Winter 2007-8 - what are you reading ?!

Past week:
Italo Calvino - Why Read the Classics? (essays on literature, of rather varying interest to me, but generally quite good. I'm a bit disappointed that there's so much overlap with the collection "The Literature Machine") Shame most of the essays are so short, as the longer ones tend to be the best
David Lodge - Therapy (It's been nearly ten years since I last read Lodge, when I read and very much so enjoyed _Nice Work_. This too was an entertaining read, though not quite as funny. Does anyone have any tips on what else of his is worth picking up? I do own a copy of _How Far Can You Go?_, so that will be next no matter what)
James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson (Abridged Penguin paperback. I enjoyed this a great deal and will probably pick up the full thing some day. I can imagine it being a good book that one would dip into frequently for a long time after reading it through. Perhaps I should go read some of Johnson's work first, however. I read very few biographies, so I feel a bit odd to have read one about an author whose works I'm completely unfamiliar with.)

Now:
Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theater (Good lord!)

David Lodge fan thread

TS David Lodge vs. David Dodge

Thanks, looks like I can't go too wrong with Lodge then.

The only possible way to judge the winner of the great Dodge-Lodge war is by the covers.
So.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/84/Plundersun.jpg
VS
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n16/n82083.jpg

Well, Dodge has a packmule and a one-eyed goth-trannie; Lodge has a tilde-spewing factory and a cricket bat-shaped woman. Really, Lodge had no chance here, poor fellow.

Started Rilke's Book of Hours this morning - I bought it ages ago but never did more than dip into it. Reading it right through from the beginning is proving far more rewarding, but the hippy-dippy translators (one has "mystic" listed under her credentials) are pissing me off. When the notes casually mention "We ommitted four lines from the beginning of this stanza" with no further explanation, you can bet I'm taking their 'interpretation' with a grain of salt.

http://www.david-dodge.com/images/gato.jpg
vs.
http://www.agoravox.fr/IMG/veritnu2.jpg

Surly but cute cat eyeing exotic skull necklace vs. pale Sanka-drinking shoulder-tatooed animated statue goddess, modestly deployed within a changing screen in the shape of a book- a tie, I'd say.

I'll go with the cat every time.

I don't know who these people are. I really like the green on the one book but I'd never pick it up to read.

What am I reading. A few things. Starting in on Plautus, Captivi. Already far better than Vergil.

Just finished Not-Knowing, the D. Barthelme essay/interview collection, and am now re-reading much of Sixty Stories.

i'm reading a collection of 4 ivy compton-burnett novels at work (starts with a family and a fortune), and at home i'm reading a william trevor short story collection. good writing. good escapism. in both cases. and that's all i'm looking for right now.

http://www.libertyassociates.com/pages/images/TreeOfSmoke.gif

Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch just arrived in the mail and I am stoked for it. His earliest let's-hang-antlers-on-the-fire-hydrants experiments not so much, but once he got his feet under him he's a treat.

I put down Dog Soldiers after one hundred pages or so b/c it was too unremittingly sordid and bleak for the winter depression I was in, but I restarted it, am almost done, and man the second half is awesome.

L'élégance du hérisson - Muriel Barbery

hey everyone
A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science and Between Meals
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris and At Large and At Small
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Other Ball
John Crowley, Little, Big
Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down
Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up
Robert O'Brien, Z for Zachariah

too many, not finishing most of them. also recently bought Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital which is like 3000 pages long in paper. ugh.

Cheers, Scott, for the Compton-Burnett collection. I've never understood how she fell out of favour with the literary/academic world.

I just started The Virgin of Flames by Chris Abani today. Reading Desire and Its Shadow by Ana Clavel for LibraryThing's Early Review programme, and am still in the middle of Patrick McGuiness' Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre.

lehane - gone baby gone
thomas - deluxe

Brian Aldiss: A Science Fiction Omnibus (mostly great)
Saul Bellow: It All Adds Up (collected essays, surprisingly a bit dull)
Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (he was a wonderful, loyal, generous friend and an unfaithful, lying, self-absorbed lover, basically--also a great writer)
Stefan Zweig: The Burning Secret & Other Stories

Still reading The Great Mortality by John Kelly - a pretty interesting survey of the Black Death, esp. if you have any interest in medieval history.

Quick review of Argonautika of Apollonius Rhodius: it succeeds in meeting most all of the standard criteria for greek epics -- as well it should, since Apollonuius took Homer for his model and aped him strenuously. It has the whole apparatus, from Homeric similes to divine sponsors who underwrite the heroes. The poetry is more or less up to the mark for narrative poetry.

Argonautika's biggest problem is that Apollonius wasn't nearly as gifted a storyteller as Homer. The pacing is all awry. Unimportant scenes occupy too much space, and several important bits get the cursory treatment. Homer's pacing sometimes seems a bit odd, but on the whole it is very much otm. Argonautika seems too concerned with outflanking the critics and pedants and not concerned enough with the delighting an ordinary audience.

I just started the Bros. Karamazov (P&V transl.). What fun!!

i read Karamazov some monthes ago and it made me realize,again,that although Dostoevski was a genius thinker,he was less than that as a writer,and i prefer other classic russians (and others) upon him.
at least on this particular point,Nabokov was right imo.

though,of course,it is still a must read.

I've started Arsenals of Folly by Richard Rhodes, the guy who wrote The Making of the Atomic Bomb. This one's about the arms race. Not incindentally, it dishes the dirt on Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's unholy beginnings in the upper reaches of government and the harm they have done at every stop along the way.

Kenneth Koch pursued a friend of mine in college. He wasn't the only prof who did tho.

I am reading:
Robert Sullivan, Cross Country
Carl Bernstein, A Woman In Charge
Joseph Rykwert, The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City

Borges - Historia universal de la infamia.
Cortázar - Rayuela.

About to start the new Junot Diaz and Chomsky's At War with Asia

I was looking around for a new book on my shelves and wasn't interested in a couple things on my list, so I started reading PKD's Valis. Tonight I might try to find some Peter de Vries or something at a used bookstore.

Finished Ha Jin's Waiting, found it disheartening, though an interesting light on living in a repressive society. The homophobia in the novels by Chinese authors I've read recently (Ha Jin, Dai Sijie) makes me not want to read any others. Ripped through Making Money (Terry Pratchett) on Saturday/Sunday and leaped from there to Karen Armstrong's The Bible, which has an excellent, approachable history of the early tribes of Israel in the initial chapters.

Finished the Black Death book on Friday. It was not as good as Bishop's The Middle Ages by a long stretch - the structural scheme was too static and not conducive to narrative motion - but it contained enough interesting details about the period to keep me going.

Over the weekend, I read some shorter selections from a Lester Bangs anthology and from the Selected Essays of Samuel Johnson.

Brothers Grimm: Fairy Tales (original, unexpurgated versions - dipping into this)
Black Lizard Big Book of Pulp (also dipping)
Georges Simenon: The Window Over the Way
Rupert Brooke: Letters from America

Black Lizard Big Book of Pulp
There will be a reading of this at the Mysterious Bookshop in January, featuring some special guests- Pelecanos for lovebug, Geoffrey O'Brien for me.

It's a fun book. Lots of (thrilling) trash, and some genuine gems.

Over the last few days...
Eileen Chang: Lust, Caution
Imre Kertesz: Liquidation
Posy Simmonds: Tamara Drewe

I read Megan Abbott's Queenpin in a few hours and was blown away by its cool/hot noir stylings.

that sounds like i wouldn't hate it!

Maybe you guys should swap books at the next Digt0wn Strutters Ball.

haha

I keep seeing some Megan Abbott-edited anthology in the mystery bookstores and regular bookstores around town.

To Catch a Thief was on Turner Classic Movies last week. Nice Work was nowhere to be seen.

So, RIP Julien Gracq. I own two of his books, one in English, and one in French, but I got them somewhat randomly and I've never read either of them. Perhaps I should give them a try?

a review of some book by Gracq, written by some doofus: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/books/reviews/6756/reading-writing-by-julien-gracq/

Ha. While I was waiting for the link to load, I correctly surmised who the doofus was going to be.

Anyway, answer to the original question: Lawrence Block, various titles.

Sontag - On Photography
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
Foucault - The Archaeology of History
Doris Lessing - The Grass is Singing
Walter Benjamin - Illuminations.

Also going to reread Amy Hempel collected short stories.

My big project is to read Benjamin's Arcades Project

berlin,alexanderplz - doblin.(a bit dated but still awesome)

The Time of the Doves - merce rodoreda (
"The most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War."—Gabriel García Márquez.OTM)

Just started The Barracks Thief (Tobias Wolff) which I bought a few months ago. Fab.

I just finished Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer by Andy Russell. I thought it was nicely done. A lot of well-told anecdotes about life on a frontier while he was growing up below the eastern slope of the Canadian Rockies in Alberta. The anecdotes centered on horses, trapping, fishing, hunting and cattle ranching. Because this was written in 1970, it also contained several pointed comments about environmental destruction and degradation, too.

I have only just begun reading Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. It promises to be good satirical fun.

Reading *What Was Literature - Class Culture & Mass Society* by Leslie Fiedler. Fiedler coming to grips with his past rockism. This book came out in the early 80's, and with every page I read, I can't help but see the looming interweb 'round every corner. Makes the whole book kind of quaint.

Finished Vile Bodies. It was good satirical fun.

I am now wading slowly into the first few pages of the book my wife gave me for Christmas. It is The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place, by Ian Baker.

It is a non-fiction book combining exploration of the extremely remote Tsangpo Gorges of Tibet with a large dose of Tibetan buddhism woven into it, since the author has spent twenty years in Kathmandu, is a practising buddhist, and made the explorations in search of certain spiritual places described in sacred texts. At 440 pp. it may take me a while.

I picked up Swann's Way at the library yesterday because I felt like I needed a big, dense difficult book and didn't feel ready for another Gaddis. I am a little scared.

I don't think of Proust as being dense or difficult (though I'll grant you big), just long and nuanced. I enjoyed it well enough, but stopped after about 300 pages, perhaps because its concerns were not my concerns, and I had gotten enough of his sentence flavor to satisfy me.

I am not very far through it at all, but I'm tending to agree with you Causistry - it's only 'difficult' in that, so far, there is plenty of writing but no plot. It's very fun.

Proust was digging inside,not going forward.and he found for us the gold: perfect,detailed and deep charecters psychology, with all the subjective pov and memory influences on human thoughts and behaviour.
a pleasure of modernist writing.

and i'm also reading him,again, right now.

so, should i read "mister pip" ?!
how is it?

'08 is pretty good so far:

Chekhov 'The Cherry Orchard', a Euripides collection ('Medea', 'Electra', etc)
Ballard 'Crash', 'The Drought'.

Gonna read more in 'blocks' (been annoyed how my reading has become frustratingly scattered as '07 went on, so hey its almost like a new year resolution and I don't usually bother with those) this year, so I've got a couple of blocks in i) plays (mostly Greek stuff) and ii) lots of SF. Might not bother with anything else for a month or two.

Finally decided to clear my unread pile this month, either by reading them or admitting that a book has to go after sitting there unread for more than 5 years. So far I've read :
Jim Thompson - The Nothing Man
Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper
currently reading David Goodis - Of Tender Sin

Still to go :
Cormac McCarthy - Cities Of The Plain
Hubert Selby Jr - Requiem For A Dream (second half, I read the first half in 2003 and never felt in the mood to finish it)
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber

and I suspect the late-period JG Ballard book will be the same as everything else he's written in the last decade or more, so I probably won't bother.

Once I've ploughed through that lot I can buy new books without feeling vaguely guilty about it. At last!

Zeno, Mister Pip is a pretty good story. I enjoyed it, but thought maybe the hype was a bit much?

over the holidays i read a book written for television by joshua ferris which got me thinking about cancer. childhood cancer seems especially grave. i bought naomi klein's book a while ago and will start it soon. i bought building java programs today. oops - wrong thread.

I'm reading Wonder Boys by Chabon. It's weird having already seen the movie, and having really loved the movie. But it doesn't spoil the book at all, Chabon's just that masterful with language, and there are just enough differences to keep it interesting.

Also read "Lost in the City" by Edward P. Jones. It's the best short story collection I've read in a long time. I just finished Portnoy's Complaint, and was entranced even though he's so transparently a bastard. Never did I like him, but that wasn't, and wasn't supposed to be, a deterrent.

Also still reading solitary chapters out of the Elegant Universe and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

I've had an ongoing conversation with a female friend over whether Toni Morrison is a women's writer or Cormac McCarthy is a men's writer, because neither of us particularly care for the other.

the rest is noise: listening to the 20th century by alex ross. about halfway thru I'm thinking this is the best writing on music I've read. ever. seriously it's that good and I don't know beans abt classical music.

Good to hear, I have that on the way. I'm a classical music dilettante (if a listener can be called such), so it sounds exactly like what I need.
I've been reading a bit of this and that: Coetzee's Stranger Shores: Essays, mostly book reviews. Milton's Paradise Lost. The advantage to not having had any sort of education in literature, is that I can come to an author like Milton without any of the baggage school-enforced reading can load one up with. Descartes' Discource on Method and Related Writings, which is a nice Penguin collection. There's a companion volume titled Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings that I'm glad I picked up at the same time.
Once I'm done pottering about on the computer, I intend to start reading The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I can't recall having read any spy fiction, but I figure I ought to at least try this one and Our Man in Havana.

Page 10 of The Spy... has a squashed mosquito in the margin. Used books are the best.

That was rather quickly put aside in favor of the English translation of Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense.

Ooh, The Luzhin Defense is great. And so is Wonder Boys (book and film).
Yes, all late-period Ballard seems to be the same: disaffected doctor moves into rich community of psychopaths who go out on violent binges, making broad and surprisingly dull points about the modern world.

Recently...
Alaa Al Aswany: The Yacoubian Building - fascinating look at modern Cairo, lots of fun though the characterisation was pretty broad-brushstroke stuff.
Alex Scarrow: Last light - unpretentious thriller about what happens when the oil supply suddenly stops, mildly spoiled by ludicrous conspiracy-theory stuff; overall like a modern, less literary John Christopher novel
James Agee: On Film - great stuff, but makes me want to watch lots of the films he talks about, and I can't afford to spend that sort of money or my wife will kill me
Alan Bennett: The Uncommon Reader - halfway through this, and it's lots of fun

"The advantage to not having had any sort of education in literature, is that I can come to an author like Milton without any of the baggage school-enforced reading can load one up with."

Or a really good education in literature.

Finished: another collection of plays by Euripides, will start on Aeschylus.
Camus "The Outsider"

Finishing: Goethe "Faust" (1st part)

Onwards to: Ibsen "A Doll's House", etc.

next book club book is Out Stealing Horses - any good?

Sorry, what I meant to say above ws how, surely, a really good ed in literature would've meant that reading something like Milton or Shakespeare would not have felt to be enforced. I've been thinking quite a bit about this as I have made plans to concentrate on older lit for a month or two, with a plan of revisiting Shakespeare again after not enjoying him at all (bcz of shit schooling, or maybe it ws me) in school, how it might have been so much better if we had read him along with the likes of [insert antique authors here] to get a feel for his plays, instead of the equivalent of just throwing a copy of Macbeth to a wall and seeing if it stuck?

"Ooh, The Luzhin Defense is great. And so is Wonder Boys (book and film)."

Have you the film of the Luzhin Defense? Its alright (Emily Watson, innit?).

I didn't even know there was such a film, and Emily Watson's always good--must seek this out.

Just finished the last 2 Martin Beck books by Sjowall/Wahloo - fantastic series, but am sad that it's now all old. Am now reading an old Indian novel, 'Indira' by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, which is engagingly bonkers so far (brigands leaping out of banyan trees, kidnapping, that sort of thing).

Semi-trashy reading before nursing classes start:

Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet and Lord John Grey and the Brotherhood of the Blade by Diana Gabaldon

A friend recently gave me Ask The Dust by John Fante. Anyone else readed it?

It's very Catcher in the Rye in the sense of having a self-obsessed, narcissistic protagonist who bangs on about nothing for 150 pages. Surprisingly enthralling thought.

From your 88 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 13,902 items

ugh... I'm going to the library *TODAY*

Now: Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theater (Good lord!)

Haha! Me too.

Upt0eleven, I read a bunch of John Fante a few years back: Ask the Dust, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, a few others. Enjoyable stuff. I have a bio on him somewhere, never read though.

I think I mentioned both author and character on this thread: Oh! I Always Get Those Two Mixed Up!

I just finished Forrest Church's So Help Me God, which was an interesting look at church-state issues & the Founding Fathers, and right now I'm savoring the between-books moment - when anything is possible and every unread book glitters with mystery and the promise of unknown vistas.

Bertrand Russell - The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Rusell - Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (Modern Library)
Harlan Ellison - Deathbird Stories
I plan on starting some Phillip K Dick soon
possibly Gurdjieff - Beezelbub's Tales to His Grandson
Anthony Kenny - The Five Ways

Ask the Dust is lots of fun: about the best book about a young, frustrated writer I've ever read, though it's appeal might not be so great to people who are sick of writers writing about writers.

Ha. I had trouble finishing it because of that.

I've just started Lucifer's Hammer. Considering spending 2008 reading only books about the end of the world.

If you do, I did a list somewhere (the McCarthy's 'The Road' thread) good end of the world books. I'll email it to you.

Chelvis, Gurdjieff is an interesting character, which is just what he planned. He would deliberately play up to his reputation as a charlatan and a fraud, then he would just as deliberately play against it in order to sow confusion among his acolytes.

Reading him, you will probably be tempted many times, as I was, to throw the book across the room. He's that irritating at times. He can never resist making a fool of anyone he comes into contact with.

In the final analysis, I found he just wasn't very great shakes as a teacher (guru) or even as an example of enlightenment, but if you take him purely as a mythic trickster figure brought to life, then he has some value in that light.

Aimless, sounds interesting! I know of Gurdjieff because Robert Anton Wilson mentioned him so often, namely as being someone who thought (or at least claimed) that they were in contact with alien minds on some other plane and someone who borrowed from a number of disparate mystical traditions. Of the people whom RAW repeatedly mentions (Joyce, Pound, Korzybski, Crowley, Leary and Gurdjieff et al.,) I have wanted to follow up on all of these influences, except probably Leary and Pound.

Did you read that newer History of Philosophy where it says The on the cover, even though it says A on the spine and title page? With the picture of the road on the cover? Happily it seems to be A History, not The.

C-, No, I never noticed the "The" on the new edition. That's pretty funny, as Russell is obviously critical of and inserts his own views into the book. I'm reading the original edition, printed on "war paper"(thinner paper, smaller margins) c.1945. For evidence that this is a critical and subjective history, not that the final chapter is on Russell's (along with Moore, Wittgenstein, et al.,) Logical Analysis. Still, with this history out there, why did Patrick Kenny decide to come out with a 4 volume history over the last 4 years?

n.b.
"not" = "note"
Patrick Kenny = Anthony Patrick Kenny

I'm not sure what else it would be? Still, obviously it's pretty good that the Russell isn't the ONLY such book out there.

http://media.npr.org/holiday2006/kidsbooks/drownedmaiden.jpg
http://www.bloomsbury.com/images/Catalogue/Jacket/9780747589136.jpg

Cities, by John Reader, which I just picked up. I'm not sure how it is yet. Jam packed with semirandom tidbits, so far, I guess. But with massive reading load for school, I don't know how far I'll get in it.

Forgot about this thread. Jaq, I will seek those other John Fantes out. Fanks for the tip.

Having finished that one I have this week returned to chugging my way through Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. South Korean's killing themselves because the IMF fucked their economy is always a jolly read on the way to work.

That John Reader book looks rather interesting. Will add it to the list.

Wuthering Heights. Rubbish.

Oh, and Robinson Crusoe, also unimpressed. Was inspired to read it after The Moonstone, which was a much more entertaining romp (even though the central conceit was highly implausible).

Still reading Atlas Shrugged. And barely into it.

Barthe's Mythologies.

Lucy Lippard -The dematerialization of Art

Raymond Carver - What we talk about when we talk about Love, will you please be quiet please.

Checkov -The story of a Nobody

I read When Genius Failed - The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein over the weekend. It was pretty good and I learned a bit about high finance, derivatives and how int'l markets work.

LOVING Swann's Way. Although it's taking me forever.

lost time?

Just about finished with Michael Connelley's "Harry Bosch" series - rather entertaining escapism and just what I needed.

They were prefaced by Fradkin's The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself and before that, by ... oh, hell, I can't recall. Must not have been that great.

Current bathroom reading is Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite, which is oddly compelling, far too morbid and sobering, and dreadfully needs a stronger editorial hand, to say nothing of a copy-editor.

Haven't a clue about what I'll read next.

I just finished Ghost by Alan Lightman. Very well done. I've liked everything of his I've read. I think The Diagnosis is the only one I've missed so I guess that's next.

Time regained, Zeno.

Ha, that Alan Lightman book is relevant to the ILE science/religion thread, but I'm nae touching that with a Tenpole Tudor.

Alan Lightman, he's great. Heard him speak at Adelaide Writers' Week a few years ago--very clever and funny. I really dug Reunion and Einstein's Dreams.

I've started on Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children which is pretty interesting so far. Kind of has the 19th-century novelistic virtues: big cast of characters, good on family dynamics, keeps the action moving along, good psychological insight.

Started Kevin Baker's latest, Striver's Row, and so far it's grand. Think I need to go back and re-read Dreamland and Paradise Alley. Didn't much care for Sometimes You See it Coming, fwiw.

Finished Muhammad Yunus's Creating a World without Poverty, which was enthusiastic but perhaps I read it too soon after finishing Banker to the Poor. It told the same story a few times over. The idea of giving foundations and rich philanthropists a new kind of business to invest in, aside from non-profits and setting up charitable trusts was interesting.

Am now 1/2 way through Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and keep looking at The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup. The library says it's my turn for this giant scholarly tome full of eye-numbing equations. The Monopoly graphic on the cover cleverly lured me into thinking this would be written for a more general audience. The library also has China Mieville's The Scar waiting, which maybe I'll go pick that up tomorrow to offset all this heavy-duty non-fiction.

Hey Casuistry, I wrote about Bertrand Russell's History of Philosophy and then how Anthony Kenny has written a new history, etc., Imagine my geeky excitement when I discover a podcast of Anthony Kenny discussing the VERY SAME thing, with his comments on Bertie's subjective History.
http://cdn.libsyn.com/philosophybites/KennyMixSes.MP3

finished pelecanos' Soul Circus today. high body count. lots of details about neighborhoods most people would just as well avoid. ho hum.

Rereading The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro. So good. So funny. So tragic.

Jaq - I'll be interested in hearing your take on The Scar - have you read Perdido Street Station?

AT long last I finished The Heart of the World: A Journey to the last Secret Place, Ian Baker. It had leeches galore! It had Tantric Buddhism in large doses. It had leeches!

After digesting the Tantric Buddhism offered up by the author, I came to the conclusion that it represents an heroic attempt to gut-and-stuff the native shamanism of Tibet with Buddhist philosophy, thus creating a sort of demon-infested, ogre-ridden, hero-diety-studded, comic book version of shamano-buddhism with Extra Added Emptiness.

Not that I object very strongly. The Catholic Church did something very similar as it adopted local myths and beliefs into the calendar of saints and the local rituals of the church. To anyone who demands logic and consistency, it looks like a huge mess, but for the average unreflective peasant or worker, it works. Sorta. For the intellectuals there is always the Diamond Sutra to fall back on.

Chelvis, that was a fun enough interview, but I don't see how Russell's "subjective" history is a bad thing, or how Kenny's could be any less subjective?

Virgil "Aeneid", should start on Dante's "Divine Comedy" tomorrow.

Samuel Johnson "Rasselas and Other Essays"

Brecht "The Threepenny Opera"

More epic poetic antiques and plays in February! Although I'll be making my way through Ruskin's "Stones of Venice" as well.

Nor do I Casusistry, I for one have enjoyed Russell's History, even though he is apparently out of fashion and many think he did no serious philosophical work after the 1920s. The Kenny series is of course not objective. My favorite history of philosophy book, or rather my first, was the Will Durant "Story of Philosophy".

lloys jones - mister pip. looks good.

lloyd

Hey MsLaura! I just picked The Scar up from the library so will start on it later today. I thoroughly enjoyed Perdido Street Station - the imagery and imagination behind all of it took my breath away at points (as did some of the violence; I had to put it down a few times). I also enjoyed Iron Council, though not as viscerally as PSS. I was talking with my son about China Mieville and what I'd read of his etc and Sean pointed out I'd read the first and third of a trilogy and why hadn't I read The Scar??? So, away we go.

It is now official. I am reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. My 1994 Penguin edition tabulates at 1150 pp, excluding index. If I finish this book I will be an expert on what Rebecca West knew, thought, opined and felt about Yugoslavia, circa 1940.

Acquiring this particular knowledge should prove far, far superior to any book about model trains I can imagine, so there's that. And it has started well: a bit like Patrick Leigh-Fermor on Greece, though with more impetuosity in the writing. So, give me 660 pp and ask me again how I like it. If the answer is still affirmative, I will be very glad.

just finished "the farewell party" by kundera, now reading "all the pretty horses" by mccarthy.
also reading in bits & pieces on the train, borges "a personal anthology"

"Rendevous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke
"Ludwig Wittgenstein: Duty of Genius" - Biography by Ray Monk

Steve Erickson's Zeroville, which I'm enjoying, but it's weird that he followed up his most obscure, weird, arty, difficult novel, with probably his most conventional and straight forward. Also it may be a book only film nerds can really enjoy.

Jonathan Raban: "Waxwings"
Juhani Aho: "Outlawed"
Charles Williams: "A Touch of Death"

Hi Jaq! I read all three of Mievelle's works set in that fantasy world - loved the first two and couldn't get into Iron Council. I liked the adventure / pirate-storyness of The Scar, near as I can recall, but loved the gothic horror of Perdido Street Station the best (though I don't think it was the strongest or best written of the three).

Finished Striver's Row - thought it was compelling, a bit annoying, and quite fascinating (time period / events that I had no knowledge of prior to reading about them). Definitely the best of the trilogy.

Now I'm about to start Water for Elephants which was a Christmas present from a cousin who said "it looks like a book you'd read" - I have no idea if that bodes well or ill.

school is over forever and ever in 5 days time, and then i shall begin reading in earnest - all the books i picked up last year and never finished, plus rereading some old favourites, plus some new stuff.

i spent 6mths of last year picking up and putting down celine's journey to the end of the night and got about 2/3 through it. now i need to begin all over again and read it properly.

desperately want to reread seven types of ambiguity by eliot pearlman.

am on the lookout for some rachel carson stuff. i'd never heard of her before, but received for my birthday a beautiful chapbook called 'a great wave was torn away and hurled into space' (from the sea around us), which has captivated me.

Re Carson: 'Silent Spring' is fascinating but out of date, 'Under the Sea Wind' is just lovely

Finished Water for Elephants last night - not great, but enjoyable, readable, and compelling. I'd have no problem recommending it to others, but it'd likely not be enjoyed by people who are at all, um, high-falutin' in their reading choices.

Am now on to Chesterton's The Man Who Knew Too Much which will likely be followed with something from Bolano.

VS Naipaul - The Return of Eva Peron w/The Killings in Trinidad
VS Naipaul - Guerillas

Killings in Trinidad is a non-fiction account of the same incident fictionalized in the novel Guerillas. so I'm comparing the two as a writing exercise but also enjoying both books as pleasure-reading.

Philip Shenon - The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation

my wife brought this home from work, the reviews didn't make me want to read but I picked it last night and got totally hooked by henry kissinger's jaw-dropping performance in the second chapter.

How would you compare it with his bomb-dropping performance in Cambodia?

What madness does Kissinger get up to in the 9/11 thing?

the 9/11 widows group meets w/HK at his NYC office, right after the old war criminal was appointed head of the 9/11 Commission by Bush. One of the women asks Kissinger if he has any clients named Bin Laden? He loses it, spilling coffee all over the place and "nearly falling off the couch." needless to say he didnt answer the question and the very next day he resigned from the commission post.

Ah, excellent. That made me laugh out loud. Thanks!

John Banville, Revolutions trilogy (Dr Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter). I'm tempted to elevate him to the exalted status of My Favourite Author.

I finished Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. It was okay - I think the greatest weakness of it is that it's kind of hard to think why you should care about any of the characters or the relatively minor things that happen to them.

The Banville Revolutions books are awesome. Claire Messud is not so much--I've only read one of hers (The Hunters, I think it was called), and it was so self-important and self-consciously writerly that it was pretty much dead on the page.

I didn't think Emperor's Children was too writerly or self-important - just that I never quite understood why these particular characters were supposed to be somehow worth getting to know, or what the significance is, within the book's own logic, that Murray Thwaite is a famous liberal journalist? I think the book is fine as a comedy of manners, it's just that it also seems to be aiming to be a novel of ideas, and that's where it loses me.

I am embarrassed to admit that I'm STILL reading bloody Swann's Way (almost finished though). I love it, I'm just slow.

Also reading Rebecca Mead's One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding which is exactly what you'd expect from a book on the out-of-control wedding industry by a staff writer for the New Yorker. It's good though; the subject matter can be ridiculously funny and she can be kinda bitchy, but I can too so we're cool.

Started and finished A Three Dog Life last night. Quick, sad, and told with an odd distance. But maybe that was needed by the author, to deal with the tragedy of a brain-injured spouse.

Now, Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia which has been laying around the house for a few months.

I did enjoy The Scar, for its pirate-ness and Mieville's warped imagination, but I doubt much of the story or characters will stick with me for long. Much as Iron Council has faded into "long weird book about a train-city hybrid".

I'm finally reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling - it's pretty short and it's been staring at me from my bookshelves for too long.

laura warholic, or the sexual intellectual by alexander theroux

sometimes a great notion

"I am embarrassed to admit that I'm STILL reading bloody Swann's Way "

you shouldnt! it's the best, and maybe the only way proust should be read:slow.

philip roth - the human stain - his best work - a masterpiece imo.
murakami - bird chronicle - good page turner, but too much pop fiction to be really great.

Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

Swann's Way is finished & was wonderful.

I couldn't bear another long one so I started Simenon's The Madman of Bergerac this morning. It's tiny and awesome.

Go Simenon!

Deep Economy by Bill McKibben

I hate the title and the writing style gets a bit corny but it was $8 hardcover and I read an article discussing it in Harper's that made it seem pretty good.

Stefan Zweig - "Confusion". really enjoying it.

Go Zweig! He's wonderful.

<i>Icefields</i> by Thomas Wharton. Historical fiction; glacier expeditions in Northern Alberta at the turn of the century. Really good.

grr html

I got over my reading rut by reading the new Age of Bronze trade.

Now I'm reading Jane Smiley's "The Duplicate Keys", hoping for a fun mystery type of thing before moving on to some more challenging stuff. So far I like how the mystery angle is very much in the background, but christ, would it have killed her to do a little bit of research? Some of the characters are involved in the music industry, and the most cringe-inducing thing so far is about a dude who is a sought-after NYC sound guy because he has perfect pitch (as if that has anything to do with doing sound).

There's a terrible line to the effect of "he claimed that sex was his only interest these days, aside from perfect pitch", like having pp is some kind of time-consuming hobby.

sometimes a great notion is a great, great book ... but it is the most ungodly slow read i have had in at least three years. i mean, i am curious to see how it will end but i am already three weeks and five hundred pages in, and i don't want know if i'm up to the last two hundred

i pretty much understand why nobody has ever read it

In your winter I am reading Don Quixote. The rate I'm going I'll have finished it by 2017.

War Made Easy by Normon Solomon

I finished Fear and Trembling - which is often thought-provoking though other times it's hard to tell what Kierkegaard's getting at - and am now reading Joel Schalit's Jerusalem Calling, which is a fairly interesting mix of politics, personal history and criticism of the alternative music industry - though sometimes he's a bit full of shit.

read "fear and tremblung" by amelie nothomb.it's short,easy and great..

I don't know what I'm reading anymore.

Some of the characters are involved in the music industry, and the most cringe-inducing thing so far is about a dude who is a sought-after NYC sound guy because he has perfect pitch (as if that has anything to do with doing sound).

There's a terrible line to the effect of "he claimed that sex was his only interest these days, aside from perfect pitch", like having pp is some kind of time-consuming hobby.

-- Jordan, Monday, February 25, 2008 3:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

(Music nerd snort)

fields of glory - gean rouaud - awesome

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - my first le Carré. I'm about halfway through and enjoying it quite a lot. Very readable & interesting because, yes it's a spy thing, but not a "cool spy" thing, if that makes sense.

Had a bit more reading time than usual, being on vacation and all, so in the past few days, I finished the Schalit book, read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (suspenseful, a real page-turner), and Miss Lonelyhearts & Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (liked Locust better, but both pretty good).

Frederick Douglass is pretty terrific, yes.

just finished 'sometimes a great notion' and will write more about it when i have some time. suffice to say: one of the most fascinating books i have ever read, difficult and weird, long and wonderful....

who else has read, who wants to chat?

http://www.pcs.org/_images/misc_images/sometimes_notion_150.jpg

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n0/n692.jpg

Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds): New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989)

yes, wake up, people! we have to move beyond the Reagan / Thatcher era and seek a new democratic, participatory politics for a post-Fordist epoch, based in the Labour party, the unions and the new social movements, but with the Left moving beyond its 'comfort zones' and engaging with the popular desires expressed in the new anthropologies of consumption and design.

Bellow: Mr. Sammler's Planet

also about to read American Purgatorio for my book club -- anyone read it?

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - my first le Carré. I'm about halfway through and enjoying it quite a lot.

The movie is so so good too, although seeing it right after reading it might be a bit much, since it's pretty much word-for-word from the book.

I'm about to read Ham on Rye. I'm not that excited about it, because if I got through my teens/early 20s without reading Bukowski, why start now amirite?

I am almost finished Holy Disorders - Crispin's 2nd Gervase Fen mystery. It is appropriately creepy and hilarious.

pinefox made me seriously lol.

jordan - i was 27 when i first read bukowski. it's not an age thing like everyone makes out. he has a very particular style which will totally pull you in or completely bore/repulse you. i haven't read ham on rye yet but it's my boyfriend's favourite and usually referred to as his best novel.

Finished a selection of Hazlitt essays on Shakespeare and poetry. Sometimes an example would be given, a set of adjectives uttered but it lacked that extra bit of show -- still, its furious writing at times.

Dante's 'Divine Comedy'. Must get onto Milton now, I have a v strong feeling I'd love him.

Ruskin - the first volume of his 'Stones of Venice'. Even if the technical details are elusive (about 60% of the time), his arguments hold on to you, v few writers reach out like this and sound convincing while doing it. Must get onto the other two vols, although I'd rather read "Modern Painters". The library doesn't have a copy, unfortunately.

I'm midway through AC Grayling's biog of Hazlitt. Eh it's fair enough but not hugely engrossing and it's quite slow going. Have a couple of books of his essays that I've never checked out, obviously will have to give them a go.

I have reader's block. Nothing in my unread pile is appealing right now. What should I request at the library?

the raw shark texts by steven hall! it's a great book - exciting, thrilling, twisty, with a really unusual concept. and it's a good light read that's still intelligent, so perfect for someone with reader's block.

"I'm midway through AC Grayling's biog of Hazlitt. Eh it's fair enough but not hugely engrossing and it's quite slow going. Have a couple of books of his essays that I've never checked out, obviously will have to give them a go."

I've only read the Shakespeare/Poets + one other collection last year, that one was really awesome. I should re-read and do a poll: this board needs polls.

I've started on "My Life as a Fake" by Peter Carey, since I greatly enjoyed "True History of the Kelly Gang". This is intermittently engaging, but doesn't seem quite as good as "Kelly Gang" so far. I'm still giving it a chance though.

the lack of punctuation in ned kelly drove me crazy!

That's understandable, but at least the lack of punctuation was true to Kelly's writing.

Pat Barker: Liza's England

foucault reader
poetics of space -bachelard
practical ethics -peter singer

no fiction?

or poetry?

shit!

I stalled out on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon at about 280pp. Then I wandered off and re-read some other stuff. I haven't wandered back, yet.

I found Ms. West to be a capable guide, well-informed, deeply interested in her subject, able to weave together diverse facts and observations into a reasonably fluid narrative, considering she throws in a vast amount of heterogenous stuff. But she doesn't know where to stop. Witness: 1150pp.

Also, everything, I do mean everything, is grist for her mill and everything is laden with meaning, and everythingis sodden with history, and everything is noble and tragic, and... well, it was a nice book to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

I'm reading Lytle Shaw's book on Frank O'Hara, the Poetics of Coterie, which is so far pretty amazing, mostly because I've failed to write any of the literature on this topic and it's totally central to my own poetics.

Also bpNichols and Steve McCaffery's Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine, the collected papers of the Toronto Research Group, which I'm also digging.

And a bunch more.

Last night I latched onto Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh. I am now reading it. I have no idea where he's going with this one.

If your interest in Rebecca West hasn't been killed off, a more manageable book in size terms is her one on treachery and (if memory serves me correctly) war crimes called 'The Meaning of Treason'. It's about 300p.

I got Beginner's Greek the other day and I am going to start it on or before my flight on Tuesday.

Greek is hella wonderful stuff. Have fun.

It is, but it is a smidge tricksy. Oh Greek verbs, why must you be so irregular?

youn, the NYT review of Beginner's Greek made it sound like perfect airplane reading - it's on my library list with 300+ people in line in front of me.

Been reading plays by Sophocles and Aristophanes (not liking him so much, I have to say) from the library (those Loeb classical editions where the left-hand page is all in the Greek).

Finished Ovid's 'Metamorphosis' as well.

Time has mostly reduced Aristophanes to an artifact and a curiosity. Most of the jokes rest on obscure references that can only sometimes be deduced from the context. The more you are steeped in obscure Athenian lore, the funnier he gets. This cuts down considerably on the hahas for anyone who doesn't seeks a PhD in classics.

He is a fabulous source for peeking deeper into the Athenian culture and mindset, though.

i'm desperately awaiting the arrival of 'denial of death' by ernest becker.

Time has mostly reduced Aristophanes to an artifact and a curiosity. Most of the jokes rest on obscure references that can only sometimes be deduced from the context. The more you are steeped in obscure Athenian lore, the funnier he gets. This cuts down considerably on the hahas for anyone who doesn't seeks a PhD in classics.

I'll probably never be able to read Aristophanes on this level, but it's always fun when you gain enough historical insight into a comedy from another era to realize that no, people weren't actually less funny back then.

Rorty: Truth & Progress

actually not scintillating, but more scintillating than most philosophy

Might give that one a go, I'm quite keen on pragmatic (small p, not so sure about big P) philosophy.

Its always work when appreciating the finer points. With comedy there are certain strands of it that need no work at all, thinking of something like "Phil Silvers Show" here.

Chaplin, otoh...

This week, taking a short break from the classics - read Duras splicing time and event in "The Lover" (just like in her script for "Hiroshima Mon Amour"). I could do with reading 3 or more bks from her right now. "The Lover" is too short, scarily neat at describing the emotional mess.

Finishing Alain Robbe-Grillet "Topology of a Phantom City". He really loves his angles doesn't he? Cubist sci-fi, maybe?

It looks like this between-term break is devoted to poetry. I'm reading through the new Jackson Mac Low selected, which obviously is very nice.

The Stephen Dunn poem in the New Yorker(!)

More poetry recommendations please.

The McCaffery/Rasula anthology "Imagining Language" is great. I am on a big Steve McCaffery kick after he read here a few weeks ago.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n07/letters.html#letter15

actually I have, and have read most of, Burt's study the Forms of Youth.

acrually never mind that link: I think this is the one that JtN once told me would yield the greatest ongoing poetry criticism of the author's generation:
http://www.accommodatingly.com/?cat=7

maybe this is good too? or maybe not:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/

Harriet is better than you'd expect from the Popo Foundation!

This made me not want to read Creeley, though.

Which, you know, maybe I don't want to, actually! I'm never sure.

Andrew O'Hagan "Be Near Me" - it's really terrible, almost as bad as Ishiguro. i think this exchange is the last straw:

"Aye, shut up Cammy" said Lisa "He's always dropping science about shit he knows nothing about. He does it in Modern Studies as well. Like, 'i love foreigners'"

"Stop Xeroxing me bitch" said Mark.

it's not the first time i cringed (only 40 pages in) but it is the last - i have set it down for good following that.

Yes. That exchange is decidedly cringeworthy.

so i finished beginner's greek in one go on the flight from hartford to newark and then on the john wayne, and it was very pleasurable. i could only imagine the ilxor smirks in the description of arthur beeche's party and the style scoring system (ah, when one's life is choreographed, by the age of 25 or 27, one should have accomplished something) associated with the description of the guests, but otherwise, i wouldd like to think they would have been indulgent. apparently there is a poem.

I finished Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake. It picked up a bit of steam in the second half, as it also morphed into more of a conventional adventure story (not a bad thing in my book). Now I'm reading Wall Street: Men and Money by Martin Mayer (perhaps the un-PC title reveals that it was written in the 1950s), which is a somewhat outdated, but nonetheless colorful and informative look at Wall Street in a rather different period of its history.

so Beginner's Greek is not actually a guide to the language, Greek?

I agree about Burt on Creeley: he fails to make him sound at all appealing. Odd how often with even good critics (like Burt) on poetry, you can see them struggling to make something sound good and interesting, and not really succeeding.

reading a Randall Jarrell essay on Romanticism --> Modernism.

the other day: Kundera, The Art of the Novel: readable, but arrogant and often unconvincing.

yesterday: FR Leavis, The Common Pursuit. His reply to Wellek, 'Criticism & Philosophy', is quite stimulating; and I was surprised to find out how much he disliked late Henry James.

Re-read: Gary Indiana's essay on Pasolini's 'Salo'. V otm on the film (while it might make certain points/have insights, it has some really crude, idiotic moments). I was thinking how I really dislike that this is the movie of Pasolini's that might get screened (its too notorius) while I never get to see 'Medea' or 'Oedipus Rex'.

Finished: Calvino's 'The Literature Machine', a set of critical essays -- noted about 5 gd recommendations.

Finishing: E.P.Thomposon's essays on Coleridge, Wordsworth and Thelwall ('The Rommantics'), w/Hazlitt as the elephant in the room.

Starting: William Empson on Shakespeare.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Pretty fun, actually. The British 'Catcher in the Rye'? Ehh, I'll let you know.

no, it is not 'catcher in the rye' – it is much more kind-hearted and interesting

it's not much like The Catcher in the Rye - which is set over a very brief period, and has very little reference to school, and concerns a slightly older boy (among other differences).

rereading Pat Barker! also: read Brenton's The Romans In Britain - complex! powerful, I think!

Beginner's Greek is about romance but not about love. It is not about the Greek language, ancient or modern.

Walter Benjamin: One Way Street

BlackSwanGreen was actually pretty good, and I plan on reading 'Cloud Atlas' pretty soon, as that is well regarded. However, I am now reading Russell Brand's 'My Booky Wook', which will probably take at least a few days. Yes, it's not very literary and more a string of anecdotes, but it is funny and has occasionally clever wordplay and images akin to a nasty and transgressive wodehouse novel.

Done with Bukowski (for the book club tonight). It was better than I expected, at least until the main character grows up and it gets into the "I am a writer, therefore I drink, fuck, and fight" territory that I expected.

No idea what to read next! But at least my reader's block is over, I want to dig into something.

Maybe some David Mitchell would be good. I've only read Ghostwritten, but I loved it.

'My Booky Wook' ghosted by music/comedy journo Ben Thompson - can't see a thread about him. I remember liking one of his books, Ways of Hearing, probably (but maybe 7 Years of plenty); not a fan of Brand, and title makes me want to burn book & any bookshop containing it, but that made me think it might actually be okay.
Currently on:
Roughing It, by Mark Twain
Marvell's poems. Haven't in a while, and missed them.

Just finished Go Down, Moses for class; SO good, but hectically rushing through it to make a deadline means I know I'm missing out on some of the best stuff. There are parts when I'm being oddly blown away and at the same time am not quite sure what's even happening. I'll have to dig through it again this summer, in the blazing heat (as someone suggested in the Faulkner thread).

Up next: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Foucault's Pendulum .

Roughing It, by Mark Twain

This is great - as comedy, adventure, tall-tale and history.

Started David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. It's good so far but very British, like ILX in 2001 lol.

Alexander Nehamas - Only a Promise of Happiness
Martha Rosler - Decoys and Disruptions
Pierre Hadot - Philosophy as a Way of Life

trying to finish idoru by gibson

In a fit of longing for the hiking season, I've been reading The Last Season, by Eric Blehm. It's a non-fiction about a backcountry ranger in the Sequoia/King's Canyon national park in the California High Sierras who went missing in 1996 while on duty.

The book pretends to be about the dramatic search-and-rescue mission this touched off. In reality, it is a fairly conventional biography with a few chapters about the search interspersed. The ranger was a fairly interesting guy, but in a sort of conventional eco-infatuated way.

The writing is pretty humdrum, too. It's OK I suppose, if you are like me and a backcountry hiker, but it's nothing I would recommend broadly.

The Painted Bird by Kosinski. Such an upper.

I'm reading James Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin - pretty interesting - I like to stop after every chapter and try to download a few samples of the songs he's writing about.

Milton - Paradise Regained
E.P Thompson - 'The Romantics', essays on Coleridge, Thelwall, etc.
Georges Perec - Species of Spaces and other stories, might be the best thing I've read by the guy, but maybe a great piece and collected bits of stuff on one collection appeals more to me than a clinically constrcuted big novel

I'd hardly call any of Perec's novels "clinically" constructed. I mean, that seems to entirely miss the point. But yes, "Species of Spaces" is fantastic and one of the books I keep going back to.

I was thinking of 'Life: A User's Manual', which I read a few years back. Enjoyed it lots at the time...its just a feeling on reflection that many parts of it seem to act as fill in for its scheme.