Spring will be a little late this year: what are you reading, Spring 2011?

I think it's about time!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZc3Dx-W794

I am rereading The Swimming Pool Library, in splashes.

The World At Night by Alan Furst - see every other post I write on here for my thoughts on this guy (I like him).

I was reading for the spec fic poll, but that went all over the shop: ended up finally reading The Kindness of Women by JG Ballard, really extraordinary - don't think I've read anything quite like it in its manoeuvres between fiction, biography & commentary on author's own fiction. Great ice-cold Ballard passages all over.

Winding the spec fic down now; just enjoying TH White, who's stood better than other things read in childhood (lists of odd words, all I really ask for); but getting back to reading Henry Fielding, via Pamela (came to it via Shamela, realised I'd never read the original), finding it v similar to Clarissa - compelling but annoying, boring but 'interesting', in the 'this paper explores' sense.

Reference books on the side: volumes of the Oxford History of English Literature. Yes, Wilson and Hunter, tell me about interludes, tell me everything about interludes.

Spec Fic Poll - is this another ILB thing?

I see these polls turn up here, then when I post to them, they vanish. Will they ever appear again?

Still reading Middlemarch and Barthes' Preparation of the Novel. I am finding Middlemarch really quite funny, much more wry than I had imagined Eliot. The Barthes book is a major contribution to his oeuvre I think - even though it's essentially his seminar notes. Came across this good piece on it in Frieze today: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/barthes-after-barthes

I think I need to read the RB myself, in an attempt to get a handle on some kind of theory of detail in the novel (ie objects, places, observations - beyond 'reality effect' which seems only a first stop to me) ... I imagine this comes up?

'Preparation of the Novel' is top on my list to read next! (after I've read 'To Kill a Mockingbird')

Thanks for that link Stevie T, looks like a great read!

Pinefox, the speculative fiction poll is a larger scale write-in thing:
▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪ ILX ALL TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION VOTING THREAD & MARGINALIA ▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■

I just sent in 25 titles!

babyfucker

finished:

terminal world - alastair reynolds (another stellar sci-fi novel from reynolds, steampunk-ish tale set on an unnamed future mars, an ending with multiple threads left hanging, and a rather touching group of interpersonal relationships sans any romance.)
zoo, or letters not about love - viktor shklovsky (an epistolary work stemming from shklovsky's correspondence with elsa triolet, with whom he was in love but it was not reciprocated. his letters are self-mockingly self-aware in their frustrated attempts at reaching her heart and hers are gentle rebuttals mixed in with what must have been dangling hooks of hope for shklovsky which likely made him even more frustrated. very funny, very interesting in a look at russian life in berlin in the early '20s esp in light of what followed over the next two plus decades, and the prefaces to many subsequent editions are moving as he looks back at the past.)
unseen - mari jungstedt (more excellent swedish crime fiction from a TV news reporter-turned-author. the last portion is a little too 'hollywood' in its "woman trapped in a killer's death bunker" climax but it's quite good overall nonetheless. it's another nordic novel of this genre obsessed with the past returning to haunt the present, much in line with 'faceless killers', 'echoes from the dead', and the arnaldur indridason that i've tackled.)

Where are you with the Fursts, omar?

The following evening, after an early swim, I went on east on the Central Line. The City had already evacuated, and though the train was crowded to Liverpool Street there was only a scattering of us left for Bethnal Green, Mile End and beyond. All the other people in my car – Indian women with carrier-bags, some beery labourers, a beautiful black boy in a track-suit – looked tired and habituated. When I got out at Mile End, though, other passengers got on, residents of an unknown area who used the Underground, just as I did, as a local service, commuting and shopping within the suburbs and rarely if ever going to the West End, which I visited daily. I felt more competent for my mobility, but also vaguely abashed as I came out into the unimpressionable streets of this strange neighbourhood.

you're farther along than i am, i'm into the polish officer. i'm trying to read them in some semblance of order. i own half a dozen of his works and plan on buying up the rest, i feel as though these will require a re-read or two.

The SPL, I'm reminded, is very sprawling and unresolved. Characters seem to turn up then not have their stories finished. I wonder if this was Hollinghurst's intent.

I looked out of the window
at the widening suburbs,
the housing estates,
the distant gasometers,
the mysterious empty
tracts of fenced-in
waste land, grass and
gravelly pools
and bursts of
purple foxgloves.

Hannu Rajaniemi: The Quantum Thief -- much-hyped Finnish (in English) author's devut spec fic novel, full of great ideas, fell apart a bit at the ending, though

Andy Warhol: America -- lots of his photos and fair few of his mostly fairly banal, though oddly enjoyable, thoughts. Some great pics, though. Best one, which I can't find online, is of Truman Capote soon after a facelift, with all these stitches and blood on his face, behind his ears, etc.

archy & mehitabel!

Harry Mathews - The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium.

Milan Kundera - The Joke. His first. No exercise in language here unless it offends the censor, that is.

John Bowen, The Centre of the Green - one of those quietly rather good middlebrow 1950s forogtten novels.

Love this bit with an old retired colonel tackling a "very long five-generation family chronicle set in a Yorkshire woollen town".

The Colonel did not intend to be defeated by a work of fiction, and having begun, persevered with it. "Going to take me a long time to get through, though," he said. "All this detail! What imaginations these chaps have, eh?"
"How far have you got?"
"Nineteen hundred and ten."
"Cheer up. You're bound to lose a lot of characters in the war."
"More chaps'll get born though," the Colonel said. "You see if they don't."

That's good indeed!

that reminds me an awful lot of brigadier pudding in 'gravity's rainbow':

It occurred to him to focus his hobby on the European balance of power, because of whose long pathology he had once labored, deeply all hope of waking lost, in the nightmare of Flanders. He started in on a mammoth work entitled Things That Can Happen in european Politics. Begin, of course, with England. "First," he wrote, "Bereshith, as it were: Ramsay MacDonald can die." By the time he went through resulting party alignments and possible permutations of cabinet posts, Ramsay MacDonald had died. "Never make it," he found himself muttering at the beginning of each day's work—"it's changing out from under me. Oh, dodgy—very dodgy."

Haha! OK, I need to finally get round to Gravity's Rainbow

That quote's great, James. I'm trying to get out of a slough of not reading by picking up Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers. Aside from anything else, it's feels like a really good, gossipy portrait of an advertising agency of the period. Good stuff.

I occasionally wonder at the great predominance of women golden period detective story writers. It would be lazy to say it's a gossipy streak, heaven knows men can be gossipy as any cliched spinster, but there does seem to be an eye for the telling detail. What do I mean, I ask myself? I guess a good detective story (of this period as I say) needs to have a lot of concrete detail in it, where the important mechanisms through which a murder happens (hat pin + false leg + illegitimate son, say) do not appear important - they are undifferentiated from the all the other details.

One of the reasons I think John Dickson Carr (the obvious odd man out) is so good (at his best) is that the concrete detail is used so well to produce an atmosphere of dread, fear, the supernatural, malevolence, so that his best work acquires the force of other genre types, less mechanical-seeming in their conception.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter the debut Dexter novel cos I found it for 50c in a charity shop yesterday.

A choice of various Rock bios. Maybe I want To Take You Higher cos of reading Sly threads recently.

Want to get Under a Hoodoo Moon cos I've meant to read it for about 15 years.

Still Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos, but this is in my shoulder bag so is mainly being read on the bus.

& The Corner by David Simon & Ed Burns. about 1/2 way through but it's my current lav book.

Haha! OK, I need to finally get round to Gravity's Rainbow

You really don't!

Did Britons in the eC20 even say 'dodgy'? Admittedly TP probably wouldn't have got this wrong, as I would never have guessed that Yanks in the late 1960s said it either.

Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang has "dodgy" dating from at least 1867!

Wasn't happy with the character in Tom McCarthy's C who used the word 'forensics' in the early 1900s for similar reasons. Maybe it came to them through the radioactive ether tho.

When you have a crack at an LRB you can make progress. I learned a bit from this:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n04/colin-burrow/sudden-elevations-of-mind

- material probably well-known to ILB FAP types.

Meanwhile, I really need to read this in full
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n03/brigid-brophy/james-joyce-and-the-readers-understanding
while wondering, but not too hard, who was Brigid Brophy?

I just re-read The great Gatsby, and before that I read Gifted by Patrick Evans. Nice read for NZ lit nerds.

forensic
"pertaining to or suitable for courts of law," 1650s, from L. forensis "of a forum, place of assembly," from forum "public place" (see forum). Used in sense of "pertaining to legal trials," as in forensic medicine (1845). Related: Forensical (1580s).

Ulysses, for my dissertation. Eeek!

You're in luck -- Colin MacCabe's work now allows it to be read

Thanks thomp. I had a look on the OED (I think that's the citation you've got there? It was the use of it (iirc) as some sort of CSI thing - oh actually I've it to hand, see what you think:

"Wow, you really are forensic," Serge says, looking at a photograph pasted beside the diagram, confirming the positions, indicated by the latter, in which objects have been found.

xxxp
That was a good article on the lives, but damn, poor Yale. Edition pretty much dismissed in last couple of pars. Bad timing with its release I guess; Lonsdale's masterwork still recent (& Lonsdale now v ill iirc)

& xp,

yes, I think that bothered me. I think it still had its 'to do with courts and trials' meaning, not our transferred fussy-science-detection meaning, which that implies.

Now that Colin MacCabe's work allows Ulysses to be read, you can also get some zany views of it here, in an article that I think quite famous that I've just read for the first time:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n15/william-empson/the-ultimate-novel

No letters after that one, to my surprise, but one thing the LRB archive shows is how very tartly ill-tempered and extensive the correspondence used to be.

Curious in the Johnson review, how he explicates the Lives book but then suddenly dashes the aspirations of that edition in the last 2 paras.

& xp,

yes, I think that bothered me. I think it still had its 'to do with courts and trials' meaning, not our transferred fussy-science-detection meaning, which that implies.

I think current meaning derives through usage in terms of original meaning. The science bit has to do with proof for criminal prosecution etc

Incredibly, Empson's review has a second half - another 9,000 words!
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n16/william-empson/the-ultimate-novel

How the LRB used to do things.

xxp
It does look like he just had some things to say about the Lives, which is fine, since that's what LRB essays are for often enough. I guess he wanted to shove the unpleasant business of knocking the edition into a small space at the end.

& re forensic, yes, that progress is pretty clear.

Just finished The World At Night, which is the best one so far (and also the one where least happens).

But disaster! I ordered the next four last week, none have yet arrived. I may take a dip in The Swimming Pool Library this evening, just to tide me over.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n22/sean-ofaolain/the-mole-on-joyces-breast

The things the LRB used to publish - this is perhaps the oddest I've yet seen.

I am reading There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America. It's a good book to read when I want to fall asleep.

I want to read the new Salinger bio and Open City by Teju Cole, but my library stopped buying books and I am out of the habit of buying them.

Anticipating The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (April 15).

I vaguely remember Brigid Brophy as a writer of short, sexy, creepy novels... this may be incorrect

Read an awful, awful novella by Christopher Fowler called 'Breathe', since I enjoyed a book of his short stories years and years ago. This was shit, though, bad Hollywood B-movie on the page.

Now reading Gay Telese: 'Frank Sinatra has a cold and other essays' -- much more the thing. Even the several boxing essays are fascinating, and I'm without any interest in boxing

the only brophy i've read was some cheap looking late sixties/early seventies critical work on aubrey beardsley (picked it up cause there were a few reproductions of his work in there i wasn't familiar with), but i associate her with virago press for some reason, sure i've seen some her novels around second hand in the telltale green covers.

last read: a not very illuminating aleister crowley biography by frances king (cool pictures, though).

currently reading: evil london by peter aykroyd (and based on this and a collection of his essays/reviews/stories i read years ago, really don't like his writing) as well as whitney chadwick's women, art, and society.

^ackroyd, even.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, multi-faceted look at Trujillo's dictatorship in the D.R., great. esp. since I was reading it as events unfolded in Egypt/Libya.

just finished Nicholas Shakespeare's bio of Bruce Chatwin, in preparation for BC's Letters which I have reserved at the library. always been intrigued by Chatwin: for his storytelling voice, singular mix of fiction/non techniques and extravagant self-invented persona. an interesting guy and also totally insufferable from all reports.

next up is Llosa's The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

(re)read a martin beck, and finally got around to reading lud-in-the-mist, and going slowly through the first of doris lessing's space operas, which i can't decide if i like it or if it is awful or both. and will probably drop that, this weekend, to read 'a visit from the goon squad'. also i read another couple chapters of 'the man without qualities', i will finish that book in my twenties yet.

i think w + gr are right about forensic, but if that's the worst thing proofreaders missed they did a p good job, yanno

Oh yeah, it just set my nose twitching is all. Glad you mentioned Lud-in-the-Mist as I've been meaning to read that for a while, but hadn't put it on my reading list. Couple of things popped up in last night's FAP - Patrick White is going to be something I'm keen to pick up soon.

an interesting guy and also totally insufferable from all reports.

The letters are out. I was just reading a review.

Just for a change of pace, I 've been reading the PowerBASIC Console Compiler for Windows Instruction Manual. Believe me, guys, version 5.5 is here and it going to be huge!*

*among users of PBCC

i'm reading…

'walden'
jeremiah and ezekiel
lots of books on stanley cavell
'the return of the native'

it's been a long time since i read any of the bible, especially the most retrograde parts. it's weird how explicit it gets when god hauls out the ol whore metaphors to accuse israel of seeing other gods.

Ah, I did forget last night but now I can mention my favourite bit of correspondence in the LRB archive is on Paul De Man.

The link above has this 'gem':

David Bromwich’s piece on Paul de Man (LRB, 7 October) was the best ever written on the subject, but Bromwich omitted one of the crucial factors in the rise of de Man’s reputation. Much of the academic worship of de Man resulted from the fact that he was, in the most precise sense of the word, a mind-fucker.

I knew many of his victims among the female graduate students at Yale. De Man seduced their psyches with a tenacity more rapacious than any his less imaginative colleagues used in trying to possess their bodies. When he told the women in his seminar they would not make the ‘bourgeois errors’ about literature that were made in every other seminar, he thrilled them with the promise of escape from their conventional families.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v13/n08/claude-rawson/old-literature-and-its-enemies

^ this one has a letter from a former ilxor, using a pseudonym. v good.

It does look like he just had some things to say about the Lives, which is fine, since that's what LRB essays are for often enough. I guess he wanted to shove the unpleasant business of knocking the edition into a small space at the end.

Colin Burrow does 'the slamming at the end' often enough, btw. In the archive there is a brilliant article on Boccaccio, but he does knock off the translation that gave rise to that review in the first place.

I was spending time with the fictions of Bruno Schulz today. Just what I needed after 4 hours sleep last night. So much...flair, I guess. And he's got a dad problem. You can just tell.

I read Cynthia Ozick's 'The Messiah of Stockholm' a little while ago, about a book reviewer with a huge dad problem of his own--he's convinced his father is Bruno Schulz -- and then he meets a woman claiming to be Schulz's daughter, who says she has the manuscript of his missing 3rd book. Very good.

^ this one has a letter from a former ilxor, using a pseudonym. v good.

I remember "Hopey Glass"'s pieces in The Wire in the early 90s. Void of any particular knowledge of their ostensible subject matter, they annoyed me until I realized that "Hopey Glass" wasn't a sham: she simply didn't care. The editor was to blame, or else I was. I relaxed into a spectator's appreciation of her performances. As with that letter, their subject was their author and their purpose was writing.

Ishiguro, The Unconsoled. It alternates between weirdly compelling and a total slog. The first scene with Sophie is amazing though, terrifyingly congruent with real life.

don't know who the former ilxor is but his / her letter to the LRB is pretty pish-weak.

I find it hard to regard such reductive point-scoring as a contribution to the ‘serious debate’ he professes to desire. His latest reflections appear in a ‘Bardbiz’ letter (I try not to read these, but, in the immortal words of the late Dr Leavis, someone told me about it), just as his previous reply to me did more than a little Bardbizness on the side. I look forward to the day when a single letter from Mr Sinfield will cover all the topics on your Letter page, past, present and future. You could then reprint it in every issue.

You guys are this worried about free Speech? Come out of your security-zone laagers for a change, and engage with the actual violent post-modern world. Where the real threat to local truth and civic well-being is the LAPD: and the assault on global ditto is directed by that Mr Bush. Higher Learning mostly just hides away when these topics turn up – when it isn’t colluding. Literature, if still alive, has not yet deigned to help. We get our news from RoboCop and Ice Cube. -- Hopey Glass, University of California, Los Angeles

ali i am confused: i thought 'hopey' WAS the editor of the wire in the early 90s

kind of sounds like jane dark to me.

what's with rawson's last bit—'i wish hopey would write more'?

ali i am confused: i thought 'hopey' WAS the editor of the wire in the early 90s

It's a pseudonym of Mark Sinker?! It was I who was confused. "The editor was to blame" was truer than I knew, then.

Just finished Augustus Carp, Esq.. One of the funniest books ever.

'the fruit hunters' by adam gollner, super enjoyable non-fiction book abt (obv) crazy fruit ppl.

A Journey Through Ruins (specifically London's) - Patrick Wright. Written at the end of the '80s beginning of the '90s, and as the end of Thatcherism is the core of the book, it's salutary to read in light of the repeating policy direction that we're getting today: things like the 'active citizens', the removal of funding from local voluntary organisations, the closing libraries, and how blitz spirit mutates from a sense of community that gave birth to the welfare state to a form of community where independence from the state and self-reliance in the face of ill-fortune without the help of the state.

One minor point - a forgotten writer of the '40s and '50s, John Lodgwick, is mentioned as possibly ripe for revival out of the second-hand bookshop bargain buckets. Did this ever happen? Anyone read any? i haven't heard of him certainly.

Juggling several. Going through the Love & Rockets box set. Murakami's After the Quake collection, not because of recent events, but the timing is pretty wild. Also, Big World, and excellent and moving little collection of short stories by Mary Miller from Hattiesburg, Miss. In the notes she thanks "Rick" Barthelme, who, I believe, still teaches at USM there. His influence is definitely there, and I'm a sucker for it.

<a ref="http://www.taharbenjelloun.org/index.php?id=4&L=0&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=207&cHash=eaabbfc8bd1a8b92a0b0a534a8ec9ca2">Lettre à Eugène Delacroix - Tahar Ben Jalloun</a>

Oh, bugger...

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell. I like it; seems like the most straightforward, or traditional-type novels of the ones of his I've read

Finished Bruno Schulz and what started as really quite a strong collection of stories fizzled out. Its like he had a way overactive imagination with nothing to anchor it to. To carry on the theme (from another thread) about what books should you read and when -- this would have been great 10 years ago, but now, just not so much.

All confirmed when I picked up The Business of Living by Cesare Pavese. Its a set of diaries posthumously published after he committed suicide. No surprise there as he actively thought and scrutinized and developed his thoughts and desires to kill himself for over 15 years (and probably more, but not published here) before actually doing it. But beyond the hatred for himself and the women in his life what makes this are his thoughts on his own poetry, on writing (only 1/3 through but he doesn't dig experimental writing at all, but he's actually interesting with that), and on 'the business of living' and what that means. A great, great book.

Also an amazing book to read in the spring sunshine. Don't know why.

gonna start Middlemarch in the next day or two.
I'm finishing up Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift." It's really knocking me out. So far it's way better than "Herzog," which I thought was overrated although I can see why other folks are so crazy about it.
And I finished "The Moonstone" (Wilkie Collins) last week. Really enjoyable, surprisingly modern, and kind of edgy, especially in how it questioned colonialism and imperialism. It's seen as the first detective novel btw.

Wilkie Collins's 'The Woman in White' is even better. Don't let its LlloydWrbberisation turn you off!

Yes! I'll definitely get to "Woman in White" at some point (which wikipedia says is actually the first detective novel.)

aha! by an odd coincidence, I have just started Wilkie Collins' "Woman In White". We are reading it for my book club. Thus far it seems to be amazingly good.

Lady chatterly's lover.

Except spelled correctly.

Bought four books as I have finally got in a reading mood again. It's kind of exhilirating! Or however you spell it. Every day I've gone to the park and read 50 pages of something.

Today it was Perks of Being a Wallflower.

It's great when you feel your reading sap rising. I've had an extraordinarily fallow period recently, but am getting back into things, got some good stuff lined up (Ballard, Patrick Wright, thanks ilb) plus The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, and going to dig a bit deeper into Walter de la Mare.

It is in part due to i. anti-depressants kicking in and ii. finally finishing my rfk biography that i thought was huge, only to find out that half of it was source notes etc. and that i don't have to spend forever not finishing things - they do end! although poor rfk *spoiler* also had an abrupt end.

i'm trying to finish off Fisk's The Great War For Civilization before biking season starts (since i'm taking transit to work over the winter). don't think i'm going to be able to pull it off tho!

The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Let me know how that one turns out.

Finishing off Pavese, onto Sciascia's Equal Danger.

*spoiler*

heh heh heh. The reading sap rising is great, yes. I've recently come to thinking of reading as less something to do, and more somewhere to go - I'm absolutely dying to open them up and take a trip.

going to dig a bit deeper into Walter de la Mare

is this the archetypal Gamaliel reading project - almost as self-parodic as me saying I think I'll give Ulysses another go?

I'd like to feel those things about the sap rising, but I almost never do. One of the last times I can remember reading a lot of books in a row was summer 2003 when I sat outside in my garden and read Proust, Morley, Pynchon, Eagleton and Roy Foster - whole books except that I was only reading sections of Foster I suppose.

Though last September when I read Kelman and Mitchell was quite a good bout, and xmas with Alasdair Gray, Arthur C. Clarke, Hazlitt et al.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3172/2975540567_db1bf7be39.jpg

that's where I read those books that summer.

that's a funny-looking (and funny-leaning) garden.

well, that is the block where I lived - the garden in question is the green grass in front of it and there's a fair amount more of that than the picture shows.

Here is a winter view from my window in those days:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2019/2403489911_de77342a49.jpg

under the tree on the left is roughly where I did all that reading I was on about.

is this the archetypal Gamaliel reading project - almost as self-parodic as me saying I think I'll give Ulysses another go?

Yes! Although they have been known to bear fruit, they're more an attempt to give some sort of direction and core to my reading. If I'm buzzing like a moth around a subject with attendant biographies, primary, secondary texts, historical context etc, I feel less bad about the incoherence of the rest of my reading, and can quite happily have all manner of disconnected stuff running alongside my 'project'. (Reminded of James Morrison's Colonel).

Nice tree btw.

recently read for the sf poll:

Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
Gibson - Neuromancer
Lethem - Gun, With Occasional Music
Lem - Solaris

currently reading Eddie Campbell's Alec collection and starting Dickens's Bleak House. i've never finished a dickens book but i've been doing well with finishing books recently, so i have a chance.

currently reading Eddie Campbell's Alec collection

First time? Or just the first time reading them all? If the former, I'm envious.

Equal Danger is one of Sciascia's best. Judges murdered, but by whom; and the hero becomes an anti-hero, or does he? Cracking stuff, and a really macabre game.

The way Sciascia writes in these concentrated phrases that leave many more questions than answers really suits the kind of tales he wants to tell. Its not giving away too much when I say that questions are all you'll be left with.

Nadeszha Mandelastam - Hope against Hope. GOOD quote by Brodsky on the back of it, promising a lot: "These two volumes [see also Hope Abandoned) amount to a Day of Judgement for her age and for its literature"

Nearly followed Sciascia w/Moravia's Boredom but I thought its enough Italian alienation for the week. Instead opting for state prisons instead of self-inflicted prisons.

First time? Or just the first time reading them all? If the former, I'm envious.

first time. didn't even know about them until last year.

It's spring break, so I finally got off the treadmill long enough to do a bit more reading. I'm about 2/3 through Alan Watts's autobiography In My Own Way. I can't say it's a great book, because AW was not a great man or a great writer, but like most autobios, it reveals more about him than the author knew he was revealing, and so it is interesting in that aspect.

I have returned to Barry Davies. Every page makes me want to exclaim that this must be the greatest book about sport ever written. It feels like one of the most continually enthralling volumes I have ever picked up.

‎'It was a rather extreme example of the need to be "on your toes" when working with Johnny Mac. In a rain interval two years ago he told me that I was one of not many who listened to him. "A big part of my job", I said, "is to query, sometimes to learn, and to lead sometimes".'

i've never felt as sorry for a character as i did for the poor professor in sciascia's 'to each his own.'

still on the mystery fiction kick but needed a break from the snowy swedes, so i'm currently tackling a very good crime thriller by spanish author alicia gimenez-bartlett, 'death rites.' it involves an amusingly prickly female inspector who is handed a serial rape investigation and partnered up with a middle-aged sergeant who is alternately glum and ingratiatingly upbeat. both are outcasts in the department and face disrespect at every turn and start off despising each other but become friends as their respective problems and mutual desire to see justice done bring them closer together. surprisingly funny and unusual, though the translation leaves a little bit to be desired.

Should re-read that. Sciascia is quite depressing but I don't think he means to be.

Little detour before the Mandelstam...

Bolano - Monsieur Pain. That was quite a coincidence as Bolano's novella seems to be partly based on Cesar Vallejo's wife's memoirs (?!) All of these short ones really add up when you've read together, and its odd there is so little of his poetry in his novels, preferring instead to talk and obsess about poets and carve them into these mythical figures.

Its slightness should annoy me far more than it does - but its the way he can tell a story that has a kick to it.

Donald Westlake - Memory : really good
Georges Perec: The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise : pretty good, but it wears thin after a while (fortnately it's only 80 pages) - the first book I can remember where the introduction by the translator describes it as unreadable
Frigyes Karinthy: Please, Sir! -- very funny school-days send-up

Keep it up with the Sciascia recommendations; I just finished The Wine Dark Sea and was intrigued.

I'm a little stuck in reader's block again so I went to my go-to, Agatha Christie. It's Endless Night and it's not her best. Or, perhaps it just doesn't follow her regular formula and I'm a bit put out by that.

Wilkie Collins' "The Woman In White" really is turning into the best book ever.

<3 Wilkie Collins!

Just borrowed Seize the Day by Bellow from a friend...looks like a nice satisfying read in between my uni texts.

Wilkie Collins' "The Woman In White" really is turning into the best book ever.

LOVE the way Maryanne is introduced.

Marian, I mean

looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!

"'dayum', i mean"

patrick white's 'riders in the chariot'
steven erikson's 'the crippled god'

getting exhausted by both, for different reasons

Jennifer Egan "Goon Squad". Thought it might be a bit hipsterish for me but not at all. Brilliant.

Henry Green "Loving" (reread). Also brilliant.

Ruth Rendell - "A Judgement in Stone". This was surprisingly bad. Some folk might think picking on a pop-thriller writer for lack of literary quality is missing the point, but RR has plenty of high-end admirers. I dimly remember reading her before and thinking she was ok, she comes across well in interviews, and the consensus is this is her best, so my expectations were pretty high. I found it stylistically pedestrian and her study of a woman imprisoned by her illiteracy ludicrously unconvincing. The book is full of shallow snobbery, intellectual and social.

I started re-reading "On Beauty" (Zadie Smith), got intrigued by the Howard's End parallels and am now re-reading both in tandem.

(Woman in White)
James - that bit where Marian is introduced reminds me of those Warner Brothers cartoons where some lady is introduced by raising a blind, so you see her saucy figure and only at the end realise that she has the head of a dog (possibly literally in the Warner Brothers case).

For all the narrator's comments on her face, Marian is clearly hawt.

I stayed up too late finishing The Swimming Pool Library last night. Really very good indeed - the twist is exquisitely done, and the whole unravelling afterwards is so neat and comprehensive I'm full of admiration. Highly skilled stuff.

(possibly literally in the Warner Brothers case)

In one cartoon the wolf served a jail term, then got out and looked up Little Red Riding Hood, with results like in Wilkie Collins. Maybe that's where they got the idea.

Ha ha! Definitely with you on Marian's hotness. One of the best C19 heroines. She was based on George Eliot, if I remember right.

I am surprised at how few film or TV adaptations of TWIW there are, though they always seem to make sure to cast a hottie as Marian.

Anyone read any Joseph Boyden? A friend recommended Three Day Road, it sounds pretty good.

Oh, nevermind:

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John Skelton. Didn't much like him when I was 20, turns out I was an idiot, as per. 'Speke, Parrot' the most enjoyable dive into the canon I've had in ages.

Finished Nadeszha Mandelstam this afternoon: there is a whole world in this book. In a sense its like non-fictional Kafka in that she is v clinical in her descriptions of the utter crazyness of that time. And I don't think I came across a single exclamation mark in the entire book, and some question marks but not as many.

In the end the book doesn't bother to ask questions, as no one will bother to get any answers for her.

I think its that restraint that is so winning here. But she never invites pity and is so eloquent throughout. She must have had an amazing memory, too, given that so many papers must have been destroyed before she finally had enough of a break to compose the book (although I am only inferring the conditions of its writing).

I am going to hunt down some of Osip's poetry, as well as Vallejo's.

In the meantime: Machado de Assis - Epitaph for a Small Winner. Most 'modern' written 19th century book since I read Balzac a while ago?

Congrats on discovering the pleasures of Skelton, as he is fairly well-hidden from view at this point. I imagine him as a fiercely proud and intelligent man, with more than a pinch of the fop and the sublime fool added in, for color and interest.

Back to Furst for me - Red Gold, #5 in the series now. I can't recall having done this before, attacking a single author with such gusto.

It actually feels a little thin, after the literary density of The Swimming Pool Library, but I will adapt. There's a reflection/action payoff in fiction, I've decided - both authors occupy a good place on that spectrum.

Belated illustration of a post above:

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5306/5581326219_ab67c99cc7.jpg

Trudging through "Middlemarch." Hoping the second half doesn't suck as bad as the first.

Just started The Learners, that Chip Kidd book that was mentioned a wee bit back. Kidd remains decidedly pleasant as a writer - every few pages there will be some bit of detail or tone that will scream out "fake!", but he manages to be fun and clever on the whole.

Jim Thompson: The Golden Gizmo -- demented fun. Semi-psychic protgonist, talking dog, stolen gold -- much more unhinged than his usual murky black comedies

Karin Michaelis: The Dangerous Age -- more excellent circa-1900 feminist Scandinavian fiction, see also Amalie Skram

Dezso Kosztolanyi: Kornel Esti -- beautiful Hungarian novel in short stories

Jim Thompson: The Golden Gizmo -- demented fun. Semi-psychic protgonist, talking dog, stolen gold -- much more unhinged than his usual murky black comedies

Well, now I need to read this. Convergences - your sudden mention and my recent reading of Geoffrey O'Brien's mini-essay on Thompson in Hardboiled America. Plus: "Golden Gizmo" is a phrase which demands my attention.

Trudging through "Middlemarch." Hoping the second half doesn't suck as bad as the first.

!

I think I might be reading this soon. I hope I enjoy it more.

I need to be hurtling back into Pale Fire.

Trudging through "Middlemarch." Hoping the second half doesn't suck as bad as the first.

Can't understand this reaction, to be honest, but if that's how you feel I very much doubt the second half will be much different from the first

Story changes somewhat
Writing stays the same?

Eh, maybe I judged Middlemarch a little too harshly. I guess I was grumpy a few days ago. I'm liking it better (about 2/3 through now) but still not thrilled by it. The first 200 pages or so were rough. But I'm trying to subordinate myself to the book now. That's helping.

John Lewis Gaddis - The Cold War
Roberto Bolaño - The Insufferable Gaucho
Frank O'Hara - Selected Poems

Frank O'Hara - Selected Poems

^^ yeah i'm leafing through this, also. love ave maria, still working up to second avenue, can't stop myself plumping for short entries, even with books of poetry.

just finishing hate: a romance by tristan garcia, and trying to line up something to jump into straight after, finishing two books in a row offering a momentum i haven't felt for a long while. maybe that darcy o'brien NYRB thing, maybe the new jennifer egan.

Woolf - Mrs Dalloway. On a first read I really picked up on the London aspect, and the WWI experience and her descriptions of shattered minds.

Onto Hubert Selby Jr. - The Willow Tree.

Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets by Stephen Crane - Halfway through. I'm kinda indifferent to the "look upon ye poor, miserable wretches!" bits, i.e. 95% of the book, but there's a splendid three-page scene where Crane describes a vaudeville-type show and the audiences reaction and semi-submission to melodrama. Yeah - that's great.

Just finished Mrs Dalloway and was surprised how much I'd liked it! There are some terrific, terrific moments in the party scene at the end. Now want to read Orlando and the Waves but am first gonna read Genet's Our Lady of Flowers...

Giving up on Mann's Royal Highness — dunno if it's the actual work or the translation, but it's just so damn boring. Starting Andrei Bely's Petersburg.

Also going to try a new strategy — designate Saturday as the day where go to the library and read one full book in one sitting. I did it once with Gide's L'Immoralist a few years ago. The day and the novel are both very distinct in my mind.

Wish I had read Mrs Dalloway before The Waves as I couldn't really get on with the latter. Yes I really liked the party scene.

Forgot to put The Willow Tree in my bag so its Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude instead. Probably avoided this because it was so admired and thought it couldn't possibly live up to the billing and I read Autumn of the Patriarch before which wasn't all that (kinda hard to not do that much with dictators, I reckon, but marquez managed to do that).

But this is truly awesome so far. Hadn't got that feeling of excitement from the first 15 pages in a book since, well, Proust. A triumph for the translation as much as the author, I reckon.

Great idea, Corey!

Mrs Dalloway strikes me as one of the great English works of art, before McCartney.

The Waves was hard going at first but it came to move me greatly.

Currently reading Rousseau's Confessions. Found the first few hundred pages pretty riveting, largely due to his apparent guilessness. Unfortunately the second half of the book is turning into an increasingly self-pitying and pedantic whine. Paranoid artists are usually hugely entertaining, but Jean Jacques is becoming a bit of a bore. Will probably read Cellini's Autobiography next.

Anyone read any Joseph Boyden? A friend recommended Three Day Road, it sounds pretty good.

― adult music person (Jordan), Thursday, 31 March 2011 18:30 (1 week ago)

I enjoyed Three Day Road, and its sequel, quite a lot. Boyden seems like a talented dude.

zuleika, is the breaking point right where he had originally projected completion, before later deciding that he had to continue accounting for his life up to the present?

the other day i read stephen mulhall, 'faith and reason', an out-of-print little introy book on just what it says which is really a very quick reading of kierkegaard juxtaposed to standard interpretations of the ontological, cosmological, and design arguments for the existence of god and then re-interpretations of them in light of the kierkegaard reading. i've never made a lot of progress with secondary sources on kierkegaard but this one was very compelling, and it also made me feel like i understand something about religion in philosophy.

now i'm rereading some schopenhauer, which is better than last time since i've reread heidegger in the meantime and have been thinking a lot about skepticism and embodiment and emotions and such.

and a little john berryman.

took Joshua Ferris, THEN WE CAME TO THE END out of my soon-closing library

it's another of those corporate satire numbers that we talked about a lot at the last ILB FAP

though long, it's quite quick and easy to read, which is more than I can say about some books.

I picked up a cheapie paperback copy of Stuart Gilbert's study of Ulysses and started on it last night.

Unfortunately, my lackadaisical barely-reading anything streak is intact. This will change, I hope, when I no longer have to go to bed at 9:30 and waken at 5:15. I've got a ton of good reading just hanging around waiting for my interest to perk up.

You sound Aimless.

Gilbert's book is of historical interest, and maybe more. I mean, a) maybe it can really tell us truths about Ulysses, and b) maybe it's somehow good in its own right.

He had an idea that Ulysses was about the circulation of matter around the universe, which seems plausible in a sense; he also said this was (deliberately) connected to Eastern mysticism, which seems less likely and something that Joyce told him (for a joke? to appear erudite? to please Gilbert? to start another hare running?).

I quite like the fact that very early on he says that JJ was shaped by the writers of the fin de siecle.

as signalled on this week's popular speculative fiction poll, i'm about to start a dystopian wander through brave new world, fahrenheit 451, a clockwork orange & slaughterhouse 5

pinefox, I'd be interested to know which, if any, books on Ulysses you would recommend as particularly keen and insighful. Otherwise, I must wait for your own book on the subject.

My answers would not be very original or distinctive. The best I have ever read, almost certainly, is Hugh Kenner's _Ulysses_ (1980). I think of that as virtually a model of literary criticism.

Kenner's earlier _Joyce's Voices_ is also good but not focused on Ulysses. His excellent chapter in _The Stoic Comedians_ is. Fritz Senn's numerous essays were very good when he was at his peak, see a collection like _Joycean Dislocutions_ for them. This is textual stuff, close reading.

The best account of the political reading of Joyce, for anyone that wants to go that way, is Andrew Gibson, _Joyce's Revenge_.

A spirited contextualization of Joyce in Irish history can be found in the work of Declan Kiberd, eg _Inventing Ireland_, though his whole book on Ulysses is sadly rather unreliable - he's better at the general sweep than the particular text, I suppose.

Of course many many other people have had their say, including many I have not read.

I went straight to my local library system web site to look for the Kenner book. They do not have it. Will poke around at Powell's for it. I, too, admire what I've read of Kenner's work (mainly The Pound Era, which touches on Joyce, but briefly).

took Joshua Ferris, THEN WE CAME TO THE END out of my soon-closing library

v much a poor man's americana, by delillo, imo

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wgyxAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA1&img=1&pgis=1&dq=came+to+the+end&sig=ACfU3U35S5vldK5Rrx4F0j-nFPSf-7XUEg&edge=0

sad about your library closing.

i just picked up a heart so white by marias, and am going to give it a shot, seeing if i can stick it out without getting impatient and starting the pale king; i always thought i'd get distracted reading JM, that it would be too sober?, maybe?, never having ready any, i don't know why.. but i read the first few pages, pages that brief searching on here tells me have suckered a few into reading it.

Just read Marias' Bad Nature, Or With Elvis In Mexico, as well. Very tight little tale.

It's weird, because Americana is the only DeLillo I've read and really disliked (though I haven't read the most recent couple), and I really enjoyed Ferris's book

Ferris's book seems quite enjoyable!
Wish it wasn't so long, then I'd be confident of finishing it.

I am finding Zamyatin's We difficult to read because either the author or the translator knew jack shit about math. For example:

- the imaginary number i is called an irrational number. it is not -- only real numbers can be irrational.

- the narrator speaks of equations being complicated because they involve transcendental numbers. anything with pi in it is transcendental, and that's high school math.

- "quadrilateral" is used to mean "square", instead of any 4-sided shape.

- "the denominator of the fraction of happiness is brought to zero and the fraction is transformed into a glorious infinity". fractions can't have zero as a denominator by the definition of "fraction".

This is all in the first 30 pages. I want to turn my mind off to this stuff, but it's hard for a math major.

Bought Ham on Rye for 50p. Buckowski is such fun pulp.

also re Ferris: apart from one sentence, does it resemble DeLillo's book? The writing doesn't seem like DeLillo. The whole thing is more like The Office: An American Workplace than most fiction I can think of (though Bracewell's Perfect Tense would be a UK echo).

Perfect Tense definitely. Americana, not like at all, really.

Read The Kindness of Women by JG Ballard, rec'd up thread by woof. Very good indeed. The first half seems more pertinent to the subject matter of the title - each chapter tends to focus around a specific woman, each one a generous tribute to each's specific nature and how they helped shape his biographical climacterics.

There are remarkable set pieces - a bombing of Shanghai, a Chinese railway station execution, aeroplane sequences, sex forensically treated, all tending to have that cold Ballardian feel of sensory distance and mental or spiritual abstraction. To me this partly came across as a childish lack of affect, or maybe polymorphous affect, and two or three times Ballard talks about how he hasn't really grown up, which made sense to me, so there's a further sense that the kindness of women has allowed his specific imagination to flourish. I wondered further whether all imagination is childish - although there's both an affirmation and a refutation of that in a conversation JGB has where someone says he must have a vivid imagination and he replies that reality is vivid enough. Is this the perpetuation of the world as a fairy tale? (And like fairy tales full of sex and death?) Well, these things seem to be in the air of the book.

The second half becomes more focused (in a way that feels slightly less focused) on what I guess might be called The Demands of Men - their obsessions, fears, sexual and psychic mortality. Women are still significant, but there's a sense of them being the victims of men, in fact Ballard worries about whether all his acquaintances have been damaged by his psychic and personal obsessions.

The women prevail against these destructive and dangerous forces by and large, the men do not.

Have there been books explicitly about the kindness of women before this? I found myself wondering how on earth no book had been called this before, with the same subject matter. It's often unaffectedly touching and has some great typically Ballardian writing in as well.

Oh, also reading Tyneham: The Village that Died for England by Patrick Wright. Like his book about East London, he looks at how a specific place is fought over in terms of physical space but also political and social needs, power games etc, as well as digging deep into a specific place can tell us something about the country as a whole. It's good, and there's plenty of intellectual meat, and what I guess might be termed gazetteer local detail.

I'm not sure the way he binds the two always quite works thouogh.

Each chapter being fairly well focused on a specific moment or ideological struggle, and this is then filled with quite a lot of detail, so that it can feel a little rambly, which is part of its virtue, but also made it a little difficult for me to focus at times, and I occasionally asking myself the deadly question 'Why am I reading this again?' I guess there's a lack of an overarching argument, but then that's something he's trying to avoid anyway, so this isn't really a criticism other than it making slightly hard for me to read at times.

Going through Louis MacNeice's poems on the tube this morning. Ten Burnt Offerings. I like the historical dissection in this (Elizabethan England = 'staged revolt upon a tightrope'), but was finding the prophetic/riddling feeling to some of the verses (the quatrains mainly) slightly off-putting. Although I was just trying to find a verse that exemplified what I mean, and none of them quite did so, seeming more lucid right now than on the train this morning.

Perfect Tense definitely. Americana, not like at all, really.

it's more the kind of beguiling, hazy take on working life that makes them similar, to me; people pushing through this depressed maze and dealing with their sardonic colleagues. that both are filtered through some sort of lens - delillo's little lyrical snatches or ferris's collective viewpoint - just make them seem like they're similarly concerned to me. i forget what it was about the ferris book that bugged me; maybe the emotional parts felt too heavily emotional in contrast to the rest, i don't know.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5224/5616268838_d87b132e4d.jpg

Bely's Petersburg was excellent. I loved the heavy symbolism (Bely was a devotee of a more humanistic offshoot of Theosophy), the heavy wordplay — a lot of which doesn't translate well or at all (the translators did a good job of explaining a lot of the more difficultly-rendered jokes/references) and the dramatic setting of pre-Revolutionary Russia.

Next: Beckett - Murphy. I've read Molloy and Malone Dies (didn't finish The Unnameable), so I expect to enjoy this.

Pinefox's photo belongs in the 'People who've figured out how to live' picture thread

don't those people own chairs

Also that teapot's spout better work properly or RAGE. Why do so few teapot spouts work properly? It's the one thing you've got to get right as a teapot designer/producer.

Enjoying Ten Burnt Offerings rather more now. Went over it again. Think I was being rather fuzzy-headed before. Still find the sententious bits a bit sententious, but I'm getting a better sense of the fun he's having - the different forms, references flying around, the echo-chamber of words and sounds, almost but not quite punning, at the beginning of Areopagus.

I finished Red Gold by Alan Furst last night. It was excellent again, his writing is getting noticeably tauter as I progress through the series, and his plots more contained. You gain a lot in terms of burrowing deeper into one character, though I did love the panoramic view of Europe that the first couple of books achieved.

Sadly, I don't feel I did that one justice - I had an extremely stressful week last week, which put me off my reading rather. I've been good this year, properly devoting time to my books while commuting and before sleep, but I let it slip when I was preoocupied. I almost never reread books, but I feel I owe this one an exception.

This morning it was onto Kingdom of Shadows, which is number six. He's really got his openings nailed down now, again I was hooked from page one. The first book, Night Soldiers is I think the only book so far which takes a bit of time to come into focus. I've recommended the series to a couple of people and they've both got stuck right there, which is really unfortunate because it's so smooth thereafter.

I think I can report that my teapot does work. Thanks to James Morrison for his very generous words about it.

I've just noticed the new name 'Fizzles the Chimp' and have to approve of this.

Thank you pinefox, Fizzles is going to be around for a while I think.

Finished the amazing One Hundred Years of Solitude and contrasting it with my next read, A Violent life by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

I guess the former does use a film like technique to cut up strands of time and recollection, and while I was reading I often was thinking of the images as if I was watching them in a cinema. The latter was written by an often brilliant film maker who writes with none of this in mind. It wouldn't matter but the portrayal of thuggish teens is so self-consciously gritty, falling short with the really one note dialogue (lots of swearing, but little to no slang) and then he goes on to contrast this with a narration that tries to paint a novel-like landscape of Rome's tougher streets (pffttt!) Apart from a scene where the characters go to see Quo Vadis at the cinema it didn't do much for me.

Spent a bit of time in a library today, researching Nabokov - ultimately skipping across most of the Selected Letters. So many moments of interest. On the way out I picked Brian Boyd's book on Pale Fire off the shelf, had to stop and read that for its response to Michael Wood's reader's report.

Was reminded that it's amazing how much you can learn in a library and I should spend many more of my days there.

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
- Saul Bellow

Eric Hobsbawm - Age of Extremes, a marvelous if dense survey of the worst century in history through a disillusioned Marxist's eyes.

Ann Beattie - Secrets and Surprises

No specific books but lotsa Luc Sante stray stuff, set off by his Lynd Ward essay in the most recent Harper's. His prose rhythms make me swoon.

Romeo, that reminds me that among VN's amusing epistles was one asking a line of praise from Bellow to be removed from a VN book cover, cos he claimed to think that Bellow was such an overrated nonentity.

That in turn reminds me of a quotation that VN had given someone about Ezra Pound being a superannuated fraud - when the publisher complained he sent a telegram saying something like CAN TOLERATE SUBSTITUTION OF NONENTITY OR MEDIOCRITY FOR FRAUD.

maybe the lack of local dialect/slang in pasolini is more down to his translators than anything else, because i'm pretty sure he wrote extensively on it elsewhere (though the only bit i can remember from a violent life is the unconvincing communist conversion and subsequent martyrdom of the main character at the end). the two novels of his i've read reminded me of dull 1930s-40s regional realism type stuff and wasn't really what i was expecting given his films. ever tried giovanni verga?

currently reading up on botany and started on volume one of the collected writings/composite biography of maya deren (all 1200 pages of it spread over two books) that was published in the eighties.

Ha! I like that, Pinefox. Doesn't surprise me that VN wasn't into Bellow.

I'm working my way through Bellow's "Collected Stories," which I'm really enjoying (especially "The Bellarosa Connection").
Also in the middle of "Dracula" (the OG Bram Stoker vrsn) and it's been hard to tear myself away from it.
And I'm the middle of Leonard Michaels' "The Men's Club" too.

maybe the lack of local dialect/slang in pasolini is more down to his translators than anything else, because i'm pretty sure he wrote extensively on it elsewhere (though the only bit i can remember from a violent life is the unconvincing communist conversion and subsequent martyrdom of the main character at the end). the two novels of his i've read reminded me of dull 1930s-40s regional realism type stuff and wasn't really what i was expecting given his films. ever tried giovanni verga?

I stopped reading about 50 pages from the end. Sounds like a good decision - it could be a translation issue, although I do maintain that almost no matter how bad you should be able to see something, anything of worth. I guess that ending could be as ridiculous as laying fascist vs commie overtones onto De Sade (although as a film it must be watched once). I've heard a few good things about Verga. But Pasolini is much more Urban hence the speed-excetement etc etc vibe. The Panther ed cover of A Violent Life is terrific.

Kathy Acker - Blood and Guts in High School has that actual anarchic spirit coming through, and the feminist dimension is utterly convincing. My edition has two other novels stuck onto it, one of which is about Pasolini! Not sure how that happened, must have looked at the back of it and committed it to my sub-concious, somehow.

I also been reading some poetry by Vallejo. There is a brilliant translators journey essay on the back of this - guy spent 50 years on his poetry. Trilce was published in the same year as The Wasteland and I should finally get onto some Eliot.

livia veneziani svevo - memoir of italo svevo
claudio magris - inferences from a sabre
bernard lewis - from babel to dragomans
wg sebald - the rings of saturn

I'm working my way through Bellow's "Collected Stories," which I'm really enjoying

"What Kind of Day Did You Have?" is my favorite Bellow work.

I'm new here, and I'm not sure if this would be the right place to ask, but do any of you guys have any Saul Bellow or John Dos Passos reccomendations?

Welcome!

I've read four Bellows: Dangling Man, Herzog, Seize The Day and The Adventures Of Augie March. I loved Dangling Man (the story of a reservist waiting for his callup) but it's considered unrepresentative of his oeuvre because I gather he changed style thereafter - it's realist where his later works are something else, though I don't understand the difference. Augie March is a terrific yarn, but the other two I found oddly disengaging and unmemorable.

Enough people swear by him though, and plenty of his other stuff is hugely acclaimed, so I'm willing to believe there's something I'm missing or it might click.

Dos Passos I don't know. Tried Manhattan Transfer once, gave up early.

Bellow has never done much for me - I recently made a go at Henderson the Rain King and stopped after fifty pages due to indifference - but I'll stand behind Augie March; it's got some worthwhile brio.

Can't say a thing about Dos Passos.

the pale king. hundred pages in. enjoying it. next is bouvard and pecuchet. on the strength of madame bovary and sentimental education i probably consider flaubert my favourite novelist. but i've never read any of his other work.

Augie March is the sort of book I wish I'd read when I was 18, but probably wouldn't have finished due to my indolence at that age. Still, I relate to his alternating devastating failures and ecstatic triumphs in the same way I relate to Of Human Bondage or Journey to the End of the Night. They're both inspiring and depressing because of how real they are.

Alfred, I loved "What Kind of Day Did You Have?" and I'm starting to think I like Bellow's shorter works better than his--so more acclaimed (why!?)--longer works. "Herzog" was a bit of a letdown. And I loved "Humboldt's Gift" but I thought it could've been better if Bellow cut it down a little. Bellow himself apparently thought a lot of his early works were overlong. I heard a story a while back that, not too long before he died, someone asked Bellow, "What do you think 'Augie March' is about?" "About 200 pages too long," he replied.

12 Angry Octomoms, I'd suggest starting with "Seize The Day," because a.) it's fantastic and a great representation of his style and comedy (which is what I read Bellow for), and b.) it's quite short, so if you hate it, no big loss. But so far, my absolute favorite is "Henderson The Rain King" -- loved the protagonist and it's just one the funniest books I've ever read.

I also been reading some poetry by Vallejo
For a moment I thought this meant Boris Vallejo, the tits-and-dragons-and-80s-hairdos artist, and was seriously mind-boggled

12 Angry Octomums, for Dos Passos, if you like more straightforward prose, go with 'Three Soldiers', and if you're up for more impressionistic experimentalism, try 'Manhattan Transfer'. The USA trilogy is only for hardcore fans who really dig 'Manhattan Transfer'.

And a second vote to start Bellow with 'Seize the Day', which is not his absolute best, but is a pretty wonderful, compact little novel

I also been reading some poetry by Vallejo. There is a brilliant translators journey essay on the back of this - guy spent 50 years on his poetry. Trilce was published in the same year as The Wasteland and I should finally get onto some Eliot.

clayton eshleman?

i've never read trilce, for my shame, one of my favourite poems is this tho:

El momento más grave de la vida

Un hombre dijo:

—El momento más grave de mi vida estuvo en la batalla del Marne cuando fui herido en el pecho.

Otro hombre dijo:

—El momento más grave de mi vida, ocurrió en un maremoto de Yokohama, del cual salvé milagrosamente, refugiado bajo el alero de una tienda de lacas.

Y otro hombre dijo:

—El momento más grave de mi vida acontece cuando duermo de día.

Y otro dijo:

—El momento más grave de mi vida ha estado en mi mayor soledad.

Y otro dijo:

—El momento más grave de mi vida fue mi prisión en una cárcel del Perú.

Y otro dijo:

—El momento más grave de mi vida es el haber sorprendido de perfil a mi padre.

Y el ultimo hombre dijo:

—El momento más grave de mi vida no ha llegado todavía.

Seize The Day is the least flawed of the Major Works.

i love augie march!

The more Bellow I read the more unsatisfactory I find him. I started with Herzog, which I loved. But it's been steadily diminishing returns through The Deans December, Ravelstein, Seize The Day and Augie March and I doubt I have the appetite for any more.

Last big Bellow discussion was here: What are you planning to read in 2011?

Would read some poetry by Boris Vallejo tbh

Thou bronzed breasts
Thy chiselled jaw
Thy bouffant hair
Face monster's maw

The Dean's December is sententious and dull. Ravelstein has its relentless pace: a continuously unfurling monologue, dependent on how scintillating you find the ideas of the late Allan Bloom.

Can I put this here?
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ljuxictB5d1qz6f9yo1_500.jpg

btw, where is a good place to start re David Foster Wallace?

Whoa, what is that?!

That's beautiful!

... except for the fountainhead

xp It's a custom made book table someone has built...

re Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer is surely it: if you like NYC or the idea of NYC, persevere with it. Agree that it would be bonkers to start on USA without reading the shorter works first.

I started on USA without reading the shorter works, and I adored it. It didn't feel like I was doing something especially bonkers, as it goes. The stakes seemed fairly low.

Was thinking of having a bookshelf porn thread but you know, there is just http://bookshelfporn.com/ for that.

(That's not to say that it doesn't make more sense to start with something shorter, although there is something to be said for plunging into the brick-sized USA without knowing what to expect.)

I retract my statement about reading USA being bonkers. It has been shown to be inaccurate. I suspected, when writing it, that it might be, though I did not expect someone to point this out.

I read Ulysses without reading Joyce's shorter works, and I adored it. If I'd started on the much less interesting shorter works I probably wouldn't have liked Joyce enough to think Ulysses was going to be great. Maybe I wouldn't even have made the effort to read it till years later.

I am reading Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment. Not all that good, but very long.

Bad combination.

I'm going Rome for a break, as I've mentioned elsewhere. Any good books I should take? About Rome. My current selections lack local flavour. (Krasznahorkai, George Saunders, and the one volume ed. of The Solitudes, John Crowley). Maybe some factual stuff needed.

i read the start of this a while back:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bookclub/the-imperfectionists
and only gave up because i am absentminded, not as a reflection of its merits. set in rome, recent, ny-er book club pick.

I'm going Rome for a break, as I've mentioned elsewhere. Any good books I should take? About Rome.

Gibbon! I've been reading fifty pages at a time for a year.

Fizzles, I find that if I go somewhere like that, the only reading I get to do is the guidebook. Be sure to have one of those.

(I am a slow reader and do not get through many books very often. I suppose with 2 weeks away, even I might read something; but 3-4 books? Never.)

Yeah, Gibbon a good idea. De Quincey on the Caesars?

I've got a copy of this guidebook for history bores if you want it.

it's been a while since i posted here, but i'm reading YA novels (for work; for review). lately i've covered

armstrong sperry – call it courage
peter cameron – someday this pain will be useful to you
rick yancey – the monstrumologist
noel langley - land of green ginger
william goldman - princess bride

I love what I've read of Gibbon, but d'oh, still no kindle!

Thanks for the tip Schlump, I'll check it out.

And yeah, woof, that'd be great - I go Thursday afternoon tho, so don't sweat it if you're not around before.

I mean, you wouldn't have to sweat it anyway obv, I'd come to you, but if you're busy beforehand then it's not a problem. Is what I'm cackhandedly trying to say.

Seize the Day and Augie March are my favorite Bellows. I read Mr. Sammler's Planet earlier this year and enjoyed it, perhaps in part because it was set in my NYC neighborhood (40 years ago).

What I liked about Ravelstein was the relationship between Chick & Ravelstein - Bloom's ideas are obnoxious at best. Planning to read Humboldt's Gift in the near future.

just started Mario Vargas LLosa's The War of the End of The World - epic, enthralling. I get the sinking feeling I will have to read everything by him.

on the non-fiction tip I finished Rick Pearlstein's Nixonland, a detailed and fascinating overview of Amerika in the late 60s and early 70s. didn't think I wanted to read any more about this era or this president but I was wrong. Garry Wills' Nixon Agonistes is probably better on the man himself but Pearlstein is great on the left/right conflict and Nixon's manipulation of middle class resentment.

M@ark, we're totally in sync as usual. I read The War of the End of the World myself a couple of months ago. I wasn't as impressed as you were, but it does whet your appetite for more. If you haven't read it yet, proceed to Feast of the Goat and the slight, very funny In Praise of the Stepmother.

and Nixon Agonistes is still my favorite study of the man.

This week:

- I finished Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes, a study of the Tea Party which posits that the grappling with the meaning of our founding goes back to Adams and Jefferson's epistolary debates. I found it readable but superficial in a magazine feature sort of way: she uncovers nothing new about Paine, Adams, Franklin, etc, or about the Tea Party for that matter.

- Ann Beattie's Secrets and Surprises. All that's best of New Yorker fiction's bright and pedestrian meet in her aspects and her eyes.

Maybe a word is missing in that sentence.

Been reading The Poincaire Conjecture. No, this is not the sequel to The Ipcress File, but a book (mainly, so far) about non-Euclidean geometries and mathematical concepts of n-dimensional space. Pretty cool stuff. But the price for not including a lot of equations in the book is, you have to pay very strict attention to the nomenclature and its definitions, or else many of the key sentences read like gibberish.

Planning to read Humboldt's Gift in the near future.

clayton eshleman?

Yeah. I can see why he spent all the time. I need to type up some of my favourite lines before I give this back to the library. The complete poetry is really expensive and I want a cheap paperback.

And that essay by Clayton could easily be made into a book, some kind of quasi-fictional work concerning him chasing Georgette Vallejo around the streets and getting her to sign the rights. The great Bolano novel that never was.

(I for one was contemplating doing a poet's wife thread. Best left alone.)

Also been mixing with poetry by Osip Mandelstam: lots of imagery surrounding flutes and apples...the Stalin poem is bad because its so obvious, its just not what he does. Otherwise I'm always mesmerized and frustrated by poetry.

Right now its more Vallejo.

On the novels front I'm onto Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel

Just wrapped up Mansfield Park, which I was disappointed with. I found Fanny Price kind of tedious in the same way people call Dickens' heroines tedious: lauded for her morality but constantly put-upon, able to withstand heroic amounts of tedium just because it's the virtuous thing to do, etc. And unlike Dickens there wasn't a lot of surrounding levity to punch things up, although the preparations for the play were pretty good.

Now I'm a hundred pages into Middlemarch (as I see several other people are!) and I'm really enjoying it. For some reason I was expecting a small-focus story like the kind Austen writes, so I was surprised when Dorothea's story went away and a whole new cast started bubbling up. And I love the narrative voice -- I'm one of those savages that dog-ears pages when I read a quote I love, and a good third of the pages I've read are folded over at this point.

Lionel Trilling said something about Mansfield Park, and this was in turn taken up and debated - with hilarious consequences! - in Whit Stillman's first film Metropolitan.

While I revere Middlemarch I had a lot of trouble and frustration with that presumptious narrative voice. It irritated me so immensely that I now wonder whether I can really revere the book as I think I do.

haha whenever i hear someones reading mansfield park i think of metropolitan

Yoking Nabokov and Mansfield Park - I love that picture of his annotations to MP in the Lectures on Literature is it? A wonderfully instructive piece of lit crit in just one image.

clayton eshleman?

When I see his name, only one association comes to mind, unfortunately. In the late 60s he invited Zukofsky to contribute poetry to his journal, which Zukofsky did. Eshleman didn't send Zukofsky a complimentary copy, which was prudent, because Eshleman had published some poetry of his own, in which he tried to purge himself of his influences. It included an imagined scene of the notoriously private Zukofsky and his wife having sex (they were in their sixties).

(I for one was contemplating doing a poet's wife thread. Best left alone.)

Agreed.

Beyond its other virtues, Middlemarch is fun – a page-turner in the best sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8IQ4ZGZsbg&feature=related

It would be good if my computer worked properly and I could watch clips like that.

Am halfway through Our Lady of the Flowers and am quite enjoying it. Despite its reputation having proceeding it for a long time in my mind, it's not nearly as salacious as I was led to believe. If anything it's been surprisingly very funny and can be very charming. It still astonishes me that he wrote it (all?) on hoarded brown paper bags in his jail cell.

Finished Beckett's Murphy; now reading Claudio Magris - Inferences from a Sabre

Reading all the bits of O'Brien's Sonata For Jukebox I'd previously skipped/skimmed over. And now it may be my favorite Geoffrey O'Brien book.

Am now also 17 pages into Waley's trans. of The Tale Of Genji. 1138 to go!

Thanks for that Eshleman 'association', alimosina :-)

Ernst Junger - Storm of Steel. Appraently H!tler loved this book and you wonder why. Yes there are heroic bits but its all very clinically described - much reportage, but without the extensive character sketches - more of a 'what i did in the summer' school essay than Junger himself might have intended. There are observations on the 'mechanization of war' but its all too few and far between. Apart from a comment on how the introduction of heavy weaponary to effectively produce carnage -- that it didn't happen straight away, instead occuring as a gradual process I ended up zoning in and out of it.

Claude Simon - Flanders Road. Love the writing, the bracket maelstrom encourages immersion and he captures more matter than seems at all possible on the page.

im reading mary weilands fall to pieces. its interesting but has the same sloppy too conversational writing most celeb bios have. i wonder how bad the writers assigned to celebs are.

uncharacteristically I FINISHED a novel yesterday, THEN WE CAME TO THE END.

main impression: it became softer and more sensationalist as it went on, after an impressively cool and canny start. Wonder if this is a case of that phenomenon everyone always alleges: the under-editing of the contemporary novel.

Now back on Barry Davies.

Claude Simon - Flanders Road. Love the writing, the bracket maelstrom encourages immersion and he captures more matter than seems at all possible on the page.

That's a great description. I read The Trolley a couple years back and thought the same thing.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5182/5643061711_2cdb2182c3.jpg

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5010/5643122367_2218afe6ce.jpg

i was going to take a pinefoxesque photo the other day which would have consisted of the pale king, a can of barr's shandy, and a very non-picturesque shot of the clyde/kingston bridge but i had left my phone in my flat.

if I'd taken a similar photo yesterday it would've been of a falafel wrapper with remnants of tahini drippings, a big mug of tea and Murphy

Appraently H!tler loved this book and you wonder why.

Maybe he was just impressed by easily grasped thoughts, because his own thinking was of a very mediocre quality.

Finished Magris's Inferences From a Sabre — a breezy read. The epistolary style and the slightly pedantic moralistic narrator in the form of the Italian priest-scholar reminded me slightly of Mann's Faustus. Magris manifests the real-life tragic character of a Cossack general, Krasnov who sided with the Nazis at the end of WWII, who, after the German defeat, turned to the British for asylum, only to be handed back to the Soviets they fought against. The general's hubris and confused idealism are both comic and sad, and absolutely human. The clarity with which Magris paints Krasnov in so short a span (less than 90 pages) is remarkable.

Reading: Witold Gombrowicz - Pornografia

Last night I finished the sixth book in Alan Furst's espionage series, Kingdom of Shadows. It's the best one so far I feel, though I couldn't quite put my finger on why. Perhaps it's the elegance of the era and settings - it's mostly about the Hungarian nobility and their struggle to untie their country from the binds that Nazi Germany were casting about it in 1938, so there's an awful lot of beautiful decay in the final dissolution of the Austria-Hungarian social order.

I found it fiendishly difficult to follow some of the time, which is a little odd for quite a short book. There are dozens of characters and subplots who feature hugely but only intermittently in the story of the protagonist. It fits with the theme, operating in a world of shadows, so is not unsatisfying in a way that it would be were it down to lack of care by the writer. It does mean you never really know what's going on, though. I do get that from books sometimes, but at least here it's deliberate.

TALES FROM WATERSHIP DOWN - stories about (and fictionally told by) rabbits, published in 1996, 25 years after the original novel.

Easter Bunny reading.

A couple of reliably wonderful Parker novels

Paul Murray: Skippy Dies -- lots of fun, but yet another case of a 600+ page novel that could easily have been 350 pages

i finished a book! assata. it was very good if you like that sort of thing.

Just finished The Wilder Life, recent nonfic that's half-memoir, half-discussion of Little House on the Prairie. I went on a binge last year reading biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, so I was looking forward to the new book, but it ended up drawing from the same sources I'd already read and didn't present anything new. Probably my own fault for being such a nerd.

parker 'reliably wonderful'? i have to say, i find westlake ... reliably vaguely unpleasant in a compelling sort of way, i'd have to put it

Today I have read 3 or 4 books about a cat called MOG

a book about a vintage car called Gumdrop

and a book of nursery rhymes with 1970s multicultural London illustrations.

Ismael: I've read one of Furst's earlier, now suppressed novels, and found it really entertaining. It was weird, though, having a book by him set in the (then) presetn day, in New York, with TVs and computers and facial recognition technology. It was like an iMac showing up in Virginia Woolf.

Thomp: "reliably vaguely unpleasant in a compelling sort of way" is actually pretty much right. I guess what I meant is that they're so clever and effortlessly entertaining at the same time as being reliably unpleasant. The most recent I read, Firebreak, starts withthe sentence "When the phone rang, Parker was killing a man in the garage." and continues on stylishly (but un-show-offishly) from there.

corey is right about magris

excellent author who ought to be more widely read

Furst's disowned his earlier work I gather - I read an interview where he dismissed one as being all second person, present tense and 'who's got the energy to read that?'. Interesting to hear it stands up!

Yes--apparently Hard Case Crime really wanted to reprint them but he refused.

Have gone book shopping CRAZY this week-

New-
Tina Fey's Bossypants
The Death of WCW
The first Mick Foley autobiog
Charles Bukowski's Bone Palace Ballet
Second hand-
Stevie Smith's Selected Poems
Diary of Anne Frank
Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World
Brian Stableford's The Way To Write Science Fiction (signed by the author, which may be impressive if i can be bothered to wikipedia who the hell he is.)

Now need to turn off Football Manager and actually read them (well, already done Death of WCW and half of Bossypants)

Anyone read Heinrich Boll? After all these years I got to Billiards at Half-Past Nine.

Group Portrait with Lady is on my list but I haven't read it yet.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is a brilliant novella.

Magris is my kind of guy: he wrote on Austrian-Habsburg myhts!

Now dipping into Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music. I'm already predisposed to disagree with much of his theory but I'm intrigued.

Damn, corey, I'm more impressed with your taste every time I read this thread!

:)

Still need someone to explain the cover of Tina Fey's Bossypants

Boll: Katharina Blum gets another vote here, as does his story collection 'Children are Civilians Too'. I've got a couple of others but have yet to read.

Re: Bossypants ... bossiness is ok in men, especially CEOs with rolled up sleeves, but not for "bossy" women like Fey so she's like "ok, look, here I'm the freakish bossy man-lady you say I am, ha!" (pretty funny, right? especially when explained). To me, it's a play on the typical businessman's autobiography, and says "memoir" but also "memoir-parody." Every comedian's doing the memoirish or memoir-parody thing it seems. No one wants to be dumped in the humor section ghetto.

I'm reading The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (not skipping around like I usually do with collections because I want to make sure I don't miss any ... she is great.).

Also half the book is about awkward hair growth

:) Thanks for the explanation!

Read(ing):

CK Stead: Smith's Dream -- about an inadvertant guerilla in a New Zealand taken over by right-wing coup
Kevin Wilson: Tunneling to the Center of the Earth -- really excellent short stories
Francis Marion Beynon: Aleta Day -- so-so pacifist/feminist Candian classic from 1919 -- heartfelt and short, but not amazing

Out amid the scent of spring grass I have just finished Barry Davies' autobiography.

"oliver twist"...ive never read it before believe it or not

Anyone read J.F. Powers' Wheat That Springeth Green?

Also: it's as if I've an obligation to read Franzen's Freedom.

I really need to give that a go too. Also, in the back of my mind I'm vaguely aware we're doing Goon Squad here shortly.

in between the Adorno: Veza Canetti - Yellow Street

Anyone read J.F. Powers' Wheat That Springeth Green?

I liked it, but wasn't blown away. I think I was in the wrong mood at the time--need to retry.

Reading Gay Talese's 'Thy Neighbour's Wife', an exploration of American sexual mores from about 1980. Recently repubbed with groovy new cover:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0061665436.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Mishima - The Temple of the Golden Pavillon. Describing moral corruption and decay like no one else.

Leslie Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century
The Goshawk by TH White.
Cymbeline

The Goshawk is quite an odd little book and rather meandering, but I enjoyed it. I hope you do, too.

'Sum' - David Eagleman

xp

Yes, I did. I like White, his style and sensibility - caring about nature and watching it, the sadness about war & 'the basic wickedness of the world', & also the past he finds (& invents) & wants to touch (while knowing he can't and it's lost, and that he's a little bit absurd). It is a bit hither-thither, but it absolutely held my attention.

(Everything above is true of The Once and Future King too, I think).

'Sum' - David Eagleman

new bathroom classic

apart from the Goon Squad book

I read Perry Anderson and Franco Moretti in the NLR

and a load of Onion articles early 2000s

and today I bought guidebooks to Berlin and, for future reference, Vienna! I expect or hope to be reading the Berlin book for the next fortnight or so. Perhaps as a result I will not be able to read the Goon Squad book while everyone else reads it.

Loved "Sum".

About to start the Egan. Finishing or have finished recently:

His Mother's House - Marta Morazzoni -- got a whole bunch of those wonderful old Harvill paperbacks from the early/mid '90s, all those great translated novels, for $2 each, and this is one of them

The Sunset Limited - Cormac McCarthy -- loved it, though he can call it "a novel in dramatic form" as much as he likes, it's obviously a play, given that it was performed a number of times before it was ever published as a book

Final Poems - A.E. Housman -- great stuff, obviously

Nobody Runs Forever - Richard Stark -- only have 2 more Parkers after this, my life will be empty

Pumpkin Eater - Penelope Mortimer -- glad I never married John Mortimer

North of South, Shiva Naipul. Just started it. Unavoidably, I will mentally compare it to Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux. Not because I expect them to be especially similar, but because I read so few books about Africa.

Just finished the Jennifer Egan novel. I started:

Robert Remini - At the Edge of the Precipice, about Henry Clay's efforts to broker the Compromise of 1850 which delayed civil war.

William Empson's Selected Letters. Great, really enjoyable letter writing, just Empson having arguments and chatting away.

Just finished Jim Harrison's Farmer. Somewhat in the vein of Williams' Stoner, a favorite of mine, but warmer and funnier, more wistful, less depressing. Highly recommended!

Jim O'Donnell's Wordgloss is my compulsive read of the moment, a collection of whatever words/phrases/topics O'Donnell feels must be better grasped before the reader goes about society using them willy-nilly. It's an odd little reference book, peculiar in the way that O'Donnell will often enfold two or three other thoroughly unrelated terms into whatever entry you're perusing (i.e. "superlative" gets nudged into "hermetic", "species" into "utopian", various etcs.). It's great.

Managed to leave unpacked the books I was reading and wanted to take with me on holiday (Aegypt - Crowley, The Caesars - de Quincey). So ended up reading much of The Caesars on google books and bought Super-Cannes - JG Ballard.

I liked the descriptive and psychological aesthetic of Super-Cannes, obv JGB's strengths, but here seemed spread thinly over too long a book. All sounded slightly conjured on the hoof. Phrases and words repeated, not in the service of intensification, but just seemingly out of forgetfulness so you think, 'Hang on, didn't you say that earlier?'. Necessity of keeping plot going, such as it is, slightly toiling and wearisome.

I think he is a bit like that at novel length - even High Rise has some of that sloppiness. When I'm feeling generous I take it as a product of a carefree pulp headcharge (even though he's usually failing to meet the criteria that can make a successful genre novel - tautness, nailed-down plot etc etc). I did like Super-cannes - I think it's basically good Ballard, & holds its tone, but a bit over-long, yeah.

What did you make of The Caesars? I know I recommended it, but went back to finish it & was tortured by his bloody style.

I've been reading Tove Jansson and Albert Cossery.

What did you make of The Caesars? I know I recommended it, but went back to finish it & was tortured by his bloody style.

dQ's a hi-falutin' double-dealing shit-talking piss-artist imo. Style does annoy - these literally arched constructions intended to convey thought (All the 'Early indeed did Caesar's trials commence' stuff - good example for tone, but doesn't quite convey his windy thought construction) . Also, I know he was writing in a different time, and I shd cut him some slack, but his whole pose throughout is bullshit. He loves the Romantic concept of an individual containing the world, and the Caesars are the only genuine manifestation of that. At least for him - they are illimitable. Don't mind all this. It's kinda fun. DO mind his prissy 'let's not talk too much about the bad stuff because it gets boring'. We both know that's bullshit, Tom. You like writing about it, and write your best on their vices, and I enjoy reading about it. You ADORE the individualism of it all and criticise Augustus for being 'socially minded'. He feeds heavily off the sensuality + effeminisation of culture crap, when it's quite clear, as he points out several times himself, that it was basically the whole concept of Roman power that brought about the vicious barbarism. If anything Rome corrupted the orient, not the other way round as he would have it.

That said, there's lots of good stuff as well. Liked his brief sketch of Caesar as person v Caesar as role. Found interesting his theory of circuses destroying tragedy ('the amphitheatre destroyed the theatre'). Lol'd but kinda liked his 'intellectualism of Romans outran paganism' theory, particularly (tho this also gives a v good idea of his f'ing annoying pub-bore style) -

'Those who were obliged to reject the ridiculous legends which invested the whole of their Pantheon, together with the fabulous adjudgers of future punishments, could not but dismiss the punishments, which were, in fact, as laughable, and as obviously the fictions of human ingenuity, as their dispensers.'

Like the idea of realising human ingenuity in godly riddles, and therefore trying to match it, plus the tacit idea that Christianity is better at beriddling its legends (tho am certain this is not at all intended). Laugh in a slightly peevish manner at his fucking annoying pompous commas, which will put me off my tendency to brackets for life.

Haven't finished it thought. Maybe the zebra Phil the Arab did it.

thought though

Fizzles, are you the first ILB poster to have read GOON SQUAD? and is that why you're not posting about it?

Also, I know he was writing in a different time, and I shd cut him some slack, but his whole pose throughout is bullshit

Nah, he's only a few years younger than Hazlitt, who's not obnoxious. It is flabby, meretricious prose & there's some ugly hard imperialism behind it too. I read it first a while ago, when I was into 'look at all that unreprinted De Q, he is a fascinating neglected writer'; he's become someone I'm v suspicious of – flannelly, posey, a harbinger of too-many-words flaccid Victorian discursive prose. I think maybe received wisdom is right - stick with the Opium Eater and a few essays – yet I keep going back to his other rambles - his love for out-of-the-way-ness (Donne, classical oddities etc) redeems him for me a bit.

try his 'flight of the tatars' if yr short of something to read

'Those who were obliged to reject the ridiculous legends which invested the whole of their Pantheon, together with the fabulous adjudgers of future punishments, could not but dismiss the punishments, which were, in fact, as laughable, and as obviously the fictions of human ingenuity, as their dispensers.'

nultations

Ha! I knew I recognised that style. To be fair to de Quincey, there's often thought in those constructions rather than vapid cliche served up as profundity, but yes - there's definitely a similarity.

Woof, yep, I had Hazlitt in mind whenever I was wondering whether I was being totally fair calling him out for all that imperialist, stoical, individual-as-tyrant masculinity v effeminate, sensual decadence. But maybe being closer to the Victorian age made him more susceptible to that British Empire new Rome bullshit, or yes, a harbinger of it.

Certainly don't mind his stuff like the English Mail Coach, Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts and minor essays anyway near as much, fun ramblings, although can still tend to his worst vices even with relatively innocuous material iirc. Think Opium Eater and Suspiria are v good, deservedly classics. Haven't read that Flight of the Tatars, nakh, will do so, thanks for the recommendation.

the pinefox - No, nothing to do with having read it, and not first, woof recommended it but I meant to get on it when I got back from Rome the other day, but it's one of the things, like unpacking and taking the euros out of my pockets, that I haven't got round to yet. Will rectify.

Oh, well it's not as good as a trip to Rome. And I can identify with the not unpacking.

STRANGELAND by Tracey Emin. I can't put it down, yet put it down I have.

Always wondered if there was more to De Quincey than Confessions.... Nice discussion. As with Ruskin, think it a travesty there is so little knocking about by either of them. But maybe not, at least in DQ's case.

Whereas I love Hazlitt -- both the prose, but just as importantly that he puts it to what I think of as good use. The punches do land, he is v funny, and on Liber Amoris he's fascinating. One of those books...must revisit.

Mishima - The Temple of Golden Pavillon. Think I have read every novel of his in translation (and I am not learning Japanese to try and read the rest, though its tempting.) Probably a few plays knocking about that I'm not too bothered about. 'I want to live' is the novel's last sentence. Really chilling when you consider what has gone on before. Interesting to contrast with Egan and the discussion elsewhere on the board. The boy at the centre of the book has a stammer, and Mishima stays with him through his interactions with others, and the way the boy's inadequacies develop through his time, etc. but its such a different setting, and Mishima certainly wants to make different set of points. Mishima can be incredibly stupid (or it can appear stupid and impossible to us at this point) but is deeply felt on some level.

Giving up on Veza Canetti's Yellow Street — I'm sure Elias had nothing but love in mind when promoting his wife, but the novel reads like sub-Zola feuilletonerie, the characters thin as cardboard, only existing to illustrate a type.

Starting: Julio Cortázar - The Winners

Gordon Woods - Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, a massive study of the period, written with his customary elan.

Keith Richards - Life

maybe I read too many glowing reviews of this when it came out cause I was disappointed. wasn't expecting anything like Patti Smith's or Bob Dylan's memoirs. either. when he talks about music - loving the blues, writing songs, working in the studio - "Keef" (he actually calls himself this!) is always interesting, often insightful. otherwise he's way too macho for my tastes, bragging about how he can drug/drink anybody under the table. apparently the way to survive addiction is to only do the top-shelf stuff, man. boring.

just finished: Jim Krusoe "Toward You" (really good, but typical Krusoe territory)
currently reading: Janet Malcolm "In The Freud Archive"

A dilemma: reread Daniel Deronda or acquaint myself with Gaskell, specifically North and South. Advice appreciated.

Loved Daniel Deronda when I read it in a Jewish lit class in college.

just finished: Jim Krusoe "Toward You" (really good, but typical Krusoe territory)

Robert Coover's Briar Rose. Having read both this and SPanking the Maid, and been bored by both, is it worth reading anything else by him?

Greg Baxter: A Preparartion for Death -- sort of a memoir, really good, hard to summarise

James Redd, "Iceland" is my favorite by far. I thought "Girl Factory" was also great, and "Toward You," the latest, is maybe on par with GF. "Erased," was slightly disappointing. I remember liking most of "Blood Lake," but can't remember specifics about it (as if often the case with me and short story collections). I think I'll read anything he writes though. I'm a sucker for his style and humor, even though it seems like he has a formula in place: socially awkward/deluded male protagonist/narrator who is hopelessly obsessed with an idealized female, and a plot that ventures into weird/implausible territory. In "Toward You" though, he does throw in a few different formal elements that I haven't seen in any of the other novels.

James Morrison, re: Robert Coover, I haven't read those two, but I liked "Ghost Town" and "A Night At The Movies" and been meaning to check out more Coover. I tried "Noir" because it seemed like "Ghost World" with noir genre-play in place of Western, but didn't like it. He's gimmicky in just about everything, I think. Not sure if that's your beef. I like his gimmickiness though, plus he writes good sentences and is funny.

errr ... "Ghost Town" not "Ghost World"

THE HACIENDA: HOW NOT TO RUN A CLUB by Peter Hook.

doris lessing the golden notebook. really put off by the first few pages, but i shall persevere a little while longer.

I'm reading a bunch of murder mysteries by Louise Penney and I think I'm in love. With her writing.

No actually with her characters.

The New Penguin Book of English Verse ed Paul Keegan. This is always wonderful to dip into. I was flipping around in the late 19th century. Hardy, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (A Musical Instrument - amazing), Tennyson (Rizpah & Tithonous), a couple of RL Stevenson things.

i am still reading schopenhauer. i've been reading schopenhauer for weeks. but i figure i ought not to keep re-posting 'i am still reading schopenhauer'. even though the monotony would be a beautiful expression of the inevitability of suffering. although i am enjoying myself. don't get me wrong.

mostly at least sort of spec fic related reading over the last month or so:

pynchon - vineland

i think it started this last october. i left me feeling sluggish & dazed & uncertain abt what i really thought abt it.

tom lloyd - the ragged man

had been putting this off but finished it in about a day. much faster moving & exciting than his previous work but hes still a p bad writer

vladimir sorokin - ice trilogy

liked this a lot, stands up a lot better w/ the entire set than ice does on its own. my only real complaint is that the book seems to offer an 'i meant it to be like that' defense to criticism & there are parts that are really stupid

john collier - fancies & goodnights

p silly but fun. a lot of the stories end exactly the way you think they will, & there are so many stories that just single lines or ideas but i liked this too. theyre really good stories to synopsize over dinner

tove jannson - fair play

i wish this had held my attention better, because i think it was smart & well-written, but a little too small to engage me

xp Schopenhauer is worth all the time you can devote to him. I'm due for a reread of World as Will myself.

I just finished Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music — incredibly persuasive. His tangled sentences require several rereads but it never feels like a chore — it's pretty exhilarating actually. You feel like you're at the very edge of what is even describable. His criticism of Stravinsky and his followers is devastating.

Just finished The Man Of Feeling - his most Nabokovian book; think a typical Marias novel and subtract 80% of the digressions.

Thus, I've completed every Marias book published in english. Darn.

'My Kind of Girl' by Buddhadeva Bose: Pleasant if not earth-shaking novella made up of stories told by four men trapped overnight in a Bengali train station of girls they have (usually unsuccessfully) loved, from 1951

'The Silicon Jungle' by Shumeet Baluja: So far really good Upton-Sinclair-inspired novel expose of data miners and other exploiters of internet-gathered personal information

Romeo, thanks for your comments re Coover--I will try one of those you recommend, because you're right, at the sentence level he can really write. It's just that both the novellas I read seemed to be operating under the impression that not much more than unpleasant and repeated sexual assaults on women delivered in jokey tones were enough to sustain a book.

Robert Coover's Briar Rose. Having read both this and SPanking the Maid, and been bored by both, is it worth reading anything else by him?

The Universal Baseball Association. That's all I know but it is worth it.

I read a little of The Public Burning and it put me off Coover. When I heard about Spanking the Maid and a "political satire" involving The Cat In The Hat, I decided that I could safely ignore him.

Robert Musil - Diaries: 1899 - 1942 (posted about it on the MwQ thread)

Susan Sontag - Styles of Radical Will. Give this woman a film and almost nothing beats it (her essays on Godard and Bergman's Persona). Can't say that the two political pieces were all that. Always, always worth reading tho'.

Finished the golden notebook already.quite good going for me nowadays. So I obv liked it.some reservations though (admittedly the main one is pedantic - lots of sentences starting with 'because' and 'and' and lots of words italicised for emphasis).

need to read the Musil diaries.

Just finished Day of The Triffids by John Wyndham. Loved it! Post-apocalyptic sci-fi classic with killer plants. And I'm nearing the end of Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. Some great ideas, interesting scenes, but I'm not really into EC as a character and I got burnt out on all the vegetarian philosophy. Next up: Robert Coover's What Ever Happened to Gloony Gus of the Chicago Bears?. The recent Coover-talk here reminded me that I have a copy I've been wanting to get to.

Wessex Poems - Hardy, weird mish-mash really. Some great stuff - Neutral Tones + She, to Him III, Valencienneës - but find him awkward and cussed. I know that's part of his thing, but when you've got supposedly tragic lines reading like Byronic prosodic tumbling then it doesn't quite sit right. Am willing to be convinced.

Flicking thru Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys to remind myself of it. Pantheistic paganism v Christianity, battle for WS's soul, his cynicism battling with his 'life-illusion', enjoyable to flick thru, but wouldn't want to read again. Anyone here read Jobber Skald (it's the title of another JCP novel, not an author btw)? It must have the least appetising title of any book I've been tempted to read. Began to read some Mary Butts short stories, but went to watch the FA Cup instead.

I finished Blood of Victory, #7 in the Alan Furst spy series. Probably the best one yet - the writing and plotting has become really spare, and he's relying more and more on setting for the gloomy mood to seep through. This one centres nominally around a 1941 plot to disrupt supplies of Roumanian oil to Germany, taking in Bucharest, Istanbul and Belgrade, as well as Paris.

What's really notable is that the bad guys barely even make an appearance here - the dread is all in the not knowing, it's proper don't-show-don't-tell stuff and entirely in keeping with the means of operation. I'm getting a real sense of what the characters feel now, a kind of resignation that fate will do what it wants with them, and they may never even find out what that is.

saramago's 'journey to portugal' and tom mccarthy's 'c'

Bought and read Barthes' Mourning Diary, partly out of some misplaced gesture of solidarity for the newly-launched Notting Hill Editions, partly to see the Michael Wood introduction, but it turned out to be customary deathbed desk-robbing testaments betrayed, notes trussed up into a book.

Still reading a chapter of Middlemarch every lunch time and absolutely loving it.

Giovanni Arpino - Scent of a Woman -- hmmm, not sure this was my thing, to be honest

Wessex Poems - Hardy, weird mish-mash really. Some great stuff - Neutral Tones + She, to Him III, Valencienneës - but find him awkward and cussed. I know that's part of his thing, but when you've got supposedly tragic lines reading like Byronic prosodic tumbling then it doesn't quite sit right. Am willing to be convinced.

Auden and Larkin are very good about explaining Hardy's gaucheries; they do add to his charm, but you must submit to two or three dozen poems to get there. "Neutral Tones" is a good start: a fairly conventional structure and resolution, easy to memorize.

Still reading a chapter of Middlemarch every lunch time and absolutely loving it.

Yay! Rereading Daniel Deronda while on vacation.

i have stalled on 'the mill on the floss' because my headspace is full of the suffering of existence (i.e. schopenhauer) : /

Proust - Against Saint-Beuve and Other Essays. Very ILM, he hates Saint-Beuve so much, but his main crime seems to be gossipy and to generally use that as a basis for criticism, wheareas what seems to be lacking (and I'm only halfway through) is questioning why this long forgotten critic seems to have been liked by people in the first place (?) Don't know enough about the ins-and-outs of 19th century French Lit to tell.

Later parts have notes on novelists he liked.

Why is it very ILM?

I have been reading nothing but the Berlin guidebook for the last week. I was still reading it on the flight home today. I think I may have to stop reading it soon. I think I like it quite a lot more than the Goon Squad book.

Vanessa Veselka: Zazen -- very good so far, very bitter book set in contemporary/near-future/parallel universe? US, in a city plagued by terrorist bombings and about a woman who, among other things, gets a sort of kick out of phoning in hoax bomb threats. No idea where it's going. Or what the title means.

Should have looked it up: "deep meditation undertaken whilst sitting upright with legs crossed", which is actually less interesting/threatening than I had thought, though it does fit one aspect of the story

Coover's What Ever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? was really good! No postmodernist tricks or surrealist plot turns, just a bit of comic realism with great characters, and it's set in Depression-era Chicago in the milieu of a bunch of Marxist union organizers and WPA artists, which I liked. Coover does a great job of evoking the tenor of the times.

Then I moved on to The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold, a nutso time travel story from the early 70s that's apparently a cult-favorite because the protagonist ends up having sex with himself ... a lot. Definitely worth a read (it's very short and goes super quick as well).

Now I'm working through The Savage God: A Study of Suicide by A. Alvarez. It's kind of a cultural history of suicide that deals a lot with literature, for instance how/why suicide became so prevalent among writers from the period of modernism onward. I'm not too far in though and probably will need to read something a little lighter along with it.

Aha -- I begin to [reflex suppressed]

"Why is it very ILM?"

Thought of Saint-Beuve as pitchfork-level badness that ILM would consistently criticize.

Now I've finished it I should correct that, get off the reductionism - Proust does lay off and really uses Saint-Beuve as a spingboard to talk about what he loves, via note-taking of how the virtues AND flaws combine, especialy in the essays on Balzac and Flaubert. Some of the book is bizarre, there is one essay where he employs a character from Remembrance... to make a point about a reader's reaction, but then again he can be incredibly reflective, hence the last few pages on how much he just loves Ruskin's prose (I often think there is much in common between the two - their 'unusual' relationships (and views of same/conduct), v wide ranging interests in the arts and the sciences, obv the paragraph blockage - although I've yet to read enough Ruskin.)

Its a funny book overall: some of the stuff is published, some left among his papers, then the stuff on Saint-Beuve. Don't know if the selection really coheres to anything much, tbh. Some of the views did need to be couched in mountains of prose and characterization that form Remembrance.... I always felt Proust to be a v well read young man, brilliant writer, diarist, part-time critic and philosopher: all of which adds up, pays and repays in his novel. Don't leave any of these elements to stand for too long on its own...

Didn't Proust use Contre Saint-Beuve as an embryonic version of his novel?

S.Yizhar - Khirbet Khizeh. Savage novella following Israel's bloody establishment in '48 (he was a soldier then). Sometimes I recalled Platonov's Foundation Pit (hoarding people in trucks to nowhere).

Yizhar alsowrote a 1000+ page novel called Days of Tziklag and (like Platonov's last book) is sadly not been translated. Expect it to be a 'hit' in 20 years.

Bolano - Nazi Literature in the Americas. There is a laugh here on almost every page if you know your South American Lit and politics. Good for me then because this is absolutely and bloody and brilliant.

Lolz *starts to read the intro* yes it did!

alfred that was Jean Santeuil. i thought the same thing at first.

Just read Chester Himes's 'A Rage in Harlem', which I really enjoyed. I had no idea these books were going to be funny as well as bleakly brutal.

i am taking a detour from schopenhauer to read the CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. kant is so reasonable-sounding it's shameful (to all other people ever). except where he takes jabs at the new hollanders and fuegians ('we cannot see why people should have to exist… a question it might not be so easy to answer if we have in mind, say…') or disses american natives ('or we might say that the mosquitoes and other stinging insects that make the wilderness areas of america so troublesome for the savages are so many prods to stir these primitive people to action, such as draining the marshes and clearing the dense forests that inhibit the flow of air, so that in this way, as well as by tilling the soil, they will also make the place where they live healthier.').

(although to be fair it's not absolutely certain that he's giving an example of something he thinks. but pretty certain.)

Just got the new Bismarck at lol Henry Kissinger's suggestion.

I've been reading Tove Jansson and Albert Cossery.

― youn, Thursday, 5 May 2011 16:55 (2 weeks ago)

I'd never heard of Cossery but I picked up Men That God Forgot from a used book store while browsing because the cover looked really old school New Directions-y. It's a pretty enjoyable book of late 60s short stories by a french dude who lived in egypt all his life, they're all grotesques. He's more perceptive than not throughout the book, and doesn't really try to be shocking or anything. Henry Miller loved him I guess, I dunno, Miller's unreadable for me but this shit's alright.

I am reading aloud today (one page), should anyone find themselves at a very short end:

http://www.woolfsonandtay.com/words-made-flesh-reading.html

Tryna read Bruce Begout - Zeropolis

xp, I read A Rage In Harlem, The Heat's On and The Real Cool Killers last month - all bleak, funny and incredibly addictive.

Just finished Robertson Davies' Fifth Business and currently on to Arkady / Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic.

Jean Santeuil

Saw a creaky paperback of this the other week...

Nazi Literatures...is such a classic, so many highlights. The Boca hooligan brothers, the attempted duel w/Lezama Lima, the thressome w/Ginsberg that never was. Real love letter to literature and its (potential) effect on people's lives. Starts off as an encyclopedia of rigth-wing writing, but it builds and builds to something that can be as significant as you want it to be.

Thomas Bernhard - The Loser. This is a nice one to follow-up. Both wrote book after book riffing on similar preoccupations. Its just about finding different scenes for the same ends, which they were able to do v effectively over and over, making you laugh again and again.

Moravia - Boredom.

Enjoying both of these:

The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels
Zeroville : Steve Erickson

Spent much of my afternoon finishing Boredom, and thought of the Cedric Kahn moviethat I must've seen at an age when I shouldn't have at an hour I shouldn't have courtesy of a C4 broadcast (in its 'pornographer-in-chief' heyday), and it is indeed an adaptation of it.

It is compulsive and Dino's interrogations of Cecilia are hilarious! I think in the Kahn he is a philosopher, not a painter, which makes it even funnier (although I don't recall enough of it now).

bought a kindle!

almost done with the picture of dorian gray (i had read half of it before, in a collection that lacked many essential punctuation marks, before giving up)

starting patti smith's just kids

that's a weird selling point for a collection.

at first i thought wilde didn't use quotation marks as a stylistic tic

then i noticed that semicolons and accented characters were also missing

Could that collection have been published by Wordsworth, by any chance? Had a similar problem with a Sheridan le Fanu collection published by them, so I bought it again in an Oxford Classics edition, and that had 96 pages repeated and 96 pages missing. I need to buy a bug-free edition before this turns into 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller'.

it was wordsworth. i haven't had a problem with their editions since.

the kindle version of wilde uses two en-dashes instead of each em-dash but is otherwise fine

Currently juggling between John Dies at the End & Cloud Atlas.

I read "Vathek" by William Beckford yesterday for classic book club. I kind of wish I had read a life of Beckford instead.

it was wordsworth. i haven't had a problem with their editions since.

Maybe they just hate Irish writers.

xp, I read A Rage In Harlem, The Heat's On and The Real Cool Killers last month - all bleak, funny and incredibly addictive.

Yes indeed! Moved onto The Real Cool Killers, which was great and horrible.

Also read bits of Somerset Maugham's 'The Vagrant Mood', an essay collection, which includes a hilarious memoir of meetings with Henry James.

xpost I loved Vathek! I have something lying around here called Episodes of Vathek that I picked up used and haven't gotten to.

just finished The Melancholy of Resistance and War of the End of the World. What a one-two punch that was.

I picked up a copy of 1491, a book that attempts to pull together a lot of achaeologial evidence that is driving revisionist theories about what humans were up to in the western hemisphere in pre-Columbian times.

There's a shitload of new finds in the past 20 or 30 years, but public knowledge of these has lagged considerably, so I look forward to seeing what startling new stuff this has to teach me. Since the theories these finds are inspiring are still in flux, I will take them with a large grain of salt. Still, it's kind of exciting -- not plate tectonic level shifts, but about halfway to that level.

The Wings of the Dove!

yay!

Manuel Rivas - Books Burn Badly. Halfway through, shaping up to be a bunch of mostly short-ish stories (reading about him that's a;; he's ever written, its his first full length novel) with one core event: a book burning by fascists that took place in Galicia in the mid-30s. It is placed near the beginning of the book so no 'build' -- smart move, this -- but then it is content to amble along in its peculiar style (which I like but have struggled with too) and am not sure if it will add up by the end. Not sure I've ever read much like this, it so is short stories but isn't: the connections are there but they are fleeting, broken, which I think Rivas wants to convey, as a story of Spanish fascism.

I have heard that 1491 is very informative but also poorly written and disorganized.

I got it for the missus as an as-yet-unread present. The premise is fascinating and it's got a lovely cover at least.

Kant - Critique of Pure Reason

The Wings of the Dove!

― Davek (davek_00), Wednesday, May 25, 2011

still the only major James I can't finish

Haven't finished that or The Golden Bowl. I think I just dislike James.

WH Auden on Henry James:

Henry James
Abhorred the word Dames
And always wrote 'Mommas'
With inverted commas.

The Wings of the Dove is the only major James I have read. I would like to reread it one day. At the moment the title still makes me think of Madness in party mode.

I am reading Brighton Rock. I have lost my momentum a bit.

Also lost my momentum with The Book of Disquiet, but then it is kind of anti-momentum anyway. That's what I liked about it until I lost my momentum. Perhaps there is a lesson there.

Recommending Washington Square has been my surefire way of warming people to James.

Finished:
Steve Erickson: Zeroville, really great... one of the best books i've read all year and my 1st by Erickson. But I'm not sure if I would have liked it nearly as much if i wasn't into film and hollywood.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Camera, enjoyable for the humorous focus on the mundane but ultimately a bit annoying for the seemingly deep but ultimately banal philosophizing. I'll probably read one or two more by him though because I liked the book's style and the rest of his novels seem like good one-sitting reads.
R L Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it was good i suppose, but kind of slight. of course i knew the basic story and reading the book didn't seem to add much depth to the basic idea and plot.

Now on to:
Bolano's Savage Detectives. Really enjoying it so far. Just finished part 1.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint's 'Running Away' might be a good next one for you--it has (slightly) a plot and enough energy to carry you on through

I finished Dark Voyage, #8 in my Furst odyssey. It took its time getting going - it's set on board ship so the wide canvas from the earlier novels is mostly missing - but it makes eventually for a tight, gripping story. I had to keep reading 'til I was done last night, even though it was late and I was dying of tired.

This one had maybe too many characters, it was hard to distinguish between the sailors, and maybe too much left unexplored. There was a sabotage midway through that I'd like to have found out more about, but in keeping with the rest of the series we're finding out less & less as we go along. Again, the villains barely make an appearance.

went back to WALTER BENJAMIN AND BERTOLT BRECHT: STORY OF A FRIENDSHIP

I was going to start #9, The Foreign Correspondent, today but I've just come out to get a spot of lunch and realised I've forgotten to bring it with me. I'm right annoyed about this, few greater pleasures in life imo.

Joseph Roth - 1002nd night. The title makes you think 'east meets west' orientalising but Roth is much smarter than that.

That's been the only J. Roth I've read so far (have had Radetzky March on my list for years now) but I enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm obsessed with Austria of that period.

Having had (had? who am I kidding?) those obsessions then he's a go to man. I wish I had somehow collected all of them to read over a two week period, he's perfect for that kind of thing. Done about six of 'em so far.

I'm more of an end-of-an-era/thing (the destruction of the Habsburg is one of many) that has huge private and public repercussions. That's how I try to put it. Roth has a lot of fun documenting what attracted people to that in the first place. Description of rooms, pearls, clothes...all are made to matter.

Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet at last.

A Clockwork Orange, for the first time. It's quite amusing.

I've also stalled half-way through Franzen's Freedom. Does it get good at any point?

Milosz - Proud to be a Mammal. Trying to pin down the Polish poet in these essays andd its a toughie. Sceptic of everything could cover it.

Chretien de Troyes - Perceval (tr. Burton Raffel)

As a New Yorker I ought to be all over the Teju Cole book. Instead, just finished Geoffrey Grigson's Recollections, mostly about London literary life in the 1930s.

Whole mix of stuff

John Le Carre: Our Kind of Traitor -- really interesting, but all the cover quotes about it being THRILLING are so dumb, given it's obviously not, and not intended to be

Jospeh Mitchell: Joe Gould's Secret

Jon Ronson: The Psychopath Test -- really enjoyed it, but I;m a big Ronson fan, so no suprises there

Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet -- lovely stuff

Adam Baker: Outpost -- end-of-the-world/pandemic/psuedo-zombie-apocalypse thing; OK, I guess, if that's what you're looking for

G. Nagarajan: Tomorrow Is One More Day -- 1970s novella about low-level pimp/fixer in Tamil Nadu; quite enjoyed this, though it was a bit fractured

xpost Alfred - please tell me why you can't finish Wings of the Dove? So far it's as brilliantly observed as the other James I've devoured...

I've read The Golden Bowl twice, The Ambassadors three times, and devoted a portion of my graduate thesis to "The Jolly Corner," but I can't steer past the first hundred pages of TWOTD.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr - Age of Jackson
Kingsley Amis - The Old Devils
Daniel Moynihan - Letters

And sorry to bug you about this, but could you possibly pinpoint why? Is it just not worth the dedication?

After that I'm planning To The Lighthouse, The Waves and Orlando towards a VW essay..

Had some peculiar convergence where I read Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget plus Zygmunt Bauman's 44 Letters From The Liquid Modern World, and watched The Social Network, all in the same week. All more interesting and less nerdy than I had expected.

Finally finished Barthes' Preparation Of The Novel, which turned out to be rather heartbreaking. Still strolling through Middlemarch: Casaubon has just had some kind of fit in the library!

Jim Thompson: Bad Boy -- his autobiography; huge fun, though I suspect it's only half-true

At this rate I think I'll be reading Critique of Pure Reason for the next two months.

i was just reading the transcendental dialectic a little bit today!

and i seem to be rereading 'the man without qualities'. we'll see if that sticks.

Re: James, am currently on Portrait of a Lady, after loving both The Aspern Papers and Daisy Miller. This too is masterful, but just over halfway into its 500 pages and I am starting to fatigue a little. The characters are delightful, and James' delight in them is palpable, but unless things suddenly take a turn for the dramatic, there just isn't enough going on to justify that length.

the shootout sequence after the carchase is gonna keep you hooked for the second half, don't sweat it

Touché? But honestly there is only so much mild romantic trauma of the young, rich, and intelligent that I can take.

Five hundred pages? Zounds! You're almost at the end.

just over halfway... 200 to go.

everything I have ever heard about Portrait of a Lady
including for instance the film
would make me very, very reluctant
to go anywhere near it.

I probably need to read the Barthes book some time

the Benjamin / Brecht together book is fun btw: an appendix includes notes from their meetings in which they discuss Joyce and Alfred Doblin, + the timeline at the start talks about their plan to write a crime novel.

The Portrait of a Lady has its longeurs, but it's a perfect novel: it's everything I want in a novel except for scenes of m4m sex.

Perhaps it is frightfully dilettante of me, but I'm not sure that everything I want in a novel could not be included in 300 pages or fewer.

the jane campion Portrait is ludicrous but the book is awesome, pinefox. though the fact that i love it suggests you might not.

unless things suddenly take a turn for the dramatic, there just isn't enough going on to justify that length.

i guess i see what you mean but it's funny because this is one of the James novels in which events most clearly occur.

yes, the campion film is mostly a travesty, save for one or two gd performances (barbara hershey is magnificent)

in his notes for POAL, james makes it clear that the last third is to be very much quicker than the preceeding two thirds - there's certainly more melodrama and incident, although it doesn't become a substantially different book or anything.

The book's structure is an odd marvel: in the last third you watch him reintroduce characters, bringing them in from the peripheries and tasking them with certain revelations and bits of business, until they surround Isabel; then they scatter again.

Arthur Schnitzler - Selected Short Fiction. 'Lieutenant Gustl' and 'Fraulein Else' are the novellas included. S really achieves lift off when he's balancing (unconsumated) love - playing it as a game of part-reality-part-dream - with death. Gustl and Else's misanthropic monologues never allow that equation to realize itself, the effort to achieve a partic effect got in the way.

Some of the shorter ones are amazing: 'The Duellist's second', 'Flowers'.

Boris Vian - Heartsnatcher

Jim Krusoe - Girl Factory, thanks to Romeo Jones recommendation.

The big sleep.

READIN':

MR. PALOMAR (CALVINO)
THE FACTORY OF FACTS (LUC SANTE)

COMIC BOOKIN':

AKIRA (KATSUHIRO OTOMO)
WE ALL DIE ALONE (MARK NEWGARDEN)

SOON:

THE MYSTERIOUS FLAME OF QUEEN LOANA (ECO)

Is Akira the comic better than the movie, because the movie really annoyed me

Is Akira the comic better than the movie, because the movie really annoyed me

My distant memory of the movie, seen back in, oh, 2000, is saying "yes" - mind you, a) I'm only a third of the way through the comic (six 300 plus volumes that add up to 2000-some pages in the end) and b) Otomo, writer/artist of the comic, also wrote/directed the movie. He's like Frank Miller that way, it seems.

The movie seems a different beast altogether from what I'm reading - the hyperbolics on display here I can't find anywhere in my memory; "Akira" is an actual character here, and, in the movie, I think he was an unseen frantic metaphor.

finished "middlemarch" at last, really really enjoyed it. dog-eared half the book to mark amazing sentences. i can't figure out a way to express this without sounding inept, but it was like dickens, but good -- less mawkish, subtler caricature, a more complex sense of humanity, etc. and i stan for dickens! so i was pleasantly surprised.

is there a good third james book to read after 'the europeans' and 'washington square'? i'm tempted to leap right into 'portrait.'

Woke up today and realized that, despite all I have said about Proust, I spend every night with the complete Recherche just a yard or two away.

J.D. - go for it! i think it makes v good sense to read james in roughly chronological order, and portrait def feels like the next 'logical' step on from washington square.

man I had the most ambitious reading list this year and I am off to an even worse start than last year. I blame a willingness to read books of short stories - picking up the book doesn't happen as readily for me when there's no unresolved action to worry about. Reading and enjoying the collected short works of Gogol, anyway - very strange, really good.

2 months and ive got 40 pages of moby dick to go

Pretty much finished with 1491. I wouldn't call it poorly written, but it's something of a hash, with about as much order imposed on the material as could be brought to bear, considering that the author had no overarching thesis in mind.

It's easy to tell where he is just reporting a hypothesis and when he is carried away by enthusiasm for a particular interpretation. The main idea I am taking away from the book is the incredible degree to which European diseases depopulated the western hemisphere.

The evidence for dense indigenous populations with sophisticated agriculture as the main mode of native life in the Americas, as opposed to a sparse population of nomadic hunter-gatherers, as was thought up until recently, has really piled up and becomes quite convincing when you view it in aggregate. Those dense populations were mostly wiped out by disease between 1500 and 1650 it appears.

Finished Portrait of a Lady. The shootouts and car chases never arrived but I'm glad to say that eventually it offered so much more than mild romantic trauma. And though I kvetched about the length, when Isabel returns to Gardencourt and recalls her first visit there, and life before, that sudden vision of the distance she has travelled is astonishing.

I went to the library yesterday for the first time in months, and picked up Prague (which I believe came highly recommended from some ILB folks), and The Keep, which is the only Jennifer Egan they had. Since they won't get Goon Squad for a while, I figure I'll see what her other stuff is like first.

is there a good third james book to read after 'the europeans' and 'washington square'? i'm tempted to leap right into 'portrait.'

Or if Portrait's size puts you off, try the excellent 'The Spoils of Poynton', which is about 250p

My distant memory of the movie, seen back in, oh, 2000, is saying "yes"

Thanks--I might have to try the book then

Re 'Prague', I just read Phillips's 'The Tragedy of Arthur'--has anyone else read this, and what did they think? I'm not sure exactly what I thought

Finished Portrait of a Lady. The shootouts and car chases never arrived but I'm glad to say that eventually it offered so much more than mild romantic trauma. And though I kvetched about the length, when Isabel returns to Gardencourt and recalls her first visit there, and life before, that sudden vision of the distance she has travelled is astonishing.

When all the characters converge on Gardencourt for the funeral, I tear up.

J.D., you're ready for Portrait.

HEY - MORRISON:

Just finished vol. 3. Halfway through, my handle on the book proper (AKIRA) is that it's virtues (of which there are many) reside in pure action kinetics. It's a textbook on how to choreograph action, set piece after set piece with a relentless momentum. Not plot-heavy, but impressive. If that sounds appealing, go for it.

I like to think this description also carries over into PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN.

Been sitting down with men I like sitting down with:
Jonathan Wild by Fielding.
Principles of Human Knowledge by George 'Bishop' Berkeley.

Poetry: Hugh MacDiarmid and Peter Porter, both in selected.

Tracey Emin - Strangeland. Contains an awful lot of what I believe the young people call "spunking up".

I do agree "Portrait" is the finest of James's novels, but Isabel's fate is just so claustrophobically horrible that it's a barrier to enjoyment. J D I wouldn't discourage you from reading "Portrait" next, but if you'd like another stepping stone you might also consider "The Bostonians" - for me the most purely enjoyable of his novels, along with Washington Square. James's suggestion ("Poynton") is shorter, but elements of the rather clotted late style are starting to emerge in it and I think it's more of an acquired taste.

The thread has tempted me to re-read Middlemarch - I've downloaded it onto my Kindle and it's sitting there inviting me to start. I've also downloaded and started to re-read "Ulysses" but I'm not sure whether I'll persevere - I'm not willing to spend lots of time looking up allusions, and I'm not sure I can remember enough from earlier readings to get through without. Some sort of primer that briskly explained the obvious allusions in Ulysses but stuck as far as possible to facts (ie avoided opinion and interpretation) would be useful I think.

I've been travelling and thought "Ulysses" probably not the best option for trains and planes so started reading Hollinghurst's "Swimming Pool Library". About a third of the way in I'm surprised by how much it reads like a prototype for TLOB.

I'd be interested in how you get along with McDiarmid Woof - I was pretty keen on him at one time.

The Bostonians is marvelous, but what an odd structure. I agree with James that the middle drags: it's distended. But the pretension of these Bostonians is well skewered.

I do agree "Portrait" is the finest of James's novels, but Isabel's fate is just so claustrophobically horrible that it's a barrier to enjoyment.

At least in Daniel Deronda Gardencourt drowns, right? The harshness of Isabel's fate is mitigated by her relationship with Pansy.

yes i read 'the tragedy of arthur' -- i liked abt 90% of it, though im generally a p big fan of phillips. there is sortof a 'twist' near the end that i was not too on board w/. i even thought the play itself was a good read and i am not big on shakespeare.

What are the problematic allusions in Ulysses?

Have just received the new SReynolds along with Lynskey's new one too - the question is, which to read first??

I'd like to read Reynolds as retro is a theme I feel closer to than much of what he usually talks about.

I feel that I might not learn much from Lynskey - well, maybe some facts, but not many ideas.

Read Retromania last week. I sympathise with the feeling/rant of modernist frustration that engendered it, but it did feel like something that might have been more comfortable as a magazine article rather than a book - not sure his heart was really in the discussions of northern soul/the late-70s mod revival/etc, which felt like obligatory padding. The concluding analogy around "derivates", in both financial and cultural senses, was suggestive but felt a bit tenuous.

Incidentally, surely it is time for the summer '11 ILB reading thread?

The English weather is currently dank, damp, dull, dreary and dour, so probably yes.

How anyone can read a book in a week is beyond me. Someone on Twitter, I think it was Martin Carr, said it took him five weeks to read 33RPM, but looking at it, it'll probably take me four months. Really wish I could improve my reading speed. It's not as though I'm completely illiterate, I just get very easily distracted when reading a book and don't enjoy skimming. Also I never remember to get hold of a bookmark and forget where I left off. Always end up rereading pages of text before I find my place.

I am with you, DL, except that I have quite a lot of bookmarks.

I can read moderate-length novels in about a week. Philosophical texts usually take twice that.

I'm lucky to have a job whose commute time allows me to dispatch novels fairly quickly: the average three hundred page novel I can read in a couple of days.

Also: I'm single.

The Genesis of Secrecy - Frank Kermode
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit - Wodehouse

I am not certain that being single helps with reading more.

I suppose it all depends, on innumerable possible factors.

For instance I can imagine someone in an unsatisfying relationship reading more to try to divert themselves from it.

But I leave this unhappy speculation here.

I finished Furst #9, The Foreign Correspondent, last night. I've given up trying to rank these they're all great. This one is among Italian emigrés in Paris in the lead-up to the Axis pact, also taking in the death of the Spanish Civil War, Berlin and Genoa. I've always fancied going to Genoa but never quite made it, this is just a sketch here but I'm up for it again now. I find Italy such an attractive place and culture anyway, a book with this setting and cast was always going to appeal.

As with most of the other books, there are few massive geoplitical acts of heroism here, just ordinary people caught up at the margins of events. It's quite sweet in its way and a very pleasant way to capture this era I think, you'd get tired if it was all about trying to fit a narrative around single epic historical events. I get the impression (from no great experience) that the majority of thrillers try to do it that way and the personal gets a bit lost, but Furst definitely tackles it the other way round.

The Brasserie Heininger scene here is my favourite since the first book too - there's a real sense of payoff for the previous eight volumes, the way this one was done.

Leaving Furst aside for the moment - I've only got two left now :( - it's onto Peter Shapiro's Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco this morning. Blistering prologue on the decay of seventies New York, great scenesetting in a dozen pages, and avoiding the flaw I hate most, which is overemphasising the importance of politics to the music and vice versa. Many's the piece I've read which fails for making much of the conflict between Thatcher and indie, say, when in reality they were a world and an asteroid that barely intersected.

I'd be interested in how you get along with McDiarmid Woof - I was pretty keen on him at one time.

he's someone I've been reading off and on for donkeys, so I know I get along with him pretty well now - the usual sort of opinion, I guess - his 20s poetry some of the greatest of the century, genuinely extraordinary stuff later on too, but it's a hike to get through that prosy kind-of-poetry-I-want style. The selected feels a bit more approachable than the big two vol collected, since it cuts down on the traipse through the later stuff, but keeps eg On a Raised Beach. Maybe the c20th British Poet who finds a way through to a genuine modern sublime? otoh, feel distant from some of his themes, since I don't think about Scotland or Lenin much. Sometimes think I'm over-fascinated by the scots vocab too (but then he knows this, is fascinated too, and it's part of the deal with the reader?)

I'm so envious of Ismael doing the Fursts in order, and for the first time

Reading the new, posthumous Beryl Bainbridge. Only 20-odd pages in and it's quite weird, in a good way. I have no idea what the hell is going on

Yeah it's great. I'm at the stage where my inclination is to try and drag it out now, so that by the time I finish #11, #12 will be out. I read an interview with him yesterday where he cited Eric Ambler (specifically 'A Coffin For Demetrios') as his inspiration, putting it as simply as saying he'd've loved there to be another ten Amblers so he's trying to write them himself. It kind of makes me want to take up the mantle now.

Also woah, this Peter Shapiro book is great. I've spent the last couple of days' commuting with Chic on my headphones reading about the history of clubs-that-play-records, mixtapes, vinyl formats, and all sorts of curious facts dropped into the mix. I'd been expecting something more like pen portraits of celebrities, but this is far better.

And so many musical references, almost none of which I know! What I really want is an ipod full of all the tunes and mixes that're mentioned in this book, that'd be incredible.

I'm pretty sure I've read more since being in my current relationship - it helps that we do just sit around at home together and read quite a lot, time I'd otherwise be spending doing something else. I am chronically easily-distracted though so an average length novel can take anywhere from two or three days to a month.

I've just finished Flaubert's Parrot (enjoyable enough but underwhelming), now re-reading some Barthelme stories and about to start Rubicon Beach by Steve Erickson.

Matt DC - I definitely started reading more when I got into a relationship. You'd think it would be the other way around.

Sorry Woolf I assumed if you were buying a selected McD you were new to him. Sounds like you've read him at least as thoroughly (and much more recently) than I have.

I pretty much agree with your take on him - the early Scots lyrics are terrific, the kind of poetry I want and communist/nationalist propaganda near-prose is hard to take, On A Raised Beach by far the pick of the later and more ambitious/experimental work. All very orthodox as you say but sometimes the consensus just happens to be right. I think the major area of real contention might be whether one thinks "A Drunk Man" coheres formally: for me it doesn't but that's a provocative opinion in some parts of Scotland.

I think the thematic problems you identify are to do with the idiosyncracy of McDs approach rather than the themes themselves. Even in my late teens as a Scot very much on the left and somewhat nationalist in my politics I found McDs political obsessions pretty alienating.

You probably already know this, but McD's Scots is a pretty artificial construction of current usage, obscurities, regional peculiarities, archaisms and neologisms. Not much more of it is familiar to a contemporary Scots speaker than, say, an American and he will need the glossary just as badly.

Alfred, my horror at Isabel's fate comes partly from finding her an almost purely sympathetic character. Being a little in love with her, I guess. I don't feel the same way about Gwendolen; it's horrible that she marries the vile Grandcourt, but she's not particularly likeable in the early stages of the novel. That doesn't mean she deserves her fate, of course, but it means I'm able to be a little more detached about it. And, as you say, she does escape.

I don't think there's anyone, man or woman, with a pulse who doesn't recoil when we realize that James has essentially maneuvered this "Heiress of the Ages" as he rather bombastically calls her at one point into this horrible situation; and, yes, for Eliot, Gwendolyn's shallowness is as essential to her charm as Isabel's intelligence and perception. But having read the novel four or five times, I no longer think her fate is so dreadful. While Lord Warburton, Goodwood, and Ralph are angels next to Osmond, there's a definite sense in which Isabel would still have perceived her prospects just as circumscribed had she married any one of them. Her pride, intelligence, and money transform any chance of a happy communion of interests into something insuperable.

From my particular POV a mystery heere is why, if the loveable main character's fate is so repulsive and horrible, you (eg Alfred) like the book so much.

I guess that some people like things that they find horrible (like horror films), but I don't think I do.

(As mentioned before, I haven't read it, am generally put off by sense that it's horrible. [and have never yet been forced to read it; only seen the film, which was indeed horrible.])

* 'a mystery here'

I suppose that Alfred could respond by saying that he has just said the character's fate is not dreadful after all.

While Lord Warburton, Goodwood, and Ralph are angels next to Osmond

fwiw I thought Goodwood an unconscionable oaf, and the final scene where his kiss - according to some commentators - sweeps her into a passion she has never before experienced and instinctively runs from, I thought was the last and vilest of his whole string of impositions.

i am reading the ask by sam lipsyte and not really enjoying it. it's not funny for one thing. i'm half way through and it really seems to have been whimsy humour-wise and one thing after another plot-wise.

is that really a criterion for whether or not you like a book, pinefox? i have trouble believing it for some reason. also, do you like the book of job?

I don't know it.

I didn't say I had a rigid, definite criterion. I'm just expressing feelings and possibilities:
"I guess that some people like things that they find horrible (like horror films), but I don't think I do."

On the whole, I would guess: if things in a book are horrible (to me), that will put me off. Then, I might want some other things about the book to be really good, to compensate.

Amis's Money is an example. Horrible in a way, but so much else going on.

London Fields is also an example: horrible, and not good enough in other ways (in fact terrible, as I recall) to compensate.

I certainly wouldn't watch a horror film, so that part of my thought stands.

But other people do like horror films. So, there are many different feelings out there.

i want to say that portrait is not really like a horror film, except maybe it is, a little. i don't like horror films fwiw.

fwiw I thought Goodwood an unconscionable oaf, and the final scene where his kiss - according to some commentators - sweeps her into a passion she has never before experienced and instinctively runs from, I thought was the last and vilest of his whole string of impositions.

And no sense of humor. And clearly almost as bad a would-be husband as Osmond, but not a monster.

pinefox, I don't know what you're saying. About 90% of fictional scenarios are ones with which I have no experience or repel me.

From my particular POV a mystery heere is why, if the loveable main character's fate is so repulsive and horrible, you (eg Alfred) like the book so much

I take it you don't like to admire a masterly novelist developing a scenario until he's found a solution.

I could add that all this is about liking a book, and wanting to read it.

There are other kinds of relation that we can have with a book - reading it cos we have to, reading it or reviewing it for money, reading it and not liking it.

I could have those kinds of relation, with horrible books.

xp Alfred: no experience of and repulsion are, I think, two very different things.

It's true that being distant from a subject could put me off, but it might not.

I think that what I am saying is plain and simple enough. That doesn't mean that I expect other people to feel the way I do. They rarely do.

Goodwood! his name is Goodwood! James is hilarious sometimes. i love that freaking book.

Alfred, I think your 2nd post comes in my 'compensation' category, ie: the book is horrible but has good things too.

I'm not sure what is meant by 'solution', because I'm not certain what the problem is. Of course, that's probably cos I haven't read this particular book.

But why should a novelist exploring a horrible scenario repel you? I'm curious.

Because I find horrible scenarios repulsive?

That seems to explain itself, to me, though maybe it doesn't to others.

But, depending on your limits, this would exclude more than half of printed literature, no?

it's horrible like a tragedy is horrible, pinefox. she marries a monster. she doesn't get hacked into a million pieces and eaten. do you not like king lear?

I don't know enough to say. I haven't read one percent of printed literature.

And of course, I will never, ever get anywhere near reading half of printed literature.

I note once more, for clarity, that I'm not saying one should not read horrible books, etc, for various motives, including knowledge and understanding of literary history.

I am only saying that I am less likely to LIKE such books or cherish them.

There might be other examples that would make me think again. I don't have a definition of what is horrible. I only started on this because of a perception that the story of PL is horrible, and people have tended to agree.

xp I do like King Lear. It seems pretty well written.

Tragedy inspires pity and terror, right?

portrait is well-written, too! it's not king lear, but nothing is

xp: People say that. Is it true? I don't know. A lot of things people say about art might or might not be true.

I don't think that what I like about KL is the pity and terror it creates. It's more the vividness of scenes and lines - the same thing Orwell said was good about it.

I'd say that, if you're keen to explore the concept of good people driven to destruction, or compelled to drive other people to destruction (and real people do this, so we should explore it), then fiction is a better arena to do so than anywhere else.

What about the Premier League?

If I'm reading you correctly, pinefox, it's difficult for you to dissociate an affective response from your aesthetic judgments. You also said in the Jennifer Egan thread that you "often find it quite hard to relate to these very different experiences" such as Egan's depictions of the band and a character's kleptomania. Is it difficult to step outside your prejudices and experiences? As a gay man I have no choice; lots of hetero couplings make no sense to me.

For myself, I'm not sure that I see much difference between 'affective response' and 'aesthetic judgment'. They look suspiciously close, to me.

Others may see them very differently.

I can't separate them, but I can separate my experiences. I don't "relate" to most songs or books.

For myself, I'm not sure that I see much difference between 'affective response' and 'aesthetic judgment'. They look suspiciously close, to me.

Others may see them very differently.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, June 8, 2011 12:40 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you sound like henry james!

Rilke - Duino Elegies/Rodin/Letters. Love that essay on Rodin is good! He is a fan throughout but he makes this into an intense study.

Soseki - I am a Cat. Some good stuff, the middle class satire is kinda meh, not that angry or funny - doesn't quite register at the mo.

apropos of nothing, my favourite clive james zinger

"Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick."

Rilke behaved very badly, but he is worth reading.

James - also good value on Canetti and Sartre, iirc.

agreed. i love that quote though. any excuse to c+p.

it's quite possible to read POAL as the portrait of a masochist - or at least of someone who knowingly invites danger into their life, and who (quite bravely and admirably) faces up to the consequence of that choice.

but i love james partly because (as he admitted) his writing tended toward the bittersweet and melancholic. he is, amongst so many other things, 'the master' of regret, disappointment, wrong paths taken, unhappy fates.

That Rilke line is great!

A fifth of the way through The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana by Eco. So far, reasonably enjoyable - too early to say, really.

One more empirical contribution to the discussion of literary appeal: I read this first para of an LRB review late last night

Edward St Aubyn began writing his Patrick Melrose novels in 1988. He finished At Last, the fifth and supposedly final book in the series, late in 2010. St Aubyn is a terrific prose stylist and, end to end, these 800 or so pages, covering more than 40 years, add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war – Dance to the Music of Time or Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour. They combine a distinctive and exotic subject – appalling posh people – with a universal theme: families, and whether people can transcend their origins (answer: no). But where you might expect such a series to be panoramic and full of digressions, the Melrose novels are claustrophobic and obsessively centred on a few deeply felt concerns: cruelty, snobbery, neglect, addiction, inheritance. They feature a large cast of sharply drawn gargoyles but are entirely dominated by three characters: Patrick and his mother and father, Eleanor and David Melrose, two of the great monsters of recent fiction.

- and thought: ... hm - I'm glad I don't have to read these books; who'd want to?

I think I would want to, and might actually make moves to enable me to do so.

I am really struggling to find anything readable at the moment. Pessoa, Emin, some Icelandic crime fiction... None of them carry me along. So I am reading pointless articles in last week's New Statesman instead. At least they are short.

Pre-ordered it, should be a nice surprise next January, unless either myself or the publishing industry has died in the meantime.

Meanwhile, Amazon, prompted by my pre-order, has suggested I "get myself a little something" - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002TMAN54/ref=s9_wish_co_ir02?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3E2XZASH249ZH&colid=3ONQY8JWZ0IQR&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=left-2&pf_rd_r=11BWE6ZHFE84KYYKYJC4&pf_rd_t=3201&pf_rd_p=466496393&pf_rd_i=typ01

and thought: ... hm - I'm glad I don't have to read these books; who'd want to?

To be fair, St Aubyn's novels are also very, very funny and beautifully written, even if the behavior of the characters is sometimes utterly evil

It's quite a good way to get a reaction, to make your characters behave in an evil way.

You should try that in your second, or possibly third, novel.

I'm glad I don't have to read these books; who'd want to?

'some hope' is a great title: one i'm surprised no one had got to yet

nevermind

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51tSJMVMbyL._SS500_.jpg

Just started "Under the volcano" by Malcolm Lowry. the description of the alcoholic Fermin family passed out on the dining room floor is hilarious. There is really good writing throughout. I know I´m going to love this.

I've had that near the top of my mental 'must read' list forever - keen to hear more

Been dying to trying to read UtV for years. Maybe this summer is the season.

Hopefully before I have to return library copy of David Markson's book book about it

woof otm on St Aubyn, although I do like the inheritance angle. Good quote at the end of that LRB piece.

Stop it here and go there: Summer is always late! What are you reading 2011?

Think some pedants will stay here for another 12 days, at which point the bonfires will be burning.

Under the Volcano is da bomb.

OK, this thread is really closed now.

spring is a season of the heart, not the calendar-makers