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?

(Rather wordy I know, and not at all witty, but Aimless stole the handy 'the leaves are turning - what leaves are you turning' one I had in mind (a couple of years ago I think). At least Winter will be hard on Autumn's heels, so nobody will have to endure this one too long.)

The last monk leaves the garden; days decrease,
And autumn grows, autumn in everything.

[/i]Andrea del Sarto - Robert Browning

It's the time of year when I start turning to heavier books, the darker evenings suggesting burrowing into history and long discursive narratives with just a hint of stodge, rather than the lighter styles of summer. Morning mists start to rise and wind rustles damp, leaf-carpeted woods. You can feel your wits sharpening in the equinoctial winds. It's a time for Gothic shadow rather than Mediterranean sun.

I've been reading Robert Browning again, on a very lovely very early morning train ride in to work, with the sky just brightening - the excellent Ohio University Press editions (vols V and VI in this case) that were being sold off cheap on Gower St a while ago, and which woofwoofwoof put me onto.

I had been talking to a friend about Robert Browning's description in [i]Andrea del Sarto of the striving that is nearer to God and heaven than achieving, and wanted to read it again.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?

It was going to be 'literary fruits' rather than 'windfall words' but 'literary fruits' sounds like Baron Corvo or Lord Alfred Douglas.

two girls, one fat one - thin mary gaitskill
hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage - alice munro
friend of my youth - alice munro

whoops, screwed up that first one

Two books started yesterday:

The Island at the Centre of the World, can't remember the author - history of New Holland. Terrific thus far, deft shifts of perspective between personal and collective, social and political, and olde times and modern really keep one interested.

The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. A slightly disconcerting prologue to this one, I had rather assumed that invisibility was going to be a metaphor.

o but it is ~

We shall see. New Netherland, not New Holland by the way - not being good with names today.

I bumped into a colleague outside work and couldn't remember the name of theguy I'd spent all day working with.

Unpacking the Boxes, Donald Hall. A memoir. The man was Poet Laureate of the USA for a year or so circa 2007, was married to Jane Kenyon, and seems to have known or met a high percentage of the noteable poets of the last half of the 20th century. He is now in his 80s.

The main problem is that he seems to have very little to say about any of those poets, or about much of anything. It's a very slight book, but then, a man over 80 should do as he pleases and shouldn't get any shit over it.

still working on my bookshelf. go tell it on the mountain

edgar allan poe

harbl how is go tell it on the mountain? i read another country recently and just wasn't sure about it.

this is the second time i've started it. i'm only on page 50 so i can't really tell at all! haven't read another country though. googling for it it looks like something i wouldn't be into but this is more about him (not really him but semi-autobiographical apparently) as a young kid and i usually like stories told as a young boy so i will probably like it.

i do quite heavily recommend the essay volumes 'notes of a native son' & 'the fire next time'

i just feel like his technique as a novelist is a little too, i don't know, consolidated

Really loved 'Go Tell it on the Mountain' and 'Giovanni's Room' and 'If Beale Street Could Talk'. Haven't tackled his longer novels yet, though.

two girls, one fat one - thin mary gaitskill
She should totally write under that name.

Am now reading Gyula Krudy's 'The Adventures of Sindbad', translated by George Szirtes, which someone recommended on the trusted translators thread, and I'm glad they did, because it's some lovely, dreamy, sexy Austro-Hungarian goodness.

It was Soukesian wot recommended it. Thanks!

thomp - i've been meaning to read his essays for a while but never got around to it. native son (the novel) is one of my favorite books too.

i am reading Fordlandia - it is interesting, if a little overly bureaucratic and slow - altho i still have 150 pgs or so

Based on a mention on ILB, I have started reading Consciousness Explained, by Daniel C. Dennett. It appears to be quite promising. It's a bit verbose, but well-written enough I can follow his thinking, and his thinking is well-developed on this subject, so he has plenty of interesting things to say.

reading the Portable Joseph Conrad...just about to finish The Nigger of the Narcissus, which I for the most part liked.

Aimless, Don Hall has contributed essays to Poetry magazine and I don't think in those one could accuse him of not having anything to say about poets. Maybe he was only trying to restrain himself.

This is memoir, not criticism, so there are some anecdotes about poets, but no appreciations of their work... appropriately. Sadly, these anecdotes seemed to me to be somewhat frail, either as good stories or as revelations of character.

But, as I said, I'm not going to give him grief about this. It is a presentable book and the author's reputation is already secure based on a lifetime's work. This memoir is just a fillip.

together, 'Ecology of Fear' by Mike Davis and 'Absolute Disaster', anthology of short fiction from Los Angeles. There is a common theme here - I just read 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' and the 33 1/3 book on 'Court and Spark.' If I can keep up this LA energy I will read 'Cadillac Desert' next but I think I will probably move on. Maybe to Alice Munro, maybe john Updike, maybe the pile of Canadian Politics memoirs I have been piling up.

My favourite book of the fall so far is Ann Patchett, 'Truth and Beauty.'

Finished: Joseph Roth - The Radestzky March: Plenty to enjoy, especially the image in the last page. Overall I must say this one has helped me harden a dislike for the bigger events, a bit annoying how it told you everything.

Lampedusa - The Leopard - like Roth's book, it engages with similar subjects, but Don Fabrizio is almost more compelling and appealing, even -- despite all of the vile characteristics that come with his almost dead now background. More quietly explosive.

Now: Antal Szerb - Journey by Moonlight.

this one has helped me harden a dislike for the bigger events, a bit annoying how it told you everything

What do you mean?

The bigger events = war, the end of an empire. I liked some of the stuff surrounding the gambling that takes place, the boredom of army life, but Roth was telling you how it was the end of everything from the beginning, pretty much - didn't quite agree with me.

That's sort of what I loved about Updike's Rabbit books - maybe one event of wider note in five books, but totally epic nevertheless.

Sir Christopher Fraying's Sergio Leone: Something To Do With Death

Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home, buncha stuff from The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Man in the High Castle

Robinson - Chris Petit
A Last Sheaf - Denton Welch

a fantasy novel by scott lynch i posted about elsewhere; a book about the role of the prime minister; anthony powell's what's become of waring?

oh, and the borges/bioy-casares collaborations, which are really not all that

gag in waring that's cracking me up, mainly because i was reading in fowler's usage again: one of the dreadful books the publisher in it deals with being called Than Whom What Other

Waring the Powell Waring? I guess it must be, although I don't remember that gag. The two publishers are great though, as is the seance scene. Yet another in the genius collection of writing that is Powell's pre-Dance novels.

Others I've read over the last week.

Leonardo Sciascia - To Each His Own. Thoroughly enjoying his political crime thrillers, pretty great how he mixed crime of passion with politics so much it obscures the motivation. Also its great his politics aren't immediately obvious (even though he was a politician), what is apparent is the lack of, not faith so much as any conviction that a system could come through.

Susan Sontag - Under the Sign of Saturn: consistent, brilliant, consistently brilliant. Actually only read her essays on photography a few years ago, forgetting all about it (not the fault of the essays; I've never had a strong experience from looking at a photograph.) Its good I didn't, as I hadn't read or experienced much of what she talks about here (and she talks and dissects hard about a lot of it.) Anyway, the essay on Elias Canetti is awesome, but also the least representative, whereas her dissection of fascist aesthetics in the essay about Leni Riefenstahl presents more of a connecting thread. xp

Javier Marias: All Souls -- you get a sense of Marias being an incredibly congenial guy from this novel -- SPanish academic spending two years in Oxford has affair, becomes obsessed with Arthur Machen and John Gawsworth, tries to figure out the English, etc

I keep reading short novels because every day I expect the next Richard Stark reprint to show up in the letterbox, and it doesn't, and meanwhile some big thick books I want to read are piling up.

Am also going through the boxes of as-yet-unreads, and discovered that I've managed to buy TWO copies of DeLillo's End Zone and TWO copies of Lewis's The Monk, without yet reading either. This has got to stop.

I'd bought THREE copies of The Big Nowhere by the time I got round to reading it.

havent done this for awhile. how time flies..will try to add commentary later.

Jeanette Walls – The Glass Castle
Robert Polsky – I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahlog – The Terrorists
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahlog – The Man Who Went Up in Smoke
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahlog – The Abominable Man
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahlog – The Fire Engine that Disappeared
Steven Johnson – The Invention of Air
Julian Barnes – Nothing to be Frightened Of
John Le Carre – A Small Town In Germany
Clive Barnes – Cultural Amnesia
Steig Larson – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Randy Shilts – And The Band Played On

Ah, you did what did with the Martin Beck novels--get near the end and can't help but binge on them to see what happens next!

Are you reading the Martin Beck novels in reverse order?

oh ha xpost

I read all of them in like two months. Roseanna is the best, I fear; the last few represent a kind of attempt at escalation that doesn't really come off, for me?

Also, the current paperbacks spell out M A R T I N B E C K along the tops of the spines: but that kind of annoys me, so every so often I try and spell out something else. right now it's CAT MERKIN B, i think

or possibly BAT MERKIN C, i can't actually remember

Robert Polsky – I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)

New on one me. Is that the sequel to I Bought Andy Warhol? I've read that one. Guess I have to read this one too.

Never read the first, the sequel is ok. stuff about art dealers is pretty interesting, they're like social-climbing used car salesmen. stuff about the author's lovelife, less so.

I'm reading the Martin Beck series in reverse because I've been buying used paperback copies for a couple bucks each and that's what order they've appeared in the store. Not the best way to proceed, especially in terms of Martin's development. So far so good, pretty consistent though the international there of The Terrorists is a stretch. Can't quite put my finger on what's so compelling about Martin Beck and his chilly milieu. One thing: I like how the other cops all get on each others nerves with their quirks and personalities.

the international there

there = theMe. "the international there" sounds like sarah palin speak/

flanerry o'connor - the violent bear it away

this book is incredible.

Maybe the best thing she wrote.

Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply (creepy, some beautiful true passages alongside some that go clang)
Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree (sci-fi history, pretty okay)
Clarice Lispector, The Apple in the Dark (have the bio on hold from the library, want to read them simultaneously)

Clive Barnes – Cultural Amnesia

oops that's Clive James. Clive Barnes was - or maybe still is - longtime theater critic for the NY Post.

You sure it wasn't Clive Barker, lovebug?

I caught a cold and put aside Consciousness Explained until my brain he works less bad. I've just been randomly browsing on essays and belle lettres.

all you martin beck fans should read the kurt wallander books as well! i dont think theyre quite as good but a lot of the same odd swedish policier stuff shows up--incl for example all the policemen getting on each others nerves--but most importantly they both partake of this horribly depressing grey nordic tao thing

A couple more Richard Starks -- The Handle and The Rare Coin Score
Wilson Tucker: Ice and Iron (odd SF novel--near-future bace at the foot of a glacier, which is part of a new oncoming Ice Age, is troubled by the bodies of charred Stone Age humans and Mesopotamian bricks dropping out of the sky)

harbl how is go tell it on the mountain? i read another country recently and just wasn't sure about it.

― thomp, Wednesday, September 16, 2009 4:01 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ok finally finished and don't know what to think. i really liked some parts (especially the middle 100 pgs or so) but the ending made me feel ???? and i wasn't sure if i understood the entire book at that point. i haven't really liked or understood a book in a while though tbqh

ha well that kind of sounds like something i might like to read

all you martin beck fans should read the kurt wallander books as well! i dont think theyre quite as good but a lot of the same odd swedish policier stuff shows up--incl for example all the policemen getting on each others nerves--but most importantly they both partake of this horribly depressing grey nordic tao thing

― fleetwood (max), Sunday, September 27, 2009 5:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

^^ there's also that one icelandic crime novelist whose name i am blanking on, the first one got film adapted last year - arnaldur indrithason! him. he's pretty good. but yes, the whole HULLO DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE A SUPRISINGLY HIGH SUICIDE RATE AND SOME PRETTY COLD WEATHER vibe

AND LOTS OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT OUR LOCAL DNA

Death and the Dervish by Mesa Selimovic. Reread Watership Down and Anne of Green Gables.

the resonance of the dna thing is kind of amazing, what with blood debt being a central trope of early norse lit., iceland being a country where everyone still uses patronymics, etc

admittedly on any other level bar literary value i think the creation of the dna record was a very weird and flawed policy, but oh well

er, xpost.

just started 'troubles' by jg farrell. excellent thus far.

John O'Hara: Appointment in Samarra

i started the human stain because i have never read a philip roth before and i rarely read anything from the 20th c., and even rarelier read anything from the late 20th c. and i'm not sure if i like it. i feel like i'm not old enough to read it.

no reason i picked that one btw--was walking through and saw it on the shelf

I can't imagine not liking it, or indeed any Roth from Sabbath's Theater on. I'd be interested to know what's making you uneasy.

I have only ever read 'Portnoy's Complaint', of Roth, which I quite like. He's always seemed maybe the most dull of the grand old men of American Postwar Lit to me, for some reason. (n.b. not 'worst' and definitely not 'most obnoxious')

I am reading A.M. Homes' Jack, which so far seems to be something of a small marvel.

Oh, and Steve Aylett's biography of a fictional cult SF novelist, which is a bit too snarky to read more than five pages of at once.

haha i don't feel uneasy i guess. i am difficult to please. i'm going to read it all. it does seem a little dull. maybe mentioning the clinton scandal in the beginning set the stage though; i was 14 when he was impeached.

Finally a book I can brag about: NOTES FRM THE UNDERGROUND by that dude Dostoyevski. Pretty good but I can only manage ten pages at a time. hah

haha, i couldn't put that down when i read it. i think i ended up staying in bed all day until it was done.

Just finished Farmelo, The Strangest Man. Onward.

now i'm confident i will survive the human stain. i guess i'm just not used to it. i always read old books. most of them really old. so if a book mentions viagra i feel like i have to let it age 100 years before i read it. i don't know what my problem is!

ugh the human stain--watch out for the weird bird metaphor.

do you say ugh like you hated it? will watch for birds

yeah i hated it--for some reason i read the book once, dug it, didn't remember the metaphor, and then started it again years later and got to the bird thing and ugh. American Pastoral is the bee's knees, though

ok. i am trying to get into the 20th century.

i need to read more 18th and 19th century--tried reading notes from the underground, couldn't get into it.

i really loved american pastoral. hated portnoy's complaint. but i don't really like that style - that really sort of ridiculous satire style of writing. it grates on me like an episode of seinfeld.

*yes* that's how i feel!

just finished symposium by muriel spark - it was ok but i liked the last one i read better (memento mori). just started a biography of carson mccullers, by virginia spencer carr, but it's not very well written and it's v v v long. if anyone can recommend a better bio, i would appreciate it. am almost done with two alice munro short story collections - so excited for her new book coming out soon.

i started the greatest american novel by roth (not sure if that title is right), and 10 pages in i knew it was gonna be ~that~ style and gave up. but yeah, american pastoral is totally different. it's pretty tragic but really engrossing.

Symposium & Memento Mori are like 20 years apart, right?

20 pages in I downgraded the AM Homes book from 'a small marvel' to merely 'very good', there's something a little unexamined about a lot of how she represents teenage attitudes. But on the other hand a lot of it is very well observed plus occasionally hilarious plus er 'affecting', you know, so I'm not complaining. Kind of curious - I keep encountering the detail that she wrote it "at nineteen" but as far as I can work out it came out when she was 28 -- makes me wonder whether the final draft is the 19 year old version or whether she had 7-9 years to improve on it.

hmm i thought it was published when she was 19. actually, i think i read that it was 'based' on something she wrote for a class when she was 19.

it's probably my least favourite of her novels - it's much softer and more sentimental than her other books. i have 'the safety of objects' and 'los angeles' half-started beside my bed.

I *love* American Pastoral but I made the mistake of reading a load of reviews afterwards and they barely mentioned the terrific characters, the intensity of Roth's craft, or the sheer joy of the backstory - they were all about framing devices and unreliable narrators. They may well be correct, but I was totally dispirited - I love it because it's the best story ever, not because it's a meditation on the nature of fiction.

much softer and more sentimental

I'm not entirely sure of this — I don't think the only other one I ever read (the donut one) escapes sentimentality to any noticable degree. That one was a bit like Don DeLillo but chirpy.

But yeah, er, the fact that Jack's immediate homophobic reactions aren't invested with any degree of seriousness, I think — that's where I started having trouble with it, and where it's most 'soft', I guess.

The remainder store had pretty much all her others, though, so I will probably be buying those this weekend.

I recently read "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson for the first time - I figured I should read it sooner or later. It didn't disappoint. A classic piece of story-telling with some indelible characters, esp. Long John Silver

Now I'm reading "Beyond Belief" by V.S. Naipaul.

I finished The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto yesterday. It was really great, a kind of intimate history of Dutch Manhattan. It would make a great film. Several great films, probably.

Carson McCullers...if anyone can recommend a better bio, i would appreciate it.

Not a bio of her alone, or her complete life, but I really enjoyed 'February House' by Sherill Tippins, which is a 'biography' of a sharehouse in Brooklyn where Auden, McCullers, Jane & Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten and stripper Gypsy Rose Lee all lived together at the same time. McCullers became obsessed with Gypsy.

I started The Counterlife by Philip Roth today. I've enjoyed what I've read, it's quite unfussy - I think it's the first big Zuckerman book I've taken on (as opposed to one where he's just an incidental to the main story) and I was worried it was going to be about the nature of writing or some other dullery, but he's playing it straight so far. I've been scarred by Operation Shylock I think.

has anyone read christopher logue's version of homer?

Yes. It's really good I think.

read two or three of the early parts, earlier this year. after someone mentioned them on that poetry thread i started. i don't know if the parts i read are great or i merely like them a lot. that said the only line i can remember as a line is the big typographic one in 'war music'. and a vague feeling of some of the camera instructions making me think of donald fagen singing 'haitian divorce'.

tonight i have finished afternoon men, which seemed rather like it actually possessed all the flaws people claim to find in a dance to etc etc, the affectation and the snobbery and so forth. Still find this sort of thing horribly funny, though:

"Pringle had been in pretty good form all day. Barlow said:
'What's come over him? It's like when one of the critics said there was a quality of originality about his treatment of water.'"

thomp how do you read so many books?

tempted to steal the "xx said: (line break)" tic

also read arnold bennett's literary taste, which was dreadful in more or less the same set of ways i imagined

xpost er they tend to be pretty short books a lot of the time? also i work in an online bookseller and have a fairly long bus trip to get there, which probably helps.

ok. i suppose.

Doesn't reading on the bus make you sick?

Tao Lin: Shoplifting from American Apparel -- wanted to like this a lot more than I did. Weird, affectless prose.

Patrick Suskind: Perfume -- fun grotesquerie (is that a word?), don't believe a word of it, enjoying it a lot

A. J . Liebling: The Jollity Building -- in this big Library of America collected omnibus, non-fiction account of a bunch of con-artists, chancers and other sub-legal "businessmen" operating out of a shithole NY office building around 1940.

Carson McCullers...if anyone can recommend a better bio, i would appreciate it.

Don't read Illumination & Night Glare, says Brooke Allen in her review of it called "Carson McCullers: The Story of an Emotional Vampire".

She does say:

Virginia Spencer Carr, and intrepid Southerner, took on the unenviable job and in 1975 produced a very thorough biography that for all its many faults and occasional lapses of taste and insight must be acknowledged a definitive work and one that throws fascinating and often lurid light on its odd subject.

has anyone read christopher logue's version of homer?

Yeah and I'm glad I did.

xp yeah i feel like this bio is gonna be a great source as actual material, but she's such a terrible writer! gah.

harbl: i read a fair amount because i read FAST but the major downside is that i truly don't remember anything about a book once i'm done. which i why i post here the books i've read, but little commentary on them. i am a shallow person.

i read really fast (imo) but sometimes get distracted between reading sessions and might not read for a few days. and if i don't finish the book within a couple weeks chances are i'll never finish it because i'll stop caring. and i used to read about a book every other week (recreationally, in undergrad) but during 3 years of law school i read about 20 books total. now i think i am getting back into reading but it's hard. it's not as fun anymore!

i post little commentary because i'm not that smart about books. lol.

Just re-read The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo, after a lapse of a few decades. It's still a good, simple, quick introduction to Japanese aesthetics.

xp yeah i like to read other ppl talking about books, but even tho i have an english lit degree i am basically useless at articulating anything intelligent about any books i read.

A. J . Liebling: The Jollity Building -- in this big Library of America collected omnibus, non-fiction account of a bunch of con-artists, chancers and other sub-legal "businessmen" operating out of a shithole NY office building around 1940.

The next phase of that is described in here if you have a morbid interest

finished human stain. did not like. i'll try american pastoral someday though.

Thanks, Alimosina--I might just have to check that out.

read a chapbook by iain sinclair on the millennium dome, called sorry meniscus. (eh.) reading a really terrible detective-story-cum-economics-primer called the fatal equilibrium. (by the author of murder at the margin.) finished jeff noon's lint, which i mentioned above, the fake biography of a pulp SF author. which i guess i didn't like all that much, though i laughed like a drain at e.g. lint submitting a script to gene roddenberry in which "the smug, unoriginal blandness aboard the Enterprise finally reaches such an unnatural pitch that it triggers an event horizon, heightening exponentially the vividness of everything else in the universe"

Last week: short, fast, mostly European fiction, some of it read in a fluey state

Rilke - The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Elio Vittorini - Conversations in Sicily
Knut Hamsun - Hunger
Mishima - Patriotism (short story)

Onto Hrabal's Closely Observed Trains and Pessoa's poetry.

Being in the middle of reading the entire A la recherche du temps perdu by Proust, I occasionally need a break, and find myself attracted to, in size, opposite books. Been re-reading parts of:

Walter Benjamin - Einbahnstraße (One Way Street)
Roland Barthes - A Lover's Discourse
H.D. Thoreau - Walden

All three are such exceptional books to just read parts of it, still managing so very good to still a hunger and get lively and inspired.

How is the Proust going? I think I am going to finally start this week myself (was hoping to finish 2-3 more of my inter library loans but I think the postal strike is having an effect here)

Well it's going slower than I expected, but I am really settling in. I believe I am a fairly fast reader, and had to adjust my pace to the language. But I am really starting to enjoy reading Proust 'slowly', as it's how the sentences 'feel' te me as well. So it's not going too fast, but I'm enjoying it thoroughly.

I managed to finally find an out of print boxed version of the whole thing. Hope the strike won't interfere your reading!

"Me Cheeta" - James Lever. Overpraised by some but still good for killing time on a long plane trip.

"Brooklyn" - Colm Toibin. Rather slight, old fashioned, well-crafted, poignant.

2666 - the part about the crimes. I'm working slowly through 2666 taking breaks between sections and with a fair bit of rereading as I go along. I lurch between believing it's head and shoulders the best new novel I've read in years and thinking it's a baggy, pretentious and frequently boring piece of self-indulgence.

I'm 130pp into a long, hard book with small print.

Time out for some St. Mark's poetry. Lewis Warsh, Dreaming As One.

British Painting - CH Collins Baker. Mainly because the first chapter on Medieval painting is by MR James. As in his biblical writings, his style is always clear and measured, and he always has an eye in passing for the grotesque, in this case a drawing on the back of the early 14th century Guthlac Roll, which portrays in crude fashion the placing of the ark in the House of Dagon (Samuel 1.5), who in the picture is given full demonic treatment, floating and grinning impishly above the Ark.

Aside from that detail, I hadn't previously seen any reproduction of the Miracles of the Virgin in Eton college, which look wonderful. Also good are two rood screens at Ranworth, Norfolk and a 13th century Virgin and Child roundel from Chichester, and a crude manuscript picture of Jannes calling up the soul of his brother Jannes, from a tract, The Marvels of the East.

Description of the Low Countreys - Ludovico Guicciardini. Italian quattrocento statesman, contemporary with Machiavelli. Read his Maxims as well recently. There might be argument about how 'Machievellian' Machievelli was, but if Guicciardini's Maxims are anything to go by, he does Machievellian in spades -

Never, from a desire to confer pleasure or to conciliate friends, refrain from doing what will gain you reputation.

amongst others.

Surely Tony Blair would have done well to heed him on war though -

I do not say that a ruler is never to imbue his hands in blood, but that he is not to do so without grave cause, and that in most instances he loses more than he gains by it. For not only does he offend those on whom he lays hands, but displeases many besides; and although he thus gets rid of some one enemy or obstacle, he does not thereby destroy the seed; so that others take their place, and often, as with the heads of Hydra, seven for one.

Guicciardini was actually mainly active in the 16th century, he was born in the late 1400s. I don't know why I described him as quattrocento. He's not a painting.

Incidentally, his Description is chatty and informal, not at all like the generally immensely irritating Maxims.

finished two more of a.m. homes's this weekend: the end of alice and music for torching. alice was okay: it felt like the narrator was kind of a received idea, and the other protagonist's life was really the interesting part. - so only hearing her voice through his act of ventriloquism was a little frustrating.

music for torching was pretty great though. the slightly sardonic third-person works really well for her - tonally it's the closest to the donuts one i guess? - & the way the novel works on the level of plot is great, i think, this total heaping on of events, any three or four of which would suffice to create a 'normal' plot for the suburban-marriage-in-breakdown novel

have been stuck on in a country of mothers for a while. probably three in a row was unnecessary.

oh, and an ed mcbain: the ten men. it's, you know, an early ed mcbain. you learn, again, that meyer meyer has the name he does because his father was a joking man.

Gamaliel made me look up 'Guthlac Roll' on Google Images, and I've now wasted a lot of time looking at these freaky pictures.

Recently read:

William Wharton: A Midnight Clear -- rather excellent WW2 novel which took me a while to get into because of the chirpy, youthful, Holden Caulfieldish narrator (this is based on very dim memories of reading 'Catcher in the Rye')

Yukio Mishima: Death in Midsummer -- short story collection

still working on 'troubles'. i love this dude's writing:

Although he was sure he had never actually proposed to Angela during the few days of their acquaintance, it was beyond doubt that they were engaged: a certainty fostered by the fact that from the very beginning she had signed her letters Your loving fiance, Angela. This had surprised him at first. But, with the odour of death drifting into the dug-out in which he scratched out his replies by the light of the candle, it would have been trivial and discourteous beyond words to split hairs about such purely social distinctions.

“Hm… actually one of our guests wrote a sort of poem, you know, about how the place probably used to look in the old days. Lovely bit of work. Angela embroidered some of it for me on a cushion. I’ll show it to you later on. I think you’ll appreciate it.”

“I’m sure I shall,” agreed the Major.

The dog barked, doubtfully.

xp to thomp:

i really enjoyed music for torching as well - i love that kind of surreal suburban weirdness. in a country of mothers is really... odd. it goes in weird directions. but i read it right after reading the mistress' daughter, which is homes' real life story of dealing with her adoption.

i started memoirs of an anti-semite

Yukio Mishima: Death in Midsummer -- short story collection

You're reading Patriotism and going 'wtf' right? ;-)

Started on Proust now

Tintin In The New World

Not really a full meal. Okay, though.

oh: "by Frederic Tuten".

Am also reading the Martin Beck series out of order this year. Also reading the Rebus series in order, just finished the first Fletch book, and rinsing with selections from Literary Journalism anthology.

You're reading Patriotism and going 'wtf' right? ;-)

Yes, very much so! Bloody hell!

Took the plunge...

Herta Muller: The Land of Green Plums

eric ambler's dirty story, which i enjoyed, but this enjoyment was rather soiled by two things: i. realising it was the middle term of a never-finished trilogy; ii. the fact that one of the mining organisations in it was called UMAD, which i just couldn't stop thinking lol u mad all through

a book of lenny bruce routines, which was funnier than i expected. now starting his autobiography.

william gass's on being blue, which is good, but gass does spend a lot of time going "look at me! me! i'm clever!": i had a dream last night where people were arguing about some of the stuff in this book, actually; in said dream someone claimed the passage of stone-sucking in molloy was "one of the most erotic in all literature"

aaaand i couldn't bring myself to try and read anything sensible so i'm reading a fantasy novel called (rather pretentiously imo) the blade itself

Speaking of not reading sensibly, I have just about finished reading every bit of ephemeral flotsam by Anthony Burgess, as collected in But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?, 589 pp of writing he did for newspapers and periodicals, mostly book reviews.

Reading so many of his opinions at one go, one does uncover what were his hobby-horses. For a while, every piece got sidetracked into phonemes and the need for educated people to know linguistic notation.

Yesterday I started John Reed's Insurgent Mexico, wherein he visits Pancho Villa's army as a war correspndent. Despite being clearly sympathetic to the peasant uprising, he is merciless at describing the participants, who come off as ignorant, impulsive, venal and brutal. Their opponents come off even worse.

I have a shameful weakness for collections of occasional writing. That one's in my future -- I'm resigned to it.

i saw a copy hanging around the other day. i kind of got annoyed bcz someone (maybe the author of gpb) had done a book called something like 'they marry brunettes, though' which seemed much the better riff on the famous title

Yeah, Anita Loos wrote 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' and 'But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes'

I read Ambler's 'Dirty Story' recently, too. Cover had a close-up of a big fat hairy chest/bulging stomach, which is probably why it had languished so long in the cheap box at the 2nd-hand shop. Enjoyed the book, though.

In this book on Flemish painting there's a critic mentioned called Ludwig Baldass.

Been a while, let's see what I can remember.

Lots of books on Jesuits for a thing I wrote ages ago and am trying to polish up: most wtf was finding Joseph Hocking, popular anti-Catholic novelist of the 19th/early 20th. His Scarlet Woman certainly persuaded me Methodism was the future.

More Hume, some Hobbes, and Quentin Skinner's book on Hobbes and Rhetoric. Felt pleasantly perverse to read a solid academic book for kicks. First time I've done so, I think, since I was sort of in that world. Stuff just flies by when you don't really have to worry about it, make notes, follow his sources etc.

Misha Glenny's McMafia. The upper true crime (I'm sort of a sucker for this), a bit of criminal sociology. Enjoyable, interesting, feels trustworthy though it (understandably) weakens the further it gets from Eastern Europe/Central Asia.

I'm struggling a bit with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I feel as if there isn't enough detail to hook me and make it come alive. I like the character and appreciate that he's having struggles, but it's as if they're on bluescreens rather than in real places and against real people.

How far into it are you? Because to me big sections of that book live from feeling unreal, there's a lot of symbolism and Kafka-type alienation to Ellison's approach. But it gets closer to realism as it moves along.

About a quarter of the way, maybe - he's delivering his letters of introduction around New York at the moment. The Kafka comparison hadn't occurred to me, but is pretty accurate.

Now on page 326. Less than 300 to go.

Time for another poetry break. Ernest Hilbert, Sixty Sonnets.

Irene Nemirovsky: The Dogs and the Wolves -- really good -- troubled Jewish family in the Ukraine and Paris circa WW1

Elizabeth Jolley: An Innocent Gentleman -- quite good -- troubled English family semi menage-a-trois shenanigans in WW2

Hugo Claus: Desire -- very good so far -- two Belgian gamblers on a Las Vegas spree

lovin it all, feelin goth

Sheridan Le Fanu- In a Glass Darkly
some P. Shelley collection
the Nunnally trans. of H.C. Andersen

Finishing Way by Swann's and it is AWESOMES: like a cross between Ruskin and Denton Welch, and I am very glad I saw Akermann's Proust film, it really gets the that will to possess and how pathetic a character like Swann comes across.

Also some unexpected funnies in this. Weirldy enough I am glad I got to see a couple of episodes of Jeeves and Wooster while I was ill last week, that got me into a mindset for this...

Will be moving on to the next part.

Pfaff's, yes Pfaff's, biography of MR James - focuses more on James the scholar than Michael Cox's biography, which is sort of the way I wanted to go.

Eton and Kings by MR James.

James' ghost stories are some of my favourite writing, but I'm not much of a reader of biographies :(

I'm pretty much in the same boat, and it's rather dry. But he's long been one of my favourite writers and so I felt it was time I paid my dues.

almost finished with The Things They Carried by tim o'brien. usually try to avoid war-centred stories, as they make me feel weirdly squeamish, but this one was great - very simple in terms of style and language, but really very moving.

just beginning
Yonder by siri hustvedt
Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill

Oh, that name's familiar - I think I have a Vietnam book by him in a box somewhere. He's good then?

v v good. the only other novel of his i've read is July, July, which i don't really remember too well, except that it was weird, something about a school reunion, and i really enjoyed it.

Yeah, Tim O'Brien's (usually) excellent: start with 'The Things They Carried', 'July, July' or 'If I Die in a Combat Zone...'

Reading William Hazlitt's 'Liber Amoris', interspersed with the huge new 2-vol Library of America 'American Fantastic Tales' -- both excellent in VERY different ways

still working on memoirs of an anti-semite (lol slow) but i like it very much
last night i started joyce carol oates - because it is bitter.... it seems good. do people like her? it seems like she writes so so much.

Been reading Dhalgren in piecemeal, just started (as in 30 pages in) Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima, which will be the first anything I've read by him. These might be some of the last few novels I read for a while before I start burying my head in technical junk about electronics.

Who is Joyce Carol Oates? I was eyeballing something or another by her at the used book store a couple days ago because the name rang a bell but just couldn't pinpoint it. (If she's somebody totally obvious I wouldn't be one to know, i am a rub3)

she's notorious for being so prolific. pretty hit and miss from what i hear, but i've only read a few of her novels. We Were The Mulvaneys is good if like family drama and tragedy, but she uses way too many explanation points in the narration.

what is an explanation point?

i have been vaguely busy, so not reading much. i read about the first third of 'diary of a nobody' this morning, though.

oh i'm a retard - ~exclamation~ point is what i meant

Pagoda, Skull & Samurai, Koda Rohan

i read the other two-thirds of 'diary of a nobody'. it's kind of funny. the funniest moments are when people other than the narrator are being ludicrous. i was surprised how many times it had been adapted to film: seems a bit beside the point somehow.

And The Best of Bijou Funnies and The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics, in one volume. Which were okay, although I don't understand why anyone would ever find the fabulous furry freak brothers funny, I guess.

Straw Dogs - John Gray.

Immensely amusing. Vigorously and persistently pessimistic, plenty of lolz per page - 'In the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury - or else a disability', 'We look at the world through eyes of ancient mud' 'Without this absurd Tertullian-like faith, the Enlightenment is a gospel of despair'.

I'm immensely sympathetic to his point of view, although I imagine like most people I depart from him here and there - he's rather cavalier in his use of science for instance, and I generally favour the pursuit of knowledge embodied in the Enlightenment as a worthwhile endeavour, for which I'm willing to accept the implicit eschatology. I mean, you could sort of sum up his argument, it's all shit, we're a murrain on the universe, we're all going to hell in a handcart and everything's f'ing pointless, it's self-deceiving and vain to think in any other way, and all programmes of self-improvement are corrupted from the beginning by their very aim. And I agree, I do, but, y'know, steady the buffs, have a mug of cocoa, John, there, there.

Anyway it's all extremely stimulating, dashing and witty - like a swashbuckling sailor defending a philosophy of Ballardian apocalypse against hordes of all-comers. Very readable as well.

finished dave eggers' zeitoun, starting that new dan chaon novel and re-reading some madeleine l'engle books for a book club.

the JCO book is very good and i read like 100 pages on saturday...then i became scared of what would happen and didn't want to read any further. this never happens to me! it's just a book! i'll finish it in the next couple days though, probably

Let's see if this works

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Hjalmar Soderbergh - Doctor Glas
Stefan Zweig - Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
Sandor Marai - Esther's Inheritance

I found "Straw Dogs" utterly unbearable and cast it aside with disgust no more than a couple of dozen pages in. I'll admit I'm not particularly sympathetic to Gray's beliefs but I honestly think that had very little to do with it. I'm happy to read a well-constructed polemic that challenges my thinking, but Gray has no idea how to construct a logical argument. There were obvious and infuriating non-sequiturs on every page. If I can find my copy I may come back to illustrate.

Weirdly failing to learn from my mistake I was later seduced by a combination of good reviews and impulse to buy "Black Mass", which I read even less of before I decided it wasn't for me.

Picked up Jenny Uglow's new biographical-historical thing on Charles II since it was lying around an office I was in. Wasn't intending to read it especially, but started and finding it enjoyable - rolls along, nothing troubling. She's good at popular history/biography: overcomes some ascetic-masochist part of me that believes if I want to know about the past, I should read a) primary sources and b) impenetrable histories that don't explain who anyone is and are full of comparative grain harvest charts. It also fits with my current long-18th-century reading jag.

Starting Thomas Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco.

Gamaliel OTM about John Gray imo: I thought Straw Dogs was a hoot & that his lunatic, absolute gloom was great fun. I mean as say a history of ideas book, it's overcompressed, elliptical, not too hard to pick apart; but as an essay in aphoristic pessimism, it's a cracker. Suspect that finding his beliefs sympathetic in the first place does help.

Black Mass I thought was a lot shakier: quite bitty, dull when dealing with contemporary politics, and iffy on pre-Enlightment apocalyptic trads. But he's someone I'm glad is in the reason/religion arguments: has some style and is willing to be the donnish jerk who just keeps saying 'no, religion's a bit more complicated than that', 'no, the Enightenment's a bit more complicated than that'.

1066: The Year of the Conquest, David Howarth. I've been reading this on successive Mondays when I have some dead time on my school bus. Just finished it.

Excellent treatment of the subject. He presented it in very human and understandable terms. I liked, too, that the author discussed his sources and his methods in very matter-of-fact, practical terms, letting you in on how he sifted and sorted the contradictions between or within them, or why he rejected some parts of the narrative and kept others.

Straw Dogs sounds like something I might find interesting. It seems like a much shorter and bleaker version of A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, which I found pretty interesting. I guess for anyone who's not convinced by Gray's assertion that secular humanism is basically a continuation of Christianity by other means, Taylor does a lot of the historical heavy-lifting to substantiate the claim. Although whereas that analysis leads Taylor to a defense of religion against humanism and the Nietzchean anti-humanist alternative, it seems to lead Gray to a modern revival of animism and Taoism via the Gaia hypothesis.

An essay by Gray in which he lays out his own highly condensed but readable genealogy of secularism:

"The myth of secularism"

http://www.newstatesman.com/200212160045

i just reread (less than a month after reading for the first time...) stephen millhauser's 2008 collection: dangerous laughter. i adored every single damn story in that book, except for 'the tower.' how good is millhauser? I say at least a 50 or 60 of good.

Hjalmar Soderbergh - Doctor Glas
Stefan Zweig - Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
Sandor Marai - Esther's Inheritance

Wow--all great books

Doctor Glas was a bit more special, out of that batch - an arresting, at times frightening discussion of eugenics and euthanasia (the latter of course very much in the agenda), from the same mind that also tries to rationalize murder later on. Much pain and confusion.

Onto the next volume of Proust - Within a Budding grove

Another piece by John Gray:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/mar/15/society

From the bits that Gamiliel quotes I'm thinking he could work up some cracking fiction, although I imagine its a field that's already been fairly well covered.

I'm through half of Parade's End - is The Last Post going to ruin everything, as Graham Greene says?

Can't lay my hands on my copy of Straw Dogs but I'll illustrate my problem with Gray by one very small example.

Gray argues that since the genetic distinction between man and other higher primates is minute, the distinctions we make between man and the higher primates (and by extension other animals) in terms of rights, value etc are artificial. He doesn't address the very obvious counterargument -- that it is precisely in this distinction, however small from a physical perspective, that the important difference lies. Human beings, from a slightly wider perspective, are structurally much the same kind of stuff as cabbages or, since we are largely made up of water some biological matter mixed in, duckponds. Should we extend human rights to cabbages or ponds?

Coal is structurally almost identical to diamonds, and any old nonsense written in iambic pentameter is structurally the same thing as the the best line in Shakespeare. Yet when we come across coal and diamonds, different lines of iambic pentameter, men and chimpanzees, we find them to be different things and may value them differently. There's no reason why some inherent similarity of structure should determine value.

If this were a one-off it wouldn't be a major problem, but it is typical. There are examples of this kind of non-sequitur, sometimes several, on almost every page.

I'm not here objecting to Gray's views per se (although I happen to disagree with them) and I don't doubt much of what he believes could be defended in a more intellectually respectable way. I'm objecting to the lack of intellectual rigour in a book that is described on the cover as philosophy. And I he can't hide behind the "reason is overrated" argument because the book is absolutely presented as a reasoned argument, or at least an interlocking series of reasoned arguments, in favour of his beliefs.

Just finished: Love is Like Park Avenue by Alvin Levin
Had to read for work: The Scarecrow by John Connelly
Halfway through: Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Skimming: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

That's fair enough on Straw Dogs. I suppose I don't really see it as philosophy proper, more as a polemical essay. Part of the fun of it for me is that style of bare assertion after bare assertion: I don't think it's seriously persuasive, but it is provocative.

I mean day-job Gray isn't a philosopher exactly: he's in that political theory/history/history of ideas world, where you argue about Mill and Free Trade and Victorian legislation & sometimes how it relates to current politics. With that hat on, he can put together clear explicit arguments w/ footnotes and evidence. Straw Dogs draws on that a bit, but it's like after False Dawn he had a breakdown (or decided that pessimism sells) and just went for a pared-down jeremiad.

I think it's self-consciously written in a tradition of informal thought & argument - Montaigne, Hume & Schopenhauer's essays, Cioran. If I use those standards, I can start to reel off his shortcomings - his pessimism is cloistered, bookish and shallow, he's melodramatic, he's slippery on various notions (progress in particular), looks weak when arguing for, not against, something, etc (also support for Thatcher then New Labour not exactly warming me to him). But I still really like SD (I also suspect it's a one-off).

Another Gray link: in conversation with Mike Skinner.

Oh, and on-topic, vol ii of the new collected Beanworld turned up yesterday. That went down very quickly.

Gray in that discussion with Skinner - 'The proof will be in the pudding'?

Reminds me of one of my pet hates, when people say in an offhand manner, of something that differs from their expectations or argument - 'the exception proves the rule'. As if that something deviating from their argument somehow proves it, and by saying that the exception proves the rule they have somehow reinforced their argument.

'NO! you smug, complacent arse,' I want to shout, 'prove' here has its old meaning of 'test' - the exception that is being cited tests your rule - the onus is on you to work out why it is an exception and why, if at all, your rule still holds despite this apparent exception. It's not a way of dismissing any example which doesn't fit into your theory or world view.' But I rarely do.

Same meaning as the proof of the pudding is in the eating - that is the true test of the pudding.

It just gets my goat is all, he concluded lamely.

What am I reading? A bloody instruction manual for this piece of shit programme that I'm supposed to be testing. When I have done this, I will pass my findings on to the most obstructive man in the universe. Which is why I'm on I Love Books instead.

Oh, I did have a very dozy day in an armchair the other day reading MR James' recollections of Eton and Kings. As pleasantly soporific as you might imagine, but readable, and witty. He was, apparently, an excellent mimic, which comes through in a couple of places.

But the afternoon was just lovely. Warm and cosy inside, turning the heavy, creamy, coarse pages, reading about a cloistered, productive bachelor existence as the rain pelted down outside.

Isn't it rather that you can't have an exception to a rule unless there's a rule, so the existence of an exception demonstrates the existence of the rule?

I'm going to say no. But I'm going to say no in the knowledge that my head is currently absolutely incapable of thought, so the correct answer might be yes. Also - that would be a slightly odd argument?

No, I don't think it is. If Joe always passes my window at 4.10 on his way home from work, that becomes a loose "rule". One day he doesn't. That's the exception. That Joe not passing my window at 4.10 has the status of an "exception" proves the rule.

But it doesn't prove (in the modern sense) the rule, does it? It shows that there is the existence of the rule, but it also goes some way to loosening it as a rule.

"It's the exception that proves that the rule is not in fact a rule but an observable tendency."

It proves the rule, in this sense: that if the observation can legitimately be termed an exception, it must be an exception to something. The "something" it falls outside of can always be stated in the form: "as a rule, x is true".

Not necessarily, although I suspect that's close to how most people use it - as if the exception simultaneously proves the existence of the rule and demonstrates that it doesn't invariably apply. But the rule here isn't that Joe invariably passes my window at 4.10, just that he normally does, except when he doesn't (eg on Sundays). Joe not passing my window at 4.10 on a Sunday would be an exception that proved the rule that he does on other days of the week.

Reply to Gamalie - 2 x posts

Fair enough.

I'm sticking with mine - that it's prove in the older sense of test, as in the proof of the pudding etc. (He said, jutting his chin out).

Mainly because the other interpretation is used by annoying people who like to use exceptions as somehow reinforcing their 'rule'. When they don't.

So, what's everybody reading?

'm sticking with mine - that it's prove in the older sense of test, as in the proof of the pudding etc. (He said, jutting his chin out).

Fowler (Modern English Usage) gives this example:

'Special leave is given for men to be out of barracks tonight till 11.00 p.m.'; 'The exception proves the rule' means that this special leave implies a rule requiring men, except when an exception is made, to be in earlier.

Schneider and Fein, The Rules
Jungersen, The Exception
Velleman, How to Prove It

Rainer Maria Rilke: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Ronan Bennett: The Second Prison

Both excellent, though completely different. Only halfway through the Rilke, and only just realised the narrator is Danish. Duh! The Bennett is gripping psychological crime/IRA stuff though was faintly confused by the end.

xpost frankiemachine - thanks for the Fowler citation - I've stopped jutting my chin now.

I finished The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga this morning. It was really good, an Augie March style yarn of a servant boy's rise, except that the setting is contemporary India and this boy's got a nasty streak in him (though not that nasty, considering he's a murderer and all). Good story, lots of amusing detail, nice lines in people's little cruelties to one another.

One thing that displeased me was stylistic - the whole thing is in form of a series of letters to Wen Jiabao, supposedly about to pay a state visit to India, the conceit being that the narrator is explaining India's real ways to him. It makes a degree of sense given that the main theme is new, nasty India rising by trampling over poor, old India - and being screwed over in return - but it's not a device I ever like, and it's rather clunky here particularly as China make no other appearance and (unless I missed it) the visit has no particular significance. I think I'd've got it anyway.

The Lion and the Fox - Wyndham Lewis (The Role of the Hero in Shakespeare)

A re-read this one. The subtitle is a lie. it's mainly about appropriations of Machiavelli and Lewis's cultural theorizing. But I LOVE Lewis's cultural theorizing. And this, along with Time and Western Man, is probably my favourite of Wyndham Lewis polemical/intellectual prose stuff.

Nabokov: Bend Sinister

Bend Sinister is great. Really enjoyable comparing Orwellian/Nabokovian dystopias (or kakatopias if you will) as well.

Yeah--was surprised how much Nabokov seems to have hated Orwell, at least going by the intro.

Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House.

Just finished "A Week in December" (Faulks), which was selected for a book club run by my wife. I suspect the book was chosen because of its reputation as a roman a clef with gossip potential. It's a passably enjoyable read but doesn't come close to delivering on its ambitions as a big state of the nation satire: well researched but stylistically undistinguished and structurally half-baked, with lots of Daily Telegraph-letters-page type harrumphing about the modern world. The most interesting element for me was my impression that Faulks is becoming increasingly bitter that he's not taken very seriously by the critical establishment - doesn't trouble the Booker selectors and so on. One character is a rancorous critic called R Tranter (Art Ranter, geddit?) who hates all contemporary fiction but particularly when it's written by well-connected, public-school educated writers who(like Faulks) he believes have had an unfair leg up. Tranter - allegedly based on DJ Taylor - is obviously meant to be a monstrous combination of envy and malice, but looking at Faulks's career - Wellington College, Oxbridge, literary editor, feted young novelist, appearances on the Beeb, followed by the growing perception that he may have ludicrously overpraised, is no more a second-division novelist who sells better than he writes - I can't help feeling Tranter/Taylor may have had a point.

I've started "Oscar and Lucinda". About 150 pages in and very good so far. In a completely different league from the Faulks.

A month later I finally finished Notes from the Underground. Yikes. It was extremely depressing (and reminded me of my best friend - no, not in that way).

Commenced The Informers. God I love his style.

What does roman a clef actually mean? A quick google is not giving me the definition I'd expected.

I've already posted too much on what I think of Faulks - in a nutshell, something I read recently revealed him as a buffoon. But I liked what little I'd read of him so I took A Week In December for a coffee in Waterstone's. I like his style, which I'd describe as pleasingly unobtrusive, but the bits I landed on here were not so interesting - either they seemed like facile treatments of things I know little about, or they were definitely facile treatments of things I do know something about. I doubt any hardnosed multi-millionaire sixty-something businessman envisages receiving his MBE in a private one-to-one with the Queen while the Prime Minister wrings his hands nervously to one side. It's not necessarily such a bad thing: in the first case I don't mind assuming a position of zero knowledge; in the second extreme clunkiness is at least amusing.

Writing about literary criticism is simply unforgiveable, though.

Isn't it when real living people are turned into characters? Like Bukowski's Hollywood book. (Hilarious what names he comes up with btw!)

Implies a novel or set of novels to which there is a key, isn't it? Usually the suggestion is a novel with an axe to grind, or a satire, like The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis, although the roman fleuve is often associated with it as well, as they tend to have heavy autobiographical elements - Recherche and Dance to the Music of Time for instance.

sorry - key as in a map key where you can associate fictional characters with real-life counterparts.

x-posts

Roman a clef basically means (as I understand it) that characters are versions of real people. The implication is that you can apply a "key" to understand who's who. So in this case R. Tranter is (supposedly) D J Taylor, and there's been speculation about other characters, like the Tory MP. Faulks has denied characters are based on real people, but then he would, wouldn't he?

I'm probably being too scathing about Faulks, a writer I've read with some pleasure in the past. I didn't on the whole like "Birdsong", presumably still his most highly rated, although there were certainly good things in it. I've also read Engleby, Charlotte Grey, On Green Dolphin Street, The Girl at the Lion D'Or and The Fatal Englishman (this last non-fiction). Engleby and and OGDS in particular were enjoyable reads, although I'd be reluctant to make any claims for them beyond that. "The Girl" is more consciously literary, tighter control of form and tone, but it's fairly slight.
Faulks has nothing to be ashamed of but if you compare A Week in December with, say, Hollinghurt's The Line of Beauty (there are some similarities, like a set piece dinner parties held by Tory MPs) there's a substantial gulf in class. I get the impression Faulks is bitter because he's not taken as seriously as the likes of Hollinghurst, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan but the truth is he's just not as good as they are.

nath, i really really like the informers too! has you seen the movie? i think it must have gotten panned by critics because it never had a major release here in the US.

Just finished the disappointing new book by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, La Vérité sur Marie. Actually disappointing is too kind of a description. I felt like it was completely unbalanced, maybe 30 interesting pages scattered in between 170 frightfully dull ones. In particular, a long (50 page?) section about a horse running around an airport is where Toussaint really lost me. This is one of those books that was so bad, it made me go back and question my favorable opinion of his earlier works :(

I've been idling, re-reading (the shame!) Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is science popularizing in its lowest form, since 2/3 of the space is devoted to anecdotes about scientists's eccentricities and internecine pissing matches. However, because scientists be funny people when viewed through this filter, it is amusing enough.

Of the remaining 1/3 that mentions actual science, I notice that a fairly large chunk is devoted to DANGER, WILL ROBINSON sorts of subjects, like asteroids striking earth or supervolcanoes. The sort of thing that gets the public's juices flowing.

Oh well. I am old and my diet is slipping farther and farther toward pure pablum, I guess.

In particular, a long (50 page?) section about a horse running around an airport is where Toussaint really lost me. This is one of those books that was so bad, it made me go back and question my favorable opinion of his earlier works :(

Shame, but I definitely want to check him out. I quite liked I'm Off by Jean Echenoz (whom Touissant is connected to)

Just finished Mehra and Milton, Climbing the Mountain. Excelsior!

How can fifty pages on a horse running around an airport be bad? Actually, how can it be at all? What the hell is going on in that book?

Ismael - it sounds good when you put it like that, but really it's quite boring and pointless :(

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky: Definitely Maybe

Not finished this yet, but it is both excellent and odd: a hot Leningrad summer, a mysterious delivery of vodka and cognac, a suicide/murder, scientific research being derailed by people claiming to be agents of an alien race or an ancient secret society....

I'd only read their 'Roadside Picnic', which I loved, so was chuffed to find this one.

That book is kind of hard to get a hold of, where did you find it, James Morrison? I took that one out of the library, read some of it, had to return it, the glue had started falling apart, so they withdrew it! Ended up buying a copy online, got Beetle In The Anthill while I was at it, still haven't read either. Yeah, I know it's a short book, but I'm a busy man, what with my extensive library holdings and internet postings.

This is a falling-apart library copy too. Quite near the end now. Very odd, but in a good way!

Actually the copy I bought seems to have arrived falling apart. And it used to be the property of the Mary Help Of Christians Library Academy! Published by Macmillan.

Somewhere I saw somebody bemoaning the fact that a bunch of these Strugatsky books were translated first into German and then from that German translation into English, like a game of telephone. Be that as it may, the ones I have come across have read really well in English, for instance all the names of the weird doodads in Roadside Picnic, "empties," "witches jelly," "black spray," etc. seemed perfect.

Justine, haven't seen the movie, but apparently the critics liked it. That's what I gathered. Didn't actually connect the book with the film at the time. I wasn't aware it was based on said book. But I remember that the movie got good reviews.

I love the book. It's so confusing: all the characters seem to "flow" into eachother. That's teh whole point. Great depiction of atmosphere. Ace.

Yarr, I'm reading "Bleak House", as the recent poll here reminded me that I'm a damned fool who've never read ANY Dickens. A damn fool indeed -- it's really very good, what. Curiously, it didn't seem like a very big switch after just having read Anthony Powell's "A Buyer's Market".

Just started Flann O'Brien's "The Best of Myles", because I wasn't able to concentrate properly on Dickens while riding the old bus. This might prove dangerous, as I'm not at all comfortable with being a tittering nuisance - but oh did the commute grow short. His bits on starting a book-handling company that will make all those pretty books look properly read are fantastic. The forged inscriptions are particularly fine.

What with autumn having settled over Oslo, I dug out the collected ghost stories of M.R. James, which was running the risk of becoming some dusty forgotten volume in itself. It's been years since I last read any ghost stories; it's moderately enjoyable, but have only read three so far. Laughed very well indeed when some misguided fellow makes the point that the way to eat a human heart is "to reduce it to ashes, and to mingle them with about a pint of some red wine, preferably port."

just finished 'The Autograph Man', really quite rubbish. To the extent that I can't be bothered going into why. Last chapter was okay, though.

I think I'm going to start 'American Pastoral' now. Along with that I'm reading 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' for something between fun and masochism, and 'Proust and Signs' for somewhere between academic stuff and fun, and am trying to fit in David Foster Wallace's book about infinity somewhere but it seems that three is quite enough for me.

Curiously, it didn't seem like a very big switch after just having read Anthony Powell's "A Buyer's Market".

Not sure Powell would have been happy about that. Doesn't he explain why he doesn't like Dickens somewhere in "Dance"? (Of course it's Nick who says it, but it's pretty obvious he's giving voice to Powell's own opinions. He says he doesn't like Dickens for much the same reasons he doesn't like Balzac, although he thinks Balzac's better.)

I may be misremembering the source and Powell actually said this somewhere else, but from memory it's in "Dance".

There was a bit in one of the wartime novels where he has a conversation in the officer's mess about Galsworthy and Balzac. Must admit I don't remember if Dickens was mentioned.

Sorry, that's vague to the point of irrelevance isn't it?

do they talk about galsworthy in dance? wouldn't that be kind of frame-breaking?

netherland and waiting to the barbarians for me, by the way, both of which are at least as good as their reputations would suggest

Just finished "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls. Found it riveting, sad, funny and thought-provoking. I don't recommend it to anyone.

Have twice tried to start "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," but both times glazed over after only a few pages. Is there a point at which it gets better?

Next up: "The Dragons of Babel" by Michael Swanwick

Is there a point at which it gets better?

If you're in all that financial/family history stuff, yeah it does eventually pick up after that.

I started Heart of Darkness but found it wanting, so am now banging through the new Dexter. I've got Juliet, Naked up next I think.

Thanks, Jaq. That's good to know. It's been so widely and well received that it was really bothering me that I couldn't slog through it. ;D

Decided not to cycle in today and get the tube and train instead, partly to rest my tired legs, but also to get a bit of reading in. Big mistake. There I was cursing my days, crushed into the compartment of a tube and feeling very hot and bothered, with no room to free my arms to open my book, let alone read it. Finally I got a seat.

As I did so I looked up and saw that someone was reading one of the old Proust editions - the blue, yellow and white covers. Aye aye, I thought, not often you see that on the tube. Looked up to examine the physiognomy of this literary sage.

And obviously (you will say in retrospect) it turned out to be an esteemed member of ILB (how could it be otherwise, you cry) - namely, xyzzz__, looking a model of unconcerned freshness.

Good to see you, too, Gamaliel! Is this the first time you've ramdomly sighted an ILXOR? It is strangely hot on the tube these days. Thankfully I only need it for a stop myself, although yesterday I took a different route (as I took the morning off) which needed a few more stops. Once I got into the office a workmate said I looked like I had been for a jog.

And yes, currently finishing vol.4 of the Chatto & Windus edition of the Proust. I have it all the way up to vol.10, all in great condition apart from vol.3, where the last 20 pages fell off before I finished.

Then I'll need to find a copy of the Penguin of Time Regained.

Continuing a Russian burst: Turgenev's 'King Lear of the Steppes', which is wonderful and blackly funny

Finished the Bryson book, A Short History of Nearly Everything (aka ASHONE).

Last night, I tried picking up Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but after about four or five pages it struck me as extremely sentimental, which is probably not a reaction it often gets, but there it is.

So, I read about half of a book of poetry: Making the Scene: Selected Poems, by Kenneth O. Hanson. His style is spare, but superbly controlled and I found the poems quite rewarding. What he does well falls into a narrow poetic niche, but he does it well enough that he doesn't need to do anything more. I'll finish it tonight.

I also started Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynmann, by James Gleick. The subject matter is rich, so it will all come down to how well it is handled. Looks good so far, but I am only 25 pages into it.

The Road is indeed sentimental. It's basically a version of Shane without the eponymous hero. A very bad book in my opinion, but plenty disagree.

It would take quite a writer to make a bad book out of Richard Feynman, I think. His own stuff's great!

Patricia Highsmith: Deep Water -- holy shit, she's good

Andrey Platonov - The Foundation Pit.

Lots of essays on the LRB (my one year subscription came in), been making my way through the archive.

Iceland Bell - Laxness.
the first part was perfect, the 2nd part is weaker (or maybe it's just the translation). hope the 3rd part will be as good as the first.

Reading the very first Bulldog Drummond novel, which is joingoist and awesome in equal measures. Some highlights I transcribed on FB:

"'Demobilised Officer' she read slowly 'finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion. Legitimate, if possible; but crime, if of a comparatively humorous description, no objection. Excitement essential. Would be prepared to consider permanent job if suitably impressed by applicant for his services. Reply at once BOX X10'"

"'Of course, you've been in France' Lakington murmured. 'Unfortunately a bad heart kept me on this side of the water. One regrets it in many ways - regrets it immensley. Sometimes I cannot help thinking how wonderful it must have been to be able to kill without fear of consequences. There is art in killing, Captain Drummond - profound art. And as you know, Phyllis' he turned to the girl , 'I have always been greatly attracted by anything requiring the artistic touch'"

"She was looking at him gravely as she spoke, and it seemed to her companion that there was an appeal in the big blue eyes. And they were very big: and the face they were set in was very charming - especially at the angle it was tilted at, in the half-light of the room. Altogether, Drummond refleted, a most adorable girl. And adorable girls had always been a hobby of his."

Yeah--I'd avoided Drummond, assuming it was rubbish, but then I saw an awesome-looking edition and took the plung. Though it's full of fascistic nonsense, it's also huge fun, and pretty exciting.

I like how it's basically a universe where Berti Wooster has become a secret agent and gets taken seriously over it. The anti german sentiment is sorta hilarious, too - that WWI era where all the big european nations were all about hating on each other feels quaint and comical now in ways that the more colonialist bigotry obviously doesn't.

(btw James, your blog has become one of my fave google reader delights)

john le carre - the looking glass war

this is the first le carre i've read (i'm halfway through the tv adaptation of 'tinker tailor soldier spy' now, too) and i think it's pretty tremendous. i like the banal and subtle games being played behind closed doors, the apparent incompetence and callousness of the protagonists and their supervisors, and the authorial point-of-view that seems to be saying, "well this is all rather pointless, isn't it?"

The first two books that I have read for myself and not work in four years:

Chris Killen - The Bird Room (just finished)
Roberto Bolano - By Night in Chile (if I like this then I will try 2666 - so far I am liking it very much)

and the authorial point-of-view that seems to be saying, "well this is all rather pointless, isn't it?"

Is this a thing that basically happened with and after Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? The ones previous to that seem to be pretty drab (good, but drab, good because drab) detective stories. Low level crime in a sense - domestic consequences of the cold war. But after TTSS it becomes, well, what omar little said above - more about the problem of the thinking personality in the heavily entrenched system of spying.

Just made it to page 108 of Christopher Priest's The Glamour, upon which the mysterious title word finally makes an appearance.

Daniel_Rf, I thank you :)

A couple of books of short stories...

Lu Xun: The Real Story of Ah-Q and other stories -- Chinese pro-Western 1920s stuff, some great, some a bit mystifying
Shirley Jackson: The Lottery and other stories -- really enjoyed this, but surprised how few of them used supernatural elements

just finished the safety of objects and los angeles by a.m. homes. the former was not as enjoyable as i found the movie adaptation to be, but the latter was great - a bunch of really interesting snapshots of LA. i'm sort of interested in reading LA-centric nonfiction right now, since i've been quite fascinated by the city after my first visit there in january. it's a surprising place.

almost done with another you by ann beattie. very richard ford-like. took me a looooong time to get into (i've been picking it up and putting it a down a lot) but it's just reached the good part.

just started netherland by joseph o'neil, which seems to be about cricket?? but has a lovely prose, and also iron & silk by mark salzman, which is a collection of anecdotes about the author (american) living in china.

I found Iron and Silk to be pretty good. The author is well aware of how remarkable he is. A little overwritten when he meets his teacher, but that's martial arts writing.

The author is well aware of how remarkable he is

haha not quite, but yeah the description of him tuning the piano is weird... it's directly preceded by him saying he has absolutely no idea but then he somehow cobbles it all together???

Because ... he is ... a GENUIS!

To be honest I enjoyed reading that book. Although later a friend of mine who had also read it and was also An American In China knocked it down a bit, maybe a little bit out of sour grapes.

i read his lost in place a long time ago and really enjoyed it, been meaning to pick up some more of his stuff. i've also got the laughing sutra.

tbh, if i could speak fluent mandarin and cantonese, was a martial arts expert, and survived a couple of years living in china, i'd probably think i was pretty awesome too.

I'm reading The Proof of the Honey by Salwa Al Neimi. First chapter here.

Maybe it's just me, but that is not an appealing title.

I thought it was going to be the title of a book translated from Arabic for Europa Editions.

Salzman is really good imo - his novel 'Lying Awake' is ace, and so's his memoir of teaching creative writing in a youth prison, the title of which I can't remember. (Googles) 'True Notebooks' it's called.
'Lost in Place' is pretty great--and very much NOT a case of him thinking he's remarkable: it's about being a white teenage doofus obsessed with Asian martial arts and not knowing what the hell is going on most of the time.

yeah i really want to find that youth prison one next. he has a very easy writing style, very readable and engaging.

i finally got around to reading netherland the other weekend. it was really good! bit like a grown up bell jar. i might have said that already.

Zweig - The Royal Game.
Grillet - In the labrynth.
Ignazio Silone - Fontamara. Written as if, like the peasants in this story, the author himself is on the run. That rough-and-tumble quality really suits the story of defeat. The intro is, aptly enough, written by Michael Foot. It is dated 1984.

Oh, and I'm about to start: Proust - Guermantes Way

A Literary History of the Low Countries

And the second volume of Stevenson's Letters - continuing reading this after being rudely incapacitated a while back.

Talking of the low countries, I'm halfway through "The Legend of the Glorious Adventures of Tyl Ulenspiegel in the Land of Flanders & Elsewhere" by Charles De Coster and it's GRATE. Perhaps just a pinch of anti-Catholicism.

now reading:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_hvV0JHPYX_I/R8JdhMQFeFI/AAAAAAAAAUY/sqibBpGUwGo/s400/Pendulum.jpg

(cover courtesy of my fave book cover blog :) although my american hardcover is actually different. though it does feature a motorcycle.)

ah okay here it is:

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/8b/be/e1a4e893e7a02a22444ff010.L.jpg

I was just recently thinking about reading that book. But instead I started The Day of the Triffids, by his archrival, John Wyndham.

Also reading this anthology of Soviet sci-fi Aliens, Travelers, and Other Strangers, from the same Macmillan series that put out some of the Strugatsky Brothers books. There is in fact a very short Strugatsky Bros story at the end which I haven't got to yet. First few stories are OK, but the fourth one a long one about time-travel, called "Vincent Van Gogh", by Sever Gansovsky, is turning out to be really good. Apparently it was made into a movie in East Germany in the 80s.

Richard Brautigan - In Watermelon Sugar
Philip K Dick - A Scanner Darkly

dug them both muchly. Wasn't expecting the Brautigan to be quite so sad.

He's still alive, John Christopher, a fact that amazed me when I heard it as all the copies of his books I had as a child seemed quite old-fashioned, and indeed they were. Lives somewhere on the coast in Sussex I think. A very, very good writer. I haven't read Pendulum. Is it good, Scott?

Edmund White – My Lives: An Autobiography

beautifully written. full of nuanced, profound observations on what my old psych professors called "interpersonal relations" and TMI sexx anecdotes, the story about Foucault getting fisted by an elderly arab man is er classic

Stephen Baker - The Numerati

like a long Wired article about mathematicians applying their formulae to commercial endeavor. as a liberal arts grad who can't fathom his son's eighth-grade math homework, I found it informative. (could probably use more explanation of the actual math, TBH.)

Janwillem van de Wetering – The Perfidious Parrot

the Amsterdam cops go to Florida. late entry in the series, good but not great.

currently perusing the Modern Library edition of P.K. Dick's late novels. Read A Maze of Death and part of VALIS so far. I've always respected PKD more than enjoyed him, there's something scattershot and inconsistent about his prose that bugs me and the religious stuff is too much. Gonna read The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and take it back to the library.

GamalielRatsey -- hard to believe. Yes, the series about the tyranny by giant aliens might have been written in the 1940s.

The Proof of the Honey? The Perfidious Parrot? What's gone wrong with the world?

Just finished Moore, Schrödinger.

Neil Belton mined this book for A Game with Sharpened Knives. You'd expect Banville to have written that book, considering the subject matter.

Thanks, Scott :)

He's still alive, John Christopher, a fact that amazed me when I heard it as all the copies of his books I had as a child seemed quite old-fashioned, and indeed they were. Lives somewhere on the coast in Sussex I think. A very, very good writer. I haven't read Pendulum. Is it good, Scott?

I'll interrupt here--I enjoyed Pendulum, but it's probably the weakest of the four end-of-civilisation books he wrote round the same time ('Death of Grass', 'The World in Winter' and 'A Wrinkle in the Skin' are the other 3). Apparently Christopher is too old and weak now to write, which is sad. I've got a copy of a book he wrote in 2001(?) called 'Bad Dreams', but haven't read it yet.

Recently...

Raymond Carver: Elephant -- not sure why I took so long to warm to Carver, as these are great stories

Chaim Potok: The Chosen -- very good, felt a bit like a YA book in style, want to read 'Asher Lev' now

Tony Burgess: Pontypool Changes Everything -- a crashing disappointment, almost incomprehensible in many places, and really very peculiar -- loved the movie 'Pontypool', which was written by Burgess, and based on this book, and yet there's almost nothing in common between the two, a fact for which this edition has an apologetic afterword, bu Burgess, pointing out that the book's actually not very good -- bugger

Elizabeth Bowen: A World of Love -- tense, complicated human relationships, wonderfully written, full of misunderstandings and so forth, so lush you don't really care there's almost no plot

J Lethem -- Chaos Moon
I spent the opening few chapters loathing it: first character introduced is named "Edge," followed by "Chaos." Ugh. Interesting but ultimately too vague post-apocalyptic road trip narrative with a really unsatisfying ending.

CARNY FOLK
Sociology writeup on old timey freakshows. A bit shallow, but engagingly written and occasionally horrifying.

O'Connor -- Wise Blood
god i love this woman

J0hn D. -- Master of Reality
Have you read this yet? Read it. So good.

Dusty Dusty Him Sad -- Poor Folk
Makes me want to write more letters.

Dirty Story - Eric Ambler. A friend found it in a pile of unwanted books and gave it me. Tough, funny, cynical, good action and atmosphere, but not actually very consequential feeling.

'The End of the Affair' - Graham Greene. Really rate this guy. I don't read him much, but what pleasure when I do - beautiful, unfussy, unobtrusive style; great humanity in his observations of character; rich, unfashionable themes; and the evocations of wartime London are superb, all the more so for being conjured out of very little. I consumed three-quarters of it in one go, and hungering for more - admittedly it's not a long book, but this is still very unusual for me lately.

Leonard Mlodinow's 'The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives' is currently giving my brain a good flexing.

'The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan' by Robert Kanigel. Halfway through -- too much life, not enough math for me so far, but it's pretty interesting. He's on the boat to England now, so I imagine there'll be some nice chapters of Ramanujan'n'Hardy being brilliant. I think I'm figuring out why I'm not a big fan of biographies -- there's too much plot!

'The End of the Affair' - Graham Greene.

Great book/writer. I especially love the bit where Bendrix is talking to the man who's named his son Lancelot, because he thinks Lancelot found the Holy Grail, and Bendrix points out that Lancelot actually didn't do that but had an affair with Guinevere instead, and the man gives his son this look of total betrayal.

I faked up a cover for one of Bendrix's books once, as part of a series of design exercises.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3311/3658544285_c6483d9600_b.jpg

Ahk, sorry it's so big!

Jeez, that couldn't be any more ominous without carrying a scythe - once I'm finished with Greene, there's no way I'm going near any Bendrix.

that Bendrix cover is awesome! I love that book, it's the only Greene I've read.

Hoos otm on that Lethem (and on the O'Connor). I liked Gun, w/ Occasional Music just fine, but that Moon one was boring (w/ a few cool ideas hinted at).

I've been reading Kelly Link- strangers things happen, am most of the way through The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (can't believe how much fun this is!) and Stephen Jay Gould's Eight Little Piggies

Just finished Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer.

Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers. Talk about a book that's hard to put down. I almost decided to skip work and stay home to keep reading!

Flaubert's letters, on recommendation from woof on another thread.

Very good. He's a precocious shit. Full of good stuff

'...where to find that heart when in most cases it is given over to the two enormous preoccupations that fill a man's life: making his fortune and living for himself, in other words compressing his heart to make it fit in somewhere between his shop and his digestion...'

Also been going over Céline again. North and Journey.

Just finished Fool's Gold by Gillian Tett. So far the best book I've read about the financial crisis (also the only book I've read about the financial crisis). I found it to be well-paced, insightful and it jibes with my own understanding of the events that took place, even if perhaps it's a bit too unabashed in it's worship of Jamie Dimon. Deserves a place on the financial crisis bookshelf alongside Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed.

To gear up for my move to Newfoundland, I just finished The Colony of Unrequited Dreamsby Wayne Johnston. I've now started The Third Policeman.

If Newfoundland is anything like 'The Third Policeman', you're in for an interesting move!

i'm reading 'blindsight' by peter watts, as per a recommendation on the recent sci-fi thread. pretty tremendous hard sci-fi, very much interested in the technical aspects of the mission the (very interesting and unusual) characters are on. character include: a woman with four different personalities, a pacifist soldier, a vampire, a man whose nerves are all dead and "feels" through implanted computer/mechanical parts, and our narrator (half of his brain has been removed and he's almost completely detached from emotion, or so it seems.) this would make a remarkable film, i think..

xpost: hahahaha!
No, I was only reading Colony as a Newfoundland primer... reading Third Policeman for fun.

George Moore - 'A drama in muslin'

late 19th century writer who never really got the kudos he deserved. the libraries of the time wouldnt stock his books and Yeats wrote an essay after Moore died which ripped him to shreds. the book has similar themes to Jane Austen (young women preparing themselves for the marriage market) but its more biting and satirical.

xpost to hoos & CharlieS - What? Amnesia Moon is like unresolved Dick, like Time Out of Joint without the dippy cop-out ending. It's fine quasi-metaphysical science fiction. I liked the picaresque quality to it, too, and all of the ideas packed in. Plus it managed to maintain its tone despite the hodgepodge construction.

But Gun, With Occasional Music was pretty formulaic as hardboiled fiction goes, despite the sf/fantasy trappings.

I really liked Amnesia Moon, though I read it as more metafictional than metaphysical. Scene that seems very 90s, in retrospect: the McDonalds, post-apocalypse, where the staff still insist in cooking in batches they throw away if they go uneaten for fifteen minutes.

I think Gun wouldn't be very remarkable if not for the 'lol kangaroo in dinner jacket' stuff - I'm not sure about Lethem whenever he tries to do noir - his version of 'They Shoot Horses, Don't They' was pretty awful

otoh wtf I am reading George R.R. Martin.

(Other things I have read lately: Iris Murdoch's Under the Net and A Severed Head, Beryl Bainbridge's The Bottle Factory Outing. Does anyone have any opinions on those two? They seem not a hundred miles apart in some ways, although obviously Murdoch's characters are, like, either psychoanalists or academics or nothing else.)

i'm reading 'blindsight' by peter watts, as per a recommendation on the recent sci-fi thread. pretty tremendous hard sci-fi, very much interested in the technical aspects of the mission the (very interesting and unusual) characters are on. character include: a woman with four different personalities, a pacifist soldier, a vampire, a man whose nerves are all dead and "feels" through implanted computer/mechanical parts, and our narrator (half of his brain has been removed and he's almost completely detached from emotion, or so it seems.) this would make a remarkable film, i think..

Yay! I've been recomme3nding this to everyone I knw who likes SF, so I'm glad other people are enjoying it!

reading Djuna Barnes' Nightwood for a modernist lit class. a strange one, this. I don't know that I particularly like it.

There was a thread on ILE (I think) where many posters ended up saying they didn't like it, either. I think I was one of two people that said otherwise.

I picked up Janet Malcolm's Two Lives a couple of days ago at the Notting Hill book exchange. This is a short biographical study. Really like the little I've read of hers and am enjoying this, even if I dislike the little I've read of Gertrude Stein's writing.

Oh, but I'm still on Proust - it gets slower, but I'm not tired of it.

Raymond Carver: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please

Dennis Tafoya: Dope Fiend -- rather excellent crime novel, where the big conclusion you expect to come at the end of the book happens in a different way to what you expect 2/3 of the way through, and then the book becomes about something else, but in a completely satisfying way

Richard Powers: Generosity -- enjoyable, but not his best; felt a little like a missing book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Washington trilogy

I like Djuna and I like Stein. I didn't know people thought of them in the same thought. Is there some biographical connection?

Thomp: metafictional sounds much more apt. Which book was him doing a poor They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Horace McCoy is pretty ragtag himself, but cute. Cute, inept Horace McCoy.

No biographical connection I know of, but I just through to mention the ILE thread to bernard, as the poster was reading Barnes. That I was reading a bk about Stein was mentioned in the next sentence.

However they were both gay, writing in the early part of the century (Barnes was perhaps fascinated by Europe but don't think she lived there much, unlike Stein), both wrote works that could be put under the same umbrella, though they wrote very differently from one another.

In other news: Janet Malcolm was able to finish The Making of Americans by ripping the book up into six parts with her kitchen knife. Just thought I'd share that.

I was under the impression that Barnes spent a significant amount of time in Europe, mostly in the familiar postwar emigre modernist writer circle -- according to my prof, she was one of the only people outside of his immediate family whom Joyce permitted to address him as "Jim".

oh, and re: Nightwood: my impressions have improved considerably in the last few chapters, as I've come to appreciate the novel's structure and logic a bit more (it struck me as rather formless initially)

I know Barnes interviewed Joyce as Ulysses was about to come out..

Just finished Pais, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life.

Meanwhile, in a protest poem entitled "Thou Shall Not Kill" (1955), Kenneth Rexroth included "Oppenheimer the Million-Killer" among the leading scientists and writers who, the poet alleged, had created a brutal and murderous culture responsible for the death of Dylan Thomas.

O kayyy...

But also in 1955, Oppenheimer received a more enthusiastic valuation from William Gaddis, a young, polymathic writer whose books are based around absurd, spiraling, cataclysmic events. Gaddis included with the letter a copy of his recent novel The Recognitions, at 956 pages nearly as long as the transcript of Oppenheimer's hearing, which was about the loss and recovery of personal integrity, and the meaning of fraudulence from all angles. You must get fan mail and crank letters of all kinds, Gaddis wrote Oppenheimer, but few half a million words long.

Good post alimosina - I watched a pretty good doc on Oppenheimer earlier this year. Really tragic how he lost his clearance, and for once dramatizing the proceedings which led to the decision proved to be a good move.

Proust - Sodom and Gomorrah. Not sure about how the role of the Dreyfus affair plays on the reading of this novel on modern readers. Its quite easy to get at what Proust is trying to show, but it seems a way too local event for its time (or too French? Would kids in France learn about it in school?) Just one more thing to get lost in.

This is, of course, just some of the background work that needs to be done anyway - I'll need to try some Saint Simon next year.

I think Dreyfus was pretty international. Queen Victoria was on the side of the Dreyfusards for example.

French schoolchildren would have defintely learnt about it and probably still do.

where to start with Julian Barnes & Sam Shepard? thx.

Gamaliel - From a review of a book that seems to be a pretty definitive account of the affair it seems to have been a wholly French (or at least it really focuses on the part of it that is French), but it also argues that this exposed wounds that would lead France into World Wars and the Vichy government.

I mean the review of the biog doesn't talk about the international aspect of this, although the Dreyfus affair rumbled on for so long that I'm sure everyone at that time had an opinion..

I'm pretty sure the Dreyfus affair was being followed at least across Europe...

read lately:

Portable Conrad
In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin

review of the book...I need sleep.

Julian Barnes--try 'Nothing to be afraid of', his recent memoirish look at death, or for the novels, 'History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters', or 'Flaubert's Parrot' or for short stories, 'The Lemon Table'

I've only read Shepard's 'Great Dream of Heaven' Short stories), but it was pretty good

finished oryx & crake and jumped right into year of the flood. also started cloud atlas.

Uncle Silas - Sheridan le Fanu

The Governess in this speaks in French lolspeak, like Allo Allo - 'Wat horror! I am so pale. Quel ennui! wat bore! Ow weak av I grow in two three days!'

Schopenhauer's Essays

Now it is obvious of itself, that the thoughts of a great mind must shrink up considerably in order to find a place in the the three-pound brain of a parasite of philosophy, from which they emerge again clothed in the contemporary jargon of the day, and accompanied by his sapient reflections.

Recently finished V.S. Naipaul's Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, his mid-90s travelogue of Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Malaysia. His MO is basically to try and find people with interesting stories that shed some light on the intersection of Islam, politics and culture in each country, and then to assemble the products of his interviews with them into somewhat cohesive narratives, while scrupulously observing the gaps and lacunae that remain. His descriptions of the logistical difficulties that he overcame as a tourist and outsider to find and meet up with people also takes up a fair chunk of the book. I think the episodic nature of the book as well as the difficulties in using such as small sample size (he was only in each country for a couple of months, at most) to tell a national story are the built-in limitations. I thought the opening and closing chapters (on Indonesia and Malaysia) were the best, and the ones where he seemed to have the most empathy with his subjects. Also, perhaps not coincidentally, these are the countries where the influence of Islam has been less extreme. In Pakistan, in particular, it seemed that his anger and disgust interfered with the application of his method, which depends for its success on the quick establishment of a bond of empathy and understanding with the subject - otherwise you are left with a brief, unenlightening CV of a stranger.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (think I spelled that right) - Memories of the Future -- quite amazing surreal fantasy/SF from 1920s Russia (but not published until long after author had died, due to taking the piss out of the USSR)

PG Wodehouse - The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - piss-take on the England-invadded novels popular at the time (1909?), pretty funny, though minor Wodehouse

Aldous Huxley - After the Fireworks -- a bit dull and a very OLD (in a bad way) book for him to have written in his 30s

Ron Carlson - The Signal -- literary/thrillery thing about a couple whose marriage has ended going on a last hike in the Wyoming wilderness--very good, actually

Yasnuri Kawabata - The Dancing Girl of Izu -- mostly lovely short stories

O Nate - is it still worth reading? I picked up Among the Believers recently but haven't got around to it yet (that and a thousand other books). Rage aside, is he a perceptive chap?

I think it's still worth reading. I have a lot of respect for his skills as a craftsman of sentences. He has a deft way sometimes of summoning a depth of feeling with a few quick lines. He sometimes has a surprising way of phrasing something - it sounds like maybe some old-fashioned idiom that you've never heard before. Maybe he read it somewhere in some old 19th century British writer, but it seems perfectly apt to the context of how he uses it. I should probably dig for an example to make this clearer. Anyway, I would say read it, but if you find yourself getting bored in one country, don't be afraid to skip ahead to the next section. It's a little longer than it really needs to be, I think. I haven't read Among the Believers.

Among The Believers blew my mind when I read it (right after 9/11). I think it's the best of his non-fiction, a blend of travel/history/journalism and far less angry & aggrieved than say his writing on India. Written in 1979-80 it's chillingly prescient yet also subtle, nuanced. One thing about VSN is his (deserved) reputation as a curmudgeon overshadows his very real empathetic gifts. Coincidentally I just finished Half A Life and am now halfway through Magic Seeds, his final (he says) novels. Overall I'd say he's a better fiction than non-fiction writer but every one of the dozen or so of his I've read has been worthwhile in the extreme. His unflashy stripped-down prose is so transportive, cinematic. There isn't anyone else remotely like him.

"Just as no man can truly wish to be someone else, since no man can imagine himself without the heart and mind he has been granted, so no man of a later time can really know what it was like to live on the land in those days."

That's a good example of his style. Unflashy is right. Almost bland except for a couple of little details that show his workmanship. In that example, I'd say the special touches are "granted" and "on the land". Both seem a little old-fashioned but not in a cliched way, and they are just enough to make the sentence unfamiliar enough to pop, despite the familiar sentiment it conveys.

Could the 'old-fashioned' just come from his being from the Caribbean? I find it interesting how the English language is developing slightly differently depending on when the seed was laid down. You don't notice it so much with American or Australian because you hear them so much (even though some of the vocabulary is old-fashioned), but e.g. South Africans speaking casually can sound a little bit archaic. Maybe the Caribbean has preserved certain phrasings similarly?

I guess that could be at least part of it - regional variations in English. Also, it wouldn't be unusual for a bookish fellow who probably spends a lot of time with his nose between the pages of a bygone century to sometimes break out the archaic diction.

Kim Wozencraft, Rush
Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

Going for a month-long trip. Think I took longer in thinking about and selecting than on such things as clothes.

Anyway I think I'll re-read parts of Flann O'Brien, Borges, Musil, Broch. Took some Morante and Cortazar.

Then

Dave Hickey - Air Guitar and Joanna Russ - The Female Man for the longish plane journey.

Above all Proust (last couple of vols)

Typing this up I'm thinking its too much. otoh there will be no internet, and I have the space.

It will be the winter thread when I get back. Best to all.

Have a good break xyzzzz__!

I'm actually rather enjoying Uncle Silas now, his topographical writing in particular is good and an air of uncertain menace and supernatural retribution hangs about the whole tale without ever being made explicit.

reading p.k. dick anthology of short stories.

man, someone just brought in that bolano 2666 along with a great stack of books to trade and i don't think i can do it. color me daunted. so cool looking though. ( i think i might read the alasdair gray collection this guy brought in though. never read him, i don't think.)

which collection? unlikely stories mostly?

it's the eye of the sibyl. volume five in the citadel complete pkd story series. the little black box, the war with the fnools, and lots more.

Other author I think!

oh sorry hahaha! yes that's the one! unlikely stories, mostly. it looks crazy. is it really good?

Just finished Dorian Gray, half way through Jekyll & Hyde. Looking to start Wilkie Collins' "Woman In White".

"Unlikely Stories, Mostly" is my favourite book of all time.

this guy brings me good books. i love when he comes by the store. lotsa brit stuff. terry jones's war on the war on terror. villain's paradise - a history of britain's underworld. the english civil war by diane purkiss. a space opera anthology edited by brian aldiss.

and he brought me liebling's book on earl long. nobody brings me liebling!

(plus another book i'm taking home. a book of sci-fi stories by william tenn. never read him before.)

"Unlikely Stories, Mostly" is my favourite book of all time."

wow! well, okay, its going home with me too.

Scott, read it now... The only thing I haven't managed to enjoy in that book is the wilfully impenetrable "Logopandacy", but I think there's a reason for that. On the other hand, "Five Letters From An Eastern Empire" is all kinds of amazing. Do you have it in hardback? If so take the dust jacket off - the gold lettering was insisted upon the publishers (Canongate?) by Mr Gray (who had spent a good deal of his life sleeping on hardwood floors), and nearly ruined them.

And while I'm at it - why can I never find Gray books in shops? He's regarded by many as one of the greatest living Scottish authors and yet I never come across them save for chance finds in s/h bookshops.

xpost - It is good. He's got a very distinctive voice; precise, careful, compassionate, rather a didactic tone, not garrulous, which he'll use to describe everything from political theory to whimsical imaginative fancies.

I must admit I don't tend to pick him up now, partly I think because I've tired slightly of that voice. But I always used to admire his capacity for mixing the mundane with the weird (and often the sexually mundane with the sexually weird) and the slightly Stevensonian desire to describe many different subjects without varying the mental approach - democratising them, bringing them to the same level, so that the political is informed by the imaginative and sexual (and the other ways round).

WORK AS IF YOU LIVE IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION

was his inscription to The Book of Prefaces and there's no doubt that for him writing is a political activity - a political activity which is designed to include the outlandish, rather than exclude it. Civic writing, if you like.

Perhaps because of this he can feel a bit pious and restrictive at times, but hey, that's criticising him for something he's not. Definitely worth a go (fwiw, I really liked Lanark and Janine 1982 of his novels).

Love the mixture of artwork and writing. Agree that it's odd you can't find him, dog latin - I haven't looked for him in bookshops for a while, but he should definitely be more easily available.

granted I live in scotland but our bookshops are always pretty well stocked w/alasdair gray

is 'logopandacy' the one about thomas urquhart?

i should reread gray. i read the three i really love (the two novels mentioned plus unlikely stories, mostly) in sixth form, though, and i'm worried that if i read them now i'll see flaws in them the same way i have with everything i've read since

currently finishing wise blood & reading some Father Brown short stories

There are at least two editions of Unlikely Stories, Mostly. The newer one has a few extra stories. I know only the older one. One of my favorite books.

Gray is very direct. There is no understatement or evasion. I assume it is a Scottish trait to avoid those things. But that doesn't account for the ebullient footnotes and rhyming page titles in Lanark.

Besides those I have read Ten Tales Tall and True, and skimmed through Poor Things, Kelvin Walker and A History Maker which I didn't like as much.

Civic writing, if you like.

He wrote a polemical work called Why Scots Should Rule Scotland. Can't get more civic than that.

I also like the self-deprecating jacket descriptions he writes for his books. Unlikely Stories has great fake reviews on the back.

"Five Letters From An Eastern Empire" is all kinds of amazing.

Yes indeedy!

Recently finished The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thorton Wilder. I guess that most of Wilder's ouevre now dwells in the shadow cast by Our Town, which has entered the American pantheon of frequent Broadway revivals and compulsory high-school reading. Rey seems mostly forgotten, though somehow a movie adaptation starring De Niro came and went this decade, without garnering much attention. Instead of being about early 20th-century small-town America, San Luis Rey is set in the 18th-century colonial capital of Peru, so perhaps the subject-matter is less accessible, and the writing is also a bit more writerly, and the characters less plain-spoken. Like Our Town though, Rey covers a lot of ground in a small amount of pages and doesn't shy away from asking (and answering) the Big Questions - the ones about the meaning of life and such. The narrative voice will be familiar - it shares a certain gentle, avuncular, but slightly clinical tone with the Stage Manager of Our Town.

I read Wilder's 'The Ides of March' a little while ago--it was actually very good, too--political novel about Julius Caesar's downfall.

Own recent reading...

Nevil Shute: Pastoral -- not bad, but no classic

Lore Segal: Lucinella -- had high hopes, was a bit disappointed

Leo Perutz: Little Apple -- now this is the stuff: proud Austrian whose been a POW with the Russians during WW1 is released because of the Russian Revolution, and then spends the next umpteen years in a mad, obsessive quest to find a Russian officer who mildly humiliated him in order to take his revenge--ends up fighting on BOTH sides of the Russian revolution, plus all sorts of other oddness.

Alan Furst: Shadow Trade -- one of his earlier books, which he now keeps out of print -- actually really good, but it was odd reading a Furst book set in the modern world, with TVs and so forth

Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight
Richard Peck, Don't Look and It Won't Hurt
Richard Naughton, My Brother Stealing Second

starting:

Simon Reynolds, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock

What was the Stahl like?

Interesting. It's a memoir of his struggle to kick his heroin habit. Tends to sensationalize the sleaze & assumes (probably correctly) that most of his audience has no firsthand knowledge of drug/street culture, but I liked it.

Sounds promising--I've got his novel about the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, but haven't read it yet: wasn't sure if it would be sleazy trash or good stuff, but maybe it will be both.

'now reading' would be a better Thread title, imo.
That Stahl was filmed; pretty funny, esp where they're looking fo the stolen stash. ' ow, if I was percodan, where would I be?'

Slowly enjoyed 'Against The Day' ( there's no other way, really) and, if the trade paperback ever comes out in the US, will buy 'Inherent Vice.'
'Bardo Thodol', mostly for its contribution to INLAND EMPIRE.

just finished effi briest (surprisingly boring), started closely watched trains

working on 'blood's a rover', the new ellroy. picks up the threads from 'the cold six thousand', a swift read, contemptible characters as per usual, leavened with a little more humor this time imo, and there's a mystery running through this one: who pulled off the brilliant and astonishingly violent armored-car heist that opens the novel and seems to have, at this point, no connection to the proceedings?

Reading that 'tibetan book of the dead'put me in mind of 'The Sea Of Fertility'
quartet by Yukio Mishima. I loved it as a kid, though that was before I realized that translations were so hopelessly useless.
A great bardo work, anyway, although the author probably was reincarnated as a Korean or an American, if not an axolotl or carp.
On topic:no luck on the paperback of 'Inherent Vice', so I bought a $10, beautifully printed and bound Charles Phillips,'Aztec and Maya: The Complete Illustrated History.' Excellent and far-ranging visually, not matched by the careless writing. Actually a work on Mesoamerican in general. Wonderful illustrations, mind. Well worth the sawbuck.

In case anyone hasn't seen it, I'm running a ILX Book of the 00s Poll on the main board. We've got about 250 nominations so far but always room for a few more, and would be good to have the regulars here participating.

i have read approximately 1 book written after 2000 so i'm no help :)

Just read:
Paul Bowles: Up Above the World -- Bowles does a crime thriller, sort of. Rather good, and the ending, though vaguely ridiculous, is an improvement on the way his other novels tend to have endings that are completely ridiculous

Now reading:
Natsume Soseki: Sanshiro -- fabulous. Published 1908 originally. Young man from the country goes to Tokyo university, makes friends, goes girl-watching, gets out of his depth... Beautiful.

I thought the ending to 'The Sheltering Sky' was very effective. Novel, not the movie.
'Up Above The world' as a whole struck me as pretty minor-league. No doubt hash was much cheaper then and there.
Now Reading: 'Leif's Voyage According To Flayeyjarbok' from 'An Introduction to Old Norse'by E.V. Gordon ( which has the most pithy and annoying grammar of a language which I have ever encountered.)

Reading done coming to, in and coming back from Japan:

After The Quake, Haruki Murakami
Books Vs Cigarettes, George Orwell
The Inimitable Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse (probably my fave Wodehouse so far)
The Edogawa Rampo Reader (great, so much more than just a japanese Poe)
The Baron In The Trees, Italo Calvino (rather overtly corny and precious at times - guess I was expecting Calvino to be closer to Eco and Borges)
The Old Capital, Yasunari Kawabata (great)
The Invisible Hand, Adam Smith (extracts from The Wealth Of Nations, just the thing to read at Frankfurt airport with two hours of sleep)

alleged current reading:

margaret atwood, the blind assassin
lorrie moore, birds of america
eric ambler, a passage of arms
george r.r. martin, a storm of swords
christopher priest (ed.), expectations
donald allen and robert creeley (eds.), the new american story
niall ferguson, empire

i think i've started like six books since last i finished one. which was another eric ambler.

I thought the ending to 'The Sheltering Sky' was very effective. Novel, not the movie.
'Up Above The world' as a whole struck me as pretty minor-league. No doubt hash was much cheaper then and there.

Sheltering Sky is definitely a better book--it just seemed to me to lose it in the last 1/10, as did Let it Come Down, which I also loved. Having read that Up Above.. was Bowles doing a crime novel, I probably had lowered expectations, which were pleasantly exceeded.

I checked out a library copy of Ghost Train the the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux and I am about half through it. It is his second whack at the train journey he took in Great Railway Bazaar.

PT's voice as a travel writer is pretty recognizable by now, and he does a workmanlike job with the writing, but he doesn't bring much freshness or energy to this book. I rank it low in his list of travel books, but still readable.

I had no idea the man had written so many books!
The only two I've read( and both of which I liked) are 'Mosquito Coast' ( faithful enough film adaptation)and 'O-Zone.'
OD: Adolfo Bioy Casares, 'The Invention of Morel'
This would be part of my 'Lost' reading list.
I had totally forgotten, btw, that Aldous Huxley 'Island' starts much as the tv series does.

finished recently:
too much happiness - alice munro
in country - bobbie ann mason
netherland - joseph o'neill
good faith - jane smiley
iron and silk - mark salzman

started:
shiloh and other stories - bobbie ann mason

netherland's style and language rang v v familiar of something else i've read recently, but i couldn't put my finger on it. still not sure how i feel about the story itself yet, but such a beautiful, rolling use of english. you could just melt right into the story.

the munro is good, but it's not open secrets. i guess it's hard to top a collection that amazing.

How is the new Munro collection overall? The last couple of things she's published in The NY have been just ok.

hmmm i think most of the collection is probably 'just ok', compared to her other work... but still so much better than a lot of other writers. in other words: worth a look, for sure.

That's the one from NRBQNYRB, is it?

I think that's Mavis Gallant

finished Blissed Out, now it's

Geek Love, Katherine Dunn

paris leary and robert kelly (eds.), a controversy of poets

still haven't finished anything

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - forgotten how much I loved this, just wonderful set pieces (the theatre, the step of the tram) and beautifully flowing inter-relation of memory and verbal echoes. A delight.

Thirty Personalities and a Self-Portrait - Wyndham Lewis. Not strictly reading as such, although there is an introduction with brief Lewisian descriptions of the various subjects of his pencil portraits which form the body of the book, and a look at the status of drawing in Western art (which he suggests is lower than it should be, and lower than in Oriental art).

Still can't get enough of Browning. Caliban upon Setebos; or Natural Theology in the Island is an incredible poem, gouts of coagulated misanthropy, the perfect depiction of a craven, hating psychology, that also manages to be beautiful and moving.

i finished closely watched trains and it was great

Probably Hrabal's best book--'I Served the King of England' and 'Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age', the other ones easy to get in English, are OK but nothing amazing, but 'Closely Watched Trains' is SO GREAT!

bohumil harbl

I have started reading Yellow Dog by Martin Amis. At first I thought it was absolutely appalling, just so inaccurately observed & clumsy & showily pompous. Then I started wondering what I'd make of this if it were by no-one in particular and I thought well dammit there's a good bit of life there and british fiction could do with more stupid caricatures and ott sentences. I'm now about 60pp in and enjoying it. It's not like actual lols, but it rolls along entertainingly. Been a while since I read any Amis (my teen fave) fiction - maybe I've been missing it.

It was the target of this famous review by Tibor Fischer, as you probably already knew. I hadn't read it before, just seen it quoted, but I have to admit that it's pretty great!

While I'm here, get yourselves over to the Book of the 00s Poll - not much Amis on there, I'm afraid.

I do remember it! Such fun. I look back fondly on the days when a news story about Martin Amis guaranteed some lols ("Amis Upset by Bad Review", "Amis has Teeth Done Expensively" "Amis Breaks Friends With Barnes"), rather than anger ("Amis: Bloody Islam").

one of Amis's weaknesses is that he isn't content to be a good writer, he wants to be profound; the drawback to profundity is that it's like being funny, either you are or you aren't, straining doesn't help). This ache for gravitas has led to much of Amis's weaker work: Time's Arrow and his writing on nuclear war (it's horrible, isn't it?).

So, so OTM from Fischer. I was trying to put my finger on it while reading Yellow Dog, but ended up on the parallel problem: he wants to be Bellow or Roth or Updike or some humane giant, but he's absolutely not equipped to be. I think he'd also like to have fled a tyrannical regime at some point.

It's a common phenomenon. Nowadays novelists often want to be taken seriously as intellectuals and thinkers when their talent is for something different and, if they are any good, rarer and more valuable. Bellow, who mentored Amis, had a similar need to feel that he counted as a heavyweight thinker. It's a recurrent weakness in his middle and later period novels. Interestingly, like Amis with Hitchens, he too was in thrall to a self-appointed public intellectual and social commentator (in his case Allan Bloom). I suppose if you convince yourself that you are quite the intellectual yourself and you then meet someone who seems in many ways substantially cleverer, you're liable to think you're in the presence of genius. Kingsley was very good at deflating this kind of nonsense.

judging from his fictional portrayal of Bloom in Ravelstein, I wouldn't say Bellow was "in thrall" to him, unless being friends w/somebody qualifies, also aren't all public intellectuals & social commentators pretty much self-appointed? maybe self-invented is the better term.

one of Amis's weaknesses is that he isn't content to be a good writer, he wants to be profound; the drawback to profundity is that it's like being funny, either you are or you aren't, straining doesn't help).

if Amis was merely "content to be a good writer" he'd be accused of being complacent. perhaps profundity, like humor is a matter of personal taste?

if Amis was merely "content to be a good writer" he'd be accused of being complacent.

Dunno. I'm trying to imagine an alternate universe in which Amis isn't given to those hectoring & melodramatic paragraphs on big topics (often: short sentence rhetoric + facts from his recent reading) that clog up the later novels & the non-fiction, and in which he doesn't have a bent for making pronouncements and... it's hard. I can see one world in which he's been sidelined as a limited entertainer, but another in which he's viewed as one of the British comic greats. But, yeah, I admit it's sort of hard to separate lecturing/soapbox Amis from the ambition, confidence and energy necessary for the good stuff.

I'd have thought the suggestion that Bellow was "in thrall" to Bloom was uncontroversial. It's a few years since I read "Ravelstein", but that's exactly the message I took from it. Taking two minutes to go to the Complete Review site for a memory jog/second opinion and reading a single review pretty much at random (The Guardian) I find: "Ravelstein memorialises his ..... mentor Allan Bloom"; "Bellow's hero (and it is obvious that Bloom truly was Bellow's hero)" and so on. I'm sure there's screeds more of this sort of stuff to be found if you're minded to look. Bellow, who has no mean opinion of his own intellect, repeatedly makes it clear that he feels overmatched by Bloom ("I was not about to get in the ring with this Sumo champion representing Platonic metaphysics").

As for all public intellectuals being self-appointed, you can no doubt improve your chances if you are manically pushy and think you understand nearly everything better than nearly everyone else. But I don't think that a Bloom/Hitchens level of narcissism is necessary for the public to decide you have some interesting ideas. All it probably takes is for a television producer to take a shine to your (perhaps modest and self-doubt filled) book.

Many novelists are self-aware enough to know that their talent or interest lies in writing fiction rather than discussing heavyweight ideas (Wodehouse, Jane Austen, Hemingway, Nabokov, Chandler. Wilde are some who come quickly to mind, but I'm sure it'd be possible to compile a very long list). Kingsley Amis once said, "importance is not important: good writing is". Of course people who think that way will be accused of complacency but those who don't agree. But even if you buy into the accusers' philistinism (art isn't important unless its freighted with concepts that have implications for the real world, bad news for composers and abstract painters) what do we gain if a good and popular comic novelist writes bad, pretentious novels of ideas?

I stopped reading Saul Bellow when I read that one book about that one guy who was still struggling to be an intellectual but was trying to round it out by dating hot tomatoes and hanging out with wise guys.

frankiemachine - I've thought a lot about that Kingsley Amis quote and my initial reaction when I read it was that this was absolutely the right way to look at things and this is something I still feel to a great extent. However, one of the questions that bothers me, as a big fan of Kingsley Amis (I'll get to Martin in a sec with any luck), is why KA isn't considered 'great' and whether that matters or not.

And the reason, I think, (as KA once himself said 'most of this is what I think, so I shall avoid such pseudo-humilities from now on) lies in that question of how important you feel importance is. And I've kind of come to the conclusion that importance is kind of important. It was reading Dostoevsky that made me reconsider Amis' quote. A lot of Dostoevsky's writing is enormously, hysterically slipshod, one-note stuff, and yet there's no denying its greatness (not for me anyway); he's concerned with soul defining issues. And that's a good thing.

My response to myself (sorry, this has been a long-running internal dialogue) is that K Amis is essentially a genre writer in the best sense of the concept. He uses traditional forms (comic novel, ghost story, science fiction) because he senses the excitement and fun to be had in those traditions, but he also uses them to touch, in a completely unpompous way (I'm ignoring his later stuff) soul-defining issues - art v individual in The Alteration, responsibility for ones own philosophical perceptions in The Green Man, language, thought, decay and relationships in Ending Up, to take three.

So I still vacillate between the idea that Kingsley Amis is not seen as great because he doesn't want to be seen as great, and that in fact greatness is a bit misleading anyway (socially and politically determined canons) - which is basically the importance isn't important argument - and the idea that Kingsley Amis isn't seen as great because he isn't great: he works within himself and tradition, and that the reason he isn't great is because he doesn't gesture towards greatness.

Okay, straying well in to tl;dr territory - but I increasingly feel that Martin Amis works in a sub-KA category. No, that isn't fair. He's not sub-KA, but he is better working in a sort of genre fiction world than a bourgeois profundity world (Sunday supplement stuff?). He's great at a flying exciting sentence (like a lot of genre writers), he's a superb literary critic (understanding the rules of the game, as it were), and he's got a nifty line in variations on a masculine theme (tho he's crap at women, something often wrongly leveled at his father).

I think somewhere along the line he got the fictional writer, a Hogarth for the modern age at his best, confused with the critic - so that he comes across as a literary critic of life, almost as bad a type as the scientist critic of literature. M Amis is basically a very very good comic writer (which is a fine thing - the height of philosophy it's possible to argue) but he ain't no philosophic writer.

I've wandered off haven't I? I'm a bit pissed to be honest. I think I've just fruitlessly and less articulately said what frankiemachine said a couple of posts up.

Better press 'submit post' then. It is Christmas after all.

The Baron In The Trees, Italo Calvino (rather overtly corny and precious at times - guess I was expecting Calvino to be closer to Eco and Borges)

Don't forget KA's On Drink

OT: Time for a "winter" thread, I say.

Gamalie I don't consider KA a genre writer. He wrote some genre stuff, sure (although I haven't read much of it) but the stuff that seems core to me - Take A Girl Like You, Stanley and the Women, The Old Devils etc - is social comedy. I don't think that qualifies as genre fiction, unless you're going to call people like Jane Austen, E M Forster and Evelyn Waugh genre writers.

I'm a big fan but for me KA ends up being minor because he didn't manage to write at the top of his game for really sustained periods. There are great things in many of his novels, but there are no great novels. My guess is this was really a failure of will - KA was deeply neurotic, beset by personal problems and phobias and cauterising those - through socialising, women, booze, being a professional gadfly and curmudgeon - too often mattered more than the writing.

Re: the stuff about novelists and their big ideas, there is an interesting article by ILX pariah Gilbert Sorrentino about ILX cult favorite Edward Dahlblerg in his collection of essays Something Said where he says something like: he has no ideas but that's OK, he's a novelist and novelists are not supposed to have ideas, they are supposed to write well, which he does.

Motion's biography of Larkin portrays Kingsley Amis as the dominant male personality in Larkin's life, a sort of enforcer of a shared attitude. I don't have the book with me but there's a passage that states that Amis was always there to search out and destroy any sign of literariness or earnestness. A sort of Two Lads Against the World philosophy.

Another critic wrote of Auden that a posture of adolescence held on into adulthood quickly becomes seedy. Larkin's and Amis's lives seem to have become seedy right away. My feeling is that Larkin was powerful enough to transmute his life circumstance into literature (while keeping the faith in his letters) and Amis never could.

Larkin is profound enough for me within his scope. Maybe the right scale isn't intellectualism or genius, but how ruthless you are with yourself. The two both armored themselves against life, but somehow only Larkin was able or willing to write around that.

Almosina I disagree about the relative success Amis and Larkin has in transmuting life into literature, but that's a difference of taste and temperament.

But wrt Amis being the "dominant male personality in Larkin's life, a sort of enforcer of a shared attitude" - if there was a dominant personality in the relationship it was Larkin. Larkin was less of a social animal than Amis, colder if you like, and Amis's approval mattered less to him than his mattered to Amis. Amis always behaved like the eager-to-please junior partner, something Larkin seems to have accepted as no more than his due, even when Amis achieved much greater worldly success. While Kingsley - who of course had ambitions as a poet himself - continued throughout his life to proselytize enthusiastically for Larkin's reputation as a poet, and seems to have felt nothing other than pleasure and pride in Larkin's successess, Larkin deeply (and not altogether secretly) resented Amis's success and the wealth and celebrity that came with it.

scott, how did you get on with alasdair gray?

Colum Mccann - let the great world spin.

i'm somewhere near the beginning, and it's fine, but somewhat cliched,isn't it?