April 2006: So, what are you reading?

Diana Wynne Jones - Castle In the Air
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
David Toop - Haunted Weather
My Japanese language course textbook

I'm still working on the prairie whores, the meandering life of Johnson, and assorted numbered ruminations.

I'm reading This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson. It's an enormous novel in the old-fashioned style, packed full of incident, spanning many years, mostly following the Beagle's famous voyage to the Americas and elsewhere.

It is very good.

the cook book (snarf) (sorry) is a really rather good semi-pamphlet thing from OUP, which makes me miss ILM when it was good. the murakami is more remarkable and a lot more horrific than when i read it first.

I'll probably now start Ali Smith's The Accidental, with a bit of George R.R. Martin on the side. What I'm really in the mood for, though is a bit of lad lit. I might sneak off with some Tony Parsons when no one is looking.

just got started on roth's american pastoral and look forward to eating it up, having loved his sex comedies.

I started Hemingay's Movable Feast but found the first story so horrifically awful--wow you went to the cafe and drank good rum and saw a pretty girl? That's great--done in the most insipid prose imaginable that I don't believe I'll be able to pick it up again. I keep on checking to see if Hemingway wrote it.

Now I'm trying Ander Monson's Other Electricities which I haven't quite settled into yet.

I'm still going through Those Feet for which I had low expectations and it's just exceeding them. Aside from newspapers and National Geographics, little else.

That's my cue for teabreak.

The Guardian's Monday architecture colummn in G2 is ace.

A gem: "Two weeks or so later I had to fill out what I wanted to be when I grew up and I thought of my dream about the man from another universe, so I wrote: I AM GOING TO BE A SCIENCE FICTION WRITER.
That made my family mad, but then, see, when they got mad I got stubborn, and anyhow my girlfriend, Ysabel Lomax, told me I'd never be any good at it and it didn't earn any money anyhow and science fiction was dumb and only people with pimples read it. So I decided for sure to write it, because people with pimples should have someone writing for them; it's unfair otherwise, just to write for people with clear complexions."

pkd, the eye of sibyl

The Ramayana
Huston Smith's "The World's Religions",
GRRM's "Storm of Swords",
CD Payne's "Youth in Revolt",

about to start

Sharon K. Penman's "Sunne in Splendour"

Then I read "A Spoonful of Jam" by Michele Magorian which is a heartwarming post-war tale aimed at adolescents and (I fear) not a very good one, but I bought it thinking my dear old Mum might like it, ad I thought I'd better read it first to check it wasn't inappropriate for her innocent mind. It isn't, but it's tat really. She might like it as a distraction for a few minutes.

Now I'm reading "The Scarperer" by Brendan ehan in honour of the Pinefox's trip to Dublin. I wish I was in Dublin.

The author just seemed to pull random people out of the past, issue a quote from them and treat it as the generally accepted view of history. A whole chapter on England's relationship with Italy. Why does it have to be Italy? I think so he can take his Italian Job analogy to its fizzly out conclusion.

The Roy Keene chapter was ambitious and silly. I mean if you're trying to fins the embodiment of Englishness throughout comic book history, don't use an Irishman as the pivot of your thinking.

I'm going to read a travel book next. Probably Wendell Stevenson's book on Georgia.

Natch.

i think i could not get myself to read slowly enough.

I'm reading a book on assertiveness now, oh yes.

Also, Laruie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning which I read every year because it is so spankingly good.

Storm of Swords
Youth in Revolt
Ramayana

currently reading

Motion of Light in Water
Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Smith's World's Religions

about to start

Qu'ran

Now I'm forcing myself to read Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. I've never read Austen before, and I'm curious to discover what all the fuss is about. Already, though, I'm a bit concerned that the commas will drive me nuts the way they did in Henry James. Christ almighty: just end the durned sentence already.

Also yesterday I finally read PF's review of Michael Wood.

(We aren't sure exactly how he got up there - he didn't seem to sure either.)

Now reading PKD's A Crack in Space and The Mixing Engineer's Handbook.

Does that mean you've got to the bits where it starts to get interesting?

(I found it a bit tedious, until you get near the end, where it a) starts to get moving a bit faster b) starts to clear up some of the more mysterious bits of Cryptonomicon)

Yet another first person narration, which is relief since Twain really didn't know how to write a decent third person narration, and it also means I get to listen in on Twain's thoughts. In the beginning he is most certainly overlaying Hannibal onto Joan's french village and there are some definite hints that he's using his recently deceased daughter as the model for Joan.

I've started on Keith Thomas "Religion and the Decline of Magic" that has a quote by Hill on the back.

huh, i just put some christopher hill on my wishlist.

I'm re-reading Valediction by Robert B Parker.

i'm reading "civlization and its discontents" by freud and "bring me the head of prince charming" by roger zelazny and robert sheckley

Quakers on the Frontier
Orphans Preferred (about the Pony Express)
Autobiography of Mark Twain

The Shadow of the Wind, meanwhile - it is so RUBBISH!

I must stop buying whatever is half price in Tesco - they are all so RUBBISH!

Except Ukranian Tractors.

I am re-reading Empson while I wait for Amazong to re-send my order of Barthes' 'Responsibility of Forms' to the correct address. I think Empson is becoming my first big litawawy crush of 2006 and I may have to buy 'The Structure of Complex Words' next. Or possibly 'Some Versions of Pastoral'. Are there any other ILB Empsonophiles who can recommend one or t'other?

this sounds scrumptious to me

Tracer you might want to read "Puratinism and revolution" next then - its divided into two halves: "movements and men" and "men and movements". The vv basic idea is that throughout these essays he tries to outline the interactions of the "world" with both, and how that world will be shaped by both.

Its all connections but it gets pretty fkn bizarre at times esp in the shortest of the whole collection about 'the mad hatter', who established an 'interesting' commune and was also a vegetarian.

I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down like paper airplanes. Geology was called a descriptive science, and with its pitted outwash plains and drowned rivers, its hanging tributaries and starved coastlines, it was nothing if not descriptive. It was a fountain of metaphor--of isostatic adjustments and degraded channels, of angular unconformities and shifting divides, of rootless mountains and bitter lakes. Streams eroded headward, digging from two sides into mountain or hill, avidly struggling toward each other until the divide between them broke down, and the two rivers that did the breaking now became confluent (one yielding to the other, giving up its direction of flow and going the opposite way) to become a single stream. Stream capture. In the Sierra Nevada, the Yuba had captured the Bear [...] There seemed, indeed, to be more than a little of the humanities in this subject. Geologists communicated in English; and they could name things in a manner that sent shivers through the bones. They had roof pendants in their discordant batholiths, mosaic conglomerates in desert pavement. There was ultrabasic, deep-ocean, mottled green-and-black rock--serpentine [...] There was almost enough resonance in some terms to stir the adolescent groin. The swelling up of mountains was described as an orogeny.

It's John McPhee's Annals of the Former World and I love it more than almost any book I've read in years.

'Pastoral' has less spectacular readings than 'Structure'? But it's a bit easier to read a bunch of it at a time.

I'm nearly finished with it, so I brought John Gregory Dunne's last novel Nothing Lost in my bag to read next.

Now back to Didion and Dunne. (I'm reading more Didion essays and interviews while taking in Dunne's last novel... I don't know what I think this might tell me, but it somehow seems romantic and right.)

I started Robert Hughes' Nothing if not Critical. I enjoy his criticism; he's lucid. I also started Henry Petroski's The Design of Useful Things, but then I mistakenly packed all loose books in a suitcase and handed it over to the baggage check. So now I am reading Stephanie Coontz's Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, and quite enjoying it.

Now I'm reading ????

Anyway, if I learn nothing else of value, it has given me the first convincing theory I've ever read about why Pythagoras forebade his followers to eat beans. I expect the Parmenides section to be more interesting. Pythagoras was an inusufferable prig.

Cut into the Patty pie wherever you wish, and you cut yourself a slice of American anguish: massive mistrust, mindless violence, media overkill, family breakdown, urban despair, racial rage, sexual dread. Change the sequence of words; call it sexual rage, racial dread, urban breakdown, family despair. However you sliced it, America's crisis was circular, a pie, a loop, a ring.

Started a re-read of Laurie Lee's Moment of War. The third volume of his life. The idyll of Rosie and the Cotswolds replaced by the Spanish Civil War. One thing I've noticed on rereading Lee; the amount of girls he meets on his travels!

leisurely working thru Connell's Deus Lo Volt! wow this isn't at all what the Jesuits taught us about the Crusades...

about to begin serious research into early 70s for a book proposal. any recommendations on histories of that period?

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0415925355.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg
haha ok, maybe not

http://www.taschen.co.uk/media/images/original/mi_ads_70s.jpg
yes!

The Norah Vincent book about living as a man. Eh, there was something about it I just didn't like. Heh, on certain knitting blogs, it got good reviews along the lines of "I am not saying this book is super awesome because the author's girlfriend is my knitting friend" but I'm thinking, yeah right.

I reread Hollywood Babylon II before bed last night, mainly because I found it fallen down between the bookshelf and the bed. Not as good as the original but still better than any other "_____ Babylon" book (hello Victor Bockris I am LOOKING AT YOU)

My book for lunch breaks is an 80s biography of Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine. I got it for a quarter.

I am also working my way through Albert Goldman's Disco book.

Not sure if it is fiction or non-fiction at the moment, but the premise of nowhere being remote anymore so you have to look in the unlikeliest of places is appealing. Perhaps the genre of travel writing needs a reaction to shake it up? I'm only just inside the door of the book, but am looking forward to getting back to it.

because Deus Lo Volt is written in a medieval-ish "period" voice. the intro is incredibly dense and daunting, but after just a few pages I got into it, all the ravaging and pillaging and freelance anarchy definitely holds your attention. author Evan S Connell has a good ear for speech rhythms, the total effect (so far) is evocative rather than archaic. still his non-fiction is so different than his novels that my head is spinning. why isn't he better-known?

hope you like the Goldman, I've hyped it up so much that a letdown could be inevitable. if nothing else, the pix are a trip, eh?

I also read Beryl Bainbridge's Watson's Apology, which I didn't like one bit. I think some comments I recently heard attributed to Bainbridge about women and rape have kind of put me off her and made me see her as anti-woman. This book was certainly full of the usual tight little lives and mean awfulness of everything, but it was hard to see the point, and it just went on and on and on.

Zipped through Mountains Of The Mind by Robert Macfarlane (some interesting facts for mountain-fans but not particularly great writing) and True Grit by Charles Portis (brilliant). Now enjoying some real-life adventure with The Conquest Of New Spain by Bernal Diaz. (Not so great for the Aztecs though.)

I LOVE the third policeman Matt, although now someone suggested to me that 'Lost' was based on it I feel wierd about both [an obsession with lost being a guilty secret, like looking at hilarious copies of Hello etc behind the cover of a London review of books in doctors waiting room -oh to splash about in dirty intellectual shallows ...]

And The Sword in the Stone - much of which seems to have gone over my head when I read it as a child. Startling digression via an ant colony on how communism = bad, feudalism = good...

I also have Prague by Arthur Phillips on standby if I get sick of Proust - the first chapter seemed a bit arch and the book will possibly be irritating. I mainly got it because i like Budapest...

Now I am going to start The World is Flat or something or other.

I'm so well-informed it hurts.

Also tried some Kipling, but he is difficult.

Noticed in Windsor yesterday that there is a plaque marking the draper's shop where HG Wells worked. Top one. Big up Mr Polly.

I was reading "Loitering With Intent" when I heard Muriel Spark had died and I think that was probably a good one to be reading, lots of vaguely melancholy musings on what it meant to be a novelist, bless.

I am now almost halfway through George P Pelecanos's DC quartet (which is to say I've read The Big Blowdown and am past halfway through King Suckerman). This is in preparation for my forthcoming trip to the States, about which I am trying not to excite myself too much, yet.

Any recommendations for surprisingly brilliant novels set in NYC, DC, or Lancaster, PA much apreciated.

This is the most absorbing book I've read since Dhalgren, for whatever that's worth.

Just started In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. "In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar." A rererererererererread.

Middlemarch is part of my self-imposed reading project, wherein I am reading the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. So far, I have read two Woolf, two Bronte, and am currently working on Eliot's thickest one; everything that I have read has been fantastic up to this point.

It is very interesting and well-written, and brilliantly captures what a fairly ecstatic conversion to Catholicism - with a very mystical bias. When Merton speaks of God and the devil, you know he is speaking of things that are very, very real to him, but entirely metaphysical in their being. His enthusiasm and joy are unfeigned and refreshing. Already a classic.

I also took out books from the library about The Fantastiks, A Chorus Line, John Cassavetes, and all the Broadway theaters in Manhattan. And some "historical" murder mysteries that seem to be based on the Weather Underground, in part (One is called Days of Rage!!!)

FUN TIMES.

I read some of Exit Pursued By A Bear this morning, but it was a bit boring.