'1: Must have a mind of Winter; 2: Regard the frost and the boughs'. It's Winter 2010/11: What are you Reading?

It's too cold.

I am reading:

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Really, really like this, more than almost any contemp novel for ages. In fact, having rushed through first 2/3, put it aside to save it for a moment when I'm thinking 'oh I don't know what to read'.

Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd. Not really sure why I'm reading this. My imagination seizes up before about 1600, can't get my head round the Renaissance in England; but starting to be more interested in Tudor Humanism, & this seemed an easy way in. 20pp so far, seems very Ackroyd: lots of nice details about London, cloudy Catholic mystical air hanging over things.

Shaftesbury's Characteristics. I dunno, '17th-18th Century History of Ideas'. That's a weird hobby for a man to have. Maybe I should find a new hobby.

Andrew Marvell. His satires and the Rehearsal Transpros'd. Blair Worden's article a couple of LRBs ago sent me off back to M. Brilliant, of c, but does come up a bit short against the satire greats: piecemeal, local bursts of genius, doesn't have an imaginative way to tie it all together (contrast Dryden a decade or so on). Anyway, always a pleasure, might hit the library up for a copy of the Nigel Smith biography Worden was reviewing (though I'm not really a fan of Smith, even leaving [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RACKETT_%28band%29]Rackett[/url aside.)

Also reading English Civil War history off and on. Want to "understand the arguments" re its causes, the structural v car crash running battle.

And yes, trying not to play Warcraft and Game Dev Story so I can get on with all of these bloody books that are in the world.

Night Soldiers by Alan Furst, acquired on omar little's recommendation. The reader's block is back though so it's been slow going - annoying as it should be perfect for curling up with on a snowy December evening.

Ah, Wittgenstein's Mistress, mentioned in last season's thread I think, and someone else recommended it as well. It's... ok. It's pretty good where it's good (funny in places - droll tone, perpetually undermining certainty and definition as you might expect + futuristic (I'm assuming) landscape configured out of misremembered, partially remembered information and travel routes). Not sure how the thing carries as a whole tho. But it's fairly easy to read, so I'll probably finish it.

Apart from that nothing, dismally. (so you have my heartfelt sympathies Ismael)

Am hoping this thread brings the winter harvest tho - that Egan's going on my list for sure.

http://www.bluesmuse.de/user/files/books/chip-kidd---the-cheese-monkeys.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_USzog_GOzyA/SqBpZTWAPsI/AAAAAAAAMDU/rrvJgNtpVFs/s400/lose.jpg

Should have both finished by... Monday?

The Cheese Monkeys started by pretending it was Catcher In The Rye oh woe is me i'm a teenager with thoughts but quickly turned into hilarious slapstick. When England Lose goes from 'Wow that is really interesting' to 'I don't care i'm soooooo bored' like every 30 pages.

lol typo, 'why' instead of 'when'

i wish i could read shaftesbury's 'characteristics'. i also wish the CUP version wasn't all modernized. i would rather read 'characteristicks'.

i've been reading a little of thoreau's journal. and reading a book for review—an atrociously proofed book that is also not very good.

Remember, the 19th is Do Nothing But Read Day.

Finished Strindberg's Inferno/From an Occult Diary. Thanks for the recommendation woof. Really so anguished its almost funny, but there was such an overabundance of darkness that I always checked my laughter. I finished it too quickly.

Did remind me a bit of Klaus Kinski's autobiog (w/out all the sex).

Now I'm onto Artemisa by Anna Banti. Its parts historical novel/criticism about the Italian Painter

Gonna have to get hold of that Strindberg.
Just started Julian Barnes's 'Arthur & George', which is extremely promising. And in keeping with the new thread title, I think 'Winter's Bone' is up next.

sweet, ismael. have a glass of brandy along w/it.

i wish i could read shaftesbury's 'characteristics'. i also wish the CUP version wasn't all modernized. i would rather read 'characteristicks'.

Yeah, I'm reading one of those dull-looking versions of the Robertson text. Early editions are beautiful: I think I might try to either POD a good-looking one from Google books, or see if I can find something better than this. The Liberty Fund ed looks like it might have original spelling at least; the Clarendon Press facsimile is way too much. I don't feel like I need commentary etc.

Made a point of setting aside time for it last night, with some warming coffee only alas. It's so interesting, I really shouldn't be having trouble with it. It's just a little intimidating to open books at the moment, I'm eating it up when I do settle down. There was a great passage with all the trainee spies getting up to high jinks with snow on board the train into the country that reminded me of Kerouac, the this-happened-then-this-happened youthful exuberance of it all.

Sandor Marai: Esther's Inheritance -- more Hungarian genius brilliance. In the middle of the night, learning Magyar so that I could read all the great untranslated Hungarian literature seemed like a brilliant idea. The cold light of morning has made this brilliant scheme look a little more difficult

Hungarian culture will scar you for life -- don't ask me how I know

Do Hungarians practise ritual scarification?

Infinite Jest, finally, after having read everything else DFW and putting it off for no apparent reason for the better part of a decade. I'm barely into it (just finished Hal Incandenza's meeting with the admissions office and the man waiting for the woman who said she'd come) and if it's this strong all the way through, I'm not sure what exactly I need other novels for.

i really loved it a lot. i think it's mainly very strong though it lost me slightly near the end. though whether this was just being fatigued through attrition - it being fairly long and while it flits through different registers a lot of the style is similar - or whether there is a dip in quality i don't know. it also lost me literally in that there are things that happen at the start or near the start that figure later, and i had forgotten some of them and so didn't actually totally get some things til i read something caek (iirc) linked on another thread. i drink a lot though, so, memory not the best.

i have never read any other dfw and feel slightly sad that i've started with his magnum opus, since i feel i will be having diminishing returns with anything else of his i subsequently read.

as for what i'm reading at the moment: i'm not, although i will read some Gogol short stories in the next few days while i wait for some new books my dad is bringing me back from his holiday, which are an anthology of the poems of nicanor parra - parranda larga, and the new one by mario vargas llosa - el sueno del celta (the dream of the celt). the latter is apparently about roger casement and hopefully better than vargas llosa's last book - the bad girl - which was fine, but not up to his standard, as churlish as it feels to complain that a septugenerian is no longer writing at the height of his powers.

Karel Capel - War with the Newtz. This was loads of fun. The satire only retains some of its bite, but its v funny, esp the beginning and Cap Van Toch character. The middle has that newspaper cut-ups, v 30s and good. The last chapter has a good ending.

John Dos Passos - Manhattan Transfer

Newts is great. Also try his 'The Absolute at Large', the central conceit of which is that animists are right after all, and everything in the world has a bit of the divine in it, so that when people split the atom, all of this unharnassed BELIEF and FAITH gets into the atmosphere, causing spiritual craziness all over the world.

telephone thing: there is a group readthro of infinite jest going on on tumblr at the moment -- i do not know if you would be interested but it is at (i think) subsidized2011.tumblr.com

jim in glasgow: the rest of his writing is not a step down, i think. although his first novel kind of feels like a rehearsal for jest.

i am reading bruce duffy's the world as i found it, which j. mentioned on the last thread. -- a pretty long damn novel about wittgenstein and the cambridge establishment of the early 20th century. it's peculiar: a lot of the time it goes into the slightly stilted syntax of popular biography and a lot of the time it goes, well, other places.

Currently:
three volumes of Fantagraphics' "Krazy Kat" reprints (1930s)
"A Slight Trick Of The Mind" (Sherlock Holmes as old man novel)
Cinema 1: The movement-image

Dark Descent horror anth
Jonathan D. Spence- Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
Beckett- Molloy

I'm absolutely loving Colonel Roosevelt, the third volume of Edmund Morris' Roosevelt biography.

bruce duffy's the world as i found it, which j. mentioned on the last thread. -- a pretty long damn novel

but it's, like, the same length as all the novels i read. (or shorter.)

(make that 'start to read'.)

lately i've read a little 'bleak house'.

Nothing. Seriously — I haven't finished a book since October. u_u

OK, just finished Daniel Woodrell's 'Winter Bone', which got rave reviews and has just been made into a movie with same. But I had a hard time taking it seriously. Not that it's not well writen, but it's set in some inbred community in the Ozarks, where everybody's a murderous meth cook, and they almost all have names like 'Thump' and 'Hogjaw', and they're all so depraved and thunderingly stupid that the whole time I read it, there was a parallel parody of it writing itself in my head, and that's no way to really enjoy a good book.

Maritius Command

that's no way to really enjoy a good book.

I disagree! I think it is the best way

Ismael, how was Why England Lose in the end? Reason I ask is I was thinking of getting it as a present for an older relation - Palace fan so got him Malcolm Allison Colours of my Life autobiog a couple of years ago (great self-aggrandising read, as you might expect). Looking for some toothy analysis rather than sketchy opinion stuff really, or at least for the toothy analysis to back up toothy opinion.

Will stop saying 'toothy' now. it's giving me the heebie-jeebies..

Or failing that, any other football book you'd recommend? (Perhaps general rather than autobiography).

hey guys, i need a new novel, like, today. i just finished let the great world spin (thought it was intermittently really good) and i'll have some time to kill in chicago over the next couple days. i'm wishing for something fun but also smart and well-executed (of course), like on a david mitchell level.

You could try A Visit from the Goon Squad - it has a few recs around here (Lamp, me), it is fun, and has a nice structure that's in the Mitchell zone.

(but I dunno, I read like three or four contemporary novels a year, there are better-informed people round here)

Gamaliel: Why England Lose is patchy - some really interesting bits, interspersed with stuff that's either too obvious to be interesting, or is just blatantly made up. I reviewed it here. It's a meld between pop-economics and sports, but it lacks the rigour that you'd want from the former or the punchy approach that someone like Michael Lewis brings to the latter. It's a pleasant enough read, but I can't really recommend it.

Jonathan Wilson is definitely the best football writer that I've come across. I've read two of his books. Inverting the Pyramid is the one people rave about. It's a pretty in-depth analysis of the development of football formations across the world and through time, with loads of interesting vignettes of personalities from 30s Austria, 50s Argentina, etc - fairly novel fare, and to be honest you probably need to be a bit geeky either about tactics or (like me) about the sport globally to get the most from it. I think it would be tougher going for someone with a more regular interest in the game.

The other, The Anatomy of England is really, really superb, and going by the age of your relative and the era of the other book I'd reckon it'd be the one to go for. It's a tracing of the national team's progress and setbacks through ten carefully-chosen triumphs and humiliations across the decades. Everyone's interested in the national team, even if we all hate them really for one reason or another. My review's here. Half the games are new to me, and the other half have been treated with enough care that it feels like he's got a new angle even on the most famous matches he writes about. Most importantly, the writing and research is first-class - you can practically see the games unfolding as you read, which amazing considering footage doesn't even exist for the first couple of games he writes about (Spain-England 1929 and Italy-England 1938 iirc) and he's just pieced it together as best he could from contemporary accounts.

visit to the goon squad vs super sad true love story?

goon squad

Recently:

Confessions of a Justified Sinner, partly prompted by James and other ilxors enthusiasm. It's a miraculous novel, for sure, as astonishingly anachronistic as Tristram Shandy, with its antihero, multiple viewpoints, unreliable narrators and fascination with criminal psychology. But I found it easier to admire than love. I thought it a bit monotonous (in the original sense of the word) and for all its hostility to Calvinism it had a touch of Calvinist gloom about it.

Smile or Die (Barbara Ehrenreich). Non-fiction, an attack on the cult of Positive Thinking. Much of the pleasure I got from this was of the slightly questionable type you get from an author saying a bunch of stuff you already agree with. The argument isn't quite presented with academic rigour, but Ehrenreich is highly intelligent, well informed and on the whole remarkably fair.

I was a bit surprised she didn't mention one of the best arguments in favour of her thesis, summarisable thus:

Peoples' tendency to optimism can be measured with a reasonable degree of objectivity. You ask them to rate the probability of desirable outcomes where the exact probability is known to the tester but can't be easily calculated by the subject. A subject who continuously overrates the likelihood of positive outcomes is an optimist.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the research shows that, a tiny minority of depressives apart, we're all optimists. People regarded as negative/pessimistic are just less irrationally optimistic, ie have a slightly better grasp of reality, than the norm.

Penelope Lively - Moon Tiger. Not quite finished this and loving it so far. I don't want to tempt fate, but if the home straight is as good as the rest this will be the best novel I read in 2010. Anyone know if any of her other stuff is this good?

I'm starting Céline's Death on the Installment Plan today.

I got Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman for my birthday. It is mint. Also re-reading - and sort of breezing thru - Mason & Dixon. It is also fucking mint.

That Morton Feldman book is great. He was an arrogant bastard, but he was dead on when it came to art.

his politics and his attitude to Art as a whole are fascinating, I find myself disagreeing and agreeing with him every other line. would love to have kicked it with him. am planning to just keep re-reading the book until forever

I have just finished Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five", which I enjoyed. I intend to try Grvity's Rainbow again at some point, but while I enjoy reading it, it does take a fair bit of concentration, and I'm not sure I'm always in the mood as I tend to be a bit tired when I read.

reading 'slaughterhouse five' myself atm

Thanks for that Ismael. That's pretty much what I thought was the case with Why England Lose, but I hadn't heard of the Anatomy of England book. Will definitely get it as a present, and probably nab it shortly after to have a read myself - sounds fascinating.

Mason and Dixon is a gas for sure.

Been flicking through Villages of Britain by Clive Aslet, which I've got my mum for Christmas. Well-formed vignettes and exemplars, good, serendipitous cross referencing and nicely produced. Nice browsing book.

Picked up Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky in a bookshop the other day. Would make a nice (expensive-ish) present but I'm not sure for whom, so I didn't pick it up. Definitely worth a look tho.

Finished "Moon Tiger". On the whole the best novel I read in 2010 (so far at least!). Some minor gripes: Lively is an erudite woman with a large vocabulary and she sometimes seems unnecessarily keen to let you know it; and there's a tendency to glam things up a bit, characters all tending to be beautiful, intellectual, creative, sexy overachievers - suggesting among other things that Lively has spent her life on a more meritocratic planet than the rest of us. But Claudia is a terrific character; technically difficult switches of point of view and chronology as well as sophisticated ideas about time and memory are handled beautifully; and emotionally the book is pitch perfect, very moving without ever becoming the slightest bit mawkish.

I wonder what the rest of her adult fiction is like. Poking around I get the impression this may be her magnum opus and the rest of her stuff might not be of similar quality. I'd love to think that isn't true.

The Absolute at Large sounds great, James. Thanks.

Dos Passos was an epic fail. More because it was a tough week for me. Think I'm going to read Pinocchio instead. Then get on to some Boccaccio for xmas.

The verzh of the Decameron that I own is pretty flat and dull, have never known whether that's cos it's a boringly generic translation or if it's Boccaccio's fault.

Is it Guido Waldman on Oxford Classics? Probably the translation; Boccaccio is a lot of fun.

Signed a ILL loan for the MA Screech translation of Rabelais. The woman in the library gave a 'here he is again' look when I insisted that she not bother with any other as I have read him in the other Penguin translation (which read parts of and though it awful)

did urquhart do rabelais? i want to read that one

j, what did you think of duffy's departures from, er, biographical fact, in the world as i found it?

Urquhart has done Rabelais and that is the one I have read most of. Its well worth your time.

(btw, the woman at the library is all right, might have sounded a bit bitchy but wasn't meant to)

i don't even know the difference between fact and fiction any more. sometimes i'm aware of it, when i see something i know to be altered or fabricated (for instance, i've been writing a book review recently that focuses on w.'s time with david pinsent, and it seems the main sources about that relationship—pinsent's published and unpublished diary, some of their letters, and maybe wittgenstein's diary—just aren't completely informative), let alone dramatized/novelized. but i haven't read either of w.'s biographies in a long time, so i don't have that much of a check, because duffy is tracking the facts very closely. and his imaginative-reconstructive aspects just sound so convincing that i'm inclined to be lulled happily into credulousness.

when russell first meets wittgenstein the characterization seems very focalized from russell's point of view to make w. seem a bit unhinged (though as their relationship re-balances and wittgenstein is given more 'inner' time by the narration, that changes). i wonder how much of that is a consequence of the main data about that period being from russell (which seems likely to me). 'logicomix' portrays russell-young w. at that stage in sort of a similar way, and it evidently leans in terms of plot and intellectual sympathies much more closely to russell.

moore provides an interesting check, because i don't know that much about his biography or work, and certainly what little i know about his biography has been filtered through its impinging on wittgenstein's and russell's anyway. nevertheless the way he's depicted, his way of thinking and acting, when he first courts his wife SOUNDS very moore. i imagine something similar is going on to markson's 'wittgenstein's mistress'. a style of thinking or way of looking at things gets picked up partly from a style of writing that's imitated, which of course a good writer is especially good at doing.

Terry Eagleton, HOW TO READ A POEM

huh. let me know when that review appears, j.! i'm probably going to be reading around this sort of thing for a while

things i've noticed (note that i'm going by online sources, my copy of the monk bio is elsewhere):

- russell's novel, presented here, is an invention which shares a title with the actual novel russell wrote - which wasn't about his agon with wittgenstein, but something in the mode of thomas love peacock, apparently
- pinsent's time in norway is moved to - rather egregiously, i think - play up the separation forced upon them by the war. he wasn't there when it broke out. also, pinsent died in training, not in battle.
- max einer would appear to be an invention (!). likewise russell's american writer.

it's a queer novel. i massively enjoy the riff on the different eating styles employed by the dons of trinity - i was hoping for more of that, but it's the only moment like it so far. what's actually going on in this novel i'm not sure - whether it's a novel of ideas or a wonky bildungsroman. i'm not sure the infelicities with regards to biography serve either. it's compelling, though, whichever way you look at it.

- max einer would appear to be an invention (!). likewise russell's american writer.

like these two are obviously based on the kinds of action that w. and r. would be getting, but ideated versions to draw out aspects of what's going on in their heads and lives. but it's very peculiar when these relationships start playing singular roles w/r/t w.'s and r.'s relationships with people who actually existed.

That Morton Feldman book is great.

For fans of that book with big cash, I recommend Robert Ashley's recently published collection of writings.

Ashley is my favorite living composer. Long ago he did an interview with Feldman and recently had it performed by a vocalist in Feldman's crushing Brooklyn accent.

"Duh PRUOSSpecs... foa duh contemporary comPOSuh... auh EXTUREMELY PUOuh."

it's a queer novel. i massively enjoy the riff on the different eating styles employed by the dons of trinity - i was hoping for more of that, but it's the only moment like it so far. what's actually going on in this novel i'm not sure - whether it's a novel of ideas or a wonky bildungsroman. i'm not sure the infelicities with regards to biography serve either. it's compelling, though, whichever way you look at it.

i can't remember if i said this above, but if it's a 'novel of ideas' i don't think it's a novel of THOSE ideas, like ideas about the foundations of logic; i think it's about 'the problem of others' (problem of other minds). i have some ways to go before i can be sure that judgment holds up, though. for one thing, i'm not sure what, if any, difference there is supposed to be between whatever he's doing with character depiction (inner/outer crossing as they interact), and the typical range of stuff modern novelists can do. maybe none.

depending on how thoughtful duffy is, i would expect the obviously fabricated characters to serve a special purpose.

and yeah, the eating styles thing was great—moore sweating, digging into place to prepare his body for maximum intake.

I am rereading Middlemarch, and I brought Comedy in a Minor Key with me. It is nice to read at night with the rain and wind lashing against the house. Holidays would be sad without books.

Yes, I need to read a book this holiday!

What should it be? Perelman? James? Austen?

I won't rehearse or rehash my view of Middlemarch which I associate with a bleak chill windy Charlton Park in early 1999, though I never read it there.

ps / uncharacteristically I did at least finish HOW TO READ A POEM

it was characteristic in that I've finished tons of his books

Comedy in a Minor Key is a wonderful little books. I finally got it and read it the other day, having been hanging out since early last year (when it was supposed to be published)--see, I have proof: Blather about books that aren't out yet but that you really want because they sound great!

Also really enjoyed Imre Kertesz's 'Union Jack'

Now on Michelle Paver's 'Dark Matter' -- a (so far) very good ghost story set in the Arctic during a 1937 British expedition. Loverly ghost story stuff for Christmas

William Trevor's Selected Stories. He and Alice Munro are the best "traditional" short story writer now working.

Halfwaythrough Franzen's FREEDOM. On KINDLE. Very readable, but not especially awe-inspiring. Too many of the characters' interior monologues wind up sounding too similar. He should have got Sam Lipsyte or someone to ghost the chapters from the pov of the dissolute indie/alt.country singer.

the dissolute indie/alt.country singer.

waht

maybe I could have ghosted them

what I did read: L.C. Knights, EXPLORATIONS

concludes an essay on Yeats by saying 'in all, his poetic career must be judged an heroic failure'. why? 'partly, no doubt, this can be assigned to defects of "character"' ...

There's no success like failure!

Just been reading Hazlitt, THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE: essays on Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott. the latter buildsto an incredible crescendo!

['builds to': my screen is obscured by a pop-up telling me to restart the computer]

There's no success like failure!

― the pinefox, Thursday, December 23, 2010 11:11 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

counterpoint: there's no failure like success

now reading Levi-Strauss — Totemism b/w Savage Mind, + various contemporary artifacts (review articles and the like) full of overheated prose abt the 'structuralist revolution'. also some Barthes, maybe eventually working my way up to Kristeva.

Didn't actually properly start on Pater yet cos have been CLEARING OUT BOOKS - literally dozens to be evacuated from my parents' house in the new year. Including lots of bad Joyce criticism I'd piled up, books on Habermas and by Lukacs, a 2000AD monthly, Coover's Pinocchio and Gazza's major work Daft As A Brush.

re: Lukacs: just got a used copy of History & Class Consciousness for 3 bucks the other day — in good condition altho with a decent amount of underlining — rly happy abt it tho cuz that book is like 30 bucks new, wtf

I have about 5 of his books here and I don't think they even include that! I think I may need to face the fact that I won't be reading much more GL in this lifetime.

well uh were the ones you read any good? like more of the lit-crit stuff or?

(I've not read anything of his yet except bits of H&CC — hear pretty mixed things — *shrug*)

Today reading Donne's devotional occasions stuff. So brilliant - spare, droll, witty about death, illness and dying. Also Hazlitt - Table Talk1. Brilliant on bores, hilarious in fact.

Also Browning - Bishop Bougram's Apology, not first rate maybe, but I always enjoy his personal conversational rhetoric as poetry schtick.

A Grammarian's Funeral - insanely recondite form and content. What did I expect. Always enjoy it tho even if it never quite sings.

The Lukacs I know best is just the occasional polemics vs modernism, and some of the accounts of what the historical novel does or should do. So in fact what I know best is probably The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Most of the GL I own, I have not read, in common with probably a majority of my books. At least now I am getting rid of books this will be slightly less true.

Hazlitt snap.

I can report that Pater's essay 'Style' is grandiosely elegant but doesn't really say much except that style = finding exactly the right expression for what you want to say. This seems to me to beg the question somewhat.

I then read 2 or 3 essays by Leavis. He cannot resist the urge to attack any contemporary critic in range from the first sentence of any essay. He is merciless. Sometimes I can go along with his judgement, but then his neverending mad infatuation with Lawrence - at the age of 70 or so! - becomes embarrassing in its all-encompassing derangement.

Whilst I'm not particularly sympathetic to Leavis's judgements, I think a good part of his beautiful, funny derangement is the result of years carving out lit crit as a discipline against the sneers of a useless Establishment.

Think Lawrence is mostly a bafflement to anybody who started caring about Literature after about 1975 tho.

it is summer iirc

hoy hoy just reminded me that I looked for The Cheese Monkeys for about three years, ordering it from bookshops and everything, then completely forgot it existed for another six

Cheese Monkeys: It's really good! And so's the sequel (which is partly about the Milgram experiment) and partly about design

of course, I'm a lapsed psychology student who works as a designer, so I may be the ideal target audience and not objective

Cheese Monkeys: It's really good! And so's the sequel (which is partly about the Milgram experiment) and partly about design

Haven't read the sequel. Quite keen on Cheese Monkeys, though - thoroughly amused by the fact that it's supposed to be a fifties period piece, but pretty much feels like it's set whenever Kidd himself went to college.

there is a sequel? ooooh, will check it out. i only came across it stealing it off a friends shelf. really enjoyed it on the whole, surprisingly easy read for something that has a backpage of quotes about 'ooooh tough catcher in the rye-shiz'.

yeah didn't get the fifties thing at all, other than the ideas obv seem to come in a pre-mad men time of design.

moved on to Arthur C. Clarke, ISLANDS IN THE SKY: 1950s SF

Was reading a bit of Leavis lately too (Revaluation, New Bearings), still find him a dislikeable critic - primarily because he's a fairly flat reader of poetry compared to Empson or Richards, with judgements that feel too assured, too aggressive (and pretty much just trailing Eliot) & way off without really pushing me towards interesting thought (tho' I accept that's partly because his judgements became the climate), but there's something I take against more personally - the Lawrence and 'felt life' stuff is symptomatic maybe, like that's return-of-the-repressed for a humourless & dutiful Nonconformist moraliser. Line of Wit essay was ok.

I guess we're all in favour of 'life' really but maybe just saying you're in favour of it doesn't settle anything much, as one person's lively text is another's dreary or nasty one. FRL slams Lewis as anti-life and venerates DHL as pro-life. Sounds simple enough, but alas, last time I read Women in Love its brutality, characterization, everything reminded me of ... Lewis.

I think Ulysses is full of felt life, but FRL didn't really see it that way. Woolf, in fact, is a still clearer case - she valued 'life' more explicitly than most (it's what the novel so often lacks according to 'Modern Fiction'), and I think her writing lived up to her own standards too, but ... FRL didn't like her much, and slams Eliot for saying she was a genius.

So 'life' isn't everything.

anyone who doesn't like Woolf should have their critic-pass revoked

like if u can't appreciate *that* when it's right there in front of you, then what are you even reading for

Yeah, I think that's a big part of the problem with 'felt life': after all this aggression, the assault on Milton and post-Romantic Miltonic lines, on Victorian & Edwardian wooly aestheticism, in the end it comes back to a slightly unimpressive hand-wave that's kind of in that same tradition (maybe it wouldn't be out of place in Q or Saintsbury? Dunno, a while since I've read them, Saintsbury leans formalist, non-judgmental iirc); and dissenting from it, saying there is more life in Joyce than Lawrence (which I would), doesn't get anywhere. Whereas with Empson I feel like I'm in the middle of an urgent, slightly scattershot and sometimes puzzling conversation about lit, life, how we respond to things, how language works; where I disagree, I have to dig back to figure out principles.

i chip kidd wrote a sequel to the cheese monkeys?
ii i really don't like woolf! i will never be a critic

Took a break from the Boccaccio to read the MR James' 'Oh Whistle, and I'll come to You, My Lad' ahead of the adaptation on BBC2 last night. Liked the TV version a lot (haven't seen the older - much celebrated - version), in that it was v well made. John Hurt is always good. Probably would have liked to have seen a more 'faithful' version but I guess the sound of a whistle is not as modern as the lush sounding scrapes and scraps.

Couldn't watch "Oh Whistle" last night cos of Xmas stuff, but caught a couple of minutes, realised it was updated and thought "fuck you I will probably never watch this, dicks".

Was fantastically shot, ending was awful - complete Ringu rip-off with none of the particular and exquisite dread of the original (book that is).

trailer looked nice, cinematography and sound design seemed lovely, pissing about with M.R. James = fuck u 4 life

Chip Kidd sequel is 'The Learners' (with Charles Burns cover)
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0061673242.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Didn't know The Ring was also called Ringu. It was over so quickly but yes looking back that was pretty weak. The pacing was still slow, built up a sense of dread.

Didn't really see the problem with some of the changes (they seemed thoughtful, not reckless). But I'm no fan (I haven't read the stories).

Read the stories! The only ghost story writer worth squat, imo. Think there's a cheapo wordsworths classics or similar edition.

Ah right you read whistle. But did you read it at night under flickering lamplight with the wind howling outside?

I have the Oxford Classics edition. The footnotes are really bad, often unnecessary.

But yes I'll get on with some of the other ones later this week.

A Life in Pictures by Alasdair Gray

The Best of S.J. Perelman

listen to this, by alex ross. i think i like it better than the rest is noise, actually. maybe i mean it's an easier read -- more personal and approachable, and touches on more contemporary subjects -- which i'm hoping will inspire me to return to, and finish, the rest is noise.

reading 'the unnamed' by josh ferris

also still working thru:

ricky jay - learned pigs & fireproof women
lorrie moore - birds of america
ann beattie - what was mine
george simenon - the cat

Nowadays I find Leavis's views about the "centrality" of literature and lit crit much creepier than his admittedly equally loopy Lawrence fandom. But I'm a massive fan of Lawrence's writing at its best and think it a shame his reputation has taken such a battering, even though it's not hard to see why. I was cheered in the past few weeks to find out that Philip Larkin was (suprisingly) an obsessive Lawrence fan, and that James Wood (perhaps less surprisingly) is another admirer.

I tried to get into Lawrence a lil while back after seeing that a number of writers/critics/theorists rate him highly (Deleuze for one) — the only thing I've read so far is "The Fox", but dang, what a story!!

Have read only bits and pieces of Lawrence - his Melville essay is the funniest thing, mind you (I believe the dominant sentiment was "GET OVER IT, MAN!"). Quite liked a travel book of his - Etruscan Places, I believe?

If you're new to Lawrence, his novellas and short stories really are frequently pretty great. He doesn't have the space to hammer home his points over and over again.

more Hazlitt: in the Coleridge essay I found 2 lines that were used in The Trip (BBC2).

on Southey he is devastatingly scathing with a broad smile - calls it 'the malice of old friends' - an extraordinary polemicist, who also seems to have read everything his subjects wrote.

maybe what distinguished Hazlitt from a modern equivalent is that he writes about these people's personalities and conversation, not just about their books - James Wood never really does that about Rushdie or Updike.

I have the Oxford Classics edition. The footnotes are really bad, often unnecessary.

Awful Sure we've talked about this before. Don't gloss anything you would find in a decent 1 vol dictionary! and that's just for starters iirc.

Quite like the Jonathan Miller/Michael Horden Whistle (it's on YouTube I think), but still wd always go to the stories. (Been thinking a bit about that alarming Story of an Appearance and Disappearance recently, after seeing some punch and judy puppets in an exhibition).

I was cheered in the past few weeks to find out that Philip Larkin was (suprisingly) an obsessive Lawrence fan

Apparently used to wear a Lawrence t-shirt (picked up at some museum/exhibition) to mow the lawn.

If you're new to Lawrence, his novellas and short stories really are frequently pretty great. He doesn't have the space to hammer home his points over and over again.

yes, this! i also like quite a few of his poems - he is much better w/ space constraints.

i started reading 'memoirs of a valet' yesterday, for no particular reason - but all that Intrigue got a bit samey after a while, and i gave up before the end.

Awful Sure we've talked about this before.

Oh yes now I recall this now. Takes me a while to actually get onto anything.

Is that Punch and Judy exhibition still on?

Someone on the Autumn 2010 thread mentioned Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes – and I have to say, to whoever that was, thank you, because that was by far the best non-fiction book I read all year.

I am thinking my 2011 reading goal might be to read Richardson's Clarissa, because I need a self-hating goal.

I sort of agree that Lawrence's novellas and short stories (and poetry) are a safer bet, but I wouldn't disregard the novels. The quasi-mystical bullshit that alienates a lot of people isn't at toxic levels before "Women In Love". "The Rainbow" or "Sons and Lovers" are the obvious starting points. "Women in Love" is my personal favourite but I'm enough of a fan to judge some of his weirder ideas tolerantly. I also have a soft spot for The Trespassers and The White Peacock, lightweight but charming early works. Post Women in Lowe novels are probably for hard-core fans only.

Recently read: Jonathan Dee - "The Privileges". Hilary Mantel - "Experiment in Love". James Wood - "How Fiction Works". Now reading "The Broken Estate", re-reading "War and Peace".

xpost yeah I have The Rainbow and am planning to read it at some point... haven't been reading a lot of fiction this year, but I recently started on Journey to the End of the Night and am greatly enjoying it, so we'll see whether this turns out to be the start of a larger trend in 2k11

At long last, I finished Nixonland. Perlstein did an excellent job of capturing the downright feral nastiness of the era, in Technicolor and Panavision, along with an accurate portrayal of what a liar and slimeball Nixon was.

It probably would best be followed up with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but I think I will take a pass on that. I haven't quite decided on my next move, yet. I may just opt for a retreat into the prim decorousness of Henry James' drawing rooms.

I also read James Wood's "How Fiction Works." Liked it a lot. Been reading Dickens'"Great Expectations" for what seems like forever, although I am enjoying it. Maybe I need to stop reading so much other stuff at the same time. I'm also in the middle of "Portnoy's Complaint," my first Phillip Roth book. It's okay, but definitely isn't thrilling me. I don't know if Roth is my guy, although I realize "Portnoy's" isn't necessarily a representative work for him.

Charles Brockden Brown: 'Wieland, or the Transformation' -- well, that was quite odd

i love that crazy book!

'women in love' is a truly great book imo but i also kinda hate it

Seem to remember feeling that way about Women in Love as well - something brilliant about the organic psychoanalytic construction of humanity and natural forces that also nauseates me iirc (which i probably don't).

Little Dorrit - interminable.

Visit from the Goon Squad - excellent.

Is that Punch and Judy exhibition still on?

Meant to answer this xyzzzz__, sorry. No, it was actually a room in the Museum of Everything, that exhibition of Peter Blake accummulations. Was thinking of doing something with P&J this year, probably a well worn subject, but maybe try and include some stuff that I've been circling moth-like round for a while - tracing it from the Commedia dell'arte paintings of Magnasco maybe, via Faust and some sketchy, speculative theory of the grotesque maybe. Can include the Bailiff in the Childermass, The Old Curiosity Shop, Story of an Appearance and a Disappearance, Box of Delights, any other literary suggestions welcome. (There's a great bit in the childhood autobiog. of Julian MacLaren-Ross as well iirc).

i love that crazy book!

Yes, i quite enjoyed it too. It was all over the shop, in many different ways, but pretty original. At the time it must have blown minds.

Oh I see its gonna open from the 5th for an extra five weeks. Might have a look. thx!

Finished Boccaccio this morning - brilliant in so many ways, and the architecture of the thing feels really modern.

After Virtue - Alasdair MacIntyre. Read something in Prospect about him, enjoyed it & was intrigued by someone making a serious case for an Aristotelian and Thomist view of the world. Decided it was time to read this. I like it, tho' really I am just a sucker for donnish jeremiads that scold the Enlightenment. He's very clear, if not lively. Holds my attention: I usually drift off after a page or two of philosophy.

Troubles - JG Farrell. Light Christmas reading. It's ok, better than ok in fact, but not quite my thing. Might put it aside, see if I pick it up.

The Ends of Life - Keith Thomas. Love him. He just knows so much, and puts it together so well.

Secret Historian by Justin Spring

(bio of Samuel Steward, academic, tattooist, Kinsey source and pornographer)

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being by Milan Kundera - Thirty pages in, not feeling it. Overly symbolic dreams always make any plot they're meant to adorn seem pat to me, so no.

While The Women Are Sleeping by Javier Marias - More like it.

I picked up a strange little book at a thrift shop for 50 cents, called An Essay on Morals by Philip Wylie, published in 1947. Been reading it. It seems like that period, a few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a high tide for books that viewed the new atomic age with alarm and sought to diagnose the source of society's obvious insanity, so it could be cured before we blew the world sky high.

Wylie's proffered cure was a sort of taoist-tinged atheism as viewed through a highly peculiar prism of Jungian archetypes and Darwinism. He's kind of sketchy on the details, but he's very colorful and specific in his diatribe against the status quo.

Jim Thompson - Nothing more than Murder. Its one of his early bks focusing around a businessman's insurance scamming and murderous plotting. Almost nobody writes better dialogue (as long as you use the criteria that good dialogue is one in which you will never hear it spoken.) Also has a quite a bit of detail about cinema operation in the late 40s as the main character owns a movie theatre. Certainly doesn't need that excuse, love movie detail in novels.

Started 2011 on a friend's xmas present: Nick Hornby - Juliet, Naked. Horrible title. The blurb says its affecting, ingenious, wise, humane. Its none of these things. But its the first novel w/ internet detail I've read: one page has a fake wiki (of course its unable to reproduce the links within links that make wiki), commentary on internet fandom (he has read the internet, but possibly not ILM, and maybe that's for the best) and has lots of emails in it. I'm not sure I'm going to be a fan of novels with internet detail in it but at least I can say I'm halfway through one.

I just finished Changes by Jim Butcher. For a frothy pleasure book, it is a massive, screaming downer.

xyz is onto something in that while we all use the www all the time I am not sure that literature has used it well, or even can do so.

perhaps I am stating the obvious again

The internet could be used as a plot device, through which one or more characters learn things about one another, in much the same way a detective novel of the 1940s might use postcards, or personal letters. Not very interesting, but fairly easy to do.

The internet could help define a character in somewhat greater depth, by showing how its use both reflects the character's mind and values, and has channeled his/her energies and shaped his/her habitual vision of the world. This could be contrasted to other characters who have gone in different directions, based on their own idiosyncratic use of or avoidance of the internet. Harder to do, and not exactly groundbreaking.

Mostly, I think the internet will appear in literature in ways similar to the telephone, once the telephone became an article of universal use. The author will invoke it almost unconsciously and the audience will see nothing odd or striking about its presence in the story. It will be furniture.

Overly symbolic dreams always make any plot they're meant to adorn seem pat to me, so no

I'm with Henry James on this: "Tell a dream, lose a reader."

'Nothing More than Murder' is such a good book. I really need to get the Jim Thompsons I haven't read yet. He is so bleakly, funnily, nastily good.

I picked up a strange little book at a thrift shop for 50 cents, called An Essay on Morals by Philip Wylie

Is this the same Philip Wylie who was a SF writer? He wrote two nuclear war novels, 'Tomorrow!' and 'Triumph'

i know 2666 can be used as an example for anything but i thought it was novel i read where the internet was used properly, just as a way to be in connection with people far away in real time. It was simple and elegant, like how letter writing used to be used in novels, but now just 'i've got an email from [x]' instead and that it is immediate. Also just as a simple way to 'this is how i booked a plane ticket' or looked up a recipe etc. and not in a lol the internet is crazy new source where we need to make up pages and pages of shit. Most people don't read every page, and most people just look for what they want, only talk to who they need to (you may have 4000 different addresses in your email, but how many do you actually talk to?) and skim read. And 2666 did that nicely.

Is this the same Philip Wylie who was a SF writer? He wrote two nuclear war novels, 'Tomorrow!' and 'Triumph'

Apparently, the very same.

xp

ALSO APPARENTLY: He seems to have created the superhero.

Gladiator is an American science fiction novel first published in 1930 and written by Philip Wylie. The story concerns a scientist who invents an "alkaline free-radical" serum to "improve" humankind by granting the proportionate strength of an ant and the leaping ability of the grasshopper, both metaphors used to explain Superman's powers in the first comic of his series. He injects his pregnant wife with the serum and his son Hugo Danner is born with superhuman strength, speed, and bulletproof skin. Hugo spends much of the novel hiding his powers, rarely getting a chance to openly use them. The novel is widely assumed an inspiration for the character Superman,[1] though no confirmation exists that Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were influenced by it.[2] The concept of a human having the proportional strength of an insect is also the basis of the Spider-Man series.

A copy of the book can be seen on Hollis Mason's shelf in one panel of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen.

Ripping through "Jane Eyre."

you should treat the pages with more care, romeo jones.

Just finished The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova. I loved her first book The Historian but this was pretty poor - a rather pointless "mystery" which certainly did not justify 560 pages. About halfway through I was beginning to wonder where this story was going, but trundled ahead anyway - now I wish I hadn't bothered.

Julian Ayesta: Helena, or the Sea in Summer -- really lovely little book about a child's memories of summer holidays and falling in love for first time -- could have been saccharine, but it was perfectly judged

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya: There Once Was a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby -- creepy fantasy and ghost and madness and fairy stories

Plus a couple of Julian Symons crime novels from the library, which were excellent in a not-quite-as-good but similar vein to Patricia Highsmith

Re-reading various bits and pieces of Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler. Stretches a bit here and there, but I do want to write like Weschler when I grow up.

Modern Masters Volume 20: Kyle Baker - supplementing my current intense Baker fixation.

Have Ways Of Seeing by John Berger and Calvino's Invisible Cities ahead of me (the latter being one of those books I always thought I've read but I haven't).

pinefox - I really really wanted "A Life In Pictures" by Alasdair Gray for Christmas, but I didn't get it. Is it worth the 30 quid price tag? (considering I'm a huge, but broke, fan).

well, as books go, it is worth more than most. I think if one likes Gray then the answer is yes. It is practically the ultimate Alasdair Gray book (apart from perhaps the major novels themselves).

another answer would be that the book must be available more cheaply, or soon will be, etc. But I wouldn't want to do Mr Gray out of a wee source of income.

I am reading Franzen and trying to understand Patty.

Michael Wood, YEATS & VIOLENCE - yes, that.

There were moments back there, maybe a third of the way through, when MW seemed to be cruising in his most dispassionate casual way, circling ideas but not pushing anything ahead. And even when I reached the chapter 'The Temptations of Form' the politeness to other critics seemed too elaborate and clubbish, and the polemic vs formalism all too easy to knock out without any struggle, and go back to the club.

But then he hits a stretch when he suddenly says 'I should probably say something about authorial intention', and (even as in that particular stretch he's partly rehashing ideas from elsewhere, like the first chapter of The Magician's Doubts) the book turns so sublime it occasionally makes me soaringly grateful just to live at an hour when I could read sentences and paragraphs like these, from another Fred Astaire of words.

have you seen this book, pf? it has some yeats stuff, looks interstn to me.

oren izenberg, 'being numerous'

No I haven't. It does discuss at least two poets I (like everyone) like, but I don't really understand that summary.

two books:

one is growth in the soil which was interesting to read in the middle of winter, with the snow falling and the wind bitter.

the second is lost books of the odyssey which i found mostly empty. i had a hard time 'connecting' with the ideas and conceits but then im not very classical. everything is too short and too clever.

Jane Eyre --- great. better than I expected.
Wide Sargasso Sea --- meh (Interesting take on Eyre / very well-written .... but I don't think I can really get down with any book that's "magical.")
Bartleby The Scrivener ---- wow, so good.

Jane Eyre was the first Adult Novel I read (eighth grade).

I read Jane Eyre last year. Walked by North Lees Hall on Boxing Day (Just out of this photo). Made me excited about the film.

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/IMG_3403.jpg

Cool! thanks for the pic and link, caek.

I'm also psyched for the film, especially after seeing the lead actress in "In Treatment" (which I've become terribly addicted to). She's good!

Finishing off Rabelais (tr. M.A. Screech) -- I found the notes, even if they come from such a brill scholar, to be a bit intrusive at first and it took me a while to pick and choose before going into a chapter. Certainly, utterly modern in its dislike of lawyers, clergy, in its scepticism of people that might like to think themselves as better. And then there are great bits on travel, old arguments on where semen comes from (!), lists and farces and all the stuff on bums = really good.

But I think I will also make a point to read Erasmus, Plutarch and some Plato. Something that stops me from really loving this. Instead I stop at admiring the achievement. Also will need to go back to Urquhart's translation. Screech says that this is the first he read (in a bomb shelter) and ends up sorta dismissing it as a recasting and hadn't read it in years (not even for his translation). Wish he had written more on it.

Urquhart's translation of Rabelais is notoriously free-handed with the original, but it has a vigor and wild inventiveness that are hard to fault.

There's a funny scene in a short story by Alasdair Gray in which Urquhart meets Milton. Milton refers to the Bible indirectly by the phrase That Great Book, and Urquhart thinks he's talking about Rabelais.

Julian Barnes: Pulse -- short stories, very good so far
Jon Fosse: Aliss by the Fire -- downcast Norwegian novella, woman looking out her window at the fjorde where her husband drowned, mind gets unmoored in time, sees visions of his family doing various things going back 100 years, not bad at all--a little Dalkey Archive book

I've just finished Night Soldiers by Alan Furst, as noted in the second post on this thread. Loved it, what a story! It's given me so much pleasure and I'm sorry to be leaving it behind. Thanks again for the tip, omar.

There was a surprise for me in the very last sentence too, a little private reference which is kind of a BF 825 to me. It's all left me very content and satisfied.

glad you enjoyed it! all of his post-night soldiers novels have some crossover with characters, btw. i believe ilya goldman shows up the most.

BF 825?

It's a code sign from the book, which turns up occasionally in heart-stopping circumstances. There was something on the last page that had a similar effect on me.

Colleague just asking me about a '50s Scandinavian book about a train stuck in a tunnel perpetually. That's it. I've not a scooby. Any ideas?

The queue:
The Grass is Singing - Doris Lessing (really enjoying this so far - aside from the main thrust, she's really good at conveying a sense of heat)
Molloy) - Beckett
Blindness) - Henry Green
Asterix the Legionary) - Goscinny and Uderzo (a re-read reward for reading so much worthy stuff).

I just read this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/15/novels-internet-laura-miller

I thought it was quite good.

From the article pinefox linked, above:

High Fidelity, with its once-hip record-store setting, has been transformed into a nostalgic artefact by the advent of downloadable music files. (Where do guys like that congregate these days?)

**cough**(ilm)**cough**

Yes! A Nick Hornby discussion! I'm currently correcting his work and from what I can tell I have everything but Juliet, Naked. I'll probably get around to reading his work later this year. I also have a stack worth of Stephen King doorstoppers, most of Michael Crichton's work and William Gibson's trilogies to get through.

Right now I'm sort of into trashy girly YA books, The Clique (about snobby private school girls), Pretty Little Liars (snobby high school girls... WHO KILL AND LIE! OMG!) and most of the Blue Bloods series, which is somewhat about vampires but mostly about materialistic, snobby private school girls (I sense a theme here...). There's some other leftover vampire novels from last year's reading pile, but I'm getting tired of that whole Supernatural Romance genre.

*correcting? COLLECTING. Damn Firefox spellcheck again.

all of his post-night soldiers novels have some crossover with characters, btw.
And every one of them (pre and post) has a scene set in that Paris club/restaurant with the bullet holes in the wall

Reading J H Prynne's Field Notes, his book on Wordsworth's 'Solitary Reaper'. Sort of amazing, like a critical study of a poem by an interplanetary anthropologist. Have been back on Wordsworth, Cowper and Crabbe a bit recently too, so it fits with that.

Read Peter Singer's Past Masters/V short Introduction to Hegel. Sort of a gesture - somehow related to my decision/realisation that I would never read Hegel, would probably never try. Went down very easily.

Listening to Donald Kagan's lectures on Greek History from iTunes U. Kagan sounds likeable and enthusiastic when played at 2Xspeed, sort of makes up for him being Kagan.

Donald Kagan is a truth-twisting neocon douchebag in his contemporary politics, but his book on the Peloponnesian War was well-written and displayed a good understanding of the politics, strategy and tactics involved. He should stick to history.

I'm never sure he separates things so cleanly - I tried one of his Peloponnesian War books, felt I was being hit with Neocon readings of stuff all the time - like Athens (and Sparta?) as aspects of America was barely a subtext, virtually the text. The lectures have a dose of the same (portrait of archaic/early polis Greeks as independent tax-hating hard-working smallholders willing to bear arms to defend their unique freedoms) but he knows his stuff, throws in good detail, presents a clear narrative, acknowledges other positions. An awareness of his black warmongering heart is a useful filter tho'.

Urquhart's translation of Rabelais is notoriously free-handed with the original, but it has a vigor and wild inventiveness that are hard to fault.

Urquhart with notes by Screech might be the dream. But the M A Screech translation has to be looked at, he just has so much to give in terms of notes, and he sounds really friendly. The Adages of Erasmus could be one of those books I could be obsessed by (frustratingly unavailable on a cheap paperback, it seems)

Gonna read Charles Lamb's version of The Odyssey next.

JM Coetzee -- Disgrace

As for Kagan's America-as-Athens subtext, I guess I just know too much about Athenian history, culture and society to buy any of it, except in the broadest, grossest sense of human nature being similar across the ages. For that kind of insight you'd be better off going to Plutarch's Lives.

for a minute there I was happy to hear that someone was correcting Hornby's work.

I rediscovered my susceptibility to the lure of fiction after listening to Jonathan Franzen talk about his hopes for readers and writers.

But I still think his novels could be tighter. They seem to have this kitchen sink tendency towards the end ...

ill and largely incapacitated today, I turned to Baker's THE ANTHOLOGIST. It's readable, I'll say that for it, which is what I need.

I'm not sure that the narrator is very right about poetry (though part of the point, I think, is that he finds generous exceptions to every rule criticizing something). There is also a passage on rhyme as a baby / infantile learning process which is supposed to be the basis of poetry - nah. I don't buy it.

oy, i really did not like that book. though i did read it in a day or so, so, yeah.

heartsick and largely ineffectual today. could do with vicarious tears for something else, to be someone else.

Isaac Bashevis Singer: Shosha -- loving this so far

Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: The Inheritors -- sci-fi oddity I've owned for years, prompted to read by something in the Guardian -- intriguing if not perfect plot about affectless humans from a higher mathematical dimension leaking into our world and setting about financially and politically destabilising it in preparation for a takeover

Frances Iles: Malice Aforethought -- classic 1930s crime novel about a man who decides to murder his wife

New vargas llosa is not too clever thus far. Telling not showing.

Anthology of nicanor parra is p great. I love him. Ambigüedad Ambigüevada.

It does seem remarkable that Conrad and FMF wrote SF!

still ill in revolving circles of pain, I stumbled on through a new LRB and an old, then today took Collini's ENGLISH PASTS to the bath, having contemplated for a moment Murakami's THE ELEPHANT VANISHES

out through a sunny midday I picked up a Guardian which is more my current standard

having contemplated for a moment Murakami's THE ELEPHANT VANISHES

The one with "Sleep" and the bakery robbery story? That's a mighty fine collection.

yeah "elephant vanishes" is really good. i started "kafka on the shore" recently but put it aside. i guess im not in the mood for wackiness right now. i was travelling around for a bit so i kept it light. read "the outsiders" and "wise blood". back home now, starting on "moby dick"

i started "kafka on the shore" recently but put it aside. i guess im not in the mood for wackiness right now.

Yeah, not his best - it's thoroughly readable but feels like a case of diminishing returns.

Moby Dick is a great read. Enjoy!

ALSO: I've begun A Journey Round My Skull by Frigyes Karinthy, but suspect it won't past my thirty-page test. The prevailing thought is "This guy writes the kind of stuff that Nabokov had a ball mocking in The Gift." Not a good sign.

But... but... but... A Journey Round My Skull is great! (Gibbers pathetically)

essentially finished Collini's ENGLISH PASTS again - that is, I reread most of the bits of it that I read first time round

moved on via brief detour to TE's overfamiliar FIGURES OF DISSENT to Collini's ABSENT MINDS

Collini seems to be good for the enfeebled - something about the clubbable Oxbridge manner and endless largely amiable mediation presents happily few obstacles.

Actually I am continuing on with A Journey Round My Skull, Morrison. Just so you know.

Mishima's Death in Midsummer collection of stories. A few dispense with dialogue, the plot of many of these are skeletal at best - in an imperial court, a monk loses control of his flesh after a glance from a beauty - doesn't sound all that but the way he channels his knowledge of Buddhism to describe the process makes you turn pages.

today I learned that AJ Ayer was a man of the Left

other readers might enjoy his recollection about Camus: "I don't know his work well, but he and I were friends: we were making love to twin sisters in Paris after the war".

Mishima's Death in Midsummer collection of stories

That is one mad book

One Hundred Years of Solitude, to which I'm surprisingly lukewarm.
Bob Woodward - The Brethren. A chatty, gossip-laden account of the first several years of Warren Burger's tenure as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Death in Midsummer hangs much better as a short story collection than Acts of Worship iirc, and its probably because much of it is quite mad.

I listened to R3's Sunday feature on the 100 year anniversary since the last Chinese dynasty fell so its put me in the mood for Lu Xun's short stories.

silence of the grave - arnaldur indridason

the second in the series of erlandur thrillers, one which differs from a traditional procedural in that its suspense derives from not a pressing ticking clock hunt for a killer, but a decades-old mystery that unfolds in both flashback and in the present as the police start to catch on to what occurred on an abandoned piece of land adjacent to a temporary military base near reykjavik during WW2. the flashback might not sit well with some and the concurrent story of erlandur dealing with his junkie daughter might not either, but both worked well for me. i liked the amusingly protracted excavation of a skeleton, which acted as a red herring not once, but twice. very good, makes the wallander mysteries look cheerful, and the depiction of a battered housewife is pretty devastating.

the dolphin people - torsten krol

working through this one now. swift read, very unusual. a woman and her two sons flee germany for south america after WW2 (her husband died on the russian front) to reunite with the dead husband's brother, a doctor (of some sort) who has fled germany for reasons of his own and wishes to "do the right thing" and marry this woman and raise the children as his own. somehow this all leads to them falling in with an undiscovered tribe being studied by another german, an anthropologist who has been with (stuck?) there for a decade and missed out on all the fun stuff that happened in europe. very amusing and kind of fascinating. the fact that the uncle-cum-mysterious doctor is named klaus makes me even more of a story herzog might tell.

I think Krol turned out to be an Australian writing under a pseudonym?

turned out to be an Australian writing under a pseudonym?

A literary hoax? Australia seems to have more than its share of those.

i think the rumor is it's the pen name of another author but i guess there hasn't been verification?

Bellow - Henderson The Rain King
Dickens - Bleak House

picked up Charlotte Brontë's 'Villette' after reading thehairpin's "Jane Eyre is not the best book: The best book is Villette" post. Took me a good few chapters to realise that i had definitely read it before, probably in that vague period in my life in which i also read all the austen, all the dickens, all the gaskell, etc (in fact it has given me confidence that this period in time definitely existed and wasn't some snobby self-aggrandising lie that i eventually started to believe). My memory of the book was pretty blurry, so it was worth doing again-- I am not sure it is the best book but it is pretty damn satisfying.

I haven't been ready to tackle anything much lately. So, I have been idling my motor, reading chunks of the Everyman Library collection of George Orwell's Essays. This clocks in at ~1350 pp, so there is plenty to read that I haven't read before, and many old faves.

I like Orwell's voice and pov. He's like a much better educated and deeper thinking version of the good journalists of the era, like Ernie Pyle. Having read Waugh's WWII trilogy last year, Orwell provides a much larger framework that Waugh fits neatly within, with plenty of room left over.

just finished A Visit From the Goon Squad - had no idea what it was about (uncorrected proof, no blurb), picked it up at a book store bc the name jumped out as being one i'd remembered seeing several times on ILB, and it was... amazing. constantly surprising. this and Dee's The Privileges are the two best books i've read in a long time, and i heard about both through ILB. thanks!

Goon Squad seems to be ILB's top contemporary book. I must read it.

Bedtime reading is once again Barry Davies' INTERESTING, VERY INTERESTING, which is very Barry Davies, which is a big compliment.

RD Laing: The Divided Self -- classic book on schizophrenia
Amalie Skram: Lucie -- 1890s feminist Norwegian shenanigans, Madame Bovary meets george Gissing
Larry McMurtry: The Last Picture Show -- only a little way in, but easy fun

finished 'the dolphin people', working through m. john harrison's 'viriconium' omnibus.

Have finished A Journey Round My Skull - iffy at parts, but the homestretch is something wonderful (barring the irksome repeat of his "my illness as seen through others" sequence).

Onto Wicked River by Lee Sandlin next.

Giving up on McMurtry -- extended scenes of country boys raping farm animals makes book much less fun

Finished Lu Xun's short stories (all the fiction he ever wrote) - real tough read - hard to keep the details in mind as the bk has one set of stories dealing with ancient Chinese mythology and other tales set in the present (early 20th century Qin dynasty China).

But the mood is clear enough -- death, ignorance, failure, ghosts.

Now more Ghosts with M.R. James.

just1n3 im really glad to hear you liked 'goon squad'! currently reading:

patrick ness knife of never letting go probably write lots abt this on the fantasy thread actually but i like it
lionel trilling the liberal imagination have only gotten through the introduction but im hopeful. i also picked up his novel the middle of the journey but thats near the back of the to read pile
also rereading zachary mason the lost books of the odyssey because i didnt really give it much time when it first came out & reading it at a slower pace ive noticed how wonderfully written it is, even im still kinda cold on the idea

But the mood is clear enough -- death, ignorance, failure, ghosts. And a strange defensiveness about cannibalism, for some reason.

Have you read Lao She's Rickshaw Boy James? The only other early Chinese 20th century novelist I've heard of.

'a visit from the goon squad' + like everyone says, it's really great. definitely going to be checking out her other stuff

so glad to hear goon squad is good; i've liked every previous egan novel. she's something special imo

Have you read Lao She's Rickshaw Boy James?

No, I'd not even heard of it, but it looks interesting. I think my library has a copy.

Lee Sandlin's Wicked River is excellent - I would not have survived the early 19th century.

'a visit from the goon squad' + like everyone says, it's really great. definitely going to be checking out her other stuff

so glad to hear goon squad is good; i've liked every previous egan novel. she's something special imo

the keep is fairly great too although i think it suffers from its structure, a little, & the situations veer closer to cliche than in goon squad.

The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand.

I'd been putting this off for years because I thought it was a tract on the development of philosophy in the USA around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, and the older I get the less interested I seem to be in ideas. That *is* what it's about I suppose, but it's about a whole lot more besides - biographies of some of the most interesting men & women involved, a good bit of history, dipping into other sciences, some nice character sketches. Also, it helps that pragmatism, which is the school of thought that it explores, appears to be the lightest and to my mind most sensible (non) ideology around.

So it's really good. The thing that's struck me most so far is the tales of the civil war and lead-up thereto - in particular how slavery, race, religion & secularism, segregation, and subsequently darwinism were all bundled up and irreconciled in the thought of the time. It's really enlightening and I feel gives me a much better understanding of how and why political or racial discourse there can sometimes seem so horrible and alien to my ears - largely because conduct and ideas which we can automatically assume to be reprehensible was once part of or even legitimised by a whole (in its own terms) coherent ideology. So things like racial IQ theories can be simultaneously hateful and yet understood as potential residual 'truths', which is not really something we have to grapple with thankfully. I'd never got that before.

It presents a kind of historical writing which has gone out of fashion the last forty years and is all the better for it. The Holmes chapter is fantastic.

Today I started Patrick O'Donnell's THE AMERICAN NOVEL NOW.

It doesn't seem very good.

most american novels arent good dude

Oh boy.

I read Timothy Taylor's The Buried Soul. Someone on here recommended it a while back, so thanks: really got me as presentation of what I guess is non-consensus but non-fringe arch/anthropology - humane, brisk - doesn't hang around, but gets on with talking cannibalism, ritual, sacrifice, murder, scapegoating, child murder etc etc in a level way. Has occupied my mind for a few days.

some American novels are good

well yes there is also that

The Buried Soul

That book does linger.

most american novels arent good dude

just keep to having terrible opinions abt rap music, plz

:)

'a storm of wings', which is the second novel in the viriconium omnibus by m. john harrison, is really good but it's some of the densest writing i've experienced in a long time. that's a compliment. it's very slow going, i probably won't be able to get through the other works in the book before i have to return it to the library, but i'll be coming back to it shortly. the descriptive passages, which take up 99% of the book at the expense of more dialogue, remind me more of the more pensive portions of the narration in welles' 'f for fake' more than it reminds me of a trad fantasy work.

i am getting further into eliot's 'adam bede' and getting more and more impressed and interested as i go. the prose and especially the narrator's adeptness at conveying interiority seem completely modern to me—probably no surprise that they would, but this is the oldest novel i've read that seemed so relatively un-old.

George Eliot is really, really good. i need to read more of her work--her essays and Middlemarch and a couple of others which I've read have all been excellent.

Just started Italo Calvino's 'Marcovaldo'

glad to see the Metaphysical Club love -- started it recently, but set it down in favor of more pressing things after 100 pages or so. but they were good pages!

most of my time lately has been spent with Celine's Journey to the End of Night (Africa and America sections not quite the zany Candide-style picaresque adventures I was for some reason expecting; I think I'm actually enjoying it more now that we've settled down into closely-observed scenes of life among the Parisian petit-petit-bourgeoise) and Giorgio Agamben's Language and Death (short, dense, immensely rewarding work that moves from Aristotle to 20th-century structural linguistics, with impressively thorough treatment of everything in between)

(... if you take "scholastic theology, provencal poetry, Hegel and Heidegger" to be "everything in between")

Done with Wicked River. Swell.

Now onto a Seuss-like pile of comics and Invisible Cities (Calvino, natch). Oh, and maybe The Broweser's Ecstasy by O'Brien - I kinda worship O'Brien but Browser's Ecstasy always put me kinda off as a bit too precious on previous attempts. I'm hoping this go will take.

Invisible Cities is so, so good. and (I am convinced, anyway) an unrecognized precursor of perennial ILX favorite The Age of Wire and String

xpost

Based entirely upon reading the first, like, ten pages of Invisible Cities, I'm convinced that there's an excellent Carter Scholz story ("Travels") which owes it a great debt - a bit of consciousness which is convinced it's Marco Polo drifts along in space until it encounters a supercomputer (like that episode of Futurama) - different modes of storytelling ensue.

yeah, Invisible Cities is a favorite. And I like Geoffrey O'Brien a lot too. "The Phantom Empire" is probably my favorite book bout film ... ever. I haven't checked out "The Browser's Ecstasy" though. Curious about it. "Dream Time" was good, and so was "Hardboiled America" (if you like noir fiction). I want to check out his latest, "Fall of the House of Walworth," a true crime thing.

most american novels arent good dude

― sammy bagels (a hoy hoy), Monday, January 31, 2011 9:32 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

'a storm of wings', which is the second novel in the viriconium omnibus by m. john harrison, is really good but it's some of the densest writing i've experienced in a long time. that's a compliment. it's very slow going, i probably won't be able to get through the other works in the book before i have to return it to the library, but i'll be coming back to it shortly. the descriptive passages, which take up 99% of the book at the expense of more dialogue, remind me more of the more pensive portions of the narration in welles' 'f for fake' more than it reminds me of a trad fantasy work.

Read about 8 lines of Finnegans Wake in a reading group for 2 hours.

I didn't really form a newly positive impression. I couldn't escape a sense that the book (at least this bit, pp.512-3) was distant from reality, with too little correspondence to plausible experience.

Read about 20p of Faulkner's 'Sanctuary', but had to give up. Maybe it's because I'm sick, but it was mystifying. Who is he? He did what? What is he talking about? Why did he do that? I felt like Seinfeld being the audience member of a complicated movie.

hahaha, excellent simile

finished the instructions

it was very good

yeah it was! i wish it had been a lil bit shorter? but still. looking fwd to the collection of short stories he's got coming out this year

i dunno i thought the length was kind of key to the whole thing

i think i have issues with the ending. possibly even with the entire second half.

well the length was key, i'm not saying cut it down to 300 pages. just 800 or so.

re: the ending: i think it's the book's strength that it sets up all these contexts so that when you read about (important event involving gurion's father) in the first half it's unclear whether

i. it happened
ii. it didn't happen but gurion's father told him it did, & gurion believed him
iii. gurion made up the whole thing, but believes it
iv. gurion is writing the whole thing as a fiction

whereas by (important climactic event) the narrative doesn't seem to be open to that kind of irresolvability -- that it's a lot more forced to try and take gurion at anything other than his word

i think somewhere else i said 'maybe ten percent' could go - gurion explaining stuff to slow readers - but i don't know what else, really. although i did think he was going to skip over the events of the pep rally, for a while, and i think i like that version of the book which exists in my head a little better

Getting myself acquainted with Robert Walser, who seemingly can't follow through any 'logic' in his writing but is quite something.

Currently reading political novels: Vargas Llosa - The Real Life of Alenjandro Mayta

Follow that w/Ariel Dorfman - Hard Rain.

'can't follow through…'—what do you mean?

I put The Metaphysical Club to the sword last night, having enjoyed it a great deal.

Started Alan Furst's Dark Star on the train this morning and am hooked already.

j - Walser is writing 1-2 page sketches which he looks like abandoning after 1-2 paragraphs (or 5-6 sentences if the story is a 1-2 page paragraph) for little reason.

I suppose there is a logic there. And there is a similarity to observations and patterns you can pick out. The adjectives can be read over a cup of tea and a slice of cake, and he clearly takes autumn over any other season, etc.

Just finished Alenjandro Mayta. I have to watch Carlos.

Last week I also read This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman, a set of sketches set around life at Auschwitz. The stories are documentary with dialogue. Some of the shorter pieces are bursts of reflection.

I recommend Carlos.

Have officially begun Invisible Cities in earnest. Am also stuck in the Book Of Disquiet trap for what may be the seventeenth time. Wish me luck escaping - I suspect that there have been certain times in my life where, if I'd read it, I would have contentedly locked myself in a closet for the rest of my days.

Fuck. I'm reading nothing. I'm moving all my books from my old flat to my new one at the weekend, and then I should be back on track. Only stuff at the moment Collected Poems of Walter de la Mare, goddam he could write a line. The Concept of Irony by Kierkegaard (well I've read some of the intro anyway), loved Either/Or and Fear and Trembling as a teen, probably my favourite, but the intro tells me that this isn't well regarded, and then goes on to say it is in fact in its entire conception a piece of irony. That may well be the case, but I suspect I'm not sufficiently attuned to the time or specific locale to be able to get this. About to start Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson.

Read most of Panic in Box C by John Dickson Carr. Late. He had a good way with titles (and chapter titles) but this is shit (late).

uh my favourite philosopher.

jesus, and the repetition of late in the bit about jdc is an accident and refers to it being part of his late career, which is generally reckoned, correctly imo, to be less good.

About to start Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson

Except for a heroine who falls rather too quickly and deeply in love with the hero, this is pretty much THE BEST late-Cold-War thriller

based on the final ten words of that sentence i'm sold already.

finished:

'the finder' by colin harrison, a thriller which simultaneously attempts at a tom wolfe-style panoramic view of NYC. it doesn't quite get to the peaks it's attempting to summit but it's quite enjoyable and tightly plotted and would probably make for a compelling film, albeit another one of those novels with a hero a bit too two-dimensional for my tastes and villains partially defined by some repellent and occasionally scatological traits which err on the side of "too easy."

working on: 'ice' by vladimir sorokin. so far, so good.

no longer have a 50 minute commute so i've slowed down a lot, but...

this year i have finished anna karenina (posted thoughts earlier on this thread, which weren't really changed by the second half), read true grit in ~4 hours (lol great book), read the dreadful david nicholls book one day, and "four major works" (doll's house, hedda gabler, the master builder and ghosts) by ibsen (first time i've sat down and read drama since school).

crazy from the heat by david lee roth next. stoked.

working on: 'ice' by vladimir sorokin. so far, so good.

i really admired this book & have posted about it quite a bit i think (lol) - interested to see what you think once youve finished every section...

ibsen is really fantastic too. man you guys are reading some great stuff.

i'm reading karen russell's 'swamplandia' & a couple of fantasy books from the early 80s by michael scott rohan

Recent readings

DJ Taylor: At the Chime of a City Clock -- thoroughly enjoyable pastiche of Patrick Hamilton and Julian Maclaren-Ross -- not sure it adds anything they hadn't already brought along, but it works very well

Noel Langley: there's a Porpoise Close Behind Us -- from 1931, like a much ruder PG Wodehouse with added predatory gays and bisexuals

Jerome K Jerome: On the Stage--And Off -- his memoirs of 3 miserable but funny years as a failed actor

Shirley Jackson: Come Along with Me -- pretty excellent short stories

Yasunari Kawabata: Snow Country -- lush, sad sort of romance, liked it a lot, but need to reread to fully get it

i've been reading wordsworth's 'prelude' and some stuff on wordsworth by richard eldridge.

xxxxxyyyzzzzz, which walser are you reading? i think it might depend which—he certainly has many 'sketchy' things, but then something like 'the assistant' weds that tendency to a novel (or something with roughly the shape of a novel).

Finished "Bleak House." I was fighting it for the first few hundred pages, but it won me over in the end. Still, I don't plan on reading any more Dickens for a while. Also finished "Henderson The Rain King" (Saul Bellow). Completely, totally loved it.

Now reading Bellow's "Herzog."

j - Masquerade and Other Stories (doh, I never said). I think it was really good and different (if what I said before was unclear on that point). The writing is ordered chronologically and I think its more interesting as he gets older.

I like the idea he managed to write a novel; he does offer so much when doing these concentrated sketches.

(and just upthread This Way for the Gas... is by Tadeusz Borowski.)

i'm reading jennifer egan's The Keep - it is totally weird and i have no idea what's gonna happen from one page to the next, but it's fantastic. i found a whole stash of her books at a local used store, but had to resist buying all but one since i left my credit slip at home. pretty sure they'll be gone next time i go back :/

on the nightstand::

'the poetry wreck 1950-1979' : karl shapiro -- contrarian essays on modernist poetry. dude tries to take down eliot & yeats. just getting started with this but the crux of his eliot argument seems to be that eliot's work per se can't lay claim to the status Eliot The Literary Figure has been afforded because the work itself is ungraceful and too much like a thicket.

'against the american dream' : forget this dude's name - essays on charles bukowski. i've never thought of bukowski as a poet worth writing a book of essays about--i sorta saw him as this solipsistic romantic drunk who had a limited place but not a lot of substance--so i figured if somebody disagreed it was worth finding out why. the guy constructs a mostly convincing class-based reading of chuck, arguing that his primary project is the representation of alienated post-industrial labor and that he posits the 'refusal of work' as the only form of resistance available.

'this side of paradise' : fitzgerald - i'm a few dozen pages in and i fucking hate amory. i'm looking forward to him going to war already.

'rainbow's end' : vernor vinge - sci fi about a guy who got alzheimers's ~present day~ and then gets 'cured' in 2025 and has to learn to adjust to the new world. starting it today!

on the way are

-complete elizabeth bishop
-life studies & other poems : robert lowell
-the world doesn't end : charles simic

About to begin that third Your Face Tomorrow book by Marias.

marias has a new one coming out, was a feature/interview in el pais yesterday (?) about it. forgotten the title but he was saying it's the first book he's done (maybe ever) where it's not set at all in england nor does it contain english language at any stage. also they were making a joke of the fact that he's still referred to as "el joven marias" ("the young marias" on account of him being published in his teens/his dad being a well known philosopher) even though he's in his fifties. best part was him saying his reasons for being an author were not to do with vocation or whatevs but because he didn't like getting up early or having a boss.

why are you a writer being one of those questions that inexorably leads to a horrifically precious reply.

"Where do you get your ideas?" being another. Though those have the tendency to be less precious and more straight-up silly.

not reading any book much but each time I watch a film on TV (all Westerns at the moment) I pick up the Time Out film guide (1999), Thomson's BD and DID YOU SEE? - and then generally get a bit distracted from the film.

because he didn't like getting up early or having a boss

major reason for choice of career of many intellectuals, artists, and academics imo

Fits with something I'm just reading--Kurt Vonnegut got a "real job" as a journalist with Sports Illustrated in the 1950s. Came in on his first morning, and was assigned a story about a racehorse that kicked down a wall and escaped. He spent the whole morning staring at his typewriter in despair, then wrote 'The horse kicked down the fucking wall!' and quit.

but Vonnegut also worked for ... wasn't it General Electric, late in the 1950s? I got the impression that he was rather proud of having some kind of 'scientific' background to play off vs the literary sphere; and that he said somewhere that it was good for him to make a living that way, then write stories in his spare time. But this last part may be my imagination.

Most of this comes, if I haven't invented it, from his Paris Review interview, as the other interviews of his that I've read I read over 20 years ago.

finished 'ice' by sorokin. awesome, wholly single-minded and merciless in its narrative, and frequently hilarious.

Have interrupted Fielding reading to stuff self for lamp's poll. Reading some pkd I hadn't before - Clans of the Alphane Moon, Galactic Pot Healer.

oh, and about half The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood, which I'd had lying around forever. Terrible, will not finish.

How'd you enjoy Clans of the Alphane Moon, woof?

Just started, will report back.

Dragging ass on Mark Vonnegut's Just Like a Person Without Mental Illness Only More So- it's a short book, and easy going, but it's for a book club, there will be other people and this presents a problem, etc. Also I feel kind of guilty for starting it without having read The Eden Express first.

am on a biography-type kick & currently reading:

tesla - man out of time - margaret cheney
the life and death of yukio mishima - henry scott-stokes
ruthless - jerry heller

finished: 'lucie' by amalie skram. utterly miserable in a very good way,. a very angry norwegian novel from the 1880s about a 'woman of ill repute' who ends up married to a middle-class lawyer and how their marriage and the random actions of people around them destroys them both (mostly her.) very political, many references to specific issues of the day in norway (entire debates about norwegian novels and plays contemporaneous w/the novel) and the sense of an angry but powerful liberal+feminist class ready to rise up and create the changes that led to how scandanavia is today.

In transit: Dark Star by Alan Furst. It's good, he weaves a tight plot and the world he writes about is such fun to inhabit for a while. However, there are a couple of flaws gnawing at me:

• Szara's not as likeable a protagonist as Stoianev. How important is likeability? I tend to think quite important - if nothing else, I think it's easier to sympathise & empathise with someone whose goals you share, or at least know instinctively.

• in a similar vein, Marta is the object of Szara's desires, which is now starting to motivate his behaviour and is likely to do so much more. The trouble is, Furst's barely set up their relationship - a handful of pages, two meetings and that's it. Couple that with the point above, and there's a hole in motive which I'm having to take on faith. The writer in me finds it very frustrating, especially because it could've been easily fixed by dwelling on the time they did have together just a little more.

Eventually abandoned Mieville's KRAKEN - it became almost painful to read. Occasional mindbending moments - the guy who does extreme origami - couldn't really sustain the terrible prose and abysmal plotting/pacing.
Picked up Barthes' PREPARATION OF THE NOVEL - course notes for the last seminar he took at the Collège de France in 79/80. It's great: more convivial, less poised, than the rest of his work - even the notes for the seminar on The Neutral. He's currently discussing mythologies of weather in Proust.
Also finally getting on with MIDDLEMARCH after several failed attempts in my youth. Much more enjoyable than I remembered.

Do you guys ever go through periods where you find it almost impossible to sit and read more than say 5 pages of a novel/book? I'm ok with magazines or newspapers or whatever, and the 2 books I need to find I have really enjoyed for over 300+ pages each (about 150 left to go w/ both and i really want to see how they finish).

I'm in that phase a hoy hoy. And it's not the first time either. Several contextual things (just moved house, some, ah, affairs of the heart) but also it can just happen.

Stevie - I don't know whether you've read the City and the City, but my experience with that pretty much parallels yours. Shame.

Incidentally, Herr Kapitan, have you noticed the top Punch and Judy action in the latest Peej vid?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2Qlb0qFLFE

took the liberty of starting a thread for this xp

Why I read; why I don't read

on the bus the other evening some semi-drunken but smartly dressed middle-aged business guy turned to me and said "i have to ask what you're reading". i hate this question at the best of times, but i was reading a v cosy middle class mystery by simon brett ('The Murder in the Museum') i was esp not keen to broadcast my taste/choice to all and sundry. i quickly flashed the guy the front cover of the book, which of course produced zero response. friend of mine used to wrap any book he was reading on the tube in brown paper, think i might start doing the same.

Started reading Gatsby (although I'm still halfway through Dracula which seems to be going slowly) - but g'lor! one of the first times I've appreciated a book for the use of language on the page. I can see why Hunter S Thompson spent ages retyping the whole thing.

I once had a boy buy me drinks all night because I caught the cover of his Heidegger and asked him about it. Unfortunately he did not throw a drink in my face when I told him I was too straight to sleep with him that night, it could have been a good sitcom moment.

Brown paper a good idea, Ward.

As I think I've said somewhere else, but was on a train one Friday night, and was reading this -

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61u1kLhivNL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

As I got off, a bloke (very much a bloke) shouted to his friend, 'Look at that wanker with his big pink dictionary!'

Which was actually pretty accurate tbqf.

Thanks, Stevie! Went back to the Museum of Everything before it shut and got some more info. Just waiting for things to settle down and will see if anything can be done with the bits and bobs floating around in my head. Seem to be a few key critical texts that will need reading as well (desultory wikipedia research).

How'd you enjoy Clans of the Alphane Moon, woof?

Right, almost finished, feel confident in saying (even if it just farts into nothingness in the final pages, cf iirc We Can Build You) it's terrific, really fun – top-class thrill-power Dick - what I usually want from his poppier stuff is to get as many pkd basics (simulacra, madness, religion), into play as quickly as poss, in well-imagined & entertaining forms, & Clans is a++++ at this. Enjoy the plot-crash in the last third when it all just gets stupidly tangled, and he's also cranking up the religion (slime-mould paraclete etc). One of the funnier ones, too, but also really grimly scratching at man-woman stuff - it's a divorce book I guess.

Yeah, one of the 'writing about giant gas masks in the sky while in a freezing beach hut' ones I think. Certainly one of my favourites. Time for a re-read I think after that great description.

'Look at that wanker with his big pink dictionary!'

new board descrip

Contra-brown paper, the worst thing about having a Kindle is that you can no longer ostentatiously display that WHY YES, I am reading - eg Pierre Reverdy, in the original French, WHAT OF IT?

lol i love it xpost

i was worried last night that trashy panther ed of Clans of the Alphane Moon might make it look like I was losing the most-impressive-book-in-the-carriage competition. Someone else (hipster looking mf) had Voltaire's Letters on England. I had a loeb Thucydides in my bag that I could have switched up to, but I think changing books would have been showing weakness. Instant loss.

(East London Line fwiw)

Construction chap on the tube this morning reading Njál's Saga in the v old black Penguin Classics. I had an anonymous Clifford Geertz hardback on the go, considered the possibility of reading it out loud, maybe to my immediate neighbour.

(this doesn't count as reading btw, because i read one paragraph about some Javanese conceptions of self then gawped out of the window for the rest of the journey).

my copy of the recognitions is the earlier american penguin edition w a nondescript painting on the front, but will always think of it as the big pink dictionary from now on, ty

My edition features this grotesque: http://www.williamgaddis.org/imagesbkcovers/RecsCover1.jpg - was once compared to some footballer whose name now escapes me.

finished: 'lucie' by amalie skram. utterly miserable in a very good way,. a very angry norwegian novel from the 1880s about a 'woman of ill repute' who ends up married to a middle-class lawyer and how their marriage and the random actions of people around them destroys them both (mostly her.) very political, many references to specific issues of the day in norway (entire debates about norwegian novels and plays contemporaneous w/the novel) and the sense of an angry but powerful liberal+feminist class ready to rise up and create the changes that led to how scandanavia is today.

I read this a few weeks ago, weirdly enough--really loved it too. I've got her 'Constance Ring' on order now

Someone else (hipster looking mf) had Voltaire's Letters on England

To be fair, this is actually a really fun book

Very much loving Your Face Tomorrow: Snap, Crackle, and Steve, at which I'm at the exact halfway point. Found the previous books in the series good but overly... familiar? Of course, Marias' entire m.o. entails motifs and repetitions but they seemed, well, not stagnant but just a little tired. But the current book is very much working for me.

I'm at the part where he's returned to Spain and his description of how certain kinds of infatuation work ("...they are where the party is at... they are the party, the event to which you continually wish to return..." or something to that effect) is just killing it for me.

Jurgen Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere — a surprisingly gripping read so far!

(well okay, "gripping" might be a bit strong, but it's quite... readable. and I'm on a bit of an Enlightenment kick at the moment, so finding it all very fascinating.)

Eventually abandoned Mieville's KRAKEN - it became almost painful to read. Occasional mindbending moments - the guy who does extreme origami - couldn't really sustain the terrible prose and abysmal plotting/pacing.

This was my exact experience too. Reading the David Mitchell's Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet now and finding it much more enjoyable.

bernard, if you like that, when you're done you should have a look at michael warner's 'publics and counterpublics'.

I am not reading any book, but I have a first edition of Larkin's HIGH WINDOWS next to me. Its jacket says: 'No introduction is necessary to this new collection of poems by Philip Larkin'.

Eventually abandoned Mieville's KRAKEN - it became almost painful to read. Occasional mindbending moments - the guy who does extreme origami - couldn't really sustain the terrible prose and abysmal plotting/pacing.

I read this yesterday, went to the work bookswap cupboard and it was just sitting there. Very strange.

i am reading making movies by sidney lumet and crazy from the heat by david lee roth + ghost writer.

i just finished the city and the city

i did not like it very much, to be honest

bring back the handlingers

bernard, if you like that, when you're done you should have a look at michael warner's 'publics and counterpublics'.

― j., Friday, February 18, 2011 6:14 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

I'll be getting on w/Njál's Saga soon!

Finished: Ignazio Silone - Bread and Wine. A marxist disguises as a priest in a village, so it plays the Jesus as a revolutionary card that Italians are particularly fond of. Kind of rough in places but it has all the characters I'm so fond of (the depressed, despairing revolutionaries and the 'brain dead' villagers that can never stand up for themselves, and the women are mostly lovers who get involved in other ways) so you get into it.

Finishing: Saramago - The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Really glad I read Pessoa before getting onto this. Its quite a tribute but he has his own voice too, so its working at the mo.

-my man just gave me a box of books and the first thing i'm plowing through is an anthology of world poetry circa 1952

About to start Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson

Except for a heroine who falls rather too quickly and deeply in love with the hero, this is pretty much THE BEST late-Cold-War thriller

― the most cuddlesome bug that ever was borned (James Morrison), Thursday, February 10, 2011 4:28 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

based on the final ten words of that sentence i'm sold already.

Wait that was thomp, never mind.

great book tho i mean

Yeah, I nearly bought Kolymsky Heights myself after that - if I hadn't just acquired Gorky Park I would've done.

Having trouble putting it down. The Door Into Summer might be next. Figure since there is a new bio of the guy it may be time to revisit his work.

Although I'm steering well clear of anything involving Lazarus Long

I have finally started reading another book.

LAUGHTER IN THE DARK.

by ViViaN Darkbloom?

Aw, shucks :)

Also reading Nabokov: Look at the Harlequins -- Not his best by a long way, but lots of lovely stuff in there nonetheless.

I finally overdosed on northern european police/crime novels. even the moody detectives started to feel too formulaic.

Recovery begins: 100 + pages into "Feast of the Goat" by Mario Vargas Llosa and really savoring it.

I just finished that novel. Suavely styled though, if anything, more plain and brisk than I might have expected from Nabokov. A kind of impatient disdain (like early Beckett's, if you know what I mean) for standard novelese, along with a very novelistic, or perhaps I mean melodramatic, story.

I find it odd that VN, though everyone says he was kind / gentle / cheery etc, is so repeatedly drawn to amorality and extremity; the cruelty in this book is so extreme as to seem implausible. He also seems unable to resist car crashes and climactic showdowns with Roscoes ringing out - there's a touch of Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane about him.

i have a book question not really important enough to warrant a question so i am using this as the ilb chitchat thread -- i remember something by a contemporary british author continually making (bad) jokes of 'where are the snows of yesteryear', possibly even had an index entry for 'yesteryear, snows of' -- what the hell is this in it is driving me mad

i vaguely thought it was will self's 'feeding frenzy' but it does not appear to be as far as i can tell from amazon preview

ou sont les neigedens d'antan

(catch 22 probably not what you are thinking about at all)

Find Snows Of Yesteryear
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[actual Google ad]

started 'matterhorn' on sunday, finished it last night. i suppose it depends on your enjoyment of novels that are grim and relentless 'the horror of battle, bookended by the boredom of waiting for the battle' soldier POV epics, but i thought it was pretty great. definite flaws exist, mainly in dialogue sections between characters (not the dialogue itself but marlantes' attempt to convey what the characters are doing while talking to each other, lots of 'they stared hard at one another'-ish bits) and i had to lol @ what another poster on ILB pointed out when he or she read it, about a particular passage involving agent orange. cliches aside and some easy characterizations also aside, it's really just incredibly depressing and makes you feel trapped in vietnam. after reading 600 pages of it in three days, i followed it up with a matterhorn-related dream last night that i swear was PTSD.

I've been on the verge a couple of times of using Matterhorn to fill out 3-for-2s, but it looked slightly too grim, read a little too manly, and felt, frankly, far too large. You have not undermined any of those preconceptions.

i am reading HEIDEGGER.

I've been on a reading binge lately.
Read two French novels by Antoine Bello (they haven't been translated to English I think) that deal with a Consortium of Falsification of Reality. This is a group of people who falsify facts in order to modify the course of history. Like for example, there was no Laika sent in space, the CFR is responsible for this story, as they wanted to speed up space research. I found the concept behind the story to be great (well it is very gripping at the least, I ended up reading till 3AM) but tbh I read those books too fast to actually judge them properly. A few days later, the concept behind the story is still great but I have to admit that the characters are totally one dimensional and the writing not so great. Still, a very fun read overall, even if the final revelation is very crappy.

Graham Greene, Dr Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party. Eh. I just read that between the two novels I talked about above. Really did not make any impression on me.

Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game. Bought it because it was cheap and I thought I remembered somebody on ilx saying good stuff about it. Maybe nobody has ever talked about it on ilx and I made that up on the spot in the library, but even if that's the case I still really enjoyed this book. Good fun even though it gets a bit tiresome after a while to keep hearing about Peter's cruelty, Valentine's niceness and Ender being all "I'm good! I'm bad! This is all the adults' fault! etc"

Jean Echenoz - Cherokee. Its kinda fun but I've been ill and sorta dying inside. Gotta say after reading Rabelais I'm getting an unexpected angle on this modern Franco macaronic whadyawannacallit, its all too throwaway at the mo.

Thomp: an amazon UK search on that term turns up a whole bunch of books: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s?ie=UTF8&tag=firefox-uk-21&index=blended&link_code=qs&field-keywords=%26%2334%3Bwhere%20are%20the%20snows%20of%20yesteryear%26%2334%3B&sourceid=Mozilla-search

Tom Stoppard?

It also turns up this unlikely quote from something called 'Lovetown' by Michal Witowski: "My glory days are long over, my arse is even sagging. 0 where o where are the snows of yesteryear? Christ, what a fruity- pie! What a crazy dame!"

Finished Your Face Tomorrow: RIP Trish Keenan, Dwayne McDuffie, and Maybe Even You! - excellent, natch. Am also running through Marias' Written Lives, which is becoming one of those compulsive space-filler books I know backward and forward (SEE ALSO: Farber'sNegative Space; Wood's The Magician's Doubts; Nabokov's The Gift; various etcs.), but pick up every few months when there's nothing new immediately at hand.

Maybe some Dickens next?

'where are the snows of yesteryear', possibly even had an index entry for 'yesteryear, snows of' -- what the hell is this in it is driving me mad

― thomp, Wednesday, February 23, 2011 1:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

towards the end of troilus & criseyde chaucer has pandarus insist that t let c go and say 'farewell to all the snow of ferne yere' fwiw

snows of yesteryear is a v common phrase

towards the end of blade runner roy batty discusses things 'lost in time like tears in rain' fwiw

it is the will self book, i was looking in the index under 'snows' and 'yesteryear, snows of'; it's under 'ou sont les neiges d'antan'

Njal's Saga. Really good so far.

WITH SPOILERS

I finished Dark Star last night. I really enjoyed it but not as much as Night Soldiers, for two reasons:

• Szara's motives started to get away from me at the end, he does things which fit in with the genre but not necessarily with the set up. When, for example, SPOILER he shoots Maltsaev the sense of dread is immense, but his escape from that situation is relatively straightforward, which can only undermine what you've read a minute before;
• the dénouement is too long. Interesting as it is, from SPOILER release from the Gestapo it's a whole series of things that have to happen, absent a great deal of tension (though not merit) in order to get us to the conclusion he's chosen. It would've been better to leave him and us in some ambiguity I think.

Tea With Walter de la Mare - Russell Brain.

God he was a bore.

although lol

Edward Thomas once picked up a skull on the beach at Dunwich, where the sea was washing a churchyard away, and sent it to Walter de la Mare knowing he was interested in the morbid ('I can't think why they call it that').

somehow a v good example of the distinction between word weight and meaning which his poetry and prose subtly explores. almost feels like Wallace Stevens in a way, as I've said before probably.

lol

"I believe telepathy is almost continuous: if you and I were not in telepathic communication now, we couldn't carry on our conversation.

o rly.

return of the lolz -

He kept Moses in a Viennese cake-box

Queer fellow.

btw I do not understand your point about 'word weight and meaning', can only note that the Dunwich scene sounds rather proleptic of Sebald's Rings of Saturn.

snows of yesteryear is a v common phrase

The commonly accepted origin of this phrase is from Francois Villon's Ballad of Dead Ladies, where it forms part of the refrain. What I cannot tell you is who first translated Villon's Middle French into this particular phrase in English. That translator deserves a modicum of credit for the popularity of the phrase, too.

Daisy Miller by Henry James.

What next, James-wise?

Washington Square, if like me you like relatively shorter texts.

btw I do not understand your point about 'word weight and meaning', can only note that the Dunwich scene sounds rather proleptic of Sebald's Rings of Saturn.

sorry, a bit of a compressed version of what was in my head. for me (in football manager's parlance) 'morbid' is indicative of a preoccupation with death. its weight comes from its emotional associations with death. its meaning is its definition of being obsessed with death. wdlm indicates a fracture in that (as I think poetry often does generally and stevens frequently does specifically) by suggesting the associative weight of the word means it is not appropriate for how he feels about the skull.

technically his obsession with the skull is 'morbid', emotionally or associatively it is not the right word.

I hope that makes at least some sense. I'm a bit a-holed.

History of Dunwich in lit? Not sure. isn't it featured in the Jonathan Miller film of O Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad? d

Thanks for the tip, pinefox - I imagine I'll flip a coin between "The Turn Of The Screw" and Washington Square.

Washington Square, if like me you like relatively shorter texts
Or The Spoils of Poynton, ditto (tho Washington Square is also ace)

I think I would specifically recommend this volume of James:
http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-new-york-stories-of-henry-james/

- it includes Washington Square and a good deal more.

im reading henry james as well! portrait of a lady. im really liking it so far (only abt 100 pages in)

Read The Aspern Papers when in Venice last year and it was wonderful, a great balancing act between the wry humour and the high stakes emotion. Devastating ending - although I had an idea about how he could have handled it better. (The protagonist. Not James.)

The commonly accepted origin of this phrase is from Francois Villon's Ballad of Dead Ladies, where it forms part of the refrain. What I cannot tell you is who first translated Villon's Middle French into this particular phrase in English. That translator deserves a modicum of credit for the popularity of the phrase, too.

― Aimless, Saturday, February 26, 2011 5:07 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

dante gabriel rossetti. who coined 'yesteryear' in his translation, i believe. said translation is awful.

viz. he also coins 'mermaiden' as a version of 'mermaid' to rhyme with 'englishmen' and 'maine'

Great opening sentences in literary biography:

Samuel Ferguson is cited as one of the earliest writers to introduce the word "boomerang" into English.

-- Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement, by Peter Denman

Indeed.

Read in the past month:
Death on the Installment Plan (Céline)
Love in the Time of Cholera (Garcia Márquez)

Reading now:
Howards End (Forster)

Death on the Installment Plan is great!

Finishing off Njal's Saga and the bloodbath is kinda dizzying and (perhaps unintentionally) funny.

re: Céline — It was, but it's a brutal read. It seemed like the bleakness would never stop, and the ending is bittersweet (especially if you've read Journey to the End of the Night, which I assume is also semi-biographical and takes place after Death)

R K Narayan's autobiography, 'My Days', which is very funny and sweet, though with odd Conan Doyle-style spiritualist bits

Reading now:
Howards End (Forster)

Some of the best dialogue ever written. Plus, I adore Margaret.

'to each his own' - leonardo sciascia

nominally a detective story about a professor whose curiosity leads him down some unexpected paths while trying to solve the mystery of who killed a pair of local men while they were out hunting, one of whom was apparently in the wrong place at the wrong time. the style is rather detached and very matter-of-fact in the way it tells its tale of a community of people who are content to watch and gossip as the corrupt, evil mafia class does what it has to in order to be assured of its own security and happiness, and not to step in the way as innocents are caught up in its trap. the end of the second-to-last chapter is viciously direct. i do NOT recommend reading the introduction to this before reading the story itself, fwiw. it's good but not spoiler-free.

ha im reading the nyrb edition of 'that awful mess on the via merulana' atm but my attention keeps wandering

Am now half-way through Voyage Along The Horizon, because I apparently cannot keep away from Javier Marias. Being his second book, published when he was 21, it is considerably different from his work of the past few decades. Intermingling levels of fiction with the ghosts of Conrad and Henry James at his side, though don't quote me on that 'cause I ain't an authority. No Shakespearean-quotes-as-motifs here, at least as far as I can see.

i finished jennifer egan's The Keep and followed it up with her short story collection, Emerald City and am starting Invisible Circus - and i just put Look at Me in my amazon cart. kind of in love with this lady.

stuff from the sf poll thread

just read: Casares - The Invention of Morel

starting: Abbott - Flatland

next: Gibson - Neuromancer

i finished jennifer egan's The Keep and followed it up with her short story collection, Emerald City and am starting Invisible Circus - and i just put Look at Me in my amazon cart. kind of in love with this lady.

― just1n3, Friday, March 4, 2011 11:14 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

just1n3! haven't read Emerald City but i love all the rest of those books. look at me is my favorite, i think, though i just read goon squad and think it might be technically better. you're in for a treat.

and yeah i kind of want jennifer egan to be my friend

she is just so... great. no waffling, no wasted words. some of the stories in emerald city are a little predictable, but generally what i love about her stuff is that you just have no idea wheretf it's all going - the keep was a perfect, shining example of that. i want her to hurry up and write more stuff!

Lermontov - A Hero for our Time

ms Egan continues to sound like a must-read

I don't like Patti Smith, but
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/06/jennifer-egan-once-upon-a-life

just started reading andre gidé's "the immoralist"

just read: Casares - The Invention of Morel
What did you think?

Just finished Christopher Koch, The Year of Living Dangerously -- very good, though uses symbolism of Javanese shadow puppets as stand-in for Indonesian politics a bit too heavily

i got the the invention of morel for xmas but havent got around to it yet

Kafka America interesting coming of age or whatever trip about 16 year old German's adventures in Kafka's idea of the New world. Don't think he'd ever been outside of Europe & his Statue of Liberty wields a sword.

john dos Passos Three Soldiers
First world war novel about army recruits. Not read a great deal of it yet but it seems pretty good. Did want to bring USA back from London but it turned out too bulky.

Ronnie Wood autobio
bit confused at times. He claims to have been asked to join the New yardbirds who went onto be Led zeppelin, didn't take the job cos he didn't like Bonham or something and his place was taken by Jimmy page.
Veracity if this is an e.g? New yardbirds only New Yardbirds because they carried on from Jimmy Page incarnation of the old Yardbirds and he somehow got the name.
Otherwise somewhat interesting. Hadn't realised him & Rod were mates to that extent. Or that the Creation job came in a gap after he'd left the Jeff Beck Group & then he rejoined JBC afterwards.
It's no Keef Life but it'll do for the moment.

The Corner David Simon & Ed Burns
wanted to read this after seeing The Wire through last year. Interesting, shows some of the roots of ideas in that series. Now want to pick up Homicide which was around cheap a while back but now doesn't seem to be.
Do wonder if books like these are around cheap in record shops etc if they do actually wind up getting read by a lot of people. Or if they just get taken home, dipped into if that.

Naomi Klein Shock Doctrine
Interesting, full of material I should already be familiar with I think & subsequently feel ignorant on readuing.

Finished The Hobbit over a couple of days last week. Had had it sitting around the floor since picking it up in a charity shop last spring/early summer. I take it this was consciously less mature than Lord of The rings, since it does come across as more of a book to read to children etc. Could be that the reverse is true, that LOTR was made more mature, since written later?
started reading some Dark Reign comics since they've been on my hardrives for a while. Then read Area 52. Must progress to some Liefeld?

Could be that the reverse is true, that LOTR was made more mature, since written later?

Yes

Must progress to some Liefeld?

You can start here.

Must progress to some Liefeld?

You can start here.

yeah just read that yesterday, not really knowing who he was beforehand.
Guess I've probably read some of his stuff without noticing quite how bad it was. It's nice that he makes all the women into ballerinas innit?
I read the first part of Xenogenesis yesterday too & that is as bad as the cover on the thread indicates. What they've done to Emma Frost is sad, somebody's sex doll now?

I like the report on Ronald Wood's book!

He is definitely big pals with Rodney or Roderick Stewart.

I like the details about his failures of veracity.

Someone once told me that RW was the greatest musician in the history of the Stones.

Recently:

Reality and Dreams - Muriel Spark. Short, slight, idiosyncratic, entertaining.
Nemesis - Philip Roth. Decent, rather untypical. Novella length, broad strokes, plain style, and a bit like a fable or 40s movie - thoroughly decent people broken by awful circumstance.
James Wood - The Broken Estate.
War and Peace (re-read)
Nothing - Henry Green (re-read)
Juggling - Barbara Trapido. A conventional but highy entertaining first half following by a pretentious, mind-bogglingly bad second. I was skim-reading to get it over with long before the end. Very disappointing.
Just started The Hare with Amber Eyes, a Christmas present.

I liked Wood's good-natured bio better than Keef's, which I didn't finish. Still think Keef's the better musician though - Wood probably has more of what a music teacher might consider to be "musical talent", but Keef is the one who's been able to produce a significant body of work, both as composer and guitar stylist.

Alfred - surely everyone adores Margaret. But the treatment of Leonard Bast sours HE for me.

I see what you mean. But I also suspect I'm going to die from an identical accident to Bast's.

Don't spoil it, I'm not finished!

Bolano - Amulet. Love the rough quality of his writing.

Mishima - Forbidden Colours. Real lolz @ this. Like Bolano, any characters are just such blatant tools to tell his own crazeee truth. Love how he's just not interested as long as he's delivering blows.

Michael Wood ... Ron Wood ... James Wood

yes, could've used a little guide to that before i puzzled through those stones bio posts.

Michael Wood: sitar

Ron Wood: guitars

James Wood: drums

Elijah Wood: vocals

Accommodations provided by P.G. Wodehouse.

Howards End was great, definitely my favorite of the Forster I've read (Room with a View, Passage to India)

Now starting: Thomas Mann - Royal Highness

More Alan Furst:

• The Polish Officer finished on Tuesday (tight writing; ambiguous ending and loose ends left hanging throughout, I'm divided as to whether this is frustrating or welcome verisimilitude, tending slightly towards the former; some marvellous set pieces especially the sequences at Calais and Nieuwpoort; but lacking a little the suffocating dread of the first two books); then straight onto

• The World At Night (splendid opening, lovely to read a dinner party done well and without smug).

I'm so with you Ismael. Furst's books are wonderful.

As you walk along the pavement you look down through the railings into an area where steam issues from the ventilators and half-open top-lights of changing-rooms and kitchens; you hear the slam of large institutional cooking trays, the hiss of showers, the inane confidence of radio disc-jockeys. The ground floor has a severe manner, the Portland stone punctuated by green-painted metal-framed windows; but at the centre it gathers to a curvaceous, broken-pedimented doorway surmounted by two finely developed figures – one pensively Negroid, the other inspiredly Caucasian – who hold between them a banner with the device ‘Men Of All Nations’. Before answering this call, step across the street and look up at the floors above. You see more clearly that it is a steel-framed building, tarted up with niches and pilasters like some bald fact inexpertly disguised. At the far corner there is a tremendous heaving of cartouches and volutes crowned by a cupola like that of some immense Midland Bank. Finances and inspiration seem to have been exhausted by this, however, and alongside, above the main cornice of the building, rises a two-storey mansard attic, containing the cheap accommodation the Club provides in the cheapest possible form of building. On the little projecting dormers of the lower attic floor the occupants of the upper put our their bottles of milk to keep cool, or spread swimming things to dry, despite the danger of pigeons.

ps / I'm not usually in favour of more and more ilx threads, but - Spring Reading thread? Maybe I'll start it myself.

That's The Swimming Pool Library, pinefox? Nice quote, I quite fancy reading that now.

It is - ever read it before?

No, I googled a slice of that and it took me to this thesis - it wasn't totally clear which of the works it was from. The Line of Beauty is one of my favourite things ever though, so I fancy taking that on now.

They are quite similar; perhaps quite consciously so.

Like you, I greatly admire TLB. If you like the writing in that book, the writing in SPL should not be much of a let-down. He seems to have become pretty fully-formed as a writer by the time he wrote this - was 34 when it was published - and to have been very consistent as a stylist since.

As for the thesis: goodness me, an entire PhD!

I quite like this from Jarman on p.272:
"I wouldn‘t wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem, you could be unaware of it"

I loved Line of Beauty too, but found Swimming Pool a bit of a let-down, mainly because Hollinghurst was obviously so in love with his ultra-perfect gay ideal narrator that it really got on my nerves. The actual writing was lovely, though.

I think almost the reverse - that he's clearly far from perfect, he's appallingly irresponsible. Perhaps Hollinghurst indulges him (well, he narrates it so he indulges himself?), but I think we're meant to be infuriated or shocked by his behaviour. Then there is a kind of interesting ambiguity about how far he manages to learn and change from his experience; sometimes he seems to, but in the end, probably not so much.

But AH did move away from the 1st person and (did I read this?) I think he was trying to get away from the trap it had perhaps set him - that in writing an awful person he still had to do it all through that person.

To put it all another way, I partly agree with you cos the character IS irritating - but surely he's supposed to be.

spent my spring break finishing up collections by Edogawa Rampo, Shirley Jackson, Akutagawa, Tanizaki, and Ramsey Campbell, then starting Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles

To put it all another way, I partly agree with you cos the character IS irritating - but surely he's supposed to be.

Actually, that's probably true. But he was just SO irritating!