Seasons always change but some threads still remains - so what are you reading autunm 2010?

Flanders Road - Claude Simon

re-reading the Lipsky/DFW book

Still hopping between Among The Believers and The Last Samurai.

Still trying to finish Liver - Will Self.
Next will be The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain de Botton.

Jeezo Andy - I speak from a position of ignorance, but by names & titles alone I can hardly imagine a less appealing pair of books.

Flanders Road - Claude Simon

― Zeno, Monday, September 20, 2010 4:34 PM (Yesterday)

Ooh, let me know how this is. I read The Trolley last year and really enjoyed the Proustian level of detail and flowing, lyrical sentences. I have The Acacia and Triptych on my shelf waiting to be read.

I'm still reading the Tolstoy novellas, finished Family Happiness and Ivan Ilych, now into The Kreutzer Sonata.

"enjoyed the Proustian level of detail and flowing, lyrical sentences"

you will enjoy it, cause it's more or less an otm descruption of Flanders Road.
i'd say he took Proust technique and tried to make it a bit different, with hyper realism details, sentences within sentences, and other variations that are more post modern than modern.

it's a slow read which goes around in circles, but it's great.

the last samurai & the privileges

James Kennaway: Tunes of Glory

Not seeing any leaves on the line you know :-) Apparently its going to be 25 degrees today.

Reading bits of Last Samurai and I'll get onto A Minor Apocalypse by Tadeusz Konwicki.

has anyone else read the privileges? kinda interested in talking abt it...

I don't even know what it is. Give it a thread and see what turns up, I say. xyzzzz__'s musings on the prospective ILF have made me realise that we could handle many more satellite threads on here.

In rural Ireland. Reading a lot, writing a bit.

God's Englishman and Liberty against the Law by Christopher Hill
Donne's Sermons, ancient multi-vol edition
Echo Round His Bones - Tom Disch
Gardiner's History of the Commonwealth/Protectorate
Walton's Lives
Thom Gunn's poems (not getting into these)

Think I'll read some Chandler or Dick tonight, head's a bit a full of Civil War stuff.

Read about half of 2666. 's ok. Don't think I'll bother myself finishing it.

Just finished "The End of The Story" by Lydia Davis, which totally blew me away.

And I just started this:

http://images.indiebound.com/942/035/9780674035942.jpg

Trying to bone up on some literary history without putting myself to sleep. Turns out that this is more of a cultural history, but it still seems worth a shot. Anyone have any suggestions for Lit history books (but not anthologies a la Norton)? They can be British, American, Renaissance, Medieval ... whatever really.

Started Isaac Bashevis Singer's 'The Magician of Lublin' on the bus to work this morning. Really loving it so far.

Pretty curious and excited about Sheila Heti's new book, only coming out in Canada :-<.

Alan Hobsbawn - Age of Capital
James Baldwin - Collected Essays

romeo, i love the german version of that book (which—the american one—is sitting unopened on my desk). the french one is kind of overawed by post-structuralist theory; the german one seems more balanced, focused on particulars.

i also like alastair fowler's history of english literature, particularly because his interest in genre and form leads him to plot his history in terms of significant formal innovations and less-innovative-but-still-workaday forms, which for me is a lot more revealing than lots of literary history.

has anyone else read the privileges? kinda interested in talking abt it...

i started a thread on ilb about it! to which absolutely no one else posted... :/ hell i loved the book so much i mailed a copy to erstwhile ilx poster thomp just so someone else i know could read it but i dont think he received it. it really is fantastic - the best new book ive read all year, i think.

lol i misspelled the book title in the thread title: "because this some end-times shit too, what we're doing" a thread for jonathan dee's THE PRIVLEGES

j., thanks for the tips. I'll definitely check out the Fowler and the German one.

Coincidentally, just as I learn about Dalkey Archive Press from the thread here, I find that the books on top of my reading list are published by them:
Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature
Harry Mathews- The Conversions

Then (finally) Inherent Vice.

Ismael - yeah I got to thinking that on ILB there are three constant 9or as I called it, driver) threads: the reading, the books we've bought thread, and now the contemp lit.

Thinking of other topics one could be 'I love writing' type stuff (or stuff that was discussed round the time of the ILW controversies), but that perhaps is too personal. Said all that, it was nice to read of one of yr maxims for a sentence on the summer thread, say.

More new threads on ILB would be good 99% of the time. Establishing driver threads are more difficult.

Finished the Konwicki - typed up a post on the Dalkey thread.

Read Yuri Olesha's Envy in a morning. This one has certain visions and its actually one of the best unreliable narrator novels.

I think after reading a couple of Victor Serge (yes I know he wrote in French) and Andrei Platonov novels I am finally getting into the Russian novel. That, and reading quite a few Hungarians, Poles and Czechs has been the best reading I've done all year.

i dipped back into the lipsky dfw book before lending it to someone; it's a nice one to do that with.

am split between american caesars & bellow's seize the day right now. i went to buy freedom and all the money i have in the world fell out of my pocket on the way, so i'm still waiting on that one.

I agree more threads'd be nice xp. I've got a couple of minor things I want to start myself.

Book Group is also potentially a good driver, though we should be sparing with it I think - maybe three or four of those a year would be about right, and those of us desperate to share something can all queue up for a shot.

And I Love Writing thread (or threads - an official writing group?) should be another I agree - it belongs here, and even if it's a personal thing for some folk there are always a few hanging around these parts who don't mind baring a bit of soul. We can always give LJ a poke from time to time if it comes to it.

non-xp I picked up Freedom today myself, it being an actual impulse purchase as I didn't realise it was out already and Waterstone's being kind enough to offer me it half-price. I literally veered off to the right as I was walking straight past the shop and the sign in the window caught my eye. I got chatting to the bloke at the counter, who told me an interesting thing which I shall save for said new thread as and when I get round to it.

Yeah I think the book group worked quite well. Doing a four-week schedule was an excellent format, giving it a structure, and agree it should be spared.

Writing group is perhaps a bit too formal, but since I wouldn't be contributing I shouldn't give much of an opinion on it.

Read Yuri Olesha's Envy in a morning.

Great little book! I've actually read it in 2 diffwerent translations, which is unusual for me--I bought the NYRB edition when it came out, and really dug it, and then it was also included in the Penguin 20th Century Russian Reader (an ace collecton, btw), so I read it again.

Finished the Bashevis Singer, and it was really cool. Travelling Jewish stage magician in Poland in the 1870s with a girl in every town, tempted to become a super-burglar, troubled by his religious flaws, unexpected ending; really good fun and clever.

Now starting Jonathan Raban's huge journalism collection, 'Coming Home', which is excellent so far.

I'm still (very slowly) reading The Vivisector, which I unambiguously loved for the first 200 pages or so before a distressing lurch into dissatisfaction with the whole Nance Lightfoot section. White suddenly seems utterly confused about what he's trying to do. Neither Nance nor Duffield's obsession with her remotely convince. The obvious comparison for me was Patrick Hamilton, whose male characters' erotic obsessions with "low women" are so painfully believable. Tellingly, the confusion is matched by a change in style - in the first sections White's style is a model of clarity, particularly for a writer noted for a fresh, poetic style. Suddenly there are sentences so opaque as to seem meaningless - or at least they won't yield up their meaning without much more concentrated thought than I think they deserve.

I'm still (very slowly) reading The Vivisector, which I unambiguously loved for the first 200 pages or so before a distressing lurch into dissatisfaction with the whole Nance Lightfoot section. White suddenly seems utterly confused about what he's trying to do.

Exactly my problem. I put it down at pg. 250.

Also: my problem with Riders in the Chariot. Thus, I've read four hundred pages of White, with increasing dissatisfaction.

I'm also tempted to give up, Alfred, around p 260. I'm past the Nancy bit now and hoping it picks up. But if I don't see signs of that happening soon it will be abandoned. I have a pile of books I'm keen to get to, including the new Franzen.

Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come

and then it was also included in the Penguin 20th Century Russian Reader (an ace collecton, btw), so I read it again.

Was browsing through the a Penguin collecting Russian short stories last week (selected by Robert Chandler)

Been reading through more Russians: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - Memories of the Future. The title piece is a novella, doing much more work than a conventional time travel story (by not separating space from the story, for example) and the narratives just didn't do it for me, except for Quadraturin, like he was on conceptual overdrive and not really shaping one or two things in particular - as Borges or Lem might have done. But I'm just prepared to accept that I don't have the chops on the philosophy he was commenting on.

Finishing Zamayatin's dystopian fable We. Fun and all but it lacks any ambiguity about the Soviet project. That he was proven correct doesn't make it for striking fiction

Next: Rabindranath Tagore - The Home and the World

Recently read:
Denis Donoghue - On Eloquence
Thomas Bernhard - My Awards
Bernhard runs around being mopey and happy and buying stuff, generally thinking the awards he's getting are damn close to insults, but the money's so very nice. I didn't really understand much of the appended speeches, but I enjoyed the book nearly as much as his novels. Kinda regretted reading it over a period of several months though, as it does hang together a bit more than a collection of essays or short stories.

Currently reading:
Jennifer Egan - A Visit From the Goon Squad
Was pretty negative to this, as I don't trust novels about rock musicians etc, but it's really good.

Michael Ende - The Neverending Story
Uh, I'm trying to learn German and figured a children's book where I know most of the story would be OK. Shucks, it's not the grand story it was when I was 10! What the hell, I'll keep going. The rock-eater's name is Pjörnrachzark!

A book of Winston Churchill's WW2 speeches, which was interesting in that 1) it shows how much the quality of political speech has decayed in 60+ years, and 2) the fascinating mix of honesty and propoganda, with very few actual lies

Alan Lightman: Dance for Two -- interesting and sweet essays on science & art

And some old mental 1960s Doom Patrol comics by Arnold Drake

Representative covers: http://www.mattfraction.com/drake/drake10.jpg http://www.mattfraction.com/drake/drake19.jpg

Anyone tempted by Peter Ackroyd's The Death of King Arthur? My favourite of his fiction is still probably Hawksmoor.

Since I found out about it, I'm also kind of tempted to read Herbert Lom's Enter a Spy: The Double Life of Christopher Marlowe. Herbert Lom! Anyone read this?

erstwhile, psht

Herbert Lom!

The Doom Patrol guy is clearly four-villains-in-one: selling himself short there

Love to get hold of My Awards at some point. Good report Oystein!

Tagore - has all of these discussion of nationalism vs pacifism, and Bimala, in between the crossfire is a nicely drawn character not merely serving as a receptacle of ideas from her male companions. otoh, not enough erratic poetic prose I almost always love - thinking it would make a good film at some point (and so it has been made).

After that The Home and the World, it was Jelinek's Woman as Lovers. Classic Austrian tale of womanly humiliation, told in a kind of clinical but correctly distanced feminist computer mode (a lifestyle journalistic pretension comes in toward the end...made me laugh.) The un-sexiness of it all is truly striking - she has got the whole body as orgasm machines thing wired. Written in '75, so its in those battle lines, but still feels of today, even if that village simpleton stuff feels more left behind...

Then saw a 'Film Stars' Penguin short bk on Ingrid Bergman by David Thomson. And its just terrific on Old Hollywood and the Rossellini stuff gets a generous reading. I imagine some other hack not even touching it.

Now: Rene Crevel - Babylon.

- a bunch of Frank O'Connor short stories
- Eric Hobsbawn's Age of Empire

cora diamond, nietzsche's 'schopenhauer as educator', and i don't know what else.

I've never read one of Thomson's little film books. Good to hear they're good.

I'm still reading A Gate At The Stairs and wondering why I maybe agree with other people about it not being as good as it should be. I'm not sure I'm right to think it isn't that great.

The Third Policeman - Flann O'brien

autunm otspur

Eileen Chang: THe Fall of the Pagoda -- novelised autobiographical shenanigans about growing up in financially failing aristocratic family in Shanghai in the 1930s with the Japanese invasion going on in the background. Very good, but I did get all the Third Mistress Concubines and Fourth Masters and Fifth Sisters and Sixth Brothers somewhat muddled

Iain Crichton SMith: Consider the Lilies -- short, pretty effective novel about an old woman being chucked out of her home during the 1800s High;and clearances in Scotland

Alain Robbe-Grillet - Jealousy and In The Labyrinth

Finished Oulipo, stuck in to Coover's Gerald's Party right now. After that it's Motherless Brooklyn for my book group.

Still kind of shocked that I signed up for a book group, both in the "agh god people socializing need pills" sense and in the "oh god that is what Square Old People do" sense. But they seem OK! In any case, my next book after MB will probably be the winner of their poll. The choices, in order of votes so far, are:
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (love it, but I haven't read it in aaages)
Bill Fitzhugh, Pest Control (no idea, maybe fun, who knows?)
Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (got my vote)
Alasdair Gray, Poor Things (my suggestion; amazed that two people actually voted for it)
Philip Pullman, Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel

How's Jealousy going for you, corey? I had really mixed feelings about it when I read it.

hermann melville-the happy failure and other stories
frank o'hara-selected works

why have I never read any of Blanchot's fiction before? I sorta knew it would be good but... not this good! "Thomas the Obscure" kinda blowing my mind right now, + it's really funny (oh man the cat! and the weird narration style that at times almost reminds me of the WIZARD PEOPLE, DEAR READER dude -- "her eyes closed, her spirit was intoxicated; her breathing became slow and deep, her hands came together: this should reasonably have continued forever.")

I tried really hard to get into The Last Samurai but my heart wasn't there. I took it back to the library feeling pretty defeated and haven't been interested in much at all since then. Feeling pretty blah about everything, even the three books I ordered with my birthday gift card.

I picked up Freedom from the library last night so maybe that will get my enthusiasm going again.

aw, don't let it get you down -- book defeats suck, but I think in the long run it's healthier to just give up sometimes than to force yourself to slog through something when you can tell you're just. not. into it.

The Niebelungenlied finally swerved away from its clothing fetish, so that the final part of the poem becomes wholly devoted to bloody slaughter. Lots of hacking with broadswords, wholesale numbers of corpses, and improbable feats of bloodshed. Did I mention the plentiful gore, spurting arteries and slaking of thirst by sucking on fresh blood? No? It's got that, too.

Only book in hand as of today is a poetry book, My Vocabulary Did This to Me, a new collected works volume of Jack Spicer's poems.

just a few pages left in 'freedom'. anyone read 'let the great world spin' by collum mccain? a friend suggested it for my next read.

yeah, it's ok -the first part is the best - getting a little obvious and banal afterwards narrative wise.

enjoyable but also skippable.

I'm also reading 'Freedom' and have 'Let the Great World Spin' on hold at the library.

Freedom (I am on p. 153) is good, but also not. I read a really stupid, peevish review of it from the Atlantic via The Elegant Variation blog and now I want to like it even more. I am a Franzen fan, and the book is really drawing me in, but man it also has giant flaws. Interested to see where it is going.

oh yeah I saw that Atlantic review (haven't read the book yet, or any Franzen) -- it was p. bad, but at the same time kind of funny to see a big-deal American LITERARY writer get called out for writing about humble messed-up people

Yeah, that was the part I didn't get. His whole problem seemed to be that the characters and their story were unworthy of Literature, and they use contemporary language which is apparently beneath him. I mean he did make some other points that I agree with sorta, but isn't that basically peering through your monocle and gasping "Why, this novel is about COMMONERS!"

Most of the examples of pedestrian writing really are pedestrian though.

I do agree that Franzen isn't a great stylist. But it scans, doesn't it? His prose, I mean. It doesn't ring false to have a character say "that sucked".

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3062/2830595147_aca24dc9ae.jpg
2937 by mjkghk, on Flickr

Rather excellent memoirs of WW2 in Middle East by a very good poet, reconstructed from his notebooks after he was killed in 1944. His own painting on the cover, too.

trying to read everything in translation by claudio magris...finished ~microcosms~, a series of essays about peripheral places in northern italy, now ~danube~, which is even more discursive and remote, an italianate epigone of middle european high modernism....but impressively diverse in its allusions anyway

Sample bizarre chapter in 'Alamein to Zem Zem'--Douglas is involved in a desert tank battle, in charge of a tank still full of the blood of its shot-to-bits previous crew. His uniform trouser buttons have fallen off, so his pants keep falling down while he's trying to command the tank. They get bogged down in the middle of battle, and looking out of the turret he spots an abandoned copy of 'Esquire' lying in the desert sand, so he creeps out and grabs it for himself and his crew to read while they wait for the fighting to calm down.

Franzen was a pretty fine stylist in The Corrections.

Reading A Gate at the Stairs till what turned out to be 1:30 last night. 90pp to go. It gets odder and odder!

How's Jealousy going for you, corey? I had really mixed feelings about it when I read it.

― Mormons come out of the sky and they stand there (Abbbottt), Monday, October 4, 2010 11:20 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm enjoying it — well, maybe "enjoy" isn't the right word, but the repetitions and the microscopic detail are a challenge to visualize. I think that it might help if you read rather quickly, so you can have the sentences represent images for you rather than focusing on the words — like a screenplay rather than a poem.

yeah, it's ok -the first part is the best - getting a little obvious and banal afterwards narrative wise.

enjoyable but also skippable.

― Zeno, Tuesday, October 5, 2010 9:35 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hmmm, anyone have suggestions for something wholly unskippable?

if you like Franzen - did you read Updike's Rabbit serious?

dostoyevsky again

david mcduff's karamazov is really readable and good so far - has more style than the version of c&p that i read, which i am confused by because that may also have been him? i don't know if the benefit is in the translation, or if the narrator d. employs helped his style, or helped his style become translatable.

"And he even burst into whimpering. He was sentimental. He was in a bad mood and sentimental."

haven't read updike but i am skeptical

Finished Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy" and found it enthralling — The repeated "blocks" of imagery, the variations upon them and the negations of previous assertions seemed very musical to me, the way a composer plays with form and brings back certain motifs playing upon the memory of the listener — and the conflation of object, person, reality, unreality is mind-expanding (in a non-hippie way).

Henry James' The Europeans – a minor novel I've read a couple of times in the last fifteen years, despite its hastily assembled ending.

^^ A good description of what I like about AR-G

Jose Donoso - The Obscure Bird of Night *reads wiki page* Oh ok so that's what this is all about.

Gotta say I sorta figured a few of themes - the destruction/remodelling/reconstruction of a personality is hard to escape, and I know my Pessoa - but still...I had actually constructed a whole plastic surgery as a modern version of reincarnation *thing*

I guess if you forget there is a plot, or any strong characterisation you'll be ok. Maddening but interesting enough to finish and certainly revisit at some point.

Comte de Lautreamont - Maldoror. Goddam @ the angsty intro to this. Ok ok so everyone got Lautreamont 'wrong'.

Don Delillo - Point Omega. This should have been an essay on the Psycho, don't know if there are enough pages to hand anything else onto it?

'to hang', I mean...

u must be readin' the same edition of Lautreamont I did (w/ hilariously aggrieved/self-righteous intro)

Javier Marias heart so white.

trying to finish the corrections (franzen) - i think i like it but occasionally he pulls shit that just makes me want to give it away ("her pussy like a seasoned baseball glove" - wtf?) and then next on my list is The Ragged Trousered Philantropists.

Can anyone recommend a decent easy read on queer theory?

Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (got my vote)

this is fucking awesome fyi and well done for voting for it

The Netherlands - Sacheverell Sitwell, also some Blanchot essays very very very slowly with a French-English dictionary.

"her pussy like a seasoned baseball glove"

there's a much-quoted thing in the new one: "“Connie had a wry, compact intelligence, a firm little clitoris of discernment and sensitivity..."

ew

Can anyone recommend a decent easy read on queer theory?

Start with Eve Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet

ty

"u must be readin' the same edition of Lautreamont I did (w/ hilariously aggrieved/self-righteous intro)"

Its by Alexis Lykiard. Keeps going in some of the footnotes to the odd wording: 'past translator (x) translated (y) as (z)...he got it wrong'. Its an odd mania, usually translators of multiple authors are much saner.

Thankfully Lautreamont is classic.

(Liking all the Noveau Roman autumn season is bringing in some of you, btw, filled out ILL cards for a couple of Blanchot novels so we'll see)

I've got that Lauremont, but haven't read it yet. Must dig it out!

Read Henri Barbusse: Inferno -- existentialist voyeurism shenanigans. Not bad, but not a patch on 'Under Fire'

Those Franzen quotes are enough to put me off Franzen in advance.

Can anyone recommend a decent easy read on queer theory?

You object to bad prose, and then turn to theory?

I don't really object to bad prose. Hell I like to write for myself, so I can't.

i have bought a spanish version of '2666' to look at (i do not read spanish at all) next to my english one. i am appalled to discover that the little bullets between sections in the translation aren't there in the spanish (at least, not in the vintage spanish version—don't know about the anagramma or whatever one). i think it would change how i feel about the narrative flow if i could read it the way the spanish one looks, but it's kind of hard to tell, since it's in spanish and all.

plus, the print is bigger.

i finished nabokov's invitation to a beheading this morning and yesterday i finished roots of steel by deborah rudicille, a book about bethlehem steel in sparrows point, md

what did you think of Invitation? it's been a while since I read it, but I remember the experience being personally demanding/troubling*, in ways that other 'novels of the absurd' (Kafka or Camus or Beckett or whatever) have not been, at least for me.

*: i.e., I frequently had to stop reading because of panic attacks brought on by the helplessness of the protagonist's situation

lol i wasn't gonna bring it up myself but part of it literally made me cry

anyone read cesar aira? i bought ghosts yesterday on impulse.

Haha did you buy that from Myopic? I *almost* bought that on Friday without knowing anything about the author.

I have heard of that dude and am intrigued by him, but have yet to read anything; I look forward 2 yr reax

nope, just ordered it online after reading like 1/2 a review. will report back.

Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (got my vote)

this is fucking awesome fyi and well done for voting for it

It's been on my Amazon wishlist since 2000, when I was going through a little Mishima phase and somehow managed to avoid his best-regarded novel. Between that and seeing a photo of Mishima-as-Sebastian in one of Brion Gysin's notebooks at the New Museum it just seemed like it was time to get around to it. Synchronicity, etc

I finished Freedom and liked it. It felt very FRANZENy; plot-points quite closely parallel to The Corrections if I remember correctly (which I may not). There were aspects that really did not work for me (but which I've seen praised in several reviews): the 'autobiography' narrative, his punch-pulling on certain crucial scenes, and some of the weirdly self-conscious turns of phrase. But there were some equally awesome turns of phrase, and the parts about the environment/birds were really good, and the characters were super-vivid. That's Franzen's gift, I think. His writing isn't always beautiful but the people seem real.

eh I don't know, maybe I'm just too well-adjusted but I got tired of how every single character is fucked up and unlikeable. I like his writing but I wish he would tell more of an interesting story instead of just talking about everyone ruining their lives and not being able to communicate

Or like I guess Walter's daughter is relatively un-fucked-up but she's barely a presence in the novel, I wouldn't have minded hearing the point of view of a character who wasn't emotionally retarded for a couple hundred pages.

Basically I just don't really care about these "family dramas" where everyone is miserable and nothing much really happens.

haha reading Post Captain, which i bought second hand, and came across a page and someone had written in biro.. "JA is gay"

Franzen is often a terrible writer. The guy just can't think.

The night after reading a review (LRB) which made me never ever want to read any Franzen, I had a dream where I was reading Freedom. I'll keep this short because dreams are usually boring unless you are having them. It started in a gym with some American footballers being trained by their coach, who at some point picked up a weird orange honeycomb fragment of something and went 'Hey, that's a bit weird' and threw it away. It turned out (quite a lot of turning out - this was the first couple of looong chapters) to be an alien plague virus which decimates the world population. Next chapter - cut to dinner at the Franzen house, he's sitting there with his glasses on. He pops out for a moment, when he comes back his family has disappeared (destroyed by the virus I think, although, to make it more striking their bodies had also disappeared). He sat down and carried on eating, thinking baout things, possibly wearily kneading the bridge of his nose. Then it got into some boring relationship stuff as previously estranged people came together because there was no one else around.

That was pretty much it. But from time to time, I keep thinking, maybe I should read it, because the fact of its existence has got stuck in a corner of my brain somewhere, and I feel only reading it would erase the itch. Although itching was the first sign of the alien plague virus too.

that lrb review is pretty good; anyone read dude's book?

itching was the first sign of the alien plague virus

You have been warned. Take heed.

henderson the rain king - bellow

Charles Yu - How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe -- ((PK Dick)^2 + (Douglas Hofstatder)^2)+(1/Chabon)*Charlie Kaufmann -- pretty good, but with a couple of elements which bugged me

Danielle Evans - Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self -- mostly very good short stories

PG Wodehouse - Meet Mr Mulliner -- Wodehousey, fun

Can anyone recommend a decent easy read on queer theory?

in my Women's/Gender Studies classes circa 2005, Genderqueer was our bible. Firsthand accounts > deep theory (no tallyho Foucault), most of it now feels sorta whiny to me ("they wouldn't let me have a doll/play football") but it's a quick introduction to the stuff.

Adrienne Rich is a natural next step after that, some of her poetry is incredible.

Beauvoir's Second Sex, and Judith Butler-- anything. Gender Trouble, Excitable Speech, Bodies that Matter. All of these are just fine.

I read a good part of Franzen's Corrections a few months ago, I'd like to finish it soon? but put myself on a fiction ban for the next few months so I can think more clearly/selfishly (side note: this hasn't really worked because I've been watching a lot of Curb Your Enthusiasm instead).

I'm reading Generation Ectasy! and am very excited by it! Also, Reason by Robert Reich (it puts me to sleep every time I pick it up, but it's good, a cheerleader of a book). And a little pocket book on Paul Klee.

I tried reading Imagined Communities but found it ...underwhelming, I guess. The language is really thick and sticky and it took me forever to translate the actual points he was getting at, which were pretty base. He's just a terrible writer. The topics *are* really interesting, though, esp. now that we live within the age of the internets.

i already ordered the book soto (iirc?) recommended but ty, if that makes me want to read more i will go with yr choices :)

Believe in People: a collection of Karel Capek's journalism and letters. Just wonderful. One of those dead writers, like RL Stevenson, I wish I could meet.

Read a review of the Capek (and a review of a collection of Vasily Grossman's journalism). Gotta read War with the Newts before the year is out.

Finished Stanislaw Lem - The Chain of Chance is an SF that revels in the inconsistencies of plotting in hardboiled noir (w/ philosophical discussion instead of the hardboiled dialogue) and A Perfect Vacuum is a collection of reviews of fictional books, but its more like all the books he wants to write but you might feel he discarded it. Ideas that might have seemed half-arsed to him, which is scary for the rest of us. Either they are fictions or they seem like newly invented sciences, with complex philosophical systems built in place to fall apart at the last second.

Next: Andrey Platonov - Happy Moscow.

Hey corey fwiw after I read Jealousy I found it interesting/gross to actually see pics of the centipede in question.

If you liked A Perfect Vacuum, check out Imaginary Magnitude as well; it's more of the same.

But, you know, in a good way. That sounded more dismissive than it should have.

xxp urgh yes I see those in the bathtub for some reason. I wash them down the drain with scalding hot water.

picked up 'night soldiers' by alan furst again after taking a break to work on some more 'black company' by glen cook. i'm not sure why i ever took a break, actually, it's really a great novel.

man i read 'the chain of chance' last year and had forgotten it, almost entirely

it was in an omnibus with 'solaris' and 'a perfect vacuum'; never finished the latter, the former stuck with me way more on this rereading than it did before, but it seemed almost like the horror of it was soft-pedalled

right now i am reading the brothers karamazov, it seems to leave less time for thinking about/doing other things than most things i could be reading do

Love love love Lem, but haven't read A Perfect Vaccuum. Must seek out!
And 'War with the Newts' is a wonderful book. One of my favourites.

The T.S. Spivet book - I thought I'd had enough of these contemporary versions of Robert Louis Stevenson or whoever but I guess I was wrong because I'm enjoying this one so far. It's kind of ludicrous but I think that might be the point.

Foe by J.M Coetzee - I thought this was kind of boring but the hilarious pillow talk at the end saved it. So good! Telling the lonely widow/castaway about the legend of the Kraken, and ruminating on how things would be if god's creatures had no need for sleep. What a smooth operator.

I adored The Chain of Chance - he has such total control over every sentence in that thing. I haven't read Solaris yet. I want to, but I always end up put off by the George Clooney cover on every copy in every bookstore.

I'm reading Rilke's book on Rodin, which is short but dense and really gorgeous.

you should read Solaris, it's very very different from the movie.

I love Lem too, though have only read maybe 5-6 of his books.

Just finishing John McGahern's excellent The Dark, probably gonna do John Christopher's The Death of Grass next.

it was in an omnibus with 'solaris' and 'a perfect vacuum'

Yeah that's what I have, but I've read Solaris before (the George Clooney cover deal), just didn't re-read this week but I like the package, a keeper if I'm 2nd hand copy had started falling apart as soon as I opened it.

Chain of Chance is remarkable. I don't think (and correct me if I'm wrong) I have come across such a good synthesis of noir elements with SF, and then those probability discussions that come in as well. Lem really performing the spinning plates trick here.

Say it once and I'll say it again: Platonov on a sentence level is just something else (love going back a few pages and re-reading a passage or two). Maybe one of the few writers of fiction that you can tell puts in very wide range of his/her own reading into the fiction (w/the trade off that there isn't much plot, but I don't mind that at all)

Looking forward to reading both Platonov and Chain of Chance, thx xyzzzz__. Never takes much to turn me to genre, and a slight case of the sniffles had me huddled comfortably up in an armchair with a glass of strong beer, reading Cause for Alarm by Eric Ambler. Always good. Some clear characteristics - the hero is never competent (apart from in the amusing Dirty Story) and that clearly gives his novels some of their flavour, the everyman imperceptibly and ineluctably caught up in international intrigue, but it does also rather rob them of any element of agency. I've seen The Dark Frontier described as a farcical approach to the spy novel, but most of his novels have that element (partly because of the expert compression). Anyway The Dark Frontier is excellent imo, particularly with its casual gesturing towards consciousness, character, memory and death (the sort of thing genre fiction does v well).

Also went back to Traffics and Discoveries by Kipling, a collection of his later stories, which I can't have read completely before. Re-read They, still moving, esp in light of Kipling's loss. Read for the first time Mrs Bathurst. Late Kipling is so strange, and this is no different, person obsessing over the repetition of a tiny section of film. All the elements of late (and some of early) Kipling are there - madness/obsession, retrieving people from the beyond via the latest technology, death. (re-read a parallel story, a great one, The Disturber of the Traffic, which seems kin to Mrs Bathurst).

Was interested to read because i thought i detected notes of Kipling in C (particularly They), but hadn't seen it mentioned anywhere else. I'd completely forgotten about the story Wireless in this collection, which goes into great technical detail about coherers and copper wires, and while someone sends a signal to Poole, the pharmacist in whose building the story takes place, channels the spirit (maybe) of the dead Keats. Good story, full of the rich but carefully ordered assimilation of material detail that Kipling is so good at.

Shit, Wireless one of my favourite Kipling stories, dunno why it didn't occur to me while reading C.

Been reading George Herbert. I'd gone off him, which was stupid of me.

Also, Making Meaning, a collection of Don McKenzie (world's greatest bibliographer, deceased) essays. It is fantastic, but I am a sucker for bibliography (fascinated by aspie academics desperately trying to recreate what exactly happened in a particular press room on a particular day in 1612 by glaring at two different versions of the same page etc). Very readable: he's engaging on difficult topics. Also, I love how much he loves Congreve, because Congreve deserves it.

Also, Clifford Geertz turned up in my head for some reason; hadn't thought about him for ages, since I was a post-grad I guess. Got Interpretation of Cultures off the shelf, and I've been enjoying that: I like the feeling that he's thinking about how the world works, and not just the academic debate.

Timothy Findley: The Telling of Lies -- was not expecting this to be a murder-mystery conspiracy thriller, but it was, and rather a good one

Just finished The God of Small Things, after reading the Franzen. May post some thoughts on both if I can find the time.

The God of Small Things made me cry, something I'm rather ashamed of. This was ~7 years ago though, and I was in a weird place emotionally. In my memory it now seems that it was actually rather bad - wld be interested in your thoughts.

I found TGOST a strange mixture of good and bad. I very much enjoyed the first 200 pages or so, obvious faults notwithstanding, but for the last 100 pages or so I was willing the end to come.

Stylistically it's sometimes quite brilliant, fresh, observant - there are lots and lots of quite wonderful sentences: at other times it's overwritten, clumsy, portentous or self-indulgent. Very moving in places but spilling over into sentimentality elsewhere. Roy is sensitive to beauty and fine feeling but at bottom she's a misanthrope and her novel is stuffed with ogres. Before the end I started to find the cumulation of horrors tiresome: child abuse; incest; a husband who repeatedly beats his wife and daughter, permanently damaging his wife's skull; a mother who lost her husband in a car crash and her daughter shortly after by drowning; an innocent man matter-of-factly kicked to death by the police; the cynical connivance of politicians and police chiefs in murder for petty career advantage; an alcoholic husband who tries to forcefully prostitute his respectable middle class wife so he can hold on to his job; a child forced to lie to deny justice to a murdered man he loved, rendered permanently mute by the experience; a close family forced apart and the mother dying in disease and poverty; a hypocritical aunt who manages to stand out as the most odious monster in book full of monsters. All of this happening in, or heavily impinging on, the life of one fairly small middle-class family.

There were improbabilities too, many to do with sex - in caste and class conscious India, would a lowly refreshment seller in a cinema really risk forcing a young boy from a "posh" family to masturbate him when the boy's family were nearby and could have come looking for him at any minute? Even accepting that Ammu's life was horribly suffocating and that she had a wilful streak in her character, is it believable that she'd have risked an affair with an Untouchable knowing discovery was inevitable and the probable consequences for herself and her children disastrous? Is the very sketchily drawn incestuous coupling of Rahel and Estha plausible? Maybe these incidents could have been made to arise believably from character and situation, but Roy doesn't put in the work and I was left with a sense of sensationalism or a misanthropic anger so uncontrolled as to lose much of its force.

so what you're saying is that her shit is TOO REAL for you.

weird, i always assumed it was full of beautiful whatsits from the people who seemed so into it.

Just finishing John McGahern's excellent The Dark

check out Amongst Women; excellent novel.

Slow day, boring job, stimulants + Wikipedia = big ol' pile of modernists waiting for me at the local library, starting with Hamsun, moving to Beckett and Baby's First Joyce The Dubliners from there. Who knows how much I'll actually get read before I have a sudden, pressing need to catch up on the last year's worth of comics or get obsessed with some little part of film history or whatever.

Celine - Guignol's Band. Its Celine but in London!
Thomas Bernhard - Extinction.

^This pair have come up with such an individual style, all of their own. The writing, the themes, the type of humour - all of that does not change all that much from book to book (minor variations that are interesting.) Regurgitated over and over so that by the end you are never in doubt that its no shtick or gimmick and leave you demanding another 1000 pages except they know when to stop.

Blanchot - The Madness of the Day. A twenty page 'story'. This is funny, wonder if Beckett read him back in the 40s. xp

Wodehouse - The Mating Season

^^^ lol

Gamaliel - Do report back when you get round to Platonov.

Interested in Arundhati Roy, sorta got onto my radar for the activism. From the way Frankie describes its perhaps surprising TGOST won the booker?

Haha did you buy that from Myopic? I *almost* bought that on Friday without knowing anything about the author.

― groovy-otter.gif (corey), Monday, October 11, 2010 10:53 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Cesar Aira, Ghosts. So far it's interesting (slice of life in an under-construction condo building, where sticking a bottle of wine into a naked man-ghost turns it from cheapo to a nice cab sauv), but the translation seems really clunky to me. Wish I had it handy to quote some lines, but it makes me appreciate most of the other lit-in-translation stuff I've read.

Jenny Wren: Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl -- 1890s book of comic essays, rather good

Chateubriand: Atala -- strange pro Native-American Christian apologist novella; very interesting, but still not sure whether I _liked_ it

plus dipping into the most recent Gardner Dozois best SF short stories of the year anthology--great stuff by Bruce Sterling, Peter Watts, Robert Charles Wilson

It's been a while since I read TGOST. I recall it as a soap opera, somewhat redeemed by its being set in India, so that my general unfamiliarity with the locale and details of daily life allowed a certain fascination with that side of the book to override the melodramatic plot. Roy also had a knack of understatement and matter-of-factness in describing her ogres, as playing against the gothic novel aspects of her story. Not especially badly written, but not particularly mature either.

Hmm, based on frankiemachine's description it would seem I've forgotten a lot of the plot of TGOST! DOn't remember half of that stuff. I do remember finding some of her descriptive passages a bit too much like something *I* would write (i.e. kind of hacky and obvious) but at other times there were some pretty powerful scenes that were built up to really nicely. And of course I'm ignorant enough about India to suspend all disbelief and accept every plot point as totally plausible.

Couldn't sleep last night; reread Story of the Eye. Kind of wishing I had the edition with Sontag and Barthes' appreciations for some additional context, but from the summaries on Wikipedia it does seem like it's nothing too earthshakingly revelatory.

Mela Hartwig: Am I a Redundant Human Being?

Blanchot - The Madness of the Day. A twenty page 'story'. This is funny, wonder if Beckett read him back in the 40s. xp

― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, October 19, 2010 8:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

reading Under Milk Wood. Every time I get scared its going to get too tim burtony precocious, it doesn't.
all you lem fans may want to check out memoirs found in a bathtub. It's my fav of his, really strange book, incredibly paranoid. Ignore the first couple pages of it tho. That 'intro' part he has. Just, like, don't even read those pgs, they're pretty bad.

Have just bought Lem's 'Perfect Vacuum', so looking forward to that, too

Nearly being at the end of The Ragged Trousered Philantropists, I have really started to tear into Evan Thomas's Robert Kennedy bio. I like this dude.

Slavoj Zizek - "First as Tragedy, then as Farce"
Giorgio Agamben - "Homo Sacer"
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey StClair - "Imperial Crusades"
Douglas Adams - "Hitchiker's Guide"/"Restaurant at the End of the Universe"

Pondering xyzzz's question of whether it's surprising TGOST won the Booker - it perhaps is, given that the judges traditional bias in favour of control and polish. Carmen Callil, who was chairman of the judges the year before, described TGOST as "execrable" on a TV show covering the Booker in the year it won - I think we can take it it wouldn't have won if it had been published a year earlier. Despite my reservations about it I think it's a long way from being the weakest novel to win. I pretty much agree with Aimless and franny's remarks too, although I'm not sure it's ever "understated".

There's some seriously O_o writing in The Chelsea Murders

He began making it on foot, threading his way through the slanted umbrellas, hands over his head. He couldn't feel the rain but he knew it was there. He didn't want a headful of rain

'Ng,' he thought (this happens throughout).

I stopped at a pub while trudging over the peaks the other day, whisky and beer, and pretty much the only book they had was Vols I and II of The Earthly Paradise by William Morris. It's rather weak, daftly archaic narrative poetry, but its absurd romanticism and narrative detail was just the thing.

Had a George Herbert moment as well, in a tiny estate church, had only a few windows, so that when you went in it was completely dark apart from a couple of slender stained-glass windows and a candle at the alter, there was a moment of hush and sheltered silence that seemed palpably holy as I entered, sounds odd I know but it summed up in a moment what I like about George Herbert so much. Poems as or nearly as clever as Donne's in a way, but aimed at order, rather than wild engines of Donne's thought. There was a huge bible in the church as well, open at the first couple of chapters of Jeremiah.

but my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit

Didn't like him as a student, which was foolish of me.

him=George Herbert

I am reading "The Turn of the Screw", which is the first Henry James I've ever read. I like it, but really, what can you even say?

I guess it makes sense that he was William James's bro, what with all the casual psychologizing. he's good at it tho so he gets a pass (see also: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor), despite my generally distaste for that sort of thing.

David Karp: One -- recently revived book from 1953, set in near-future anti-individual dystopia/utopia, inevitably 1984ish, but rather excellent in its own way

isn't psychologizing kind of the traditional province of novelists?

i am lately reading… john searle, again. i don't totally want to, but oh well.

I guess I mean the particular kind of late-19th/early-20th century psychologizing. maybe I was just reading with particular attention to those parts because I had just been reading Shoshana Feldman's Writing and Madness, and then stopped when I got to the chapter on "Turn of the Screw" so I could go read the story first. not sure I know what "the traditional province of novelists" is.

never read Sarl but Derrida's response to him was A++ imho

haha, this was my exact thought when I read it for the first time a week or two ago! certainly wouldn't be surprised if he had, although I don't really know much about Beckett's reading habits (beyond, uh, Joyce. and Dante.)

Proust, too - enough reading to write a book on him that I can never quite get going whenever I have a stab at it.

Library has just got hold of Death Sentence so I'm quite excited.

Finishing off Gyula Krudy - Life is a Dream. This is GREAT, I think, when I can follow - each story seem to have way more going on, requiring that bit more attention than I am able to give at the mo'.

Death Sentence is my next one to read -- I checked out the Blanchot Reader that Station Hill Press put out, which includes the aforementioned two recits, the second (shorter) version of Thomas the Obscure, "The Instant of My Death", and a few other stories I can't recall, along with a smattering of his critical writing. pretty nice volume, all told; thinking about buying a copy to have around.

Blanchot, as you might know, was definitely into Beckett. "In truth, what can one say of a work? In praising Beckett's How it is, would we dare promise it to posterity? Would we even wish to praise it? Which does not mean that it surpasses, but rather discredits all praise, and that it would be paradoxical to read it with admiration."

I just finished A Gate at the Stairs!

Lorrie Moore

Sad confession:

Since September I have been waking at 5:15 am on weekdays and retiring at 9:30 pm. This has almost eliminated my normal reading time. I am reduced to doing the NYTimes crossword puzzle, since I can't seem to get my mind focussed on reading. I am one sorry-assed pseudo-intellectual these days.

Carry on without me, lads. Play up, play up, play up and play the game.

Aimless, keep it up and come to the xword tournament with me and jaymc next March.

I am a shy maiden (not literally) and the harsh spotlight of a xword tournament would be too much for me to handle, I fear. Thank god I am not agoraphobic. It would have crippled my social life!

Reader's block - I'm happily stagnating, re-reading two of my favorite books: Nabokov's The Gift and Alec: The Years Have Pants.

The new Geoffrey O'Brien and that Tom McCarthy book readily available, but they ain't gettin' read.

Was taking the Krudy in much more slowly and it is something. Great great descriptions of food, was making me hungry. Very geezer like book, if there is any such thing.

Although they shouldn't have included the Sindbad story as its totally out of place.

Death Sentence is my next one to read -- I checked out the Blanchot Reader that Station Hill Press put out, which includes the aforementioned two recits, the second (shorter) version of Thomas the Obscure, "The Instant of My Death", and a few other stories I can't recall, along with a smattering of his critical writing. pretty nice volume, all told; thinking about buying a copy to have around.

Yeah tried placing a hold on the reader through my library. Couldn't get it, but yes, nice package.

Although, having just read Death Sentence I'm not so sure...def a guy to be taken in short bursts. I doubt he could ever write anything much more than 100 pages. He's just so *intense*. An intensity over a void. This one had precisely one laugh, more of my own making (when a kid says 'I see dead people'! Sixth Sense in 1948!) Very intent on excising any meaning and more into concentrating the philosophy he's read into an skeleton of plot (or a description of encounters).

The Moon and the Bonfires - Cesare Pavese

John Williams: Stoner -- holy shit this is good

I heard good things about that one, it's on the list.

Thought that one started great, but the way it turned out bugged me.

Love Moon and the Bonfires, Zeno. Funnily enough I have just started on his The Political Prisoner

Finished a couple more intense novellas:

Hrabal - Too Loud a Solitude
Radiguet - Count d'Orge's Ball

Reading like a sheep shits at the moment - at random and everywhere.

Some Walter de la Mare short stories today - amazing. I like a lot of his poetry, but for some reason didn't even really know that he wrote short stories. Was reading from his first collection - The Riddle. Extremely uncanny, as you might expect, playful too. Poetic not in the sense of rhythm but stylistically expressing an intense awareness and love of the weight of words and things, and of words as things and vice versa. Reminded me almost of Wallace Stevens with the richness of his obscurity. Lispet, Lispett and Vaine is quite remarkable - as the interlocutor and narrator K exclaims to the appropriately named Maunders - 'What on earth are you talking about? I have always supposed that speech was intended to disclose one's meaning. Nymphs!'

There's certainly no disclosure in WdlM. They are more like gilded silken nets to catch the spritish coneys of meaning - any sense of the material is completely evaded by his approach, and it's rather effective for conveying the supernatural. I'm finding Out of the Deep genuinely disturbing, authentically frightening in a sort of slow-burning way, which I always think is extraordinarily hard for a writer to do.

He's really weird, uncanny, strange, innovative in his thrills, and psychologically bizarre, but just when you're starting to think it's perhaps all a little bit fey for prolonged immersion, he'll show a knack for directness, and a sort of wry amusement at the unconventional. Here the main character is having a look round a childhood room -

Quite apart from themselves, [the objects] reminded him of incidents and experiences which at the time could scarcely have been so nauseous as they now seemed in retrospect. He found himself suffocatingly resentful even of what must have been kindly intentions. He remembered how his Aunt Charlotte used to read to him - with her puffy cheeks, plump ringed hands, and the moving orbs of her eyes showing under her spectacles.

He wasn't exactly accusing the past. Even in his first breeches he was never what could be called a nice little boy.

Those 'moving orbs' are great, I think, so alienating, such a slight, neat indicator of the character's mental derangement. But I love the passage because it's completely full of the wrong sentiment, and positively radiates a lack of warmth about the past, and in a writer who is clearly concerned with the spiritual, nay magical, that little bit of grit is exactly what's needed to leaven things somewhat.

There's another great bit to do with Aunt Charlotte's eyes a bit further on -

..as he stood before his Aunt's foot-stool to bid her Good-night, her aggrieved pupils had visibly swum down from beneath their lids out of a nap, to fix themselves and look at him at last as if neither he nor she, either in this or in another world, had ever so much as seen one another before.

Anyway, tip top stuff, Lispet, Lispett and Vaine has immediately gone onto whatever strange and only vaguely coherent congeries that comprises what I will take the pompous liberty of calling my personal canon. Positively Borgesian in conception, and richly poetic in execution.

Picked up some Sax Rohmer, my first. Looking forward to it. (Er, the first one - The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu I think).

Dipping in and out of Gibbon (prompted by ILX), the sparkling sanity and order of his prose (gotta love 18th century prose writers) contrasting nicely with the insane scope and toothsome nuttiness of that which it conveys. Although he sent me to sleep today on the back of a dreadful hangover (hence the WdlM and Fu Manchu)

What else. Oh yeah - Fantômas - yes, it is the Ashbery one, woof. It's... well it's ok. I mean, it doesn't seem to be immediately striking in any sense of devious plotting or remarkable style (as far as I can tell), that said there is a certain je ner say kwong in the basic conception I guess. I'll certainly finish it - the high praise from the mandarins of European modernism is slightly mystifying though. (Tho as any fule kno, all intellectuals like a good genre piece - was it Wittgenstein who loved seeing sentimental films?)

God how I go on - time to get back to the reading.

I finished that Cesar Aira book and liked the last 30 pages a lot. Still, I'd love to know if the translation is really clunky or if it's just the way he writes (especially with regard to all the odd rhetorical questions and generalizations).

Now reading the Lipsky DFW book.

the high praise from the mandarins of European modernism is slightly mystifying though

It's just daft adventure fun.

Sad confession:

Since September I have been waking at 5:15 am on weekdays and retiring at 9:30 pm. This has almost eliminated my normal reading time.

this is pretty close to my normal sleep schedule so do not feel too sad. explains why i read so little now, but sleeping is great.

Thanks, GamalielRatsey, for that lovely, evocative post. And I highly commend your latest screen name, too.

Thanks, Aimless! (I too have had times when I've had to get up preposterously early and go to bed likewise, and while it can have its rewards, it certainly isn't conducive to extended periods of reading).

It's just daft adventure fun.

― buildings with goats on the roof (James Morrison), Monday, October 25, 2010 11:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

(not really sure what I was expecting tho -- like proto-Pynchon set in fin-de-siecle Paris? obviously a bit much to ask)

oh god book club is tomorrow and I have half of Motherless Brooklyn left :(

I was wondering how I would fuck this up, and hey, there it is! I'll be able to finish it, but I will be grumpy and sleep-deprived and no fun to be around. A typical Wednesday.

Assuming this book club thing isn't awkward enough to put me off of reading for life, it's either Lanark or Burroughs' Nova trilogy next.

Burroughs' Nova trilogy may put you off reading for life.

I dunno, I have a pretty high tolerance, and I've read The Soft Machine on its own before. Lanark is seeming like a much better use of time, though.

I have a pretty high tolerance, and I've read The Soft Machine on its own before

Is that the one with the "Subliminal Kid" passage? Or was that in Nova Express? Cuz you could skip the trilogy altogether having just read that (quite neat) section and find yourself far more fulfilled, in my opinion.

My sentiments are with Morrison - go for Lanark.

The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa

So halfway through The Mystery of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer. My word. What a colossal imbecile boor the hero Nayland Smith is. Like Bulldog Drummond he seems like some sort of prototype of the sports science bro, a staggeringly unsympathetic brawny buffoon of the first water. The idea of him reaching a position of any sort of power in the greatest Victorian industrial machine of all, the civil service, that incomparably vast difference engine of empire, is utterly preposterous.

Not only has he managed to spend eight years in the Far East without gaining an ounce of understanding of or insight to its peoples, he's also a first-class cretin both in terms of thought and action - no wonder Fu Manchu is disgusted and embarrassed with his continual meddling, although usually he just turns up on the scene just after several people have died, a master of after-the-fact deduction, and after-the-horse-has-bolted stable door shutting.

The narrator Petrie is a more curious case. I'm normally fairly wary of homosexualised interpretations of those intense Victorian male friendships, but it seems to me the only explanation of his willingness to fall in with this crashing hercules of stupidity. The interest, I think, is essentially pornographic - Petrie's descriptions of Nayland Smith only ever emphasise that he's a clean-cut defender of the White Man, a pin-up boy for the public school muddied oaf. So when I say pornographic, I don't actually mean Petrie is sexually interested in Nayland Smith, but in his representation of public school-state - Petrie has probably been hypnotised by the same educational background (far more sinister than Fu Manchu's hypnotic eyes, surely). This is the only way to explain, surely, the way Petrie is continually able to resist the advances of the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Poor woman, she's continually having to rescue her beloved Petrie and his idiot companion (who she has the good sense to be utterly dismissive of). Time and time again, she is the only thing that stands between them and death, and time and time again, Petrie looks into those lovely imploring eyes, and ends up toddling off with that bloody prat of a head boy.

Fu Manchu's Empire of Death being brought to England? Bring it on.

(Oh, by the way, good call naming your hero Smith, Sax. 'Quick Smith! Through here!' 'Smith! Wake up!' etc etc)

Is it wrong to think that that sounds great?

Yah, never thought about Fu Manchu before, but I'm fascinated.

Fu Manchu's murderous plots are marked by the extensive use of arcane methods; he disdains guns or explosives, preferring dacoits, Thuggee, and members of other secret societies as his agents armed with knives, or using "pythons and hamadryads... fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli... my black spiders"

Hamadryads!

Didn't know Rohmer was in the Golden Dawn. Also, he has his defence against charges of racism. Rohmer:

occasionally defended his character by saying that the portrait was "fundamentally truthful" because "criminality was often rampant among the Chinese", especially in Limehouse

Ah! Hamadryad a name for the king cobra, good, that's something I learned today.

Yeah, the best bits about Fu Manchu are his methods -

Even at that very moment some venomous centipede might be wriggling towards us over the slime of the stones,

Hope so!

some poisonous spider be preparing to drop from the roof

Go for it!

Fu-Manchu might have released a serpent in the cellar

If he's got any sense, certainly!

or the air be alive with microbes of a loathsome disease!

Bring it on.

GamalielRatsey, thank u for these wonderful posts, you are truly doing the lord's work.

stuff I'm reading atm:
Inherent Vice -- lent to me ages ago by a friend, have just now gotten around to reading it; about 3/4 of the way through, and I wld agree with the general consensus(?) that it is, though not Pynchon's best, certainly his funniest.
The Crying of Lot 49 -- having read this at least 3 or 4 times before, am currently 68/152 pages (20,098/??? words) through my project of typing out the whole thing on my computer. (I would be further, but I keep getting hand cramps :/ ) fortunately, even though I am p.familiar with the book already, there are still plenty of wonderful little details I had forgotten about (on the scene from the play-within-the-book where a cardinal is brutally tortured and murdered: "Altogether, a most anti-clerical scene, perhaps intended as a sop to the Puritans of the time (a useless gesture since none of them ever went to plays, regarding them for some reason as immoral)"), and in general it holds up well under the close scrutiny that this process has focused upon it.
Mauriche Blanchot, Death Sentence -- taking this one slowly. copying out passages by hand whenever I start to lose interest, and also sometimes when I haven't lost interest but just to further slow down the reading process. so far, though, I'm liking it as much as anything else of his.
Robbes-Grillet, Jealousy -- just started, no strong feelings yet. seems like it may be slow going as well. time will tell whether I drop this one or not.

At long last, after a distinguished career of uttering, "My God, we are too late!" always with the trace of a sneer, a pro-forma condescension -- because of course he *never* arrives too late, there's always a reprieve, a mistake by one of the Yellow Adversary's hired bunglers, at worst a vital clue to be found next to the body -- now, finally, Sir Denis Nayland Smith *will* arrive, my God, too late.

bernard, you doing that typing/copying for Official Purposes or just to practice close attention?

also, this is awesome:

or the air be alive with microbes of a loathsome disease!

Vasily Grossman - Everything Flows. This is awesome. Although officially unfinished, there is such a such a finality to the main character's fate it makes the spine chill. It is such a loose novel, really veers off into a history of the USSR: how Lenin was a continuation of Russian history (not a break from it) and how Stalin was furthering some of what Lenin started (in the period it was written it was perhaps easier to bas Stalin than Lenin, but he doesn't spare Lenin).

Then you have some startling documentary writing of the Ukrainian famine (apparently about 3-5 million dead over a period of 3-4 years).

I love how it changes register from character based novel to essay to reportage. A novel that does so much and does it so powerfully.

Anyone here read Life and Fate?

Next: Marguerite Duras - The Vice-Consul

Lolz when I read Death Sentence I copied out one passage. Should do more of this.

bernard, you doing that typing/copying for Official Purposes or just to practice close attention?

so far, it seems to have provoked a drastic increase in the complexity and length of my dreams. and I'm finding myself able to spin out goofy yarns in my head a little more easily than usual, so that's cool.

i've always done a lot of typing-transcribing—must have something to do with growing up with the internet and not having e-books—but when i was working on my dissertation i got way more into actual handwritten transcription (alongside typed). it had all kinds of benefits but at first it was just really effective at getting me to read very slowly. (once you've read the same thing a thousand times it's hard to have the patience to actually think about it instead of letting your habitual reaction zoom by.)

i always find it kind of weird when i read about a poet, and their manuscripts are shown, and it's like this sloppy scrawl that barely fits a dozen lines on a page. i always imagine poets writing neat little poems in their journals, exactly like they look in print, except—handwritten.

I'm going to be spending my evenings the next couple of weeks transcribing notes taken during the day - not quite the same, but still enough hard effing work to torpedo any thoughts of NaNoWriMo for me I think.

I've been tackling Michael Collins' The Likes Of Us. It's clearly very good, but surprisingly dense and I'm going slowly. It's also taking time to drop - I'm not really sure what I think yet, or where he might be going with it.

absurdistan, shteyngart
rereading wittgenstein's mistress, which i half liked as a callow youth but am a lot more impressed/affected by now
forster's aspects of the novel, which is comfort reading sorta
dostoyevsky, still

i find forster infuriating as a novelist, kind of wish he'd written more stuff like the two pages in 'aspects...' he spends bitching about the critic who developed a typography of weather in the novel

or observations like 'real humans, as a rule, have glands, while those in novels generally do not have glands, unless it is necessary for them to do so'

shit got to read Wittgenstein's Mistress, friend lent it to me and I'm seeing him Tuesday.
Still on Gibbon.
Read The Privileges. I liked it, not sure how much. Digesting it still, may pop into its thread when I have.

I muddled my way through Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel, so you don't have to. It had many, many glaring weaknesses. It was, in a word, a mess.

It was so non-technical that the author didn't even include an illustration of the gun's mechanism, let alone attempting to actually explain how the gun worked at a level that contained any detail whatsoever. All in all, the gun itself was strangely missing from the book, except as an empty symbol of... something the author couldn't quite convey.

The gun wasn't the only no-show. Richard Gatling's life and character appeared only as ghostly apparitions. Either the man was so uninteresting as to have had no character, or else no one had ever bothered to leave an account of him containing illuminating anecdotes from his life, or vivid descriptions of his temperment, or clues about his intellect, because all this was strangely missing from the book.

Instead, the author chose to wander about in the civil war and postwar era during which the gun was invented and sold, harvesting random facts, then drawing from them baseless and overblown conclusions in a flailing attempt to erect an elaborate structure of meaning on a foundation that couldn't uphold it.

Now I am starting to read Strange Justice:The Selling of Clarence Thomas. The first 40 pages make me think it will be of a much higher quality than my previous choice.

finished 'night soldiers' by alan furst after a lot of interruptions in my reading schedule over the last several weeks. this dude is great. his minor characters--and i'm not talking about supporting ones, but ones who serve to just provide another brief POV from someone who is wholly "inconsequential" to the story--are pretty amazing. the german fighter pilot, the man recruited into a bizarre and messy mission to steal some documents from an NKVD agent in paris, the woman who is giving out doughnuts to people arriving in new york city from overseas--all wonderful.

This week I am mostly into reading about couples in a political 'storm'.

Moravia - The Conformist.
Mishima - After the Banquet.

Though the Mishima is more of a farce.

Moravia is awesome
The Conformist is def. one of his best works, but nothing compares to Contempt imo (even not the Godard adptation)

a farce? for my future reading habits can i at least get a thumbs up/down?

In its general view of human beings, yeah.

Zeno - love Contempt (not seen the film). Adored The Conformist, especially the 10-15 pages when Marcello and wife are walking around as people celebrate the fall of fascism.

Jean Genet - Funeral Rites. I think its the only one of his I've not got round to. Till now.

I ordered Night Soldiers on the basis of that review xp - surrepticiously (I hope!) on phone under the desk, during a very dull meeting.

i hope you enjoy it!

It is great stuff. As is Contempt (book and film).

Read the Howard Jacobson. Surprisingly pleasant read but I doubt I'll remember much of it in a few weeks time. More sui generis than I expected (the history/motivations/psychology/dialogue of characters are often not very realistic, but that's true of many comic writers). Not so good: I find Jacobson an unattractive character, and bits of that seep into his books - his characters have status anxieties and obessions that Jacobson obviously thinks are funny in an "it's normal, we're all like that" way, missing the fact that most people are way less narcissistic and insecure than he is himself; and it's got a highly irritating, pernicious political bias.

Started reading "C" by Tom McCarthy but I didn't get very far before deciding it probably wasn't for me. I tend not to like long, detailed descriptions of the physical world (there are exceptions) and I found McCarthy's tedious. I may go back and give it another try at some point.

Now "Under The Frog" by Tibor Fischer. Pretty entertaining so far (about 70 pages) but I know people who just adore this book and I suspect I won't be as enthusiastic as all that.

Incidentally if anyone's interested: Larkin's letters to Monica, book of the week on Radio 4, nicely read by Hugh Bonneville and still available on BBC iPlayer (5 X 15 min episodes) - utterly fantastic.

Musil - Tonka and Other stories. One of the few writers who exhaust because the words cannot support the thoughts! But you keep turning pages (hence the exhaustion).

Doubling this w/some Kafka.

the words cannot support the thoughts!

not sure what you mean by this?

In The Perfecting of a Love Musil is always conceptualizing and endlessly expanding on a feeling giving me the impression of sentences falling apart. Both stories I've read so far have almost no dialogue, and I bet they are adapted from diary entries.

Guess I'm not sure what I mean, still digesting this one.

The Men Inside by Barry Malzberg. I needed something light both in weight and matter for the tube and grabbed it more or less at random off the top of a pile. You know, before I started this I wondered: would this be as much fun as Underlay?

First para

In media res folks, here comes Blount. He is on the run and looking for fun, looking for a follicle of cancer. Consider him if you will, if you must: his indignity, his power; he is twenty-two years old at this time, still and always-to-be virginal, sliding through corpuscles and strips of intestine like beetle, scuttling through all of the fields of darkness. At the ready is his little lance, in his helmet is his tiny light, both ready to aim and cut. Think of Blount if you will: he is a man of some potential, education and background. Does he really deserve to be in a position of like this? Mote in the crazed and sleeping Yancey, eighty-three years old and there he lies in the Institute at some enormous expenditure to be cured of his diagnosis. The figure for treatment bedazzles Blount; he continues on his way.

Fun, right! Well, I guess it depends on your tolerance for that sort of thing. And although I quite enjoy it, by the third page it's unspooled into a kind of wild facetiousness, which even depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing is pretty alarming. In fact I wondered more than once if he was drunk while he was writing (was he a drinker anyone? I'm guessing he was).

I mean, what to make of

Blount .. swings his gaze in increasingly wider arcs like the buttocks of a man fucking

(ignore the 'increasingly wider arcs' btw, he's doing this all the time - 'incharitably' occurs on the next page)

Also Blount's age changes from 22 to 23 at one point. (I'm willing to accept this might be the source of a revelation later on, but to be frank, I'm doubting it - and if you're thinking the subs would have picked it up - well, there's a repeated line, which caused me no end of confusion, on p18 of this imprint. I thought it was some avant garde string to Malzberg's general steez).

This sort of thing worked really well in Underlay which was farce+mafia+horseracing+rackety New York types (and I still want to read Overlay, the science-fiction counterpart). I'm less convinced here, but all things considered, it's still pretty fun. (Malzberg has Blount singing 'popular songs of the 1990s' in Yancey's intestine as he lances a cancer - pissed maybe, but fun pissed. Hey, maybe he'll get angry pissed later, that would be good. It's pretty angry as well in fact).

Strange that he chose the name Yancey as well - is this some kind of science fiction writer vendetta or something? Anyway, more tube riding today (flat hunting, dreadful task - you need a Malzberg book on days like this), so I might well have finished it by the end of today.

Then the Platonov. (Walter de la Mare short stories still sublimely good btw).

I think I could pull out a few '?' quotes like the 2nd one from Genet's Funeral Rites.

^^ Sounds like bad Malzberg.

If you want sublimely good Malzberg, look up the short story "Still Life" in Again, Dangerous Visions.

Some time ago there was a thread here on Rick Moody's most recent book, with a link to a review. The review made me angry. It was obvious that the reviewer had never heard of Malzberg and did not know that Moody was blatantly ripping off Malzberg's best-known theme and his style for good measure.

Will Malzberg, like Dick, have to die before he is discovered by the wider culture?

It's weird--I've read a couple of Malzbergs, and they were quite grim and chilly--would never have picked him as the author of the bits quoted above. 'On a Planet Alien' and something else I now can't remember the title of were the ones I read.

Put me down as one of the 'Under the Frog' lovers.

Cigarettes - Harry Mathews

so, yes Wittgenstein's Mistress, fantastic. 2/3s of the way through, obvs great.

Sibylla's enthusiasm in The Last Samurai led to me getting Ptolemaic Alexandria out of the library. Enjoying, in the way I enjoy almost anything that involves ppl inferring stuff from inscriptions, dug-up buildings and brief passages scattered throughout a badly preserved corpus.

Still Gibbon, but slowing down on this – lost a lot of reading time lately, besides picking up other books.

Has anyone ever read any Stanley Middleton? He's been popping into my head lately - wrote a lot of novels, won the Booker, yet barely seems to exist in some regards. I mean this:

On the face of it, there was not much going on in Middleton's novels. Mostly set in "Beechnall" (his home city of Nottingham), they explored the quiet everyday lives of middle-class professional men, teachers (Middleton himself was one), lawyers, accountants, businessmen, architects.

doesn't sound appealing, but then is almost so dispiriting as to make me think, 'yes, I am curious, I'll go for that, accountants in Nottingham (good dull band post to ilx?).' Is he worth reading?

they were quite grim and chilly--would never have picked him as the author of the bits quoted above.

Same here. But he does like jaunty beginnings occasionally. He wrote the funniest first sentence of a science fiction story I know. "So here I am, surrounded by aliens."

Put me down as one of the 'Under the Frog' lovers.

I found it very funny but at heart an English comic novel despite its subject matter.

i am making my way into duffy's 'the world as i found it' about wittgenstein, russell, and moore. the odd feeling, at the beginning, of reading things i know to be historical and biographical facts mixed in with fiction has more or less disappeared now that i've settled into the more novelistic aspects. i wasn't sure about duffy's prose for a moment, but now his assuredness and exactness are really impressive, and his way with character kind of surprises me. i had forgotten how much it's possible to convey how a person is by just describing them in certain ways.

the 'philosophical content' so far seems actually well-handled—not misrepresented out of authorial incompetence or because of constraints of the fictional form, in fact just the opposite, the ways that the relationships between people and their ideas are represented seem true to life—but what's really interesting is that on the dramatic-narrative-narratorial intervention (especially through a bit of free-indirectness) level, it seems like the author has put into practice an idea from wittgenstein's later work about philosophical problems as 'personal' problems that have to do with relations to other people.

having found a copy of the above book, i would like to note that the first section is called 'Duck-Wabbit'

Still doing Lanark next, honest, but plowed through The Wild Boys last night just to get the WSB itch out of my system.

Re: Under the Frog, how are Fischer's other novels? I read The Thought Gang 8 or 9 years ago and remember liking it, but didn't go any further. Not really sure why.

'Under the Frog' easily his best work, I reckon.

Still esconced in reader's block.

WELL, ACTUALLY:

I am reading both The Book Of Disquiet and the final third of Cerebus (specifically, just finished Rick's Story).

Neither of those quite count as a) Cerebus is comics, not prose (or, rather, some prose - quite leaden, without a bit of rhythm, and rife with two or three bold generalizations to a sentence; the comics bits makes up for this by being the work of a very brilliant crackpot) and b) The Book of Disquiet encourages indirect readings, with a few sections from throughout the book on any given day, not unlike a religious tome.

Christ, who was more dysfunctional - Dave Sim or Fernando Pessoa?

Suspended reading Under The Frog because lost in Keef's autobiography. Well above average as these things go, although you'd be unlikely to read it for its literary merits if you weren't fascinated by the subject matter.

Recently read:

-- The 33 1/3rd for Neil Young's Harvest (mediocre at best)
-- Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes by Jim Holt (an impulse buy (closeout sale!) and a pleasant surprise. very entertaining and informative, but super super short and left me wanting more.)
-- Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," the new Lydia Davis translation (my first go at Bovary, so I can't make any comparisons with other translations, but jeez, holy shit, what a book)
-- Kundera's "The Art of The Novel" (really thought-provoking and great. I will have to comb through it again and take notes before I return it to the library.)

I'm still working on The New Literary History of America, and am now poking at The Anthology of Rap, which is a totally amazing collection of lyrics to rap songs. Glad to have it as a resource, but still kinda regretting that I dropped $35 on it. Oh well.

I'm now in the middle of Bedwetter, the Sarah Silverman memoir. So far, it's (kinda surprisingly) very good, funny and breezy. But ... I'm eager to get back to some capital-L Literature after having my mind blown by Bovary.

i haven't read the book, but i enjoyed the review of the holt book in nyrb: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jul/17/isnt-it-funny/?pagination=false

having found a copy of the above book, i would like to note that the first section is called 'Duck-Wabbit'

i always feel somewhat proud that wittgenstein liked to go to the movies.

Steve Holden--Somebody to Love: odd short novel about transgender Tasmanian mortician. Beautifully written on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but every character in it is so corrupt and corrupting that it's hard to tak any of them as seriously as the book really requires--it's all just too much.

The Anthology of Rap, which is a totally amazing collection of lyrics to rap songs

I really wonder what the target audience for this book is supposed to be.

I started McCann's Let the Great World Spin last night, so far so good.

I just read Ann Beattie's novella Walks with Men -- NYC in the 1980s, but more interior monologue than surface. Good stuff.

Steve Holden--Somebody to Love

OK, giving up on this

Luigi Pirandello - The Late Mattia Pascal. Got an idea for a listy thread off this:

Prose works by Playwrights

Just not really hitting off with it. Story of a man who is accidentally thought of as dead and uses this as an opportunity to start a new life but then enters new prisons. I think its the dialogue and a sense that this is covered more sharply in Pavese's The Political Prisoner.

Leonard Merrick: One Man's View -- enjoyable 1890s melodrama, like minor Henry James crossed with George Gissing
Norbert Davis - a couple of his Doan & Carstairs comedy-noirs from the 1940s (Doan being a detective and Carstairs a gigantic Great Dane)
Andrew Evin- Extraordinary Renditions -- really, really good novel (of 3 linked novellas) about 3 troubled Americans in Budapest, affected by the US using Hungarian bases as torture camps

True Grit by Charles Portis, in anticipation of the movie.

I finished Sarah Silverman's book, The Bedwetter. It was ... enjoyable. Also read Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, which was also good but definitely not great.

Rereading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for book club. Marveling at the fact that I'm participating in a book club, which always seemed like such a middle-aged-lady thing to do. Wishing someone had been willing to talk about the damn book the first time I read it ten years ago, but what can you do...

I finished The Likes of Us by Michael Collins. Very good - it's a history of the white working class of Southwark, told by following the author's family tree and linking in various significant events with a bit of licence. There's some good stuff in there about the funerary tradition, music hall, catastrophic works at Elephant & Castle, and just plain ordinary life.

I've been looking at its reviews and am at a loss as to explain some of the vehemence towards it: The destructive nostalgia of Michael Collins's The Likes of Us should have no place in modern Britain. There's the odd sentence that made me a little uneasy with where he was going, but the context is always class, specifically the middle and upper classes' patronising and occasionally hilarious condemnation and romanticising of the subjects of the book.

The New Statesman's sniffy review is nearer the mark - specifically that it fails as history for lack of interesting material (not true I reckon) and fails as polemic for not being clear what it wants to say. The latter hits close I think - ultimately, I'm not sure he's trying to say more than 'we're still here' - but it didn't stop it from being a good read.

I am 100 pages into Anna Karenina. Very good so far.

Since last post: Getting Away With It, Soderbergh's diaries from the Schizopolis/Gray's Anatomy/Out of Sight era, interspered with him interviewing Richard Lester. A bit slight for a book, but pretty funny. The Mating Season and Jeeves in the Offing = lol. Ukridge = not so lol.

Tale of love and darkness - Amos Oz

I am reading Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, and some work of low brow SF so trashy I cannot even remember its name.

Lydia Davis - Varieties of Disturbance
Ishiguro - Nocturnes

^Two short story collections. Both erratic. Davis has a wit about her, especially in her one line stories, and I loved the ones which were sorta disguised crit on Beckett/Proust/Kafka. Some of the others were much harder to connect with. She doesn't make the alienation count.

The Ishiguro has music as theme, but this is nothing to do with the sensations of music. It doesn't concentrate on the strong experiences you can get from music. Its more dryly sociological. The last story has a great first line.

So not a lot of joy for the last week or so.

Yukio Mishima - The Sound of Waves. Should do the trick, he's a favourite.

Speak, Nabokov by Michael Maar - if yer a Nabokovian, that title is bound to elicit many a groan. Not quite The Magician's Doubts (the gold standard in booklength author studies, and quite notable for the fact that Wood's a prosesmith almost worthy of N. himself), but almost has me convinced that the last third of Lolita is a dream. Also, how odd is it that Nabokov scholars all have names he would probably have conjured up (Alfred Appel, Brian Boyd, and now Michael Maar. Odd.

I've been looking at its reviews and am at a loss as to explain some of the vehemence towards it: The destructive nostalgia of Michael Collins's The Likes of Us should have no place in modern Britain.

It's not hard to think up an explanation for that. But I should probably read the book first.

Ellen Ullman: The Bug -- really good novel set in 1984, about programmers at birth of home computing--main character is a programmer whose life is destroyed by intermittent bug in software

It's like early Richard Powers.

Picked up a copy of Bolano's 2666. The hardback cover looks nice.

(Just to go back up a bit I also love The Art of the Novel. Made me read The Sleepwalkers)

My library has 3 copies of this, which I find bizarre.

shit was popular mayne

(assuming you mean 2666)

my mum was telling me yesterday there was a positive review of 2666 in a copy of Elle magazine she was reading at the hairdressers.

not totally surprised — that big blogosphere-led campaign against the really tasteless MAC line seems like it raised a lot of awareness in the fashion industry/community about fucked-up goings-on in Mexico

read A Streetcar Named Desire and the end made me cry on the train.

Aw - can't remember the last book to do that to me. Could be Captain Corelli's Mandolin, more than eight years ago.

Eric Garnsworth: Extra Indians -- really some really good reviews of this, and I do like it, but could stand to have 50p+ shaved off

I'm a real sucker for crying at the ends of books. The two public cases I recall are The Portrait of a Lady in the library and Atonement on a bus, the latter coming against my better instinct to be angry at being emotionally played with so effectively. Last time was The Corrections, the last few pages of which took me about five minutes each to read, such a kicking did they give me. Don't even know why, really - too close to home? Certainly felt manipulated again, though.

anyway, I am currently reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty and, non-fictionally, Alberto Toscano's The Theatre of Production.

how's the toscano? I think I've read some stuff he translated, but don't really know anything about dude's own philosophizing

"I'm a real sucker for crying at the ends of books."

Good thread idea but I've never cried at the end of a book - heart is made of stone.

"(assuming you mean 2666)"

Yeah, it was 2666. Forgot this was popular.

I'm liking the Toscano a lot - basic gist is an assessment of responses to the problems Kant ran into with fitting the individuation of the organism into the critical project, looking esp. at Nietzsche, Whitehead, Peirce, Simondon and Deleuze. Only read the Kant section so far, but it was v interesting and cleared up a lot of things about Kant I'd been muddled on. He's a super-intensely dense writer, sometimes to the point of getting ugly and confusing, but for the most part it's remarkably clear considering how much he's saying in so little space. On a purely personal academic note, dude intimidates the shit out of me - like not only is he apparently extremely well-read in everything, but he's extremely well-read in everything across about five languages, and is still only 35 or so.

"The Mimic Men" by VS Naipaul

Would like to read "The Black Minutes" by Martin Solares

"I'm a real sucker for crying at the ends of books."

I remember 'Disgrace' almost killed me in this way.

yeah I've looked at that book in the library a couple of times (and probably have a pdf of it on my computer, lol arg) but never read it cuz I wasn't sure what the 'point' of it was — plus I'm still not nearly solid enough about Kant, and I know next to nothing about Whitehead, Peirce, or Simondon (the latter seems frustratingly difficult to get ahold of in translation)

("that book" = Theater of Production)

Alphonse Daudet: Artist's Wives -- short story collection about crappy women married to artists, and crappy artists married to women -- lightweight 1870s French fun

Madison and Jefferson - Andrew Burnstein
Nemesis - Philip Roth

Reading Orwell's Coming Up For Air for the first time, wonderful stuff so far. And reading an Alan Garner to my kids at bedtime which is freaking them out a bit, but they won't let me stop all the same... Missed out on him when I was little, so he's a good guy to catch up on. Might do some Russell Hoban next - The Mouse And His Child perhaps?

Shit, you really are looking to freak out your kids. LOVED Alan Garner's stuff when i was younger, they always had such a great atmosphere. Might give some of em a reread actually.

I recently read his 'Redshift', which I never read as a kid, and that was really ace. His adult stuff is pretty excelent, too, like 'Strandloper' and 'The Stone Book Quartet'

Javier Marias - While the Women are Sleeping

Just finished Vendler, The Music of What Happens.

^^^ One of my favorite volumes of crit. I love her Plath, Sexton, and O'Hara essays.

Andrew Burstein - Madison and Jefferson. One of the most intelligent political biographies I've ever read.

er, Madison and Jefferson

Nancy Mitford/Evelyn Waugh letters -- took a while to get into, and not sure I can do all 500 pages, but enjoying now

Eric Ambler: Judgment on Deltchev -- loves me some Ambler

reading Why England Lose (ty again Ismael) and The Cheese Monkeys for a light giggle and maybe the occasional bit of insight now I am halfway through the RFK bio and Ragged Trousered Philantropists. They were a bit too full on for a delicate lady like myself but i'll return next week.

"The Mimic Men" by VS Naipaul

have read this but can't remember anything about it

^^^
i find it hard to get into. i've absolutely loved the other books of his i've read but i couldn't get into this (i think 'a bend in the river' is my favorite work of contemporary fiction, endstop).

also the new marias book of short stories is very weak, but then again it covers a huge swathe of his early writing career (there is a short story in the collection that he wrote when he was 14, for example). imo he did not pick up speed until the late 80's as a major writer.

Charles Dickens - "Great Expectations"
James Woods - "How Fiction Works" (really great so far)
Susan Sontag - "On Photography"

Burroughs: Queer -- I have to admit, I think this and Junky/ie are the only books of his I actually like. I'm tempted to give The Exterminators a go for the sci-fi aspect, but my low Beat tolerance will probably end up with it abandoned

Finished 2666 - love the Arabian Nights type narration (w/ a stronger singular voice behind it) adding up to a 'total' work.

Gave me a 'last novel' feeling, too!

Gonna start on some Strindberg - Inferno/From an Occult Diary.

finding anna karenina to sag pretty badly in the middle after an amazing first couple of hundred pages

keep at it, it's worth it. the passages about levin being in love are ecstatically written. i found a.k. to be a much more 'entertaining' read than war and peace or the death of ivan ilyich.

Finished infinite jest. Oh dfw, you tease.

i loved ivan ilyich. even though AK is supposed to be his western novel, the structure is obv. quite unconventional, and i'm struggling with that, i think. Ilyich didn't have that problem for me simply because it was so short. "insights about character"/page ratio may have been higher too.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend is worth a look after you finish AJ.

Wow did I miss a lot.

Burroughs: Queer -- I have to admit, I think this and Junky/ie are the only books of his I actually like.

i think this is the way many - most? - readers secretly feel about Burroughs.

Sam Lipsyte: The Ask -- enjoying this a lot, though it's not GREAT GREAT GREAT: every character talks exactly the same way. But pretty funny

On the verge of finishing 2666.

Been reading Nixonland. Lord, it takes me back. I was 13 through most of 1968. Not old enough to have participated in the madness, but plenty old enough to know what was happening. This book gives me the willies about every 5 pages or so. Just had the dubious pleasure of reliving the assassinations of MLK and RFK coming a couple of months apart.

2666 is good. i remember there was a time prior to 2006 or so when you couldn't get people to read bolano. i used to post on a spanish-language bolano forum in english because i couldn't convince my friends to read him after i'd give them his books and i wanted to talk to someone about his work.

^^^saw the velvet underground at the factory

Am half Chilean and read all my bolaño in the original: authentic bolaño vibes.

savage detectives was translated before 2666 and it got quite a bit of hype i remember? that was the first i'd heard of him

yeah 2007 is about when he breaks - that's when the translation of The Savage Detectives comes out, articles everywhere.

About to start the winter thread btw.

jesus my last post was lame. excuse that please

to jim in glasgow - what do you make of alejandro zambra?

Burroughs: Queer -- I have to admit, I think this and Junky/ie are the only books of his I actually like. I'm tempted to give The Exterminators a go for the sci-fi aspect, but my low Beat tolerance will probably end up with it abandoned

― buildings with goats on the roof (James Morrison),

seems weird - queer has a lot more in common with naked lunch, i thought, and definitely with the yage letters (which are great! i like them way more than junky, anyway)

i still haven't gotten around to the cut-up trilogy and the pirates/sex plague trilogy, though i started the latter as a teenager and was kind of impressed by it, i guess

not very good: 'the cat inside'

Never read bonsai. Probably should get round to it.specially as it'd only take a couple hours.

kate78 -- how are you liking it? I gotta say he reminded of Konwicki a bit. Both are interested in how culture gets hijacked by politics (Konwicki is more a film guy) and then they both speak to the person reading in a very direct manner.

OK, I might have to try the Yage leters, since they seem to pretty much follow on from Queer
Naked Lunch I remember being a real slog, whereas Queer just flew by. Of course, it's only about 1/3 the length.

Lyndall Gordon - Lives Like Loaded Gun: a biography of Emily Dickinson and how her brother's adulterous relationship influenced her. Well done.

Gaddis - The Recognitions (starting for the third time)

arthur machen - 'the great god pan'

Winter thread has begun!
'1: Must have a mind of Winter; 2: Regard the frost and the boughs'. It's Winter 2010/11: What are you Reading?
(thought awkward Stevens pun title might have lured Alfred in.)
(don't want to be thread police, btw, just avoiding excruciating social embarrassment of having started winter thread, it quietly dying, someone else starting new winter thread in a month, etc etc)