teddy Lloyd, and Miss Brodie's prime still flourished unbetrayed.

I envy you: your Spark addiction begins.

methland - nick reding
titian: a life - sheila hale
headstone - ken bruen

Nothing about the Depression yet, but WWI is back there for sure; hence one-armed Teddy and at least one dead lover Miss Brodie tells her select girls about, and the decimation of Brodie's male peers is a reason (not yet specified here, I think, but in histories) for the number of Brodie-style restless (yet hometown-based, some still living with parents) thirty-something "progressive spinsters," as the author tags them ("but none of them were schoolteachers.")

oh, I shouldn't say *nothing* about the Depression: she took them to see a dread section of the city. GirlL "Here are the Idle." Brodie: "They are the Unemployed." But altogether a shuffling, snaky entity, Sandy thinks; the way she's starting to see Brodie and her girls, including herself. (I'll shut up now; I know this is like Stop The Presses, Man Discovers Fire.)

Just finished (ILXer) Sean Michaels' Us Conductors. It's lovely. I couldn't recommend higher.

'zat the one about Clara Rockmore and Lev Theremin? If so been meaning to check that out.

Yup!

I've got about 100 pages left in Americanah and it's really good. It manages to talk about race on every page without it feeling forced or didactic at all.

Jocelyn Brooke - Image of a Drawn Sword. This is an odd fusion of Kafka and military school homoeroticism like Mishima but not as French or anything.

Pavese - The Beach. Dashes of misogny and blunted non-endings. I'd recommend it after you've read a few.

Currently finishing a few stories by Ballard. Everyone is very accepting of chaos, the characters go towards it and are 'happily' engulfed in it.

Victor Serge - The Conquered City.

Everyone is very accepting of chaos, the characters go towards it and are 'happily' engulfed in it.
Eventually happens in The Way We Live Now: even if they can't grab a piece of the ill-gotten gains, some want to get a good view of the proceeding collapse: they, and I, just wanna see it go ka-BOOM (as well as being concerned about fates of those involved, of course).

Not like the day's ration of media outrage, either: for me, that book eventually sidetracked almost everything else and/or created its own sidetrack; wheeee!

Currently finishing a few stories by Ballard. Everyone is very accepting of chaos, the characters go towards it and are 'happily' engulfed in it.

Have you read The Drowned World? I vividly remember the way characters are pulled primevally to return to the city-submerging swamps and oceans of their prehistoric past

started second vol of proust just now (sleepless night lol); have switched from the modern to the scott-montcrieff (but the updated one, i'm not totally crazy); it's a lot more comfortable, cozier, i guess

Sam Tanenhaus - Whittaker Chambers
Alice Adams - Almost Perfect

Read The Drowned World a long time ago but yes I vaguely recall. Now Wakes the Sea (a story present in this collection) runs along similar lines. It could be filmed as a M R James story!

Just scored a nearly-mint trade ed. Call It Sleep at the library shop for 25 cents, whoo-hoo! Been so long since I read it, will prob seem nearly new this time. Got stung by a gigantic flying insect as I was unlocking my back door (not a euphemism). Maybe the same thing happened to Roth, since he disappeared for about 50 years, then came back with a whole series of novels. How are they? Ornamental Cabbage, I'll bet you've read at least one.

I am reading the Serge in parts btw, try to finish it today. Its fairly short but has no particular strong characters (which is not a criticism btw, the person seems to be a 'symbol', like in Eisenstein) and shifts POV quite a bit. Its always interesting -- especially if you are interested in the Soviet Union -- it marshals quite a lot of material on it, focusing on the Red/White civil war (I'd commission someone like Sheila Fitzpatrick to read 'em all and write a piece on his novels, she has reviewed Memoirs of a Revolutionary)

D.H. Lawrence - another dozen or so short stories. I think I filed him (and Austen) in a 'its been done to death on TV/film' and I somehow took it for granted and never got round it on the page itself.

Denton Welch - I left my GrandFather's House. An account of the walking tour Welch did when he was 18 or so and its great despite his unbreakability as a person -- annoyed me how quick he was to judge others. I wonder if he is that interested in them because its such a revolving door of people -- but actually its more to do with the design of the novel, i.e. he keeps on walking and meeting people. Love how he communicates that dimension of walking to keep loneliness away, not to let the mind wallow in it if you were not walking (which he wasn't by the time he wrote this post-accident).

Often funny: where is he arguing that he doesn't care for nature, how books should never be read a 2nd time for pleasure only (unlucky you).

Haven't read Sebald in a long time, be interesting to compare. iirc don't think Sebald is that interested in others, only in what they make. Welch is usually annoyed by them but he will nonetheless write about them.

this is very enjoyable. maria read it because of the montana locale (she grew up there) and the time period (early 80's) and now i'm reading it. haven't read a mod lit book about fucked up americans in a while. outside of sci-fi anyway. written well + page turner.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61ksW6tCl3L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I got the David Stubbs Future Days through the mail yesterday so am reading that when I'm reading anything. Finding it very interesting so far. Want to read some of the titles he's brought up so far, hadn't heard there was a book specifically on Amon Duul before so wondering if it's German language. 'Tanz Der Lemminge' like their 3rd lp.

Still reading through Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant as a toilet book. So it'll take a while yet, I'm on the 2nd book of the first trilogy now though.

& reading Flashback! number 5. Currently in the Blossom Toes history.

Because of various camping and hiking trips I've been taking, my reading life has seen me start a number of books I have not yet finished. I still plan to finish most of them, but many of them are still dangling.

Finished:

Treasure Island. I took this on a two-night wilderness trek and polished it off before emerging. It is well known to most ILBers, so I'll simply note that from my adult perspective it is still a ripping yarn and exceptionally well-crafted.

Still in process:

Arthurian Romances, Chretien de Troyes, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
Welcome to Hard Times, E.L. Doctorow. His first novel. The tone is very reminiscent of spaghetti westerns, but the action is more diffuse.
The Great Crash, J. K. Galbraith. It's urbanity and wit are its great strengths.

Begun and flung aside:

The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield. Short stories. I was too tired from hiking to focus on this and not in the mood to go where she wanted to take me.

It's urbanity

Fuck me, how did that apostrophe sneak in there?

Autocorrect?

Oh the urbanity

finished reading 2666 a while ago which despite the unrelenting grimness i enjoyed much more than the savage detectives (almost tempted to go back and reread it in light of the later novel) though the last part did kind of fizzle out into sub-grass pastures at the end. would be interested in any suggestions for a good bolano to check out after the "big two".

couldn't think of anything to follow 2666 so ended up reading a bunch of le carrés, amblers and simenons (never read him before), some queneau (aka sally mara), vian's l'ecume des jours (found this much too cute), and now perec's species of spaces collection.

My fave Bolano books after 2666 are Nazi Lietratures in the Americas, Amulet and By Night in Chile.

perec's species of spaces collection.

The only Perec I have anytime for.

Marilynne Robinson - Gilead. Oddly reminded me of Bernhard (so it should, one character recollecting interactions with about 3-4 others) except any bitterness, regret and animosity are more subtly worked in, with room for goodwill and happiness. Quite like to read her essays...she has a new one in the autumn too.

Love Gilead. Such a generous & openhearted main character, such a desire and willingness to try and understand, not to judge. Had a harder time with Home, seemed much more opaque, and from what I've read about them have zero desire to go anywhere near her essays.

loved it too

Trollope - The Small House at Allington

I'd expect Robinson's essays to be a further expression of her tolerant liberal christian POV, as per Gilead. Might add more meat to that. We'll see.

her essays make my eyes roll back into my head and into my brain. i just think of how glad i am that she's not my mom. nothing but disapproving looks my whole life. honestly, housekeeping is kinda it for me. as much as i wanted to love gilead and as happy as i was that she had written another book the home and hearth of it ultimately left me cold. like a cold church. maybe i'll read it again when i'm older and sadder. i just don't have a lot of interest in christianity. i wasn't raised with religion and mostly like it when it pertains to vampires and possessed children.

finished that 4th of july creek and i can't help but think about how it would make the most excellent netflix series....

don't get me wrong, she's an insanely talented writer. but its like reading something carved in rock for me. it's rock-like. obscure. arcane. she's a weird one. it's like she's possessed by robinson jeffers. the essays, i'm talking about.

I didn't care for the essays, it's true. They're so finely written that they're almost leaden if that makes sense.

Churches are almost always cold, they never switch on the heating. Admittedly I only go to one to hear a recital.

This is interesting. A friend - not a catholic but raised as one and not practicing (like me) - really likes those essays and loves Robinson.

One thought I had is that my mother would enjoy Gilead. She is a catholic and devout - so she would enjoy it from that standpoint.

Finished Charles Rice-Gonzalez's Chulito, a typical coming out/first love novel unique for being, according to the jacket, "the first novel detailing a gay Puerto Rican experience in New York City." Uneven but likeable.

i finally watched the movie gran torino and i didn't really care for it and i wondered if it had to do with my 0% interest in church and god. the christ-like ending just left me cold. like a passion play or something. in comparison, my pal chuck e. loved that movie and he grew up with all that stuff and is a sucker for priest movies.

which is why i love sci-fi where the religions are made-up weirdo hybrids.

and the exception is the book i just read! which totally had endtimes brimstone in it. done really well, i might add. totally recommend that book for a great quick read.

The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield. Short stories. I was too tired from hiking to focus on this and not in the mood to go where she wanted to take me.

hope you eventually revisit this, it's one of my favorites. one of my desert-island short story collections.

I'm about halfway through Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. One of my favorite eras to read about, though some of the chapters seem to get bogged down in minutiae of politics. I prefer the stuff that gives a flavor of everyday life.

Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, so slickly/efficiently written/plotted. Cool book

Heavily religious works normally leave me cold too, idk with I took so well to Gilead. Every time he prayed for understanding it didn't seem in expectation of divine revelation, it was just his method for sincerely and personally thinking through the problems. Dunno if that would be an author approved reading, certainly the subtext of redeeming Calvinism passed me by. Suddenly feel wary of rereading it in case I see it differently.

Just finished Manuel Vazquez Montalban's The Man Of My Life, which was disappointing. Montalban is highly rated as a Chandleresque detective writer doing for Barcelona what he did for LA but it was a bit of a meandering drag.

Reading Frank Fraser Darling's Island Farm / Island Years alongside it, which i'm enjoying greatly. Will probably go through most of the Little Toller nature reissues, having loved Claire Leighton's Four Hedges.

Also dipping in to Jessica Mitford's Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art Of Muckraking, which is great fun.

Sonic, you might also like Hammett's Red Harvest: pretty different plot, but def Hammett. Also different enough from the movie it inspired, Yojimbo. I thought it was his most involving, although Maltese's greed-quest as a way of life got me going too.

finished that 4th of july creek and i can't help but think about how it would make the most excellent netflix series....

― scott seward, Wednesday, August 27, 2014 3:18 PM (Yesterday)

"Two years later, he sold "Fourth of July Creek." He's adapting the novel into a TV series for El Jefe, a production company founded by the novelists Philipp Meyer, author of "The Son," and Brian McGreevy, who wrote "Hemlock Grove," a horror novel and now a Netflix series."

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304479704579575881110084424

right now i'm in the middle of the cities in flight novels by james blish though (in one big volume). which would also make a great netflix series.

(i actually started the cities in flight thing over a month ago but i became addicted to resogun (survival mode - heroes upgrade) for the PS4 and it took up all of my free reading time. i'm back on track now...)

Connie Willis - Doomsday Book (terrific page-turner)
Sara Marcus - Girls to the Front

that (the willis) was one of the first books i ever didn't finish reading, because it was so boring (i was very young, expecting something trashier i guess?) that i couldn't get more than a chapter in.

I found the mediaeval sections pretty gripping, the future ones facepalmingly awful. An absolute tin ear for comedy, and failing in basic research, especially in brit v us english (including a peculiar obsession with "mufflers" which even carried over into another story of hers i read (being a glutton for punishment)).

Reading Marcel Theroux's Far North:

"Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol this dingy city."

Not the most promising of opening lines (it gets better) but never before has a character spoken to me with such a clear and obvious accent. Then in chapter 3 the surprise discovery that this gruff, weathered US frontiersman is female. Possibly still gruff & weathered of course.

gruff, weathered and rather literary in her locution

You would prefer "every day ah buckles on mah guns"?

dinghy city, that would make a good book

just finished Bleak House, my first real Dickens novel (the mere wisp of a book that is Hard Times doesn't feel like it should count)

man I've given that novel two chances

i've given it LOTS! i start over every time, have barely made headway toward 100 pages in iirc

I mean, I'm racing through The Small House at Allington, my fourth Trollope novel, and have read all of George Eliot. Clearly the problem is Dickens.

Possibly the two narrative perspectives = the book takes a longer time to get going? I don't really have any point of comparison on which to base this assertion but it seems plausible...

yeah i find whatsername, esther's part, kind of a drag

Esther is... not exactly dislikeable, but a hard character to care much about one way or the other (somewhat ironic, given that all the others fall all over themselves to tell us what a constant delight she is to be around). For my money, things only start to get interesting with the appearance of the Jellyby family.

Never made it through this book either, although did enjoy the arrival of the Jellybys. E is an example of one of those saintly Dickensian girl children that borders on insufferable. Do like the third sentence of the very first paragraph.

Anyway came to post starting Eustace and Hilda by L. P. Hartley. Beginning is incredible.

Think I've said this here before but the willful, breaking-my-toys attitude Dickens brings to BH is part of what makes it compelling to me - how he conjures up these half-people and then torpedoes them with a sudden passion. If you think that Esther's insufferable, she comes in for that too, if you can wait...

love her so much...

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6303/the-art-of-fiction-no-223-joy-williams

Cover of the new David Mitchell is really ugly (at least in the UK). Which is a shame because he usually has such nice covers...

Few letters by Lorca written during his time in New York (appnded to the Poet in New York cycle) and they are great, you can see hs struggle to get all that complexity and modernity into his mind.

Montale - Poet in our Time. This is a bit like the Lorca but written (certainly collected) much later. 2-3 page essays, a kind of avant-garde reactionary. Its an amazing collection. Montale seems to accept modernity, but its like he is trying to account for the price we are paying for it. In poet's prose: fast and agile, short, easily msinterpreted and more lines will make sense only with age (like the best books then, or maybe the best fortune cookie messages).

Having been super-super sick, had a lot of trouble settling on something I could maintain interest/momentum in. Finally stuck with an Elmore Leonard, 'Stick', one of the few non-Westerns of his I hadn't already read (been rationing them since he's dead)

And have bought the new Ian McEwan, really hoping it's better than Sweet Tooth

Also in an excess of madness, bought the new Martin Amis, really hoping it's better than his last 6+ books (well, everything since Experience has been a bit shit, really)

And the last thing i read was the frankly bizarre 'Comfort Station' by Donald E Westlake, under an alias, an Arthur Hailey-Airport-style parody set in a toilet block by the NY Public Library

pt three of proust

finished xavier de maistre's rather sternean a journey around my room & its follow up a nocturnal expedition around my room, flaubert's three tales and about to start on maupassant's novel of fin de siecle paris bel ami.

I read his 'afloat' on a plane the other day. which seemed less than apt, less than ideal. I didn't like it much.

Cover of the new David Mitchell is really ugly (at least in the UK). Which is a shame because he usually has such nice covers...

― Spaceport Leuchars (dowd), Tuesday, 2 September 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Saw an interview with Mitchell. On breakfast TV, he was asked whether he liked words.

Making my way through Buchner's plays. Danton's Death is really good right now.

Did he like words? "They're alright"

He said they were magical things.

Maybe he thought they said 'birds'. Birds are pretty good.

buchner is so good! had to buy another collection of his work just for lenz since the oxford world's classics edition didn't include it.

Mine does include Lenz (plus a lecture and some letters). Should get to that by tonight.

Flicked through a couple of pages of the new Mitchell (not feeling well, so I can't really read) and worried it seems a bit Adrian Mole. Though I worried the same about Black Swan Green. (Not to denigrate Adrian Mole, of course)

Been a long time, but I seem to recall that Lenz's own writing is worth checking out too, especially "The Soldiers, " the basis of Buchner's "Woyzeck." (Think I read "The Soldiers" in a twofer with "The Lesson."). He's also been the protagonist of other fiction and stage works, down to the late 20th Century at least. He was always fragile, and may have been a schizophrenic (for instance). People tried to help him, but it was the 18th Century.

I finally read Lenz last week, after knowing of it mostly through Celan's allusions in "The Meridian" and the extracts D&G used in Anti-Oedipus, but it really is terrifying and visionary in its own right, and Richard Sieburth's translation superbly captures the jaggedness and eerie concision of Büchner's style.

About to start reading Oliver Twist for the first time. I've enjoyed other Dickens, but I've probably avoided this one for the very silly reason that I hated the movie Oliver! as a kid.

picked up joy williams' taking care after reading that interview. started in with "the lover", this is definitely my shit.

I finally cleared my backlog of half-read books. I finished the Tale of Perceval, the last of the Arthurian romances by Chretien de Troyes, last night. Now I want to read some Jack Spicer and Marianne Moore, in search of a bit of inspiration for the 2014 ILX Poetry Contest.

Spicer is really wonderful, and PennSound has an excellent archive of his recordings, including the Vancouver lectures on poetics that were published as The House that Jack Built. The readings there of "Imaginary Elegies" and "Language" might be a good place to start: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Spicer.html

Richard Sieburth

Not really come across him before (although I read a review of his Nostradamus translation without really looking at who) but looking at a list on wiki and several of his translations look really interesting (Scève, Labé, Moscow Diary)

The Goldfinch. See you guys on the either side.

Read Andy Weir's The Martian over the weekend. Great, great fun. 100% hard sci-fi, there's hardly any psychology or backstory, just plot.
The two things that made it stand out for me are the creative solutions the main character comes up with to get out of life-threatening situations, and the way Weir keeps adding elements, characters and perspectives to the central spine of the hero's log entries.
The complete lack of psychological effects on the hero's situation are not very believable, but the thing that bugged me most was the music. The complete recorded works of western civilisation fit on a hard drive the size of a shoe box, and this guy has only disco to listen to?

Started on Buccaneers of America, Alexander Exquemelin.

When this was published in 1678, America was a remote and exotic place, so every minor detail the author could offer had a certain fascination, down to how the boar hunters of Hispaniola went about their work and tobacco planters went about clearing a new area to plant. In 2014, the America of 1678 is still a remote and exotic place and all these details retain their fascination. Oh, and the buccaneers are kind of interesting, too.

Damn, now I want to read about buccaneers.

I'm stuck reading about time travel. (Connie Willis - Blackout)

Aimless's appealing description reminds me of another true time trip, John Bailey's The Lost German Slave Girl, which starts like Google Books says:Louisiana, 1843: a German immigrant thinks she recognizes a young slave girl as the long-lost daughter of her German friend, but the girl has no memory of such a past, and her owner refuses to free her.The old (65!) owner sells her, the new owner keeps out of sight while her would-be liberator raises funds in New Orleans' German immigrant community to bring suit against big-time defense, the geezer former owner and his nonogenarian mother make their good name the issue in the the papers and pamphlets, while alliances form and fray, intricate class interests clash and mesh, medical examiners get a work-out, etc. The author is an Australian attorney, bringing a slightly distanced yet never clinical gaze from his former-penal-colony's perspective, steadily slicing through the bizarre intricacies of Louisiana slavery law.
Also, he doesn't say more than he knows, than can be known (at the time of writing, anyway). Doesn't need to, with this material, and plenty is known, incl. the labyrinthine path of immigrants from the German hinterlands in this era (Ireland wasn't the only place with a famine).

You definitely get old New Orleans in this, not just the courtroom.

hundreds of teenage girls queuing outside Waterstones Piccadilly it must be for the new david Mitchell.

ooh, lots of screaming now he must have turned up.

oh it's Alfie Deyes

plz live blog..

yeah it could be my big break in fact. here goes.

From my vantage point about 40 yards away, peering out of this coffee place the excitement seems to have died down #alfie #liveblog

wait! two girls just came into the cafe. "I might get a drink after if I get superthirsty". didn't see what they bought because I was busy #liveblogging #sensiblegirl

just finished coffee and am heading down back past Waterstones. just nearly bumped into someone because #liveblogging #noteasy

renewed screaming as I walk down. don't think it's directed at me despite breakthrough #liveblog queue now moving. wait need to use the traffic lights. #alfie

the day can only get better for you..

decided not to talk to random tween about #aflie #crepey queue still HUEG.

mother and teenage daughter talking jermyn street tailor in bowler hat and tape measure. he frowns and says "not sure". #liveblog #descentintothemaelstrom

back in the library now. glad you all cd join me #liveblog #succesd'estime

ha ha. I thought it was all over but from my vantage point I just saw a horde of girls *pegging it* after a car and screaming. adding to the confusion were a lot of builders and construction workers in hi vis trying to marshal everything around their construction area. they were completely defeated, on of them in his hard hat and hi vis just holding his arms aloft saying "no! no!", others trying run *round* them without *approaching* them, like baffled sheepdogs, while their flock ran in all directions screaming. #farfromthemaddingcrowd2

kinell, police are there now. chants of ALFIE ALFIE ALFIE ALFIE. no idea who was in the car. maybe haruki murakami.

Jude Law?

arf. riot-police lite on horses there now. they've had to shut the road. tween-power managing to do more than much political activism.

https://twitter.com/Bohan_Hannah17/status/508218833996615680

Everyone's telling us that the queue is closed. NO GIVING UP @pointlessblog #PointlessBook

Sorry, missed the reveal earlier

right, back to the Rev Sabine Baring-Gould. it's been real.

agatha christie -the sittaford mystery. only my second AC after Roger Ackroyd. boring as hell and badly written.

kinda really don't think much of agatha christie

orient express just being another locked-room mystery, not a spy or anarchist in the bunch, was so disappointing

Agatha Christie wrote horribly. She only served as entertainment for people who'd already finished doing that day's crossword puzzle.

(compare to stamboul train or computer adventure game the last express xp)

i remember reading the abc murders in one sleepless 12-yr-old nite and being rly gripped + spooked but looking at the premise now it kinda sounds like the dumbest thing ever? idk. there are some miss marples i've dug.

i like the one w the unreliable narrator, is that that one

it surprises me slightly. I've got a soft spot for golden age thrillers (I'm afraid I'm a fan of that sort of post crossword 'entertainment', Aimless). interesting that a large proportion of them were women - Margery Allingham, Dorothy l Sayers, Anne hocking, Josephine tey. but so far Agatha Christie seems low down the list in terms of merit.

can someone who's read more offer a different opinion?

no that's roger ackroyd xp.

yeah i'm in same position, ate up lord peter, ate up the josephine tey abt richard 3. christie is maybe cleverer than most at thinking of ways to murder people? perhaps an overrated skill.

also love it when wodehouse does private eyes (pilbeam), not that he strains himself with them.

I'm not going to go on about john Dickson-Carr/Carter Dickson again but - JDC/CD: numerous superb variations on the locked room (think 64?) and a fine sense of supernatural atmosphere (after all partly the point of golden age thrillers).

Just read that Blish coined the term "gas giant."

Ha wrong thread sorry

cool fact though

i have probably read like 20+ christies, but mostly that was contemporaneous with reading hardy boys and stuff, for the most part, i don' think i've read one since my early teens

i seem to recall mark s vouching for the non-poirot and non-marple novels on ilx a while back but my memory may fail me there

i think a part of her rep is due to some historically contingent stuff: reputation-boosting real life mystery disappearance, bizarrely successful west end adaptation becomes its own self-propelling thing, her sheer longevity (only the first miss marple story was writen in the golden age proper; most of them postdate the outbreak of wwii)

a part of her appeal comes from the possibilities afforded for the reader to situate themselves in relation to marple and poirot. professor fell or peter wimsey require some kind of attraction to modes of elitism on the reader's part. marple and poirot do not. they also afford the possibility that the reader can find them faintly ridiculous. (though i guess fell, wimsey do this too, but i think there's a difference of mode ... you can find fell or wimsey ridiculous to precisely the degree the narrator and implied author tell you that you can find them ridiculous. you can find marple or poirot more ridiculous than the narrator tells you they are)

a lot of her novels are remarkably tightly wound springs. 'ten little _____' in particular.

i suspect there's more chronicle-of-their-times stuff in relation to christie than others. arguably this is either a function of her populism or her longevity

yep, think you're otm with all of those factors. tho chronicle of their time seems right for Margery Allingham as well. this *is* a non-marple/poirot novel, so I'd be interested to see where mark s had repped for them - the main sleuthing woman is the best thing about it. think the "tightly wound spring" and an intelligence that isn't quite playing to me but which may well appeal to reader-sleuths is prob key (I tend to work these out almost entirely according to aesthetic principles, rather than drawing up timetables and the like, as people were wont to do, which makes me an imbecile in an important set of critical factors. still usually get it wrong as well)

incidentally - incredibly badly proofed. ninth impression (1938) of a (1931) pub. that feels a little slow for AC? which might suggest it's second tier (or lack of marple/poirot)

And Then There Were None (Ten Liitle Hatcats) might be the first instance of the kind of black comedy institutionalized in slasher films ... When I read that one not long ago, the writer I kept thinking of was Stephen King ... He and Christie are also alike in having published so much that their better books are sort of hidden by piles of junk

Allingham is pretty good imitation Sayers, but not so much into fair play mystery construction ... In terms of plot and pacing she's more like I dunno Ian Fleming without the machismo and product placement

Ngaio Marsh is a little more predictably good at the Sayers thing

v good post thomp

partic maybe thing abt ridiculousness idk. also feel simultaneously admiring/mockinglyindulgent of holmes, it is the point of reading those for me. there this feeling is enabled/modulated skillfully thru watson tho i think. those stories without him as mediating personality (the one where the killer is a sea anemone, which holmes kills w a stick) are dead. someone should compare hastings+watson from a position of confidence.

Stocking up on cheapo Xmas gifts, I just got a mint-condition trade-size pb Christie collection from the library shop. It's Masterpieces in Miniature, and while I dunno yet if title is right, this does include 12 stories starring Parker Pyne, and 13 with Harley Quin (along with eight Poirots, six Marples). Published in 2005 by St. Martin's Minotaur, along with quite a few I've never heard of, incl. several other collections, such as Parker Pyne Investigates.
The publisher's list also sports two omnibus editions of novels by AC writing as Mary Westmacott, three stand-alone novels as by Charles Osbourne.
Don't think I've ever read her---though I might, having been intrigued by tomp's post---but enjoyed several dramatizations, most recently Witness For The Prosecution, on TCM. Also liked Agatha, the movie about her mysterious interlude, with Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman (she's about a foot taller, but it's not a problem for this American, nossir.)

(Also several British-made TV sagas showing up on PBS, sometimes ending with spell-threatening, ridic explanations of how the unmasked perp did the deed, but I don't expect good endings of anything.)

Finished Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower - the 2 sections on British politics and the one on anarchism were my favorites. It kind of makes more sense to me now that I know it was a collection of previously published essays.

Now I've started on Gore Vidal's memoir, Palimpsest. I'm not always super-interested in the quasi-celebrities he dishes dirt on, but he does it so suavely it's hard not to enjoy.

the first two-thirds of 'the orators'

And Then There Were None (Ten Liitle Hatcats) might be the first instance of the kind of black comedy institutionalized in slasher films ...

Yes! And I think that points to another element of Christie that's of interest - she can be much more savage then her peers. Savage in terms of the nastiness of her murders, but also savage about people and their motivations and desires: she's a terrible snob, but she mostly hates the middle classes, too. The very restricted demands of her crossword-puzzle-plotting mean that her non-detective characters are broad brushstroke caricatures, while Poirot and Marple are utterly unknowable - we can't ever gain access to their thoughts, we only encounter them through their tics and eccentricities. So there's a kind of absence (of real human feeling) at the heart of her work, a seething contempt, that often leaks through the formula and cliche and mirrors the actions of her killers - you often feel that secretly, or not-so-secretly, Christie is on their side (or at least really really feels their rage). So in this way at least she anticpates someone like Patricia Highsmith or even Thomas Harris; despite all the archaic social detail, she feels 'modern' in a way that Sayers and Allingham really don't anymore.

nice post. one of the characteristics was its survey of people. writing reduced entirely to clues and personalities. it is not prosaic. this is probably also why I'm not a particular fan - I like the prosaic, the listing of snobberies and meannessness felt laborious, listy.

but it also almost becomes a philosophical approach - an interpretative mechanism for all humans. And also for crime or guilt. SPOILER. the underlying motive for the sittaham mystery is a crossword prize (not grand revenge or buried historical feuds).

I had a long deleted project to get a copy of those Patricia Highsmith bks and read 'em in a go.

Anyway to end the summer I've been reading Elena Ferrante. Staring with My Beautiful Friend, I'd describe it as quietly brutal. Have a couple more from the library by her after this so if I can make it I'll say more.

I finished Capital in the 21st Century too early and now I have nothing to read on the plane. An emergency trip tomorrow for Bone Clocks or reread with notes ...

It was interesting that the audience was the EU and obliquely the US. It makes me want to live in France or at least to ask the one American expat I know what it is like ... to be part of the great experiment ... let it not be bogged down in triumphal midnight hour ministerial communiques ... and be perfectly compatible with Scottish independence if the Scottish people so desire ...

I bought a Kindle a few months ago and loaded it with an odd assortment of freebie e-books, but have not been using it until a couple of days ago, when I read a book by G.K. Chesterton titled, What I Saw in America from circa 1921. It is just a steaming pile of journalism he banged out during a lecture tour of the USA. It veers from borderline genius to near incoherence, including several less-than-amusing forays into anti-Semitism and casual racism.

Although this is a somewhat trivial piece of flotsam within his larger career, I am glad I read it. It was illuminating to see Chesterton revealing his crasser, darker side in these unbuttoned pieces tossed off presumably for an English newspaper audience. From reading only his better known works I would never have known he was a racist or committed anti-Semite. Now I know.

I've read some fairly demented Catholic propaganda by him, too, with some nasty anti-Semitic stuff mixed in

his journalism can be p poor - actually rally rebarbative in fact

ffs hadnt finished.

his journalism can be p poor - rebarbative in fact, with anti-senitidm and dull, intolerant Catholicism. But Orthodoxy is good, by and large, and I'll defend and advocate "early" Chesterton.

i really love some of his fiction, definitely - Club of Queer Trades, The Ball and the Cross, The Man Who Was Thursday, etc

yup agree. manalive is total shite.

Anti semitic, anti evolution, anti birth control, anti female emancipation - Chesterton did a great job of ending up firmly on the wrong side of history.

Also the Father Brown stories are kind of meh

Started rereading Psmith, Journalist. One of Wodehouse's earliest and one of his best.

Panofsky's Tomb Sculpture is the most interesting book. "(T)here is hardly any sphere of human experience where rationally incompatible beliefs so easily coexist and where prelogical, one might almost say metalogical, feelings so stubbornly survive in periods of advanced civilization as in our attitude toward the dead." :) :)

Cozy Moments cannot be muzzled!
(xp)

Reading I, Claudius. Started thinking it was great, lovely voice, maybe a bit stiff, drifted in and out; have ended unable to put it down, hit a perfect holiday-book/potboiler-by-a-sage spot.

Always torn by Chesterton – tremendous style early on, but very wearing – the addiction to paradox & challop, the muddle of perception and posture (I think he accuses Wilde of the same?), the glitter surrounding things I simply don't believe or accept. There's something genuinely pernicious about his charm – you read and want to go along with this bluff, sensible, funny worldliness – but actually it's blowaway sentence making, sometimes with ugliness underneath.

but then when I'm ready to harden my heart to him I'll read something good - the book on Robert Browning, which is the last thing I read apart from the odd Fr Brown story, has some fantastic stuff in it.

i wish I still had some game on Shaw, I'm curious how they mirror and differ.

My library records must be getting a bit creepy. I took this out today--was drawn to the macabre cover: http://www.amazon.com/The-Empire-Death-Cultural-Ossuaries/dp/0500251789

The best thing it's pointed me towards so far is this very interesting practice in Madagascar called Famidihana, where villages will disinter their dead ancestors to change their shrouds, dance and drink with the cadavers, and give them a place at the meal table.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCPbJmQPMp4

Now I just want to find more anthropology books about funeral rites / people's long-term interactions with the dead.

have you read The Buried Soul by Timothy Taylor? My old 'what are you reading' post on it:

Someone on here recommended it a while back, so thanks: really got me as presentation of what I guess is non-consensus but non-fringe arch/anthropology - humane, brisk - doesn't hang around, but gets on with talking cannibalism, ritual, sacrifice, murder, scapegoating, child murder etc etc in a level way. Has occupied my mind for a few days.

My parents went to Famidihana last year, took lots of photos. Very weird and creepy stuff.

I haven't read that, woof, but it looks good. I will try to get to it. I've read very little anthro. The nearest thing to this present interest was a book on the mass graves in Srebrenica, arguing that the ways bones and bodies were mixed up during and after the massacre made for a complicated process of mourning. That struck me as an inspiring example of what anthropology could be.

Aero nominated for National Book Award, omfg

Holy shit

^^^

damn, 'grats

Nice!

long overdue, he should have got the nom for Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?

Congrats, aero! December--the soonest possible time that I will be able to read it--can't come fast enough.

Just started The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for my Death and the Victorians course.

oh, I'm reading Victorian Poetry Now by Val Cunningham. Very enjoyable – torrent of quotation, bursts of close reading, biographical snippets, showy critical writing. (There's a chapter on Mourning and Melancholia in there that I haven't got to yet).

Whoa, congrats. All the books I've been looking forward to are out this month (David Mitchell, Jeff Vandermeer), and aero's book is up next for me.

xpost

Will have to look into that. The mourning and melancholia chapter may very well be of use to me. Thanks!

huh, congrats to aerosmith

As of this afternoon, I'm about a third of the way into Wolf in White Van, and I love it so far, especially the slow circling around unspeakable events. Congratulations, aero!

Henry Roth's much lauded Call It Sleep, which I'm not prepared to laud.

Still working my way through A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz. It's good, but definitely too long.

Unwillingly (I know this stuff---but dammit more details keep turning up), I've gotten pulled into this week's Ken Burns miniseries on the Roosevelts. What bios of Franklin and Eleanor, separately and together, should I read?

Rosanne Rabinowitz: Helen's Story -- a reinterpretation/sequel to Arthur Machen's 'The Great God Pan', promising so far, has 1970s-style fantasy cover with naked lady and everything

What bios of Franklin and Eleanor, separately and together, should I read?

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Age of Roosevelt is the best of the older ones, despite cobwebby portions eulogizing liberal foreign policy.

The best of the recent ones:

H.W. Brands - Traitor to His Class
Ira Katznelson - Fear Itself, about progressivism requiring the racist and awful Solid South's congressional cooperation.
Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman - FDR and the Jew

'grats aero.

Elena Ferrante - The Lost Daughter. By coincidence I saw a film about Sylvia Plath yesterday and that struggle to be a mother for your children and at the same do those things that satisfy your mind and your work is something that is all over Ferrante's work (you can imagine why she chooses to be anonymous).

Currently placed most of the rest of her novels on order at my library. A lot to explore.

About to start on: Doris Lessing - The golden Notebook. Seems like the right follow-up.

alfred, have you read jean smith's FDR bio? haven't been sure whether to go for that one or the brands one.

Thanks for the tips, think I'll start with the Brands. His readings and commentary on BookTV, as well as contributions to various docs, incl this one, are always cogent. What's a good bio of Theodore?

It's fine, J.D. Brands' is a bit more elegant.

of TR? Edmund Morris. Go no further.

Oh? Will check it out, but have always been put off by excerpts and reviews of his apparently effusiveDutch---like this:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/10/reviews/991010.10weismat.html

Its baffling conceit aside, Dutch is fantastic. He's just a good writer, with unusual descriptive and evocatory powers.

have only read the first of morris's TR books, but it was terrific. will probably get around to his reagan book some time -- is that the only major reagan bio to date?

Lou Cannon's, which is the best and least starry-eyed bio.

this quote, from the review dow posted, is really sad to me:

At the end of the book, Morris visits Dutch in late 1994 and the image of the isolated lifeguard returns unbidden. Reagan, closed off more than ever by Alzheimer's disease, rambles incoherently, but then poignantly he shows his visitor a watercolor of a riverbank. "This," Dutch says, snapping into focus, "is where I was a lifeguard for seven [\(sic) summers. I saved 77 lives. And you know, none of 'em ever thanked me!" The truth, as Morris reminds us repeatedly, was just the opposite. Reagan never thanked anybody for anything.

Coming from the opposite, more or less: my god the Roosevelts (just watched the end of the broadcast; whole thing or big chunks may well be on pbs.org soon enough)! it's like looking into another timeline, another universe, to see presidents and a first lady accomplishing so much, mostly for the good. Sure, FDR got 12 years, but so much in the first four, and beyondo.
Depression apparently ran through many well-populated branches of that family---for the most accomplished, it was doing your civic duty and then some, as one means of self-medication (slaughter of big game and soldiers also helped, according to quotations from TR). Note to self: pull up your socks. Go put some on then do it. Anyway my god.

the doc does an estimable job of showing how Eleanor was essential.

Just finished George Packer's The Unwinding. Stunning achievement which makes good on it's premise, taking the format of Dos Passos's USA and removing the fictional component. Extraordinary narrative skills. Liked it even more when I read that David Brooks criticised it for not being prescriptive enough, ie not being enough like a David Brooks book.

does anyone feel like defending Lars Iyer to me because jeez

weird annoying thing: sentences which recall McCarthy trying to do pynchon, which was annoying enough at first remove

"Last night, Mulberry smoked crack on the roof of his house, Doyle says. Up on the roof, the ridge tiles between his thighs, laughing like a maniac, he declaimed a poem about a coffin full of shit ..."

ellipsis, italics, in original, obv

I seem to have two books going atm. My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin and the big three volume, 2500 page history of the Civil War by Shelby Foote. I'll probably finish the novel soon and most likely will never finish the history, but it is a very well-written narrative, so there is some hope I'll stick to it. The greatest merit in the novel are the parts where it is most Australian in language, setting and detail; unhappily, the story is coming unglued about midway through.

Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook. Last time I had this feeling of compulsively reading a big-ish novel was when I got hold of 2666 about three years ago.

I quickly skipped my way through the remainder of My Brilliant Career, omitting completely a long episode of her being governess to a squalid family of filthy brats. I basically abandoned any pretense of really reading the thing. The adolescent fantasy aspects of the plot just became too overpowering for me (the author was 16 when she wrote it).

Now I shall plunge into the Civil War for a time, until I am sated with battle lore and battle gore.

unhappily, the story is coming unglued about midway through.

See the sort-of sequel, My Brilliant Career Goes Bung, where the heroine's life goes berserk due to the success/public reaction to the first book

I read aero's book in one go tonight and since I have something of a mental block some times around reading novels that are short enough to finish in a lifetime or novels in general I feel pretty good about that. It was really good and it's leaving showers of sparks inside my mind.

Aero nominated for National Book Award, omfg

Just to be clear, the posts above citing 'aero' are referring to underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned... correct? Any road, National Book Award is almost as big time as it gets, so awed congratulations are in order.

yes

this news is too big to confine to I Love Books

It's in the tmg thread in ILM, too, I believe

The Mountain Goats thread, that is.

I'm hoping to get to WIWV this weekend or next week. Someone with more standing here than me should start a discussion thread.

just think of how much standing you'll gain by authoring such a righteous thread

I can see it now

https://michellesgotsomethingtosay.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/mountaingoat1.gif

I finished my book of Robert Sheckley stories.

I read a lot of a guidebook about Norway.

does anyone feel like defending Lars Iyer to me because jeez

I read Exodus & enjoyed it, but I like books about academics gone bad

I read the Spurious trilogy and laughed and laughed, loving all that wonderful asshole friend stuff. Tbh, I can hardly remember any of the plot.

Finishing The Golden Notebook, its awesome but I'm not even sure where to begin, so I'll end here:

Sex is the opium of the people

Moving onto: Peter Weiss - Leavetaking.

Leavetaking's great!

Had a really good month of reading in September, but capped it off yesterday by starting the worst book I've tried to read in a long time. Figured it was the season to try some horror fiction; the local libraries don't have a lot of the stuff, so I ended up with _Horns_ by Joe Hill.

Ig, short for Ignatius, is the novel's protagonist. His girlfriend was killed a year ago, and most people assume he did it. In this scene, some 60 pages in, his brother tells him who the killer was.

'And if I had any idea (Spoiler) was going to kill her, I would've tried to stop it,' Terry said. 'I thought Spoiler was her friend. I've wanted to tell you so bad, but Spoiler made me keep quiet. He made me.'
'EEEEEEEEEE,' Ig screamed.
'He's awful, Ig,' Terry said. 'You don't know him. You think you do, but you don't have any idea.'
'EEEEEEEEEEEE,' lg went on.

I stopped reading shortly after.

I read a little bit of Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, about a neurotic, middle-aging rock muso, a minor star, it seems, who may have peaked, jittering around the home office (hated growing up on a farm, but being conditioned to farm hours messed him up on tour, so took drugs to adjust; didn't like that either) while his assistent orders something weird from EBay, as another investment of course. More plausible than usual "rock novel" set-ups, though I may well never go back to it.

Don't try this at home: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer, whose stories spin through glimpses of comedy, often closer to tragedy, "but it was also," as Chris Rock says, "Tuesday." Stories say, She whooshed through the green lights faster than the reds, which is the basic idea of greens and reds, after all; and "She was a big girl, too, " a boy said. "I'd be afraid to steer that wheel." Like you had a shot. Really great so far, with more consequential, make-me-care content in the first three than many whole novels.

Any of the booker shortlist any good, cause my flatmate just got all six in hardback and I've got nothing else lined up. Already read "we are all completely beside ourselves", crazy family story with a decent twist, fine for the tube but nothing earth shattering.

I am about 420pp into Foote's history of the US Civil War. I am beginning to think I may finish all 2500pp. It is squarely in the sweet spot for narrative history, in terms of my preferences. The events are clearly laid out and actions easy to follow. He generally confines himself to the salient parts of a battle and doesn't bog down in too much detail. He is deft at quick character sketches of the major actors. He drops in amusing or illuminating anecdotes and they leaven the grimness here and there.

Any historic event that covers many years, more than a million soldiers, a continental breadth of geography, and hundreds of battles on many fronts cannot be fully described by one author or one book, however lengthy it may be. But Foote's version of this war is quite lively, sometimes surprising, and almost made comprehensible.

I may read some lighter material in between volumes, though. Reading this book is no short task.

Leavetaking's great!

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Wednesday, October 1, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This edition also has another biographical piece called Vanishing Point that might be of interest to you.

Anyway I only read a couple of sentences because the library also came up with a copy of Natsume Soseki's Kokoro and that is simply one of the great books!

Oh yeah, the Penguin Classics edition of Kokoro was my introduction to Soseki, and it got me completely hooked

the Foote sounds like a great read but I'm not sure I'd be able to devote so much time to a narrative written by a guy so deeply invested in Lost Cause ideology

i'm kind of a civil war buff (insert george costanza joke here) but i always get bogged down about 50 pages into the first foote volume. he's a good writer but when a guy begins his 2,500 page civil war epic with a long chapter on jefferson davis's childhood it's...not hard to guess where he's coming from. there's a good chapter on foote in tony horwitz's 'confederates in the attic.'

i really like bruce catton's army of the potomac trilogy, which i zapped through earlier this year. catton isn't as good a stylist as foote, no one was ever going to interview him for the paris review, but the books still hold up wonderfully well.

I love the Civil War so long as I don't read about battles.

theoretically I am reading The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig, but it's too thick for a subway carry.

a narrative written by a guy so deeply invested in Lost Cause ideology

The odd thing to me so far is how, in the first year or so of the war that I've covered, he often shows the Union army and navy either victorious or else fighting their opponents to a draw, and he how often he shows the Confederate generals inflating their accomplishments or badly deluded by their own self-confidence. Their first year of war was a straight up disaster for the CSA.

In what I've read, Foote is basically showing up the entire project of the southern rebellion as rash, poorly conceived and riddled with a foolish grandiosity. Even Jeff Davis is described in far less flattering terms than Lincoln. He obviously admires the Confederate soldier, but doesn't denigrate the fighting qualities of the Union soldiers at all. He even explains how McClellan's handling of the army was actually rather competent, and his reluctance to engage in an all-out assault on Richmond was based on the highly alarmist misinformation he was being fed on a near daily basis by the Pinkerton spies the Union employed in Virginia, which inflated the size of the defending army by a factor of three or four times.

iow, he doesn't convey an overly nostalgic view of the South's cause.

that's entirely fair -- i'll give it another shot before long. i think my view is partly shaded by interviews that foote gave decades after writing those books, when he really did start sounding like a lost cause guy:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/the-convenient-suspension-of-disbelief/240318/

coates is spot on about foote's white romanticism. foote spends zero time so far examining what slavery was or how it pervaded the south's economy and culture. he gives only a glance at the political roots of the war. his history is about the conduct of the war and almost nothing else. even then, the use of slaves to do work like digging defensive fortifications is passed over in silence. in this book, slaves and slavery disappear from view entirely, as uninteresting details.

Just for the record, it moves here:

'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

Just finished (ILXer) Sean Michaels' Us Conductors. It's lovely. I couldn't recommend higher.

― MaudAddam (cryptosicko), Wednesday, August 20, 2014 9:58 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And a bump to congratulate him on winning the Giller Prize tonight! Congrats!!

Wait he is on ilx?

Theremin

Oh wow, that sounds good.

Will check that, thanks. Also, is the documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey good?

Is that the one by the other Steve Martin? If so, yes

wow, THANK YOU!!! MaudAddam - really kind of you.