Summer is always late! What are you reading 2011?

Sunshine and showers!

The Song of the Earth - Jonathan Bate!

Find myself taking agin every other word atm.

James M. Cain - Mildred Pierce. Man, this was much better than expected!

'Our instinct about Hardy is this: he values a world - for him vanishing, for us long vanished - in which people live in rhythm with nature.'

His goddam itallics. Here's some nature to live in rhythm with: horseshit. Or at least, he may well have valued it, in fact I'm sure he did, but that's not the predominant tone of his books/poems, surely? The rural world, and the supernatural world perhaps beyond that, in which humans live
and which they have partly created is surely his obsession, but Bate's expression? Just, no.

Or at least all of ILB is going to come and tell me otherwise now, but what do I care, zummer ys ycumen yn!

What was good about MP, Soto?

I read a Hardy novel once, Jude the Obscure. I don't remember anyone in it being in rhythm with nature. But maybe Bate would say that was their problem.

I suppose that there are ways that one can live in a rhythm with nature. For instance, if one grows crops then one might be more keenly aware of the cycles of their growth.

But it could also possibly be protested that people are part of nature too, so never really out of its rhythm. I am not sure.

It's more accurate to say that in Hardy's novels the people can't forget nature if they tried.

I haven't read much Bat, & haven't been wild on what I read. Knows stuff, but ahem not deft with ideas ahem. I've got his Clare biog knocking about the house somewhere, should read that one of these days.

Soto otm - sounds like a weird misreading of Hardy - like he does have an interest in the folk year, fairs, rituals, the craft of farming, but v few English writers have as keen a sense of nature as abomination (plants strangling each other, blasted heaths, life against life in blind universe) and sense of human rustic activity as being this sad struggle with the next fucked-up surprise from dame kind (the sheep are exploding, there's garlic in the milk etc etc).

Bate for bat there, tho' I think I'd like him more if he were Jonathan Bat.

yep that's my feeling about Hardy as well. There's a large supernal storehouse there as well - but it's not 'Huans living in rhythm with nature'. Beginning of Far From The Madding Crowd ffs!

meant to say supernal/folkloric. but yeah - some rhythm! some nature!

or the impressive, boring first chapter of The Return of the Native that dwells endlessly on the majesty of Egdon Heath.

Like the Monty Python version of that better than the original.

Al Silverman: The Time of their Lives -- big oral history of the 'golden age' of modern US publishing (1946-1980ish); interesting, but not wonderfully written. Like a series of congenial middlebrow magazine articles more than a proper book

The kicking Bate is getting is a bit unfair. The italicisation of "live in rhythm with nature" is crass, but Hardy very explicitly thought that a rural way of life that kept people close to the rhythm of nature was passing and that was much to be regretted. Perhaps inconsistently, he was also a gloomy Schopenhauerian determinist who knew nature could be cruel and scratching a living from the land hard and precarious. But I'd have said Bate's only crime is stating the baldly obvious in the tone of someone offering some sort of revelation.

actually it's doubly unfair in that it's more or less an aside. that said, the way it was couched immediately got my back up - it struck me as a summation that no one with a feel for Hardy would make.

He knows what he's talking about, but I do find myself regularly pulled up by evaluations that feel half-baked or right in a vague way but not useful - like the Hardy bit. He is good tho in terms of his own subject matter and it's a novel and interesting approach.

Can't believe PF has only read one Tommy Hardy.

When you live in the country, you live in rhythm with nature, mainly because there is fuck all else going on, so you tend to notice complete shite like tres' leaves sprouting or whatever at different times. Things like trees' leaves sprouting at diiferent times, seemingly following some kind of divine plan about farms, become really fucking annoying.

I have nearly finished my first Scandi-crime novel, Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indrithason. I think it is pish.

Things like trees' leaves sprouting at diiferent times, seemingly following some kind of divine plan about farms, become really fucking annoying.

Well yes exactly. hedgehogs skiers round your toes. The whole rhythm wit nature thing feels a bit silly on examination. But I wd stress, I just plucked a throwaway comment from Bate. It'd be grotesquely unfair to judge him on it.

I think it is pish.

Birdseye potato roffles.

What's the best Hardy? Or the best starting point? I was thinking of starting Tess D'Ubervilles at some point.

The Mayor of Castorbridge is his tightest novel; very few wasted scenes. The first chapter, in which Henchard sells his wife and daughter at a country fair, is one of the quietly horrifying you'll ever read. One of the few genuine tragedies in English lit.

*Casterbridge of course

The rest:

Far From the Madding Crowd - The only one of the majors I haven't finished.

The Return of the Native - I don't find Eustacia Vye as marvelous and sultry as Holden Caulfield and lots of critics. Famous, endless opening chapter describing the majesty of Egdon Heath sets the pace for a rather tentative first third.

Jude the Obscure - Bleak, bleak, bleak. First-rate on observing how a young man of above average intelligence and shitty background is destroyed.

Tess - As weird as Wuthering Heights. He pulls off a difficult trick: he's in and out of Tess' desires and fantasies; he's sympathetic without condescension. Section in which Tess works on dairy farm is one of the few sustained lyrical moments in the English novel. You'll find others in...

The Woodlanders - This reads like a verse play. Love triangle deep in the Wessex countryside.

As for the 'minor' stuff: I need to read Under the Greenwood Tree. Reprints of forgotten things like A Laodicean and Two in the Tower still haven't led to significant critical rediscovery. With Hardy, when's he's bad he's not enough of a craftsman to compel you to finish a novel.

I'm very, very fond of Hardy. I understand why modernists like Lawrence and Pound and heirs (Larkin, Amis, Auden) adored him. Like Hopkins, he straddles two centuries as uneasily as his talent; he always had to work a little harder than naturals like James.

I haven't even mentioned his poetry.

Life and Fate, about 700 pages through.

finished:
Christie - The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Carr - The Plague Court Murders

2 short mysteries for summer. not the best works of either author/detective but entertaining enough.

now reading:
Asimov - The Gods Themselves

it was doing well but now he went to the moon and he's describing everything he knows about low gravity. hopefully the plot will resume soon.

the first chapter of 'return of the native' is only four pages long!

i was a little let down that it broke so quickly from that into people conversating.

I'm impressed by Alfred's words on and knowledge of Hardy, but would also say

>>> one of the few sustained lyrical moments in the English novel.

... hm - aren't there really rather a lot of such moments, esp in the modern novel? Hollinghurst would be an example. Well, depends how you define it. Maybe 'sustained' is key

Pound adored Hardy? really? I would have thought his attitude, whatever it was, would be pretty different from that of Larkin - who detested Pound

'naturals like James' -- kind of get this in contrast to TH, but then not sure what HJ was a natural *at*. Probably not at breezily accessible storytelling.

Sciascia - The Moro Affair. This unsurprisingly ties all his fiction together.

Life and Fate, about 700 pages through.

You can't leave it like this you know ;-) I am planning to read this...sometime

then not sure what HJ was a natural *at*. Probably not at breezily accessible storytelling.

He sure was -- his early novels are marvels of pacing and ingenuity. Try Washington Square. And even the sand dunes of the late novels depend on confident narrative pivots.

I've read WS

I like it OK, or think I like it, or like to think I like it.

To be honest one reason I do that is, I like the title.

I still wouldn't be sure about agreeing with the statement 'HJ was a natural at breezily accessible storytelling'.

then again, perhaps in defence of HJ, who IS?

lots of good novelists - David Mitchell, George Eliot, Lethem - don't necessarily strike me as breezily accessible storytellers.

I suppose Lorrie Moore is or has been.

Mitchell and Lethem ARE breezy but I feel that they deliberately try to make themselves less accessible than they might naturally be.

LM is one writer with whom I never have any problems in this way.

Maybe Dickens was accessible etc, I don't know.

"breezily" is your adverb, by the way.

The obvious barrier to enjoying Hardy is style. When not inspired he's often crabbed and cumbersome, even in his best work. He has no real interest in elegance or finish. But he knows how to feel, and communicate feeling, and I too am very, very fond of him.

My take on the novels

Jude: very different from the rest of his stuff, anticipates modernism (the character of Old Father Time in particular a departure from the realist tradition). Sue Bridehead seems almost anachronistically modern in both her ambitions and neuroses. Alfred is right that it's very, very bleak. I see why many think it the best or at least most important Hardy but despite containing many fine things it's not one of my own favourites.

Tess/Woodlanders/Return: this is core Hardy for me. His strengths are those of a poet, really - Shakespearean in his structures, heavily symbolic, full of numinous set pieces. The Woodlanders, pastoral and elegiac, is under-rated, but Tess is perhaps the finest.

Casterbridge/Madding: These are closer to typical Victorian novels in their social sweep (although still full of stuff that could only be written by Hardy). Many no doubt think that a positive but I like them less than the more intensely poetic novels. For me Madding Crowd is the weakest of the 6 biggies. It's perhaps his best known novel, probably because of the big budget film with Julie Christie at the height of her celebrity.

Alfred, Under the Greenwood Tree is slight but delightful. A rare (unique?) happy(ish) ending. The Trumpet Major is also good.

The Woodlanders is indeed marvelous and has only gotten the critical attention it deserves in the last twenty years. The scene I always remember is the one in which Winterborne hides in the tree while his beloved calls to him.

Hardy confused realism with bleakness, so that the horrors to which he subjects Jude and Sue look rigged from the start. This tendency also mars a fair chunk of his poetry too.

More likely bleakness was the sort of realism he best understood and had the greatest affinity for. What you have to look at is whether the bleakness seems superficial.

I just finished True Deceiver by Tove Jansson. The Summer Book is checked out. I will take Comedy in a Minor Key to read on the plane.

Peter Shapiro Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. Man, is this book fantastic. So much incredible music to get to know. When there's an extended discussion of a single record (pretty often), I'm trying when I can to fire up the track in question and it makes for such a rewarding way to discover new stuff. I sometimes struggle to find an 'in' to genres off my current radar, soul being one of those right now, but doing it this way immediately overcomes any resistance.

Awesome discoveries today:

• The O'Jays: Back Stabbers
• The Undisputed Truth: Smiling Faces Sometimes
• T-Connection: Do What You Wanna Do

I once sent The Summer Book to someone in Sweden.

I suppose that is a bit 'coals to Newcastle'.

Mr Klata, I also don't find it easy to get into other genres, and soul would often be one of those (though in truth I might have thought that soul and disco were two different genres; I daresay they are and your book is about both).

No, I think you're right - I've been working through a series of chapters today showing the evolution of soul music's arrangements, rhythms and lyrical concerns around the early seventies moved together towards a kind of artifice, which is essentially the disco sound. The overall theme seems to be to expose a certain tension in the post-civil rights era upward mobility of the black middle classes, which I couldn't really say is accurate or not, but is certainly fascinating.

iirc, Isaac Hayes was the immediate soul forerunner of disco and Donna Summer was the inflection point from soul into full disco.

Turn The Beat Around is indeed great and so is Tim Lawrence's Love Saves The Day. And Ismael, LSTD is maybe a bit less fun to read (I remember loving Shapiro's voice whereas Lawrence tries to be more objective and scholarly) but LSTD is definitely stronger when it comes to listing actual songs and it has lots of DJ/Club top tens for particular years so you can see the changes from the Francis Grasso sound of the early 70s to Siano, Mancuso, Levan etc. There's supposed to be a second volume of LSTD coming out at some point that covers post-disco 80s 90s stuff.

Thanks for the Hardy reccs! Hopefully I'll get to one this summer (Tess, Jude or Casterbridge).

Now I'm on to The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant.

I read Comedy in a Minor Key last night so I must go to the library tomorrow morning to borrow Art of Recklessness by Dean Young. I've written down the call number in advance to save time.

Comedy in a Minor Key is ace. What did you think of it?

Read Robert Charles Wilson (probably my favourite living SF writer)'s 'The Harvest', and am now on Koestler's 'The Case of the Midwife Toad', which was $2 at a charity book shed

Adorno - Aesthetic Theory

woo!

i'm saving that until i'm 'ready'.

i'm almost done with richards, 'the romantic conception of life', now reading frederick beiser, 'the romantic imperative', and a bit of wallace stevens. and still schopenhauer.

I was reading Critique of Pure Reason but stopped because I felt like I didn't have enough time to devote to it to gain any real value or understanding from it.

last year i started going chronologically through the books of l.m. montogomery ("anne of green gables" etc), but i had to stop about halfway through because i was getting cynical about her recycled plot elements and pet disdains (fat people, Italians, the French, etc). i've started back up again with her "emily" trilogy and it reminded me what i loved about her -- the reverence in which she holds art and the creative spirit, her respect for traditions that are emotionally fulfilling, etc. however she still has a chip on her shoulder about people who don't "know their place" that infects even her best characters, which is disappointing.

next up is "the blue castle," which a lot of people think is her best work. it's hilarious and also the kind of "mousy girl makes good" story that i would devour when i was younger.

I got about five pages into The Windup Girl before giving it up as a bad job. Gah, £7.99!

get thee to a bookswap

Just finished a re-reading of Hollinghurst's "The Folding Star" it's a good book but "The Spell" is where imo he starts to become truly great.

Just started Ackroyd's "Hawksmoor" which I'm enjoying immensely.

Just finished a re-reading of Hollinghurst's "The Folding Star"

Not usually a fan of sex scenes, but the one in that novel is pretty hot.

I loved the rendering of the quiet precise way of communicating (extraordinary things).

I found Art of Recklessness. I am also taking Something Else (a biography) in preparation for reading Ashbery's translation of Illuminations when I get back. Lydia Davis's review in the NYT was terrific.

A couple of pop shakespeare books - Bate's Soul of the Age and Greenblatt's Will in the World. Never comfortable reading this stuff, feel like I should be actually stuck in the thing itself, whether WS or contemporaries, but both authors know a lot, & snobbery's a vice. Bate slightly irritating me already, not sure why, may come back to it.

Fielding's Voyage to Lisbon. Gloomy.

Not sure what to read on my forthcoming short break in Granada - I think perhaps Alan Clark's Diaries will best survive the constant interruptions.

Have you read this geezer, PGM? http://catalog.openletterbooks.org/authors/23

I haven't read any, but I have heard of him. He writes in weirdo Catalan. I believe our old friend Mr Jordi is a big fan, as far as it goes. Maybe I should read some. Hard to take somebody called Quim seriously though. Quivering Quim.

I was thinking I should maybe have another go at The Savage Detectives.

anyone see the new john sayles novel at the bookstore? wowza! what a beast. almost a thousand pages long. don't think i can tackle it. i'm a fan of his movies and i read his old books years ago when i was a kid - union dues, pride of the bimbos, the anarchist's convention & other stories - but i'm too afraid to pay 30 bucks for something that ends up half-read.

my sister went to see him talk/read from that book. she said he was amazing/crazy.

he is a dreamboat

why is mcsweeneys anti-dust jacket?

my father has been a big fan of his since return of the secaucus seven. he even took me to see that in the theatre. and he bought all those early books.

I've bought it but haven't yet tackled it. It's a gorgeous thing, though

a trio of books by jg farrell - troubles, the siege of krishnapur and the singapore grip - which im finding enjoyable but dense, a mix of reportage, historical fiction & modernism.

i loved troubles. what a great book.

have you read the others scott? singapore grip is the one i liked the best (still havent finished the siege.. yet tho) & i think its the most interesting. it buries its coldness under a lot of information and narrative chaos but its incredibly sour abt ppl & 'society', sorta shook me tbh.

no, i haven't read them. i think i started the singapore one and it got lost in the shuffle. i will try again some day.

Tolstoy - Hadji Murat
Victor Serge - Conquered City

Insurgents, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionists, terrorists and state sponsered terror, to repression of the people - all taking place in the primitive east and the modern 20th century city.

Kathy Acker - Kathy goes to Haiti. Need a bit of p0rn to calm down after all that.

Thoroughly enjoyed the stories in Pastorlia by George Saunders, which various people here have recommended.

Ulysses ch 1 + 5 on CD

James Stewart's Mr Speaker!, his rousing biography of the forgotten Thomas Reed, Speaker of the House in the late 1890's. A fascinating study of the politics of the 1880's and 1890's: the debates about tariff rates, how to spend the swollen federal surplus, etc.

I just finished Egan’s The Keep which I thought was really good. I look forward to Goon Squad whenever I can get my hands on it.

Started A Passage to India which I’m ashamed I haven’t read before now. I've been a big fan of all the other Forster stuff I've read.

House Speaker Thomas Reed! Yes! Great subject for a bio.

Manuel Puig - The Buenos Aires Affair. In which two (physically, mentally) 'damaged' people meet and damage each other even more. Throw in Peron, a healthy dose of art scene stuff and hey presto! Anyone else read him?

Probably making it sound more grim than it actually is.

haven't read him in ages. i liked Eternal Curse On The Reader Of These Pages. definitely one of my favorite TITLES in all of fiction. he reminds me of college lit in the 80's. not a slam or anything. just seemed like if someone was talking about puig back then it was for a class of some sort. same with milan kundera. plus, arty movies made back then out of those guys books. another reason why people were walking around with their books. (plus, LL Kundera. ladies loved kundera. great icebreaker with brainy young women back in the day. also see: marquez and neruda. this probably doesn't work now. but if you ever build a time machine and go back to the 80's you can thank me later. unless you are gay. in which case this information wouldn't be of any use to you in a possible future where you go back in time.)

I see he had a screenwriting sideline...contents wise I can see why he could be bracketed w/Kundera and Marquez. It is my strong suspicion that we have Bolano now for this, so no need for time machine just yet.

I've been reading Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. It's a straight-up dose of the usual Sacks m.o., a lot of case studies that illuminate how damage to tiny parts of the brain can produce extremely targeted and selective losses of abilities or personality, along with stories of how this affects the individual and how on ocassion the plasticity and adaptability of the brain can "regrow" a functionality through alternate means.

I find it good to understand this sort of information, since my daughter has brain damage and I'm entering the time of life when dementia of various kinds can begin to emerge.

Finished Oe's A Private Matter, a nasty little short novel. It boasts terseness, an evocative way with surrealism, and an ear for idle chatter. The existential-with-a-capital-E sex scenes are rather dated.

re discussion just above, I am not convinced that talking about a given author will get you anywhere romantically with anyone, unless unlike me you were the sort of person who was going to get there anyway.

Damn.

LL Kundera. ladies loved kundera. great icebreaker with brainy young women back in the day. also see: marquez and neruda.

otm. there was a point circa '85/'86 when all the intellectual chicks carried around Don Delilo's White Noise too.

Haha, Scott, "LL Kundera." I did indeed carry Kundera around in 80s. I didn't carry Delillo around until the 90s though. Ladies these days seem to carry around such boring books comparatively.

I am reading "L.A. Noire: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City" -- which posits the battle between mobster Mickey Cohen and police chief William Parker as the creation story of the City of Angels.

Just remembering a short-lived relationship I had in my early twenties that was by and large based on shared appreciation of the books of Don Delillo and Joan Didion (and also Robert Altman's 70s output). So thank you, I guess, Don Delillo.

alfred have you read 'the silent cry'

Nope. A recommendation?

I just cracked Gaskell's North and South open.

Just finished The Factory Of Facts by Sante - pretty damn excellent, but be sure to read it as a series of closely-related essays, not a connect-the-chapters memoir. It'll go down all the easier.

Now onto About Looking by John Berger.

the silent cry is one of my favourite books

reading a collection of essays and lectures by Elliott Carter

Lieven De Cauter, The Capsular Civilization

I should also mention I read Beautiful and Pointless, David Orr. It billed itself as poetry crit, but was a bit on the airy side to really qualify. I found out more about the politics of contemporary poetry scene than I'd known before, but of course that may have been what the "pointless" in the title was referring to. It was a very quick read, whcih was good; any longer and I would have stopped reading before the end.

What's the gist? A buddy and I interrogated a friend, a poetry MFA, on Friday. At least fiction has the possibility of getting read; a poet must rely on a coterie of MFA students, she said.

The discussion of poetry politics was just one chapter out of maybe eight. The idea of the book was an informal, personal discussion of various aspects of poetry, designed to help non-poets figure out how to "get at" poetry and get something out of it. I was not in the target audience.

I finished Turn The Beat Around this afternoon. Loved it. Great digressions into all sorts of things I wouldn't've thought worth their own sections - the creation of mixing, disco/hip-hop nexus, roller disco, italo, various political scenesettings, swing kids in nazi europe - and none overplayed.

It ends with a discography, pleasingly. I'm going to make up a cd-r for the car of the top 100 talked-about tunes, then lose myself in a polyester & 'luudes frenzy next time I have a six-hour drive.

I was planning to squeeze in Palo Alto or Point Omega before we tackle Open City, but I might go for a headstart there instead.

IK, btw, Jon Savage's TEENAGE also talks, at length I think, about 'swing kids in Nazi Europe' -- I heard him talk about it at a reading once - though I don't really know any more about it.

just been reading WB / BB in my local pub. The book is full of priceless quotations.

I was reading Steven Wells' review of that last night, pinefox - unfortunately his style rather puts me off any of his enthusiasms.

I did look up the swing kids separately though. There seems to have been some real foolhardy bravery going on there, for example the German branch of the movement keeping going into the forties and more-or-less openly opposing nazi cultural efforts, to the extent that a dozen of their leaders were hanged in 1944.

I should also mention I read Beautiful and Pointless, David Orr.

ahh, i should have known this phrase came from somewhere! my poet friend is dating an old-school marxist, and at a recent reading he said the phrase "beautiful and pointless" summed up the whole endeavor. of course, when HE says "pointless" he means "does not uplift the productive class." also he called us all a bunch of petty bourgeoisie dilettantes, but i guess if the shoe fits.

Cony Catchers and Bawdy Baskets: an anthology of Elizabethan Low life. A selection of pamphleteers get upset about abraham men, prigs, wild rogues and their morts.

woof i quite randomly picked up a copy of that the other day, i haven't read it yet though

i am reading dominic sandbrook's state of emergency: the way we were: britain 1970-1974, which title annoys me every time i type it out; and the steven erikson book i mentioned on the fantasy thread some weeks ago, still, which is dragging out; and i just finished rivka galchen's atmospheric disturbances, following which i imagine i will go back to rereading gravity's rainbow

state of emergency: the way we were: britain 1970-1974

:_:

;_;

yup

How's Atmospheric Disturbances? Keep thinking about reading it.

Funny that about Cony Catchers - I hadn't thought about it for a while myself – I remember it as the sort of thing that lurks around the CONTEXTS sections of Shakespeare/Renaissance reading lists, & iirc I grudgingly/dutifully read a chunk of it as an undergrad – was reading some Nashe recently & thought to find it again. Enjoying it way more now, think I'm much more comfortable with chatty, rambly Tudor prose than I used to be.

i am reading george oppen. and the upanishads. and still schopenhauer.

the upanishads are bananas.

I <3 Oppen.

The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand - the title's a bit misleading since the meetings of the club itself only take up part of one chapter - it's more of a group intellectual biography and a toe dipped into the currents of late 19th century philosophical thought.

Just finished Garner's Strandloper.

i did not get past the "my daddy fought in the war" parts of the metaphysical club

How's Atmospheric Disturbances?

prob my fav new novel of the last few yrs

The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand - the title's a bit misleading since the meetings of the club itself only take up part of one chapter - it's more of a group intellectual biography and a toe dipped into the currents of late 19th century philosophical thought.

Excellent book, particularly the Holmes sections.

Hugo Wilcken's little book on Bowie's LOW

-- i want to reread 'the metaphysical club' now that i have more of a sense of the period; i read it at, what, fourteen, and it was interesting to me, but i recall so little of it in any meaningful way

-- more on 'state of emergency': after using 'doctor who' to illustrate points about feminism, northern ireland, and the european union, sandbrook makes fun of mary whitehouse's 'curious obsession with doctor who'

'atmospheric disturbances' left me curiously untouched, i don't know; i was a lot more interested in it on a literal level than i was on any figurative or metaphorical one, which meant i just went "ayup this is a fairly well-constructed and judicious narrative based on mental ill-health". i don't know, possibly i just wasn't in the right mood to encounter it. i found myself thinking things like "this coffee shop in manhattan, which is real, sounds interesting; i would like to go there" or "huh, the narrator speaks spanish; i should learn spanish" -- i think this is a sign that i was not in the mood, really, to be reading fiction

So can I read Cary's The Horse's Mouth without reading the others in the trilogy?

Denton Welch - Maiden Voyage. Ended up skimming large sections - Part of the reason is that I do find this gorgeous as prose in a way that what he actually says never ends up being registered in my mind.

Jelinek - Lust. Couldn't be more different. Machine prose to talk about mechanized relations between men and women. She is asking you to enjoy that piece of shit on your plate. Just eat it.

"Metaphysical Club" does seem a bit formless at times - like I'm about 2/3rds of the way through and it's not really clear where he's going with it - but that doesn't bother me too much. I guess the main story is about the development of pragmatism, but there are lots of tangents. In any case, there are usually enough interesting ideas per page to keep my morale up. I guess he's trying to sketch the intellectual climate of an era, and he tends to proceed by the aggregation of many small portraits. He's good on providing some context on how the scientific establishment was shaken up by Darwin's "Origin of Species" and how that reverberated throughout the intellectual firmament.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro

Wasn't expecting to like this, but I'm half way through and really enjoying it.

Dom Casmurro is great!

Hugo Wilcken's little book on Bowie's LOW

What you think? I really enjoyed it, but I also love Wilcken's two novels, so I'm a bit of a fan.

Vote ma another not much enthralled by 'Atmospheric Disturbances'--I was hoping it would be excellent, but it didn't do much for me, and now I can barely remember it

Am now reading this new NYRB rerelease, which is amazingly good

http://assets.nybooks.com/media/images/productimage-picture-the-judges-of-the-secret-court-145.jpg

JM, I think the book is quite informative, though I don't think it's written with especial panache considering that the author is a novelist.

But statements like 'Again, Bowie is muddling a few things up here' (p.54) are quite amusing.

Actually, that's true--though his novels do have (very grim) panache

A few recent efforts:

John Mortimer - Clinging to the Wreckage (excellent autobiography)
Auberon Waugh - Way of the World (bonkers reacionary but v funny)
Rudolf Steiner - Manifestations of Karma (decidedly odd, even by Theosophical standards)
Karen Armstrong - The Buddha (excellent introduction)
Bernice Rubens - Mr Wakefield's Crusade (great fun as expected)
Doris Lessing - The Good Terrorist (nearly finished, enjoying a lot - interesting mix of Englishness and Marxism)

I have started reading an Evel Knievel biography. It is very enjoyable so far, featuring prostitutes who have serviced him and so forth.

John Mortimer - Clinging to the Wreckage (excellent autobiography)

Yeah, this was excellent. Though looking at the author photo, it's obvious Emily Mortimer must have got her looks from her mum

saw wicked a few months ago and thought it was cute but badly written, so i decided to give the book a try. turned out to be nothing like the musical but just as badly written! disappointing, as i'd read a short story by gregory maguire in a glbt YA anthology and enjoyed his writing style a lot. he has some nice turns of phrase but his characters were frustratingly inconsistent and the plot meandered pointlessly all over.

yeah, i've never seen the musical, but wicked is a terrible book.

a splendid conspiracy and the jokers by cossery, one's new directions and one's nyrb, both translations released in the past year or two, meaning he just died I guess. French dude who grew up in Egypt a while ago.

these are way different from the stuff in men that god forgot, both much more pointedly ~political~ than any of his short stories in his little fuck the world fuck the police fuck anyone in government fuck anyone who plays sports sanctioned by the government fuck the system kind of way.

All the characters only have sex w/ chicks under 15 or so, all female characters that are any older are prostitutes or insane. Despite all of this his writing, even when translated, is quiet interesting and incredibly incredibly smooth and easy to read. His ideas about life are also interesting in a way (again, despite the above).

I wish he never outgrew his phase of writing Paris Spleen type shit he was good at that

Terry Eagleton, WHY MARX WAS RIGHT

WHY WAS HE?

Finished Nothing to Envy about North Korea. Very good book.

From Hell. Hadn't read it before. Been meaning to for years. It's great.

Argufying - Empson. Great robust opinion, robust common sense and robust nonsense - it's great watching such great thinking. Love the way in his reviews he'll start 'in this stimulating book' and you go 'wuh-oh' and sure enough a few sentences later a phrase basically saying 'almost everything this writer says is almost entirely wrong'. Immensely stimulating and great encouragent to gleefully tear apart everything with only the POWER OF YOUR MIND.

Still reading The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. It's not about the Rosicrucians or the Enlightenment. I've liked a lot of her other writing, but there's an awful lot of building done on speculative argument here. Loads of paragraphs ending with stuff like "Was this perhaps a reason for showing the defeated Frederick on a Y, to underline the failure of a movement emanating from Dee's influence in Bohemia?"

The picture is convincing enough, the argument from evidence is often weak-sounding, and occasionally the whole subject matter feels like it's bearing too much load. Enjoyable masses of detail in there tho - steam powered musical statues, insane masques, European cosmopolitan culture, the business trips of magicians etc.

ffs stop saying 'great' you illiterate buffoon.

This WHY MARX WAS RIGHT book is a lot of fun. I like it.

On separate occasions it mentions Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.

Guillaume Apollinaire - Selected writings. Great New Directions paperback. Thorough intro, then to a selection of poems and prose writings. I really want to read The Poet Assassinated. From the chapter included here it keeps to the word 'surrealist'.

Stephen Vizinczey - In Praise of Older Women. In fact its a lot more than a young man's diary of conquests. Lots on his background, Hungarian history, his escape from home and travels to Europe, then onto a credit-fuelled high life in North America.

Post-pynchon revive from a month ago I have now started on Stanislaw Lem - Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. Following that w/Pynchon and Bolano.

I finished WHY MARX WAS RIGHT

and went back to

LOW.

finishing the high window.

i could really have posted "reading the philip marlowe novels" earlier and saved myself a few posts. so i'm doing it now.

Went camping last week and read a trash novel, The Osterman Weekend, an early (1972) Robert Ludlum. Pretty bad stuff when you get down to it. The entire plot premise hinged on an absurdity and the set piece was almost a parody of every 1960s description of wealthy NY suburbanites gettting together to party.

Also re-read The Aran Islands, J.M. Synge. First read it in 1978. Not a bad little book at all. I kept my original copy in Oxford World's Classics all these years, waiting for just such a desire to reread it. I'm glad I did.

Just started India: A Wounded Civilization, V.S. Naipul. It seems perceptive enough, even though it is 35 years old. I am sure it had a lasting effect among the literate classes in India.

Martin Buber - Tales of the Hasidim: they're sort of like the closest you could possibly get to Jewish koans.

I remember Jack B. Yeats doing a picture for that Synge book, didn't he? Or ... am I just mixing this up with his 'Memory Island' picture?

Finished the wee LOW book. I think I learned from it though it is remarkably slackly written. Amazing what some people can get away with, stylistically. He will finish a whole chapter with a casual parenthesis, or (no kidding) with a transcript of a lengthy email from Momus.

Now started THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES.

Diana Athill: Midsummer Night in the Workhouse -- short stories, really good; V S Naipaul can go fuck himself

Richard Dooling: Rapture for the Geeks -- about the people obsessed with the 'Singularity', but not really very good. It was funny, but it was also basically Dooling riffing on his own in a room; no interviews or anything

Rudolf Herzog: Dead Funny -- about joke-telling in Hitler's Germany; OK, but nothing amazing either

Paula Fox: Poor George -- great stuff; can't believe Fox is Courtney Love's grandmother--she's so coherent and talented and perceptive!

I've been slacking on reading in the past month, but over the weekend I read Ariel Dorfman's "Konfidenz" and my first Maigret novel, "Maigret and the Headless Corpse." Both were pretty great.

or (no kidding) with a transcript of a lengthy email from Momus

That's just showing off, isn't it?

COME DANCE WITH ME by Russell Hoban. I like it. It is essential reading for fans of the made-up band sub-genre of literary fiction.

It's not very effective showing off.

I didn't know about that sub-genre but I wonder if Iain Banks' ESPEDAIR STREET is in it.

was this posted here? saw it on my facebook:

http://flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history

Thanks Scott, fun read!

29. Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman

“…like a large shaggy dog just unchained scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”

I think Whitman would genuinely see this as a compliment.

that nabokov on dostoevsky zing always makes me mad

lol @ d.h. lawrence taking on melville, though; that's a little above your pay-grade, son.

oh i hadn't even got to him zinging joyce

Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.

how is this even a zing it sounds awesome

wait is that him talking about joyce?? dude is many things but "journalistic" is not one of the first i'd think of. unless he means "like some dude writing about his farts in a journal."

reading (aside from the didion collection i mentioned on the didion thread) that big ol' manny farber collection that came out a year or two ago. the man had some wacky notions. i'm jumping around, but i actually think i prefer the earlier straighter reviews to the bouncing from one idea eight steps ahead to something that's not immediately connected later stuff. i also wish a lot of them weren't so short. when he really has the length to pick something apart (like the taxi driver essay) he seems less...scattered. though obviously scattered what something he valued to an extent.

I think he means it in a way that possibly Joyce would agree with, that is to say the quotidian concerns of the local daily newspaper are also Joyce's. Lawrence felt his concerns to be grander and more potent perhaps. As with Lawrence on Joyce, Nabokov's zing seems a point in Dostoevsky's favour really, but I've sometimes thought the most accurate critics are the adverse ones, as long as you take what they are criticising as a good thing (Swift's critics for instance - 'it's full of shit!')

the nabokov one left off the part about dostoevsky 'spilling christ all over the page'.

Byron's letters are full of increasingly scurrilous dismissals of Keats and his work – hilarius.

Not too surprising. Byron and Keats represent very opposite temperments.

“I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”

yeah like you were non-stop boning erika, shutup auden.

not really convinced this one's meant to be having a go at Browning, sounds more like a arresting and chatty run-up to what he actually thinks but I haven't read the table talk, and can't think of anything else Auden said about browning, so I don't know.

he's half-right I think, on the fantasy front - Browning's self-consciously got a nympholept thing going on, but I don't think it's about the little girls for him. Don't quite know enough of Browning's corners though. How old is passing Pippa?

The Swimming Pool Library - Hollinghurst. About 3/4 way through. Disappointing, I think, if only because my expectations were so high. Left me wondering if he might only have the one great book in him, but the new one seems to be getting well-reviewed and I have it ordered so fingers crossed.

The Faber Pocket Guide to Britten - Bridcut. Another disappointment. Good if you want a mini-reference book, Bridcut's prose is breezy and readable, he really knows his stuff and his brief notes on the works are fresh and thought-provoking. The problem is the idiosyncratic, disjointed layout of the material and too much dry, train-spotterish facts. OK to dip into but I can't imagine many people wanting to read this from cover to cover. A couple of major new bios are expected for the centenary next year and I'm hoping one will become the new standard biography. Meantime the old Michael Kennedy bio in the Master Musicians series is a much more satisfying read than Bridcut's effort.

The Swimming Pool Library - Hollinghurst. About 3/4 way through. Disappointing, I think, if only because my expectations were so high. Left me wondering if he might only have the one great book in him

is The Line of Beauty said novel?

The last quarter makes the book iirc - though I guess if the first three were disappointing you might not care enough when it happens.

Re Auden, this is kind of off topic, but it still makes me laugh. Someone (wish I knew who) said of him, looking at the crinkliness of his face:

http://www.fwi.co.uk/blogs/lincolnshire-farming-blog/auden.jpg
"If that's what his face is like, imagine his scrotum!"

Every one of his friends -- every one -- said he was the dirtiest motherfucker who ever lived.

Dirty as in unwashed, I presume.

Bram Stoker, 'Dracula' – Mainly waffle but the set pieces are fantastic, and I never knew so many standard vampire tropes were in this book. The narrative style works really well when it's not waffling – the ship scene in particular benefits hugely from being told by two different perspectives, the latter really driving home the sheer horror of a particular moment.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, 'The Secret Garden' – Glued to this right from the start. Nothing pulls you in like SUCH a horrible protagonist. Nesr the end it becomes obvious that Burnett had had some profound religious experience that she wanted to share, but at no point is she preachy about it. It is a really lovely book with some genuinely joyful moments, though.

Shirley Jackson, 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' – This is my first Jackson and definitely not my last. I can't really say a lot without spoiling it (the blurb on my paperback copy (which I didn't read) gives away way too much imo), but it does take a couple of chapters to really get going. The end is thoroughly rewarding, too.

John Wyndham, 'The Midwich Cuckoos' – It's disappointing that such a short book can be so full of padding. The key story is all right, and the idea is imaginative, but I found myself skimming half the book and not missing a thing. Could really have been a short story.

Dirty as in unwashed, I presume.

Yeah--there's a famous story about guests visiting and finding what looked like a bowl full of shit sitting on top of the toilet tank, so the guests flushed it away. Turned out to be where Auden was keeping the pudding.

re lawrence on melville, to be fair he was one of the few taking his writing seriously at that point in time, i believe. seem to remember from that studies in classic american literature book that poe was the one he really had it in for, the white american death and all that.

that nd apollinaire selection mentioned upthread: enjoyed the poetry okay, but yeah, need to get hold of some more of his fiction.

currently reading a biography of nz painter philip clairmont, works more as a social history of nz in the 50s-60s-70s though (lots of art gossip/bitchiness which is a bonus).

Ismael, seems you make a good point about the last 1/4 of TSPL. Having read a few dozen pages more it feels like a very different novel now. Not sure the last 1/4 altogether redeems it, but it's certainly making it a lot more interesting.

Alfred, yes, The Line of Beauty, although I haven't read The Folding Star.

unknown - mari jungstedt

grim yet breezy swedish crime thriller complete with heroes w/disintegrating domestic situations and brutal murders committed by a seemingly normal middle-class fellow. par for the swedish crime course, but i tend to enjoy this specific genre a lot so i forgive the predictability. among recent entries in the genre, a cut below the mankell novels or 'echoes from the dead' by johan theorin, but worth checking out.

the succubus - vlado zabot

lynchian slovenian insanity horror. the story of an older man with a distant wife and apparently zero real friends who is slowly losing his mind and possibly being followed by a seductive young succubus, all the while paranoid that he is suspected by all those around him of being a murderer. not "great", but one of those interesting unknown minor (with spurts of major) successes that the dalkey archive seems to specialize in illuminating.

men at arms - evelyn waugh

just started this one. thus far, wonderful.

i think it was brion gysin who said that abt auden's balls

Cheers, Ward, I think you're right

The Vats by Walter de la Mare really is a remarkable short story, very like The Voices of Time by JG Ballard.

i will read that.

fwiw (i mean I know i am prob in a small group for whom auden's assessment of browning is a burning issue) I looked at Auden's table talk, and there is a bit more about Browning in there - he admires him, especially technically, but 'his way is not my way'.

nothing about his nuts that i could see.

The Finkler Question - it's good, but not that good. So far.

xpost Rabbi Ben Deeznuts. Anyway. if it's not tedious, in what sense 'his way not my way'. I can think of some things they might be said to share, perhaps a certain demotic irreverance to poetic authority? Is that fair? But Browning's loquacious diction is certainly not Auden's would you say?

Just got the new Hollinghurst in the mail. Didn't realise it was such a tome.

I can't remember what exactly he said; I'm not sure he explained that remark (he did pick out the lyrics as awful). Started going on about 'myth and poetry', so I put it down instead of thinking about it.

I think the principle symptom of their difference is Auden's lack of interest in the dramatic monologue – There isn't much in the way of inhabiting characters, revelation of interior states or that whole 'Look! There! See!' in his poetry – so not much of a sense of urgent address (later Auden can cruise along in that 'one civilized man to another' mode, but it's more 'so, we…' than 'hey, you!').

Feel like Auden doesn't tend that strongly to poetic irreverance - his longest chatty poem takes Byron as its precedent and obvs light verse is a big tradition for him. It's like for him even lifts from living speech get wrapped up in traditional rhyme forms (where Browning defaults to a v flexible blank verse)

they are a funny mix of likeness and difference - both love the scruffy world of stuff and particulars, but Browning a doubter of big things, while Auden drawn to systems and schemes.

that all makes sense, thank you. And yes, not sure entirely what I mean about irreverence, perhaps a tone of... No, I'm not going to finish that, I was going down some sort of route where Auden's engaging with the world of plain objects, without poetic 'high' tone (hence the love of light verse) and that this is what I meant by irreverent. But that's too sketchy to be of use.

i have had a copy of men and women on my 'more or less current reading' pile for about three months, i pick it up and fall into the trap of the long ones seeming too much effort and the short ones not worth bothering with

meanwhile, i am reading china mieville's kraken

I've never read Men and Women through as a collection. the really short stuff is a bit so-so (My start, love in a life (even though that's kind of essence of Browning's universe)), but it's got a pile of victoria's greatest poems - Tocatti of Galuppi, Andrea Del Sarto, Childe Roland.

*my star

man, "Andrea Del Sarto" is as good as poetry gets.

yeah, rly. It goes through my mind super regularly. 'A common greyness silvers everything –'

Men and Women S&D

Andrea del Sarto is amazing.

Fra Lippo Lippi
Karshish
Childe Roland
Two in the Campagna?

"My Star" crap
"Andrea Del Sarto" glorious

agreed on all - also-

Grammarian's Funeral
Master Hugues

Best super-short one is Memorabilia

Bishop Blougram great but really long right? Haven't read it in an age.

Memory hazy, but I think Saul and Cleon are good.

Yeah, I really like Bishop Blougram, but it's very long and pretty deep in the Browning idiosyncratic conversation style, one of the deepest iirc. Feels pretty out there really.

Grammarian's Funeral is great.

What's Time? leave Now for
Dogs and apes! Man has For ever

Or is that Bishop Blougram. I forget.

i'm reading Out of Sight, my first elmore leonard: it's okay, a quick read, but i don't really buy the romance between foley and karen. and some of there dialogue is soooo bad.

just finished aimee bender's short story collection, Girl with the Flammable Skirt. totally bizarro stories. a little pretentious.

Or is that Bishop Blougram. I forget.

did you intend that as a perfect browning soundalike pentameter?

Of course.

That's what we painters call our harmony!

Finished the Menand, and I'm now reading The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David Chalmers. You have to have a certain tolerance for professional-philosopher jargon, but it's fairly accessible so far.

Pynchon - Vineland. I have a Roky Erickson solo LP around here somewhere...maybe I should put it on.

The section on LA rock -- or LA rock morphing into Reaganite politics? -- blows 'Goon Squad' out of the water.

Bolano - The Skating Rink.

tried vineland this week, read about forty pages and cbfed reading more, can't abide tp's high functioning stoner dorkism and suspect i'll never enjoy him nearly as much as i did when i was 18

yeah it took me half a year to finish vineland i think it was... not very good?

i gave vineland a go a few months back and unfortch i wanted to cast it into the ocean. it was kind of a nails-on-chalkboard reading experience.

you mean, lo-key reunion with an old friend, right

but 'his way is not my way'.

maybe he just meant bonking ladies

I got into Vineland a lot more than I thought I would actually. Will be onto Inherent Vice quite soon.

As for Skating Rink: again, you'd think it minor except it -- has to be said time and time again -- is more than minor as everything Bolano did all goes into one big book. Quite a lot here are seeds for part IV of 2666.

Hubert Selby - The Willow Tree. This has a brutal opening..

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

God: A Biography by Jack Miles and Novels In Three Lines by Felix Feneon.

'the birth of tragedy'

i really liked 'novels in three lines' but its not something to be taken all at once imo

Yeah, I'm taking the "book of disquiet" approach to it, just controlled intermittent doses a few times a day, pecking at it whenever I feel like it. Lotsa laffs here, as opposed to Pessoa, which is a lotta sighs.

I think you could tweet a lot of them, actually.

First experiment: successful.

Though it always helps to check beforehand.

haha i would read them on the subway to work last summer, they were like a reprieve

Patrick French's Naipaul biography. I'm impressed with Naipaul's decision to flaunt his swinishness.

I noticed earlier that my local Waterstone's had the new Hollinghurst at half price, will treat myself to a copy later I think. The review I saw was ecstatic. Perhaps this will finally be the hardback I manage to read before the paperback comes out?

I just began Melville's Pierre for like the seventh time. I think it'll take - wish me luck!

smite that mighty POLA X

"From hell's heart, I stab I thee!" is the phrase I bellow every time I open the book.

it took me like four months to read "vineland," i should've just stopped reading but there were always little descriptive bits that i liked enough to keep going. don't feel like it was worth it in the end however.

finished "persuasion" due to austen poll thread, enjoyed it but was surprised by how short it was! i went ahead and started "emma" (the last of my unread austens) because i felt like i hadn't gotten my fill.

Read these on the beach:

The Real Cool Killers -- Chester Himes (wow, glad I picked this out from the pile because of all the Himes mentions upthread. hard to believe he wrote this in the 50s)
I Am Legend -- Richard Matheson (quick, enjoyable, but meh).
The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night-Time -- Mark Haddon (gimmicky / cutesy but kept my interest / worth $3)

I started "Meeks" by Julia Holmes but it's not really suiting me at the moment so I might want to quit or at least put it on hold.

Yeah, I'm now hooked on Himes

Cees Nooteboom - no idea where I know that name from, but I started a short book called The Following Story. Didn't get very far, so I started Cold Comfort Farm, the foreword of which made me laugh. Good start. But really struggling to concentrate.

wow

not like THAT wow but ive just opened nooteboom's 'roads to santiago'

Ohhh Nakh, really? I enjoyed that one very much! If you have an interest in the subject of pilgrimage, it's ace.

Rogue Male - Geoffrey Household

involving hide-in-plain-sight thriller until the end, the energy dissipated when I wanted a dramatic payoff

Fire & Rain - David Browne

well-reported and carefully paced look at 1970 in soft-rock: james taylor/CSNY/simon & garfunkel/beatles breakup, juxtaposed with current events.
more journalistic than analytic or critical but v. entertaining and a real page-turner in you're interested in these musicians

Troubled Man - Henning Mankell

last of the kurt wallender series and a resonant summing-up. not a sunny ending but a realistic one, i guess. slightly convoluted cold war sub-plot.

Pulse - Julian Barnes

short stories about relationships, some better than others (both the stores and the relationships) but always funny and observant. I laughed. I winced.

i am reading 'the interpretation of dreams', and 'anatomy of criticism', and 'human, all too human'.

Andrwe Holleran - The Beauty of Men
Kingsley Amis - The King's English, which I expect to be as useful as his drinking books.

what does one learn from the drinking books??

Also reading The King's English--lots of fun, and useful tyo me since my job is working as an editor, among other things

and so of course I scatter typos everywhere in that sentence

ah thanks for reminding me about The King's English. in the meantime, these 2 are next:

Oliver Sacks - The Mind's Eye

Mario Vargas Llosa - The Way To Paradise

I really like most of the Cees Nootebooms I've read, so maybe I've banged on to you about him before, PJM? "Rituals" is very sad, "In The Dutch Mountains" is unhinged fun, I remember liking "The Following Story" but it hasn't left much impression on me past the ahhhh do you SEE ending which still bugs me even now.

what does one learn from the drinking books??

when not to order rum cocktails

not sure how i feel about repub. of king's english, fun book though

can i just point out that three of you are talking about a usage guide and have all introduced a non-present article into its title? ok thx

edmund wilson: memoirs of hecate county

i kind of think this is sorta like an expensive but conservative blue suit: it serves a purpose, & you can tell that care and craftmanship went into its construction but its not much fun or unique

yashar kemal: the burn the thistles & memed, my hawk

kemal has a real storyteller's gift for hypnosis of making you forget that you're reading, rather than directly experiencing, the events in his novels.

theophile gaultier: my fantomes

this was so much more fun that i expected, totally arch & witty & sophisticated. french romantic short stories about men (usually artists) in love with vampires or paintings or ghosts.

edmund wilson: memoirs of hecate county

i kind of think this is sorta like an expensive but conservative blue suit: it serves a purpose, & you can tell that care and craftmanship went into its construction but its not much fun or unique

When I read this years ago, I concluded that Wilson wrote it just to see if writing clinically about sex was possible. It was, alas.

middlemarch

Pushkin - Eugene Onegin. The Charles Johnston translation. Great job all round, notes actually add what is needed, good summaries, etc.

About to start on Inherent Vice

what does one learn from the drinking books??

Which drink's effect is akin to throwing a cricket ball into an empty bath.

I am now about 230pp into that book THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES.

I have started reading the Caro bio of LBJ. At 55pp into it, Lyndon has yet to be born. I am uncertain whether I will have the stamina for this one. Consequently I am taking a couple of fallbacks with me on my upcoming camping trip.

I would suggest putting down that volume and heading straight for Master of the Senate.

Thanks for the advice. I may skip ahead to Means of Ascent and test it out first.

MOTS reads like a Tolstoy novel.

Oh, goody!

can i just point out that three of you are talking about a usage guide and have all introduced a non-present article into its title? ok thxp

But it's there, dude! http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0141194316.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

whaaaaaaat? oy. i would have sworn it wasn't there in the original edition! i thought that was you know the 'joke'

apparently i am just wrong

has anyone read "a house and its head" by ivy compton-burnett? it's next for my book club but it doesn't sound like my cup of tea to be honest. thinking of taking the month off.

I'm surprised by the lack of enthusiasm for Memoirs of Hecate County. I guess maybe I just find that early 20th-century, upper-middle-class New York City/suburban milieu to be innately interesting, but I thought it was quite enjoyable, esp. "The Princess with the Golden Hair" - which is at least as interesting for its clinical view of class as for its clinical view of sex.

^^^ that's the best story. I like the book but Wilson the critic had so much more juice than Wilson the novelist.

Wouldn't the 'joke' be that there is no English king atm?

its the only story - the others are barely sketches & the 'supernatural' elements are completely out of place. i thought the narrator was such a drip too & was sorta rmde that all these women kept fucking this prep school deathdr0ne

also i really dont know whats 'interesting' about its take on class or gender relationships

I agree the narrator does seem to be a supercilious twit. To me that's a lot of the drama of the story. I guess it's not so improbable that a struggling, single-mom waiter in Depression-era New York might be attracted to a financially-independent, cultured intellectual, despite his apparent self-centeredness. To me it's interesting that Wilson makes his narrator so unlikeable, and how comfortable he is in his privileged status.

i think ive hardened a bit on it since i finished it acutally - when i was reading it felt like wilson was obliquely critical of what a narcissistic pos his narrator is about a women but i think in continuously having woman throw themselves at him the stories end up sharing in is offhand contempt? ill admit that it may be my own poor reading but i ended up feeling like wilson doesnt do all that much to distance the narrator's attitudes from his own

I agree Wilson doesn't put a lot of distance between himself and his narrator - perhaps some of the narrator's attitudes were his own? - but to me that didn't make it any less interesting.

I think I prefer it without the ironic distancing nudges that something like "Mad Men" for instance would use to let the audience know that it's okay to enjoy watching these unreformed chauvinist characters behaving badly.

reading some fred barthelme short stories, they're pretty good

all of them are about kind of odd quiet old man sitting alone in a room and suddenly a young girl busts in and wants to go shopping

The "Golden Hair" narrator isn't chauvinist so much as a social slummer.

I don't know - it seemed to me that he basically saw his less-privileged lover as basically just a fun fling and never really considered it becoming anything more serious, and that was primarily because he just took for granted that they were from different orders of society. So to me that's chauvinism at the deep, instinctual level, despite his self-avowed intellectualized quasi-Marxist sympathies for the plight of the working class.

I've always wanted to read "Bunny" Wilson because of the Fitzgerald connection, but every time I pick up one of his novels they look so boring. Is Hecate County the best of the lot?

I agree the narrator does seem to be a supercilious twit. To me that's a lot of the drama of the story. I guess it's not so improbable that a struggling, single-mom waiter in Depression-era New York might be attracted to a financially-independent, cultured intellectual, despite his apparent self-centeredness. To me it's interesting that Wilson makes his narrator so unlikeable, and how comfortable he is in his privileged status.

That's pretty much what happened in real life. Wilson wasn't financially independent, though. (His mother used money to try to control him, but Wilson made just enough from his journalism to stay free of her.) I haven't read Hecate County, but his journals veer into self-loathing at times.

I've never read any of Wilson's other fiction. "Princess with The Golden Hair" is a novella, and probably the most essential part of Hecate County - the other stories in the collection aren't bad, but not as good as that one. xp

Wilson is one of the great critics of the twentieth century: lucid, clear, practical. Ignore the fiction and read Axel's Castle and The Wound and the Bow.

Wilson's 'I Thought of Daisy' isn't bad--shortish Jazz Age novel. Like lesser Fitzgerald. Haven't read Hecate County yet, but I've randomly trawled through a couple of his collected essays/reviews books, and they were great

Recently:

Rebecca Wolff: The Beginners -- partway through, enjoying but have reservations. Describing a dream on pages 1 and 2 is a risky start (I'm with Henry James -- "Tell a dream, lose a reader."), and needs better editing (one character's clothes change mid-scene for no reason), but very interesting.

Jacques Jouet: Upstaged -- Dalkey Archive novella about play performance that goes wrong when guerilla actor ties up male lead and takes his place, then vanishes: lots of fun, no idea what it "meant"

First few volumes of Kaoru Mori's 'Emma', a Japanese comic set in 1896/7 London, about a maid--another in my sporadic and almost always failed attempts to "get" manga; this is better than most in its attention to period detail, but the translation sucks (everyone talks like teenagers from 1990)

Robert Charles Wilson: Vortex -- latest by my favourite living SF writer, inevitably excellent

To the Finland Station is dated insofar as it treats Lenin as an flawed hero of an epic poem caught before his moment of realization, and I'm not sure he integrates the introductory meditations on Taine and Michelet; but the character sketches of Engels and Marx are terrific, and when you've finished the thing you really feel You've Learned Something.

Patriotic Gore is fantastic: interconnected essays on Civil War and Reconstruction literary heroes. The short essay on Lincoln as a writer is still one of the best of its kind.

when you've finished the thing you really feel You've Learned Something.

this is comforting, since i bought my copy so that i could Learn Something but haven't been able to make any headway in it since. there is hope!

It's often ponderous.

The "Golden Hair" narrator isn't chauvinist so much as a social slummer.

i guess i thought he was both, but his chauvinism had a quality that i was particularly primed to dislike because of a bunch of other things that id been thinking about & it probably got in my head more than it would have if i read the book at a different time. the narrator abstracts all three women he sleeps with over the course of the story & its interesting to watch the story contrast his sense of them as 'representative ideas' vs. them as flesh-and-blood women but they never seem to reach full personhood in the eyes of the narrator or the author. theyre just objects or animals or something less than a person, yknow, a man.

(summer of sad disturbing stuff and... SF Giants)
lords of chaos
doctors from hell
band of misfits
nixon

Wouldn't the 'joke' be that there is no English king atm?

I believe the joke, such as it is, wd be that friends/family would sometimes call him Kingers/The King.

Book is fun, although certainly best not read with some sort of language axe to grind. Best approached like his drinking books, as Alfred said, or his more relaxed essays. examples of conversational tone rather than instruction ex cathedra (as the title implies/despite the title, whichever way you want to take it).

did anyone end up reading on elegance, while sleeping
its so good

i thought the joke was that it was, you know, "king's english", as in king, as in kingsley, & not "the king's english", as in fowler and also as in the king, as in the king, of england

oh well

middlemarch is really good

As Kingsley puts it in The King's English (and "the King", by the way, was a nickname he tolerated)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/27/martin-amis-father-english-language-kingsley

the narrator abstracts all three women he sleeps with over the course of the story & its interesting to watch the story contrast his sense of them as 'representative ideas' vs. them as flesh-and-blood women but they never seem to reach full personhood in the eyes of the narrator or the author

I'm certainly with you about the narrator seeing the women more as "representative ideas" than as flesh-and-blood people. However, I think the saving grace of the story is that the author has enough of a dedication to the principles of realism that the realness of the women peeks through the narrator's self-centered haze. I felt more like I was reading a thinly-veiled autobiographical story than some allegory invented to dramatize ideas about womanhood or something like that.

Have you all read "Pages From a Cold Island" in which Frederick Exley is supposed to obsessed with Wilson? It's not as good as his obsession with Frank Gifford though. I requested all of the Wilson books mentioned on this thread, save "To The Finland Station," but I think a have some sort of block against him, and won't end up reading anything.

not that I've read this Wilson fiction book
but isn't it daft for an individual to be
fortunate enough to be
intimately involved with a few other people
and then to think of them
(disdainfully or negatively)
as 'representative ideas'?
rather than as, say, 'real people'?

how stupid would you have to be, to do that?

what is wrong with people??

the broad truth is, in life, if you get intimately involved with anyone
you're probably doing well
count yourself lucky.

btw I agree with all the praise, above, for Wilson as critic
and the admirable Virginia Plain for instance
has nothing to fear from,
for goodness' sake,
Axel's Castle
a book that I
have always liked.

I've been reading an obscure memoir, The Lady and the Lumberjack, Olive Barber. She married a logger and lived in Coos Bay, OR in the 1930s. It is designed to be a breezy tale, but it is truthful and chocked full of local color about Yet Another Vanished Way of Life.

would you be referring to Being a Lady or Being a Lumberjack there

Le Carre: Tinker, Tailor, etc

The Emperor: Downfall Of An Autocrat by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Henry James - The Other House. A play elongated into a novel. It shows.

Last night I couldn't sleep so I started Rebekah by Daphne Du Maurier - far too many words for my liking, but it did the trick.

Today I started It's Only a Movie by Mark Kermode AKA Mark Farey and it is quite bad (does that thing all celeb books do of directly addressing someone form their past in case they are "reading this") but also quite entertaining. In other words it goes on about Slade quite a bit.

roland barthes - "mythologies"

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantae

Furst #10, The Spies Of Warsaw. As enjoyable as ever. I hope he keeps churning them out, I've nearly caught up with him.

I struggled a little with The Master of Ballentrae, boxall, and I'm an RLS stan. How are you finding it? I'm not sure I was in the right mood.

Yeah it's been sort of slow going since I started it Monday or Tuesday, but my brother loved it so I'll persist. We both read a lot of fiction about sibling conflict, now that I think about it.

Javier Marias: Your Face Tomorrow: Fever & Spear

i am reading montaigne. and a book by jean starobinski about: montaigne.

From Inherent Vice:

Fritz chuckled at length. "Yeah, PIs should really stay away from drugs, all 'em alternate universes just make the job that much more complicated"
"But what about Sherlock Holmes, he did coke all the time, man, it helped him solve cases"
"Yeah but he...was not real?"
"Wh--Naw. No, he's real. He lives at this real address in London. Well, maybe not anymore, it was years ago, he has to be dead by now"

Basically if you hated Vineland, stay away from Inherent Vice. I like that he must be, what, in his 70s, and he is writing about druggy surfers and the whole Frank Zappa scene, etc. Kinda endearing.

The logging camp memoir was fun, kind of like an extended, better-than-average Life magazine article from 1950 (but without all the b&w photos).

Now I am reading The Heart of a Dog, Mikhail Bulgakov, wherein a feral mongrel is transplanted with human glands and turns humanlike, eventually becoming a Soviet commisar. Bulgakov was very good with this kind of material. Another fun book to read.

Doubling this w/Auerbach writing about European high-art vulgarity in Mimesis. He might have liked some of this(?) xp

Barthes Reader, Hiroshima (by Rotter) and The New Shostakovich by Ian McDonald. May start a few more before bedtime.

Dangerous Visions. Finally got past the poorly-styled novella. The PKD story is the first one I like.

As someone who's put down with varying degrees of disinterest and disgust every post-Lot 49 Pynchon novel, I found Inherent Vice smashing.

After finishing Teju Cole, re-read "Spies" by Michael Frayn. I didn't remember much from my first reading except that I liked it, but either my taste has changed or it doesn't stand up to re-reading very well - I found it very clunky with all sorts of structural and plausibility problems. Now starting the new Hollinghurst.

I've just finished The Spies of Warsaw. Only one left now. This one was terrific, maybe top two or three in the series (I'll have to rank them properly when I finish). He's become so accomplished now, the mood is perfect, everyone under suspicion at all times, very little properly resolved, telling the story through little bits of imagery, I love it. This was about intrigue among the diplomatic community in 1937 Warsaw, with parallels drawn between and among various pro- and anti-government factions in at least three countries, and mirrored in family and romantic life as well. It's very cleverly plotted I realise only now, I hadn't seen the intricacies so much while I was simply enjoying it.

One loss from the earliest books is the occasional dip into the minor, inconsequential characters. The form is still there a little, but now always in service of the plot, and the fact that they're no longer pure digressions detracts a little from the richness I feel (though only a little). It's an interesting example of where good style may actually hinder the final product slightly.

Dana Spiotta: Eat the Document -- loving this! And it does a lot of things with music that would make it an interesting counterpoint for people critical of Jennifer Egan

Bernice Rubens - I Sent A Letter To My Love (just fantastic)

Bernice Rubens - A Solitary Grief (not quite as good)

A N Wilson - The Healing Art

John Wyndham - The Day of The Triffids

Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan (stopped at about 300 pages of this one - will probably go back to it soon. Found the Dickensian dialogues & grotesques very entertaining, but apart from that found it a bit lacking, a bit of a sham in fact. So far can't agree with Anthony Burgess on it being a 'modern classic', but should give it a bit longer)

Javier Marias: Your Face Tomorrow: Fever & Spear

Finding this really tedious. Digressions that just won't stop. Made it pretty far though so I think I'll go ahead and knock it out. Is there more, um, action in the other books?

If you're new to Marias, well, the digressions are pretty much the point, the plot, if not secondary, than a freqently skeletal framework. That's an exaggeration, but only slightly. Mind you, I'm speaking as someone who loves Marias.

Dana Spiotta: Eat the Document -- loving this! And it does a lot of things with music that would make it an interesting counterpoint for people critical of Jennifer Egan

― not bulimic, just a cat (James Morrison), Monday, July 18, 2011 7:47 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

damn i shoulda bought this i saw it at a book sale over the wkend. i remember liking her 1st book and am curious abt the new one

I finished Bulgakov's The Heart of a Dog and also jogged through a book of essays, Eiger Dreams by Jon Krakauer. The Bulgakov was entertaining but nowhere near on a level with Master and Margarita. The Krakauer book was also entertaining; it is filled with high-level magazine feature writing and that's plenty good enough for me at the moment.

It feels good to be reading again at a reasonable clip, rather than the bogged-down pace I was stuck in since last September. The fact that I am not tackling any big or important books is not an issue yet. Far from it.

Guys, I got a copy of Freedom from the library. Michiko Kakutani called it "Updike-esque." Is this a compliment? What am I in for?

if michiko kakutani says it can it really be considered an unqualified comment?

i am reading nietzsche again. vol. 2 of 'human, all too human'. and a bit of p.f. strawson.

I've never read Updike, but Freedom is pretty bad in retrospect.

looking back. on those foolish bygone days of 2010.

Johnny, get the Spiotta, it's realy good.

Also:

Kevin Wilson: The Family Fang -- loved this, about the troubled kids of a pair of obsessive performance artists

Velibor Colic: The Uncannily Strange and Brief Life of Amedeo Modigliani -- short, pretentious, irritating, and implicates Modigliani in a murder which I can't find any references to online

For school: reading Chaucer. Troilus and Crisyede was first, and now on to The Canterbury Tales.
For fun: Wilkie Collins' "The Woman in White."
Before that, I read "The Anthologist" by Nicholson Baker. The narrator annoyed me at first, but I ended up really liking it and learning a lot about rhyming poetry.

I'm about to read Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints.

Emma Tennant, TWO WOMEN OF LONDON

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By - Georges Simenon.

h8 the anthologist

started reading 'the magic mountain' because it is easier to take on the bus than george r.r. martin (i hate myself)

moreno there is a fairly large thread on those books somewhere, the marias

i really liked the anthologist and im not much of a nicholson baker stan

reading kate christensen's the astral -- is ok, feels too similar to 'the great man' so far; also had a tossed off description of a hipster bar called "Mullet", business in front (linoleum), party in the back (shag carpet) that made me literally want to stop reading immediately

i do not 'get' jonathan franzen

yahh i'm going to be writing a dissertation next year about how avant-garde poetry is the only true poetry so the anthologist was maybe designed to rile me but enhh

i don't know, i think it's bafflingly awful! either baker thinks his stupid thesis is actually interesting and/or valuable, or else he thinks having a barely-present character go on about his (the character's) stupid thesis for a book's length is i. &/or v., or else he's laughing at us

like, baker's books have rarely managed to successfully depart from the sphere of his own experiences & perceptions, but knowing that the baker-surrogate of the mezzanine liked noticing things about shoelaces & appreciated that penguin classics list their editors on the same page as their authors seemed like it told you a lot more about him or about the world than knowing that the narrator of the anthologist held some incorrect opinions about poetry & was sleeping with someone who had left him

how avant-garde poetry is the only true poetry

Seems to me this overshoots the mark. Much of the poetry that attempts to occupy the avant-garde is dreck, because whatever is novel in it is of little or no value to its power as poetry but rather detracts from that power. The avant-garde is generally connected to some or other critical manifesto that declares what contemporary poetry lacks and proclaims a remedy for that lack, generally in terms of a new technique. All this is only tenuously connected to the production of true poetry to my mind.

It would be more reasonable to say that true poetry, if it is new, must strike the reader as fresh and unusual. Oftentimes it will be seen as 'difficult' because it is unusual, and therefore the reader is to some degree unprepared for it. This aspect of 'difficulty' naturally leads to that poetry being categorized as avant-garde. The poet may or may not accept that categorization, or find it apt.

In general, the avant-garde is a creation of poetry critics. Poets often engage in criticism, too, but if they do so too avidly they generally lose, rather than gain, by their critical avocation, imposing a too-mechanical and too-technical approach to what they write. The result is rarely true poetry.

'avocation'! that's a great word, i should use it more often

i don't think 'avant garde poetry is the only poetry' is actually an accurate or true statement, to be honest, & that's not really an accurate summation of what i'm going to be writing on. i just wanted some kind of disclaimer as to where i was coming from before i started on 'the anthologist', whose narrator decides that poetry you can set to a hummable melody in very slightly syncopated four-four is the only poetry

'stone arabia' by dana spiotta, as discussed on the contemp lit fiction thread (i thinkkk?)

really liking it so fat, which is nice, since ive been a run or stuff i havent enjoyed very much lately

Ha! I was wondering if I was going to end up defending "The Anthologist." Well, I haven't ever studied poetry too intensely, so a lot of the book's ideas and explanations were really new to me. Maybe if I had more of a poetry background, I wouldn't have appreciated it as much. Stressing the song-like qualities and breaking down poems into beats ... that was all fairly new to me (or maybe just long forgotten). And I did end up liking it more for the information it presented--and especially the way it presented it--than for the character and narrative aspects, although I was pretty surprised and pleased at the end when I felt that those two elements came together and made the book more affecting.

I am studying English though, and could relate to the book in a way because I've often had people dismiss the "old-fashioned" stuff that I've studied (Victorian novels, medieval, renaissance etc) just as so many seem to dismiss the rhyming poetry that Paul geeks out on. And, at this point, the avant-garde has won, right? (Serioulsy, that q is not just rhetorical) And the rhyming stuff is seen as fuddy-duddy, right? It all makes me think of Peter Burger's idea that the avant-garde ends up being assimilated by the mainstream commercial culture (and that's probably an oversimplification of Burger (it's been a few year) and his theory seems much more applicable to music and visual arts than poetry, but still ...).

But anyways, here's some thought-provoking bits I liked about The Anthologist:
--the beat breakdowns and diagrams (even the songs)
-- the idea of rhyme recalling baby-speak, and our innate draw to rhyme, puns, alliteration
-- translations of rhyming poetry into free verse leading to "the death of rhyme" 19th-->20th century

thomp, I'd be interested in hearing more of your take on poetry. What is the avant-garde stuff you are focusing on?

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By - Georges Simenon.

― Ward Fowler, Friday, 22 July 2011 Bookmark

Love to get hold of Tropic Moon

I quite liked the book The Anthologist.

I don't think I needed to agree with the character's views on poetry, to like it.

I remember him interestingly contradicting himself - attacking Pound then admitting his greatness, or something like that.

I think that for most ordinary people and readers it could be a happy renewal of acquaintance with poetry. Most people, most of the time, don't read ANY poetry. It seems like possibly a good idea for people, in general, to think about poetry occasionally.

I don't think the book is as good as The Mezzanine, or U&I. I suppose it is slacker.

I can't remember quite what was good about the book. Maybe just that it was easy to read and I finished it.

Several things started or finished today.

John Dickson Carr - The Four False Weapons. A late Bencolin mystery, mediocre, with an extremely unlikely and chancy crux, but interesting in as far as it it deals with two crimes that have one effect, and so two alibis that are dependent, and how this complicates the matter of deduction. It's further interesting therefore, because it shows how Golden Period 'tec writing works, and in this case how it doesn't work. It works by a writer saying 'What are the material effects if we have x method of murder, what would they look like, what would they look like to an intelligent person with no knowledge of x method of murder, how would a solution be deduced from the misleading effects?'

It doesn't work, in extreme examples, which this is, where the narrative requirements of bringing about such a murder produce something too unlikely for naturalistic narrative. This shows that in fact the tension between naturalistic narrative and author-end knowledge of the solution is both the great enjoyment of this period of crime and detection thrillers and their great problem.

Lady Eleanor Smith - Satan's Circus. I was lead to believe by a bibliographical work (Shadows in the Attic) that this was a predominantly supernatural set of stories. In fact it isn't. There is one vampire story, which is the title story, and the others are a curious mixture, but their closest equivalent is I think the disturbing tales of Roald Dahl say, like those collected in Kiss Kiss. I suppose a certain strand of American short story writing is also in this vein, Ray Bradbury maybe? Stephen King has written this sort of stuff as well iirc. Not sure. At their most unpleasant, these sorts of stories show people being ingeniously and often fatally nasty to each other. There is only one story in this volume that qualifies to that extent - One O'Clock - and the others tend to be slightly more cheerful, but the distinct presence of supernatural unease without any supernatural cause seems distinctive. The stories are very well written, and are mainly about circus or music-hall performers or gypsies. Apparently LES was married to the Earl of Birkenhead but spent much of her time round circuses and researching at close hand her gypsy heritage. Although the stories are good, and would be very enjoyable when found unexpectedly on a rainy day on a pub bookshelf, or a strange house's bookcase, her life sounds even more interesting.

Elizabeth Jane Howard & Robert Aickman - We Are For the Dark. A collection of short stories, all ghost stories I think. I've only read the first one 'Perfect Love', which was excellent. Very well written, and provocative of long and lingering thought afterwards. Apparently Stephen King was baffled by these early stories of Aickman/Howard, because no solution to the supernatural problem is described at the end. Instead, if the first story is anything to go by, the reader is only left with their guesses. Whether this technique in itself is responsible for the long and lingering thought is difficult to say. I think not entirely; the technique of the story I read was excellent. The narration feels very practical, not at all atmospheric, and so the main source of terror is what is being described, and the structure - the accumulation of fear from slight suspicions to almost certainty.

I wondered slightly at the practical narration, by which I mean there is no attempt to exclude emotions such as cynicism and boredom, and there is a fairly matter-of-fact approach to the events. I wondered at it because it reminded me of Kingsley Amis, to whom of course EJH was later married. I wasn't sure whether it was a sort of contemporary tone (1951 these were published, a year before Lucky Jim I think - ELJ must have been v young) or whether there was a genuine spiritual affinity. I don't know about Aickman because I've never read any of his other stuff. KA was wary of stylistic atmospherics himself of course, pathologically wary towards the end of his life, although was capable of such things himself - the opening to The Alteration always strikes me as KA thoroughly enjoying himself in this respect, which is always when he was at his best I think.

I had to meet someone outside Piccadilly Circus tube as well, but was early, so popped into Waterstones and read some Dennis Wheatley, some Duc de Richelieu thrillers collected into a trilogy, starting with the first supernatural one The Devil Rides Out. This struck me as very bad indeed, with that peculiar expression of perpetual cliche that you get when the tone of a previous era's literature is retained, so that where the subject matter fits the style it seems absurdly antiquated, and where there is a contemporary reference, it makes the style look exceptionally silly. Needless to say, I couldn't put it down, and am very much regretting not having it with me now. It's a good example, in opposition, of why the story I read from We Are For the Dark seemed so good.

Got CS Lewis - Studies in Words out of the library as well. Very sane and intelligent, with some excellent insights into linguistic change. For instance, if you alter the word 'verbicide' to 'change' according to your intellectual taste:

But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative -- useless synonyms for good or bad.

Finishing off Mimesis and while you can find yourself awed by the depth an breadth of reading I also get a bit lost what signifies high and low style on a line-by-line basis, partly because he seems to leave that on the shelf for lenghty periods to have all of these kaleidoscopic speculations on class/politics of the audience and what that meant -- the audience that could read were also well to do was really tiny -- as well as the humanism inherent in the work. So I'm often trying and failing to pin down a central point.

Can't help but to pick off more from the chapters of books I have read -- love the sequence from Dante, Rabelais, Boccaccio through Montaigne. Might skip onto what he says on Woolf and Proust.

Hate to bring this up as I'll never read things as 'deeply' however its annoying that literature from the East is excluded: Arabian Nights, Chinese and Hindu Epics. I know he would probably need translations but since he did write this while in exile in the east...would be fascinating to know pair Arabian stories against Boccaccio and the like.

Tom McCarthy's C which is totally super so far.

ha! i am reading that, and v much agree

I'm a huge fan of McCarthy, and I'm reading it (very belatedly after its release last year) for an article series looking at each of his books (I say books rather than 'novels' because I'd like to write about Tintin and the Secret of Literature).

Of course I worry I'm not well versed enough in his influences, particularly all the continental philosophy stuff, but I feel I have a useful enough angle, coming from the perspective of just being a big fan.

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck -- you guys who were pushing this were on the money: a wonderful book

That's the last Alan Furst, Spies of the Balkans, just finished. I didn't think I was enjoying it so much, because I didn't get a rounded feel for the main character initially and he kept falling into love affairs which seemed trite and implausible - but it suddenly clicked midway through, when the espionage proper kicked in, and I've devoured half the book in one sitting, which I hardly ever do.

So that's me done, unless and until he writes another. Thanks omar, it was your recommendation last November that got me started, and it's been a real pleasure.

He'd BETTER write another!

Donald Westlake: Sacred Monster -- disappointing straightforward and obvious

Susan Maushart: The Winter of Our Disconnect -- woman and her kids go for 6-months without screen-based technology - some interesting ideas, but written in really irritating newspaper-columnese

Rereading some EM Forster short stories, prompted by desire to reread The Machine Stops, prompted by the fact that Maushart book above keeps quoting Forster's "Only connect!", but completely fails to miss the fact that he wrote the first story of media/net obsession 102 years ago (indeed, she's ignorant enough to say Forster "could never have imagined" the world we live in, when he did in fact do just that)

Why don't they film one of Furst's books, I'd like to know. Instead we get The Smurfs Movie.

is there any good non-fiction that's come out recently that anyone can recommend?

I just read a lot of the Eyewitness Guide to Vienna.

Another non-fiction book that talks about Vienna and is quite well written is THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES.

is there any good non-fiction that's come out recently that anyone can recommend?

history, memoir, poetry, collection of essays...?

i'd love to hear about any new collection of essays that's worth reading. it's something i've been wanting to read more of so i picked up some old orwell. anything else?

These aren't especially new, but I read them recently and they were pretty decent:

The New Kings of Nonfiction (ed. Ira Glass) (some of these pieces are quite old, but a pretty good assortment)
Alain de Botton - The Art of Travel (essays around the theme of travel)

There's that book of David Grann articles - The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

New Kings looks good. Read most of the Grann articles when they were published in the New Yorker, but yeah, they're great for anyone who hasn't read them already.

That huge new Jonathan Raban collection, Driving Home, is really good

read Ethan Frome for the first time, now i'm super depressed. like, i should've known to expect it, given the framing story and about ten years of "lol sledding" spoilers, but damn. i'm always surprised by how resonant wharton's depiction of can't-be-requited love is -- the era and the setting are far-removed and unfamiliar but the pain feels exactly like the stuff we've got right now.

I only read it for the first time a couple of years ago -- I'm not sure it earns its bleakness. But I love Wharton. Check out Summer, its literal polar opposite.

it helped that i've come off a year of reading similar "how hard it is on the prairie" books -- specifically rose wilder lane's biography and a few of her novels (which are great; still bleak, but more prosaic/wry and less sentimental than frome). will check out "summer," thanks!

rereading part II of HARE WITH AMBER EYES

it's quite informative and well researched

journey to portugal by josé saramago

i might have said i was reading that already but now i actually am

So I finished We Are For the Dark by Elizabeth Jane Howard & Robert Aickman. Three really good stories - Perfect Love, The View and Left Luggage - and four not so good ones. The View had elements that reminded me of Borges and also The Invention of Morel - an excessively mirrored house which makes it seem to the narrator as if two houses are standing in the one place, for instance. Left Luggage had me on the edge of my seat and was very tense, usually a sign of skilled writing, as it's difficult to do writing badly I think. I wouldn't necessarily seek the book out, but if you do see it, it's well worth a look.

In between glutting on supernatural fiction, I've been delving into the new criticism - IA Richards, Empson, some practical CS Lewis writing. One of the things I find interesting about this sort of writing is its style, the plain-speaking, rather dogged manner of which seems to designate a democratic approach. It has in it, it seems to me, the implication of a public who wants to know and appreciate literary writing; in fact Empson uses the phrase 'poetic public', which he later recants somewhat, in one of his essays. They seem determined to avoid the mandarin tone that often seems to signify gatekeepers, the arch, exclusive cadences of knowingness. In some ways this reminds me of what I might term an ILX approach to writing about, well, popular music specifically, but culture (can i say that?) more generally. I think Tom Ewing touched on it in his most recent Guardian piece, about needing to listen to the fans. That's not relevant here so much, but the style it engenders is. I was reminded of it while reading Martin Skidmore's piece 'Everything They Say About Soul is Wrong'. It's a more conversational tone in that it accepts areas of confusion, admits possibilities of difference and engages with them (a democratic process, not generally found in gatekeepers).

As Empson says:

Certainly, too, the protocols, as criticism, were bad; it is just because they are bad that the process of analysis needs to be carried further than Mr Sparrow wishes. I quite see that they give no pleasure to the appreciative critic, who needs to protect a private sensitivity. They are tedious and sometimes facetious; they display to the bitter end what it would be more merciful to hide; I confess I could not attend the original lectures [IA Richards'] because I found them embarrassing for that reason. But this is not a thing I am proud of; nor ought Mr Sparrow to be; one has been trained to regard literature far too much as a social competition.

The comparison may well be sketchy, I realise. I don't know either ilx tradition or the new criticism as well as many if not most people on these boards, but the similarity struck me nevertheless. Anyway, none of that is really the question I wanted to ask, although it pertains. The question I wanted to ask is where is the literary criticism that is attempting to engage an interested public these days? Is it newspaper stuff? Surely not. Blogs seem the likeliest candidate, I guess, but is there a general public engagement there, to the same extent? No, I'd imagine. By 'general public engagement', I don't mean X-factor, Here Comes Everyone levels, just engaged readers. Was there this public when New Criticism was around, or was that just a fiction that was bound up with how they approached literature? What about wider criticism? Is there where Slavoj Zîzek comes in? Alain de Botton god help us? This seems to me to fit in, in some way, with the question about good contemporary essay writing.

If you can become a success as a critic attempting to address an intelligent general public, you may find that you become routinely ridiculed on ILB and someone creates an extensive blog entirely dedicated to attacking you as the cultural wing of imperial US Neo-Conservatism.

Otherwise, Fizzles, I will presumably be stating the obvious if I list the Guardian Review, LRB, TLS and NYRB; or for that matter The Believer, n+1 and the other journals you can find in the LRB shop -- most contributors to these presumably try to write for as wide a public as possible. I feel like this is ground frequently gone over.

I don't think Zizek or de Botton come in, particularly, as they are 'philosophers'.

Maybe your point was about books, not periodicals? Apart from J Wood, I am not sure that I can think of many recent books of literary criticism that have any kind of wide reputation outside the academy. Though as Stefan Collini would point out, 'outside the academy' may be a red herring as there are so many people INSIDE the academy by now, why shouldn't they be included?

I think your thought about the New Critics et al imagining their public is a good one. You might be interested in reading about the NY Intellectuals and how marginal they actually were, in terms of readership.

I can't make much sense of Ewing's request that we 'listen to the fans' -- not because I disagree with that (I'm a fan), but because I don't see a distinction between 'fans' and 'critics' in this case. On one hand, the founders of Rolling Stone or Crawdaddy, or for that matter Paul Morley and Simon Reynolds, were (are?) fans. On the other, the 3 people Ewing cites to support his argument are people writing for money, for the Guardian and other publications / websites - two of whom he knows from ilx. If you're writing an article about music for money then you're by definition a professional -- not quite what we usually mainly mean by a 'fan', except in the sense (as I just suggested) that critics are all fans anyway.

I did think that Ewing was on a good tip saying that we should try to avoid standard narratives, but I didn't think the particular alternative ones he cited sounded very alternative.

Otherwise, Fizzles, I like your interest in those old critics and their way of writing - though I think there is quite a difference from the contemporary critics you're talking about: the former are more tied to education, and I think claim the status to be telling us things we don't know, including critical vocabularies; the latter may belong more to 'appreciation' and the expression of feelings about something.

A couple of disappointments: Miriam Toews's new one, 'Irma Voth', which was fine, I guess, but didn't have the zest/energy/humour of her last book

And Gardner Dozois' 'When the Great Days Come', a best-of story collection, which, again, was perfectly OK, but I was expecting AMAZING things from the reviews and things I've read about his work from other SF writers over the years. I'm guessing now that the fact that he has edited pretty much every SF writer in existence, and collected their work in numerous anthologies, meant that their gratefulness perhaps caused them to overhype his own work. Ah well.

ilx tradition

now we don't just have a history people can not know about, it's become a tradition to be born into and passed down in ignorance of its origins!! awesome.

xpost to pinefox

1. It's a hazardous enterprise, true. In fact one of the pleasant things about the collection of Empson essays and lectures in Argufying is that the editor includes zings from those criticised and Empson's counterzings.

2. Yes, I guess those are obvious in a way, never hurts to state them though. Guardian literary writing, although often good, doesn't often seem to attempt higher criticism. This is fine obviously, but I'm just wondering where that sort of thing has gone. NYRB always seems quite feisty, and LRB. Long perspective can make trends from half a century ago easier to spot than current trends - this sort of thing leads to lazy 'culture is dead' opinions.

Books come into it, and yes, James Wood is an obvious example. And yes, that point about so many people being INSIDE THE ACADEMY is well made I think. Not many men of letters about any more.

3. I think I understand TE's point. It seems to do with this idea of critical protocols - the things that give the critic authority. I'd imagine this is partly to do with having to do things that fans of a particular group or musician don't have to do; ie engage with things immediately beyond their immediate area of sympathy.

I want to carry on, but everyone will be pleased to know that I've got some work to do, and this plainly isn't it.

one of the places we went through it was here if you recall:
Frank Kermode - RIP
and I would still say that that 192?-197? period is an anomaly. Expanding my guesses why lit crit was big time then: English becoming a Proper Subject at the old universities, but especially Cambridge, due largely to Richards and above all Leavis; the cult of Leavis generating apostles who could spread no-nonsense moral prac crit to the schools and universities of England; decline of latin; rise of the new universities and their English depts; Reithian media, in which gatekeepers looked natural; a fairly focused canon (or more like two, the older one that was more Milton-Gray-Bridges, the newer Donne-Pope-Eliot model; I think in any case they coexisted, maybe initially as schoolroom knowledge vs reading for oneself knowledge), which meant you had a decent-sized audience who'd get your Shelley references, and that audience wouldn't just be ex-Eng Lit students; suspect it's a revolutionary discipline in the 20s and 30s, with Richards giving it a scientific sheen & Leavis a religious aura, so that means fervour (& it's clear that Leavis and Knights are out to give the Victorian-Edwardian crit tradition a good kicking); it also becomes very teachable - prac/new crit seems more markable than appreciation somehow, which might make it spread through schools (v tentative guess that).

I think the broader audience that cultural moment helped generate has dissipated: some of the drive to analyse and argue has shifted into films, tv, culture, continental philosophy (I don't think it is a category error to introduce zizek), recorded music; many more outlets for argumentative energy; English is a huge, well-established discipline, far more diffuse, & tends to reward a stilted, attempting-neutrality style in its publications, so it's hard to get careless ease back in; and the success of the discipline turned swathes of literature into serious objects of study, which may be kind of offputting for people on the outside of the machine, which means fewer interested generalists.

So I guess my answer to 'where has it gone?' is that the underlying educational conditions have changed. That's boring.

Luke Haines: Post Everything -- no great prose writer, but heaps of fun

xpost, ah of course we did. there's certainly something of the school textbook about How To Read A Book (Q1: list Richards' 113 ambiguous words).

Yes - he's also keen on experiments and diagrams iirc. I think maybe a lot of his energies went into classrooms and thinking about theories & method of English and teaching (Basic English would bear this out).

In fact one of the pleasant things about the collection of Empson essays and lectures in Argufying is that the editor includes zings from those criticised and Empson's counterzings.

I admire the principled way he picks fights - if he laid into someone in an out-of-the-way journal, he'd write to them & send the article.

& yet (i imagine?) we're minting way more english graduates a year than ever

Otherwise, Fizzles, I will presumably be stating the obvious if I list the Guardian Review, LRB, TLS and NYRB; or for that matter The Believer, n+1 and the other journals you can find in the LRB shop -- most contributors to these presumably try to write for as wide a public as possible.

"journals you can find in the LRB shop ... as wide a public as possible"

they do expensive tea and cake as well.

it would never even have crossed my mind that there was an LRB shop, to be honest. oh, it's in bloomsbury. of course.

green cardamom and white chocolate brownie? gtfo

this is the culinary wing of imperial u.s. neoconservatism

expensive tea infusions, sorry. To have with your green brownie.

& yet (i imagine?) we're minting way more english graduates a year than ever

I think that's probably right, but if you gave me 5 random recent English grads, I don't think I could guess an author (apart from Shakespeare?) that they'd all have studied.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n22/stefan-collini/liquored-up

for Fizzles on nostalgia for critics past

I thought that that review was the one where Collini cited some figures and pointed out that Orwell or Wilson or somebody wrote for an audience a fraction of the LRB's. It seems not to be. I can't find that one.

anyway it is a typical Collini point, cautionary vs thinking the past was more intellectual-friendly than the present, saying the reverse can be true in some ways

maybe I am mixing the reviews up with the books somewhat, ie ABSENT MINDS, but no I am sure there was at least one review where this was gone through.

It's from Dave Simpson's review of Absent Minds:

George Orwell is commonly invoked as the ideal role model for the intellectual: feisty, independent, outspoken and contrarian, active in the public sphere, and famous. So it’s a surprise to learn that the combined circulation of the three periodicals in which most of his essays appeared was only about half that of the publication you are now reading. On the other hand, A.J.P. Taylor wrote some 1500 book reviews in the course of his career, many of which appeared in the Sunday Express, which in the late 1950s had a circulation of four million and paid him up to £100 a time – a very considerable sum.

I picked up three books on a recent trip around the very nice Waterstones in Liverpool 1: Steve Connor's Paraphernalia, a nice edition of Adorno's Minima Moralia, and Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne. Have started Paraphernalia, much of which I'd read on his website in this past. Lovely essays on everyday "magical" objects, but find it hard to read very much at a time - like eating a meal consisting entirely of meringue. Think ideally I would like to read it as a regular column in a weekend newspaper supplement.

mm, xpost

you probably want this one: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n05/david-simpson/is-it-glamorous

note the letters in which people argue the case. i fear naked circulation figures aren't a very good metric of how well disseminated the views of an orwell or a wilson were (let alone a leavis or a richards or an empson.) -- for one thing, 50,000 present-day sales of the LRB is (probably) a smaller fraction of total sales of all print media than 10,000 sales of the tribune in the 40s (if, as the letter claims, it sold 40k, that's another thing entirely); for another, a much greater proportion of the modern-day is going to be institutional or gift copies, i fear

this is probably getting away from the main question, tho, which was

"The question I wanted to ask is where is the literary criticism that is attempting to engage an interested public these days?"

to which the answer is "on blogs about television"

Even if the bare stats correct (and I suspect more readers per copy in the 40s), that ignores Orwell reviews for The Observer, a much closer comparison to Taylor in the Express; also the Evening Standard essays and war talks reprinted in the Listener.

Meringues invite us in, with a kind of succulent affordance. Montaigne wrote that 'a woman is like a meringue - so safe as to be dangerous'. And meringues have indeed continued to be sources of fear in subsequent centuries, down to the time that Ringo Starr compared Paul McCartney's first solo LP to a lemon meringue pie. In my own family when I was growing up in Bognor, it was said that a little sweetness went as far as Plymouth - a saying which puzzled me at the time as I dismantled my Raleigh bicycle in the lean-to, but now seems to carry a fabulously homespun wisdom about the inextricability of sweetness from proximity, and proximity from sweetness.

Bits of the chapter on sticky-tape do read remarkably like a pinefoxian pastiche.

LRB coffee shop is really meh, as it happens. I know tabletop guitarist extraordinaire Keith Rowe played there once.

Thought the 'listen to the fans' was a response to older crits (Morley) dismissing the 17,000 bloggers as having one dull opinion on anything as oposed to the 17 crits working in the 70s who supposedly all had a different voice each. Incidentally I've been reading Erich Auerbach's Literary Language and its Public, where he close reads every cleric and troubadour up to Dante tracing the peaks and troughs of the high and low 'styles', and the influence of rhethoric on these. A reason to read this is to look through translated passages of medieval lit. and read more on the context in which they were written. Another thing though is how accessible parts of the topic seem despite a lot of the reasoning for the arguments proposed being based on structural analysis of the texts. Should feel more shut out than I am.

Then again I'm only halfway through so it may all fall apart.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300153651/

i have a copy of this but never read it - jonathan rose's 'intellectual life of the british working classes'.

a couple of l.p. hartley books from the nyrb: 'the go-between' and 'eustace & hilda'

Thanks for the Collini link, pinefox. I'm looking forward to reading it, but seeing the first paragraph just reminded me how much Edmund Wilson FUCKED ME OFF the other day. He said something like.. hang on a sec, let me find my notes. Oh, they don't make any sense. Anyway, he was very wrong. Something guff about Kafka being a better horror writer than Lovecraft. Psychological horror being the true horror. Moral dimensions being important. Pious folly. Doesn't like physical manifestations of the horrific and finds hobgoblins unconvincing. 'These collections of course aim primarily at popular entertainment; they do not pretend to a literary standard'. That sort of thing. Hey, Bunny! We make our own literary standards round here. You don't like alien octopuses? Get back to your Henry James! In the words of Kris Kristoffersen: If it sounds country, that's what it is, it's a country song.

Anyway, lrb.

haha im v soured on wilson atm but that reminds of a good essay i read about 'moral horror' last year... of course i cant remember where on the internet i read it :/

I don't think Ewing was talking about Morley at all.

I think he was talking about clichéd forms of journalism - a good point.

And it's quite true that fans might sometimes avoid those.

My problem was partly that his examples of 'fan writing' were, in effect, professional journalists (and I didn't like the sound of what he quoted from them - but this is a local problem, not one about the principle; but it did put me right off what he was saying).

Yes, good point. The only reason I made the comparison I think is because how much I felt they sounded like each other at times. There's a sound of practical rolling-sleeves-up language about it. Things that are uncertain are called uncertain, things that are felt to be perhaps rather partisan personal opinion are declared as such. It draws the reader in. It's intended to. I guess there's possibly an argument about the New Criticism using new theories like psychology and new music criticism gesturing towards inclusive, even-handed language using a sort of anthropological/market research techniques. I don't know, it was confusing to bring it in really. As I say, it was more about the sound of it, lack of a mandarin exclusion. The desire to break down 'critical protocols' to use Empson's phrase. Of course in time those new standards become themselves critical protocols, can be used badly in the wrong hands, develop unexamined internal cliches, and need breaking down themselves.

I like your thoughts about the UK critics, but dare I say that New Criticism is mainly a US-related term?

Richards and Empson are related no doubt, but I think might be called 'The Cambridge School of the interwar years' or something.

But perhaps to some people they are New Critics.

I think that the things you say about critics explaining clearly where they stand and hence helping the reader sound good.

There are lots of ways to be excluded, though. I have very often felt excluded by Freaky Trigger stuff, not necessarily because of the way they talk (though they do indeed have their own private codes), more because of what they talk about. Equally, many people are so utterly uninterested by what I am interested in that they are probably happy to feel excluded from it.

But this is no disagreeent with writing and talking as clearly and simply as possible, when appropriate.

I think that's right - New Criticism is usually the US movement, Wimsatt et al; & Empson, for instance, absolutely and cheerfully dismisses some core New Crit principles, especially the shyness re intention and biography.

I've usually thought of the UK version as 'practical criticism', but I know that's extremely misleading as a group name.

I wrote a long essay about the joys and perils of New Criticism for grad school lol

Wilson isn't really in their camp though.

Fair enough - I shd steer clear of talking about crit anyway. Tended to avoid it at university for reasons if not wholly inexplicable to me now, at least somewhat derisory. feared tainting authentic personal interpretation or some such thing. Of course I still read Empson and plenty of others, but extremely warily and with a rule that it was better to disagree rather'n agree. I don't necessarily think it's a bad way to read criticism as such, but didn't get a sense of the critical round. Rather a weak approach.

Oh but I just brought up Wilson cos he was mentioned in the first para of that Collini thing.

i'm reading nietzsche: 'daybreak' and 'untimely meditations'.

I finished THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES.

I was quite impressed by it and learned some things, especially about Vienna.

It was mostly well written and the writer was learned.

It fell away in the last few chapters, last 30-50pp, I thought - the material on Japan and Odessa was quite a bit less satisfactory than what had preceded it.

I just brought up Wilson cos he was mentioned in the first para is the subject of that Collini thing.

Going through The Grotesque in Art and Literature by Wilhelm Kayser again. Not an awful lot which combines the literary and the artistic grotesque. There's Bakhtin of course. But there don't seem to be many explorations of out outside of art history. One for JSTOR I think.

question i thought i might put here: is thinlinednotepaper.tumblr.com one of you people?

journey to portugal by josé saramago

i might have said i was reading that already but now i actually am

― MY WEEDS STRONG BLUD.mp3 (nakhchivan), Saturday, 30 July 2011 18:06 (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is nice

i hate the future perfect now tho & wish js would refrain

saramago has been nultified?

this is written mostly in the third person from the perspective of 'the traveller', mostly in the present tense but sometimes lapsing into a nultic subjunctive wherein the traveller's wanderings will merely have been surmised

some of it comes across rather well even in the translation, a sort of marxist sublime in which generations of landless peasants scrape and terraform their poor soils while the fictions of national prestige happen elsewhere

Dedalus Book of Austrian Fanatsy 1890-2000 : lots of great stuff in this, various fantasy/surrealistic/impressionistic/sci-fi short stories from Austro-Hungarian Empire onwards

Chester Himes: Cotton Comes to Harlem -- brutal, excellent

AND Nabokov: The Original of Laura -- because I found a mint copy cheap, and couldn't resist. Intriguing, obviously, with some lovely writing, but in no way anything approaching a novel. Still worth it, though.

Reading this, and it's fun and smart:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31Z4qe7ONLL.jpg

Carlo Levi - Christ Stopped at Eboli. A familiar tale to reader of Russian and Italian post-wae fiction where the author is sent into exile in another part of the country (either really hot or really cold, surely remote) for anti-fascist activities to rot. But the mind is always at work and a pencil is about for use.

This is a more forensic study of peasants - so you have descriptions of rituals, art, peasant history - but also, through the form of fiction...warmth (?) is allowed for. Specific characters and attitudes are drawn that are allowed to contradict what is said about peasantry as a constituency. Its also fascinating as a look at the south of Italy, which he seems to be saying is another country, somehow not unified - which if you read Sciascia is also there. Also present if you think of attitudes of nothern Europeans toward Southerners in the present Euro crisis, with all of Italy being 'the south'.

Bolano - The Savage Detectives. To be a poet or a drug dealer, that is the question...

Perry Anderson's essay on the historical novel.

I was confused by what it was saying about the modern historical novel and yet glad to hear of Buru Quartet and Cities of Salt. That's what my autumn reading will look like, if I can track.

http://bloodletters.tumblr.com/post/8714387705/a-funny-thing-happened

(my experience of reading Maldoror in public)

I am reading The Canal by Lee Rourke but I keep wanting to put it down, it is bad

Sean Willentz's massive The Rise of American Democracy and a bunch of Deborah Eisenberg stories

Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus (dipping repeatedly all throughout - the bit about Mourre in the monastery is splendid), Supergods by Grant Morrison (breezy - if you've read Men Of Tomorrow you basically know the score, though every few pages you get a nice bit of inimitable wit), and Cosmicomics by Calvino.

I soon hope to begin Monkey by Wu Ch'eng-en.

oh man Monkey is so fucking good

there should be a videogame of it, has anyone done this yet

I've been meaning to get to it since I read the Borges essay in Selected Non-fictions.

George Orwell is commonly invoked as the ideal role model for the intellectual: feisty, independent, outspoken and contrarian, active in the public sphere, and famous. So it’s a surprise to learn that the combined circulation of the three periodicals in which most of his essays appeared was only about half that of the publication you are now reading.

Intellectual influence cannot be measured by a periodical's circulation numbers. This was especially true in Britain at the time Orwell wrote, when having attended the right schools and belonging to the right club was far more important criteria of influence than being known to the general public.

I've been reading some of Plutarch's Lives in the Penguin collection titled The Age of Alexander; Timoleon's was especially pleasant reading.

Also, I read Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps. This was probably a good and useful book in its day, but it has aged to the point where it is a curio of another age, rather than a though-provoking look at contemporary Africa.

Apart from those I recently re-read one of the Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brien. Predictably entertaining stuff. It doesn't much matter which one it was.

how is maldoror in that knight translation? lykiard pours disdain/rips it apart (along with the earlier translations) in the foreword to his lautreamont collected works that exact change put out. i read maldoror during lunch breaks in an abandoned (with the exception of joggers) and crumbling cemetery complete with gothic mausoleum (housing the remains of a colonial plutocrat-banker-politician who shot himself in parliament house) and nary a passing press photographer to be seen.

currently reading a composite biography/collected writings type thing of maya deren after finally getting around to watching a collection of her film work recently.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt, first thing of hers I've read (the library was out of Possession). I'm enjoying it so far, although I feel like the cast of characters got too big too quick and the periodic historical infodumps are dull.

I put down 'Soldiers of Salamis' by Javier Cercas a few times now. I find it very boring. His non-fiction book 'Anatomy of a Moment' is much better.

Also reading 'The seamstress and the wind' by Cesar Aira. His books are really short which is nice, but I don't like it as much as his little piece of genius called 'The Literary Conference'. That book is a must for Calvino-fans (esp. 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller').

Have read Bolaño's 'Between Parentheses'. Very good, as good as his other books.
Really liked Camus' 'The Outsider', but am still looking for a good follow-up for that one, but I have to admit I haven't read a lot of his other books.

Loving by Henry Green. The first of his novels I've ever read - more definite articles than I was expecting, also much more humour. Seems to be a definite Joycean flavour to the style/use of language, crossed with an almost Wodehousian comedy of manners. Very poetic and beautiful, in places.

WF, of Green's novels, it's only "Living" which does that thing with the definite article.

Ah interesting, thanks Tim. Living is the next book in this 3-in-1 collection I'm reading, although I've got a 'thing' about reading two books by the same author in a row.

Living was one of those Epochal Novels for me.

Just started Omega Minor by Paul Verhaeghen, which I picked up at a book sale for a buck, published by the Dalkey Archive. Main focuses so far are cognitive psychology and semen.

I was trying to write down thoughts on things I'd read recently, here's a couple, not exactly final drafts:

Troubles, J G Farrell

A book that is very clearly incredibly well-written if you open it up and just read a couple pages. The setting of the novel is such a fine invention that I wonder if it would really matter if there was a plot at all, as long as the novel took place in this fantastic, ancient hotel, crumbling into ruin as Ireland descends into chaos. There are elements of Waugh to the story; in particular the hapless protagonist Major Archer, and his drawn-out, doomed love for the mysterious and cruel Sarah. The rapidly degenerating twins Faith and Charity echo the similarly-named phalanx of young ladies/prostitutes in Vile Bodies. But Farrell doesn't have Waugh's viciousness; the Major has enough competence that his fumblings inspire worry about just how damaged he was in the war.

A Shilling For Candles, Josephine Tey

An enjoyable enough mystery, adapted by Hitchcock into a movie I never saw that apparently eliminates the plot surrounding the "wrongly suspected adorable young man on the run" subplot. It features a wonderful 16-year-old heroine, utterly in control of her life and desires, and a dead 30-year-old woman who was trying to be and ends up killed for an outrageously pointless reason. With the exception of a loathsome reporter, all the main characters are charming and likable, but appear entrenched in a bitter feud with the rest of humanity, which is nosy, greedy, superstitious, and generally worthless. A key moment shows the brilliant Inspector Grant observing a workman and wishing he worked with "things, not people."

I was also meaning to write something about the physical comedy in Troubles, and the almost psychedelic way in which it's written. The whole novel sometimes seems to drift in and out of a druggy haze.

Three By Cain: Serenade, Love's Lovely Counterfeit, The Butterflyby James Cain. I've only just started Serenade, but it is so, so good. It's borderline offensive about Mexico and Mexicans, but mostly really funny.

I just finished 'Solar' by Ian McEwan. Enjoyed it less as it went on and faintly unsure about the ending. I liked the crisps bit the best.

Finished "The Stranger's Child" (Hollinghurst). Possibly his best, but it's a big novel with a complex structure and I really need to read it again to get a handle on it. Which I will.

It's less immediately appealing or exciting than ITLOB: less glitz, less sex, less easy-target satire. It's more of a middle-aged man's novel, controlled and serious, but still addictively readable. Hollinghursts' trademark stylistic flair is a bit in abeyance, as though he's decided that more serious subjects need a soberer language. There's still plenty to keep addicts happy but for long passages the prose is more Forsterian and less Jamesian than you expect from him.

Now going through one of those phases where I can't work out what I want to read next. I read around a third of A D Miller's Snowdrops, but lost patience with what seemed a readable but undistinguished thriller. You'd be glad of it if you were stuck on a plane with nothing to read, but I can't understand why it's on the Booker Longlist.

Also read the Kindle samples for Infinite Jest (interesting, but I doubt I'd have the patience for the whole thing) and Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies - I haven't decided whether to stick with that or not. Most of the third party narrative has been promising, but I'm discouraged by a letter from the heroine's unsampathetic brother (nouveau riche, social climbing, bullying, insensitive, vulgar) that isn't remotely credible as a letter from a real person rather than a straw-man stereotype.

The Q65 biography that the people from Ugly Things put out. Very interesting.
Also Sinner Saint The true Confessions the Mat Snow compiled Nick Cave interviews book. Do wish it had a few more I remember reading at the time but I guess it wasn't going to be completist.

& Stuff a book on hoarders that has me needing to give several rooms a springclean while I'm actually at home.

Enjoyed the Lautremont story!

Yannick Murphy: The Call
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Scenes of Childhood -- both really, really, really good

I've been reading Ghandi's The Story of My Experiments With Truth as a break from the heavier Chalmers book. The short chapters and disarming frankness make it surprisingly readable.

Enjoyed the Lautremont story!

how is maldoror in that knight translation? lykiard pours disdain/rips it apart (along with the earlier translations) in the foreword to his lautreamont collected works that exact change put out. i read maldoror during lunch breaks in an abandoned (with the exception of joggers) and crumbling cemetery complete with gothic mausoleum (housing the remains of a colonial plutocrat-banker-politician who shot himself in parliament house) and nary a passing press photographer to be seen.

currently reading Schiller's Mary Stuart, which is quite good, and provides some interesting context for his aesthetic doctrines (e.g. Mortimer, the youthful conspirator who is driving much of the action so far, at one point describes the splendor of the Vatican as the 'sublime' experience that immediately converted him to Catholicism and the cause of Mary)

update: finished the Schiller, it was really good. surprisingly timely, too! lots of interesting things going on at the intersection of the personal and the political, legal issues pertaining to Mary's status, etc (btw I misremembered—it's not seeing the Vatican, but seeing a portrait of Mary that converts Mortimer, which is pretty lolzy but generally in keeping with his 'youthful romantic' demeanor)—near the end of the play one of the conspirators who testified against Mary learns that she is being sentenced to death, begs to have his testimony retracted, confesses to having falsified her involvement in the affair, runs to his prison cell window and shouts about what an awful rogue he is and the eternity of punishment he deserves for his terrible lies, etc etc—obviously this information is of no little import to Elizabeth and her wise council, leading to this wonderful exchange:

ELIZABETH
But you yourself denote him as insane.
Lunacy is a worthless testimony.

SHREWSBURY
But that he is insane proves everything.

Got the Lykiard but Maldoror is the kind of thing that will have an impact - think it really needs to be an absolutely terrible translation not to.

Brodsky - Less than One. Very thorough, brings a lot of thought to the essays, managing to sound conversational and adds to what I have read (Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva) so I'll have more in mind when I give it another reading.

Just finished Simon Reynolds' "Retromania" (loved it) and I'm about to start Richard Ford's "The Sportswriter".

Also read the Kindle samples for Infinite Jest (interesting, but I doubt I'd have the patience for the whole thing) and Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies - I haven't decided whether to stick with that or not. Most of the third party narrative has been promising, but I'm discouraged by a letter from the heroine's unsampathetic brother (nouveau riche, social climbing, bullying, insensitive, vulgar) that isn't remotely credible as a letter from a real person rather than a straw-man stereotype.

An immense disappointment. Much of the prose is fussy and cute in a way Ozick's never been.

Too late, Alfred, I've already downloaded it and pressed on. I'm actually enjoying it so far, but I haven't ready anything else by Ozick so wouldn't be able to tell if it was below her usual standard.

I'm a fan. As an essayist Ozick is classic; you can find Fame and Folly and Art and Ardor cheap on Amazon. Among her novels The Messiah of Stockholm is by far the best.

Went on holiday to Cornwall. there were god damn children around so I didn't get a chance to read as much as I'd hoped. But started rereading Tess of the Durbs, great, still an at-heart-adolescent sucker for dream-nightmare pastoral pictures + talk of a blighted world, tho' I'm now a bit bogged down in the bit where Tess is umming and ahhing about Angel.

Also, since yknow, Cornwall, Charles Causley's Collected Poems. One of my favourite post-war poets.

A couple of academic books by friends, one on Burke, one on early modern Irish women's writing. I am totally childishly pleased that they both thank me in the acknowledgements.

Thanks Alfred, I'll bear those in mind. Digging around I get the impression she's an American writer who hasn't caught on in the UK as much as some of her peers. I'm wondering if "Foreign Bodies" is the first of her novels to get a bit of a marketing push over here.

Woof, is there a definitive collection of Causley's poems? Which collection did you bring? I'm intrigued.

I'm not quite sure, to be honest. I had the Collected Poems 1951-2000, which I think is the most recent (It misses out a lot of the poems for children, but that's ok by me.) I wonder myself if someone is working on a more definitive collection; I hope he'll be looked after well, posthumously.

Finished the Ghandi, and I've started on E.M. Forster's A Room With A View.

Thanks Woof! Found the one you mentioned for a tenner!

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
Bring on the Empty Horses by David Niven

I don't know why I'm so obsessed with historical Hollywood.

Among her novels The Messiah of Stockholm is by far the best.

The only one of hers' I've read, but it was awesome, especialy if you also like Bruno Schulz

Schulz isn't one of those names anyone invokes at a whim, so I think I'll look into this as well.

It's actually even sort of about Schulz--a Swedish man is convinced he's Schulz's son, and thinks he's come across Schulz's lost final book ('The Messiah')

light in august
vineland

I'll look into Schulz. Another writer I've never read who sometimes gets bracketed with Ozick is Joyce Carol Oates. Always had a concern she might be a bit gimmicky for me, but that may be unfair. Anyone any thoughts about her, is she worth reading and what would be a good start?

Monkey is indeed a joy.

jess walter, the financial lives of the poets.

I really enjoyed that! 'Financial Lives', I mean, though 'Monkey' was also great--loved the whole Gods as inefficient Chinese bureaucracy thing

i'm about 210 pages into it (about 80 left). i loved the buildup. i could feel the pain and frustration in martin's life. but the sharp turn it's taken -- while a good plot device and interesting to read -- feels like a copout to me. whatever happens with his very real problems will be viewed through, and distorted by, this very odd situation that's happened to him.

on the other hand, walter's a genuinely funny writer. i can't remember the last time i laughed out loud at a book, and that's happened to me again-and-again reading TFLOTP.

Me too--that rare book blurbed as being hilarious that actually was.

though 'Monkey' was also great--loved the whole Gods as inefficient Chinese bureaucracy thing

Flashback to Dragon Ball interestingly, where our heroes fight glorious battles, reach the afterlife, and find... more fighting tournaments! I always wanted to write an essay or something about works which define reality so precisely and mundanely, both in its celestial and everyday aspects.

the best thing about dragon ball is that you spend eternal life in the pursuit of power levels and cool new hair styles

John Kenneth Galbraith - The Great Crash
Samuel Beckett - Watt

re-reading 'the plague'

the best thing about dragon ball is that you spend eternal life in the pursuit of power levels and cool new hair styles

the best thing about monkey is that you spend eternal life in pursuit of power leves and cool new names

Lawrence Wechsler - Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder

finished FLOTP. maybe a little too neatly tied up at the end, but i'm glad he ended it with that relationship as the focus. one of the things that the book didn't do is give much insight into lisa. her motives are obvious, but he doesn't give the audience much reason to empathize with her. maybe that's best, since her being hidden in that way heightens the sense that the walls-are-closing-in around matt. either way, i'm happy it ended almost happily.

Finished all 1124 pages of Sigrid Undset's 'Kristin Lavransdatter', which was wonderful: 14th-century Norwegian shenanigans on a big, big scale

Now on David Rose's 'Vault: An Anti-Novel': the subtitle coming from the fact that part of the book is a novel, and part is the annoyed commentary from the man whose life story inspired the novel -- enjoying this a lot

reading a collection called THE GOOD OF THE NOVEL

need to read John Sutherland's OFFENSIVE LITERATURE

will be reading Stefan Collini's THAT'S OFFENSIVE!

got so many new books from border's going-out-of-business sale. mostly used the sale as a springboard to getting back into fiction again, by looking for interesting voices.

think i'll tackle dave eggers' what is the what next.

Which Borders did you visit, Daniel? How's the one on US 1 near Dadeland?

i went to the one on the 3d floor of the village of merrick park. haven't been to the dadeland one.

VOMP borders is still stuffed with books. surprisingly good/diverse fiction section.

Poifect.

are all selections officially 40% off?

40 -- 60% now. all fiction 50% off.

100 pages in, and what is the what is finally starting to hook me. sadly, it's because of the real-life horrible circumstances that the subject of the book endured in south sudan.

not sure if the reason it's taken me so long to get absorbed in the book is because (a) the central conceipt so far -- the story is told as a flashback while the main character is tied-up during a long robbery -- is bothering me or (b) i lack context about the history of the second sudanese civil war. as to (a), i think i'm just bothered by how passive the protagonist sounds when he's talking, or thinking about, the kid who is assigned to guard him. as to (b), wiki has helped. i thought that the SPLA rebels were the "bad guys," i.e., the agitators that led to a gov't crackdown on the small, rural villages in south sudan. i now see that the history is more complicated, with the arab gov't in north sudan exploiting and marginalizing the africans in south sudan, building-up frustration and resentment that led to the second civil war. now both sides seem equally ruthless to me, with the protagonist's people (the dinkas) caught in a savage, barbaric crossfire.

sorry; i suppose i used this space to work-out some of my feelings about the book.

Holiday reading:

Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22
PG Wodehouse - Right Ho Jeeves
Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise
Richard Price - Freedomland

I feel like Price is underrated. I know he gets good reviews but he should be talked about more - the way he wraps a painstakingly detailed and nuanced social realist novel in a thriller and just layers it and layers it is extraordinary.

I agree. He's probably due a new book some time soon isn't he?

Ah, i see he's going to be doing a series of more straight-forward detective books under the pen name Jay Morris starting in autumn of this year. Cool

Most of THE GOOD OF THE NOVEL

all of THAT'S OFFENSIVE!

the first 3pp of THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

Finished The Hunger Games and The Hunger Games II: Mo Hunger Mo Games. There was a tremendous drop-off in quality between the two; the second book read like an elaborate script treatment rather than a novel. Whole climaxes were swept aside with a paragraph of summary!

My sister says the third one is the worst of all, but I told her I'd read it anyway, since discussing things we hate is like the bedrock of our relationship.

i'm reading martin stannard's biography of muriel spark and when i finish it i'm going to re-read ' the prime of miss jean brodie' and 'the ballad of peckham rye' and 'the comforters'.

In Christmas '09 I read a bunch of Spark novels, the best of which was The Driver's Seat.

I'm rereading Tess and Molly Dies. Also: started The Affluent Society.

Some recent additions to my ever growing reading list that rules from the space next to my bed:

SReynold's Retromania book (kind of stalled half way on it but back on it now)
Cerebus Book Two by Dave Sim (not sure if I entirely get this yet but the drawing is out of this world)
DL's book
Sandman graphic novel (not read any of these yet)
Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

im reading actor james franco's book of short stories, 'palo alto'. reminds me of s.e. hinton's stuff a bit.

I bought that recently, with Point Omega as a 'short stuff' theme purchase. I've never heard of the guy.

I've started The Stranger's Child. Great from the off, made me think I should only read stuff of such quality.

I went through a period a few years ago of reading a ton of short classics - Jean Brodie, Slaughterhouse 5, Day of the Locust, etc - very satisfying.

Done with Monkey - now I've gotta search out an unabridged translation of Journey To The West, hopefully one that can compete w/ Waley's translation.

Onto The Complete Cosmicomics!

Turnin pages, not much is sinking in:

Stevenson - Treasure Island
ETA Hoffmann - Tales

So turned to a bunch of poems by Baudelaire and Rimbaud (also read the latter's 'Season in Hell')

Now: Tarjei Vessas - The Birds, and this is good so far.

How you finding Treasure Island? The momentum up until Stevenson got sick is remarkable. Nothing matches that matched momentum of writing and reading apart from Decline and Fall maybe?

I wanted to read TREASURE ISLAND

as I walked round the Stevenson section of the Edinburgh Writers' Museum 2 days ago

also THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, et al

and maybe Walter Scott, or is that a non-runner?

Benjamin Constant's memoir (only 68 pages) of being young and randy and gambling-addicted and romantically inept in the 1780s. Wonderfully funny. A couple of typical passages:

I'd often had the thought that wanting to kill yourself for the sake of a woman was a good way to impress her - which isn't quite true. When a woman likes you and asks nothing better than to let you take her, it's a good idea to threaten to kill yourself; it provides her with a quick, decisive and respectable pretext. But if she doesn't love you, neither the threat nor actually doing it will have any effect on her. In my adventure with Mademoiselle Pourrat there was one basic mistake: I was the only person participating in the romance.

Then follows the most farcical opium-overdose attempt ever. And on fleeing to England with almost no money...

I didn't feel at all concerned at my lack of money, and I spent two of the fifteen louis I had left on two dogs and a monkey, and took these splendid purchases back to my lodgings.

Now reading Patricia Highsmith: Found in the Street

Googling about for a few minutes with no immediate luck - where can you find that memoir, Mr. Morrison?

Never mind - pegged it as The Red Notebook.

Sorry, should have said! I read the Douglas Parmee version, from Oneworld Classics

Gamaliel - just couldn't get into 'Treasure Island' at all, just the ind of week I've been having hence the switch to a few poems

The Stranger's Child makes for a very 'active' reading experience. On the face of it all that's happening is a series of conversations, but I'm asking questions constantly - how does this person fit in? how does he know x? what's his motive? what does he know? what do I know?

There are quite a lot of characters, some with more than one name, which is making it slightly harder work than I'd like, but otherwise I can't fault it.

xpost to xyzzzz__, Stevenson's fictional prose seems to me like glass - it's brilliant, but there's a sense in which it's not engaging. It is very far, for instance, from being conversational. I don't really mean the style, but the treatment of the material if you like. In some respects, for instance, Treasure Island doesn't feel like a children's book, but a book imitating a children's book. I think there are psychological reasons for it to do with Stevenson's attitude to religion, specifically his traumatic rejection of God. Jekyll and Hyde can be read, should you wish, as a dramatisation of what was going on inside his mind when this happened. His prose is covert and dutiful and he spent extraordinary amounts of energy to make it reveal as little as possible. Wyndham Lewis called him a 'sedulous ape', and that can often seem accurate to me. He's a very strange writer I think.

Specifically wrt Treasure Island, I think the book more or less breaks down after whenever it is that Stevenson got ill and never quite recovers itself but, personally speaking, I think it's wonderful, for characters like Pew, Bones, Ben Gunn, and Long John Silver alone. Find it impossible to dissociate in my mind from the edition with the wonderful Mervyn Peake illustrations that I had when I was growing up.

On my most recent camping trip I read King Harald's Saga, Penguin's excerpt of the much longer Heimskringla by Snorri Sturlusson. This was interesting, but not nearly up to the mark set by Egil's Saga. Now there was a character you can sink your teeth into.

King Harald (the Ruthless) was your standard issue fire-eating Norse king, but with more cunning and better luck than the run of the mill. He was, of course, the guy who got scotched at the battle of Stamford Bridge a few weeks before William the Bastard won the battle of Hastings and plucked the crown of England off the ground while it was still warm. NB: The most interesting thing about William wasn't his winning at Hastings, but the fact that he succeeded at consolidating power afterward.

The fact that Harald the Ruthless spent his early 20s as a mercenary for the Byzantine empress Zoe, knocking heads and grabbing booty in the eastern Mediterranean was a definite source of interest, but it would have been better if it had been longer and more fully filled in, but Snorri was an Icelander and his almost total ignorance of the Byzantine empire handicapped him.

i read 'treasure island' for the first time in april, during a particularly boring business trip. it was delightful. wouldn't have thought to liken it to 'decline and fall' in any way but that's kind of an intriguing thought.

Purely a comparison based on them both being written in one fit, or at least the first half of Treasure Island was anyway. Possibly it lends both a compelling momentum/unity of tone. They're both books I find impossible to put down - every time I pick up D+F it tends to get read in at most two sessions, often long into the night, likewise Treasure Island. Not sure whether this is other people's experience obviously - it was a slightly flippant observation. Not sure how you'd go about proving/disproving it.

It is always a puzzle how Fizzles manages to have such an exciting 'personal life' given that he spends all his spare time furiously reading, often long into the night.

my tremendously exciting personal life, about which you must tell me more, always involved reading furiously into the night. Terrible skimming just to get to the end, pages flying by in a nonsense of verbiage.

I thought when you first said 'Decline and Fall' you meant Gibbon, rather than Waugh. But I don't suppose many people read Gibbon in two sessions.

The Vandals did it/it's about some Romans.

Thanks Gamaliel. I found the style really hard, needed way more concentration than I was willing/able to give it in this last week. Thought by pairing it with nigh/day writer like ETA Hofmann it might pay off but no. The intro didn't help, something about Treasure Island being written in the stream of other US lit of the time. Wasn't bothered by it really. Get onto Jekyll and Hyde. How is Kidnapped?

Vesaas is building up nicely. Its just so economical and quietly building to something that could be monumental. In a way its a bit like Elfried Jelinek/Thomas Bernhard, in the way it describes people in the countryside as having these fundamentally beaten lives, where nature does a lot of the beating - Jelinek will make a point to focus on backbreaking woodchopping whereas Vesaas focuses on a struggle against the natural surroundings (main characters in the novels I've read = an eleven(?) year old girl and a man with the inteligence of a 5 year old). All that oppressive isolation. xxp

Read most of The Reformation of the Landscape - Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland by Alexandra Walsham. Was looking forward to this, mainly because it focuses on the effect on the landscape of religious changes. Full of interesting detail, but found it a bit slippery. Quite often chapters seemed to be aggregated anecdote + argument - rather than argument from selected evidence. I like anecdote, but it does make the argument feel rather spurious at times. Felt like a GCSE essay in places with some of the writing. Things 'resonate', or 'underline' other things a lot (i.e. not actually linked) and she slips from her putative subject into more well-covered territory like iconoclasm and pilgrimages quite often. Always interesting to read about of course, but feel it's probably been rather better done elsewhere (Keith Thomas for one). Perhaps her enthusiasm for her argument leads causes her to try and build too much out of what's actually there. Still it's a reasonable collection of writing on landscape and religion from different views.

xpost - I like Kidnapped, but if you struggled with Treasure Island I'd suggest some of the same issues apply - characters striking rather cartoonish poses, and again, any weightiness seems to appear in the style rather than the content. Possibly prefer Catriona as a romance, although would need to read them again.

reading Dollimore's SEX, LITERATURE & CENSORSHIP (2001)

he thinks he's scoring a demotic point when he compares Keats to 'more contemporary, less ambiguous lines'

then casually misquotes 'Mad World', not even naming the song.

He wouldn't have been allowed to do that with a literary text!

Oh, someone lent me Whatever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici. I kept saying 'No, no, I don't want to borrow that, seriously, I've got other things I want to read, please don't lend it to me' and yet he turned up at his leaving do with it in a plastic bag and now it's on my desk. Maybe we need a What Aren't You Reading 2011 thread.

You needn't bother with it, Fizzles: it's bad and it has very little to do with modernism.

Thanks pinefox - I'd seen the dissuasion elsewhere (from you amongst others I think) and had pretty much decided the same. Also now when I hand it back unread I can say in answer to the inevitable 'What did you think?' 'Oh, I didn't read it - the pinefox said I needn't', which is a weight off my mind.

I suppose I might pick it up if I'm feeling drunk and argumentative. Spoil for a fight.

Oh, 'dissuasion' a typo for 'discussion' but it can stay.

Middlemarch! by George Eliot. The annoying god botherer girl has decided to marry the holy joe reverend instead of the fun loving local big landowner. This will surely prove to be a match made in heaven.

Not finding much time to read, but I finished Ozick's Foreign Bodies which on the whole I rather liked. I agree with Alfred that some passages are badly overwritten (there are some very silly descriptions of the effects of listening to music) but they are quite a small percentage of the novel. I've read quite a few books with a heavy Jamesian influence over the past couple of years but when she really tries Ozick can replicate his voice more precisely than anyone else.

Finished 'Ready Player One' last night - lots of fun. Think I may read Reginald Hill's 'The Woodcuter' next.

NDV i read middlemarch lately and it is great! it may have converted me to actually liking the nineteenth-century novel

I reread Daniel Deronda in May and fell in love with Ms. Evans again.

Also: I checked my first Trollope novel out of the library! Phineas Finn! I decided to try one of the political novels first. Thoughts?

I've read quite a few books with a heavy Jamesian influence over the past couple of years but when she really tries Ozick can replicate his voice more precisely than anyone else.

She also boasts a SERIOUS case of Jamesian anxiety of influence; she's written several essays trying to understand her problem.

Raymond Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings. Currently reading The Lady in the Lake; looking forward to reading Playback.

i really enjoyed 'playback', in the same way i enjoyed later marx brothers films

"just look at me and pretend to laugh"
"i've been doing that for thirty years"

just put james agee's 'let us now praise famous men' on hold for a spell to read annie cohan-solal's bio of leo castelli

I agree about Treasure Island having a great sense of momentum. Not many 19th-century novels have that kind of pacing. It reminds me of something more contemporary, like a Robert Ludlum thriller. It also has great characterizations and plenty of action. I read it for the first time as a grown-up.

hurrah, i'm always excited when someone's reading chandler -- the lady in the lake might be my fav (or the big goodbye, i waver). i liked playback a lot, tho some bits of it were hard to follow. it's also fun to read the marlowe-less script version that chandler wrote prior to making it a book.

just put james agee's 'let us now praise famous men' on hold for a spell

What's this like. I've had it for a while, but the length and tiny type have put me off starting it

I really enjoyed that headlong energy of Treasure Island. Another Stevenson that I really enjoyed but which doesn't get much love is 'The Wrong Box', which he wrote with his step-son. It's like a 1950s Ealing movie starring Alec Guinness.

John Sutherland, OFFENSIVE LITERATURE

Still not read The Wrong Box, James. Was going through them in chronological order, with the letters, in order to get to the bottom of what I perceive to be his peculiarities. Do like his capacity for collaboration tho eg with Fanny - always rather an attractive trait, I think.

Finished Omega Minor last night. He just goes for broke with the ending, and it pretty much works. Gotta say I still don't quite understand the motivations of the De Heer character, but whatever.

Stevenson's letters and travel writing always make me wish I'd known him--he seems so likeable

I know - for all the problems his fictional prose poses me, his early travel writing is companionable and funny.

The sweetest letters are between James and Stevenson -- James adored him.

I believe I've attempted Treasure Island twice in my time and can't remember if I ever finished it. I think it's a great book up until they actually reach the island itself.. I love Jekyll & Hyde though.

That's interesting about Ozick Alfred. She's an intriguing writer and I'm sure I'll read more.

Still in one of those moods where I'm struggling to find anything I really want to read. I picked up A Game Of Thrones, which I abandoned 200 pages in last time. The writing is just a notch or two above adequate but the creation of a world as big, detailed and coherent as Martin's is massively impressive , even if most of it has a second-hand feel. How far I'll stick with it this time I don't know. These are big books and there's always the nagging feeling that while it's passably enjoyable I could be reading something better.

At perhaps the opposite extreme I've also started re-reading Swann's Way. The start is so perfect. Whether I have the appetite or stamina for a full re-read of A La Recherche I rather doubt, I'll just see how far the mood takes me.

james: tbh i'm not sure how likely it is that i'm gonna return to LUNPFM - finding it a bit over-labored and hand-wringy. i have the LoA version with 'a death in the family' which i'd still like to read, though

Picked up Lorrie Moore's LIKE LIFE to reread it and started to get the curious impression that I'd ... never read it in the first place.

A Death in the Family is definitely worth reading; I liked it so much that I rushed out to buy Let Us Now Praise, which i then neglected for 4 years and counting....

Finished Bleak House. Entertaining, but clearly stretched to increase Dickens's per-word payment. I liked the first-person chapters more than his third-person chapters since his omniscient narrator tends to go off on tangents.

Started Washington Square but I kept putting off reading it, so I'm into Joe Haldeman's The Forever War for now.

Washington Square is the cruel, masterly little novel I recommend to James skeptics.

NDV i read middlemarch lately and it is great! it may have converted me to actually liking the nineteenth-century novel

19th century novels are great. Well, the English language ones are; not so keen on the French ones.

I am still enjoying Middlemarch. I may be for some time, except that I have to finish it by Sunday week for classic book club. But I am enjoying it so much that I am starting to wonder if maybe I would (gasp) actually like Silas Marner if I went back to it.

Washington Square is wonderful. So is Middlemarch but alas nothing else by George Eliot is remotely as good. In fact no other 19 Century novel in English is remotely as good. And the ones that come closest are not by George Eliot.

some of eliot's other books look keraaaazeeee. have bought a copy of felix holt which i have yet to open

i am reading paolo bacagalupi's grown-up novel, i am not sure which of three plausible threads i should talk about it on

I couldn't finish Felix Holt and have no interest in Romola, but The Mill on the Floss is charming.

not so keen on the French ones

Even the shorter Zolas, like 'Nana' or 'The Kill'? They're pretty great!

Now reading Albert Camus' 'The First Man': it's really good! You get the feeling that, as with Fitzgerald/The Last Tycoon, me hight have been working on his best book when he died

it's a long time since I read it but The First Man was the one I ended up liking best.

Even the shorter Zolas, like 'Nana' or 'The Kill'? They're pretty great!

haven't tried those. Might sometimes, Zola is something of a hero to me because of the J'Accuse letter so I should really read something by him.

The French novels we read in book club were: The Red and the Black by Stendahl, which goes on and on and on about a slimy social climber, and Madame Bovary, which is better but for me was let down by the annoying narcissism of the main character, whose sad fate I could not have cared less about.

On the basis of my limited sample, it does seem like you can pretty much guarantee that a French novel will feature loads of shagging, and an English book will not.

I started reading a copy of the fourth in a series of compilations of author interviews which first appeared in the Paris Review. The series is called Writers at Work. So far: Isak Dineson, Conrad Aiken & Robert Graves.

Graves was predictably off-the-wall, but fascinating, much like a fantasy writer who creates a huge and intricate world that is fully internally consistent and vaguely resembles the earth.

Still dallying with The Complete Cosmicomics (Calvino). Dismayed after the more-buoyant-than-not Cosmicomics to read the incredibly lugubrious "The Soft Moon" which, as a welcome back, kinda put me off. Still - onward.

Also looking forward to Cohn's Pursuit Of The Millenium, having just been primed by Lipstick Traces.

Was it this Graves interview Aimless? I am always totally fascinated by Graves' opinions, no matter how loopy. Tops at throwing out one confounding sentence after another.

There is something fantasy author about him. Feel like there's something to be said about Graves and Tolkien - WWI veterans, myth systems, odd play between scholarly & autonomous imaginations – but I don't know enough to say it firmly.

woof i never have much productive to say in response to your posts but often i find myself absentmindedly looking for a 'like' or 'kudos' button

thanks thomp! same back at you (here + yr tumblr in my reader, always a pleasure.)

What I've read of Graves' poetry is as delicious as Hardy's, but more perfectly chiseled. Randall Jarrell was a huge fan.

I like him a lot as a poet, but have never really loved him: a master, but sometimes so polished that I feel like there's nothing there; he doesn't often stay in my memory, though there's lots of strange detail and an uncanny thing he hits regularly (Welsh Incident!). One of the strangest of his generation, despite the surface.

Jarrell's a really good critic of Graves I think, has a great nose for the gold.

woof, that is the very same interview. Good sleuthing.

I, too, admire Graves's willingness to plunge far off the beaten way in pursuit of his notions and his notions rarely fail to be suggestive and intriguing, even when he does things like state categorically that there had only been fifteen poets in English so far, and then stress to the interviewer that he meant precisely fifteen - no more and no fewer.

I place Graves in the middle rank of English poets, quite good enough to remain relevant and read for another 60 or 80 years, before slowly drifting into the substrate, through gentle neglect.

clearly I had not read LIKE LIFE before.
I wonder why I thought I had!

"You're Ugly, Too"

Like Life is really good, isn't it?

Reading Kobo Abe's 'The Face of Another': a bit mad, a bit lurid, but actually pretty good, too, so far at least

I nearly posted, but didn't, that if you've read a lot more LM, the book feels like Moore-by-numbers.
I wish I could think of a Lorriemooriean angle on that statement.

It felt like Moore by numbers. They weren't even big numbers. They were the kind of little numbers that would buzz around the porch at night, like gnats, like failures.

I do like it, because I like LM, a lot. But it is pretty remarkable how extensively she joined the ranks of those artists (Henry James, The Clientele) who do the same thing over and over again and don't mind who knows.

Martha lived in a town called Pontiac. It wasn't like a Pontiac, she told people when they called from New York. Or if it was, it was a Pontiac with a few previous owners. A used Pontiac. That was okay. She was one of the users!

- You have to get out of that waste land, Bob said through the faint fizz of the telephone line. He sounded like a stranded, sulky ghost.
- It's not really a waist land, she protested. It's more like a hip replacement.

I didn't have any objection to Lorrie Moore until 'A Gate to the Stairs', which would have been BETTER if it was her by numbers: the less Moore-ish stuff just didn't work

a gate at the stairs was not a very good novel but it was certainly a song you could sing along to and comforting for being so

Currently reading Joseph Roth's 'The Radetzky March' - surprisingly enough, a very addictive page turner. Pretty great too.

There is a peculiar sci-fi story in Like Life which doesn't really work, and probably supports this idea that she should stick to traditional Moore-ishness.
I wonder if we should have a LM stories poll?

I'm reading the Trimalchio's Dinner section of the Satyricon. My friends will have to really up their game next time they have me round for dinner.

Currently reading Joseph Roth's 'The Radetzky March' - surprisingly enough, a very addictive page turner. Pretty great too.

Good choice. The sequel The Emperor's Tomb is almost as good, so if you like the former go for the latter.

btw James Wood's Roth essay is among his best too; it led me to Roth.

Think I'll be going for a quite a bit more Roth - his writing style is strange and wonderful. May try 'The Legend of the Holy Drinker' next.

I got Birds of America to read on the plane after reading the story about Agnes in the store. And then I discovered what you already know.

Still on Kobo Abe. There's this feeling I get with him and several other famous Japanese writers, that makes me wonder if they've ever actually met another human being. The psychologies they describe are complex and consistent, they just don't match any sort of real-world human behaviour.

still on what is the what. meanwhile, i bought another book by dave eggars during a second border's fire-sale binge-buying session. from the first few pages of it, i can see that eggars adopted a very different voice when he wrote what is the what, which i'm sure helped him with critics (like an actor is often praised when he or she has to speak with a heavy accent, or lose/gain a lot of weight, for a particular movie role).

what is the what has really picked-up steam. it's a good book. it's also inspiring me to learn more about the history and current situation in sudan.

What UK fiction should I read featuring non-white characters? Brick Lane, White Teeth maybe? Others? Don't have to be recent. I think I've read most of the leading white people.

White Teeth is sprawling amd somewhat annoying in parts but I enjoyed it in the end, though the end seems rushed after hundred of pages that needed cutting. worth a read anyway. Read brick lane but don't remember it being all that memorable. If that helps at all. Once read Wole Soyinka's Ake, and that really sticks in the mind, but recall it would have been hard going had I not been stuck in a room in Alexandria with bad guts. Time when you can't eat and are mile from anywhere is when you will read anything.

Sorry, that was full of typos. Anyway, White Teeth is a book written by a 25 year old finding her feet, but she knows what she is about. I just read: I have an idea what is bad, but am not so good at judging what is good sometimes, so don't take what I say as worth taking note of.
Being currently unemployed, I do not buy as many books as I used to but I was given a sony reader.So I download a lot of stuff from guttenburg and have been enjoying ripping yarns like tarzan and Conan Doyle and pulp like Fu man Chu. Probably the opposite of what you are asking about.
But just to plug free ebooks, you do tend to read stuff you might not splash out for. Enjoyed a rainy evening reading King Solomon's Mines and Jules Verne.
Back to what you were asking about, Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace is good, but not set in the UK. buddha of Suburbia is okay.

Goodness, I am rather drunk. Ignore my posts M. Dow and wait for better-read folk who are not just sitting in Bangkok and waiting out the rain so that they can go and buy some grilled meat and another beer.

Thanks! Hope you got your grilled meat and beer. I was thinking about an extention of an English Lit course I took in the late 70s, Modern British Fiction. We read: Jude The Obscure, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses,The Rainbow, Antic Hay, A Passage To India, To The Lighthouse, The Power and the Glory, The Loved One, and A Clockwork Orange. For the Final Project, I wrote a comparative study of Lord Jim and The Four-Gated City (???--it's true). Was thinking, if I were to try teaching it myself, I'd want to (squeeze in Ivy Compton-Burnett, Henry Green, plus a different Waugh and no Huxley) and have some non-white views of the UK, postcolonial, sure, but maybe before, re early 20 Century immigrants.

It feels almost unfair to those other texts to put them on a course alongside Ulysses.

Well,art ain't far.So yeah, the mention of The Buddha of Suburbia def pertains. I should read Ghosh, but not for present purposes (or pipe dreams); he doesn't seem to have set any of his novels in the UK. Naipul's Half A Life spends some time in 1950s Britain, but I'm intrigued by Rushdie's cautionary (though also intrigued) review of The Enigma of Arrival:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1987/mar/13/fiction.vsnaipaul

(pinefox, I'd prob make other changes--a dif Greene, for inst)

correction: art is far, but not fair.

The Enigma of Arrival is interesting in a way, but also remarkably repetitive, to a quasi-Beckettian degree.

White Teeth is terrible. On Beauty is very well written.

Dow, it sounds like you should read Samuel Selvon and George Lamming if you haven't already.

A second vote for Samuel Selvon here, esp. The Lonely Londoners

Also maybe Andrew Salkey, Escape to an Autumn Pavement - from 1960, about gay Carribean immigrant to London trying to find his feet

Finished Edmund White's Genet biog - read the 1st part last year, that was so great (talking about everything up to Querelle and the novels) and the final pages summarizing his achievement is proably my fave bit of Edmund's writing that I just couldn't think there was really that much left. Anyway, saw it on the shelves and read the rest quickly and it turned out to be a fairly good acount of interesting bits on the French cultural elite and radical movements of the late 60s and 70s. Above all, its a study on the artist who has achieved everything and will not repeat himself - what he will do now? The struggles w/that question formed part of the 2nd half.

Now reading some of Pavese's poetry (really great!) and Eliot.

What happened to Genet in his last decade or two? He didn't write much, did he? More about Selvon and Lamming, please.

THE LONELY LONDONERS (c.1956) is a short novel about West Indians in London c.1950s, written by a Trinidadian.

It is written in a 'creole style' and is, to me, very funny.

One thing that I and others dislike about this likeable book is the treatment of women, by characters and / or by the narrator, not to mention, if you like, the author, who made them up. This is the only real reason that I can think of not to recommend this funny book to others, like you.

That's okay, the course title is Modern British Fiction, not The Most Enlightened (or necessarily Best) British Fiction. I do want to get some more female writers in there, though.

So maybe Smith's On Beauty, something by Lessing (Four-Gated City is so long, might have to be on the list of options for Final Project). Something by Angela Carter, maybe?

try Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age - a late '70s novel about baby boomers turning inward & solipsistic, proto-yuppies if you will. I recently re-read and thought it had aged very well

i now want to read bUtterfield 8.

Coetzee's Youth does the immigrant experience in I think 60s Britain. White, and not British fiction strictly, but certainly postcolonial - I'm not sure of the relative importance of these things for you. I remember it as very good, certainly, though I've lost my copies of it and Disgrace, which I regret very much especially as I rarely if ever lose books.

Coetzee, yeah; doesn't have to be non-white, but anyway immigrant (or return of longtime emigrant). Is Disgrace one of his as well. I'll check both of those, thanks. The Ice Age might well fit; I'll have to re-read it. Was considered a definitive 70s view at the time, I remember. (but I hope to lean way past the 70s before the semester is over, so a book folding in more time, space, class and ethnicity is still needed.)

Oh, yeah, Youth is really good--very dry, but surprisngly funny too

Drabble too. "He was what passed in theatrical circles as an intellectual." (from The Garrick Year--I was an acting student then, in more ways than one.)

Re Andrew Salkey, it's currently published by some people called Peepal Tree Press, who do a series of Caribbean Modern Classics: their website's a bit of a mess, but might be worth exploring: http://www.peepaltreepress.com/home.asp

I'd like some Trollope recommendations beyond Phineas Finn.

Dow: Julian Barnes, ARTHUR & GEORGE (2005)

Just finished Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist, as mentioned by Zuleika above. Surprisingly addictive given that so much of it is deliberately mundane. It's sort of a Leninist flatshare soap opera, with the politics manifesting itself in sporadic and surprising ways (it's set in London in 1983). I like novels about everyday extremists - cf The Secret Agent, Eat the Document - and Lessing's politics here are interesting to unpack.

Oo yes, Arthur & George is a good one.

Reading Tom Perrotta's 'The Leftovers'

Anthony Trollope - Phineas Finn
Amanda Foreman - A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role during the Civil War

The premise of The Leftovers is intriguing: a possibly secular version of the Rapture, in which sorts of people suddenly disappear, not just the Saved. The Leftovers dress in white, trail other supposed (and offensively non-guilt-ridden) rejects, while chain-smoking and exhibiting various symptoms of "what the fuck, it's all fucked." Shades of Hazel Moates' Church Without Christ etc., and why should they draw the line anywhere? I need to read it to find out. I'll check out the above recs too, thanks.

Yeah, I'm liking The Leftovers so far. Perotta's not a very flashy writer, but I've enjoyed all his other books

i wld like to read that book, despite finding perotta a disappointing writer

ivy compton burnett - a house and its head

this improved enormously once i got used to the style. this is apparently usual (was mentioned in the afterword). very funny i thought.

Anyone read Huxley's The Island? I picked it up along with his Doors of Perception/Heaven & Hell for next to nothing. Thoughts on these?

Like most utopias, The Island is wholly unpersuasive as an imagined society, but the point isn't realism, rather it is special pleading for a certain moral and intellectual position, disguised as a fable. Whether you like it will depend on your stomach for characters who ooze with moral superiority, explaining at length why their society is so turgid.

Doors of Perception is moderately interesting, if you haven't read much of the literature of halluceniogenic drugs. Huxely takes pains to strip his narrative of all sensationalism, so he wouldn't be accused of thrill-seeking. The result is an oddly clinical dissection of his aesthetic experience.

aimless can you think of any imagined societies which are persuasive?

I'm partial to imagined societies extended ("extrapolated", as the good ol' science fictioneers used to say) from our own, and not just as a parody or "if this goes on" editorial prophecy. Science fiction can be like good jazz. Anyway, the society of Le Guin's The Dispossessed seems ideal at first, but needs to change in a certain way, by no means simple, or go stagnant (at best). The author might have been contemplating her own 60s/early 70s social ideals, might've been thinking about Israel, other Earthly areas--I dunno, but (set in another time, another part of the universe) it rings true and then some. Ditto Charles Oberndorf's Sheltered Lives, from deep in the 80s, as AIDS emerged as ongoing social crisis, scientific conundrum, and media flashpoint/ ever-reliable source of exploitable anxiety. Turns out, in this novel, AIDS has proven to be just another forerunner of various epidemic and chronic conditions, along with sudden flare-ups and mutations (not of people, but treatment-resistant viruses etc). Sort of a medical version of present day climate change, or whatever you want to call it. Oh yeah, and isolation areas for variously afflicted citizens--just another part of society (note how much of [increasingly privatized] US prison population has increased since this book was written). But even without the "prophetic" element (not really the main emphasis), it's a pretty compelling contemplation.

i now want to read bUtterfield 8.

Thanks for the link - that was an interesting review. This has been on my to-read list for a while. I've enjoyed O'Hara's shorter fiction but I've yet to read any of his novels.

I finished Forster's A Room with A View (don't think I've ever seen the movie, but it seems like something that would translate well to the screen) and Chalmer's The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (thought-provoking, if not always persuasive). Now I'm starting on Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men.

O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra is essential, o. nate - one of my favourite novels. Haven't read Butterfield 8 - bought a secondhand copy to take to a festival and left it there without reading a single page.

On the Grotesque - GG Harpham. wtf.

Despite the accelerating acceptance of the grotesque as a 'mode' in contemporary art, this book appears at a time when the grotesque is becoming less and less possible because of the pervasive, soupy tolerance of disorder, of the genre mixte. When the televsion talk-shows present the casual viewer with "in-depth" interviews with, for example, transvestites and transsexuals, how can we continue to call the hermaphrodite grotesque?

Even the most charitable reading of this, which happens also to be the most difficult, rather undermines his credentials to look for the Ding an Sich as he puts it of the grotesque.

"the television talk-shows". He watches the television talk-shows now?

"for example"

""in-depth""

"soupy tolerance"

I'd vote for both Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8 too, plus his short stories. Some of his later novels are less successful: they combine HUGE length with an increased sexual frankness that O'Hara didn't handle very appealingly. They seem more like Harold Robbins.

Just finished Clancy Martin: How to Sell -- novel highly praised bu Franzen, Zadie Smith, Shteyngart, etc, but didn't do much for me. Written with a weird lack of affect, plus most of the dialogue in the first part of the book avoids contractions, so that everyone talks like a polite formal robot. And has various cliches, like a gorgeous prostitute who remains gorgeous for years despite being a crystal meth smoker, etc

About to start A Supposedly Fun Thing... never read Foster Wallace before, having been turned off by the hype, but thought I'd finally better give him a go

reread the first 2pp of A GATE AT THE STAIRS
could have liked that book more if it had all been like this

reread a few paragraphs here and there from CHRONIC CITY

skipped around Kenan Malik, FROM FATWA TO JIHAD
which seems to me a very good book about religion, multiculturalism etc

"An increased sexual frankness that O'Hara didn't handle very appealingly." Most persuasive anti-recommendation ever.