The girls are out flaunting their Summer plumage but you're stuck inside, reading. What?

James Ellroy, The Big Nowhere. Hurrah, finally one of his that doesn't instantly give me a headache.

The successor thread to Spring in the NORTH, Autumn in the SOUTH, it matters not, what are you READING?, by overwhelming popular demand.

at the moment:

John Barth, Chimera -- I sorta gave up on The Sot-Weed Factor cuz it was getting waaaaay tedious, but I found a used copy of this at a marxist book store for two bucks and couldn't resist. The first part was great, second pretty good, third seems okay so far but I'm worried diminishing returns are setting in. Still, I gotta give him credit: dude can make a mind-bending metafictional structure like nobody else.

Kierkegaard, Either/Or -- Sort of been on a K kick lately, and I figured this was a good springboard from the existential stuff (The Sickness Unto Death and Fear and Trembling are all I've read so far) into the broader range of his writings. I didn't expect him to be so (proto-)Nietzschean (NB: this is a good thing, as I find them both enormously entertaining).

Lautreamont, Les Chants du Maldoror -- Weirder than I expected. Not really sure what to think. Like, at all.

Big fan of Kiekegaard, Snowy - your post makes me want to return to him, and your 'description' of the Lautreamont has made me powerful curious.

Just finished both The Flower in Season by Jocelyn Brooke, which was a guide to wild flowers arranged seasonally. I know nothing about wild flowers (even now) but it's full of digressive excerpts from old botanical books, as well as relevant scraps of poetry and impressionistic descriptions of the months. More appealing than it might sound.

Also, unconnectedly, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, which I'm afraid to say I never really got into. I wanted to, and I could sort of sense its skillful interweavings and depiction of a time (where I'm sure the slightest bum note would have stood out a mile), but at a distance. I found it exceptionally hard to envisage the characters.

I'm pretty certain this is my fault, and I think I was reading the wrong books around it - I'll give it another go at another time I think.

One of the books I was reading around it was Denton Welch's A Voice Through A Cloud by Denton Welch, which I mentioned on the previous thread, but will mention again, because it zoomed right into one of my favourite books of all time. Sensitive and morbid, with pre-Raphaelite obsession with detail. This comes at the expense of having a likable character - he's petulant and self-centred, but because of his dreadful predicament, this is allowable and excusable, and in no way detracts from the beauty and force of the book. I will be reading more of his stuff immediately. Anyone whose two main fans appear to be Alan Bennett and William Burroughs must have something going for him, right?

About to start Chaos and Night by Henry de Montherlant.

Denton Welch's A Voice Through A Cloud by Denton Welch

er, by Denton Welch, in case you hadn't guessed.

Struggling through Alasdair Gray's Lanark. Liked the first book, but the middle two were too grimly crushingly real, and I'm all out of steam for the last one.

http://repeatingislands.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/naipaul1.jpg

A Passage to India (stuffy old English dudes will be pleased to know that Forster's put them back in my good books after Women in Love put them in my bad books), an introduction to Alain Badiou in anticipation of his trip here next month, and Andy Hamilton's Aesthetics and Music.

Still going with Moby Dick, a few pages a day, alas. It has nothing to do with the book itself (which I'm actually savoring), but with life with a newborn, which has left me with a maximum of about 7 minutes of reading before I start to nod off.

Just returned to 2666 for the 2nd book.

Finished The Radetsky March - the best novel I've read in a few years. Never expected to shed a tear over at the demise of the Austro-Hungarian empire or the twin monarchy. I re-read "The Rotters Club" for a book group discussion without much changing my opinion of it as a very enjoyable read despite a pedestrian prose style and many other egregious flaws. Also read Daniel Jaffe's short bio of Prokofiev in the 20th Century Composers series, good and readable of its type though Jaffe's enthusiasm for Sergey Sergeyevich's music seems a bit lukewarm for a guy who chose to write a book on him - couldn't they have found a fan?

Have a bunch of books on my desk I bought at various charity shops to read the next couple weeks:
Nabokov's Lolita
Greene's The Power & The Glory
Sartre's The Age of Reason
I'm sure there is another I'm missing.

oh and that Celine Dion 33 1/3.

Re the Kierkegaard, there's a book I'll buy if I ever see it...

http://press.princeton.edu/images/k7746.gif

Supposed to be genuinely hilarious.

finished jane smiley's 10 days in the hills - really really enjoyed this, just a super long ramble about a bunch of people, but still great. i like the way she draws details.

also finished 'music for torching' and 'the mistress's daughter' by a.m. homes - really liked both, just started 'the end of alice' which is so far disappointing.

almost at the end of 'inner circle' by t.c. boyle, pretty good, nothing amazing.

Simon Reynolds Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (Anniversary Edition) - I've really enjoyed this for the most part, although it suffers the same problems as Rip It Up and Start Again in that a) it is a bunch of essays stitched together b) it kind of peters out towards the end once it gets past the big stuff like Detroit/Chicago, Acid House, Hardcore, and Jungle (big sections on gabba and American rave post-90 are a drag). With hindsight, it is pretty lol when he basically endorses Big Beat as the next great wave of rave at the end of the original edition, but he corrects himself in the final chapter of the revised edition. He is also a bit too quick to canonize the period of music that he was a direct participant in (1991-1993) and the impression is that he is basically chastizing readers who missed out on the first go round (cf. Zomby's "Where Were You in '92?"). This seems paradoxically rockist in a book that is arguing for the merits of experimentation being driven by the needs of the populist masses/dancefloor rather than auteurs. But excellent whether you are interested in the music or the social/drug aspects of the culture particularly in Britain.

David Thomson The Alien Quartet - critical essays on the Alien movies. Purchased after someone revived the Aliens thread the other day. I've only read a couple of pages so far but I like he is style. I don't generally enjoy reading academic cultural crit, but for the Aliens movies I will make an exception.

THOMSON = ACADEMIC

QUOI?????

His prose does glitter mightily, mind you, though I've soured on most of his critiques (basically spending his current days catering to nostalgiaphiles).

Writing my MA dissertation this summer, so pretty much only reading for that. So everything by Bern Porter I can lay my hands on, a bunch of shit about concrete poetry, typography, sciart, mail art, all that jazz.

Vercors: You Shall Know Them

This is some weird, fun stuff, like a French (ie a bit more sexual explicitness, more philosophising, though set in England) version of John Wyndham's more satirical stuff. The missin link species is discovered, but are they legally apes or humans? One guy has a child with one of the missing link women, and then kills the child, hoping that he will get done for murder, thus proving the new species to be human, and preventing them becoming enslaved by corporate interests.

The Alienist and Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End.

i started reading parade's end and then misplaced my copy! so aggravating. by the time i found it again i was reading something else. but i will get back to it. i rilly rilly liked what i read of it. which was, like, most of the first book.

you want a daunting list? here are the "selected" works of ford madox ford:

The Shifting of the Fire, as H Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
The Brown Owl, as H Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
The Queen Who Flew: A Fairy Tale, Bliss Sands & Foster, 1894
The Cinque Ports, Blackwood, 1900.
The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Heinemann, 1901.
Rossetti, Duckworth, [1902].
Romance, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Smith Elder, 1903.
The Benefactor, Langham, 1905.
The Soul of London, Alston, 1905.
The Heart of the Country, Duckworth, 1906.
The Fifth Queen, Alston, 1906.
Privy Seal, Alston, 1907.
An English Girl, Methuen, 1907.
The Fifth Queen Crowned, Nash, 1908.
Mr Apollo, Methuen, 1908.
The Half Moon, Nash, 1909.
A Call, Chatto, 1910.
The Portrait, Methuen, 1910.
The Critical Attitude, as Ford Madox Hueffer, Duckworth 1911 (extensively revised in 1935).
The Simple Life Limited, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1911.
Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, Constable, 1911 (extensively revised in 1935).
The Panel, Constable, 1912.
The New Humpty Dumpty, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1912.
Henry James, Secker, 1913.
Mr Fleight, Latimer, 1913.
The Young Lovell, Chatto, 1913.
Between St Dennis and St George, Hodder, 1915.
The Good Soldier, Lane, 1915.
Zeppelin Nights, with Violet Hunt, Lane, 1915.
The Marsden Case, Duckworth, 1923.
Women and Men, Paris, 1923.
Mr Bosphorous, Duckworth, 1923.
The Nature of a Crime, with Joseph Conrad, Duckworth, 1924.
Some Do Not..., Duckworth, 1924.
No More Parades, Duckworth, 1925.
A Man Could Stand Up, Duckworth, 1926.
New York is Not America, Duckworth, 1927.
New York Essays, Rudge, 1927.
New Poems, Rudge, 1927.
Last Post, Duckworth, 1928.
A Little Less Than Gods, Duckworth, [1928].
No Enemy, Macaulay, 1929.
The English Novel, Constable, 1930.
When the Wicked Man, Cape, 1932.
The Rash Act, Cape, 1933.
It Was the Nightingale, Lippincott, 1933.
Henry for Hugh, Lippincott, 1934.
Provence, Unwin, 1935.
Ladies Whose Bright Eyes(revised version), 1935
Great Trade Route, OUP, 1937.
Vive Le Roy, Unwin, 1937.
The March of Literature, Dial, 1938.
Selected Poems, Randall, 1971.
Your Mirror to My Times, Holt, 1971.

Blimey!

The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, is about invaders from a parallel universe coming to our world.

A significant chunk of Coetzee's 'Youth' is about a the main character doing his PhD(?) on Ford, and discovering that pretty much everything outside of Parade's End, The Good Soldier and The Fifth Queen is tedious and unreadable.

i remember once looking e.f. benson up online and seeing his bibliography and thinking: hmm, i've read 5 or 6 of these, only 70 more to go!

i am trading some books in this weekend, cuz i want a copy of the book they have at the nice indie book shop in my 'hood about the AACM. They also have a book abt Juju music that i am gonna get for ilx user "69"

Fucking Vercors. It was the nineties and I was a new student arrival in France, taking among other things a class on the Code Civil. It's quite difficult, what with the language, the alien subject and the bizarrely rote-learning approach that characterises the lower years of undergraduate life there. But I'm trying my best, and sit in the very front row of each class, pen working furiously, hoping to note enough to know where the gaps might be so that I can fill them in in my own time.

Code Civil comes around, but rather than talking about the Code, the teacher instead spends the first four lectures (two hours each!) reading excerpts from Les Animaux Dénaturés and then giving us his musings thereon, following such tangents as pleased him. All the while sitting behind his lectern, head cocked heavenwards as if struck by divine inspiration, sometimes playing with his horrible long hair.

Few things in my life have ever been so disheartening as those lectures - not only were they impossible to make sense of, but even where I could understand the words they meant absolutely nothing to me. And then at the end of the eighth hour, he revealed that the book did not in fact bear upon the subject at all, but 'I speak of this merely because it is a matter which interests me'. The actual class would commence in week five.

The worst part was that he didn't change his manner, and continued to teach the Code as if it were a philosophical tract, which it is not. Come the oral exam, instead of simply answering the questions as dully as possible (with hindsight clearly the correct approach) I attempted to answer as the class had been taught. It was a fiasco as I still didn't have the language for it and he wasn't interested in engaging, instead reverting to his incomprehensible monologues. Come the end, the final humiliation - he paused for a long time, looked at me and said in baby words: "Votre français n'est pas bon", wrote my mark on the sheet and looked away. It was a bare pass. The test had gone so badly that I was effusively and pathetically grateful. I wish I'd punched him in the face.

Professor Roy, if you're reading this: I didn't think you were a wise man or a great intellectual, I thought you were a pompous wanker. I was only pretending.

'I speak of this merely because it is a matter which interests me'

I laughed a lot.

That Thomson book on the Alien films is nuts - will be interested to hear what you make of it. Trotting along stylishly and then (SPOILERS) off we go into the world of Weaver menses fanfic.

Finished Doctor Faustus. My that's a serious novel. I liked it a lot. Also read Mann's short book on the composition of Faustus, which was nice both as part-portrait of that Pacific Weimar scene and account of how 600pp novel of ideas gets written. Am now continuing on a Mann kick: The Holy Sinner, but thinking about a re-read of The Magic Mountain. But The Man Without Qualities is tempting.

In any case, sticking with dense mid-century central Europe. I feel like I'm only really up for this stuff once every 2-3 years, and should exploit any roll I get on.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa's Rashomon And Seventeen Other Stories

Just read Maclaren Ross's "Of Love and Hunger", prompted by his proselytisers on ILM. A fine novel that made me think of Richard Yates as well as the more obvious Patrick Hamilton. It's not quite as fine as the very best work of those writers but it's close enough and different enough that I'm very pleased to have been made aware of it.

I'm about to read Ruiz Zafon's "The Shadow of The Wind". The first few pages are not encouraging.

Just finished The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It's wonderful.

Just started The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier. I get overly excited about most books, I'm an easy target, and not much of a critic, but I'm abnormally giddy about Carpentier.

Didn't know of Mann's composition bk -- sounds like a good one to track down.

In the last week or so I've some Djuna Barnes (after the hate she got on ILE), finishing Patricia Highsmith's Carol, and looking over a few essays by Milan Kundera (he loves that Central European Canon)

Frederic Spotts - 'The Shameful Peace - How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation'

'In Youth Is Pleasure' = Denton Welch

Less pleasing than A Voice Through a Cloud but the semi post aesthete attitude to detail, with barely subdued homoeroticism. Very skilful writing.

Less pleasing than A Voice Through a Cloud but the semi post aesthete attitude to detail, with barely subdued homoeroticism.

Good that i can still construct a sentence after a few beers.

Mishna Wolff: I'm Down

Memoir of a girl whose completely white father was convinced he was a funky black man, and who tried his utmost to make his nerdy white daughter a funky black girl. Entertaining without being brilliantly written. Great cover, though:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0312378556.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

nice

Just finished: David Thomson The Alien Quartet. This was really good I thought, despite a couple of odd misinterpretations. Made me go back and watch all the films again. It is a shame he didn't talk about the Director's Cuts, although possibly they weren't released when he wrote this. Are any of the other books in this series any good?

Nearly finished: JG Ballard, The Drowned World. Ballard is my favourite novelist, even when he is very heavily riffing off of Conrad as he does here. Nothing really happens as such in his environmental-disaster novels, but some of the images he evokes I just find so haunting.

Just about to start: Rihcard Price, Clockers

*Richard Price, obv

Nearly finished: JG Ballard, The Drowned World. Ballard is my favourite novelist, even when he is very heavily riffing off of Conrad as he does here. Nothing really happens as such in his environmental-disaster novels, but some of the images he evokes I just find so haunting.

Yeah, this is probably my favourite Ballard.

the idea of a conrad-> ballard thing is making them both more interesting to me. mb i should try them both again.

also i should dig out my copy of nightwood this week

i am in the horrible nested big book trap where i started reading dead souls and then started reading dr faustus and then started reading dhalgren, so before i read anything else i feel i have to finish dhalgren, and then finish dr faustus, and then finish dead souls

I bought Smallcreep's Day today why because it look intersting plus the title was naggingly familiar. I assumed it must've been filmed or televised or something. When I got home and Googled it I realised it was the title of a Mike Rutherford solo album lol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallcreep%27s_Day

'stoned', andrew loog oldham's autobiography
'netherland'

Nathalie Sarraute - The Planetarium. Maybe a bit too similar to Do you hear Them? plot-wise. Such an in depth, rich dissection of motivation going on here tho'.

About to start on: Italo Svevo - Zeno's Conscience.

finished shalom auslander's foreskin's lament and another richard stark book, started arthur philips' the song is you (so far not terrible) and scarlett thomas' popco

nearly done w/ The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary

Sarah Moss: Cold Earth - a bunch of grad students on an archaeological dig in remote Greenland, while the rest of the world seems to be succumbing to some horrible super-virus. Well done so far, but having the first 100 pages narrated by a convincingly drawn neurotic pain in the arse who it's difficult to want to spend time with may have been a bit of a tactical mistake.

I'm still plowing through Rising Up, Rising Down and enjoying it, as far as such a book can be enjoyed.

Also just started How Fiction Works because I need to read it before it's due back at the library. I've never ready any of Wood's book-length criticism before and I like him.

just finished "Jaka's Story" by Dave Sim. Was really good.

reading through the Inner Worlds of Mental Illness anthology again (first person accounts of various mental disorders)...about up to the place where I left off last time...thought it was really interesting before but couldnt quite hang with it at that particular moment...

I just returned from an extended road/camping trip that took my wife and I south to Mt Shasta, Mt Lassen, Yosemite Park and the eastern Sierras, then back north via the Redwoods and the Oregon coast.

Along the way I read:

An obscure book called One Man's West, David Lavender, first published in 1943 and republished in 1956 with an additional chapter. Mainly a memoir that covers his life as a cowboy (and a brief stint as a hardrock gold miner) in Colorado in the 1930s. It was quite interesting and well written, with many well-observed anecdotes and a lot of shop-talk about what cowboys really did and how they thought. My copy was a withdrawn xlib copy that showed up in a local thrift shop. Not too likely any ILB member will run across it. A most likeable book, but destined to disappear, like most good books.

Fast Food Nation, a best seller from 2000. Told me things I knew and many things I didn't. I stopped eating fast food around 1978, but as the book points out, the ramifications of fast food extend far beyond the restaurants to affect food production from top to bottom. I'm glad I read it; it is a worthy tome in the best muckraking tradition.

Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow. I am currently 70% through this and it has taken an unfortunate turn to tedious didacticism and specious philosophizing. After assembling a cast of somewhat interesting characters, Bellow has spent the past 25 pages sitting them down in a room together so he can use them as mouthpieces for his own questionable intellectual offgassing. Sad stuff, really. Too bad. I do not recommend it.

Bugger--I've got Sammler in the teetering to-read pile. Oh well. 'Fast Food Nation' was really good, though I can't imagine how it was turned into a movie.

Lou Jagz, I am loving the Jerome! The party where they laugh at German's tragic song had me in stitches. If only I wasn't in frantic panic mode and had more time to read.

Finished The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin. It's remarkably bad. The author's idea of explicating WB is sometimes to quote him, then in the commentary repeat WB's own phrases, outside of quotation marks, as though they explain what WB has just said.

john buchan's the power house and jim thompson's pop 1980. still being afraid of the big books. v annoying.

the buchan is about a two-fisted tory mp defeating an anarchist conspiracy, by the way.

Ha ha. Good old Buchan. As the Hannay ones go on, they have more and more the unpalatable racial flavour
of the age so there are at least two or three very big winces per book. Almost Sapper levels of suspicion
of the swarthy.

Must venture outside the Hannay ones at some point - is The Power House any good, thomp?

Currently reading The Man Without Qualities, like everyone else it seems. Been meaning to read it for a while, it being one of Anthony Powell's favourites (more of an influence than Proust, he said somewhere),
but I found it lying around the house the other day, so the time seemed propitious.

A friend of mine who read it ultimately got fed up with it not going anywhere, but this isn't feeling like a problem at the moment for me.

Enjoying its cool and wry philosophical cynicism - although I wonder whether this slightly cynical flexibility
will begin to feel a little unrewarding after a while. It's certainly not feeling that way tho,
and there is enough of a feeling of transcendence behind it all to suggest that it will be rewarding rather than reductive. Very much initial impressions. Really liking the tone.

i think 'greenmantle' is fantastic - the second hannay, right? the fact that hannay spends the whole thing scurrying around trying to avoid direction and not understanding that his acquaintance further east is the actual motor of the plot. it's sort of avant-la-lettre le carre mb? (i don't particularly like le carre, but i mean: the feeling that espionage is nine-tenths not getting caught and maybe once in a very long while accomplishing something.) also the loz of arabia stuff.

actually i'd be very glad to read more authors who operate around the same locuses as buchan - i guess kipling's great game stuff is the closest i've read to the hannay novels - i have a feeling 'the riddle of the sands' might be along the same lines?

the power house is silly and doesn't make a lot of sense and is only about a hundred pages long. if you see it for like a quid and have an hour to spare go ahead. i'm surprised to find it's in print. and online, if you're an e-reader owning type.

'locuses'? ugh.

which translation of mwq did everyone read / is everyone reading?

https://www.cyberread.com/files/09/72/12/large_97212.jpeg

awesome

Greenmantle is my favourite as well. There's a great sense of geographical scope and political urgency to it all.
Not sure about the Le Carre comparison - obviously there's the espionage angle, but Le Carre always seemed to me to be coming out of detective stories (which a couple of the Smiley novels actually are)rather than spy stories - very little dynamic action as such. Ambler I suppose is the midway point between Buchan and later spy stuff.

I haven't read much late Le Carre though.

Also, plenty of lolz in Buchan with the rather shaky theory that people are totally unrecognisable out of context. It's okay when he gets dressed up as a postman, but I seem to remember a couple of occasions when anyone seeing him would have had to have been a purblind imbecile not to recognise him. Oh yes, I remember the worst offender, it's when the chap with the forever hooded eyes impersonates a Lord of the Admiralty at a high-powered meeting of international affairs policy makers. And although the know the person he is impersonating, nobody realises. 39 Steps I think.

They are very solemn about it afterwards.

I'm reading the Wilkins and Kaiser translation, having a general prejudice towards older translations and it also being the one that Powell said was 'excellent' although I have absolutely no idea whether this is true or not. It seems to read well enough.

actually i'd be very glad to read more authors who operate around the same locuses as buchan - i guess kipling's great game stuff is the closest i've read to the hannay novels - i have a feeling 'the riddle of the sands' might be along the same lines?

Riddle Of The Sands is more of a fish out of water story, the protagonist (if memory serves me right) not being any sort of professional spy. I remember it having reaaally long digressions into the ins & outs of sailing, which I seemed to read happily without either making the effort to understand what they're on about or getting frustrated with them; the passages just felt soothing, somehow. A great Summer book.

Liked it a lot more than the only Buchan I've read, 39 Steps, which despite being very short just felt cringingly repetitive.

actually i'd be very glad to read more authors who operate around the same locuses as buchan - i guess kipling's great game stuff is the closest i've read to the hannay novels - i have a feeling 'the riddle of the sands' might be along the same lines?

for more buchan-y ish you want e. phillips oppenheim and william le queux, or so im led to believe.

'the power house' was the first buchan espionager iirc -- think he is a terser writer than the two i mentioned but they were his predecessors and equally popular.

Ambler's (great) books are very much often fish out of water stories too, says he with the wisdom of having read five of them in the last month. Journos and businessmen and academics who accidentally end up becoming spies and criminals.

Just read Henry James's 'The Reverberator', a novella about a hack gossip journalist playing hell with the lives of a bunch of Americans in Paris, which was fun, and am now reading Ross Macdonald's 'The Way Some People Die', which is great.

finished 'the forever war' by dexter filkins (excellent), finished 'the kingdom of this world' by carpentier (ditto), halfway through 'the girls of slender means' (highly enjoyable).

dividing time between

alex ross - the rest is noise: listening to the 20th century
david welky - the moguls and the dictators: hollywood and the coming of WWII
george eliot - middlemarch (yeah, we'll see if i get through this before summer's end)

The Labyrinth of Solitude - Octavio Paz.

Quite enjoying it, have never read any of his poetry.

>>> Henry James's 'The Reverberator', a novella about a hack gossip journalist playing hell with the lives of a bunch of Americans in Paris

The REVERBERATOR? For real?

or is it really REVERBARATOR

no, it must be the first one

The doing of the thing, the very reverberating matter of the thing to be done, turned out in all candidness to be the vieux jeu that was, however, one now very considerably expected to learn, not yet concluded or 'in the bag' - pas du tout!

THE REVERBERATOR is the title of the newspaper that the hack works for, non?

am also reading THE REST IS NOISE by Alex Ross and am finding it pretty boring/safe, so far - don't really get the hype

Yes, it's the somewhat unlikely name of the paper, as well as of the book. Fortunately, it's pretty low on sentences like Pinefox's sample!

Just finished Elaine Dundy's 'The Old Man and Me' and have just ventured into 'Summer Will Show' by Silvia Townsend Warner.

The Reverberator is solid minor James. I should reread it.

Just finished Colm Toîbin's lovely new Brooklyn – a respite from Ford Madox Ford's interminable No More Parades.

I did finish Mr. Sammler's Planet. I owed it that much. It ended better than the worst bit, spoken of above, but no better than the average - which was pretty damned average.

The whole novel gave off a strong impression of how much this was written by an old man, who felt an innate kinship with other old men and how they viewed the dwindling stub ends of their lives. Which turned out to be a real weakness, since it reduced every character but the protagonist to an old man's caricature of those younger than himself. Bellow not only stepped into that bear trap, but did so eagerly and by design.

Now I am reading randomly in a book of essays by Graham Greene, until I settle on a real book.

I can't get through those "mid period" Bellow novels (I also include Henderson the Rain King). I'm rereading Herzog at the moment.

Anonymity by John Mullan.

I'm probably reading some Thackeray next.

"am also reading THE REST IS NOISE by Alex Ross and am finding it pretty boring/safe, so far - don't really get the hype"

Good to know someone doesn't get it, either - haven't got round it myself as I've been pretty suspicious, partly bcz of the ppl hyping it up in the first place (partly bcz of his tastes). Been saying I'll get around it for a year now...

"I'm reading the Wilkins and Kaiser translation, having a general prejudice towards older translations"

For Proust I am going to read Swann's Way in the Lydia Davis Translation, then the next 4-5 parts in the Scott Moncrieff one, returning to the recent Penguin translation for Time Regained.

That is if I happen to make it that far. But I'm backing myself.

Finishing Svevo - not as funny as I was expecting this to be. I'll be starting the final part later.
Doubling this with Duras' North China Lover. Can't say I've liked all of the fiction I've read from her, but when she rehashes what seemed to have been a hard childhood and intersects with her first love affair its nothing less than a furious page turner. Love the bits where she digresses from the scene in the book to the way it might look like in a film, should it be filmed. She should talk about film in her books a lot more.

all right, I need to spend some time on the books board and actually do more reading, and try to help my attention span which has narrowed to about 20 minutes.

currently: Catharine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? ("Not to replicate the caricature of the world, this is what we should do with our brain.") So weird.
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side

Jeremy Lewis: Kindred Spirits - engaging but a bit erratic memoirs of a guy who worked in various editorial/publishing/lit agent jobs in London in the 1970s and 1980s. Funny, self-deprecating stuff.

Eric Ambler: The Dark Frontier - his first novel, a satire of spy/adventure fiction. A physicist suffers a head injury in a car crash, and wakes up thinking he's Conway Carruthers of Department Y, a Bulldog Drummond type who must be an international avenger of justice! Lightweight, but a lot of fun.

I am about to conduct an experiment. In the past I have always brought books with me to read in the evenings on multi-day hikes. When I start my next four-day hike I will not bring a book, but instead I will bring an MP3 player onto which I have loaded two audio books. Two, because if I don't like the first, I can jump to the second and still be covered.

Doing it this way will save me an average of about 6 to 8 oz over regular paperbacks. When you have to lug every ounce up and down mountainsides, lighter = better. Always.

The books I am bringing are The Good Rat by Jim Breslin and Uncommon Carriers by John MacPhee.

I shall make a full report next week.

Are the UNABRIDGED? This is important, though perhaps only to fools like me.

Stopped reading central European gloom because I went on holiday (but did read a bit of Kleist: didn't really get on with him before, but enjoyed 'Michael Kohlhaas' as much as anything I've read in ages. Maybe it's the different translation this time around - Constantine rather than that Penguin Classics one)

It was a trip to Italy, so I haphazardly read about the Renaissance instead. Chunk of Vasari, last stretch of Gibbon, JR Hale's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Europe, Frances Yates, & Goethe's Italian Journey (likeable, this). Giant good fun: enjoyed throwing myself against something and trying to figure it out and seeing it at the same time.

Fell sick shortly after return, hid in bed and read The Stars My Destination and Flow My Tears, The Policeman said.

Currently working on Slavoj Zizek's Enjoy Your Symptom!, which attempts to illustrate major principles of Lacanian psychoanalysis using examples from film (lots of Hitchcock so far). It's slow going, not least because I keep having to stop to track down movies I've never seen (yesterday it was Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero), but I feel like I'm learning at least a little from it...

finished dhalgren and read some short things: pop. 1280 by jim thompson, homage to catalonia, and guy debord's panegyric. i might see if i can get more than ten paragraphs into the society of the spectacle without my eyes glazing over, now.

I really enjoyed (what I read of) Society of the Spectacle -- had to sort of resign myself to not following everything, since I'm not up on my Marx, but I found the discussion of 'spectacular time' in part VI really interesting.

Pseudodoxica Epidemica by Sir Thomas Browne.

Not a new observation, but there aren't many more enjoyable prose stylists. Wonderful conversational, clarity of thought, light and energetic. Wonderfully motion of lapidary depending thoughts with a cheerful capacity for digression.

Yeah wonderful wonderful. Thomas Browne eat your heart out. That's what comes of posting from your phone.

God, that was such a spastic post. Apologies everyone. The sentiment remains.

Second those sentiments on Browne, tho' maybe it makes him sound a bit more transparent than he is, ie his insane make-it-up-from-Greek-and-Latin vocab is i) A+ prose style entertainment and ii) a bit thorny. But PE's a bit stop-start in that regard, right? Like there are 'quincunciall decussations - wut?' Garden of Cyrussy bits and also fairly pleasant rambles around eg plant names.

He is so awesome. I'm going to go and read some right now.

(but did read a bit of Kleist: didn't really get on with him before, but enjoyed 'Michael Kohlhaas' as much as anything I've read in ages. Maybe it's the different translation this time around - Constantine rather than that Penguin Classics one)

What I really love about that story is how awful things end up happening even though no one is actually invested in having them happen - the nightmare of bureaucracy. He's a very modern writer in that sense, his short stories should get more play.

Goethe's Italian Journey (likeable, this).

I envy you your trip and your reading. Haven't read that Goethe, but his 'Italian Notebooks' (the much shorter raw diaries from which he wrote the Journey) was very enjoyable.

I love the Kleist Penguin translations, but I've never compared them against the others (and can't read German). Barthelme mentioned Kleist a lot in interviews and I think you can really see that he learned a lot about pace from him, particularly "The Marquise of O". Anybody read or seen the plays? I've never been able to make it through Prince Friedrich of Homburg, which is the only one I've ever found in English.

Just finished Leonard Michaels' The Men's Club. It was alright, but nowhere near as good as the short stories. I'm also not really sure why he decided to publish this of all things as a novel. It's novella-length and the structure and time-frame don't strike me as particularly novelistic.

Frances Yates - was it The Art of Memory? so interesting! I've read part of it.. had no idea such a field even existed (mnemonics), nor that it told you anything about theater.

The Yates book was Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, so there's some overlap, but it's a bit more broadly philosophy-theology-magic in the Renaissance, plus biography of Bruno.

On Kleist, yes, I love the pacing: the speed with which things escalate in Kohlhaas, till everything is this huge mess (a favourite of Kafka's I think I read) is fantastic; also love the way it flips into the fortune-telling/locket stuff & so goes folktaley in the middle of this bizarre tale of the Holy Roman Empire shaken because of a horse dispute.

The plays are in the selected writings, which is what I've been reading this time. I haven't read them yet. You also get the essay on the Marionette Theatre in there, which is great. Still don't think I've quite got my head round what an odd figure he is.

I've nearly finished rereading U&I!

I'm not so stunned this time round but still believe it must be a special little book. It makes me wonder why I didn't make a point of reading everything else Baker has ever written, in order. I've had a copy of ROOM TEMPERATURE unread on my shelf for about 7 years. Maybe I'm saving it up for the day I think babies are interesting.

Very little of Room Temp is actually about babies, from memory, if that helps.

I think Room Temp may be the key NB text!

And I thought that before I had a baby!

That's interesting. Why do you think it's the key NB text, ahead of The Mezzanine and U&I?

The Recognitions: although Gaddis doesn't make it easy for you to connect the lines (not that you'd want it any other way) I was expecting to give this up by now.

This is really enjoyable so far, 400 pages in, with one or two moments of 'wow this was written in the 50s, did he have a crystal ball or what?' moments. This is also mixed with a few moments with the book (as well as myself) showing its age.

Also reading 10 pages here and there of Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat

"Stopped reading central European gloom because I went on holiday"
How about Central European tragic (?) comedy? I scored a cheap copy of The Good Soldier Schweik yesterday. Only read the intro so far.

richard hoggart's the uses of literacy. and alfred bester's the deceivers.

Reading Vanity Fair for the first time ever. 200 pages in, my response is "God, this is a blast!"

I suspect I'll either take on either Sterne's A Sentimental Journey... or Bester's The Demolished Man next.

Memo: In re audio book experiment.

A qualified failure. I listened to the McPhee book for several nights, derived some enjoyment from it, but it was strangely annoying to have the voice I heard not be the voice I supplied in my head.

If my concentration wavered for a moment, I either had to lose a sentence or two (preferred option) or rewind to relisten (too too awkward). With a real book I can just lay it down on my chest until I am ready to start again, or scan back and reread if I realize I wasn't concentrating.

Lastly, it was difficult to choose a stopping place, since I never knew when a chapter, or a paragraph, or even the current sentence would end. All I could do was stab the Stop button somewhat at random.

In the future I will resume printed books. Aw, well.

Richard Stark's The Hunter

Started Through Black Spruce, by Joseph Boyden, this morning. Follow-up to Three Day Road which I liked a couple of years ago.

finished the deceivers. fun, but bester's attitudes viz. sex and race are a bit harder to take when the novel was nominally a product of the 80s rather than the 50s. i just looked at my copy of golem100, that one seems the most out there in terms of diversions from 'prose' of all of them. (starting to wonder about the dismissal of his post-50s work generally, i think.)

finished george orwell's down and out in paris and london. i really want someone to make a film of it.

started celebrated cases of judge dee. what an odd little book it is.

Chester Himes: The Big Gold Dream - my first Himes, well written and atmospheric, but a plot too convoluted for me to entirely follow
Mohan Senapati: Six Acres and a Third - Indian satirical novel
Justin Evans: A Good and Happy Child - ace novel about a lonely boy who becomes demonically possessed. Creepy and well-written.
Percival Everett: I Am Not Sidney Poitier - I love Everett, and this is one of his odder books - a young boy named Not Sidney Poitier by a mad mother is semi-adopted by Ted Turner, goes on Candide-style adventures through USA

hey, tell me more about everett! i read erasure as grist for my undergrad dissertation and it left me curious about what he might have written in a less pissed off mood. also love the idea of 'a history of the african-american people, by strom thrumond, as told to percival everett and james kincaid'; haven't read it yet

I love his stuff (except for 'Glyph', which is about a hyper-intelligent baby and is a satire of postmodernism, a topic I know not enough about to enjoy the jokes).

His non-pissed-off, realist books are probably my favourites: 'Wounded', about a black horse breeder/dealer; 'Watershed', a sort of detective/environmentalist/Native American literary thriller; 'Cutting Lisa', a novel about reasonable, kindly people which ends up with one character performing an illegal and not-agreed-to abortion on another without this seeming at all unrealistic. 'A History...' is very funny, and I suspect I'd have found it even more so if I was American and got all the jokes, but it was still great. His books are much more wide-ranging than anyone else I can think off off-hand, and I've really enjoyed them all, 'Glyph' aside.

thx james. for some reason i thought you were american, don't know why.

my internet connection has been down for two days and i have read a half dozen more mediocre SF novels.

i also found a copy of frank norris's 'mcteague' on the way back from the dentist. i always thought david foster wallace had invented this book. anyway, it's amazingly bad.

ha, finding mcteague on the way back from the dentist is pretty funny!

Post to Aimless:

I 'do' audiobooks a lot, while I'm driving. I have a subscription to download one a month. I think they're great, but your basic point is correct: they are much harder work than real books. As a result, I have worked out a few rules to enhance the experience:
- I need to concentrate, so it only really works on motorways or roads I know well. I didn't realise how much more difficult city driving is until I tried it while appreciating the subtexts of White Noise.
- stick to fiction. Understanding how a narrative works does a lot of the work for you. Non-fiction can be very bitty and, like you say, you only have to zone out for a moment and the thread is lost.
- avoid experimental fiction for the same reason.
- simplicity is good. A few characters are better than a host. I tried a biography of Oppenheimer, with a cast of hundreds, and without the facility of skipping back a few pages to refresh who someone is it just doesn't work.
- narrators are important. A comfortable voice really helps. A skilled actor giving different voices to each character is a useful signpost, but more importantly turns the experience into an intimate, real pleasure. Revolutionary Road was outstanding. Beloved, read by Toni Morrison herself, was turgid.
- a straight first-person narration probably works best of all. Netherland enhanced the voice to I felt quite a remarkable level.

Perhaps the best use of all is to get a new perspective on a book you've read before. I finished American Pastoral yesterday, which ticks most of the boxes above, and the experience was every bit as intense and dreadful as reading the original.

Thanks for the tips.

I am leaving tomorrow for two weeks of backcountry trekking. The books I am taking are Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions to read on a five day hike, and Henry James's Spoils of Poynton to read on a seven day hike. The first book is 5 1/2 oz., while the second is 4 oz. - an important consideration for this kind of reading.

I started listening to audiobooks via genre fiction (figuring, perhaps a bit snobbishly, that books in this area would be more centered on plot than style, and as such less prone to sounding "wrong" when read out loud by someone else); have had very good experiences in fantasy and (to a lesser degree) sci-fi. The Audible books of the A Song Of Ice & Fire series are superb - nothing beats a few hours of playing Civ while listening to Lannister exploits. Crime fiction works less well - very hard for voice actors not to fall into total 40's noir caricatures.

I have a friend who enjoyed the Obama autobio, read by same.

I actually really like 'McTeague'! The situation in which the title character finds himself at the end of the final page is the perfection of hopelessness.

The first few chapters of The Spoils of Poynton are howlingly funny!

Just finished White Noise, grudgingly. Starting the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation of Notes from Underground, although I'm not a big fan of P & V in general. Searching for books from my shelf which I'll have no trouble finishing before I head off again in two weeks.

i also found a copy of frank norris's 'mcteague' on the way back from the dentist. i always thought david foster wallace had invented this book. anyway, it's amazingly bad.

― thomp, Saturday, July 25, 2009 10:18 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Thomp, you should be ashamed! McTeague is incredible. Especially the last page. Frank Norris rules.

I actually really like 'McTeague'! The situation in which the title character finds himself at the end of the final page is the perfection of hopelessness.

― When two tribes go to war, he always gets picked last (James Morrison), Saturday, July 25, 2009 7:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

^^ This.

I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with Pevear and Volokhonsky, but their Notes From Underground (which was the first of their translations I read) remains excellent.

bernard, why are you disillusioned with them?

guys it is possible the cumulative effect of mcteague will add up to something greater than what it creates page-by-page, but the parade of caricature working-class 'types' / ethnic minority 'types' is deeply uncomfortable (although fairly often funny, as with the female lead's dad, who is ehtnically german or dutch or transylvanian or something in a way the rest of his family aren't) ("dyew vill der gvatest whipping off dyour live reseef!", etc) - i mean not funny for the reasons it's meant to be funny so much. i mean, it's very effective on a level of total melodrama: i think the introduction that tries to sell it earnestly as an underrated realist classic was going a bit too far

i just got to the one scene that got suppressed from the first edition. it's the one where nazi dad's kid wets himself

recent reading: 'space lords' cordwainer smith, 'star smashers of the galaxy rangers' hary harrison, 'the two-timers' bob shaw, 'timepiece' brian boll, 'the unteleported man' pkd ... think i'm forgetting some.

picked up james baldwin's 'notes of a native son' again today. his approach as an essayist is surprisingly like to orwell's: anyway, it's great

xpost: I don't know if 'disillusioned' was exactly the right term... it's just, while I'm sure they really are faithful to the idiosyncracies of the original language and all that, I'm starting to realize that fidelity is not the conditio sine qua non for my enjoyment of a translated work. Several times recently, I've picked up a P&V Dostoevsky translation and found that, on a sentence-by-sentence level, it's just unpleasant to read. Then I go to the library and check out some older translations, which I guess might be more 'compromised', but not in ways that I feel obscure or alter the meaning.

Maybe not the best example, but grabbing the nearby copy of Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and flipping to George Bird's 1958 translation of "The Double", I read:

It was a little before eight when Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a minor civil servant, came to, yawned, stretched, and finally opened his eyes wide after a long night's rest. For two minutes or so he lay motionless in bed, like a man as yet uncertain whether all at present going on about him is reality or a continuation of his disordered dreams. But in a short while Mr. Golyadkin's senses began recording their usual everyday impressions more clearly. Everything looked back at him familiarly: the messy green walls of his little room, begrimed with soot and dust, his mahogany chest of drawers, his imitation mahogany chairs, the red painted table, the reddish oilcloth-covered ottoman patterned with sickly green flowers, and lastly the clothing he had hastily discarded the night before and thrown in a heap onto the ottoman. And then the foul, murky, grey autumnal day peered in at him through the dirty panes in such a sour, ill-humoured way, that Mr. Golyadkin had no longer any possible ground for doubting that he lay, not in some distant fairy realm, but in his own rooms on the fourth floor of a large tenement house in Shestilavochnaya Street, in the capital city of St. Petersburg. Having made a discovery of such importance, Mr. Golyadkin twitched his eyes shut again, as though regretting his recently-ended slumbers and wishing to recall them for a moment. But an instant later, having in all likelihood at last stumbled upon the one idea about which his scattered and inconsequent thoughts had been revolving, he bounded out of bed, and ran to a small round mirror standing on the chest of drawers. Although the sleepy, weak-sighted and rather bald image reflected was of so insignificant a character as to be certain of commanding no great attention at a first glance, its possessor remained well pleased with all that he beheld in the mirror.

Then I hit up Google books and find P&V's:

It was nearly eight o'clock in the morning when the titular councillor Yakov Petrovich Goliadkin came to after a long sleep, yawned, stretched, and finally opened his eyes all the way. For some two minutes, however, he lay motionless on his bed, like a man who is not fully certain whether he is awake or still asleep, whether what is happening around him now is a reality or a continuation of the disordered reveries of his sleep. Soon, though, Mr. Goliadkin's senses began to receive their usual everyday impressions more clearly and distinctly. The dirtyish green, sooty, and dusty walls of his little room, his mahogany chest of drawers, the imitation mahogany chairs, the red-painted table, the oilcloth Turkish sofa of a reddish color with little green flowers, and finally his clothes, hastily taken off the night before and thrown in a heap on the sofa, all gazed at him familiarly. Finally, the gray autumn day, dull and dirty, peeked into his room so crossly and with such a sour grimace that Mr. Goliadkin could in no way doubt any longer that he was not in some far-off kingdom but in the city of Petersburg, in the capital, on Shestilavochnaya Street, on the fourth floor of a quite large tenement house, in his own apartment. Having made this important discovery, Mr. Goliadkin convulsively closed his eyes, as if regretting his recent dream and wishing to bring it back for a brief moment. But after a moment he leaped out of bed at a single bound, probably hitting finally upon the idea about which his scattered, not yet properly ordered thoughts had been turning. Having leaped out of bed, he ran at once to the small round mirror that stood on the chest of drawers. Though the sleepy, myopic, and rather bald-pated figure reflected in the mirror was precisely of such insignificant quality as to arrest decidedly no one's exclusive attention at first sight, its owner evidently remained perfectly pleased with all he saw in the mirror.

Regardless of fidelity, I just don't think the second reads as well. Take, for example, "the messy green walls of his little room, begrimed with soot and dust" vs. "The dirtyish green, sooty, and dusty walls of his little room". Basically the exact same image, except that one makes you wait until after all the modifiers to discover that what is being modified is, in fact, the walls. Without being able to see or understand the original Russian, I can only speculate, but my guess is that P&V's reproduces its structure more closely... but when the end result is both clunky-sounding and harder to parse, what exactly is the point? Why use "bald-pated" instead of "bald"? Is there really anything lost by rejiggering two sentences that begin "But after a moment he leaped out of bed" and "Having leaped out of bed" to make them flow more smoothly together? Again, I'm sure that what they're doing is quite valuable in some respects; but for me, the cons of having to read a phrase like "precisely of such insignificant quality as to arrest decidedly no one's exclusive attention at first sight" would seem to outweigh the pros.

(of course, I hasten to add that I've yet to read an entire novel in two different translations, so it is of course possible that the cumulative effect would be significantly different; but then again, when the individual sentences are well-written, it's a bit easier to get through the whole novel...)

Nice post, interesting to see the two lined up like that. Agree with all you say.

Slightly off-topic, I've seen a couple of times recently people who claim to have learned another language so as to be able to read Proust or Tolstoy in the original. It sounds like the most pretentious, and implausible, thing in all the world.

Any reason to read a language is a good reason! I mean yeah it sounds insufferable but hey. I know I'm glad that I've brushed up on my high school french, and practiced spanish, enough to read Camus and Borges in the original language. Since I also speak german (born there), portuguese (grew up there) and english (like everyone else), I'm sort of spoiled enough to avoid translations alltogether, which accounts for my serious gaps of knowledge in russian literature. That being said, I've read enough translated japanese lit this year to be able to overcome that, hopefully.

Yeah, as a lover of books, literature, and language in general, I can sympathize with their motives. But I agree with Ismael Klata on the "implausible" part, and I think a lot of these people probably didn't really think their decisions through.

When a native French speaker tells you that reading Proust in English can't compare with reading him in the original French, it's like... well, duh, English isn't your first language! It seems unlikely that anything you reads in English will affect you as strongly as Proust in French, simply because you have a longer and richer personal history with the French language. And so yeah, "native French speaker reading Proust in French" may beat "native English speaker reading Proust in English translation", but does "native English speaker reading Proust in French"?

I'm sure that, if I studied French very seriously, for a long time, not only reading books but writing, talking, going to the store, having love affairs, reading newspapers, all in French -- yeah, at some point, I'd have a strong enough connection with the language to really appreciate Proust. But that's gonna take, what... 5 years? 7? 10? No book is worth that much of my life. If I learn French, it'll be because I want to learn French, because I'm interested in the French language, its discourse, its tradition -- not just because I want a Rosetta stone for Proust.

'anything you reads in English' -- urgh, sorry, I think I've made it clear that I'm not actually fluent in any language whatsoever

agree with what bernard snowy said -- I'll just add that Pevear's predilection for poetic turns of phrases, for le mot juste, seems too pat. I do admit that maybe part of my preference of older translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy may lie in the desire for something that reads a little closer to a nineteenth century Victorian novel! I think it's for the same reasons that I preferred the Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey to Fagles'. I feel that when I read a P&V translation I can see Pevear's hand hovering over the work, and it's distracting.

I support polyglotism in the pursuit of literature, but really only take someone seriously in this regard when they also have a deep and thorough experience with the culture that produced the language in question. Not that that guarantees fidelity (what does?), but it gets closer to the aim of learning another language in the first place.

There is some magic in reading a language that you're just mastering too, though - your brain takes a bit longer to assimiliate what's being said so if it's expressed in a particuarly creative way you're more likely to savour it. But yeah, obviously it won't give you the decades of cultural context etc.

I do admit that maybe part of my preference of older translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy may lie in the desire for something that reads a little closer to a nineteenth century Victorian novel!

(the 'this' I'm referring to, since I didn't make it totally clear, being a desire to read old translations of old books, so that I can better place them in some sort of historical continuum)

That side-by-side translation post is great, bernard. It's actually kind of astonishing how--despite their obvious differences--the two translations are so similar.

is 'mcteague' as good as von stroheim's 'greed'?

finally about to finish 'sophie's world.' it's ok, i guess, but i wish i'd spent my time reading something like bertrand russell.

Is 'Greed' the 8-hour film? I'd loved to see McTeague: the Movie, but I'm not sure I have the stamina.

finished 'PopCo', reading 'The Song is You' by Arthur Philips and Bill Bruford's autobio.

Kusamakura by Natsume Soseki

most of 'greed' was cut by the studio -- the version that survives is only about 2 hours. still great and worth seeing, particularly the (terrifying) ending.

Recently finished Roger's Version, my first full-length Updike. I liked it more than I thought I would - an odd mix of theological argument and frank depictions of sex, with occasional flashes of a wicked sense of humor.

I'm now reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay, which is what good 19th century pop history should be - long on colorful anecdotes of dubious provenance.

You guys should also know that there is a novel which features, among other things, a Greed-like film shoot, Leslie Epstein's Pandaemonium. Narrated in part by one Laszlo Loewenstein, aka Peter Lorre.

Kusamakura by Natsume Soseki - I loved this!

Hey, I have Pandaemonium somewhere--bought it at a remainder shop, and forgot about it until just now. Had no idea it was "told" by Lorre. I have to dig that out.

Just finished "The Lost Steps" by Carpentier. It was wordy, but wonderful.

Started "Disgrace" by Coetzee.

Denton Welch's Journals edited by Jocelyn Brooke.

Edward Sackville-West sums up one of the curiously pleasing features of Welch's writing -

'That is why is so disarming about your book [Maiden Voyage I think], the fact that you don't in the least mind making yourself out to be unpleasant or ridiculous.'

just finished "Tree of Smoke' by Denis Johnson. good but not great vietnam/conspiracy/paranoia epic. slightly overlong/over-written in my humble but mostly worth the effort.

Another Self - James Lees-Milne. Didn't really like this. Earlier chapters okay - okay memoir of misfit child in country house life, good portraits of Mother and Father - but starts to stink with snobbery, boring aestheticism, old-school politics, bit of racism as it goes along. Don't think it has the qualities that make up for that in his right-leaning contemporaries (Waugh, Powell, etc). I find the diaries more bearable - actively funny in places - for some reason. Possibly because he's unapologetic about being a neurotic, snobby shit there and can get on with observation/cutting remarks.

Had Denton Welch recommended to me before, so Gamaliel tipped me over. Read about half of Voice Through a Cloud. The style and eye are great, and I like his character sketches *a lot*, but I'm not feeling compelled to finish for some reason. Possibly a lack of hospital time?

Have started reading things on an iPhone. Surprisingly enjoyable. Using Eucalyptus and downloading stuff from Gutenberg in the Victorian-Edwardian line (which PG is quite strong on). Beerbohm, Pater, Ruskin. Enoch Soames still fun on the small screen.

Kusamakura by Natsume Soseki - I loved this!

It's very dense and lyrical. I only read I Am A Cat before, which is funny but does get a bit repetitive.

Agree with you on both. I think I only read vol 1 of 'Cat' for that reason.

Had Denton Welch recommended to me before, so Gamaliel tipped me over. Read about half of Voice Through a Cloud. The style and eye are great, and I like his character sketches *a lot*, but I'm not feeling compelled to finish for some reason. Possibly a lack of hospital time?

I think that's pretty much what I found as well really. There was a sense of inertia while reading it, maybe to do with it's loose-ish episodic structure and possibly to do with the fact it isn't finished, not sure. I didn't mind particularly because it seemed to fit in with the whole medical malaise, the feeble sense of futility about what happens.

I like the way the pathological, highly sensitised, 'ill' if you like, approach to the world immediately after his accident, rather than gradually disappearing with his slow recovery, undergoes a process of diffusion, so that it encompasses the whole of his existence. One of the best descriptions of a 'morbid' personality I think I've come across.

And yeah, he's spot on with the psychology of the insitutionalised patient as well. In fact I've been thinking for a while about collecting literary examples of morphine hallucination - there's a good one in The Strings are False by MacNiece, and um, tum-ti-tum, a couple of others as well, can't remember for the moment. (Although an honorary mention would have to go to the 'Pinfold to hooligans, Pinfold to hooligans' section in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.)

As for my experience, I thought the nurses were trying to poison me, that I had to steal a bus to get a takeaway in order to be allowed to go to the toilet, and that my entire extended family had come to visit me one day, but that they weren't allowed to see me.

Back to the Denton Welch - there's something very appealing about the quality of his prose as well (for me anyway), that's difficult to put my finger on. Possibly it's the slightly naive sentence structure with the ornate detail that does it.

The bit with the zombies is good as well. (or is it vampires, I can't remember).

Agree with you on both. I think I only read vol 1 of 'Cat' for that reason.

I need to stop being so obsessive-cumpulsive with this shit: ended up reading the entire thing, and got the straps of my messenger bag ripped from carrying it around. Really downbeat ending, too. :(

I've been thinking for a while about collecting literary examples of morphine hallucination

The words from the opera Dust by Robert Ashley.

Really downbeat ending, too. :( - yeah, I did skip ahead and read that. A bummer.

Finished Notes from Underground - wow. Glad I chose this time of my life to read it - it's kinda like Catcher in the Rye in that I don't think its impact would have been so great had I read it earlier in my life.

Gonna try and finish Jesus' Son now without getting immensely bored

"Shadow in the Wind" by Ruiz Zafon. Derivative, populist tosh with a wafer-thin sprinkling of of postmodernist pretension? I think so, but do I have a tiny - and I do mean tiny - suspicion that I'm being unfair and there's a better book in there than I was able to identify. But the only way to know is to reread it, and I'm no interested enough to do that.

"No Fond Return of Love" Barbara Pym. The sixth of hers I've read and easily the weakest. For diehard fans only.

Still making my way through 2666. Almost made up my mind to abandon it after The Part about Amalfitano, when I was finding the relentless bleakness and overwhelming sense of dread very hard to take. What's kept me reading is the sense that a writer as original and talented as this must have something less banal to say than life's (pointless) shit and then you die, with maybe a few inconsequential scraps of poetry along the way if you're lucky. But I still need convincing.

Started re-reading "The Line of Beauty" and also started "The Little Stanger" by Sarah Waters. The Waters has been abandoned meantime 'cause I'm reading too much simultaneously but it starts very well.

apologies for typos: I do have not do I have; not interested, not no interested.

Am about to finish Light by M. John Harrison, which I was inspired to read after reading the John Clute afterword to Christopher Priest's awesome Inverted World, published by ILB favorite NYRB Publishing. So what should I read next? The sequel, Nova Swing? Virconium? Or another Christopher Priest, either The Extremes or The Prestige? Or the John Wyndham book published by NYRB that Priest wrote the forward for, The Chrysalids?

i read nova swing the other week and wasn't too impressed. heavy lifting from stalker. or mb just from roadside picnic.

i think in viriconium might be pretty good: the two preceding novels are kind of grouchy-minded anti-high-fantasy things of doubtful subtlety, but that one had other dimensions. i think. it's been a while now since i read them.

<img src="http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/devilinthewhitecity/final_images/buildingimage.jpg";>
devil in the white city by erik larson

http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/devilinthewhitecity/final_images/buildingimage.jpg

bah!

I didn't like Light that much. A lot of dazzling effects but at some level it wasn't honest.

i'm still only through 2 parts of '2666' and yeah, i'm not sure i've read a novel with such a sense of dread hanging over the whole proceedings, even during banal scenes. it's the literary equivalent of those shots in 'twin peaks' of empty intersections w/stoplights swinging in the breeze at night.

anybody ever read stories/novels by Ursula Hegi? someone brought a bunch of books in to the store and there were four of hers. looks like my kinda thing. was gonna bring them home. obviously i'm asking cuz i've never read any of her stuff.

You can never go wrong reading 'The Chrysalids'!

I'm finally reading John Ashberry and James Schuyler's 'A Nest of Ninnies', which is basically 200p of listening in on witty conversation, without any real plot to speak of. I'm enjoying it, but it's very light.I notice that the Library of Congress cataloguing categories at the front are 'Suburban life-fiction', 'Middle class-fiction' and 'New York-fiction', which is probably enough on its own to drive some readers into a fury. They may as well have added 'White people-fiction' to complete the effect.

Camilo Jose Cela - The Hive. Fragmented tales from post-war Madrid. Not feeling this, although it could a post-Gaddis comedown.

Gertrude Stein - Paris France. Anyone like her? The syntactical games are ho-hum but most of all I can't say I care for her definitions of how the French are 'civilized' or otherwise.

I tried, xyzzzz__, but I never really got on with her. Always felt Wyndham Lewis summed her up with that comment about the Stein-sausage in was it Time and Western Man?

I think her greatest achievement was probably Ernest Hemingway. I am a philistine tho.

D.H. Lawrence - The Trespasser.

You're no philistine to me but someone with always right instincts, if you don't mind me saying so :-)

I've not read any Hemingway either. However I would like to Janet Malcolm's book on Stein.

stein sausage?

i think the theory behind stein's work is way, way, way more interesting than her actual writing

have you tried Three Lives by Stein. her first book. pretty interesting. and much more straightforward than her later stuff.

She dispatched Paul Bowles to Tangiers, too, and that was a good idea.

I once spent time working for an actress whose speciality was a one-woman show based on the life and writings of Gertrude Stein. I ended up knowing huge swathes of Stein more or less by heart. It was an entertaining show but, being charitable, most of Stein's writing had dated badly.

I like "The Trespasser". Early Lawrence may not be the best Lawrence, but it's perhaps the most purely enjoyable. A lot of undigested Nietzsche though.

I like "The Trespasser". Early Lawrence may not be the best Lawrence, but it's perhaps the most purely enjoyable. A lot of undigested Nietzsche though.

This is probably the Lawrence novel I really enjoyed the most--didn't feel like hard work, the way a lot of his stuff does (not that it's always unrewarding work, it's just that with most of his later stuff he can't bear that you'll not get exactly what he means, so he bashes you over the head with it at great length).

I once spent time working for an actress whose speciality was a one-woman show based on the life and writings of Gertrude Stein.

fantastic. this could be the plot of a (comic) novel!

Reading one entry a day in the Wordsworth Vintage Mystery & Detective Stories omnibus and posting my impressions on twitter (DanielRoffle, if you don't mind sorting through the rest of my posts, which are in portuguese gibberishspeak)

finished notes of a native son. and madame bovary, which i've been reading on and off (mostly off) for a while.

and more from my accumulated box of SF:
james blish, a life for the stars
james blish, midsummer century
james blish, earthman, come home!
thomas m. disch, echo round his bones
ward moore, bring the jubilee
wollheim & carr, eds., world's best science fiction 1965

in the middle of the last of blish's cities in flight books and john boyd's the last starship from earth. and then i will bloody well find something better to do with my time. yes.

Thomas Bernhard - Woodcutters. Another bitter tirade, but the (now old, but no less vital) themes are rendered distinctively, the black humour is winning and the lament over Joanna is truly touching.

Think I'll read Jelinek's Piano teacher next.

read Stefan Zweig's bio of Balzac and flipping through Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human which I tend to read once a year...

Death in Spring. It is quite remarkable.

Wow, no accounting for taste. I thought Bloom's Shakespeare tome was one of the worst books I've ever read.

Library had an early copy of Banville's The Infinities, so I grabbed that. I'd just subbed a review of it last week, which made it sound crazy: Bowen-y Big House novel + comic romp + Greek gods knocking about + alt universe science-theology. Sort of, but really it's a John Banville novel. Lots of death, good prose. Enjoying it; will finish quickly, then to Pynchon (getting my copy Friday).

'Death in Spring' looks really interesting. I suddenly realise I've read about six books called 'Death in X' (usually a place), and they've actually all been really good.

i forgot this board existed for a while.

i am trying to read books that have been sitting on my shelf since i was 18 so i just finished:

anne labastille, woodswoman
lars gustafsson, death of a beekeeper
josef m. bauer, as far as my feet will carry me

all very easy. i'm going to read heart of darkness next because i've never been able to get past page 10 :(

i finished mcteague. i did end up reading the second half of it in one sitting, so it does have stuff going for it: i still think it seems like it's deluded it's got a handle on its characters that achieves something more than dickensian grotesqueries

and read a bunch more old SF, obviously. i've had that box of books for ages. in fact "i am trying to read books that have been sitting on my shelf since i was 18" is going on with me a bit. i'm on dead souls. which is great, actually: i love how fucked off the narrator seems to be with the whole practice of narrating a novel.

death in spring does look fantastic.

dead souls is in that pile for me too! thirded re: death in spring. i love the cover, too.

unfortunately, I was a smug pretentious teenager, so the books that have been sitting on my shelf unread since I was 16 are Gravity's Rainbow/Infinite Jest/Underworld/Foucault's Pendulum etc.

Dalton Trumbo: Johnny Got His Gun - bloody hell, this is both really good and really horrible. An American WW1 soldier wakes up in hospital minus all his limbs, his hearing, and his face. It's basically what goes through his head as he lies there (a mix of memories, desperate philosophy, despair, mad plans for escape/suicide).

The Jelinek was absolutely fantastic!

Arthur Schnitzler - Dream Story.

Go Schnitzler--I love him!

Its better than Eyes Wide Shut that's for sure!

"Dalton Trumbo: Johnny Got His Gun - bloody hell, this is both really good and really horrible. An American WW1 soldier wakes up in hospital minus all his limbs, his hearing, and his face. It's basically what goes through his head as he lies there (a mix of memories, desperate philosophy, despair, mad plans for escape/suicide)."

everyone in america has to read this in high school. and then we are forced to listen to the metallica song based on it. it's required.

you should see the movie version, james. it's great. dalton trumbo directed it.

or you can just watch the metallica video that incorporates scenes from the film.

currently in the August queue: Spring Snow, Hadrian the Seventh, and Pale Fire.

Just back from two weeks of intensive hiking. During that time I read Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut and concluded that it was not not of his best, but it would be pretty heady stuff for a 14 year old, or for a somewhat geeky, backward 18 year old. Luckily, I find Vonnegut's company enaging enough that he is readable for that reason alone.

In the interval before and between hikes I read some of Falling Off the Map by Pico Iyer. Pleasant travel type stuff.

I also began and am not entirely finished with The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James. (As short as it is, I do not have much time or energy to devote to reading when I am hiking 10 miles a day - up and down as much as 3000 feet in a day - carrying about 30 pounds on my back every step of the way.)

I am finding it amazing, both for how James lays down multiple layers of nuance in his sentences and for the almost incomprehensible reticences and scruples of the central character, which require such carefully shaded nuances to convey. James is also very good at encapsulating a huge amount of wit into a single well-chosen word. You've got to read him like a hound tracking a fox.

unfortunately, I was a smug pretentious teenager, so the books that have been sitting on my shelf unread since I was 16 are Gravity's Rainbow/Infinite Jest/Underworld/Foucault's Pendulum etc.

haha these are basically the only books i read as a teenager

everyone in america has to read this in high school. and then we are forced to listen to the metallica song based on it. it's required.

you should see the movie version, james. it's great. dalton trumbo directed it.

or you can just watch the metallica video that incorporates scenes from the film.

Thanks--I'll have to seek the film out. Weirdly, I had the vague idea that this was a pretty much forgotten book. Obviously I know what's going on.

And have just finished Nicholas Monsarrat's 'The Cruel Sea', which is fine, mostly stiff-upper-lip, occasionally startlingly gruesome, WW2 adventure. Since I'm expecting a "new" Stefan Zweig in the post any day ('Journey into the Past'), I might just have to read these Hard Case Crime books I've got hanging around to fill in th etime.

Almost finished A Sentimental Education, when i was on holiday I finished Moby Dick and read a book of short stories by de Maupasant.

Also not very interesting book related anecdote, very conventional looking middle-aged woman was sitting next to me on a plane the other day reading "The Piano Teacher", which I was a bit took aback by. Until I noticed the name of the author http://www.amazon.co.uk/Piano-Teacher-Janice-Y-Lee/dp/0007286198

i'd never heard of johnny got his gun so not *everyone* in america had to read it. i think we read "a separate peace" instead of that because we were boring.

finished heart of darkness. it was ok. i am going to read the tin drum next.

Finished A Sentimental Education. Wow. What a book! Flaubert is yoga flame for all time.

Reading The Rebel by Camus.

I'm discovering that i love French literature so much that it's making me want to take classes so I can read this stuff in the original.

haha yeah me too. has anyone else here ever done anything like that -- learned russian to read tolstoy, or whatever?

I took Spanish in university in part to be able to talk to my Spanish speaking relatives, but probably more to be able to read Latin American Boom writers in the original.

Just yesterday I was reading an essay by Helene Cixous in a bookshop -- about Joyce and Clarice Lispector...wishing I could regain my Portuguese.

Finished: Sartre's Nausea. So he wasn't that keen on writing a novel, but maybe, unlike Robbe-Grillet, he wasn't able to come up with a (de)construction that could appeal. Its kinda clunky, and the philosophy could've been cut and compressed and enhanced in a more personal way. I kept thinking that Mishima, in Sun and Steel, managed to do something that was just like this.

Now: Ayi Kwei Armah's The Bautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Much better evocation of ennui (Sartre is mentioned at the back), this time the sense of disgust registers when detailing Ghanaian corruption.

Probably move onto Moravia's Contempt next.

'Contempt' is great!

Read the Stefan Zweig, which was predictably ace, and am now reading 'Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste' by Carl Wilson, which is both really funny and really interesting.

a writer at war: vasily grossman with the red army 1941-1945

grossman joins up with the red army as they're fighting the german invasion, stays with them through most of stalingrad, and accompanies them all the way to berlin. the book compiles his notebooks from the time, pieces of reportage or entire columns for newspapers, and makes them flow together with some easy, unobtrusive commentary and background from antony beevor. many of the lengthier passages describe unimaginable horror, but generally the most terrifying quotes are obviously quick scribblings without any context, something like, "a woman has thrown herself on fire from a 3rd story window", full stop. his piece on treblinka is just astonishing; he seems to have interviewed dozens of camp survivors, local peasants, and german POWs to arrive at a full picture of how the entire operation was accomplished, right down to creating a fake "normal" train station at the last stop on the train line. pretty powerful stuff.

I left my Calvino on the roof of my car and then pulled out of my parking space, drove away, and forgot about it until the next day.

:/

'the treblinka hell', that piece in question, was used by the prosecution at the nuremberg trials. xxp

omar little that book sounds fantastic, but i doubt i could bear to read it

hoos: which calvino?

That's one disruption to finishing the book that 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' is lacking...

everyone in america has to read this in high school. and then we are forced to listen to the metallica song based on it. it's required.

you should see the movie version, james. it's great. dalton trumbo directed it.

or you can just watch the metallica video that incorporates scenes from the film.

― scott seward, Saturday, August 8, 2009 10:48 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark

I did all three of these in a one month period during middle school, although I had been regularly listening to 'One' for some time beforehand

I was in the class that never read that book for some reason, but I saw all the kids in all the other classes carrying them around. A mild form of a parallel universe.

That's one disruption to finishing the book that 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' is lacking...

Two hundred pages later, Mason & Dixon is excrutiating. I need encouragement.

There's some Pynchon love/hate on this thread so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

gotta say, if you don't like it i don't think there's going to be a point you WON'T find mason/dixon excruciating

That's one disruption to finishing the book that 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' is lacking...

A long time ago, my girlfriend bought two books I'd been raving about and took them on a plane flight. One was If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. The other was a copy of John Barth's Chimera that turned out to have the signatures misplaced and a good chunk of the opening missing. I can't remember which order she started them in: either she got to the missing chunk of Chimera, turned to the Calvino, and went "whoah, uncanny," or she got partway in the Calvino, decided to try the Barth instead, and then went "whoah, uncanny."

The Taste For Beauty

Dugmore Boetie: Familiarity os the Kingdom of the Lost

A strange but good one, this--a memoir by a black South African con-artist and street thief who died in 1966. Has some very odd touches, though, like the fact that he accidentally burns his mother to death on page 1 and then never mentions it again.

stein sausage?

― thomp, Saturday, 1 August 2009 16:04 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

Sorry thomp, meant to elaborate a while ago, but I can't find my copy of Time and Western Man. At the library now tho, so:

At present I am referring to what I have read of Miss Stein at the Three Lives stage of her techinical evolution. What is the matter with it is, probably, that it is so dead. Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously-reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through, and all along. It is weighted, projected, with a sibylline urge. It is mournful and monstrous, composed of dead and inanimate material. It is all fat, without nerve. Or the evident vitality that informs it is vegetable rather than animal. Its life is a low-grade, if tenacious, one; of the sausage, by-the-yard, variety.

Finished:

Alberto Moravia - Contempt. My new favourite author -- will be going onto read Two Women soon.

Joseph Roth - Confessions of a Murderer. My new favourite author -- will be going onto read Radetzsky March soon.

Leonardo Sciascia - The Day of the Owl. My new favourite author -- hoping to read etc

Now: Stefan Zweig - Beware of Pity.

How is 'Beware of Pity'? I've had it on my shelf for a while, but (of all the reasons not to get around to reading it) it's far too heavy relative to its size, which I find weirdly intimidating.

GR that is kind of funny but mainly it makes me think wyndham lewis is a dick

read james baldwin's the fire next time and another country. and some other things.

like him way more as an essayist. it's kind of weird reading an essentially old-fashioned novel where people talk about racism and say 'motherfucker' and it isn't awful, though

it makes me think wyndham lewis is a dick

― thomp, Tuesday, August 18, 2009 10:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

He is definitely a bit of a dick.

I like him though - Time and Western Man is great, not necessarily particularly coherent as such - it's just an all-out assault on the idea of Bergsonian time as a philosophical and literary idea. The force of his prose is tremendously energising (it can also be tremendously ennervating, like anything noisy and sometimes obstreperous - see The Apes of God). What I like about his theoretical writing generally is what you don't necessarily get in that section, or rather you only get the second half of it in that section - the way he takes abstract ideas and materialises them into bricks which he then heaves with tremendous gusto at whatever it is he is arguing against.

In fact, he uses the methods of satire to analyse and attack his theoretical opponents. He is, it hardly needs saying, not even handed. The thing that makes this okay is that he's very good at it. Or at least he's very good at it sometimes. Other times, such as in Paleface, it's boring and shrill and substanceless - glorified pub rant.

What makes it work especially well in Time and Western Man is that the theories of flux and sensational time that he's attacking are exactly those opposed by the methods of satire. Sparks fly in a most entertaining fashion - and within its context, that Stein quote is amusing.

And I basically think he's right about Stein, both theoretically and in that descriptive section (which is sort of an extension of his theory anyway). It's preceded by a bit which compares Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with Gertrude Stein, which is fun as well.

IK -- Is the Pushkin edition the one you're thinking of? Great cover, but yes, it feels as if it could be lighter (see also that horrible edition of Gaddis' Recognitions with the pink cover -- although it didn't stop me from reading either, perhaps because I got both as a loan from the library). NYRB should print every book ever.

So far its shaping up to be quite the tragedy. Great set-up, although I am feeling a bit fatigued by the Vienna novels. A bit but I doubt it will be enough to stop.

Gamiliel -- Since Lewis attacks Bergson's ideas does he discuss Proust's fiction?

Since Lewis attacks Bergson's ideas does he discuss Proust's fiction?

He does, in the main in The Apes of God, in fact, through Horace Zagreus, and that's really a discussion about satire - Proust the gossip columnist rather than Proust the time philosopher.

I can't remember what he says about Proust elsewhere, although I don't think he condemns (or blasts) him particularly. In fact Lewis was a big admirer of Proust, and if he does discuss his time philosophy, it's more in a tone of admiring disagreement than belligerent disapproval.

I would suggest, tentatively, that Lewis's major beef was with writers who tried to convey the passing of sensational time through stylistic devices - the Stein stutter, sections of Joyce, certainly Virginia Woolf. The idea of internal monologue offended him.

This is vague recollecting on my part, I need to return to Time and Western Man and have a proper look, and will do so with pleasure, it's a most invigorating read.

A friend of mine went to the Futurism exhibition the other day, and I quoted her the section in Blasting and Bombardeering where Lewis talks about Marinetti - to a certain extent his attitude can be guessed at by their conversation -

'You are a futurist, Lewis!' he shouted at me one day, as we were passing into a lavabo together, where we wanted to wash after a lecture where he had drenched himself in sweat.

'No,' I said.

'Why don't you announce that you are a futurist!' he asked me squarely.

'Because I am not one,' I answered, just as pointblank and to the point.

'Yes. But what's it matter!' said he with great impatience.

'It's most important,' I repled rather coldly.

'Not at all!' said he. 'Futurism is good. It is all right.'

'Not too bad,' said I. 'It has its points. But you Wops insist too much on the Machine. You're always on about these driving-belts, you are always exploding about internal combustion. We've had machines here in England for a donkey's years. They're no novelty to us.'

'You have never understood you machines! You have never known the ivresse of travelling at a kilometre a minute. Have you ever travelled at a kilometre a minute?'

'Never,' I shook my head energetically. 'Never. I loathe anything that goes too quickly. If it goes too quickly, it is not there.'

'It is not there!' he thundered for this had touched him on the raw. 'It is only when it goes quickly that it is there!'

'That is nonsense,' I said. 'I cannot see a thing that is going too quickly.'

'See it - see it!' Why should you want to see?' he exclaimed. 'But you do see it. You see it multiplied a thousand times. you see a thousand things instead of one thing.'

I shrugged my shoulders - this was not the first time I had had this argument.
'That's just what I don't want to see. I am not a futurist,' I said. 'I prefer one thing.'

'There is no such thing as one thing.'

'There is if I wish to have it so. And I wish to have it so.'

'You are a monist!' he said at this, with a contemptuous glance, curling his lip.

'All right. I'm not a futurist anyway. Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes.'

At this quotation he broke into a hundred angry pieces.

'And you "never weep" - I know, I know. Ah zut alors! What a thing to be an Englishman!'

Yes, the Pushkin edition xp. I was just flicking through it there and noticed that pp145-168 are printed upside-down too, so that's yet another obstacle to overcome.

Also tucking into some Eric Ambler. Nicely end-of-days 1939 paranoid.

Alberto Moravia - Contempt. My new favourite author -- will be going onto read Two Women soon.

Joseph Roth - Confessions of a Murderer. My new favourite author -- will be going onto read Radetzsky March soon.

Leonardo Sciascia - The Day of the Owl. My new favourite author -- hoping to read etc

Now: Stefan Zweig - Beware of Pity.

What a line-up of fantastic books!

Am reading 'An Apology for Idlers' by Robert Louis Stevenson: essay collection. I've said it before, but I really love RLS, and you can't help feeling he'd have been a great guy to know--funny, charming, completely without arsehole qualities.
The title essay is all about the joys of laziness, and is my new philosophy of life. The cover's excellent too--appropriately unfinished...
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0141043962.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

The Mystery of the Yellow Room - Gaston Leroux

The birth of the logical detective? Holmes essentially being a superlative observer, Rouletabille explicitly spurns the footprint. (Can Dupin really be called a detective? Rue Morgue's solution is too way out, Purloined Letter's too silly.)

Complete lack of human warmth. Fun, all the same.

I put a library hold today on Kobo Abe's Kangaroo Notebook. A description of it elsewhere on ILB sounded intriguing, although existentially-oriented magical realism isn't my usual fare.

Donald Westlakre: The Hot Rock

WestLAKE that should be.

Also, just read the first novel by William Trevor, which is now out of print and which is no longer listed among his books, so he seems to have disowned it, But check out the cover!
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2481/3840588509_c3ec0e3647_b.jpg

(Try http://www.flickr.com/photos/28475170@N02/3840588509/ if that didn't work.)

Gamaliel -- Thanks for your answer (and the quote). I very much like internal monologues, perhaps more blindly than I should so 'Time and Western Man' is a must read. Even if Wyndham does sound like a dick.

James -- yeah that was a good run of books. The Moravia in particular, I just love how he pours scorn (if that was the intention and it purely wasn't the only one) on that old chestnut of literature as a way of gaining insight into particular mindsets by setting up a a drama where all we have left is the inability of using writing as a way to understand the deepest most important things. Even better than Zeno's Consicence in that respect. No wonder Godard adapted it (haven't seen that film)

The Sciascia amounts to a comprehensive set of diamond edged sentences, huh? No waste. I like how there seems to a whole worrying underneath about the notion of justice that is at the heart of these books, with the whodunits being a sideshow. Hopefully more will come out as soon as I get a run of these going.

The ending to the Roth was very beautiful, to me.

The Zweig is a bit hard going at the mo. Every word, gesture seems to be meticulously looked at but I wonder if, for once, there is the need for that much detail. How are the short stories?

I only read the one about chess and it's meticolous but not excessively so.

Reading Graham Greene's The Third Man and The Fallen Idol.

Just finished the Collected Essays of Graham Greene. He definitely had an intellectual pov and certain amount of rigor in pursuing it, mostly coalesced around his convert's adherence to Catholic doctrine.

Last night started Justinian's Flea. So far it is walking over ground I have walked over in the past with other authors and with many of the original sources (easy because they are so few in number). I am hoping for a bit of Grand Unifying Theory sprinkled on top.

Just finished the Collected Essays of Graham Greene. He definitely had an intellectual pov and certain amount of rigor in pursuing it, mostly coalesced around his convert's adherence to Catholic doctrine.

We talked about this book some time ago on one of these threads. Him meeting up with Ho Chi Minh is pretty thrilling stuff.

'The Forsaken' - Tim Tzouliadis

The Book of Questions - Pablo Neruda

How are the short stories?

Fan-bloody-tastic!

Was in the West of Ireland for a week, seemed fitting to read a Tim Robinson book: went for Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage. Love the style - dense, observant, bit of knotty abstraction. Will read more next time I'm over. (Read the new Faber edition, which has an 'other books in this series' page right at the end, listing the NYRB Catalogue. Good job, Faber. Tidy editing. For a reprint of Labyrinth, how about a stapled Roneo of your old edition?)

Read randomly from books around the house for the rest of my time there. Aubrey, Jonson, Burke. Also realised I'd never tried a serious long poem by Byron. Started Childe Harold, realised why I'd never tried one.

Also had fit of rereading Chandler: Farewell, My Lovely and The Little Sister. Simple pleasures.

master and margarita! loving it so far. also a book of criticial essays in preparation for college.

Alberto Moravia - Two Women. Excellent, and Rosetta's way of dealing with her loss of innonence was utterly unexpected, affecting, even quite shocking. The story is similar -- in the sense that it is to do with a family dealing with the end of the second world war -- to Morante's History: A Novel. I definitely will read it at some point.

Started: Denton Welch - A Voice Through a Cloud.

re-reading 'ariel' and 'chimera'

trying to decide whether to read the sylvia plath thread

have read in past few days:

some of gogol's short stories
some of cordwainer smith's
some of the man without qualities
all of the house of the seven gables (loved it)

Enjoying the Musil thomp?

Weren't Moravia and Morante married?

E. Nesbit, Kelly Link, and George Herbert. Gonna read Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home for class next week.

Recently finished...
John Cheever - Bullet Park
Malcolm Braly - On the Yard
(both great)

About to start...
San Francisco Tape Music Centre
Saul Bellow - Herzog

Finished up the Greene. Now it's time for my traditional Summer moomins book (this year it's Moominsummer Madness) and after that, Ikku Jippensha's Shank's Mare.

San Francisco Tape Music Centre

Fantastic. In that connection, here is Ramon Sender's attempt to communicate with a hypothetical being by means of randomly-chosen works in the dictionary. It made me laugh.

"Weren't Moravia and Morante married?"

Yup. Just wondering if anyone read both books and how similar they are or not.

Finished the Welch last night - so many incredible sentences that concretely communicate the blackness and agony and yet others that express his desire to live. Brilliant writing.

Doubled that w/Sartre - The Wall.

Just started on Durrenmatt - The Judge and His Hangman.

Really glad you liked A Voice Through A Cloud, xyzzz__, the tone of his writing is quite remarkable.

I've just been dicking about the intern... I mean, I've just finished Murder in the Submarine Zone by Carter Dickson/John Dickson Carr, and rather like my attitude to The Fall, I find myself incapable of criticism - I can go through the motions, but really (rather like in My New House) 'I do love the bad things about it'.

Am starting either The Blood of the Lamb by Peter De Vries or Maiden Voyage, Denton Welch's first novel, apparently rather more a travelogue, than novel actually.

Inherent Vice is still on the back burner (in the form of the right-hand stereo speaker), begging to be read, but I think it's just going to have to wait a bit longer. No rush, no rush.

Oh, and read Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson. Very good. Got me thinking about deranged-psyche-of-the-criminal-stories (Tell-Tale Heart, Crime and Punishment, Killer Inside Me &c., he said, implying a host of others, that don't actually spring to mind right now).

Right, must read 'Markheim' NOW!

It's only about five pages long, I should add, but good, good!

The thing I want to add, just before I retire (because that's what young gentlemen like I do, we retire - we don't collapse into bed barely tugging a sheet over our fully clothed body while half heartedly shuffling out of one shoe oh no) was that Markheim was specifically recommended to me by an extremely eccentric elderly Italian chap, who was a passionate Anglophile, loathed Italian 'incompetence' as he called it. He would occasionally walk round the office holding his arms somewhat in the manner of a chicken impression, while flexing them experimentally all the while saying 'I must, I must, I must improve my bust'. He was very likable, but extraordinarily tight, frugal to the point of rudeness.

Anyway, when I said I liked Stevenson, found him interesting, he enthusiastically recommended to me Markheim in the strongest possible terms. As a consequence a good deal of reading it involved me wondering what exactly it was about the story that so appealed to his personality. I'm really none the wiser, but I had an entertaining enough time chewing over my speculations as I read.

reading:

eleven - patricia highsmith

i've been on an a.m. homes and mary gaitskill kick of late, and the girl at the bookstore recommended patricia highsmith next

GamalielRatsey, that's a great story. I find I have a copy of Markheim in a big book of RLS short stoires, so I shall HAVE AT IT!

I recently finished Paul Lafarge's The Artist of the Missing, which I read while home with the flu, and the combination of cold-medicine-induced delirium and Lafarge's wacky/surreal way with narrative motion made for a pleasant head-trip.

Now I'm back to John Hemming's magnum opus The Conquest of the Incas, which I formerly left off at around page 300.

Recently...
Conrad Aiken: A Heart for the Gods of Mexico -- odd
RL Stevenson: Markheim -- great stuff - GamalielRatsey really otm
J M Coetzee: Summertime -- yay! a return to the good stuff after a couple of pretty minor books from him

Just finished The Blood of the Lamb by Peter de Vries. This is the only book that has ever made me actually cry. In that American tradition that is not at all literary, but with that vein of directness that I've never quite been able to appreciate in Raymond Carver. It is clear, sane, funny and incredibly bleak and sad - looks unpretentiously at the limits both of faith and doubt (without in any way making those the subjects of what he is writing about).

Although not at all lyrical (it is brief and horribly to the point in its style) there are also moments of intense lyricism.

I haven't done it justice, damn, but this is a really good book, and it will make me return to his comic novels, which I've been able to see are well done, without actually enjoying them as much as I feel I should.

Reading Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch now, his first novel.

The only De Vries I've read was Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, which underwhelmed me a bit. The arch tone of the narrator started to grate after a while - like someone who compulsively cracks wise - his need for a joke to fill the space is palpable, though the jokes miss at least as often as they hit. It kind of reminded me of a mediocre indie comedy film peopled with oh-so-eccentric characters that you're supposed to find inherently lovable and interesting (e.g. "Little Miss Sunshine").

Yep, that sums up pretty well the feeling I get from what I've read of his comic stuff as well. I like it more than that, and feel that maybe I just need to get used to the tone, but that comment about compulsively cracking wise had me nodding.

I think I know what you mean about the indy film thing - but I'm not sure you're supposed to find the characters lovable or interesting, and there is a feeling of suburban nightmare even in his lighter stuff, which helps leaven the tone. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure the blackness that is in The Blood of the Lamb isn't inherent in the earlier, whiter comic material, and that reading that book has convinced me to go back and have another look.

If you are at all tempted to read Blood of the Lamb, really don't let your distaste for his comic stuff put you off - the comic style becomes, in the context of the very bleak material, a sort of biting wisdom - if that doesn't sound too unbearably pissy.

Well, you make "Blood of the Lamb" sound interesting, but my experience with "Kalamazoo" would probably keep me from running out to buy it. I will keep it in mind though. Maybe you're right that the characters aren't supposed to be lovable and there is a subtle bleakness underlying the comic tone - but if so, I missed it. It just seems to me that each character tends to become a one-note running joke - and if you didn't find the joke funny the first time, you certainly won't be laughing the 50th time.

No, I know what you mean - I found Comfort Me With Apples tiring for that very reason.

Perhaps fits into the category encompassed by CS Lewis' supposed whispered aside during one of the Inklings meetings in Oxford, where Tolkein was reading out another passage from one of his then as yet uncompleted Lord of the Rings volumes.

The anecdote runs something like 'Even the mild-mannered CS Lewis was heard to mutter under his breath, 'Not another fucking elf.'

used to love that story at fourteen

should i visit the inkling pub this weekend y/n

Er, yes? I met Stevie Winwood in there once.

And didn't Tolkien say of Narnia, "Tripish, I fear."

I've only read a few Devries books, but my favorite, The Cat's Pajamas and Witch's Tit lampooned faddish existentialist thought and literature (and pop psychology? - can't remember) while at the same time really effectively and poignantly describing an existential crisis. It was not like reading Wodehouse or something - more like Beerbohm.

I think I'll try those two next, bamcquern, cheers.

Also xpost, I hadn't heard that 'Tripish' comment before. Good stuff. I prefer Lewis as being less of a bore - there's a very good three-way conversation between K Amis, Brian Aldiss and him on science fiction at the beginning of one of the Spectrum collections - but much as I loved both the Narnia books and the Lord of the Rings as a child, I feel very little attachment to them now. I re-read all the Narnia books recently while convalescing, and while some of them are quite charming and magical, (I have soft spot for the Horse and his Boy) something like The Last Battle is just really weird, patrician and dull.

As for The Lord of the Rings, vast tracts of Teutonic tedium interspersed with the tiniest elements of human emotion and excitement. HOW long does it take for Sam and Frodo to get from just outside Mordor to actually throwing the damn thing in the Pit of Doom? And how long does it take just to get to Rivendell for fuxache? I can make an exception for the still thrilling Mines of Moria. In fact The Fellowship of the Ring is by a long chalk the strongest of the three for me.

So Tripish and Not Another Fucking Elf get the thumbs up for me - the mystery is how they could sit round as adults listening to this nonsense. (But Out of the Silent Planet and Voyage to Venus are really good - That Hideous Strength though is [makes circular motion at forehead with forefinger] but enjoyable enough I suppose.)

Christ, rambling.

'voyage to venus'?? my copy is 'perelandra'. which is so much better. that one is weird in a similar set of ways to 'the last battle' though. (er, have you by any chance read 'the case of conscience' by james blish? it's a more science fiction-y science fiction novel about life on another planet and church heresy. it makes kind of an interesting comparison. probably.) TLB is actually my favourite lewis, though i find it quite horrifying, which was admittedly probably not the goal.

LOTR is sooo tedious. there was this horrible period while i was in sixth form when everyone was reading it because of the movies and it was just — that's MY thing, you jocks, get away! and it's not even any good! trust me! i know! — also, later misprision by various parties means i can only read the exciting bits by visualising them with lead figures on a grid and six different sorts of die lying around.

That's a fair summary xp. The Shire and the other early bits have stuck (with a faintly sticky tweeness) but the later books haven't at all other than the odd detail (even with the help of the films). I was going to posit that Tolkien did not do epic well, but then does anyone do epic fiction well? I've been noticing that all the stuff I've been enjoying recently is above all a tangle of minutiae. The book just kind of explodes upwards out of sight after the Mines, except for the bit in the marshes.

I spent a significant part of my early teenage life reading into the back story - the Silmarillion, Lost Tales and all that - not a jot of which I even remotely remember now, other than a scene where two of the most significant historical figures stumble upon each other in a forest clearing, and just stare at each other then run away, that being the only time they ever met. I thought that was nice.

It was Perelandra in the states, which as you say is much better (although I quite like the B-movie tone of Voyage to Venus. I didn't mind all the weird quasi-religious stuff in it, I have to admit.

I haven't read any James Blish, although I have heard of The Case of Conscience. I'll put it on my reading list. A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller is another religion, heresy, science fiction one. It's pretty good.

My favourite bit in the films is in The Return of the King where there's that absurd hobbit pr0n slo-mo bit where they all bounce around on the bed and Gandalf stands there smiling on benevolently like an elderly p a e d o groomer. That took ages to finish as well, after the actual finish had happened. Didn't even have that bit where the hobbits return home and find Saruman has turned the Shire into a light industrial development.

The Hobbit is ok. Why am I talking about this? Gah.

The Balrog inflicts d20 damage and kills you with his ball of fire. You die.

xpost, yep, completely agree about the lack of detail IK. Mystifyingly empty.

just finished:

Daniel Dennett "Consciousness Explained" (huge tome, took me all summer, really fantastic though- highly recommended to anyone interested in philosophy of mind and neuroscience)

Samuel Johnson "Rasselas" (fun and silly, always meant to read this and now I have)

currently reading:

Walter Abish "Alphabetical Africa"

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol.

dope collected tales imo

Abish's Alphabetical Africa? Ace!

Whizzing through In the Land of Invented Languages. The author is a babe.

but actually alphabetical africa's basically boring. can't be bothered. don't.

re: gogol: read through the diaryofamadman+others last week. might have mentioned that. don't know. i'm on a computer with a really small screen so it's kind of a pain to check. also dead souls. though i stopped after part one. dunno if the er gogol worldview is quite expansive enough for me to want to live in. if that makes sense. might get a collected tales though. i did see like eight dozen copies of 'the government collector' at work though. might get one of those first.

re: musil: trying to find to read + have opinions; failing

I've been reading The Lost Art of Walking, Geoff Nicholson. I love walking. I do it daily. It is my meat and drink.

Sadly, this book is a pastiche with nothing much to say. It looks like the author submitted a proposal that named every possible angle on walking that he could think of: historic figures, obsessive walkers, psychogeography, walking streets in L.A., London and N.Y., street photographers, and so on. It must have looked like one hell of an impressive proposal.

When it came time to write the book, he had almost nothing to say about any of these subjects. The only reason I will most likely finish it is that it is such a quick, easy read that it is easier to finish than to summon the will to toss it aside.

Don't bother starting it. That would be even easier than reading it.

Thomp: I wish I had not a single opinion on Musil when I finished (especially as mine weren't a lot more than 'this is great omg!'), so I think you're on the right track.

Abish: How German Is it is brilliant, but can't say Alphabetical Africa appeals to me, nor any kind of epic Oulipian adventures. Has anyone read his other fictions and poems?

Reading: Hasek - The Good Soldier Schweik.

Good Soldier Schweik! I read that when I was quite young, at the recommendation of my dad. It took me a while to get into it, but I was sad when it ended, it felt like something that could go on forever and never stop being fun.

Read recently:

Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book
Cormac McCarthy - No Country For Old Men
Leonard Sciascia - To Each His Own

Currently in the middle of:

Italo Calvino - If On A Winter's Night a Traveler
Rene Daumal - A Night of Serious Drinking

Re-reading:

Tove Jansson - The Summer Book

I'm reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. It took a while to get up much enthusiasm because it's quite a dull opening - a rather unattractive old couple moaning about old people things - but the rest of the family appear soon enough and I'm drawn right in.

I've had a good run of books set on fault lines of generational, ideological or ethnic divides - how dull, initially, the Midwest seems in comparison! Had I not been softened up by Updike I'm not sure I'd've got over the hump, but it's been worth it. The human conflicts are still there, you just have to burrow deeper to find them. The Rabbit books are vastly superior to this, of course, but it's still good.

reading a copy of anthony powell's 'venusberg', which is reissued in green integer, which is kind of wtf

couple things it brings to mind: there's this thing i note, more in american literature, but in english as well, of the past couple decades, where at some point a central character gets sent off to a developing-world country where REAL THINGS HAPPEN and PEOPLE LIVE IN DANGER to accentuate a point about how er devalued mb modern life is? but i've been reading a lot of pre-ww2 british fiction lately where people get sent off to the developing world where real things happen and ppl live in danger mainly to point out how dull and uncivilised it all is. i'm not sure whether i prefer the pre- or the post- colonial cliche.

also powell's relation to musil might be kind of interesting to dwell on, at some point. (though i have found powell, here and in 'a dance ...' [i really can't call it 'the dance', i sound silly to myself even typing], less of a slog than musil)(not a slog exactly, i just wonder whether pushing through it is the right way to go.) i have forgotten what i was going to say. something about their different approaches to time and musil saying 'such and such was of the bourgeois lower middle class' and powell saying 'his father sold coal but he was editing a Communist periodical'

also powell's idea of the tedium of pre-war europe vs evelyn waugh's apocalyptic fatalism about it, which latter seems a lot sillier to me now than it did at 19-20

I think Venusberg is my favourite of his. There's a strong feeling of melancholy throughout it and some extremely funny sections.

Powell was a big admirer of Musil's.

I'm not sure how far I'd go along with your thoughts, thomp. Venusberg isn't actually a developing world place though, is it? And Waugh's travel writing on Ethiopa is very amusing, but his descriptions are no less cynical than his descriptions of home. In fact I'd say something that both Waugh and Powell have in common is that danger and death and violence are almost arbitrary independent of so-called civilisation - the England of Decline and Fall or From a View to a Death is downright lethal. People popping their clogs all over the place.

yeah, i haven't thought any of this through. 'developing country' is the wrong word, i guess. venusberg (not actually named thus - the best and most obnoxious gag in the book is that lushington is presented to you departing for a Baltic state, "the name of which he could never remember"; this state of course remains unnamed throughout.) is newly ex-russian and apparently based on powell's time in estonia. the narrative becomes a lot less blasé about it all when people lushington actually knows gets shot.

powell's admiration of musil i'd come across before. it makes sense, sort of. i wonder if he read him in translation or the original.

i don't remember the deaths in decline and fall at all. or any of scoop except the outline, which i recall being vaguely similar to venusberg. oh, and "up to a point, lord copper." i should go back to waugh maybe. always meant to read the travel writing.

google result (nsfw, one imagines):

http://www.venusberg.de/

Since 1998! The First Virtual Erotic-Art-Museum Since 1998!

"TO THE HAPPY FEW !"

We will present you one of the biggest and most beautiful collections of European EROTIC ART from the 17th to the 20th century!

Meanwhile - September 2009 - we present you more than 3.600 Erotic-Art- Pictures!! (But with each update we will remove older series).

These watercolors, drawings and prints are an invaluable documentation of social mores and cultural history. They also trace the history of taboo, secrecy and prohibition.

We also have a GALLERY-ROOM, where we will show pictures from contemporary artists.

But first of all let these pictures be a pleasure for your eyes!

Ha ha. I wonder what Lushington would have made of that. Probably wouldn't have been that put out. I was just chuckling to myself remembering when Lushington is woken up by that valet who has been foisted upon him.

I'd never noticed that about Venusberg never being mentioned! Nice.

Powell read it in translation, I'm pretty certain. In fact he praises the Kaiser and Wilkins translation very highly. And now I need to find where he did this - almost certainly in one of his volumes of essays and reviews, I'll check later - because I see that the first volume of this translation didn't appear until the first two books of DTTMOT had appeared.

Will report back.

The description of a Mediterranean cruise and the famous account of the coronation of Haile Selassie by Waugh are amazing. I've got an old Penguin with them in, entitled I think 'When the Going Was Good'.

The First Virtual Erotic-Art-Museum Since 1998!

Hmmm. This immediately got me to thinking what an anti-erotic art museum might be like. I quickly realized that such a thing is probably impossible. No doubt there's someone out there who would find any object, person or situation you exhibited to be erotic.

Good Soldier Schweik! I read that when I was quite young, at the recommendation of my dad. It took me a while to get into it, but I was sad when it ended, it felt like something that could go on forever and never stop being fun.

Yes this mirrors my initial experience with the book. I found VERY funny but also extremely sad at points, an ugly harshness behind the gags.

Following this with Hrabal's I served the King of England

The Black Arrow - RL Stevenson. A Romance set in War of Roses period. Worst bit of dialogue so far -

'Where goeth me this track?'
'Let us even try,' said Matcham.

Prithee up your bum, good sirras.

I'm quite enjoying it, even though it's totally confusing, hectic without covering a lot of ground, and stitched together even worse than one of the leather jerkins everyone goes round wearing.

A binge of fun recently...

Richard Stark: Lemons Never Lie
Henry James: The Coxon Fund (a novella--I love the quote from the text on the back: 'The greater the windbag, the greater the calamity.')
William Dean Howells: A Sleep and a Forgetting (another novella, about how much YOU remain YOU if your memory vanishes)
Richard Russo: That Old Cape Magic
Eric Ambler: Dirty Story (overweight con man gets involved with making porn movie, becomes inadvertent mercenary "liberating" African territory for a mining corporation)
Somerset Maugham: Christmas Holiday

Evelyn Waugh: Helena
John Gray: Black Mass
Pynchon: Inherent Vice
Henry Green: Party Going
Old 18th-century habits coming back, so slightly scattershot reading of Hume and Burke.

theodore white: the making of the american president, 1960
peter hennessy: the prime minister: the office & its holders since 1945
more cordwainer smith
tony harrison's 'collected film poetry'

glancing in a lot of other poetry - james fenton, paul muldoon. also a cheap collected andrew motion, which is pretty dreadful.

finished the first volume of the man without qualities. finally.

Recently The Spoils of Poynton (James), The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst, reread), The Little Stranger (Waters, a bit disappointing, maybe I'm tiring of her take old genre fiction and bulk it out with my terrific eye for period detail trick), Sorrows of An American (Hustvedt - very disappointing, one of those regrettable books that makes you wonder if your admiration for a writer's earlier work wasn't a lapse in judgement). Started Brooklyn by Colm Toibin.

I finished 'The Corrections' last night. It was really good, had me hooked like few books have in the last year or two. I was really looking forward to every opportunity to escape into that world, which was even more impressive because most of it was so ordinary. It didn't even need the Lithuanian bits, I don't think, Denise's story would have carried the action on its own.

I have a bathroom full of books to choose from now (we're recarpeting and they've been rehoused there temporarily). I'm thinking either 'The Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, or the recent Lennon biography by I think Philip Norman. Not quite ready for the Austria-Hungarian stuff yet.

Maiden Voyage - Denton Welch (much prefer it to In Youth Is Pleasure, although IYIP does have a lovely lyric at the beginning of it. MV is an account of DW's school days, then a voyage to Shanghai. Paradoxically perhaps, it doesn't really go anywhere - that feature woof described in A Voice Through A Cloud - but I find his peculiar form of psychic description powerful enough for this not to matter, without him being at all likable. He is unsparing of himself.)

A Last Sheaf - Denton Welch. (Short stories, including an excellent one called 'Ghosts', poetry and black and white reproductions of some of his late paintings, which share the features of his writing - morbidly detailed, with oppressive sense of deathly life)

Poetry of Thomas Wyatt (Attractive if slightly trite-feeling lyrics, imitations and satires, which are occasionally vivid, occasionally cluttered, with that renaissance feeling of classical reference packed with English detail and description.)

Sorry that was a shit description of Wyatt, but I had to leave work for a train, which I didn't get, because I thought maybe I should cycle, but I didn't because I didn't have my mudguards, so I got a BUS, which got stuck in TRAFFIC. And when I got off the BUS, I landed ankle deep in a PUDDLE. And then all the TRAINS were delayed because of FLOODING, and then I got another BUS after standing in the pissing RAIN for an AGE.

Which is all by way of saying, isn't it time for a new thread? I was in Brompton Cemetary the other day and I swear the leaves were turning...

Yes, someone should - not me though, I haven't even got my first train delay through the 'leaves on the line' excuse yet.

Raymond Radiguet - The Devil in the Flesh. Short and intense early 20s French novel from a man who knew way too much too soon. Or so the cliche goes. Living really is hell.

Over the weekend:

Henry De Montherlant - Chaos and Night. I really liked parts of this once everyone goes into Spain - the bullfight was incredibly vivid, and I suspect that the more I'd re-read the more terrifying it could get. I like it that Montherlant makes it hard for you to engage with the man's utter sense of loneliness and the way he works at a blankness to everything.

Musil - Young Torless

Now: Joseph Roth - The Radetzky March

Not me either - I done it last time, and have regretted going full stop-capital letter, rather than ellipsis, ever since.

'The Devil in the Flesh' is great. His 'Count D'Orgels's Ball' is pretty good, too.

And then he died.

i just read that hustvedt book too, frankiemachine - i enjoyed it! i dunno, i really like the she writes, i find her style incredibly engaging and i like the way she builds this really sinister vibe that turns out to be quite marginal to the story (same thing in all her other novels). i've got yonder to read next.

Okay, rather reluctantly I have ushered in the autumnal equinox. Tell us what you're reading here -

It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

Hope that works. I'm new to this.

Yeah, well done Gamaliel.

Yeah Dan the Hustvedt was generally well-reviewed and I really enjoyed "What I Loved" so I was looking forward to it. But I found I had massive problems with it.

They started with the epigraph by Rumi. "Don't turn away/Keep looking at the bandaged place./That's where the light enters you."

I didn't much care for this -- does light really enter a wound? Even a bandaged one? Even if it did, would you learn much from looking? It became a kind of metaphor for what I didn't like about the book. If you're going to be as relentlessly gloomy as Hustvedt is in this book, you'd better have some real insight to compensate. She certainly kept looking at the bandaged place, remorselessly so in fact, but for me not much light entered. Intelligence, sensitivity and truth to life are not enough - your book has to enrich the reader's life. I felt this one rubbed my nose in a lot of unpleasant stuff about life that I already knew, and mistook that for seriousness of purpose and unflinching integrity.

My second problem was what seemed a lot of undigested autobiography. Obviously you can't split the autobiographical from the fictional easily, but the starry New York intellectual lifestyle, the neurotic, beautiful, cerebral woman married to a famous novelist, the recently deceased father all point one way. I'm not objecting to fictionalised autbiography per se, but I started to read Inga particularly and some strands of other characters as versions of the author, and found myself increasingly turned off by the self absorption implied. For example, I'm sure the prying of prurient journalists into the lives of celebrity authors (and their wives) is pretty damn unpleasant, but the weight given to it by Hustvedt seems disproportionate in a novel that takes itself so very, very seriously.

Similarly Inga's near psychological collapse at the fear that her book might be published and pass without public notice is passed off as the justifiable fear of a hyper-intelligent woman that she won't receive due recognition in a male-dominated world. But it comes across as something much weirder - a sense of entitlement to the status of celebrity intellectual. This jars because, although we don't doubt her abilities, the number of people who become famous (or even semi-famous) for producing intellectual work will always be a vanishingly small fraction of the number of people who produce outstanding work. To hope for due recognition, the approbation of your professional peers and so on is natural and healthy. To believe that you'd have a legitimate grievance against the world if it denied you celebrity, even the somewhat rarified kind Inga aspires to, seems more than slightly loopy. Which would be fine if she was pure fiction, offered up for judgement as she is. But in a character who's manifestly a version of an author who has achieved some celebrity partly as a consequence of having a famous husband, and whose stock in trade is self awareness, it comes across as a curious and unattractive mixture of self-justification and self-pity.

This post has grown unexpectedly long and self-indulgent, so I won't lengthen it by going into detail about what seem to me egregious faults of structure (a mess IMO) and style. Generally Hustvedt writes well but there is a generous sprinkling of jaw-droppingly ugly or pretentious sentences. Some of the negative reviews on Amazon nail a few of these with more more perception than you might expect from Amazon reviewers.

This is highly subjective stuff - how gloomy is too gloomy, how can you be sure this is autobiographical - and plenty of reviewers liked the book. But it's damaged my romance with Hustvedt, probably beyond repair.

Still, as I say, the book was well reviewed and plenty of sensitive and perceptive readers seemed to like it.