March 2006: So, what are you reading?

At home, but not yet started:

Arthur & George
The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value

99 days to the World Cup!

Oysters, naturally!:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345476387/002-3821789-3074440?v=glance&n=283155

As far as an inside look at law school (from a practical standpoint) it can't be beat, but as literature it's pretty sub-par, and pretty dull.

It's OK so far. Illuminating, I suppose.

neither did flaubert.

i think he must be one of my least favorite of the classic or canonical authors.

I also bought, yesterday, William Gaddis "Carpenter's Gothic" but I haven't started it. It was bought at hstencil's suggestions, when we were in da junk shop.

I bought it from the book stall at Spitalfields market. First time I've been in about three months and was expecting an architectural disaster after reading about the redevelopment. It was far from that. I like the walkway with the glass roof framing Christchurch.

Acoid the tapas bar at Spitalfields. Very poor.

i enjoy that book.

I have just started 'The System Of The World'.

I am now reading "London Psychogeography Rachman Riots and Rillington Place" by Tom Vague.

He has a very singular style, not far from note-taking and I'm not sure everyone would think this worthwhile but I like this book and I like Tom Vague and I'm finding out how much I didn't know about the 10 Rillington Place murders, and the Notting Hill race riots of the late 50s, and the fabled slum landlord Rachman, and tons more stuff.

I finished "The Foundation Pit" and it's as dispiriting a book as I know, so I'm glad it made me laugh several times along the way.

What's wrong with sidebars and historical trivia? This is my favourite kind of reading! Sadly Salt actually degenerates into a list of recipes and doesn't really tell you anything that Cod didn't.

Currently reading Ludmila's Broken English by DBC Pierre and I can't decide if I like it or not. His ear for bizarre dialogue is excellent, and I like the story, but his actual prose is terrible, and his descriptions are disastrous. Even something as simple as the layout of a room becomes a syrupy mess of dagger looks and shaky similes. Amateurish.

Seriously though. When it comes to books about historical trivia, I am expert (as they say in The Big Lebowski).

The book jacket ranks it up there with Ford and Brennan. We shall see. "Spain conquered the world then didn't know what to do with it." That's a bit of a crass statement for the opening chapter. You only need to look at the tin and silver mines throughout the Americas to work out what they wanted.

I liked Fup too.

It may be a bit emo.

Mikey I hope you like reading about little Romanesque churches.

I didn't read anything this morning. I rested my eyes.

I don't mean I then played in the game. No, just watched it. Christ, Man Utd got lucky. I had rosti and steamed brocoli for tea and a rather heavy new world shiraz.

Oh, and, Chris, thanks for my accepting my amazon invitation!

At least you stopped at one "very".

I gave up on Oldest Confederate. I don't know why, really.

Just started Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, not far enough in to give a response to it yet.

I'm enjoying it (Nooteboom) more as I go along, although his obsession with Zubaran (who I've only really considered a decent painter of monks rather than a great painter) is wearing.

Travelling around Spain, staying in paradors, is how I want to spend my life.

You haven't lived until you'd stayed a night at the Parador in Santiago!

I think half the joy of travelling in Spain lies in using the local railways and bus networks. Public transport compares quite favourably to Portugal, France, Italy etc. Much cheaper than the UK too.

How does one go about booking a room in a parador?

Used to live round the corner from this one. I am surprised to find myself vaguely nostalgic.

There is a booking bit "reservas" on that website, but you need to register "introduce your datos".

Just booked a weekend in Spain! Flying to Vitoria, There is a Parador in Argomaniz just outside Vitoria. Know this one, PJM?

Napoleon stayed there!

Ryanair return flights for two people, all taxes included = £50!

Neither Here Nor There [Bill Bryson]
Separate Parts [Martha King] [my old boss! a memoir of her raging artsy life in the 60s!]
The Uses Of Literature [Italo Calvino]
and the first few pages of THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON [BOSFUCKINWELL]

which is pretty great, so far, and it hasn't even gotten into its stride.

The cover of the edition I bought strangely says right at the top, "Film Rights Acquired by Francis Ford Coppola." I'm having a really hard time imagining who would consider that a selling point for a book. "Ah - a burnt-out has been movie director has purchased the rights to possibly make a movie out of this book - oh my god, I must read this immediately!"

I really enjoyed A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

Prior to that I read Phil Dick's "The man in the high castle". Good book, and a lot more interesting than I expected. I'd steered clear of it before, since I'm usually not interested in alternative history. Still, it dawned on me halfway through that alt.hist. is just about the perfect medium for the kind of reality-confusion Dick so often wrote about. And his prose is fantastic: "I wonder if it will sell, he wondered."
Poetry, innit?

If you could define me as a target market, this would be the book most tailored to my reading requirements. It was published at the weekend and I've only read the first chapter (on the Ukraine), but it is very promising. (I'm hoping it's up there with Morbo or and Tor). The author was the FT's Eastern European football correspondent.

Also, Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin. A 1964 collection of poems, with scant concern for Eastern European football.

are the earlier novels worth investigating?

I am rereadng IN THE LINE OF BEAUTY in homage to PJM.

I just finished 'Money' in homage to Da PF! Gosh, I had forgotten how poor the ending is. "You want motivation? Call Fielding Goodney's mother."

Dah!

Yes, that is an apt homage.

I agree, about the ending.

He has never explained it well - I think he wanted it to be like Othello: motiveless malignancy? The way he gives the tel # is quite neat, quite Nabokovian perhaps? - but still it's poor, very poor. I think I said this, when I finished rereading it, in fact!

Exactly! What I liked about Motherless Brooklyn and am liking about Gun, With... is the playfulness, which is totally absent in TFOS as far I can see. Girl in Landscape was a bit too sci-fi tropey for me, and As She Climbed Across The Table just odd, but I still enjoyed them because they weren't - literally - weighed down with their own Great American Novel pretensions.

some descartes on the table next, some hume next week, and eyeing queneau's 'we always treat women too well', which i had to look up on the web to check to make sure was by the oulipo queneau since on scanning the promotional materials in the book i could find no mention of that group (so much the better, i suppose).

It is funny to compare The Rotters' Club with The Fortress of Solitude.

I tried to explain my reaction to the latter on the what are you reading? thread, or maybe a Lethem thread, or both, in probably February 2005. Probably I tried to explain there why I thought it was excessively hip. Perhaps not. Part of my reaction may be from not being American, I suppose.

I saw this one in a used bookstore the other day, and I decided to buy it out of curiosity.

Given the topic, I think that it would be impossible to write a four-hundred page book that even remotely touches on said subject in any kind of depth. That aside, much of the material in this book was previously unknown to me; I also like her style of writing.

Too, the more I read from it, the more it seems less of a history of celibacy, per se, than a document of one woman's research into her own sexuality. Which is just as alluring, if the person, herself, is an interesting human being -- which she seems to be.

Melmoth the Wanderer

So far, I absolutely love this one -- but then, I love anything containing a Faustian soul-exchange element; the framed storytelling within is also a lot of fun.

(Musil was interesting, very ironic. Ulrich, the protagonist, is trying to find a meaningful or 'good' way of livingand engages in lots of dense discussions about what this could mean/be. All these discussions are taken seriously and sincerely but (it seems to me) most of the other characters are living variants on these ways of living, and all are unsatisfactory. The big irony in the plot is that most of the central characters are involved in a committee to come up with some way of commemorating the 70th anniversary of their (Austrian) emperor's reign. Which means that they are, starting in 1913, planning a great celebration to take place in 1918)

I'm now reading "Doting", Henry Green's final novel.

IPA, I'm assuming.

Shoedog George Pellecanos. An early novel from my favorite nuevo noir crime writer. Not as richly detailed as later work, but fast-moving and violently "cinematic" in a Q Tarrantino style.

The Aztec Treasure House Evan S Connell. New and selected essays on uh, I guess you'd call it anthropology. Just started.

also sprang for a copy of Rip It Up And Start Again by Simon Reynolds. So far it's smart but v. accessible, well-written and thoruoughly researched, though somewhat less-than-earth-shattering so far. This has more to do w/my advanced age and firsthand exp of postpunk than it does w/Reynolds efforts. And in an unconscious Kogan/Eddy tribute I just re-posted something I said on ILM :-)

Apols for the coma / comma typo above, btw.

I am planning to reading (or re-reading) all of his work chronologically. "V." has been mostly fun so far. It gets off to a great start but then you sort of hit a wall with Stencil's South Africa Chapter and again with Paola's Dad's Journal/Letter, which I found particularly hard to get through.

Has anyone ever been to Malta? It sounds like a cool place to visit with an extremely rich history?

Also, has anyone read "Mason & Dixon"?

*"We" in this case being the British, who all seem to obsess variously about the whole business.

Yes.

I'm reading Huston Smith's 'The World's Religions' and PKD's 'Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich.'

I was briefly hoping for a common bond of chromaticism and cynicism.

the other week at the store i was seriously eyeing a smaller copy of it to replace my large paperback copy. just thinking about carrying around some of my books on the bus makes me disinclined to finish them. (see also: tale of genji. how cool would it be if they published it in ten little volumes or so?)

Neither was particularly color-laden, alas. However, the Hrabel novel had lots of turquoise-blue and velvet-violet, associated with gypsy girls.

Really, all books should be published in little hardback Loeb Classic edition style books. And translated into Latin or Greek. Except not as expensive.

Yeah, the book is very entertaining. For instance, I had heard about vestal virgins many times previously, but had no idea behind the history or origins of the phrase.

As a history, of course, it is extremely spotty -- she should have given it a different title.

It has many things against it:
* inability to maintain much narrative momentum over 1,000 pages;
* dopily wacky sense of humour ("President Washington was a drug fiend!"); and
* fatal attraction to banal allegory.

Nevertheless, I have high hopes for the next book.

xpost

recently arrived: Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop, Baseball Prospectus 2006

also working on Leigh Brackett's The Book of Skaith

I'm not reading anything right now, although I'm technically in the middle of about 3 different books. None of which are really holding my interest. I'm in a phase of book apathy.

Just started: The Bridge, by Iain Banks, which I'm re-reading and finding amusing and well structured (arf!) though less "OMG how good is this?!" than it seemed when I was a teenage boy.

I've also been working my way through Men & Cartoons, by Jonathan Lethem and David Foster Wallace's Consider The Lobster this month, both of which are very good indeed.

Almost all of the stories in that Lethem book are very immediate and fun, but that last story, The National Anthem... that one doesn't quite work for me. Beside the whole "A motorcycle that’s gone off a cliff can't be fixed by another motorcycle" line (CLUNK!), it just seems a bit too… up-front, maybe?

I think Lethem's best stuff pushes that po-mo genre play thing he does to the point where it becomes very affecting rather than just kinda clever, or else gives his pop-culture inflected ramblings a bit more room to breath. The National Anthem is very straight-forward and compressed, and the style doesn’t suite Lethem at all.

Consider The Lobster is more or less business as usual for Wallace. Like most of his non-fiction (I can’t vouch for the maths stuff) it’s all humour, self-consciousness and footnotes, and it’s often pretty damned insightful to boot. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I thought that the Republican candidacy campaign as covered in Up Simba was pretty much the perfect jump-off point for one of Wallace’s recurring themes: the potentially harmful effects of a cynical, seen-it-all-so-who-cares postmodernist world view. The layout for Host is making my head bleed right now, but I’m going to give it another go over the weekend all the same…

I'm still reading Gun With Occasional Music, and Teh Fr0gmore P4pers no. 67 which returned from the printers several apostrophes short, alas :(

Just started: The Bridge, by Iain Banks, which I'm re-reading and finding amusing and well structured (arf!) though less "OMG how good is this?!" than it seemed when I was a teenage boy.
Huh, I'm wondering how that will work for me on re-read too. I have that and "Use of Weapons" mentally marked as the best Banks books, and it could definitely be time to revisit.
Incidentally, a fellow named Rich Puchalsky made a lot of posts about The Bridge a few years ago, where he went chapter by chapter, commenting on the plot, connections etc. I recall it being quite interesting, though I didn't read the whole thing.
A quick search turns up a page where he's backed up all the posts: http://home.att.net/~rpuchalsky/bridge/index.html

I've also been working my way through Men & Cartoons, by Jonathan Lethem
I sort of blasted through this a year or two ago - still the only Lethem I've read, though I've picked up a copy of "Gun..." - but I found it to be a lot of fun. I did occasionally think that I was running through it a bit too quickly, so I didn't really stop to consider the stories very much, mostly taking it as a collection of pure fun. I had a similar reaction to yours with the final story. I'd enjoyed everything in the book, and was really let down by having it end with a story that didn't feel at all up to the rest. Maybe it was a difference in tone that didn't fit the mood I was in; truth be told, I can't at -all- recall what it was about anymore.
Anyhoo, the super goat man and past-spray stories were my favorites, I believe.

Stories like Access Fantasy and The Spray are good pop fun, but there are little touches there that stay with me. Like the patches that make you compelled to advertise and the one way permeable barrier in Access Fantasy, or the whole concept of The Spray.

Thanks for the Bridge link, by the way. I'm feeling a bit of Banks re-read coming on at the moment, but I tend to have a pretty short attention span so we'll see how it goes.

bouvard and pecuchet have given up on agriculture and commenced their investigation of chemistry.

I quite liked it, but I can see how it would get passed over in the prize race.

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0141020520.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

http://www.harpers.org/TheFrequency.html

Now I'm reading "Home Is The Sailor" by Jorge Amado.

Tim, I've just started Loving. As it were.

I finished The Scarlet Cockerel, which was very rough-n-tumble with swordfights and petards and "caneu"ing in the wilds of Florida. Also, every native American stereotype known to man. And the only female character was a cossetted, not-bright, dainty mademoiselle.

also I am now reading Kenzaburo Oe's "Somersault"

I finished Drood (amazing, of course, though unfinished), so next I start Diderot's the Nun. I really wanted to reread Rameau's Nephew but my library doesn't have a copy. (I read Enlightening the World about Diderot's role in the Encyclopedia which made me want to revisit him.)

I really want to be reading John Fante's "Ask the Dust" but I am eighth in line and it is still on order:(

I always thought the antenna guy was looking for me.

Now, onto "The Satyricon" and perhaps "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

It sparkles still.

I keep meaning to read "Salammbo" but my copy is too big, and it's a hardback, but you should see the pretty illustrations.

Now I am reading Thomas Hardy's first novel, Desperate Remedies, which, if the introduction is to be believed, firmly inserts Hardy into the realm of the sensation novelists, a genre that will continue to impact upon him throughout his novelistic career.

see what you think, US reviews were mixed. I actually like it better than Atonement but not more than Enduring Love.

Anyway, I'm reading Stuart - A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters. I'm two thirds of the way through and not sure how I feel about it.

Mary, I didn't. But if it went to the address on here then I wouldn't have, yet. But I will, soon. If it went to my work address then we need to think, again.

Archel I found "Loving" slower than the other HG books I've read, too, and none the worse for it.

Not very good really. Seems to go on for ever.

"I don't see any sense in owning something you can't kick..."

Also, joie de vivre is sort of the opposite of what you need to enjoy Schulz (and arguably the Muppets as well).

after this, "swann's way" or milan kundera's "art of the novel."

I just finished Banville's 'The Sea'.

also a little wittgenstein to pick me up (lots of zingers in 'zettel'), a bit about epictetus, some hume and some charles taylor.

and amelie rorty's great essay on descartes, 'the structure of the meditations'.

I have very nearly finished At Swim Two-Birds, for which I congratulate myself. I shall be neeeding a thorough explanation though.

Hmm, what next? Bollocks to Alton Towers?

Next, it's either the Ukrainian tractor thing or that David Winner book on British football which I've flicked through and it looks bollocks. I hope not, his Dutch one was tip top.

I am buried in Frank Kogan, taking it slowly, trying to think about it as I go, liking it very much.

from the library yesterday: more cold-war thrillerz

Judgement on Deltchev Eric Ambler
Epitaph for a Spy Eric Ambler

also borrowed a friend's copy of Deus Lo Volt! by Evan S Connell, non-ficiton on teh Crusades. I returned that big book of Connell essays after reading only a couple, it was v. good but I guess pop anthropology isn't really my thing. But he's still the best "unknown" author I've come across in years.

And I'm still at it. Yesterday I bought one of the Wire CD reissues. Incidentally, the CD liner notes are great, "Wire were a big influence on the Dusseldorf art punk scene in the late seventies." Ha.

no I'd heard of him but your post there encouraged me to read him! thanks big redd!

Mati Unt - Things in the Night
Curtis Sittenfeld - Prep
Neil Gaiman - The Sandman vol.1: Preludes and Nocturnes
Joan Didion - Democracy
Dubravka Ugresic - The Ministry of Pain
bits of James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds

I'm now halfway through Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker on my mom's recommendation. She makes good recommendations.

It does a pretty good job of building its theses and is interestingly written enough. But like a lot of scholarly history, it tends to take a couple of modest ideas and then treat them as if they were so novel and controversial as to merit the 150 pp. of back matter (!!) appended to the 300 pp. of exposition.

Next, I read The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist by Richard Feynman. It isn't really fair to father this book onto Feynman. He didn't seek to publish these transcripts of three lectures he gave in 1963. That was someone else's bright idea, as part of the continuing mini-industry of fobbing off whatever Feynman's fans will buy.

I can see why he got so popular. He won a Nobel Prize in Physics and he talks like an ordinary Joe. He's folksy. He talks around all the hard stuff and uses words like "stuff" a lot, and phrases like "a lot" a lot, too. And these lectures are something of an embarrassment, except he never pretended they were profound or worthy of preserving for posterity, so he's off the hook. I blame greed and idolatry.

Also, perhaps more urgently, have you heard his voice?

This one, though, was not worthy of publication, IMHO. It rambles all over and has very few interesting things to say - and these few things are fairly perfunctory and disconnected. It would work OK as a lecture - you'd listen to him and walk out of and remember one or tidbits and be satisfied with your evening.

I've never heard a recording of his speaking voice. I'd expect he had good timing and delivery for his jokey bits.

I haven't read that book (I saw it recently but didn't look closely, thinking it was a collection of other pieces I had already read).