Springtime 2010, and fancies lightly turn to what are you reading?

Today is the vernal equinox. It is time for a renewal of the perrenial question.

I have been reading The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister's Pox by Stephen Jay Gould, wherein he makes a lengthy and (I would hope) unnecessary argument that the sciences and the humanities may peacefully coexist, supporting and encouraging one another, each being a valauble ornament to human knowledge and understanding.

He even argues that scientists able to write in a lucid and pleasing prose style ought to be commended for this accomplishment. Was this in doubt?

Later on, in the part I have not yet read, he apparently will take issue with E.O. Wilson's book on this same subject. Given that Wilson is a highly influential scientist, perhaps Gould's answering tome was not entirely unnessary.

Huzzahs. Maybe this timely augury of spring will cause that rucking great black cloud to bugger off somewhere before I have to go home.

Just started Agape Agape by William Gaddis - one to read in one session I'm feeling at the moment, so I might save it for when I've got a day of lounging ahead of me (specifically Monday I think).

Aimless, or indeed anyone, would you recommend any SJ Gould in particular (even this one perhaps?). I read some of the essays from his earlier works and enjoyed them (more than others writing in the same vein iirc) but for some reason never actually engaged properly with him.

flann o'brien, the dalkey archive

That Flann O'Brien single-handedly saved me from a bout of intense gloom last year.

the first few pages are great, think this may be one for a single session too

GR, if you would like to read some Gould apart from his essays, I would recommend Full House. It contains a well-developed set of ideas about the nature of evolution, as viewed through the lens of statistics.

You do not need to be a math geek to appreciate the argument he makes, because Gould was quite adept at expressing the nub of the matter in ways that a lay reader can easily grasp. For example, in order to lay the groundwork for his argument, he spends a fair portion of the book discussing the disappearance of the .400 hitter in baseball.

The books of essays are generally clustered around some theme. The one that springs to mind as especially interesting to me, was The Mismeasure of Man. It addresses the false path taken by 19th and early 20th century scientists who tried to put a scientific underpinning beneath racism, and uses this to talk about issues of scientific bias and how to counter it. The essays are nice, because you may take them individually and finish them in a fairly short time, in between other reading.

Thanks Aimless, I'll have a look at both of these at some point. Speaking of the scientific racial theory/racism, was reading The Yellow Face (Sherlock Holmes/Conan-Doyle) the other day - had forgotten it was one of the literary expressions of the unhappy Victorian belief that inherited racial characteristics could make a reappearance in the descendants - specifically the belief that mixed race parents could produce a black child, a throwback as it were. It's good therefore the story's tone is one of compassion.

Shd probably stress I don't think it'sthe belief itself that's unhappy (apart from being wrong), rather the way it became an immutable genetic shibboleth, preventing people with mixed or even uncertain backgrounds from marrying into 'pure' white families, was unhappy. Didn't this play a part in the Robert Browning/Elizabeth Barrett courtship?

Didn't this play a part in the Robert Browning/Elizabeth Barrett courtship?

Thinking of the Bowyer/Keeney courtship?

I'm just finishing Whoops! Great, as expected - knew I'd be getting the LRB essays again, but there's lots of stuff I hadn't seen before & it's good to have it together. Do like his comic timing - like he'll throw out a lol at just the right point to keep things moving.

Have so far read the cover, spine and epigraphs of The Pregnant Widow. Stunning return to form, though spine and cover were a bit samey.

Bowyer/Dyer relationship shurely?

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41126000/jpg/_41126056_dyer.jpg

'Meanwhile how much I loved him
I find out now I've lost him'

Ha ha. "My mum says you've got something 'in' you." Maybe his mum had alerted him to the possibility with Dyer as well.

I've been reading "The Sportswriter" by Richard Ford. I started this couple of years ago and didn't get on with it -- I could see Ford was a very talented writer but his world seemed a very gloomy place to spend time. I thought I'd give it another crack and I'm enjoying it a lot more this time.

I've also been rereading Shakespeare and Yeats after buying better editions of their work. It's all about the notes. The RSC complete Shakespeare supplies a pretty comprehensive glossary at the bottom of the page. No excessive scholarly stuff, no idiosyncratic interpretation of meaning, just an explanation of obscurities or words that have changed meaning, and on the same page. Perfect. I also got a copy of the Everyman Yeats because the notes in my paperback Selected Poems were totally inadequate. The notes in the Everyman edition are slightly too fulsome for my taste, and at the back of the book, but it's still a very very nice edition, an attractive hardback at a low price. Much better than the one I had before.

About halfway through Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Whenever things start to go well for the main character, I get nervous, waiting for the next shoe to drop. I haven't quite figured out yet whether Yates just hates this guy or sees him as some kind of tragic figure.

about 2/3 of the way through Lord Jim, which I'm reading mostly in order to better appreciate Fredric Jameson's chapter on Conrad in The Political Unconscious. it's enjoyable enough so far, although I'm not sure if I'll end up going through with my original plan to move on to Nostromo as soon as I'm finished.

sat down and read Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" yesterday, which was pleasantly devastating. I kind of want to read A Sentimental Education at some point, but I'll probably read the other two of his Three Tales first.

also been diggin' Manuel DeLanda's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, a surprisingly readable mishmash of Deleuze, chaos theory, and history of technology.

Carlo Gadda - Acquainted with Grief

Finishing this now: really exuberant prose about his (abusive, painful) relationship with his mother, with the 'action' taking place in a fake South American country. Been ill-ish while reading so its been tough. Even so, something very strange and hard to get at. Looking at his bibliography he has some varied stuff (writings on science, philosophy, history of fascism as well as more fiction) but no translation. Took nearly a hundred years since the publication of Journey to the End of the Night for all of Celine's novels to get a translation, and he has fans like Burroughs and Philip Roth.

Don't have a lot of hope for a similar job on CG anytime soon.

Andrei Platonov - The Fierce and Beautiful World. Harrowing, political, with enough sentences to get at you...lots of symbolism and irrational logic in the stories to wade through...

Currently ignoring the fact that I'm going v. slowly through Madame Bovary w/

Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. It's in parts lol, sweet and headslap.

Finished Infinite Jest last weekend. Admired it more than enjoyed it, but occasionally v. funny.

Read Great Gatsby as a palette cleanser during the week. That is a sad book.

Now Hollywood by Gore Vidal. I think this was an ILX recommendation although I forget who.

p.s. 45 minute train commutes with guaranteed seats are the best. one is crushing books in 2010.

http://members.multimania.nl/forzacm/cantona.jpg

Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King dispatched at the weekend. It was enjoyable, but suffered a bit from the lack of involvement of Eric himself. The author went halfway towards making the book about Cantona's effect on his interviewees instead, which I think was the right approach, but he might have gone further. As it was the book suffered a little from a certain disengagement.

Lots to interest in there, though, in particular that Aime Jacquet specifically wanted Cantona to turn himself into the France's centre-forward from 1996 onwards, post-ban, Zidane and Djorkaeff having taken to his playmaker role in his absence. But Eric basically wussed out, for no particular reason other than the disillusionment that led him to retire early. He should've been the target-man/workhorse when they won the world cup, and that he wasn't was his own doing - certainly not how I'd remembered it.

I started 2666 last night. Really not the opening I expected, but strangely gripping all the same.

Gilead. A+++++++++ amazing and beautiful

Now on to The Lost City of Z.

Recent readings:

Penelope Gilliat: One by One (1965) -- well-written but compromised by the fact that it doesn't know whether it's a suburban middle-class tragicomedy or a novel about London devastated by a plague outbreak. Check out this cover (not the one I have, sadly):
http://pantherhorror.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/penelopegilliatonebyone.jpg

Lono Waiwaiole: Dark Paradise (2009) -- Hawaiian-set crime novel. Wanted to like it, but the first 50 pages kept on introducing more and more new viewpoint characters, none of whom I gave a shit about, so didn't get very far.

Peter Watts: Maelstrom (2001) -- seriously grim, seriously hard sci-fi; really excellent stuff

Shen Congwen: Border Town (1934) -- much-banned-in-China Chinese classic - enjoyable, but oddly simplistic in tone

Ian mcEwan: Solar (2010) -- loved it! Increasingly morally compromised scientist attempts to save world from global warming

Platonov is going slowly but should finish the remaining stories today: striking when he inserts the language of hope and optimism (presumably of the Bolshevik time) then completely flips that by 180 degrees to dehumanize and humiliate the characters that say those thoughts.

Also started on:

John Fahey - Vampire Vultures

Finished the above as well as The Age of Sinatra by David Ohle who is not really talked about at all on the boards. Creates a world you'll get to know just well enough to get by, but the obscurity he creates isn't off putting in the least. Then there are a lot of shit jokes. That helps.

Gonna start on: JG Ballard - High Rise. Can't believe I haven't read this before.

Just finished The Slap by Christos Tsialkos, which was really damn good and recommended. I've been wanting to read it for months and my stupid library finally got it in...worth the wait, for sure.

45 minute train commutes with guaranteed seats are the best. one is crushing books in 2010.

― caek, Saturday, 27 March 2010 19:09 (1 week ago)

I am experiencing this too. When I can stay awake - this is improving, though.

ts: sleeping on trains vs reading on trains.

oscillating between in praise of older women and mailer's advertisements for myself, right now, just skimming through his advertisements and comment at the moment.

i'm on a Henry James tip and loving him much more than i ever thought i would:

Washington Square was the eye opener.
Turn of the Screw i just didn't get the love for
The Aspern Papers i really enjoyed
The Spoils of Poynton is my favourite thus far
The Portrait of a Lady i felt lagged a bit for the first 200 pages then i got into it and now i'm on the home strait i'm extremely keen.

next: The Europeans and then i'll take a break but i intend to read everything i can get my hands on.

in the interim i think i'll take a stab at Balzac.

Jed this is good stuff. I stare into my copy of The Golden Bowl every now and again and wonder. Maybe I'll give Washington Square a go.

what does xyzzzz__ see when he stares into the golden bowl? it's just like you to go for "the difficult one" straight off, j! i recommend The Spoils of Poynton for you, it's very subtle, everything seems to turn on the unsaid, it's very interesting. it has a less satisfying conclusion than Washington Square but it's more "difficult" as well as subtle, which i know you like.

ps i will email you this week re. a dance performance at sadlers wells in may which i may come down specially for, i'll let you know if i book up.

What Maisie Knew!

I wouldn't necessarily go for difficulty, jed! :-) There was an article about The Golden Bowl I read years ago that made it sound quite fascinating.

Actually I recalled today that I have read a couple of his short stories...maybe this will be a Henry James summer.

ps excellent stuff, would be up for the dance! let us know...

Two of the five books from 2666 read now, and I'm really enjoying it. I'm delighted that it's not difficult at all - in fact it's quite inspiring, that the relative straightforwardness of most of it gets me thinking 'Yeah, I could write like this'. Possibly delusionally - the horrible menace everywhere is quite something, particularly seeing the murders have barely appeared yet.

Bolaño pulls one of my favourite tricks quite a lot, which is creating heart-stopping dread by telling you what's going to happen before it does - but he adds the twist that sometimes the thing never happens at all, or if it does it's way off-camera. Not sure what I think of that, but I presume there's some serious delayed gratification building up for later.

i'm enjoying white teeth at the moment

Jed if you love mid-period James (as I do) don't overlook "The Bostonians", it's superb.

I finished Revolutionary Road. I think I admired it more than I liked it overall, since it was a bit grim, but it was pretty good. As writing, there were many deft characterizations and startling sentences to admire. As psychological insight, I'm not sure I buy the main female characters, esp. April Wheeler - the characterizations seemed a bit stuck in a sexist '50s Freudian mentality. But as a time capsule of '50s social conformity and as a window into the narcissistic male soul it was pretty great.

Reading Slaughterhouse 5 at the moment... shortly to move on to a rather interesting looking one I found recently. Let Our Fame be Great by Oliver Bullough. "Journeys among the defiant people of the Caucasus".

On my to read list for the rest of the holidays:

Shades of Grey (Jasper Fforde)
A Book of Silence (Sara Maitland)
The Man in the High Castle (Philip K. Dick)
Women (Charles Bukowski)
Russia - A Short History (Ascher)

Just went through 2 Agatha Christies, and am about to start 'Baba Yaga Laid an Egg' by Dubravka Ugresic.

Tarjei Vesaas - The Ice Palace. I got this recommended to me on the Scando Lit: search thread. It does fit any preconceptions of what a Scandinavian literature could read like. Not sure what I feel about that however it is quite a piece of writing, really captures how affecting a memory and their secret knowledge could be so affecting.

The mirroring of that to the landscape is really well done, too.

Finishing: Kenzaburo Oe - Rouse up O Young Men of the New Age!

Also started on Edmund White - A Boy's Own Story

xyzzzzzt, i've been meaning to read that david ohle for ages. there's a sequel, as well, isn't there? or is 'age of sinatra' the sequel itself?

Its 'Motorman', 'Age of Sinatra', then 'The Pisstown Chaos'.

Have given the books back so can't re-check but apart from Moldenke I'd say its a pretty loose link between the first two. 'The Pisstown Chaos' is something else, hard going..

oh ok

right now i want to finish rereading infinite jest and then read some books on lacan and some sci fi and some books of short stories and then hopefully finish the man without qualities but who knows

I've been kicking back and re-reading some of the final few Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian. These require little or no concentration, as the plots, scenes and dialogue are eminently clear, even to the meanest understanding. If you have once read through the series, rereading any part of it is like a homecoming.

Yesterday I went out and bought a pile of used books, which may soon tempt me back onto the path of venturous reading.

I've started reading We Think the World of You by J.R. Ackerley. I like that the narrator makes no effort to make himself seem more likeable or noble than he is. Some pretty funny passages so far.

A good way through A High Wind In Jamaica, which probably shares the same font/design style as the Ackerley title immediately above. Picked up largely thanks to the babies-as-another-species quotation that opens The Book Of Leviathan. The narrative voice is priceless stuff.

'We Think the World of You' and 'A High Wind In Jamaica' are both fantastic books!

Bolaño pulls one of my favourite tricks quite a lot, which is creating heart-stopping dread by telling you what's going to happen before it does - but he adds the twist that sometimes the thing never happens at all, or if it does it's way off-camera.

I agree with you on this. It's amazing how he continues to build tension through the whole book again and again. Last weekend I finished '2666' and I was so concerned with following the main story that I missed quite a lot of references to a lot things. The thing also with Bolaño is that all his books are their own reference material, and there are cross-references to his other material all over the place, also to his poetry, essays and lectures. It's basically one book.

Kenzaburo Oe - Rouse up O Young Men of the New Age!

this book sux iirc

Right. Just finishing this now and finding it hard to decide whether juxtaposing essays on William Blake with his mentally disabled son's story works or not. Certainly haven't read anything like it.

Is there anything else by him you'd recommend? A Personal Matter?

i havent read that altho its supposed to be good. d8d sum1 that was really into japanese fiction and iirc she really repped "the day he himself..." collection that story in particular. i enjoyed the one that indirectly references the sarin gas attacks. its a lot less experimental than his other works, a lot warmer, more traditionally novelistic & story-driven. its actually kinda victorian.

reading or really rereading a story collection edited by ilx fave nick hornby "speaking with the angel". its really v v hit or miss but im really liking the incredibly optimistic force animating most of the stories, even the sad or angry ones. its a weird monument to the not really very long ago time when it felt (culturally) like the 21st c. meant something was just beginning, rather than something was ending.

also the melissa banks story is quietly brilliant its hard 2 rite so unshowily abt happiness & trust

really really really

I remember in that anthology that I was really surprised how good the story by Colin Firth was. And the Patrick Marber one was ace, too. The Zadie Smith and Helen Fielding ones were balls, from memory.

right now i want to finish rereading infinite jest and then read some books on lacan and some sci fi and some books of short stories and then hopefully finish the man without qualities but who knows

― thomp, Sunday, April 11, 2010 7:43 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

We all give ourselves away.

Oh, before I'm misunderstood, I mean that affectionately and not at all condescendingly. It's only an observation and a lol I guess.

'the silent cry' by oe is rly great

I remember in that anthology that I was really surprised how good the story by Colin Firth was. And the Patrick Marber one was ace, too. The Zadie Smith and Helen Fielding ones were balls, from memory.

the marber one is maybe my least favorite itc filled with short bursts of unimportant detail and its kinda gross. i liked the zadie smith one altho it feels tossed-off & a little silly. i skipped the fielding story bcuz tbh lifes too short.

one of the things that i thought was interesting abt the stories tho was how many of them adopt a highly self-conscious & moderately inarticulate voice thats neither really personal nor inauthentic. idk if its an attempt at escaping cliched 'writerly' forms or just failed verisimilitude but it felt dated and really specific to that moment in time. i also remember eggers and hornby doing this in a couple of mcsweeneys short story collections altho a little more effectively.

The Marber was gross, true, but oddly sweet. You're spot-on about the voices... very well put. Hornby did it well in that McSweeneys story about the VCR that shows the apocalyptic future.

Jim Thompson - A Swell-Looking Babe. The usual brutality, and one of his best performances.

Just notices on wiki there are 12 books from '52 - '55. He is a writer where it would be nice to have a boxset of those. Really would benefit from that kind of treatment.

Onto Leonard Sciascia - Wine Dark Sea

finally getting through pynchon's 'v,' which is enjoyable if sometimes exhaustingly wacky.

bamcquern i kind of have no idea what you're talking about but ok i guess?

why do i not have time to read lately

The Sportswriter - Richard Ford. I can see why this is so admired: Ford is a terrific observer and stylist. But I had some problems with it, particularly Frank Bascombe's yearning for suburban mundanity, which seemed clumsily overdone at times. Ford sacrifices the plausibility and integrity of his character to make what seems to me a fairly clunky philosophical point. There's a bleakness to Ford's world-view that makes the novel easier to admire than love. I'm ndecided whether to move on to Independence Day, but I'll probably pick it up sometime.

Also Summertime by Coetzee. An interesting comparison with the Ford - Coetzee is another bleak-world-view writer who it's easier to admire than love. His pared-down prose isn't as immediately seductive as Ford's lusher style, but he outclasses Ford in the clarity, honesty and psychological penetration. I thought this was exceptionally good.

For a book club, I tried to read A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I didn't manage to get through the last Irving I attempted (Cider House Rules) and couldn't get through this either. Managed about 200 pages by which time I had developed an unhealthy loathing of Irving and his horribly dishonest and manipulative book.

Grrr typos.

reading nicholson baker's the anthologist & enjoying it immensely.

also started lorrie moore's anagrams though im not really diggin it

1) Richard Brookhiser's bitchy, hilarious account of the 1984 prez election The Outside Story.
2) Words in the Air, the collection of Elizabeth Bishop-Robert Lowell letters.
3) Supreme Power, about FDR's efforts to pack the Supreme Court.

xp to frankiemachine - i really think independence day is the best of the 3. i read ID first for school and really, really loved it. then i tried reading the sportswriter, which i just couldn't quite get into. and then there's the lay of the land, which i REALLY couldn't get into. somehow, that meandering style totally worked for me in ID but not in the other two.

lay of the land is totally hilarious tho i think i may have liked it best out of the three.

Men And Cartoons by Lethem - a mixed bag, natch, but "Super Goat Man" is hilarious.

xp hmmm really? maybe i'll give it another go, then. his stuff is also the kind of stuff you really gotta be in the right frame of mind for (which i was def not at the time, i was mad stressed). i think i got 1/3 of the way in and gave up.

i've been reading this same jane smiley book for what feels like months now: it's good but it's all about horses and racing, two things which i have no knowledge or interest in. i've also been rereading the crying of lot 49 on the train.

Cheers Justin, I'll bear that in mind.

Been dipping into Martin Amis's "Money" (which would be a re-read) and Updike's "Couples" (which wouldn't) trying to make up my mind which to read next. The Updike is a paperback originally belonging to one of my parents and around 40 years old, very yellowed and frayed. The Updike starts brilliantly but I know from past experience that his style tends to wear me down over the long haul. Amis is a much shallower writer but an effortless and entertaining read.

Remind me how it starts, please. I found it rather wearing, long and grey (though not enough to stop me finishing it) but I hadn't found the Rabbit books yet, so it might be tastier meat now.

It sets up the relationship between Piet and Angela (hedonism, boozy parties, his social inferiority, sexual prurience along with her lack of interest in doing it with him, etc). It's nicely done, but the real glory is in the descriptive material: eg of the house ("the slender mullions of the windows whose older panes were flecked with oblong bubbles and tinged with lavender...............He loved how this house welcomed into itself in every season lemony flecked rhomboids of sun whose slow sliding revolved it with the day, like the cabin of a ship on a curving course"). My problem is I know from experience this sort of stuff tends to delight me for a few dozen pages and then start to feel like wading through treacle. Terrific for a short story, tiring over a 500 page novel, so much so that I end up becoming wilfully blind to the stylistic felicities in my anxiety just to get through the damn thing. I may just have talked myself out of reading this: we'll see.

"lemony flecked" deeply irritating 2 me

I like the image, but even as I was inputting these excerpts and reading them back I was starting to realise they don't read very well out of context. The ultra lyrical bits I've picked out seem fussy-pretty in isolation. And he does have a fantastic ear, which you don't get the sense of in half-sentence excerpts.

anyone read any john haskell? http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/aug/13/i-am-not-steve-martin/ was intriguing

Can I read 'Independence Day' without first reading 'The Sportswriter,' or would I just be cheating myself?

i dont see why not i think all 3 f(n) p well independently

currently reading: gerald's party by robert coover. just finished: a couple of sean russell fantasy novels

i read independence day first, it's def a stand-alone book. i dunno, i think they're the kind of books that it almost makes it more interesting to read them out of order?

I'm finishing up 'White Teeth' and 'Food of a Younger Land'.

So, I need something to read for a two week trip to Spain in May, something chunky that I'll look forward to cracking open. I'm thinking 'The Corrections', and maybe that Lipsky/DFW book?

my attention span is in a knightquest battle w/ infinite jest

Osip Mandelstam - The Noise of Time. A collection of his prose. Shares, with Platonov, similar interests in the East as a means of escape. Then there is plenty of autobiog of him and his poet friends. Fourth Prose serves as a dissection of his struggles with higher authorities. V good, needs even more attention than I am able to give it at the mo.

Next: Herman Broch - The Sleepwalkers.

xp def recommend the corrections for that: it's kind of dumb in places but entertaining.

Osip Mandelstam - The Noise of Time

Especially loved the childhood reminiscences in this.

Anyone read any Peter van Greenaway here and got any recommendations?

Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick - first Dick I've read since 2001, when I read a whole slew of his stuff right after freshman year. Dipping into that first almost unreadable opening sentence (waaay too many clauses) hit the right notes of nostalgia; I remember Ubik having one of the most awkward beginnings I've ever read and being blown away by the end.

Recent readings...

Elizabeth Taylor: A Dedicated Man -- ace collection of short stories and, tragically, the last thing by her I hadn't read. Life is now empty.

Joseph Brodsky: To Urania -- selected poems. Not sure how much I got out of these. But then, the day I was reading them, I also managed to wear my underpants back-to-front all day, so I may be a bit dim for him.

Andrez Bursa: Killing Auntie -- novella by Polish writer who died in 1957 at age 25 - man decides on a whim to kill his aunt, who dominates his life -- very good, but assembled from drafts after Bursa's death, and the last few chapters don't seem to quite match the rest

Richard Stark: The Green Eagle Score -- fun Parker crime shenanigans

Margaret Drabble: The Millstone -- young single woman has baby in 1960s Britain -- ghood, but weirdly affectless 1st-person narration -- probably mainly of sociological interest as snapshot of attitudes at a certain time

Penelope Lively: Treasures of Time -- very enjoyable, but can't think of much else to say

Good to see Elizabeth Taylor there. I've read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont and Angel and in quite different ways thought they were both incredibly bleak and v funny (kind of warm but also terrifyingly unsparing).

Started A Wreath of Roses, which starts amazingly, but for some reason I now can't remember never actually finished it.

I need to go back to her at some point. Doesn't necessarily play to my tastes (wch can obv be a good thing, but, y'know, makes it harder) but on both occasions I've found myself gripped. She somehow (duh, good writing) makes the things I find intensely boring - relationship stuff, characters, personality, aging etc, all that stuff about humans - and draws out the great psychic and spiritual stakes that are in play.

I need to read more Elizabeth Taylor. One problem is I can't remember for certain which ones I've read. Definitely Blaming, The Blush, Angel, The Wedding Group. One or two others. Mainly the Virago Modern Classics series. The ones in the bookshops now are differently focussed, seeming to include a few titles that were presumably out of print before but not featuring some of the Virago ones.

Joseph Brodkey's Stories in an Almost Classical Mode. I really wanted First Love and Other Stories but I don't get it until the end of the week.

Robert W. Merry's A Country of Vast Designs, about James Polk and the Mexican War.

Richard Stark: The Green Eagle Score -- fun Parker crime shenanigans

Have you perused Darwyn Cooke's adaptation of The Hunter? Swell stuff; that first page ("Go to hell" on the Brooklyn Bridge) is sure to please.

OTHERWISE:

I seem to be perpetually perusing Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov And The Risks Of Fiction/ - Wood's an excellent stylist himself.

NEXT: Remainder by Tom McCarthy or We Think The World Of You by Ackerley (as mentioned a few weeks back on this thread).

re Elizabeth Taylor, a grear one to start with is 'At Mrs Lippincote's', which was actually her first novel--"unsuitable" wife of a military officer in a boarding house during WW2. Great stuff. I don't know that I share Gamaliel's literary leanings in that I like character and relationship stuff, but his comments re the quality of her work are spot-on.

I need that Darwyn Cooke. Have only seen it at hideous price in local shops. internet bookshop time, I think.

Am now reading a collection of Fitz-James O'Brien's 19th-Century sci-fi, fantasy and horror short stories, which I made myself via Lulu, since there seems to be no such collection in print. Great freaky stories (man falls in love with microscopic nude woman he discovers via world's most powerful telescope; psychopathic Gypsies create army of toy-sized soldiers possessed by demons to kill all a town's Christian children on Christmas Eve; boarding house haunted by invisble killer monster; secret Mormons, alchemists, etc)

NEXT: Remainder by Tom McCarthy or We Think The World Of You by Ackerley (as mentioned a few weeks back on this thread).

I highly recommend the Ackerley, which I finished last weekend. You can judge my lack of reading time by the fact that it took me a couple of weeks to read a ~200 page book. It's really great though - packs quite an emotional punch, in a wonderfully elegant and understated way.

Just finished Wilkie Collins's "Woman In White". It's taken since before Christmas to read it (with toilet and lunch breaks of course), but it was worth it. I thought the defeat was pretty lacklustre for such a long book though.

Count Fosco is one of the great cool villains

Totally incoherent, chaotic and ill-managed period of reading for me at the moment. However, I did pick up RW Southern's Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe today, just as an explanatory gloss on something, ended up totally engrossed and spent all afternoon reading it.

Clear, well set out, and appealing.

Also, to relive what I can only term some kind of 'information anxiety', brought on by too much internet and factual books, went back to one of my favourite collections of poetry, Men and Women by R Browning, humane, urbane, robust and witty, and restores those characteristics back to the world.

We Think The World Of You by Ackerley

Up to page 70 or so - Ackerley has mastered the art of quiet, cringe-worthy social situations - you can scarcely get through five pages without squirming a bit.

Had a couple of weeks in Ireland, mould-scrubbing labour by day & intensive reading by night. No TV, no internet: for a few days, I had an attn span. I used it to get back to the 17th century. A lot of Milton (PL & chunk of the prose), and a bit about Milton, & the English Revolution - in fact yes reread Hill's Milton and the English Revolution</a>. (I probably should have made more of a showing on the Paradise Lost thread).

Lots of history: more of Diarmaid McCullough's [i]Reformation, & it really is astonishingly good - so well organised. Had another look at Macaulay after Noodle Vague mentioned him next to Gibbon on the History Books thread, but, no, it's no good, he annoys me.

Once I'd overloaded my brain with information, reread Valis and A Maze of Death. Now I'm back and I'm just picking up books for a second, staring at them in puzzlement, then walking off to look at ILX.

Some happy-go-lucky tagging there.

right now i want to finish rereading infinite jest and then read some books on lacan and some sci fi and some books of short stories and then hopefully finish the man without qualities but who knows

― thomp, Sunday, April 11, 2010 12:43 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark

I'm not really reading any fiction at the moment, but I picked up a used copy of Mann's Doctor Faustus the other day cuz I've been really into the Frankfurt School lately and I know Adorno was Mann's "musical consultant" (or something) on the book; plus, Lukacs was always stanning for Mann as an exemplar of 'realism' in these goofy debates about socialist aesthetics.

Doctor Faustus is also the last used bk I picked up! Mann and Adorno struck a correspondence, he was Mann's 2nd Vienesse school insider!

Haven't been reading much -- been glued to the snooker world championships!

b. snowy: nothing particularly advanced -- bruce fink's intro, 'the lacanian subject'; the zizek-edited 'everything you always wanted to know about lacan but were afraid to ask hitchcock'. plus i have 'an introductionary dictionary of lacanian psychoanalysis' and the first couple volumes of the seminar around, but i don't think i'm going to read more than chunks of them. it's mostly so i can follow various bits of zizek, i think.

i have started reading 'the savage detectives' & am roaring through it with surprised delight. I bought it unspoilered thinking 'ah yes this person is an important writer they say' and expecting some sort of great serious sadness and instead it hits the same glee in me as does foucault's pendulum, i want to swallow it all up as quickly as possible and i want to hang around inside it for days and days and I put it aside at the ends of chapters grinning stupidly at the world.

yah savage detective is really wonderful

mavis gallant collection "in transit" kinda the perfect book 4 me tbh so shorn & precise & beautiful. filled with games & the consequences of games. the story "when we were nearly young" hurt me 2 read

b. snowy: nothing particularly advanced -- bruce fink's intro, 'the lacanian subject'; the zizek-edited 'everything you always wanted to know about lacan but were afraid to ask hitchcock'. plus i have 'an introductionary dictionary of lacanian psychoanalysis' and the first couple volumes of the seminar around, but i don't think i'm going to read more than chunks of them. it's mostly so i can follow various bits of zizek, i think.

― thomp, Monday, May 3, 2010 12:45 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I don't know if this is something you'd be interested in, but lately I've been getting into Eric Santner, a theologian who's tight with Zizek and writes very cool stuff on psychoanalysis. I'm currently reading his book On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, which is one of the better treatments I've encountered of Freud in relation to Jewish thought.

Roudinesco's biography is the only book about or by Lacan I need.

haha Aleister Crowley = Lacan.

Has anyone read Malcolm Bowie's book on Lacan? (he wrote extensively on French lit, esp Proust, hence my interest)

Picked up Knut Hamsun's Victoria last night. Should be able to finish it tonight, as it is short. Star-crossed lovers, but with a very keen appreciation of what that feels like to the participants. Romance meets literature, old school.

Have you read Hunger, Aimless?it's on my shelf but I'm feelin cueiously reluctant to read it. Got a bad rep from my flatmate. Think he called it some bs.

Read Hunger last year and from what I think I know of your tastes its right up your alley Gamaliel! (translated by Sverre Lyngstad who is very critical of the earlier translation)

Picked up Knut Hamsun's Victoria last night.

This and Hunger are really good!

Just finished MP Shiel's 'THe Purple Cloud' (1901): volcanoes spew cyanogen gas all over the world, killing every animal except for the narrator, who may have been responsible, due to weird cosmological/theological shenanigans. He then develops two hobbies: burning down cities (starting with London) and building a vast golden palace with a lake of red wine. Glorious and daft.

Hunger (in the I.B. Singer version) was the first book I ever purchased for myself, back in the summer of 1973. It is one hella strange, but compelling, book. The narrator is starving and half mad, but he tries not to notice.

Oddly, when I was only a bit younger (1971?), I read Crime and Punishment and Raskolnikov seemed like some weird alien creature from another universe, but somehow I was right in tune with the narrator of Hunger; what with his whimsical self-distractions and denials he seemed... familiar.

Roudinesco's biography is the only book about or by Lacan I need.

― alimosina, Tuesday, May 4, 2010 4:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

In the final years, the process of shortening reached its natural conclusion in the ‘non-session’, in which ‘the patient was not allowed either to speak or not to speak’ as Lacan ‘had no time to waste on silence’. With the help of non-sessions he averaged 80 patients a day in the penultimate year of his life. Non-sessions were perhaps an improvement on sessions, in which, disinhibited through dementia, he would indulge his bad temper, raging at patients and occasionally punching them or pulling their hair.

I have no idea if Lacan suffered end-of-life dementia. I can say that such dementia can often lead to similar incidents of uncontrolled angry behavior. For example, my dad exhibited some of this phenomenon, and he was pretty good natured as a rule. So, the serious bad faith of the author is not really apparent in the quotation you chose, unless the presumed dementia is a figment.

I take exception to author's extremely loaded choice of words, which makes it sound like dementia was simply a convenient excuse for Lacan to "indulge his bad temper" (seriously, wtf?!?) and beat up his patients -- which he wanted to do all along, of course, because he was an evil sociopath! Also, even though his bizarre 'non-sessions' were happening at the same time as the dementia-related violent outbursts, we're supposed to interpret the former as the calculated actions of a clear-headed man motivated by insatiable greed. This interpretation seems... uncharitable, to say the least.

Well, that puts more context around the quote, but it seems like a fairly extreme interpretation of the author's subtext.

I don't really believe in "subtext".

but to abandon this discussion and go in a totally different direction... I've just started reading The Making of Law by Bruno Latour (very cool 'comparative ethnographer', mostly writes on the processes of scientific research), and I'm finding it fascinating so far. basically, he got insider access to some of the meetings of the Conseil d'Etat, the supreme body of French administrative law, and brought back extremely detailed (but surprisingly fun!) reports of its workings. I'm only about 30 pages in; right now he's describing a meeting where everyone's pulling their hair out because they're considering an appeal that was filed on the grounds that a certain form that needed to be signed by the Prime Minister wasn't, and while the Prime Minister's office assures the Conseil d'Etat that they have the signed original in their possession, they won't let anyone see it and are basically just asking the councillors to take their word for it.

Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France - Have a friend who's publishing a book on B, so feel I should get myself back to where I can hold my own/ask pertinent questions in a conversation on the topic. Enjoying his style, as per - I like the work his balanced & precise webs of distinct abstractions make you do, tho it's a little suffocating sometimes. OTOH, his arguments get on my nerves - propertied interests, honour this, chivalry that, don't touch it you'll break it - happier with the earlier stuff iirc.

Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Scored the new-ish Roger Lonsdale edition for ridic price, so back to this. A straight-up pleasure. The best aphoristic critic, bit of moralising, anecdotal sideshows, & a look into a world where Prior, Young etc are still significant poets. God bless fat Sam.

And God bless Lonsdale as well, knows his onions - did that great and more or less ground-breaking anthology of 18th Century women poets.

Oh yeah. Think the precursor - The New Oxford Book of 18th Century English Verse - is ground-breaking in itself: changed the map of the period for non-specialists, brought what was (canonically) the boring stretch of English verse to life - period looks incredibly energetic in that anthology, rather than Pope + Gray's Elegy + ?????let's just wait for Romanticism to show up.

Just finished Richard Hughes' In Hazard - tremendous stuff; just a straight-on plunge into a freak catastrophe on the high seas, the crew under the most extreme duress imaginable for nearly a week. As meticulous as these things get, and fun to think about as Hughes' own pissing contest with Conrad's Typhoon (pretty much confirmed when the latter gets namechecked five pages in).

Lately I've been reading Mark Twain's Following the Equator.

Following the Equator has a lot of good patches in it, and some mediocre-journalism filler material, and a few really ace fulminations - such as his blast on missionaries in the South Pacific. Have fun with it.

With Twain, I have a hard time deciding what's filler, since sometimes the most tangential shaggy-dog stories and narrative detours are among the most entertaining parts. His travel writing rarely progresses in a straight line when it can proceed by zig-zags and curlicues. I guess I could do without some parts which might be considered filler, such as a poem that he quoted at length for no other reason than he read it during his travels. Another entertaining piece of Twain travel-writing is Roughing It. I still haven't read Innocents Abroad so I have that to look forward to too.

The Girl Who Played With Fire. I'm hooked. I keep reading ahead - terrible habit.

Just started The Imperfectionists. Holy shit so far.

Steven Church: The Day After The Day After -- I ought to be the ideal audience for this book, having been obsessed with nuclear war and nuclear war movies since I was a kid, but this is a big dull dud of a book. A 30-page magazine article padded relentlesly to 200 pages.

Peter de Vries: Slouching to Kalamazoo -- not at all what I was expecting, but really really good!

Don Delillo - End Zone

read recently

tim winton - cloudstreet (ugh)
the travels of sir john mandeville (great)
edward said - orientalism (rereading, great)
volume of 3 nancy mitford novels (all hilarious and great)

recently:

gore vidal - hollywod
dubliners
here is new york - e.b. white
red dragon - thomas harris

Remainder by Tom McCarthy - hot damn. Bears some comparison to Synechdoche, New York.

Biblio-frenzy, as of late. Panicky too, as once Remainder's done with, there's nothing immediately at hand. Maybe Invitation To A Beheading, maybe not.

Daniil Kharms: Today I Wrote Nothing -- absdurdist short-short 'stories' from Soviet writer who starved to death in prison during seige of Leningrad, having been charged with 'anti-Soviet activities in the field of children's literature'. His life story is more interesting than most of his fiction, I suspect, which has the flaw of being absurdist fiction written by someone with no sense of humour at all.

I'm laid up with a broken arm and throat infection and burning through The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Ridiculously entertaining.

my semester ends thursday and i've got a few books on a pile in my room i intend on starting; satanic verses, middlemarch, steinbeck's 'the wayward bus.'

just started 2666, roberto bolano. somewhat worried because i'm finding it really quite funny, yet none of the rapturous reviews quoted mention this, and in fact hint rather at horror. and it gets weirder, since about thirty pages in, three of the main characters visit a lady who talks of a painter who amused her greatly, while her one-time friend, an art critic, was plunged into great depression by his work, and when learning of her reaction declared she knew no more about art than a cow, and never spoke to her again.

lol

the different sections are p divergent in tone with only the part about the crimes really being horrifying. but that part is so powerful & visceral & fathomless it casts a retrospective pall over the other, lighter sections

atm: speak, memory

Was totally right that I preferred earlier Burke. Thoughts on the Present Discontents much more like it.

morrison i kind of like kharms - i haven't read that collection but the incidences / incidents collection i think's pretty great. dunno if that's in there, or if it's the same translation it used to be.

I'm laid up with a broken arm and throat infection and burning through The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Ridiculously entertaining.

― sofatruck, Tuesday, May 11, 2010 12:50 AM (18 hours ago) Bookmark

The second one is the same. There are some really oddly written sections, but overall it's killer, the epitome of a page-turner.

Now I'm reading 'The Lions of Al-Rassan', which I've heard is one of Kay's best. A slow start so far, but he's like that - it took me forever to get through the meandering prologue of 'Sailing to Sarantium', and I almost gave up on it, but it turned out to be fab.

Yeah, he gets weirdly precise with some of the computer related stuff, saying things like "He finished writing his email to <eri✧✧✧@millen✧✧✧.s✧>" instead of just "He finished emailing Ericka". Reads like someone who is totally unfamiliar with basic computing.

morrison i kind of like kharms - i haven't read that collection but the incidences / incidents collection i think's pretty great. dunno if that's in there, or if it's the same translation it used to be.

That's in there, and I quite like it... I suspect Kharms was an utter pain in the arse to know, though. Kind of, "I'm CRAZY, I am!"

Yeah, he gets weirdly precise with some of the computer related stuff, saying things like "He finished writing his email to <eri✧✧✧@millen✧✧✧.s✧>" instead of just "He finished emailing Ericka". Reads like someone who is totally unfamiliar with basic computing.

And that page and a half detailing exactly what she bought at Ikea - bizarre. I have a feeling that since Larsson died just after delivering the manuscripts they went pretty light on the editing. Never mind, it was still great. Can't wait to get stuck into the last one.

... i just found i actually do own an unread copy of 'today i wrote nothing' -- suspect it was remaindered? or cheap on amazon? but yeah it's a different translation to the one in the old collection -- viz. it is called 'events' and not 'incidents' ...

Xpost.

I wanted to chalk up the weird expository details to bad translation, but the IKEA stuff ("she made herself comfortable on her Verksaem IKEA chair") was offputting and not due to bad translation. Did not stop me from blowing through both books and enjoying them. Can't wait for the third honestly.

Oh yeah, and so far have read 'Solar' and am struggling through 'Matterhorn.'

Is Solar any good? I get suspicious when I see ecstatic reviews which concdentrate more on the politics than the acual story.

The excerpt they published in the New Yorker seemed like a parody of a McEwan story. So bad it made me want to throw it across the room, but I was reading it on a computer so I didn't.

'Solar' was middling McEwan. It's supposed to be a dark comedy but doesn't quite pull it off. Better than 'On Chesil Beach' and 'Saturday' though.

a true achievement!

xxxpost... How is Matterhorn? I was intrigued by the NYT review a few weeks ago.

Matterhorn is a struggle. It's the guy's debut novel and the book reads like it.

Yesterday I was reading it and it was at the part where the main character's platoon has arrived in a part of the jungle where they need to stay. Suddenly a jet flies by and sprays the jungle, and them, with a chemical -- there was a screwup and the jet sprayed on the wrong day. One of the characters wonders what it is they were sprayed with. They call in and find out. Radio man says something like "Oh, it's just this chemical called Agent Orange. Don't worry though. They say it's safe and only kills plants." I think I said out loud at that point, "Oh, c'mon!"

Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint - the book is, thus far (more than halfway done), one long bout of procrastination and rationalizations about procrastination by a not-very-interesting doofus intellectual; so yeah - fun.

righteousmaelstrom: pretty amateurish all right.

The definitive treatment of Agent Orange in literature is in Meditations in Green, by Stephen Wright (not the comedian).

I finished 2666 on Thursday and liked it - though it doesn't move me in the same way that a well-written straight narrative would, it's about as good a piece of postmodernist style as I've read since Underworld

Yesterday I started and finished Indignation by Philip Roth. First time that's happened in forever. Okay, it's a short book, but a dream to read, and also a great example of how engaging a book can be when it (mostly) eschews perspective shifts and other fancy tricks.

I am finally FINALLY finishing The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch. As I thought even before getting to the final section the essay on the 'The Disintegration of Values' really makes this book. I suspect that on subsequent readings I'll end up agreeing with Milan Kundera's assessment that the different sub-sections within the last part don't exactly cohere together to a polyphonious (dis)harmony.

Also it gave me the chills to read a lot of this while the outcome(s) of the general election were being fought over.

Riders Of The Chariot - Patrick White. so good.

the man was a genius. like a combination between the realism of the psychological novel and the modernism of Proust - he succeeds in digging deep into the readers soul and stay there, with his epic novels.

this and Voss are probably his best works.
(i didnt read Tree Of Man yet).

Edith Wharton's short stories

Evan Thomas - The War Lovers

Within a Budding Grove. I fell asleep after 3 pages but that's a reflection on my lack of sleep last night, not the writing.

eh, I doubt proust would take offense

Recently, three of the Penguin Central European Classics (Central European Classics) (all ace, in different ways)...

The Elephant, Slawomir Mrozek -- great absurdist short-short stories (reminded me of Daniil Kharms, only much much better)

How I Came to Know Fish, Ota Pavel -- quite touching memoir about learning to fish, being half-Jewish under the Nazis in Czechoslovakia, and going mad

Proud To Be A Mammal, Czeslaw Milosz -- essays and memoirs

Also Dorothy B Hughes: In a Lonely Place -- great proto-Highsmith noir thriller

Any thoughts on Thousand Summers of Jacob de Zoet, the new David Mitchell? I know a couple of people have bought it/read it. I... can't make up my mind. Some good things - there's a nice aesthetic tingle produced by yoking constructs of Dutch 18th C Enlightenment/language with Japanese, and also his brief thumbnail detail has a sort of... well, what I wd approximate ignorantly with Japanese brush strokes, or the fine detail of its poetry/art.

Yet, and yet, it's awful slow burning. Mitchell's good at little set pieces, but actually, not an awful lot is happening. Continual hints at mystery are beginning to produce an atmosphere of a type of magic realism, whereas Cloud Atlas details a sense of real magic, rather than gesturing towards a sort of totemic/symbolic/metaphoric spirituality, which always strikes me as half-baked, and not a little lubberly.

There's a touch of the TEFL about the language stuff and a touch of the history lesson about more than a few of the character speechs.

His style grates on me sometimes as well, with characters' thinking descriptions in a most writerly fashion. Noticed this as well in Cloud Atlas, but it mattered less.

I read the intro then passed it on to the missus because I had other reading to do - fantastic set-piece is about right. I may give it a go next, though I'm a little put off by your news tbh - I'm not a fan of the magical realist stuff unless it means something, and the bits I've encountered generally don't (seem to)

dostoyevsky

Scratching round after finishing the David Mitchell Thousand Autumns. Picked up and put down a couple of things. Didn't really feel like reading another novel immediately, so plumped for Arthur Rackham's History of the Countryside (British countryside). Whenever I've dipped into this it's looked great - bought it second hand as a present for a woodcutter friend of mine years ago.

Then I remembered I'd also start Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow while making my way home pissed the other night, and that I'd been enjoying it as well, so will probably divide my time between the two.

dostoyevsky

haha oh man did you finish infinte jest?

i keep picking things up and putting them down but i have managed to finish bolaño's antwerp and a couple of trashy fantasy novels

Men In Space - Which is good, often great, but with nowhere near the laser-precision of REMAINDER. It's almost certainly a first novel that just happens to be a second novel.

It's almost certainly a first novel that just happens to be a second novel.

Yup, that's right - written first, published second, Remainder came in a burst afterwards iirc. Have high hopes for C later this summer.

This week:

Georges Simenon - The Engagement
Gyula Krudy - The Adventures of Sindbad: Really good fun from Hungary (from round 1912). One of the few things that could stand up to Borges (although there are severe differences)
Heinrich Boll - The Lost of Katharina Blum. Taking the temperature of early 70s W Germany. Want to see more novelists doing things like this today.

haha oh man did you finish infinte jest?

haha yeah - it's kind of turning into heavy novels month - i think after i leave off dostoyevsky i'm going to try and quickly reread joyce before i go to dublin /:

p.s. i am going to dublin for bloomsday with my girlfriend
p.p.s. is this the nerdiest thing i have ever done? probably

i think as long as it doesnt involve a costume or any kind of 'role-play'...

what dosto are you reading? i was thinking of having a go at demons bcuz i was watching a lot of early soviet film in the last month are so & it felt kinda appropriate

I loved Demons (The Devils in my trans). Not canonical Dostoevsky I believe, but it just seemed to be the distillation of Dostoevsky character portrait and interaction - all self-deluding machination, slyness, and self-pity.

What does one do on Bloomsday? My sister's lived there four years and has been too lazy to check it out even once.

Think the men just head for Sandymount Strand to rub one out while looking at a crippled girl.

(j/k obvs - but I suppose... they must go to Sandymount Strand at the appropriate time (Or are you meant to be following Stephen? Where's he then?) – do they have a Gertie MacDowell in fancy dress sitting around there? Who would lay that on? Is it a volunteer thing? So basically, what Ismael asked.)

a big Hendrik Hertzberg collection on politics: http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0143035533

and The Selfish Gene

This weekend so far:

Tibor Dery - Niki: The Story of a Dog - where the fate of an animal stands for the fate of Hungary in '48. Probably one of the few times I have a prolonged tale of human-animal interaction (haven't owned a pet since I was about four) so i don't how convincing or otherwise that element was, really.

Ernst Junger - The Glass Bees. SF from 1960. Almost no dialogue, just a situation (man goes for job interview in scientists home for a job he has been headhunted for) and all reflection/essay - it was sorta interesting to see the leap between someone who experienced destruction via war (Junger was a soldier in WWI) on what it might be to master nature. Really felt v thin though. Needed drama to toughen up the speculation.

Aargh, all garbled sorry I am listening to a rub entry in the Eurovision song contest

i will report back on the bloomsday thing in june, it was basically a whim

dost'y: i'm reading 'crime and punishment' bcz i never got anywhere at all when i tried to read it as a teenager. i think i might have benefited from that, i don't know; obviously it's amazing but i'm a lot more comfortable noting the, er, essential cheapness of a lot of the machinery, reading it now. i also have an old harper perennial 'great short works' which i think is next up

Also had a failed attempt at C&P when I was 15 or so :-(

I think with Dostoevsky I tend to prefer the ones with larger casts - Brothers Karamazov is still my favourite.

still reading Elmer Gantry

Tibor Dery - Niki: The Story of a Dog would so love to read this, but have strong suspicion that dog will not make it to the end of the book, so it ain't happening

Was sick over the weekend, so read a lot of comforting PG Wodehouse (esp loved 'Hot Water'). Am now gingerly starting Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet', and glad I didn't try this when my head was all bunged up with mucous/phlegm

The Story of a Dog is really good, and there isn't any animal cruelty as such btw.

have strong suspicion that dog will not make it to the end of the book, so it ain't happening

That's why I can't bear to start I Am A Cat.

Leo Perutz - Master of the Day of Judgement. With Viennese novels I scan for very specific things nowdays and have little patience. The hallucinations in the last 20 pages were ok.

Harry Mathews - The Human Country. Short stories displaying his combinatorial powers, then other stories as thinly disguised literary essays. Which beats stories about people. Includes the story Franz Kafka in Riga

Moving onto: Lydia Davis - Varieties of Disturbance. Includes the story Kafka Cooks Dinner

Am now gingerly starting Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet', and glad I didn't try this when my head was all bunged up with mucous/phlegm

Is it possible to begin that book gingerly? You just dive in on a random page, find the meaning of your existence, then dip into another section and repeat.

Am now engaged in Orson Welles: The Stories Of His Life by Peter Conrad, which is short on facts (long disproved Welles fables trotted out anew) but long on myth and association; Conrad's a swell prose-smith though, which makes it easy to forgive him anything.

And after that - Billy Budd!

Is it possible to begin that book gingerly? You just dive in on a random page, find the meaning of your existence, then dip into another section and repeat.

You're right--I'm doing a bunch of pages each day, interspersed with other things, rather than the linear reading. It's great!

Also great: Natsume Soseki's 'The Tower of London', a collection of his writings from when he was a miserable student in London in 1902.

Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov - beatings, minus 60 degree temperatures, hunger, random killings, overwork...but the snatches of friendship, warmth, the alertness of the mind that writes the words and gets by -- when all of this does happen, are things to hold onto.

AND...

Barbara Comyns: Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead -- strange and great novella from the 1950s about a small village which suffers a flood and then an outbreak of ergot bread poisoning, resulting in lots of madness and death. Banned in Ireland for gruesomeness.

Helen Zenna Smith: Not So Quiet... -- 1930 autobiographical novel about women ambulance drivers in France in WW1; excellent and alarming in equal measure. Apparently commissioned as a satire of Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front', but Smith felt that writing a satire was a ridiculous idea, and went for the real thing. And then she ended up writing horoscopes for Australian Vogue in the 1980s. The world is an odd place.

reading What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown. love it. love the meta-ness of it all. and that it was first published in this magazine with this cover. (cuz much of the novel is concerned with this magazine and that cover! um, for those of you haven't read it.)

http://www.thompsonrarebooks.com/shop_image/product/5189.jpg

don't know what i'll read next. someone lent me two noir novels by Derek Raymond - He Died With His Eyes Open and The Crust On Its Uppers - so i might go for those. i had a copy of Bombe Surprise in the store, his second novel written when he was still using the name Robin Cook (no, not that robin cook) and the person who gave me these to read bought it and raved about him. but i didn't get to read bombe surprise before i sold it.

http://jarett.kobek.com/covers/bombe-hard.jpg

been too busy buying and selling books for the store to read much. i know, lame excuse. but the store takes a lot of my time. just have to force myself to not turn on the t.v. at night and then i read more.

reading What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown. love it.

It's great, isn't it?

What on earth is Bombe Surprise about?

london youth gone wild, naturally. you'd love it. anarchy in the streets and all that. really hard to find in hardcover. i sold my copy cheap. just glad it went to a good home.

decided to read: A Fearful Joy by Joyce Carey

Read Homicide: A Year On the Killing Streets, which was great. Really should start watching the TV show sometime. Also reread A High Wind in Jamaica after about 10 years.

Currently reading Literature and Life, by Jorge Semprun, about the direct aftermath of his liberation from Buchenwald, and the difficulty in writing anything meaningful and true about the experience.

And also Nazarin, by Benito Perez-Galdos, who I don't really know anything about.

I finished Bowie In Berlin: A New Career In A New Town last night. It was really rather good. So many rock bios are quite childish I find, too easily impressed by throwaway things or going the other way and getting caught up in trying to give political contexts that are barely relevant. This captured Bowie mostly caught up in his own world and was much more interesting for it - even though the setting was my main reason for picking up the book. I especially enjoyed the bits about putting the bands and tracks together, and the guy's workaholism is really interesting.

The Rachel Papers. After avoiding him for years I've decided it's finally time to bit the bullet and find out if I like him. Plus if it's shit, at least it'll be over soon.

Rachel Papers sitting by my bedside. Haven't read it since I was at school, want to check it out again - see what was there at first in Amis. First par enjoyable.

Buying that (film tie-in edition, o yeah) was prompted partly by Money, and partly by Hitch 22. I'll prob revive the Hitch thread when I finish the latter, but in short it's exactly what one wd think.

Also because of Hitch 22 – it's dedicated to him and he pops up a lot – back to James Fenton's poetry. Endlessly fascinated by Fenton - so talented, so good, but feels, idk, off to one side, or minor. Maybe he didn't write enough in his prime? Maybe that line of English poetry is a dead end? Just too Audeny?

Hahaha just realised my fretful thinking on James Fenton poss a version of "Mr. Best, where did it all go wrong?", given that he has the FANTASY LITERARY LIFE:

In 1985, Les Misérables opened. Fenton has said he got 'less than one per cent' of worldwide royalties, but, given that the show has earned more than £1.4 billion worldwide, the wolf has since been absent from his door.

Finishing Kolyma Tales. Just feel like I didn't quite represent the tone of it correctly.

Reading back I made it sound like its brutal with the odd nice moment of 'humanity' to sweeten proceedings but its actually a lot more like barely disguised reportage. What's human is not the acts between people (which are almost always cruel, true) but its in the fact that they tell each other tales in the first place: that they are still talking and bullshitting until a particular aspect of life in a Gulag comes into view. Some of it does strike you as fantastical in isolation but given the sober spin that Shalamov gives it then all is plausible, and when he says that teller of tales can get preferential treatment there is really no escape -- not even art redeems...

One or two of these tales are sorta essays on other Russian writers: Platonov, Osip Mandelstam, or older writers such as Pushkin. At other points these stories serve as historical essays from the front line of the purges of '37 - '38.

Rachel Papers not the best book to judge Amis on, Matt. Very much juvenilia. Predictable, I know, but Money and Success capture him at his peak. London Fields is the beginning of the decline because he's so bad with working class characters.

Just finished The Ask by Sam Lipsyte and starting The Imperfectionists by Thomas Rachman.

Ripped through the final Stieg Larsson and Joe Hill's Horns the past few days and started The Lacuna last night. I stalled out in the final epilogue of War and Peace, just too much of Tolstoy's philosophy and not enough interesting stuff.

Started reading a copy of The Arabian Nights. Translation is by Husain Haddawy. Based on the earliest manuscript and it eliminates all the subsequent additions found in Indian and Egyptians manuscripts. Husain's essays discusses all of the issues in a really interesting essay where he reveals that some of the more famous stories were written in the 'spirit' of the ...nights much later.

Also he is very aware, post-Said, of exoticisms. In the end I do want an organised selection, and it looks like I am getting this here, so...

Literature and Life, by Jorge Semprun

Had not heard of this, but LOVED his 'The Long Voyage', one of the best Auschwitz-related books I've ever read--fierce, moving, wonderfully written, staggeringly unbitter

starting The Imperfectionists by Thomas Rachman

Me too! Not quite what I had expected, but really really enjoying it, actually. It's very much linked short stories so far, rather than a novel proper

Oh, and...

london youth gone wild, naturally. you'd love it. anarchy in the streets and all that. really hard to find in hardcover. i sold my copy cheap. just glad it went to a good home.

I'm sold! Or I am if I can find a non-pricey, non-French-translation version...

I'm 3/4 of the way through The Imperfectionists. I love the geeky journalistic detail, and the way that after so many poignant, understated stories the one about the Cairo stringer is unexpectedly flat-out hilarious.

Just over half-way through <em>Bleak House</em>. Quite good.

Inspired by the Miles Davis exhibit I saw here last week, I went to the library looking for a bio or something. Ended up picking Running The Voodoo Down not realizing Phil posts here. Its great so far.

I started Libra by Don DeLillo at the weekend. Two chapters in and it's quite engaging so far. Premise is intriguing, and he does the minutiae of street life very well I think - the kid in the first chapter here, and the New York bits in Underworld, are very good. He's often cited as a wonderful stylist, and I don't quite buy that because he makes you work so much harder than someone like Roth - Roth's dialogue pours off the page, but with DeLillo it feels like I'm having to piece it together a word at a time.

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. Does everyone smoke on rooftop terraces in NYC? I wore a short-sleeve button-down shirt with a tie attached to the collar today. But no hat.

Before that (in reverse order) Kaaterskill Falls and Intuition by Allegra Goodman.

Next up The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, but I need to save this for a flight or find another book. Any help appreciated.

Gyula Krudy: Life is a Dream -- fantastic!

Just finished the final story in Life is a Dream last night. I'd been putting it off because I didn't want it to end. Krudy at his very best. Does for food (and drink) what Sindbad does for sex. The Green Ace is a particular standout, but it's all great.

Just so... although I can't say I want to try eating "sour lungs" any time soon.

the trial. Have tried to read it before but never finished. Find it oppressive and excrutiating (suppose that's the point, but still).

I picked it up last year for the first time since I was a teenager, and was surprised (and slightly disturbed?) at how funny I was finding it.

There's a touch of the Larry David about becoming inextricably involved in a snowballing set of drily related inescapable circumstances that tend towards your ultimate, complete unjust, culpability.

Haha - that's exactly it!

Larry David will often dig his own grave tho'.

Yep, as an aside - I think the first two series he was rarely if ever at fault ('I was just trying to be affable!') whereas the later ones he's a bit more of an asshole, which is why I enjoy them less.

I picked it up last year for the first time since I was a teenager, and was surprised (and slightly disturbed?) at how funny I was finding it.

Me too--esp the bit where he opens a cupbioard door at work and discovers some morrid scene of beating (it doesn't sound funny described that way, but it's the way he tells them)

bleak house was too big for my luggage allowance (no joke), so i printed out a copy of the project gutenberg version simple soul by flaubert. not sure about the translation and i keep trying to read it in bars, but am enjoying.

I started Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov, a couple of nights ago. It seems like the kind of book that requires a quick reading, and I doubt I will be able to give it that. Too many competing responsibilities and chores gobbling my time and attention. We'll just have to see.

I like what I've read so far better than I like most stuff by Nabokov - maybe because he wrote the original in Russian. His English generally seems a bit too high-flown and artificial to me, too much like a butterfly collection.

I must admit I tend to prefer the the Russian novels translated into English in terms of style - less American cultural garnishing, which is flimsy (deliberately I guess) compared to the Russian world, and less word gadgetry.

Read it a long time ago, and only really remember Invitation as almost an existentialist adjunct to Camus and Beckett, which I'm sure must be wrong, in light of everything else I read subsequently by him.

Don't remember it being as fun, say, as The Defence, or The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (which was English, but early, and one of my favourites), or Despair.

I ended up reading The Imperfectionists over the weekend, so I got Middlemarch and Independent People for (before) my flight. I looked for Krudy at 2 bookstores but found nothing.

There is not a lot of Krudy around is there? The new stories are issued as a Penguin edition and I'm not sure how available they are if you don't live in the UK.

Gore Vidal - The Judgment of Paris
Hitchens - Hitch-22

Finished the Arabian Nights. Fantastic!

Only about 400 pages (it is a kind of rockist edition), wish there was a lot more by the end. Takes a while to get into reading stories (like they used to do in the old days, or so it seems) where the turns and twists come so quickly, and there can be so many of them, and bits are told in a highly concentrated sentence that would normally be told in several paragraphs and pages.

Now I've gone onto The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. xp

has anyone read Ian McEwan's Solar? i got On Chesil Beach the day it came out and I've read a bunch of his other stuff, but i haven't looked into this one yet

I really enjoyed Solar, though everyone else round here seems to hate McEwan. It's pretty amusing, though it involves at least 2 unlikely coincidences. Really it's like a C21 version of Victorian lit: "big issue' theme, lots of coincidences, larger than life characters, and some lovely prose

Am now on Karel Capek's 'The Absolute at Large', from 1927: a man invents perfect, clean atomic power, which has the unexpected side-effect of producing vast fields of a kind of energy which induces religious belief and the working of miracles. Turns out that the animist were right, and that every object has part of god in it, so when you completely annihilate the mass of an object (via E=mc2) you liberate all of that previously restrained God-ness, and it gets out into the world to create trouble.

It's a hoot.

xpost

awesome! thanks. i'll definitely be reading it. i like McEwan. i should get the new Delillo too. and Coetzee published a new one last year, right? oh man, so far behind

That Coetzee is ace---much better than 'Diary of a Bad Year'.

the last one I read was Elizabeth Costello, iirc -- good to hear this one is good!

Thanks for the report on Capek James!

AND NOW: Jakov Lind: Soul of Wood -- quite bleak and astonishing

http://184.73.187.38/media/images/productimage-picture-soul-of-wood-45.jpg

I don't know quite how to describe it. The blurb says 'Set during World War II, “Soul of Wood” is the story of Wohlbrecht, a peg-legged veteran of World War I, who smuggles Anton Barth, a paralyzed Jewish boy, to a mountain hideout after the boy’s parents have been sent to their deaths. Abandoning the helpless boy to the elements, Wohlbrecht returns to Vienna, where, having been committed to an insane asylum, he helps the chief psychiatrist to administer lethal injections to other patients. But Germany is collapsing and the war will soon be over. The one way, Wohlbrecht realizes, that he can evade retribution is by returning to the woods to redeem “his” hidden Jew. Others, however, have had the same bright idea.', which gives the bare bones of the plot, but nothing of the style. Plus there are 6 other stories in it, equally dark and amazing.

And all this from a Jewish Austrian author who, as a child, escaped the Nazis and took an assumed identity in Holland, then escaped back into Germany and ended up working in a Nazi government ministry building in Berlin, successfully hiding his Jewishness.

I finished "Lowlife" by Luc Sante, which I liked about as much as I expected to - now I'm on to "The World of Yesterday" by Stefan Zweig.

Finally got on to Black Swan Green by David Mitchell - I wanted to see whether my slightly indifferent feeling to Thousand Autumns was me or him, if you see what I mean. It's great! Who knew? (Obv everyone). There's the odd duff note, but that's only because in general it's a really coherent tone and mood, really is quite an achievement I think.

Now - Paracelsus - Browning.

Yeah! It's my favourite thing I've read by him, glad to see it get praise. The duff notes for me were the Crommylenk-type bits - which might be what he's known for, but if he could iron them out completely that'd be nice.

finished with the trial, about 13 years after first beginning to read it, now reading the castle. after that i've got america and metamorphosis and other stories to read.

xpost to IK - Yeah, I still find his tone a bit hard to take at times - the rhythm of his description can feel cackhanded (tho not the meat of it) but what I liked about it most was the rural spookiness (slightly reminded me of Jocelyn Brooke in fact), how he captured the violence fantasy lies and proportions of the childhood world. And yes, the cloth of the '80s is very well woven

I think, unlike Thousand Autumns, Mitchell does the voice well, only on a few occasions does Jason feel like he's speaking in tones not his own - the slightly out-of-kilter stuttering poet aspect of him allows a good combination of childhood pov + searching but not writerly metaphor. For the most part anyway.

A nice feeling of strangeness and imminence really transforms the finely detailed material.

James OTM on Solar

(looks at his watch)

Dang! Summer already?! I had better start thinking of a new, clever thread title, unless someone else would prefer to take the honors.

I don't dare - the title sits there, perpetually perking its coxcomb's ears in your face, a recurrent wince-inducing reproach to the vessel of those flickering embers of sunken wit so-called, its little frivolous life only throwing into sharper relief the cumbersome feet of clay with which you have been anchored to this mundane existence.

I'm speaking for myself of course.

The answer for that is, of course, Ask A Drunk, assuming that Ask A Drunk could be coaxed into voluntary motion, which ability seems to evade its powers more and more these past few years, rather like a rat with tertiary syphyllis (if such were possible).

"Solstice is past, and Aestas asks what you are reading".

?

"And that high-builded stack / Shrinking at summer's pace." What are you reading?

While we try to decide, I read these two books...

The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis
http://184.73.187.38/media/images/productimage-picture-the-murderess-86.jpg

Weird, striking novella about a serial child-killer, written in Greek around the 1880s(?)

The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF, edited by Mike Ashley
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1849013055.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

500 pages of short stories about the end of the world. Am halfway through, and only a couple of duds so far.

Nice to see Peter Levi as the translator. I have his book, The Hill of Kronos, about Greece under the Colonels' junta.

i'm reading the satanic verses but it's been summer for a couple days tbh

Lost in the thickets of Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow -- acres of dialogue, to no purpose.

Also:

Julian Barnes - Nothing To Be Frightened Of
Tom Lutz's study of neurasthenia at the turn of the century.

acres of dialogue to no purpose in a nice way?

The Raw Shark Text by Steven Hall - Not brilliant, but alright. Best bits are the big daft ideas in the Grant-Morrison-plot-what-plot? vein that pop up every hundred pages or so. Fun; Murakami-ish.

i really enjoyed that - thinking about giving it a reread. i just found the whole idea so... inventive and fun and a real page-turner.

new thread: Summer sun, something's begun, but oh, Louis Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of the Night - what you reading, summer 2010?