Winter Is Here and the Time Is Right For A "Whatchoo Reading?" Thread

Although the solistice is fully a week away, I have decided it is now wintertime, and therefore it is time for our quarterly sojourn to a new "What Are You Reading?" thread. I shall lead the ceremonial parade, as we bid farewell to the midden of the old thread, heaped full of crusts and tea bags, and wend our way to our shiny new digs for the winter of 2008/2009.

As I mentioned at the tail end of our last exciting edition of the What Are You Reading thread (Fall 2008 is on it's way so please be kind to tell us what you read), what I am reading is: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

How's with you, eh?

Still with Infinite Jest, alas. Up to p. 310 and gaining speed.

Well, as it's winter, there's absolutely no doubt that The Collected Ghost Stories of MR James will be making an appearance at some point - I sometimes feel ashamed at how many times I've read these. But for the moment I'm flicking through Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come by Norman Cohn. It's a sort of a... um, prequel to his excellent Pursuit of the Millennium. Of course it isn't that - but it deals with the emergence of apocalyptic faith at the beginning of religious history (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Zoroastrian and so forth), rather than its expressions in Medieval period.

Something about the tone (I wouldn't know enough to criticise it less obliquely) makes me feel he is on rather less certain ground with this volume - some his arguments seem rather speculative, diffuse. It's interesting enough however for one, such as myself, who knows relatively little about the subject matter.

shantaram - gregory david roberts
a death in vienna - frank tallis
black mass - dick lehr and gerard o'neill

'Master and Margarita' is a wonderful book: one of my favourites.

Am now reading Thornton Wilder's 'The Ides of March'. Before reading anything of his, I'd always assumed, based on bits of 'Our Town' seen performed as a school play in wholesome US movies, that he would be saccharine and irritating. In fact, this novel is steely and clever and politically/philosophically charged: it's all in the form of letters and diaries, and about the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar and also about various manoueverings in the Roman aristocracy of the time. Great stuff.

Sorry about the damn apostrophe in the thread title. I had no idea it would do that idiotic thing. Now we are stuck with it for months, unless a moderator uncontracts the mess into "Winter is". J' regret.

Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends
Robert Ferguson, The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme
Lucinda Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal

Although the philosophizing hard man Hulme and the Romantically wasting away Siddal were about as dissimilar as two English people can get, they are at three degrees of separation via Fitzgerald's book. At one point Charlotte is being shown a strand from Lizzie's mane, and at another point in Ferguson, Hulme is trying to seduce Mew's loyal friend Alida Klementaski at the Poetry Bookshop.

the garden of last days - andre dubus III
a spot of bother - mark haddon (one scene in the early part of the book had me smothering giggles on the train home yesterday; my eyes were watering from the effort)
the sparrow - mary doria russell
the children of god - mary doria russell
the book shop - penelope fitzgerald (i read this on ILB's recommendation - tbh i didn't love it... the narrative structure was kind of a surprise to me and left me feeling unsatisfied)

just started Tristram Shandy, and I must admit, it's even more rambling and digressive than its reputation led me to expect. but in a good way, of course.

i've got a few hundred pages left in 2666, i just haven't had much time to read. just want to finish it before '09.

Only got time for work stuff:

Adorno - 'Commitment'
Adorno & Horkheimer - Dialectic of Enlightenment
Derrida - Writing & Difference
Derrida - 'The Law of Genre'
Derrida - The Monolingualism of the Other
B.S. Johnson - House Mother Normal (again!)

And a fair few other essays and bits.

Read most of The Broken Word by Adam Foulds - long-ish poem up for the Whitbread/Costa prize, good not great. Strong narrative, not enough local flash or interest for me. Too storyish.
Got Sean Borodale's Notes for an Atlas from the library. Long poem, more or less the opposite of The Broken Word - it's a long list of things noticed while walking round London, not sure how much more there is to it. Interesting, yes, don't know if I'll last 300+ pages.
Lucian's Life of Alexander the False Prophet. Great fun. Religious fraud in 2nd century Greece. Glycon, the snake god that Alan Moore worships, starts off here, which is why I thought I'd read it.
TJ Binyon's life of Pushkin. Also great fun.

emil.y i want your job

myself i have been bogged down in umpteen books, including but not restricted to robert fisk's the great war for civilisation: the conquest of the middle east and emma for, like, weeks now. in the past couple days i have read the terrible/great death note spinoff novel (bought it as a present for someone) and paul beatty's new one, which i am enjoying far too much, although i suppose the argument could be made that it doesn't really amount to more than a sort of angry terry pratchett of free jazz

a terrymiad, perhaps

I've just finished " The Northern Clemency" by Philip Hensher. It's very long and not terribly good, but I enjoyed it nevertheless - purely because of its subject matter, the history of two relatively ordinary lower-middle-class families in the North of England through the 70s to (more or less) now, with the emphasis on the earlier decades when the younger characters are growing up. There's not enough good, or even goodish, fiction about people who look, sound and feel like the kind of unremarkable people I grew up with, no doubt because that kind of ordinariness isn't what most people want in novels. It might appeal to anyone who liked "Black Swan Green" or "The Rotters Club", although it's a little too flatulent, and perhaps too detached and self-regarding, to be as good as either of those; reading it made me think that Hensher would be much harder to like personally than Coe or Mitchell.

Hensher does sometimes write enjoyably rude book reviews, though (the best being one that finished along the lines of "On this showing, X couldn't even write 'bum' on a wall.")

Am reading Sean O'Faolain's 'The Heat of the Sun and Other Stories', which is all kinds of great. Why have I not read him before? Why is he completely OP, as far as I can see?

Also read a brilliant play, 'Tales from Hollywood', by Christopher Hampton, about emigre German writers working in Hollywood during WW2 (Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Brecht, etc): very funny, sad. Want to see it performed, but the thing about living in Australia's fifth-biggest city, even if it foolishly claims to be the country's arts capital, is you tend not to see too many great plays.

[Makes warding-off sign of cross at emil.y]

James Morrison - Would that be Victoria?

No, South Australia--for a brief period in the 1970s we had a VERY pro-arts, left-wing gay state premier, and we've been kidding ourselves that we've been national leaders in the arts ever since.

Let's Pretend - 37 stories about (in)fidelity
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank - Thad Carhart
The Snow Traveller - Charlie English

Recently got Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (Vols. I and II).

Think I'll clear my feet before I start on them though!

Primo Levi - The Periodic Table

I kind of wish I'd read this when I still could have taken chemistry classes.

huxley - brave new world
tartt - the secret history
dostoevsky - the idiot
absolute winter warmers!

I've settled for this lot as my Christmas-reads:
Thomas Pynchon - Against the Day
H.L. Mencken - A Mencken Chrestomathy
J.F. Powers - The Collected Stories

I haven't settled properly on my Christmas reads yet (unless Outrun 2 on the Xbox counts as a book), but like Woof have been reading The Broken Word by Adam Foulds. I think I probably enjoyed it rather more than Woof - I don't particularly mind narrative story poetry anyway - it can sink into moribund sounding language at times and at other times the narrative and poetic language seem at odds leading to a feeling of redundant richness or unpoetic haste.

However I thoroughly enjoyed the section DINNER 1, which starts with the appealing formulation 'Frank was dead and he was very tired.'

Local colour was definitely slightly weak. I thought it was quite successful in its portayal of mental and physical evisceration throughout - although perhaps without enough of a sense of violence in the actual scenes of violence.

About 50 pages into 2666 and I think it's cool. (Some other books read since my last list. I just don't have the info. handy.)

i have decideed to read only comic books for the rest of the year. i will start out 2009 with some black humor:

-Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
-Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
-Louis Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
-Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & (maybe) The Day of the Locust
-Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
-Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
-William Faulkner, These 13 (reconstructed from my copy of Collected Stories)

then just maybe I'll start back on The Portable Conrad, after which I plan on reading some anthology about mental illness, then the U.S.A. trilogy, some Balzac, and hopefully Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet (the Dos Passos and Robbe Grillet will all be loaners from the public library of course)

(also Gamaliel the collected ghost stories of MR James sounds terrific, I hope to be able to read that a little later on this winter...

+ )

-Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
-Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
-Louis Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
-Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & (maybe) The Day of the Locust
-Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
-Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
-William Faulkner, These 13 (reconstructed from my copy of Collected Stories)

With the exception of the last (I just can't get into Faulkner: it's like trying to read a bowl of slurry), you've got some excellent, excellent books there.

Just read...

Alan Ayckbourn: Three Plays - good stuff
David Bowker: How to be Bad - really wanted to like this (it's about a 2nd-hand bookseller who specialises in first-edition bloke-lit a la Nick Hornby and who ends up becoming a multiple murderer to get a girl), but it wasn't as clever or as funny as it (and the blurbs) thought it was.

reading millhauser's dangerous laughter collection. not really loving it.

last night I dreamt I read Infinite Jest cover-to-cover in a single day. I am not sure what this means.

Only in your dreams, fella. Only in your dreams.

at first i didn't get the vital "i dreamt" clue there, and was quite scared of you

hemingway, the sun also rises
wodehouse, the inimitable jeeves
robert caro, means of ascent

I did finish Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene (part of my Dalkey Archive holiday sale purchase) this afternoon, after starting it last night; but being that it is roughly 1/10th the length of Infinite Jest, this is a rather unremarkable accomplishment.

lolz you just need to learn how to read 10x faster that's all

continuing on the "confused dying old man" theme, I sat down this afternoon and read Gaddis's Agapē Agape -- which, incidentally, was also the book sitting next to Man in the Holocene on my alphabetically-arranged shelves, although I didn't realize that until I was finished and I went to put it back.

I am not sure yet what I think of it.

J.M.G. Le Clézio's 'Le chercheur d'or'.

Is that one in English yet? Is it as bad as The Giants?

I finished The Master and Margarita a couple of nights ago. I quite enjoyed it. Tales of the supernatural can be very liberating for the right author and Bulgakov kept all the elements of politics, religion and social satire firmly subservient to the larger story of Satan visiting Moscow. Juicy stuff, understandingly handled. I thank ILB for bringing this title to my attention a couple of years ago.

I haven't settled on my next book. Under consideration are Infinite Jest and Pale Fire, or else some trifling light entertainment like a Walter Mosley novel. In the meantime I've been fooling around with reading Bede's History of the English Church and People. One learns so many odd things from such books, they are really very interesting.

John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird

Finishing:

Gilbert Sorrentino - Mulligan's Stew. Reading the thread on him (well, all three threads on him) and I found it a compulsive read while also finding not as funny as he thinks he is yet its probably the best novel about a failed novel I've read (not that I've read many or know of many). But the lack of funnies could be intentional (Lamont is such a 'failure' or whatever)...who knows I'm trapped in meta about the lit 'scene', and maybe that is the problem...

Harry Matthews - Cigarettes. Really great so far, can't wait to check out some more by him. Its gonna be my new year resolution and I don't make any.

A few short stories by Cortazar. Most bizarrely under-discussed author on ILX (not even a thread)? Have I said this before? Thanks to the now much improved search engine I can't find much beyond bits about him on a Murakami thread, which is almost an insult!

he's been discussed, bcz i'm pretty sure i first heard about 62 and hopscotch (which has recently moved back into my 'reading this soon, honestly' queue) here. never really got through him much, probably bcz i resented him for not being borges.

i got a copy of the savage detectives for christmas. yup, i am behind the times. so far i am mostly surprised at the amount of sex. it should be called the sexy detectives

this reminds me i've been meaning to read cigarettes and singular pleasures for ages, actually.

The search doesn't really reveal a thread about Cortazar (apart from an unanswered one on the 'I Rate Everything' board). I'd say I get as much out of him as Borges or any short story writer.

Gotta read Singular Pleasures.

Oh, and I also read Alexander Trocchi - Cain's book.

I started reading Infinite Jest last night. It appears to fall into the Walt Whitman / Thomas Wolfe / Henry Miller School of All-Embracing Word-Drunk Authorship. A fine old American tradition, but it remains to be seen if I can preserve enough momentum to ski past the uphill stretches.

Perhaps this belongs in ILC, but currently reading Neil Gaiman's update of Jack Kirby's Eternals.

i quite like the number of folks reading Infinite Jest, it's my fav book ever, probably

im reading:

When the shooting stops - ralph rosenabum
Our Gang - Philip Roth
& still 2666 - im bogged down in the murder section

Bernard Malamud: The Assistant - strange and wonderful (and sadly OP)

I've had a major case of reader's block for some time, but sat and read 140 pages of In Europe by Geert Mak on Christmas day. It's quite enjoyable, tracing the 20th century chronologically city-by-city as the author travelled around Europe. What I like about it is that it's filled with facts and little sketches, but the author doesn't necessarily take the most obvious angle - the London 1913 chapter is mostly about suffragettes rather than militarism or empire, for example - which makes the train wreck of all these historical currents in 1914 quite poignant

-Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
-Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
-Louis Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
-Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & (maybe) The Day of the Locust
-Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
-Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

(...)you've got some excellent, excellent books there.

apart from the Flannery O'Connor (who is up on my top 3 favourite writers list), this is the rough list of books that inspired Joseph Heller to turn away from the Hemingwayesque realism that was his early mode and start writing in the more surreal and comedic tone of Catch-22.

How is the O'Connor? Good Man is one of my all-time favorite books.

Everything that Rises Must Converge is excellent...i've read it many times before & it still blows me away every time...

just finished up 'a spot of bother' by mark haddon... some incredibly funny scenes, but also some nauseating scenes.

have opened up a library of america collection of willa cather's early novels/stories, and also 'a fan's notes' by frederick exley.

Nick Hornby: Shakespeare Wrote for Money - funny, light
Michel Faber: The Fire Gospel - meh, not as funny as it thought it was - "His worst book yet!"
Mayakovsky: The Bedbug (a play, satire on Stalinism from a guy who topped himself before Stalin could get him)

I started H.W. Brands' new FDR bio.

i'm still reading bruce jay friedman, but that cheney book Angler ended up at our house on christmas and i've been reading that too. i'm gonna see how much dick i can take.

Angler was great! Thorough reporting, and does a good job synthesizing all we've read in the last seven years.

continuing the retro vibe, Robert Draper's Bushie chronicle Dead Certain

I finished Book I of Tristram Shandy and decided to take a short hiatus from it to read Pynchon's V.. A little over halfway through now; still not really sure what to make of it, but it's been an enjoyable read so far.

Also read Donald Barthelme's last novel The King, about King Arthur & co. fighting in World War II, atom-bomb-as-holy-grail, etc etc. If it sounds like one of his short story premises stretched out to novel length, well, that's because it basically is; but it's also lots of fun. Probably 95% of the book is dialogue, but not in an obvious gimmicky "hey look what I'm doing!" way; it's clear that Barthelme is a master craftsman who's completely in his element here, and the sheer pleasure of watching him at work makes it a worthwhile read. I realize I'm making this sound like the literary equivalent of prog rock, so I'll just stop now.

michael connelly - the brass verdict. his new guy (the lincoln lawyer) meets his old guy (det. harry bosch). satisfying if not thrilling legal whosis.

gore vidal - the collected essays. compact collection. it was great to re-read the dawn powell essay, she's so good. and his response to midge decter's anti-gay screed is a scorcher. I'd never read his 1973 bestsellers rundown, very funny. downside: a strain of bitchy-ness sometimes undermines his arguments and I don't like the later political stuff at all.

richard yates - revolutionary road. currently half-way through and will have more to say on completion. (haven't seen the movie) well-written without a doubt.

"Also read Donald Barthelme's last novel The King, about King Arthur & co. fighting in World War II, atom-bomb-as-holy-grail, etc etc. If it sounds like one of his short story premises stretched out to novel length, well, that's because it basically is" — this is true of all his novels, right?

I'm still reading the Bolano. Have reached part two. There is less sex in it, now.

this is true of all his novels, right?

Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions by Diana Johnstone (This is pretty mind-blowing stuff, both in its discussion of the facts around US/NATO intervention in this instance and the broader historical context.)
Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer—And Back by Katherin Russell Rich has been sitting around for years and I mostly read it just because it was there, unread, on my shelf. Also I inherited from a friend who died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and who found this book fairly on-target re: what it's like to deal with cancer.)
Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton (Ditto--except for the last part obviously.)
2666 by Roberto Bolaño (I finished this with a lot of ambivalence. I think I'm off fiction for a while. It tends to shade into feeling like a waste of time, to me.)

Although paradoxically I sometimes find myself thinking I want to read Savage Detectives now.

(And I really mean that about fiction strictly as a matter of personal policy not as an invitation to an argument.)

Right now I'm dipping into:

J.M.G Le Clezio - The Flood
Yves Navarre - Sweet Tooth
Cabrera Infante - Three Trapped Tigers

"Cabrera Infante - Three Trapped Tigers"

i keep picking this up off the bookshelf, but i am a little scared of it, cuz i'm kinda dumb. lemme know how it is. (kinda scared of bolano too. it's my longstanding pynchon fear rearing its head. i'm afraid my brain isn't scientific enough to appreciate some of these big shaggy books. or that i will just get tired of them after committing to 300 pages or more. that's like a whole 'nother book i could have read!)

The only Bolano I've read (YET) is 'Nazi Literature of the Americas', which was nice and short and funny--maybe start with that? It's a collection of short stories disguised as biographies of right-wing nasties from North and South America.

xyzzzz did you pick up that Cabrera in the Dalkey Archive sale too? I got it but I'm saving it for... well I dunno when, but not right now.

er Cabrera Infante, something-something, I type gud

I'm approx 200pp into Infinite Jest. DFW obv has the narrative-voice-thing going for him in spades, even if his narrators are all ventriloquist dummies for the language-obsessed voice in DFW's head and his characters exist mainly to give the narrator something to describe at greatly extended length.

With roughly another 800pp to go, it is increasingly obvious to me that, if DFW had any point to make about anything at all, he has already made his point, and if he has any story to tell, he is not very insistent upon telling it and not very interested in stories per se. So, it is either let myself be pulled along by his voice, or bag the whole business.

At this juncture, I plan to let myself be pulled along by his voice for a while yet. It's a pretty good'un. But I am beginning to doubt its magnetism will persist for another 800pp.

Ah, but wait! I am (finally) about halfway through it (around p 470) and am now totally hooked. I found it hard work at first, too big, too many strands, not going anywhere (even if I liked it, really liked it, on a micro level, which is probably the voice you speak of). I started reading maybe six weeks ago, and probably read 250-300 pages in the first five weeks.

But now, honest to god, it's pure pleasure-- I'm conspiring to find more time in the day to read. It actually took me over 300 pages to get properly hooked, for what it's worth.

Am finishing Lethem's The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye this evening. Seven stories, 2 or so of which are really strong and the rest of which feel like idea farts. More than once I had to resist the urge to write notes in the margins ala workshops. Hoping Girl in Landscape is better.

Just finished Swann's Way, just started In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (Jesus what a horrific title) by M. Proust.

Girl in Landscape may be my favorite Lethem!

mc: what do you dislike about vidal's later political stuff? i do think he got increasingly strident and predictable at some point during the last ten years, writing what amounted to the same article over and over again. but i think he's good before then.

working my way through 'pale fire' now.

Albert Camus: The Plague - quite enjoyed it, though surprised at how hard it worked to kill any narrative tension
Jason Aaron: Scalped - read first 2 vols of this collected comic, about crime and life on a Native American reservation - very good but the violence is so OTT it kills some of the believability

Currently reading Updike: The Centaur - some lovely writing, but my heart sinks whenever I get to one of the modern-characters-transposed-into-mythological-characters bits -- they really aren't working for me, and feel like Updike's trying to hard to write what some critic will call a "Tour de Force".

xyzzzz did you pick up that Cabrera in the Dalkey Archive sale too?

Nah it was a present. 20% off is US only right? (Londoners should know there is a copy of 'Three Trapped Tigers' -- faber ed -- on sale at Skoob books if anyone wants it)

i rate wall of the sky below any/all lethem novels, although the one that rips 'they shoot horses, don't they' is almost a laugh

aimless: have you read any of DFW's short stories?

i have just finished geoffrey wheatcroft's 'the strange death of tory england' (i thought this was going to be about thatcherist the-free-market-is-your-new-overlord stuff destroyed High Toryism, wheatcroft actually likes thatcher, makes up for her govt.'s apparent back-turning on tory principles by claiming there was no such thing as tory principles in the first place and this is toryism's strength: what an odd argument) and hope to finish said's 'covering islam' by the end of this train journey

(i think DFW's work has what in another context (i.e., the 70s) i might try and get away with calling a "radical distrust" of narrative -- i'm not sure if "not very interested in stories per se" is a particularly fair way of putting this)

(and i think one of infinite jest's failings is that it makes it incredibly easy to mistake the reductio ad absurdum versions presented of its themes to be taken for its thesis) (hopefully, anyone who has read it knows what i am talking about)

thomp, I have only read some of DFW's essays. No short stories.

As for anyone's "radical distrust of narrative", although I am quite interested in reading and writing, I have never found much personal interest in critical theory. To give you the basic idea, I appreciate Duchamp and Dada at the level of "nudge-nudge, haha, it's just a joke, d'y'see?" So, whatever critical comments I make about a work, your view on my comments should be informed by this knowledge. If it is a gift to be simple, I am among the blessed.

As a reader, I care only if the author has given me an a cogent reason to continue reading. The pleasure of a developing narrative is only one possible form this reason might take.

Just to be catty, I do notice that DFW has taken the trouble to embed a narrative into his novel, so perhaps he somewhat distrusted his radical distrust. It is just that the narrative elements have been reduced to tiny particles and dispersed into the prose in the way poppyseeds are mixed into the batter of a poppyseed cake. In which case, the main pleasure must be taken in the sweet, cakey medium of the prose. He does this pretty well, so I am still reading.

Ambrose Bierce: The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter - great little crime/obsession/religion novella

Muriel Spark: A Far Cry from Kensington - blackmail, hatred, comedy, poison-pen letters in 1950s English publishing world - great stuff, also less savage (so far) than much Spark

oh dfw totes distrusts his radical distrust also, mos def

i need more muriel spark to read. i read 'the girls of slender means' on a course once and wasn't expecting to like it and then did, and read the copy of 'miss jean brodie' i had lying around for years and thought it was absolutely fantastic. i also need to know more about james cowie, one of whose paintings of scottish schoolgirls adorns the cover of the latter.

still the bolano. also reading edward said's 'covering islam', which is irritating me a bit.

In re DFW short stories: Girl with Curious Hair is lots of fun. Really several perfect acts of ventriloquism. Particularly "Everything Is Green," which is a nice short perfect heartbreak. I enjoy the title story too but find the last long one overlong and in-clubby.

Luke Haines: Bad Vibes (Britpop and my part in its downfall) -- savage, bad-tempered and thoroughly fun, as you'd expect

You read a lot.

James Schuyler: Alfred and Guinevere
Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (rules like all hell, wish I hadn't glanced at the introduction/review quotes which gave away the ending)
E. Nesbit: The House of Arden (not her best but the business with the photos is way cool)

Kingsley Amis - Difficulties With Girls
Toni Morrison - Sula

i saw three (3) people reading 2666 yesterday. bolano everywhere.

i am still reading 2666 as well, though not in public as I am unemployed. I was intrigued that my spanish version has so many more pages than the english translation when I saw it in a shop. Although maybe it's just that the text size is a lot different, though that seems dubious.

You read a lot.

I'm a lazy bastard who doesn't do much else, unfortunately.

James Schuyler: Alfred and Guinevere
Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (rules like all hell, wish I hadn't glanced at the introduction/review quotes which gave away the ending)

Those are two great books!

Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings. Enjoying - forces you to wrestle with his Christian/Anglican language (which he knows isn't the current language) for talking about poetry & ethics & politics. Result is more engaging than most criticism I read, but does dissolve into abstractions for me if I'm not stretching to understand that theological mode.
And because of that, back to David Norbrook's Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse. Lol they couldn't spell.

Reading short stories right now:

O'Conner's "Complete Stories"
Never read anything by her before, not sure why I waited so long, but these are amazing. At times sentimental, but I think short stories just do that.
Oscar Casares's "Brownsville"
A collection of the most subtle and caring stories I've ever read. I'm really enjoying this.
Arno Schmidt's collected stories by Dalkey
I'm a little confused about how to attack these, which isn't an unusual thing for me, but I feel like I'm making progress.

i've got two volumes of willa cather, and i feebly started the first few pages of the first story. does anyone have a recommendation for a good story/novel to start with?

Ooh, Cather: novel-wise try maybe 'The Professor's House' to start with? I love her stuff. 'Coming, Aphrodite' is a great story--her later stories are especially good.

I'm reading the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf.

A Lost Lady and My Antonia are flawless, just1n3.

I'm reading the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf.

― roxymuzak, Thursday, January 8, 2009 10:58 PM (3 minutes ago)

gave this to an ex and then broke up before i got a chance to read it so i envy you.

currently giving Freddy and Fredericka - Mark Helprin a shot. fun so far.

fixed up yer titlepostrophe difficulty also.

i started reading The Normals by David Gilbert. lotsa laughs. lotsa great evocative writing too.

chip kidd cover not really working for me though:

http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/14920000/14923572.JPG

(stock los alamos nuclear testing photo reminds me of 80's book covers. but not in a good way.)

on the other hand, the book that the picture was taken from has a totally ruling cover:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1400041139.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Mr, Justen, please accept my warmest regards for fixing my apostropheaking mess.

100 Suns is a fantastic and terrifying book.

reading edward said's 'covering islam', which is irritating me a bit.

― thomp, Tuesday, January 6, 2009 2:44 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark

why, if i may ask?

I don't really like Girl With Curious Hair! It's a bit... MFA-ish.

I am reading Light In August.

Light in August is fantastic...

About a third of the way thru Scoop...(I know, I've been real ADD lately)...good stuff, a little more obscure than I remember Handful of Dust being, prhaps???? The main thrust of the book, though, which proposes that maybe the press is full of shit when it comes to foreign wars, is very relevant, and casts the last nine years in interesting light...

((not that I doubt that there was conflict in Iraq, Waugh just does a lot to undercut the press's credibility, that's all)

Ivan Turgenev: On the Eve
William Dean Howells: A Modern Instance

- a couple of absolutely wonderful 19th-Century novels. Brilliant stuff.

re: covering islam, hoos, it's not that i don't think said's wrong in his main thesis (basically it's an application of the ideas developed in orientalism, that 'islam' as referred to in the anglo-american media is a concept of their own construction that doesn't quite exist anywhere in the world, etc.); there's just a certain inevitablity of tone to it that bugs me. probably most egregious: the book was originally written right after the revolution in iran, and published as such, with the central section taking this as its main example; it was then revised in the mid-90s. said finds new texts from the intervening years with which to continue demonstrating his main point, but doesn't substantively revise anything which refers directly to iran ...

Ah the "of course I'm right" problem?

i'm supposed to be reading the cather stuff, but i saw 'lunar park' by bret easton ellis in hardcover and nice condition for just $8.50 so i'm reading that instead. so far, i'm enjoying it more than any of his other books - it's more 'readable', in a sense. less disjointed.

Lunar Park is engrossing, but ultimately I found it unsatisfying...has anyone here ever read anything by Will Christopher Baer???

i did, once.

finished 2666 yesterday, and then i read half of a richard stark novel ('the man with the getaway face', one of the new reissues) last night as a palate cleanser. then i'm going to read kevin brockmeier's 'a brief history of the dead' for a book club.

finished the said.

"But underlying every interpretation of other cultures—especially of Islam—is the choice facing the individual scholar or intellectual: whether to put intellect at the service of power or at the service of criticism, community, dialogue, or moral sense. This choice must be the first act of interpretation today, and it must result in a decision, not simply a postponement. If the history of knowledge about Islam in the West has been too closely tied to conquest and domination, the time has come for these ties to be severed completely. About this one cannot be too emphatic. For otherwise we will not only face protracted tension and perhaps even war, but we will offer the Muslim world, its various societies and states, the prospect of many wars, unimaginable suffering, and disastrous upheavals, not the least of which would be the victory of an 'Islam' fully ready to play the role prepared for it by reaction, orthodoxy, and desperation. By even the most sanguine of standards, this is not a pleasant possibility."

the midnight man - loren d. estleman
woken furies - richard k. morgan
the peace war - vernor vinge
legacy of ashes - tim weiner

I'm reading the NEA thread.

I think that counts as a book if you're counting for the year.

needed some healing/inspirational non-fiction after finishing yates' revolutionary road - the bleakest novel I've ever read? maybe. so I'm currently reading david mccullough's bio of john adams. makes me proud to be an american, no kidding.

Finally got round to The Recognitions.

So how come this is so much fun when Carpenter's Gothic felt so much like hard work?

Pynchon like cadences.

Took a quick break from some more serious stuff to read "The Alcoholic" by Jonathan Ames. Bad decision. Ames's memoir is the most self-indulgent, trashy book I've read in a long time. Don't read this book.

now reading: Troubles by J.G. Farrell

loving it so far! one of those nyrb classics paperbacks. they reissued farrell's last three books (his empire trilogy). kinda hard to believe it was written in 1970. reads like something from the 30's or 40's. (it's set in 1919)

also highly recommend that book i just finished: The Normals. very funny. spot-on social commentary. (without being a drag about it or too cutesy/clever. basically a book that that little children perrotta dude WISHES he could write. also one of the few main characters in recent memory who was basically my own age and who i could relate to! doesn't happen often. and who i ended up liking. most brainy 30-something losers in books written by brainy 30-something losers make me cringe. mostly for pop cult blindspot reasons that only a nerd like me would even care about. but this book had almost perfect pitch.)

btw, Scott (this is from way above about 'Three trapped Tigers'): a lot of TTT reminds me of Hubert Selby in a kind of automatic typing mode: whatever that really means, but its not quite Ulysses to me, as the blurb at the back says. The blurb also says the whole thing is a memoir to pre-Castro Cuba but because of the way he writes you don't detect a trace of sentimentality except in the last 100 pages or so has this dialogue, but its more like someone having his brain divided into two while struggling to remember a great evening, or so I thought...didn't quite connect with the humor as I wanted to but those last 100 pages or so are something.

Nam Le: The Boat -- very good, brutal short story collection

Graham Robb's 'The Discovery of France'.

anthony powell, 'a question of upbringing'

how is "discovery of france"? i remember loving robb's rimbaud biography back when i read it.

Speaking of Life Affirming Self Help ish I just started "Taking Our Places: The Buddhist Path to Truly Growing Up" by one of the SF Zen Center dudes. It's good so far.

I suppose this is how most of us view the notion of responsibility--as the opposite of creativity, spontaneity, growth. No wonder we resist growing up, and no wonder we become boring we it finally seems we must admit that we are adults and had better start acting like it. But responsibility doesn't have to be like that. In its most literal sense, responsibility is simply the capacity to respond. Being responsible is an inherently lively quality. It is the capacity to react completely and freely to conditions. Being responsible has nothing to do with control and conformity. Quite the contrary, responsibility is the willingness to confront nakedly and clearly what's in front of you on its own terms and to be called forth fresh by what occurs. The Greek root of the word response means "to offer" or "to pledge." To be responsible is to offer yourself to what happens to you, to pledge yourself to your life.

Thomp, are you just starting out on the Dance to the Music of Time sequence? If so, I hope you enjoy it - it really is one of my very favourite things.

reading Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables for a 'major American authors' class that I decided to take on a whim -- predictably, it is not v. good, although it can be improved somewhat by reading passages out loud in a Vincent Price-style melodramatic goth voice.

how is "discovery of france"? i remember loving robb's rimbaud biography back when i read it.

Funny someone said almost the very same thing to me when I was at the pet store yesterday.

I like it a lot. It's got the kind of detail I would expect from someone like Braudel but it's charmingly written and he's willing to take a side and make a case.

Last few:

John Lennon - Philip Norman. Solid and comprehensive bio, readable enough, but I doubt anyone would consider it literature. I was long ago forced to accept that Lennon, a childhood hero for me, was not a particularly nice man. All the same, some of this tarnished my opinion of him still further, which made it a mildly depressing read. I think Norman is fair to John, though, and perhaps generous to Yoko. I'm unpersuaded by the revisionism that suggests Yoko was a much nicer person and more substantial artist than we all once thought; I suspect that Norman would privately agree, but he struggles manfully to be positive about her whenever he can, perhaps mindful that, unlike Lennon, she is still around to read the book.

The Believers - Zoe Heller: I thought this was good, if not quite as good as some of the hype suggests. Heller writes beautifully, with clarity and precision, and has an almost Waugh-esque talent for observational satire. She's very good at creating character too, particularly by contemporary standards - Audrey, the monstrous mother is superb. Unfortunately she needs a narrative and thematic framework to hang all this good stuff on, and that's where the problems arise. I couldn't see that she had anything penetrating or new to say about the nature of belief, or left-wing New York intellectuals: that the beautiful, intelligent daughter of an aggressively secular Jewish family might want to become an orthodox believer, for example, isn't remarkable enough to be intrinsically interesting and Heller fails to make anything interesting of it (although she describes the process very convincingly). I still think she's an incredible talent, though, and I'll buy her next one.

The Clothes on Their Backs - Linda Grant: Not bad - Grant can write, no doubt about that, her handling of the thematic material was strong, but there were implausibilities of plot and character that jarred, and for me at least her characters and the worlds they lived in never came fully alive. My impression is that she needs to rely less on her intellect and more on her imagination and instinct, which are excellent but won't take her where she wants to be if she doesn't trust them.

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill: I thought this was superb, surprisingly living up to the hype (mistrust of which almost prevented me from reading it). Stylistically I didn't like it as much as the reviewers - O'Neill takes chances and sometimes lands the wrong side of the line separating fresh and telling from pretentious and opaque. (He's by no means as bad in this respect as Bellow, to whom he's been frequently likened; but if his bad sentences are less frequent and less bad than Bellow's, his better ones are less frequent and not as great). It's a terrific portrait of how a highly intelligent but normally rational-to-the-point-of-being-boring guy's consciousness takes on a visionary intensity in extremis (the narrator's marriage is breaking down in the aftermath of 9/11), and at the same time an original, sophisticated and tightly worked novel of ideas. Oddly, I don't think O'Neill is a born writer like Heller, for example: I suspect he won't write anything close to being this good again, although I'd love to be proved wrong.

frankiemachine, are you Paul McCartney?

Let's just say I think John was the more talented Beatle.

Most recently finished: Unitarianism in America by George Willis Cooke - Intermittently interesting, but only really recommended if you have an interest in the subject.

Now reading: A Secular Age by Charles Taylor

xpost to fm

That is an effective refutation. ;)

Indeed. ;) To be fair, I'm a big fan of McCartney as well. On the whole, probably a nicer bloke, but (in my opinion at any rate) a less original artist.

hi, uh, GamalielRatsey; yes, it is the first time I've read Powell. Would you recommend I try and find the next eleven as quickly as possible or should I wait until I come across them?

Can you buy them as singletons? Here they come one threepack per season.

theomp I'd advise you to go onto at least the next couple if you enjoy the first one. After that you'll know whether you want to press on. I think they improve after the first and deteriorate a little toward the very end, as Powell gets older and understands the generation that came after his and the world they created less well than the world of the 30s and 40s. (I re-read the first three recently and was slightly disappointed that I didn't still love them as much as I thought I did. But I'll still probably pick up the next three at some point).

finished lunar park today - i quite enjoyed it. it was pretty disturbing in places, but in a different way to his previous books. i also thought it was very sad.

i'm now reading the devil in the white city by erik larson for a bookclub thing i've been roped in to.

Garry Wills' The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power . Almost as good as his Nixon biography.

A third of the way through Dexter Filkins' The Forever War, and just starting Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise.

the midnight man - loren d. estleman
I've only read one book by this guy, Little Black Dress. Still wondering when I'll get around to another and what it should be.

Sean O'Faolain: The Talking Trees - more great short stories, and again amazed that he's out of print

hi, uh, GamalielRatsey; yes, it is the first time I've read Powell. Would you recommend I try and find the next eleven as quickly as possible or should I wait until I come across them?

I'd wait, I think. But I would recommend that you buy the individual novels rather than the four volumes containing three in each - they just seem to work better that way.

theomp I'd advise you to go onto at least the next couple if you enjoy the first one. After that you'll know whether you want to press on. I think they improve after the first and deteriorate a little toward the very end, as Powell gets older and understands the generation that came after his and the world they created less well than the world of the 30s and 40s. (I re-read the first three recently and was slightly disappointed that I didn't still love them as much as I thought I did. But I'll still probably pick up the next three at some point).

― frankiemachine, Wednesday, January 14, 2009 9:33 PM (Yesterday)

I think the second half of A Question of Upbringing is extremely good, and really, for me, they don't really take a dive until perhaps the latter war ones, and Books Do Furnish a Room. Temporary Kings is the weakest by a long chalk, and I thought Hearing Secret Harmonies a return to form of sorts, against what a lot of critics say. I quite like his portrayal of Murtlock and think his depiction of 'the next generation' actually quite good in its merciless way.

Gamalie I wouldn't argue with most of that. But I found that on a first reading A Buyer's Market was where I really began to be gripped. After re-reading, I'd probably agree that AQOU is good in the second half, but much of the charm of Dance is cumulative, and on a first reading I think you need to get into the second book before you start to get a feel for that: prior to that it would be easy to think of AQOU as no more than a rather slight, eccentric novel with a weakish first half and some connection, of a sort yet to be determined, to later novels in a series. I'm agree that HSH is better than TK, which I also agree is the weakest.

I have no intention on buying the omnibus volumes, because they are hideous.

It'd be well weird to read AQoU without the foreknowledge of there being thousands of pages to follow: it ends on such a deliberately trivial note, and while it's clear now that there's, you know, pieces being moved into place and shit, the 1951 (?) reader wouldn't have that ... I actually found the first two chunks my favorite, on internal merit, the third the least interesting (urgh, comedy Europeans); the fourth is the most likable for external, structural reasons, but I think it seemed less enjoyable due to being somewhere between the way a new prose stylist is likable and the way a familiar one is, already.

the opening paragraphs brought on a spate of 'why isn't everyone this good,' though. "like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold."

Anyway, I am finishing John Lanchester's 'The Debt to Pleasure' before I look to start the next one. But hopefully I will be able to find a copy tomorrow.

I am about 500pp into Infinite Jest now. My main impressions are only becoming more confirmed as I wade in further.

The book can fairly be described as a comedy, but it is not especially funny so much as it is witty. And, like most wit, it provokes admiration more often than laughter. The only characters resembling humans are the AA drunks and other drug addicts. These he treats with care and affection. His other characters are more like placeholders, which, of course, is quite permissable in social satire.

I only wish I appreciated his wit more than I have so far. It is peculiar and personal and seems to tied to a milieu at the margins of my own experience. As it ages, I expect it will join such period pieces as Restoration Comedies and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, as "good in its kind and very popular in its day".

For now, I read on. I am still wringing some pleasure from the book, but with diminishing returns as the novelty wears off.

finally getting around to The Killer Inside Me - Jim Thompson interspersed w/the Helprin book (which is actually v v funny and better than expected).

i guess i agree that the incandenzas are more outlandish characters than the halfway house crew, but they're also more detailed and memorable in a lot of ways.

i'm curious to see if you feel the same way after you finish the book, since i thought it got more affecting as it went on (and then it would be a little jarring when the sci-fi satire elements popped up, like "oh yeah, i forgot that it's that kind of book too").

my two favorite things about IJ were the halfway house story and the bizarre michael pemulis story arc, which is why when people tell me that they aren't reading the endnotes i tell them that they might as well not read the book.

'arc', huh. I barely remember what happens to Pemulis -- does he get expelled after, uh, events involving a loose ceiling tile and a game played on tennis courts?

Also, Aimless, I have had Sartor Resartus stuck in my to-read pile for, like, a full year now, out of a serious suspicion that it's 'my kind of thing' -- (also) also, I totally applaud your even-handedness; out of the people I've seen expressing a lack of fondness for IJ, those who don't also need to express an intense resentment of, animus against it form a vanishingly small subset.

I'm reading liner notes for a Julian Cope album.

started "lucky jim," then decided i wasn't in the mood for it and decided to finally read "catch-22" after all these years.

also reading an essay or two out of my orwell "complete essays" book just before going to sleep every night. it's strangely comforting, that nightly dose of gentle, articulate reasonableness.

Any mood is the right mood for 'Lucky Jim'!

I dunno, the mood I was in from about fourteen to twenty I hated it.

Finishing: Djuna Barnes - Nightwood. Some of these sentences are lovely. I reckon they will get even lovelier with subsequent re-reads. Has anyone read 'Ryder' or anything else by her?

Finished: Short stories by Kawabata ('Dancing Girl of Izu', etc)

Kawabata's short stories are so great. Love the one about the couple meeting again in the ruins of post WWII-Tokyo, and the one about the wart.

Bernard Malamud: The Natural -- loved this book, which given it's a novel about baseball (about which I care nothing, and know only what I've gathered from reading 'Peanuts') shows how good it was

Elaine Dundy: The Old Man and Me -- almost gave up on this after 5 pages, but very glad I persisted - great stuff, soon to be revived by NYRB Classics

Hooray for Malamud!

you recommend nightwood then, xyzzz__? cuz I've been kind of wanting to read it for a minute...

finished The Killer Inside Me. wow. just brutal, unrelentingly unpleasant and uncomfortable to read. yeesh. which i guess means it is really well written, but def recommend having something pleasant to cleanse your worldview palate with afterwards.

Irmgard Keun: The Bad Example - beautiful little novel, very funny, from POV of 11yo girl in Cologne, Germany in last months of WW1 and early months of British occupation - in looking for an image of the dustjacket of my old 2nd-hand copy, I found an Indian library has put the whole book online at the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/badexample012496mbp

you recommend nightwood then, xyzzz__? cuz I've been kind of wanting to read it for a minute...

― Test Tube Teens from the Year 1754 (Drugs A. Money), Saturday, January 17, 2009 Bookmark

If we have the same taste in sentences, sure, why not...it actually won't take much longer than a minute, its pretty short (unless you get 'reconstructed' version on Dalkey Archive)!

Right now: Robbe-Grillet painstakingly nanoscopic descriptions - Jealousy.

All Quiet On The Western front at the moment. Before that was Charles Bukowski's Ham On Rye, up next is D.H Lawrence: either "Fox" or "Lady Chatterley's Lover." I've just begun my semester so "Fox" might be more timely since it's so short, has anyone read it/is it worth reading?

It's quite good. Lawrence is expert at describing the physicalness of eating: never forgot those passages in which one of the women cuts thick slices of buttered bread for the narrator. Lawrence's clumsy symbolism (OOOH! A FOX!) is quite charming in this context.

Yeah, 'The Fox' is a great little novella, but Alfred's right about the symbolism: Lawrence could never leave things alone, they always had to be made explicit (and not just in the sexual sense)--everything's always drawn to the reader's attention in case they're too thick to make the connections themselves.

All Quiet On The Western front: I need to reread this--wonderful book. Why is nothing else by Remarque available in English?

Reading Ismail Kadare's 'The File on H', which is surprisingly fun.

sartre the words
virginia woolf a room of ones own

John Barth the end of the road- Every ten pages or so, flashes of excellence. Dud ending, though.

almost done with kevin brockmeier's a brief history of the dead. apocalypse fiction + high-concept afterlife + antarctic survival story. it's a quick read but some of the internal logic is annoying...it focuses on the characters more than the mechanics of the world, but treats them with the distance/coldness of a hard sci-fi story.

Coraline - Neil Gaiman

Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction

Mostly 70s-80s hard boiled stuff with a couple Jim Thompsons and 50s dudes thrown in. It's good so far.

I've never actually read A Tale of Two Cities – here goes!

Also: Robert Conquest's Stalin, a masterly and compact 350 pages.

gay porn star/biographer?

i love tale of two cities.

Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond

Just started a book of Orwell essays.

I read Towers of Trebizond long ago and enjoyed it. Some day I will see what there is to like in her "big book", The Pleasure of Ruins.

Orwell's essays are uneven in quality, but it is always a pleasure just to see his mind working and his pen assembling sentences.

Never tried the essays. If they have the same level of thought that went onto '1984' I'll pass...

Finished:

Nathalie Sarraute - Childhood (ok-ish, wanna read more by her)
Boris Vian - I Spit on your Graves (its like a message board troll writing pulp, and its ok)
Friedrich Durrenmatt - The Pledge (especially awesome)

Now I'm trying one of Simenon's Maigret books..

Steven Hall - The Raw Shark Texts

some weird amalgam of The Phantom Tollbooth and House Made Of Leaves? I think it's good, but the jury is officially out until I finish it, it seems like it could go off the rails at any moment. Even though I like it, having a really hard time making progress in Freddy and Fredericka (which leads to distractions like this and the Thompson book).

If they have the same level of thought that went onto '1984' I'll pass...

??????????????????wtf????????????????????

they were pretty down on 1984 on ile back when we had a thread about it, but to be honest i think it was just the usual above-it-all posturing (along the lines of the nabokov thread where ppl were sniffing at pale fire as 'a one-joke book').

orwell's essays are pretty unimpeachable, i think. way more lucid and lively than essays tend to be nowadays.

raw shark texts is brilliant - intelligent, fast-paced, original.

"The Story of The Haunted House That Was Made of Leaves"

just finished 'The Quest for Corvo'.

just finished 'The Quest for Corvo'.

What did you think? I found it fascinating. Made me track down Symons' own autobiography, which I haven't read yet.

Yeah it was good. I must admit I found it chiefly enjoyable not for its own sake, well put together though it was, but for the information it gave me on Rolfe and his life. Having said that, most of the felicities of the book make this more interesting I guess - the sordidnes, stupidity, culpability etc in FR's life is not stinted on, and thus it's all the more racy, delectable and pathetic. It gave me the desire not to read Rolfe - alot of his writing save Hadrian 7th looks rather tedious - but to read a modern biography of him.

Indeed I'd like to know exactly what happened in Venice, and quite how much I should be disgusted by Rolfe.

they were pretty down on 1984 on ile back when we had a thread about it, but to be honest i think it was just the usual above-it-all posturing (along the lines of the nabokov thread where ppl were sniffing at pale fire as 'a one-joke book').

Finally finished IJ!

I spent much of the past month, although really enjoying it, wishing that I was done. Now I wish I were still reading it ;_;

I finished Dylan Thomas's collected stories and am about halfway through Mary McCarthy 'How I Grew' memoir. Nothing really happens but she's so awesome.

John Barth the end of the road- Every ten pages or so, flashes of excellence. Dud ending, though.

― R Baez, Tuesday, January 20, 2009 12:36 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the ending made me think that barth is just a huge fucking psycho when I read it

what would lead anyone to think that writing that shit would be a good idea

Read '1984' at 16, years before I found ile. I hated it then with a Hazlitt-like psychotic haze (that's more my type of essayist). I've yet to read Nabokov...I'll probably start with 'Luzhin Defense' as I enjoyed the film, plus board game novels are quite appealing to me (Kawabata's 'Master of Go').

I think it's just called The Defense!

And hey xyz, what Hazlitt would you recommend out of these, cause I'm interested:

An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805)
Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth and Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817)
Lectures on the English Poets (1818)
Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)
Table-Talk; or, Original Essays (1821–22; "Paris" edition, with somewhat different contents, 1825)
Liber Amoris: Or, The New Pygmalion (1823)
"On The Pleasure of Hating" (written 1823; published 1826)
The Spirit of the Age (1825)

Of those I'd say 'Lectures on the English Poets' (for its introduction that really communicates his passion for the art form, then for the essay on Milton that I remember as particularly affecting, then for the attacks on Johnson, and finally for the brewing feud with Coleridge/Wordsworth).

Leave 'Liber Amoris' after you've read a few essays, that's a one off piece about his unfulfilled romantic obsession. Too inward looking when he was always looking to communicate and reach everyone, but I must revisit that.

But actually just pick any old collection. Love 'The Fight', 'On Disagreeable People', essay on Hogarth etc. Can't find my paperback now otherwise I'd do a top ten.

Funnily enough I don't think I've read 'On the Pleasures of Hating'! Never come across a collection with that one. Anyone read Tom Paulin's biog on him too.

Current reading: Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress. Wish I started this tonight instead of starting and stopping on the train. Wow anyway...

love coleridge beefs, gotta get that. THANKS

i am reading 'a buyer's market'

i wish i had this edition:

http://hermes.andover.edu/english/jgould/dance/millyparty.jpg

Sex Damnation and Dissidence. I think that's the title. Can't even recall the author. hah. But fairly interesting to read about heresy, deviants and such during the middle ages.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5131ZCNR8YL._BO2%2C204%2C203%2C200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click%2CTopRight%2C35%2C-76_AA240_SH20_OU02_.jpg

Bleak House- after the first few depressing and unengaging pages I couldn't get past the last time now I am enjoying the heck out of it.

Duncan Wu, editor of the collected works, has written a new biography of Hazlitt. I haven't gotten hold of a copy yet.

ws hazlitt btw

just started on The Adventures of Augie March. first book of Bellow's I've ever read. I'm only a few chapters in, but so far it's a nice change of pace from the kind of stuff I've been reading lately.

Just started On the Origin of Species by one Charles Darwin in honor of the 200th anniversary of his birth.

awesome

Starting The Gutter and the Grave by Ed McBain

'The Queue' by Vladimir Sorokin

Just started On the Origin of Species by one Charles Darwin in honor of the 200th anniversary of his birth.

and the 150th anniversary of its publication!

Reading Salinger, after the thread revival here. Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beams, For Esmé... Had forgotten how much I liked him.
Also Pierre Martory's poems, translated by John Ashbery and To Ireland, I, Paul Muldoon's lectures on Irish literature.
Oh and just read The Prestige and Fugue for a Darkening Island by Christopher Priest. Both excellent: could not stop reading. Fugue like a race-fear variation on the early Ballard apocalypses.
Roxy, for Hazlitt, I'd pick Table Talkfrom that list: he's a great critic (and critic of critics), but it's the character, manners and society side of him that I love best, all the combative, compact essays on pretense, subjection, mediocrity, etc. But "On The Pleasure of Hating" would make my top ten I think. Spirit of the Age needs a bit more knowledge about the period than I have iirc (though it's got one of the tirades against William Gifford in it, which brings out the force-of-nature fighter in him).
The Paulin book, from what I remember, is okay if a bit obvious-Pauliny: Hazlitt as great Republican radical from British tradition of religious dissent, plus his prose = poetry. Lots of prac crit to support this. I may be caricaturing - it's been a long time and I'm not a fan of Paulin. I was glad H was getting some publicity, but mostly remember thinking that I'd rather be reading the man himself.

Ok, I was just wondering what I should read next by Christopher Priest and saw that he did the novelisation of Short Circuit. To eBay!

woof I've been really wanting to read Priest's A Dream of Wessex...you might check it out and tell me how you like it???

Have you read Priest's 'Inverted World'? It's brilliant, and mind-boggling in the best way.

I'm reading Malamud's Dubin's Lives and am loving it completely. I've only read (and loved) his early work (The Assistant, The Magic Barrel, The Natural) before, and this is just so different. It actually seems set in the contemporary, real world! It's strangely (or not so strangely, if you either a. know me, or b. know little about the writers) reminding me of Roth's The Ghost Writer, published the same year, also featuring a Malamud-like writer up in the Berkshires struggling to turn sentences around.

starting reading this:

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n2/n11205.jpg

and at 800+ pages it means i probably won't be seeing you guys for a while. all the best to you and yours. (i'm a slowpoke.)

(also, *Troubles* was AWESOME. highly recommend it to anyone who likes, um, fiction. or writing. or great books. you know who you are. also pretty long, but well worth the trip.)

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n25/n128637.jpg

Georges Simenon: In Case of Emergency
Osip Mandelstam: The Noise of Time

So unless anyone warns me off, finally going to read The Devil In The White City - Erik Larson, which everyone I know seems to have read. Killing in between serious reading time with Curious Men - Frank Buckland (one of those brought back from obscurity Mcsweeney's Collins Library thingys. Pretty fun so far, odd british surgeon dude musing about freaks and street peddlers in london in the mid/late 1800's)

ooooooooh i am just finishing up with that larson book! it's a great story - i like historical, factual books that a written as novel-like narrative. lots of interesting stuff about architecture, and architectural movements in the US.

I just copped a cheap copy of The Devil in the White City last weekend ($1). It's in the queue.

Finished:

Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
Ariel Dorfman - Konfidenz

Starting: Augusto Roa Bastos - I the Supreme

Thanks for the Christopher Priest suggestions, James and Drugs - library didn't have many options, went with The Affirmation, which was again quite something. I mean I'm not such a huge fan of clever narrative/structural tricks, but my gosh he can do it and head-fryingly. Time to take a break from him, but will read more.
Dunno what's next. Might start 2666 this evening. Just got Schreber's Memoirs of my Nervous Illness out of the library, so that's a possible.

Recently finished:

Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler. Only my second Tyler (the other was Ladder of Years, some time ago). I seem to remember thinking LOY good but not great - DATHR, on the other hand, is astonishingly good. One quibble: her examination of the quotidian distress of ordinary lives is a little too bleak for me to want to read her books consecutively. It probably seems an odd thing to say about a Pulitzer prize winner, but I suspect she's in some ways quite underrated.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid. Pleasant enough, an undemanding read, very clearly written. Not much more than a novella, but technically clumsy. Intellectually superficial and by no means the penetrating analysis of Muslim/Western differences some people have claimed.

Reading:

White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
Watchmen - Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons

I finished Gutter and the Grave in one sitting and am officially back in love with Hard Case Crime. Pale Fire is on my list next but I might delay for one of these.

With Hard Case Crime I particularly dig the old books they've dug up rather than the new ones (mostly)--the new ones sometimes feel a bit pastichey.

Having said that, I'm reading L. P. Hartley's 'The Hireling', so I'm obviously not manly enough to read hardboiled fiction.

With Hard Case Crime I particularly dig the old books they've dug up rather than the new ones (mostly)--the new ones sometimes feel a bit pastichey.

Yeah I'm trying to stick to the old stuff. I got a little tired of the Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction once I figured out it was mostly dudes from the 80s who were B- imitators at best.

Did you two see this one, came out last month, haven't read it yet:

http://www.hardcasecrime.com/books/bk50/cover_big.jpg

— in which the narrative apparently centres around a publishing company called 'hard case crime', only in the fifties, and the stories are all true; yes, those are the previous books in the imprint on the cover

That does sound cool: I dig that cover!

Re-reading Owls Do Cry which is a favourite I've not read in years. Still pretty much the best thing ever.

I don't know what's up next. I keep requesting things at the library and then never getting a chance to pick them up.

Did you two see this one, came out last month, haven't read it yet:

— in which the narrative apparently centres around a publishing company called 'hard case crime', only in the fifties, and the stories are all true; yes, those are the previous books in the imprint on the cover

― thomp, Thursday, January 29, 2009 11:48 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark

ha!!

V S Pritchett: Collected Stories -- holy shit, this guy was good (and so, inevitably, almost OP)

i think this year i might try and count them: so far this year i have finished seven books: the first three powells, 'covering islam', 'the savage detectives', 'dept to pleasure', 'tory england.

now i am reading 2666.

ordered the above hard case crime, needing something to scratch that kind of itch; had been reading mcbain's 'the mugger' but it is totally early, totally weak. also ordered 'king dork' by i-forget-whom.

also i am up to 'at lady molly's', which i did find in this edition:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/68/231484763_fed506c189.jpg?v=0

having finished the acceptance world. i have located up to part six, i think i will take a break when the war arrives.

have been reading a u of minnesota book also by i-forget-whom (tho a different one) called 'adorno in america', it's actually pretty good, cites asimov and 30s nielsen advertising

'a confederacy of dunces'

Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War by Dennis Perrin

Re-reading Owls Do Cry which is a favourite I've not read in years. Still pretty much the best thing ever.

I read Owls Do Cry for the first time around the new year and loved it. What else of Janet Frame's can you/anyone else recommend?

how is it xp

it would induce gnashing of teeth among ILDems.

awesome

Finished Roa Bastos a couple of days ago - as exhausting a read as I've had in a long while. Really nails the dictator in all its power and ability to suffocate just about everyone, including the reader (as far as a mere reader of a book could be made to feel suffocated, that is).

Finishing: Kobo Abe - Face of Another. Erratic, perhaps far too many digressions and spends far too long going nowhere in particular, like the researcher running desperately when trying to escape the sand bank in Woman of the Dunes which I've only watched the film of, not read.

I read Woman in the Dunes a few weeks ago. it was okay, but dude uses some seriously awkward metaphors ("between the sand and her skin, there was a layer of perspiration like melted butter" -- wtf?). couldn't decide whether or not this was done intentionally.

almost done with Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus, which is a total head trip, but also surprisingly readable. in addition to all the weird structural gimmicks, dude is just a damn good storyteller. I already checked out Impressions of Africa to read after this, along with Foucault's book about Roussel, and I think I might go back for New Impressions of Africa and How I Wrote Certain of My Books.

"I read Owls Do Cry for the first time around the new year and loved it. What else of Janet Frame's can you/anyone else recommend?"

you could just go chronologically. i love them all and they all just get weirder and wilder and more daring as you go.

Awesome, thanks!

"White Tiger" was very good, and probably the easiest-to-read Booker winner since Paddy Clarke Ha Ha. It managed the rarer-than-it-should-be feat of taking serious themes, treating them in an intelligent, consistent and enlightening way, and encapsulating them in a novel that works perfectly as pure entertainment.

Am now reading "Possession" by AS Byatt, which has been lying unread on my shelves too long. Also rereading the selected poems of Geoffrey Hill.

I agree James that the collected stories of Pritchett are very fine indeed.

For some reason Powell's Dance seems to inspire book designers. I first read the novels in a particulary beautiful set of small hardbacks, which unfortunately belonged to a library, and not to me.

"I read Woman in the Dunes a few weeks ago. it was okay, but dude uses some seriously awkward metaphors ("between the sand and her skin, there was a layer of perspiration like melted butter" -- wtf?). couldn't decide whether or not this was done intentionally."

See if I hadn't read any Abe I would want to read someone that comes up with those lines. In Face of Another there seemed to be one of those a page, hitting you in with a speed that begs you finish it in a feverish state. Man is out of control in a way I haven't quite read from many other writers. Its as if he lacks a point, or a lack of confidence to hit on a central big idea, so he ends up desperately trying to make up.

Quite impressive.

Just finished "The Explosionist" by Jenny Davidson and it was pretty awesome. A YA alternate history where Napoleon beat Wellington at Waterloo, it actually takes place in 1930s Edinburgh. Very fast-paced, though I guess there'll be a sequel because there's not as much closure at the end as I'd've liked.

I then started to read "Napoleon: A Political Life" by Steven Englund, which was good but definitely presumes you already know a lot about Napoloen's life, which I don't. So I gave up about 80 pages in; maybe I will try to find a better beginner biography of him...

Ann Quin - Passages. Really I'm just a whore for this kind of thing.
Raymond Queneau - Zazie in the Metro.

Just started: Faulkner - Light in August.

Splitting my time between Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Philip Davis's Malamud bio.

Mario Vargas Llosa - The Feast of the Goat
Gjertrud Schnackenberg - Collected Poems

Ann Quin - Passages. Really I'm just a whore for this kind of thing.
Raymond Queneau - Zazie in the Metro.

That was worrying - as my eye flicked over the above it thought it saw 'Ayn Rand'!

I really enjoyed Zazie, but it was years ago I read it. Must revisit.
Read recently...

PG Wodehouse: Laughing Gas (great!)
Gottfried Keller: A Village Romeo and Juliet (Swiss novella from 1850s, rather cool, only 1/2-way through as yet)
and more of the great Pritchett short stories

Zazie is great.

Been wanting to read Zazie for a long time...might actually get to do it this year. I loved the two Queneau books I read so far--Blue Flowers and The Skin of Dreams--and was super happy to see him mentioned so often in the first part of Savage Detectives. This year I wanna finally own Zazie and We Always Treat Women Too Well, his travesty of the sensational novel...

As for me...will be finishing up These 13 by Faulkner soon, also reading The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard, and started Henry VI part one (thinking about starting a thread about Shakespeare's problem comedies). Next up: The Inner World of Mental Illness, an anthology edited by Bert Kaplan, which apparently not only includes first person accounts of experiences w/ psychedelic drugs, and excerpts from Notes from the Underground, but also an essay from Comics Code-villain Frederic Werthram, who wrote the inflammatory "Seduction of the Innocent". His excerpt is called "A Psychosomatic Study of Myself" from a book he apparently wrote (?) called When Doctors are Patients. Good stuff, I hope.

We Always Treat Women Too Well, his travesty of the sensational novel

Is that the mental Ireland-in-1916 one? I loved that.

Currently reading Richard Rodriguez's collection of essays Days of Obligation: Arguments With My Mexican Father

xpost...I believe so, James...all of the characters are named after characters in Finnegans Wake...

Timothy Findley: Stones - rather good story collection

plus the first 4 volumes of 100 Bullets

plus the first 4 volumes of 100 Bullets

I only got the first. Let me know how the rest are?

return the first and then buy 1-4 from me!

(also tryin' to sell the 1st-5th TPBs of Transmetropolitan and maybe 1st-3rd of Starman, if anyone's interested)

Wrapped up The Origin of Species today (happy birthday, Chuck!), will start on Watchmen before the movie comes out next month.

Vol 1 of 100 Bullets is very indicative of the STYLE of the rest, though the background plot becomes waaay more complex (big historical conspiracy shenanigans), so if you liked vol1 you should keep going. I've got vols 5 and 6 coming in the post soon.

I also joined up with my old uni library last night, and went borrowing. Got heaps of stuff, and have so far read F Scott Fitzgerald's play 'The Vegetable' (surprisingly Wodehouse-y) and James Agee's novella 'The Morning Watch'.

Started on a Cornwell spree. Finished PostMortem in a few days and now reading second one, namely Body of Evidence.

Starting: Hermann Broch - The Death of Virgil. Perhaps the unsexiest 'story' ever, but from the first 10 pages this has the sentences. Has anyone here read Steiner's essay on it?

(I assume there is an essay on it, given the quote at the back)

I've wanted to read The Death of Virgil for a long time, but I think in order to really appreciate it I would need to know more about the, uh... life of Virgil.

I put down Broch's The Sleepwalkers about a month ago. Should I give it another shot?

I've only read the 1st vol of 'Sleepwalkers', but I liked it--need to get back to the others.

Read my second JMG le Clezio: 'Fever'. Based on my vast reading of 2 of his 40 books, both published before he was 30, I have to say I don't get what the fuss is about. For a guy to win the Literature Nobel, you'd think he'd need to be interested in people outside of himself.

halfway through the cities of the plains trilogy, dipping in and out of myles of myles and a coupla robin hobb fantasy books i keep coming back to.

summer at tiffany

Just re-read Experience by Martin Amis, as I found my copy of it at a friend's house. I really do think this is one of the best things he's written, while still finding his slightly huffy self-importance annoying at times.

But it's beautifully structured, very funny at times and moving as well - although as a die-hard Kingsley Amis fan I'm probably likely to find it more so than many.

experience is my favorite book of his

i lolled at it, especially the bit about "Terminator"

"Cut your hair, cut your hair"

"flawless masterpiece"

KA otm

experience is my favorite book of his

Yes.

I'm going through another one of those adolescent romantic foolish unrequited love fits again, and what do I decide to read? Quentin Compson's monologue from The Sound and The Fury. That helped! Gawd!

I can see why Faulkner was an alcoholic...I've never wanted to crawl into bed with a halfgallon of whiskey more than I did yesterday...

Agree Experience is the best MA, but I'm another who massively prefers Kingsley.

I read Owls Do Cry for the first time around the new year and loved it. What else of Janet Frame's can you/anyone else recommend?

― kate78, Friday, 6 February 2009 22:08 (1 week ago)

Her memoirs are wonderful. I am in love with everything of hers that I've read.

Oh, and right now I'm reading Isherwood's Berlin Stories.

The Bookshop!

Penelope Fitzgerald? Awesome.

just started Devil in the White City the other night

"I've wanted to read The Death of Virgil for a long time, but I think in order to really appreciate it I would need to know more about the, uh... life of Virgil."

I don't think you need to know a lot more than just a sketch of his life (get it form an intro in a Penguin paperback), and maybe read parts of the 'Aenied' and 'The Georgics'. You don't necessarily need to read 'The Odyssey' to read 'Ulysses'.

In the end all of us have to read everything, otherwise its not really good enough is it? :-)

"Read my second JMG le Clezio: 'Fever'. Based on my vast reading of 2 of his 40 books, both published before he was 30, I have to say I don't get what the fuss is about. For a guy to win the Literature Nobel, you'd think he'd need to be interested in people outside of himself."

The Nobel was given just as much for the stuff he wrote after he was 30, as much as for the stuff before, and the stuff after seems to be a lot more conscious of the world around him, its probably a bit odd that what has made it to Waterstone has been the stuff form the 60s and 70s.

Having said the above, what is the criteria for winning the Nobel? The award is very shadowy to me in a manner that the Booker, for example, isn't. Has anyone written any hard hittin' literary investigative journalism about the machinations that go on?

Frame's short story "Snowman, Snowman" wipes me out me every time I read it.

Now I'm reminded that I wanna read the p-fitz's book about her clever father and uncles.

I've had that Fitzgerald on my shelf for ages. Why I haven't read it is beyond me. Must read more Janet Frame.

The Nobel was given just as much for the stuff he wrote after he was 30, as much as for the stuff before, and the stuff after seems to be a lot more conscious of the world around him, its probably a bit odd that what has made it to Waterstone has been the stuff form the 60s and 70s.

Having said the above, what is the criteria for winning the Nobel? The award is very shadowy to me in a manner that the Booker, for example, isn't. Has anyone written any hard hittin' literary investigative journalism about the machinations that go on?

Yeah, it's weird that the only stuff available in English is the early stuff--obviously they're just reprinting old translations, and nobody's bothered turning anything he's done in the last 30 years into English. As for the Nobel, I'd always assumed it had overtones of being awarded to writers who've had great insights into the human condition, with heavy humanistic overtones... but then I don't know that I ever read that anywhere, just assumed it. Hmm.

Am now reading Ciaran Carson's translation of the old Irish epic 'The Tain'. More bloodthirsty than 'Grendel', but with more jokes.

The Bookshop was awesome. Read it, James! I've not read any more of Fitzgerald's though.

I finished Infinite Jest in the middle of last week, but I don't think I have anything to add to what I've already said about it, above.

In the meantime, I started and finished A Blistered Kind of Love, a mediocre book written by a young couple who hiked the 2,6700 mile Pacific Crest Trail in one season (a feat known as thru-hiking). It was much like every other book ever written by hikers who have thru-hiked one of the USA's Big Three trails (the PCT, the Appalachian trail and the Continental Divide trail). I just like to read this kind of thing, being a hiker who likes to hike long distances.

Now I am casting about for my next book.

Sorry, I meant I hadn't read Fitzgerald's bio of her family: I have read the Bookshop, and agree about its awesomeness.

I also meant 'Beowulf', not 'Grendel'. Me brain no works.

Now on Cory Doctorow's 'Little Brother', which is a very good YA novel/manual for electronic freedom. Suspect it would be more useful if I owned a mobile phone.

I'm starting John Burdett's Bangkok Haunts today, the third in his series about a Thai Buddhist detective. I haven't read the two previous, but I understand they're quite good, so I'm looking forward to this one.

i lolled at it, especially the bit about "Terminator"

― caek, Monday, February 16, 2009 9:01 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark

haha i was just quoting this to and what

Just read JR Ackerley's We Think the World of You. Found it more creepy than hilarious, but a good quick read anyway.

Still in the middle of The Quest For Corvo.

i have been reading book four of 2666 for what seems like forever.

You might not finish it until New Year's of the titular year.

Finished Death of Virgil. The intro(by Bernard Levin) is really missing sense when boringly calling this book a 'masterpiece'. By the design of the totally exhausting dialogue between Augustus and Virgil in the third section it definitely created an impression that Broch had enough himself, and perhaps wanted to destroy his own becoming novel into the fire. Glad he didn't, 5-15 single paragraphed pages are nice.

After finishing I thought to start on Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London but the intro is like a book about writing doesn't work for me after Broch. Maybe Thomas Bernhard's Correction (another Steiner quote in the cover), and another Austrian who HATES.

so yeah its winter!

Ethan Bronner's Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America, which is a lot better than its hysterical title would suggest.

Anton Chekhov: The Woman in the Case - collection of mostly early stories - not as good as his best, but, you know, it's Chekhov, so still pretty fucking good.

I've got a copy of that Hard Case Crime book pictured up thread but haven't read it yet. I did read his previous book very recently, the second one written under that pseudonym with the William Blake title and that was incredible, maybe my favorite HCC next to The Confession.

i'm half-way through it. it's cute but hardly compelling.

Zadie Smith: she's very, very bad

old LRB from June 2000: amazingly rich. Starts with TJ Clark on WB's Arcades, but is full of amazingly ... cherce material.

bought another volume of Paris Review interviews the other day, the blue one: doesn't look as good as the yellow one.

did reread some extracts in The Barthes Reader: Pleasure of the Text is less comprehensible than I remembered.

oh, and: reading a book on contemporary fiction called The State of the Novel: Britain & Beyond.

It appears that just as there are conversation-stoppers, there are reading-stoppers. An old and invalided friend who wants me to turn Catholic has given me some books for the purpose and out of loyalty I have promised to read them. I struggle manfully, but those books have stopped my reading cold.

which zadie smith is very, very bad, the pinefox?

(I have finally got through the anti-reader section of 2666 hurrah)

When I was in Sweden last year I was talking to some Swedish people who had read White Teeth, and talked about it having a "detached" and "alien", "inhuman", "robotic", etc voice, which was frighteningly removed from human norms, like if they were talking about i don't know Robbe-Grillet or something. I was confused by this.

here is my list at the moment of things i switch back & forth between:

-Guy Maddin, "From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings"

-Randall Maggs, "Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems" (it's a book of poems about hockey and hockey-players, don't really understand why i picked it up, good biographical form though)

- Nathanael (Nathalie Stephens), "Absence Where As: Claude Cahun & the Unopened Book" (this book is fucking amazing)

upcoming:
- K. Silem Mohammed's "Deer Head Nation"
- Bataille's "Story of the Eye"
- Joshua Harmon's "Scape"

the Guy Maddin is really something-- his prose is so purple is totally sucks you into his whole universe of absurd, homoerotic, melodramatic cinephilia. highly rec'd.

next:

-the stars at noon:denis johnson
-la confidential:james ellroy
-sharpshooter blues: dude's name escapes me tbh

is the guy maddin the diary he kept? i liked that a lot, though only read chunks of it. i wish "good bathroom reading" sounded like a better compliment.

i liked la confidential a lot when i read it a few years ago - it's got a really complex plot, and i found it required some effort to get to the end, but i also felt like the effort is rewarded.

i working through microserfs by douglas coupland and eleven kinds of loneliness by richard yates. my reading has slowed right down the last couple of months - i'm finding it super difficult to focus for more than a few minutes.

Finished The Devil In the White City finally. it was completely acceptable, but suffers from hitting its stride early and then turning into sort of a slow stomp towards the ultra-telegraphed end point. sad really, because the first 100 pages had me really raving about it to people, but i felt compelled to read most of the last 75 more out of obligation than anything else. to be fair, i knew a fair amount about H.H. Holmes before reading the book, so some of the revelatory aspects towards the end just weren't.

thinking i should probably do this 2666 thing. any stated preference between the hardcover and the odd little box set of individual volumes?

i just got through the first 100 pages of DitWC. :/ i'm into it but i'm hoping it gets better, not worse (i still the end-of-chapter cliffhangers are really silly, but also kind of charming).

maybe i enjoyed it more because i knew nothing about the subject matter? even my bf, who was born and raised in chicago, knew nothing about the world's fair. would like to go check out the remaining buildings next time we're there.

the ferris wheel - the first one ever built - blew my mind.

justin3, did you mention starting confederacy of dunces upthread, or did i imagine that?

oh i forgot about that! yes, i'm about a third through it, but i put it down somewhere and haven't picked it back up. it's pretty funny,tho.

White Teeth, thomp.

I don't think it's robotic and alien (Swedes are more likely to be that), but it is totally, incredibly, offensively abysmal, and having started badly it gradually gets worse and worse.

Couples by John Updike. Is this a bad introduction? (I guess that big RIP thread would tell me.) I don't know what I think yet, but I'm not confident I'll make it to page 500.

While I'm here, I just spotted this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51WY9E1WMWL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

and I am sure there's another Penguin Classic (or maybe Penguin Modern Classic) that uses a virtually identical photo, but I can't think what. Anyone?

I think we have placemats with that photo.

This is pretty close...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143055062.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

..but this is closer!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/413065JWC1L._SS500_.jpg

Weirdly, it's actually a painting: 'Casting of Runes' by Alan Magee

James Morrison, is that your real name? A.A. Milne wrote a great poem/song regarding that name.

http://ingeb.org/songs/jamesjam.html

my grandfather used to bounce me on his knee to it.

That poem blighted my childhood. Every teacher, or any other vaguely well-read adult, thought they were the first to notice it, and would chant it at me in front of other children. If there's one thing a young me could be sent into a rage by, it was the implication that I took great care of my mother, though I was only 3.

As an adult, I just share my name with the wanker who was lead singer of the Doors, a famous-in-Australia jazz trumpeter, and an irritating British AOR singer. This is why I don't bother googleproofing myself--they're going to have to wade through piles of these James Morrison bastards before they ever find me slaggging off some potential future employer (I hope).

oh, you're British.

most Americans have no fuckin idea what i'm talking about when i mention that poem.

sorry for bringing up painful memories.

Not British, Australian.
That's OK--painful memories are as nothing compared to the staff meeting I sat through today.

Couples was also my introduction to Updike a few years back - I'd've said it was a bit boring, but to be honest I can't actually remember very much about it. I've got Rabbit, Run on audiobook in the car just now, and it's much better.

Otherwise still reading In Europe which, easy as it is to read and much as I like it, is taking me ages.

after three months of off-and-on reading, I'm finally nearing the end of Tristram Shandy. also about halfway through Augie March at the moment. I kind of want to go ahead and finish both of them before I start anything else, just so I can savor the feeling of having a completely clean slate for a day or two. but I have a sneaking suspicion I'll soon be knee-deep in 3 or 4 books as soon as I can decide what to read. been eyeing the Flann O'Brien Complete Novels I picked up a little while back...

i'm now reading 'chump change' by dan fante (son of john fante)

Any good?

i'm not that far into it, but i don't think it's as good as his other one - 'spitting off tall buildings' - or it could be i'm realising that this subject matter has been done before, and better. i read SOTB a couple of years ago, when i was just starting to get into bukowski and other realist writers so i think i might have an idealised memory of it.

i do have a broadside poem (letterpress printed) by dan fante that is very good.

hm, I don't think it was the Findley book I was thinking of! But if you can't come up with anything else then I'm probably just stupid. I was initially sure it was a Virginia Woolf (either The Waves or To the Lighthouse), but it seems that I was wrong.

Currently reading: lots and lots of Nietzsche, with some concern that I'm about halfway into the wordcount of this project and haven't actually reached anything I put in my proposal yet.

that's what happens with nietzsche.

mm, i kind of want to re-read The Waves soon. what an astounding piece of writing.

Finished: Jacques Roubaud - The Great Fire of London. Another addition to the unfinished novel mini-genre, I suppose...

Ben Marcus - Notable American Women. Really good once I slowed down a bit. Will enjoy re-reading this LOADS!!

Finishing: Thomas Bernhard - Correction. A really awesome performance so far. I can tell I'll finish most of his books by the end of the year. Will be reading Jelinek sometime soon, as well.

Lionel Trilling - Matthew Arnold

xyzzzz have you read The Age of Wire and String? how does Notable American Women compare?

'To the Lighthouse' used to have this cover--is this the one you're thinking of?
http://image.kyobobook.co.kr/images/book/large/411/l9780141183411.jpg

notable american women is fantastic

like, if i felt i knew enough to weigh in on such a topic i would totally be claiming it as the best american novel of the past decade type fantastic

ha thomp I think it was a post of yours that reminded me to get this. Don't think I've read more than 10 novels published in the last decade. I'm stuck in the past.

Bernard - haven't read AOWAT. We should book swap but my copy of NAW is from the library.

! that's the one. Not quite as similar as my memory had it, but at least it's real.

Couples really isn't going well with piles of academic work (despite having read lots of Nietzsche before I'm just now reading Zarathustra, and wondering why it's so BAD. Kind of. I think he writes brilliantly elsewhere, and of course it's full of ideas, but I'm very much disliking the whole prose style), I may give up and head for something a little lighter. Maybe Pinefox's beloved White Teeth.

Madame Bovary. Since I've never read it.

You're in luck!

was going to pick confederacy of dunces back up but i can't find it!

opinions on eudora welty?

i think i'm going to read confederacy of dunces next.

COD is great. i have decided to give my brain a rest and am reading some serial killer pulp something called "HeartSick" by Chelsea Cain, and im here to shame myself by saying that it is lots of fun, despite being full on crap in a literary sense.

nothing wrong w/enjoying crap pulp! i regard it as the literary equivalent to watching a shitty yet enjoyable action movie

m. justen, it's a matter to be resolved between you and the book. Crap is in the eye of the beholder.

Finished: Henry Green - Loving.

After watching Arsenal fire blanks on Match of the Day I will start reading Celine's Death on Credit.

"opinions on eudora welty?"

you know what's funny? i live and breathe stuff like eudora and ALL my favorite fiction writers are u.s. and u.k. 20th century women (pretty much), and i love flannery o'connor and carson mccullers and katherine anne porter and a zillion others before and after, but i don't love eudora welty. go figure. i'm not a big grace paley fan either. or a big kay boyle fan. i mean, i've read most of welty's stories and they just never did much for me. not like faulkner and barry hannah and larry brown or even peter taylor have. (speaking of the south, with those folks. i'd even recommend breece d'j pancake's slim volume of stories before i recommended eudora. or one of chris offutt's collections. not that she couldn't write! she was a fine writer. it's just that her stories don't linger in my mind. honestly, i'd much rather read james purdy. or shirley jackson! or patricia highsmith. all writers who can blow me away with one sentence in one story in a way that eudora never could. my fave welty might actually be her autobio: one writer's beginnings. or maybe her collection of crit and essays: the eye of the story. and even that isn't the mindblower that flannery o'connor's non-fiction collection Mystery & Manners is.)

you know whose southern short stories i really dig?? shirley ann grau! i know, right? nobody reads her anymore. but she was cool. (and she is better in short form too, like welty.)

scott thx for all the excited name dropping you do, it makes me excitedly chase new things down.

I just finished Bangkok Haunts and was pretty much bored by it, am now starting Denis Johnson's The Stars At Noon and re-reading Watchmen in anticipation of the moviefilm.

re-reading Watchmen in anticipation of the moviefilm.

feelin this

honestly, i'd much rather read james purdy.

His stuff is some fucked up shit.

Hmmm--just bought me the collected stories of Welty, having been on a great US women short story writers binge (highlights so far were Flannery O'Connor and Katherine Anne Porter), so interested to see how they go - BUT I really did dig Grace Paley, so that's a start.

The O'Connor Revival has arrived, thanks to Brad Gooch's new biography.

(i.e. the bio's gotten excellent reviews)

thanks, scott - i'm huge mccullers fan, and would like to read more stuff in that vein. i picked up welty's collected stories at the book store and read a few pages, after reading that alice munro was a fan.

i found confederacy of dunces! so i shall pick up where i left off with it.

The O'Connor Revival has arrived

damn just when i thought i was ahead of the curve

Haha, I wanted to be the first to mention that new FO'C bio.

Not that I've read it, I just wanted to be the first to mention it.

new Flannery O' Connor bio????? I need this!

did I mention I was reading a David Lynch bio called Beautiful Dark? its decent but fall short of essential...

What about the new Wittgenstein family bio by one of the Waugh family? That looks pretty interesting.

Read a couple of good reviews of that new O'Connor bio by Brad Gooch. I usually try to stick to short stories, because the world can go to hell when I'm caught up in a novel, but McCullers' Collected Stories grabbed me and took off. It includes Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Member of the Wedding (which is a fine movie too; I'll have to read her stage version) This collection is from '89 I think, when some of her major stuff first came out in trade size paperback, with amazing portraits by Cartier-Bresson. Then: The Heart Is A Loney Hunter OMG (not sure how much to say about these, might run into spoilers)She really really pushed her luck, talent and early skill going on that long (Heart is prob her longest by far), but it's pretty remarkable. I dig the way the "allegorical" element seems to dissolve, though it's assimilated, fuel for the characters' hopes, dreams, delusions,striving, jiving and other pastimes ("dramatic stasis"? It works well enough to keep me going along toward the end, like it does [most of] the characters)

(The Waugh family is pretty out there too, though maybe not as far as Wittgenstein's, judging by him.)

wow, that wittgenstein bio sounds crazy with a capital K! tons for suicide lovers to dig.

and, meanwhile, one of my all time fave short story writers, joy williams, reviews the new o'connor bio in today's nyt book review. AND a good article about the coming cheever reappraisal courtesy of fancy new editions of his prose and the new blake bailey bio coming out. (loved bailey's yates bio. you'd think he would have overdosed on suburban gloom and booze by now.)

i still haven't read the big fat 1978 cheever story collection that i have and i've been meaning to for a while. i guess i'll ride the coming wave. i mean, i've read cheever short stories before, but never all 60 or whatever that are in that collection. (i doubt i'll buy the fancy schmancy collection coming out. and, in any case, paperbacks of most of his stuff is easy to find for cheap.)

flannery wasn't a carson mccullers fan. easy to see why. too sentimental for her. (i still want to get the o'connor letters collection. never read that.)

i really want the O'connor letters collection too...its called The Habit of Being, I believe, and I've read some of it (it being included in the Modern Library volume on her)...

This bio sounds awesome!

I'm reading Cowley's "Exile's Return". Good, not great. When I read about giants like Pound or Joyce, there's always some ambiguous line about the 'group of artists' they hung out with. Malcolm is just one in a crowd, a little boring.

Youth in Revolt, PD James -- it's funny, but does it really have to be 500 pages?

henry green, "living"
gilbert sorrentino, "aberration of starlight"
gogol, "short stories"

L.A. Confidential

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. A marvelous coincidence that I read Vargas Llosa's Feast of the Goat a few weeks ago.

hoos are you reading that ellroy trilogy in order, i.e. the big nowhere/l.a. con/white jazz?

the forever war - joe haldeman
black mass: the true story of an unholy alliance between the fbi and the irish mob
the midnight man - loren d estleman

pondering 3 purchases:

gomorrah (the book which the recent film of the same name was adapted from)
the steel remains - richard k morgan
drood - dan simmons

hoos are you reading that ellroy trilogy in order, i.e. the big nowhere/l.a. con/white jazz?

Nah I tried reading White Jazz first kinda straight up and I wasn't quite ready for it yet, so I thought I'd backtrack to L.A. Confidential. Would you recommend doing it in order?

O'Conner and McCullers are very different; O'Conner may well be the greater artist, but one of those go-deep-by-drilling-narrow geniuses, and likes to stick pins in many (not all) of her characters, in the name of JESUS of course. The big fat Cheever short story collection seemed to hold up pretty well when I read it, but that was in the 80s; started reading the big fat Welty short story collection and so far agreeing with Scott, alas (but haven't gotten very far, though even teenage McCullers left this apparently mid/late-20s Welty in the dust)

i would do it in order personally, since you get a notion of some of the characters better and can get better attuned to ellroy's evolving writing. 'the big nowhere' is pretty straightforward and nicely fucked up and has a shocking psycho-kinda twist in the middle w/a main character, l.a. confidential is great (and weird if you saw the movie first), and i would say 'white jazz' is the best of the three because it's a really unsentimental and nasty novel, and a (haw) jazzed-up style that you can only get used to if you've eased into the series via the first two.

Recently and currently:

Ruth Park: Missus - the most Irish novel about Australia ever--written by a New Zealander
Henry Lawson: Short Stories
Alan Lightman: Ghost - gentle but fascinating
100 Bullets vols 5 and 6
Timothy Findley: Last of the Crazy People -- surprisingly excellent first novel
Jo Walton: Farthing -- country house murder shenanigans in alternative history fascist England
Hans Fallada: Alone in Berlin (aka Every Man Dies Alone) - fucking awesome

the strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde

VERY good. expected sth rather dull.

STuff I read in February: four-fifths of 2666, and three books about computers, sort of. ('masters of doom', 'smartbomb: the quest for blah blah blah videogames blah', 'the soul of a new machine'.) (only the last of these is any good, although masters of doom is an interesting couple hours if you are into the source material.) (soul of ... also features a main character with MY NAME, which is really cool, it's a bit like reading one of those books you get for five year olds with their name in, but instead of talking to mermaids i'm doing, like, management bullshit)

so far in march: 'see them die', by ed mcbain (probably top five of the precinct ones i've read), 'at lady molly's.'

the strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde

VERY good. expected sth rather dull.

I'm glad your expectations were exceeded. This is a fantastic little book. Stevenson is such a hero of mine.

Finished the Celine. A 'fab' trip!

Started on Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet (the Serpent's Tail version, not the Penguin with more pages and the awesome cover, as my library made the wrong choice) and Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman.

Jekyll and Hyde is great. Because of the way it's often packaged for film, the impression is given that it narrates one man's struggle with his evil half. What's good about the story, is the way the revelation is handled, in a series of narrative boxes, so that at first it just reads like a straightish mystery story with some detection (who is the strange man who haunts Jekyll's life?) and only gradually do the horrific pieces fall in place.

Particularly interesting reading it at the same time as the letters to his father (and mother and friends) which are full of anguish at their split over RL Stevenson's very difficult loss of belief. Stevenson's godless compulsions must have felt very much like Jekyll's need for liberation from himself at times.

I never realized it was Stevenson who wrote the book! Silly of me, I know. I also love the cover.I think what deterred me from reading the book was the way it has been... raped in films. Now when I read it, it feels much more psychological, a battle with oneself/evil side. It's rather funny that I love reading these Gothic books which are full of Christian references and also have the (pre?)Freudian aspect. I both loathe Freud and Christianity but still I am fascinated by the duality of man, the connection between good 'n' evil. :-)

Forgot to pass on this amazing quote from an otherwise bland book:

"The gangsters admired Dorothy Day because she could drink them under the table; but they felt more at home with Eugene O'Neill" Exile's Return.

Great.

Finished reading "Kafka Was the Rage" by Broyard. A sentimental look at a time and place I'm prone to be sentimental about, so I looked past a few bumps.

Bout' to start a literary bio, three new ones sitting on my desk now: O'Connor's, Cheever's, and Barthelme's. Conflicted.

I both loathe Freud and Christianity but still I am fascinated by the duality of man, the connection between good 'n' evil. :-)

I'm no Freudian either, but his influence on literature has been (mostly) good--see the great Viennese writer who were inspired by his work, for example.

After far too long a period of moving around, books in boxes, and almost going mad with dieting only on the sketchy take-away food of the internet, I'm finally getting some bookshelves for my new flat today. Longing to sink into something sustained and slightly heavy, Englishy (ahem), and reassuring in its heft - am thinking maybe the Claudius novels by Graves, or maybe even, God help me, something by one of the Powys brothers (Welshy). Maybe Sheridan Le Fanu novels? (Irishy)

Any other suggestions?

read this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51HGN09FN9L._SS500_.jpg

although, again, i can't recommend this book enough. it's got heft, englishness, irishness, and it's brilliant. and funny too! (and it's the first book in a loose trilogy if you really wanna go crazy)

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n25/n128637.jpg

finally dipping my toes into the murakami pond - is "A Wild Sheep Chase" a decent jump off point?

jeff chiang
marilynne robinson
bolano
j.c. powys

finally dipping my toes into the murakami pond - is "A Wild Sheep Chase" a decent jump off point?
Not entirely sure; I started there, enjoyed it, and never felt any great urge to look at his other work. I did end up reading "Kafka on the Shore" later though, which I liked rather less.

I've given up on a few random recent Norwegian books I from the library, and am back on "Middlemarch" after a detour to read Forster's "Howards End", Woolf's essay "A Room of Ones Own" and Coetzee's second memoir "Youth".
For bedtime reading I'm dipping into the gargantuan Everyman's Library collection of essays by Orwell, Peter Altenberg's "Telegrams of the Soul" (translated by Peter Wortsman) and Olav H Hauge's collected poems.

still reading 'a confederacy of dunces' (it's my on-the-train book) and just started egger's 'and you shall know our velocity' which has made me laugh out loud a few times already.

read this:

― scott seward, Saturday, 7 March 2009 15:34 (Yesterday)

Cheers, Scott. I'm going to take you up on both of those I think - just what the doctor ordered.

Finished reading "Kafka Was the Rage" by Broyard. A sentimental look at a time and place I'm prone to be sentimental about, so I looked past a few bumps.

just finished this myself. got from the library after reading his daughter's memoir "One Drop" by Bliss Broyard, which I thought was outstanding a brilliant examination of mixed-race in america. "Kafka" started off stong & compelling I thought but ultimately felt slight. by the time it ended I was thinking "where is he going with this?"not so much an unfinished book as a fragment. in case you read Bliss I don't want to spoil other than to say knowing what learn from her, dad seems disingenuous. in the extreme.

Yeah, I felt similarly about "Kafka," which I read this summer. I liked much better his reminiscences of what it felt like to be young and virile and chasing women than his (seemingly central) accounts of living amongst the artists and intellectuals.

One quote has stayed with me: “When I read a book, I always keep one eye on the world, like someone watching a clock.”

Will have to check out "One Drop", which I hadn't heard of. It was difficult to read "Kafka" without the race issue bobbing up in the background. (Also difficult was to separate Broyard's Broyard from Roth's Coleman Silk.)

About to finish Persuasion and started Randall Woods' LBJ: Architect of American Ambition.

dow, I think there's a McCullers thread here you might be interested in.

As for me: ON BEAUTY and CLOUD ATLAS. Catching up with mid-decade epics I guess. Oh, and still reading an LRB from June 2000.

Just how much Zadie Smith are you planning to read, pinefox? Wouldn't you rather read someone you like?

I was a huge stan of Kafka was the Rage as a teenager.

I totally dug that book when I read it (maybe freshman or sophomore in college?)

Right now reading Martha Rosler: Decoys and Disruptions. Good stuff.

i'm not reading anything right now! i did read the new york times today. which begs the question: who among you is gonna read *The Kindly Ones*? it's the big happening book of the day! you are either on the bus or you aren't. i have no desire to read it. if it were a 1000 page novel about a little old lady who moves into a rooming house WHERE NOTHING MUCH HAPPENS, i would be there with bells on. but my kind of books are rarely all that zeitgeist-y.

fact is, all my books are in boxes. cuz we are moving. and i am opening a tiny used record & book store in western mass soon, so, i probably won't have much time for reading for awhile. i'll let you guys know when it's open (if you happen to live near enough to visit). mention ilb and get, um, 10% off? is that a good deal? in any case, i'll be selling books cheap.

hey congrats on the move! and the store!!

can't say I want to read The Kindly Ones but this review makes it sound like more than pissing-on-the holocaust-from-a-great-height/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22452

congratz on the store, scott! you are living my dream! :) :) :)

Felt a bit all over the place with reading recently, can't settle. Started The Savage Detectives, was enjoying it, but put it down and not compelled to pick it up. Enjoying a trip to the Seventeenth Century - Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, and Hobbes's Leviathan. Reading through Peter Porter's collected poems - could swear I used to really enjoy him, but finding him a bit flat right now.
Have taken most pleasure from starting JH Carr's A Month in the Country.
I'm a little curious about The Kindly Ones. Odd to see an author who aligns himself with all the Bs (Beckett, Blanchot, Bataille, not so sure about Bernhard, maybe only French Bs) getting solid hype from the big-house publicity machine. That said, I most likely won't read it. I'm not great with long novels.

JL Carr that is. You'd think I could do him courtesy of getting his name right. Introduction by Michael Holroyd also makes me want to get hold of Carr's chapbooks and maps

joan didion - after henry
jeffrey steingarten - the man who ate everything
elaine dundy - the dud avocado

I suspect Scott will stop reading books altogether: that's what being surrounded by a product you love does to you. Hyperbole, I know, but I'm disinterested in jewellery as a result of being around it on a daily basis. Yes, I know, not a comparison. :-)

I've worked in a bookstore off and on for a while now, and I read more when I'm working at the store. But the books I read differ: newer stuff when bookselling (mostly arc's), when not a bookseller, I reread a lot of my favorites.

(thanx Pinefox, I'd seen the McCullers thread, but don't know how much more I have to say about here--about to read Reflections In A Golden Eye, which will exhaust my library's stash)(anybody read her non-standards,like Clock Without Hands, or the memoir she was working on at the end?) Stevie, speaking of your non-Freudian, non-Christian taste for Gothic, you might want to check Maureen Corrigan's Don't Bother Me, I'm Reading. As a Boomer, post-Vatican II Catholic and feminist, she's got a lot of tips on and relish for some pretty twisted stuff, which she presents very vividly.

that's great scott, good luck

thanks, you guys! it's my great mid-life adventure. okay, i'm 40, so maybe these days that's young to have a mid-life adventure. and, um, i read somewhere about the economy slowing down a tad...

but timing aside, my scheme is to try and make my rent and expenses by selling pricey records on ebay (my rent is pretty cheap) and keeping the store full of cheap cool stuff for browsers.

also, i'm gonna try and get some freelance work again for extra money. i stopped writing for money here cuz my custodian job + 2 children just left me with no energy whatsover. i'll be writing for Decibel Magazine again! i'm excited about that. i was bummed to leave their fold last year.

we are moving to Greenfield, which is 20 minutes from Northhampton and close to Amherst and Vermont. that's where my store will be. by the way, there is an EXCELLENT used book store off of main street in Greenfield. one huge floor and a full basement. and everything priced cheap. i bought the crazy 4 book tetralogy by robert nichols there that new directions put out. cheap too for all four paperbacks. they have a very cool sci-fi paperback section. anyone ever read the nichols books? *Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai* is the title of the whole series. kinda hippie. all about this mythical asian land and the westerners who go there to document the lives of the natives. anyway, cool bookstore! if you are ever in that neck of the woods.

also near me is the whately antiquarian book store in south deerfield which is this HUUUUUUUUGE crazy building filled with books and catacomb-like basements and just a whole lot of fun to browse around if you dig old books. people sell stuff on consignment there, so they are always filling their shelves with oddities. you could spend a day or two in there easy. more for the fan of the oddball and the old.

just about to finish up denis johnson's tree of smoke. thoroughly enjoying it, though after a nice long buildup, it seems to be fizzling a bit in the last 100 pages. we'll see.

Skot, are you gonna be anywhere near Coley etc--?

I skimmed through the Bliss Broyard book, Mark, but having already read the Skip Gates article I was a little disappointed.

i am going to read the kindly ones, although by this i mean the anthony powell novel.

i found a library slip for a book called 'the big fix' by roger simon. i think i read this in february, but could not remember doing so by the end of the month.

Best of luck to Scott in his adventure. I'm sure this book store of yours will be all pilgrimage like to plenty of ILB people in years to come!

That NYB article makes me want to read Blanchot. I tried to get my library to buy a copy of Death Sentence, but no, they wouldn't do it *sigh* The obituary in the Guardian makes him out to be a really fascinating figure. xp

Good luck, Scott!

Can someone recommend the next Walker Percy novel I should read after The Moviegoer? I've got Love in the Ruins and The Last Gentleman in my library queue.

I have Clock Without Hands, Dow.

Scott S's store is in a nice part of the world! I used to love going to Northampton, MA.

I'm not really planning on reading more ZS after this one, but that's not because I don't like it. It's actually astoundingly good compared to her first novel - astoundingly, miraculously, because 5 years (2000 / 2005), or even more, if you want to push WT back into the 1990s, doesn't seem like enough time to have evolved so much. But she really did.

Then again I'm still only less than 50% through it, having had to stop for other things; quite possibly it goes downhill.

I really want to read WATCHMEN again. It's become a perpetually deferred treat.

The Last Gentleman, Alfred. That and The Moviegoer are the stone classics, all the other novels have some problems. Maybe after those two read some of the non-fiction, like the linguistics essays about Helen Keller. Then maybe the bio Pilgrims In The Ruins.

Robert Walser The Assistant (finally).

Finished Franzen's Strong Motion, out of curiosity, as I've been enjoying his essays. Still unable to shake the DFW thing, so am re-reading Consider the Lobster, while anxiously waiting for my copy of TNY to arrive in the post, any day now, but who knows how long it takes to get to Melbourne. Also looking at John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, as well as Schopenhauer's Essays and Aphorisms, which are a hoot "A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten."

I bought some good (i hope) books last weekend;
Inimitable Jeeves - Wodehouse
A time of gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermour
Les Grand Meaulnes - Alain-Fournier
The Boat - Nam Le

think i'll read the wodehouse first. Haven't read anything funny in a good while

If you need light-hearted comedy, avoid 'The Boat'. It's a great collection, but the opening story has pretty gut-churning My Lai massacre descriptions.

Recently or now read(ing)....

John Bowen: The Birdcage
Clare Wigfall: The Loudest Sound and Nothing
Eli Gottlieb: Now You See Him (a weirdly typeset book, full of kerning errors, so that every page has a least half-a-dozen sentences with wei rd gap s li ke thi s. Ve ry distr acting.

xyzzzz__, could you to persuade the library to order a copy of The Station Hill Blanchot Reader? A lot (most?) of his fiction is in there, including Death Sentence, along with a bit of criticism (The other Blanchot Reader, the one from Blackwell, is better for the criticism, which I like better than the fiction, tbh, tho' Death Sentence is intense) and it's pretty reasonably priced for a comprehensive selection (this might be bit skewed in my memory - there were a lot of remainder copies on Amazon uk when I bought it).
(Oh, and, yes, congratulations & good luck Scott! I may never be in your part of America, but if I am, will be sure to smash my baggage allowance via your shop)

I will get them on it.

After all I got them to buy a Jean Ricardou book, no reason why they couldn't get me some Blanchot.

read colson whitehead's "sag harbor" over the weekend and started "a confederacy of dunces". i'm still halfway through "the devil in the white city"...i enjoy it when i'm reading it but it never entices me to pick it up.

how is the whitehead? and how come you have a copy already, huh?

Thansk for the recommendation, James. The Last Gentleman is a drag so far, though: lots – too much – dialogue.

Looking forward to reading Scott's recommendations, but until that moment, I've just picked up 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare by James Shapiro. Bonus points for astutely imaginative reconstructions of the Elizabethan world, and also for practical interpretations of the plays according to context.

Minus points for rather odd lapses, such as when he puts down lapses in stage directions to Shakespeare's psychology rather than transcribers or setters. Also, I never feel ENTIRELY comfortable with these sorts of imaginative reconstructions, good though this one undoubtedly is, preferring lotsa footnotes and scholarly structures. My bad I think, this.

Also picked up Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell again. It was hanging round my grilfiend's (as I had bought it for her). Very funny with the feeling of melancholy that characterizes his early comic stuff, pretty much of all of which is brilliant.

Just starting Underworld by DeLillo.

Collected Essays by Graham Greene. Wasn't expecting it to be almost all book reviews, which makes it a bit monotonous at times. And he's sort of almost too reasonable at times - so many essays go "well, this guy has this and this and this going for him, but he is really bad at this" (tendency to end on the negative rather than the positive, too.) But I'm still having a good time, hard to dislike Greene.

bouncing back and forth between The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 and Paddy Whacked - T.J. English, about irish gangsters. Getting my true crime itch scratched i guess.

Anthony Powell's pre-Dance comic novels are wonderful.
I love the Graham Greene essay on Beatrix Potter (and if you can find 'Mornings in the Dark', his collected film writing, it's great too).

Reading/read...

Andre Malraux: The Way of the Kings
Colette: The Pure and the Impure

how is the whitehead? and how come you have a copy already, huh?

― thomp, Wednesday, March 11, 2009 12:18 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i'm connected, yo. :D

i revived this thread for it, but i really enjoyed it. i think it's very direct and earnest for him, but i've only read 'the intuitionist' so maybe it's not as atypical as i think.

"Just starting Underworld by DeLillo."

fantastic book! middle dragged a bit but well worth reading. i loved it.

finished dr jekyll and mr hyde which i enjoyed immensely. ollala (?) was a good story as well. now off to read another cornwell book. the body farm.

John Stewart Collis: The Worm Forgives the Plough

I seem to have lost my copy of L.A. Confidential.

In my grief I wandered into the Half Price and picked up Lethem's Amnesia Moon & something called Thinks... by David Lodge.

JM, what is that?

Alimosina: Collis worked on an English farm during WW2, and it's a collection of his observations on nature, the land, etc--actually 2 books together, the second of which is especially good at communicating the amazing-ness of everyday natural life viewed with a fresh eye.

riding toward everywhere by william t. vollman

Finally finished Madame Bovary and appreciated it much more than I thought I would. It seemed ridiculously modern and written much later than it was, and although much of that may have been the effect of the translator it's still hard to believe it was written so long before Freud, etc.

Just started The Rape of Nanking. The preface alone has me utterly depressed. Should be fun!

I'm also reading an Agatha Christie (the ABC Murders) which I read back in high school but whose plot & solution I've forgotten so it doesn't feel like a re-read.

I'm a little giddy.

Just got a copy of Oscar Casares's first novel Amigoland. His short story collection, Brownsville, is one of the best collections I've ever read. As Ice Cube would say, today was a good day.

Greene's Collected Essays incl re-evaluating his early discoveries of books, and excavating/salvaging works from deep in British literature (obscure to me anyway)going with passing references to world going down tubes in 30s, so urge to rescue/counterbalance seems subtly evident, but yeah, he doesn't hesitate to go negative, and my copy indicates that Beatrix Potter was not amused by his celebration. Pinefox, have you read yr copy of Clock Without Hands, and if so, what did you think?

I can't remember if it's Collected Essays or Mornings in the Dark that has Greene's great movie review where he basically accused Shirley Temple's movie producers as using her as paedophile-bait, and got sued for it.

I just finished Sam Taylor's 'The Island at the End of the World', and while I can't really recommend it to anyone, I really want someone else to read it so I can have someone to moan to about the massive multiple gaping logic holes in it. Nice cover, though:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0571240518.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Just read Gabriel Josipovici's essay review on Volume 1 of Beckett's letters. Josipovici can go repetitively fuck heself with a long eclectic thing of doubtful provenance,(nothing to do with the review - just general dislike) but the letters sound great.

In the TLS I meant to say.

Katherine Mansfield: Letters & Journals -- a very interesting selection, but not very helpfully edited (obscure references and persons remain unexplained throughout)

James, thanks for the advice! Lack of movie related writing was my main disappointment wrt this anthology. Did end up enjoying it immensley though, especially the stuff about popes and priests (don't often read actively catholic writers, I guess, was nice to get a small window into that world.)

going with passing references to world going down tubes in 30s

Haha yeah dow, that next to last essay written in 1940 where he talks about how people are saying that man gets used to anything and he's like "well, NO, we just get used to THIS stuff because we knew it was gonna happen anyway, it was inevitable"? Wow. I'd love to know where - if at all - that was actually published, not exactly a call to buy war bonds.

Now reading Yukio Mishima's Temple Of The Golden Pavillion

Perhaps the time has come to make the seasonal change of digs for this thread. You know, spring cleaning and all that jazz. Since I screwed up the thread title last time with a fistful of those &apos doohickeys, maybe someone else might care to do the honors this time. Øystein? Jaq? Scott?

Done: Spring in the NORTH, Autumn in the SOUTH, it matters not, what are you READING?