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

Ok, so I did it. Boredom rather than drunkeness was the cause, a worse sin imo. And usual apologies to those on the other side of the world.

So, China Mieville's The City and the City. You know, I'm not sure this is all that. The first bit isn't so bad, as you have fun guessing at all the defamiliarising lingo, working out the landscape, allowing the plot hooks to do their work.

But I've familiarised myself with the landscape now and it's all getting pretty thin. A lot of knocking on doors and going to talk to people. I think it's supposed to be noirish, but although there's a bit of weariness, there's no one single interesting character, or hard bitten element to it.

The whole divided city thing is neat, although sometimes a bit fudgy, but perhaps unsurprisingly, you're increasingly left with the feeling of a cold war thriller (investigating behind the curtain, minders with you all the time, people unwilling to talk) but without, say, a Smiley or even a Quiller or Bond.

The first person narrative is dreadfully uninteresting, apart from all the city mechanics stuff, and even that gets slightly annoying, beginning somewhat programmatic - fairly standard descriptions of East European desuetude v East European economic growth.

It's indicating quite clearly where it's going (or so it seems at the mo) and it's all feeling slightly thin and paradoxically perhaps, unimaginative.

Reminds me slightly of a children's book called Downtown (anyone remember this - I don't, I don't even remember whether it was good or not) about another New York underneath New York, or even another children's book called I think The Village Under the Pond, that motif anyway - bleeding worlds, old folk tale thing. I'll finish it - I'm a sucker for even the most basic of thrillers, but, yeah, not sure I'd hugely recommend it at the moment.

started reading The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin. it's about THE STRANGE PLACE BY THE CREEK.

this guy - a poet - brought in three boxes of books to the store and the boxes were filled with old lit journals and back issues of poetry magazine and slim volumes of verse and i've been digging into that stuff as well.

I'm about halfway into Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday" - his autobiographical/political/historical memoir of the Europe of his youth and adulthood (late 19th century up to beginning of WWII). It's fascinating so far, though I'm not familiar with most of the poets, writers and artists he name-drops. But he's great on capturing the mood of an era, and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that social mores changes.

Beg to differ about The City and The City - I really enjoyed it, thought it worked and rate it as one of his best. Mieville certainly seems to be a writer who divides people. I put off reading this one because of critical negativity, kicked myself for having done so, then realised I'd been through the same cycle with previous titles of his.

Currently working on an anthology of ghost stories by Lisa Tuttle, and Kadare's Palace of Dreams.

Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann. So far, not so good.

That people would have won any poll it was entered in - tick!

Glad I ranted about Mann's The Magic Mountain on ILE earlier in the week. Now I'm really into it, probably because of the appearance of the anarchist-like figure of Naphta as counterpoint to Settembrini. The struggle for Castorp's soul (who is a kind of mediator figure) also becomes apparent.

(That title would have won, not people..)

recently:

the lives of girls and women - alice munro. her only 'novel', but still feels like a collection of short stories. still great though.

the girl with the dragon tattoo - steig larsson. this was good but... not really getting why it's become this huge phenomenon?

babel-17 - samuel delaney. corny writing in places (why don't scifi writers get better editors???) but such incredibly fascinating, thought-provoking ideas about language and culture and identity and things. actually read this for a class a couple of years ago but am enjoying it much more this time round.

Libra by Don DeLillo - fantastic, watching his Oswald take shape is so gripping.

i have tried to read that book maybe 3 times now and never finish it. it's SO complicated! i just feel like i never have any idea what the hell is really going on, like there's so much between the lines that i just can't read.

I'm still reading Within A Budding Grove, over a month later. Not even halfway through yet, and I feel like a bit of a failure. I remember some writer said that if you take over a month to read a book, you haven't really read it. I am beginning to see what he means - I feel like I'm reading the same page over and over. And the thing is, it's good! Not just good, but amazingly good. I just can't make myself sit down and bloody read it.

Took me the end of Autumn and the whole of winter to read the whole lot. Never felt like I read it, but its a book to be re-read (like all the best ones).

One of my reading mini-projects is to, before a re-read, compile and read some of the Proustian sources: the rant against Saint-Beauve, a book or articles on the Dreyfus affair, some Chateaubriand, Saint Simon or the odd tale from the Arabian Nights.

Maybe if you have some of those you could switch for a bit...

still on kafka, finished the trial, about half-way through the castle. definitely feeling the old adage about novelists writing the same novel over and over but enjoying it anyway; it's a bit more comical than the trial, and somewhat less grim.

A few books glaring at me from my desk as if annoyed:

My Life In CIA by Harry Mathews
Swann's Way by Some Dude
Typee by Another Dude

I am giving up on this crap Anthropolgy of and American Girl (sample text: "I tried to put him out of my mind, the effortless way he had been dressed, the lazy curl of his hair, the hidden influence of his chest beneath his shirt." Emphasis mine).

I mean srsly, HIDDEN INFLUENCE OF HIS CHEST????

Dickens - Bleak House
Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

a fruity combination

Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" for me. Very interesting so far!

i iz reading zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
it is making me want to get a motorcycle and philosophize

I am giving up on this crap Anthropolgy of and American Girl

That's a relief. was thinking about getting this, but now I can tell myself I don't need to.

How's 'The Ask'?

You really, really don't need to get this, I promise. The Ask is on my list for this summer, too.

its like ASK mania on ilx!

is the ask one of those things that's gonna end up being a ben stiller movie? not that there is anything wrong with that.

So far it's funny in a glib sort of way – a nice antidote to Bleak House when the latter gets ponderous.

Very easy to finish in an afternoon or two.

terry teachout - pops: a life of louis armstrong

compact and compelling bio by neoconservative wheezebag who actually refrains from political axe-grinding, presents a well-balanced portrait drawn largely from louis' own writing.

alice echols - hot stuff: disco and the remaking of american culture

academic study that's hobbled by its narrow focus & reliance on received ideas (IMO) best parts are echols' recounting of being a disco DJ in ann arbor - i went once to her club!

deborah blum - the poisoner's handbook

superb pop-history of the origins of forensic science in early 20th century NYC, deftly handles murder-mystery narratives and well-explained science. you bet I never thought chemistry could actually be rendered interesting.

have also recently read five crime novels by George V Higgins. He's inconsistent at best but a total original, telling stories almost exclusively through dialogue. can get bogged down but when it works, as in his taut debut The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the effect is absolutely hypnotic. can't understand why his early books arent in paperback?

you bet I never thought chemistry could actually be rendered interesting.

In fiction Primo Levi's Periodic table is fine.

dark side of the sun - pratchett
and countryside companion which i read tonight whilst fishing

have also recently read five crime novels by George V Higgins. He's inconsistent at best but a total original, telling stories almost exclusively through dialogue. can get bogged down but when it works, as in his taut debut The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the effect is absolutely hypnotic. can't understand why his early books arent in paperback?

Re-read The Imposters and The Friends of Eddie Coyle recently, would agree with what you say, mc. When he's on song he's probably one of the best writers of dialogue I've ever read.

gonna start Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version. I think. looks good. and funny. the friends of eddie coyle -vs- the apprenticeship of duddy kravitz! ah, the 70's.

eugene lyons - 'assignment in utopia'
david gates - 'preston falls'
douglas coupland - 'generation x'
francis wheen - 'strange days indeed'
michael foley - 'the age of absurdity'

I should read generation X again--it has been many, many years, and I wonder if it will hold up to er me not being 19 anymore.

What's the Wheen, Michael? I thought he only had one book.

I ordered The Friends of Eddie Coyle today after seeing this thread - looking forward to it.

this is a new one, i just stumbled across it when i was in the bookstore. 'strange days indeed: the golden age of paranoia', its about the craziness of the 70's (uri geller, nixon, culture of paranoia)...tries to tie it in some way with whats going on now at the end of the book but its the anecdotes like the strange grip Harold Wilson's political secretary Marcia Williams had over him that make the book tbh.

Humphrey Cobb: Paths of Glory
JM Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians
Justin Cronin: The Passage

The first two were excellent. The third is exhausting me. It's a 750-page book, but really a 400-page book with padding. You read the first 275 pages, and find out that was just the prologue (though I sort of appreciate the publisher not splitting it up into a trilogy to maximise their $$). The problem is the presentation of old ideas as though they're new and original, when they're not, and so don't require all this explication. I can give you the first 275 pages in a paragraph:

SPOILERS: Exotic virus from Bolivia, turns people into super-strong vampire monsters. Immoral US special ops lab, experimenting on death row prisoners. Little psychic girl also gets experimented on. Bad things happen in lab, vampires get out, world goes to hell. Little girl disappears, everyone else introduced up to this point dies.

It reminds me, by being the opposite, of John Wyndham, and how efficiently and effectively he'd set about destroying the world. By page 20 you were already in the aftermath, and you already cared about the characters, and the whole book was only 250 pages, and not a word was wasted.

Really not sure if I'm finishing this one.

I ordered The Friends of Eddie Coyle today after seeing this thread - looking forward to it.

Here's a sample.

i just got death on the installment plan recently after having read journey to the end of the night 5 years ago, might read it soon
now reading:
wilhelm reich - mass psychology of fascism (i am enjoying this but it is slow, less than 200 pp left though)
joyce carol oates - garden of earthly delights (still don't know how much i like her but i keep reading her so...)

I just read "Imperial Bedrooms" by Bret Easton Ellis. It started out very promising, but quickly devolved. I think he did a disservice to "Less Than Zero."

Now I am going back to "A Fan's Notes" by Frederick Exley, which is a wonderful read.

My Life In CIA by Harry Mathews - Clever, larky fictional memoir.

The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer - Why no mention of Jack Cole?

The Passage bogs down badly for a while in the middle, but the last third is better. In the end I was glad I stuck with it. It reminded me of The Stand, minus some of the humor and shock effects but with extra added dread.

Does it end with some rationality, or is it all arbitrary supernatural nonsense?

Went camping last week. I tried out Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, but set it aside after about 30 pages. Too much morbid sensitive young genius action for me to take.

I substituted Cold Comfort Farm, which seemed much more in keeping with my needs. I am afraid there are at least several dozen British in-jokes I've missed, being too dense and too American to know what's behind them. Still, it amuses me. My wife was mystified, but then she often is by my taste in literature.

Seems I'm on a kick for short texts:

Heinrich von Kleist - Amfitryon (aka Gods are jerks, part n. Another installment in my private series of "wait, wtf, I didn't expect this to be so funny!")
Annie Ernaux - La Place (Short memory about growing up in a small town, mostly describing her father and his apparent wish to become a good middle-class fellow. Really good, disappointed that only one other, even shorter, books of hers has made it to Norwegian)
Cynthia Ozick - The Shawl

Have no idea what to read now -- I'm reading a short story collection by Gro Dahle at the rate of one story a day -- first time I read her fiction, but I've enjoyed her poetry earlier, and this is turning out to be ace.
Started Alice Munro's "Open Secrets" and loved the first story, but think I'll try spreading it out over a few weeks as well.
Been picking up books all day and reading a few pages here and there, but the mood doesn't seem right for anything. Shame my all my Wodehouses are boxed up.

Independent People by Halldor Laxness

do you love it? i got halfway through a while ago and put it down because of other stuff to do but it's great. i should start over one of these days.

Barbara Pym: Jane and Prudence -- so good!

I just read "Imperial Bedrooms" by Bret Easton Ellis. It started out very promising, but quickly devolved. I think he did a disservice to "Less Than Zero."

Now I am going back to "A Fan's Notes" by Frederick Exley, which is a wonderful read.

― Virginia Plain, Thursday, July 1, 2010 9:48 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Haven't read 'Imperial Bedrooms' yet, but just read my first two Ellises 'Less Than Zero' and 'Glamorama' on a friend's recommendation. LTZ is a super visceral read - I'm not sure if I *liked* it per se but it was a punch to the gut. I'm never sure if I'm reading an indictment or just a point of view w/ Ellis but the dead-eyed nihilism of it all is too sexy for it to be wholly a condemnation. Hard to be sure, esp. in light of his later stuff that I've read.

Reading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh now b/c I need some lighter fare. Was thinking 'Illustrado' but it's only in hardcover.

Glad I ranted about Mann's The Magic Mountain on ILE earlier in the week. Now I'm really into it, probably because of the appearance of the anarchist-like figure of Naphta as counterpoint to Settembrini. The struggle for Castorp's soul (who is a kind of mediator figure) also becomes apparent.

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, June 26, 2010 10:03 PM

Excellent novel. It's been a couple of years since I read it, and I think I'm due for a reread. It seems like one of those novels, like Broch's "The Sleepwalkers" or Musil's "The Man Without Qualities" that grows with you.

Reading right now Mann's "The Confessions of Felix Krull" — his last, unfinished novel. So far it's good and a lot more obviously humorous than his other stuff.

Finished it over the weekend. Think its in that vein of Broch and Musil just not as funny as either, or as formally inventive as the Broch. Wondering how much this is to do w/the translation. Will def reread as it grew on me.

Now for Isherwood's A Single Man. Tracking what makes it into the film and what doesn't.

"gonna start Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version."

really enjoying this! never read richler before. its like a funnier more expansive bellow novel. i don't even know what i mean by more expansive. saul was expansive. it seems less sour. a bigger heart. yet, it doesn't shrink away from meanness or darkness either. and the plot is more intriguing then a bellow plot. you don't really go to bellow for plot. you go for language and ideas. and saul could be funny too. sorry, saul! this is like saul's drunker brother who never left the old neighborhood in canada.

m. coleman, for some reason i think you would like this. are you a fan?

XP which translation did you read? I had John Woods who is supposed to be good (I have read several translations of German authors by him including a volume of Arno Schmidt stories that I just finished). Helen Lowe-Porter is supposed to be the one to avoid, even though she was the first to advocate him in the English-speaking world — her translations are apparently full of errors.

I like it and may love it before it's over. I like Nonni and the bounds of his day. I like the characterization of Bjartur and the Bailiff. In every story where they talk about falling asleep in the snow, that feeling seems to be the same all over. In a way it's miraculous that people should feel the same way in the same stages, not just in reaction to the elements, but all the feelings overlaid on those reactions. Not to be afraid of animals and to take worms and lice for granted... and the huge quantities of coffee, also consumed by small children...

Corey - Helen Lowe-Porter.

btw, the thread I refer to is this one - Thomas Mann C/D S+D

I'm also interested in Isherwood too, more from reading Forster than the recent buzz. Apparently they were chums.

'A Single Man' is wonderful: read it years ago, and need to re-read in the light of the film, whcih I really enjoyed, but couldn't remember whetehr some details were in the book or not.

'Barney's Version' is a thoroughly enjoyable book--clever, funny, engaging. Probably Richler's best, at least of the 6 or so I've read.

Just finished Kevin Brownlow's 'How It Happened Here', about the making of It Happened Here (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055024/). Not the most amazing writer, but such an interesting story: two kids (18yo and 16yo) in the 1950s start making a movie about an alternative history where the Nazis invaded Britain, take 8 years to finish the film with almost no budget, with various disasters along the way. Read this because I watched the film a couple of weeks ago, and it was really, really good.

It Happened Here is great.

Ok, so I read The Death of Grass by John Christopher last night. Very good. Not an ounce of spare fat on it, rattles through and could, I suppose (someone with more knowledge help me out here) be considered an early pioneer of the genre (the genre of sudden decline of civilisation genre)? No, wait, both Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes were earlier by a few years. Anyway, it's good and bleak.

Dipping in and out of WF Smith's heavily annotated translation of Pantagruel and Gargantua. Read the Urquhart translation (or most some of it anyway) as a youth, going back in the light of reading the brilliant first volume of Southern's Scholastic Humanism, and also some reading on the grotesque (mainly Kayser's groundbreaking The Grotesque in Art and Literature) - generally retreading old ground, turning over the old vegetable patches of my mind now gone to seed etc.

Urquhart/Motteaux is far more zippy, but it's good to immerse yourself in the various bits of nuggety, footnotey detail that back up the text and immerse you in the world. Screech's book Rabelais is great for this as well.

'All Shall be Well; and All Shall be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall be Well' by Tod Wodicka, on the recommendation of someone here. Very John Banville-esque (a good thing imo) with it's exquisite sentences and grimly-humored, somewhat lost, middle-aged/elderly male protagonist. Slightly more ridiculous than Banville - both in plot and prose, not quite sure what to make of an inflatable ball floating alone in a swimming pool "like a doomed aria".

Just finished Nothing by Janne Teller. Really great existential parable told largely in the 1st person plural. A 13 year old declares that nothing matters and goes to live in a plum tree. His classmates freak out. Parts of it are violent and fucked up.

Wonder how it compares to Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai - also kind of an existential parable, middle-aged office clerk goes to live in a guava tree. His family doesn't freak out, in fact they move to the forest with him. None of it is violent or fucked up. Some magical realism.

Hmm, Nothing also reminded me of Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, though I haven't read that in so long that I can't remember if there was existential stuff going on.

What is it about living in trees?

Reimagining of society as organized by Ewoks?

Ok, so I read The Death of Grass by John Christopher last night. Very good. Not an ounce of spare fat on it, rattles through and could, I suppose (someone with more knowledge help me out here) be considered an early pioneer of the genre (the genre of sudden decline of civilisation genre)? No, wait, both Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes were earlier by a few years. Anyway, it's good and bleak.

If you can find Christopher's 'The World in Winter' (Western civilisation destroyed by sudden ice age) and 'A Wrinkle in the Skin' (humanity nearly wiped out by massive tectonic activity), they're both well worth reading too. He also wrote 'Pendulum', another society collapses book, but it's a bit creakier and too middle-aged-writer-scared-of-young-people.

currently reading:
belinda rathbone's walker evans bio
morton feldman, 'give my regards to eighth street'

just finished:
jean rhys, 'good morning, midnight
james mccourt, 'mawrdew czgowchcz' (i think i got that right)

That Feldman collection is great! Very interesting not just for music people but for anyone interested in art in general.

Hmmm, I really liked The Death of Grass but was dissapointed by The World in Winter. Not sure why, could have just been my mood.

'A Single Man' is wonderful: read it years ago, and need to re-read in the light of the film, whcih I really enjoyed, but couldn't remember whetehr some details were in the book or not.

Halfway through now (switched to Bernhard's Old Masters for the moment) and the film really concentrates on the feeling of the main character. The book likes to take a more satirical look at academia and bits of social satire and to look at exclusion and alienation.

brad watson "aliens in the prime of their lives"

tht this was interesting or least worth posting about: a collection of really conventional, carver-esque stories about the vulnerable and the down-and-out. its mostly interesting bcuz watson does this thing where the stories are ostensibly really obvious 60s/70s american realist fiction - quarreling drunks & divorced dads & race issues - but then he destablizes them by adding strange, incongruous details or slightly unmooring them from a recognizable reality.

theres a moment in the opening story when some children describe a maid as a "dirt-eater" & you think its just childish fancy & prejudice and then in a later story the narrator describes her aunt as "one of the dirt-eaters" and describes visiting her and eating the soft, wet clay near her house. or he'll use jarring adjectives (a dead boar spills "beautiful entrails") or have sinister characters appear and then fade w/o explanation. theres a kind of thomas ligotti quality to some of the stories: otherworldy and banal at the same time.

the deliberate weirdness doesnt really stop some of the stories from being kinda dull or empty but some of the stories were really affecting.

I finished Under The Volcano and am reading some Love And Rockets thing and then I will get David Mitchell's "Ghostwritten" and Tarkovsky's "Sculpting In Time" in the mail.

Cor I have always wanted to read Sculpting in Time back when I wanted to read my library's entire film section. Do report back.

Now onto: Czeslaw Milosz - A Captive Mind

Wasn't as impressed with Mitchell's Black Swan Green as lot of guys around here are, but I'm intrigued enough to have checked Ghostwritten out of the library.

Does it end with some rationality, or is it all arbitrary supernatural nonsense?

Just saw this about The Passage ... it stays SF of a soft variety throughout.

I'm happy to read supernatural nonsense, but I like a big unheimlich build-up.

The Captive Mind is great.

Still reading William Gaddis The Recognitions

Slowly drifting through Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being by Ted Hughes, and reading around it a bit - Shakespeare (obvs – poems & Macbeth so far), Eliade on Shamanism, other Shakespeare crit (Empson, Dr Johnson).

S&tGoCB itself is batshit, fun, fascinating - started it wanting to find out how nuts it actually is, realised some way in that I'd rather be reading this than Carey/Kermode/Ricks classic anglo prac crit. Have a real soft spot for poets writing these sort of books (The White Goddess, A Vision) - mystical systems backed up by wobbly scholarship which, however broken by academic standards, let the poet wrestle with his (it's usually men, I think) own inspiration, & help him get somewhere else with it (in Hughes's case, his mid-late 90s renaissance follows iirc). Terrific passages of prose scattered throughout the book; never quite sure what'll be on the next page.

I finished Cold Comfort Farm. As perhaps was inevitable, in the latter part of the book the requirements of satire slowly yielded ground to the necessities of plotting, so it became more farcical than satirical - and farce was not the author's strong point. Still, quite worth the read.

I've been ill and so my recent choices have been in the lighter vein: Fillets of Plaice by Gerald Durrell and The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten. Both reliably amusing.

Last night I began one of those books that keep authors of middling talents in funds, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, who is nothing if not determined to keep the tone breezy (breezy, do you hear me!!)

However, I am finding this book congenial, whereas I tried entering The Man Who Loved Children and found that, being achy, weak and feverish, I could not absorb the long, detailed, ornate descriptions of her characters' inner and outer lives, unrelieved by anything that might be construed as action. I put it aside again for later.

I read most of Stiff recently - thought she had a real knack for chatty jokes & clear info, jolly journalism, but by about halfway it had worn a bit thin and I just flipped through looking for cool stuff abt dead bodies.

You can see the publisher's heavy hand at work in the subtitle. Does the term "cadavers" ever refer to corpses which are not "human"? Gives a good idea of how well they trust their customers to puzzle these things out on their own.

The Dog at Clambercrown by Jocelyn Brooke. I can't think of another writer I'd rather read. He's extraordinarily congenial; warm, drily amusing, loose-limbed. He's also one the best stylists I've read - his effects are subtle to the point of invisibility, but the overall feeling is of evanescence captured in the most delicate, fleeting way. He's cognate in some ways with Denton Welch (who is not at all congenial), but has an un-matey affability. (I'm speaking by and large of his autobiographical-ish material here, not The Image of a Drawn Sword, which is amazing, but to a certain extent a different kettle of ball games).

I failed to read The Dog at Clambercrown in my first more or less compulsive immersion into Brooke's writing, partly out of a feeling of wanting to keep something back, but also an awareness that I'd had my fill - his range is extremely limited, with the same themes and moments perpetually revisited from many different angles.

It's not quite his best, it seems to me - perhaps rather flippant, pleasurably so, but without that flowing, imperceptible development of theme (the musical metaphor is apt, I think) that characterises, say, The Military Orchid trilogy. Nevertheless I've already laughed out loud twice in the pleasantest, least guffawing fashion, and the pages have turned without me realising it.

No one else is better described by that overused epithet, the English Proust (with the emphasis as much on the adjective as on the noun). If that makes him sound heavy, it's not intended to - it's meant to evoke his brilliance at sensational evocation (his spiritual heart has a certain amount of fin-de-siecle aestheticism in it, although his style couldn't be less 'mauve' so to speak), and his rather mordant, observant wit.

I can't think of anyone I'd rather read on these high summer days we've been having in Britain, the only caveat being that I'd like to be in the countryside, or possibly by the sea, rather than in London.

"The Captive Mind is great."

This is really good so far, Milosz is a very intellectually generous mind. Which is the best kind. Although if I had a copy of Witkiewicz's Insatiability (which Milosz discusses in the first essay) I might have switched to that. Sounds like fantastically bizarre book (there is an English translation of it so I will be filling out an IL loan card soon enough).

I also read this essay on Cuban writing, discussing similar sorts of things as The Captive Mind (and mentioning the book). Another IL loan card might have to be filled out for Lezama Lima's Paradiso.

"No one else is better described by that overused epithet, the English Proust"

I haven't seen it used that much. I guess in the '20s to the 40s/50s it might have been used a lot more?

I was (briefly) round Kent earlier this week, and I can see what you mean about Brooke's book as a countryside/sea book (at least I could after the point I got past the sea of Warehouses)

I've been thinking about investigating Witkiewicz / Witkacy - sounds a truly odd writer. There is actually a movie of 'Insatiability', and Inkermen have issued his first play under their Axis imprint.

"No one else is better described by that overused epithet, the English Proust"

I haven't seen it used that much.

I've quite often come across being used for a) anyone who has written a roman-fleuve b) anyone who traffics in any way with memory c) anyone who writes 'well' in an evocative way (in other words a lot of people very unlike Proust).

Joyce (Proust in English here rather, Powell, Henry Williamson, Woolf, Beckett (yes, I know),

Where were you in Kent, xyzzz? West or East? Man of Kent or Kentish Man? I grew up in the West, and whenever I go down there (was also down last weekend) around Hever and Cowden, Chiddingstone and Penshurst, that there is no landscape I love more. I'm thinking of going over to the other side next w'end, to visit Brooke's childhood paradise of Elham. I see looking at Wikipedia that Audrey Hepburn also spent some of her childhood there. Although there's 20 years age difference, an overlap of sorts isn't, with some stretch of the imagination, impossible, and would be fitting considering Brooke's obsessions with the theatre.

Gamaliel - A train ride to Chatham (so not that deep into Kent). I did actually enjoy some of the scenery after I got past all the Warehouses.

Elham (from a google) looks great.

bought a few alistair maclean books from carboot sale yesterday, but looking forward to starting Nova tonight.

Finished Libra on Friday - fabulous book. Then a change of direction to Why England Lose by Simon Kuper, which is a kind of football/economics crossover with some good bits and some unconvincing bits, but I'll save my review of it for one of the football threads. Or one of the economics threads.

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez: Our GG in Havana -- awful, awful shit. Can't believe I wasted my money on this supposed "exploration" of Graham Greene's work, life, fears, etc.

Henry Green: Nothing -- really good, though it took a while to get into the rhythm of his dialogue

Only seventy pages left in David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, and I'll break my standing rule against issuing opinions before I've finished the novel: I'm loving it.

started reading the bob dylan chronicles thing. had to stop myself from reading so that i could go to bed. that is some addictive stuff. for me, anyway.

he can write!

ya, he definitely can. i actually just (five minutes ago) finished Luc Sante's Kill All Your Darlings and there's a great essay about Chronicles in there

next up for me is Underworld, something i've been anticipating for a while

Wow, Lots of other people are reading Delillo right now. I'm finishing up "The Names" and so far I've been pretty blow away. Out of all the Delillo's I've read, "Underworld" is my favorite, and "Libra" was my least favorite. I just couldn't connect with the characters in that one, and actually kept confusing a few of them, probably because I read the book in spurts over about 6 weeks time.

Recently, I've read ...

"The Sun Also Rises" ... eh.
"Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside The Playboy Mansion" ... good and trashy, read it in one day while on the beach.
"The Moving Target" by Ross McDonald ... couldn't really get into it.

I've been wanting to read Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser" for a while, but am intimidated by the lack of chapters and paragraph breaks.

Oh, and I read "The Sons" by Kafka, four short stories including "The Metamorphosis." The whole thing was awesome.

Dear Dean Young,

I started reading one of your

Books at my book store

Your poems

Make me laugh

Even though I don't feel much

Like laughing

I erased the price that was

In pencil

Inside

And wrote my own

Three dollars cheaper

No offense

Just being realistic

Living where i'm living

If I could write poems like you

I would write poems like you

All the best,

Scott

Stawomir Mrozek - The Elephant. Quite funny, quote at the back compares it too Kafka, then says its funnier, but its also less disturbing and less open to interpretation, which I guess makes K more powerful.

Moving onto Herta Muller - The Land of Green Plums

reading 'the moor's last sigh' at breakneck pace - luther blisset's 'q' is coming in the mail and i'm excited about starting that a s a humanly p. (also tmls suits a breakneck speed of reading)

scott that was an excellent poem!!

Never had the guts to do that even tho I've thought of it many times.

Moving onto Herta Muller - The Land of Green Plums

Interested to know what you think--I was distinctly underwhelmed. Some interesting stuff there, but I just didn't think her writing was that good. Normally I might blame the translator, but it was the great Michael Hofmann, so no dice.

I'm glad Scott likes Dean Young.

I'm reading Catherine O'Flynn's The News Where You Are. I liked her first book, What Was Lost, a great deal and this is even better: daft, deadpan, West Midlands melancholy. It feels deceptively slight, but packs a hefty emotional punch. I kind of think she's picked up where Alan Plater left off.

finished that dylan thing. that was very entertaining. Sun Pie!

started reading graham greene's The Confidential Agent this morning.

i finished black boy by richard wright. very good.
i started berlin alexanderplatz.

Read most of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Finished Girl with Dragon Tattoo
Read a little of Gommorrah
Reading Revolutionary Road

finished the moor's last sigh and am pootling nostalgically through 'the agrarian origins of modern japan' until i can get home and new books new books new books yayyy

Haha, I read harbl's post without seeing who it was and thought "I know someone who's JUST finished reading Black Boy!!'

Anyway, the Tarkovsky book is not what I had hoped for so far. I wanted it to be more along the lines of Dorsky's "Devotional Cinema" or Bresson's book, which are both amazing. But I'll stick with it.

I read Muller's The Appointment last year - it was good, but yeah I sort of wanted it to knock me over

Mansfield Park -- it's a good ol' time, and I can't quite figure out what it is that makes it so damn enjoyable. It might be well-written or some such crazy thing.
Still dipping into Munro's "Open Secrets", and started on Wells Tower's collection. I don't think I cared for the first story when I'd just finished it, but now when I think about the fish tank, I can't help but like it. It's the ridiculous central place given to the sea cucumber that makes it, I guess.

he likes his taint does wells tower

Just finished The Conversions by Harry Mathews - absurd little treasure hunt; quite fun.

Now onto W. Or The Memory Of Childhood by Georges Perec, and after that, presumably, I'll have to find a book by a writer who was friends with Perec if I wish to keep the chain unbroken.

A couple of "new" Tove Janssons...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/095489958X.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/189729994X.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

The second book being vol 5 of the collected comic strips

have you seen puffin are doing new moomin books 'inspired by' for younger readers? fuck that imo

What? No! Wrong!

I've been reading Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, by David Lipsky, which consists of a set of edited transcripts of David Foster Wallace having long rambling conversations with Lipsky, back in 1996, when Infinite Jest had been newly published and DFW was the hottest young literary lion and Lipsky was interviewing him for Rolling Stone.

It has a strange fascination, in that it gives the flavor of his personality, in a raw, diffuse, digressive sort of way that is much different from his trademark prose. And it catches him right as fame was trying to engulf him and he was trying hard not to be engulfed.

So I'm finishing Herta Muller:

I was distinctly underwhelmed. Some interesting stuff there, but I just didn't think her writing was that good. Normally I might blame the translator, but it was the great Michael Hofmann, so no dice.

Its v disappointing. For me its not so much the writing as I just found myself all over the place while reading it.

There is a strong plot established at the beginning (apparent suicide and diaries that disappear of Lola, and who might have been directly or indirectly responsible), but she veers from it way too often for impressionistic passages of oppressed life in 1980s Romania and then introduces (strong) symbolism that mostly works on its own but adds another layer. She is not too concerned with the plot or character, but sticks along by re-introducing skeletons of both. Its like that spinning plates trick but she can't keep all the elements going and the whole thing collapsed.

Shame because its quite ambitious, tough subjects, but I kept think to all the amazing Romanian films released in the past few years and how they are doing a better job of it.

Finally getting round to reading Hamlet, but keep getting distracted by all the notes and analysis and whatnot

read Turn of the Screw, Beckford's Vathek,and Tanizaki's "Portrait of Shinkin" this week. Three kindsa hoots.

Vathek was wild, had a manic, gleefully blasphemous tone reminiscent of Lewis's The Monk. Really quick plots, almost randomly personality developments, and lots of great lines, like this one spoken by the (suddenly) evil mother: "There is nothing so pleasing as retiring to caverns: my taste for dead bodies, and everything like mummy, is decided."

Tanizaki is new to me. Picked up Seven Japanese Tales for 75 cents. Shunkin I thought was odd and haunting, mixing together a lot of unexpected emotions.

Oh, I forgot to mention that in Cold Comfort Farm there is a character called Aimless. This deeply warmed the cockles of my heart, although the character was a cow.

i started berlin alexanderplatz.

One of my favorite novels ever!

Finished footy book Why England Lose by Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski last night, and stuck my review here.

my summer shopping + the two books I am halfway through:

400 pages into 2666 and bitches be deaaad.
200 pages into Tess of the D'Urbervilles and ;_;

Bought-
Far From The Madding Crowd
Jude The Obscure - see a pattern here?
A Streetcar Named Desire
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - another pattern emerging
The Glass Menagerie

Alexander Trocchi - Young Adam. Unreliable narrators don't do a lot for me but this was really good. The writing is probably more to my immediate tastes and, although I've not read his pornographic novels I think he can insert enough bits from that background to liven it up, instead just really being tied to the unreliableness.

Georges Simenon - Red Lights. One of his Roman Durs from the early 50s. Excellent, although there is a 'I'm in America yay me!' touristy tone that doesn't quite agree after a while.

Moving onto: Roberto Bolano - By Night in Chile.

Third Policeman. Meander, in a not unentertaining fashion - did lol twice - until the reveal at the end makes it meaningful and worthwhile. No desire at all to re-read in the light of but might check out At Swim Two Birds.

Now onto Marilynne Robinson, Home.

read At Swim Two Birds on holiday last week and loved it, especially the banter between the the Palooka and the pocket fairy. will likely yield more lols if you liked The Third Policeman.

I didn't know Trocchi did porn - I thought he only had two books. Young Adam is excellent, agreed. Personal aside: I've got a thing about ultra-minor non-characters and toy with using them as pseudonyms - Daniel Goon was an option I considered as a display name for this place.

Just finished Perec's W, Or The Memory Of Childhood - all good, but the sections on W proper left the strongest impression.

Onto Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott or The Manchurian Candidate - can't decide.

I didn't know Trocchi did porn

As Ted Morgan writes in his biography of Burroughs, at the time there were a number of junkie novelists writing porn for Olympia Press. None of them had any interest left in sex, they just needed money to score.

didn't christopher logue do one about the same time? he is very down on the whole thing in his memoir

I have three choices: Middlemarch (reread), The Cookbook Collector (by Allegra Goodman), The End (by Salvatore Scibona). I believe I will go in reverse order.

"at the time there were a number of junkie novelists writing porn for Olympia Press"

in barney's version, the mordecai richler book i just read, his best friend in the novel does this and i was trying to figure out who the character was based on.

nabokov "the defense"
robert jordan "new spring"

I've got a thing about ultra-minor non-characters and toy with using them as pseudonyms

Is IK from a novel?

He is! From an, uh, planned but unwritten novel that is.

I have also used the name Lanz, from The Trial, which is as minor as minor gets.

The Drought by Ballard. F'in great.

Cat On a Hot Tin Roof slayed me. And like 50 more women died in 2666 - it's getting fucking ridiculous now.

just finished Absolom, Absolom!

thinking Gilead or some Murakami next.

The Drought by Ballard. F'in great.

Shit yeah! Have you read 'The Drowned Earth'? Also great.

xp Gilead! Gilead!

By Night in Chile was awesome.

Moved onto Henry Green - Living.

Yep, read The Drowned World and The Crystal World, just really love the psycho-spiritual reconfiguration that his characters undergo, and a wonderful precise strangeness about his description, general disconnected feeling.

didn't christopher logue do one about the same time?

Yup, Morgan writes that Logue wrote as Count Palmiro Vicarion. But Morgan also writes that Count Palmiro Vicarion wrote White Thighs, whereas Amazon proudly sells it under Trocchi's name.

i was trying to figure out who the character was based on.

Hmm, that's a research problem.

Isaac Deutscher - The Prophet Unarmed

Last night at 9 p.m. I started reading As Nature Made Him: The Boy That Was Raised A Girl and wasn't able to stop until I was finished. It was crazy. This Canadian couple had twin boys, and at 8 moths, they both had phimosis, so they were taken to the doctor for circumcision. The first circumcision resulted in the little boy's penis being burnt off. They contacted a scientist who worked w/adult transsexuals, who convinced them to raise him as a girl. Because they were twins, the scientific and medical community was super excited. So this was an interesting tale of both the history of recent thought about gender identity, and a very sad tale about a little kid with a really angry and confused childhood.

The first circumcision resulted in the little boy's penis being burnt off.

how does this happen exactly!

also i am reading cloud atlas

The circumcision failed because: the attending doctor was a GP not used to doing circumcisions. The book explained that normally they use some kind of clamp that helps get all the blood out of the foreskin. This doctor, instead, used some cutting device that had an electric current in it (to cauterize the foreskin), and she had it turned up way too high. The author described the results as looking like "a burnt piece of string."

Here is an article published in 1997 about the boy, from Rolling Stone, by the author who later wrote the book.

The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon - more bonkers than the (very superior) movie, though kinda brilliant in an awful way or (you knew this bit was coming) awful in a brilliant way. Am a third of the way through and have learned why you shouldn't try to seduce eskimos - am hoping that that Janet Leigh/Marco meet-cute scene on the train will be explained (was she keying in his programming?).

Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley - Rock.

Finishing off Living at the mo. Henry Green is the real deal, love the awkwardness of his writing, and it proves to be fitting to describing the emotional rollecoaster the characters go through, but also the fumbling the Lily and Bert do.

The period stuff: early cinema, Charleston, is another plus.

Really would serve from reading one book after another as its quite easy to tune out from the dialogue.

Finished Q, which was pretty much exactly what I'd expected and exactly what I needed - historical romps about sectarian religious/political groups are pretty much my favourite genre. For a moment I felt proud of myself for having solved the mystery bit, and then I thought back and realised it was totally signposted at the time, so, bah, whatever, pretty much all the suspense of it had been drained away already by the fact that I knew what was historically about to happen next most of the way through. Also I wish I"d realised before I started that there was a map at the back: that would have been pretty useful.

Now on Anne Carson's 'Autobiography of Red', which I picked up in an Oxfam the other day (!) and is sublime, the sadness of it is so tender and strong.

I've given up on Within a Budding Grove - 500 pages in, but it was overdue at the library and I just couldn't do it. I'll get it out again soon to finish it. I don't know what's wrong with me.

I started Tinkers (Paul Harding) this morning. Another book about memory, but more haunting and melancholy than little Marcel's seaside adventures. I'm really in the mood for haunting and melancholy.

Katherine Burderkin's 'Swastika Nights', first published 1937. Must have been the first Hitler wins books, published even before WW2. Set in a technologically ossified future with the globe divided between Nazi Germany and the Japanese. The Germans worship this Hitlerian religion, with Hitler remembered as a tall, muscular, blonde bearded hero 'Who was not Born of Woman, but Exploded", and where women are treated as cattle and kept in concentration camps. Also, weirdly, has a descendent of Hess involved in sending secret documents to occupied England to begin an attempt to undermine it all. Pretty good, but lots of long philosophical conversations, which may weary some.

That's kind of amazing. Japan didn't even properly ally with Germany 'til the war was well underway. What's the backstory? (to the writing of the book I mean, I'm aware of the other stuff)

Finished the Wells Tower collection, which was thoroughly OK and not much else. Also Munro's "Open Secrets", which I must admit it took a couple of stories for me to really get into (though I loved the first one, hrm ... ) Amazed at how for most of the stories it felt like I'd read a really good novel. Any tips on where to go next? Hateship, Friendship &c is the one I've heard most of.

Going off on a sunny vacation for the next couple of week. Naturally bringing along far too many books, just in case. usual, but Anyways, I've started on Der Nister's "The Family Mashber", which is excellent so far. Whodda thought several pages of descriptions of synagogues could be so interesting.
The narration seems almost like transcriptions of a likeable, gregarious fellow's story-telling.

"In the course of those busy days, people eat very little. Whatever was eaten in the morning at home before leaving for the market suffices until evening, until dark, until, red-faced, swollen, exhausted, one gets home.
One ignores everything. Trembling hands, freezing faces, noses, ears. Blows are overlooked, and splinters. Never mind. In the evening at home where it's warm, the splinters can be removed."

For some reason I really like that sentence "Blows are overlooked, and splinters."

That's kind of amazing. Japan didn't even properly ally with Germany 'til the war was well underway. What's the backstory? (to the writing of the book I mean, I'm aware of the other stuff)

Burdekin was a left-wing feminist/socialist (she wrote the book under a male psuedonym, and it was published in the UK by the Left Book Club. She was a pacifist, but was so horrified by Fascism that she abandoned pacifism, and Swastika Night was part of her attempt to scare people into fighting the Nazis.

i've been jumping around a lot lately, mainly reading philosophy (a lot of which is re-reading or study, it's not like i'm just plowing through them all) -

charles travis, the uses of sense: wittgenstein's philosophy of language
john searle, speech acts
nietzsche, the gay science
books by maudmarie clark, robert pippin, and bernard reginster on nietzsche
julian young's nietzsche biography
cavell, the claim of reason
cavell, cities of words
emerson, essays
thoreau, walden
la rochefoucauld, maxims
ernst tugendhat, traditional and analytical philosophy

- but also some other things, none of which i've settled into -

joshua cohen, witz
robert walser, the nyrb selected stories
thomas bernhard, the voice imitator
stanley fish, self-consuming artifacts
augustine, on christian teaching
pynchon, mason & dixon
dos passos, u.s.a.
ingeborg bachmann, darkness spoken
montaigne, essays
john guillory, cultural capital: the problem of literary canon formation
an anthology of french poetry, 'into the deep street'
some dickens

i realized the other day that it's been around eleven or twelve years since i first started reading 'mason & dixon' and i still haven't finished it. even after i finally found my feet with it, i enjoy reading it so much that i just start over at the beginning whenever i come back to it.

i realized the other day that it's been around eleven or twelve years since i first started reading 'mason & dixon' and i still haven't finished it

oh man don't even talk to me about that sort of thing, i'm still annoyed i've been on the man without qualities for over a year

it's different with books you don't think that, in some sense, you need to put behind you.

ingeborg bachmann, darkness spoken

Read any of her fiction?

As for me:

Jiri Grusa - The Questionnaire. A late 70s Czech novel where the main character answers a state given questionnaire (no particular reaon is given, but you can make a guess in a Soviet occupied setting) and then uses that as a jumping off to talk about really anything and everything autobiographical in a fantastical, grotesque.

All to express a tiredness with the bureaucratic regimes. It can be pretty funny, and you can detect an anger crossed with resignation behind it, which makes it for pretty good satire.

Now I've moved to some Arthur Schnitzler - Vienna 1900: Games with Love and Death

hang on a sec

j., who are you

some a long time ago—i think that green integer volume collects some 'thirtieth year' stuff and some later stuff?—and 'letters to felician', if you count that. i actually just ordered an english copy of 'malina' and the other stuff because i've had a german copy of it sitting around for years, untouched. i think i'm sold enough on the idea of her fiction by marjorie perloff's chapter on her in 'wittgenstein's ladder' not to be in a hurry to read it, though, if that makes sense.

Thanks for the Bachmann summary, j.

I read a rev of Malina a year or two back and it had the whole 'but this is impossible to translate!' thing and left it but I probably would pick up if I saw it 2nd hand. I think a translator did a talk in the LRB bookshop a few weeks ago when her correspondance with Paul Celan came out.

(Further reflections on the Grusa in that I'm probably reading it as anger and satire because I know some of the background, but actually its just fabulistic w/out much commentary or reflection -- its just flat out disturbance/disturbing -- but it does a lampoonning of commie speak that comes in every now and again.)

Onto Mishima's "Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea" which is not really doing it for me so far.
Went on an extended Delillo kick for a while ... "The Names," "End Zone," and "Players."

Claustrophilia - a poem in this week's New Yorker

'impossible to translate' as a critics' trope seems like it might do as much harm (stopping people from reading translated work, stopping people from taking up translation as a job) as good (attracting people to difficult books, creating an allure specific to translated works, accurately characterizing an aspect of the whole fact of translation) by now.

xpost to myself and June 15. closeness is texture. also, stars / stuff / stow.

xp Gilead! Gilead!

― ledge, Wednesday, July 21, 2010 5:13 AM (1 week ago)

well done with the motivating. great book.

Schnitzler is really great. I guess because anything with a strong psychological focus towards the Freudian (the word 'dream' recurs anyway) is past its time, then the fact that it was spoken as shocking when perhaps it never was since most of the shock was absorbed by a particularly conservative Viennese public of the early 20th century (which was always a bit too keen to turn the anti-semitic wheel) Schnitzler isn't read much but when you turn to The Spring Sonata (one of the four stories in this collection) its contemporary and unbearably sad tale of a woman's attempt to move on from her husband's death, and to move on in more ways, both from her pre-determined position and her place (psychological and geographical) - this is also a precursor to Jelinek's work.

The other story I read also displays a grasp on what a glance, or a tinniest gesture could mean - and that the inner mind of the character is so much more coherent than what they are capable of expressing to others by talk.

I'll read the other two later. Broken this off to start on Jose Lezama Lima - Paradiso

Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec - A fourth of the way through. Wow. There's no doubt a site or two out there carefully annotating every chapter, something tempting to google up, but it's just wonderful to bask in for the moment. The book I needed right now, at this moment, I suspect.

Our Hero: Superman On Earth by Tom De Haven - Splendid essay, esp. w/r/t the weird appeal of the Weisinger era.

i accidentally started reading 2666 and now i cannot stop

pls send help

Schnitzler is really great.

Seconded, thirded, fourthed, etc. Read 'Casanova's Return to Venice'--a wonderful, wonderful book.

cis - I have been meaning to avoid that (just that I don't NEED any really big books for a while). Please stop :-)

James - yes, def need to read as much as I can.

now i'm through 'speech acts' and moving on to searle's 'expression and meaning'. somewhat disappointing that, according to him, there are only five basic categories of illocutionary act ('assertives', 'directives', 'commissives', 'expressives', and 'declarations'):

‘If we adopt illocutionary point as the basic notion on which to classify uses of language, then there are a rather limited number of basic things we do with language: we tell people how things are, we try to get them to do things, we commit ourselves to doing things, we express our feelings and attitudes and we bring about changes through our utterances. Often, we do more than one of these things at once in the same utterance.’

Alan Furst's new one, 'Spies of the Balkans', was pure pleasure

Now reading a book by a Cote d'Ivoire writer I know nothing about, 'As the Crow Flies'

just finished 2666 a couple days ago, i enjoyed it a lot. something quite insidious about it, a kind of lurking evil quality. i wasn't crazy about part 4 (about the crimes), though.

got a nice haul from the ol library yesterday:

True to Life: 25 Years of Conversations with David Kockney by Lawrence Weschler (a companion/counter-point to the one on Robert Irwin by Weschler which I loved)
The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
The Dice Man by Luke Reihnhardt (I have no idea what to expect from this, I don't remember where I heard about it)
and
The Corrections

I finished Love and Summer by William Trevor last night, a recommendation I think I got from here. I've never read Trevor before and it was excellent. I like understated, quiet stories occasionally and next time I feel like one I'll know where to go.

I started re-reading The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge this morning. Huge love for this one.

The Dice Man by Luke Reihnhardt (I have no idea what to expect from this, I don't remember where I heard about it)
and

wow this brings back memories, i read this on holiday a few years ago. excellent i recall.

in between sci fi epic novels, i've just started Robinson Crusoe and what seems to be an extremely old book with strange adverts at the rear for short docu manuals with titles such as "What alcohol is?" written by johnson and son etc.

franny, i hope you know there's a new translation of the rilke by burton pike (published by dalkey archive). it's very… clear.

Yes! That's the one I have. I read (and loved) the Stephen Mitchell translation the first time, but could never find it in a store. I found the Dalkey one a couple of months ago and I'm hoping it's as good.

about to finish Cloud Atlas and a book of Shirley Jackson short stories. The Loser is in the mail.

re. The Dice Man

My mate and I read (& loved) this book in high school. While he was on a fishing trip with his family over summer holidays Jesso got drunk and made a list of choices, the most controversial of which was "Liberate Trevor's boat"; Trevor was the person camping next to them. Sure enough he rolled the dice & got this option, so he dutifully went out to the pier and set Trevor's boat free. When he and his dad went to go fishing the next day, his dad spotted Trevor's boat washed up on the shore a couple of hundred metres away and told Jesso to go and fetch it for him.

Jonathen Schell's Nixon bio, at J.D.'s suggestion. Also:

William Dean Howells - A Hazard of New Fortunes
Altman on Altman

I finished Love and Summer by William Trevor last night, a recommendation I think I got from here. I've never read Trevor before and it was excellent. I like understated, quiet stories occasionally and next time I feel like one I'll know where to go.

otm. I loved this.

[i]Yes! That's the one I have. I read (and loved) the Stephen Mitchell translation the first time, but could never find it in a store. I found the Dalkey one a couple of months ago and I'm hoping it's as good.[i]

i first read the norton translation, and could never tolerate the mitchell translation long enough to understand what my problem was with it in comparison. but the pike translation seems to me to get the close-knit feel of the norton without feeling so crabbed. (i think those are both terms pike probably uses in his introduction.) that fits with my sense of the german, though i can only read rilke's german quite slowly and dimly.

now i'm reading chaim perelman's 'realm of rhetoric', george englebretsen's 'something to reckon with: the logic of terms', and i dunno, some other stuff.

boo.

I have no German at all, but I liked Pike's introduction and so far am fine with how it's reading. I think it's sparer and a bit more familiar than I remember the Mitchell being, but honestly it was ~6 years ago that I read it, so I'm not exactly remembering it fresh.

It's a damn beautiful book though. Some of the sentences really kill me. Last night there was one, something about women after giving birth 'sleeping and closing themselves' - that's not exactly it, but it was gorgeous.

I liked the Mitchell translation well enough, prob bcz Malte... really has enough going for it to 'survive' almost any translation. My edition has also a real cracker of an essay by William Gass, iirc.

If I see the Pike I'll give it a go.

Halfway through another novel poem: Paradiso by Lezama Lima. Rabassa sorta pulling out a miracle on that one.

C by Tom McCarthy. Got its faults - smells of research in places, shadow of Pynchon a bit heavy - but I really liked it. Love his style & his sensibility; abstraction, bit of ice in the blood, pile on the ideas, description overload. Can't see there being a novel I'll like more anytime soon. Won't say more, sure more people will read it.

Millennium People by Ballard. Wasn't wild on this one. Readable, but felt messy, like the bits - middle class slavery & revolt, meaning and meaningless violence – weren't coming together properly. Enjoyed its tonal uncertainties (something close to comedy sliding into classic Ballardian stuff). But doesn't work as cleanly as eg Super-Cannes.

the europeans - henry james. first james i've ever read, apart from daisy miller. it's quite funny, reminds me more of waugh or wodehouse than i would have expected.

the oxford book of english verse - christopher ricks, ed. slowly working my way through this one.

Can anyone recommend a really good book of literary criticism/history?

Alfred Kazin - On Native Grounds
any collection of Edmund Wilson
Lionel Trilling - The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent
anything by Helen Vendler
James Wood - The Broken Estate

Thanks, Alfred

malcolm gladwell - 'what the dog saw'

glad you enjoyed the schell book, alfred. what's the best order to read james's novels in? will i be over my head if i go for portrait of a lady next?

Absolutely not! The Europeans and Washington Square are splendid introductions – they're funny (especially the former) and incisive; he has a gift for defining a character in an almost aphoristic way, yet the character continually surprises you. The stereotype of James as the creator of unwieldy, terrifying novels is so untrue about his work before 1900.

I've been giving J.M. Coetzee's essays an on-and-off reading as on the Stranger Shores collection. The one on Kafka is particularly good, where he works through problems with the first translations.

Just about any reviews/overviews of an author as written by Susan Sontag are fantastic, too.

Who is good for medieval/renaissance/baroque lit? Erich Auerbach?

Oh, and this (if you subscribe) is good. Mary McCarthy (not come across her till that essay) has a forceful personality punching its way through in this overview of 'History of Ideas' types novels. Slightly bizarre conclusion tho'.

matt rendell's marco pantani biography

Finally getting round to The Inheritance of Rome - A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 by Chris Wickham. Just had to find out what happened in those Dark Ages.

As it is, this is good. At least, his chapters on how to read the evidence of the period, and the end of the Roman Empire seem judicious, and have some nice anecdotes, plus careful revisionism based on what looks like intelligent reading of the sources and archaelogical evidence. I mean, I have to be cautious, since I know next to nothing about the period, but well, if he's a fraud, he's faking it well.

And I'm delighted to know that Merovingian kings associated kingship with uncut hair, and saw hair-cutting as a temporary deposition. (Clearly the SBing of the Frankish world).

ooh, xpost, I bought my brother that pantani biography - how is it?

That said, sentences like

But Chlotar and Dagobert's centrality is by now rarely doubted, and more recent historians have gone the other way, arguing that even late seventh-century kings like Childeric II (662-711) and Childebert III (694-711) had a good deal of power

can make the eyes feel a little heavy, other activities like staring vacantly at the ceiling seem mildly attractive. He does in fact earlier concede that the 'political history of the period can easily be reduced to rivalries, and perennial wars, between competing Merovingians. This would make for dull reading; what follows focuses on some of the major figures' but clearly it's not a specific period rich in narrative detail, and, ah, Chris, is clearly caught in a position of having to plough through it.

Still, I'm looking forward to Kings Without States: Britain and Ireland, 400-800 (might be able to bring a bit more to the party, in sporting parlance), the chapter on material culture and display from Imp. Rome to the Carolingians, the Byzantine/Arab stuff (again, a bit warmer on this stuff than the descendants of 'the shadowy Merovech'), and a chapter excitingly called The Caging of the Peasantry.

ok that xpost is supposed to be at the end.

Oh, and a good appendix note to p 66.

Benedict: The Rule of St Benedict, ed. and trans. J. McCann (London, 1952). So there!

Nothing else of the sort in the entire 100pp of closely printed notes. I'm almost tempted to write to him and find out what the joke was.

xpostin'

On the general critics question (Brit perspective), anything by Frank Kermode is worth a look (Sense of an Ending especially maybe). Christopher Ricks is the other obvious big one - he gets on my nerves a bit (almost too flashy in places, a bit like Empson without Empson's curiosity and thoughtfulness about people, their thoughts and feelings - Empson's refusal to take literature as autonomous is a big part of what makes him my favourite critic) but a collection of his essays would be stimulating at least. John Carey can be very incisive, but there's a kind of mean-spiritedness there sometimes - you get beaten over the head with common sense, feels a bit sulkily british.

Hugh Kenner is a good, provocative read. The Pound Era, The Counterfeiters.

Carey and Kermode are both very good Renaissance/Baroque critics - that's where their scholarly roots are. I like David Norbrook a lot as well - the Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse is the best modern-ish intro to the period's poetry. And it can take some wrestling with, but Geoffrey Hill's criticism can go deep into 1500-1700 - since he's unapologetically religious, he's got a connection to stuff other critics hold with tongs.

Can't think of that much for the 18th that would appeal outside the academy - old standbys like Pat Rogers are solid guides to the period.

All fairly old fashioned. Not much idea about more recent theory-driven criticism

Also, the 2 vols collected of Cyril Connolly are really good, too.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0330485563.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0330486012.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Seconding Wilson in a big way as well.

What I've read of Clive James seems pretty ace.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0330485563.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0330486012.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

is what I meant.

What a coincidence -- I've just discovered Connolly. Too bad his memoirs are impossible to find (I read Enemies of Promise years ago though).

Weirdly, the memoirs are included in those 2 vols, but split between them for some reason.

I'm pretty sure I picked up The Inheritance of Rome in a three-for-two a couple of months back. "Just had to find out what happened in those Dark Ages" was exactly my thought process too - it seemed totally imperative for a few weeks, for reasons I can't quite remember but which sadly faded before I got round to opening the thing.

Every Clive Cussler and Terry Pratchett book my library owns.

Now reading that new John Cornwell book on Cardinal Newman. Really not sure why. Always struggled with Newman, find his prose utterly stultifying after about a page and am not really into Victorian or snob Catholic stuff enough that I am compelled to figure him out. I keep trying because he jumps out at me all over the place when reading other stuff (Matthew Arnold, James Joyce, Hopkins), & ok yeh I am fascinated/disgusted by the creepy camp catholics who love him. I guess I picked it up because it was lying around an office & I enjoyed Eagleton's review of it in the LRB. It's good, but I'm not sure I'll finish it.

I loved "Hitler's Pope" & "A Thief In The Night" by Cornwell, but yeah Newman doesn't interest me in the slightest either

I find Newman one of the best prose stylists of the late nineteenth century. I've a weakness for this marmoreal Paterian stuff.

Hitler's Pope is fantastic.

yeah, for some reason I've got a big block on Victorian discursive prose. I can't think of anyone from 1830-1890 I really really enjoy reading the way I do Browne or Hobbes or Gibbon or Hazlitt. I've never got on with Carlyle, prose Arnold, Ruskin, Pater, etc. & I'd have thought I'd be a fan of at least one of those. Ruskin's probably closest to an exception.

I just came back from a long hiking/camping trip durnig which I read The Confessions of an English Opium Eater by DeQuincey. Hadn't read it before. This edition was based on the original magazine articles, with extensive appendices of material from the late-in-life revised edition. The original was a quick engaging read. The additional material was of interest only insofar as one might be interested in DeQuincey's life story.

I also read a selection of nine of Plutarch's Lives put out by Penguin a while back, titled The Making of Rome or something like that. Anyway, it had some early Republic lives, including Coriolanus, some mid-Republic lives, including the Gracchi, and late Republic lives, such as Brutus and Mark Anthony. It's a shame that Plutarch wasn't just a tad more reliable in terms of facts, because that man knew how to spin a ripping tale.

Into such interstices as presented themselves, I stuffed some Flann O'Brien (in his guise of Myles na Gopaleen, newspaper columnist extraordinaire). Always fun stuff, even if I don't get all of his trans-linguistic puns.

yeah, for some reason I've got a big block on Victorian discursive prose. I can't think of anyone from 1830-1890 I really really enjoy reading the way I do Browne or Hobbes or Gibbon or Hazlitt

George Eliot might be your thing: try her 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' for starters: http://webscript.princeton.edu/~mnoble/eliot-texts/eliot-sillynovels.html

Middlemarch is essential reading.

Definitely! I was just thinking more of your essay-type shenanigans

ty James - that looks great, will read while working today, & have added Eliot's essays to my 'to chase' list. She'd crossed my mind, but mainly because I was wondering if energetic prose that handles ideas hadn't become the novel's domain around mid-century, poss because of her. I'd written off her non-fiction - I'd taken a look at some things and found stuff that kills my interest - earnest ethics, German philosophy, iirc - but I was probably hasty.

I thought about it some more and realised that there is some high Vic non-fic that I like nearly as much as earlier prose, but it's more journalistic or reportagey than essayish - Dickens (not wildly different from his fiction tbh) and Mayhew's London Labour.

I have been going back through my shelves of the great unread:
A Critic Writes by Reyner Banham: great collection of mostly New Society columns by Norwich-born, LA-bound architecture/culture critic, includes a perceptive essay on Star Wars and a funny piece on Buckminster Fuller.
Mindless Pleasures: 70s collection of essays on Pynchon, particularly a great piece by Edward Mendelson on encyclopedic novels.
Had another crack at that vast Greil-Marcus-edited new literary history of America, but I'm not getting on with it at all, not least because it's such an impractically cumbersome book to browse through.

Should be Mind-FUL Pleasures, obv.

hmm guess I need to look at that despite my longstanding issues w/GM

I just finished The Professor & The Madman by Simon Winchester about the making of the OED, this is the kind of popular history interspersed w/narrative that I enjoy and use as a model for my own scribbling. yesterday I started Winchester's Krakatoa and will finally crack The Pregnant Widow when I'm done.

That was The Surgeon of Crowthorne in the UK, right? Was fun iirc.

Done with Life, A User's Manual. Am now set to begin:

La Disparition by Georges Perec (translation, natch, but I far prefer the original title so I'm labelling it that)
That Bellos biography of Perec
A Fox In The Attic by Richard Hughes

Probably all at once.

That Eagleton review of the Cardinal Newman book is a great read.

"He was not going to let a little thing like his entire social formation as an individual stand in the way of what he saw as the truth."

Incidentally, this - "Esoteric debates about early church heresies thus had an indirect bearing on issues of political power" is pretty much one of the main messages of the early part of The Inheritance of Rome book.

currently working on 'the third policeman' by flann o'brien (again) and 'what jesus meant' by garry wills (interesting, a gift from my ex-seminarian father)

do any of you guys do your reading on the k1ndle, btw? am i a rube for being philosophically opposed to a life that shifts from one electronic device to another, most of which involve yet another glowing screen? i've engaged in debate ("debate") on the k1ndle thread and oft feel as though i'm in the minority these days. maybe this is for another thread.

I'm not interested in a Kindle for myself, but not violently opposed to them. A 50 cent used book serves my needs entirely, so buying a $150 device to do the same thing seems superfluous.

i'm not violently opposed to them for other people as much as i'm not exactly eagerly anticipating a future with kindles being more omnipresent than actual books

seeing more & more Kindles on the NY subways & buses. could see my wife getting one - she works in book publishing and reads tons of manuscripts, there's a tower of paper next to the bed where she does her reading. problem is she's a luddite who only recently broke down and got a blackberry. the other night we had dinner w/friends who are "early adopter" types, they stanned hot & heavy for the iPad.
anything longer than an article I like to read on paper but I can imagine a reading device being useful for my own book research, pulling together articles and parts of books in one place. except you can't really write or take notes on a Kindle, right? gonna wait & see.

There is a little thing to take notes on there. I've got the first generation one so I don't know if they've improved upon it.

how much do you use the Kindle? is it your primary way to read now?

I carry the Kindle and a library book with me every day on the subway and read from one or the other. If I am really into what I am reading then the Kindle reading is fine and I don't really regret not having a flesh-and-blood brick-and-mortar glue-thread-and-paper actual book. But sometimes I feel like it's giving too much choice about what to read, sometimes I feel like I end up reading more slowly than my already glacially slow pace which may be somehow because of the really annoying feature of the thing, which is the inability to flip back and forth, to random access it, which is annoying both during reading and after finishing. Of course this is all subjective, your mileage may vary, etc.

Also, has anybody told you about the Kindle samples yet?

I just finished Soccer in a Football World by David Wangerin and reviewed it here. It was excellent. I was going to go for my fourth straight football book, but I ordered Maradona's autobiography and it hasn't arrived yet - so I've either got a full library to choose from, or an early bunk.

So against ebooks, partly through blind prejudice, and partly because am an old-fashioned physical book lover. Also, A 50 cent used book serves my needs entirely, so buying a $150 device to do the same thing seems superfluous. so OTM

Reading Wallace Stegner's 'The Spectator Bird', which is really sour and really good

I picked up VS Naipaul Among The Believers last night. It was immediately obvious that I was onto a high plane of writing. He's got an easy, unshowy style and totally instant, while packed full of conflict and deeper themes. And all he's done so far is trek across Tehran looking for a bus.

Finished Paradiso: imagery gets way too esoteric and wild (and plenty of discussions surrounding homosexuality, something that estranged him from Castro's regime). Oddly not as modern (because he stretches imagery) but the thought and feel are there.

Googling shows that he was an essayist and I'd certainly like to read those sometime, a lot of 'role of the poet' stuff in here. And his poetry, too.

Among The Believers is diamond-hard brilliance. be prepared for the long haul: you'll probably want to read everything else by curmudgeonly old Vido.

So I finished The Dice Man and True to Life: Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney.

The former was entertaining but poorly written imo. I liked the basic idea, I can totally understanding developing a fascination with using random chance to make decisions, but I don't think the novel really tried to depict it very realistically or was able to present anything like a developed character.

The latter was really disappointing. After reading Seeing is Forgetting (which I highly, highly recommend to anyone interested in visual art) I was really hoping for a challenging, thoughtful counterpoint which would force me to critically reconsider the point of view presented by Robert Irwin, but Hockney doesn't really develop a coherent point of view from what I can see and doesn't really go any way towards critiquing Irwin's ideas. Hockney came across as a really nice guy and an extremely hard working artist, but I wasn't pulled into his way of seeing at all like I was with Irwin.

I am getting into The End by Scibona. This week's NYT Book Review made me want to read Hans Keilson.

Wasn't The Dice Man supposed to be a satire on the narrator, with his patients as foils? IIRC one patient describes his plans to be a child-rapist-murderer, and the narrator simply repeats the details back, a la psychotherapy, without moral judgment. Another of his patients (a young man) rejects the dice idea and storms out, vowing to make constructive change in the world, which I took to be a signal from the writer around the narrator.

On the Kindle discussion, above, it would be good to get a portable screen device so I could read rare bks that are only available to d/l online, Ranciere's The Ignorant Schoolmaster comes to mind. Otherwise I do realize there is a difference between reading of things on a screen (where I tend to skim more) and on a physical page where I read more slowly.

Not that the pace at which I read makes me a better or worse reader.

xpost, its a satire of a lot of things, but def not a cut and dry satire of the narrator, no

Started: E.C. Goossen - Ellsworth Kelly

Next up: Tadeusz Borowski - This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

On the Kindle discussion, above, it would be good to get a portable screen device so I could read rare bks that are only available to d/l online, Ranciere's The Ignorant Schoolmaster comes to mind. Otherwise I do realize there is a difference between reading of things on a screen (where I tend to skim more) and on a physical page where I read more slowly.

I've actually taken to creating my own editions of books like this--designing new covers, laying out the text, and getting them printed through Lulu. Usually costs around US$8-12 inc postage, and I get a physical book I want. Only problem is it becomes weirdly addictive, and I've done this with a few books that probably were OP for a reason. Still, some gems found.

Suddenly at the Priory by John Williams. Bit of an accident this one, I was comfort-reading round John Dickson Carr, and he wrote an intro to this book. It's an account of the Charles Bravo poisoning, written in the 1950s. Anyway, I got hooked (it's not really that great, but I had an afternoon free, and didn't fancy the fine details of Visigoth political structures in the Iberian peninsula).

True crime was different in those days - society murders, poisoning etc. I guess there are fashions in murder as there are in anything else. Poisoning, in particular, is it even a thing any more? Could someone like Shipman, say, be considered a poisoner? It got me speculating about how much there's an environmental niche for murder and its representation both journalistic and fictional. But as usual my speculations were desultory and fruitless.

Oh, and a book of 50 Great Detectives, which is hilariously badly illustrated, but does have a late Sherlock Holmes story that I hadn't previously read, and a couple of other half decent things in it.

Nice, James - never heard of Lulu before.

Corey - Do report on the Borowski. I am interested in reading him sometime.

Elias Khoury - Yalo. Tale of a Lebanese soldier who is interrogated/tortured about his activities as a soldier. Khoury is excellent at the whole different points of views to arrive at a multiplicity of truths (and those - in the problematic form of a confession - are never enough for the interrogator), so you're 'working' in that way.

Also reading some short stories by Walter Abish. The first one is a re-run of How German Is it?, a cracking novel about Germany's silence on its past (in the way that many former Nazis went on to be reintegrated into Germanic structures). The other stories are Oulipian types games, which I am really not that interested in but I'm reading anyway.

I read Kafka- Amerika and now I am reading Chris Petit's "Robinson", a nice seedy/surreal London noir. Quite a page-turner

Amerika was great, Kafka's humor is so underrated, but the unfinished nature of the book/final chapter lead to inevitable disappointment. Still an excellent book though.

"I've actually taken to creating my own editions of books like this--designing new covers, laying out the text, and getting them printed through Lulu. Usually costs around US$8-12 inc postage, and I get a physical book I want. Only problem is it becomes weirdly addictive, and I've done this with a few books that probably were OP for a reason. Still, some gems found."

okay, you are some sort of genius. can we see some of the covers you have designed?

Here are some...

Henri Barbusse: 'Inferno' (about a voyeur who peers through a hole in the wall at the sexual and other shenanigans going on in the room next door)
http://static.lulu.com/product/paperback/inferno-%5Ba-whisky-priest-book%5D/12185434/thumbnail/320

Grant Allen: 'Michael's Crag' (about a man convinced he is the archangel Michael)
http://static.lulu.com/product/paperback/michaels-crag-%5Ba-whisky-priest-book%5D/11269622/thumbnail/320/

Peter George: 'Red Alert' (original basis for 'Doctor Strangelove, but without jokes)--uses frames from old civil defense film
http://static.lulu.com/product/paperback/red-alert-%5Ba-whisky-priest-book%5D/10791537/thumbnail/320

Inez Gillmore: 'Angel Island' (feminist SF about shipwrecked men on island of winged women)
http://static.lulu.com/product/paperback/angel-island-%5Ba-whisky-priest-book%5D/11778305/thumbnail/320

Storm Jameson: 'In the Second Year' (1930s book about Britain taken over by Fascists)
http://static.lulu.com/product/paperback/in-the-second-year-%5Ba-whisky-priest-book%5D/11264440/thumbnail/320

Lord Dunsany: 'Tales of War' (lots of VERY short stories about WWI, plus one about a gorilla)
http://static.lulu.com/product/paperback/tales-of-war-%5Ba-whisky-priest-book%5D/11905283/thumbnail/320

Fitz-James O'Brien: 'The Diamond Lens' (19th-Century short SF/fantasy/ghost stories, title one about man falling in love with microscopic woman he discovers through high-powered microscope)
http://static.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-diamond-lens-other-stories-%5ba-whisky-priest-book%5d/10791576/thumbnail/320

'A Young Girl's Diary' (diary of early 20th-century Vienesse girl, published by Freud and co)
http://static.lulu.com/product/paperback/a-young-girl%E2%80%99s-diary-%5Ba-whisky-priest-book%5D/12044225/thumbnail/320

Casualty: 'Contemptible' (fictionalised WWI memoir, not as good as I'd hoped it would be)
http://static.lulu.com/product/paperback/contemptible-%5ba-whisky-priest-book%5d/11256099/thumbnail/320

There are others, but I won't go on: they're here (http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum=-1&search_cat=2&show_results=topics&return_chars=200&search_keywords=&keys=&header_search=true&search=&locale=&sitesearch=lulu.com&q=&fListingClass=7&fSearch=%22whisky+priest%22&fSubmitSearch.x=9&fSubmitSearch.y=6) if you want to see them. As I say, it gets a bit addictive.

Nice, were the texts originally pdfs? I might do this

The Grant Allen and Storm Jameson are from PDFs, the rest I reset and laid out myself.

It's a lot of fun, although explaining it to someone they couldn't get their head around it. "So if you do a copy of Moby Dick, does that replace the ones in the shops? What if someone else does one, will that replace yours?"

wow! color me impressed!

forgive my ignorance, but what do u mean by "reset"?

Sorry, I mean I get a copy of the book as plain text from somewhwere like Project Gutenberg, and then lay it all out in InDesign, in a way that I find attractive, rather than just using a PDF of a photocopy of the book.

yah i do that. It's fun! i do it with essays and short stories and stuff, but i set with latex (memoir class) and typeset so they print legibly at A5, which is how i print them. here is a simple soul by flaubert

Those covers are great - doubly impressive because 1) I'm crap at this sort of thing and 2) it sometimes seems that a lot of publisher's designers are as well.

now I am reading Chris Petit's "Robinson", a nice seedy/surreal London noir. Quite a page-turner

Yes, liked this a lot. I'd read The Passenger - one of his airport thrillers - before, and hadn't quite known what to make of it. As a thriller I'm not sure it really worked, however it was clearly concerned with ideas about identity and information. (See also his recent documentary, um, Content was it?) There were no characters, just sort of empty ciphers, line drawings so to speak. After reading Robinson I was quite keen to go back to The Passenger and see whether it was a continuation of sorts of similar concerns.

Those covers are great! And it's a great plan, had never occurred to me before, always thought there must be prohibitive economies of scale involved, ie I couldn't beat the prices of those fugly POD editions that clutter Amazon and ABE results when you're looking for something out-of-the-way (& they, presumably use the same principle).

So I can just use downloaded Google books PDFs, right, if I don't mind not resetting?

This is terrible, expensive news.

And sticking this in with the books rather than on the iPlayer thread, just in case overseas ilxors want to track it down: watched In Their Own Words: British Novelists last night. Linking material's a bit patchy, but it has some great footage - Wodehouse, Chesterton, Waugh, Bowen, Graves. A++++ TH White bit about 40 minutes in.

So I can just use downloaded Google books PDFs, right, if I don't mind not resetting?

Yeah--just work out the size you want the book to be (ie 6" by 9") and then 'print' the downloaded PDF into a new PDF (freeware like PrimoPDF will do this if you don't have Acrobat) of the relevant paper size. I hope that makes sense.

Have also found good things at Internet Archive Texts when Google Books failed me.

Sorry for so derailing the thread, BTW! In an attempt to talk about what I am actually reading:

Geoffrey Homes: Build My Gallows High -- ultra-grim but rather spiffy noir novel, basis for 'Out of the Past'

Must find a working proxy to watch that BBC show!

I am reading "Nothing To Envy", Barbara Demick's cheery read about North Korea. And also Laurence Sterne's "The Life And Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman". And Stephen Baxter's "Ark". I am also kind of reading Stefan Aust's book about the RAF. and other things.

Geoffrey Homes: Build My Gallows High -- ultra-grim but rather spiffy noir novel, basis for 'Out of the Past'

And sticking this in with the books rather than on the iPlayer thread, just in case overseas ilxors want to track it down: watched In Their Own Words: British Novelists last night. Linking material's a bit patchy, but it has some great footage - Wodehouse, Chesterton, Waugh, Bowen, Graves. A++++ TH White bit about 40 minutes in.

― tetrahedron of space (woof), Tuesday, August 17, 2010 Bookmark

Saw that last night -- would have done some kind of 'who was best poll' but there wasn't enough to it really. TH White, but also Waugh was (predictably?) hilarious.

Cartland was odd, usually they'd have a talking head + the novelist but they didn't find anyone for here did they? Seemed a very forced inclusion.

I wonder if Henry Green was ever interviewed by the BBC? Bit of a recluse wasn't he? Its the big omission.

Will need to figure out the google books stuff (once I get round to getting a new computer). Good work James!

Did he say google books? Thought he was said Project Gutenberg.

Google books and Project Guttenburg, too - sorta washed over me anyway.

Gro Dahle - Loop
She's starting to become my Norwegian writer -- twee as hell, at times vaguely reminiscent of George Saunders, but less political, more religious. Her way of writing about relationships seems very, well, aspie -- lots of studying how people act and obsessing over what rules to follow etc. She writes beautifully and hilariously though.

Interesting Henry Green interview here, by Nigel Dennis: http://books.google.be/books?id=YFYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA83&dq=nigel+dennis+henry+green&hl=en&ei=cdJdTL35N8GMONfnkb0J&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=nigel%20dennis%20henry%20green&f=false

What's Baxter's 'Ark' like? I enjoyed 'Flood', but I'm assuming this one's set out in space, rather than on the flooded Earth?

Geoffrey Homes is a pen name for Daniel Mainwaring, no?

Yeah, the blacklisted writer. He wrote the screenplay too, but the main character is rather more morally compromised in the book than the film. Unfortunately the femme fatale in the book goes by the name 'Mumsie', which rather undercuts the air of sexiness.

Emjoyed the writers in their own words thing. As has been said upthread, could have done with less of the linking stuff (some of which was excruciating - of the BBC having no recordings of Orwell's voice: 'Big Brother would have been proud', ugh). And I suppose there has to be a narrative of sorts, but what they had did result in some chronological infelicities, trying to get the post-war 1984 in because of Brave New World (and rather dismissive of Huxley's excellent early novels). Still, as I say, I suppose these things give some coherence.

Perhaps more of a shame was that there just wasn't more of the stuff. I could easily have done with a ragbag including more of everyone, esp TH White and Waugh (and indeed Jean Rhys). The old three-part documentary on Waugh that the BBC showed a year or so ago has more of that Elizabeth Jane Howard interview, which is good, as it has him being eloquently generous to other writers (such as Wodehouse) and funny about his own (particularly why all his characters have to die iirc). TH White kiw the justification for the Temple to Hadrian.

Oh, and perhaps less footage from adaptations of the writers' works - a curse of this sort of thing (the Greene scenes from Brighton Rock excepted). If I see Ian Carmichael as Jim Dixon next week I'm going to put a boot through the screen.

some of which was excruciating - of the BBC having no recordings of Orwell's voice: 'Big Brother would have been proud',

haha that was baffling. & otm on the muddled treatment of Huxley - the summary of his pre-BNW career was actively misleading iirc, treating him like he was a Waugh-lite.

White's 'whacking big swimming pool and Temple to Hadrian' kept cheering me up yesterday.

I wonder if Henry Green was ever interviewed by the BBC?

Dunno if there's any radio. Really didn't like being photographed though, so I guess Face to Face would be out. Paris Review interview available too.

On topic, I just started How I Escaped My Certain Fate, the Stewart Lee book. A lot of it is routines that you'll have seen if you're the sort who'll want to read it, all heavily annotated. The biographical linking sections are funny, interesting, etc.

Think I'm also about to read a biography of Goodwin Wharton, c17th MP, treasure hunter, alchemist, deep sea diver and exorcist.

Is one of those the interview where Henry Green is described as "A writer's writer's writer"?

Well, what do you know, it is- the Paris Review interview with Terry Southern.

Henry Green & Terry Southern? This I have to read!

Now on Dezso Kosztolanyi: 'Anna Edes' -- Hungarian novel greatness. I swoon!

James Morrison, you are a reader's reader's reader.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Autumn of the Patriarch. My first by him, and its flowing well enough.

I suppose Marquez could observe certain events the novel was based on from a distance (dictator in an 'imaginary' Caribbean country, etc) but I like the speculative elements that come into its own with a work like this where you can't really know relationships of people in power.

Stendahl, The Red and The Black. Bit of a slog, bit ridiculous, in places at least, to my 21st century sensibilities, but ultimately decent food for thought.

GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday. Big old heap of appalling rubbish.

Before that, Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. Following on from an Earthsea binge, confirmed her as a new All Time Fave Author.

Loved The Left Hand of Darkness as well. What did you hate about The Man Who Was Thursday, ledge? I like it; the atmospheric effects, the chase through London in the snow, even the weird mystical bollocks at the end. I get a hallucinogenic ('nightmarish' obv) quality from it, and well, it all seems like tremendous fun.

As an adventure story I thought it was ridiculous, just a tissue of absurdities, totally lacking in intrigue or plausibility. I thought The 39 Steps was bad, but that was Chandleresque compared to this. As for the christian apologia side, well if I'd known that was where it was all going I'd never have bothered. That kind of sophistry just ain't my cup of tea, to put it mildly.

Yeah, I don't mind the absurdities (among which is the weird telescoping of time - four seasons in what appears to be a couple of hours) - just seemed to emphasise the weird dream-like aspect to it all, and the adventure stuff, well, it never really felt much like a real adventure to me (unlike The 39 Steps which is clearly a thriller), so I didn't mind. And are those Christian apologetics? Not so sure at this stage tbh. Dey is some weird shit tho, agreed.

But then I liked The 39 Steps as well, so perhaps best not to go there.

Speaking of places not to go, I keep on wanting to investigate Peter de Polnay, just because there's nothing about him at all anywhere afaik, and he was well liked in the early/mid-20th century, but whatever I've read by him has been strange in a not good way. Strange in a dull way in fact. Maybe I'll hold off for a bit longer.

Reading The Necessary Angel essays by Wallace Stevens. V good, attractive style, imaginative explorations of ideas. Reminds me slightly of essays by Borges, but better (not sure how much this holds, it was just glancing parallel I felt while reading).

Re-read Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley. Again, a strange book. Remembered it being funnier than it feels now. Then there's the whole chapter about the dwarf ancestors completely surrounding themselves with other dwarfs, before committing suicide because they've had a giant son, which is oddly moving. Endless speeches by the professional bore Mr Scogan, descriptions of bores always amuse me -

The heat that was slowly paralysing all Denis's mental and bodily facutlies seemed to bring to Mr Scogan additional vitality. He talked with an ever-increasing energy, his hands moved in sharp, quick, precise gestures, his eyes shone. Hard, dry and continuous, his voice went on sounding and sounding in Denis's ears with the insistence of a mechanical noise.

I'm not sure how you could read it as anything other than Christian, tbh. Chesterton was a huge influence on CS Lewis and his apologetics, and even aside from the obvious use of Genesis, it seems pretty clear to me that it's broadly concerned with the problem of evil, from Syme going on about the back and the front of Sunday's head (echoes of 'now we see through a glass darkly'), to the likely reference to the Incarnation at the end ('Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?').

But anyway I guess I deserved what I got, choosing to read a book mostly on the merits of the title, in a genre I was already sceptical of, by a guy with a philosophy I knew I wildly disagreed with.

just finished 'the third policeman', which never fails to make me lol, especially this footnote towards the end:

Another of de Selby's weaknesses was his inability to distinguish between men and women. After the famous occasion when the Countess Schnapper had been presented to him (her Glauben ueber Ueberalls is still read) he made flattering references to 'that man', 'that cultured old gentleman', 'crafty old boy', and so on. The age, intellectual attainments and style of dress of the Countess would make this a pardonable error for anybody afflicted with poor sight but it is feared that the same cannot be said of other instances when young shop-girls, waitresses and the like were publicly referred to as 'boys'. In the few references which he ever made to his own mysterious family he called his mother 'a very distinguished old gentleman' (Lux Mundi p. 307), 'a man of stern habits' (ibid p. 308) and 'a man's man' (Kraus: Briefe, xvii).

"the passage" by justin cronin. thought this was not very good for lots & lots of reasons but mostly because its terrifically empty and overlong

^^ The footnote about the "Codex" always does it for me

Endless speeches by the professional bore Mr Scogan, descriptions of bores always amuse me

Do you read Patrick Hamilton? He does the best bores--see 'Slaves of Solitude'

"the passage" by justin cronin. thought this was not very good for lots & lots of reasons but mostly because its terrifically empty and overlong

Good God, so vry much agree with you on this!

I do indeed read Patrick Hamilton - Slaves of Solitude is amazing, and yes, especially the bores. The trick is, I guess, to show they are bores without actually being a bore to the reader -something Huxley doesn't really pull off (in fact seems to deliberately encourage, slightly weirdly).

Just to clarify - I don't think Chesterton, at the time he wrote The Man Who Was Thursday, would have considered himself a Christian. But would definitely agree that really, to all intents and purposes, it doesn't seem to make much difference, and if you don't like him then, you're not going to like him later. I do like him, as I've said, but would definitely say he has the capacity to be a bore himself (particularly in his whimsical essays) - where his abundant but somehow rather narrow range of rhetorical techniques become tedious. That, fed back into the imaginative work, can quite easily produce distaste even in one who's sympathetic to him, so I can certainly see why he wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea. Very good at skies tho.

Gamaliel - which of the earlier Huxley novels do you like?

(Also was wondering whether you visited Baggings Book Bazaar, nr Strood)

As for me I will be shortly moving onto Witkiewicz's Insatiability

which of the earlier Huxley novels do you like?

Well, it's slightly limited by what I've read. I guess Limbo and Antic Hay would be obvious choices. Point Counter Point I didn't particularly like when I read it (it was the first of his I read), but I think I'll give it another go. And Crome Yellow as well. Mortal Coils I haven't read.

No, I haven't been to Baggins. In fact, although I've passed through Strood and Rochester, I'm afraid to say, despite my eulogies to Kent, I don't know that area very well, something I intend to rectify soon. I'll try and pay a visit if I'm round there. Is it good?

I finished Ian McEwan's disappointing Solar last night.

Just started: Henry Clay: The Essential American, a biography about the preeminent politician between the Jeffersonian era and years just before the Civil War.

Disappointing how? I've been thinking about giving him another go recently and wondered whether that'd be worth the investment. I might try The Innocent instead.

The narrative both sputters and lingers on unimportant digressions.

Gamaliel - Haven't gone in but I go past it on the train everyday. Will pay a visit sometime and report.

Find myself enmeshed in more than a few tomes at the moment, a study in contrasts in terms of the qualities of translation:

A Void by Georges Perec and ushered into English by Gilbert Adair: casually sauntering through this one. Enormously clever, natch, and I think it spoils The Invention Of Morel, which I've been inteding to get to forever.

The Dream Of Heroes by Adolfo Bioy Casares - workmanlike translation, but so far, a 1/3 of the way through, alright.

enmeshed in more than a few tomes

As am I.

I am maybe 100pp into Gravity's Rainbow, but it is too bulky to take camping, so I am also most of the way through F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, which is a deft character study with an unfinished plot (not peculiar, as the whole novel was unfinished when he died).

In addition, I'm a good chunk of the way into The Niebelungenlied, which spends a surprising amount of time discussing the clothes everyone wears, rather as if it were Women's Wear Daily, only the men get as many column inches as the women, or possibly more.

i doubt you can find a cheap copy, aimless, but they actually made a 'pocket' paperback of gravity's rainbow back in the day!

i loaned mine to someone and never got it back. : (

besides 'underworld' i've been reading a couple of u.s. histories, some of the 'nicomachean ethics', cavell's 'cities of words', a bit of regnister's 'affirmation of life' on nietzsche, jonathan lear's 'aristotle: the desire to understand' (excellent, even though i've read parts before the explanation at the beginning of aristotle's concepts of nature and cause seem totally fresh and clarifying for me), some other usual philosophy junk.

read the first part of 2666 but then the lurking sense of dread and the fact that it's unwieldy to carry around made the whole thing difficult, so I set it aside for Benjamin's Arcades Project. which is even bigger. and unwieldy to even think about! well done me.

also on the side: Edward Platt's Leadville, about the A40; Alexandra Kollontai's 'A Great Love' (it's about Lenin!); some Donald Barthelme short stories; and Radclyffe Hall's 'The Unlit Lamp', which is just heartbreaking.

Leadville is great. Especially the footnote about the Hanger Lane Gyratory.

speaking of tomes, i've decided to rectify my ignorance of all russian literature. i'm thinking i'll just dive right in to the big Tolstoy (W&P, Anna Karenina) and Dostoevsky (C&P, Bros Karamazov) so if anybody has any other suggestions or anything it would be appreciated. not sure if this is the best way to start or if i'll just burn myself out.

If you wanna bum (not burn) yourself out in a really short time then you can't do better than Gogol's The Greatcoat.

yeah my first attempt at russian lit ended after one of Gogol's short story collections. not that i didn't dig it...

If you wanna bum (not burn) yourself out in a really short time then you can't do better than Gogol's The Greatcoat.

SECONDED (also - more commonly known as "The Overcoat", to confuse things further.)

otoh If you don't want to dive right in at the deep end, Turgenev is a joy and a wonder and a sight less harrowing than Dostoyevsky
(note: I have q strong reactions to Dostoyevsky - I must read his novels in one unbroken stretch else I scream and throw them against the wall in rage at humanity, so the whole thing is an entirely consuming and quite painful emotional experience, and because i have to read it so fast (because rage) i forget things and can do the entire thing again a few years later. It is possible that it is not the same for other people!).

don't know much about Turgenev but that fact that Tolstoy challenged him to a duel makes me interested. fuck it, i'm starting with one of the big boys... probably W&P.

the volume of tolstoy novellas with ivan ilyich is the best place to start imo.

thanks caek, think i'm gonna do that.

Turgenev! "The poet of the spirit's strangeness" (-- Thubron)

speaking of tomes, i've decided to rectify my ignorance of all russian literature. i'm thinking i'll just dive right in to the big Tolstoy (W&P, Anna Karenina) and Dostoevsky (C&P, Bros Karamazov) so if anybody has any other suggestions or anything it would be appreciated. not sure if this is the best way to start or if i'll just burn myself out.

Elif Batuman's The Possessed is a kind of zany overview.

i've been working on 2666 for the better part of a year now, i finish up one section and need to take a break. i finished the crimes section fairly recently, and it was just so grim. but the whole novel is pretty grim and creepy. i read the section w/the reporter while staying at a remote resort in desert hot springs, ca, on a particularly windy yet eerily clear night, and i felt like i was in the middle of a lynch film.

Lots of short Russian Literature: Lermontov, Goncharov, Chehkov.

Witkiewicz's Insatiability might turn out to be one of the better novels I have read this year (and I have read some good ones). Its seems to be set in the early 20s (the rise and reaction to Bolshevism). A bit like Mann's The Magic Mountain (lots of big themes, but not afraid to lose any respectability, with its talk of sex and cocaine) then there are plenty of scientific metaphors, discussion of older philosophy (and eastern philosophy), the emerging psychology.

Most impressive of all it argues with everything: scepticism is its default mode.

Also its quite Rabelaisian.

Winesburg, Ohio and the Hunger Games trilogy.

Turgenev is a joy and a wonder and a sight less harrowing than Dostoyevsky

So seconded. As as xyzzzz says, read Lermontov, Goncharov & Chehkov.

"oblomov" is one of my favorites of the less read russians

Read half of Leadville last night, after the recommendation upthread - used to travel up and down there a fair bit wondering about what the hell was going on there so it fits the bill.

Would certainly second/third Lermontov. Dostoevsky's still my favourite of the Russians tho.

i need to get back on the dostoyevsky; i started on this collection of short novels and got stuck on the one with 'sentimental' and 'nights' in the title

i have been reading that terrible 'american caesars' book, which did at least make me read suetonius, who was kind of awesome; now i am probably going to end up reading tacitus & grave's 'claudius the god' also

forster's 'a passage to india', which is way less stupid than howard's end so far

some random litcrit: 'cover stories: the something something of the british spy story' (poorly written but non-stupid, for the most part); 'radical children's literature: future visions and aesthetic transformations in juvenile fiction' (hella dumb)

“As the plot summary shows, PC games such as Clock Tower 3 are not the non-linear puzzles novices and non-players often imagine them to be, but developmental narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends, thoguh they do include complicated digressions that add multilinear dimensions to the narratives. This is not surprising since games have their origins in the highly popular gamebook typified by the Fighting Fantasy series by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone in the 1980s and 1990s.”

“If ghosts in Rowling’s series are benign, her treatment of the undead is a different matter. The range and variety of such creatures has increased with each book of the series: from the dementors who reflect the many people of all ages who struggle to fight off depression or who have been damaged by abuse and torture, to the hooded wizards who launch a brief but recognisable terrorist attack during the Quidditch World Cup. Their significance goes beyond symbolising some of the anxieties and tensions Harry feels as he enters adolescence. In fact, from its light-hearted beginnings the series has become an important barometer of public reponse to post-9/11 circumstances.”

finished the Unlit Lamp last night, which isn't a great book (kind of preachy, tells you people's motives way too much) but very effective, made me horribly sad - ended up padding around my aunt's house at 1am searching for Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Lolly Willowes" which is just-similar-enough in subject matter but much more magical and hopeful.

(i alphabetised my virago modern classics the other weekend and have decided, for the umpteenth time, to get back on the 'totally going to read all of these' horse.)

I know that feeling!

Came across a blog of someone aiming to read the whole lot. http://veritysviragoventure.blogspot.com/
Not the most incisive reviews, but it did make me hunt up more books 2nd-hand. Because that's what I need in my life, more piles of unread books.

I have been trudging through Amis' Pregnant Widow: reports of his return to form have been greatly exaggerated. Not sure I have the will to finish it.

Also started Electric Eden, Rob Young's huge book on British folk etc - much prefer breathless enthusiasm to nerdy pedantry, but the over-ripe Blakean rapture is a little too much, so far.

Most enjoyable thing I've dipped into recently is Edward Mendelson's The Things That Matter, short essays on British novels - particularly good on Woolf.

have been trudging through Amis' Pregnant Widow: reports of his return to form have been greatly exaggerated. Not sure I have the will to finish it.

Yeah, I reached about 1/2-way & now it's moved to 'must finish that one of these days' limbo. Some fun bits, but really…

veering back and forth between nick kent's 'the dark stuff' and david wangerin's 'soccer in a football world'

re dostoevsky, i've always meant to read a writer's diary because of (what the bakhtinian editor of that edition trumpets as) its resulting from inter-genre experimentation in a periodical dostoevsky produced… but i've never made it all the way to actually reading the copy that's around here somewhere.

I just finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (pretty damn terrible, but the kind of thing I love anyway), and just started Algren's short story collection Neon Wilderness. I just love him, his style is so gorgeous and heartbreaking. He wrote an interesting introduction to it, decrying the mid-century college-boy literary critics who (he said) weren't interested in stories about the low and downtrodden of the world. He aligns himself very firmly with Whitman and Hemingway and says that standing with criminals is the only place for a writer.

(pretty damn terrible, but the kind of thing I love anyway)

I've been seriously considering running a proper ILB nominations & write-in poll along these lines if I get a bit of free time - maybe an idea for October & November? These things make awesome Christmas presents imo. D'you think that'd work?

I can think of a few noms for me, yep. I totally think it's a valid category. 'Good' is overrated as a concept.

Reading Walter de la Mare's Memoirs of a Midget. Pretty good so far. The "midget" of the title is Miss M., who has apparently fallen in love with her landlady's daughter. Sounds risque for 1921, but of course de la Mare is not exactly the kind of person who would write a sexploitation epic about lesbian dwarves. The prose often has that precious-in-a-good-way quality to it, with lots of sentences like this: "Faintly out of the frosty air was wafted the knelling of midnight."

I heard last night that ILB was back, and here I am also.

I recently decided I needed to read more books.

I finished Franzen's THE DISCOMFORT ZONE. He writes well, is intelligent and knowledgeable. But he's also irritating and arrogant in a faux-humble way. I tried to explain this to Mark S last night. I just looked at what I said about JF's other book of essays on a Franzen thread and I think that this was accurate, too.

Then I read Jonathan Coe's THE ACCIDENTAL WOMAN. Odd, maybe, to find someone so openly reviving early Beckett's tone in the British 1980s.

These books were good for me because they were short.

Another short book is Richard Gillanders' TAKE THIS WALTZ. I've gone back to that.

A long book is James Kelman's KIERON SMITH, BOY. It is 422pp and I am 32pp in. I doubt it will change or develop very much. But I am going to keep reading it.

But he's also irritating and arrogant in a faux-humble way

Haven't read the Franzen, but it's always annoying when you sense this happening in a writer's style.

What was that book that Stevie was waving about last night? I remember it looked really interesting, but that, currently, is all I can remember.

Edward Mendelson on 7 ages of literature.

btw what I mean about faux-humble here = he says he's telling what it was like to be a nerd / geek / loner, but peppers every page with references to the chicks he's dating at every point (from age 15 onwards). Obnoxious. He also talks (for an entire chapter) about being part of a club that pulled immense pranks all the time at his high school; again, no genuinely solitary, unpopular, introverted, etc teen would have any relation to or knowledge of such things. (This connects slightly, btw, with our discussion of adolescence last night.)

Oh no I missed a rare FAP last night. ILB was away?!

Thanks pinefox.

xyzzzz__, fear not - there was enthusiasm for an autumn ILB FAP from several people last night, so you shouldn't have to wait too longer until the next get-together. You will of course, however, have to drink in sufficient quantities to make up for not being there last night.

I read the first draft of my thesis this week. Absolute farrago of bullshit, but it'll do.

Will finish The Worst Journey In The World this weekend. Incredible book. Surprisingly funny. Not Jeeves and Wooster, but occasionally laugh out loud good. And obviously what happened is incredible and it can't help but be thrilling. It's a bit "one crevasse after another" (lol sounds like my friday night) for the first 300 pages or so, but from the winter journey to the penguin rookery onwards (obv. including the polar journey) it's just wonderful. And I really enjoyed the unusual structure of the last couple of hundred pages, which is assembled from diaries of multiple people in multiple parties and ends up jumping backwards and forwards revealing what happened in a rather crafty way (although obviously you know the basic story).

Finally read The Corrections before this. I got pretty tired of living with these horrible people, but it does come together very nicely. Not sure it was worth it to be honest, although my grandad had Parkinsons and it brought back some weird feelings in that respect.

Next will start either Anna Karenina or Getting Away With It, which is Steven Soderbergh's diaries from around the time of Out of Sight and his interviews with Richard Lester.

Will finish The Worst Journey In The World this weekend. Incredible book. Surprisingly funny.

I've been eyeing this off, a bit daunted by its size, but this is what I needed to hear! Thanks!

Recent reading:

Lord Dunsany: Tales of War -- mostly very short pieces inspired by his WW1 experiences. Also includes the theory that the war started because the Kaiser was being macho to compensate for the silliness of his moustache, and blaming all the deaths on his barber.

Borges: On Mysticism -- selection of stories and essays about metaphysics, religion, related weirdo stuff. Ace!

Rohan O'Grady: Let's Kill Uncle -- odd but enjoyable 1960s Canadian novel about two kids who decide to murder a man who intends to murder them

And now I just finished Anne Frank's diary, which I'd never read before, and I'm very depressed :(

Gamaliel - cool! I have just started on a can of Dr. Pepper.

Finished Insatiability. Its got to go down as one of the more remarkable novels of the 20s. The thought and feeling are really there, and it takes the SF-ish turn as well. That was always a feature but it comes to the fore in the 2nd half. Also I've not read a novel where a character's sense of place (as in physical space) is so dislocated. Geopolitics and Poland's place in the new world is discussed at length, and W does not come across as a brain dead nationalist. The politics are hard to summarize. Doubt and cynicism over everything is, as I said, a default: just as well its a novel.

Writes really well on madness, music, art (and love) as counting for little and, as a playwright, the review of the play Zipcio witnesses is a highlight.

Next on: Juan Rulfo - Pedro Paramo. Perfect from the first few sentences.

i'm reading:

'nixonland', which is totally fascinating, if it weren't four million pages long i wouldn't feel inclined to pace myself.

wordsworth's 'prelude', again, marveling at how regular the rhythm of the sentences is even though they seem 'ordinary' and not musical.

and david herman, 'story logic: problems and possibilities of narrative', which is apparently a synthesis of narrative theory (barthes, genette, greimas, cohn, that sort of stuff) with cognitive science and cog-sci-influenced and -friendly fields like linguistics and discourse analysis. i have an aversion to cognitive science but herman seems very sharp, and even after the introduction he's said some very insightful things about the nature of the kinds of explanations cognitive-science-oriented people try to give that fit in very well with the kinds of considerations that come up when you look at narrative structurally/linguistically.

reading:

http://jarett.kobek.com/covers/he%20died%20with%20his%20eyes%20open.JPG

Pasternak - Safe Conduct. Its an autobiog of sorts, compiling formative impressions and experiences. Couldn't finish, too many bits with not enough of a sense to them.

Started on Nabokov - Lolita.

Inspired by the Heavy Hitters poll, on Ackroyd's biography of Blake, with some scattershot reading of Blake alongside. Don't much enjoy biographies normally, and thought I was over Ackroyd, but liking this a lot.

Looks like I'd better read Insatiability

"A View from the Harbour". This is my 3rd recent Elizabeth Taylor (the others being "In a Summer Season" and "A Game of Hide and Seek") and it's shaping up to be easily the best. Absolutely delicious. I read a few of her novels and 2 or 3 short story collections some years ago and loved them, but I found IASS and AGOHAS slightly disappointing and wondered if I'd lost my taste for her work. Good to have my faith restored.

Couple of William Boyd's - "Any Human Heart" and "The Confessions" (the second a re-read, although I could hardly remember it from the first time). I've read some Boyd in the past without a huge amount of enthusiasm, but someone urged me to give these a chance. Both are novel-as-facsimile-biography (AHH even has an index), very, very readable and well crafted. But there's still something that prevents me from really connecting with Boyd - a sense that his interest in other people doesn't go very deep and he's more interested in incident than character. I'd recommend these for a long plane journey though.

"Alone in Berlin" - Fallada - a story about dissidents in wartime Nazi Germany. Its good points are not conventionally literary - Fallada's characters don't have much depth, the novel is sloppily constructed and as far as I can tell from the translation he's no stylist - but the subject matter is gripping and there's a bleak honesty about Fallada's telling of the story that enhances its power. I hadn't realised how much relatively ordinary Germans suffered under Hitler.

"The Elegance of the Hedgehog" - not normally my sort of thing but my wife was reading it for a book group and I picked it up. Slight but charming despite some obvious faults (intellectual pretension, sentimentality). Tails off badly in the final third.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet". I've liked other Mitchells I've read but hated this. My memory isn't the best and there were too many glancing references to one or another of a large cast of peripheral and not very well differentiated characters, two or three of whom then reappear a dozen pages later on the assumption that you'll remember who they were, which of course I didn't. That made reading it hard work. Mitchell has talent to burn, but he seems to have lost his way in this one. It's a good illustration of the difficulties of wanting to go outside established tradition and having to reinvent the form every time you write a new novel. Mitchell falls back on his old trick of pastiche (this time of the colonial seafaring/adventure novel) but he ends up with too much of the crudeness of his models and not enough of the readability.

I've also been inspired by the Heavy Hitters poll and I've been reading Wallace Stevens, a poet I've read bits of before but never really got to grips with. I still don't know what to make of him. My initial response was massively favourable, complete fascination. He reminds me of Spenser and Shelley, very musical, lots of surface beauty, pretty images, much of the content more or less versified philosophy of an initially intriguing sort. But I went through phases of loving S & S too, only to find that with time their poetry starts to feel thin, overly abstract, disconnected from life. Add Stevens's wilful obscurity into the mix and I have a foreboding that initial infatuation may not develop into lasting love. But I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

i am ashamed to say i couldn't finish berlin alexanderplatz at this time. it is obviously really really gread but i got a new job and other stuff and was taking too long to read it (mostly falling asleep after i'd read 4 pages at a time, not the book's fault). i don't get how you all have jobs but still read so many books. i started victor klemperer's language of the third reich instead. it's very good.

so 222 pages into the Kelman. if it is long. maybe it is. maybe if it is 422 pages. well if it is. i did not care. i did not i just did not care. ye would say ah didnae care but yer maw would say it is not ah didnae, it it i did not. well if it is. i did not care. i just did not. but i read the book. if i did.

But I went through phases of loving S & S too, only to find that with time their poetry starts to feel thin, overly abstract, disconnected from life.

Yeah, despite being a full-throated defender of WS on the poll, I know what you mean: he (like Shelley) can go in and out of focus for me, like I'll drift to a point where he's not really what I want from poetry - the 'philosophy versified' thing sticks out, feels too chilly, too narrow. But I do shift back, and the poetry surprises me after a period away - the lustre, precision, fun.

haha xp

victor klemperer's language of the third reich

^ would like to hear more about this. It looks fascinating.

it's a collection of anecdotes where he talks about what it's like to be a jew in germany during wwii, but he's a professor of french so he sees everything that's happening through language and all of it revolves around how german has evolved in recent (to him) history. it makes me wish i knew german but it's still plenty clear to non-german speakers. it's not dry or academic at all though, very bleak and humorous at the same time.

I will reread Middlemarch over winter break instead. I checked out Stories from the Tube by Matthew Sharpe today. It is a book of short stories. I am waiting for Freedom and Comedy in a Minor Key to arrive.

"A View from the Harbour". This is my 3rd recent Elizabeth Taylor (the others being "In a Summer Season" and "A Game of Hide and Seek") and it's shaping up to be easily the best. Absolutely delicious.

Absolutely great book. I'd held off for ages, as it was the only ET I hadn't read, and it was one of the best. Beautiful stuff.

Also wonderful, and am halfway through it--'Under the Frog' by Tibor Fischer. Had read one other of his, which was fun but unmemorable, so hadn't rushed out for more, but this is an amazingly good novel.

I was just no to be in them. How come? Maybe if I was just half and half. So that was how I was not to be in them.

What was me? What I was? If I was something. What if I looked like something? What did I look like? If it was me, what did ye see?

Ha ha. Are you still reading it?

I've just started C by Tom McCarthy. Usual geometric tracery and abstract patterns linking intellectual and material worlds. (An elaboration of Beckett?

This

Got its faults - smells of research in places, shadow of Pynchon a bit heavy - but I really liked it.

certainly.

Will report back more when I've read more, but v enjoyable. Don't mind the Pynchon shadow, but it's certainly tangible. A miniaturist's approach to detail, little descriptions and lists everywhere, again a continuation and part of the approach of Remainder, and something that's quite appealing, especially with that 'ice in the blood' that woof described above.

Will read that Elizabeth Taylor soon, I think.

'still' reading it?
I usually take months, years, to get through books. I'm past p.300 already in this!

btw my last post was a verbatim quotation, which might surprise me, if you told me it was, rather than a pastiche.

Yeah, I did think it was a pastiche.

That Kelman quote seems to me like a direct channeling of Gertrude Stein, circa Making of Americans.

The first sentence Stein, the second Beckett circa The Unnamable.

Anyone kept watching the 'British novelists in their words' doc on BBC4? Kelman was good on it. Must read.

I felt like I really wanted to read more British novelists other than the one or two (Henry Green, Denton Welch, Alasdair Gray) that get onto my radar.

At the end I also got that feeling that the Beeb couldn't make some of those programmes anymore. Thinking that, wow, they used to dramatize up-and-coming novels! Or pay an actor to give it a read!! Then latch on an extensive interview with the author. I just don't see that anymore.

Stories from the Tube has a fantastic story called Rose in the House.

yx, yes, I agree, the sad thing about the programme is that it reminds you they don't interview people that way now.

I thought Amis came across surprisingly well; Greer was a worthy sparring partner for him - and can you imagine TV staging a debate of this relative (OK, actually mild) density now?

I like the old time sequences of writers standing at bus stops, etc, and also wish I'd seen the whole Morley / Kureishi interview. Rushdie seemed shifty and self-serving at the Booker bash, though actually the interview in his study was good. Carter didn't do it for me, M Warner talked nonsense about her, and her supposedly witty assertion to Arthur Marshall that you can't buy cod in Sainsbury's seemed daft, unless back then fresh fish actually wasn't available in supermarkets?

I don't know if I thought Kelman was so good on the prog, though I do like him, he must even be one of my favourite living writers. I find his analysis somewhat simplistic or paranoid and not always totally coherent I think. But I like him so maybe what really put me off was AL Kennedy's DIRE advocacy of him. I used to think she was a major modern writer, now I learn she's a bad bog-standard culture-chat-show hack.

Just finished Murakami's The Wind-up Bird and Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. Nice little parallel of 30 year old guys on a "search." Should've suited me well since I'm in the same boat, but I can't say either blew me away. Both were enjoyable enough though.

Finished Kelman. I like it.

Really enjoying C. The pageant scene is virtuoso, redefining the characters through the re-enactment of the rape of Persephone and her voyage to the underworld. The first world war looms behind everything with, you suspect, dire consequences, and McCarthy's not afraid of the cheap-ish lolz comparing modern communication and that of the early 1900s, while exploring it with greater subtlety throughout (I'm not usually a fan of heavy-handed historical fiction 'relevance' but it seems to work here because he's having fun. Really enjoying the general tone, which surprises me slightly, as after a couple of pages I wasn't sure whether I would. Yeah, it's great!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9107386@N06/4953487523/

or
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9107386@N06/4953487523/

now back to Phil Moores' collection of essays about Alasdair Gray.

Any good? I went through a period of absolutely adoring Alasdair Gray with I think Janine, 1982 being my favourite, maybe Lanark, and had a v awkward encounter with him. I've not really gone back to him since.

I'm wondering what essays on Alasdair Gray would 'bring to the party' in sporting parlance.

PF - Agree A L Kennedy was terrible. The Greer-Amis interview was excellent, and that doc on Midnight's Children was fully shown a few months ago and was a perfect documentary on a contemporary novel. I can imagine a programme based on Tom McCarthy's C to be just as memorable.

Finished Lolita, first Nabokov - really loves his Proust. The narrator is remarkably likeable though I can cope and love highly unlikeable narrators (such as Marcel).

Blaise Cendrars - Moravagine. Maybe the only author who manages to use surrealism (as in the surrealism of that time) to really powerful novelistic effect? Brilliant, brilliant book.

Now its Victor Serge - The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

Hitch is such a Serge fan that his memoir is on my to-read list.

Serge managed to write novels (and read 'em, from the modernist end of things), essays, articles, a memoir and who knows what else while being on the run (due to all the political engagements he crammed in) for most of his life. ...Comrade Tulayev was written over a two year period in France (Paris and Marseilles), Dominican Republic and Mexico.

So that's unsurprising.

Just watching the last of the In Their Own words programmes, and in relation to what was said the other night at the ILX@X FAP about Kingsley and Martin, and their parallel lives I've just remembered that in an early version of his not particularly good novel I Like It Here Kingsley Amis put himself in the novel as a named character.

A curious and unexpected parallel.

That is interesting.

I have never met Alasdair Gray. I sometimes think I should try to, while we are both alive, but perhaps you would not advise it.

No, no, he was sweetness itself. I worked in a bookshop at the time and his agent came round making sure we were stocking the boxed set of Lanark, which had just come out at the time. I'd just bought The Book of Prefaces, which had also just come out, and was probably at the height of my appreciation for his way of writing. I said how much I liked his writing, and she said that although he was very busy, very busy, she would see if he would come in and see me the next day (a Saturday iirc). Working in a bookshop lulls and surges, and unfortunately he came in during one of the surges, and waited patiently for me to deal with the customers, who seemed to be taking an unconscionable amount of time over what seemed to me quite minor decisions. Finally I managed to pass them on to my supercapable Brazilian lesbian assistant, and went over to him, stammered out a greeting, to which he responded, and then asked what I liked about his writing, and dammit I couldn't think of a f'ing thing. I mean, I could even at this great remove cite his wry, emotionally democratic precision, a discursive but not garrulous generosity to the reader, a wonderful grafting of the fantastic into the realist, (or the other way round if you will), an often amusing clarity about the social politics of the basic emotions, and back then I could probably have listed a thousand other things, great and small, that pleased me about his writing, could have listed to anyone but the author that is, to whom I barely got out a pathetic, 'I don't know, it's good', a response that shames me to this day (although an intellectual and emotional freezing at the point of social delivery has always been a curse; I live permanently on 'l'escaliers').

To do him immense credit (and considering what I later heard about his personality, perhaps surprisingly) he bowed his head courteously and signed my copy of The Book of Prefaces to me, in large, curling writing, and went off, no doubt feeling 'Well, that was rather a waste of time.' Maybe not, but he certainly didn't learn anything illuminating about his readership from me, apart from maybe that one of them is an illiterate and socially retarded hodge.

That is a bit of a sad story, though it reflects well on Mr Gray. I think I can identify somewhat with your plight. Perhaps being confronted by the artist in person is too different a situation from the mass of thoughts and feelings we have in reading or experiencing their work; it is hard on the spot to isolate anything that is worth saying to them.

done for now with the Gray essays: on to A Gate at the Stairs, a novel that ought to be perfection but that no one on ilx seemed to rate.

on to A Gate at the Stairs, a novel that ought to be perfection but that no one on ilx seemed to rate

That was the problem--it OUGHT to have been great!

Reading Gerard Woodward's 'Nourishment', which also ought to have been great, since the August trilogy was amazing, but is also only OK
and Chinua Achebe's 'An Image of Africa' (on Conrad's racism) and 'The Trouble with Nigeria' (on why second-rate countries stay second-rate, among other things)

I finished Nicholson Baker's 'The Anthologist' (the N.B. thread was revived on ILE last week, and it inspired me to pick it up). Twas great. I don't read a lot of poetry these days so it was nice to get to think about poetry for an entire novel. Also, I love his perfect little weird turns of phrase.

Just started 'Mr Peanut' which got a good review somewhere (NYT?). It's about a dude who (I think?) kills his wife. So far it's pretty disturbing, but quite ridiculous and funny in places too. I'm very much enjoying.

When I'm done that, I've got The Last Samurai waiting for me for the ILB BOOK CLUB. Yay!

loved The Anthologist, it's genuinely funny and strange.

finished recently, and also loved, Hollinghurst's "The Spell" which seemed very wise and moving despite H's overindulgence for, and willingness to forgive, extremely posh & beautiful men. I think It may be his best book, although maybe i only think that because i just finished it.

finished even more recently, and also loved even more Marilynne Robinson's "Home" which had me in tears.

Made a false start on James's "The Wings of the Dove", the prose is difficult and i read some sentences 3 or 4 times without being able to understand what they could possibly mean. William James had the same problem with the book and told his brother as much in a series of letters so i'm in good company. i'll come back to it in a bit when i'm in a better place for it. James's "In the Cage", which i read a couple of weeks back, is extremely interesting.

"You hear that bird? Chirtle chirtle chirtle chirtle. With bird's it's different. Birds are very different than we are. They don't know what an upbeat is. They go Chirtle, chirtle, chirtle, chirtle. And then the next time they might just go Chirtle—chirtle, chirtle. It's like some kind of wigged-out aimless Gregorian chant…. And then: Chirtle chirtle chirt? Questioning… It's a primitive meter. But we obviously respond to it. When I hear that chirping, I know the world is starting up. And that I better get something done that day, or I will have failed once again. As I have failed today.

Chirtle chirtle. Chirtle. Chirtle.

Nice chirpin' there, Mister Birdie! Good one. I like what you did there. That's good! Funky bitch! Love your work!"

NB The Anthologist

i ordered that, the other day, and remainder, which i have never gotten round to, and a book by steven erickson. yes.

also a book about how to make vegan cheese substitutes but not so much the right board for that

The Spell - it was pleasant enough, had a sort of melancholy about it, and was an interesting window into a world I suppose; but I couldn't really imagine any great claims for it. I can see it as him getting his eye in maybe, but having read it after The Line Of Beauty made it seem slight almost to the point of invisibility.

Finished ...Comrade Tulayev. Really getting to some stone cold classics: Rulfo, Cendrars, Schnitzler and now this (after a more so-so period). Interesting coincidence to read Rulfo and Serge. Different subjects (Rulfo there isn't a topic, more a macabre tale told with an intensity of a Kafka) but that revolving door of death and worms in the soil. Mexico does things to people (Rulfo from there, Serge dying there in exile although I don't think he ever had a place he could call home)

Serge is brill tho'. The only thing is it probably helps to know a bit about that era of Russian history, whereas it would do to know next to nothing about the purges when tackling Orwell (just cute rubbish like Room 101!) But other than its quite a feat: from the little bits of detail like using new technologies like the telephone as an instrument to bark orders and spread fear, to the murder (very Camus like, as Sontag notes in her intro!), to the sociological detail (magazines, propaganda), then a survey of Soviet-era society (how religion survives under the ground or how peasants are educated to the wonders of science, all leading to hilariously macabre scenes and conversations) and, ultimately, different characters who seek to do what they feel is right, which is completely beyond them.

Going onto his last novel: The Unforgiving Years.

Happy - I didn't realise there was this archive of the full interviews that were snipped into the 'In Their Own Words' series we've talked about.

Finished Blake, on The Last Samurai, got an impulse to read Salammbo tho'.

Looking at that archive, was surprised to see that they did have substantial recent interviews. Then noticed that almost everything after 95 is radio.

'Wigs on the Green' - Nancy Mitford

Just finished Ishiguro's "An Artist of the Floating World" and Bernhard's "The Loser." The Ishiguro was my least favorite of the 3 I've read by him (the others being "Remains of The Day" and "Never Let Me Go"), but was still really great. "The Loser" was my first go at Bernhard. So good. Will definitely have to read more of him. I could use another dose of his curmudgeon-ness.

Just started Donald Antrim's "The Afterlife," and a collection of short stories by Joy Williams, "Escapes." Williams might be a new favorite. I'm only about a third of the way through "Escapes," but every story has been incredible, and I loved "The Quick and The Dead," which I read earlier this summer.

Just added a few more to the to-read pile:
Joy Williams' "Breaking and Entering"
Joan Didion's "Run River"
Jona Didion's "Democracy"

Started Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich in a Signet paperback with The Kreutzer Sonata and Family Happiness. First time reading Tolstoy.

'Wigs on the Green' - Nancy Mitford
What's this like? Recently read her first, 'Highland Fling', which was enjoyable enough, but it started about 25 pages too early, and went on about 30 pages too long at the other end.

Bernhard's "The Loser."
Am just reading his 'Old Masters' now, which is brilliant and bad-tempered. i love it.

Started Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich in a Signet paperback with The Kreutzer Sonata and Family Happiness. First time reading Tolstoy.
I think you've started in the best way--Ivan Ilyich is representative of his good stuff, without being 900 pages long. Kreutzer is representative of his madder, more idiosyncratic-beliefs stuff (but still good)

is corey = moreno, or did two people coincidentally decide to read ivan ilyich the same week?

'Wigs on the Green' - Nancy Mitford
What's this like? Recently read her first, 'Highland Fling', which was enjoyable enough, but it started about 25 pages too early, and went on about 30 pages too long at the other end.

It has some of the youthful faults of her early novels but it's okay so far. It's been out of print for ages since it pissed off her sister, Diana, and was felt cruel toward her sister, Unity, who didn't die until '48.

sounds like corey actually started ivan ilyich xpost. i just decided i would in the near future. determined to get through cloud atlas first.

read a couple reviews of that new book on the great migration, "the warmth of other suns." it looks great. think i'll buy that one next chance.

In between Serious Challenging Hrm Yes Books right now, and taking a break with John Hodgman's More Information Than You Require. Some of the "this day in history" throwaway jokes are just perfect little gems (December 4, 1998, New York: I complete my controversial shot-by-shot remake of the film “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.”)

Next is probably PKD's Voices from the Street, picked up in the same remainder binge as the Hodgman.

Old Masters is terrific. Love the rant at Vienna's public toilets.

Serge's Unforgiving Years had good female characterization, or even attempts at such (...what with ...Tulayev presenting such a male oriented world.) The first part had some great hallucinations (as did the final part) as well as very touching musings on death (the novel was completed a year before serge died) and what life can mean after the brutality of the WWII. Old hat now, but this was written by someone who I guess had passing experiences of it. Great descriptions of war torn cities and the Mexican landscape, that sense of someone who is always on the run is powerfully conveyed.

So I moved to Elsa Morante's History: A Novel, about a woman's experiences in Italy from around that time (though this was published in the 70s)

Just finished:
Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Smith, Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith

Just started:
Murakami, Norwegian Wood

I am pressing on with The Niebelungenlied, but slowly. Clothes still play a prominent role in this epic, without contributing much to the action I might add.

For light reading, I have What the Dog Saw, a collection of short journalism pieces by Malcolm Gladwell. He writes well and understands his business, which is to shape a bunch of odd bits of data, quotations and observations into a fairly coherent, interesting story.

However, in the back of my mind I have been comparing him to John McPhee and finding him wanting in the balance. Gladwell's weakness is his compulsive need to argue a thesis and persuade you of its truth, as opposed to McPhee's willingness to let the story guide the writing, so that at the end you are far better acquainted with the subject and feel capable of incorporating it into your own view of the world.

McPhee is more of an intercessor, guide and interpretor who brings you the experience and thoughts of others. Gladwell draws his own conclusions, then attempts to persuade you of their truth. This makes me much more suspicious of his reliability and impatient with his egotism.

For the moment, Gravity's Rainbow has been set aside, due to too many hiking and camping interruptions between when I started it and when I was able to pick it up again. Based on the first 150pp, I can see how it obtained its reputation and exerts its fascination on its loyal readers, but I haven't found the singularity of the author's vision to be of very great value, and that vision is woven into every sentence. I will certainly give this another crack, but I'm not sanguine about it.

Finished A View From the Harbour - superb. Read "Noah's Ark" - Barbara Trapido. My first Trapido - undemanding light comedy, but nicely done. I enjoyed it very much and will read more. Now reading "Under The Net" by Iris Murdoch. My first Murdoch in ages, although I've read around half a dozen in the past. I wondered if I'd feel differently about her with passing time, but I don't, really. Her first novel's a bit less polished than her later work, maybe just very slightly closer to something resembling real life, but the essential Murdoch is already in place, which you love or loath, or in my case think is sort of all right, according to taste. It's civilised entertainment but she's too preoccupied by abstractions to be as thought-provoking a novelist as she ought to be given her imagination and obvious and persistent intelligence.

Nice brace of posts.

I've just rattled through Drown by Junot Diaz. I read it once before, nigh on fifteen years ago I'd guess. It was every bit as good this time around. The beauty, simplicity and genuine human drama compares favourably, and slightly stupidly, with my parallel book group reading, which is nearly the opposite.

Read "Noah's Ark" - Barbara Trapido. My first Trapido - undemanding light comedy, but nicely done. I enjoyed it very much and will read more

All her stuff up to 'Frankie & Stankie' is like that--fun, smart, light, frothy. 'Frankie...' is a bit more serious, but still really good, and then her most recent one, the title of which I forget, is a real disappointment.

Just finished David Benioff's short story collection, 'When the Nines Roll OVer', which was 90% excellent (one story was mystifying and out of place).

I'm disappointed to know you didn't think much of "Sex and Stravinsky" James. I'm a bit of a Stravinsky obsessive, so the title alone was liable to have me ordering it. On the other hand, "Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky" was one of the worst films I've ever seen, so there's a lesson there.

I'm disappointed to know you didn't think much of "Sex and Stravinsky" James. I'm a bit of a Stravinsky obsessive, so the title alone was liable to have me ordering it.

If it helps, there's not much actual Stravinsky in the plot! I actually bought a novel a number of years ago about Stravinsky and Chanel, from similar Stravinsky keenness, but haven't got round to reading it yet.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0755300874.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

And looking round, I see it was the basis for the film, which bodes ill.

The film was just silly. According to Stephen Walsh's bio it's far from clear that Stravinsky was ever romantically or sexually involved with Chanel (although there were allegations). All that's beyond question is that she gave his family use of a house for a few months and was generous in financing the "Rite".

In the film she's shown as the real love of his life, both partners reflecting on what might have been as death approaches some 50 years after their putative brief-but-incandescent affair in 1921. That Stravinsky unquestionably did start an important affair in 1921 - with Vera de Bosset (who was to become the second Mrs Stravinsky and actually WAS the love of his life - is overlooked, presumably on the grounds that Vera wasn't a celebrity in her own right; also ignored is the inconvenient fact that Stravinsky was an incontinent womaniser, which might suggest the distasteful possibility that even if he did bed Chanel she was just another notch on a well-whittled bedpost.

Of course this kind of nonsense is common enough in biopics and doesn't necessarily preclude a film being entertaining, but this pretentious, absurdly langorous film certainly isn't that. It looks good in a coffee-table way and of course there's some wonderful music (although not nearly as much as there should be given the subject matter). None of this means the original novel is bad of course, although I wouldn't be too optimistic.

finished the last samurai
left my copy of ilustrado on a bus
read nicholson baker's the anthologist on a train ride; found it deeply mediocre
read two-thirds or so of remainder on two or three different buses; finding it 'major' in the way most everyone agrees it is, though not sure whether i'm liking it
reading a john dickson carr called the blind barber because i wanted to re-familiarise myself with dr. fell and it was the only one i could find, annoyed at fell being largely off-page throughout. also it just not being very good

The Blind Barber is pretty bloody awful, agreed. Endless forced humour amounting almost to hysteria about anything to do with drink, v tiresome.

Started and abandoned Matthew Sharpe's 'You Were Wrong', which is a shame, as I like the cover...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1608191877.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Now on Hans Keilson's 'The Death of the Adversary', which is ace

has anyone read Patrick White's The Vivisector? Thoughts?

On to "The End of the Story" by Lydia Davis. Really enjoying it.
Still rambling through "Escapes" by Joy Williams (story collections take me longer, especially since I always seem to be reading a few other things concurrently).
Finished Didion's "Democracy" and Antrim's "The Afterlife." Both were good, but not great.
Currently sipping on a Fourloko and trying to get some work done. This is not going so well.

Haven't read The Vivisector but I ordered it from Amazon a couple of days ago (along with books by Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Trapido, Tibor Fischer and Peter Carey). So I expect to be reading it soon, but not sure how soon - depends if I'm in the mood for something long and literary or something lighter.

Patrick White wrote much better books than Vivisector.

Voss, for example.

here is his scores in complete-review.com

didnt read them all, but from what i did read - i agree with the list:

Patrick White's Books at the complete review:
The Aunt's Story (A-)
Big Toys (B)
The Cockatoos (B+)
The Eye of the Storm (A)
A Fringe of Leaves (B)
The Living and the Dead (B+)
Memoirs of Many in One (B)
Patrick White Speaks (C+)
Riders in the Chariot (A)
Signal Driver (B)
The Solid Mandala (A-)
Three Uneasy Pieces (A-)
The Twyborn Affair (A-)
The Vivisector (B+)
Voss (A+)

the list misses Tree Of Man which is out of print for too long, and supposed to be one of his best works.

read a couple reviews of that new book on the great migration, "the warmth of other suns." it looks great. think i'll buy that one next chance.

Me too. It sounds like excellent history.

Just bought 'Riders in the Chariot' yesterday, as part of a haul of old Penguins. THe newest 'Vivisector' cover gives me the heebie jeebies.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143105671.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Am now reading Jessica Mitford's 'Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking', and it's both excellent and a hell of a lot of fun

Riders of the Chariot is great, sometimes a little too melodramatic, but other than that - superb writing, esp. the parts about the jewish proffesor.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

xp

Well it seems I may have ordered the wrong White. The two best known ones seemed to be Vivisector and Voss and I chose Vivisector because, based on the cover blurb, the subject matter looked more likely to be congenial to me personally. A story of people trecking across the Australian outback is going to have a few inbuilt hurdles to get over before I find it enjoyable. A tale of bitchiness and egotism among arty sorts and academics OTOH seemed likely to be right up my street.

The question of congenial subject matter seems to be one that reviewers and critics prefer to sidestep, it being (arguably) irrelevant to literary merit and therefore presumably not a respectable reason for liking/disliking a novel. But it plays a huge part in what I choose to read, preferring on the whole to read about people not very different from me or people I know in situations I can readily imagine us in. This means among other things that I prefer novels about people in rich social situations to novels about people in exotic geographical situations. I can't think of many things I'd be less likely to do than go trecking in the Australian outback.

holy shit @ that vivisector cover!

read The Europeans over the weekend. found it so subtle it seemed kinda nothing. and i did find the sentences a bit jamesian. not sure whether to try another james.

next up: The Long and the Short of it: A Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Aren't in the Industry (title + wacky neon pink cover = ew) and anna karenina

Try Washington Square, caek – better drawn characters.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9107386@N06/4992580007/

278pp in, with 140 or so still to go. Thing about this novel is, if someone said "SPOILER ALERT - all the characters turn into digital cats and fight in a climactic flying saucer battle around Mars" it would sound quite a likely outcome.

Conjunction of cover and mug in that pic make it look as though the book might be an oneiric meditation on Roman Pavlyuchenko. (Read it myself years ago and cannot remember a thing about it - other than it seemed Murakami-lite).

cheers alfred xxp

Roman's a good lad, sometimes he don't look like he's working ard enough but he's a good boy, when he gets his head down and concentrates he's one of the best finishers at the club. He's a good player, they're all good players, we're a good team. We'll have a go. We'll go out and give it a go, we'll give anyone a game.

"holy shit @ that vivisector cover!"

don't judge a book by it's cover..

I'm getting bored with The Vivisectionist, and I've 400 pages left.

Sorry to hear that. I've rarely got the appetite these days to finish long novels if I'm finding them a bit of a slog. Starting to get a bad feeling about this one and I haven't even got it yet.

Finished Elsa Morante this morning. I'd say History is one the great big books (effortlessly leading you through 700 pages worth of events). I think I came up with 'Modernist weepie' to describe (a bit like Berlin Alexanderplatz).

I don't know if I could ever re-read it, the ending was just too much (if I didn't have to work I think I would stared at the ceiling for the rest of morning), but you also understand that it couldn't be any other way.

I love how it writes about animals, how their fortunes tend to mirror their owners. How it also handles the simplicity of thought from Morante's main character to the (unnamed) narration, which must be flexible and delicate to contain (former anarchist and drug addict) Davide's complicated thoughts on the path that History takes.

Sorta started on Past Continuous by Yaakov Shabtai.

I am reading Italo Calino's "Six Memos For The Next Milennium" and "Rock/Writings" by Dan Graham. Plus this book by Sol Worth about visual anthropology and experimental film.

Here, by all means, read it online:

http://isc.temple.edu/TNE/introduction.htm

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4090/4999376848_19bdae1f98.jpg

Surprising sunshine yesterday: carried on with the book outside

today, made an extra effort on the summit and finished it. Possibly it's longer than it needed to be, but a dazzling book.

It prompted once again thoughts of Mitchell vis a vis Martin Amis. Briefly, I suppose: I've always thought of MA as the great British stylist since the war - but DM makes me wonder, makes me think MA is limited and my own judgement may have given him more credit than he deserved. DM actually seems the deeper and more daring, as well as more romantic and likeable, artist.

i seem to have begun rereading 2666 (which i hadn't yet finished in the first place).

it's only, what, a year and a half, two years since i was last reading it, but the slight change in perspective has made the spare little scenes describing the critics/academics' motivations and attempts to negotiate their way into and through their coteries and careers much sharper. bolaño's narrator's presence is more noticeable, too.

Just bought a collection of bolaño's stories. It collects together llamadas telefonicas, putas asesinas and el gaucho insufrible. Read through the first of that bunch. Great stories. Sad, fragmentary, ironic. Never read any of his short fiction before.

DM actually seems the deeper and more daring, as well as more romantic and likeable, artist.

"romantic and likeable" feels really true but "daring" less so. i finally got around to finishing the last 100 or so pages of 1000 autumns & was really idk underwhelmed. i feel like it made no real impression on me.

Having trouble with yet another White novel, Riders in the Chariot. The style is often pompous.

Just bought a collection of bolaño's stories. It collects together llamadas telefonicas, putas asesinas and el gaucho insufrible. Read through the first of that bunch. Great stories. Sad, fragmentary, ironic. Never read any of his short fiction before.

― Efraqueen Juárez (jim in glasgow), Saturday, September 18, 2010 2:40 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

his first translated short story collection, "Last Nights on Earth," is wonderful too.

Riders in the Chariot was an epic FAIL for me. I stopped at the Jewsih prof section. Never tried another Patrick White novel after that.

Really enjoying Yaakov Shabtai after a tough opening 50 pages. Mostly to do with starting straight after finishing Morante.

Now all I see is the ambition really comes through. There are three central characters and then a whole other host of characters that are connected to them, each of whom seem to last about five pages. People with their own set of successes, attachments (some would say imprisonments) to family and relationships, and most of all, their failures, all described in a galloping style. Sure I'm losing track of character but the themes are clear enough.

his first translated short story collection, "Last Nights on Earth," is wonderful too.
that story appears here, not sure what other published short fiction he has outside of these 3 collections. the three are a bit of a tome, circa 550 pages. About half way through.

reading 2 depressive books one after anotehr is hard..
xpost

"a tough opening 50 pages" = those are some of the best, most memorable pages on the book:
the going around in circles looking for the cemetary for the funeral is a metaphor for the whole book - both it's theme and style.

Patrick Dennis - 'Auntie Mame' -- maybe this was a comic masterpiece in 1955, but dated as all get-out now. I laughed more at some ads for Panda cheese on Youtube this morning than I did for the entirety of this book.

BUT am about to start Italo Svevo ' The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl', so that bodes well.

never read any svevo except for zeno

under early evening mid-September clouds I returned to

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4144/5007219293_8f2e0518cf.jpg

I like it, but think she's straining more than usual.

Picked up Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy at the weekend - always interested in how an expert like Ambler weighs the competing demands of genre, descriptive detail, how he balances the need for excitement with the need for development, compression of narrative and elaboration of scene that sort of thing.

First paragraph -

I arrived in St. Gatien from Nice on Tuesday, the fourteenth of August. I was arrested at 11.45a.m. on Thursday, the sixteenth, by an agent de police and an inspector in plain clothes and taken to the Commissariat.

Hot damn. Here's a man who knows wot's o'clock it is.

Needless to say I finished it in an afternoon.

Loving the balcony, pinefox.

Around 150 pages in, I'm loving "The Vivisector". Of course, this may change.

A maxim of mine for creating flow is that every sentence should pose a question. Those two by Ambler each ask about a dozen.

A maxim of mine for creating flow is that every sentence should pose a question.

I like this. I'm quite fond of maxims of this sort tbh, makes it seem as if that job of writing a novel one day might get done if I collect enough maxims. Stuff like 'Never have a character laugh at another character's joke' (sounds odd, but the more I contemplated it, the righter it felt).

I had a load of them somewhere, you know, writer's off the cuff comments on style from interviews and the like.

"If you don't like the way a scene is going, change the weather." - I like this Eric Roth one (although he consistently bad screenplays)

I am reading:

Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow

Alan Moore - The League Of Extraordianry Gentlemen (Black Dossier) (graphic novel)

Alan Moore - The League Of Extraordianry Gentlemen (Black Dossier) (graphic novel)

My pathetic claim to fame is my presence among the acknowledgements to the book of annotations that goes with that.