We're now in Spring 2008 and I need to know - what are you reading?

andrei beli - petersburg. (one of the picks of modern prose according to Nabokov, and myself), quite ahead of it's time (1905).
also in the middle of bolano's "savage detectives" which is brilliant, though could have used a little editing imo.

so far this year:

Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise
Erik Larson - The Devil In The White City
Phillip Shenon: The Commission: Behind The 9/11 Investigation
VS Naipaul – The Return of Eva Peron w/The Killings in Trinidad
VS Naipaul – Guerillas
VS Naipaul – The Enigma of Arrival
Kingsley Amis – Girl, 20
Kingsley Amis – The Anti-Death League
Michael John Carley – Asperger’s from the Inside Out
Terry Eagleton – The Meaning of Life
Martin Amis – The Second Plane
Elizabeth Royte – Garbage Land

Garbage Land is great. Royte is an intrepid reporter and good writer w/dry wit. she puts herself in the story to telling effect, her quest - following the path of her family's garbage -- pulled me in like a good travel book.

I was looking in my local public library just today for some V.S. Naipul. Their selection of his work was pathetic, so I took a pass.

At the same time I checked out No Other Book: Selected Essays of Randall Jarrell. I intend to start it tonight. He has a good reputation as a poetry critic, probably the best rep going in the period after T.S. Eliot kicked off. We shall see what we shall see.

naipul's "house for mr. biswaz" is a masterpiece

There was a profile on Naipul on BBC four earlier in the week.

William Empson: finished his essays on Renaissance Literature.
'She' by H. Rider Haggard, 30p and looks like I'll be doing lots of page turning tonight.
Hazlitt's essays on comic writers.

Mr Biswaz was not on the library's shelf. I want to start there. It seems to be the consensus as "best VS Naipul".

that and "bend in the river", which i liked much less gotta say

been reading lots of Roth. on portnoy's complaint now...

Frederick Douglass's 'Narrative', which people were recommending somewhere on ILB recently. Amazing: a gripping story, beautifully written.
C P Cavafy: Selected Poems

A House For Mr Biswas is Naipaul's best novel IMO but I haven't read them all.

Among The Believers is the place to start with his non-fiction.

Lawrence Friedman - A History of American Law

(gulp. here we go.)

andrei beli - petersburg

I read this a number of years ago after reading Nabokov's praise and was underwhelmed. I'm really curious to know why you thought it was ahead of its time.

Right now I'm reading Richard Price's Clockers and I just finished Lush Life.

mainly because it might be the first major work of modernist prose.
all the writers that resmeble Beli will come later (except Gogol and Dostoevsky):Joyve (fragmentation),Proust (subjective consciousness),Alfred Doblin (expressionism and the use of a city),Beckett (elusive definition of the self) and Nabokov of course (the masks,mirrors,shadows and games of the mind).
i dare to say even, "petersburg" might be the first post-modern book, like a long Borges story, with all it's big universe vs. small people connections.

in short, it's a masterpiece.

Still reading "Motherless Brooklyn" after which point I'll move to Bastard Out of Carolina. Then hopefully some Ginsberg essays & a Ben Johnson anthology I just got.

I'd assume Nabokov's praise was for the original Russian novel and not the translation that we non-Russian-speakers would be stuck reading, so I'm guessing if you read it and didn't quite see what he was on about, that might be why.

ha even in Russian the book can be difficult. So many historical/social references incoded that aren't transparent to someone today. It's more that Nabokov represented the novel as a way forward for Russian lit and I just didn't see that in Bely's book. Mostly because of the two exceptions Zeno makes. Also not free of Tolstoy either in a macro sense? at least re: big universe vs. small people connections. My thinking was in the context of Russian literature I guess, rather than the larger W.European one. Petersburg also suffered from my teenage self reading Zamyatin ~ the same time and loving it w/entirely unabashed enthusiasm.

tbh I should just reread the book since I can't argue a position I formed when I was sixteen v. well.

i didn't read the english translation,but it was still a "wow" experience, even in a different language. of course the original is always the best if you hsppen to know russian.

p.s. another great thing about this novel, that also resemble Faulkner,Joyce and many others, is the influence of greek mytology in it.

i guess nabokov liked the novel because: the pushkin quotes,the gogol influence,all those elusions of light,mirrors,colors,shadows (and butterflies!), and the sometiems cynicaal POV of Beli

I was mixing two arguments a little. I'm wholly unqualified to qn the masterpiece argument I do qn the idea that the book was ahead of its time and/or represented a real opposition to socialist-realism. This is the claim that Nabokov makes in... Strong Opinions, maybe? Google has no answer for me.

From what I've heard the English translation isn't v. good? I actually that it was oop but apparently not.

you shoud def. re-read it Lamp.if you like the 20th century's classics cannon, theres no reason you wouldnt admire "petersburg" might be less known, but not less magnificent.
(just checked wikipedia about the book and they mainly talk about how much pre-Joyce's Ulysess the book is.it is pre-even-more-than-that.)

I do remember reading Dubliners and thinking of how closely some of the stories esp. the middle ones seem to follow from Petersburg.

anyway,petersburg is difficult because of it's fragmentation, the broken dialouge, the word games, the heavy symbloism, but its worth the effort,which is not so big, cause the book is relatively short, and the macro story is very clear and it's basicly a suspence novel , with a bomb thats about to explode in its center, which is of course the biggest symbol of it all.

i'm not sure Joyce knew about bely, which was translated into english much later

I just finished Black Swan Green (loved it), not sure what I'm reading next. Maybe some Richard Price (seems to be going around right now) or another David Mitchell book.

I'm still reading James Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin - which is making me interested in '50s rock-and-roll for perhaps the first time ever.

Alain Robbes-Grillet: 'Jealousy'--weird how a book can be quite compelling and frequently boring simultaneously. It was a bit like being hypnotised.

Frigyes Karinthy: A Journey Around My Skull
Amazing stuff--here's the blurb.

The distinguished Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy was sitting in a Budapest café, wondering whether to write a long-planned monograph on modern man or a new play, when he was disturbed by the roaring—so loud as to drown out all other noises—of a passing train. Soon it was gone, only to be succeeded by another. And another. Strange, Karinthy thought, it had been years since Budapest had streetcars. Only then did he realize he was suffering from an auditory hallucination of extraordinary intensity.

What in fact Karinthy was suffering from was a brain tumor, not cancerous but hardly benign, though it was only much later—after spells of giddiness, fainting fits, friends remarking that his handwriting had altered, and books going blank before his eyes—that he consulted a doctor and embarked on a series of examinations that would lead to brain surgery. Karinthy's description of his descent into illness and his observations of his symptoms, thoughts, and feelings, as well as of his friends' and doctors' varied responses to his predicament, are exact and engrossing and entirely free of self-pity. A Journey Round My Skull is not only an extraordinary piece of medical testimony, but a powerful work of literature—one that dances brilliantly on the edge of extinction.

reading jakob von gunten now (robert walser), will probably read nadezhda mandelstam's hope beyond hope next, or maybe bunuel's my last sigh.

Capital, Vol 1.

HL Mencken: A Religious Orgy in Tennessee - his collected articles about the Scopes "monkey trial". Great savage stuff.

Ashbery - Chinese Whispers.

"Alain Robbes-Grillet: 'Jealousy'--weird how a book can be quite compelling and frequently boring simultaneously. It was a bit like being hypnotised."

Yeah I read one of his last month and that was roughly my experience. I felt that if I turned to the first page as soon as I finished the last I would read it over and over again for a month no probs.

There is a Mencken collection I'll be getting round to soon.

In the meantime I'm starting on a selection from Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets'

Finishing Jim Thompson's 'Savage Night', move onto 'The Grifters'

Started: History of the Conquest of Mexico by William H Prescott.

I'm getting ready to move and most of my books are packed, so I went out and bought a new one. But there wasn't anything on-hand in my apartment that I was really in the mood to read anyway. I hope this old classic history is really still worth reading.

Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth is by far the most interesting thing I've read by him, but then I'm not even sure I ever made it through any of his other novels. I liked the very geometric descriptions of things, and I remember being especially taken with the way he moved between a picture hanging on the wall (in a bar?) and an actual real life scene. His whole blurring of real/illusionary schtick gets old kind of quickly though, imo. (I vaguely remember a short story involving someone trapped in an area where the tide was rising.)

nadezhda mandelstam's hope beyond hope

Is really good. I hope you like it.

My friend was all into Prescott for a while. He raved about him.

I read the Hugh Thomas book, but he said Prescott had already done it all before him.

Thanks and thanks.

thanks lamp!

also bought yday, been looking for for a while: tha world of yesterday by stefan zweig.

Finished a bunch more essays by Hazlitt. 'On Disagreeable People' had a bit of 'oh dear I recognize myself' here to it. Bastard :-)

Simone De Beauvoir 'A woman Destroyed'. Nicely going along, but I wanted this to hit me harder than its doing so. Thought she'd be right up my street.

Really enjoying 'The Grifters', but Thompson can do no wrong.

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

I was liking this more than I expected til the end. don't want to spoil it but a certain cataclysmic recent event in our history is deployed as deus ex machina/plot tidy-upper. maybe the first time I actually wanted to throw a book at the wall. did anyone else read it and react this way?

is the grifters the one where dude gets punched in the stomach and thompson tells you "HE DIDN'T KNOW IT BUT THAT PUNCH WOULD BE FATAL" but then later on it turns out means "BUT THAT PUNCH WOULD HAVE BEEN FATAL, HAD IT REMAINED UNTREATED, WHICH IT ISN'T GOING TO"

guys what should i read now

Pop. 1280.

I never finished "South of Heaven"! Does that mean Thompson isn't palatable for me, or did I just read the wrong one?

I never even heard of that one! Is that one of his early New Deal books?

March / April:

Rudyard Kipling -- Kim
Christopher Isherwood -- Diaries I: 1939 - 1960
Christopher Isherwood -- Isherwood on Writing
Christopher Isherwood -- Christopher and his Kind
Milorad Pavic -- Dictionary of the Kazars
Aldous Huxley -- Time Must Have a Stop
Alvaro Mutis -- Adventures and Misadventures of Magroll
Margaret Atwood -- Oryx and Crake

on deck

Huxley -- Heaven and Hell
Ibsen -- Peer Gynt / Doors of Perception
Capote -- Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel
Isherwood and Upward -- Mortmare Stories

Is that one of his early New Deal books?

-- James Redd and the Blecchs, Friday, April 25, 2008 12:50 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

I don't know what that means! lol

on deck

Capote -- Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel

-- remy bean, Friday, April 25, 2008 1:01 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

let me know how this is!

Jim Thompson, like Chester Himes, started out writing Social Realism-type fiction before finding his voice while trying to make a living writing crime fiction.

Answered Prayers is, on the whole, awful. Unfortunately.

also in the middle of bolano's "savage detectives" which is brilliant, though could have used a little editing imo.

-- Zeno, Friday, April 11, 2008 1:50 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Link

finished this today, fucking incredible book. one of the best ive read in years

about to start murakami's 'after dark'

"kill all your darlings" - luc santé
"old goriot" - balzac
"the red brain" - donald wandrei

Grifters has the bag of oranges to the stomach trick, no? I think it's the Mom what gets it.

The Bob Dylan bit in the Luc S book is the best thing ever.

The Battle for Spain- Antony Beevor

I was liking [The Emperor's Children] more than I expected til the end. don't want to spoil it but a certain cataclysmic recent event in our history is deployed as deus ex machina/plot tidy-upper. maybe the first time I actually wanted to throw a book at the wall. did anyone else read it and react this way?

I didn't. Or at least I didn't have a problem with the event itself being used, which seemd kinda the point of the book? I did feel like she let some of the characters off too easy though.

Yeah Grifters is the punch that once it finally gets treated allows him to meet Carol the nurse.

Thompson's first novel ws the only 'realist' thing; but from the short life blurb on the bk he started out writing short stories for detective magazines, selling his first story at 14!

xpost

i didn't see it coming which was a little dumb, cause I had mentally calculated the setting to be right around the turn of the century and there were a couple very self-conscious evocations of the pre-cataclysm. it's not like i think nobody should write about it, but yeah, the characters got off too easy as a result.

i picked up one of CM's earlier books in a store yesterday and was surprised to see she was born in 1966. i had guessed she was older, writing about the younger ppl in the book from an even greater remove.

i thought "the emperor" was loosely based on chirstopher hitchens, w/the eternal scotch beside his word processor, continually name dropping the kurds and all his freedom-fighting friends.

"Pop. 1280."

Not read it but Tavernier's film is terrific, capturing that special brand of evil Thompson committed to the page

'Pop 1280' and 'The Killer Inside Me' have very similar vibes. Both nastily wonderful.

Am reading (Ethel) Henry Handel Richardson's "The Fortunes of Richard Mahony" trilogy, which is completely absorbing, but taking a long time: 900 pages of very small type.

I'm reading The Savage Detectives and am starting to really love it.

gf has me reading some dresden files books lol

London Mayoral Manifestos (only 2pp each)

I was liking [The Emperor's Children] more than I expected til the end. don't want to spoil it but a certain cataclysmic recent event in our history is deployed as deus ex machina/plot tidy-upper. maybe the first time I actually wanted to throw a book at the wall. did anyone else read it and react this way?

I think I was just relieved that it was over, since I had started to lose interest about half-way through. It does seem that the plot threads seem to be weaving more tightly towards a sort of climax or confrontation - Bootie & Ludovic vs. Murray (with Marina caught in the middle), but then they just kind of unravel instead.

i wish i had the time & energy to read more. alas no.

i'm reading: abelard & heloise's letters.

classique!

i am having "you can't go home again" sent to me via bookmooch (which is an awesome thing if you guys don't know about it)

For school: "Typical American"- Gish Jen
for not school: a bunch of JG Ballard and George Saunders short stories, and "Foucault's Pendulum"

I read about 2/3 of the Jarrell critical essays, up to where he was recycling materials from earlier essays. I can't say I was greatly impressed.

His good points: he had a good ear and eye for poetry and knew what he was talking about, and he didn't try to baffle the reader with bullshit. In a time when the so-called New Criticism was all the rage and critics could skate on self-importance and pseudo-sociology, Jarrell's qualities were probably much appreciated as an antidote.

His weakness: RJ was a good reader and appreciator, but his critical insights were few and simple. Unfortunately, the essays were not correspondingly short and sweet. They seem like small beer, watering down their potency across 20 pages when 7 would have been better.

Since ditching Jarrell, I've been reading essays and biding my time. Best essay of the most recent bunch: James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son from 1955 or thereabouts. It would be intensely interesting to know Baldwin's take on the current presidential race.

i am having "you can't go home again" sent to me via bookmooch (which is an awesome thing if you guys don't know about it)

Yeah, Bookmooch is great. I hardly buy books any more. Most people on there are incredibly conscientious and nice.

I've finished reading Flowers in the Dustbin. The chapters on the '50s were the best. The '60s stuff was mostly too familiar, and in the '70s it seems like Miller had too much of a critical axe to grind.

Now I've started on Mischa Berlinski's Fieldwork. It moves quickly out of the starting-gate, which is nice.

i just read nabokov's *the real life of seabastian knight*. loved it! devoured it in a day or so.

gonna start reading steven millhauser's *martin dressler* next.

i haven't been reading much lately, sad to say. i've been writing.

did you read *pale fire* - the expansion of *knight* and (one of) nabokov's masterpiece?

nope. i've always been kind of scared of nabokov. i wanted to see if i liked something relatively short and simple. (i've tried reading other bigger more complicated books of his and i've always ended up giving up. sometimes i just need an easy in and then i don't find scary geniuses so scary anymore. does that make sense? he always seemed like such an interesting writer, and that's why i've never given up reading him entirely. also, i just don't have much of a brain for fancy wordplay/games/tricks/puzzles/anagrams/etc. or i didn't in the past. and this put me off. but i'm always willing to keep trying. sometimes i'm just not old enough for something yet. this is true of me and music and other art as well.)

i think you can enjoy nabokov (and pale fire in particualr)even if you are not aware of everything he puts on his late texts (and who can be fully aware anyway).
but the shortes,simple novels are awesome as well, and if you like those kind i'll humbly recommend the cynical "laughter in the dark" ,the surreal "invitaion for the beheading" and the irocic "pnin" which are more narrative driven novels,less sophisticated.

yeah, i was gonna say, i think i'd like to track down some of the earlier stuff like beheading and the other books he wrote in russian in the 20's and 30's before i try some of the later books.

what blew me away about Sebastian Knight was how modern it was! and he wrote it in 1938. in the bathroom. in a language he had never written a book in before. that book could have been written yesterday!

yeah. it is somewhat post-modern

Alberto Moravia -Contempt (a masterpiece!)

Javier Marias - tommorow in the battle think of me

Contempt is fucking ace!
Another great earlyish Nabokov to try is 'Laughter in the Dark', about a blind man whose wife sneaks her lover in to live secretly in the house with them. Nastily good fun.

Am now reading Stefan Zweig's 'The Post-Office Girl'. It, too, is fucking ace!

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product-file/32/thep7732/product.jpg

most of the "nyrb classics" publishing is,indeed,classic

Jumping back into this board, apparently as a sci-fi nerd these days:

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Selected Stories
Sarah Hall, Haweswater & The Electric Michelangelo
Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Ian McDonald, River of Gods
Howard Waldrop, Howard WHO?

Oh yeah also read Machado de Assis' Epitaph of a Small Winner (so unsettling) and re-read Julio Cortázar's Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (so beautiful!) lately.

I want to read 'Epitaph'. I really liked his 'Don Casmurro'.
How were the Sarah Halls? I read "The Carhullan Army", which was all build-up and epilogue, with the climax happening frustratingly off-page.

Once I finish this goddamn paper, Mount Analogue by Rene Daumal, from a recommendation in Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music.

JM: I have not yet started the Sarah Hall books, and I need to like quick-like. And you should definitely read "Epitaph," it's the most complicated simple book I've ever read. Plus, THE BIG TWIST!

While Mr. Jaq is plowing through all of Dostoevsky (who will forever be "Dusty-dusty" in my mind, thanks to EdwardIII's little daughter, all "him sad in him room?") AND the 5 volume bio, I am reading comic books and Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics.

Massimo Carlotto, The Fugitive. Read The Goodbye Kiss a few weeks ago, last night finished Death's Dark Abyss and started this one right away. Tough, witty, cynical and funny, just what I want in a Euro-noir. When you've run out of Camilleri the guys at the Mystery bookstores always tell you to go cozy and read Donna Leon, but they really should tell you to go hardboiled and go with this guy.

I <3 Europa Editions.

I have been told by people on two continents (neither of them Europe!) to read Donna Leon, but I have found her DULL.

Then you're a perfect candidate for Camilleri and Carlotto!

Dostoevsky (who will forever be "Dusty-dusty" in my mind, thanks to EdwardIII's little daughter, all "him sad in him room?"

I like the sound of this, wityhout knowing what it means. Help!

I'll see if I can find the thread - it's over on ILE.

This: The two year old's guide to Dostoevsky

That's fantastic! Thanks.

i finished martin dressler. it was fun. reminded me of all those sinclair lewis rags to riches novels i used to read when i was a kid. in fact, i think sinclair lewis even had one about a guy who ended up a hotel magnate, but don't quote me on that. i should probably read that richard powers book i haven't read yet about the turn-of-the-century soap company next, just to round out my fake biography spree, but i don't think i will right now.

in fact, i picked up the collected stories of Heinrich von Kleist this morning. been meaning to read it forever. still reading the Thomas Mann intro though. The intro is great all by itself! what a bummed out dude von Kleist was. i love that he killed himself and another woman and the only thing him and this woman shared was "a death wish". viva Germany! anyway, i always figured if someone like von Kleist had such a big impact on Kafka that i should read his stuff.

oh brother that was me, not maria d.

and maria did major in german and german literature in college, so she's probably already read her von Kleist.

Hi Scott! I left you a link over on ILCooking, but you probably don't read it: Black metal baking

Another fun fake bio is Peter Carey's one about Ned Kelley.

I am still reading comic books, though the library has the new book about Roget (of the thesaurus) on hold for me.

I've been reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Main impressions: DFW seems painfully young to me in this book, but it is equally obvious that he was an engaging writer with sufficient virtues to overcome his flaws.

Main Flaw: he wants to find the significance of everything he looks at, which is OK, but he magnifies every grain of significance into Major Meanings, which can get tiresome.

Most Engaging Trait: he can communicate humor through written words. This is difficult. He clearly has this nailed down. It flat out saves him from his absurdly overblown penchant for profundity.

That book is mostly about that final eponymous essay, although the dumb-ass one about TV is the one that I've seen cited most often.

haha, thanks, Jaq!

Finished a couple of novels by Mishima, parts two and four of his Tetralogy: Runaway Horses and The Decay of the Angel. Spring Snow I read late last year. Followed it with Pound and Ernest Fenollosa translations of several Noh plays. Its kinda inescapable how Mishima adapted some of the poetics of these plays (that awe of nature, those descriptions of the sea) to an incisive style.

I felt a bit underwhelmed by Mishima. Fuck knows what I was on though. Probably was expecting a bit more guts but I've finally come round to the slow burning constructions of his, he's fantastic really.

Also finished Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn. Something I wanted to do for ages and glad to finally get round to. Now onto Waiting Period.

Started on Mencken's Selected Prejudices.

death on the installment plan and ludgwig wittgenstein: the duty of genius

Re Mishima... Probably was expecting a bit more guts

Ho ho.

Sorry, I'll be off now.

the MES autobiography
Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn
now I'm reading Ethan Mordden's 1930s Broadway musicals book
I'm trying to catch up with the books in my apartment I haven't read yet! It's a tough row to hoe, yo

"Sorry, I'll be off now."

To read Mishima, right?

Waiting Period is one of those few novels I assume mention the internet quite a few times and DO NOT end up looking square-ish while doing so. Must get hold of Hubert Selby biog if there is any around.

Mencken is ok, once you get past the politics (whatever they are), that is - the piece on Roosevelt was pretty good on a blow to blow account kinda way. Elsewhere those generalizations pay off on the page.

Kundera's The Book on laughter and Forgetting was an ok read -- wish I liked it more, disliked the musicological stuff in it.

Onto Richard Yates Revolutionary road

Started Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, and it's great. I'm less than 200 pages into this 900 page novel, but I find Chandra's narrative pacing and flow very entrancing. I tend to like his characters, and since I'm not a very good novel reader, that makes a big difference to me. (I suspect that a really serious novel reader doesn't care whether or not the characters are likeable.) I like how the work stays just this side of the divide between the naturalistic and the fantastic (at least so far). The events are true-to-life, but maybe a bit unlikely.

"The events are true-to-life, but maybe a bit unlikely."

sounds like my life!

just read sun and steel by mishima and not-knowning: essays and interviews by donald barthelme

loved loved loved loved loved the former, the latter i hated and it made me retroactively hate sixty stories and everything else ive read by barthelme
except maybe that story about the baby called dancing or whatever i donno if thats ruin-able by pretentious new yorker schiesse

finished those von Kleist stories. they were awesome. can certainly see why kafka dug him. scarily modern for stuff written in 1801 or thereabouts.

now reading: Larry Brown's Father and Son. i dig Larry. Still haven't read a few of his novels. already found my favorite sentence of the week:

"His hand was hurting and he wished the monkey was still alive so he could kill it again."

Von Kliest is so great; have you read Georg Buchner? Several years younger, I guess (B. 1813, died when he was 23). Been a while since I read his collected works, but this excerpt of Gerhard P. Knapp's article in the Literary Encyclopedia
http://litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5188 is pretty much the way I remember him:
..Buchner has...been hailed as a "contemporary" by generations of writers, both Modern and Postmodern...His thoughts and his aesthetics were firmly grounded in 19th Century discourse, however, as a political thinker and a writer, Buchner radically transcends the boundaries of his time...As his life and his works are an inseperable unity, his writings are always informed by the spirit of revolution...they display novel and revolutionary aesthetics in practically every line.His characters are both perpetrators and victims...Anguish, poverty and pathology are focal points...But there is also beauty and wit, and most important, compassion. Love and tenderness provide a respite from despair. It is Buchner's inimitable poetic voice and its insistent empathy with human suffering that speaks out to his readers and to theatre audiences around the globe to this day. Scientific texts, philosophical critiques, politcal pamphlets aside, he left three plays and one novel, in one volume, several dif editions--mainly, I guess because he left several versions of the last play, "Wozzeck" or "Woyzeck," and I think scholars eventually agreed on the ending, though the sequence of scenes may still be debated (but make your own sequence; he probably wouldn't care, and what if he did)The novel is Lenz, and you might wanna check the few collected plays of the real-life J.R.R. Lenz, from late 18th Century, I think, and def take a look at William Godwin's late 18th novel, Caleb Williams Caleb manages to offend this real dick, who dogs him all around England, but also won't let him leave the island. It's pretty disturbing. A short Nabokov novel I really enjoyed in high school was The Defense Also Transparent Things, but I'd start with the former.

Tolkien's first three initials may not fit der Lenz.

sacred games

Buddenbrooks - so extremely satisfying

Imaginary Magnitude by Stanislaw Lem - which is much funnier than I was expecting.

Also, in Sacred Games there's a whole Bollywood subtext (I don't know about subtext, but that sounds good). The Bollywood Intertext in the Post-Colonialist Discourse of the New Indian Mega-Novel. Anyway, a couple of the characters are always breaking into lines of songs from films, and then you can look in the glossary for translations. Sacred Games is so good and so big, I don't know what to say about it.

Good and big is a start. Go on.

Just started To the Finland Station. The Michelet chapters were great, but he moves a little quickly through Renan and Taine and I feel like I'm missing some context.

i can't decide if i like the sound of this 'sacred games' thing or not

Agape Agape, which is a lot more thoroughly depressing than I anticipated. But still genius.

Finished Fieldwork, which was pretty good - the sort of mystery novel where you start out already knowing whodunnit, but need to figure out whytheydunnit. Packed with lots of interesting local color about Thailand and Southeast Asia - it's a clash of worldviews: local tribe vs. anthropologist vs. missionaries.

Now I'm tentatively starting on The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris.

If you want fun Bollywood-in-literature action, try Shashi Tharoor's 'Show Business'.

Am reading Irmgard Keun's "After Midnight", published in 1937. Given how much piss it extracts from the Nazis, Hitler, etc, how she stayed alive when she was in Germany during WW2 is beyond me. It's a great book.

Re: Imaginary Magnitude by Stanislaw Lem - which is much funnier than I was expecting.

I got this email today...

"Dear Amazon.com Customer, we've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Stanislaw Lem have also purchased Bonjour Tristesse: A Novel (P.S.) by Francoise Sagan."

An odd combination.

Best book I've read lately is Pravda by Edward Docx. Or maybe The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert Redick.

Dear Amazon.com Customer, we've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Stanislaw Lem have also purchased Bonjour Tristesse: A Novel (P.S.) by Francoise Sagan.

Well that definitely wasn't me.

I found The Red Wolf Conspiracy to be a bit formulaic (although, to be fair, I probably read way too much Epic Fantasy). It does have one really good wtf? moment, however.

HG Wells - 'War in the Air'
Vincent Lam - 'Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures'

Both wonderful, in very different ways.

Virginia Woolf - The Waves. Enjoyed and hated in bits.
J.G.Ballard - Empire of the Sun. I think its the first movie that my family took me to watch at the cinema (would've been 10 or so at the time)

Finished the Savage Detectives (so good), on deck I've got God is Dead (short) and Postville. Lush Life too, but that'll have to wait.

Virginia Woolf - The Waves. Enjoyed and hated in bits.

My sentiments exactly.

I'm picking up Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year from the library this afternoon, and am excited about it.

does the savage detectives have any actual detectives in it or should i get sacred games first

no detectives

have you read my name is red btw? great nontraditional detective story.

god is dead is incredible, jordan, as is lush life. and nate, i enjoyed fieldwork quite a bit. just a really good balance between pulp and "literature." i recently finished the wanderers by richard price (extremely good) and jakob von gunten (good) and secret history of the american empire (bad). couldn't finish knockemstiff (first two stories were great). right now reading ministry of fear, which is one of the few canon green's i haven't gotten to. btw i have bought so many books thanks to this thread!

"My sentiments exactly."

And I usually forgive easily with streams of consciousness type things. Love love all that, can live in it etc. The waves is a title that promises so much, delivering little, except with those kinds of constructions getting little sometimes/often happens, but here I just felt unsatisfied. Will be reading To the lighthouse soon enough tho'.

Italo Calvino - If on a winter night's traveller. Extra gd scanning if you've read some of his essays collected in The Literature Machine, what with the preoccupation w/machines writing and producing novels yadda yadda.

Camus - The Plague

Am reading Conrad for the first time--wow! Read The Shadow-Line and Heart of Darkness this week and am thinking about making it three in a row. It's like no one told him modernist books aren't supposed to be fun.

Conrad's great: if you can get hols of his novella, The Duel, do so as fast as you can. It's genuinely funny, and really, really great. It's in this collection, and probably lots of others, too.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/images/0141441704/ref=dp_image_text_0?ie=UTF8&n=266239&s=books

This collection, I mean...
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41VHUgdrqZL._SS500_.jpg

I read God is Dead at a coffee shop yesterday. I don't know about "incredible" but it did have some good parts. It definitely feels like a first novel, maybe a little too self-consciously clever?

I started Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America.

Also, re Conrad, 'The Secret Agent' is a masterpiece... again, a wonderfully well-written modernist book that's also a thoroughly absorbing thriller.

Am now reading Martin Boyd's 'A Difficult Young Man'.

it is so crazy to remember that english wasn't conrad's first language

Finished Joseph O'Neil's Netherland yesterday. I wanted to start a thread called "'We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically' Joseph O'Neil's Netherland" but was afraid no one cares/has the read the book/would post.

I loved it so much I'm reticent to give form or shape to my enthusiasm because I'm not sure I can describe the why w/o falling into hyperbole and/or incoherence. A big part of the pleasure in reading, for me, is stumbling on moments where an author makes explicable thoughts and feelings that I've had but have never been able to formulate and Netherland is filled w/those moments. When he's describing the formation of players on a cricket field, or applying for a driver's license or the drunken logic which dictates a boozy night out, O'Neill's prose is perfect. I just loved this novel so much.

FWIW, re: Woolf I felt the same about Mrs. Dalloway the first time I read it, that feeling of having a writer both describe life as I know it and sharply illuminating things I'd never thought to articulate. Nothing else she's written has come close to that, for me.

Lamp, I just put Netherland on my library req list yesterday. It sounds like a terrific read. I probably won't have it for months, but I look forward to it.

Oh, and Stone Monkey Red Wolf is formulaic but I... don't care, really. I thought Redick did a great job of giving me what I wanted, which was a fun, exciting story and fun, enjoyable characters. Actually one of the benefits of reading way too much fantasy is that, considering how dark most recent fantasy is, a few of the plot points broke in ways I wasn't entirely expecting them to.

Hazlitt - Liber Amoris
Starting on plays by Genet and Nathalie Sarraute
Primo Levi - The Sixth Day

Jordan, 'My Name is Red' is indeed a totally legit novel, very involved and smart and one of a handful of novels I will eventually re-read rather than read something new. Pamuk's 'Istanbul' is also great, but I never finished his 'Snow'.

i am now reading:

http://mccoy.lib.siu.edu/illinois/images/gargoyles.gif

i would rate hecht's novels below his screenplay work, below his short stories (which at their zingiest have a great damon runyon/john o'hara pep to them), below his massive and cool and strange autobiography, and way below his peerless newspaper columns (a big influence on me). but they still retain some (dated) 20's boho charm.

Try the Thomas Bernhard's Gargoyles. it is awesome

Currently engaged in:

YOUR FACE TOMORROW: DANCE AND DREAM,

though "engaged" is perhaps too strong a word - it has its singular delights, but perhaps I've fallen out of Marias' wavelength. It hasn't quite clicked for me, despite being halfway through...I suspect my loyalty to DARK BACK OF TIME (perhaps my favorite book of the 90s) will see me through to the end.

couldn't finish knockemstiff

me neither. i was pretty excited about it but only made it about half way through before i had to concede defeat. while i found them genuinely affecting, the stories were numbingly same-y. he's a powerful and talented writer, but i wanted the stories to branch out more than they did (if that's the right way to say it), to consider more than just brutality and absurdity. many favorable reviews cite the dignity and the hope found in the stories despite the terrible circumstances, but i didn't get a sense of that. at all. there's plenty of time before it has to go back to the library, so i may try starting from the end of the book and go backwards as the later stories seem to be a bit fuller, not just wham-bam catastrophe.

just finished the dud avocado, by elaine dundy. terry teachout compares her to dawn powell in his introduction, which is a bit of wishful thinking, but it's a charming and funny book (depending on your tolerance for smart-mouthed girls abroad who stumble into white slavery rings).

The Easter Parade, Alice Munro collected stories, George Saunders something Megaphone (essays)

Umberto Eco - Travels in Hyperreality, an ace essay collection on anything from Casablanca to football to terrorism (often he'll mix it all in the same essay). Shame I gotta give this one back to the library.

Predictably Irrational, which so far is like a sophomore marketing class.

Also, I have given up on the Skippyjon Jones books, which are not as charming as they could be.

I've been knocking around with books that barely rate a mention: The Secret History of the American Empire (written with a crayon), a recently published history of Byzantium (v. generalist and loosely focused), a book about the founders of the U.S.A. (rather tired old ground to walk over). Not bad books, but not ones to chat up, either.

All I really want to do is drag my sorry bus-driving ass to the end of the school year (June 12 for me) and then disappear into the backwoods for a while. Once I rest up a bit, I am sure I will turn up some more interesting books than these.

terry teachout compares her to dawn powell in his introduction, which is a bit of wishful thinking

wishful thinking = his speciality. and living in the past. he's a good writer but what a reactionary oddball.

I'm still on the VS Naipaul kick. Just finished The Mimic Men, a late 60s novel about an expatriate island politician in London, presented in first-person as his biography. touches on all the Naipaulian themes.

a good one, aimless, if you see it around.

Had a terrfic BRAGGIN' + WEEKEND = good books read lately in order of personal enjoyment:
01) The Secret Life of Oscar Wao by Junota Diaz
02) World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
03) Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara
04) Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
05) The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier

The last being the only one that I didn't enjoy since it read more like a research proposal than an actual book made for people to read + terribly flat and awkward writing + repetitive/?? thinking

I was surprised how much I enjoyed 'World War Z'.

I finished We Need to Talk About Kevin yesterday in an obsessive most-of-the-day read-a-thon. The most gripping and horrifying book I've read in a very long time.

I had last week off, so I read:

The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (fantastic!) by Sally Armstrong
Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai (good, but not quite as good as above)
& An Equal Music by Vikram Seth which I am really enjoying and about 90% through.

Back to work now so not likely to get as much reading done.. boo.

I finished Sacred Games and I'm about to finish History of the Conquest of Mexico. I think I'm going to be mostly reading fiction (especially by Southwest authors, I guess) and Spanish and Latin American history. Up next, I think, is Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead.

Jonathan Coe: The Dwarves of Death (very much his least impressive book)
Robertson Davies: On the Pleasures of Reading

Elaine Dundy's 'The Dud Avocado'. This is such a 'me' book.

I saw Salman Rushdie the other night read from his new book, which sounded good, but I couldn't get over my shame - we were 15 minutes late because of a friend getting stuck in traffic, slunk into the theatre only to find that somehow our seats were FRONT ROW and directly in front of the podium he was reading from. I got Rushdie cuteye!

glad you're enjoying it, michael.

i rescued the deptford trilogy by robertson davies from a box of unwanted books, so that's what i'm on now. so far it's functioning more as a placeholder until i find something i really want to read, but perhaps i'll surprise myself and get engrossed in it. there's plenty of time for that to happen, as it's certainly long enough.

Plays by David Mamet, including Barthelme fave Sexual Pervesity in Chicago, and is the best of the bunch.

Chekhov - The Story of a Nobody

Friederich Durrenmatt - Writings on Drama. Sadly not many reflections on his own fiction, which I suppose I shouldn't have expected much of.

I finished Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption, which I found more interesting and thought-provoking than Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, which covers some similar ground.

Now I'm starting David Rockefeller's Memoirs.

finefinemusic I bloody loved an equal music...untilo you posted I'd forgotten I read it. Must reread, ta.

Reread City of Glass, Ackroyd's Dan Leno

Currently deep in Tom Raworth's collected poems, genius.

Lauren, give 'The Deptford Trilogy' a decent try. It's a great series of books, imso.

Seconded!

oh, i will! and i'm definitely enjoying it. i just have my greedy eyes on a few books that are making their way to me via interlibrary loan (yes, i still use the library).

Right now enjoying Arthur Rex by Thomas Berger. Does anybody else around here like his stuff?

Robertson Davies is good but you should also take note of what David Lodge said about him.

Just finished 'Earthly Powers' by Anthony Burgess. Lots of fun.

Yeah, that's his magnum opus.

finished the first book of the trilogy, enjoyed it very much, and am now putting the entire thing aside for the moment to start apex hides the hurt (colson whitehead).

But the second one is the good one! N.B. I am the only person in the world who thinks this.

omg netherland

Have just got Netherland AND 'A Nervous Splendour' (see Stefan Zweig thread) and several others, am in panic over which to read first, aaaarrrgh, etc

I've decided that the way forward (for me, right now) is reading several at once. Along with Neverland, I'm reading the stories of Ellison's Flying Home and Anatole Broyard's memoir Kafka was the Rage. I'm hoping this circumvents my recent non-finishing tendencies.

I can't remember much about 'Flying Home', other than that I really enjoyed it.

So far it's pretty great--the first story (which the intro does warn is an anomaly of sorts), "A Party Down at the Square," about a lynching, is extraordinary.

omg netherland

For real, right? So, so good. I really hope this book gets a wide audience.

I'm kind of stuck on what to read right now since I've started my MCAT studying in earnest. I've been unethusiastically reading Tom Lloyd's Stormcaller but I need something that will hold my interest w/o taking up to much mental space.

I always see 'Earthly Powers' as about Maugham at some level.

Finished Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (btw the Amazon reviews on that one are pretty interesting) and started Lush Life.

Keep your feelings and oppinions to yourself! Do not write a book showing "facts" of the life-style of religous just to bring people to think badly of them. No wonder the author wrote for the LA Times, a known and proven anti-simetic paper!
I am not immpressed by someone who wishes to bad-mouth a group of people and putting in a book.

OK, am now reading 'Netherland', and it's wonderful. Realised about 50 pages in that I read another book by this chap years and years ago--'The Breezes', which was a very funny novel about "the unluckiest family in Ireland".

A volume of Ionesco's plays
Raymong Queneau - The flight of Icarus
De Sade - Incest

Is 'Incest' any good? I'm not much into de Sade's porn, but I've liked some of his Gothic tales.

Its not gothic as such -- I've only read a few short stories, he just works his themes (atheism, cruelty, evil power games, classic 'French' stuff) into this tale.

I don't know how it would compare to Justine

I'm about a third of the way into War and Peace; loving it, but am seriously considering switching my commuting mode from bicycle to train simply so I can get more pages under my belt.

I like how broad our definition of "Spring" is on this thread.

The Three Musketeers of all things. It's, unsurprisingly enough, a lot of fun.

"I like how broad our definition of "Spring" is on this thread." :

Summer 2008 - Pray tell, what readest thou?

scott seward, man of action.

thanks guy.