January 2007 - Your current reading. Confess here.

titus alone - mervyn peake
sunday suppers at lucques - suzanne goin
another bullshit night in suck city - nick flynn
revolting youth - c.d. payne
perlandia - c.s. lewis
the moonstone - wilkie collins
painted veil - w. somerset maugham

Also I have discovered a list of all virago modern classics (around six hundred) and am going to read them ALL this year - which i've been saying I'd do for as long as I've known VMCs exiisted, but, no, for real this time - so I should probably make a start on those while the month is young.

I've got my eye on that new Thomas Hardy biography.

Navek: What's 'World War Z' like?

Me, I finished Gerald Woodward's brilliant funny/miserable 'August', but before I tackle the sequel ('I'll Go To Bed At Noon') I need something a smidge more relaxing, so I'm on the new Jon Ronson.

Still reading Sontag's book on photography as well as that Stitch'n'Bitch book.

There's some podcast versions of the chapters on the World War Z site if you want to check it out without purchasing.

I finished John McGahern's Amongst Women today and fell in love. It's entrancing the way he can encouch the familial brutality in such piercing, delicate, careful prose. Pornographer will be the next one in the TBR pile from him.

Still on My Name is Red by Pamuk. I'll take a look at my TBR stacks later on today and decide which other book to read. The Vonnegut, Abani or Ronald Firbank? Hmm.

There needs to be a Greek figure-of-speech term for the sort of redundant repetition one does in a more or less scholarly work that one expects to be excerpted.

just finished Hello Americans the second volume of Simon Callow's Orson Welles biography. A worthy follow-up as they say, though the series is now projected to be three volumes. #1 covered childhood thru Citizen Kane, #2 picks up w/The Magnioficent Ambersons and ends with Welles' euro exile in the late 40s. Callow has a sharp writing style and his experience as actor and director illuminates the discussion of Welles' work. Maybe the scene by scene analysis of The Lady From Shanghai geeked out a bit but on the whole this is excellent. Looking forward to Volume 3 but it could take another ten years.

now i am deep into Minding the Public Purse: The Fiscal Crisis, Political Trade-offs, and Canada's Future, which is a public policy-oriented memoir by janice mackinnon, who was saskatchewan's NDP finance minister from 1993-1997. it's really fantastic.

I was on this board quite a while back, much enjoyed it and now am back. Hope I can play in the sandbox with you all for a while.

I'm reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys right now. And I'm glad to say I'm liking it after being a little disappointed with American Gods when it came out.

John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Nature Of Mass Poverty".

Hi Julie! Welcome to the board.

I'm just about to start American Gods after being a little disappointed with Anansi Boys.

Just finished Pratchett's Thud which was Sam Vimes By Numbers while being very short on laughs and very long on unsubtle analogies to current racial and religious tensions.

I'm reading too many novels, I need to read some non-fic.

So I read the first page of Cat's Cradle and...I think I'll have to try that one a bit later. In its place I've started Ronald Firbank's The Flower Beneath the Foot which attains heights of absurdity hitherto unimagined.

I've read 'Fade to Blonde' in the Hard Case Crime, by otherwise literary novelist Max Phillips, and that was excellent.

Now I'm reading 'Into the Forest' by Jean Hegland - not sure yet whether it's good or not.

Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance by Ian Buruma.
Looking for Mr Nobody by Sue Rann, which is 00s paranoiapulp
Outsider in Amsterdam by Janwillem Wetering which is 70s cop pulp

In all good faith I could only really recommend the first, which I do, and even that has its frustrations.

Then I had some fun with a Flann O'Brien book I'd failed to come across before, "The Hair of the Dogma".

Now I'm reading "Dreams of Speaking" by Gail Jones, which is an Australian novel set (so far) largely in Paris. It's a wistful affair and one of those novels which periodically tips into prose poetry, not necessarily a bad thing.

Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance by Ian Buruma. I read his book on Anglophilia, which was tolerable. Tell us what you thought of this one.

Is the Highsmith bio the good recent one with her (oddly enough) nude on the spine, put out by Bloomsbury, or is it the not very good one by her ex-girlfriend, about how wonderful and ground-breaking her ex-girlfriend is?

I'm now on 'Fiasco', about 15 of the biggest movie flops ever, which is interesting, but strangely humourless.

also recommended
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder
Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert
Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi
Barry Lopez, Desert Notes
Stephen Trimble, ed., Talking with the Clay: The Art of Pueblo Pottery
Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon (for instance)
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge

It's only 170 pages and I wish there were more. Greene's prose is marvelous. Bold, incisive, and yet thoughtful. There is also a quiet intensity to its rhythm.

Ultimately the issue is how a society which has long defined itself (or imagined itself) as hyper-rational and hyper-tolerant deal with members of that society who (appear to) reject tolerance and reason. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't come up with an answer so much as get to the conclusion that the correct question is more complicated than that, and that much of the problem is, at root, one of social exclusion. No real surprise to anyone there, I guess, but the specifically Dutch wrinkles of this issue are interestingly presented and the prose is a pleasure to read.

There's another interesting story here, which is touched on but never makes it to front and/or centre, and that's the way politics produces strange bedfellows. (the big obvious one here is Van Gogh - Hirsi Ali - Fortuyn).

I liked it, but then I'm interested in the Netherlands.

("Dreams of Speaking", as of two thirds of the way through, is turning out wonderfully, by the way.)

Now to start The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

It wasn't so much that the story was ill-told, but that Swofford painted himself into a stylistic corner by resolutely identifying himself as a plain, ordinary "jarhead" and telling his story in the garish, profane, and bluntly obscene manner of a Marine drill instructor. This gave his book a certain novelty, since few books are written in such a voice and it is not one normally heard in civilian life, but in the final analysis it flattened the book out into something rather too thin to be satisfying.

There's only so many thoughts you can properly frame in such a voice and most of them are pretty tame, despite the raw-meat obscentities he decorates them with. For example: war is fucked up; soldiers are ambivalent about killing and dying; this is often due to a certain immaturity in them, which is understandable in light of their youth and youthful illusions; war is an ugly way to have one's illusions stripped away; it leaves deep scars; afterward, the ambivalence never goes away completely.

Now I am reading David Foster Wallace's book of essays, Consider the Lobster. I see already that he is fond of nested boxes.

Finally finished the Pamuk and am now on to Heather Lewis' House Rules and the Vintage Nabokov anthology.

I have also been reading small pieces of the deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass, along with some of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Now I'm having a little bash at "Bruiser" by Richard House, which is OK in its way but hasn't been anything special, as of a quarter of the way through. Diverting enough to keep me awake on the bus in the morning.

I've only read one other bk by him, enjoyed it well enough...would prob do a 'this year I'm reading every Jim Thompson bk ever' thread like you did with PKD - love the style. Except I've already posted a 'search' thread on ILE.

"Oh oh Whipping Star and its companion book are really good! I found them used for like 25 cents with trippy old mass-market covers"

Yes, trippy cover and cheap - got the NEL edn 2nd hand.

there's a sinker piece on whipping star somewhere. i think.

Sounds interesting. I like a few of his poems, but I find they get to be too samey after a while. (I'm happy to have just a few examples of the best stuff and leave it at that.) But I could see aspects of his style working better as fiction.

Skellig rocks.

Now I'm reading Alice Munroe's 'The Moons of Jupiter', which is just brilliant. Whenever I read her I wonder why so many other writers even bother, given they're competing in the same field.

I also started to read "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" today, which I am viewing as a sort of respite from the Shakespearean tragedies. Not bad so far. It is written in the vein of the unreliable narrator of Nabokov's "Lolita," which I am particularly enjoying.

the baldwin was nice, but not what i'd been led to expect -- found the religious passion less moving i suppose than others did and the picaresques more powerful but waaay too sketchy -- like halfway between a "social" novel and a "character" novel and i suppose tho looking back at its place and time it would have been a much more significant sort of work to produce then, and its still pretty great in parts. the green was v. nice, as was the other -- the latter again for its place and time, and also v. clever-funny in its own way, the former for all the subtlety and hints, the way it evoked mood rather than message.

the heany i need to keep going back to -- i found reading it to myself with my poor fake-irish accent voice actually made the lines scan better. still a mixed bag of themes i'm interested in and themes i'm not. oh yeah! bought myself a nice used copy i tracked down of the collected poems of MacNeice which is almost too easy and enjoyable to read. feels so effortless and fun sometimes it really almost can't be poetry, but also yeah such mastery of form. a shame the major collected vols are all out of print and need to be hunted down like this. lots of good poets are like this actually :-( -- plenty of novels too, but not the same way, in terms of the narrowing of the in-print "cannon".

i blame anthologies.

The other thing this book made me think about was the way that our current version of western civilization is smothering under needless and pointless details, and the great analytical impulse that has carried WCiv for centuries now spends the majority of its force in the microanalysis of stupefyingly complex trivialities. This is the reflexive Thoureauvian in me.

The one essay on Dostoevsky was especially poignant for this reason. In it DFW exposes a deep yearning after the nineteenth century's comfort with writing and reading about all the large, basic themes of human life and thought - and then he talks himself out of following his heart's desire, wistfully citing the inability of his audience to follow him there. My impulse was to tell him, write the book you want to write and let it find its own audience.

I haven't really committed to my next book, yet. I did read the Introduction and first ten pages of Meister Eckhardt: A Modern Translation by Raymond Blakney. It's a collection of ME's known and attributed writings.

The End of the Poem by Paul Muldoon
Round Ireland in Low Gear by Eric Newby
Morehead On Bidding by Albert H. Morehead
The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth
Between Meals by A. J. Liebling
Climbing the Mountain by Derek Parfit

about to start:
The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow
On Bidding, 2nd ed. by Morehead, revised by Truscott and Alder

Also just finished Alex Robinson's "Box Office Poison". Light and funny with good art.

Now I'm searching my shelves for something to reread...

I just read Zadie Smith's On Beauty. have any of you read this? I have mixed feelings about it.

I haven't tried it primarily because it is non-fiction. ;) I'll have to take a peek if I see it in the store.

I did read the Smith article: found it fairly interesting as a whole even though I didn't agree with everything. I loved the reaction from a few folks on blogs: "oh ho so "accessiblity" isn't necessary? I know whose books I'm not buying, huckster!"

Been re-reading chunks of The Other Hollywood; re-read Live From New York. I'm a sucker for an oral history.

Ken Tucker's love/hate book on TV is really cranky and the crankitude is often misplaced but it's sort of fun, and the structure (50 things he loves followed by 50 he hates) is so ingenious I'm tempted to steal it for myself.

Also got through about 1/3 of The Fortress of Solitude for a book club thing w/friends but I won't be able to make the book club due to work engagements.

i really liked the initial premise, about the way writers view their own work in totally difft terms, but she just sorta let it drop.

Well, first off, it was odd finally reading all of it (I'd read the first few books before, and have read ABOUT it plenty) after reading Philosophical Investigations, which starts with a quote from Augustine (about how he learned language as an infant) and later quotes him again ("I know what time is until you ask me what it is", basically). So it's hard not to read it in the context of PI -- and vice versa. While it seemed at first that Wittg was just using Aug as an old example of a certain way of thinking ("These are 1600 year old ideas that people still seem to believe in and they have major problems"), it turns out that Aug seems to be using them as logical foundations for his theories of how we recognize God, etc., etc., so -- without being explicit about it -- it turns PI into a much more religiously oriented book. Which was surprising. Although I haven't sat down and mapped it out yet, but I can only assume some grad student somewhere has done so.

The other obvious thing about the Confessions is why they (used to?) force feed this book to freshmen, who of course are going to be sympathetic to his young man's quest for a systemic answer to big, big questions. And there's something direly propagandistic about choosing THIS to be the text to represent that quest, since the "answer" he finds is of course the now- (or, let's say, not-too-long-ago- ) hegemonic church.

He does that Platonic thing that irritates me, where he can't really handle the impermanence and "corruptible" nature of the world, and insists that there must be something "higher", perfectly pure and unchanging and eternal, which he can hang his hat on. These days this is striking me as a somewhat cowardly move, an inability to live in the world of change and decay, and to make the most of it -- but I certainly understand the temptation of an ideal pure state.

Anyway I suppose there's a lot I could say. The class I'm reading it for only asked that I read the autobiographical books, but I went ahead and read the whole thing, out of curiousity. And in some ways, while I certainly enjoyed all the bits that everyone enjoys and talks about all the time, I felt a certain greater pleasure in books 10 and 11, the books on memory and time, and their rambling and undergraddy attempts to come to terms with these concepts. The part where he freaks out about how can he remember forgetfulness (omg d00d whoa!) was particularly touching, and I wanted to get him a glass of water and sit him down and tell him it would all be all right.

I kinda want to read his 3000 pages of readings on each of the psalms.

I keep thinking I want to read Th. Aquinas and then end up throwing him across the room after three pages.

'Box Office Poison' was something I enjoyed, though the art visibly improves as it goes along, which is slightly jarring. It was annoying, though, that what I had was billed as 'The Complete BOP', only for me to find a whole other book of not-included off-cuts and extra stories (called something like 'BOP!'). Either way, 'Tricked', his follow-up, didn't seem quite as good.

I've been looking at the 'Confessions' in my pile of unreads - now I think I must read it.

oh, I want to read this!

A name like a timbale fill.

I finished The Blessing Way (I don't sit down and read very often, and typically it's only for brief periods of time, so even light material can take a while to get through) and now I'm starting Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, which alreay seems better, or at any rate different, than I was expecting it to be.

Still have a bunch of non-fiction books lined up to read, including a book on Syrian music that I have hardly looked at yet.

I wonder if this happens to novelists working on long books? I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, though. Interesting.

The sense that I got from reading "Parmenides" was that Plato had given up on this Theory of Forms doctrine. However, I have not gotten around to reading the post-"Republic" dialogs since that energetic burst of reading Plato; therefore, I have not encountered all of the demiurge business of the "Timaeus," or the bizarre social system he constructed in "The Laws" (as if the Republic was not strange enough!).

I remember reading Augustine's "Confessions" two or three years ago with that mindset that you had pointed out of someone in search of the big, ideal picture. If, anything, though, I recollect that it only gave me a picture of someone who clearly needed to convert in order to stay sane. And I am not saying this viewpoint is academic or accurate in the least! It was just my take on the book.

That much anxiety about a pear? I think that I understand why he felt that way (the mentalitly behind the theft), but I cannot relate to it at all.

In case you did not know, Wittgenstein converted to Christianity after WWI, and it is well known that he found much importance in Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God Is Within You" and "The Gospels in Brief." But you probably did know these things. It does give the PIs a very religious coloring if you look at them in that light.

I would very much agree with Aimless about Aquinas. No less than torture to me to read.

Still ploughing away through Kesey, which I hope to finish by the end of the weekend.

That much anxiety about a pear? I think that I understand why he felt that way (the mentalitly behind the theft), but I cannot relate to it at all.

I mean, you get that it's not really the pear he's anxious about, right? It's the "I did this thing only because it was wrong" -- sort of the same as The Stranger, but on a scale most people can relate to. But it's an interesting choice nonetheless, both for the obvious Adam & Eve overtones, and because he picks such a dinky crime in order to show that it's not really the crime that he finds horrible. I mean, in The Stranger, is the shooting upsetting, or is the anomie? Augie wants to be clear that it's the anomie (although of course the risk is to come off as someone who gets worked up over every last detail).

In case you did not know, Wittgenstein converted to Christianity after WWI, and it is well known that he found much importance in Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God Is Within You" and "The Gospels in Brief." But you probably did know these things. It does give the PIs a very religious coloring if you look at them in that light.

I did know about the conversion. I suspect he wasn't interested in applying logic to faith, though. I'm curious to reread PI now to see what sort of religious reading pokes through -- I was more focused on the queer reading last time (and the, you know, main thrust of his content). (But I will probably read On Certainty first, since I regret having put it down years ago.)

Now reading: Back to Vico during snow day lulls in school reading. He's such a kook, it's great.

Yes, I understood that particular point! I just have a hard time imagining being someone with such a stringent and rigid moral code, is all.

Oh: Wittgenstein was not trying to write a religious tome -- far from it, from what I remember. I just thought it was interesting to think about those religious aspects when he wrote such things as "explanations have to come to an end somewhere."

Tell me when you start reading "On Certainty," and I will do likewise. That should be fun.

"[makes completely impossible statement about his life]...I'm joking of course."

And the constant crowbaring of pop culture references of the time into passages.

it is interesting, in this respect, that he would respond so intensely to tolstoy's gospel, because of the extent to which tolstoy tried to eliminate incredible elements from the standard gospels.

Working on:
Diderot-"D'alembert's Dream"
Didion-Year of Magical Thinking

Now I am starting The Old Man And Me by Elaine Dundy. The blurb promises roffles.

I should probably just change my name to Joe and move to the US.

The more I read it the more I am inspired to shrug and say, "So what? Who cares? Why is this supposed to interest me?"

The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares (ISBN 1590170571): An Argentinean writer much less known than his brilliant friend and collaborator, Jorge Luis Borges, “Bioy” was also less consistent in the quality of his work. But he did write at least one great book, a dreamy novella inspired by movies and the flapper actress Louise Brooks. Published in 1940, it’s also one of the earliest books which uses virtual reality as a central conceit, long before the digital age.

It begins like a Latin American version of a story by Wells or Stevenson (both favourites of Casares and of Borges, too). A mysterious island, rumours of a terrible disease, a refugee from justice, and all-too-real ghosts which keep on repeating the same actions… Tinged by post-modern ideas without losing its emotional heart, fantastic without ever seeming preposterous, this is a weird and exciting book. The Louise Brooks photo NYRB use on the cover is great, too—the white-swathed actress with her famous bang, surrounded by piles of books. Just like the book, it’s haunting, sexy and literary.

Is it about Rousseau coming to stay in Hume's house and bringing his dog with him, and Rousseeau's dog pooing all over Hume's Important Papers, and Hume saying in a comedy Scottish accent "get that wee bloody shite oot ma hoose?" Because someone gave Mister Monkey a copy of it for Christmas, and we imagined that that's what it should be like.

I realise, in these sensitive times, that laughing at comedy accents isn't funny, but still...

Also, I have finally finished the two-month struggle that was The Russian Debutante's Handbook, and it so was not worth it. Next up is Admiral Lord Cochrane's Memoirs of a Fighting Captain, which is far more the thing.

Wanted to read the the Annie Proux collection w/ Brokeback, but my copy seems to have disappeared.

Now I'm reading "Bartleby & Co" by Enrique Vila-Matas, which is half fiction and half literary criticism, and takes as its subject writers' refusal to write. It's been interesting, so far, but I'm not really sure the fiction helps the criticism, or vice versa.

Haven't been here much because I don't think I've finished a whole book since Alice's birth (6 weeks ago). I can note that my 'in labour' reading was Labyrinth by Kate Mosse though. The labour ended well before the book did, thankfully...

So far we have read to Alice: Where The Wild Things Are and Dogger. She's already had two trips to the library, but at this stage literature is not quite as compelling to her as milk, milk and more milk.

John Steinbeck- Grapes of Wrath
Daniel Silva- The Kill Artist
Martin Cruz Smith- December 6th
Anne Tyler- If Morning Ever Comes
William Styron- Sophie’s Choice
Stuart Woods- Palindrome
John Steinbeck East of Eden
Robert Tanenbaum- Absolute Rage
Edith Wharton- Glimpses of the Moon
Virginia Woolf- To the Lighthouse
Paul Theroux- Hotel Honolulu
Bob Perelman- The Marginalization of Poetry
John Steinbeck- In Dubious Battle
PG Wodehouse- Mating Season
Richard Stark- The Score
John Steinbeck- Cannery Row
Georges Simenon- Maigret & the Killer
Zadie Smith- The Autograph Man
Muriel Spark- Reality & Dream

I leaped on to The Translation of Dr. Apelles by David Treuer and am being rewarded by an incredible story. I have to rip myself away from the thing.

Woha! I don't even read that in... *sigh* a year. :-( Knitting and a baby doesn't enable me to read much. :-( I really do need to learn how to knit and read, it seems to be possible.

I shall be selecting my next lucky book quite soon and my library shelves are agog with anticipation. You will see it here first.

http://www.powells.com/review/2007_01_25.html

Me too. I miss them so much.

So far we have read to Alice: Where The Wild Things Are and Dogger.
Great choice Archel, I love Dogger. I bought my 6 months old niece a collection of Shirley Hughes books for Christmas.
My brother has taken to reading aloud the Harry Potter books while his daughter has her night time feed. I'm very impressed with him as at 35 this is probably the first book he's read other than the odd Choose Your Own Adventure book.

Today, I finished Barry Glassner's The Gospel of Food. I really enjoyed his Culture of Fear and found it both well-researched and straightforward. The same with this one, except the man obviously loves to eat (to which I fully relate), and this may have tainted his objectivity somewhat :)

Just finished J Meade Falkner's 'The Lost Stradivarius' (entertaining but sometimes stodgy late-Victorian supernatural novel, and too cagey about the awful wickedness of the villain - it's hard to dislike him if you never have any idea of ANYTHING he did that was actually bad), and am now partway through 'Uncle', which is absurdist children's fiction, and very fun.

I'm not very far into it, but I am very much enjoying what little I've read. It's a bit all over the place, and it's taking a while to form a coherent plot, but that's okay.

Am now reading Richard Ford's The Sportswriter.

Now I'm readling X20 by Richard Beard, as (sort of) recommended upthread (I think) and it's OK, OK to good I'd say. The scaffolding's a bit obvious.

Just finished Dostoyevsky's 'The Gambler' and 'A Nasty Story', which was brilliant - suprisingly gossipy and funny. Great stuff.

Carol Shields- Unless
Evelyn Waugh- Brideshead Revisited
Patrick Cockburn- The Occupation
Jane Smiley- Moo
John Steinbeck- Tortilla Flat

paradise lost.* henry louis gates, 'loose canons'. nicholas meyer, 'the seven-per-cent solution.'**

*fantastic.
**disappointing.

The Murder of Charles the Good by Galbert of Bruges. Kinda fantastic, so far! Consiprators murder the pious count in 1127, and our on-the-scene reporter tells us how it all plays out. He's got a zippy writing style.

I'm having a look at "The Map Is Not The Territory", Alan Woods's book about (with?) Ralph Rumney, the first British situationist, abstract painter, interesting cove.

This isn't a read-from-cover-to-cover kind of affair but I like RR a great deal and am enjoying it so far.

(I read the book in January, though.)