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

What it says, continuing from Winter Is Here and the Time Is Right For A "Whatchoo Reading?" Thread

Robert W Chambers: The King in Yellow - mental, mostly in a good way
Peter Handke: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams - brief, sad, unsentimental memoir of his suicide mother

last May I took a class where we had to read Ulysses in a month. of course I bragged a lot about having read Ulysses, but my sacred shame is that because I was busy working on the final assignment for the class, I never actually read the last chapter. it's haunted me for 9 months now, so I decided to rectify the situation.

bliss broyard - one drop
anatole broyard - kafka was the rage

daughter bliss wrote her memoir after discovering that her late father -- NY times book reviewer anatole -- passed as white his whole life. one drop is a compelling examination of mixed race, though the author get bogged down in historical research in the book's long middle section her exploration of her family's twisted roots in new orleans is fascinating & very well written in a non-show-off-y kinda way. dad's uncompleted & posthumously published memoir is a mixed bag, starts off strong and then meanders into self-mythology. apparently reading lots of books could get you laid in NYC circa 1948. huh.

katheryn stockett - the help

not my usual fare but this is a great mainstream/commercial novel about african-american domestic servants in the south ("the help") and the white children they basically raise. set in 1964, told in three voices who are indelible characters. a page-turner I read in 1 day.

richard price - lush life

reads like a really good crime novel. though as sociology or satire I though it was a bit superficial (I don't like tom wolfe's fiction either) hate to say this confirms that I prefer Price's early (pre-Clockers) books: the wanderers, bloodbrothers ladies man, the breaks.

jf powers - morte d'urban

third of the way through and liking quite a bit despite the flood of lapsed-catholic neuroses it has unleashed.

"I prefer Price's early (pre-Clockers) books: the wanderers, bloodbrothers ladies man, the breaks."

this is me exactly. nothing ever hit me as hard as the breaks or ladies man. all of those first four books rule. i had the same problem with madison smart bell once he started writing about haiti and stuff. i really dug his early more autobio type stuff a bunch.

The Mays of Ventadorn, W.S. Merwin. I am the person this book was written for. Well, me and a few thousand others who live in the same cave. It features troubadours who do not resemble cartoon characters, a pinch of Ezra Pound, and some elaborate self-deflation. It's short.

I recently checked out a bio of Thomas Huxley from the library. It is glowering at me, but I haven't started it, yet.

Doing a lot of driving just now, and I'm right in the middle of Updike's Rabbit quadrilogy (Or is it quintilogy? My audio subscription is offering me a fifth book which I didn't know existed). It's an absolute joy.

Otherwise still plodding through In Europe by Geert Mak. Like I've said before, it's really good, but I started it on Christmas Day and I've still got a way to go

I assume the fifth book is 'Rabbit Remembered'? It's a short story collection with a novella of that title about Rabbit's family after he'd dead.

Reading Turgenev: Home of the Gentry. On a real Turgenev binge recently. He's wonderful.

Have just started Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage From Home, and am definitely really enjoying it so far. I have to review a new bio of Rosenfeld for the TLS so I'll read his collection of short stories Alpha and Omega after this. I've not read him before--has anyone here? I should probably check out the non-fiction too.

That's it xp, I'll check it out later. Seeing Ulysses up there^ made me wonder to what extent Updike is borrowing some of its tricks. It seems deliberate sometimes, e.g. Harry being a typesetter and imagining his experiences in print. But the stream-of-thoughts/memories is so much better in Updike - he is so effortless and natural, whereUlysses seems like just an exercise.

Finished: Elias Canetti - Auto-da-Fe: this IS genuinely crazy at points.

Finishing: Alejo Carpentier - Reasons of State: its a Latin American 'dictator' novel. But its not just politics, there is plenty about music on here (and checking out his bio I see he was a musicologist)

I read Carpentier's El Reino en este mundo for university a couple of years back and seem to remember enjoying it.

Currently nearing the end of Underworld by DeLillo and have started leafing through Martín Fierro. Which I'm enjoying but the archaic gauch-argentinian Spanish is a bit hard at times.

I am reading David Harvey and Kristi Maxwell.

i'm close to finishing confederacy of dunces - it's funny but just not all that compelling, which is why it's taking me AGES - and am really starting to get into eggers' 'and you shall know our velocity' (which is has real lol - actual lol - moments).

Joan Didion: Play it as it Lays -- well-written on a sentence-by-sentence level, but the central character is so passive that you don't really care much what happens. But it's very short, so no big commitment required.

pynchon - v
updike - in the beauty of lillies

both are sortof a slog right now, tbh

Alan Moore and various artists: AMERICA'S BEST COMICS - a primer

Recently: Possession A S Byatt; The Reader Bernhard Schlink; Salmon Fishing in the Yemen Paul Torday. I read the Torday not entirely of my own volition: it is quite astonishingly awful.

Now: "The Savage Detectives". I picked this up purely out of curiosity about the fuss being made of Bolano, fairly certain I wouldn't like it. I somehow got it into my head that he was going to be like Pynchon, a writer I don't care for at all. But so far (about 50 pages in) I've found it fresh and enjoyable. Whether my enthusiasm will survive 500+ pages is a different matter.

Memoirs of a Public Baby, by Philip O'Connor.

It's the story of his mostly parentless childhood and youth. I had no idea who O'Connor was, but the book cost a dollar and was jacketed in blurbs from Dorothy Parker, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender and Anthony Powell.

It's an effort. The writing is very dense and Lawrencian. Everyone is physically hideous and everyone is morally corrupt. School is described in sentences like "Culture was done in a cryptic brio; spread like butter on stones, or tombstones on child corpses." To go on with much of this you have to know the center out of which he is writing, but there is no center, except loyalty to the impulse of the moment and hatred of anyone who would deny it. I don't know of another book not by Anais Nin in which the infantile ego is given its apologia at such detailed length. It's no surprise to learn that he lived the life of an alcoholized Peter Pan, moving from one woman to another and fathering various children whom he mostly ignored. (Or as O'Connor writes, "One has a natural right to everything that exists: one's share, in gifts or in earnings, is absolutely arbitrarily determined by economic conditions.")

Still, he was the man who hid behind the door and said boo to T. S. Eliot, which will endure.

Andrew Barrow wrote a dual biography of Quentin Crisp and Philip O'Connor.

But what of the title's Philip, and how did he link in with Quentin Crisp? Barrow describes Philip O'Connor as an alcoholic genius. The alcoholic bit I can readily believe but I shall have to take Barrow's word concerning the genius. O'Connor comes across as being unspeakably horrible - even for a genius. Naturally he had a traumatic childhood. He was abandoned by his mother, and lived with a one-legged civil servant in a hut in Surrey. As soon as he was old enough to embark on a life of scrounging, Philip moved in with a rich heiress called Jean, squandered her fortune on himself, and seemingly drove her mad. The poor woman was duly bunged in a mental hospital by Philip, who remarked, `The trouble with Jean is that her money has run out.' He then foisted himself on a beautiful woman called Maria Steiner, and after siring two children and spending her cash he crawled, like a giant, juice-sucking bug, into the life of actress Anna Wing (who later made her name as the Granny in Eastenders). Why do intelligent women put up with such vile treatment from ghastly men? It is a question as old and puzzling as passion itself. And O'Connor was a passionate man. Like so many writers whose names I won't mention in case they wreak heinous revenge on me, Philip's personal life was far more interesting than his work. His awful ways were not solely directed at women and children. Persistent begging and an evil temper tested the patience of many a friend, such as the writer David Thomson, who gave him a job interviewing people for the BBC. Philip's first interviewee was Quentin Crisp. Crisp's wit was so engaging, he was asked by a publisher to write a book - The Naked Civil Servant so O'Connor can, in a way, be said to have launched Quentin's career. O'Connor's claim to fame is Memoirs of a Public Baby, an autobiography which won lavish critical acclaim.

After ditching Anna Wing and his children, he met a wealthy American society hostess called Panna Grady. Panna `saw herself as a nurturer of genius' and became a willing recipient to O'Connor's serial sponging. She bought a rambling farmhouse in France in which she installed O'Connor and their children. Unsurprisingly, he was no nicer to his offspring than he was to anyone else. `Fuck off, you creep!' he yelled to his son who visited him from England, and then added for good measure, `Mediocrity!'

Yecch.

Still, he was the man who hid behind the door and said boo to T. S. Eliot, which will endure.

Now that's a blurb quote!

On Scott's recommendation upthread I started Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys yesterday. Exactly the thing I was after - perfect in fact.

Rather ponderous (the first chapter could easily have been half the length - surely you don't need to be told a character is 35 twice), heavy on the rural, and with an atmosphere of leaden mysticism. Main character rather a rum card. Given to long cosmic ramblings and suspicions and hyper-aware of other character's facial details.

And what's with the names JC? Wolf Solent? Darnley Otter? I'll defend a writer's choice of names as part of their credo any day, but some of these ones are quite alarming.

Also, is it going to turn into an Avengers plot? Three chapters in and it feels it might.

I just realised I've read 'Memoirs of a Public Baby', yet obviously it hadn't stayed with me.

I'm impressed. The O'Connor effect wears off -- excellent.

Seventeen things simultaneously, as is the ideal reading experience. Among them:

CULTURAL AMNESIA by Clive James - Like the bit where the Sophie Scholl essay becomes, three pages into it, a charmingly pervy old man love letter to Natalie Portman.
2666 by Some Dude - tralalalala...
THE GREAT GOD PAN by Arthur Machen

'The Great God Pan'--that some seriously mental writing.

It is. The Hill of Dreams is his most seriously out there shit I think.

This JC Powys book (Wolf Solent) I'm reading reminds me of Machen in quite a lot of ways. The same reverance for the rural and abstract worship of the female, the same cosmic speculations, and the way the mysticism often results in a certain vagueness in the writing is shared by them as well.

Finished: Max Frisch - I'm Not Stiller

Now: Viktor Shklovsky - A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922. This books describes seismic events in such a dry and detached manner on the surface, but he does manage to have a v subtle way to intensify the action...

Le dérèglement du monde : Quand nos civilisations s'épuisent - Amin Maalouf

Reading Tender is the Night. Next is Gaddis' The Recognitions.

Next is Gaddis' The Recognitions.

The best of luck with that one - it's one of my white whales. Along with Melville's PIERRE.

started Drop City by t.c. boyle today. have no idea where it's going since i didn't bother reading the blurb before removing the dj and taking it to work. but already there are far too many similes.

i really want to finish you shall know our velocity but it's a valuable edition belonging to my fiance so i can't just throw it in my bag and bring it to work

Norman Collins: London Belongs to Me
Theophile Gautier: My Fantoms

ive had london belongs to me on my "to read" forever

Gaddis is one of those guys whose work I've never been able to penetrate, except for Agape Agape, which is probably one of my favorite books about mortality.

william golding - the pyramid

Last week I read The Devil in the White City. It seemed accurate, fairly interesting, and thankfully was not too overwrought (a common failing of narrative history).

The premise of the book, which sought to yoke together the stories of the primary architect of the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 and a serial killer whose victims probably included some fairgoers, never really worked for me. The two stories chug along in parallel ruts and the author jumps from one to the other very often, but the two stories never really merge or illuminate one another. He even dabbles with a third subplot concerning a paranoid schizophrenic who assasinates the mayor of Chicago, but wisely leaves that story as nothing but a minor decoration glued to the side.

In short, it was OK and quite readable. For someone who knew nothing of the era or its characteristics, it would be a good introduction to some of the gaudier aspects of the Gilded Age.

Oh yes, the book I am currently reading is Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich. What's weird about this book is that she is writing for an audience who apparently have never worked in a minimum wage job while trying to live on their earnings.

It is hard to wrap my head around the fact that it would be news to some people that minimum wage jobs are hard, dirty, exhausting and demeaning to the worker mostly by the design of the employer, and only rarely so by the nature of the work. Equally so, that only a magician could live decently on such a pittance.

Who are the idiots who don't understand this already?

I went to a fancy private high school where Nickel and Dimed was our summer reading assignment one year (10th or 11th grade I think). of course the class discussions abounded with young republican outrage about socialist propaganda and poor people being lazy/stupid/whatever.

looking back on it now, I think the experience taught me a lot more about rich people than it did about poor people.

'London Belongs to Me' is great--not great literature by any means, but one of those 19th-century-style big fat books full of characters and local detail which really draw you in. I took it with me on a short business trip with lots of time spent on planes and in airports, so it was just the thing.

Susan Sontag -On Photography. Finally! Dunno if I'll pull through, but damn this is great. Not as fantastic as Barthes (duh!) but still a nice read.

I read that last year, stevie. It was lovely.

Still slogging through The Rape of Nanking. Interesting subject, but it is not actually that good.

Of late: Victor Serge - Birth of Our Power, as talked about on the commie bks thread.

Nathalie Sarraute - Do you Hear Them?

Now: Jean Genet - Prisoner of Love.

I really liked the Susan Sontag too--I just wish it had included some of the photographs it talked about.i read much of it on buses when I had no internet to look the pictures up with.

Having disposed of Barbara Ehrenreich, I have picked up Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov, via the english translation prowess of Marian Schwartz (published in 2008). It was the only copy I could locate through my local library. I hope the translation does it justice.

Weird, I don't remember whether my copy of On Photography includes the photos. For some reason I think it does, but maybe that's because I looked them up on the internet...I'll have to check when I get home.

I finished The Rape of Nanking yesterday and feel like I could have gained the same level of knowledge about the incident if I had just read the Wikipedia page.

Started on Gerard Donovan's Schopenhauer's Telescope, which is already intriguing. I loved Julius Winsome and this is equally lovely. He has a thing about snow which I like.

Hans Fallada: What Now, Little Man?

How a novelist who was making fun of the Nazis in print in 1932, and whose book was filmed by Jewish film-makers, survived beyond the end of WW2, even though he stayed in Germany, is beyond me.

It's really good, btw.

finishing up 'Caliban and the Witch' by Silvia Federici.

now i shall start Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 'Dictee.' do yall know her? imagine one of the most influential books of contemporary poetry. and then imagine its author being murdered A WEEK after its release, never able to reap what would have been massive benefits and praise.

also, never being able to write again, obv.

Never heard of 'Dictee'--must take a look.

Now on David Malouf: Remembering Babylon

If you'd like to share some poem or fragment of Dictee, the latest poetry thread is here. It seems a pity that, after such an enthusiastic build-up, we don't get to have a sample.

Currently reading Reynolds Price's The Names and Faces of Heroes.

Gun, with Occasional Music !!!

Just finished Amigoland by Casares. Very good. If you were wondering if his subtle style would translate to a longer format, don't worry, it does.

Just started The Optimist's Daughter. I've never read Welty before, but all the hype surrounding her 100 yr anniversary hooked me, so here it goes.

Just started the first book of A Dance to the Music of Time. So far enjoying it, not blown away but I'm only 70 pages in.

Read Clark Gifford's Body by Kenneth Fearing a few days ago, very impressive. I'm still rather puzzled as to what we're supposed to make of the title character, though.

Finished Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years last week as well, one of the grimmer books I've read lately, also one of the best.

Read Clark Gifford's Body by Kenneth Fearing...

I found this very satisfying and a bit mystifying, in a good way.

just finishes Muriel Spark's curious "The Driver's Seat" and i'm currently about half way through Hollinghurst's "the Swimming Pool Library" which i'm enjoying (although it's no Line of Beauty).

-Lotsa Orwell, courtesy of one of the, no doubt, dozens of Orwell-reader anthologies. I'm almost certainly heading directly to HOMAGE TO CATALONIA in complete, non bite-sized, form.

-THE PHANTOM EMPIRE by Geoffrey O'Brien, which I seem to re-read every few months.

-SEAGUY: SLAVES OF MICKEY EYE by Grant Morrison & Cameron Stewart

Marguerite Duras - The Ravishing of Lol Stein. For the life of me I don't know how she was not commissioned to write a Mills & Boon.

Hollinghurst's "the Swimming Pool Library" which i'm enjoying (although it's no Line of Beauty).

Yeah--the narrator of 'Library' is too in love with himself, and Hollinghurst too in love with his creation, for it to be entirely satisfying, I thought.

kingsley amis - the alteration

counter-factual history set in 20th century europe where the reformation didn't happen and the catholic church rules. weird and perfectly worked-out, this is one of his best.

kingsley amis - take a girl like you

smart/semi-naive girl gets entangled with callow yet semi-charming cad. classic amis but surprisingly padded w/too much mundane detail, description etc. TOO LONG in other words.

philip bobbitt - terror & consent: wars for the 21st century.

just started this academic history and it's original, gripping, startling even. but is this the book I want to take on vacation next week? hmmmm.

I'm pretty sure that all copies of On Photography lack pictures. If I remember correctly - which I probably don't, cause my brain lacks a few cells - she intended this.
I love it but at times my whole brain and face go "?" because I don't get the idea she's trying to convey. I R Moran, you see. Still, a very nice read and it made me order Diane Arbus' biography. (I also checked out how many items I have bought from Amazon.co.uk. Woha 221 or something. Granted that's in a period of YEARS and I never buy much elsewhere but still 221 items! Yikes! That includes DVDs, CDs and whatnot. But I repeat: 221 ITEMS! WOHA.)

I also have James Hogg"s Confessions of a Justified Sinner on my nightstand as a result. Seems lovely.

Yep stevie, I was wrong about my copy of OP having photos. I guess I did just google the pictures. How frustrating it must have been to have read before the internet.

The Bachelors - Muriel Spark. One of those Spark books that people don't seem to talk about much. No real complaints so far, except too many characters have two-syllable names, which makes it slightly hard to keep them apart in my head. Does feel a bit thinner, or less precise than same-period Spark I guess, but still way ahead of most novels.
Have just started that first volume of Beckett's letters. Nosy of me.

While we're on such things, The Bachelors by Henry de Montherlant is astringently amusing.

- William Leuchtenburg's Herbert Hoover, the latest and one of the best entries in the American Presidents Series.

- I reread Roth's The Counterlife and liked it even more now.

Glamour, A History - Stephen Gundle

More from Duras - Sailor from Gibraltar.

Also sorta started Witold Gombrowicz - Ferdyduke (its the v first, indirect, translation)

I love Gombrowicz! But I've not read any of the direct translations either, cos my library doesn't have them.

I just started 'How Right You Are, Jeeves' - my first Wodehouse. I adore it.

The Oblomov thing didn't work out. The library wanted it back too soon and wouldn't let me renew after 14 days. Shit on that noise.

I just checked out some P.G. Wodehouse and some Jim Thompson (The Killer Within and The Grifters). I will see how they appeal.

Somerset Maugham: The Narrow Margin - lots of fun, with added Australian political/underworld shenanigans

Sapper: Bulldog Drummond - not sure why decided I read this, expecting it to be Imperialistic, racist tosh, and to an extent it is, but it's also quite exciting, and the thuggish hero is also weirdly like Bertie Wooster

John Steinbeck: To a God Unknown - somebody had been reading waaaaaaay too much DH Lawrence.

Not much time to read lately and still reading The Savage Detectives. I really should read some more Muriel Spark though, and possibly re-read some Roth. Never cared for de Montherlant.

I thought the first "Seaguy" was imaginative but nasty and depressing. I hadn't heard any more had appeared.

I just checked out some P.G. Wodehouse and some Jim Thompson (The Killer Within and The Grifters). I will see how they appeal.

Aimless, you and I must be psychically linked. As evidenced by the 'What books have you purchased lately?" thread, my most recent purchases were Wodehouse and Thompson.

just finished 1972 annual world's best sci fi collection. some good stuff in there. the only real duds were the ellison and malzberg stories.

Includes: Introduction by the editor; The Fourth Profession by Larry Niven; Gleepsite by Joanna Russ; The Bear with the Knot on His Tail by Stephen Tall; The Sharks of Pentreath by Michael G. Coney; A Little Knowledge by Poul Anderson; Real-Time World by Christopher Priest; All Pieces of a River Shore by R.A. Lafferty; With Friends Like These by Alan Dean Foster; Aunt Jennie's Tonic by Leonard Tushnet; Timestorm by Eddy C. Bertin; Transit of Earth by Arthur C. Clarke; Gehenna by Barry Malzberg; One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty by Harlan Ellison; Occam's Scalpel by Theodore Sturgeon.

now i'm reading the collected stories of louis auchincloss. which is great.

In one of his collections of essays I recall Gore Vidal doing some major repping for Louis Auchincloss. He convinced me to read several story collections by Auchincloss. I greatly enjoyed his work, until the sameness of it finally got the upper hand.

Vidal's main point was that Auchincloss really knew about the lives of the wealthy (old money) and the powerful (mostly top lawyers) from an insider's perspective and that Auchincloss dished the genuine dirty lowdown, not the glitzy, ditzy soap opera stuff like Dallas, Dynasty or Dirty Sexy Money to name but a few well-known examples, but the cold-blooded ways in which the wealthy and powerful protected their power and wealth from erosion, no matter who they had to beat down to do it.

Hearing Aimless say he is reading his first Wodehouse is like hearing Dr. Morbius say he had just seen his first Preston Sturges.

(splutters) My first Wodehouse! (wipes mouth with sleeve)

Sorry 'bout that. No, siree. I've been reading Wodehouse since the cows were coming home in diapers, you doe-eyed article of humanity. Psmith and I matriculated together in the year twelve.

This will be my first fiction by Jim Thompson. I previously read his autobiographical memoir, the name of which I have forgotten.

Hands up who else thinks Malzberg is a depressing but very good writer!

I do! Though I've only read 'On a Planet Alien'.

Are you a Kingsley fan in general, coleman?

big time. and martin's been my main man/guru/influence since the early 80s.

The brief story "Still-Life" in the anthology "Again, Dangerous Visions", written by Malzberg under the pseudonym K. M. O'Donnell, still blows me away.

I do! Though I've only read 'On a Planet Alien'.

― James Morrison, Sunday, April 12, 2009

I've only read Underlay, which I loved. For some reason he seems extraordinarily difficult to get in the UK, not that that's really a problem nowadays, but you never really see his stuff arond.

Finished Schopenhauer's Telescope, which was really good. Also finished How Right You Are, Jeeves (UK title: Jeeves in the Offing), which was, shamefully, my first Wodehouse. I giggled the whole way through it.

On the subway this morning I began Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants which is decidedly more trippy than I expected, although I'm not really sure what I expected. All I know is that people whose taste I trust think he's the greatest thing ever.

Marcel Ayme: Beautiful Image

- one of those groovy little Pushkin Press paperbacks.
http://www.pushkinpress.com/engine/resource/shop/203/images/a8e5f770-bd54-498f-bf07-14aaf95450c2.jpg

Before that, Alice Munro's 'Runaway', which was characteristically brilliant. I've been reading Munro in order, which means I only have 'The View from Castle Rock' to go. I want to launch straight into it, but she's getting on a bit, and I don't want to have nothing of hers left to read.

i loved 'runaway', although not quite as much as 'open secrets'.

finished 'drop city' by t.c. boyle - good story, still thinking about it though, the ending was kind of strange.

now into 'what i loved' by siri hustvedt - enjoying it a lot so far.

I have never read a single Alice Munro story. I am a bad Canadian :(

part four of 'A Dance to the Music of Time' by Anthony Powell - 'At Lady Molly's' - continuing my massive enjoyment of the series

Dirk Wittenborn - 'Pharmakon' which so far is good but doesn't blow Bret Easton Ellis out of the water like Kate Muir in The Times said it does, it's just got refreshing, different subject matter

I finished The Grifters by Jim Thompson a couple of days ago. It is short, almost more of a novella, but it seemed a bit - what's a good word? - thin.

Things happened, but little changed. It laid on a bit of criminal psychology, but the psychology didn't ring quite true, not in the way that well-observed and well-described people and actions ring true. Here the actions seemed true enough, but the psychology seemed half true to life and half sophomoric pretension.

I started The Killer Inside Me last night and it seems liable to swerve into the same path. The killer reads Kraft-Ebbing, among other things. I had hoped for a bit more gristle to chew on.

Has anyone read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon? I think I'm going to start on that next, although my book pile is getting pretty big.

I'll be finishing In Europe tonight. I would describe my 'to read' pile as monolithic, were there not several of them.

Just got through Blankets in one sitting. Deeply resonant (I told a friend I was "pissed this guy stole my life for the sake of his plot"), heart-rending and basically just what I needed given my station in life at he moment. Looking forward to a collection of Ed McBain short stories Learning How to Kill & Nabokov's The Defense based on an urgent recommendation from my go-to Nab stan Roxy.

& Nabokov's The Defense

My favourite I think, along with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

I really like his Russian stuff, less so his American stuff. Stuff stuff, jesus, I don't even belong in the same post as Nabokov.

i am right towards the end of Kevin k*ll*an and Lew Ellingham's "Poet Be Like God," a biography of Jack Spicer and chronicle of the San Francisco renaissance. great book, and i got it for only FOUR BUCKS at a book store that was going out of business.

The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: ra-ra-ra for those wacky 1890s-1910s superintelligent master-thieves

Crime and Punishment, and 8 months worth of notes on the irish local govt system for an exam tomorrow.

Just finished "A Feast of Snakes" by Harry Crews; see Noise Board thread for furhter commentary. Long story short: revolting, couldn't put it down, would never suggest it to anyone, except people of extremely black humor.

The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime

droooool

i had a period in the late 80's where i went out and bought every harry crews book i could find and devoured them all. i should read them again. i always thought that a feast of snakes was his most overt nod to the southern goth tradition. or maybe the gospel singer was. see, i need to go back... ( i really loved car, and the knockout artist, and all we need of hell, and his memoir, a childhood.)

i think the last one i read was the mulching of america, and i don't know what he's done since.

x-post

i always wanted to read the harry crews book about eating a car...that's not feast of snakes, is it?

no, that's Car.

that's what i thought; thanx Scott!

loool

"Here the actions seemed true enough, but the psychology seemed half true to life and half sophomoric pretension."
Do you need that level of realism, A?

I want to re-read a bunch by him again and read The Brothers Karamazov.

^Won't happen till next year

"I love Gombrowicz! But I've not read any of the direct translations either, cos my library doesn't have them."
Finsihed this, but didn't a whole great deal out of it - I like the duel, and got some of the themes, probably there is a whole lot more in terms of background that I need to know? What did you like about it?

Finished: Kawabata - Beauty and Sadness. A revenge thriller, but its as much about them cherry blossoms and the like. The definition of literary excellence!

Finsihing: Henry Green - Party Going

It isn't so much a matter of realism, but of art. I am perfectly willing to go along with whatever an author offers me, provided it is artful enough to make the journey worthwhile.

In The Grifters you get a stripped-down, hard-boiled prose. Short sentences, plain words, brief descriptions. You get characters who display an emotional affect as flat as the prose. Anything that formed them happened in the far past and is mentioned in retrospect. The realtime story is nearly static, in that the actions and events lead to no character development and merely confirm what we are told about the characters.

This reduces the book to what is essentially a set of portraits.

That is fine, in terms of an artistic choice and I don't mind reading a set of portraits. But it does put a premium on making those portraits revealing and interesting. The false psychology and mediocre observational powers I complained of really undercut the portraiture.

In the end, the only interesting character in the book is the general criminality the characters engage in, the facts of how con men operate, or how horse race betting odds are manipulated. The people merely fill the roles of Con Man #1 and Con Woman #1. Everyone is a minor character, except The Grift.

That's ok, too, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. That is why I said the book felt "thin". I wanted more than that. If the book had been 75,000 words instead of maybe 45,000 I would have quit before the end. IOW, making it very short was a good artistic choice.

Define 'artful' for me? I kind of like the written on the run quality; there isn't much 'development' because of this -- it couldn't be anything but short. The length is important.

I like the flatness, too -- many things that tend to be 'well' written are flat out boring. I find him really comfortable with that quality, combining with the portraiture and his views on what he think people are (which maybe wrong or dishonest, but I don't care) to a pay off that can be brilliant. In fact I think everything you've said is a positive to me apart from the observation. I don't think there he ever cared about displaying that quality.

But I'm just doing a quick reflection: I do like him a lot but read one every few months or so. Do intend to sit down with 10-15 and just go through 'em in one go...someday.

Artful? Let's see. Quintillian said good writing should instruct, persuade or delight. That's about as close as I can come to fullfilling your request for a definition.

You seem to be reacting as if I panned Thompson. That isn't what I had in mind. It was more on the order of faint praise.

His choices of style, plot and character were not expansive. He consistently opted to narrow and confine his possibilities in order to achieve a kind of purity, simplicity or clarity. Within those narrow confines success means hitting a very small target. For me, he missed the mark. Not horribly, but it just didn't chime clear and true.

Nah I was just digging around your reasoning for your not quite hitting the mark...

James M Cain: Jealous Woman -- not that great, sadly. BUT, before that...

Stefan Zweig: Wondrak and Other Stories -- ace ace ace ace (but sadly abbreviated: he died with the title story unfinished)

Ed McBain's collection of shorts is really great.

Each piece is introduced with little snippets of the phase in his career, the pseudonym he wrote it under, and the people he was working with at the time. They're only about a paragraph each and they're as amusing as the stories themselves!

i finished dfw's brief interviews with hideous men last night and started the making of a chef: mastering heat at the culinary institute of america, which is awesome so far.

David Lodge: Nice Work

'what i loved' by siri hustvedt was wonderful - love the way she moves the story along, love her language, love her characters. re-reading 'the enchantment of lily dahl' by her as well.

almost done with eggers' 'you shall know our velocity' (for some reason, until recently, i had the title in my head as 'AND you shall know our velocity'). started off great, lots of lolz, but now i'm getting annoyed with it, annoyed with his inner dialogues and their pretentious language.

(for some reason, until recently, i had the title in my head as 'AND you shall know our velocity')

could this be because of my twitter/facebook bitching about eggers stealing my title

no, pretty sure i had it in my head before then, because the reason i couldn't find it in search for that book-list thing was because i kept entering 'and' as the first word

Hooray for Siri Hustvedt! Her latest somehow passed me by; I'll have to get it.

ok, finished the eggers last night. got into an argument with my husband about how the first paragraph says this story takes place several years earlier, but the last paragraph ends the story two months before he dies. husband argued that the guy is dead so he could be telling the story from any point in the future, which i guess makes sense, but still annoys me for unexplainable reasons.

feel like i missed out on something with this novel.

maybe you were thinkin' of ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead

Reading Seven Types of Ambiguity again. Mainly because I want to re-engage with Empson and I didn't have anything else lying around. Feels very like the production of a student to me now - something that wasn't clear at the time - in both a good (iconoclastic) and a bad way (a carapace of self-justification surrounds it - if you don't agree, you don't really understand the argument and furthermore, if you don't understand in a way it's because I don't meant to be understood).

Would add a belated big up to Jim Thompson as well - I rather like the thinness and narrowness of vision of his novels. As well as being excellent examples of hard-boiled language and sentences, pathological behaviour is so insisted on that becomes a view of humanity, perpetually teetering on the brink of insanity, where what seems inevitable is presented in terms of psychological and physical compulsions. Solipsism as transcendental illness of humanity, its consequence - action as crime.

If artistic precedents need to be cited - I'm not sure they do - then an inarticulate and unintelligent Iago would spring to mind, or a Notes from the Underground without the self-awareness.

here here

Excellent words on Thompson! Agree thoroughly, and wish I had your articulacy!

Yeah, probably best ignore 'don't meant' in the previous paragraph.

or Pulp Fiction's 'AND you shall KNOW my vengeance', or whatever it is that SLJ says

moi: Henry James: A Life in Letters !!

Impulse-bought The Rings of Saturn and immediately started reading it. Thoughts after one chapter: this is really, really good.

I also thought "What I Love" was terrific so the new Siri is a must-read, but I've been buying books much faster than I can get through them so it may not be soon. I have 2666 and The Kindly Ones on the way from Amazon so that's about 2000 pages right there. I'll probably intersperse them with something lighter.

Pinefox I thought Colm Toibin's fictionalisation of a bit of HJ's life in "The Master" was beautifully done. If you've not read it it might be an interesting companion the the Life in Letters (which I have not read). CT has a new novel out which also goes onto my list of future purchases.

Moved onto some Brazilian fiction, courtesy of Dalkey: Ivan Angelo - Tower of Glass

Has anyone ever checked out Rubem Fonseca. He looks promising.

Balzac - Eugenie Grandet.

Very well put, Abbe! Ignored the 'I don't meant' :-)

just finished White Teeth and while I'm not quite down with Pinefox's hatred of it (I did enjoy it very much, really!), I see where the James Wood assessment is coming from. The side of Samad who cursed his pointlessly wasted potential fizzling out into him being Angry Asian Man was especially disappointing.

Now I'm reading Don DeLillo's White Noise, and here's what I'm really here for: this bit about The Most Photographed Barn in America. Is there another novel that features a visit to it? Or have I absorbed it elsewhere somehow? Actually I'm thinking that maybe Fredric Jameson talks about that passage somewhere?

Robert Olen Butler: Intercourse - a set of 50 stories, each of which consists of 2 internal monologues from a couple having sex, ranging from Adam and Eve to the modern day, some very touching and a few (Laura and George W Bush) very funny.

John Clare: The Parish - 60-page poem published posthumously where he dumps shit on everybody. Good stuff.

just bought Eugenie Grandet...planning on reading Lost Illusions, and A Harlot High and Low first, though...

Still going "WTF?" at Robert Coover (in a good way), and just got a library notice that a copy of Netherland is finally waiting for me. This has been hyped a lot by several good blogs and reviews but apart from "it's awesome" I know next to nothing about it. Looking forward to it.

it's awesome

it's awesome

i miss this thread for a couple weeks and people are arguing about jim thompson and someone else is reading powell. i should look here more often.

i remember suggesting as an undergrad that The Most Photographed Barn in America is also now The Most Overdetermined Exemplar Of Pomo In America, and thus removed from any real use to us

not sure quite how that argument was meant to work

Worth mentioning perhaps that James Wood very substantially changed his mind about Zadie Smith after his notoriously negative review. He used the review as a platform to launch an attack on trends in fiction he thought she exemplified: but he was lumping her in with other writers (Rushdie, Pynchon et al) that she was only very superficially like. He later came to recognise this and admitted she was a much more impressive talent than the likes of Rushdie. He and Smith seem to be great chums now.

Big news round these parts: In Europe by Geert Mak has finally been put to the sword, so I start afresh for the first time since Christmas. It was really good, a Dutch journalist touring the continent in 1999 and plotting the course of the century city-by-city. It's apparently been criticised for being lightweight, too much journalism and not enough history, but personally I have no problem with that. Journalists write better than historians in my experience. What I found quite striking is the amount of space given to the various 90s Balkans crises - enormously significant, but not something I give much thought to these days.

I have narrowed my next book down to either Miracles of Life by JG Ballard, How To Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen, or Richard II, which was an impulse buy in a charity shop earlier this week on basis of the pretty woodcut on the cover - King Richard admiring his smiling self in a handheld mirror.

In due course Netherland awaits me too. It's my next audiobook once I'm finished with Updike's Rabbit series (I'll say nowt about these at the moment, other than that they are possibly the greatest things I've ever read). Just Rabbit Remembered to go - burning it at the moment, which is taking up all my free memory and making this the slowest post I've ever typed.

Locked myself out of the house, so went for the pub for flatmates to return. Didn't have any books with me, so after some desultory consideration of the books on the shelf of the pub, picked Dry Spell by Susie Moloney. It was very very bad, clearly, but so bad that it was difficult to work out the specific reasons it was so bad. There was a just bleak awareness of very thin literary aliment. Fortunately things were clarified by the line

'Suck my Dicky!' Dicky screamed pointlessly.

Which although it was unanalysably bad, was also so hypnotically hilarious that I couldn't actually read any further, so I put it back on the shelf, went out and bought the TLS like the weak-ass pussy that I am. Had an article on Elizabeth Taylor (writer), which I intend to write a post about, but I see there's one on male and female authors so maybe I'll put it in that.

Cesare Pavese - The Moon and the Bonfire. He had such a clean, economical style - used to describe lives whose innocence is forever shattered.

Jean Genet - Querelle of Brest. Started last year but left it halfway through as life annoyingly distracted me.

'pointlessly', there, is such a great choice of adverb

have finished book seven of dance to the etc of etc.; can see why people think the decline starts - it's kind of demonstratable that powell's edifice is collapsing under its own weight, and nick has to rather artificially remind people of shit far too often - but it's kind of more interesting for that. and the ahem hem lower orders are quite well handled. (interesting to see, i think, how until book six people's servants basically don't exist - could be wrong here, actually.)

reading simenon novels i found old penguin copies of, which have sort of jumped to the top of the pile so i can convince myself i didn't buy them for the covers, which is so played, now, you know

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3178/2280754717_751aacae36_o.jpg

still

also this one

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n27/n139383.jpg

can anyone remind me the name of the simenon about the alcoholic who finds out a murder has been committed under his own roof and becomes slightly less of an alcoholic? i think that is my favorite of his, and it may have been another one in the format 'the (x) man who (y)'

i need to read canticle for leibowitz i guess

Powell - there's sort of a decline at the beginning of the wartime novels, but the brilliant comic style of his pre-Dance novels has become lost in a more portentous cumbersome machinery. They're still great though. For me Temporary Kings is seriously the weakest, although it has some amazing set pieces [hang on, need to go to my shelf]

....

[fuck, too pissed, not going to find it] but it's something about Widmerpool being bored to the point of fear or something. I think Hearing Secret Harmonies is good though, as I do the Fisher King, and although O! How The Wheel Becomes It has been lingering on my shelves for some time, I still haven't read it.

Canticle for Liebowitz I enjoyed although I did feel it probably had more impact in its time - a slight weariness with the theme is pardonable now I think. Also - Catholic Apologist SF? I'm all for it in a way, but I don't quite see how it's earned quite the level of applause that it has.

Hearn, When the Devil Came Down to Dixie

Love those Simenon penguin covers.

Just finished Hans Fallada's 'The Drinker', which was very good indeed, though it lost a bit of narrative energy near the end.

"Had an article on Elizabeth Taylor (writer), which I intend to write a post about, but I see there's one on male and female authors so maybe I'll put it in that."

i'm such a big fan. and there are still so many of her books i need to read. they aren't all that easy to come by in the states. if it weren't for those invaluable virago paperback reissues i doubt i would have become a fan at all.

Thing about MIRACLES OF LIFE is how incredibly readable it is - pick it up and start halfway through and you're suddenly 5pp further in. As though finitude clarified him to write in the most straightforward way possible; also to be phenomenally, touchingly generous to all and especially family. It's moving and I like it more than I like the rest of his work (though I appreciate his importance etc).

Wood / ZS has been gone over many times but to clarify again:
1. JW wrote long review mainly of WT but also attacking others; he said WT was better than the others, and praised it far too highly, in the act of criticizing the trend
2. ZS acknowledged that he was at least partly correct about her, in c.10.2001
3. 2002: JW reviewed her second novel and panned it in the same terms as he was negative about WT
4. subsequently, JW and ZS met (may have already met), talked, appeared on platforms together (I saw one in 10.2004): rapprochement - this based NOT on JW changing his mind about WT (he'd always praised it anyway), but on ZS's openness to criticism and growing interest in other models of fiction more congenial to JW, notably Forster
5. On Beauty, 2005: JW didn't review it as far as I know -- but it's a very very very different book from WT, so it's no wonder that JW (or anyone) reading that would come to a different conclusion about where ZS was at, compared to where she'd reached by 2000
6. more recent hype saying that ZS has been on the attack and trying to make her own kind of major critical interventions, esp in her review of Netherland which questions what she calls 'lyrical realism' (possibly what she thinks JW likes)

here's #6 on pinefox's list--well worth a read

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22083

don't forget JW raved about Netherland in the New Yorker

Wood's review of WT is here:

http://www.powells.com/review/2001_08_30.html

I seem to have split this in my memory into two separate pieces, with some of the more positive comments about WT appearing in a "later" piece (hence my impression of a retraction). My bad memory - (or did I read only part of a restricted access version first, and the full one later? - this seems very possible). What further complicates things is that it seems to have become accepted wisdom that this was a hostile review specifically of Smith - the internet and books pages of newspapers have been littered with references to Wood's savaging of her. I suspect many more people "know" that Wood wrote a brutal attack on Smith than have read the review, which of course is nothing of the sort. Reading the review again it seems fair judged against my memory of the book, which admittedly is now pretty vague: I remember it as baggy and overlong and an odd mixture of sloppy carelessness and very good things. I can't agree with PF that Wood praises the book far too highly. He's (on the whole, justifiably) merciless in places.

I was hugely disappointed by Smith's review of "Netherland", not because of what it said about "Netherland" but because of what it says about the way Smith is thinking about fiction: it reduced my hope that her next book might be the one where she finally delivers on her potential. After "On Beauty" I thought she was starting to work out what she was good at. This piece makes me think the next step will be backwards, to a kind of fiction I don't personally care for but more importantly doesn't suit her particular gift. (I don't say this as a particular admirer of Wood who's far too prescriptive a critic for my taste, but I suspect he's a better judge of what Smith is good at than she is herself).

Simenon question

Do the Maigret mysteries sequenced, or can they be read in any order?

i've read maybe a half-dozen and never been able to establish some kind of arc i'm missing out on.

there are 75 of them: if you want to try and do them in order, good luck to you

-

why does hoos 'need' to read leibowitz?

Don't think I'll get all 75 in... but it's nice to know I can pick up a handful at random and just read. Thanks.

There's no real order to them--in fact, the internal chronology, in as much as you can work it out, seems to bounce around from book to book in terms of the order they were written. Did that make sense? What I mean is: It really doesn't matter what order you go in.

Started Netherland this afternoon. Nobody told me it would open with 10 pages about cricket! If I had known this I would probably have read it MUCH sooner. They were 10 pretty beautiful pages, also.

I agree: and I don't even really like cricket!

Read Derek Robinson's 'The Eldorado Network' and 'Artillery of Lies', which are excellent black comedies about double-agents during WW2.

halfway through 'the military philosophers'.

what is this 'netherland' book?

david berman's 'actual air'. i feel a little guilty about this being the first single book of poetry (i mean, non-anthology) i've read in ages. i seem to have forgotten how and why to read poetry, somewhere.

i think i enjoy the berman because it's quite clear there's no chance of the author thinking Deeply Important Poetic Work For The Ages is happening in it. i tried going back to 'The New American Poetry' the other day to see if i could make it lead anywhere interesting and it just made me want to go back in time and take a golf club to the printing presses of the Black Mountain Review.

you're in good company, from the Ny Times

At the end of our conversation, when I asked him if he was reading anything good, he said he had become sick enough of briefing books to begin reading a novel in the evenings — “Netherland,” by Joseph O’Neill.

actual air is lovely.

i am slogging through notable american women and thinking that if i'm going to invest this much effort, i wish it was in something i was more involved in.

Thomp - how are you finding The Military Philosophers. A lot of people seem to think that Dance starts to go downhill during the war novels. I'm not sure I'd say that - the stuff in Wales at the beginning of The Valley of Bones is it? is brilliant. But by The Soldier's Art I wonder whether he has taken his foot off the pedal slightly. It's still brilliant of course, but I think for me the best novels are everything from A Buyer's Market up to The Kindly Ones.

What am I saying? Brilliant stuff in all of them.

i was quite affected by SA, actually — stringham's reappearance and final exit, the night in london where the club madrid is bombed

hard not to wonder how powell's original decrescendo for the series was meant to come in: one assumes he did not predict the sixties.

MP seems to have more of a 'and this is how jenkins got through the rest of the war' problem: i mean, structurally the last three have nothing on KO, i guess.

Bulgakov: A Country Doctor's Notebook -- how odd to be reading something off his that has no surreal or absurdist (or no more absurd than real life, any way) elements. Not that that's a complaint, it's just unexpected.

I've been trying to read Dead Souls by Gogol, but I keep picking up a collection of occasional pieces by Anthony Burgess entitled But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? and reading it instead. This doesn't bode well for Nikolai.

philip bobbitt - terror & consent: wars for the 21st century.

just started this academic history and it's original, gripping, startling even. but is this the book I want to take on vacation next week?

ended up bailing 1/4 way thru. even reading that much gave me a new perspective and I just might borrow it from the library again. in the meantime:

elmore leonard -- unknown man #89

this is from the late 70s and I liked it so much better than his more recent work. richer characters, not as dialogue-dependent. descriptions of detroit in its disco-era decrepitude (this was when I lived in the area) brought a nostalgic tear to my eye.

graham greene -- the comedians

one of the few of his I haven't read and all the elements are present: third world dictatorship, ugly americans, infidelity, catholic guilt. a bit discursive towards end. B+

richard price -- samartin. almost finished. like a cross between his pre-Clockers work and a straight crime novel. better than lush life, IMO.

descriptions of detroit in its disco-era decrepitude

jesus -- you can tell I was a rock critic

i need to read more graham greene! and anthony powell! and simenon! i'll get around to it soon. you'll see.

i'll get around to it soon. you'll see.

halfway through siri hustvedt's 'the blindfold'

just beginning a reread of capote's 'other voices, other rooms'

still on gaddis' the recognitions, also reading canto general by neruda.

yeah, absolutely all the time i look on this thread, of late, there's something i've thought 'i should really read that' in preceding weeks

John Carey's "What Good Are The Arts", a polemic against art snobs and the whole idea of "high art". My views on this were practically identical to Carey's before I started reading his book, so it delivered the kind of pleasure that arises from enthusiastic agreement rather than from being introduced to new ideas. I didn't learn much new, but it hadn't properly occurred to me before that the whole concept of art as a quasi-spiritual marker of civilisation was so modern - dating from mid-late 18 century & Kant. The second half of his book, a claim that literature is the most important of the arts, somewhat contradicts the first and is much less persuasively argued: but then I'm much more obsessive about music than books so I would say that.

frankiemachine, are you Ronnie Scott?

Oh wait.

frankiemachine, I can top that:

Roger L. Taylor, Art, An Enemy of the People. As I remember the cover description stated that the author "will not have a work of art in his house."

I don't get the Ronnie Scott reference James. Is it to do with me being a jazzer? (incidentally I'm not any more - I haven't played in nearly 4 years because of physical problems with my hands).

James Howard Kunstler: World Made by Hand - pastoral post-apocalypse - only 1/3 in, but great so far.

do you never sleep

finished 'military philosophers'. felt quite flat, the end, but i had accidentally found out all of the big surprises / resolutions of plot threads running for several volumes, browing in hilary spurling's handbook: it may just have been that.

also finished 'actual air'. i brought in a long-unread copy of 'the tennis court oath' to work for follow-up lunchbreak reading.

Sleep?

I really have to get back to Powell--have only read the first volume (but HAVE read his non Dance books, which were great).

I forgot to say that in James Howard Kunstler's 'World Made by Hand', which was first published last year, much of the world has been depopulated by a MEXICAN FLU which kills mostly the young and otherwise healthy.

A bit scattershot again at the mo. Just finished Watt by Beckett, which I believe I might be AGAINST. Lots of moments, yes, where it gets you into that hypnotized slightly dizzy uncomfortable space which is one of Beckett's A1 prose achievements, & some great funny stuff, but seriously that mathematical permutations of things routine pissed me off after a while (prefer the more judicious use in Molloy).
Reading a bit of Xenophon and Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith. Have Michael Moorcock's Byzantium Endures out of the library, but thread is making me think it's time for the next stage of Powell. Think I left off at Casanova's Chinese Restaurant.

How did you find Casanova's, woof? I seem to remember, possibly wrongly, you were a bit indifferent to the series early on.

Read Watt when I was a little'un and diligently went through all the permutations feeling that it was part of the point (well so it is, but I'm not sure I'd have the stamina or desire now). It does have good bits - I still remember with affection the sequence - is it outside a lunatic asylum - where one character encounters another talking backwards, which I found rather moving.

Rather soft of me I know, but I do love Murphy.

I only read a few pages of Casanova's, so I'll be starting there. You remember correctly: I'm not really a fan. I just don't really care about all those people, and the narrator is a prig, I've never laughed and I just feel like I'm reading gossip about made-up people. He's a nice stylist, and a really sharp observer, so it's pleasant enough to read, but it doesn't go much further than that for me. But enough people whose opinions I respect like it a great deal - weirdly much - so I feel I should keep going. Like I say, it's pleasant enough, so no great burden, but I'm not a fan.
Yes, when I think of bits of Watt I like, the bit I think you're talking about would be in there: is it when the narrator (Sam?) starts to use first-person, and talks about hanging out with Watt in gardens which border one another? It has an odd pastoral/paradisic feel. Watt disorders his words, sentences, and letters within words, in various permutations. Also that drifts into the funniest bit, I think, the account of an academic's research trip and findings, fairly Flann O'B-ish.

The narrator's pomposity would be a problem for me I think if I ever read it when in a mood of surly proletarian insurrection. I tend to steer clear of Powell on those occasions, for obvious reasons.

I just worry that as a consequence his pre-Dance comic novels, which I think are straightforward excellent - melancholy and funny - will be spoiled as a result of a distaste for the Dance novels. Why I worry, I don't know, since like most people you're perfectly capable of judging stuff on its merits, and other people pleading special cases won't change anything if you're not, but worry I do.

Yes! That's the bit in Watt. Absolutely spot on about the pastoral element. I'd forgotten about the research trip! I'll have to revisit that bit if not the whole novel. I'm feeling all excited now.

Although not as excited as yesterday when I cycled past an incredibly out-of-breath Andrew Neil, with a face like a pink boiled ham, struggling up the incline that goes alongside Rotten Row in Hyde Park yesterday, slugging away at the pedals like a heavyweight boxer on the ropes, mouth slackly agape, bleakly staring at the tarmac directly in front of his front tyre. (I've posted this elsewhere, but it still amuses me).

I don't get the Ronnie Scott reference James. Is it to do with me being a jazzer?

I had to look up which Beckett novels I had and hadn't read, just now.

Also, every time I picked up Ashbery today I put it back down again, mentally going: "No."

I finished Updike's Rabbit series today. I'm sorry to have come to the end, I loved them all so much - even if it is a little dispiriting for the aspiring writer within to see how Updike makes the craft seem so effortless, and the commonplace so epic.

"Yeah, that was it. Sorry about your hands."

Still not getting the Ronnie Scott reference, but thanks. It's not such a big deal, to be honest. More recently I was never far away from the thought that I could no longer be arsed playing given the amount of hours spent practising when I could have been doing other (& more lucrative) things. Some of the social aspects apart, I'm not missing it too much.

Finished My Friend Maigret, good, not great. I'll read more of the Maigret novels, but not obsessively. Picked up The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day. I'm crushin' a bit on Dorothy. The book is so polite, it cracks me up.

m spark's 'the driver's seat'

swiftly becoming one of my favorite authors, this m spark

Elfriede Jelinek - Greed. Its a crime bk, apparently..

"swiftly becoming one of my favorite authors, this m spark"

yay! there is always room for one more in the club.

Dunno about that. Think the lifeboat is getting pretty crowded right now.

I got the only copy of the new Cheever bio at the library. Huzzah!

Hm. Better check whether those Cheever Modern Libraries that Virginia Plain ordered have arrived in the Queens Library yet.

Of course I meant Library of America. Both copies out or on hold.

reading the Mark E Smith bio...its decent, but I thought there was going to be more LSD in it...

will finish it tonight, and then onto The 42nd Parallel by Dos Passos

a lot of reading going on here!
I read Watt in the springtime years and years ago - so long ago. It is quite hard going but at least having read it I can refer to its significance without having to read it again.

I am STILL reading AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE: amazing as it's a brisk 190pp

yesterday I reread sections of Amis's EINSTEIN'S MONSTERS

Reading Graves' The Greek Myths which is half good and half centaur bollocks. Also Ted Hughes' Collected Poems which is all good but suffers from being too big to carry around all day.

just finished Silence by Shusaku Endo

orwell, coming up for air and the old decline of the english murder essay collection
back to last part of adorno's minima moralia
odd how these complement each other, sort of

Wordsworth mystery anthology of Ambrose Bierce's ghost stories.

two of pamela des barres' books lol

I'm with the Band? I have that...

Tell me more about Coming Up For Air. You never hear much about that or Keep The Aspidistra Flying

hey noodle vague, have you read any of hughes' children's books? so bizarre and freaky.

finishing up 'other voices, other rooms' and just bought 'the easter parade' by richard yates

Ausonius, Three Amusements, translated by David Slavitt.

Hughes' Iron Man inspired the Ozzy Osborne song, after Ozzy grew up.

just finished milan kundera's 'the joke'. great book. now onto naomi klein's 'the shock doctrine'.

Yeahm I'm With the Band and Let's Spend the Night Together.

Shock Doctrine is on my list for this year.

I really dig 'Keep the Aspidistra Lying', if only for the extremely bitter reflections on working in a bookshop. It seemed more like a Patrick Hamilton novel than a George Orwell in some ways.

just finished Silence by Shusaku Endo

How was it. I've only read one Endo, and am wondering what else of his is good.

I'm halfway through Wallace Stegner's 'Crossing to Safety', which is a nice, gentle (so far) book of leisurely, lovely writing. But suspect tragedy lurks in part 2.

You don't hear much of A Clergyman's Daughter or Burmese Days either, I thought. Orwell himself rejected his previous methods, I think?

The narrator of Coming Up For Air is a fat bloke in a middle-class suburb in 1939 who spends the first thirty pages trying to decide whether he should spent the seventeen pounds he has won on a horse, which his wife does not know of, on booze, cigars, or 'a weekend with a woman'. A Part Two starts at this point which is an extended flashback covering his youth and his war service; I have glanced ahead to the opening of Part Three, which opens on page 143 with the sentence "When I came home that evening I was still in doubt as to what I'd spend my seventeen quid on."

The 1939 section was great; I'm finding it difficult to read the flashback chunks with any speed, so am reading M. John Harrison's Nova Swing in the meantime. (There are novels that seem made to read quickly and novels which seem made to read slowly? I'm coming to think this - after years of going into them with the intention of getting to the other side as quickly as possible? Might start a thread on this.)

"The train was running along an embankment. A little below us you could see the roofs of the houses stretching on and on, the little red roofs where the bombs are going to drop, a bit lighted up at this moment because a ray of sunshine was catching them. Funny how we keep on thinking about bombs. Of courses there's no question that it's coming soon. You can tell how close it is by the cheer-up stuff they're talking about it in the newspapers. I was reading a piece in the News Chronicle the other day where it said that bombing planes can't do any damage nowadays. The anti-aircraft guns have got so good that the bomber has to stay at twenty thousand feet. The chap thinks, you notice, that if an aeroplane's high enough the bombs don't reach the ground."

That's good; these threads can get a bit list-y, I like the interludes describing them in a bit of depth. We did a bit of Burmese Days at school, I think. The voice is good in that quote. It's got an old-fashioned feel to it, which I think gets switched off at some point before Orwell's two most famous books. I suppose it's almost another manifestation of the schism he's writing around.

I quite fancy reading Coming Up For Air myself now, I've read a lot of non-fiction about the period around the start of the war recently, but no fiction for a while. When I've read novels set then, they've always been very moving regardless of, say, how well-plotted the story is. It's possible I just pick good books, but I think I've got a tendency to give more leeway to that period than any other, just because I find it so fascinating. It's the combination of it being effectively our national myth, having been able to talk to my grandparents about it (not that I paid the attention I should have), and the idea that it was the last real struggle we had to go through and we've been rather spoiled and childish since then. I also like the 1939-40 period before the shoe dropped. It just seems such fertile, ominous ground.

Three books going on right now, 2666 which I'm liking so far (about 50 pages in), 1974 (Peace) and re-reading "The Rotters Club".

Coming Up For Air has been one of my favourite novels for longer than I care to admit.

Imagine if you had £17 and could decide to spend it on 'a weekend with a woman'!

thomp's little synopsis and excerpt have caused me to put Coming Up For Air on my list. I like when I get recommendations from this thread.

i'm reading carlos ruiz zafon's the shadow of the wind, it's really enjoyable so far. one of my friends recommended it to me when we were watching a guillermo del toro movie and she was like "oh man, del toro needs to make a movie of the shadow of the wind." she was otm.

Finished Jelinek's Greed - V rough going, but it could become one of those great fake crime bks, just using the genre to riff on old skool feminism and talk about how fucked we all are (and given that she's Austrian what a dump Austria seems to be, v little is spared)

Hubert Selby Jr - The Room. Rough going, for very different reasons.

I read an old Hugh Walpole novel--Walpole is one of those writers who was absolutely HUGE in his day (1910-1940s) and who has completely vanished now. The introduction has this great extract from one of PG Wodehouse's letters.

"I (met) Hugh Walpole when I was at Oxford getting my D.Litt. I was staying with the Vice-Chancellor at Magdalen and he blew in and spent the day. It was just after Hilaire Belloc had said that I was the best living English writer. It was just a gag, of course, but it worried Hugh terribly. He said to me, `Did you see what Belloc said about you?' I said I had.—`I wonder why he said that.' `I wonder,' I said. Long silence. `I can't imagine why he said that,' said Hugh. I said I couldn't, either. Another long silence. `It seems such an extraordinary thing to say!'—'Most extraordinary.' Long silence again. `Ah,well,' said Hugh, having apparently found the solution, `the old man's getting very old.'"

Rabbit Angstrom - a Modern Library compilation of the Rabbit novels. I finished Rabbit Run last night.

i meant to post this picture earlier when people were talking about jim thompson. wanted to show who his kissing cousin was on my bookshelf:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3623/3505440481_3bdcd35fff_b.jpg

um, of course, that picture sucks and you probably can't read the spines. anyway, much love for jim thompson and henry james.

does my spark-mania picture show up good?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3644/3505440687_b733bb02df_b.jpg

much better. i think mozilla makes the difference. or maybe i'm crazy.

serious question: how many of those have you read? I have certain authors I really like and am tempted to collect as much as I can whenever I see but I always feel bad cuz I already have 3 or 4 unread books by most of them lying around.

my frame-demonium can be viewed here:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3562/3506249224_76e4745753_b.jpg

i have read them all, but it's been so long since i've read any one of them that when i re-read them it will be a COMPLETELY different experience. I started reading Janet Frame when I was 20 or 21. I'm 40 now. You know?

Conspicuous absence from my Spark shelf. A copy of the prime of miss jean brodie. i can NEVER find a nice copy. or just a decent used oversized copy. just cheap paperbacks that always look poopy.

oh, and i also have cheap paperback copies of muriel's last couple of books. i've seen hardcovers, and i'd like those, but they were always too much money or something. i'm a cheapskate.

I started reading Janet Frame when I was 20 or 21. I'm 40 now. You know?

yeah, I figured that age was probably a factor -- even for the handful authors I got into in high school and still enjoy today, that's only, like, 5 years' worth of book-buying.

anyway, just curious. apart from intoxicants, books are really the only non-essential thing I spend money on these days. I feel kinda weird about it cuz I also go to the library about once a week, but there are some books I just feel like owning and I don't know why.

i never go to the library. too much pressure. i don't rent from video stores either. i just find cool stuff cheap. any excess money i have goes to buying books/records/videos. second-hand. i hardly ever buy new stuff. though i did make an impulse buy last week and bought a 2-disc tropic thunder dvd for ten bucks.

how's the bookstore going, scott??

it's going good! we had a brief setback. the original space we moved into was cheap, but it turned out to be too cheap. there were apartments above it, and one night someone's toilet overflowed all night and leaked down onto our space! ewwww. luckily, not much was hurt. but our landlord's response was depressing. In their words: "These things happen." and: "Just don't put stuff there."(Meaning, the very large area where there was water damage.) Neither of these responses was exceptable to us. So, we looked for a new place. and we found one. a great spot right on main street in town. tons of foot traffic, bigger, a great dry basement for storage, it's awesome! so, hopefully we will be open in a couple of weeks. we love our spot and we are totally excited to open.

i'm excited for you! you're living my dream! i wish you nothing but success :) :) :)

I like Silence, JM, it puts you in the mind of the oppressed missionary in Japan and turns him into his own worst enemy. (allegedly to become a Scorses film, it was already adapted in the '70s)

Youn - there's a fifth Rabbit book, a novella called Rabbit Remembered that I only found out about when I was midway through the series. Don't know if it's included in that compendium or not, but if not it's worth seeking out as a lovely coda to the whole thing

That is a nice collection of Spark books. Have that hardback of Memento Mori, one of my favourite covers:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/49/MementoMori.jpg/200px-MementoMori.jpg
Just amazing how many very good books she wrote. She's a bottomless supply of stuff worth reading. And good luck with the shop!
Thought I'd read The Four Zoas by Blake. Not sure why.

Tell me where it is, scott, and I'll stop by sometime.

my store is gonna be right on main street in Greenfield, Mass. right next to Tofu A Go Go, the veggie/vegan restaurant. so, if you are ever out that way, look for the sign that says John Doe Jr. (my brother has a used book and record shop in Hudson, NY called John Doe and a second shop called John Deux, so i decided to add to the family empire, name-wise.) my store is half books/half records as well. we won't be open for a couple of weeks.

The idea of not liking cheap paperbacks kind of saddens me. The other day, playing very much to type, I bought this copy of Miss Jean Brodie:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/120/265971860_f2db84e2dc.jpg

i wish you the very best of luck with your bookstore. i wish i could buy all my books in second hand bookstores! sadly, i have never lived anywhere where that has been remotely practicable. i should move that on my list of key criteria for places to go to.

is 'now and on earth' (second left jim thompson) any good? i bought it rather hurriedly from a charity store before discovering it wasn't crime fiction, and have been too angry at it to read.

i like cheap paperbacks! if i saw that penguin copy i would totally buy it. i'm talking, like, dog-eared crummy american copies that look really bad. the book has probably had a hundred covers. i just wish i could find a hardcover someday. or something that will last anyway and that i won't have to replace.

now and on earth is great! it's his first book. and very autobiographical.

good luck with the store, dude.

i can't decide if the plot turns in the shadow of the wind are juvenile or fun or both. at first i thought it reminded me of YA lit, now i'm thinking of it more like a point-and-click adventure game.

interrupted-while-typing xpost: that edition of the spark, not that copy. that copy belongs to some random on flickr, or someone that knows said random-on-flickr.

today i took a long lunchbreak so i could read murder in the cathedral. i found it kind of odd how well the stuff eliot got from christian mysticism maps onto modern conceptions of the mind. it had notes scrawled on it in pencil by someone who was continually claiming about parts of the play they found sentimental, and a series of notices from alec guinness's london revival of the play stuck into the endpaper.

i considered taking four quartets in for tomorrow's lunchbreak, but my copy of the new colson whitehead arrived, from the internet: so i should probably start that.

i just wish i could find a hardcover someday

Everyman's Library apparently put out a hardcover that included Brodie along with several other works. They list it at the back of the copy of Dead Souls I'm reading. Try a search for it by author and publisher in Alibris or Amazon. There should be some copies floating around.

I am almost finished Netherland and am pleased that it's lived up to its fabulous reviews. I think I'm identifying with a lot of it so strongly since, like the central character, I'm an expat from a cricketing country living in North America, but I think I'd like it just as much if I weren't. I can't wait to get home tonight so I can finish it.

Ismail Kadare: Broken April

This book is blowing my mind. It's very well written, which helps, but the underlying idea is even more fascinating. It's set in Albania, where the hill-dwelling people have this mad system of honour and code of behavior called the 'Kanun'. The main character's family was visited 70 years ago by a stranger, who stayed the night. The next morning, as he's leaving the village, the stranger is shot dead. Because of the way in which he fell, it's up to the host family to avenge his murder by killing the killer. Then it's up to that guy's family to avenge his murder by killing someone from the host family. And then back and forth, until 70 years later some 44 people have been killed, and the main character has just had to shoot someone dead. Then there's this system of 1-day and 30-day truces, and safe zones, and special rules, and taxes you have to pay when you kill someone. And it's all true. (More here)

Then this writer with romantic ideas about the Kanun stumbles into the midst of all this with his new wife while on their honeymoon. You can see where this might all go wrong for them.

2666 - i like it but i'm finding it to be very slow going, which is strange because typically i read novels very swiftly

I've been trying to work out who the Kadare reminds me of, and I just realised: it's like one of Ursula LeGuin's sociological-science-fiction novels, only with Albanians rather than aliens.

lol, I just bought The (Judge Roger) Traynor Reader for when I'm done with finals. What the fuck has law school done to me?

Just started on "The Man Who Loved Children" by Christina Stead. It makes me want to start a reading journal, just so I can quote endless from it and writing insightful things "LOL" and "AWESOME", so in a few months I can go back to those pages and go "man, that's some book!"
I'm actually just a chapter in, but what a chapter it is--it's some of the most enjoyable writing I've read since, well, since I read "The Franchiser" by Stanley Elkin a few months ago.

EVERYONE who loves great fiction should read The Man Who Loved Children. It can't be said enough. That book blew my little mind.

And I'm so happy that you enjoyed The Franchiser, Oystein. Mostly I'm just happy when anyone reads a book by Stanley Elkin. I'm one of those people who feel that he should be talked about in the same way that people talk about roth and updike and other "biggies". i sometimes wonder if he's underrated because he wrote "funny" books.

Jean Genet - Thief's Journal. I'm finding this to be the best read of any of his novels. Maybe that's more to do with the impression that I finally seem to have internalized his 'flowers blossoming from a block of concrete' aesthetic.

Should be starting on Musil's Man Without Qualities next. See you all in the next lifetime yeah?

Just started Alejo Carpentier's "The Kingdom of this World". Brutal.

Also started Jonathan Lethem's new one "Chronic City". Does Lethem fill all his books with silly metaphors? I remember loving Motherless Brooklyn, but I've disliked everything else I've read by him. His sense of humor makes it worth the time, though.

I thought that wasn't out until the end of the year?

Just started Alejo Carpentier's "The Kingdom of this World". Brutal.

Read this for a university class once, really liked it but don't remember it very well.

Also, finding The Recognitions a bit of a drag. Thinking of giving up.

aww. how far along are you

I thought that wasn't out until the end of the year?

Got a review copy... tentative date, according to the back cover, is 10/13/09.

"Kingdom of the World" is, I think, famous for being recognized as the first example of Magical Realism. Maybe so.

i have started reading 'sag harbor'. incidentally, people with your review copies are annoying.

-your wtf.

Got a book of the Paris Review interviews from the library: Dorothy Parker, Capote, Borges, James M Cain, Billy Wilder, Hemingway... great stuff. Also reading an 1880 novella about London being destroyed by KILLER SMOG!

aww. how far along are you

only about 300 pages. Enjoyed it for 200 or so pages, halfway through the conversation with Recktall Brown and Basil Valentine I realised it had began to feel a bit of a chore.

Gaddis is always a chore. I have been reading one per year at most because I find them completely exhausting. But, in my opinion at least, they are totally worth the work. And Recognitions is my favourite.

Incidentally, we don't care. I get my review copies because I work a SUPER low paying job at an independent bookstore. I love it, but poverty is the drawback. 'Sag Harbor' is on my list, so I'll be curious to see what you think. Hope it's good, or at least better than his last book.

James M: that Paris Review book is super. Parker's interview not least! And Vonnegut's. I bought the next volume also.

Youn, that's a good thing to read! I saw that complete volume the other day and really fancied it in a way. I imagine those books are well-written and important, and good to know. (I've never read a single Updike novel.)

Finished my Lethem as said elsewhere, rereading Amis essay, finish with that soon; also Wood on McEwan this week. Don't think I can allow myself to start another Lethem yet, ought to read something more responsible.

Must check out that Paris Review book. On the second of Scott's recommendations upthread after having thoroughly enjoyed Wolf Solent - absolutely what I wanted to read at that point. So on Troubles by JG Farrell now, having only read The Siege of Krishnapur when I was younger.

Funny, with a sense of disquiet and unease that is intriguing, although sometimes I find his writing too meticulous - just need to settle into it I think.

Possibly going up to Hadrian's Wall this weekend, and want to take Puck of Pook's Hill with me. Didn't bring it (I'm away from home) but reckon I'll be able to pick up a cheap copy somewhere. Although having typed that I've realised that in this (as in so many things) I'm probably doomed to failure.

Whenever I read Dorothy Parker I fall in love with her a little bit. This was no different. She's a really interesting interviewee. I'm about to read the Vonnegut IV. Wa-hey!

finished 'the easter parade' - really really loved it, more than revolutionary road, i think. sad, but not as grim.

just starting alice munro's 'friend of my youth' short story collection.

Where to begin with Muriel Sparks?

now let us praise famous men, so great

haw "sparks"

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_SKETAAdxLvs/SYzXBXuvdRI/AAAAAAAABHI/0OvFDgxCi8A/s400/sparks.jpg

It's kind of the obvious choice but The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a really fantastic novel.

I shouldn't start with her first (The Comforters) unless you're really OCD about that sort of thing, as it feels like it was written by a different author, albeit one who shares an underlyingly similar set of sensibilities. I kind of feel unqualified answering this, given that Scott has apparently read all of them.

i think you are right on. jean brodie is a good place to start. and i agree about the comforters. for earlier stuff, i would say go for memento mori or the girls of slender means or the ballad of peckham rye.

the 70's though is where the going gets weird. and that's some of my favorite stuff. novels like the driver's seat and the takeover and the hothouse by the east river.

and the later stuff from the 90's and beyond is some of the most fun.

Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor

I finished Sag Harbor this evening. I'd like if he wrote a book that was actually more ambitious than his first, someday.

Also I think I am starting to get a bit bored of pop-culture riffs? lol old before my time ;_;

just started on John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor. only about 1/10th of the way in, but so far it's v. entertaining.

Re Muriel Spark: 'The Girls of Slender Means' is another great starting point: a bunch of young women living together in a boarding house in London during the Blitz, with an unexploded bomb on the property doing odd things to ratchet up the sexual tension.

so at the bookstore today i had $45 to burn. i saw a bunch of jonathon lethem, and was trying to remember which title i had seen favourably mentioned on ILB, but i couldn't so i went for the one that sounded most familiar: motherless brooklyn

i also remembered the recent discussion of sparks so i also picked up memento mori, since i couldn't remember the ILB recommended first-read of her works either!

is she now officially called 'sparks' by ILB?

I'd have liked to agree about The Prime of Ms Jean Brodie, but it really disappointed me; I saw almost nothing in it, at least till JB's political entanglements complicated things a bit. I've heard that The Comforters is an interesting one.

I think The Easter Parade is one of the grimmest books I've read!

Just1n3, everyone (see Lethem thread) seems to have different views about his work and what's best, but I happen to like M Brooklyn best: in fact I feel it's one of my favourite novels ever.

ILB <3 sparky!

bonus points to anyone who reads this. i never have.

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/x0/x3376.jpg

gave up on The Recognitions, reading The Second Sex.

I get those bonus points! It's a pretty good, fairly short biography, rather than an 800-page monster. Basically half of it's about the (fascinating) life of Mary Shelley, a quarter discusses 'Frankenstein', and a quarter discusses 'The Last Man', which Spark, reasonably enough, rates as her two great works.

Am now tackling Woolf's 'Jacob's Room', having spent the weekend happily with Richard Stark's Parker novels 4, 5 and 6.

I looked for Memento Mori when I was last at the library, but to no avail.

Currently reading:
Waugh, A Handful of Dust
Lynda Barry, What It Is (this book is rad)

Finished:
Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (tons of fun when not horrifying, apparently my dad used to have a signed copy)
Sjowall & Wahloo, Cop Killer (pretty good, melancholy but with some out-of-nowhere hilarious shit in a couple places)

Annie Cohen-Solal, Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life.

...only with Albanians rather than aliens.

Hmmmm, there's a whole other novel in that phrase alone...

Those Sjowall and Wahloo books are great. I love the way some of the characters sometimes say the funniest things, but NOBODY EVER LAUGHS EVER.

I think I'm giving up on Jacob's Room. I get what she's doing, I just don't really give a shit.

Is 'Cop Killer' the one where the obnoxious cop (I forget his name) shows up to work with a serious concussion but no one bothers to send him home? That was funny, in a mean-spirited way. I read all of those in the early weeks of last year, good times. The first one's the best, though.

"I think I'm giving up on Jacob's Room. I get what she's doing, I just don't really give a shit."

This is how I have felt with pretty much every book of Woolf's I have troubled with /:

Me too, with the exceptions of 'Between the Acts', 'Flush' and 'Orlando'. I'm tempted by the blurb of 'Night and Day', but I think I might just be done with Ms Woolf. Her husband, on the other hand, is ace. I have to find a copy of 'The Village in the Jungle'.

Finished the first section of 2666 and swithering whether to press on or take a break (ie, treat as one novel, as the publishers want me to, or 5 separate ones, which is what Bolano himself seems to have intended). I enjoyed and was impressed by the first part, although I thought it unexpectedly conventional after "The Savage Detectives". Surprisingly the writer I was most put in mind of was de Montherlant. Temperamentally there are obvious differences - Bolano is not a self-regarding French aristo, or a snob, or gay. Nor am I suggesting B matches DM's sour misogyny, but there is something troubling about his treatment of his female characters. And there's something about his detachment and his method of presenting reality, that seems like a continuation of something that might in a parellel universe have become mainstream modernist tradition (or post modernism if that term hadn't been appropriated for other purposes). Wyndham Lewis comes to mind as well as DM. All these very tentative first thoughts, of course.

Still, it must say something for Bolano that he's got me reading this stuff and willing to read on. These days I tend to prefer a nice bit of realism, so to get me motivated to read two very long novels with experimental aspirations - especially in translation - is not bad going.

I think I'm giving up on Jacob's Room. I get what she's doing, I just don't really give a shit.

Jacob's Room has some moments that stuck with me (the dude who goes on about how silence doesn't exist), and a pretty heartbreaking ending - actually I don't think the novel's worth much if you take out the end. Skip to it if you can't be bothered.

These days I tend to prefer a nice bit of realism, so to get me motivated to read two very long novels with experimental aspirations - especially in translation - is not bad going.

High praise.

Just started Timothy Snyder's 'The Red Prince'. The prose is plodding but the story intrigues me.

frankiemac: bolano does seem to have gotten sort of a free pass on his attitude to female characters, yeah: i think perhaps equal parts a wish not to speak ill of the recently deceased and a sort of "lol latin american" feeling, though i feel totally crass expressing it like that.

i think perhaps the "continuation of something that might in a parellel universe have become mainstream modernist tradition" stuff is probably relatable to his having been a latin american exile, & doubly exiled to europe by the time he started writing. but i don't know enough about modernism, south america, or europe to unpack that feeling.

i'm in the middle of a long break from it: should probably have stopped after finally finishing part four, instead of grinding on to stop miserably halfway through part five. (not that i'm suggesting these parts are in any way bad writing, from certain perspectives at least they seem the best in the book.)

i have been reading the new american poetry at work. i might bring the postmoderns in tomorrow.

also, between the acts was the one i abandoned quickest. i came to it fairly late in my cycle of 'oh maybe this will be the one that convinces me she is actually of such value as she is regarded as'—'oh, fuck this', my tolerance for her having sunk so low at this point i think my reason for thinking it was dreadful was that it used semi-colons, or possibly ellipses

It's odd to imagine Updike playing the role of Skeeter. Rabbit Redux reminds me of my dad at that time when he was taking long business trips to Korea, had a post 20s gut, longish hair, and that kind of post-adolescent sloppiness from which only men seem to suffer. (With women of course it's all neurotic if not less sloppy.) Sitting at the typewriter I bet he enjoyed it and maybe even acted it out.

also, between the acts was the one i abandoned quickest.

Yeah, I think I liked it because I came to it first... I hadn't become so jaded about her stylistic tricks at that point.

I loved the Skeeter bits, though not entirely in a pleasant way - not sure I've ever read anything that made feel so uncomfortable, just the dread of this guy's behaving so outrageously. It's a curious thing in the series that no-one ever seems to get offended - I mean, these people say quite horrible things to each other quite a lot of the time.

Eventually finished Troubles by JG Farrell. I enjoyed it a lot - it managed to combine some quite funny character portraits, situations, even one liners, with a general trend of decrepitude, decline and spiritual and physical putrefaction.

It seems very much of a piece with The Siege of Krishnapur, descriptive of the force of fading power in the land and in the psyche, charting English imperial desuetude. Would be interested to see whether what seems to be a theme across these two books is continued in his other ones.

That said I'm not immediately tempted to go back. The pace was inevitably funereal, a narrative of the small slippages that go to make up a greater decline, and yet a certain precision in the writing perhaps made progress even more ponderous than the matter requires.

I think GCSE and A-level English have given me a fear of works that contain or seem open to interpretation through obvious parallels (Edward Spencer's spiritual welfare, the state of the Hotel Majestic, the 'Troubles' (which has several meanings, you see). This prejudice doesn't really have a lot going for it, and it's debatable whether this mechanism isn't perfectly naturally, even expertly handled by Farrell. Nevertheless it's a personal preference to have metaphors a little more integrated. I suppose it's nothing more than a fear of the allegorical - I think I tend to see it is little more than a literary form of dot-to-dot.

That admission makes me feel hopelessly philistine, but there it is. Put it this way - I recognised and even felt the general excellence of the novel, without ever perhaps truly warming to it.

By way of comfort last night I re-read (for some umpteenth time) The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr. Do love it. Love the set up (the fresh, unbroken snow and the general atmosphere of mystery), love the locked-room mystery lecture by Gideon Fell towards the end and love this quotation contained within it, which I quote because I feel in some way it also explains the grudging praise above -

'When I say that a story about a hermetically sealed chamber is more interesting than anything else in detective fiction, that's merely a prejudice. I like my murders to be frequent, gory and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened. I do not care to hear the hum of everyday life; I much prefer to listen to the chuckle of the great Hanaud or the deadly bells of Fenchurch St Paul. All these things, I admit, are happy, cheerful, rational prejudices, and entail no criticism of more tepid (or more able) work.'

Would be interested to see whether what seems to be a theme across these two books is continued in his other ones.

It's certainly also in 'The Singapore Grip' - those three books were conceived as a loose trilogy about the end of the British Empire.

Right, thanks James - will probably give that a go soonish then. Maybe after Oliver VII and The Blue Flower (as mentioned in the recently bought thread). Then I think I'm going to go back to RL Stevenson, my reading of whose letters and complete works was rudely interrupted by illness last year.

The Curious Casebook Of Inspector Hanshichi by Kido Okamoto - early 20th century japanese take on Sherlock Holmes.

What's the Hanschichi like, Daniel?

I read some Edogawa Rampo (the Japanese disciple of Edgar Allen Poe - hence the name), which was perfectly good, but not as great as it sounds.

Thoroughly enjoying Oliver VII. It does have the same sort of flip tone as The Pendragon Legend, but for some reason I find it less wearing on the nerves. Maybe it's because that political intrigue seems suited to farce (my favourite Ambler, The Dark Frontier, has a similar tone in places), but it might just be that I read The Pendragon Legend in the wrong sort of mood, was expecting something different from what I got, which wrong-footed me.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins

really great clipped yet garrulous small-time crook dialogue

The New Zealand Book of the Beach, an anthology of seaside stories by Kiwis that my sister sent me for my birthday last year. I haven't read it before now because I knew that it would depress the hell out of me to read it in the middle of a Canadian winter, so now that it's warming up I thought I'd give it a go. First story is Katherine Mansfield's "At the Bay" which is an old favourite, and it contains such awesome folks as Sargeson, Ihimaera, Owen Marshall, plus some good contemporary writers and a bunch I've never heard of. I'm really excited about it, although I can already feel the homesickness rising.

i read 'the ballad of peckham rye' last night. it confirmed two things about spark for me -

i. that there's a detached clinical-cynical side of her writing (or rather the worldview of the implied author) which kind of gives me the creeps, on occasion
ii. the way she handles violence is extraordinary

oh, (iii.?) her use of prolepsis & analepsis is incredibly deft, characteristic

Finished 'Chronic City' and 'The Kingdom of This World'. Lethem isn't a very good writer, but he's very funny. Alejo is a very good writer, but this book was so violent it gave me the scares.

Just started Love and Obstacles by Hemon.

I'm looking for some good nonfiction of South America, any recommendations? Thanks.

What's the Hanschichi like, Daniel?

I read some Edogawa Rampo (the Japanese disciple of Edgar Allen Poe - hence the name), which was perfectly good, but not as great as it sounds.

So far I think the main character's a bit lacking - he's just wise and mysterious, sorta lacking in the quirks department. The first story's plot was pretty ho-hum, too, but they seem to get better as they go along.

Rampo's on my to read list as well (I'm diving deep into japanese literature due to having planned a trip there this Summer); another Poe paralell is that, much as EAP's stuff has been adapted for american grindhouse cinema via Corman et al, Rampo is a pretty big brand within japanese horror cinema.

Am taking the plunge into '2666', which is nothing like what I expected so far (though it IS good).

Reading 'Brideshead Revisited' actually. Haven't read it before. Was enjoying it for a bit, felt criticisms about its snobbery to be misplaced - after all, you can feel 'the chill wind blowing the tapestry' or whatever his phrase is, all the time, no matter how lush the proceedings.

Then suddenly I became incredibly sick of their goings on. They all seemed immensely hateful. Instead of the cynically cruel universe of his early novels you have a sentimentally cruel universe. He just seems to be endorsing the feelings of massively entitled shits.

Also, the line about Evelyn Waugh not really liking writing, hence his wonderful brevity, is clearly not to true with Brideshead. He seems to revel in all that hi-falutin crap about food and wine.

Betjeman I think it was wrote how it was a book that described the state of the soul and it's not totally without appeal if you care about the souls of massively entitled shits. Writes some rather odd sentences as well, that make for you to screw your face up in confusion and distaste.

Still, here's a bit of a stuff that does you good from it -

(Cordelia - the 12-year-old Flyte girl to Charles Ryder)

"D'you know, if you weren't an agnostic, I should ask you for five
shillings to buy a black god-daughter?"
"Nothing will surprise me about your religion.."
"It's a new thing a missionary priest started last term. You send five
bob to some nuns in Africa and they christen a baby and name her after
you. I've got six black Cordelias already. Isn't it lovely?"

is clearly not to true

Reading Wittgenstein's Mistress and enjoying it immensely. It's going a lot quicker than I expected, and it's waaaaay more fun than I could've imagined.

I dunno, the protagonists in Brideshead Revisited are spoiled and useless to be sure, but I don't recall them being particuarly cruel or hateful about it, I just sort of see them as Bertie Wooster types. It's always puzzled me that the book gets badmouthed as religious propaganda, and I'm aware enough that the author fully endorsed that interpretation, but to me it just reads as a sad story about an all-around fucked up family, and the religion feels integral to that fucked-upness. I might be taking Death Of The Author too far with this, but that's what I felt when I read it.

Yes--I suspect it might have been MEANT as religious propoganda, but you'd have to be pretty odd to actually be converted by it.

Musil - Man Without Qualities. Currently halfway through the 2nd vol. So great (for the toxic atmosphere it conjures up more than anything else, although the multiple levels of ideas is, on the surface, pretty stunning - on a first read its pretty hard to tell where all the threads are going even though I suspect that going nowhere is the point). Should start a thread about 'philosophical novels' but I doubt that there is much else like this that I don't know about (Broch/Proust/Svevo/Pessoa).

That is another of the HUGE books I'm really keen to read once I gird my loins for the task.

Brideshead Revisited is vile: one of the most heartless, ill-structured, badly-turned, unbelievably repugnant, reactionary books I have ever forced myself to read.

(In case anyone's forgotten: at one point the protagonist joins a fascist militia and goes round in an armed gang beating up striking trades unionists. The book does not present this as a bad idea.)

Sure Waugh was just doing Write What You Know.

I think it does present it as a bad idea, though admitidely in a "oh the follies of youth, can't blame 'em" way; it's all depicted as farce.

julio you are continually reading stuff that makes me go 'crap, i never got around to that one'

ha, well, I certainly felt a bit out of the loop when you're all talking about this M Spark person I have never checked out. I have now put her in my reading list (and taken stuff out that I just don't think I'll ever come across when 2nd hand bk trawling, its my excuse to keep it manageable).

But you should def get around to Musil, although for me I wish I had read my copy of AJP Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 - just a bit more detailed historical background which maybe not strictly necessary, as its about a lot more than mere history, maybe one of the few books that feels likes its about everything ever. No wonder he never finished it.

Well I aim to get around to Musil this year. That or starting Cao Xueqin again. One wonders which more requires the sourcebook.

Just out of interest, are you going to any of the Coleman performances for the Meltdown festival this year?

In my uni library I found a Muriel Spark children's book illustrated by Edward Gorey. Now there's a combination.

Taking a break after the first 3 vols of 2666, I read Miriam Toews 'The Flying Troutmans', which was really funny and sad. Now back to the Mexican killings.

"Just out of interest, are you going to any of the Coleman performances for the Meltdown festival this year?"

Can only go to 'This is our music' one as 'Shape of jazz...' has sold out (thx for reminding me, I am so used to 'one-man-and-his-dog' type attendance at concerts that I keep forgetting to buy way in advance...would have probably missed it)

What about you?

i got tickets for 'this is our music' and the charlie haden with carla bley and robert wyatt performance (which was !!! for me, possibly even moreso than the chance to see coleman). more than that would have been an issue w/r/t money and time /:

kind of hoping the this is our music night will move away from the blueprint a little, being the last night. (i think it's his current group playing, though, which is sort of interesting: wonder what 'beauty is a rare thing' sounds like with the two-bass setup). but i do dislike the whole 'play the album' thing that's come into fashion of late, and it feels doubly weird to have it in this context.

-

anyway, with regards to the thread about reading books, i think this weekend i may finally finish 'a dance to the music of time' and 'minima moralia'. i also have given up on emily barton's 'the testament of yves gundrun', which was written with obvious talent and potential and then started pissing in the wind with it a little, it felt.

See you there then - that is if I get the tickets, I am gonna walk by the rfh and buy it from their box office this coming Tuesday. Who knows it might be sold out by then.

I was thinking about what a match up Bley/Wyatt/Haden was...but I was also wondering how Yo La Tengo have found themselves in the line up (?!) They must've changed their sound quite a bit since the last time I've heard them -- which is a v long time.

I like that the evenings are titled 'reflections...' I expect Ornette to be more perverse with the play your album idea (I had no idea that this was a fashion)

John Sturrock: THE WORD FROM PARIS

Sad thing about the Yo La gig is that it seemed to sell out before the Ornette two, which is craaaaazy. Anyway, they have slight jazz bona-fides, having recorded with William Parker and some other Blue Series dudes. They also did this, once:

http://cdn.pitchfork.com/media/8871-today-is-the-day-ep.jpg

-

I have now finished both 'Minima Moralia' — although I feel like I only read about a half of it, getting lost before the end of various arguments, paragraphs, sentences — and A Dance To The Music Etc., which really has made me want to get on with reading Proust and Musil this year. The ways in which the novels change is very strange: it's number eight or nine where they stop being constructed as elaborate series of incidents and suddenly have some more regular novelistic passage of time ... it'd be hard to explain that without more specific reference.

One gets the idea that Powell had somewhat different ideas of how his novel but The Novel functioned, in terms of structure, mechanics, etc., towards the end: though that sort of idea of 'how novels work' is foreign to the sort of talk of 'how novels work' that X. Trapnel* and Nick Jenkins indulge in in the latter volumes. There's also the problem of moments where the gears grind to a halt (the first of these is probably Moreland being introduced in volume five) ... Bagshaw in volume ten is perhaps the most troubling, in that almost everyone else is assumed to have already known him for years.

He never quite works out how to write Pamela. (Or, one fears, most of the females in the book.) This is probably the biggest problem with 10, 11: notwithstanding the rather forced (again, gears grind) way in which we are expected to transfer our interest (in 10) to an entirely new focal character, and then (in 11) his biographer: Powell discharges himself of this fairly well, once it gets to it. The confrontation at the end of 11 would match up with any of the other big comic parallel tricks, were it not for how terribly inconvincing Pamela's diction is throughout. Also there's the issue of how coy the first three volumes are about sex compared to the brusqueness of the last three.

On the other hand, it's interesting how well Widmerpool's end (confirmed as latterly arrived on) is made to dovetail with the ways the first volume is introduced.

Been looking at some of the proposed match-ups today: amused by Quiggin as Leavis, surprised I didn't spot Erridge as Orwell.

*Has anyone ever read any Julien Maclaren-Ross? I'm sort of curious

ugh. apparently the side effect of a bank holiday reading powell is that one becomes awfully prolix, refers to oneself as 'one', and finds it natural to refer to women as 'females'

"The Radetsky March" by Joseph Roth. About a third of the way through. So far, astonishingly great. Everyone should read this.

I've read quite a lot of Maclaren-Ross and if I may be permitted a dubious statement, this being I Love Books I hope I may, I would say, out of that group of consanguinous writers - Waugh, Powell, Hamilton (perhaps), he seems the most naturally talented of the lot.

However, as his biographer Paul Willetts who has done more than anyone else to revive his reputation, said (if I remember right), 'he was a very mediocre caretaker of his own great talent' and I don't think there's any need to alter that.

Of Love and Hunger is amazing - bitter and funny - as is Memoirs of the '40s (collected with some autobiographical material about his youth, also excellent). He was a very good film critic and his essays have an informal pertinence that's hard to match - Bitten by the Tarantula is your volume for that stuff. His short stories are effortlessly brilliant marvels.

His letters reveal a tiresome duplicitous ingrate and his mine of brilliance seems to have been squandered very quickly.

Sorry, that was rather abrupt. I had some potatoes on and was salading some tomatoes, and got distracted. I should say that although I think he was more naturally talented (a sort of ease of expression and wit) I certainly wouldn't put him above any of the authors mentioned - all things considered it was rather too lenten a vein to consider him a great writer, but DO read him - he's ace.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with you about Pamela either - the way she starts off horrific as a small child and maintains a similar level of horror throughout her life, gave me a good deal of the pleasure to be had from the later volumes. Those awkwardnesses that Powell is so good at (McClintick and his wife have the other really memorable relationship in that regard).

Everything the Fairy Josser says about Maclaren-Ross is spot-on. I've read all of his stuff, and you NEED to read 'Of Love and Hunger' at least.

Ah man, Moby Dick!

Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up--flaked up, with rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights. And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.

john cheever, falconer

and

a time for trolls, a cool and often hilarious collection of norwegian folk tales

was thinking about powell at work again today: i think one of the big changes in the latter books is that powell starts to deal in "this happened to this person and it made him change in that way" psychological development - whereas in the earlier points of the cycle characters emerge from the mist in fixed attitudes which circumstances merely demonstrate - and never change before yr eyes

this also fits with the oddness of the odd increase in sexual frankness: it kins of seems in the earlier books that any revelation about someone's sex life is always aimed at "oh, that fits" and not "well, that explains it": i think this is, again, part of the pamela widmerpool problem

i'm not going back for textual evidence to support this theory right now though. i am convinced to try and find the maclaren-ross book, at any rate.

-

reading andy beckett's when the lights went out: a history of the seventies , which has totally done all the necessary research to write a great new 200-page book about the 70s

also, which should i read, the magic mountain or doktor faustus?

neither?

hahaha exactly

Surely Doktor Faustus as Adorno had some input in its creation.

My choice would be DF, IMO a better novel and one that's better survived the test of time. It probably helps if you're at least a bit interested in twentieth century classical music and the developments of serialism. TMM has more in the way of conventional fictional pleasures - a variety of well-drawn characters and the like - but I found it turgid in places. DF is (even) more cerebral, more purely a novel of ideas, but Mann is more passionately engaged, and I never found it a drag to read.

OK, have finally finished 2666: wow! Am having trouble settling on anything to read next, after that monument. I read parts 4 and 5 in reverse order, as someone who knows what they're on about said to me they found it more satisfying that way. What a book! Although you can see how it might have benefited from one last draft of polishing--part 4 is probably too long, and none of the sections (and, indeed the whole book) so much conclude as just suddenly STOP. But, yes, I really enjoyed it. Now I see what everyone else was raving about 6 months ago!

How is Buddenbrooks?

A short break from Musil came in the shape of Chandler's The Big Sleep. Plot holes that I can't be bothered to sit down and work it out? Possibly..

"The Radetsky March" by Joseph Roth. About a third of the way through. So far, astonishingly great. Everyone should read this.

Agreed. Run to The Emperor's Tomb when you're finished.

I've got fifteen pages left in my reread of James' The Ambassadors, the "easiest" of the three Difficult Late Novels.

Also: Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was The Rage, a lyrical account of Greenwich Village in the forties.

Finished Great Gatsby, which I was reading for the first time, earlier in the afternoon. Really liked it, had recently read Tender is the night and Gatsby really was very similar in style and theme but much less flawed. A great novel.

Just started If on a winter's night a traveler by Calvino.

While deciding what should follow '2666', I read the rest of that Paris Review Interviews book I borrowed. Rebecca West is wonderful. I love her dismissing Ian McEwan. I paraphrase, but she roughly says: "So they bury Mum under concrete in the basement. Then she starts smelling. Nothing much else happens. It's just 'Mum's still smelling'." (I like McEwan, but this is very true.)

the great gatsby is such a perfect, dense, layered piece of work - it was the second reading that really struck me.

i've just read:
'the brief history of the dead' by kevin brockmeier. interesting. nice, easy writing style. kept me interested all the way through. the ending was unsatisfying, though.
'the lovely bones' by alice sebold. been curious about this since i heard peter jackson was making it into a movie. pretty good, a bit twee, but not sickeningly so, a good quick read.
'ten days in the hills' by jane smiley. just started this, interesting so far.

Buddenbrooks is like Mann's "Sons & Lovers" - an early Bildungsroman that lacks the assurance/originality/finish/& (arguably) depth of later work but has a rawness, freshness and approachability that will make many readers prefer it. It beats TMM simply as a good, enjoyable read. But anyone coming to Mann for the first time should start with the short stuff IMO - especially Death in Venice, Mario The Magician and Tonio Kroger. Not everyone will like him, and if you don't like the shorter pieces it's unlikely you'll like the long novels.

From what folks are saying this Maclaren Ross - who I hadn't heard of at all - sounds right up my street and I will be getting my hands on "Of Love and Hunger". Thanks also for the "Emperor's Tomb" recommendation - I'll definitely be looking to read more Roth, although given size of my to read next pile it may not be very soon.

Incidentally, anyone read the Patrick Hamilton bio by Nigel Jones & is it any good? I seem to know so much about Hamilton that I feel I must have read a bio at some point but I'm pretty sure it wasn't this one. It could just be a combination of newspaper articles/the fiction being so autobiographica/there was a TV piece about him too.

I've read Sean French's bio of Hamilton, which was very good: affectionate but clear-eyed. It's pretty cheap 2nd-hand as a hardback, as it never made it into paperback. I read French somewhere saying Faber had told them it was their worst-selling book ever. It came out when pretty much all of Hamilton was out of print and nobody cared.

First back!

Just read Eric Ambler's "Epitaph for a Spy", which was really fun. I've several more Amblers waiting for me, and I might have to have a bit of a binge.

I've acquired my first couple of Amblers - A Coffin for Demetrios and The Levantine - because Michael Gove (of all people) has been writing about him recently and makes him sound great. Not normally my thing, but I'm quite looking forward to it.

I think the early stuff is best. A Coffin for Demetrios is great.

Donald is addicted to Ambler—he got into it via Furst.
I'm reading two at once, both fantastic:
"The Debt to Pleasure" by John Lanchester, and "All The King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren, which I'd somehow missed up till now.

http://api.ning.com/files/HM99qSWBjQjKgTokTd2p1IHHfmyMgLHlkSVTUFGARYD7weSmkqicjZ6*hD4btGFSER-dkVsdDZLAQ*AijpRhFYUbpGVbyufp/Overcoming_300dpi.jpg

The Dark Frontier is my favourite Ambler, I think - the premise is quite weird - along with The Mask of Dimitrios/Coffin for Dimitrios.

Just started reading Denton Welch's A Voice Through a Cloud today and at the moment am thinking it's one of the best things I've read. Difficult tone to pin down, calm elegance describing intense psychic and physical pain. The first chapter is a wonder of story telling, and subsequent chapters are exceptional essays of perception - vivid and clear - all in measured and intelligent phrasing. Something slightly loopy and surreal as well, that is extremely disconcerting.

Looks like a fascinating writer and one who I'm looking forward to reading more of.

I've just read the first chapter of 'The Radetzsky March' while browsing in my local Waterstone's - it's great

In a break from Powell I just read Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". Obviously several bits are totally gripping. Read something in an old copy of Literary Review about critics being sniffy about his unidiomatic English and I get that. I felt like there was similarity with Steinbeck's writing - was he an influence? It was nice to find out the influence behind David Mitchell's section on the Englishman in Australia from 'Cloud Atlas'. I'll definitely read "Heart of Darkness" again pretty soon, hopefully in one sitting. Don't feel like Conrad is someone I want to get into in a big way though.

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/c4/c22903.jpg

OK, am reading 'Dimitrios'!

'Finished' Musil...phew.

Jean Echenoz - I'm Off.

finished Madame Bovary. Great, but pretty much unrelentingly grim. Is there a single character who isn't foolish, duplicitious and banal?

i thought that one guy in bovary was pretty sympathetic and not that foolish. um, the young guy who moves away to work in the city. i mean, it seemed like he grew up a bit. and he realized that the IDEA of being with emma and the reality were two very different things. i've been there, lemme tellya.

I just finished Mick Foley's autobiography (the first one). It wasn't as good as I thought it would be, but still pretty readable. Currently reading Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for the second time. I didn't quite finish it the first time round. It would be nice, for the layman anyway, if he could give a few more real world examples to back up the theory - it is a little dry without them.

I am almost done with The Forever War, which is really really really REALLY good.

I just started William T. Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down. It's super. I really liked Europe Central but haven't read any of his earlier novels.

Just started David Thomson's Try To Tell The Tale, which I was first inclined to completely dismiss due to the presence of "tell the tale" in its name. A downright contemptible thing to see in the title of a memoir.

Brodeck: A novel by Philippe Claudel

A truely great novel, which manage to be both deep and thrilling,simple yet significant, a rare acheivment
Like Kafka and Gunter Grass.
hard to stop reading and think about it.
can you ask for more?

I finished The Shadow of the Wind (a fun read but lots of little things annoyed me) and started Shalom Auslander's Foreskin's Lament and Bill Bruford's autobiography (not because I want to read dirt on prog rocker dudes, but because of his musings on being an aging musician, self-consciousness vs. creativity, etc.).

Btw has anyone noticed that Shalom Auslander and Chief Tyrol from BSG are the same dude?

http://www.jewcy.com/files/u1466/17060403_ShalomAuslander_lg.jpghttp://www.aarondouglasfans.com/DesignElements/Images/Biography_SkyOne.jpg

Decided on a push-myself-a-bit, hear-something-new whim to get tickets to Berg's Lulu, and that prompted me to round up lots of unfinished/dipped into early-mid 20th mitteleuropa stuff lying around the flat, so it's a burst of Wedekind's plays (I know, SPOILERS), Spengler's Decline of the West, Benjamin, Mann, and Musil (at last) for me. I'll see where I get to. Be nice to finish Faustus & maybe get through vol 1 of The Man without Qualities.

I started Faustus but haven't really been in the right frame of mind to read anything other than the paper lately.

Though I did get through the above-recommended 'Of Love And Hunger'. Which I don't know about, though the vacuum salesmanship stuff was pretty great. It's also one of that category of pre-war novels like Coming Up For Air mentioned further up ^^. Although an artificial one, being written in 1956 or something.

And the first volume of Logue's Homer, which was great, actually.

I have pretty much all the same "dipped into early-mid 20th mitteleuropa stuff". Although I've never even vaguely felt the urge to read 'Decline of the West'.

also, person who is reading 'rising up and rising down', let me know how that goes plz

'Operation Shylock' by Philip Roth. I'm not really enjoying it - I'm finding it hard to keep up with who is who and who's doing what and whether they're really doing it at all, and I'm not really sure how seriously I'm supposed to take any of it. Basically it feels like a huge joke that I'm not in on

Just shelved David McCullough's John Adams bio after 300 pages. Picked up Richard Rhodes' Making of the Atomic Bomb. I previously breezed through Edmund Morris' The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which is one of the best books I've read in years.

^Picked all of these by browsing through pulitzer.org. I had hoped this would be a failsafe strategy for picking books, but John Adams proved otherwise.

My life feels empty because I finished Rabbit Angstrom.

Did you read 'Rabbit Remembered'?

Reading a collection of excellent HE Bates short stories, interspersed with volume 4 of the Tove Jansson 'Moomin' comic strips (yay!). Probably with more Eric Ambler to follow.

Making of the Atomic Bomb is truly an excellent read.

Carlo Gadda - The Mess on Via Merulana

"Decided on a push-myself-a-bit, hear-something-new whim to get tickets to Berg's Lulu"

Yeah I'm gonna try and go on wed 17th. I love Lulu but keep not reading that play. So that's a must.

I'd love to see 'Lulu': I've read the play(s), and really dug them.
Am reading Calvino's 'The Road to San Giovanni', autobiographical essays, just lovely. I'll get back to Ambler soon!

Oh - I am going on the 17th! I would suggest meeting, but I suspect I must extra attn to my girlfriend that evening, since she is having divided reaction - going to the opera = good, 12-tone misanthropy = not so sure.

Have been a bit distracted from my reading programme by When the Lights Go Out by Andy Beckett, a history of 70s Britain. Easy lunchtime reading - good, fast-moving, full of odd detail and written by someone - like myself - for whom the period's on the fringes of memory, so that's a congenial perspective.

i still think it's three and a half times too long. i don't care what kind of armchair ted heath had

"Oh - I am going on the 17th! I would suggest meeting, but I suspect I must extra attn to my girlfriend that evening, since she is having divided reaction - going to the opera = good, 12-tone misanthropy = not so sure."

I hear ya! Although this makes me think that a summer London ILB FAP wouldn't be a terrible idea at some point (there was one about two years ago, I think?)

If there is interest I'll get a thread going.

no, I guess that will be up next after Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi unless I feel duty bound to read nonfiction books (4) that I have accumulated. (xpost)

a summer London ILB FAP

I'm always up for a pint.

I finished the last-mentioned Dead Souls some time ago. It is my belief that this book is venerated by Russians because Gogol was entirely obsessed with capturing The Russian Soul in this book and therefore, even when he is satirizing Russia he is clearly flattering it, too.

In this translation (P&V) you could sense Gogol's vernacular fluency, but it was also pretty clear that, as a satirist, he always refrained from twisting the knife, so that the wounds he inflicted were only superficial.

It may have been fear of censors or it may have been his obvious sentimental streak, but this is satire in the same vein as The Pickwick Papers - i.e. so gentle and harmless as to become beloved by the supposedly satirized nation. Contrast with Ulysses.

I have been seriously non-reading for a while. Just newspapers and crosswords. Soon I will be taking an 18 day trip and I must decide what books to bring. I may bring Don Quixote and give it a good airing out - with a few backups in case DQ falls flat for me.

I'm reading King Dork by Frank Portman.

i read that not long ago. i was disappointed the uk edition's cover wasn't as good as this:

http://partyends.com/peblog/kingdork.jpg

also, person who is reading 'rising up and rising down', let me know how that goes plz

― thomp, Tuesday, 9 June 2009 16:17 (4 days ago) Permalink

Slow but rewarding (127 pages in).

The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary

frank portman is an acquaintance of mine

For Whom the Bell Tolls. Weird to read someone that seems like he influenced both Cormac McCarthy and James Frey.

Ian MacEwan – On Chesil Beach: minor Mac but compact, compelling.

Dexter Filkins – The Forever War: shattering & brilliant account of iraq (and afghanistan) by NY Times correspondent. not his prev published columns/

John Braine – Room At The Top: angry young classic, funny and more relevant to modern world than I might have imagined.

Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City: my wife scored an advance copy. nothing less than a literary version of a Philip K Dick novel.

Rick Perlstein - Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater & The Unmaking of the American Consensus. rise of the new right/best political history I've read since Robt Caro's last.

Kevin Mattson - What The Heck Are You Up To Mr. President: re-examining Jimmy Carter's infamous malaise speech of 1979 and surrounding events. haven't done a book review for awhile but this was so juicy I couldn't resist. currently working, fascinating so far, we'll see.

franny, is that the full-length edition?

Getting me into the David Milch Deadwood book and some Machado de Assis.

About time for a new rubric?

Starting on: Andrei Bely - Petersburg. Anyone read it? Nabokov said it was one of the three best 20th century novels, but probably even more interesting is the 1916 publication date, one year before the 'red horror'.

what were his other 2?

Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past (I think he reserved his admiration for the first 3 vols in particular)

i wuold have guessed the 1st one, not the 2nd

Joyce and Proust I would've guessed. Don't think most would've thought of Bely (or Biely), who is pretty obscure - although from what I can tell Petersburg had some success upon its publication in Russia.

franny, is that the full-length edition?

― alimosina, Saturday, 13 June 2009 15:35 (6 hours ago) Permalink

Heh, no. As appealing as it sounds I don't have time in my life or room in my purse for 3300 pages. The abridged version is very readable so far.

I thought I'd been seeing references to a book called 'Petersburg' crop up in all sorts of odd places in the last week or two and I was going to check it out, but the Biely one doesn't sound like what I was thinking of at all - I had in mind an exile revisiting the place in modern times. Must've got it mixed up with something else.

The lone Amazon customer review is a bit gushing:
"In my opinion this is consistently the greatest work of art ever created, greater than 'Tristan and Isolde', 'Ulysses', 'Moby-Dick', 'The Idiot', 'Hamlet', or any of those other works of genius which find profound patterns of beauty in extremes of human chaos. This plunges deeper into the chaos and brings up stranger, wilder, more intimate forms of beauty than any of them, and then weaves them into a more coherent whole. I suppose most people can't get past the narrator being an unreliable, disturbingly schizophrenic prat"

The synopsis also features the Nabokov quote, but with a slightly different take:

One of the four most important works of twentieth century literature

i have the first-ed unabridged 'rising up'. i'm not sure why.

Starting on: Andrei Bely - Petersburg. Anyone read it?

yah i didnt particularly like it. i read it for the nabokov connection as well tbh i think thats probably the main reason its still read today and it seemed just messy and not v. insightful. pretty sure ive argued about this on ilb before but ive also read that the english translation isnt the greatest.

The fourth would be Kafka's Metamorphosis, so I mis-remembered probably because the Kafka is a short story. The inclusion of Biely makes me think he just had to have a Russian work. Without an essay you just can't tell.

There are three translations, I think - I have the Penguin that I borrowed from the library but there is another on Pushkin press. The intro to the Penguin ed. tells me that Biely revised his 1916 edition into something that is apparently more compact and 'modernistic' in 1922.

Personally Viktor Shklovsky seems a more compelling early 20th century Russian, and his civil war memoirs bear this out.

mad xposts, glad you took my recommendation of 'the forever war', DP ^___^

Thomp - do see what you mean about When The Lights Go Out, hadn't noticed you were reading it upthread. 1/2way through, and I'd say it's about a third overweight. It is all that G2 Politics personal colour stuff, with the 'I woke early to get a train from Waterloo' journey descriptions and the reports of decor. But I just breeze through/skip that. Barely goes in, apart from that description of how the chairs were rearranged during his Heath interview, which really did seem so pointless that it's fixed in my memory, and may haunt me till I die.

And Xyzzzz__ - yes, a ILB London FAP sounds good to me. Same as Gamaliel - always on for a drink.

I read a bit of Petersburg, but fell off. Want to come back to it, but always heard that it's a major sufferer from lost in translation - that there's a lot of texture & style it's hard to get into anything like natural English (presumably, psrt of the reason for Nabokov love - there's a bit in this Languagehat post on the stylistic links between Bely-era Russians and Nabokov.)

dhalgren

for some reason i thought this sub-board was too balkanized to manage FAPing

There was a London ILB FAP once upon a time:

London ILB - FAP?

thomp - you round London? Gonna revive that thread...

As for reading I've finished Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and Singular pleasures by Harry Mathews. Now I am going to start on Biely, although I was distracted by some Rabelais and Shakespeare (the latter told by Charles and Mary Lamb)

Got a nice birthday present from an ex - GF Watts by GK Chesterton, his monograph on the Victorian establishment and allegorical artist. Not at all valuable, but a nice first edition, pleasantly bound. An early work as well, and a brief skim suggests that like his other good early biographical studies (Browning and Stevenson) he largely avoids the didactic pomposities, entertaining as they may be, of his later stuff.

Read Joseph O'Neill (of Netherland)'s first book (having read his second'The Breezes', which was hilarious, years ago). This one, 'This is the Life', is well-written, but sort of lacking. Unlike 'The Breezes', it's easy to see how it fell out of print for almost 20 years. Very odd. Hard to explain why it's unsatisfying without giving the whole game away, though.

finally finishing up the U.S.A. trilogy by Dos Passos...it's a bit grim fersure...it seems just a tad uneven, I liked the first one, and am liking The Big Money (though I'm definitely ready to be finished) but for my money, it's 1919 which is the dark horse candidate for Great American Novel...the way most of the characters wander through WWI in their aimless, self-absorbed manner is brought into sharp relief by the single chapter devoted to Ben Compton, who is v. much my favourite character of the whole trilogy...

you really should read all three as a group though...

Ah, that's interesting - I tried Manhattan Transfer last year and couldn't get into it. I read a piece comparing him to his contemporaries, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and so on, which argued that while they were in love with people and characters, Dos Passos cared more about crowds and movements. It struck me as not the ideal starting-point for a novelist.

Just finished Eudora Welty's first story collection. It's lucky she's such a good writer, because I never realised just how strong my prejudice is against stuff set in the South of the US. The grotesquerie, the proud stupidity, the bigotry, the poverty, the religiosity that almost every writer dwells on makes my brain want to crawl out of my head. Someone needs to be of Welty (or, even better, Flannery O'Connor) class to make me get over it.

Oh, also, I liked 'Manhattan Transfer', but I wouldn't want most books to be like it.

i loved the usa trilogy so much. read it twice years and years ago. i should do it again and see what i think now at my ripe advanced age.

Forty pages left to go, and I must say, The Big Money has grown on me quite a bit...1919 is still my favourite but turns out Dos passos still had a few tricks up his sleeves (and I kinda feel like a moron for not catching on sooner...)

I will say this, though; I have a hard timme imagining either Steinbeck or Fitzerald writing something anywhere NEAR this satisfying...the unbridled political radicalism alone is bracing and refreshing...I actually am revising my former ambivalence and am highly recommending it now, if only for the Thorstein Veblen bio in Big Money...

read 'the road to wigan pier' today. did not realise how sly and grebt that title was before i read it.

found first three of d peace's 'red riding quartet' for £1 ea.; made it through one and a half before deciding no, they were awful. (i think it was after the second narrator with no previous indications of such tendencies randomly decided on sexual assault) (also from glancing ahead it appears both narrators of the second book and the narrator of the third end their narration with variations on AND THEN I GOT KILLED)

Joseph Roth: The String of Pearls - I love Roth!

Now reading Elizabeth Stoddard: The Morgesons - very good, and weirdly modern for something published in 1862.

summer is here - who wanna start the new thread?

I've been thinking about it for a while but I don't know if I have enough ILB clout to pull it off v_v