It's November 2006! Quickly, what are you reading?

But rollicking, all the same, and the women are terrible instigators.

Do you get to know anything about Nokter the Stammerer himself? Because, what a great name!

Now I'm a little under helf way through "The Damned United" by David Peace. Certainly the best football novel I've ever read*, maybe the best football book. It's an oddly conflicting experience though, because the baddies in the book are my ultimate footballing heroes.

*Yes I'm including even Jimmy Greaves's series concerning the adventures of star striker Jackie Groves.

Now reading:
ZZ Packer - Drinking coffee elsewhere
Camilla Collett - Fortellinger i utvalg ("Selected stories")
Ivan Gontsjarov - Oblomov

Also dipping into semi-random parts of:
Whitney Balliett - Collected Works : A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000
R.S. Thomas - Collected Poems (thanks to ILB, actually, after someone posted his beautiful poem "The Moor")

Phew.

This morning I read the "Ask Fred" section of Mojo. Someone wants to know who the backing musicians were for the Banana Splits.

Anyhow, now reading Susan Sontags' Photography and The Devil Wears Prada. I have a tendency to read the book and watch the film. In the case I saw the film on sunday and started the book yesterday.

Only in the introduction; he was a monk and he stammered. We think. And he seems to have an endless supply of stories that start "So Charlemange was visiting this bishop, and the bishop says..."

Just started (within the past 1/2-hour) Josephine Tey's The Man in the Queue from the "Golden Age of British crime writing" (from the intro. to the text). Since I don't know/haven't read much about this so-called "Golden Age" I'm hoping to be enlightened.

Still thinking about Suite Francaise, though.

the second half (i.e. 1975 until he died) of robert creeley's collected poems came out so even though i already owned a number of them i caved (if that word is right to describe how little resistance i put up) and bought it in hardcover for an absurdly high price. so earlier this week i was reading 'hello'.

also started ellroy's 'american tabloid', and even though about 50 pages in i don't feel committed enough to it that i've absolutely gotta keep reading (which i expect him to be able to do given some more plot).

'the western intellectual tradition' by uh i forget. i'm up to the chapter on puritans. i certainly don't like puritans but i think a lot of us contemporary people would be well-served by learning some more about what their deal was. they seem a lot more interesting than the widely circulating equation of them with sexual prudes would have it.

'european literature and the latin middle ages' by e.r. curtius, very informative about social stuff and practices of reading, writing, etc., not just names of french dudes and latin texts.

'solitude' by anthony storr though i've dropped it for a couple of weeks.

'reading writing' by julien gracq; some of his formulations are a little - insular? not quite that - but even in the long chapter on stendahl/balzac/flaubert/proust he offers a number of interesting ideas despite my only knowing a little about flaubert and proust to help me follow along. the book is physically very attractive.

cavell, 'the claim of reason' still.

a bit of 'the bible for students of art and literature' here and there.

tonight i visited the new bookstore that garrison keillor just opened in the cathedral hill area of saint paul. it has clearly just started and is mostly stocked by the same kind of mass-distribution books you expect to find in most bookstores, which is not to its credit. but i'll give it some time. and it's by a coffeeshop i use anyway so i'm bound to drop some money there. tonight i for some reason bought a copy of 'the magic mountain' even though i obviously do not have the time to read it.

I suppose that most people run across this book at some point of their lives, or at least have it recommended to them. Anyway, I like it, and it occasionally makes some rather, to me, profound insights. But then, I am such a novice to philosophy, so it isn't all that surprising. It has really made me excited about reading Kant and Hume, though, so maybe that isn't a bad thing.

Josh probably hates this book, but then that is just a guess.

Please don't ask me to defend this reading of Zen in detail, it's years since I read the book, and there's no way I could cite chapter and verse in support of it without rereading the thing, which I have no plans to do. I'm just throwing up the thought for consideration -- if you think it's garbage, so be it.

Oh definitely!

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

I hated it. My friends said I probably didn't understand it. ROFL. I think I did and that was the reason why I hated it: it gave me nothing new.

That is an interesting reading of the text, and it does make sense to me. I think I like it, in the end, for more simple reasons -- such as his interesting ways of describing his previous life, his cross-country motorcycle trip (something that I've always wanted to do), etc. Occasionally his thinking makes sense to me, but it is usually not related to the main system -- and like Nathalie, I don't think it is really giving me anything new to work with. At least, not like my brief experiences with thinkers like Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard.

i have never read pirsig. i don't know that i've ever even considered it.

and franny, i'm not saying i would give up in that way. just in the default way of having a lot to do and not being very resolute about the books i start. i'm sure some day i'll finish it no matter what. though i think your opinion on 'the cold six thousand' puts you at variance with most of the people who mentioned it on the ellroy thread!

octavia butler, 'lilith's brood'
fredric jameson on postmodernism, oy vey
paul beatty, 'the white boy shuffle'

haven't opened wittgenstein in a couple days.

milan kundera-the book of laughter and forgetting

just finished
paul auster-the music of chance

I'm reading Lolita by Nabokov, Eugénie Grandet by Balzac, translated by Marion Ayton Crawford and Art as Experience by John Dewey.

I've also been reading bits and pieces of The Complete English Poems of John Donne and The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens after reading a great article on Donne by A.S. Byatt in the Times Literary Supplement some weeks ago.

You may be interested to know that some very interesting names are developing a film version.

I am reading Stephen King's new book Lisey's Story for work, and by christ it's annoying. I can't BEAR his stupid stupid stupid nonsense words and neologisms, and the structure is so wildly pretentious without even being interesting.

And yet... there is something that prevents me from just going on strike and burning the fucking thing. I guess when he actually tries to tell a tale rather than endlessly character-building and memory-remembering he's got a certain gift. But mainly, what an arse. D-

It was assigned to me for a class, actually, so I guess my prof liked it too.

g.o.b.'s grief

i'm about to start either Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet" or Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" but am not sure which to go for. advice?

I have a really excellent book written in semaphore code. But not Morse.

in trying to avoid the inevitability of studying for exams i scoured my bookshelves and came across Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter/Seymour: An Introduction; i bought it years ago but never read it - probably because it's a slim volume and it's easily hidden itself. i laughed out loud through much of it which prompted me to buy Franny & Zooey - which also made laugh, particularly the bathroom scene.

re-read Daylight by Elizabeth Knox and am now re-reading Billie's Kiss, also by Knox. she's an incredibly intelligent New Zealand writer (franny, i'm sure you have probably read her), who never fails to draw you into her world.

For some reason someone's left their phonenumber on a post-it note in the middle of the library copy I'm reading.

I came across it on Amazon this week, looks really good. I will buy it but need to finish the Kundera I mentioned first...don't want book overload.

i am three stories into alice munro's something i've been meaning to tell you, but am setting it aside this weekend to finish off hedrick smith's the power game: how washington works, which i got halfway through two years ago. it's from '88, and as such is a little dated and all about reagan, but it is still a fascinating read. 720 pages, too!

i am hoping to plow through ray bradbury's something wicked this way comes before fall is over.

http://papercutsrekindled.blogspot.com/

Later on I started Underworld again. I like it (Jackie Gleason!) but I doubt my ability to finish it. I may even have to reread what I've already read, because I was falling asleep.

Next up, I have a few lined up in my to-read pile (Kokoro, Mother Night and some book about crab fishing in Alaska) but would really like a magical/Christmassy read to see me into the festive period - last year it was His Dark Materials, anyone got recommendations?

Ronan, Underworld isn't difficult, i guess Cosmopolis may be difficult because its focus is so narrow. if you can't get interested in the main character there's not much else to hang your attention on other than the language but i guess that can be very dry.

didnt think that gj street was that hard, but underworld is much easier to read. i do have to admit that i found the middle part a bit... tedious. overall, though, it's an excellent book. especially the first hundred pages are classic.

Read that as Huey Lewis.

It is really a very excellent book indeed and I heartily recommend it, though I do wonder whether it might be a bit light on background for anyone to whom the name "Billy Bremner" (for example) means little or nothing.

Then I read "A Bed In Heaven" by Tessa de Loo, and while it threatened from time to time to be an emotional trial, it ended being nothing especially out of the ordinary as far as Dutch miserabilism is concerned.

Now I'm reading "Black Swan Green" by David Mitchell. It's OK thus far. Oh and "The Rough Guide to Germany" - any recommendations for Berlin and / or Munich novels, anyone?

"Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha" is pretty great.

I read Paddy Clarke more than 10 years ago and still remember "Confucius say go to bed with itchy hole, wake up with smelly finger".

I like Paddy Clarke, I didn't want to arrive at work.

I don't need to do any German homework any more, because I'm not going anymore. This is probably good news because I didn't much want to read "The Tin Drum".

To replace that reading slot I've started Sheila Heti's Ticknor.

Dudes! I'm in Paris! Still reading Of Human Bondage! It's so great, I'm sad that I'm nearly finished it. Then I will read Snow by Orhan Pamuk. I have probably spelled his name wrong, but I don't CARE because I am drunk on wine and full of Berthellin sorbet yumtytum.

Monkey, here is a tribute to you. Yesterday, I started carrying my floppy disks in a jiffy bag that you had sent me. It even has your name on it.

Middlemarch is one of the best novels I have ever read.

My reading of late has been very poor. I have been conscious of not even starting things, let alone finishing them. Did I ever get round to reporting back on my reading in September? That was a lot more eventful.

New Magnus Mills? On to the wishlist it goes....

PF, life on holiday in Paris is v.exciting. Today Monsieur le Singe and I invented a whole complicated coding system which proves that the message of the Lady and the Unicorn series of tapestries actually means that the wife of the merchant who commissioned it was shagging the tapestry maker. Not being of the nobility, the merchant cannot decode the tapestry, but all of the noblemen he invites round can see the joke clearly.

I'm trying to get into The Ebony Tower, a short fiction collection by John Fowles I've had for simply ages. It's definitely good, but I'm not enthralled. I think it's kind of aged badly.

I'm not sure how new the new Magnus Mills is. It's £5 in Fopp.

I really want to start reading some different books again, like I used to read Fitzgerald, Didion et al. I fear that my resolution to read Mary McCarthy's The Group is on the verge of being broken for another year.

I finished it and I actually liked it quite a bit. I enjoyed how it was completely internal and so Ticknor's character and personality were laid bare; his voice was so strong. I enjoyed trying to read between the lines to discern exactly how Prescott and other people actually were beyond Ticknor's pov. It's one of those books I might re-read to see what else I can unearth.

Now...I'm not sure what to pick up next. I have a Graeme Gibson and Ivy Compton-Burnett novel (which I had started and abandoned some time ago) staring at me steadily. Or I could start C.S. Lewis' "Space Trilogy" that one roommate lent me, or the Sara Gruen equestrian romance novel that my other roommate eagerly pushed into my hands (:-S). I probably should make some more headway with my other two books before I pick up another one.

I have recently finished The Selfish Gene and more of Plato's dialogues -- Lysis, Charmides, Phaedo, Euthyphro, and Laches. I am finding that early Platonic dialogues are not quite as interesting as the later ones.

Coming up:

The Chemical History of a Candle (admittedly, some of these books were mined from the popular science thread that was created over the summer)

Gorgias, Phaedrus, The Symposium.

Well, and I say relatively "easy-to-follow," but I'm still not sure what he was getting at with that strange logic in Lysis, or that bizarre section about the "living coming from the dead" opposites argument in Phaedo. Most of it has made sense, though, and Meno was wonderful.

Fun reading right now: Procopius, The Secret History. Class reading: Gisli Sursson's Saga, the book of Jeremiah.

p.s. Middlemarch is one of the best novels I've ever read, too.

meg, have you read any Charles De Lint? urban fantasy, very very good - not sure about the "christmassy" bit, but definitely fits magical genre. I don't usually like fantasy or even much magical realism but i love his books.

Am reading Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True; it hurts to read it but it also makes me laugh, and i think its often a very honest story. i seem to know a lot of people with various kinds of mental problems so it aches to read about someone who would cut off his own hand because he really thinks he could change the world.

Fitzgerald: '"The Sensible Thing"', 'Magnetism' (an early run at The Last Tycoon's material?), 'The Rough Crossing'. I like FSF a lot, yet these stories seem to be agreeably slight somehow. They don't seem well-*written* in the same way that Gatsby does. And it's remarkable what a fuss he continually makes about the passing of youthful time: 'she was 26... and she yearned for the dreams of 21', that kind of thing. Like Lloyd Cole!

James Wood on Richard Yates; I wonder if I should read more of him.

Now I'm giving "Sleep HAs His House" by Anna Kavan a go, though it might end up being put aside for something Spanish, or something Basque.

Have also been reading Love All the People (bit pointless really - it's not like anything is added to the routines by seeing them on the page) and I just started Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson and Set in Darkness by Ian Rankin (have never read anything of his before).

It is very good, once you get over the notion of Brian Clough as Joycean narrator. I have read lots, and I only started last night. I keep thinking I am bound to get bored soon, but I haven't so far. In fact it was making me very nervous and uneasy last night. Perhaps it is because of Clough, in real life, looking like a ghost, at Burton Albion. I don't think I have ever readf a book narrated by som,,eone I have seen in real life.

Apart from Ned Kelly, of course.

This guy is so far up his own arse it's untrue. He's only gone and written himself into the fucking books in a piece of Never-Ending Story bollocks. He's got his characters visiting him at his house! And don't start me on the Harry Potter and Star Wars references! I'm six and a half books into a seven book series and I'm thinking of giving up. I'm missing out on other books to read this crap!

Me, I've been on a Dickens kick for the last few months. I just finished David Copperfield and I'm moving on to A Tale of Two Cities.

I must read Donna Tartt one day.

I thought it was pretty good: 3 and a half stars. I also wrote a bit about it on the Paul Auster thread.

It really seems to me that it is a sort of culmination and summary of all of the earlier Socratic dialogs that use dialectics to eventually end in a state of aporia. Things like "Ion" and "Laches" seem trite, by comparison. This one really gets at the heart of the issues -- knowledge in general.

Over the last three or four days, I've managed to finish what was listed previously along with another dialog, Euthydemus. I concur with you Chris -- the Symposium and Gorgias were both pretty great! Trying to read Cratylus was a complete failure, however. Couldn't make heads or tails of that one.

I set "Sleep Has His House" aside for a wehile: I was enjoying it but wasn't in the mood to push forward with a largely shapeless, dreamy / surrealist novel.

Instead I sank into the pleasure of re-reading an old favourite: "The Lone Woman" by Bernardo Atxaga. This counts as homework for a forthcoming trip to the Basque country. It's a wonderful novel, even if it does quote a Smiths song I don't like.

Tonight I'm going to cleanse the palate by dipping into a complete collection of Noel Coward's short stories. Has anyone read any of them and can recommend any stories in particular? I got it from the library and figure I'll probably just read random stories here and there, instead of trying to plow straight through the whole thing.

I stalled a bit and found an interesting book trying to trace the development of "sex magick" from pre-Victorian sources, as well as trying to explain its political and social appeal to us "modern" folk. A bit dry at times, but a good break from the dialogs. It has a fancy scholarly title, too: Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism.

I have also started Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, which is really great so far. I like his speechwriting abilities and the obsessive focus on power. I also didn't realize that the political situation in Greece was that complicated!

Franny - that Penguin Classics Russian Short Stories is a gem, even if it has hardly any Chekhov. I don't know why that bothered me, given I have all the other Penguin Chekhov collections anyway, but it did. Also, you have to get the (US Penguin Classics ) Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, which is like a volume 2, bringing it almost up to date (the early 1990s, at least).

I'm reading John Banville/Benjamin Black's 'Christine Falls'. I really like Banville, and I really like this, but if I hadn't been told there's no way I would have picked him as the man behind the pseudonym.

Tim was right, the ending is a bit of a damp squib (and I didn't know the half of it).

I look forward to the sequel, Them Ruddy Saudis Are A Rum Lot.

my tutor loaned me the comic book version of auster's city of glass.

joe david bellamy, 'the new fiction'
paul beatty, 'tuff'

i'm quite prepared to admit i'm wrong on this one since i didn't (couldn't!) finish it. my boyfriend hates it too, it's one of the things we bonded over when we first met :)

Also again, the caveat that it's been a long time since I've read it.

finnish guy on i love comics has gone on about him a bit.

And I loved 'Pale Fire', which was the first Nabokov I read after 'Lolita'. Casuistry's description of it seems just about perfect to me as to why I liked it.

Now I'm reading Muriel Spark's autobiography, 'Curriculum Vitae'.

The Importance of Being Earnest, and perhaps other Wilde plays in the coming week.

I WILL start Plato's "Republic" in the coming week, too.

Made me laugh like a twat on the tube.

I've started reading Sarah Waters's "Fingersmith" -- I'm about 80 pages in. I was looking forward to this tremendously after "Night Watch", but reading the first 50 or 60 pages I started to fear serious disappointment as it completely failed to engage. I've never much liked Dickens, and he seemed the major influence, on story and atmosphere if not on style. Fortunately, it's started to pick up in the last 20 pages or so, and I'm starting to get a good feeling about it now.

Am now reading Kobo Abe's 'The Woman in the Dunes', whcih I'm liking despite some reservations. It does, however, fall into the weird trap that I find with EVERY modern Japanese novel I've read, which is when the sex scenes begin, it quickly becomes deeply ludicrous. Does this stuff just not translate, or are the original Japanese sex scenes just as daft?

I was incredibly disappointed by FoS - it seemed like Lethem was all over the place and no thoughts were ever brought to completion - moments of insight and excellent writing and stuff that was just boring. But I thought much the same of Motherless Brooklyn, too.

I think I've now read most of his stuff (can't recall why I went on a Lethem kick, though) and the one that's stayed with me was Gun, With Occasional Music - creative, fun, complex, noirish - kinda reminded me of PKD's Do Androids Dream at the time I read it.

And As She Climbed Across the Table was interesting, though ultimately unsatifying (at least to me). Neither Amnesia Moon or Girl in Landscape have stayed with me.

I'm still working my way through Jospehine Tey's Alan Grant series. It's fun to be reading something that's a "series" where each book is so markedly different in plot and concept from the others. Of course, this means that some work better than others, but it's an enjoyable experience. To be honest, I'd probably be raving about her writing were I reading these books in something more than fits and stops, 'cause her language and characterizations deserve better attention from the reader than I'm according them at this point.

James, Wilkie Collins may be right, I didn't make the connection, and perhaps should have. It's a long time since I read Collins, although I do remember I didn't like him very much. I thought I could understand why he'd be popular in his day, and why he's still regarded as "important" nowadays as a pioneer and influence on subsequent writers, but I found his books shapeless and overlong. He did have gift for intruding numinous, almost symbolist elements into his stories, though, and I can sense that as an influence on Waters. Also the crime-thriller plot is more Collins than Dickens. Another 40 or 50 pages in, I'm now enthralled by Fingersmith -- if it stays this good until the end it's going to be one of the best books I've read in a long time.

Sorry - I didn't mean to trash him nearly as badly as I did.

Please keep up to appraisal of "Fingersmith" - all that I've read of her's was "Tipping the Velvet" and walked away from that feeling underwhelmed but I've had other folks tell me that I should try some of her other books.

The Sign of Four by Sherlock Holmes.

-- reddening (reddenin...), November 14th, 2006 1:50 PM. (reddening) (link)

Yup. Fuck a Stephen King. The last two books were obviously motivated by "fuck it let's just get it finished". I had to laugh though when he actually put "HERE COMES THE DEUX EX MACHINA" on a note to a character!

I'm now reading Don Delillo's 'Underworld'.

I finished A Study In Scarlet, but thought it was a bit rub.

Now reading Working On The Edge by Spike Walker, about crab fishing in Alaska - it's like a book version of The Deadliest Catch, not the best written but undeniably exciting.

Pete Baran said THS is annoying. I haven't been annoyed by it, yet. I'm rather enjoying it.

Anyone have any particular favourite books set in Madrid or Seville? I could re-read "Variable Cloud" by Carmen Maria Gaite, which I like, or "The Seville Communion" by Perez-Reverte, which is fine in its way, but I wonder whether I could do better, or at least different.