What Are You Reading This Wet Hot (& Not Necessarily ) American Summer 2007?

I've been rereading some of "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which is seeming sort of dated to me. I came up with a term to describe his style -- "high informalism."

Fear and trenbling by Amelie Nothomb is quite great may i say.
you can read it in many levels, and one of them is like a version of Kafka's ideas.
simple and complicated at the same time.

trembling

"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which is seeming sort of dated to me.

the built-in fate of any journalism anthology/collection? as these doorstops tend to go, I thought DFW/s was amazingly successful*

*when I read it ten years ago...

Just started Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, who is a very good writer and whose collection of stories I might pick up sometime.

Am still picking through The Beauty Myth too, which is slow going because lately I don't feel like slogging through violent descriptions of liposuction. But obv it's great if a little dated.

"High informalism" is a great term.

I'm reading assorted Latin bits. Haven't really settled on a book in English yet.

I'm 1/2 way through Rabbit, Run, which is hmmmmmmmmm well bleak but with lots of hetero sex. So far, I don't get this guy, nor do I like him much.

the built-in fate of any journalism anthology/collection? as these doorstops tend to go, I thought DFW/s was amazingly successful*

*when I read it ten years ago...

Perhaps, although I mostly meant his style - like I remember being excited by his style when I first read it (maybe eight years ago?), but now I suppose so many people have followed his lead that the whole *casually exploding the conventions of magazine writing* thing doesn't seem very fresh.

I've recently read much collections of much older journalism/essays by Didion and Christgau, and neither bothered me as much. The prose itself didn't seem dated. Some of the ideas did at times, but I suppose the greater distance made that less of a problem.

Just finished "The Road" which I suspect will be looked back on as the most hysterically overpraised novel in years. But time will tell.

Also "Portnoy's Complaint", which I have mysteriously put off reading until now despite being a huge Roth fan. Superb.

Just started Siri Husvedt's "What I Loved". I had some reservations about starting this because I don't care for her husband's novels, and some reviewers seemed to think she would appeal to the same readers as him. A hundred pages in, I am really enjoying it so far.

Simultaneously reading Elizabeth Wilson's "Shostakovich: A Life Remembered", terrific if you're interested in Shostakovich probably of limited interest otherwise, although it is very good on life for artists and their families under Stalin.

Thank You For Arguing, a pop-culture savvy self-improvement through rhetoric thing. And Wimbledon Green.

"Portnoy's Complaint", which I have mysteriously put off reading until now despite being a huge Roth fan. Superb."

agreed.superb, mainly because the hysteric tone of roth's writing and characters fits with the genre (satire).

Over recent days...

PG Wodehouse: Psmith Journalist (great stuff - 'Cozy Moments cannot be muzzled!')
Nick Bertozzi: The Salon (a rather wonderful graphic novel)
Georges Simenon: The Door (pretty minor Simenon)
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature (cool, but I need to reread it to properly get to grips with it all)
Tove Jansson: Fair Play (excellent, and more of her adult stuff needs to be translated into English)

i just bought a huge stack of books, thanks to culling my current bookshelf and getting a large credit at my local second-hand book store. let's see if i can remember all of them:

richard ford - the sportswriter
grace paley - the little disturbances of man (?)
carson mccullers - reflections in a golden eye
- the ballad of the sad cafe
- the member of the wedding
john steinbeck - of mice and men
johy yau - hawaiian cowboys
- collected poems (forgotten the title)
bobbie ann mason - shiloh and other stories
fitzgerald - tender is the night
- the beautiful and the damned
o. henry - the four million
tobias wolf - hunter in the snow (?)

and i've also got celine's 'journey to the end of the night', maggie dubris' 'weep not, my wanton', and a collection of aubrey beardsley's writings - all sitting patiently beside my bed.

"and i've also got celine's 'journey to the end of the night'"

read this one first, if i may suggest

read this one first, if i may suggest

And the Tobias Wolff second.

that's funny... i actually (seriously) happen to be reading those two simultaneously :)

i'm loving both.

Currently library borrows:

Read an academic study on rap by Tricia Ross ("Black Noise" is a great title) - surely one of the first (?) to attempt such a thing (its from the early 90s). Very interesting how there is one chapter dedicated solely to the music, wish she knew the turns that classical took so it wouldn't provide her with such easy negotiations.

Currently finishing a comp of essays on 'world music' from the late 80s (ed. by Simon Firth). There is quite a lot I want to listen to (but will I ever get the time?)

Then I stopped bcz I got David Thomson's 'The Whole Equation'. Finish it tonight and its amazing but also getting prepared for its annoying conclusion, as I imagine it - its the end of cinema as the movies can't give him that communal feel that he had with others when he started going to the movies (just after WWII ended) anymore. Its a gd ol' follow the money history but plenty of judgement, biographical sketches, experiences and so on.

Uhg - somebody please change the title of this thread! I can't stand to look at that shit for the next three months.

Meanwhile - I'm rapidly turning the pages of Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank.

I'm at the beginning of Anthony Trollope's "He Knew He Was Right," which is excellent when I can be bothered to pick it up, despite its fusty classic veneer. Lunchtime reading is Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach," which doesn't contain much not covered in the New Yorker excerpt, as far as I can tell.

I'm in the middle of Andrei Codrescu's The Hole in the Flag, a good, if somewhat too breathless, account of the 89 Romanian Revolution.

Uhg - somebody please change the title of this thread! I can't stand to look at that shit for the next three months.

Start your own, then, and we'll battle for supremacy, or just surrender to my donning skills.

(it's not summer for 2 days yet...) /pedant

Tell Glen Beck.

I just returned two books to the library that I got about halfway through without finishing: Nicol Krauss's The History of Love and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came To The End. The Nicole Krauss book I think I'll recheck out or buy my own copy, the Joshua Ferris I'm not too sure.

What I read of the Ferris book was reasonably amusing but I was put off by his tendency to let wacky windbag characters go on about their obsessions for pages on end.

rereading yet again:

edith hamilton's mythology and gods and myths of northern europe by h.r. ellis davidson

i forgot to add 'desperate characters' by paula fox to that list. and the john yau poetry collection is called 'radiant silhouette'.

N Lee Wood: 'Faraday's Orphans' - good but not great post-apocalypse shenanigans
Jim Thompson: 'Now and On Earth' - his first book, and a rather good one
Roger McGough et al: 'The Mersey Sound' - 'classic' collection of work by 3 Liverpool poets from 1967 - very 1960s, with all the weaknesses you might imagine from that description; interesting for the light it shines on the concerns of that era, not so much for the middling quality of the poems

CALAMITIES OF EXILE: THREE NONFICTION NOVELLAS by Lawrence Weschler: The Breytenbach piece is astoundingly good, so much so that I imagine I'll be preoccupied with the subject's own work for the next month or so.

wouldn't let it keep you up at night not finishing the Josh Ferris book. I mean, I finished it but it never really got good in any unique way.

did anyone read wells tower's On The Show had in the may harpers? I've liked some of his past stuff and want to know if it's worth tracking down...or finding a subscription login i guess...

argh had

Danilo Kis, Encyclopedia of the Dead. As bloody good as anticipated, so far.

Encyclopedia of the Dead is great. I was turned off by it at first because it seemed so Borgesian, but I felt that by the end he'd staked out his own territory. Also check out his Garden, Ashes and books by Bruno Schulz if you haven't already.

During my camping trip last week I read The DaVinci Code. It was a pretty well-crafted suspense/adventure thingie, but after reading it I still have one burning question I cannot get out of my head: wtf kind of a character name is 'Fazu Beche'? I mean, Fazu Beche -- that is just a step too far for me to travel. Other than that, it was further proof, if any were still required, that esoteric symbology is the equivalent of seeing the face of an angel or the figure of a weasel when you look at the shape of clouds or at wallpaper stains in dim light.

Next, I read Beowulf in the Seamus Heaney translation. I liked that quite a bit. He gave it a sort of bouldery texture in the mouth and a punchy narrative drive that I found very satisfying.

After I finished it, I considered diving into Don Quixote, which I would like to read this summer, but I hesitated, since I am still midway through that Russian Revolution tome and didn't want to be midway through two huge books at once. So I read some of D.T. Suzuki's zen essays instead. Nice stuff, if you like that sort of stuff (as I do).

Now that I am back from camping, I think I'll go back and finish the revolution.

The only Fazu I can find is Фазу Алиева, who is from the Dagestan part of southwestern Russia. Beche is most popularly a French last name, perhaps. Весне seems to mean "spring", but of course is pronounced totally unlike "Beche". It could also be related maybe to Беч, which I guess is their way of spelling the Polish town of Biecz?

since last i posted (april? early may?)

between the river and the bridge -- craig ferguson
samuel johnson - selected essays
otis spofford - beverly cleary
eye of the wolf - daniel pennac
king of ireland's son - padraic somethingorother
his dark materials - philip pullma
crack in space - pkd
cosmic puppets - pkd
moby dick - melville (first time, it's really funny!)
moon and sixpence - somerset maugham
great shark hunt - hst

Judith Butler - Gender Trouble. (I'm having a very hard time reading this. Me not so smrat.)

maybe you need to look at an english translation ;-)

Also check out his Garden, Ashes and books by Bruno Schulz if you haven't already.

I loved 'Garden, Ashes' along with several of his others, and am fast becoming a gigantic Kis fan. But have not tried Bruno Schulz - thanks for the tip!

When did this thread get taken over by the Kis Army?

Three posts by two people is hardly 'taken over'.

I'm 300+ pages into Don Quixote and am not particularly looking forward to the rest. Paradise Lost, on the other hand, is nothing less than magnificent. I can't imagine any film adaptation doing justice to the work. Just finished The House at Pooh Corner with a tear or two (or three) in my eyes. Milne's Eeyore is so much more deliciously sarcastic and withering than the plain ol' gloomy Disney version. What fun. Kokoro by Natsume Soseki has thrown me for a quite a loop and I must now figure out how a story presented in such a seemingly simple, measured fashion holds such resonance.

Just started Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. "The Glass Coffin" was a bit underwhelming 'till near the end but "Gode's Story" was terrifying. *shudder*

Sorry, franny, I just wanted to make that Kis Army joke. Just a bit of fun, let's be cool.

Maybe I should just have posted an image of that coffee shop boot.

http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/5905/kisarmynj1.jpg

How far are you into Paradise Lost? I really liked it a lot yet didn't get much past Book 4.

Okay, now I feel stupid. I still don't think I get it, but at least I'm aware that there *was* a joke. As you were.

i hate, hate, hate reading milton. i can't wait for the movie to come out; then i'll know how the book ends.

today i bought:
marlene dietrich - higham
buddenbrooks - mann
Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay - wranovics
dr. futurity - pkd
his master's voice - lem

i am looking for a good (comprehensive) social history of hollywood in the '30s and '40s with an emphasis on anecdotes, gossip, and crime. it's for research purposes, so density doesn't matter -- suggestions?

If you can find a copy of the Penguin Book of Hollywood, which has excerpts from hundreds of biogs, autobiogs, histories, etc, there's a great list of sources at the back that would include several of what you're looking for. If my copy wasn't in a box somewhere...

Am reading Kipling: War Stories
having recently read
The Forest of Thieves: Medieval Jain Stories
Ed McBain: Give the Boys a Great Big Hand
Tim O'Brien: If I Die in a Combat Zone

Casuistry, I'm in the middle of Book 3. So far I'm still engrossed and entertained. It may help that I've become a big Satan fan.

Milton got a certain amount of flak because everyone becomes a big Satan fan.

Satan was the Son of Morning, an archangel, a luminous being from God's inner circle, whose great sin was pride and who refused to be humiliated in his punishment. What's not to like?

So is the précis given by Peter Cook to Dudley Moore in Bedazzled accurate?

Middlemarch. Woo-hoo!

Peter Cook was a smart cookie.

Alastair Cookie was a passable cook.

I'm reading The Birth Of Tragedy, which is pissing me off with all its Romanticist hooey.

Sorry, Alistair. Sheesh.

I've been reading Gone with the Wind since December or something; I'm about in the middle right now. Progress during the school year has been really slow, plus the negative aspects of the story really get to me sometimes.

I just checked Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck out of the library, as well as an unabridged audio set of Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca, which I will enjoy in my kitchen.

Finally, I've been reading some of the essays in Best Food Writing 2006. There's some interesting stuff in there.

Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

Sara, how was "I Feel Bad About My Neck" ?

I told my wife not to buy it because it'd be like prematurely giving in to aging or something, but that was probably unfair of me.

I recently read Mole: the True Story of the First Russian Spy to Become an American Counterspy by William Hood - which has the pacing of a good spy thriller but is always firmly believable and gives a sense of what it might have been like to be a CIA officer in Europe in the early '50s.

Now I'm reading Thomas McGuane's Ninety-two in the Shade, which is pretty enjoyable so far, and reminds me of the few days I spent in Key West.

Raining buckets as I look out.

Keith Thomas' terrific "Religion and the Decline of Magic"

I am still plodding through the Russian revoution. The czar and czarina have just been disposed of after 650 pages. So far, the most obvious fact that rises above all others is that Russia was one incredibly fucked up country from top to bottom. sigh. Only 175 more pages to go.

I keep noticing that, although Lenin was undoubtedly the central pivot point, Trotsky is the most interesting figure in all this violent hubbub. He's as ruthless as Lenin and is far more quotable. But he always appears in brief vignettes, so I can't quite get a good grip on him.

Just started Cortazar's 'Hopscotch'

Just started Cortazar's 'Hopscotch'

Good luck with that, I'll state ominously.

Yeah the introductory section is already a bit daunting...

Middlemarch was fandoobytastic.

Now...

Chekhov: A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire
Narayan: Under the Banyan Tree

both of which are also excellent.

Hello ILB Massive, long time no see.

I started to read a Gordon Brown biography, but didn't get far before I relaised that I don't give a monkey's. Oh well, at least now I know that he has only got one functional eye.

This morning a Iread a Shaun Ryder interview, but it did not give me any clues as to whether the new Happy Mondays record is any good.

I am still reading the book about TEH LAST MUGHAL. I am in the sadface bit now.

I am also reading a collection of stories pitting Sherlock Holmes against the Cthulhu Mythos. There are many moments of a "My God Holmes, the Necronomicon!" nature.

"Just started Cortazar's 'Hopscotch'

Good luck with that, I'll state ominously."

it's not such a hard read, if you do it the regular way, not the hopscotch way, as a amtter of fact, there's not musch point in reading it not in the conservative way

up to "Rabbit is Rich" in Angstrom novels! still enjoying immensely!

also in the midst of:

No one belongs here more than you - miranda july
Skinema - Chris Nieratko
The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure - Jack Pendarvis
Beloved Infidel/Embryoyo - Dean Young

I just finished Rabbit is Rich, skipping Rabbit Redux. What terribly spoiled men those Angstroms are. I'm starting Perdido Street Station instead of Rabbit at Rest, I think. The library system has also returned Special Topics in Calamity Physics to me, so I can jump back into the party and find out who died.

"skipping Rabbit Redux. What terribly spoiled men those Angstroms are"

not spoiled in redux - where rabbit is trying to understand and live in harmony with the troubled 70's america.
yes,they are spoiled in "Rich", the material america is making them spoiled, but also hollow,as always, cause materilism and sex can't solve the modern western person problems, only give them immidiate satisfaction, that fades away shortly

They are more spoiled by their own egos and arrogance and the women who cater to them than anything material imo. But whatever. At least S. had an interesting female character.

"They are more spoiled by their own egos and arrogance and the women who cater to them than anything material imo"
true,and this isnt a contradiction to what ive said if you believe that enviorment,culture and society have a big influence on individual humans behaviour

hard to take seriously a gripe about Rabbit not having interesting female characters...lol...some of my favorite passages so far are because of updike so clearly conveying v. misogynistic perspectives. so far "rich" is giving me more the lazy, middle-aged, comfort and sated vibe rather than the spoiled but we'll see..

also hard to take seriously 'Special Topics' narrator as interesting.

The revolution is over! The Maximum Leader is dead and entombed in a masoleum in Moscow. Long live the moustachioed Maximum Leader!

To celebrate the end of the bloodshed, I hopped around in a book of essays last night, Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport, a fellow with a fine mind, a rich education and an overly dogmatic attitude. A deep-dyed Ezra Pound acolyte - which really says it all.

I may savor my newly-won freedom a bit longer by flitting about among the anectdotists, belle lettrists, and dramaticians, before I settle on something more substantial.

also hard to take seriously 'Special Topics' narrator as interesting.

Did I say this? Nope, I did not.

Sara, how was "I Feel Bad About My Neck" ?

I told my wife not to buy it because it'd be like prematurely giving in to aging or something, but that was probably unfair of me.

It was a fast read and kind of funny. I'm pretty sure that one of the essays is actually a segment of her novel Heartburn. If your wife wants to read it, she could check it out from the library (which is what I did)! Some of it really is relevant to us younger people - I liked the essay "What I Wish I'd Known," which is just a few pages of things Ephron has learned over the years. Especially since some of them are about divorce, and a friend is going through a divorce right now...

The only essay that stuck with me from I Feel Bad About My Neck was about the apartment she gave up in New York, which embodied a lot about what "home" means, to a person who has moved 8 times in 8 years.

xxpost

sorry then, I guessed that's what S. meant as you had referenced coming back to Special Topics

I actually didn't hate Special Topics as much as I sense some people did! (I know, how's that for a compliment..)

S. as in the Updike novel, which I enjoyed a lot. Special Topics, well, hmmm. It's got some very annoying things going on, but I really did want to know who had died at the party. I was hoping it was the insufferably tedious father.

Miranda July: No One Belongs Here More Than You - enjoyable, but not quite what I'd hoped from the brilliance of her promo website
Balzac: Sarrasine - cross-dressing madness ahoy
Various: The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction - exactly what it says, and includes a bunch of authors too obscure to have been reprinted in the last 100 years, and some too obscure to have even turned up on Project Gutenberg, so rather cool

Paul Theroux -- Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across 5 Continents

After putzing around with some essays and journalism, last night I picked up The Trial by Franz Kafka.

First impression: Kafka roams around in the territory between the age-old genre of allegory and the newer notions of Freud about dreams and the unconcious. His great strength is that he did not do this mechanically or clumsily. He has a deft touch.

Finishing Mishima's 'Spring Snow' -- the first part of his tetralogy. s'ok, although somehow I wish it ws more pulpily written...dunno, this is the kind of thing I'd normally really like much more than I currently am.

Finished Keith Thomas' history of witchcraft in England. Really amazing and fascinating in the best way, and very much relevant as a history of beliefs. A short story collection from Hubert Selby Jr ('the coat' is great, and some others).

First impression: Kafka roams around in the territory between the age-old genre of allegory and the newer notions of Freud about dreams and the unconcious. His great strength is that he did not do this mechanically or clumsily. He has a deft touch.

Thanx

-- FranzK, Satuday July 14, 2007 2:08 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

Hindoo Holiday, by J.R. Ackerley, which is a fairly terrific light diary/memoir of a Brit visiting India (in the 20s) and admiring the young man flesh. Or, perhaps, not finding as much worth admiring as he might have expected. And other things.

Ackerley's great - have you read his other books? 'Hindoo...' is the only one I haven't read yet.

No, I just grabbed that one because it seemed interesting and I like NYRB's odd tastes. I'd never heard of him. I'd read another, although probably not the dog one even though I can tell it's probably a good one -- I just don't like dogs.

Today I read both volumes of Persepolis, which were OK.

Finished Atul Gawande's Complications and scanned Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers this weekend. The first was engrossing with some cringe-making moments (compelling enough for squeamish me to continue with it though); the second was much more academic than I expected and assured me that nothing much has changed since I was a religious American teenager.

Re Ackerley: Was it 'My Father and Myself', about his own gayness and his father's secret other wife and family? And there are two dog ones - 'My Dog Tulip', which is autobiography, and 'We Think the World of You', which is a novel about a gay man who moves in with a bloke he's lufting after (and the bloke's wife), and ends up looking after his dog when said bloke goes off to prison. All are excellent, in any case.

Recently read 'The Feast of July' by HE Bates, and am now reading 'The Tartar Steppe' by Dino Buzzati, both very enjoyable. What's mildly disconcerting is that in both cases its very hard to work out when they are set, something which always nags at the back of my mind while I'm reading.

Paul Theroux -- Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across 5 Continents

ok this was fascinating, really like nothing else I've read. A memoir of the mentor/protege relationship between the unbelievably cranky curmudgeon VS Naipaul and traveller/novelist Theroux. The arc of their relationship and eventual falling out unfolds like an expertly rendered travel book -- even though you know how/where it'll end the surprises along the way are mind-expanding. Full of insights into writing, too, I was scribbling down Sir Vidia's advice to Paul between bouts of laughter and amazement. Also gleaned some insight into a de facto estrangement/falling-out I've had with an old freind this year.

"the inevitable revisionism of the new wife" = old old story I guess.

Sillitoe: 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning'

I recently started Mercy Among Children by David Adams Richards. Started out strange but well...then hit a steady decline. I love that he's focusing on the poorest of the poor, and because he chose the Maritimes he's teasing out some regional Canadian issues and that are interesting because they're so fucked up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But his writing is so...polemical. I feel as though I'm reading some kind of sociological treatise at the centre of which is Sydney, the Dirt Poor Pacifist, determinedly held up as a Christ figure to the point of inhumanity. No matter how many injustices happen to him and his family -- even if his wife is verbally abused and he is physically attacked in front of her and his children -- he will never, ever, not for a moment, fight back or have the teeniest rebellious thought. Just dusts himself off and plods on "nobly", dignity in tact while his kids' self-esteem is steadily eroded.

I'll probably finish it with lots of shouting and threats to do the book physical harm.

*ahem* Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is going on much better as is Louise Gluck's Averno which will probably the first book of contemporary poetry I read in its entirety, in order.

Close to Book V in Paradise Lost. Turns out that God is egotistical merciless tyrant and Jesus is a somewhat more palatable teacher's pet. Who knew? (I do like Uriel though, probably because I have William Blake's image of him is stuck in my mind.) I sighed my way through all of Eve's, "Oh, Adam I revel in your obvious superiority over my beautiful but derivative form. Tee hee!"

just started:
Nixon & Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek

on deck:
North of South by Shiva Naipaul

Two Cheers for Democracy - essays by E. M. Forster, written from 1936 - 1946 or so.

Iris Murdoch - The Sea The Sea

i think i fell ambivalence towards Murdoch's fiction:
it's smart,deep layerd,and knows how to move a plot and feels sometimes like a modern Tolstoy tales,but it also tends towards the irritating banal,too melodramatic,and sometimes unreliable dialouge. to my taste at least.

Finally took the plunge into the third volume of Robert Caro's LBJ bios, *The Master of the Senate," which actually doubles as a history of the Senate itself. A good mix of fascination with the body's procedural detail and insight into the interaction of personalities. Also, he impossibly builds up suspense even though we all know how it turns out.

Recent Reads--

Kenneth Fearing- The Big Clock
Gore Vidal- Point to Point Navigation
Gore Vidal- The City & the Pillar
Glen Greenwald- A Tragic Legacy
Ayaan Hirsi Ali- Infidel
Harlen Coben- The Woods
Brian Moore- The Magician’s Wife
Chris Willman- Rednecks & Bluenecks
Ruth Rendell- Piranha to Scurfy

i think i fell ambivalence towards Murdoch's fiction:
it's smart,deep layerd,and knows how to move a plot and feels sometimes like a modern Tolstoy tales,but it also tends towards the irritating banal,too melodramatic,and sometimes unreliable dialouge. to my taste at least.

-- Zeno, Thursday, 19 July 2007 14:11 (7 hours ago)

Yeah, me too. The prose itself is good enough that it keeps me reading. Actually the biggest problem I'm having so far is that I have no interest in theater.

I'd be amazed if Murdoch isn't one of those writers hailed as "classic" while they're alive/newly dead/newly the focus of a whitewashing biographical film, but who quickly vanishes from the shelves after that. Look at how little of her stuff is in print compared to 5 years ago. She'll be doing a Bulwer-Lytton, methinks.

Having said that, I enjoyed 'Under the Net', but, really, she isn't that good a novelist, is she?

"Look at how little of her stuff is in print"

that doesnt say anything (look at Thomas Bernhard for exapmle of a great writer who most of his stuff is out of print).

i think she is well talented, and knows how to tell and invent a smart story, but she doesnt have new ideas that i havent read before, or after what she has written .

(and i didnt read all her books)

plus,she is one of those writers of the "if you read one - it's like you read everything".
(in this case "the black prince" is the best)

fwiw my wife loves Iris Murdoch and has read a bunch of her books.

"Look at how little of her stuff is in print"

that doesnt say anything (look at Thomas Bernhard for exapmle of a great writer who most of his stuff is out of print).

I wasn't saying this showed she wasn't a great writer, simply that the speed with which it has happened showed that (despite the very recent past when you couldn't move for articles, films, books, etc, about her) she was headed quickly for obscurity.

Having said that, she isn't a great writer (unlike Bernhard). If reading one of your books is like reading all of your books, then you either shouldn't write more than one book.

Recently completed Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards -- a morally potent but problematic text. I'm not surprised he isn't well-known in the US (as so many feel he should be) -- his style is definitely not en vogue. I'd like to read more but need looong breaks in-between. Don't want to get depressed or anything.

Just got The Haunted Hillybilly by Derek McCormack who is another Canadian writer. I hadn't known at the time I got it -- only picked it up because it was from Soft Skull press.

Also reading Louise Gluck's "Averno" -- probably the first contemporary poet in a long, long time to fully engage me.

Oh and Fun Home isn't really that good after all. It's more "literary" I suppose but in a very obvious way -- I'm not used to authors spelling out their allusions to other texts. Also Bechdel has an odd habit of dropping in 4 syllable words from out of nowhere. Much preferred "Blankets" despite its lower aspirations.

No, it really is very good.

One of the great things about Fun Home is that can spell out its allusions to other texts, because it isn't making those allusions to be clever, but instead wants to show how overwhelming the weight of those allusions can be. So a sly "did you get that? it's like Proust!" moment, which is the sort of game that most allusions end up being, would have totally defeated her purpose. Instead, she almost makes fun of you for being part of that game; the book is about some of the consequences of such a mediated life.

Blankets I haven't read, but I did read Goodbye Chunky Rice, which I am told is a sort of "warm up" to Blankets; it was OK, but I don't feel a great need to read 500 pages of it. Carnet de Voyage is very good, though.

Good authors don't use allusions to be "clever". I prefer them to be used in more subtle manner, more as a seamless you-can-see-it-if-you-know-it-doesn't-matter-if-you-don't manner, rather than the book become nothing more than a personalized Cliff Notes. *shrugs* Which is how Fun Home read to me. I get that's how she had to tell her story, it just didn't work for me. (Funnily enough the Proust section worked the best for me, probably because that was the one, out of all of them, that least needed the And This Is How Budding Grove Applies To My Life tactic.)

(Bechdel also had the habit of dropping in $10 words out of the middle of nowhere. What was up with that?)

I heard that Chunky Rice wasn't as good as Blankets. Is Carnet do Voyage by Thompson as well? (This is my first foray into the graphic novel/memoir genre.)

Started Haunted Hillbilly by Derek McCormack. Started out on a gleeful, delighted note took a sharp turn for holy crap.

I'm halfway through Perdido Street Station and it's giving me the squicks. Yet I press on because the library wants it back tomorrow.

The Apocalypse Reader: pretty disappointing (despite getting agood review from Bookslut and others)--the new stories almost all pale compared to the likes of Wells, Hawthorne, etc, and a significant number of them are really annoying.
Henry de Monfried: Hashish - A Smuggler's Tale: autobiography of a WWI Middle East-to-Greece dope smuggler - rather good, but it's a Penguin Classic that has NO introduction and NO notes, and it really needs them, as it keeps referring to a couple of his other books, which are out of print, so a brief summary of important events/persons would have been nice.

Bartelby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas: a novelistic essay on Writers Who Would Prefer Not To- prefer not to write! Very nicely done so far, although I've only heard of half that writers he mentions- I'm trying to wait until I'm done to see whether the others really exist.

I remember reading a Susan Sontag essay on the same subject, but I think I lost it a move or two ago.

Just finished Michael Herr's Dispatches, which I really enjoyed.

Just started Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities"

"Just started Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities"

the long and winding road...

Didn't get to the end of Perdido Street Station, but so so close! It's back on my request list and now I'm deep into Twinkie, Deconstructed and have learned where baking soda comes from: Wyoming.

is it worth the wind Zeno? certainly requires a lot of concentration and re-reading, but yields interesting stuff so far.

Children of Hurin - Tolkien
Demons - Dostoevsky
Myth of Sisyphus - Camus

PG Wodehouse: Full Moon
James Gunn: The Immortals

Ronan,i think Musil worth your effort, less as a novel, more as a book of ideas (the narrative seems like an excuse here for the philosophy),.
Thomas Bernhard thought Musil (and Mann) are,what he called "Bureaucratic writers" meaning that they write only to an inner circle of the bourgeoisie readers (as oppose to Kafka, which is more direct,short and relatavely easy),and i think he had a point there.
but still, Musil was obv. a genius, so if you like novels of ideas, like Broch and Mann,(but longer and more dificult) and the german style of clean prose writing, youll like it.
i liked it, but it's not at my top ten.or even 50.
Broch had more or less the same ideas on "the sleepwalkers" and i enjoyed that one better.

There was a hilarious excerpt from a Thomas Bernhard interview in the readings in a recent Harper's magazine in which he basically trashed every other German language writer ever.

i think he changes his mind about it (and about many other stuff)in different periods of his life.
he always loved Kafka though.
in "extintion" he trashed Goethe, and in "correction" he wrote that he adore him,for example.
sometimes he says opopsite opinion on the same writer in the same novel.
but than again,this ambivilation is part of the idea of all his novels and writing.

Ah, yes, Kafka. Just finished off The Trial. The big payoff in the cathedral chapter takes a while to load, but is rather nice when it comes. I ambled through all 460 pp. of Ernie Pyle's old newspaper columns in Home Country. Not sure what to read next. It needs to be lightweight, as I'll be hiking next week. Maybe The Master and Margarita.

There was a hilarious excerpt from a Thomas Bernhard interview in the readings in a recent Harper's magazine in which he basically trashed every other German language writer ever.

-- James Redd and the Blecchs, Thursday, July 26, 2007 6:36 PM

That interview is online here: http://www.signandsight.com/features/1090.html

It's well worth reading.

July so far:

Harryette Mullen, Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge.
Mark Kurlansky, Cod.
Derek Wilson, Charlemagne.
Clifton Hood, 722 Miles (a history of the NYC subway).
Aaron Fischer, Ted Berrigan: An Annotated Checklist.
JR Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday.
Francoise Wacquet, Latin, or the Empire of a Sign.
Snorri Sturluson, King Harald's Saga.
Jean Gimpel, Medieval Machine.
Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America.
F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.

Not sure what to read next.

Oh and Persepolis.

Anna Karenina.

First time, too.

I settled on what to take to read on my hiking trip:

Letters From My Windmill, Alphonse Daudet
Hot Water, P.G. Wodehouse

I chose these because they seem about the correct speed for a vacation, and my copies of them weigh a combined 10 oz. I decided my copy of The Master and Margarita is too nice to get all grubby on a hike. Meanwhile, I am reading in Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, a series of reprinted essays by Tim Cahill, first having appeared in Outside magazine.

I read something by Cahill I really enjoyed a few years ago. 'Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered", I think, looking at him on Amazon.

The Daudet and Wodehouse are good moves. I'm not sure you could have called 'Margarita' lightweight, after all - I mean, it's easy to read, but needs a lot of contemplative processing time, and I found it handy to have access to the net to look stuff up (including the large amount of very groovy art it has inspired, which was talked about in one of the other 'What are you reading now' threads).

I've recently read...
Brian Moore; The Colour of Blood
Tom Drury: The Driftless Area

Both of these were ace in an extra-ace way.

By lightweight, I believe Aimless is referring to the actual weight of the book, as it sounds like he's taking another of his really long hikes.

"Tom Drury: The Driftless Area"

i just read a book by him. The End Of Vandalism. it was good. homespun. "wry". kinda Fargo-esque.

now i'm reading Painted Desert by Frederick Barthelme. something i picked up at random at the big book sale this weekend. it's snappy.

On a break from the The Magic Mountain:
Alison Bechdel - Fun Home (per discussion on this thread)
Sylvie Simmons - Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes
Sasha Issenberg - The Sushi Economy

The last two were pretty bad, which was no surprise for the Issenberg book but I was expecting more from the Gainsbourg bio than a rundown of the major events of his life and the repeated assertion that he was an important artist.

I've accidentally gotten into Art as Experience, but I would really like to get back to Magic Mountain.

Finished the McGuane, which was funny and moving, and am now on a kind of Spanish philosophers kick - I just finished a book of essays by Jose Ortega y Gasset (History as a System) and am now starting on Miguel de Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life.

Brecht: The Caucasian Chalk Circle - expected this to be more than it was, somehow
DH Lawrence: England, My England & Other Stories - really enjoying this, somewhat to my surprise

Colin what didn't you like about the Issenberg? it's been getting a lot of media attn here, it sounds well-researched but potentially dry/dull writing-wise...

Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan, which I got at the library solely because it's plugged on Bookslut just about every day. It's very good, so I'm glad I did.

Colin what didn't you like about the Issenberg? it's been getting a lot of media attn here, it sounds well-researched but potentially dry/dull writing-wise...

I didn't necessarily dislike it, it just didn't really provide any surprises; at points it could be almost any other recent pop economics/globalization book and it sometimes seems that Issenberg is overselling his thesis. He's not a bad writer and the vignettes are compelling enough, but don't expect anything more from the book than a basic outline of the global tuna trade.

Robert Charles Wilson: The Divide
Ken MacLeod: The Execution Channel
- a pair of very good science-fiction literary-thriller thingies

Biyi Bandele: Burma Boy
- very funny, moving story about a Nigerian soldier in the British Army in South-East Asia in WW2.

I just got some mystery out of the library called Christine Falls which I thought was the maiden voyage of an unknown Irish writer named Benjamin Black, but turns out to be John Banville writing under a pseudonym. I guess I'd better return to The Mystery Of The Sardine, by Stefan Themerson, a Polish philosopher/graphic artist(see his webpage!)/novelist writing in English(he wrote lots of books, including children's books, although now only three are in print at the Dalkey Archive, as far as I know.) I started a stone-drop thread on him back in the 17 days void, but maybe this time I can turn an ILB ember into a flame.

Carte Blanche - Carlo Lucarelli

Birds w/out Wings - Louis de Bernieres

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair - Pablo Neruda

Absolutely sublime and i'm in the middle of 'Residence on Earth'.

I'm re-reading Lolita, and also enjoying the hell out of Up In The Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. I'm not usually a two-books-at-once person, but this is going quite smoothly so far.

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, finished over the weekend. Well-crafted, fascinating to me, except for the sidebar contributions of her 19-year-old which were awfully stiff and self-important. Lots of good reasons presented on why corporate/processed foods should be avoided. Since I just finished reading Twinkie, Deconstructed, with its focus on just where all those additives/chemicals come from (hint: corn is EVERYWHERE), it just added fuel to the fire.

Shaw: Man and Superman - can't imagine being able to sit through a full-length performance of this; it must take about 6 hours

"Science Fiction from the Rivals of HG Wells" rather nifty harback from 1980 with 30 stories and a novel all reprinted in facsimiles of their first magazine appearances, with the original illustrations (panama-hatted jingoist soldiers turning howitzers on elasmosaurs, winged airships crashing into London). Lots of sometimes daft fun, and London gets destroyed about 11 times during the course of the collection.

I have returned, briefly. (My hike was quite satisfactory, for those who might wonder about such things.)

I read the Daudet on the first leg. Very nice vignettes that almost rise to the level of stories. Almost inevitably the introduction by the translator compared Daudet's style to the impressionist painters, but I would liken these letters more to sketchbook watercolors, which tend to convey their form and substance through swiftly painted, but artful, blobs (I mean this in a good way).

I haven't quite finished Hot Water, yet. For that reason, my judgement is tenative. Still, it strikes me as less funny than many another Wodehouse, and I think I have sussed out the the reason: it is so crammed with plot machinery that it overstrains both the author and the reader to keep it all straight. This constraint prevents Wodehouse from doing what he does best, the liesurely unwinding of a funny moment in a superbly crafted paragraph. He doesn't have time for it, what with keeping all the gears of the plot meshed and synchronized.

Along the way I polished of Dava Sobel's little book Longitude. It was a tasty little snack, although it purported to tell the story of the man who invented the chronometer and at the end of the book you know almost as little about him as when you began. In one place she simply states that he went away to work on his clock for another 17 years and provides not one detail about that interval. That's OK. The clocks are the real heroes of the story and they can bear the weight of the tale.

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair - Pablo Neruda

Absolutely sublime and i'm in the middle of 'Residence on Earth'.

The ones that I've read are indeed excellent. I only have a selection of them in an anthology, but I should get the book.

The Garden Next Door- José Donoso

anybody read anything else by him?

Elmore Leonard: 'Mr Majestyk'
Pat Barker: 'Life Class'
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo: 'Murder at the Savoy'

Wilhelm Reich-Listen, Little Man!
Romain Gary-White Dog
If on a winter's night a traveler

2007 PURCHASED AND READ FOR PLEASURE LIST:

Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon
Mason and Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
Xanth: The Quest for Magic - Piers Anthony
Between the River and the Bridge - Craig Ferguson
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
In Evil Hour - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Golden Compass - Philip Pullman
Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman
Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman
Ellen Tebbits - Beverly Cleary
Henry Huggins - Beverly Cleary
Bird by Bird - Anne LaMott
Querelle - Jean Genet
Bone - Jeff Smith
Cosmic Puppets - PKD
Eye in the Sky - PKD
Dr. Futurity - PKD
The Simulacra - PKD
Martian Time-Slip - PKD
Dr. Bloodmoney - PKD
The Crack in Space - PKD
Galactic Pot Healer - PKD
Lies, Inc - PKD
Clans of the Alphane Moon - PKD
Great Shark Hunt - HST
Moon and Sixpence - Maugham
Titus Alone - Mervyn Peake
A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L'Engle
A Wind in the Door - Madeline L'Engle
Many Waters - Madeline L'Engle
A Swiftly Tilting Planet - Madeline L'Engle
An Acceptable Time - Madeline L'Engle
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence
The Magus - John Fowles
Prater Violet - Christopher Isherwood

Coming into the Country - John McPhee
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City - Nick Flynn
Best Friends / Worst Enemies - Micahel Thompson
Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, The Writer, and the Lost Screenplay
My Brain is Open: The Life of Paul Erdos
Marlene (Dietrich): A Life - Norton

Collected Poems of James Joyce - James Joyce
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens - Wallace Stevens
A Boy's Will - Robert Frost

Next up:

Down There On A Visit - Christopher Ishwerwood
Buddenbrooks - Mann
The Immoralist - André Gide
City of Nets - Otto Friedrich
We Can Build You - PKD

What I've read since I started this thread--

Kenneth Fearing- The Big Clock
Gore Vidal- Point to Point Navigation
Glen Greenwald- A Tragic Legacy
Ayaan Hirsi Ali- Infidel
Harlen Coben- The Woods
Brian Moore- The Magician’s Wife
Jonathan Raab- The Overseer
Steve Martini- The Attorney
Chris Willman- Rednecks & Bluenecks
Ruth Rendell- Piranha to Scurfy
Gore Vidal- The City & the Pillar
JK Rowling- Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix
" " - " " & the Half Blood Prince
" " - " " & the Deathly Hallows
Chris Hedges- American Fascists
Chris Hedges- War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
Harlen Coben- The Innocent
Harlen Coben- Promise Me
Theodore Roethke- The Lost Son
Elizabeth Bishop- North & South
Joseph Goulden- The Best Years
Jefferey Deaver- Cold Moon

Douglas Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop, and it's making me angrier by the page. I keep reading though, in hopes he'll redeem himself, esp. w/r/t conscienceness = soul. Oh, really?

Argh - consciousness = soul

I've been reading some selections from Smiling through the Apocalypse: Esquire's History of the Sixties - just finished one by Norman Mailer on the 1960 Democratic convention.

Consciousness doesn't seem like a terribly unreasonable synonym for soul in at least one of its meanings, but it depends on his argument, etc.

He has worked in the idea of greater and lesser "souledness" and has ranked himself and other "normal" people as having more "souledness" than people who are mentally challenged or are afflicted with Alzheimer's, etc. Then comes other mammals, then chickens, then fish. It just pisses me off.

Also ALSO! There's this bit about how while a fetus definitely doesn't have enough soul, a 2 year old has "soul potential" and also "cuteness" and therefore it's just as hard to decide between allowing a 2 year old and a 20 year old to be killed (ala Sophie's Choice).

It's just making me nuts and yet I can't stop. I personally don't believe anything has a soul (as in some unique bit of self that persists independently after death, either adrift in the ether or absorbed into some Greater Being) and the slippery slopes this guy is rapidly descending is justifying that belief as the right choice for me.

Alfred Hutchinson: The Road to Ghana
Simone de Beauvoir: The Blood of Others
Emily Holmes Coleman: The Shutter of Snow
Elizabeth Hardwick: The Simple Truth

Is that (the persistence of soul) really where he's going?

I have to keep reading to find out :( I thought this would be more about the concept of "I" and self-referential strange loops, but so far it's about not eating meat and deciding who has less souledness than me.

Oy.

Tillie Olsen: 'Tell Me a Riddle'
William Dampier: 'A New Voyage Round the World'

has ranked himself and other "normal" people as having more "souledness" than people who are mentally challenged or are afflicted with Alzheimer's, etc.

Arrrgh! This douchebag has conflated "mind" and "soul" and clearly is way off base. This is the sort of misplaced pride that deserves to be called pure hubris.

Do not be taken in, Jaq. However he argues this position, it is wrong. I happen to know this, not just from abundant personal experience with mentally challenged individuals, but also from a more theoretical and Buddhist point of view.

I agree Aimless, the man's ego is leaching out all over the place in this book. I'd decided to return it, then thought well maybe I'd persevere so I could say I'd given it a fair shot and answer Chris's question. But in chapter 2 he perverts the phrase "thermodynamics is explained by statistical mechanics" into "thinkodynamics is explained by statistical mentalics" and now I don't care one whit about this book any more.

I started Iron Council by China Mieville instead.

Have you read any other Hofstadter, Jaq? Your descriptions of the new one do sound unappealing, but I loved his book on translation and liked the little I read from GEB.

I've been marking time with some essays by E.B. White in a collection called One Man's Meat, and reading some poetry (R.S. Thomas, Joseph Brodsky, Stevie Smith).

I also read The Poor Mouth, by Flann O'Brien, a very slender book with some fine wit, but its only real claim to fame is as the funniest book ever written in Irish Gaelic, which is somewhat akin to writing the best fashion magazine in Yiddish, or the best popular science book in Urdu.

Colin B, I had read GEB when it came out and had fond memories of it. I was excited when I read about this one, because of its promise of expanding and elaborating on the underlying theme of GEB. Maybe it does, in later chapters. A quick flip through made that look possible, but thinkodynamics was very liberally sprinkled on every page I saw.

Wait, except Irish people are supposed to be dead funny!

Maybe they're only funny in english?

I believe it was the English who invented the comic Irishman. Gaelic literature is known more for its melancholy.

I thought it was the indistinguishableness of comedy and melancholy that marked the Irishman -- but perhaps I've read too much Joyce and Beckett.

In other news I just read Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and was kinda not impressed! Hadn't read him before, was expecting a bit more.

Beckett's stuff was more Gallic than Gaelic, wunnit? And Joyce, in the end, just patted together polyglot mudpies to serve at his imaginary tea party. How sad. How very sad. [removes his cap and bows head in a dejected, hangdog manner]

Tom Drury: 'The End of Vandalism'
Celia Fremlin: 'The Hours Before Dawn'

I can't believe you're trying to make mudpie tea parties sound sad! And polyglot ones, at that.

The sadness of such tea parties is not only real, but it can be substantially enhanced by costuming all the participants as sad clowns, dressed as hobos, with drooping flowers in their battered hats. This has been proved by science.

I finished <i>The Exception</i> by Christian Jungersen last night. I may read some essays in <i>Reporting</i> by David Remnick before starting <i>Fortress of Solitude</i>. Before that I read Carl Bernstein's biography of Hillary Clinton.

Sad clowns, mudpies, imaginary tea party - giving me flashbacks to the creepy scene in Con Air

Captain James Cook: The Journals
Alan Weissman: The World Without Us

Swapping backwards and forwards between these two, both excellent. From the Cook I learned to my surprise that Australia does seem to be named after Austria--the explorer Pedro Fernandez De Quirós, in 1605, reached Vanuatu and thought he;d discovered the mythical Great Sothern Continent, and named it La Austrialia del Espíritu Santo after King Phillip III, Duke of Austria. So all those annoying Americans who can't tell Austria from Australia do at least have etymology on their side.

The Weissman is very interesting. The blurb says...

"On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house – or houses, that is. Cleans them right off the face of the earth. They all go."

How would the world change if human beings vanished from the earth right now, for good? What would the planet be like in a day, a week, a month… a millennium? In the current age of anxiety about our impact on the earth’s climate and environment, this groundbreaking book offers an intriguing glimpse of what the real legacy of our time on the planet may be.

The World Without Us takes readers on a journey into the future, to a world without humans and asks how the natural world would respond if we all simply disappeared. Would the planet’s climate ever recover from the effects of human activity? How would nature destroy our huge cities? Could it ever reduce our myriad plastics and toxic synthetics back to benign, basic elements? And what about architecture and art? Will we have left any enduring mark on the universe; any sign that we were once here?

To discover the answers, Alan Weisman looks to areas of the world that are currently unoccupied to see how they have fared without us. He reveals how animals would react to our disappearance and how the planet’s flora would be affected, and uncovers just how long our greatest achievements and our biggest mistakes would last after we are gone. In doing so he wrestles with some of the key concerns of our time and reveals a picture of the future that is both captivating and terrifying.

I'm trying to squeeze in a few more books-for-fun before classes start again in September.

In the past few weeks I've finished
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (of course)
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill - pretty good first novel from Stephen King's son
Blaze by Richard Bachman - enjoyable book from King/Bachman's earlier writing days (although apparently re-written from whatever form he found the manuscript in)

Just started Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams by Alfred Lubrano

Still trying to get into Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs

Still meandering through Best Food Writing 2006

Aimless is no longer invited to my imaginary hobo tea parties. Me and Beckett and Emmett Kelly and Bizarro-Churchill will have "fun" without him.

Kathy Acker - Kathy Goes to Haiti
Richard Yates - 11 Kinds of Loneliness
Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road

I wish I had listened to Yates recommendations earlier!

Just finished a library book I checked out. It's full title is Feeding the Fire: The Lost History and Uncertain Future of Mankind's Energy Addiction. It had a few interesting tidbits, but on the whole it was woefully simplistic and underthought. My recommendation would be, don't bother yourself with it.

Apart from that I have been reading poetry. For a lark I started reading Stevie Smith side by side with Emily Dickinson. They both seem to have very a similar sense of poetic language, but in the service of rather different sensibilities.

Emily tires me out with all her sighing and pining away, and I think she must have tired herself, too, up there all alone in her room. Stevie was also reclusive and death-obsessed, but usually she seems in a better humor about the world and much healthier overall. If I weren't so tired myself, I would go post some representative poems on the poetry thread. They make an interesting contrast.

Updike - Rabbit Run

I'm not thrilled with the first 50 pages or so. I find the prose jerky and the dialogue unconvincing.

read it backwards from "rabbit in rest" to "run".

Is skully a real game?

I'm reading Consider the Lobster, but I might take a break and read that new Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach) 'cause someone lent it to me.

youn: skully is a real game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skully_%28game%29

I've just started on Don Delillo's "Falling Man". I was a bit put off that he did a 911 novel, but it's very good so far.

Thank you. I forget that you can Google everything. In gratitude: "Football was an arrangement of failures, a proving how unlikely most things were."

ok, I'm warming to the Updike

DH Lawrence: The Tresspasser - despite some reservations when I first started reading Lawrence (and Lady Chatterley is still dull), I'm actually enjoying him more and more. But he makes everything so explicit, and not in the way you'd normally mean with Lawrence. It's just that every thought, every subtle observation, every moment, is so thoroughly described that there's no room for the reader to add to it (if that makes sense). He's no follower of "show, don't tell".

Alan Garner: The Stone Book Quartet - wow, now this is the stuff!

W S Maugham: The Moon and Sixpence - fun, not terribly deep

My Recent Reading:

The Lost Estate - Henri Alain-Fournier
If On a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
Comfort of Strangers - Ian McEwan
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke
Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Giving Tree - Shel Silverstein

The first chapter of the Calvino is the best thing i've ever read although it is slightly creepy and i'm convinced that The Little Prince and The Giving Tree are the best children's books ever. I've got about eight other books to get through but i start my english degree in a couple of weeks and i don't think i'll get through them. Has anyone seen the film of Comfort of Strangers?

Rudolph Wurlitzer - Quake
George Konrad - The Case Worker

On my most recent hike I took a copy of Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars and read Julius, Augustus, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. I had read it first back in college and loved it then. In no other book can you find such lovely tidbits as (paraphrased):

"In the first years of his reign, Domitian would spend several hours each day closeted in a room by himself, catching flies, which he would then execute using a small pin that was razor sharp."

Hahaha! The Twelve Caesars is the perfect airplane book, imo - fascinating, absurd, literate, just enough actual history, and low commitment. And if I recall, some of the final caesars were dull enough to lull a person right to sleep.

I'm reading Miranda July's new collection. Is it just me or do her narrators all come across as wise, worldly five year olds? It's starting to bother me.

I'm now reading V.S. Naipul's Beyond Belief, his sequel to Among the Believers. It tells the stories of many Muslims he met and interviewed from four non-Arab Islamic countries: Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia.

Taken purely as reportage, it is fairly interesting, but it doesn't seem to rise very far above reportage. IOW, I haven't yet been able to detect any larger threads of continuity that run through the stories of the people he interviewed, aside from the obvious one of their Islamic beliefs - which sort of belies the title of the book. By the end these common threads may become more obvious than they are at the 1/3 mark I've reached in the book. At least he writes well.

Miranda July comes across as a wise, worldly, preachy five year old.

visual bookshelf has killed me for this thread : (

I'm reading Miranda July's new collection. Is it just me or do her narrators all come across as wise, worldly five year olds? It's starting to bother me

I wanted to like that book more than I did. Some of the stories were very good, but it didn't quite have the greatness promised by the inventive ad funny website (of all things).

I have recently read...
Hari Kunzru: My Revolutions
Elizabeth Jolley: The Well
Deborah Eisenberg: The Stories (So Far) of...

I wish Visual Bookshelf had dates! I can sort of triangulate based on my LT dates and figure out about when I read the things I don't own, though.

it files them in order added, i thought.

anyway i just looked at it to check which of the pile of books by my bed i was actually reading. oh dear.

I am finished with the Naipul book. I read the first 400 pages and elided the last 40, which is not a thing I normally do.

Last night I took a swing at Don Delillo's Mao II, but failed to make solid contact and grounded out. It goes back to the public library. It seemed to be written to conform to a thesis about crowds taking over society. Since crowds do not read, I wonder who he was writing for?

After laying aside DeLillo, I took up Joan Didion's Where I Came From, but only had time to make a bare beginning. I have, as yet, no idea where she came from or where she thinks she is going.

I finished James Burke's Lost Get-Back Boogie last week and started on Paul Clemen's memoir Made in Detroit. I think Christopher Hitchen's God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is up next. It's mostly rant, according to Mr. Jaq, so should go fairly quickly. All the books we own are now packed up in boxes! (except for 5 or 6 Mr. Jaq might've been reading so I left them out.)

Off sick for a week, so reads heaps of stuff (yay!). Most recently, finished 'Hindoo Holiday' by Ackerley, and am now reading the new Edmund White ('Hotel de Dream'), which is about Stephen Crane plus added the-usual-White-gay-sex shenanigans.

You're moving AGAIN, Jaq?

oh yes. Next Monday. We get the keys today. It's a loft space across from Elliott Bay Books, and has a great kitchen.

Small correction: it's Where I Was From, and not Where I Came From.

Jaq, a great kitchen and a great bookstore across the street? You must think you've died and gone to heaven, provided that heaven has an unusual number of packing cartons in every room.

Heh :) If the place had a view of the water (or anything really - the windows are on the alley), it would be beyond my wildest dreams. It used to be a gallery (it's a live/work space) - we are plotting some similar possibilities, once we get all our stuff in there. And you Portland people, it is right near the train station, so come visit!

I'm reading Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites - it's more of a collection of shorter pieces that originally appeared separately in various magazines than a coherent, book-length argument, and some of the pieces are more interesting than others - but there are some thought-provoking ideas in here that remain timely.

I finished Where I Was From last night. IT was a quick and easy read, but I am beginning to think that Ms. Didion is not an authorial voice I desire to spend time with.

Her style has its merits. It has sufficient precision and her word sense avoids the kind of extravagence that makes people weary, like the extravagence of gesture of mimes.

But from time to time, she grates on me, often by being falsely portentious. The effect on me as a reader is similar to being abruptly shoved over what Didion thinks is an emotional cliff edge, designed to elicit a taut moment of vertiginous reaction, but it turns out to be just the far side of a dune, where I stumble, get sand on my hands and knees and wonder why she was so rude.

Reading Comics
Felix Feneon - Novels in Three Lines

Oooh, I'm envious--I had that Fenon on order at my local bookshop, but they cancelled the order for some reason. and now I have to wait until they can get a new order in for me (possible translation: my order came in but someone working in the shop liked the book enough to buy it themselves before I could get it)

LOW LIFE by Luc Sante
Lists and lists of ridiculous-and-now-quaint names attached to various unpleasant folks. Plus: sailors revealed to be easy marks in ye olde New York. Fun stuff.

THE ONGOING MOMENT by Geoff Dyer
Overview of any number of tenuous/non-existent connections between photographs/photographers, filtered through Dyer's lovely prose-style. Features my favorite Whitman lines towards the end.

MEGILLAT ESTHER by J.T. Waldman
Gorgeous comic-bookization of The Book Of Esther. You could get drunk off it by merely staring. Featuring an introduction by a rabbi!

Just for the sake of simple pleasure, I read Thousand-Mile Summer by Colin Fletcher - a classic hiking book from 1964.

Now I am working on two books:

Byrne, by Anthony Burgess, and The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh, by David Damrosch. (By next decade I expect to see a book whose subtitles require four or five intakes of breath to read aloud.)

Byrne shows off Burgess's wit, style and erudition to good effect. It's a narrative poem written in the stanza and meter of Lord Byron's Don Juan or Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. It isn't quite so good as either of those, but is good enough. The plot moves along, but the real action is watching the nimble footwork of the poet as he satisfies the need to constantly pull rhymes out of his arse.

I'm not far enough along in the other book to say anything pertinent, yet. It promises fair.

That Felix Feneon book has been calling to me for a long time, but so far I haven't responded to the siren song.

I recommed checking it out from the library or even just flipping through it in the bookstore. The pieces certainly are astonishingly economical and impressive, which is the pitch I guess, but after flipping through it the day I bought it, I haven't felt the need to pick it up again. It's not the kind of I book I think you need to spend a whole lot of time with.

About 85 pages into <i>A Frolic of His Own</i>. It's my one allotted Gaddis for the year - any more than that and my brain will explode.

It's awesome, of course.

Yes, the Feneon I'm reading in bits and pieces, now that I've got it. It's a bleak kind of fun. Mr Baez might like to note that it's translated and introduced by Luc Sante.

HE CAN'T - HE'S OUT OF THE LOOP ON A GREAT MANY THINGS AND WAS UNAWARE OF THIS BIT OF INFO. WILL OUR BELEAGUERED PROTAGONIST EVER ACHIEVE THE COSMIC AWARENESS THE DEITIES FORETOLD UPON HIS BIRTH???

Otherwise - thanks!

Now I am reading Arabella Edge's "The Company", a historical novel. It is the 17th century and some people are heading off on a Dutch East India Company ship to Java. No doubt the voyage will prove uneventful and they will arrive and build successful careers for themselves.