Late 2005: So now what are you reading?

Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" which is beautiful and precise and wonderful and complex and still. I'm reading it very slowly and, for the first time in a long time, i'm in no particular rush to reach the end. i LOVE this book. please read it.

Thanks for the new thread!

speaking of interviews, the 2nd interview ever with cormac mccarthy is in the new vanity fair. very interesting, and i'm not really a fan or anything. he's just interesting. he spends all his time writing at a scientific think-tank in santa fe! who knew? he is the only writer there.

And I've got Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" I'm about to crack open. This Norton volume contain both the deathbed and 1855 editions. Any advice on which one to read first?

I recommend you start with one section -- the "Song of Myself", say -- and read both versions and decide which you prefer, and go from there.

plus, the original is more punchy. but if i recall correctly there's no 'eidolons' in that one, which is slightly too bad just because i find it kind of endearing in its repetition of 'eidolons' despite otherwise not being all that.

eidolons!

But now I am going to start reading *Singing from the Well* by Reinaldo Arenas.

After I finish that I'm going to read Catch-22-- I think I'm the only person alive who has never read it.

After I finish that I'm going to read Catch-22-- I think I'm the only person alive who has never read it.

i've got a friend who has read Ulysses, War & Peace etc i.e. all those supposed inpenetrable books, but she just can't get past the first 10 pages of Catch 22. i think she's tried about 5 times now!

anyway, i've just finished "my fault" by billy childish. like a british "ham on rye" bukowski, he can write ok but it was relentlessly depressing. i want some literary chocolate now.

Now I'm reading O Pioneers! by Willa Cather, which is suiting me very well in current circumstances.

I used to enjoy watching The Waltons on Sunday mornings when I was wretched with hangover, it felt soothing to the soul. So does this. I haven't got to the bit where they do "Long Shot Kick De Bucket", yet.

The front of "Back" has a Victor Pasmore painting of a naked woman's back.

Now reading Lanark by Alasdair Gray.

After this, I want to read Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter, and then a couple more Wodehouses: The Luck of the Bodkins and The Code of the Woosters. And after that Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery.

I'm reading "Ghost Story" by Peter Straub. It's too darn hot here so maybe this will give me some much-needed chills. Shame I'm a slow reader, or I could fan myself by wooshing through the pages.

The book club at work is doing Time Traveler's Wife, but I'm not sure that I would enjoy reading it.

And I'll always be a cheerleader for Ghostwritten...

michel houllebecq's worldview is the most misanthropic and repellent thing i have ever read. i think his books are poorly written and his philosophy is too bleak and childish for me. yet, i've read them all and would leap to read the next one. i enjoy the sex, sure, but mostly i think his nasty, repugnant views are like a guilty pleasure for me - they are so genuine and biting, and i love black humour.

I just finished "Plan B," by Anne Lamott. A good book, a sequel to "Tender Mercies."

j lethem, 'the disappointment artist'. has its moments. will revive that old thread once i'm done with it, mebbe.

steve erickson.

'1968 in america' by iforgetwho, my sister bought it for me years ago, it annoys me.

next up: more steve erickson, delillo's 'end zone', if i don't have a summer job by the end of the month proust

Blub fest!

I am almost finished my Nadine Gordimer and will then read some Beryl Bainbridge book which has such a terrible seventies cover, complete with awful photo, that I am embarrassed to be seen with it and will not read it in public, but huddled in a corner somewhere. Luckily it is very short.

Now I'm reading "The Ballad Of Peckham Rye" by Muriel Spark, because thats' where I live. It's already mentioned two of my favourite pubs and I'm only on page 15.

I'm reading Wouk's mammoth "Winds of War", followed, if I gots the guts, by the sequel "War and Remembrance".

To think I almost put it down after a couple of pages because it looked too cyberpunky.

I am listening to these boring "History of Ancient Rome" lectures in the hopes that I'll be able to jump back into the Decline And Fall.

I'm reading something by Charlotte Mendelson, and Harry Potter.

Here it is:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140260234/qid%3D1121855448/026-1079273-2068421

Customers who bought it also bought the Bloodaxe Book of Petry, so it probably is the one you've got.

I am now reading One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard. It is one page in Welsh, one page in English. I'm skipping the Welsh pages, so I'm getting through it quite quickly, 100 pages during this morning's 3 hour commuting odyssey. I think they say the same thing anyway.

just started, will report back but so far it's pretty riveting

I want to know what Youn thinks of Franzen's book.

I have started Oh Play That Thing. It is Fast-Moving. I wonder did AccentMonkey read it.

No, it hasn't been donated yet. I am currently reading Sweet William by Beryl Bainbridge. It's so rooted in the early seventies, it's wonderful. Oh my god, I'm going to bed with a man! What will my mother think! And so on.

I cannot find my joke about "Back". Was it good?

I suppose it could have gone, 'Put the book, "Back", on the shelf'.

everyone in the stores i asked about the disappointment artist thought the j i was looking for was j safran foer.

oh, x-post

fortress's overbearingness of style works in that the moment being described throughout pt one is meant to be one of incredible weight of potential; pt two is not written the same, really.

Other people said that in school too, right?

Just finished reading Beryl Bainbridge. Great seventies detailing, like everyone trying to avoid tripping over the cord from the electric carving knife at Christmas dinner, and with some nice caustic lines in it. I do love Beryl Bainbridge.

Now reading The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut. Only 20 pages in, love it already.

And now I really am going to bed with a man. Because, like, it's bedtime.

about to start Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5" - i've never ready any of his, i think he's quite an ILXy author is he not?

then probably George Saunders' "Pastoralia"

I think I'm living about a year in the past.

For now I'm going to read A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

Now I'm reading 'A Box of Matches' which has already inexplicably made me cry at the breakfast table (scuse the split infinitive). Tears are rarely that far away at the moment though.

In preparation for a forthcoming trip to Cork, I was thinking about beginning to read some Roy Keane.

I have only read those two though!

This is certainly one of those books that will make me think differently about my life, my memories. It's making me want to go back and finish Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia as well.

southern's the making of the middle ages is really really well written.

oh i read that book on enron "the smartest guys in the room" -- totally one of the best invst journo boox i've read.

i came this close to buying painters' book on the gilded age but it rilly didn't seem as good on a skim as i'd hoped.

Now I am reading "Leonardo's Judas" by Leo Perutz. I heart Leo Perutz, and this is the only one of his, uh, major works* which I'm yet to read. I was given it for Christmas and I've been saving it for the right moment. Now is the time.

*I haven't yet read "From Nine To Nine", which I have a copy of, or "The Third Bullet" which it appears is impossible to find in English. But these are recognised, it seems, as relatively minor in Perutzworld.

Must be that time of year again.

Up next is probably the new Harry Potter. The anti-ponderous.

I just bought "Who Could Ask For Anything More" by E. Merman at the library store, and I am damned excited about it. I'm trying to figure out a way to make poetry out of it. I am thinking about combining it somehow with "Making of Americans" by G. Stein and seeing what happens.

And loving it!

I am reading "fischer Vs. spassky, the new york times account"

Thank God for libraries

From E. Merman's "Who Could Ask For Anything More", since I can't find the "post a line or two" thread:

"I'm no connoisseur. I don't eat potatoes -- too starchy -- but if I did I'd be a meat-and-potatoes girl."

Now I am reading "The Truth About The Irish", by Terry Eagleton, as recommended to me by One Of Us. It starts rather badly but I'm hoping it will pick up.

Archel that was "Independent People" by Halldor Laxness, which I'm assured is rather better than "The Atom Station" which I have read and only enjoyed a bit. As far as interesting nordic types go, I think he's no Torgny Lindgren, if you know what I mean.

While we're here Archel, the thing I hope you're reading is your email at your slightly foxed account, or the screen of your mobile telephone, either of which should tell you that you have messages!

Who was it that wrote the book that the film Elling was based on? Norwegian? I was interested to read that.

How's that working out for you, Tom?

Perhaps David Thomson made the difference?

I have an Ethel Merman CD.

TH, I suppose that TE's book is patchy. There is a woeful moment, for instance, when he says 'the fairies have left Ireland; rumour has it they ended up in San Francisco'. But I like it somewhat, still, for (as I said) it is such an odd artefact, from such a writer; it is genuinely funny at times, I think; and it contains a remarkable amount of facts and information.

(The English titles are direct translations by me, I don't know if any are available in English)

--

I've just finished reading Fritz Leiber's The Big Time, which I didn't like all that much. It's standing together with Niven's "Ringworld" as the Huge winner I've enjoyed the least. At least this was short enough that I managed to bring myself to finish it though. Still, it was somewhat interesting to see a science fiction novel that's essentially a locked room mystery play.

Just started on Ian McDonald's River of Gods, which seems nice. Hopefully the off-putting 'Neuromancer' comparison in one of the review snippets is rubbish.

He's good really, Archel. Although to be honest the only Laxness I've read was The Atom Station, which probably made more sense if you knew more about Iceland in the 1950s than I do.

At present, I have Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd in my work bag, in the hope that I will start reading it in my lunch breaks. So far it hasn't worked. I'm also reading a big book called A World History of Photography.

By Henry Green.

Boom boom!

Well, I would be if I had picked it up from my 'books to read' pile this morning. Instead I picked up "A Balcomy In The Forest" by Julien Gracq. He taught Georges Perec, you know.

I have finished reading "The Truth About The Irish" and it does pick up, though not as far as I'd hoped. I think it's fair to say that TE has a long way to go as a comic writer, though I laughed a handful of times. Some of the things he says are inexplicable, such as when he notes that the Irish will call you by your first name as soon as you're introduced, while the English will wait for the eighth or ninth time (NB this is my paraphrase at best). I mean, that's obviously not true, but I also can't see how it works as humour or even as exaggerated stereotype. I'm quite pleased I read it, perhaps mainly for the factual content. It has made me keener to read "Keane" too.

I read "Sofia Petrovna" by Lydia Chukovskaya, too. The back cover calls it "searing". It's certainly rather upsetting. It claims to be the only more-or-less contemporary fictional account of Stalin's mid-thirties purges. I liked it very much.

I haven't read any of the Baroque cycle, just listened to Maddie lay into it a lot. :>

Finished the communal Archel household reading of Harry Potter on Saturday - reading out loud sucks when you get to the end of books and your voice just can't keep up with the exciting denouement, it's very tempting to read ahead silently and get walloped by your audience.

What is Boris Akunin like Joe? I was thinking of investigating him/buying 'The Winter Queen' for a friend.

"A Balcony In The Forest", as of nearly half-way through, is a wonderful thing. It's beautifully written (translated) and there's something about a precision in the use of metaphor which I want to say but can't, not at this time in the morning.

Tim, I'll have a think about what to recommend in Cork.

Also reading Sinfield on post-war culture, properly at very long last (I like his plainness); and Amis again alas.

i just finished book one today and went and did something else, which felt good. i did however look around on the internet and found one very neat twist apparently introduced in book three.

it's weird: it seems to me like the thing would be of no possible interest to readers not primed on the themes by cryptonomicon? well, this is an exagerration. but i can't imagine the opening having enough weight otherwise for anyone to go "okay i want another three thousand pages of this..." (apparently there are several MORE books abt. the waterhouse dynasty, and cryptology, and the history of money. (i think the first future one will be U&K in that it will NOT require the hanging-around-actual-historical-people bit - that one waterhouse is pacing turing and another is pacing newton is somewhat beyond belief, and to have one where another waterhouse paced charles babbage and ada lovelace, say, would be very much beyond belief.) )

i dunno how to actually rate it as a novel. newton/leibniz interests me as a topic, as does the stuff on the history of england-as-democracy. the stuff on money and crypto is sort of interesting, but less so than in the first half of cryptonomicon. the second half of cryptonomicon i still don't know if i rate: i mean i know it has thematic justification up the wazoo, but i still don't want any kind of book i'm reading to turn out to be about nazi gold. (stephenson lets some of his conforming-to-genre in quicksilver get by in a sort of nudge-wink metafictional recurring thread, mentioning picaresque novels or "picaroon-romances" or whatever perhaps a bit much; also, so far about thirteen or fourteen different things have been compared to mercury, or the appearance of mercury, or how mercury moves around if you pour it, or how mercury acts in a thermometer, or the possible value of mercury as a clothes dye, or the effect of mercury on the digestion, and it is getting rather tiresome.)

i'm surprised at how not-awful the structure of it is, though. that's as far as i'm going on that account, for now.

has a fair bit in common with mason & dixon: way, way more than cryptonomicon ever did with GR, anyway.

my DAD is reading cryptonomicon, btw.

Now I'm on to "The Fifth Corner Of The Room" by Israel Metter. More Soviet-era business, starts off being just the kind of chirpy miserabilism I respond to.

I'm reading 'Girl in Landscape' now. It's good. But I always imagine when a 'literary' author sits down to write a sort of sci-fi book, them having a thought process like: 'wow, this is great, I'm setting a book on another planet/in the future/both, what totally random thing can I invent now I am not constrained by present reality? I know! Tiny silvery household deer! Haha brilliant!'

'Real' sci-fi often seems much more logically rigorous, somehow.

So, I started "Robinson Crusoe" instead!

is river of gods one of the two singularity novels on the hugo list? or am i thinking of something else?

Which is the catchphrase from Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place."

Ha-cha-cha-cha.

I liked it a whole lot, and you probably would too, but I would guess that most non-fans/musicians would find it a bit boring. It's basically FW describing the endless musician's cycle of being broke, putting together bands/getting hired, gigging, touring, recording, touring, and having it end or fall apart for some reason. Usually money. Repeat, over the course of a lifetime.

He gets pretty snarky about his fellow musicians and bosses, which is fun, but it's amazing he manages to gloss over his personal life. Not a big deal, since the focus is clearly on his musical life, but it's funny when he tosses in "so I married my childhood sweetheart" who he's never mentioned before or when you're wondering what happened to the wife & kids during the "sex & cocaine" years.

faulkner knows it's confusing as fuck and compensates for that in the (iirc) second to last (jason's) section. as i recall there were a couple major major plot points i was still more or less in the dark about until i read that part. it's def worth it to keep going, esp. if you haven't even gotten out of the first section, which, let's face it, blows.

PS: Thank you, Mooro, for this book.

I'm taking a break from library books to read all the Hitchhikers Guide books again, and I keep annoying Matt by giggling in bed.

Making mistakes is nothing new for me.
I was thinking I may try to pick it up again before I return it but I don't think I'll bother. It's a bit disappointing considering, as I mentioned earlier, how much I liked As I Lay Dying and Light In August.

I'll probably end up giving it another chance sometime in the distant future

Is House of leaves REALLY any good? I have it checked out but can't decide if I should read it or not.

I never managed to finish reading it though.

Censorship was once a predictable topic, dividing liberals and conservatives down the middle on issues like obscenity and national security. Today, the debate over the regulation of speech offers no such easy dichotomy, with feminists joining forces with religious fundamentalists to control pornography, and abortion rights advocates seeking to restrict clinic demonstrations while prolife groups defend their freedom to picket. Underlying this trend is a fundamental intellectual shift--exemplified by the work of Michel Foucault--that holds that the state is not the only agent of censorship. The thirteen contributors here explore the topic of censorship from the viewpoint of numerous disciplines and viewpoints.

What caught me was the Author's Note by Hesse that he wrote the book as a fifty-year-old and that it dealt with the problems of being that age, and he couldn't figure out why so many readers of the book were so young and was puzzled by what they seemed to get out of it.

By coicidence, I am exactly fifty years old. So I bought a copy for 50 cents and I'm reading it.

I haven't finished it, yet (I'm about 3/4 through it) but I'll be hanged if I know what a teenager would make of this book. I mean, the book is about dealing with the overhanging reality of death and breaking through the old crust of experience - and let's face it, death means something very different to a teenager compared to a fifty-year old like me. And the crust of old experience is not exactly a youth's main problem.

To a teenager, personal extinction is too mixed up in romantic notions of early death, sacrifice and melodrama. In contrast, I can start to feel death working into in my bones now. Nothing romantic about it. From what I've read so far, Hesse seems to be working at a story that would revive a middle-aged man's sense of life's innate heroism, rekindle his sense of faith and meaning, lighten some of the weight of memory and habit, and finally reconcile him to impending death. Not exactly a brew for kids.

At fifty, it's a lot easier to see all the stuff about suicide and sex and death and magic and immortality as useful symbols rather than as thrilling romance. Just by a natural inclination, I discount it all by half and arrive at a more sane interpretation of what Hesse was driving at - I think.

Anyway, that's a long-winded answer to the question of what I'm reading now.

Hang on, I'll start a thread.

Not what I'd call a bundle of laughs, mind.

I am now reading "The Messenger" by Mayra Montero. I quite like Mayra Montero, although the two of her novels I've read before aren't really the sort of thing I usually enjoy (they're both sweaty, voodoo-ridden spooked affairs). This one's set in Cuba so I suppose won't strictly be voodoo-related but seems likely to be along the same lines. And I think it features Caruso, which can't be a bad thing.

I have started Shake! by Yvonne Roberts, which was so engrossing on the train this morning I forgot all about security alerts and stuff and was therefore surprised to see so many police at Paddington.

I think this is high praise indeed.

I bet I won't finish it either though.

Armed and dangerous : memoirs of a Chicago policewoman

lodge makes extravagent claims for the comic voice tho as being a relatively new and distinct one when it broke. these days it seems a dime a dozen, so i wonder how new it was. i know it's a stretch, but as far as precedents (i'm not bang-up on funny british lit so i've gotta reach) it has the same modernist comedy-of-manners touch as say, musil. maybe the difference is it ends so terribly pleasantly?

?!???

Now reading 'Small Island' which is nicely gripping.

Tonight I will finish Roy Keane's autobiography. I haven't read a footballer's autobiography for a long, long time. I wonder if they are all so badly-paced?

Next I think I will try to find something Irish on my shelves which I haven't read before. I wonder if there is anything? If not, the pleasure of Myles.

TH: I am trying to think of another Irish book for you, though I did not do too well with the last one. Do you like Ciaran Carson? I think I can imagine that you could. My favourite book of his is The Star Factory.

Maybe you would like Patrick McCabe, too, or Glenn Patterson (whose book That Which Was stands blue as the sky on my shelf). Actually, there is a load that you might like. John McGahern, for instance. Also, Roddy Doyle - I like the Last Round-Up sequence so far!

But I should not be distracting anyone from Myles.

The other night I turned off the radio before Janice Long came on and looked for something to read in bed. I lit in the end on Heaney, and reread a run of early poems - things like 'The Peninsula' and 'Personal Helicon'. Despite everything (whatever that is), I find that I still return to Heaney more than to almost any other poet. Perhaps it is the sheer bareness of those thin quatrains - the toughness of finding the meat of meaning on those bones.

I tried to keep track of everything I read after the 50 (last year?), and failed miserably. Good on ya though!

I would like to read something disenchantingly funny.

(PF your Eagleton recommendation was a good one, and thanks. TTATI is an interesting and entertaining thing, but you know it has its problems. It also made an ideal gift for a friend of mine who has something of a fixation on his (possibly fictitious) Irish roots and who was at school with TE.)

Roy Keane, it turns out, is a bit of a plank. But I've always had a soft spot for monomaniacs.

Maybe I should read Rip It Up And Start Again next. I seem to be "in the mood".

But only reading, not listening.

No trendy GenX novels for him...

This will be book 25 for me; I wasn't aiming for 50, but I could come close if I applied myself. Do Gidget books count?

holy shit! how much hyperbole is involved here?

Now I'm a few chapters into David Mitchell's Ghostwritten.

I don't think I would ever have picked up a Heinlein book, except that this one is part of the Gollancz classic sci fi series and the other books I've read in that series have been great. Apart from Zelazny's Lord of Light, which appears to be wishy-washy hippy nonsense.

'four jazz lives' by spellmann (orig 'four lives in the bebop business): lots of surprising detail and quite a bit here even if you were to listen and dislike the music.

still reading lenin on hegel. seems useful (besides the actual content) as a guide on how to approach philosophical texts.

Ah, don't say that. Now I'm going to be reading it thinking "Ray is right! These people are taking it turns to play guru and idiot! I have been cheated!"

Speaking of, hands up who believes that Bush is really reading those three books on his vacation, and not listening to someone read him one-page summaries while he's in the gym?

I only know about Salt, which is mostly recipes, from what I remember. What are the other two?

I actually prefer Heinlein's later stuff like To Sail Beyond the Sunset and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to his "Golden Age" stuff. He's probably the only SF author I liked as a teenager that I still get the urge to read anymore.

It presents many scenarios drawn from history and archaeology where a society has established itself, seemed to thrive and then flamed out in some sort of self-inflicted disaster. Examples: Easter Island, the Norse Greenland colony of Eric the Red, the Maya of Yucatan. It shows how environmental distress and long-continued bad choices contributed to their collapse.

Alternatively, he presents scenarios of several societies coping with these stresses successfully. Examples: Tokugawa Japan dealing with deforestation problems, islands in Polynesia learning to deal with isolation and sustainability issues.

In the last part of the book I haven't read he gathers examples from modern states, then draws up broad conclusions on how to avoid getting driven to the wall as a society.

Impressions: It's a great concept and it assembles a large mass of information and mostly manages to synthesize it. There's a lot of incisive thinking going on here, even if it's not quite as fresh or new as Guns, Germs and Steel.

The only problem is that it seems a bit doughy and underdone, like it needed a longer time in the oven. I expect the publisher was overly anxious to capitalize on the success of Guns, Germs and Steel and rushed it out about a year too soon. It's not like it's badly written or organized, it's just a bit on the slack side and could have used some tightening up. This happens a lot these days.

I am not that keen on The Moon's A Harsh Mistress, or at least, I wasn't.

So... I'm now reading The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I'll come back to Carver when I feel like being reminded of how horrible humans can be. (This is not a knock on his prose; I really enjoyed his writing, but I just couldn't handle the themes.)

'now we're cooking with gas!'

i have been reading:

collins, 'interaction ritual chains', esp. the chapter on smoking rituals

berlin alexanderplatz, still: franz biberkopf has just re-joined pums' gang

a bit of 'molloy' for pure pleasure, the part where moran is preparing to depart with his idiot son

bits of berryman's dream songs

Time's Arrow is the only Amis book I've read, either M or K. I did quite like it, although I was an impressionably teenager at the time.

Kafka's "The Trial" (for about the third time)

I am now working on these concurrently:

"The Monk" -- Lewis
"The Plague" -- Camus
"Brighton Rock" -- Graham Greene
"Selected Poems" -- Langston Hughes

randall collins, 'sociological insight'
lawrence stone, 'the family, sex, and marriage in england 1500-1800'
a bit more of 'molloy', where moran has become lame and delivers instructions to his idiot son to walk to hole and buy a bicycle, second-hand preference

PJM, did you see the revived Morley thread (Remember the Name!) about that feature? I thought some of the underrated treasures were not that underrated.

*or dog-ear the pages, not that anyone here would do anything like that

I can't be arsed with Master and Commander, although it is very good. Nautical but nice, would be my review headline.

We just had that on loan from our local music library, tom. try the library!

So I need to pick out about five books from the stack inside to take with me. Hooray! This is the kind of choice I love being faced with.

Currently reading Don Quixote, because of the recent discussion on the 50 books thread. It's funny - okay, the book is funny, but also the _situation_ is funny, because I bounced off this a few years ago, after only reading one or two chapters, and now I can't figure out why, because it's funny. Even in the super-cheap Wrodswor!h edition.

Um, I, er, um, hang on...

Okay, I've weeded out The Pirate Wars and Under the Black Flag, which I was going to take. Instead I am taking

Philippa Gregory's The Wise Woman. Two things must ye know of the wise woman. No, wait, it's about passion and betrayal in Tudor England.
James Morrow's This is the Way the World Ends. According to the NY Times Book Review "if Kurt Vonnegut had collaborated with Jonathan Schell on an antinuclear novel, this might be the result", which strikes me as a little like an introduction to a bad impersonation (if Robert De Niro was doing the washing up, how might that sound?), but we'll give it a go.
Joe Bennett's A Land of Two Halves, which is a travel/humour book about New Zealand, which someone gave me as a present (the book, not New Zealand (do you see what I did? DO YOU?)). I'm not sure about travel/humour books. Let's face it, it has to be really fucking funny to be funnier than my mates. We shall see.
Daphne du Maurier's Hungry Hill, because Mikey G was singing her praises last year. What ever happened to Mikey anyway?
Colm Toibin's The Master, blah blah, Booker shortlist, blah. I've never read one of his books.

And that's it! Not one sailing ship to be seen, but I reserve the right to purchase books with pictures of sailing ships on them while I am away. Ray, let us know how Don Quixote goes for you. I really should read it too.

I'm near finishing Cloud Atlas, then starting Rip It Up... Have just put in an Amazon order for next month's holiday reading, consisting of Paul Morley's Nothing, Charles Portis' The Dog Of The South and Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped At Eboli.

I might bring along South of the Border, West of the Sun if only so that I might, in the seclusion of a French villa, convince my husband to finally read some Murakami (he's taking some Tony Parsons and Houellebecq). I have an ARC of Rushdie's new book that I might bring along, but I've never managed to like a Rushdie book, so that could just be dead weight in the suitcase.

Otherwise, I'll be shopping in the Birkenhead Waterstone's on our pit stop before we head to France. Any recommendations for books that just came out in the UK? Or is everything there just more of what I'd find here (NYC)?

wait, do you read books you give as gifts?!

I was being disingenuous anyway because I've read gift books before

I finally finished reading "No More Than Human" which is by no means great - in fact I found it something of a slog - but contains some glorious passages of sly observation, so I'm glad I read it.

Now I'm reading "Make Believe" by Joanna Scott.

Snow has started quite brilliantly.

The signature thing - will its value increase?

I'm kind of off "things" so I probably wouldn't get it anyway.

In fact I hate "things".

Things are so pretty, sometimes.

I will be choosing a new book to read next week. I am informed I should cure my misogyny by reading more - or any - novels by women.

Currently reading: Don DeLillo - White Noise

Will probably read next: Daniel Defoe - A Journal Of The Plague Year

In fact I hate "things".

Things by George Perec? I couldn't read it either.

In looking for a dictionary I was sure we had somewhere (our bookshelves are completely disorganized), I found a copy of Riddley Walker, which I haven't read in years but was reminded of here. So perhaps that's next.

I finished Patricia Rain's Vanilla, which was interesting but seemed to have quite an agenda behind it. Then, I saw on the back flap that she is the CEO of vanilla.COMpany, which explained a lot. She is the self-styled Vanilla Queen; the Vanilla King lives in my town, and I'm wondering if his wife knows.

I'm far away in Canada!

I've also got some H.G. Wells and other assorted sci-fi that I'll probably read soon.

Mind you, his old book reviews are still fantastic.

Still reading (and enjoying) Rip It Up And Start Again. I am on New Pop now.

Meeting Evil Thomas Berger
The Poet Michael Connelly
The Lincoln Lawyer Michael Connelly
The Black Echo Michael Connelly
Drama City George Pelecanos

Under The Banner of Heaven Jon Krakauer: not exactly "fun" but riveting study of Mormonism and its extremist offshoots

still working on Dream Boogie Peter Guralnick's upcoming Sam Cooke biography. It's as good a music bio as I've ever read.

I've been enjoying dipping into The Collected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth quite a bit. Very worthwhile.

I took a beat-up old copy of a Penguin edition of Livy called Early History of Rome, on an overnight hike and read about 150 pages, while sitting in various beauty spots high on Mt. Hood. Cinncinnatus at the plow, Horatio at the bridge, the Rape of Lucretia -- chauvinist mythology at its finest.

I stayed up til 3am finishing Pigeon Post - oh no! fallen-in mine workings! oh no! - and am now inspired to revisit all the Ransome I can.

In the meantime I still haven't felt like reading grown-up books so I read Jennings Goes to School (wizard) and Confessions of A Teenage Drama Queen (ozard).

Then I read "Fup" by Jim Dodge, which I also totally adored. Now I'm realding "Light" by Craig Taylor. I picked it up because my football team used to have a player by that name (Craig Taylor, not "Light"). I'm enjoying it, but it feels a bit like comfort literature.

i am reading 'riddley walker' and 'underworld' and this place is to blame.

Crikey Archel I didn't even notice the one-word-title thing as I was typing that post, but I'll try to carry on for the rest of the month. Which means "The Knight On The Bridge" by William Watson will go back on the pile, and also means I may have to buy another couple of Henry Green novels, what a shame...

For Jebus sake!!!

I started Fishmarket Close by Inspector Rebus, but it was unpleasant, all rape and murder.

I put it aside and started (again) bumshoving epic In The Line Of Beauty. Compared to Inspector Rebus, it is wonderful indeed.

I suppose I would have liked Nothing if my mind had not been in such a turmoil. I have a 3-in-1 Henry Green, Loving, Living, Party Going, which you can have Tim, if you want it. My mind is in turmoil, I cannot read anything that requires effort or an attention span.

Today I have been poorly.

PJM: you're a Prince, but I have two of those already and so I think I will be a collector boy and hold out for the matching Harvill edition of "Party Going". Also I certainly won't be able to read it until two-word October, or Archel will be angry.

I am reading a book!

Sorry you are poorly, PJM.

I am reading 'How to Dunk a Doughnut' by Len Fisher. Food science!

I read it ages and ages ago, but I seem to recall Dictionary of the Khazars as being dull and skimmable. A few good bits and a nice overall conceit but... meh.

Currently reading This is the Way the World Ends. It's very good so far.

I think thats the order I'll read them in

i read the foreword and the preface, but not yet the introduction, the hofstadter i just bought.

straws!

prepare to be frustrated

there's so much good in that game

it's a shame the map-collecting / boating ruined it

Wind Waker is no Ocarina of Time. Endless, endless sailing. But it's more puzzle oriented and less "kill! kill!" than previous Zeldas -- I'm actually zipping along quickly and have only died, like, three times, which is odd for me.

Metamagical Themas is awesome by the way! Totally difft then GEB, but better for it -- less ambitious, more playful awkward and often totally WTF -- the way he just goes nuts in the end of the Rubics Cube essay is dear to my heart.

reading some cavell, still poking at that (richard) hofstadter, started on the epistemology textbook and verified my claim made on the book purchase thread of its awfulness, some fragments on some presocratics also (i had forgotten that all we have of thales is indirect quotation at best, usually worse!).

also some gadamer in 'the beginning of philosophy', some more hofstadter (illuminating), some 'pythagoras' and 'heraclitus'.

um.

stuff on the presocratics.

bad survey papers on 'the analysis of knowledge' which raise my ire.

I'm now on to Clare Dudman's 98 Reasons for Being (every time I look at that title, I get Jay Z's '99 Problems' stuck in my head).

currently returning to reading!
now:
jonathan lethem - fortress of solitude
next:
lethem - gun, with occasional music
lethem - motherless brooklyn
rushdie - midnight's children

It's good, but last night i started wondering how much is true, and how much made up. The section from his great-uncle's diary seem to be very similar to Sebald's own style of writing.

Tim H., did you ever make it to Cork?

La possibilité d'une île is Houellebecq's latest.

That certainly is the case during their time as undergraduates; but I don't think anything much is known about Newton's real-life roommate after he graduated.

Things I have learned: I shouldn't commit suicide, Pagan religions don't deliver the goods when needed, God continually tests both the good and the wicked, and I'm free from impurity if my mind is correctly steeled against the, uh, violations of other people committed against me.

Oh, and, damn those horrible, lustful, power-obsessed Romans.

(also as Jack The Coiner jack shaftoe is replacing an actual historical individual or so it seems. this seems like cheating.)

So I finished "Soul" and it's great although it turns out Platonov wrote tons of endings and I think I'd have preferred the one of gut-wrenching emptiness rather than affirmation of humanity, which the editors of this edition chose. That might just be my funny mood.

Then I had a bash at "Living" by Henry Green and I had to abandon it. I wasn't looking forward to picking it up at all, and it was blighting one-word-title September. I don't like abandoning books, I'll have another go at some point. But who knows when I'll be reading one word title novels again? March, maybe.

So now I'm on to "Cassada" by James Salter which isn't especially great either (it's all about aeroplanes and homosociality) but at least it's chugging away nicely. Then I think a re-read of the classic "Rituals" by Cees Nooteboom in preparation for a trip to the Netherlands.

Then one or maybe two short one word title novels before I begin two-word October. Which?

I think 1984 is more properly called Nineteen Eighty Four (although I might be wrong). You are trying to trick me!

Have you read Middlesex?

Short, chilling, sad but not mawkish.

I'm quickly realizing that he's extremely genius and I want to read everything he's ever written. I'm also realizing what an influence he is on Zadie Smith's style. It's no surprise she picked this book's plot to mimic; the tone is hers already.

I can't concentrate on reading anything at the moment. Skimming through an annoyingly illustrated but useful book on running focus groups.

The last fiction book I read was A Deepness in the Sky by Verner Vinge. He may be, along with Kim Stanley Robinson, my favorite SciFi author ever. I love how this book spans thousands of years but the restraint used in telling the story makes it seem like he's not trying to cram a lot of information into it's 700 and some pages. This is the first book that made me cry in a long time too.

Now that my classes have started again, I'm mostly reading academic related texts, but they have been amazinly interesting. Women's Way of Knowing, I wish someone had handed me this book when I was 13 years old. While focusing on women, there is so much to learn about how people develop cognition. Same thing with A Different Voice. Also breezed through Blink by Malcom Gladwell. Fascinating albeit light anecdotal reading.

Next up is The Mathematics of Marriage by John Gottman.

La possibilité d'une île is typical, cynical Houellebecq 'rubbish'. He varies from pissing me off to bringing me down but I think that's what he's trying to do and he's certainly an observant, inventive writer.

It seems to me that a lot of enlgish-language poetry is crap, but, being amerikkkan, I am mono-lingual. I refuse to read translations of poetry, but I yearn for rilke, baudelaire, celan, etc. I must brush up on my french.

My daughter is doing her master's in translation theory at the moment, so we have talked extensively about poetry in translation. I read spanish (technically, and with the help of dictionaries), but reading poetry in spanish loses too much - the colloquialisms, any playfulness of language, gone due to my all too technical interpretation. The best method for me is to have the original text in the native language, along with an english translation. I do a literal technical translation of the original, then suss out the translation. I know I'm missing much of the beauty and perhaps most of the truth of the poem, but in the effort I feel the shadow of both.

I have been reading the winning poems in our poetry competition, which are very good (hooray!), I finished reading the horrible book I had to read for a review (it went on, and on, and on) and now I'm reading source material about controlled trials in modern medicine for a writing contract I'm trying to get. Which, of course, is why I'm monkeying around here instead of working.

Today I decided that I had to read "Piano" by Jean Echenoz (another Harvill fave) before One Word Title September was over, so I was off to shell £12 on it but thought I'd check the Oxfam bookshop on Strutton Ground first. BINGO! Also "Lang" by Kjall Westo (that o should have umlauts, if they call umlauts umlauts in Swedish-speaking Finland). Between these I should make it safely to the end of the month. I also bought the Oxford edition of "Evelina" by Burney which has a cute Edward Bawden linocut on the front, but I don't suppose I'll have time to get onto it before Two Word Title October dawns. Maybe it'll be in January when a period of austerity could follow the abandon of No Limit December?

Perec's the only one I really knew on my own, and none ever comes in. Gah bah.

They also did "LAUM", "Three", ""53 Days"", "Things" / "A Man Asleep" and "A Void", plus that big fat biography of The Great Man by David Bellos. Think that's it.

I never managed to lay my hands on the Harvile ""53 Days"" meaning I have some inconsistent copy. That's rankle-icious.

Also finished Pass the Butterworms by Tom Cahill, a moderately amusing and informative collection of short magazine pieces.

Currently reading Selected Non-Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. It covers quite a wide range of ground, but the highly intellectual stuff is the most intriguing so far.

The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye

I don't know the name of the translator of your edition of LAUM, obv., but I think the Harvill one is David Bellos.

I am reading Molesworth for the first time and suddenly I understand what everyone is on about on ilx.

DB's biogrraphy of Perec is very fine but perhaps too fat. I read it once and would like to read it again but it can only be a reference work now, life being too short and that.

May I stress that "Rituals" by Cees Nooteboom is, on my current reading, rocketing upwards through the ranks of the greatest novels I've ever read. That can't just be because it's largely set in Amserdam and I'm so excited about going there the week after next. Can it?

I'm sorry

: )

i think this applies to all biographies.

Then I read "Piano" by Jean Echenoz and although it's maybe not quite as fab as "I'm Off" it's still pretty great. It's sort of like that Will Self story "The Crouch End Book of the Dead" would have been if Self was something other than an insufferable and self-congratulatory idiot, and if it was set in Paris.

Then I read "Cheese" by Willem Elsschot, which is a brief story of a fellow who embarks on a doomed venture to sell lots of cheese, or not. It's not as funny as it could have been, but was still quite cute in its way.

Next up will be "Annam" by Christophe Bataille (anyone know if he's any relation?) which is vey short indeed. hurrah.

I'm reading The Rotter's Club. It's ok. Also it makes me feel relatively young bwahaha.

Now I am reading "Lang" by Kjell Westo. It starts off well enough in its shadowy, troubled Scandinavian thriller kind of way.

(Julio expect an email tonight or tomorrow, sorry!)

Orhan Pamuk's Snow. Not sure I'd read another by him. My impression is that he can write (beneath a somewhat clunky translation - maybe good translation from the Turkish is not easy). But he takes himself seriously & forgets to entertain (or at least he didn't entertain me). Very illuminating about Turkey/religious extremism etc but not an enjoyable enough experience for me to want more. I'd recommend it to people who read novels to find out more about the world, rather than for the kinds of superficial reasons I read them.

Mieville's Iron Council. I'm about 2/3 of the way through this and may or may not finish it. I'm in awe of his imagination but I find his pumped up prose style very hit-and-miss and his retro politics uninteresting. There is some stunning prose writing but also long passages that were an effort to get through and with hindsight not worth the bother. There's something very raw and unfinished about everything he does, probably exactly his appeal for some people but I could have used more polishing and pruning.

Yate's Young Hearts Crying. This is the fourth Yates novel I've read and although I enjoyed it the formula is starting to wear thin. Too many doomed, self-deluding, arty sorts who drink too much and can't get their marriages to work. Probably my last Yates, although I still want to read the autobiography.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. About 150 pages in and the jury still out. Not the immediate delight I'd hoped for: the cod 19 century prose occasionally achieves some nice effects, but generally Susanna Clarke's irony is clunky compared to her models and she doesn't have an especially good ear. Plot development is slow. I'm still reading, though, and optimistic things will pick up now that Jonathan Strange is on the scene. I hope so because I'm not on a winning streak and would love to read a novel I can enjoy with less reservations than the ones mentioned above.

Fun things are not inherently compelling to adults.
Any child might find fun things inherently compelling.
If a thing is interesting, it is compelling.
Therefore if you are not a child, you do not necessarily find all fun things to be interesting things.

You said "interesting (i.e. compelling)" -- it is interesting, that is to say compelling. Now that I reread it, though, I think it is possible that you could either mean "all interesting things are compelling" or "all compelling things are interesting" by that. Although I think the first reading -- "The critter is a dog (i.e., a mammal)" -- is more likely than the second -- "The crittier is a mammal (i.e., a dog)" -- since when there are only two terms, it seems that the rephrasing has to be to something more general. (If there are more terms before the "i.e." then I think it probably means the term after the "i.e." is the specific term -- "The critter is furry and gets help for Timmy (i.e., it is Lassie)" -- but without more context, you couldn't say "The critter is furry (i.e., it is Lassie)".)

But this new addition is a nice one:

All interesting things are fun.
Not all interesting things are compelling.

Because then that forces us to accpet the less likely reading of "All compelling things are interesting."

So:

Fun things are not inherently compelling to adults.
More specifically, there exists a fun thing that is not compelling, at least for an adult.
Interesting thigns are not inherently compelling.
More specifically, there exists an interesting thing that is not compelling.
All interesting things are fun.
All compelling things are interesting.
Therefore all compelling things are fun!
Therefore there are a greater number of fun things than interesting things, and a greater number of interesting things than compelling things, at least as far as adults are concerned!

This is a useful deduction, I think.

Currently reading The Face of Spain by Gerald Brenan. A travel through the south of the country in the early Franco years. Poverty and the black market on every page.

Highlights of my reading year are: One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Time Travellers Wife, Down and Out in Paris and London, In Search of Languages by Mark Abley, Accursed Mountains by Philip Carver (travels in Albania), re-reading Laurie Lee & Ruy Castro's biography of Garrincha. These are the books that scored 8/10 or more on my extremly sad spreadsheet of books read.

Disappointment of the year is Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicles. I've saved it for ages and it just felt bloated and wilfully obtuse. The one plus is Rossini's overture to The Thieving Magpie, hummed by a waiter in the book and a great tune I'd forgotten all about.

frankiemachine: Aren't Coe's sex scenes atrocious? I agree with your impressions; I expected more, but I still really enjoyed the book. And give Jonathan Strange a chance. For months after I read it I still didn't know if I liked it or not (at points I even hated it), but now, a year later, I remember it very fondly, and certain scenes from it have stuck with me better than many books I loved immediately.

Mikey G: Read A Wild Sheep Chase. I think it's the perfect Murakami book: bizarre, sad, and much tighter than Wind-Up Bird. Although, if you didn't find merit in it, you might just be one of those people who doesn't like Murakami.

And if we're talking highlights and lowlights, Kafka on the Shore was a surprising highlight for me this year. I thought I wouldn't like it, but ended up loving it.

The other book I'm reading (The Vampyre) is even more rub. I think I'll just move on to that book by Simon Winchester about the OED - anyone read it?

I started reading Saturday by Ian McEwan, but 50 pages in I really don't like it. It could be the head cold, but I'm inclined to think it's the book. I've temporarily put it to one side in favour of Giles Minton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Seafaring! The Dutch being bastards! Scurvy! It's got all the things I love in a book.

I started reading Saturday by Ian McEwan, but 50 pages in I really don't like it. It could be the head cold, but I'm inclined to think it's the book. I've temporarily put it to one side in favour of Giles Minton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg. Seafaring! The Dutch being bastards! Scurvy! It's got all the things I love in a book.

Isn't the Winchester book called The Surgeon of Crowthorne?

I have started The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I think it is dish as dullwater, and the newspapers are called The Obscurer and The Daily Chloroform.

I also started The Blind Assassin, but it looked like it might involve thinking, so I put it aside.

Should I read Hangover Square, do you think? Or perhaps I should get this Mr Strange Norrel book from Fopp, where it is on special offer.

Frankiemachine on Coe was quite convincing. I thought the novel had some melancholy that was its strongest suit.

I seem not to be reading books anymore! I read the Guardian. It contains multitudes. And I read most of the Independent's DYLAN: A SPECIAL CELEBRATION. But I did just last night start Henry Green's Loving, in these last burnished days of one-word September.

Thrillers which start with the end, though, never quite live up to their name, do they?

I don't read many thrillers. Can you tell? To tell you the truth, I don't even know if Lang counts as one.

Anyway, TWO WORD OCTOBER beckons. I won't be reading much next week because I'll be on a holiday effectively made up of a series of city breaks, and I'll be wanting to gaze, fascinated, from train windows. Suggestions for unmissable two-worders much appreciated. Currently lined up: "Blockade Diary" by Lidiya Ginzburg; "The Towpath" by Jesus Moncada; "Double Jeopardy" by Jean Echenoz and "Second Harvest" by Jean Giono.

I was going to include that GB84 but mark s told me it was four words. Shame.

The Guardian is indeed PACKED, although not as much today as yesterday, mainly because the Films and Music section is missing from my copy.

Tim, I don't know if "The" can be considered a word for these purposes. I notice that you favour the work of Johnny Foreigner.

I've put off reading this for a while (pricetag says 2001), as I don't like too many of the authors that are associated with Burroughs, and only found Junky/Junkie to be moderately interesting; but this is a whole 'nother level!

I want to move to NYC now, as I've just had the joy of dragging a suitcase chockful o' cheap hardcovers home with me. "12th Street Books" = first prize!

Anyway, it quotes a Pierre Trudeau essay about canoeing, with the great line: "Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature."

While I finally got my bicycle today and am currently content to be a bourgeois, I did think this was a terrific line, and I googled up the entire essay, which is short, well written, and worth reading.

I found a selected essays on Amazon -- was Trudeau known as a good essayist, in general?

It reminded me of when I was reading Thomas Jefferson's book about Virginia, and I was saddened thinking about how we'd never elect anyone who could write such a book these days (I suspect neither Trudeau nor Jefferson used ghostwriters). But I'm glad Canada could, not too long ago.

OK, Tim! No need to totally blow your cool like that.

Is it about canals? Or is it a metaphorical journey along the towpath of life?

Definitely give it a try. It's lovely. However, if you haven't already or never intend on reading Assassin, read "Cat's Eye" or "Alias Grace" instead. I enjoyed them more, & plus they're both shorter.

Other books I tried and failed to read:

Danny Wallace - The Yes Man.

YES!

Apparently someone suggested Winchester write it after they read The Surgeon of thingy, on the grounds that having written a footnote to the history of the OED he should now go and write the history itself.

Dense, intense, dificult. Two-word title.

God, I love Green.

I finally finished the exceptionally depressing La possibilité d'une île and am currently happy to be reading pop-history in the form of A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage.

Just re-read Journey to the Alcarria by Camilo Jose Cela. I read it every year and it gets better each time. Sparse and read-between-the-linesy, the humour is drole and it conjours up a I-wanna-go-there-right-now feeling of place. Maybe because the place doesn't recognisably exist anymore.

If anyone else has read it, I would love to talk about it with you and I may even touch you inappropriately.

I have not read it, Mikey, but I will do one day, just for you.

then I received an e-mail the next day

"out of stock"

: (

Some nice textual imagery of post-war America.

On another note, in my search for this book I finally made it over to Gotham Book Mart, which is just lovely. They have a great Greta Garbo exhibit up at the moment, and the staff is amazingly friendly and helpful. (I'd already been to Labyrinth, The Strand, and Three Lives looking for a copy - all out. Go Dalkey.)

Incidentally, my favorite store during my brief visit was "12th Street Books", which was right around the corner from the Strand.

How is 3rd Policeman, by the way? Anywhere near as funny as At Swim-Two-Birds? The Lost thing is kinda neat, as I saw over on the Complete Review's blog that "Since this information was reported in a Chicago Tribune article a week ago, [Dalkey Archive Press have] sold about five years worth of copies of The Third Policeman"

Oh, now reading:
"Lord Foul's Bane" by Stephen Donaldson. I hated the "Gap" book I read, and generally don't like fantasy, but this is starting out surprisingly well. Particularly considering how reviled the novel is over on rec.arts.sf.written, whose volkgeist matches mine relatively well on SF novels.

Now I will devote my attention more thoroughly to ItLoB.

They seem to have two floors, though I never made it to the second one as I was in a hurry. The front of the shop is dedicated to Edward Gorey stuff; a few shelves' worth. They had a lovely back room where older white men seemed to be discussing something important and literary. I wanted to go back there, but it looked forbidden.

I'll go again, and report next time on the mysterious second floor, and whether or not I discover more Gorey there.

The Third Policeman is great so far, funny enough to make me snigger out loud (something I never do), though I have no other Flann O'Brien to compare it to. I'll definitely be reading more.

All right, Nick, if you're basically finished with that, then maybe I will finish reading another weird book with a strange baseball team in it, Harry Mathew's Tlooth.

I'm planning on starting MFK Fisher's "A Cordiall Water" today. But I am also thinking of going to the library. Anything I should grab?

So now I am reading Ask the Dust by John Fante and it is good and I like it.

About halfway through Dylan volume 1. It could do with an index. I want to cross reference and it is hard work but not as hard work as that awful blonde woman who murdered Like a Rolling Stone at the tribute concert. I'm gonna hunt her down.

Finished the last half of The Third Policeman in a terrific 2-hour marathon only to find out that the book was shown for a split second on "Lost" and not referred to at all (apart from the obvious references to an underground computer, and the possible futility of pushing buttons, which I knew already). Hopefully it'll still be a big sales boost for Dalkey as the book does bolster a lot of possible theories on the mysteries of the show.

Now reading Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

It's true that the interview and the book correlate quite interestingly - maybe one provoked the other to happen. But if you are concerned that the book is a transcript of Dylan talking, rather than properly written by him -- that has never been claimed that I have seen, there is no evidence for it that I am aware of. Actually, if it had been edited by an ordinary writer, it would probably have fewer flat little sentences going nowhere, leaving aside the many extraordinary ones.

Meanwhile - Myles and Pynchon - wow! it's all happening here.

I much prefer the writing when he switches to Woody Guthrie, when the the perspective shifts, humility surfaces and it reads more like a fan.

My copy has 'book of the year' plastered all over the back cover. On closer analysis, these people include Gryff Rhys Jones, Caitlan Moran and (never forgiven him for that composer in a dream book), Kazuo Ishiguro.

The one thing I take from this book is calling people at work, 'Cat'.

I have just finished Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors, which I found most enjoyable. Now I am going to read The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead by Max Brooks. I suspect this book will change my life! I live in fear of zombie attacks.

This translation gives Pushkin a voice quite reminiscent of Byron in Don Juan in terms of wit and wordplay, but the tone is less manic and the satire gentler and more affectionate. I quite like it.

Now I am reading Jonathan Lethem's Gun, With Occasional Music, which is very good in a Chandler/Dick crossover stylee.

I bought a Woody Guthrie CD yesterday. Best song title? "See that my skillet is kept good and greasy"

Now Reading Richard Brautigan - An Unfortunate Woman. His last book and full of weariness.

I am reading a relatively dumb book about wine. Herodotus keeps a slow pace; the Persians are so close!

Now reading one of Philip K. Dick's earliest novels: "The World Jones Made", which is fun pulp SF/fantasy. Definitely not as strange as the material from his last ten years, which is all I've really been familiar with up to now.

Oh, and to whomever recommended Carver's "Cathedral" to me: thanks. I read it two nights ago, and it was inspiring.

Aimless, let me know how you like this when you've finished. I'd like to read it.

I'm reading 'Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin' by Marion Meade, though I'm not sure why, since it's not really a subject I haven't read about a million times before. Well written, though.

Last night I started in on Alice Munro for the first time. 'Runaway'. Two stories down, this isn't really doing it for me, either.

M. White - I will let you know about Onegin. So far so good.

Oh man, has there been a TS Johnson vs. James thread on ILM? There should be.

Not bad. There were lots of interesting facts about the fair, though at times the specifics of the bureaucratic infighting among the fair's planners got a bit tedious. And the H. H. Holmes serial killer story was fascinating, if a bit sensationalistic. I admire any book which makes an honest attempt to recreate the fabric of daily life in a bygone age - in this case the late 19th century.

I'm rereading Life a users manual, and Queneau's Exercises in Style. And agog waiting for a couple of Marry Hathews novels to arrive

So now I'm back and making slow progress with "The Towpath". This would not usually be worthy of comment, but I'm enjoying it very much and I'll normally be impatient with the slow.

Matt! Which Mathewses? I have yet to read the correct Mathews book for me, though I'm sure it's out there, though perhaps not Out There.

The Mathewses where, not so much: The Sinking Of The Or[darek?] Stadium, despite its obvious appeal, Selected Declarations Of [whatever it was].

The Mathewses which I really should get around to reading: Singular Pleasures, that story that's written like a cook book recipe that my friend keeps raving about.

I am reading Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld. It is one of those "am I missing something?" books, in a good way. For some reasonm it makes me think of the Montreaux Jazz Festival, which in turn makes me think of Smoke On The Water.

I love Laytown. These days it's dark when I take the dogs walking in the morning and I only know where the horizon is because I can see the lights of the fishing boats out there. It's very romantic. Also I saw a guy scrape a guy with a knife in the city centre today and they were screaming at each other and there was blood everywhere, and that kind of thing doesn't really happen in Laytown.

To get back to books, I just love The Time Traveller's Wife so far. It's one of those books I want to sneak home early from work to read.

Maybe it's just me.

I finished Badenheim 1939. I would like to compare and contrast it with Joe Orton's Butlins thing, but I can't remember what it's called. Any road, it's a good book, although I'm sure Hebrew readers get more from it than us honkies.

I started Beryl Bainbridge's Young Adolf, but I don't think I can be bothered with it at the moment. Perhaps I will go back to Clare Short's thrilling memoir, before getting stuck into The Hearing Trumpet, which I hope is the novelistic equivalent of George Fell Into His French Horn.

Jerry the Nipper gave it (to) me!

sterl what else of his have you read? i enjoyed and admired 'pallbearers' but found it kind of hard to get comfortable with his style, i mean in the sense of being able to react readily to what i recognized as much funnier/biting/moving writing than my reactions made it out to be. it was almost as if i hadn't found the right way to read individual sentences and also to go from sentence to sentence: not the right speed somehow (yever read adorno's essay on how to read hegel? kinda like that: 'hegel demands to be read slowly, and quickly, at the same time). 'mumbo jumbo' and 'radio' are still on the shelf lying in wait.

I see what you mean about the pace thing though. Terrible Twos has this fantastic opening montage and then falls into a v. funny imitation "airplane thriller" mode rapidly. I found myself having to flip back to remind myself who characters were b/c they get an intro scene where everything important about them is sorta casually established, then they just start moving in full speed. I figured the best way was to keep going fast with it, b/c the gags while great are never v. subtle and eventually get full play even if there's "subtle" foreshadowing before. Reed's not really a character novelist so much as a satirist, so I think powering thru his books is the most rewarding way.

I bought one of his poems in a little limited edition pamphlet from Red Snapper on Saturday. It's cuter than a pretty girl in a tight top.

OK. I finally finished it. It took so long because of complications in my life, not because it was too boring or difficult. Actually, it is a fairly swift read for a versified novelette.

With a verse translation it is very hard to know how much of your impression is due to the original and how much to the filter it has been run through. I thought the first half was wittier and more sparkling, the next quarter section was less brilliant, and the final quarter recovered its footing - though not so much in terms of wit or sparkle, but mainly in terms of characterization and added depth.

I'd recommend it. It comes across very well in the Charles Johnston translation.

That is my interesting fact for the day.

About a quarter of the way through Bob Dylan's Chronicles, I decided I didn't care about his life or Dave Van Ronk's coat and gave up. I liked the bits that serve as a practical manual for artistic endeavour, but you could just put those in a pamphlet and have done.

So now I am reading At Swim-Two-Birds again. Not from the begining though!

Some great writing on Cantona by Jim White and on Tino Asprilla by some bloke. A reread from 1997.

After nearly three weeks of two-word October I've FINALLY finished "The Towpath" by Jesus Moncada. I'm sorry it's swallowed so much of the month but I'm delighted I took my time over it because its a marvellous thing. It reminds me a bit of "Life A Users Manual", and that can hardly be a bad thing, but it's much less structured and formal than LAUM, its stories are told in fragmented memories. Where the order of the House in Rue Simon-Crubellier sits at the centre of LAUM, at the centre of TT there's the river Ebro.

I had Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain blaring from the speakers and the Real Madrid game on mute on the telly. It's goes without saying that a bottle of wine was slowly emptying.

Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night.

I feel that PJM, the pied piper of ILB, is following me on this one.

I disagree with the people who don't like Nothing, and agree with those who do. I dare say I am repeating myself, again.

Jaq, I feel it is a one-sided match, and thus not, come to think of it, a game of two halves.

I did not get far with Shandy but want to see Rob Brydon's cinematic contribution.

I have finished In Anger! It's extensively informative, a copper mine of raw material.

Rob Brydon is very funny in that film.

What is The Towpath called in foreign, Tim?

Had I not given it away, I would give Nothing another whirl.

The book is set in Catalonia and there are a few references to people speaking halting Castillian, so maybe it's Catalan? I imagine that the answer is obvious to you PJM with your language skeez and therefore this paragraph is just so many useless words.

I should warn you that it's one of those big swirling histories of a town through the generations, so if you hate those it's probably best to avoid it. OK?

Oh look here is a linky: http://www.escriptors.com/autors/moncadaj/index.php

I started to read Bill Bryson's History of Nearly Everything or whatever it's called, last night. I got to the bit about Schiehallion and measuring the mass of the Earth with plumb lines and stuff, and then a programme all about it came on the radio. SPOOKY.

Swim-Birds is very musical, I think. It does rather remind me of Joyce though. Why this should be bad, I don't know. I see Brian Glover in the role of the uncle.

Foxy, Rob Bonnet has left The Rob Bonnet Show :-(

Hrm, maybe that's why I often find books like At Swim easier to read than any number of pulpy "easy reads". I feel like all the words I read actually give me something back, and so get more involved.

I'm currently reading Italo Calvino's "Why read the classics"? So far it's made me want to read Xenophon.

Time is a blind rider who no one can unsaddle, you know.

It is very good and very short.