Fall 2008 is on it's way so please be kind to tell us what you read

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda

supposed to be the italian equivalent to joyce/Proust, admired by Moravia,Pasolini and Calvino among others, and it's a detective story.
so far so good.

Mary Shelley: The Pilgrims - short story collection
Justin Cartwright: In a Secret Garden - love letter to Oxford
Charles Stross: Halting State - cunning near-future science-fiction IT thriller, very clever but with some stylistic annoyances
Wallace Stegner: Unheard Laughter - not bad, felt sort of like a remix of 'Ethan Frome'

I've been working the non-fiction side of the street.

I recently finished Fermat's Enigma, by Simon Singh, covering the history of Fermat's Last Theorem up to and including the proof of this theorem that was constructed in the mid-90s by Andrew Wiles (mainly). In this book I discovered the importance of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture (now proved at the same time as Fermat's conjecture).

The last several nights I've been reading Body of Secrets, a book about the NSA spy agency. It spends a huge amount of time rehashing the Cold War, so I've taken to skipping ahead somewhat. The craziest thing I've encountered in this book is a description of Operation Northwoods, a scheme to start a war with Cuba, by having the U.S. government kill Americans, blow up buildings, commit acts of terror and frame the Cubans for these atrocities, so the U.S. could invade and occupy Cuba.

Who would come up with such an outrageous (even treasonous) plan? The fucking Joint Chiefs of Staff, that's who. This was circa 1962. The author claimed to have the classified documents to prove this. I believe him.

The Strings are False - Louis MacNeice's (scrappy, unfinished) autobiography. So good. Sharp, clear prose (and able to break into a great image) and a fine watcher. Willing to come across badly - irresponsible, a snob at points, detached, egotistical - but very winning; same wordly attention and acuity as his poems.

Matt Taibbi: The Great Derangement - very funny, enraging, somewhat ethically dubious

That MacNiece autobiography sounds like something I should grab a copy of and read.

Body of Secrets

I enjoyed this.

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda

This has been on my wishlist for some time. Please let us know what you think when you're done, Zeno.

I'm reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls which is an interesting story but so far not the most engaging book. I'm reading it because a friend lent it to me and I feel obligated to do so. Next up is Tobias Wolff's latest collection (woo!).

http://media.tumblr.com/UmgbcxYFvdsr39otp98eT0Nlo1_400.jpg

cowzn, read the Highsmith book of stories about various animals killing people. Highly entertaining.

Yes, 'The Animal Lover's Beastly Book of Murder' - it's great. That Highsmith biography is good, too, though it seems odd to stick a nude portrait of an author on her biography's spine.

tales of natural and unnatural catastrophes is groovy too. i really dig her later weirdness.

reading madame bovary right now. never read it before.

before that i read *lightning on the sun* by robert bingham. kind of a literary thriller. i liked it a bunch. dude was one of the founders of the lit mag open city. he died in 1999.

also ended up really liking that book *triage* by scott anderson. the one they are making into a movie. not what i was expecting at all. yet another "literary" thriller. kinda. oh i don't know what to call it. but it was pretty cool.

Thomas Fleming's The New Dealers' War, a revisionist take on FDR's WWII domestic and foreign leadership; he fumbled a lot more than we're taught.

Finally finished All The King's Men: not impressed.

FDR was the kind of leader who liked to launch a lot of boats and didn't care if the majority of them sank, as long as some of them floated.

woofwoofwoof - there's a new MacNeice Collected Poems out last year in England.
cozwn - tasty.

James Branch Cabell and Richmond-in-Virgina. I value my time cheaply.

fdr was the kind of man who liked to miss boats, but he didn't miss them all too often

I remember loving 'Lightning on the Sun', and the short story collection Bingham did before it. Great grim stuff. Must re-read.

James Welch: Winter in the Blood

have started:

James Hogg - The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Ford Madox Ford - Some Do Not... (am I supposed to like the evil bitch wife as much as I do? Because she's awesome - like a grown-up Little My)

recently read:

Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Dorothy Sayers - Gaudy Night (interesting reading this after Whose Body?, where Lord Peter's really annoying and fucked-up)

just finished
"the roaches have no king", daniel e. weiss
"the dog of the south", charles portis
"i was told there'd be cake", sloane crosley

Right now reading :
"the sirens of titan", vonnegut
"nova swing", clive barker

Aimless - I do recommend the MacNeice thing. The regular 30s generation stuff is all there (prep school, public school, Oxford, Spain), so maybe slight caution if that leaves you cold.
Alimosina - yes - grabbed a copy shortly after release (am a UK person myself). Much nicer than the old PB Collected I have, which is cramped - but that one's easier to carry round, so I haven't read the new one too much. Love the cover photo:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41ApIxmuGOL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
I started City of Quartz by Mike Davis. Am meant to be going to LA next spring, so think I will put it aside till then. Going to finish Doctor Faustus (Mann) instead.

finished 'revolutionary road' by richard yates the other day. am now onto 'middlesex' by someone-eugenides (i don't have the book on me right now and can't remember his first name). just bought a bunch of books today:
'skels' by maggie dubris ($5 in near-fine condition, have been wanting this for a long time), a couple of douglas coupland novels and and the latest essay collection from jonathon franzen. also got 'old school' by tobias wolff and 'the square root of wonderful' by carson mccullers.

Body of Secrets was recommended by tombot on ASK TOMBOT. I have it in my Amazon cart.

I loved Madame Bovary, Scott. How are you finding it?

My list for the next year. I really did have Infinite Jest at the top of the stack, but I'm not sure I'll enjoy it now. I'm in the middle of the Saboteurs and only have a couple of interviews to go with Screenwriter's Masterclass

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/IMG_2915.jpg

That's Needle by Hal Clement above Gore Vidal.

I adore Hollywood. After Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson may be Vidal's most fully rendered American president.

haha was the orange box on top there before I posted my picture?

The scenes at dinners where Wilson so nonchalantly drapes a napkin over the face of his wife (who suffered from seizures)....
(xpost)

Alfred, I picked up Hollywood after you raved about it elsewhere (the Wilson thread?)

Orange Box should be at the top of every pile ; )

are you thinking of McKinley? It's a great scene. He attacks an omelette while his wife sits there having a seizure.

xpost to Jaq

Walter Abish - How German Is it? This is great but I need to know way way more about Germanic fascism and Baader-Meinhof gangs than I do for this to be greater.

Kawabata - The Master of Go. An account of a six month match between the 'Master' and his young challenger. Japan's imperial past giving way to...whatever comes next. What if Mishima wrote about sports...

Michel Butor - Portrait of an Artist as a Young Ape. I want to have those dreams.

Robert Pinget - Mahu or The material.

Claude Simon - Triptych. Very similar to Grillet but I don't mind that at all.

Kathy Acker - Don Quixote. Currently reading the Schonberg/Lulu section...

Thanks Alfred! R. read the whole series aloud to me a few years back - I keep meaning to send Vidal a fan note about his dialogue, it reads so wonderfully.

I'm nearing the end of Independent People, which is breaking my heart in so many ways. And the library has returned Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals back to me, so that is queued up next.

"I loved Madame Bovary, Scott. How are you finding it?"

i dig it. i really liked sentimental education a bunch. don't know yet whether i like this more or not yet...

Just finished "The Gone Away World" by Nick Harkaway.

If you immediately reject books with Zen Buddhist ninja pirates battling against groups of heavy drinking communal mimes, then this book is not for you, but, for the rest of us, this is a fun, light read.

People round here be reading great stuff at the moment--'Madame Bovary', Walter Abish, 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner', 'Revolutionary Road'

Am reading Sadeq Hedayat: The Blind Owl. Only just started it, but I think it's great.

Just started these:

"Every Force Evolves A Form" Davenport

"The Great Fire Of London" Roubaud

I think this is my favorite line from M. Bovary, about teaching a son to be tough:

"He sent him to bed without a fire, taught him to take great swigs of rum and to shout insults at religious processions. But, being naturally peaceful, the boy responded poorly to his efforts."

i'm still trying to get my brain around the description of young charles' hat! quite possibly the most elaborate, and yet most cryptic (to me anyway), description of headgear that i've ever read in my life:

"It was one of those hats of the Composite order, in which we find features of the military bear-skin, the Polish chapska, the bowler hat, the beaver and the cotton nightcap, one of those pathetic things, in fact, whose mute ugliness has a profundity of expression like the face of an imbecile. Ovoid and stiffened with whalebone, it began with three big circular sausages; then, separated by a red band, there alternated diamonds of velours and rabbit-fur; after that came a sort of bag terminating in a cardboard polygon, embroidered all over with complicated braid, and hanging down at the end of a long cord that was too thin, a little cluster of gold threads, like a tassel. It looked new; the peak was gleaming."

if someone would like to try and draw that hat and post a picture of it here, it would be most appreciated.

I did learn thru the footnotes that the Composite order is a type of Roman column that is a mixture of the Greek Ionic and Corinthian columns. which didn't help me a bit.

After all these years I'm still trying to understand how Flaubert makes us forget that the novel begins as a first-person narrative offered by a classmate of Charles', before moving outward to the famous free indirect with which we're all familiar.

warmsherry - isn't Nova Swing by Harrison? Just reread Centauri D.
woofwoofwoof - yes - the paperback is Faber I think, it's the only one I've got.
Forget Naples, see Torrance and die
caek - Asperger's, eh - I fell in love with an AS-er once, not knowing what it was...

yah, it is for a scifi screenplay I'm working on with a friend. Two out of three main characters are on the autistic spectrum. I have been reading a lot about it. That particular book sucks, by the way.

I finished Body of Secrets. It was informative, but had a kind of kitchen sink tendency to include everything, such as statistics on how much pizza is consumed daily by NSA employees and the fact that there is a gay employees organization. And it was written in 2001, so it misses all the fireworks from the Bush domestic spying initiatives.

Now reading the book of essays by Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends, alternating with some short stories by Stephan Zwieg.

Scott S: I believe that Georg Lukacs had some things to say about that improbable hat (I don't quite remember what now), and I also think that Vladimir Nabokov, of all people, tried to draw it for his students in a lecture - this may be replicated in his Lectures in Literature.

vs naipaul -- in a free state. as in both political and psychological freedom. four case studies. the centerpiece follows two decadent colonialists on a desperate mission driving through a uganda-like country in the throes of revolution. the section called "tell me who to kill" about an alienated immigrant driven to homicide kept me awake at night after reading.

vladimir nabokov -- pale fire. more academic satire, some of it over my head but I liked (though not quite as much as pnin.)

bob colacello - holy terror. memoir of 10+ years working for andy warhol. interesting dark-side companion to the diaries -- warhol is so manipulative & awful in this telling it's like colacello can't understand why he stayed with him for so long.

curtis sittenfield - american wife. just started and am really liking, the narrator's voice is riveting and real.

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda

:D i really liked this. i also reread Confessions of Zeno, while ilx was down. everyone is reading books i love: James Hogg, Flaubert, Pale Fire! currently reading/just finished Borges: The Aleph and Robinson: Home the latter being a disappointment.

also also a bunch of comic and things i cannot remember will post pic + orange box when i get home

almost done with george pelecanos' "the turnaround". wasn't convinced by the first part, but got hooked when it hit the present day section.

Lamp - I saw Robinson's Home when I was out this weekend but didn't pick it up. How does it disappoint?

Where do I start with Pelecanos?

"That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda

This has been on my wishlist for some time. Please let us know what you think when you're done, Zeno"

i'm left with like 1/3 of it to read.
it's getting more difficult and Ulysess-like as the book moves on-the detective story, which from the start is uncommon for the genre, becomes more and more metaphoric,poetic, digging deeper and trying to understand the history and the cause of Italy's facsism through images from art, history, and mythology, that put the narrative "story" (also dealing with the same issues, but in a more realistic way) and the main characters aside for that analysis, which is remarkably written.
it's an effort, but it worth it. Gadda is a master of words and his thinking is wide and deep as can be, not skipping and detail from the scene. plus, it's relatively short as oppose to Ulysess or Broch's Death of Virgil, so yeah, i recommend it.

Jaq not sure how to explain w/o seeming inept i need to give it a little thought. it's still a vivid and sometimes wonderful book and worth a read it just wasn't what i wanted it to be, i think.

caek i liked Drama City a lot but i might start with The Big Blowdown and work my way through the four D.C. novels

I've put it on my library list, Lamp, instead of buying it straight off. Do post more though, once you've had a think on it. There's 60 or so people in front of me in the queue, so it will be a little while before I see it.

this is my first pelecanos book, and from what i gather it's the first that's not (at least nominally) a cop/detective/mystery novel.

George Perec's Things. A Story of the Sixties.

Read it a few years back and loved it. Now can't quite get the same feeling back. But wil persevere... Had a similar experience this year when I re-read Rousseau's Confessions. Maybe I need to stop re-reading books and take notice of this list more.

Read Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun (apologies if I've messed up the title). My first Murakami. At first I picked it up because I needed something light after taking months to get through James' The Golden Bowl. The Murakami was a real grower. After thinking that I'd picked up something like a "light" piece that'd been written to fulfil a contract, I steadily got taken by it. It's interesting to see someone who doesn't put much effort at all into building scenes, working on making something vivid, etc., but is happy to leave things fairly approximate. Good tip for all those aspiring types. Also loved the resonant images and motifs that he stuck with, the limping women, the woman who washes the ashes of her baby into a river, licking her finger, then smiling in a strange shy/apologetic way with the protagonist. So, a strange book, at once laid back but also Expressionist.

working my way through Grass's The Tin Drum. only about 70 pages in; it's appealing, but I'm not sure if it's really hooked me yet, and it's been pretty slow going for the most part. feels like that will change soon, though.

so the pelecanos did turn out to be a murder twistery, and the ending was on the pat side, but i still enjoyed it. it made me want to go back and read more richard price instead of more pelecanos, though.

Just started The Quick and The Dead by Joy Williams this morning. Bought it a couple of years ago(?) based maybe on people talking it up around here? First impressions are really good... making me wonder why I left it sitting on the to be read shelf so long.

I've gone back to Michel Faber's Under the Skin after putting it down momentarily. This is his first published novel, I think. It's not terrible, but I wouldn't say it's got anything incredibly special about it. It's one of those "this is a science fiction book but we'll ignore that because it's by a literary author" things happening (which, if I'm not mistaken has happened a lot recently, well maybe only with The Road).

Other things I'm meaning to read: Vollmann's Europe Central, a Stefan Zweig (sorry, haven't got it near by and too lazy to check); now I realise I shouldn't have started to try to list the things I might be reading next...

I ripped through Cory Doctorow's Little Brother yesterday. Excellent, angrifying stuff on rfid, security vs. secrecy vs. privacy. Realistically drawn urban teenage characters with typical swearing and sex (as compared to the sanitized faux-teens of Stephanie Meyer, the other YA author I've recently read.) It's available for free download on his site.

I recently read a pretty so-so anthology, but it had a fantastic Cory Doctorow story in it, 'When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth'. Brilliant.
Just read Robert Louis Stevenson's 'The Amateur Emigrant', which was also brilliant. Most writers you read you suspect you'd not like them as people, but I have to say I've a real affection for poor old Robert (who died of a sudden brain haemorrhage while making mayonnaise).
Am about to start George Gissing's 'Will Walburton', his last novel. His 'New Grub Street' is one of my favourite books: all about writers, the basic message is that you either sell out or die a failure.

Have you seen this?

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFD81E3FF930A25753C1A967958260&sec=&am
p;spon=&pagewanted=1

Good shout for The Amateur Emigrant, there. The edition I read recently had a letter to Stevenson at the beginning wishing him in Scotland, although realising that because of his health, he couldn't be, and a brief explanatory piece from Stevenson explaining that the gloomy tone that sets in about halfway through is probably as much because while he was writing it in Edinburgh his health was suffering.

This perspective only serves to lengthen the shadow cast in the book even further, right to the end of his life - those vivid moments of extreme illness on the train, and the time in the morning when he looked at the mists and cloud coming up like a tide to his spot in the mountains, and yet despite this, his interest is always an urbane and unaffected one in the people and practical conundrums of the world around him, which also provide curious and toothsome spiritual sustenance.

You're right, he's very likable I'd love to have met him, he has an extremely amenable, sincere enjoyment in speculating about the world. Turn his hand to anything. I think it was Chesterton who said that the great thing to take in with Stevenson is not so much the quality, but the quantity of what he wrote; his remarkable variation.

Bloody hell, I'm going on a bit - what I meant to say was I've got lined up -

Carpenter's Gothic, by William Gaddis (although I really wanted The Recognitions, but couldn't immmediately lay my hands on it)
Children, My Children! by Peter de Polnay (a writer I know nothing about)
Death in Five Boxes by Carter Dickson (bedtime reading)

Actually, I'm already halfway through the Gaddis - really good I think, although... No, no although. Not yet.

Hate to say it, but CG is the worst Gaddis by a mile or three

for mega Gaddis fans only

Hmmm. Well - here's what I like about it so far - well, like is the wrong word - things I've noticed and am impressed someone has tried: the underwater claustrophobia of the descriptions; the verbal world pushing confusedly onto the physical world, so that they impose upon each other - not done in a stream of unconsciousness sort of way, but an extremely physical way - you get the feeling of forces that don't have room for each other at work; the characters, assertive egoistic males v the protective, imposed upon woman; the phone calls, with no one ever reaching the person they need; the sudden looming presences of unknown people posing a threat; the continuing barked shins, cut fingers, stubbed out cigarettes.

I think it all adds up quite effectively. My although was probably going to be something like - 'to what end, though?', but if that matters, then I'm going to have to wait until the end of the book to worry about it.

Well, yeah but what's funny is you compare all that to JR-- which treads on similar ground with a similar atmosphere. There's an entire apartment in JR that's like McCandless's locked room, messy and filled with books and papers but it also has a videophone and sink that won't stop running. And people are always calling the wrong person, tripping on shoelaces, running into each other.

And the underwater claustrophobia of the descriptions: a pretty great way of describing Gaddis's prose style which appears only here and there throughout the entirety of JR--most of the book is broken dialog, and when the exposition does come, it's exactly as you describe. Plus, the story is better and funnier, with more complex characters. The characters in CG all seemed to be types or cliches--but I think that was WG's point.

I shall put in on my (non-existent, but continually updated) list of Things to Read forthwith, along with The Recognitions, which I still want to read anyway. Thank you, Mr Que.

Gamaliel-great points about Stevenson, and I hadn't known he'd been writing the second part in Edinburgh. It still amazes me that someone so ill should have done so much adventurous travelling in such an (apparently) cheerful, interested, optimistic mood.

And David, thanks for that Gissing link: seems pretty much spot-on!

I used the phrase 'stream of unconciousness' - I would do my retarded ape dance around the bed room, but I really can't be bothered and am lying in bed instead. 'Stream of unconciousness'. Christ. Sounds like the wee you do when you're dead drunk and can't make it to the toilet.

Don't have a problem with Carpenter's Gothic. Agree that it's not really up with JR or the other two big ones, but still pretty great. Interesting to see him do something which bends back towards a conventional novel: like a New England failed marriage story mashed through the Gaddis sensibility & technique. It does feel a step back after JR, but I'm happy to see it as chamber piece to symphony, or similar analogy which I'd use more confidently if I understood classical music.
It suffered a little for me because I read it not long after JR and the Gaddis dialogue devices (eg repetitions, stumbling, indications of action) which help give the chaos/overload effect in JR felt more like tics in CG. Like 'oh right, Gaddis', rather than a unifying & urgent principle which disorients then totally absorbs a reader. But as I say, I suspect that's from reading it too close to JR.
Currently reading Real Life of Sebastian Knight and picking through Thucydides.

Makes sense. Maybe it's just as well that I read Carpenter's Gothic first. Reading more last night, the whole metaphor of the Carpetenter's Gothic style, where things are just crammed higgedly piggedly into a surface design is really pulling the whole thing together for me. Christ as the carpenter. Romance and Nature as having become divided from the human world stuff as well. I'm liking it more and more.

Sebastian Knight is, I think, one of my favourites. The interplay of the two plot lines, one going backwards in time, one going forwards, v clever, and the connecting thread of little patches of violet colour placed throughout hinting at a possible definitive truth. And it's great fun. Full of secret compartments, sliding doors and little magic tricks.

Gad, I might have to read it again.

quit making me want to read more Nabokov! I've already got Despair and Pnin in my to-read pile, with Speak, Memory reserved for some point after that in the not-too-distant future.

I LOVE Nabokov, but I've decided to parcel his books out to maybe 2/year, so I'll have something of his to look forward to for as long as possible. This year was Pnin and Lolita.

I'm still reading (and enjoying) Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire.

Carl-Henning Wijkmark - Stundande Natten ("Approaching Night". Won a big Swedish award last year. Old actor in a hospital waiting for death. Passing time by thinking abuot death and reading about death and betting with his room-mates about which one of them will croak last. No nazis, murderous midgets of crime-solving so far.)
G. Polya - How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (somewhat old book on, well, solving problems. Seems pretty good, though for a few minutes i felt I was in trouble when he decided to make his chief examples about parallelepipeds. I'd never heard of them before. This, I admit, might say too much about my education)

Also slowly going through Nicholson Baker's "Human Smoke". Its fragmented -- albeit chronologically linear -- structure makes it a bit too tempting to read at odd moments over a longer timespan. I started it two months ago and am barely halfway through.

Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth. Although the concept of wealth seems rather quaint this week.

Nice cover for the above.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/SMm-E4zV82I/AAAAAAAACDE/Dd2jjUiFoxg/s1600-h/Morton+Dimonstein+(1).jpg

Fuck, that didn't work: see http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/SMm-E4zV82I/AAAAAAAACDE/Dd2jjUiFoxg/s1600-h/Morton+Dimonstein+(1).jpg

the concept of wealth seems rather quaint this week

Not to hijack the thread, but....

Credit instruments (and, by extension, the supply of ready money), which are the source of the problems plaguing the economy right now, are only abstractions which claim to be based upon wealth. Wealth itself is not diminished by the destruction of credit. However, the ability to transfer wealth, or to implement the further creation of wealth, are diminished when credit is impaired. Hence, our current woes.

Leroi Jones - The System of Dante's hell
David Jones - In Parenthesis
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic.

Edward Lazarus' Closed Chambers, about his clerkship with Justice Harry Blackmun; an unofficial prequel to Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine.

The Recognitions has been staring at me for days.

The Recognitions has been staring at me for days.

Do it do it do it do it do it

I know. Why do I suspect that it'll be rougher going than Daniel Deronda?

it's all relative. it's not a *super* difficult book. all that hype and baloney about Gaddis being really difficult is only a little bit true. he's a little tough, but no tougher than, say, Faulkner. his writing style takes a bit of adjustment but once you get used to him, he's a blast.

I finished the book of Chabon essays a couple of days ago. I am not so enamored of comics and sci-fi as he is, so the subject matter of most of the essays was peripheral to my interests. I suppose it is a testament to his writing ability that I found the essays interesting enough to finish the book.

In the final analysis, this is the kind of a book that an author gets to publish only after they are well-established and have a solid fan base. Kind of like when John Updike's publisher agreed to print a book of his poetry.

I'm about 100 pp into Collosus: The Price of America's Empire, by Niall Ferguson. After stating in the beginning that he is, overall, a supporter of America's imperial adventures, he has spent the next section of the book describing how poorly the USA has performed in those adventures.

Without yet reading his justification for supporting this sorry history of blundering and bloodshed, I am guessing that his support will come down to arguing that, if we only were to embrace imperialistic ambitions more fully, and in the proper liberal spirit, we'd get hella better at it and thereby start doing it correctly. Right-o, Niall.

Without wishing to turn this into a Gaddis thread - I thoroughly enjoyed Carpenter's Gothic, but did get damn tired with the characters banging on the whole time. I know that's intentional - didn't stop me occasionally furrowing my forrid in pain.

However, the pastoral description, what there is of it, the pathos of the situation of the central character and the construction of the world outside the house from the world within it is just ace. There, that's it. Oh, just to say that I started The Recognitions last night because I didn't have anything to read on me and was passing a bookshop. I found it immediately very appealing, more so than CG.

Death in Five Boxes by Carter Dickson tonight - light relief - interspersed with desultory Ryder Cup viewing and some alkyhol.

Roadside Picnic: ace
In Parenthesis: probably ace, but I found it really difficult

Good to see you enjoyed the Gissing piece, James.

Have just been given Robert Walser's The Assistant, so am looking forward to that as soon as have finished off the Faber.

The Assistant: also ace!

Just read Jay Meno's 'Hairstyles of the Damned', which was a very good novel, rather than the book of photos of daggy haircuts the title suggests.

I signed up for the History Faculty lending library and borrowed Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives and Herodotus.

I think I'm going to start Infinite Jest after I finish these Junot Diaz short stories (me and a thousand other people, no doubt).

this doesn't have anything to do with anything, but is everyone familiar with the paperback covers that edward gorey did in the 50's? the doubleday anchor ones and the vintage ones? probably, right? i've always loved them and this page has them all:

http://www.goreyography.com/west/paper/paper.htm

(kinda wish they were bigger and in color, but that's okay...)

(i have some at home. the tom jones one and the wanderer by alain-fournier and some others. they are so beautiful to look at.)

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_VNSbqV2hz-o/RqZTlZwUxfI/AAAAAAAAAKw/Y52h6ufDcQw/s1600/Redburn.jpg

i love his what maisie knew:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/89/261198917_a42382424c.jpg?v=0

Wow, I didn't realize he'd done so many! We have 5 or 6 of them, including the Maisie. The one for Redburn is so "Hey sailor..."<wink wink>!

read the last 3/4s of drown last night so i could start on infinite jest. see you next year.

I read Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist yesterday - it's really good. Some of the music stuff is over the top, and the PG-13 sexuality gets clumsy, but I'm a total sucker for that one-perfect-night shit.

What Maisie Knew is great. I reread The Princess Cassamassima and The Europeans last spring.

Thomas Fleming's The New Dealers' War, a revisionist take on FDR's WWII domestic and foreign leadership; he fumbled a lot more than we're taught.

A Republican dude I know gave me this and it wasn't nearly as bad as I worried it might be.

Well, it was much kinder to Henry Wallace than I expected.

I have two of the Sarah Caudwell mass market mysteries, both have Gorey covers as far as I can remember.

Have never managed to find the third one, and now she's dead and the books are OOP. Amazon O Amazon...!

OK, this is a self-plug, but I did a series of blog posts on Edward Gorey's cover (for others and himself) (in colour): found about 100 - see http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/search/label/Edward%20Gorey?max-results=100

Reading Mary Kelly's "The Spoilt Kill"

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2105/2528934248_e4ff07f194.jpg

wow, james, awesome! i love that painted devils cover. i love them all.

and, of course, i have an original copy of this on vinyl. one of the greatest albums ever made:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/SI-9cSMOfXI/AAAAAAAABHc/Seqi716D-iU/s1600/dream%2Bworld%2Bof%2Bdion%2Bmcgregor.jpg

john zorn put out a cd of even more (and even crazier) dion mcgregor dreams, and that is also essential.

There are a couple of MP3s of the Dion McGregor recordings floating around online: http://www.torporvigil.com/soundworksindex4.htm#dion
Freaky stuff. Not a man I would have wanted to share a room with.

I pulled the plug on Colossus: long subtitle after reading 150 pp; it was fucking around with a lot of distortions of fact and special pleading to make a case that couldn't be made by sticking to the truth. Niall Ferguson can just fuck right off as either a political analyst or historian (he masquerades as both in the book).

In honor of the Wall Street armageddon or apocalypse or meltdown or whatever horror term is in vogue as of today, I am reading Money in the Bank, a morality tale in 300 pp, by P.G.Wodehouse. It is curiously soothing.

lately: 'the quiet american', 'what maisie knew', 'memories of my melancholy whores'

looking for a copy of broom of the system to reread but there doesn't appear to be one in hanoi

i did get a copy of the recognitions tho: i keep thinking maybe i should start reading it and then thinking really no

julio how is the leroi jones? i bought his collected fiction not long ago but i've not quite pushed myself to look at it yet

Turgenev: Fathers and Sons - why have I not read this before? It's wonderful!

Currently on a recently deceased greats tribute reading plan with "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace.

Recently finished "The Changeling" by Robin Jenkins.

Mackerel Plaza by Peter de Vries.

Unusual writer, idiosyncratic style, takes a while getting used to. Very laconic. Great deal of blackness behind the sparkling humour. Read Comfort Me With Apples before and it took me an age to get into and it's only a short book, but have hit the ground running with Mackerel Plaza - a satire, so it seems so far, on (dis)organised religion. What with this and Carpenter's Gothic my church going days could be coming to an end...

Yes, "Fathers and Sons" is magnificent.

I've been reading more Barbara Pym. First "Sweet Dove Died", now in the middle of "Some Tame Gazelle". I suspect lots of people wouldn't see the point of these, but I think they are wonderful. SDD is a later work, STG early -- I'm not sure how representative they are as examples of her late/early work respectively but they are very different from one another. STG is a very Jane Austen-ish social comedy, set in an even narrower and somewhat queerer social setting: the educated and conventionally religious upper-middle-class of post-war England. Middle-aged spinsters are besotted by curates - in fact a whole class of women are engaged in an almost groupie-ish erotic preoccupation with clergymen, all heavily repressed, with presents of home-baking or socks, or assistance with the jumble sale, substituting for sex. Women with an snobbish sense of their social position, able to eat food and wear clothes that would have been considered luxurious in their day, spend their time darning socks, knitting pullovers and gardening. Even characters with few intellectual pretensions read poetry for pleasure, and assume that anyone they know socially will recognize quotations from well-known and even less well-known English poets. It's a fascinating shock to realise that bits of England were still like as recently as the 1950s.

Many of the same ingredients are there in SDD, but it's as if Pym has injected a shot of EF Benson (or even Oscar Wilde) to fluff things up. Perhaps she realised that she wasn't so in touch with the world of the 70s as of the 50s and needed to write fiction that was more overtly fictitious. The result is sophisticated, camp entertainment -- and if limpid clarity and a perfect control of rythm and tone is your idea of good prose, she is a superb stylist. No wonder she was Larkin's favourite novelist.

Also read Rebecca Miller's " The Private Lives of Pippa Lee". Miller is not without talent and it was an enjoyable read, but she lacks the empathy of a good novelist. To take one of many examples, the main male character, given good reason to believe that he is suffering from Alzheimer's near the start of the book, betrays no sense of fear or alarm. We might be expected to see this as extreme Stoicism or fatalism, but it just looks as though Miller has no real interest in any of her characters except as they affect her her protagonist - clearly a version of Miller herself. What makes the book more interesting than run of the mill pop-fiction plus psychobabble is the quasi-autobiographical elements. Lee steals her husband, a much older, literary man from a neurotic, attention-seeking, sex goddess. Anyone who knows anything about Miller's life will recognise versions of Arthur, Marilyn and Rebecca, who has created a story in which her dad would rather sleep with her than with his world-famously sexy ex-wife. Whether this is something very weird indeed or just cynical marketing I can't tell.

i heart barbara pym. i thought of her recently when i was reading *An Autumn Sowing* by Benson.

and, boy, i love Peter De Vries even more! I've never read Mackerel Plaza though. luckily, he wrote a lot of books and i haven't even read half of them yet. i have much to look forward to. EVERYONE should read a De Vries book. Everyone who loves great comic fiction anyway. he's an inspiration to me in the same way that Stanley Elkin is. i get drunk on their words and imaginations. such genius.

Aimless, I read the Simon Singh a while back. Pretty engaging, I thought.

Um, at the mo Sillitoe's Loneliness of the long distance runner, which is beyond excellent. Dorothy Hartley's Food in England for medieaval recipe fun. Just started Dostoyevsky's Notes from underground

Cesar Aira's How I Became a Nun. The first two chapters were incredibly funny. Just the way he manages to constantly play with one's expectations is dazzling. 1/3 of the way through the short book, and still no idea where it could possibly be going. Great stuff.

Finished 'Fathers and Sons', which was indeed brilliant. Went out and bough 'Spring Torrents', but not started yet, as am reading Best New SF 2007 (ed Gardner Dozois), my yearly round-up of what's going on in science-fiction--lots of mind-blowing ideas, and some pretty great writing (and a very few duds).

Am eyeing a copy of Robin Jenkins' 'The Cone-Gatherers' I forgot I had until I saw the mention of 'The Changeling' upthread. And I know I have a Peter DeVries somewhere, forgot the title, but it's got a Groucho specs/nose/moustache on the front. So much to read! Argh!

And I need to read more Pym, too--loved 'Excellent Women', and have ordered 'Jane and Prudence'.

how is the leroi jones? i bought his collected fiction not long ago but i've not quite pushed myself to look at it yet

Just from the title and bits of knowledge about the guy I could see a great idea. Then you start turning the pages. Maybe I need to read lots of beat writing to get a better feel but I didn't get very far with it so I'm sorry I can't say anymore.

However I did get hold of a penguin paperback called 'Three Negro Plays' with one of his in it so I'll be reading more soon.

I thought "Excellent Women" was the least good of the four (or more accurately the 3 1/2) I've read so far, although I still found it very enjoyable. I'll be surprised if you don't prefer "Jane and Prudence".

OK, can't find the DeVries I KNOW is here somewhere. Any suggestions of the best book of his to start with?

Blood of the Lamb is supposed to be amazing, but it is apparently very, very black indeed, and possibly autobiographical, which makes it somewhat blacker. Mackerel Plaza, wot I am reading at the moment, is very good... I don't know, I'm still not entirely decided about him - there must be someone out there who knows wot's o'clock it is with De Vries.

i don't think you can go wrong with him! just find one and read it! his books are less about individual plots and characters and more about his mad inventiveness and verbal gymnastics. to me, anyway. like, i would have a hard time even remembering what the plots of madder music or into your tent i'll creep even WERE, but this is not a criticism.

Robert Louis Stevenson's Letters, Vol 1 1854 ('Dear Papa, Do come home very soon. I am your son that's going to try to be good') to 1874 ('The war began with my father accusing Bob of having ruined his house and his son. Bob answered that he didn't know where I had found out that the Christian religion was not true, but that he hadn't told me.')

He's a brilliant correspondant, sprightly, eager to entertain, and open and honest with his frenz - extremely readable.

Check out RLS as a student - 'Yesterday I was in high spirits [...] But this morning I was gone, tried to find out where I could get Haschish, half-determined to get drunk and ended (as usual) by going to a graveyard.'

Also read his short stories appended to New Arabian Nights - Pavilion on the Links (neat mini-adventure concerning itself with the moral stances of three men) A Lodging for the Night (excellent story about Villon and great Paris in winter special effects), The Sire de Maletroit's Door (irritating and mechanical) Providence and the Guitar (quixotic and meandering, not good qualities in a short story).

Will O' The Mill - rather annoying parable about constancy and forsaken experience and love
Thrawn Janet - Stevenson ventriloquises Scottish dialect (it's Stevenson, but just in a silly voice, compare Kipling's great use of accent and dialogue) in a rather ghoulish story about witchery and the devil.

Prince Otto - Problem with RLS's characters - he's bloody good with people he meets on his journeys, because he's capable of reducing them to well defined lines of character, but when he creates characters, they are rather cartoony. This a story of a crap Prince who finds out he's crap, tries to do something about it, but loses his fictional German Kingdom to a republican revolution. Very cynical. Prince an utter buffoon. Ends up being a 'World Well Lost for Love' story, with Prince and his Princess finding true love in losing their Kingdom. Tiresome, BUT has fake reading recommendations and scholarly apparatus at the end. You can see why Borges liked Stevenson.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Cool. Not having read it, didn't realise how much it was presented as a mystery, gradually unfurling over three tiers.

Current conclusion - Stevenson's obsession with morality is pathological.

At the risk of going on rather - also started today, as it was mentioned in a Wyndham Lewis spoken word thing I was listening to The Possessed/The Devils by Dostoevsky, which has somehow slipped through the net. REAL buffoons making melodramatic political speeches! Cool.

Must! Find! Stevenson's! Letters!
Have you read 'The Ebb-Tide'? Short RLS novel, very much the good stuff.

'Madder Music' rings a bell as the DeVries I have. Will seek out more.

Having a few days off work, am reading/have read:
- J M Coetzee: Diary of a Bad Year - enjoyed it a lot, but objectively speaking Coetzee's been coasting since 'Disgrace'
- Seiichi Hayashi: Red Colored Elegy - apparently very influential Japanese graphic novel from 1970, quite odd, not terribly satisfying
- Richard Stark: The Hunter - classic noir pulp

I haven't read the Ebb Tide. I made a decision to go through his stuff chronologically, or at least the vague chronology that comprises the Swanston Edition. My girlfriend bought me a second-hand copy of the Ebb Tide, which she happened to see while out getting Chinese back massages or something, so I ought to get round to it sooner rather than later - good to know it's worth waiting for. About to start The Wrong Box, written in collaboration, like quite a lot of his stuff, with someone or other.

I think the guy who did the 8 volume edition of the Letters (Mehew) also compiled a judicious selection, which is more easily available, although I quite like the close detail of the full version.

The collaborator was his son-in-law, Fanny Stevenson's son. Louis Osbourne or something like that, I think. 'The Wrong Box' is a fun caper story.

James, you should read On The Eve. It's Turgenev's fluffiest, but most effortless novels. It's a lark that covers much unfamiliar terrain.

I shall!

Am now reading Robert Drewe: The Rip - one of Australia's best writers, I think, and this is a really good collection of short stories: the first one is so far the best, about a white collar criminal awaiting trial who finds a red-bellied black snake in his swimming pool. I've never been on trial, but we did have of these snakes come through a gap in the wall behind our TV one night, causing much excitement.
http://i.pbase.com/o6/58/351358/1/74768848.sAGc4aPc.blacksnake.jpg

Also read Cyrano de Bergerac's 'A Voyage to the Moon', fun early science-fiction; like most pre-20th-century SF, though, much of it consists of the narrator engaging in extended philosopical-satirical discussions with various aliens. My edition is a funky Folio Society version I got 2nd-hand with great Quentin Blake illustrations.

I'm not sure exactly where I left off on the last reading thread, but I think it was before these:

Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower
To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia by Michael Parenti
Improvisation by Derek Bailey [started a long while back]

STILL reading madame bovary, but events have been keeping me from her. found a huuuuuuuuge paperback copy of that paris review compendium at the thrift store, and it's been entertaining me. even though i was sad to see that the art of fiction interviews were just snippets. still need to find the interview collection that i'm pretty sure exists.

also, at work, someone dropped off about 20 copies of *intellectual digest* from 1972 and 1973. kinda the utne reader of it's day. brought to you by the makers of psychology today. anyway, loads of fun. cover story on masters & houston and the varieties of postpsychedelic experience. tons of interviews. erik erikson interviewing huey newton. poetry. and lots of stuff culled from various magazines and journals. very trippy, dudes. (i really need to get a new digital camera, cuz other than a few ebay listings, there are no cover pictures on the web of this magazine, and the covers are way cool.)

what paris review compendium? not this one? http://www.amazon.com/Paris-Review-Interviews-I/dp/0312361750/

no, this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Paris-Review-Book-Heartbreak-Intoxication/dp/0312422393/ref=pd_sim_b_2

Arthur Schlesinger's The Crisis of the Old Order, the first in his multi-volume bio of FDR. It reads like the best New Yorker essay ever written.

Marilynne Robinson's Home, a quasi-sequel to Gilead.

basically, a thousand pages of fiction/letters/poetry/etc.

but i need those two interview volumes! (now i know there are two. or two paperbacks, anyway. maybe there was a single volume at some point?)

vol. 1 came out a couple of years back and I think there was always the intention to have a vol. 2 (I infer this from the fact that vol. 1 had "volume 1" written on the front).

I bought 1 for a friend and I think they are the full interviews, but I didn't check

vol. 1 came out a couple of years back and I think there was always the intention to have a vol. 2 (I infer this from the fact that vol. 1 had "volume 1" written on the front).

this was not meant to be as sarcastic as it sounds, which is extremely.

as much as i love marilynne (and speaking of writer interviews, i have a great - probably out-of-print - softback collection of interviews with writers from the northwest, and she is one of them), i'm strangely in no hurry to read home. i figure it will always be there for me to read. like the bible. what's funny is how prolific she is now after i waited for a new book from her for over 20 years!

they have volume two for sale too:

http://www.amazon.com/Paris-Review-Interviews-II/dp/0312363141/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b

I'm thumbing through her essay collection The Death of Adam, Scott; there's a patient, well-wrought, contrarian take on Calvinism.

Thanks, Scott. If you're interested in the Art of Fiction stuff about technique then you should check this out: http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/2004/12/how_we_work.html

Strugatsky Brothers - The Roadside Picnic

nifty! I feel like the translation might be a little weak, but I like the more expansive exploration of what the Zones are and what they've done to the world (compared with Stalker).

And a bunch of Kipling, but I made a thread about that.

Love 'Roadside Picnic'.
Reading Maude Hutchins' 'Victorine', one of the most recent NYRB Classics: a good-bad book. Very lush, frequently purple, sensual prose, but powerful in its way--like a sort of sexy, pubertal, female-centred version of H P Lovecraft without the monsters, if that makes any sense at all (ie it has the same pluses and minuses of Lovecraft's style, but a very different worldview and subject matter)

Short stories by Poe and Lovecraft (in the Panther Horror editions covers).

Reading Cortazar, also for the first time, unsurpirsingly I went straight to reading "The Blow up" and now would like to see it again as I couldn't quite get into the film back then (although the ending is kinda fantastic). There is surprisingly little about him on ILX, he's great.

Jim Thompson - Pop 1280

Juvenal - The Satires

Plays by Seneca

Jim Thompson - Pop 1280

Juvenal - The Satires

Plays by Seneca

Crikey, come spread the bountiful love of humanity when you're done...

Oddly or otherwise, I have been reading ... The Paris Review Interviews, volume 1.

I think I may have finally given up on All The Sad Young Literary Men.

Tonight I started Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father.

Unless I have missed a literary in-joke, could someone please take the apostrophe out of the thread title?

Marilynne Robinson read from Home at my library last Thursday (competing with the VP debate) - I bought a copy, but am waiting to read it, saving it for a long weekend with no other demands. Scott, at this rate, she'll have another novel out in 2012 :) She did say she is working on another non-fiction work.

pinefox, that apostrophe is serving out its well-merited sentence, after being apprehended while wantonly and recklessly appearing in the title of Finnegans Wake more than one hundred thousand times.

semi-relevant revive, my friend's book site is having an Election Themed giveaway for any of you interested. She's giving away:
Mike’s Election Guide by Michael Moore
The Preacher and the Presidents by Nancy Gibbs
Hard Call by John McCain
The American Journey of Barack Obama by The Editors of Life Magazine
Goodnight Bush by Erich Origen
Takeover by Charlie Savage
Her Way by Jeff Gerth
Dream in Color by Congresswoman Linda Sánchez and Congresswoman Loretta Sánchez
The Revolution by Ron Paul
What You Should Know About Politics…But Don’t by Jessamyn Conrad

it's http://bookbrothel.com

very good review of Marilynne Robinson in the latest Nation, taking her to task a bit for secularist-excluding view of American history. (I've only read Housekeeping)

Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo
Dead Certain - Robert Draper

A Sportsman's Notebook, Ivan Turgenev, tr. Charles and Natasha Hepburn. This is the Everyman Library version. Lots of serfs, smallholders, steppes, game birds and dogs. No plotline to follow, just evocations of personalities, sights, smells, situations. A curiously soothing book.

very good review of Marilynne Robinson in the latest Nation, taking her to task a bit for secularist-excluding view of American history.

i had this problem w/the book as well, sort of. at least, i thought that her christianity informed even the secular characters and made them unknowable and false, for me.

the Nation critic was pinpointing it in the essays, it didn't seem to bother him in the novel.

Crikey, come spread the bountiful love of humanity when you're done...

I have my reasons to be down on the whole 'humanity' project at the momenta and my reading is helping me cope! ;-)

Starting on more plays by Strindberg and Ionesco

I'm reading Robinson's Home, and it suffers from the same problem afflicting the other two novels: its moments of revelation are so quiet that they're practically muffled; and no one talks very loudly. I still loved Gilead and Housekeeping (the movie more than the book, though).

Her essay collection includes one contrarian take on Calvin; it reminded me a bit of Jacques Barzun's approach to history.

The Battle for Wine and Love or How I Saved the Wolrd from Perkerization - Alice Feiring

sometimes i feel like i'm not a good enough person to read marilynne. like i don't have enough grace or humility. or that i might knock a family heirloom off the table. she's not precious or a prude, but i feel like I'M not quiet enough to read her.

which is a weird way too feel. and i dig her a bunch. i dig her sentences. and i love the essays i've read.

hey, i don't know why i would put this here, but it is tangentially literary. today, maria, my beloved, hung out at patricia neal's house and recorded patricia's daughter tessa dahl interviewing her mom for THREE HOURS. anyway, lots of great roald dahl stories and gary cooper stories (i haven't listened to the whole thing yet). she's amazing at 83 or whatever and after massive strokes years ago. tessa is going to have a radio show on maria's low power fm station here. and the interview will be aired in three parts.

THE BEST PART is the station id that patricia did! what a voice. listen here:

http://wvvy.org/listen/content/stationID-patricianeal-2.mp3

I might pick up roadside picnic for another leaf through

Upton Sinclair: Go West, Young Man - collected stories about class in America
Jim Thompson: Recoil
Angela Carter: Charles Perrault's Fairy Tales

Camilo José Cela: Mazurka for Two Dead Men

love the station id, scott

Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich. I was happily surprised by this, as I didn't know much about it and the title had me fearing excessive whimsy, which didn't turn out to be a problem at all.

I've been curious about Marilynne Robinson since the professor in one of my undergrad. "Intellectual Heritage" classes praised Housekeeping, but I don't know if I could hack her. I take Calvinism kind of personally what with my Calvinist religious nut sister and her husband.

(I think I said that I was afraid Bless Me Ultima would be too whimsical too. What is this fear of whimsy?)

When I said Upton Sinclair, I meant Sinclair Lewis.

The Hunt, Tamas Aczel

chris adrian: a better angel which is a collection of short stories.

is that chris adrian who did the children's hospital?? i just finished reading that a month or so ago. it was pretty good!

Christmas Eve and Easter Day by Robert Browning. Very good - versification fireworks - has a quatrain that rhymes 'it' with itself four times. Rhymes 'perfect' with 'perfect' without it seeming a con. Ease, brio and dash.

The arguments about religion made my pore brane hurt a bit though. Eh? You say, before going over a passage again to see if you can get the thread of what he means.

Disch, The Castle of Indolence. Poetry reviews by the late lamented wit.

Am trying to finish Chuck Palahnuik's (sp?) Diary. Not sure what made me purchase this book. Wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Plus, and most embarrassingly, see if there's any resemblance between him and what I attempt. Am about half way through and am yet to be impressed by either the plot or the style. I've seen his "style" described as minimalist, but it seems to me to be more impoverished. Am hoping to finish as quickly as possible, so can get onto something enjoyable.

Anyone here read Vollman's Europe Central (sorry for asking a question here).

is that chris adrian who did the children's hospital??

yes.

now reading gay gavriel kay: last light of the sun. not his best but still v. good.

"Jim Thompson: Recoil"

The only one of his I've read and couldn't quite follow. Didn't help that I kept stopping and starting on it.

Never read Christmas Eve…, Gamaliel. Was thinking about it after a recent run through Sordello, but felt like I was suffering from brain damage after that - rushing in with a 'no, how hard can it be really?' attitude, and finding out that yes, it is very nearly incomprehensible for stretches (especially in editions that skip the quote marks to cue you as to who's speaking). Also sonically awesome - bombs along in this twisty, physical blank verse that utterly and lyingly persuades you this is making sense and you understand it, especially when read aloud.
(Incidentally, we should go for a pint soon, Gamaliel. And if anyone wants a London ILB fap…)
I finished Story of the Eye by Bataille on the Tube in to work this morning. I'd been chuckling away at the piss sex and egg games, but then it gets whoah from about the bullfight onwards. Feel a bit odd.
Started Elkin's The Magic Kingdom on basis of multi-recommendations. I like it, but his ear for British English isn't that convincing to me, which is a problem.
Also lots of Jaime Hernandez, but there's another board for that I guess.

Just got Roland Torpor's The Tenant in the mail. Intro by Thomas Ligotti! I'm gonna love it, I'm sure. I'm goth, though.

A pint would certainly be welcome, Woof. Not least because Christmas Eve has evidently precipitated some kind of theological crisis in my reading - Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton and Sir Walter Ralegh's poems, and both while reading The Possessed by Dostoevsky and RLS's wranglings with his father about his unbelief.

I do like the way Stavrogin and his rotten crew go about their politco-theological disputes as you might a love affair, escaping houses at night, walking miles through the mud, and in cynical and passionate frenzy, feverishly declaiming about the nature of belief, faith and the Russian people. Of course, it's horrendously ill-organised and all over the shop and full of inexplicable histrionics, but for one of his that isn't particularly well favoured, I'm enjoying it more than Crime and Punishment. The new translation 'Demons' (in Penguin) is supposed to be good - has anyone read it?

Marguerite Duras - The Rapture of Lol V. Stein. I picked it up because I really like the name. Cant say that I enjoyed it as much as I'd expeected to.

Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys. A good, fun read.

Just started Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan

"nova swing" was penned by Harrison indeed

I kind of want to check out something by Nabokov that was originally written in English

Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones - interesting,weird and provocative (in it's combination of different types of literature and in such a sensitive subjuect as the holocaust) , but certainly not the masterpiece that some publishers and reviewers claims it to be - beside sparkles of geniusity large part of it is highly superficial.
(i might change my mind by the end, but i doubt it)

carlos fuentes - the death of artemio cruz - sort of an easier Faulkner version.good.

btw, The Kindly Ones will be published in english march 3, 2009.
i wonder if the reviews will be kindly ones, (the franch way) or unkindly ones (german)

I'm curious as to how it reads in English, Zeno.

me too. i'm reading it in hebrew, though.
the reviews in israel were mixed btw.
sometiems the reading feels as if Littell tried to throw all the research details he collected on the pages, with odd narrative connection, which is kind of superficial, esp cause he doesnt pay much attention to characters complexity, but still, the book is sort of an achieivement

I kind of want to check out something by Nabokov that was originally written in English

Have you read 'Pnin'?

nope, might check it out

re: Topor
I can never find him in any bookstore. I have a feeling he's completely unknown in US or Europe, bar France and Poland.

Irene Nemirovsky: All Our Wordly Goods - ace ace ace

Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales: lots of fun ('Pshaw, havers, the poor wee beast's demented!' is one character's response to a frog claiming to be a prince in disguise)

Wilfrid Sheed: Max Jamison - deeply savage semi-comedy about a theatre critic having a crack-up - very well-written, but am pleased not to be spending any more time in that character's mind

Frederick Pollack, The Adventure. A book-length narrative poem about the life after death, which turns out to be very different but nearly as depressing as this one.

re: Topor
I can never find him in any bookstore. I have a feeling he's completely unknown in US or Europe, bar France and Poland.

― warmsherry, Friday, October 17, 2008 3:12 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I found it used on Amazon for under ten bucks. It was definitely worth it. I read it and listened to the Shadow Ring and went crazy for a night! There's a bunch of his really cool artwork in the back.

I'd never heard of him before stumbling across it online while looking for something else. But the Polanski film seems to be getting a lot of love on the ILE poll, and he formed The Panic Movement with Jodorowsky (and someone else, blanking on the name),worked on Viva Le Muerte, and (according to netflix) played Renfield in Herzog's Nosferatu; you'd think he'd be a bigger name, yeah.

Ligotti's intro swung back and forth between interesting and irritating.

This publisher, Millipede Press, looks awesome. Anyone read any of this stuff?

Finished Desert Solitaire and am now continuing the nature theme with Thoreau's Walden, which I'm enjoying so far, but not quite as much as the Abbey.

Anyone know if any of Abbey's other fiction is as good as 'The Monkey-Wrench Gang'? I was very disappointed by 'Good News'.

And am now reading David Malouf's 'Johnno', which is great.

'birds of america' by lorrie moore. very funny, in a weird and disturbing way.

I've been interspersing short stories by Kipling with the Turgenev 'sportsman's sketches'. Very different approaches. Turgenev relies entirely on pacing and color to carry the day, Kipling is very structured and professional, but less pleasant.

I kind of want to check out something by Nabokov that was originally written in English

Have you read 'Pnin'?

Or, you know, Lolita?

I've been interspersing short stories by Kipling with the Turgenev 'sportsman's sketches'. Very different approaches. Turgenev relies entirely on pacing and color to carry the day, Kipling is very structured and professional, but less pleasant.

― Aimless, Sunday, 19 October 2008 03:35 (6 hours ago)

Which Kipling? Reason I ask is, colour has always seemed to me one of the great Kipling attributes - Dymchurch Flit and The Light at the End of the Passage to name two of 'em - but then I thought, maybe we mean something different by colour.

I kind of want to check out something by Nabokov that was originally written in English

Have you read 'Pnin'?

Or, you know, Lolita?

― Casuistry, Sunday, October 19, 2008 7:25 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

like, yeah, I did

I wouldn't say that Kipling omits to add 'color' to his stories; it is part of his professionalism concientiously to organize and employ his pallet. But his use of color is much different than Turgenev's. Where Kipling lays on color with a lot of modeling to achieve a kind of impasto, Turgenev works more like a plein air watercolorist and his effects are fresher, more transparent and emergent.

Now reading:

Elizabeth Bishop: Collected Poems, Prose & Letters - never read anything by her before; she seems to know her way round a poem
Tove Jansson: Moomin Vol 3 - huzzah!

finally reading Fortress of Solitude and deeply disappointed that i'm not enjoying it as much as i thought i might.

Lethem has annexed the neighborhood I live in into his books. It's all his now. He even wrote an essay about the subway station I commute from every morning.

Frederick Pollack, Happiness, hard on the heels of The Adventure, which was amazing.

Balzac - The Unknown masterpiece/Gambarra
Rabelais - Gantua and Pantagruel (vol.1)

This one, Alimosina?

http://flickr.com/photos/9107386@N06/2625417450

Blaise Cendrars - Moravagine
Dorothy Sayers - Have His Carcase

Follies by ann beattie

The same, pinefox. And if you can pronounce it correctly, you're a New Yorker.

I'm beginning SWANN'S WAY for perhaps the ninth time - hopefully this attempt will not prove abortive.

Otherwise, my nose is buried in James Thurber's MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES and lots of fusion-fueled funnybooks.

Ivan Turgenev: Spring Torrents (thanks to recommendations last thread)

The 'Sch' is pronounced more like 'Sk', non? 'Schkermerhorn'?

Yes, "skimmerhorn". Just a few nights ago, was sitting there reading Pollack's The Adventure (per above) while a Quasimodo-like homeless guy who'd been following me around harangued me.

Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974. In oral-history format, so it's like a play. How people ended up arguing in print over rows of bricks on the floor.

I read about flaneurs in Michael Wood's book at Labyrinths during the fire alarm on Thursday morning. I believe it had to do with the imperfect tense. I should give everything up and return to reading. I hate everything.

After the earlier recommendation - The Best of Myles. Somehow evaded my purblind eye till now, despite numerous people now claiming they've been telling me to read it for years. Welcome on the tube - has me gurgling in pleasure in a warm infantile blanket of good humour. This I occasionally puncture with loud and irritating guffaws and exclamations, causing people frowning over their Paul Coelhos to look up with countenances at once abstracted and annoyed, surveying my now sombre countenance for signs of the coarse savagery that undoubted lies within.

i'm reading a book i found at work. oh, man, i don't even know how to describe it...it's self-published...um, wow, it is really something:

http://static.lulu.com/author/display_thumbnail.php?fCID=444295&fSize=zoom_&fSide=front&1224945352

"A collection of 27 stories, the first fiction book about caffeine psychosis is written by a writer, medical professional and the world expert on caffeine psychosis. The book carries the reader from the Boston Tea Party through the widespread production and use of psychiatric drugs, including SSRI drugs, drugs that should not be used with caffeine. The book focuses on many issues, including caffeine-induced physical illness diagnosed as mental illness, elderly dementia, and ADHD. Showing how caffeine can bring its user to the depths of despair, the book reveals caffeine's horrific effects that many caffeine users, medical doctors and psychiatrists don't know about. Mike Dijital, photographer and urban explorer, designed the book cover, and small photos are in the book. The realistic material may disturb some readers. Due to subject matters and language the book is suggested for readers over the age of 16."

Brideshead Revisited
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr - The Coming of the New Deal

Finished:

Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Confllict by Charles D. Smith (2004)
Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity by Robert Pollin

(The latter traces a lot of what's happening now back to deregulation moves under Clinton.)

Currently reading: Nomi Prines's Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America.

I wish I had been paying a little more attention to the bizarre world of Wall Street all these years, not that it makes much practical difference (i.e., I would not have been able to save the world or anything).

Sorry, that's Prins. Prins's.

But nobody saw this coming (and everybody thought Iraq had WMDs).

The Journal of Jules Renard: fascinating (but much abridged, I think) diary of French writer from 1880s to 1910, when he died

Bruno Munari: Design as Art - from the late 1960s, but still very relevant--I work in graphic design and related fields, so lots of good stuff in this for me

Mary Borden: The Forbidden Zone - short book of memoirs from WWI Somme (and other battlegrounds) nurse - heartbreaking and alarming and occasionally over-written

In the last of those, a surgeon cuts out a gangrenous knee and sticks it in a saucepan for later dissection, but then an orderly thinks it's ham meant for the kitchen and wanders off with it.

And now, Katherine Anne Porter's Collected Stories

Flowering Judas kicks ass.

follies, by ann beattie
meditations from a moveable chair, andre dubus
jpod, douglas coupland
the gum thief, douglas coupland

now reading
resuscitations of a hanged man, by denis johnson

Flower Judas does indeed kick all kinds of arse. It's the Library of America edition, so it's got about 500 pages of bonus stuff as wellas all the stories - memoirs, reviews, articles, whatevers. Bit of a treasure trove.

Just finished Kay's Sarantine Mosaic. It was just really good.

Henry James: 'Watch and Ward' -- his first novel, and an inadvertently deeply creepy one it is too. Basic plot: man adopts 12yo girl, and sets about grooming her to be his ideal future wife. General unpleasant atmosphere not helped by metaphors like this:

"..Roger caught himself wondering whether, at the worst, a little precursory love-making would do any harm. The ground might be gently tickled to receive his own sowing; the petals of the young girl's nature, playfully forced apart, would leave the golden heart of the flower but the more accessible to his own vertical rays."

Well, yes. I guess this sort of thing indicates why this book remains basically out of print. Quite well-written (though not as good as James would get), opens with typically Henry James 700-word paragraph, but it's hard to get past the distasteful (at least to modern readers) central idea.

Also read Georges Simenon's 'Act of Passion', which was really good except for a psychologically unconvincing final 15 pages.

lawrence wright - the looming tower

journalistic history of al-qaeda and run-up to the 9.11, pulls together a lot of stuff I've read bits and pieces about (OBL's background and rise) and puts it in one place. useful and compelling though it runs out of steam towards the end when it gets to more familiar (to me) events.

michael pollan - the omnivore's dilemma

mixed bag, informative on food issues but also way too discursive, pollan gets caught up in his anecdotes and kinda looses the thread at times. repetitious, too, in that old school new yorker style, every idea gets restated and reshuffled ad nauseum (no pun intended). and the end is frustrating, pollan never really draws conclusions from his reporting instead he goes huntin' for dinner in another endless anecdote and reveals himself (IMO) as an insufferable yuppie.

shiva naipaul - the chip-chip gathers

lovely second novel from the underrated younger brother of sir vidia. like his first (fireflies), a family saga set in trinidad, funny/tragic with indelible characters.

bob lowell & liz bishop's letters

I've already dropped several hints to friends about the Bishop-Lowell letter collection: birthday present!

I get the feeling that Willa Cather is underrated. Rarely mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald (too dowdy?), she's their equal as a stylist; she writes an English -- an American English -- as pure and lyrical as Fitzgerald.

I'm reading Death Comes For the Archbishop. Since it consists largely of a series of static tableaux, it's slower paced than A Lost Lady and My Antonia, but the better to concentrate on her effects.

Willa Cather is fantastic. I read about 10 of her books in a huge binge a while ago, and am now trying to measure out the last few to last me a bit longer. Haven't read 'Archbishop', but your description of it reminds me of 'The Professor's House', which was ace.

Really, if the US had produced no writers other than Willa Cather and Edith Wharton it would have already earned its keep.

Better Never To Have Been by David Benetar

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oXqs8QCwCpUC

Better Never to Have Been argues for a number of related, highly provocative, views: (1) Coming into existence is always a serious harm. (2) It is always wrong to have children. (3) It is wrong not to abort fetuses at the earlier stages of gestation. (4) It would be better if, as a result of there being no new people, humanity became extinct. These views may sound unbelievable--but anyone who reads Benatar will be obliged to take them seriously.

This book is hilarious. The dedication reads "To my parents, even though they brought me into existence."

And The Physics of Quantum Mechanics by Binney and Skinner. Pedagogically unusual new QM textbook by easily the most intelligent person I have ever met.

Henry James: 'Watch and Ward' -- his first novel, and an inadvertently deeply creepy one it is too.

This is the only James novel I haven't touched ("The Sacred Fount" doesn't count).

"Cancer Ward"

Finished:

Jean Cocteau - Les Enfants Terribles
G K Chesterton - The Club of Queer Trades

Finishing: Kipling - Kim

Hey guys, what is a good biography of FDR?

Conrad Black's recent one got good reviews.

I just bought AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS.

Abbott, have you read the hilarious 'The Book on the Edge of Forever', about the 3rd Dangerous Visions anthology, due in 1972 and still pending in 2008?

Alfred, why should I steer clear of 'The Sacred Fount'?

Hey guys, what is a good biography of FDR?

If you have the fortitude, dip into Arthur Schlesinger, Jr's Age of Roosevelt. For all his reputation in later years as a bootlicker of the powerful, he was a stylist of unusual poise and suppleness. This thing is just a delight to read. The first volume, "The Crisis of the Old Order," contains dated information, but as a sweeping chronicle of what the twenties were like for the plutocrats and the left, a great read.

The sketch of Roosevelt in office in the last section of "The Coming of the New Deal" is maybe what you're looking for: almost one hundred beautiful pages of speculation and reminisces artfully weaved.

Jean Edward Smith's recent doorstopper (FDR) is a good'un too.

Thanks to you both!

i have been reading 'shadow country' by peter mathiesson forever and i'm still in pt. I of III. it's really good though, like a less creepy/bloody cormac mccarthy set in the everglades almost?

'Shadow Country' is the best book I've read in 2008. Southern Gothic at its best.

Richard Hughes: 'In Hazard' - very enjoyable, and the style its written in has a sort of Edwardian children's book feel, which nicely sets off the horrors being inflicted on the characters.

Richard Hughes, he was the chap who did A High Wind in Jamaica and The Fox in the Attic wasn't he? I read them ages ago, and am ashamed to say I can't remember anything about them. The Wooden Sherpherdess as well?

I do remember that young Martin Amis was in the film version of A High Wind in Jamaica though.

Also appearing in A High Wind in Jamaica is Trader Faulkner, whose name gets lifted for a character in Night Train (Accidentally - he's a relative of friend of ex-gf - ended up visiting him once a few years ago. He's the only actual old school ac-TOR actor I've ever met, anecdotes about 'Larry' Olivier etc)
I'm rereading Pynchon (GR and Lot 49 so far, fabulous, back to wondering why I read anything other than Pynchon), bit of Basil Bunting (ok, but he never really thrills me) and waiting for the Library of America Ashbery collected poems to come through my letterbox.

I love Basil Bunting, Briggflatts is a favourite poem of mine.

I saw a copy of that Ashberry in the new arrivals in the library. It looked yum.

Good trivia about Trader Faulkner. The only good ac-TOR anECdote I know is the one about John Gielgud in his dressing room, standing in front of a full length mirror, naked as the day he was born. He gave a great sigh from the depths, and said, as one who has resigned himself to the Fates,

'Such a great actor, such a tiny cock.'

Noodle - Briggflatts (+ some of the odes) is the main reason I persist with Bunting - the opening section's so great. Elsewhere, I just get worn out/left cold by those dense Pound-y sonics & the stern Modernism of a lot of it. Might try listening this evening.
Gamaliel - saw it there too; didn't know it existed before. The Library of America seem to want all my money at the moment.

Last night I dreamt I was in the Spanish Civil War.
It caused me to spend all my pocket change on Orwell's Fighting in Spain. Like one of those dream advertisements in Transmetropolitan or Futurama only less sinister.

best author photo of the month award goes to the picture of carolyn chute and her husband in today's new york times:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/04/books/chute.lrg.jpg

best author quote too:

"...nearby she keeps her AK-47 rifle, which she likes because it has a gas piston that dampens recoil. “It’s very gentle, very soft,” she said."

finishing:
The Crystal World, J.G. Ballard

thumbing through:

2nd Cerebus phone book, the classic High Society

coming up next:

High Rise, J.G. Ballard
The Portable Joseph Conrad

Anyone read Ballard's 'Hello America'? It's calling out to me, but so are about 20 other books from the pile.

just finished 'open secrets' by alice munro. wonderful, really wonderful. such absorbing stories, such economy of language.

Open Secrets is a ruling collection. "Carried Away" makes my head explode. In a good way.

now reading: The Gate of Angels - Penelope Fitzgerald (i heart Penelope)

Ditto for Munro. Ditto for Penelope.

Am reading Jiri Weil's 'Mendelssohn is on the Roof', which is fucking awesome. A helpful blurb: "Julius Schlesinger, aspiring SS officer, has received his new orders -- to remove from the roof of Prague's concert hall the statue of the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn. But which of the figures adorning the roof is the Jew? Remembering his course on "racial science", Schlesinger instructs his men to pull down the statue with the biggest nose. Only as the statue they have carefully chosen begins to topple does he recognize that it is not Mendelssohn; it is Richard Wagner."

wtf???

good reading, Woof! I read Briggflatts once but to be honest didn't really get it.

Colin MacCabe's Godard

The Onion, c.2002

'the clock without hands' by carson mccullers, the only one of her novels i haven't read. it has these funny little repetitive bits, and i can't figure out if it's bad editing or there's a point to it.

Last reads:
Man in the Dark, Paul Auster. The first half had an embedded story that reminded me a lot of George Saunders, though less amusing. I think I'd like to read more of his novels. I read "The New York Trilogy" years ago and enjoyed it greatly, but then bounced pretty hard off "Leviathan". Whenever he comes up here and elsewhere, it seems he get denigrated for doing the same schtick over and over, so perhaps long pauses between works is a good thing.

In The Bathroom, Jean-Philippe Toussaint. I haven't a clue what this really was. It's really short so I may give it another go-through before I return it. Particularly enjoyed the whole octopus bit in the first section.

Just started Iain M Banks' "Matter", which is at turns fun and annoying. The annoying bits basically being when it reads too much like... well: "Utaltifuhl, the Grand Zamerin of Sursamen-Nariscene, in charge of all Nariscene interests on the planet and its accompanying solar system and therefore - by the terms of the mandate the Nariscene held under the auspices of the Galactic General Council - as close as one might get to overall ruler of both, was just beginning the long journey to the 3044th Great Spawning of the Everlasting Queen on the far-distant home planet of his kind when..." (trailing dots are mine, that's about half of the sentence)
Also reading Slavoj Zizek's "Welcome to the Desert of the Real", a 2002 essay collection about 9/11. Perhaps a bit late.

Slowly working through the complete Lone Wolf & Cub comics. This is really good, though I'm still having trouble with not really pausing to look at the images (or perhaps that's a good thing? I feel like I don't know how to read comics. Since the local branch of the library has a quite large comics division, I figured I should take the chance to acquaint myself with the medium in long form beyond Tintin, Asterix and Donald Duck.)

Yeah, this:

I read "The New York Trilogy" years ago and enjoyed it greatly, but then bounced pretty hard off _______

is pretty much all everyone I've ever spoken to says about Auster, myself included. I actually prefer his wife's work.

Ditto re the Auster. Never read further as all reviews seemed to indicate he was doing the same thing over and over--and by the 3rd book of the NY Trilogy I was already a bit over it.

Now reading Timothy Findley's "Famous Last Words", which is really good and quite unexpectedly thriller-like as well. A sort of secret history of 1935-1945.

How I Grew by Mary McCarthy, who I love to bits.

I read "The New York Trilogy" years ago and enjoyed it greatly, but then bounced pretty hard off _______

Exactly my case! But in Brooklyn, he's our rock star.

I thought Moon Palace was not an entirely unworthy successor to the NY Trilogy. I read it before the trilogy, so perhaps it would have seemed weaker if I had read it after.

I've finished Walden, which was quite pleasurably discursive - and despite the nature theme, not really that similar to Desert Solitaire (perhaps because Abbey's machismo contrasts so sharply with Thoreau's dilettantism when it comes to the technical aspects of roughing it).

Now I'm reading Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, which is pretty interesting and persuasively argued so far.

now reading: Strange Itineraries - The Complete Short Stories of Tim Powers

never read him before. picked this up at the dump for free. hooked by all the "genius heir to phil k. dick!" blurbs on front and back cover. first story was kind of a dud, and the second one is also a little clunky, but i'll stick with it.

Georgi Gospodinov - The Natural Novel. A novel about a divorce and a man expecting his first child leading to the unusual ways of agonizing and yet it seems like a highly usual strategy. Still, the sketch for the history of the toilet was nice.
Andre Gide - Fruits of the Earth. The sensations jump off the page. Shame he had to write a second half to this.

Starting: Ousmane Sembene - God's bits of wood. Really excited to find that my local library stocks a novel by the same guy who wrote and directed one of my favourite films.

I finished Consider the Lobster in a rush last week, and am now anxiously awaiting the postman, who (I pray) will be delivering my copy of Infinite Jest this morning. (Full disclosure: so on fire with DFW am I at the moment that I read the first 25 pages of IJ at the British Library yesterday rather than do the work I was meant to be doing.)

Occupying myself in the meantime with my first Raymond Carver stories--I'm trying to restrict myself to one a day to amplify their effects.

I am reading The Poisoned Embrace: A Brief History of Sexual Pessimism by Lawrence Osborne. It's very good, with interesting things about eg double-penised devils, Blessed Virgin's Hymen, history of faulty sexual anatomy etc on almost every page.

I'm closing in on Infinite Jest, I'm at about page 800. I thought I might get irritated by reading the same book for so long, but now it feels like I could read this forever and I'll be a little sad when I'm done.

anathem. really digging it after having to force myself through the first 50 pages or so.

xpost fucking postman did not have ij for me, I'm so pissed. I should have just gone to the bookstore and bought it instead of ordering it.

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers. Initiation of the Penelope Fitzgerald Project.

i think penelope fitzgerald is going on my need-to-buy list.

just finishing up 'the view from castle rock' by alice munro. not really loving it, since it pales in comparision to 'open secrets'.

castle rock is a different kind of thing, being so autobiographical and all. go for one of the earlier story collections next. hateship, friendship, courtship, etc... or the progress of love or the love of a good woman. any of them, really.

"The Knox Brothers"

i have this, but haven't read it yet. i've never read any of her non-fiction.

loved the gate of angels, by the way.

next penelope i will be reading will be the blue flower. and then the means of escape, her short story collection.

If you haven't yet bought it, make sure you get the paperback of 'Means of Escape', as it has an extra short story in it. I discovered this, to my annoyance, after shelling out for the "complete" hardback.

Am reading/have recently read...

Poetry of the Thirties (dipping into this)

Marcel Proust: The Lemoine Affair - Proust pastiches Balzac, FLaubert, the Goncourts, etc, and writes a scene where he (Proust) meets and punches out Zola - quite funny, very good imitations, but goes on a bit too long

Heather McRobie: Psalm 119 - really good writing, really irritating main character

i've read parts of 'the love of a good woman' and 'runaway', and i've got the collected stories to read as well.

Hmm, you guys are making me curious about Fitzgerald. What would be a good entry-point with her? The libary here seems to have quite a few of her books.

I'm still reading the same books as I mentioned a few days ago. I'm at a dubious 10-pages-a-day pace at the moment. But, weekend's almost here!
Just got Tobias Wolff's "Old School" from the library, so have a slight urge to throw everything aside to start on that.

OK IJ has arrived here I go

get off the internet then

fine I will

I just started this Swedish thriller, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo", by Stieg Larsson. It was a huge sensation in Sweden but this translation is a little rough so far. Anybody read it?

"What would be a good entry-point with her?"

The Bookshop! everyone needs to read that book.

weird, i thought i already posted this (i wonder if i posted it somewhere else by accident!), but now i'm reading a flag for sunrise by robert stone. i'm really digging it. never read any of his novels.

i gave up on that tim powers collection. too clunky for me. but i might go back to it someday. maybe.

Fitzgerald: 'The Bookshop' is fantastic. Also could start very satisfactorily with 'Human Voices', 'THe Beginning of Spring' or 'Innocence'.

But I would also say READ 'OLD SCHOOL' NOW as it is wonderful and very funny (especially if you like the idea of someone taking the piss out of Ayn Rand).

yes! it's one of my favourite of tobias wolff's stuff. i only just found out that 'hunter in the snow' and 'in the garden of north american martyrs' are the same book, just different titles for different markets.

Thanks, I've put in an interlibrary order for The Bookshop. After struggling a bit more with "Matter", I've given up on it. So Wolff it is! The copy I'm reading has clearly been in the hands of someone working on his language skills, as every couple of lines a word or phrase is underlined. Stuff like "His wife was a fox". Anyways, I found it sort of charming when I ran across a question mark scribbled next to the lines "especially the wrestlers, who merrily wiped the mat with grim, grunting boys up and down the Eastern Seaboard."
I wonder how he ended up interpreting that phrase. Alas, as nearly always is the case with books that are marked up like this, the reader seems to have given up around page 40.
Err, anyways, book is ace so far.

i went on a book-buying spree today and i bought p. fitzgerald's 'the bookshop'!

I'm squeamish and can't bear to read books that others have marked up. Ugh.

haha my bf is anally retentive when it comes to book condition. he's made me into a book snob too, altho not nearly as much as him!

At least I'm not one of those "fine bindings" maniacs. In fact I like modest editions, as long as they're newish and clean.

Stanley Winchester: Ten Percent of Your Life - entertaining 1973 book about shady shenanigans in a literary agency by one of the many pseudonyms of John Christopher ('The Tripods' trilogy, 'The Death of Grass', etc), made somewhat odd by the era's demand that commercial fiction include a sex scene every 15 pages

Vita Sackville-West: The Heir - lovely little novella about a chap obsessed with the house he has inherited but cannot afford to keep

Mati Unt: Diary of a Blood Donor - just started this, very promising, Dalkey Archive-published Estonian novel about a writer getting mixed up with literary vampires in St Petersburg. Has some great lines, like this bit: "My head began to ache. The cares of this world are heavy. A person has to be so many things at the same time: Homo sapiens, an Estonian, a nursing mother, a biped. I've listed only a tiny fraction of the full range of possibilities."

Really enjoyed "Old School". The whole Ayn Rand section was a good reminder of what a naive reader I was, that even though I have my thoughts about Rand, when the protagonist got really enthusiastic about her, I laughed, but also felt a slight urge to look at her books again. Loved that whole bit where he'd read Atlas Shrugged twice and wandered around detesting all the servile untermensch around him. I'm really glad I didn't read Rand as a teenager, I'd no doubt be much the same for a while.

Just read the first few pages of Amélie Nothomb's "Antichrista" at lunch. Curious that this is her only book to be translated to Norwegian so far, as it doesn't seem to be one of her major novels.
Will probably start on Studs Terkel's "Hard times : an oral history of the great depression" tonight. It always feels kinda sad to first read an author shortly after his death, but so it goes.

saw this in the paper the other day and had to laugh. from book ninja's book cover contest:

http://www.bookninja.com/wp-content/themes/bookninja/images/road.jpg

like this one too:

http://www.bookninja.com/wp-content/themes/bookninja/images/ibsen.jpg

"a Torvald Helmer novel"

Finished:

The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne
Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America by Nomi Prins
God’s Problem by Bart D. Ehrman
Killing Hope: U.S. Military Interventions Since World War II by William Blum (1995)
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"Hi, is Rockist Scientist there? This is Amy Goodman. I just called to say I love you."

http://tour.democracynow.org/covers/Amy-phns2.JPG

I wondered if my concerned citizen reading list would produce any comments!

Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant.

The Road: a heartwarming story of a divorced father bonding with his young son on Cape Cod.

Recently read...

Henry James: The Other House - I'm obviously finding my way to the weirder Jameses by accident. I enjoyed it, without fully buying the motivation behind the actions of a couple of the characters.

Robert Kirkman: The Walking Dead volumes 1 to 8 - not everything can be Henry James

Moliere: The Imaginary Invalid - anti-doctor, anti-medicine play, during one performance of which Moliere himself took ill and died - beware IRONIC DEATHS!

Irene Nemirovsky: The Courilof Affair - Communist assassin goes undercover as doctor to Tsarist minister; hilarity ensues - I love everything I've read by this woman, which is everything so far translated into English: more! now!

Dorothy Porter: El Dorado - Australian crime novel in verse, lots of murky fun

was that first weird james novel you read one that he originally wrote under another name? didn't he write stuff under other names?

the obscure james thing i started and never finished was the chain-novel he did with a bunch of other writers, *The Whole Family*. william dean howells wrote a chapter for it, but most of the other people who contributed to it are forgotten or near forgotten.

I think it--'Watch and Ward'--was originally published under his own name. I'd be interested to read the early James-under-another-name stuff, but the guy who tracked it all down and published it sounded a little bit mad, and I wasn't sure whether or not I trusted his judgement as to whether the stuff was actually by James after all.

I've read some of the Dickens chain-novels. You get chapters by Dickens and Gaskell and Wilkie Collins, and then some terribly dated 19th-century hack who ruins the mood.

JL Carr: A Month In the Country - quite lovely, hard to describe, all the pieces of it are so tiny that I can't figure out what I thought of the book as a whole, but it's something.
Max Beerbohm: Seven Men - loving this, though the stories I've read so far are darker than I expected. (Zuleika Dobson is dark in it's way, but the deaths don't have the horror that the imaginary ones in "A V Laider" do.) The punchline of "Enoch Soames" is hilarious, but I'd be hesitant to recommend it to any aspiring writers.

Clotpoll, both of those are wonderful books. Well done!

Andrew Caldecott: Not Exactly Ghosts - see the Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural thread
Thomas Hardy: Under the Greenwood Tree - funny Hardy! With happy ending (sort of)! Nobody dies!

I was reading an Umberto Ecco edited book on beauty but I think it'll probably hibernate until it turns ugly.

Aside from that I read (har har here it comes) a Kate Moss bio (second one!), a Pearl Lowe bio and now Kostova's The Historian. Yep, trashy stuff. But after that I am going to delve into the more serious stuff again. Or try to anyway. This past year was hellish with a baby waking up every couple of hours.

Just flicking through an essay by Empson 'Obscurity and Annotation' and I did laugh at his quotation from Wyndham Lewis -

'The notion that one ought to be interested in truth, indeed, is connected by Mr Wyndham Lewis, somewhere, with the child who is always asking questions; the only question he wants to ask is 'how do babies come,' and he asks the others because he is not allowed to ask that one.'

I'm assuming that must be from Time and Western Man, although I don't remember it myself, and the idea of wading through ALL of Lewis's critical works is rather grueling.

mick imlah, "the lost leader"
jean rhys, "carole angiers"
nicola barker, "darkmans"

You can't read too many Kate Moss bios.

Robert Laughlin, The Crime of Reason.

Henry James: The Other House - I'm obviously finding my way to the weirder Jameses by accident. I enjoyed it, without fully buying the motivation behind the actions of a couple of the characters.

I have the NY Review of Books edition sitting on my shelf.

now reading: selected stories of mary wilkins freeman (love it. gobbling it up like candy. compact, minimal, late-19th century short stories in a sarah orne jewett vein, but even more deadpan and so very modern as well.)

reading Metropole (Ferenc Karinthy) and then it's on to 2666

I have just been reading a lot of books about heroic dogs that save people.

Those dogs are so cool.

jean rhys, "carole angiers"

Does this have another title, because I thought I'd read everything Rhys?

Henri Barbusse: Under Fire - awesome, horrifying thinly fictionalised WWI trench-warfare memoir/novel

Currently reading Yiddish Policeman's Union and Fletch and The Man Who

If I ever get through Infinite Jest I'm gonna tackle the former^^.

About halfway through The Law of Dreams, Peter Behrens.

I've decided to reread The Bell Jar. I'm thinking again about Plath. Loved her after 15, mostly disliked since 17; reckon I've been too close-minded.
Also, CH Sisson's and George Barker's poetry (I joined The Poetry Library in the South Bank Centre. It is fabulous)
Cozwn, how's The Lost Leader? I'm intending to read it (but will probably keep forgetting to hassle libraries for it.)

Just read Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel. It was enjoyable, and I can see why Borges loved it so much, but I don't know if I'm quite as taken with it as he was. Hmm.

Also workin' on Woolf's To the Lighthouse, although I'm sort of stalling out on this 30-page dinner conversation scene. Will try to persevere.

oh shit, sorry for getting your hopes up james morrison : (

I meant to say, carole angiers, "jean rhys" - it's the 1990 biography of JR

the prospect of an unread JR book would have had me v.excited too : /

woofwoofwoof, I'm enjoying it but I wouldn't like to say anything more vague than that until I've spent more time with it

martin meredith : the state of africa. saddening stuff esp. chapter on rwanda

reading the dart league king and 2666

Ah well, re the Rhys. I'm so keen on her I even found a dodgy POD edition of a book she had translated from the French (Paul Carroll's "Perversity") which, while not as good as her own stuff, at least had a similar tone and theme.

Just now reading Italo Calvino: Difficult Loves

Been reading a collection of John Collier stories. Great fun, really cruel.

now reading: Neighbors by Thomas Berger

Just read Dan Yack by Blaise Cendrars. I don't even know.

Read a bit over half of "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", but was by that point no longer able to muster any more energy for it.
Also failed to finish Tore Stubberud's "Råtten Sol" ("Rotten Sun")

Quite enjoyed Alan Bennett's novella "The Uncommon Reader", the first book of his I've read, having previously only known him from the film "The History Boys". Found H.G. Wells' "The Crystal Egg" to be OK enough, I suppose. I've just picked up a collection of his major novels from the library, and that short story was plunked down in the middle. Planning to read "War of the Worlds" or "The Island of Dr Moreau" soon.

Most importantly, I read half of Penelope Fitzgerald's "The Bookshop" last night, and you fellows were quite right to enthuse over her work. I can hardly wait to get back to it, and am trying my best not to order those Everyman Library omnibuses right away.

I've been remiss in keeping ILB up-to-the-minute on my reading activities.

I recently read The Great Influenza, John M. Barry. It was well-researched, well-edited and well worth reading. Only in a few places did the author descend to melodramatic foreshadownigs and purple patches of prose (although each time he did, it stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb).

It was especially informative about the nature of the influenza virus, as understood by the latest modern research, and also about the peculiar virulence of the 1918-19 strain, which sometimes killed its victim within less than 24 hours of the first symptoms appearing! The pathology of this flu was especially horrifying. Many doctors refused to believe it was flu and diagnosed it as pneumonic plague. After reading the clinical descriptions, I can't say I blame them. At its worst, it was an ultra-nasty way to die.

I am now almost finished with the Histories of Tacitus. These describe the chaotic course of events during Rome's "Year of Four Emperors", where a tumultuous civil war cast up four different claimants to the imperial throne following the assasination of Nero, three of whom died violent deaths before Vespasian managed to get a good firm grip on the empire.

Balzac: The Vendetta - minor but fun novella about Corsicans/vengeance in Paris
Colette: The Innocent Libertine - I likes me some Colette!

Am about to start Hesse's 'Gertrude', mainly because it has a cool Klimt on the cover.

I'm reading absolutely bugger all at the moment - struggling through London freesheets is about my level at the moment. Am going through The Strings Are False as recommended further uppa da list. Is v good.

Oh, Peter de Polnay's Boo is rather odd. I sort of speed read it because as well as being rather odd it was rather boring, but it appeared to be about a lower middle class northern imbecile lad who could only say Boo, hence his name, which was Boo you see?

Then he went to London and helped at a relative's boarding house where a Japanese who was continuing his father's vendetta against the British by studying their ways, who has fallen in love with a West End prostitute, rather takes to Boo, seeing in his gentle imbecility a representation of Oriental wisdom and politeness.

However he is about to make love one night with the prostitute when he finds Boo hiding under the bed. Then he kills himself out of shame and a realisation that his opponent has won.

This was when I started speed reading. He seems to become feted as a great writer and society figure towards the nd of the book, and a young lady falls in love with him. Then his *SPOILER* father, who has always despised his son's imbecility, but likes the money it has made, crashes the car on a coastal drive, killing himself on the rocks. After a short moment of contemplation, Boo stupidly throws himself down upon the rocks also.

I don't know what I think about Peter de Polnay, other than I am glad I skimmed Boo and didn't read it properly. His humour seems weak as piss and his tone uncertain, but taking Boo with Children! My Children! he is BLOODY GOOD at writing children's characters and points of view.

At the moment at the moment.

That description could describe the worst book ever or, in the right hands, pure genius. Unfortunately it seems to have been the first.

False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire by Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin
The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power by Tariq Ali
The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski (give or take some diacriticals)

Kapuscinski is a little baffling. He starts the book out by saying that "Africa" has no meaning except as a geographic term, but he then proceeds, throughout the book, to make generalizations about African society. (I'm not necessarily saying he shouldn't do that or that his generalizations or wrong or whatever, just noting the apparent contradiction.) I think I like him best when he's doing narrative, which takes up a lot of the book. When he starts to tease out broader philosophical issues, I think he weakens somewhat. But everything else he writes is natural fodder for such thoughts. He expresses a great deal of sympathy for African culture and talks about the way in which Europeans don't have the language to address it adequately, but in the end I can't say I find the portrait he paints a very attractive one (leaving aside all the war and horrors he deals with).

now reading: The Sea Came In At Midnight by Steve Erickson (finally getting around to reading something by him, after hearing about him forever.)

(oh and i dug neighbors by thomas berger. very funny. madcap surburban hijinx and all that. kinda makes me want to watch the belushi/ackroyd movie after not having seen it for 20+ years. can't believe nobody thought to make this book into a play. or maybe someone did. it would be a great theatrical comedy.)

Just finished The Owl of Minerva by Gustav Regler, the autobiography of a guy who fought in just about every war of the first half of the 20th century.. Beautifully written, terribly sad once it reaches WWII (though I love the story of the Communist ex-friend who tells him to "pay for my coffee and never speak to me again" for his disavowal of Communism).

Also read The Laughing Policeman by Sjowall and Wahloo, v. good police procedural.

how are you finding the erickson, scott? I've not read tht one, but really really like "black clock", "between stations" and "leap year"

That description could describe the worst book ever or, in the right hands, pure genius. Unfortunately it seems to have been the first.

It's not really that bad. It's well written in lots of ways, but at the same time quiet hard to summon up the desire to continue reading. I'm curious to read more of his though, just because the two I've read have been so different. It's intriguing.

The opposite of de Polnay, in that it seems very badly written but has a curious force all its own is The Senior Commoner by Julian Hall. Like most people I'd imagine, I got to it through Larkin's recommendation.

As he says 'the narrative is laconic to the point of flatness, as if disclaiming concern or even interest. No one could write this badly without meaning to...'

It's the second time I've read it, and it is as strongly fascinating as the first time; soft, indistinct tones of humour, a foregrounding of the background so that distant sounds seem to have a strong importance to what is going on in some way, and also none at all, idle thoughts that seem like they must have meaning, and sudden spikes of raw feeling.

Kingsley Amis, presumably reading it on Larkin's recomendation called it, if I remember right, 'a strange, marsh light of a novel' and this sums it up quite well even if I can't explain why. It is a beautiful read and also slightly painful, with an intensity of longing that is more powerful for the flat and disinterested tone.

Susan Sontag: On Photography - great stuff, but has no pictures, and I'd love to be able to look at the photos she talks about as she does so

Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti - very sad, and made sadder by their somewhat broken English giving them an oddly childlike tone

Brian Aldiss: Dracula Unbound - what should have been a bit of fun, with time travel, vampires, Bram Stoker, etc, but deeply flawed and sporadically stupid (vampires as the descendents of pterodactyls?) to the point of not being enjoyable (and when you've both already travelled in time, AND have JUST unveiled your newly invented time machine, would you not suspect the fossilised 65-million-year-old human remains found by one of your employees were not some previously undiscovered lost race but, just maybe, time travellers?)

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's "The Shadow of the Wind"
Juan Gabriel Vasquez's "The Informers"

Oscar Wao, Mordecai Richler, Janet Frame.

I picked up a book at the library to read: The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder. It isn't about the USA deep-sixing its isolationist heritage, or economic globalization, or a cutely titled novel about adultery. It is about the quantum phenomenon known as entanglement, or as Einstein described it, "spooky action at a distance."

It seems that atoms get entangled with one another and consequently seem to 'know' what the other is doing, no matter how far apart they are. Theoretically, the two atoms could be at the far ends of the universe and this entanglement would allow one atom to react to the other almost instantaneously. That is spooky enough right there.

It is also apparent that these effects can exceed the speed of light. IOW, if one of the two universe-apart atoms emitted a photon, it would take many, many thousands of years for it to reach the other atom. But entanglement would allow the one to sense the other one in a New York femtosecond. Super spooky!

I look forward to discovering what Miss Gilder can convey about this strange stuff to one who, like me, is not a trained particle physicist. It sounds incredibly interesting.

So interesting, in fact, that I am willing to go along with her choice of narrative style, which is extremely synthetic. She invents conversations between various physicists, by noting occasions when they met one another and are known to have conversed, and then transposing snippets quoted from their letters into bits of spoken conversation. The effect is somewhat strange and stilted at times, since few people write as they would speak, but you get the main gist of their thoughts and ideas in a somewhat informal manner, allowing the whole creaky machinery get where it needs to go.

"how are you finding the erickson, scott?"

it's pretty good. i don't love it or anything though. it reminds me of a lot of other stuff. kinda delillo + david lynch in some ways. i feel like the end of the universe/dystopia and fear/attraction of mass murder/chaos/etc stuff has been done better elsewhere. and some of the more outlandish stuff almost reminds me of chuck palahniuk (for instance: person who paints people's satellite dishes black with the ashes of the violent porn she made with her husband and nazi souvenirs so that they will somehow receive images of death and destruction??? i still don't know how this works, by the way.)

the endtimes "everyone is mad and guilty and even the innocent are asking for it" premise is just kinda moldy. maybe if i had read this in the 80's i would have loved it.

and the mass media insanity/chaos theory stuff was done way better in white noise and mao II. erickson even mentions the moon cult mass wedding several times.

i mention david lynch cuzza all the cosmic and completely implausible coincidences. random people end up being intimately connected. plus, just all the underground sex and psychic impairment. maybe some cronenberg thrown in for good measure.

parts of this book remind me of toby olsen's *The Woman Who Escaped From Shame*. (toby is bound to be the topic of one of those Believer articles on unsung writers some day, just like erickson was.)

it's entertaining enough though. it flows. i like when he's funny. he'll write something like: "She looked at her with deep sadness." and then a character will yell: "Stop looking at me with deep sadness!" there are some nice little touches like that. (i'm easily amused.)

also: don't start your book with a quote from bjork. (okay, you can if you want.)

also also: when i started this book i said to myself: "i hope none of the main characters are mute or have tourettes or amnesia or some other writerly physical tic or condition that seem to be all the rage with so many quirky modern writers and that i never actually believe is anything but an easy trick to hang your hat on." okay, i didn't say it exactly like that. anyway, the one main character can't dream, and the other main character was mute for seven years and suffers from blinding headaches. i learned to live with it.

actually, for amazing (and even transcendent and beautiful at times) writing (erickson is good, but he's no delillo) and suitable "we are all doomed/we all suck/life is cheap and shitty" thesis, the book i just finished by robert stone, *A Flag For Sunrise" beats most anything i've read in a while. (and it's not perfect either, but the good stuff is really really good.)

I really dug Stone's 'Children of Light', but haven't read anything else by him. It had a great deadpan style, including one character who "made the night horrible with his cries".

for a funnier take on the end of history/media overload/etc, there is this too:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ADBH7X6ZL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

the crazy end of the world novel i was reading in the 80's:

http://lopezbooks.com/articles/images/nuclear.jpg

(nobody bought it though and tim said whoops better get back to 'nam!)

James Morrison -- you should read Dog Soldiers if no other. There's a sequence near the end which is transcendent writing.

Currently reading Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout. Also been reading a bunch of Mr. Mulliner stories. "The Smile That Wins" and "Strychnine in the Soup" are gold.

"Susan Sontag: On Photography - great stuff, but has no pictures, and I'd love to be able to look at the photos she talks about as she does so"

How sad is this: I don't know if I have this or not. :-( I really need to rummage through my gazillion unread books. Did give a copy of the Barthes book to our friend (who does photography, but, har har, frowns upon most things "intellectual".)

i seriously can't recommend that steve erickson book to anyone. hoo boy, i'm just glad it's over. BUT, i will keep an open mind if i see something else by him. it's funny that the two books i had the most trouble reading/finishing this year were by an "heir to pynchon!" and an "heir to pk dick!".

gonna read bruce jay friedman's *A Mother's Kisses* next. which i already know i will like cuz bruce jay rules. so sue me. i am a big fan of comfort food.

duly noted. steve erickson is somebody whose reviews & blurbs make me think "should try" but reading his journalism (film criticism) puts me off, he's kinda boring in short form.

been reading a lot of relatively short books lately.

graham greene - a sort of life. childhood autobiography. he was suicidally depressed until he underwent psychoanalysis in the 1920s!

jorge luis borges - dr. brodie's report. autumnal short stories written for the popular press, entertaining and just twisted enough.

george pellecanos - the turnaround. overly familiar, and I'm a big fan. settled too deeply into his Wash DC formula, george needs to shake it up and find a new setting. or something.

vs naipaul - the suffrage of elvira. hilarious LOL satire of an early democratic election in trinidad's poorest district. hapless attempts to pander to various ethnic groups recall current US elections in a way I never would've expected.

vs naipaul - mr stone & the knights companion. so far the only naipaul I haven't liked, an odd and pointless novella about a middle-aged Englishman and his ambitious young wife.

vs naipaul - a flag on the island. short stories from the 50s and 60s including some real comedic gems, naipaul was quite the laugh-riot before he went all political in the 70s.

where do I start with borges?

Borges is really not hard to get into. I ended up buying all of the Penguin volumes and don't regret it in the least; but if you're just starting out, Labyrinths has most of his best (or at least, best-known) stories, plus some essays (dude is a wonderful essayist -- erudite, opinionated, sometimes even snobby and pedantic, but always a real pleasure to read).

"Labyrinths" is still the best start, but once you're started, you'll never get out! Might as well go straight for the Penguin "Collected Fictions".

Currently about 2/3 through John Crowley's "AEgypt" cycle, which I'm finding totally compulsive.

vs naipaul - the suffrage of elvira
I love this book. SO funny.

Am reading Helen Garner's 'Monkey Grip', which is a great 200-page novel unfortunately stretched to 400 pages.

naomi klein's the shock doctrine, which is surprisingly gripping and fast-paced, like a turn-of-the-century muckraking novel or somethin'.

read evelyn waugh's vile bodies a couple weeks ago and adored the hell out of it.

just finished Francois Mauriac's "The Knot of Vipers":
it's a nice surprise to find a masterpiece, a book that you would carry on with you for the rest of your life, just by accident.
a must read.
Mauriac is up there with Grahm Greene and Patrick White (but not with Tolstoy i guess): 3 masters of religious theme writing.

where do I start with borges?

I recommend picking up Collected Fictions, which collects all of his short stories in one volume. If you want just a taste, then go for Ficciones or Labyrinths. But both of those are included in Collected Fictions, so you may as well save yourself the time and money and go for that first!

Voltaire - Candide/Micromegas/Zadig
Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier
Mishima - Thirst for Love

James Morrison, thanks for your (September( mention of Mary Shelley's The Pilgrims--did you like it? Her The Last Man turns into an eco-gothic epic, or anti-epic (rec. to fans of Shearwater's Rooks for inst) Skot, I was very disappointed by A Flag For Sunrise, though no doubt influenced by reading it during Reagan's Central American atrocities--just seemed to emphasize the exhaustion of liberal response, and to such a familiar kind of atrocity, to anyone who knew even a little about America's screwing with Central America, long before Vietnam. (And could see the bits that seemed lifted from Greene, Conrad; Jason Robards as whiskey priest, etc)But maybe I'd like it now. Stone's Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers are wonderful though.

Hey, xyzzzz, I'm reading 'Thirst for Love' too! Just started it last night. Ah, that wacky bonkers nationalistic self-disembowelling Mishima.

Dow, I did like the Pilgrims, but it was probably pretty minor stuff. I did love 'The Last Man', though: I'm a sucker for end-of-the-world goings-on.

Zeno, Mauriac is ace, isn't he? Loved 'Knot of Vipers', 'Therese' and 'Desert of Love'. Have a couple of others by him not yet read.

Oh, anybody read Robert Stone's short fiction, collected or not? Used to come across it in New American Review etc, seems like a collection would be good.

i would read that collection! i will seek out dog soldiers someday.

a flag for sunrise had some problems, but i just dug the overall vibe. there were a couple of things/characters that made the book seem a little overstuffed. like, he would have a better book without them. but i could live with them. the only other book of his i have is damascus gate, which is also hefty and worldhistoricalweary. or so it seems from browsing through it.

Oh yeah, seems like that might be better than A Flag, judging by (dimly remembered) reviews.

Yeah, Stone was always good at "overall vibe"--esp low-rent thirtysomething working/bohemian couples, in margins of political creepiness (=realism)

I liked Flag, mostly because of the nun, the old spy, and the speed freak-- great characters, great triangle. (And that recurring nightmare of standing on top of the pile of bodies...) What I go to Stone for, I guess, is his creepiness, you're right, and his paranoia and cynicism. But I couldn't get into Damascus Gate, too crazy. I liked Children of Light and Outerbridge Reach (mostly, though both are too long), but Dog Soldiers is still my favorite.

There's a short story about three people on a sailboat full of coke that is especially bleak...
I didn't like his memoir much

Loved Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello – an experiment that worked.

I recommend picking up Collected Fictions, which collects all of his short stories in one volume. If you want just a taste, then go for Ficciones or Labyrinths. But both of those are included in Collected Fictions, so you may as well save yourself the time and money and go for that first!

― Z S, Thursday, December 11, 2008 1:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

fwiw imo the collected fictions volume kind of sucks... its nice to have all of them together but hurley is not a particularly good translator.

creepiness x poignance (re the right characters, not all of 'em: a sense of justice)

Labyrinths is a great collection. Maybe that's all you need.

xxpost: I hear this criticism a lot and I don't really get it. I haven't read any of Borges's fiction in the original Spanish, but he's always struck me as a writer who would be fairly easy to translate; his style seems very dry, literal, and academic, without any sort of wordplay or poetic elements that could be lost in translation. At any rate, I found Hurley's translations perfectly readable, understandable, and enjoyable, and the others I've compared them to don't seem any better or worse. (One trivial exception: my girlfriend got really annoyed that the translation of "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius" in the copy of Labyrinths that I lent her used "pale-orange-of-the-sky" in the section about the language composed entirely of adjectives, since "sky" is, of course, not an adjective; Hurley avoids this pitfall with the obvious choice of "celestial")

right now:
Federalist Papers
Juvenal
Thomas Disch "Fun With Your New Head"

recently finished:
KW Jeter "Noir" (ayiyiyi this book)
Letters of Pliny the Younger

Juvenal >> Younger Pliny

There's so much more bitterness, spite and gall to enjoy.

Right now I'm just reading The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (how thrilling), but for fiction I have The Boat by Nam Le to start. Yesterday I finished The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin, which was a lot of fun, but philosophically pretentious in a way that would really appeal to HS/college students and not so much to me right now. As far as nonfiction, I'm trying to decide whether to start The Varieties of Religious Experience or the Pope's Jesus of Nazareth next. I'm thinking Jesus because it's Advent.

It's only recently that I've been able to get a library card, it's hard to get used to obtaining and reading multiple books at a time again.

finished (and enjoyed!) To The Lighthouse; since then I've been working on Italo Calvino's Baron in the Trees, which my girlfriend got me for my birthday, and which is proving to be totally delightful escapism of the sort that I always forget books are capable of providing me.

For all the narrative advances of the later books, I love Baron in the Trees more than Calvino's other novels.

'Baron in the Trees' is lots of fun.

Shakey Mo, have you experienced KW Jeter's Dr. Adder--?

Been meaning to pop in and say that The Sea Came in at Midnight is a horrible place to start with Steve Erickson. If you're going to read his fiction, you should pretty much read it in order. The first handful are best, and to some extent, they're all interconnected. The Sea Came in at Midnight and the almost unreadable Our Ecstatic Days should both be skipped.

Oh - I'm currently reading Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld and having a hard time getting into it / connecting to the various (too many) characters 64 pages in. I've really liked the other Appelfeld books I've read though and it's short, so I'm sticking with it...

Le Clezio: Terra Amata
My first shot at the new Nobel chappie.

James Chace's 1912, a splendid account of the more exciting (and history-changing) elections in American history.

I think I will start Moby Dick after I finish William Trevor's latest New Yorker story.

I haven't read any of Borges's fiction in the original Spanish, but he's always struck me as a writer who would be fairly easy to translate; his style seems very dry, literal, and academic, without any sort of wordplay or poetic elements that could be lost in translation

ya 'wordplay' might be stretching it but borges in spanish (to my 'ears' at least) is a sort of fastidiously poetic writer deeply concerned w/ the rhythms of his phrases & the movement of his sentences (in the shorter works in partic.)... a lot of hurley's translations are good to fine but some are, as they say, woefully inadequate--this is arguably a personal preference but hurleys familiar/'american' style jars when youre used to borges's v. formal, urbane prose... to be totally fair i havent read borges in english or spanish in a few years now, so i may be misremembering one way or the other. ultimately tho i just have found other translators--di giovanni for example, who worked w/ borges on some of those translations--to be more enjoyable to read! hurley always leaves me lukewarm, 'fidelity' to the original aside.

I finished The Age of Entanglement. It left me a bit unsatisfied, probably because I felt less informed at the end than I had hoped to be. It's not a bad book, but it did a much better job of coming to grips with the personalitites of the physicists than with the underlying physics.

Last night I began The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, in the Peavar/Volokhonsky translation (Penguin edition). Seems good so far. The translation is readable, with only a few little awkwardnesses here and there.

Di Giovanni's the one to start with, at the very least. Didn't he write fiction too? Anybody read it?

In spite of the fact that I hold neither warrant nor authority to do so, I have just now started a new What Are You Reading? thread for winter 2008/2009.

It is my earnest desire that you, who have come to this thread seeking to share your reading wisdom, shall consider my humble new thread a proper repository for your ineffable commentary. I shall feel honored if you do.