Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?

As has been typical lately, ILB has been so engrossed in its bookish business, we've let another season start without freshening up the WAYR thread. For reference, this thread continues what we started in ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017.

To repeat myself, I am reading Thomas Merton's memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, wherein he unloads his overwhelming conviction of sin and makes his confession of faith, after a rather typical, tepid and confused youth of reading D. H. Lawrence, drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes.

I'm reading Back Of Beyond by C.J. Box. I like C.J.

It's about an alcoholic cop trying to solve the murder of his AA sponsor in the wilds of Montana and also Yellowstone.

Terry Pratchett Pyramids
not sure if first 11 pages of this are missing or not, seems to start at a logical point on the 2nd intact page. Library copy that I've had out for months and am only just getting around to reading.
Events in the Assassins guild college.

Memoirs of A Geezer Jah Wobble
think I mainly picked this up because of the P.I.L. connections but am getting interested in his solo stuff, probably should have been already.
he's just been surly on Later and punched Sean Hughes in the canteen at Nevermind the Buzzcocks Had forgotten Hughes was even on there. Was he a team captain before either Bill Bailey, Phil Jupitus or Noel Fielding?

The Philosopher's Stone Peter Marshall
picked this up from a sale years ago. Got about 100 pages into it then started reading something else.
Thought I'd give it another shot.
History of the transforming object, starts with an ancient Chinese tomb being opened and the lady inside still being perfectly preserved. he then looks at similar beliefs across the globe and across history ancient to modern going through alchemy etc etc.
Should be really interesting.

I finished Toibin's House of Names in less than two days. Cold and impressive. It helps that I'd read Mary Renault for the first time a couple weeks ago, and he's influenced by her.

I recently finished Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. It's both a vivid from-the-trenches perspective on the horrors of WWI and an acute study of human psychology under enormous strain. Highly recommended to fans of All Quiet on the Western Front, Catch 22, and other depictions of military life. The book could have probably ended with the armistice and perhaps been stronger for it, but the remaining pages on Graves's desultory early career and failing first marriage were an interesting slice of postwar life.

Thread title reminds me of https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/514HlUSas-L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I am reading a book by the lawyer Joseph M. Hassett called THE ULYSSES TRIALS.

It is published by Lilliput Press in Arbour Hill, Dublin. Walking through Dublin in Spring last year I happened down a side street and found this publisher in a little house on a corner. You can see it here. It was remarkable to come across it this way:

http://www.tn2magazine.ie/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/5500495752_e1375efdd8_b.jpg

The Long Goodbye, and Roger Lancelyn Green's kids book about King Arthur. Trying to figure out which Leonard to take on holiday - LaBrava, Glitz, or City Primeval. Is the Go-Between a holiday book, or is it too demanding?

Nah, it's an easy read. Great book for the summer too

Seconded

I also like Colm Toibin: The Blackwater Lightship was excellent.

Started Omar El Akkad's AMERICAN WAR, but bailed. Dreary and over-long. Seems to be an attempt to make Americans understand what the Middle-Eastern experience of civil war/constant bombings/refugee life would be like if it happened to them, but as a non-American who actually has some curiosity about the outside world there wasn't much in this for me

Now on Gordon Lish: COLLECTED FICTIONS -- odd combination of compressed size and weirdly verbose language, but pretty enjoyable

J.L. Austin, HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS. Has something of the brisk amiable cranky mid-century Oxford don vibe of Empson, but to me is actually a bit clearer.

I finished "All My Puny Sorrows", which I thought very good, heartbreaking in parts. In other parts the rather chatty tone chafed with me a little, what with my being used to an icier, more detached tone in some of the Nordic things I read with similarly upsetting themes. That's a criticism of me as reader rather than the book though.

I read Matos's 33 1/3 about "Sign 'O' The Times" as homework ahead of visiting Minneapolis, and I thought it was excellent and illuminating on an LP I don't know well.

Now I am reading "White Tears" by Hari Kunzru which (as of half-way through) takes a theme of music-freakery as cultural appropriation and makes that into a page-turner with what seem to be supernatural overtones, maybe with parallels to the Gillen / McKelvie "Phonogram" comics? I am enjoying it a great deal, in a summer-reading sort of way. It rushes by engagingly without any of the sentences calling attention to themselves by way of being especially good, or ever bad.

Way too much circling the same points about love as jealousy and vice-versa in The Prisoner so far. but then they-he-we cruise the allure just a bit more, once in a while, and it can go like this:

Our car was going quickly down the boulevards and avenues, whose rows of large houses, frozen pink cliffs of sun and cold, recalled to me my visits to Mme. Swann, those afternoons gently illuminated by chrysanthemums as we waited for the lamps to be lit. I had hardly time to notice, being just as cut off by them by the car windows as I would have been behind the curtains of my bedroom, a young fruit-seller, a dairy-girl standing in front of her shop door, lit up by the winter sun, like a heroine whom my desire could involve in the most delicious complications, on the threshold of a novel which I should never read. For I could hardly ask Albertine to stop, and I had already lost sight of the young women, almost before my eyes had time to distinguish their features and caress their youthful freshness in the blood vapour in which they were enveloped. Said Vapour slipping me just enough sustenance to keep going for a while.

Strike by them, sorry.

Works better in context, duh, sorry

aragon - paris peasant
breton - nadja
crevel - babylon

Started on some Franzen essays (!) in FARTHER AWAY last night. The first one, a commencement address called 'Pain Doesn't Kill You', is remarkably bad at times. The passages of sniping at 'how we present ourselves on social media' etc are so oddly unconnected to the real use and experience of social media, and the supposed insight that consumer goods narcissistically want to be loved (and this affects our attitude to love) all seems -- quite wrong, considering how confidently he presents it.

I have always tended to defend Franzen a bit, saying: at least he writes good novels. Maybe he does, or maybe one disagrees - but I think it's true, after all, that the non-fiction can be quite bad.

His nonfiction is all i have read, and thus I will never read his fiction. He is a nitwit.

I ended up enjoying "White Tears" even more than I thought I would, I tore through it with a real sense of dread.

Now I am reading "Melancholy" by Jon Fosse. I have half an idea it's not going to be the very cheeriest, but maybe the chair and the noose on the front cover are misleading.

^ It is quite funny at times!

"Art Sex Music" Cosey Fanni Tutti
Bresson On Bresson
The Order Of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago - François J. Bonnet

Just finished Chris Kraus' Torpor which I warmly recommend. I preferred it quite a bit to I Love Dick (which I also liked) and found it both very funny and moving.

Switched gears and started Robert Brenner's Economics of Global Turbulence which advanced a "secular stagnation" view of the last 25-30 years before it gained more widespread recognition (via Larry Summers). Interesting analysis, he marshals a lot of data and offers a compelling comparative view of the boom and "slow declines" of Japan/Germany/the US.

I'm also about to pick up Vila Matas' Bartleby and Co. I may also squeeze in a couple of shorter novels (and maybe the Savage Detectives, too!) before I re-read Swann's Way.

some good stuff on the horizon

http://www.themillions.com/2017/07/anticipated-great-second-half-2017-book-preview.html

I read Outline by Rachel Cusk and enjoyed it. The reviews talk a lot about how the narrator is a cipher, but it seems pretty clear that it's just a good mechanism to connect the short stories and monologues of the people she meets. Will probably read the sequel soon.

I've been reading The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill. Definitely worth the hype. Not done yet, but I'll go out on a limb and say my favorite contemporary novel since Miranda July's The First Bad Man.

Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo -- very good, though I'm not sure I got more out of the whole 250p than I got from the general effect of the first 50p

Akimitsu Takagi: The Informer -- sort of noirish Japanese novel from 1965, good on friction of liberated post-WW2 Japanese youngsters against those just 5 years older who have WW2 memories and are more repressed, etc

Yr. description of the Takagi reminds me of Oshima's 1960 Cruel Story of Youth, recently on TCM. I enjoyed Mumbo Jumbo too, and still need to check his early The Freelance Pallbearers and Yellowback Radio Broke-Down. Ditto my favorite contemporary novel since Miranda July's The First Bad Man!

I read excerpts (a chapter?) from Mumbo Jumbo for a class once, and it was pretty great. Need to check out the whole thing one of these days.

Cruel Story of Youth looks really good. I have this box of Nikkatsu Noir movies I really should watch the rest of.

reread the english surrealist painter ithell colquhoun's short novel goose of hermogenes (her only piece of fiction as far as i'm aware?) which employs a number of your typical gothic tropes within a framework based on the alchemical process. shares a similar somnambulistic quality & atmosphere of all-pervading menace with some of anna kavan's work.

now starting on leonora carrington's short stories :-D

Yr. description of the Takagi reminds me of Oshima's 1960 Cruel Story of Youth, recently on TCM.

Don't wanna come across as overly sensitive but did the cover of the Masters Of Cinema blu-ray of this have to be a dude straight slapping a woman? Makes me go "actually, maybe not..." every time I pick it up.

I have this box of Nikkatsu Noir movies I really should watch the rest of.

I remember liking A Colt Is My Passport best. The Suzuki one was actually the least interesting!

Sorry for movie talk on the book thread. I'm two thirds through Jean De Florette - it's my jam, a satirical look at the deep French countryside. Particularly enjoyed the description of the socialist mayor who, along with the village's other four atheists, makes a big show out of having his aperitif at the village bar facing the church during Sunday mass.

I am going away for a week for work and I think I am taking:

Emily St John Mandel, STATION ELEVEN

Jorge Luis Borges, LABYRINTHS

Hermann Hesse: Knulp -- can honestly not tell if this book is good or bad, but I seem to be continuing reading it

reading Breaking Point by C.J. Box and it's even better than the C.J. Box book I just read. And that one was really good. Evil E.P.A. agents! Boooooooo!

also one of the grossest things i've read in a while was a scene - i'm gonna tell you the scene because you will never read this book - where this guy is stumbling through the forest with his hands tied and its night and he's dying of dehydration and he stumbles upon what he thinks is a small stream and starts drinking from it and it turns out its the inside of a huge mule deer carcass and he had been drinking rotten blood. EWWWWW!!! stephen king must have read that and smacked his forehead and said why didn't I think of that!?

I finished the Merton book about a week ago and had several thoughts about it to share here. Then I went camping, read 3/4 of another book and have lost the thread of what I would have written about Merton, other than to note that his book did fit well with the officially anti-Communist sentiments of the Church that was a Big Deal in the USA at the time. That probably gave it a bit of a push in its popularity.

The other book, of which I have read about 85%, is a historical novel by Don Berry, a local Oregonian author. It was published in 1960 and is called Trask. The title character was a fur trapper and the other characters are nearly all native Americans. It is set in 1848 on the north Oregon coast, which is very thinly settled by whites, mostly traders and a few ex-trappers like Trask. The natives outnumber them considerably. The California gold rush has not yet loosed its tidal wave of change.

For a book written about native Americans in an era when simple-minded TV westerns had been riding high for almost a decade, it is carefully researched and quite respectful. Like almost any historical novel, it is highly colored, plays up the drama and romance at the expense of realism, and the author is careful to give the reader both heroes and villains. These are not flaws in the novel so much as requirements of the genre. It's a pretty good story so far and it does the basic job of bringing the time and place alive. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

Peter Parker's Isherwood bio.

anna kavan: eagle's nest

Time for some Summer genre reading: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles by Kim Newman.

just started reading John Crowley's Little, Big. it's kind of a bumpy read not helped by the fact the text on the page is so tiny

Georges Simenon: Maigret's Memoirs -- which rather startlingly breaks the series formula by having the book written by Maigret in the first person, complaining about all the mistakes, continuity glitches and simplifications of police process by Simenon in all the other books

I didn't read Borges after all - have instead spent whole week reading Charles Townshend's EASTER 1916. Riveting.

Finished The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. Once you look past the weird conceit played deadpan, it's not so secretly a sympathetic social-realist novel about the downwardly-mobile American male, Southern edition. Highly recommended.

Started The Transformation of the World by Jurgen Osterhammel. Should keep me busy for a while.

Great run this summer. The first two books are detective novels set ca. 1972 Lao, in the Alexander McCall Smith tradition but with sharper humor, more supernatural elements, and heaps of cynicism. The author is a fascinating fellow.

The Coroner's Lunch (Dr. Siri Paiboun, #1), Thirty-Three Teeth (Dr. Siri Paiboun, #2) by (Colin Coterell),
Baba Dunja's Last Love (Alina Brodsky)
Lincoln at the Bardo (Georfe Saunders)
The Sympathesizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen)
Uncle Scrooge Vol. 5 and 6: The Richest Duck in the World and Universal Solvant, (Don Rosa)
KRAZY: George Herriman, a Life in Black and (Michael Tisserand)

Just starting Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project. I needed a non-fiction break, preferably some vaguely popular-science-y stuff, pitched at a middlebrow level. This one looks interesting and Lewis's other books have never let me down, yet.

i bought the herriman bio a few months ago but haven't given it a shot yet. it got pretty solid reviews i think.

i'm working through The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by the VanderMeers. it has lots of translated stories that aren't well known, but unfortunately most of them aren't great. love the h.g. wells story at the start -- i need to read more of his short works.

The whole health care debacle has made me finish Robert Caro's Means of Ascent after having left it for about a year, and now I've just begun Master of the Senate.

Also, I'm reading Jay Leyda's Kino, on Soviet Cinema, and Maxim Gorky's Mother, because I'm going to write a bit about Mark Donskoy later, who made a lot of films related to Gorky.

I'm 180 pages into the Michael Lewis book and so far it reads like a high-quality, book-length People magazine article. The scientific content could be inscribed on a paper napkin.

The Big Book of SF is very uneven, and incl. some too familiar---trying to balance it for noobs and old hands---but though I'm the latter, there are many I'd never heard of---didn't know WEB DuBoise wrote fiction, much less SF--and his vision goes well with the excellent Wells catastrophic panorama. Some better translations later on.
Aimless, have you read Oakley Hall's Westerns?

W.E.B. Du Bois, that should be (respect).

Fleur Jaeggy: I am the Brother of XX -- depressing little stories
Svetlana Alexievich: Boys in Zinc -- depressing reportage of the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan

Is Boys in Zinc an old book? There's a spoonfed hybrid track of the same name and I'm curious which came first?

Originally published very late 1980s or early 1990s (as 'Zincy Boys'), and translated into English in 1993; this is a new translation from this year

rex warner: the aerodrome (crumbling wwii era penguin which is probably going to fall to pieces by the time i'm finished)

Reading a Francoise Sagan novel (Sunlight on Cold Water) which is pretty hilarious in its 60s Frenchness. Gilles is an unfeasibly handsome journalist who has an apartment on the Left Bank where he lives with his girlfriend Eloise, a model for a fashion house. But he's filled with an unnameable ennui, and he's lost interest in life and even in sex with his girlfriend. He gets some pills from his doctor then goes off to see a former girlfriend, who is much older at 48, but luckily is still "physically superb". Unfortunately she's just off to see her 19 year old toy boy so is not up for sex, but she says she'll "send Veronique round". Veronique is "superb looking and one of the most versatile women I know. That'll take your mind off things". But Gilles, still suffering from his anomie, doesn't feel like sex with Veronique so he goes off to a jazz club where he gets into a fight with a colleague. Later, he goes to the country, where he beds a married woman, also physically superb. But still filled with anomie etc etc, he can't get it up. All this and I'm only on page 44!

Liked The Aerodrome. it keeps slipping out of print and then being rediscovered. Current UK edition has a weird lenticular cover thing going on.

Slow summer, so far:

Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
Janet Malcolm - Reading Chekhov
Allen Ginsberg - Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems
Aime Cesaire - Return to my Native Land

Reading The Long Goodbye, which is even better than I was expecting, Roth's The Ghost Writer (as recommended on ILB), Tana French's Secret Place, and my usual summer treat to myself, a bunch of Star Trek novels - this year Peter David's New Frontier series.

I am glad to say the scientific content of The Undoing Project did pick up its pace in the latter part of the book, although as a long time observer of humans and their behavior, it is unclear to me why the work of these Nobel Laureates was deemed so startling. Their insights seem bland enough to me, but I guess what set them apart was their ability to design tests and gather data to substantiate what should have been fairly obvious to begin with.

I haven't read The Undoing Project, but if you're interested in more of the scientific content, you might like Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow. On one level I agree that it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that humans are frequently irrational, however, in this book he goes into more depth on specific, repeatable, testable ways that people are prone to errors of logic and estimation. I thought it was fairly interesting, though not necessarily mind-blowing.

re the aerodrome, beneath the allegory of a quasi-fascist/technocratic takeover found the plot (& prose) oddly old fashioned like it could have been lifted straight from a nineteenth century sensation novel of familial intrigue ala wilkie collins. also read his earlier novel the professor, again about an attempted fascist coup d'état this time in an unnamed central european country. not very successful mix of farce & earnest warning about the precarious state of liberal democracy.

now reading blackout in gretley, a breezy jb priestley espionage thriller set in a grim northern industrial town.

i read the aerodrome a few months ago too. otm that it felt extremely old-fashioned, weirdly committed to an extremely neat and squared-away family-drama structure that in the end reduced to soap opera. but i found myself recommending it (w tiresome caveats) to more or less everybody i talk to; i've already given away my (weird lenticular) copy. rare to see fascism's subpolitical emotional/sexual appeal so well captured without having to go to a fascist.

I finished A Lover's Discourse last night. I can plausibly claim to be still reading Moby-Dick and Alison Weir's The Wars of the Roses. Sometime soon I'm likely to open Dublin Murder Squad 3 and/or Neapolitan Novels 2

"rare to see fascism's subpolitical emotional/sexual appeal so well captured without having to go to a fascist"

what is a work by a fascist that does this? I want to read such a thing.

Marinetti's manifestos!

You could also probably detect a latent fascism in more canonical conservative and reactionary writers who were contemporaneous with different kinds of fascism and whose works' emotional/sexual resonance can be said to express its appeal.

Read and enjoyed Bartleby and Co. and bought a copy of The Savage Detectives which is glaring at me from one of my shelves, so hopefully I will get around to it soon. I do enjoy how allusive Bolano and Vila Matas are as they've definitely exposed me to lots of Latin American novelists and poets whose work I don't think I would have necessarily otherwise found.

In addition to these, I'm also still reading Brenner's The Economics of Global Turbulence and I also began Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, as well, which I posted about on its own thread.

(speaking of fascists) rereading wyndham lewis's the vulgar streak: not one of his better works of fiction but i do remember it had some interesting things to say about class & the construction of self.

that priestley thriller was quite good and i liked that it had an explicitly leftist slant to it (seem to recall he was quite popular in the soviet bloc?) also probably the only one of his novels to inspire a nuggets era garage track

Great track, no lime, I'm listening again now---"the universe is permeated with the odor of kerosene" is the best opening line I've found in a while, and the song lives up to it.
DH Lawrence was something of a pagan folk metal fascist, wasn't he? Wouldn't have approved of Mussolini making the trains run on time.

what is a work by a fascist that does this? I want to read such a thing.

I don't know if he was a fascist but Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers is often accused of glorifying fascism.

he was pretty much on the border where libertarians and fascists meet by the end

and incest . . . mongers

plus nipples going 'spung'

Three weeks of holidays in Japan gave me ample time to read
finished a few Eric ambler books, quite entertaining. Will def read some more if I happen upon them in the future.
Dave Hutchinson - Europe in autumn : picked it up based on someone recommending it here. Had a great time, was a bit surprised by the way it ends but am looking forward to read the rest. So thanks whoever it was that mentioned it here.
Don Winslow - the cartel : i really dislike the way it's written, but I kept reading anyways. Not very good tbh but it made me want to read a good non-fiction book about the war on drugs, Mexico the USA and cartels if anyone has a recommendation. My knowledge of all this is quite limited yet enough to recognize references in the novel to actual events and people and now I really want to read up in detail about this horrible situation.
Jerome K. Jerome - three men in a boat : read this quite quickly, was def good for a few laughs
Nakamura Fuminori - the thief : about a pickpocket in Tokyo. The fact I read it while in Tokyo made me enjoy it just a little bit more as I recognized the subway stations and places mentioned in here. The plot is not that great but I found the scenes where he described picking pockets quite thrilling.

I have raved about Dave Hutchinson, so I will take the credit

The Big Book of SF is very uneven, and incl. some too familiar---trying to balance it for noobs and old hands---but though I'm the latter, there are many I'd never heard of---didn't know WEB DuBoise wrote fiction, much less SF--and his vision goes well with the excellent Wells catastrophic panorama. Some better translations later on.
Aimless, have you read Oakley Hall's Westerns?

― dow, Wednesday, July 26, 2017 7:42 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

W.E.B. Du Bois, that should be (respect).

― dow, Wednesday, July 26, 2017 7:44 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm trying to think where the subject of Sci Fi by W.E.B. du Bois came up recently. Was it natalie Mitchell's interview in The Wire or something.
Don't think I'd heard about it before a couple of weeks ago.

but keep having the name Webby du Bois and his brother Shooby running through my head.

Think I have the Souls of Black Folk around somewhere still waiting to be read after at least a couple of years.

I just picked up a copy of Manahttan Transfer by JOhn Dos Passos yesterday and read the first chapter last night.

Susan Sontag On Photography is my bathroom book

& The No-Nonsense Guide to Fair Trade is currently my transport book but I think I'll finish it shortly. Then move on to Gunter Grasse's Tin Drum.

now reading blackout in gretley, a breezy jb priestley espionage thriller set in a grim northern industrial town.

― no lime tangier, Monday, July 31, 2017 8:52 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Does that relate at all to the Gonn track about not realising the protagonist is wearing sunglasses? Though I thought that Was Blackout OF Gretely

I missed the new thread!

Re-read House of Leaves, which I acknowledge is a mess, but even second time around it had a profound effect on me. It's the evocation of the uncanny, the limitless potential of the house (the book), the pathos of it. It seems to me to be a commentary on the limits of analysis and hermeneutics - of texts, of place, of the self - and also an exploration of depression and trauma. It's extraordinary and maddening. The Truant stuff annoyed me fist time, but I found it more affecting this time. Ach, I dunno.

Read my fist Maigret (...and the Killer) - will be reading more! Now reading Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, which is lovely. I thought I'd had my fill of the 'broken confessional finds solace in nature' narrative, but evidently not.

Oh, and I read Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Magnificent.

weirdly committed to an extremely neat and squared-away family-drama structure that in the end reduced to soap opera

For me this ruined an interesting book. An extremely old-fashioned world by itself wouldn't have. If memory serves the author implies in a forward that the traditional Englishness of the non-aerodrome world was a sort of parody, and he did lay it on pretty thick.

rare to see fascism's subpolitical emotional/sexual appeal so well captured without having to go to a fascist

Pinter's Party Time does that too.

About 1050 pages into Alan Moore's Jerusalem, took a while to get through the cod-Joyce section. Obviously it's tremendously self-indulgent and overwritten but in a (mainly) easygoing, enjoyable sort of way. The dead kids time-travel adventure story that makes up the middle section is a blast.

Also reread Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver last weekend when I was in a shitty mood and hadn't been able to concentrate on anything, read it straight through in a couple hours, still riveting despite my familiarity and the fact that there's only the bare bones of a plot.

The True Deceiver is an astonishing little book

Reading Lydie Salvayre: Cry, Mother Spain -- fictionalised version of her parents' lives during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Interesting and entertaining, but also structurally a bit messy, and not sure that the characters ever break the 2D barrier

I've heard that Virginia Cowles' Looking For Trouble incl. some of the very best journalism to come out of the Spanish Civil War---true?

I've heard very good things about it too, but have never read it, sadly.

crawling my way thru Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens, I think I have like 70 pages left. Came out last year, my dad gave it to me to see what I thought because it was pumped up as another "millennial spokesman" novel. It's like Franzen meets Tao Lin. Also lots of incredibly obvious DFW worship and riffs that are straight out of Infinite Jest. But he's a good prose stylist, very lyrical, lots of really cool turns of phrase. I look forward to reading whatever he puts out next.

― flappy bird, Wednesday, June 14, 2017 2:27 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im abt 1/3 of the way into this, liking it. the characters are v well realized, i can see it as a film i think

also recently finished o'neill's mourning becomes electra -- p great; not a ton of discussion of o'neill on ILB, i may start a dedicated thread~

I just returned from a camping trip, during which I read several books:

Three Tales, Flaubert. I liked A Simple Heart and The Legend of Julian Hospitator, but Herodias seemed much too overwrought, even if it makes a few shrewd observations.

The Public Image, Muriel Spark. This was located right in the center of Spark's strengths. It is not as praised as her other work and my only thought as to why would be that perhaps her audience was not interested in the subject of celebrity.

Human Voices, Penelope Fitzgerald. This is filled with affectionate humor and is clearly centered around memories concerning the wartime BBC that she felt warmly toward. It does not dive as deeply into human nature as The Bookshop or The Blue Flower, but it's very enjoyable.

Loved the atmosphere conjured up by Human Voices

The period called The Phony War, after Dunkirk and before the Battle of Britain, must have felt about as surreal as she depicts it.

I read The Drifter by Nick Petrie and it was EXCELLENT. Crime novel with Jack Reacher-esque antihero suffering from PTSD. I have the second one too and i'm looking forward to it. Even Lee Child is a fan.

Started The Mote In God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. a CLASSIC that i have never read. Famously, Heinlein said it was the finest SF novel he had ever read. i got the sequel that they wrote 20 years later as well.

I've loved every book by Fitzgerald except The Blue Flower, and even that one is pretty good.

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers, my first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery (the title is a campanology reference). Has a great foreword by the author: "From time to time complaints are made about the ringing of church bells. It seems strange that a generation which tolerates the uproar of the internal combustion engine and the wailing of the jazz band should be so sensitive to the one loud noise that is made to the glory of God."

I've been reading in Seven Viking Romances, a Penguin anthology of old Icelandic lit that clearly has a fantasy-romance element. A Viking romance is nothing like a Harlequin romance. Women play very peripheral roles, while swords and death play a very central role.

Baba Dunja’s Last Love
Lincoln in the Bardo
Krazy: A Life in Black and White
The Sympathizer

Francois Sagan: Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile. The critical verdict on these seems to stretch from 'works of precocious genius' to 'juvenilia of a writer of significant but unfulfilled promise'. There's plenty of evidence to support both views. I ended up on the fence but the books were short, enjoyable and easy to read.

Elizabeth Jane Howard: The Long View. Early Howard, quite different from the Cazalet novels, the only other books of hers I've read. Her strengths remain pretty constant while the weaknesses change: The Cazalet books sometimes rely on popular fiction tropes to fill the gaps in inspiration; the less inspired bits in The Long View aim at something more self-consciously literary and not all of it comes off. But she's a brilliant psychologist and overall I thought this was pretty magnificent. I've just started The Sea Change, another early one.

Ben Ratliff: The Jazz Ear. Discussions with jazz greats while listening to their choice of music. You'd have to have an interest in jazz to care about it of course but I thought it was pretty great. Lots of unexpected insights. Ratliff's idea that playing some recordings will get musicians to open up works really well.

the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and other writings on media benjamin

I'm reading Paul McGrath's autobio

Holiday reading:

Moriarty, Kim Newman. Revisionist take on Holmes from the baddie's pov but also League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen-like mash-up of all sorts of 19th century genre and literary fiction characters, mostly handled quite reverentially. Lots of silly winks in the chapter titles ("The Hound Of The D'Ubervilles"). I can imagine some people really hating this but I found it clever and funny.
An aborted stab at Léo Henry, Le Diable Est Au Piano", about Corto Maltese meeting Blaise Cendrars in Brazil. Couldn't get with it - maybe 2edgy4me and possibly somewhat racially suspect in its glee for the squalor of the favela, but it's just as likely my beach-addled head wasn't in for something quite this demanding and not in my native tongue, so I went for...
O Espelho Que Foge, Giovanni Papini. Originally picked this up as part of a beautiful Portuguese re-edition of Borge's Library Of Babel project (it has an intro by the man); short stories by a 19th century Italian decadentist, highly influenced by Poe and itself anticipating magical realism and Weird fiction in many ways. Got a bit samey reading one story after the other on a flight, but I do highly recommend this guy - melancholic, poetic, world weary in a way that's evocative of half-abandoned villages in the middle of Summer. Quite spooky, too.

Now I'm reading At The Existencialist Cafe, Sarah Bakewell. She does an extremley good job making some of the more difficult philosophers accessible - which immediatley makes me suspicious, both out of fear that she's being reductionist/dumbing stuff down and (perhaps sadly moreso) because of Tall Poppy Syndrome making me feel that what I SHOULD do is struggle with the original texts and learn to understand them instead. But what the hell, the chances that I'll ever decide to tackle Heidegger are pretty slim at this point and it's dumb to be angry at someone for giving me knowledge.

Oh, also Julian Barnes - The Sense Of An Ending, which started out strong but had a crazy melodramatic conclusion that made it difficult for me to take it seriously.

The film is quite good, btw.

Finished Chehkov's Letters and a collection of Olav Hauge's poetry.

I haven't updated this lately, have I? Good things I've read off the top of my proverbial include a couple of Par Lagerqvists ("Herod and Mariamne" and "Barrabas"), "White Tears" by Hari Kunzru, "All My Puny Sorrows" by Miriam Toews and Damon Krukowski's "The New Analog" about what's changed in moving to a digital world, especially in respect of music and communication. I read "Attrib." by Eley Williams again and I will never stop recommending it.

Art and Illusion, by E. H. Gombrich, from 1960. It looks at visual depiction and the history of artistic styles via early cognitive science. It's very fun.

I've been reading Hugo Ball's diaries, Flight Out of Time, which I had only really known through excerpts in Lipstick Traces and the like; the sections dealing with Zurich Dada and with Emmy Hennings are fascinating, but I wasn't really prepared for how brief they are in relation to Ball's musings on German identity and the harmful consequences of the Protestant Reformation. I also recently read Taylor Mac's anarchic satire Hir: I think it's flatter on the page than it's likely to be in performance, but I can appreciate how it both hollows out and repurposes the tropes of the collapsing nuclear family drama, and how determinedly it resists resolving any of its tensions. I'm also starting Samuel Delany's collection of novellas, Atlantis: Three Tales: its prose is unsurprisingly richly textured so far, but I'm not really far enough into it to comment otherwise.

*(supposedly harmful, obvi)

Chekhov's letters are very entertaining

I read a good review of the slate of recent Henry Green re-prints that have recently come out through NYRB publishing which sparked my interest. I recall there being some messages on the Spring thread about him/them. If anyone has a recommendation on which is a good starting point (he was prolific), I'd be happy to hear!

My wife is reading Delaney's Dhalgren (and also picked up The Jewels of Aptor the other day). Although I've never been as into scifi, he seems super fascinating and someone I'd very much like to read.

Also, re: Damon K - he recently started a podcast, Ways of Hearing, which is very related (I'm guessing he adapted passages from the book for it?) and has been very enjoyable!
https://www.radiotopia.fm/podcasts/showcase

re: Henry Green - Party Going is the starting point imo

re: Chehkov - those are lovely and build an interesting picture. Its well worth reading them alongside Janet Malcolm's book on him as they contain thoughtful (as always) commentary. There are strong moral positions - the case for a principled literature (Zola defending Dreyfus, Tolstoy) that provides a kind of guiding light. The letter to his elder brother on what it is to be cultured (after seeing his behaviour) is also terrific and sets the tone. On a lesser note women are there to look good, there are a few times where he remarks that there are no beautiful women to look at and that's kind of it. I think sometimes he wrote more passionately about Tolstoy than to his wife (although that - as Janet Malcolm and the commentary notes show - its perhaps a marriage that should not have been).

Oops, meant to write *spate not slate up there. I see Penguin published an omnibus ed with Loving/Living/Party Going, which I'll try and keep an eye out for (thanks for the Party Going rec - looking it up, I came across this ed.).

Still trying to squeeze in a few more shorter books before re-reading Swann's Way and having a go at the rest of A la Recherche. I'm hoping to read Watt by Beckett, Love's Work by Gillian Rose, and perhaps one of these Green ones.

W/ Henry Green you shld start by Concluding

ketchup on list from previous thread:

• very close now to finishing nicola barker's DARKMANS (in my defence it is quite long)
• found the misplaced copy i did after all have of THE IPCRESS FILE (i now have two, and had not misremembered that i owned only, only that i had started reading it) -- will write up a note or two on the four deightons i read when i have a moment -- ditto the barker when i eventually get there
• finished THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE and recommend it, squirmy moment and all: tho i felt it was under-edited (several anecdotes seemed to appear in fragmentary form more than once, in a way that didn't strike me as stylistic) and now and then he reached for a word or an idea i wished he'd been persuaded to drop -- but the basic idea is good and the all-round tale fascinating (i shd add that i embarked on it assuming it was fiction and it took me more pages than it probably should have done to realise that it isn't)
• started and finished eric ambler's THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS (which i thought i'd read before but certainly hadn't)

THE SOT-WEED FACTOR (the original poem) is a weird mix of fascinating (for its uncalculating portrait of pre-revolutionary america) and terrible (as poetry) (the rhyme scheme is like being slapped with a fish)

re: Henry Green - Party Going is the starting point imo

Not my favourite.

*reads further down*

W/ Henry Green you shld start by Concluding

This is my favourite

I just read a book about the Paris Commune called "Massacre" which depressed me so thoroughly I decided to read Strindberg to lift my spirits but haven't even finished the introduction yet, it's longer than some novels.

I don't think I have read Concluding (one of 2/3 I haven't) so will give that one a go too.

All the Green theefers I know or know of are on this page---wherever you dive in, if you like him at all, you're likely to get hooked: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nothing-Doting-Blindness-Vintage-Classics/dp/0099481480/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1/257-1520979-5155141?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=HJ31ZK7JCJ8BZ2RBK0AS

"threefers", I meant.

my Elena Ferrante Summer concluded, just finished the Neapolitan Quartet. two quotes from The Story of The Lost Child

In what disorder we lived, how many fragments were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.

I realized in a flash that memory was already literature...my book...really was bad, and this was because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn't been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.

Inhaled Dawn Powell's Angels on Toast, next up her Turn, Magic Wheel. currently reading John Williams' Stoner and enduring my son's smirking jokes abt the title

adding to my list above

Cosey Fanni Tutti's ART SEX MAGIC: not very far in, but so far GPO is way more of an arsehole than you maybe imagined (or at least than *i* imagined, having met him a handful of times, when he was charm itself -- i always tended to think he was more sinned against than sinning; now i am a LOT less certain)
Michael Ende's JIM BUTTON AND LUKE THE ENGINE DRIVER -- children's classic from the late 50s (translated from german, where i believe ende is p well known?); rereading to see how it stands up… it's a sweetnatured attempt at a kind of multicultural fable, jim is a black orphan (who i think in later stories goes looking for his parents); he and luke travel to china to help rescue the emperor's daughter from dragons; the china in question is um let's say an ahistorical and fantastical orientalist invention (transparent trees made of glass, food a wild absurdist caricature, ditto its folkways). it's kinda racist, in fact, though there's no malice in it whatever (the general tenor is that people are nice everywhere and shd get along, even if they're from very different backgrounds). easily the best scene is a hermit who lives alone in the desert bcz -- unlike the rest of us, who look smaller the further away they're viewed from, he looks bigger, so is always encountered as a vast giant

Cosey Fanni Tutti's ART SEX MAGIC: not very far in, but so far GPO is way more of an arsehole than you maybe imagined (or at least than *i* imagined, having met him a handful of times, when he was charm itself -- i always tended to think he was more sinned against than sinning; now i am a LOT less certain)

I talked about it here, Cosey Fanni Tutti: Classic or Dud?

(translated from german, where i believe ende is p well known?)

Yeah, remember enjoying these stories as a very small child, despite my parent's aversion to them, which was indeed based on their racial politics (though I'd imagine as much about the book covers, where Jim Knopf had some distinctly gollywog-like features).

jim is handled perfectly acceptably in the illustrations in the edition i have, but the various chinese characters tend to the cartoonish and hence often the problematic

the illustrator, maurice s. dodd, is better known for his strip the perishers

https://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/britishcomics/images/4/44/Perishers1.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120212112641

haha oh well

Didn't know Dodd had done illustration work outside of The Perishers. He was chiefly the writer on The Perishers, and only took over the artwork too when the (much, much better) artist Dennis Collins retired.

Yeah, in the classic German edition I had the art was....not great. https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9783551313065-us-300.jpg

There's been modernized editions with new art though. Researching this I also found out the original book uses the German n word, once, though apparently not with malicious intent (frankly Germany was pretty late in getting rid of it in the public sphere, there was still a popular kind of dessert with the name around when I was a kid).

re dodd: there doesn't seem to be much outside the perishers! the only other books i can find he worked on are jim phelan's waggon-wheels and tony elphick's billykin's first voyage

(neither of which i'd heard of till i started googling)

> there was still a popular kind of dessert

what did this entail?

(that said, we had (have?) golliwogs on our jam for ever)

Kinda similar to tea cakes, but people called them "n word kisses". :/

These days I think they just go by the name of the company that makes them, which gloriously enough is called Dickmann's. You can spend a good time on YouTube giggling at the commercials, I know I did:

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

U.R. Anantha Murthy - Samskara

Really good but finding everything slow-going. You can see why the BJP celebrated his deat. He has no respect with the theocracy they are trying to implement. Although it seems to be working as a book I think it has the makings of a terrific film too (and a film of this was made in the 70s, which I'll try and source)

I finished Seven Viking Romances. There was some small overlap with the more fantastical Arthurian romances, in that a dwarf might appear from time to time or the occasional magic castle, but there is no denying that a Viking's idea of a romantic tale is mainly built around swords hacking at human limbs, ships, plundering, and heavy drinking.

I'm now 2/3rds of the way through Concluding by Henry Green. It has rather a unique flavor to it that is hard to describe briefly. At times it puts me in mind of Cold Comfort Farm, but where CCF is broad and hammers away cheerfully at its targets, Green confines himself to the merest glances and gestures at his characters' absurdity. Everything and everyone is very English, and their mild absurdity contains a lurking tragic note that you can't wholly ignore. I can't offhand think of another book like it.

You're in for a treat if you've never read Green. Most of his major novels have been republished in sparkling NYROB editions.

I recently read a biography of Evelyn Waugh, who was a friend of Green, and I learned that like Waugh, he was a raging Tory. It's funny how quite a few of the modernist-leaning writers of the age were on the Right.

Still reading the tome-like "Transformation of the World" by Osterhammel. Thought-provoking and informative, though it does contain a lot of sentences like: "Here two things must be distinguished." (actual sentence)

The only other Green I've read was his very first novel, Blindness about a year ago. A bit odd that my next one is his very last novel, but that is how it fell out. There are ample clues to his Tory leanings sprinkled through Concluding, where mentions of The State are invariably biting or bitter.

I recently read a biography of Evelyn Waugh, who was a friend of Green, and I learned that like Waugh, he was a raging Tory. It's funny how quite a few of the modernist-leaning writers of the age were on the Right.

― Zelda Zonk, Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Amis too. All my favorite terse British novelists (I've no idea about Scottish-born Spark).

I recently read a biography of Evelyn Waugh, who was a friend of Green, and I learned that like Waugh, he was a raging Tory. It's funny how quite a few of the modernist-leaning writers of the age were on the Right.

No great surprise that Green was a Tory if you read his post war books, "Concluding", "Nothing", "Doting". There's a generation gap thing going on where the younger people (including women!) are often working for state institutions while middle aged men are slogging away in the City to pay socialist state taxes, school fees etc.

Also, while I'm here, "Caught" is amazing too, especially the bit where the leading character goes to the toy shop with his son.

Green was an Etonian contemporary of Anthony Powell's, another 'raging Tory' (not so sure you cld describe the author of a twelve volume sequence as 'terse', tho.) But Unlike Powell, Green has great imaginative sympathy for his working class characters (I'm guessing partly because, as a factory owner, he actually had frequent contact with non-posh ppl, and paid closer attention to the way those outside of his own class spoke and behaved.)

Before the holidays (yeech, nearly gone!) we were having various discussions at school about 'right-leaning' literature, and what we could possibly teach to counter claims of stuff like An Inspector Calls being lefty propaganda. I'd thought of Waugh (not that you'd particularly want to teach him?) but not considered that clutch of inter and post-war writers as having a commonality about them. I wondered about some post-war Sci-Fi writers, but it feels like we missed something obvious. Any ideas?

I finished Concluding. It was first rate, but despite the title, curiously inconclusive. I am now reading A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by de la Casas.

Got about 100 pages to go to finish the first volume of Miklós Bánffy's Transylvania Trilogy(They Were Counted in the English edition; Writing In Flames according to the German edition I'm reading); it's a great big fin de siécle epic, with lots of descriptions of long banquets, balls, gambling and a looming dread as WWI approaches. Really lovely, melancholy stuff. Tiyl: Proust, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Tomasi di Lampedusa.

^^^ great ,lovely book

At the other end of the scale, am thoroughly loving new Tove Jansson translation: Letters from Klara

In the midst of Tana French, "Faithful Place" (Dublin Murder Squad #3), I love these so much

Oooh new Jansson!

James, did you read the entire trilogy?

I'm digging this so far

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51evtck75zL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

p sure I've seen twitter backlash against that book from someone or other

p sure I've read people saying it was too short and too rushed on this board somewhere

definitely remember a review saying she was far too uncritical about the right's take on gamergate, sjws, etc.

Gunter Grasse The Tin Drum
story of little Oskar and his toy Tin drum. Oskar refused to grow in size above the age of 3 and likes to shatter glass with ihis voice.
He relates teh story many years later from an insane asylum.
Been meaning to read thsi for years, started iit in '85 then lost the copy of it I had tehn. Found it in a charity shop a couple of months back and am now finally getting to read it.
d/lded the film too

Jeanette Leech Fearless.
Story of post-rock that I find interesting but keep finding doesn't agree with background i knew about at the time or leaves great big bits out.
I don't think she's ever going to be on eof my favourite writers but I think I'll keep going with this.
Might also mean I pick up a few recordings that I've had on the back burner for years.

definitely remember a review saying she was far too uncritical about the right's take on gamergate, sjws, etc.

― angelo irishagreementi (ledge), Monday, 28 August 2017 18:06 (yesterday) Permalink

One of the more least surprising criticisms tbf

finally finished nicola barker's darkmans -- and i think my first reaction is, "i have to read this again before i can write properly about it"

i found it very engaging: a brief passage in the unremarkable lives of fairly weird people (or vice versa) except for one quasi-supernatural event, which maybe isn't supernatural (tho if it isn't i don't really know what it is). barker's characters are all very vivid, and i liked the slightly mazy sense of "nothing actually ever happens here" interspersed w/a fvckton of driving around that is actual life in the country (it's set a little distance inland from winchelsea)

i've read a couple of hers before -- wide open and one of the very early collections -- but besides remembering i quite liked them (and a cut-in-half wasp in the opening scenes of wide open) i don;t really remember anything about them“ so i think i might go on a binge before i reread this (quite long) book

I finished the de Las Casas. It was unavoidably repetitive, given the subject matter, but it was brutal in its descriptions and he could not find terms strong enough to denounce the atrocities, although he used the strongest ones he knew, consigning the conquistadores and the provincial governors to eternal hellfire dozens of times over. No genocide of the twentieth century surpasses the genocide he describes, even though he inflates his numbers by about an order of magnitude.

After such a heavy dose of Vikings and conquistadores, I think I'll try for something a bit more sedate for my next book.

Anybody read this book? Looks promising, and "the spoof of Eliot in his most vatic mode" is a hoot:
http://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2017/07/at-club-of-bad-books-dylan-thomas-john.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Wormwoodiana+%28Wormwoodiana%29

Oooh new Jansson!

James, did you read the entire trilogy?

Yes, though it was a while ago: I'd like to reread them soon, I think. It stays very good throughout.

Am now reading Lydia Chukovskaya's 'Sofia Petrovna', slim novel written during Stalin's 1937 Purges about a naive woman whose loyal Communist Party son gets caught up in the mass trials and exiled

Finished The Bell by Iris Murdoch (surprisingly 'modern' treatment of homosexuality; at its best when edging into the gothic, tho' I was surprised at how frequently the novel flirts with farce; Murdoch, like Thomas Hardy, not afraid of grand and improbable narrative coincidence).

Now reading The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene.

Power & The Glory is my shit; as always with Greene, his faith is not solace, it is a further complication. At one point

(SPOILER)

...the main character is in jail and discovers the one person he can feel the least sympathy for is the only other Christian in the room.

^^^^^^

Finished The Bell by Iris Murdoch (surprisingly 'modern' treatment of homosexuality; at its best when edging into the gothic, tho' I was surprised at how frequently the novel flirts with farce; Murdoch, like Thomas Hardy, not afraid of grand and improbable narrative coincidence).

I'm fond of The Good Apprentice and Bruno's Dream but otherwise stare at those dusty hardcovers in their library wondering if anyone cares about her anymroe.

Yes, as I sat with The Bell on my journey into work, I wondered if I was the only person reading it in Britain at that particular moment (my paperback edition was a tie-in with a BBC TV adaptation, which also felt like a signifier of a vanished world). I guess she will survive as someone with a sad and interesting 'back story' who was once played by Kate Winslet; the social relations in her novel (lol the middle classes), and the way that philosophical questions are posed and ruminated on, already seem very dated, tho' for historians of a very narrow sliver of British society in the 20th century she will undoubtedly remain a useful resource.

I stayed in a Oxfordshire B&B with a copy of The Bell last week. The first few pages were a lot of fun - I've never read any Murdoch but I never imagined her as "fun". I was tempted to read the rest but had a feeling like "Muriel Spark does this, but with a much shorter pagecount". That's probably unfair.

It felt like a very weary book for a 39-year-old to have written, though

lol otm

Spark = certainty
Murdoch = doubt

(In truth, they don't really have a lot in common but I can see why the opening pages of The Bell might lead you to think that they do. And yes, Iris could usefully have learnt from Muriel's concision - but then, what author couldn't?)

Murdoch popped up a lot in At The Existentialist Café as the person who brought the philosophy to the UK.

Though I guess those guys are all heading towards "not read anymore" territory too.

There is an obtrusive moral (as well as a vividly mad collie dog): we are but shadows, and our desires for particularised individuals are both illusory and predatory. In a sentence that might be labelled in the margin with ‘WAKE UP AND LISTEN’, Charles asks the rhetorical question ‘Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear?’ The answer to that question for Murdoch was a resounding ‘no’. The reason for that answer does not lie in the nature of human beings or of the universe. It lies in her strange mixture of beliefs. She combined an implausibly unconstrained conception of human freedom ultimately drawn from Sartre with an implausibly depersonalising view of love drawn from Plato. Fusing those two things with the conventions of the realist novel was a profoundly interesting thing to have done, and for having attempted that fusion she certainly will always be thought to deserve a major part in the history of 20th-century fiction in Britain. But it made for plots in which people try to be free and find they are trapped in master-slave relationships, and in which being in love means being cruelly disloyal to more or less any particular person. Behind that recurrent dynamic in her fiction is a deep kind of sadness: she never quite recognised that it might be possible and even pleasurable just messily to get on with loving one person.

Q: what if she hadn't had John Bayley there at the end?

just started

Lee Server "Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care"
Lavie Tidhar, "Central Station"

That Mitchum bio is fucking great, a mindblowing anecdote every other page. It made me buy some more stuff by the author, he has an Asian Pop Cinema primer that's really interesting.

10 pages in and yeah, does not disappoint!

There's an epic (not just long, but more eventful than many movies and novels) feature re Mitchum in Splendor In The Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader, a collection of journalism, fiction, poetry etc. I mentioned at some length on a previous What Are You Reading: this is from the set of The Friends of Eddie Coyle (and the office of Friends author-prosecutor George V. Higgins), Mitchum holding forth as expected, but also motormouth virtuosity from Peter Boyle, and the trusting lucidity of Mitchum's daughter Trina, then twenty, and making as much sense of her family life as she can, for the moment.

Machado De Assis, said to be forerunner of Borges, Marquez etc, also “funny as hell", says Harold Bloom---not the blurbmeister I expect such a line from---this might a be a good place to start, but I noticed one Verified Purchase complaint about perplexing typos (also want to check others in Oxford’s Library of South America):
https://www.amazon.com/Posthumous-Memoirs-Cubas-Library-America/dp/0195101707/ref=pd_sim_14_4?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=A6DSE6Q2N4FRKR86WW4J

Any other suggestions? Would rather not start with the one about the Unreliable Narrator who's freaked out about being cuckolded, given the amount of time I recently spent with Proust's narrator.

I'm reading A Severed Head, thanks to Ward.

Zama, by Antonio Di Benedetto, v much my shit:

A dead moneky, still whole, still undecomposed, drifted back and forth with a certain precision upon those ripples and eddies without exit. All his life at forest's edge had beckoned him to a journey, a journey he did not take until he was no longer a monkey but only a monkey's corpse. The water that bore him up tried to bear him away, but he was caught among the posts of the decreipt wharf and there he was, ready to go and not going. And there we were.

Ready to go and not going.

I'm reading A Severed Head, thanks to Ward.

I hope it's one of the good ones, Alfred! In his entertainingly gossipy book about Murdoch, A N Wilson suggests that she wrote a good one then a bad one, a good one, a bad one etc etc. I haven't delved sufficiently deeply into the IM oeuvre to judge the accuracy of this, but if The Bell is one of the good ones then A Severed Head wld be one of the bad ones. The opening precis in the wiki summary def reads like a parody:

Primary themes include marriage, adultery, and incest within a group of civilised and educated people. Set in and around London, it depicts a power struggle between grown-up middle-class people who are lucky to be free of real problems.

Any other suggestions? Would rather not start with the one about the Unreliable Narrator who's freaked out about being cuckolded, given the amount of time I recently spent with Proust's narrator.

I read the one you linked, remember enjoying it, though the "Brazilian Tristram Shandy" pitch I had gotten oversold it. People really like Dom Casmurro, but I'm guessing that's the cukold one you mention.

lol, i was once describing an intricate situation in my social circle to my mum, and she said it sounded like a iris murdoch novel

a severed head was the only iris murdoch novel in the house

I picked up Edith Wharton's Custom of the Country. It boldly and directly addresses issues of a woman's place in society that others were too timid to face in 1913. But I am not yet sure that this fact will be sufficient to keep my interest in 2017.

Was mildly curious about Murdoch's Letters published a couple of years ago, which that summary on wiki reminded me of. xps

I picked up Edith Wharton's Custom of the Country. It boldly and directly addresses issues of a woman's place in society that others were too timid to face in 1913. But I am not yet sure that this fact will be sufficient to keep my interest in 2017.

― A is for (Aimless),

It's hilarious. She wrote her breeziest, most devastating prose to date for it.

Actually, Aimless, that description more accurately describes The Reef or The House of Mirth than TCOTC, which centers on the hotel culture populated by rapacious American nouveau riche.

Her heroine, so far, seems like a distant forerunner to the Kardashians.

yep!

fuck i gotta hurry up and read a book

the hotel culture populated by rapacious American nouveau riche. Reminds me that somewhere I've got The Buccaneers, which revolves around five wealthy and ambitious American girls, their guardians and the titled, landed but impoverished Englishmen who marry them as the girls participate in the London Season. Thanks, Wiki! I haven't read it, but this also says it was unfinished at her death, endings tacked on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Buccaneers Seems like it might be good enough anyway, since most things don't end well.

I've recently read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time which is extraordinary and should be on school curricula, and Rosamond Lehmann's Invitation to the Waltz, which I loved, loved. Dumb prejudice has kept from so much brilliant literature, that I don't why I'm still surprised when things defy my expectations. This was minor in all the right ways, and rapturous at the same time - particularly Olivia Curtis's perception of the natural world. Can't wait to read more.

Funnily enough I'm reading "The Weather In The Streets", the next Olivia Curtis novel, just now. I haven't read ITTW, and I'm both enjoying TWITS and finding it rather slow going (this latter more to do with me than the book I suspect).

https://drawrite.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/01.jpg

You read my mind.

Rosamond Lehmann's novels that don't involve psychic nonsense are great

Though I always have incredible trouble remembering which one was called what

read the news about the closure of the Buenos Aires Herald which led me to pick up Andrew Graham-Yooll's A State of Fear: Memories of Argentina's Nightmare. It's a series of extended anecdotes, effectively, covering the experiences of a journalist in the ten-year period between 1973 and 1983 from guerrilla violence, the return of Perón,, junta, los desaparecidos (the disappeared), exile and return, and is very good. He's a good writer in the journalistic style for a start, but it's also his depiction of where political violence sits in society, how it infects it and the mirroring of state and revolutionary violence that gives the books chapters a cumulative power.

It contains disgusting ironies for those who have accustomed themselves to the British national media:

.. the government was ridiculed in every headline, the bravado of the press an undignified retaliation for its toadying to a Perónism capable of instilling fear in the newsrooms just weeks before. There was an unabashed crowing at every stumble of a preposterous administration.

The disgusting irony being that yes, this is v reminiscent of the jackal mentality of the UK press, but of course that 'toadying' had been instilled by a fear as a journalist or editor of bombs in your desk, imprisonment serious death threats and warnings from the military and police, let alone running the other risk of being seen to favour the government by revolutionary groups. The toadying of our press is of course born of no such fear, but greed for proximity to power and laziness.

The best piece is The Hangover, which frames experiences of the extreme pre-junta violence (1100 dead from political violence in 1975, 60 in January 1976) with a heavy evening of beach-side drinking with his revolutionary friend Diego Muñíz Barreto:

He winced slightly as he passed on the description of the youth dropping, hit by the bullet. 'I've seen it before; people just drop or fall back in a small pile, like a shirt or a pair of trousers. There is no more convincing sign of death or serious damage than that drop. Death is not an athletic pirouette as in the cinema.'

On the return of Perón:

That was the day when everybody one had ever known seemed to have gone to the Ezeiza airport; old schoolfriends met there, carrying a pistol in each pocket, their own memory of their real name confused by the use of so many aliases. That was the day when some people went to watch, some to commit murder; a few men went to commit adultery; provincial aunts arrived on the free train service - special for that day - to look for lost nieces; and hundreds of citizens of all ages went in the belief that this was the day when all their problems would be solved.

That's a great piece of writing, I think.

on how violence infests and infects society:

During Mrs Perón's government, her secretary made kidnapping fashionable. it had previously been a reprehensible part of guerrilla fund-raising - which by the end of 1973 had totalled 170 million people abducted and released, in exchange for a ransom of 43 million US dollars. The police found kidnapping to be an effective form of retaliation. The secretary [described elsewhere as a 'man ridden with a fear of dying, an impotent diabetic, devoted to parapsychology'] set an example, using his own ministry as headquarters for a private army into which retired and active police officers were recruited ...

The fashion went all the way down the social line. In Munro, a working-class suburb, a woman with a babe in arms had the child snatched from her as she entered a grocery. Until she emptied her purse of her scant shopping money on the pavement, the infant was not returned.

Buenos Aires became a city roamed by unmarked cars, usually Ford Falcons, supplied on a fleet order to the police, but preferred by all for reliability at high speed and relatively low running cost...

Inside these cars sat men in dark glass and half open shirts, holding machine guns, wearing half a dozen chains around their necks, with St Christophers, crucifixes and Virgin Marys. They would sometimes travel home on the same train as I, or on the bus to the islands, late at night.. If there was a hint of recognition, their reaction was always the same; a glance over their dark glasses, a wink and a shake of the head was an order that greetings were not possible because recognition did not exist, and neither did casual acquaintance.

Who were these men? How did they wake up? With whom? Did they love? How? There did not have to be anything logical about them; there was no need to explain them; but it would be interesting just to know the full story of twenty-four hours of their lives.

The last quarter of the third bottle of wine was emptied into the tuco pan. Diego decided to put the tallarines on to cook and give his children supper.

So, yes, really good book. And for followers of the Is the Guardian worse than it used to be? thread:

I went to work at The Guardian, where liberals are conservatives who counsel readers to vote Labour

Am currently reading the autobiography of Michael Powell (of Powell and Pressburger), excitingly titled A Life in Movies. He's got a vivid sense of place- a good early section describes hopping time at his father's hop farm in Kent. The writing is both slightly stagey, and chatty and informal, and generally full of good cheer, a mix recognisable from his films, though it can be a little erratic in tone, slightly elderly in places. There's a recognisable 'Powell tone' (though of course Pressburger was really the writer) in bits like this:

The next day we had only a twenty-mile ride to Bournemouth from "The Sign of the Trusty Servant". He's a bit rare now but the sign is still there. He has deer's feet to run fast with messages, and a pig's head, because a pig will eat anything, and a padlock on his snout, because he can keep his mouth shut; and - I don't remember the rest but take the day off!

I can almost hear it as a line of dialogue or an opening narrative monologue to one of their films. But there's also the slightly brexity mix of good cheer and sentimental feudalism - i think we talked a bit about that on the P&P thread wrt A Canterbury Tale. It's not quite right as an observation - certainly the brexity thing is unfair, he loved France as a second home - but a love of age, and of childhood, of striking landscapes, and of vivacious, strong-headed women and sexual relations with them gives an odd, certainly not unpleasing but also slightly uneasy tone to some of his films, especially his early ones.

as i'm nearing the end of old goriot i started the ballad of peckham rye

xpost Hadn't heard of that one, will have to check it out. Reminds me, have you read Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number? I haven't, but it was well-received in the US, except by junta fans like Buckley and Buchanan and Jesse Helms and maybe Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who made the Reagan Administration distinction between Authoritarian and Totalitarian.

i haven't read it, dow. but seeing you post does remind me i owe you a post on la vida es sueño! (haven't really been around ilb much recently, but have generally been reading a *lot* more, so lurking in the corner a bit more).

Spook: Science Tackles The Afterlife, Mary Roach. Got this ages ago as a perk of donating to a podcast network, thought I should give it a shot.

So James Atlas has a new book about being a biographer. Does this mean his excellent Delmore Schwartz bio will come back into print?

Of course the book seems like it might be largely about writing the Delmore Schwartz bio, with the Saul Bellow bio of course getting into the act as well.

Okay, having read a few pages, this thing is right in my wheelhouse.

Apparently Richard Ellmann was his mentor, so this book has something for everybody, well everybody on ILB, well teh pinefox, at least.

Just finished chandler's the long goodbye - it's no surprise but what a beautiful book.

read william gerhardie's futility which is an exquisite little novel: look forward to checking out his later work

now reading lady into fox by david garnett (bloomsbury hanger-on & recipient of admonishing letters from dh lawrence)

gerhardie's DOOM is fun

Elizabeth Taylor's A View of the Harbour. This is despairing, funny and exquisitely observed. Turns out paranoia and smalltown rage are just what the doctor ordered for an end of summer fit of the vapours. Who knew.

Finished Greene's The Power and the Glory. For some reason, I had it in my mind that this was a much more whimsical, almost comic novel with a lovable rogue as the central character - so the novel's bleakness and pessimism, the savagery of its observations, took me wholly by surprise - he's definitely from the 'tough love' school of Catholicism! Less surprising - the beautifully economical way that Greene conjures atmosphere, a sense of place, a feeling of foreboding, hellhounds on the trail.

Now reading: Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood

I read Jane Eyre and loved it, every shocking twist and dumb coincidence.

Just finished "Inferno" and "Alone" by Strindberg. Really liked the latter, the former is completely insane.

doris lessing: briefing for a descent into hell

Now reading The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark, which is about beautiful people who aren't wearing clothes. Damn fascinating subject.

I found this, on a similar-ish theme, pretty interesting too:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1858940842.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Well its been one and half memoirs from me, depending on how you see Enrique Vilas-Matas account -- translated as Any Way in Paris -- of his attempts to become a writer in 70s Paris by following on Hemingway's footsteps (zzz) and by also renting a room from Margerite Duras (no ordinary landlady) (v good, tick). I've begun to read Simone De Beauvoir's Force of Circumstance (one of the four vols of her properly dictated to the reader memoirs) and the new translation of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet which is something far stranger than any of this.

Intriguing re FP and new translation in recent New Yorker.

Simone de Beauvoir invented the Blade Runner speech:

"I think with sadness of all the books I've read, all the places I've seen, all the knowledge I've amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn't much she didn't see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness - the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahia, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I've talked about, others I have left unspoken - there is no place where it will all live again."

the ballad of peckham rye

Finally finished TWITS, and I think the first two thirds are very good and the final third is amazing. So there.

Now I'm reading "Left and Right" by Joseph Roth, and "Darker With The Lights On" by David Hayden, this latter a brand-new (debut) short story collection by someone who is pleasingly happy to talk about being a modernist writer, hooray.

Yeah dow iirc that piece is all we have more of it but the early stuff is not as good.

Good de Beauvoir quote. Her novels didn't leave a mark with me; this is a lot better so far.

I really like that Roth bk xp

xpost I just bought that David Hayden - haven't taken the wrapping off it yet. Look forward to it. Reading a few story collections at the moment, You Are Having A Good time by Amie Barrodale, pretty good, sort of like darker post-internet Cheever.

I've also been started Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett, not sure what I feel about this, Room Little Darker by June Caldwell which I really like in places despite a growing irritation with some of the cliches of modern Irish short story writing, eg twee alliteration, made-up words to fit twee alliteration, etc. Starts to feel a bit forced/performative, especially when you read British reviews delighting in the use of language etc written by people who prob think the falsified language is real or authentic.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (a few pleasing and unexpected similarities with the (superb) Caroline Blackwood book I read just before this)

I had high expectations of WHALITC but found the middle stretch pretty hardgoing for such a short book. Begins and ends well, though.

What did you think of Peckham Rye, Mark?

Don't remember a middle slump but then I did read WHALITC in one go on a plane.

Peckham Rye I remember as being really good, too.

re packham rye: still only 3/4 chapters in currently, chuck

peckham

The Wry Ballad of Chris Packham: would not read.

I wanted to go for a moonlight walk around Peckham Rye Common after reading Ballad, even though my own experience of Peckham told me this might not be the wisest thing to do. Amongst many other things, M. Spark = a great London writer.

And yes, I haven't experienced any middle book slump with the Shirley Jackson, nor found it particularly hard going. I am surprised it hasn't ever been made into film though.

I had the same experience with WHALITC (that took almost as long to type as the actual title). I think it's something to do with Jackson's fierce grip on the narrative - nothing escapes; there's no excess.

Wry/Rye would be a rhotacist's nightmare.

The first thirty pages or so are beautiful - tense, weird, precise - then Charles turns up and sucks the wind out of things. The denouement is pretty compelling but I didn't buy Constance's devotion to Merricat. I dunno. I have a feeling like it's one of those great books I read on the wrong day.

I am pulling up to the final few pages of The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton, and apart from its being focused exclusively on the folkways of the very wealthy, with special emphasis on New York and Paris, it has been reasonably compelling. It is worth noting that, for the purposes of the characters in this book, the world is solely made up of the wealthy and no other kind of existence is imagined. The social climber at the center of the book is cruelly lacerated, but from the perspective of the lowly reader, every last one of them comes off badly.

Kazimierz Brandys: Rondo -- supremely entertaining Polish novel about theatre/WW2 Resistance/fakery/sexual obsession

Finished Rachel Cusk's Transit, it's better than Outline (which I enjoyed). It's still a series of little character studies, but the narrator slowly starts becoming less of a cipher. You get her first name near the end of this one (spoilers!), and I'm pretty sure that's the first time?

I'm currently reading the new Orhan Pamuk, enjoying it but I have no idea where it's going or even what kind of story this is going to turn out to be (which is a good thing I guess).

Also read VanderMeer's Borne, it's fun except for all of the time that Borne is not 'onscreen', which is unfortunately most of the second half of the book. Great final image though.

I am pulling up to the final few pages of The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton, and apart from its being focused exclusively on the folkways of the very wealthy, with special emphasis on New York and Paris, it has been reasonably compelling. It is worth noting that, for the purposes of the characters in this book, the world is solely made up of the wealthy and no other kind of existence is imagined.

You have troubles with novels about wealth? It's not criticism, I'm just curious. That's her milieu, but not her only one: she wrote one of the great American short novels about rural insularity, Summer.

jordan the narrator's first name gets used once in outline, when she gets a phone call. that's it tho. glad to hear transit is good, will add to the ever growing pile

That Mary Roach thing ended up being way too cutesey for my taste, but I still finished it.

Now back to French rural life and Pagnol with Manon Des Sources

Oh that rings a bell, thanks Adam! I wonder if she makes a point of using it once per book. Looking forward to the last one in the trilogy.

Having laid to rest Edith Wharton's book, I took up with a very different novel, To Build a Ship by Don Berry, set on the Oregon coast in 1851, at a time when native americans still outnumbered settlers by about 5 to 1. I chose this because I spent most of the past week camping and hiking just a few miles south of Tillamook Bay, where the story occurs.

Earlier this year I read Trask by the same author, set in 1848 in the same coastal area. He wrote a third novel called Moontrap which forms a sort of trilogy of books about Oregon in those few years of transition, when California was being overrun by ragtag fortune hunters and Oregon received some of the overflow. I own Moontrap and will read it before too many months go by.

read & quite enjoyed john clute's first novel the disinheriting party. more seventies postmodernist grotesquerie than anything to do with sf proper... kind of interested in checking out his other novel now.

now per wahlöö's the lorry.

Ernest Becker - The Denial of Death

Very interested to know what The Lorry is like

Reading BACACAY by Witold Gombrowicz, his first collection of stories, and it's very good and quite mad so far

Was thinking of reading Patrick Modiano, then saw a mention of The Black Notebook---good? Or should I start somewhere else, if at all?

Bacacay was good, but stylistically unlike other Gombrowicz. Wondered if this was the translator, but looking it up I find that, annoyingly, the other Gombrowicz i have read (Ferdydurke, Pornografia) was translated, chinese whispers style, from another translation rather than the original Polish

With Modiano, try Dora Bruder or Honeymoon: if they don't grab you, he is prob not for you. Haven't read Black Notebook.

I have begun reading a novella, Cat's Foot, Brian Doyle. He's a local author who died recently and therefore is enjoying a small local revival. From this and the one other book of his I've read, his main stylistic trope is to craft sentences meant to evoke a childlike directness and simplicity, while maintaining an adult's point of view.

He also incorporates a variety of 'magical realism', which allows him to lard his story with transparent fantasies. I can't say this pleases me, but for those who are susceptible to it, the general effect is to lard the story with dollops of sentimentality, while effectively saying, this is only a fairy tale, so you may ignore your critical facilities and indulge yourself in unearned emotions.

Luckily, it's short, so I'll probably forge on to the end and return it to the library tomorrow.

Very interested to know what The Lorry is like

turns out it is actually one of the wahloos vintage have subsequently republished (retitled a necessary action). quite downbeat portrayal of fifties era artist/drop-out life in a small coastal spanish town/environs and the underlying tensions between locals, visitors and franco-ist officialdom. thought it was very good!

Ah, excellent,I have that in the tbr pile in its new title. Cheers!

I am racing through "Black Teeth and A Brilliant Smile" by Adelle Stripe, a novel based on the life of Andrea Dunbar. I love it. So Yorkshire!

I'm now reading Fishcakes and Courtesans: The Consuming Passions of Ancient Athens. It is about halfway between a scholarly and a popular handling of the subject matter and the author, James Davidson, really knows his stuff. I'm not sure anyone here on ILB gives a hoot about ancient Athens, but I expect to enjoy this.

Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah's Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel. Nicholas Blanford.

Just finished Gavid Grossman's A Horse Walks Into A Bar: it's only 194 pages, but so dense, so action-packed a monologue that I only read for an hour each night at bedtime this past week, with no loss of momentum. The old comic, the expert at long-game set-ups is leading his audience and himself off the trail of zingers, off the rails too, but toward the inside-out hobo jungle of psychodrama, revelation, confession, testimony, what maybe the final bit---meanwhile the audience, incl. the narrator, becomes known by quite the range of reactions, in a rowdy Israeli pitstop one frickin' night: "You wanna clear your head, and this guy gives us Yom Kippur!" Others are like, "No, he's still giving us jokes too," even counting them, a bit shell-shocked, others are drawn into the serious cobweb moonlight, at least for a while. And yet the monologist (who has to react to all this, of course) doesn't try to explain *every* fucking thing, the author doesn't try to spoonfeed us: revelation leads to room for speculation.
Even more interesting to read so soon after In Search of Lost Time.

Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

I'm reading Aciman's latest, Enigma Variations. It's worth checking out if you like Call Me By Your Name. This one starts in Italy and moves to New York City, and follows one male character through a number of romances (with men and women) that feel like little Rohmer stories with a Proustian interest in lingering more on how a relationship might turn out than the actualities. I like his writing, but I wouldn't want to hang out with his characters for long.

xpost Jeez, that looks good: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/books/review/DErasmo.t.html?mcubz=0 Think you mentioned getting The Gallery? What did you think of that? Still need to check it out.

Query to the Doctor, but any other responses to The Gallery are welcome.

Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

What'd you think? I adored it.

Jeez, that looks good

yeah, it is, I've read it twice now and love it. The movie version looks good also.

i'm only 40 pp in

lots of interior monologue, which is intriguing as it's an imminent awards-friendly movie

read The Gallery a couple years ago, excellent

I'm going to Iceland next month. I've only read a bit of Sjon - what should I read? Fancy a bit of fiction, and something social history/anthropological/travel-related if such a thing exists.

Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

What'd you think? I adored it.

― the general theme of STUFF (cryptosicko), F

I'm reading it too; I'm halfway done. The narrator's monomania distracts me.

I can say definitively that Armie Hammer is alarmingly well cast as Oliver: the hauteur, looks, frigidity.

The narrator's monomania distracts me.

Do you remember 17-year-olds?

iirc. lord sotosyn teaches students who are slightly older than17, but not by much.

Aciman writes 28-year-olds exactly the same way.

I don't read my student's monologues, Morbsy.

I'm enjoying it. Apparently the film kept the peach scene.

I really meant do you remember yerself at 17. ;)

xpost

If that's the case, between this and Toni Erdmann, we have an interesting little cinematic trend going on here.

I've been reading Dennis Lim's elegant and insightful David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, Christina Sharpe's In the Wake, a series of essays on antiblackness that examines the wake, the ship, the hold, and the weather as figures for the Middle Passage and the structures of white supremacy, and Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian's capacious anthology of writing from the New Narrative movement, Writers Who Love Too Much, which works both as an overview of the major US and Canadian experimental prose writers of the 1980s and early '90s and as a welcome redress to the obscurity of many of the less prolific writers from New Narrative circles, something like a Bay Area counterpart to Brandon Stosuy's Down is Down, But So is Up.

*("an overview of most of the US and Canadian experimental prose writers of the '80s and early '90s whom I actively find interesting, apart from Delany, Wallace, Wojnarowicz, and Anne Carson" might be more accurate, though)

Chinaski I was very pleased I'd read some sagas when I went, Njal's is a good one, I really like Laxdaela and Gisli's also. "Independent People" by Halldor Laxness is a must IMO.

More Nordic bizniss inc all the Icelandic bits that come to my mind here on the bus here: Scando Lit: search

Including all the above, sorry.

Cheers, Tim - that's fantastic.

Was thinking I might be approaching my fill of fiction (for a while), when Ashbery died and some surprisingly (given prev. lazy skimming/stoned staring of yore) engaging, refeshing JA poems appeared on Twitter---which of his books should I get? (Maybe not Three Poems for now, that's the one I was staring at back in the 70s.)

Start with Houseboat Days.

Yeah, Houseboat Days, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Rivers and Mountains, and The Double Dream of Spring are probably the most compelling books to start with.

Will get, thanks! Now I'm wondering about Frank O'Hara.

Start with Lunch Poems!

A Wave too. He repeats himself something fierce, though, so his collections tend to bore me after a while -- as I learned this week when I checked Can You Hear, Bird? out of the library. You can start anywhere!

Turn a leaf: Fall 2017 Happy Families Are Alike. What Are You Reading Now?