Autumn or Fall - does it matter at all?- what are you reading 2011?

just started Julio Cortazar - 62: a Model Kit

Alberto Moravia - Two Women (good but too long...)

Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday. I've been trying to work up the mojo for Ada but it's not happening yet.

strong, I forgot about Humboldt's Gift, which doesn't get as funny as it should until the last third.

*strongo

Started The Female Man by Joanna Russ - 50 pages on the train last Monday, didn't understand much in terms of overall plot but a couple of good scenes so not much of a problem. Unable to pick up since due to my week. Today I've got this horrible cold.

Two Women was p/good. Didn't think it too long as his novels are written in such a breezy style. Never seen the film.

How is the Cortazar, btw?

alfred, noted. also, ward, noted, from previous thread.

took a break from herzog-mania to plow through all three of william gibson's 90s novels in about a day and a half. first time i've re-read all three since they were new. much slighter than i remembered, at least compared to the '80s trilogy, and you can sorta see the drift on the horizon toward the much smaller stakes of the '00s books. still, his worldbuilding remains astounding in places, and for all they get wrong, technology and history wise, they are more often pretty damn eerie in their prescience.

is there a good list of fiction/non-fiction coming out this fall?

haha not herzog-mania, obviously, but bellow-mania. though i did read herzog's book of his diaries from the making of fitzcarraldo a while back and that was...something.

Humboldt's Gift=Bellow at its best in my (and not only my) opinion.

"Two Women was p/good. Didn't think it too long as his novels are written in such a breezy style. Never seen the film.

How is the Cortazar, btw?"

i don't think the other Moravia books ive been reading were too long, but this one is, despite the breezy,precise style.

about Cortazar - just started, seems very sophisticated (not surprising), will report later..

started dana spiotta's eat the document, def am diggin it; of course instantly thought abt ilm w/ the record collecting kid & neighbor & dennis wilson section

― johnny crunch, Sunday, September 25, 2011 12:26 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Good interview with Spiotta on Fresh Air, still available as podcast (check the music at the end by her stepfather, who inspired the novel)
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/22/139715507/in-arabia-writing-life-as-you-wish-youd-lived-it
Wonder if she knows about Mingering Mike?

― dow, Sunday, September 25, 2011 4:47 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Ian Livingstone, CAVERNS OF THE SNOW WITCH

Ha ha, i remember that one. In fact, i remember playing the half-length preview version from Warlock magazine (only 200 sections rather than 400), so that's how old-school I am

Arnold Bennett: The Great Man - fun satire of late-Victorian literary world, about a hugely successful and not very good sentimental novelist

Alexander Baron: The Human kind -- short stories/vignettes based on his WW2 experiences. Very good, but not GREAT like his 'From the City, From the Plough' or 'There's No Home' which were similar in theme but were novels, and so had more depth/expansiveness

that bennett book sounds like something i'd like to read, & i have avoided reading bennett

actually i should probably read bennett so i can explain to people why he is, actually, a lot better than woolf

probably i have avoided reading bennett because he is not actually better than woolf, and it would take a lot of cognitive effort on my part to convince myself otherwise

i am reading love at goon park, a biography of harry harlow and a potted history of 30s-50s psychology as it relates to the notion of affection

i have issues with it

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Harlow/fig14.jpg

Bennett is one of my blind spots. Thanks for the reminder.

Anyone read Monica Ali's In the Kitchen? Typical jittery-followup-to-excellent-breakthrough-novel-blues.

having a really difficult time getting into chang-rae lee's the surrendered, which my daughter picked out for me to read next.

much more gripping, in terms of the author's distinctive voice and maintaining my interest in the early going, are (a) marlon james' the book of night women; (b) isabel allende's island beneath the sea; and (c) malcolm lowry's under the volcano. but, for my daughter, i'm going to keep slogging thru the surrendered (for now).

Anyone read Monica Ali's In the Kitchen? Typical jittery-followup-to-excellent-breakthrough-novel-blues

Her most recent one, about Princess Diana, sounds like an absolute car-crash-of-awfulness novel

I just finished Njal's Saga. I would hazard a guess that the body count in this book exceeds the body count in Terminator II by a few dozen. I am contemplating starting a poll on the best names, as listed in the many geneaologies that accompany the introduction of each new character.

Re the Arnold Bennett, it has one of the most vivid descriptions of vomiting I've read in Edwardian fiction:

It proved to be the worst dyspeptic visitation that Henry had ever had. It was not a mere 'attack'—it was a revolution, beginning with slight insurrections, but culminating in universal upheaval, the overthrowing of dynasties, the establishment of committees of public safety, and a reign of terror. As a series of phenomena it was immense, variegated, and splendid, and was remembered for months afterwards.

That's marvellous. There were a few Arnold Bennetts lying around my parent's bookshelves when I was growing up, but I'd casually dismissed him. Edwardian literature seemed so easily dismissable at that age - a position I've almost entirely reversed into it being one of the great underinvestigated periods of recent Eng Lit. Well by me only maybe, still I sense a comparatively slender critical corpus.

Fizzles, you might like to read David Trotter, a critic.

James M, I have the Warlock version too - or I did, I think, and can hardly imagine having thrown it away. Research online last night told me it has only 190 entries.

To be honest every time I have played SNOW WITCH since 2000 I have slightly hankered for more atmosphere - I can't quite work out why the wonderful snow and ice world doesn't come across more strongly, as say the Shamutanti Hills do But this must be unfair - IL does festoon the book with features specific to that world. This is something I like about gamebooks, the choice of features and characters - here a Mammoth, a Yeti, a Mountain Elf, an avalanche ...

I'm reading "Pride and Prejudice". It is the first Jane Austen book I've read and I'm not feeling it tbh.

if you don't like pride and prejudice austen is probably not for you

yeah. i liked the movie of 'sense and sensibility' though

At least, Austen is not for you at the moment. Could change in the future.

which movie version of sense and sensibility? if it was the ang lee one, though i enjoy that movie, it is very different in spirit + tone than the original imo.

yeah the ang lee one. i guess my problem with austen is she concerns herself with things i find awful; gossip, the marriage market and so on. its critical of it i know but also revels in it too. im sure there's subtleties im missing out on though. anyone ever read george moore's "a drama in muslin"? a great book, kinda reminds me of a more caustic and political austen (set among the irish gentry at the turn of the century)

I'm intrigued by 'A Drama in Muslin'--will have to check it out.

Reading Jean Rolin's 'The Explosion of the Radiator Hose', one of those excellent and not easily quantifiable Dalkey Archive books--pseudo?-autobiographical story of Rolin and an ex-Congolese soldier trying to transport an Audi from Paris to Kinshasa to give to the soldier's family to use as a money-earning taxi

if you don't want to read about the marriage market you should avoid Austen. it's not so much that she's critical of it or revels in it as that she's writing about the lives of women like her.

^^^restraint

Here's my confession: I've read every major Austen EXCEPT P&P.

so don't feel bad, Michael.

I learned to love Austen with Persuasion and Emma.

yeah the ang lee one. i guess my problem with austen is she concerns herself with things i find awful; gossip, the marriage market and so on. its critical of it i know but also revels in it too.

No snark intended: doesn't this approach define irony?

i'm not saying you have to have read p&p to like austen, but if you're not sure she's your kind of thing and you don't like p&p, i think it's a fair bet you won't like the others. p&p is the one that's most pleasant.

i mean, emma and persuasion are both better books.

also even if you haven't read p&p you kind of have if you've ever seen a romantic comedy.

i didn't mean "you should avoid Austen" as a criticism, btw; i get what you're saying Michael B. i don't seek out, like, books about a man and his boat or whatever.

reading:

things for skool;

and a bit of the new facsimile of WCW's 'spring and all' (which feels really good and fresh! i like it when books get reformatted and become better to read in the process), and a bit of melissa kwasny, 'reading novalis in montana'.

what is it you're doing skoolwise now, j. ?

slingin knowledge to eager young mindz for generously low pay, no security, etc.

/:

just finished (for a class): Jennifer Egan - Look at Me
right now: Klaus Eidam - True Life of J.S. Bach
afterwards: Robert Musil - The Confusions of Young Törless

it ain't no thang.

Finished The Female Man yesterday and today and I...need to read it again. Suggested it needed a ILX Book Group - SF edn. special arrangement.

http://www.boingboing.net/filesroot/how-to-open-a-new-book.jpg

I just started The Uses of Enchantment and it's super-fascinating although a little bit big on Freud imo and also so far has COMPLETELY by-passed the obvious symbolism of pre-pubescent girls being tormented by evils of the world in every single fairy tale ever, like he can go for 2 single-spaced pages about the wolf in The Three Little Pigs as a symbol of how destructive a child's anger feels but no, female sexuality will not be covered here.

Still, it's fascinating and plus is setting off light bulbs w/r/t to the bible as fairy tale all over my brain.

Dwight Macdonald's Against the American Grain. Man, is he pissy.

started cannery row for bookclub (discussed in the summer thread). i didn't realise steinbeck was funny!

good god, everything i know about opening books is wrong

I am about halfway through REAMDE. And I am wishing Stephenson would clamp down on his tendency to start sentences with conjunctions and prepositions. Because it starts to become very annoying and it gets in the way of an otherwise entertaining story.

Just finished Sweet Thursday, as recommended by Jaq on the predecessor thread. Great idea to go back-to-back with Cannery Row, I highly recommend it to you caek. I was going to say I liked the second one better, and I probably did but that's not really it - it's more about the prolonged pleasure of living with these guys over an extended novel.

And yes, Steinbeck keeps on being funny. I can't believe we were even asking whether he's a good writer! Like the answer could ever be 'no'.

dino buzzati - tartar steppe - the italian version of Kafka's Castle. great stuff.
also on my way with Cortazar - 62:model kit - fascinating. like an invention of a new world with different rules of psychology.

I am about halfway through REAMDE. And I am wishing Stephenson would clamp down on his tendency to start sentences with conjunctions and prepositions. Because it starts to become very annoying and it gets in the way of an otherwise entertaining story.

― the tax avocado (DJP)

first time i saw the title of this i thought "damn that's a pretty presumptuous title for a book" and then i caught my mistake.

i didn't catch the mistake (making the same one) because i thought it was neal stephenson and that was a reasonable enough title for him to choose

trying to decide if i want to read that. otoh i am still trying if i want to read 'anathem'

i am reading a lot of ezra pound

The Joke's Over Ralph Steadman's memoir about his time with Hunter S Thompson. Greatly enjoying this so far. May then reread the better known Thompson prose which i picked up in the anthology covering all the Gonzo stuff a few months back. Had just had that lying in the flat somewhere while I was elsewhere.

Never suck a Dead Man's Hand, a book about being a civilian forensic expert attached to a US police force. Had some interesting stuff in but I probably had better things to read.

Nigger factory Gil Scott Heron one of his 2 early novels. Pretty good so far.

still reading Middlemarch. And Neuromancer.

Middlemarch is better than Neuromancer.

first time i saw the title of this i thought "damn that's a pretty presumptuous title for a book" and then i caught my mistake.

― omar little, Wednesday, October 5, 2011 7:45 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i didn't catch the mistake (making the same one) because i thought it was neal stephenson and that was a reasonable enough title for him to choose

― j., Wednesday, October 5, 2011 10:20 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I was a third of the way through the book before I realized I was making the same mistake

xp Good pissy or bad pissy, Alfred. That's on my list.

Just finished the first novel in Dos Passos's USA trilogy. Good, compelling stuff, especially the beautiful thumbnail sketches of historical figures. Feels like useful reading at a time when there's so much discussion of the past and future of the American left. Can't find a Dos Passos thread so may start one as I move through the trilogy.

Mixed pissy. Poor MacDonald published his Adorno-drenched diatribe on the banality of middle class culture two years before the Beatles and Warhold made such a thing beside the point.

read some of Horace Fairlamb's CRITICAL CONDITIONS on New Criticism

must remember to read an essay on FLASHDANCE and costume, then I can forget about the book it's in

Got a couple more Le Guins - The Birthday of the World and Four Ways to Forgiveness. Just read the first story in Birthday and it affirmed everything I love about her writing. She is so generous towards her characters.

Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, Elaine Pagels & Karen King
Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell

on deck:
Nobody Move, Denis Johnson

Didn't elaine pagels also write a book about cracking the shroud of turin hoax? That was a good book.

Horacio Castellanos Moya - A murder is committed and finding out whodunit is only one of many priorities. The others are to uncover corruption at every level in San Salvador...and to do it in a one paragraph monologue!

Unlike Thomas Bernhard, say, it is a monologue however Horacio has a tech which means he often breaks down what seems to be dialogue. Doesn't have the former's '(x) said' which was a great invention by Bernhard, sounds like a small detail but gave a lot of momentum to his monologues. Not that this doesn't have any, just think he is to find his own voice and constructions. Keen to read Senselessness next.

I have an amazon voucher so I am going to spend some of it on this.

Now I'm reading After Midnight by Irmgard Keun. Like Joseph Roth (they were partners for a while) she has this kinetic style...this is an anti-Nazi satire, and like any satire it can wear off pretty quickly if not read in its own time. The characters are well drawn though and it is short and quite funny at points.

did you read the masterpiece of Laszlo Krasznahorkai: War and War? if you like Bernhard/Sebald - you would love this.
(he was also the scriptwriter for bela Tar, but his writing isnt abstract the latter)

(Senselessness is waiting on my shelf btw)

Thanks, I keep meaning to read some Lazlo - I'll add War and War to my basket, and I like Bela Tarr quite a bit (or at least Satantango has some great moments in it - which might seem like I'm damning a six hour movie with faint praise but it isn't!)

Oh, and the name of the Horacio novel is The She-Devil in the Mirror

Warrant For Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Norman Cohn

and

Symmetries by Luisa Valenzuela

are both books I'm kinda reading right now. Kinda, in the sense that I'm uselessly dipping while being overly preoccupied with stuff.

finally reading a javier marias, which turns out to be fantastic

also, a lot of ezra pound

finally reading a javier marias

Which one?

'a heart so white'. i've had 'your face tomorrow' hanging around for a long time but i have been reluctant to commit; i get the impression that it's a lot more in the mode of the opening section of 'a heart ...' than it is the later sections, but i don't know if that is accurate

Nobody Move, Denis Johnson

good luck.

dino buzzati - tartar steppe - the italian version of Kafka's Castle. great stuff

so good

been away for a week, so now catching up on ilb

I finished Roy Foster's LUCK AND THE IRISH

2 or 3 or 4 years after starting it

William Blake - 'Selected Poems'
Katherine Mansfield - 'The Garden Party'

reading Le Guin's The Compass Rose, had read a couple of the stories before.

On a whim picked up a copy of The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh (sequel to Harriet the Spy, which I somehow never read) at my parents' house, read through it in a couple days, thought it was fantastic. It captures very well the sense in adolescence that everything is changing, and yet things are still quite boring most of the time. The adults have secrets, and the heroines don't get to find out what they are, because the adults just don't want to tell them. The novel (published in '65, I think) places Harriet and Beth Ellen in this enclave of well-off white summer homes, and yet finds ways to make them aware of class issues, civil rights, etc, without them necessarily LEARNING IMPORTANT LESSONS. There's also a frank and funny discussion of the onset of menstruation, which I'm told is far more accurate in the characters' reactions than Judy Blume's take on the subject.

It's also rather nice to read a children's book where religion is treated with respect, but the idea of atheism is considered completely valid as well (and argued for quite strenuously by one of the kids).

Nobody Move, Denis Johnson

good luck.

I made it through The Name of the World. I can make it through this.

On a whim picked up a copy of The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh (sequel to Harriet the Spy, which I somehow never read) at my parents' house, read through it in a couple days, thought it was fantastic. It captures very well the sense in adolescence that everything is changing, and yet things are still quite boring most of the time. The adults have secrets, and the heroines don't get to find out what they are, because the adults just don't want to tell them.

You've made my day. This book and Harriet The Spy introduced me to the possibilities of the novel. Harriet and Beth Ellen sitting on the beach, the uproarious discussion about menstruation led by Janie, the absurd dinner scene at the hotel involving the notes – it's all mad. Fitzhugh doesn't condescend to her audience; she expects us to look up "vehement" and "somnambulism." She's not afraid to make Harriet cartoonish in TLS (the book feels like a prequel).

50 pages into Laszlo Kraznahorkai's 'The Melancholy of Resistance' and it's great. Very Bernhard-esque.

reamde is very entertaining

i don't think i was quite prepared for what an ACTIONFEST it was going to be

yeah, that took me by surprise as well

It did a great job of reminding me of exactly what it was I loved about Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.

I really need to finish the Black Company books; I had no idea getting a Nook would destroy my desire to read physical books though!

Junot Díaz - The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The first Derek Raymond 'Factory' book, 'He Died With His Eyes Open' -- really good! and grim!

I've seen the later books in that series going for cheap recently but not the first one. P. annoying

Mainly re-reading recently. The exception being Appointment in Samarra (O'Hara). Rough-hewn and has dated a bit but still enjoyable and memorable.

Re-read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Hadn't read this since school. I know the story pretty well from the film, but remembered the book hardly at all. I expected a well-written but straightforward piece of realist fiction, but in fact it has some almost post-modern elements - an elaborate non-linear handling of time and an arch consciousness of its own artificiality. I love Spark but she never topped this. Superb. And wonderfully short.

Also re-read Swann's Way. I can see exactly why Proust is so often disliked: stylistically he can seem wilfully opaque and I'm perhaps surprised I'm not more alienated than I am by his snobbery, ultra-romanticism, precious aestheticism or weird stories of masochistic, obsessive love. I kept finding myself wishing that Swann or the narrator would man up, cut his losses and go and find a woman who likes him back, which I realise is missing the point. And yet surprisingly, of the heavyweight moderns he's the one I'm most likely to go back to, for the frequent beauty of the writing, and his deep philosophical and psychological intelligence.

Now rereading Summer Lightning (Wodehouse).

frankiemachine, your account of what's annoying about Proust makes him sound vastly better and less offensive and immensely irritating than he is.

"offensive"?!

I know I'm asking for a lot, but Proust's virtues resonate with greater clarity the further you get into the other volumes.

I've seen the later books in that series going for cheap recently but not the first one. P. annoying

It's probably worth plumping for the new US editions, as they are so pretty!
http://mhpbooks.com/media/image/original/HeDiedwithHisEyesOpen.jpg
http://mhpbooks.com/media/image/original/TheDevilsHomeonLeave.jpg
http://mhpbooks.com/media/image/original/HowtheDeadLive.jpg
http://mhpbooks.com/media/image/original/IWasDoraSuarez.jpg

Now reading olivier Rolin's "Hotel Crystal": half hotel room catalogue, half James Bond-style spoof. Very odd but lots of fun

Done with Cohn's Warrant For Genocide. Onto Calvino or, I dunno, another version of Journey To The West. One of those two.

Over the last couple of weeks:

Sybille Bedford - Jigsaw
Guy de Maupassant - Pierre et Jean (and other stories)
Marguerite Duras - The Lover
Mary McCarthy - Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

Loved all of them.

Done with Ada, now onto some early Roth - Goodbye, Columbus. I was expecting a jolt at the prose but no, it flowed quite naturally - to Nabokov's credit in my view.

Alfred I have read the other volumes, albeit not recently. From memory they do become more immediately appealing, although I also recall thinking there was a falling off in quality toward the end. I haven't made up my mind whether to press on and reread them all.

I may have given the impression of more hostility to Proust than intended. The gist of my post was meant to be that rereading SW has reminded me that I like Proust very much despite some serious irritations; and that this surprises me because there are many reasons why I wouldn't have expected him to be my type of writer.

Anyway I'm now reading "Parades End", which I haven't read before, despite loving The Good Soldier when I read it many years ago. It's started brilliantly.

Pinefox I know Proust tends to attract haters as well as idolators. I seem to remember seeing Germaine Greer lashing out at him. Ah well, de gustibus and all that. I doubt there are many people around who've been morally corrupted by Proust.

frankie said 'alienated' and also 'irritation'; my 'offensive' is a variant on those.

xp I didn't say he could morally corrupt others. I am a bit doubtful whether any book does that. I just think that he's bad and massively irritating in lots of ways.

I don't think that frankie's liking for Proust failed to come through.

** MESSAGE FOR FIZZLES THE CHIMP **

first-class rail to Edinburgh, Oct to Dec, £25 each way, if you book by next Tuesday.

seriously, it's a Fizzling opportunity to be immersed in RLS and all that.

reader, I bought it.

thanks, pinefox.

cannery row book club tonight. don't have much to say tbh. found it very pretty, which is not nothing, but that's about all. *shrug*

I know you didn't accuse P of moral corruption PF, I was anticipating a potential objection to my view that it's purely a question of taste. Greer for example claimed that Ps treatment of sexuality was voyeuristic and inauthentic (actually I somewhat agree, I just don't think it matters as much as she seems to). Since you find the books "offensive" I thought you might also have similar (or different) moral objections. I'm glad you don't.

I admit I couldn't get through Cannery Row, the only Steinbeck I've attempted.

I think it's probably possible to have 'moral objections' to a book without believing that it is likely to 'morally corrupt' another individual.

Analogously, one can probably deplore the politics of a book while not thinking it will convince others to act politically. Most people think or claim that they are against the politics of EP's Cantos; but probably none of them worries that other readers might become supporters of Mussolini's programme if they are allowed to read it.

I am just throwing out thoughts and distinctions here.

There is certainly voyeurism in Proust, quite literally - and I found it nasty to read. 'Inauthenticity' I don't know about. I mostly just think the book is an appalling monument to bloated egotism on every level.

It is good to know that Fizzles is going to Edinburgh!!

Myself, I am going back to Dublin.

You are obviously right in what you say. All the same, in my experience people who object to a book on moral grounds are usually explicitly or implicitly concerned that it will be a bad influence.

Finished Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child -- disappointing after TLOB. It's too...ambitious? Too many shifts in time and points of view produced a diffuse narrative; I wasn't sure for whom I was supposed to have sympathy. It does create a vague but palpable sense of loss: none of the characters get their heart's desire, especially when desire turns from same-sex to straight in equal measure.

Karel Capek: The Makropolous Secret -- excellent, funny, cynical play about immortality

just started "Cochrane: Britannia's Sea Wolf"

Currently reading The Marriage Plot. Nadas' Parallel Stories after.

I finished Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus - terrific stuff, and a great clutch of short stories tacked onto the end too. He's so full of life. It reads quite like some recent works like Indigation - amazing that he appeared fully formed in 1959 and just kept going.

This morning I started The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vazquez Montalban. It's about a Spanish private detective sent there to find a disappeared relative. I love the place and I should get right into this, but I don't know if I'll be able to stick with it. It's the style - too much exposition and flab, characters immediately talking politics and things that 'seem to be' such-and-such. I often find this with translations from latin languages actually. Do such authors tend towards a more verbose style generally? Is Hemingway not a thing there?

"Also re-read Swann's Way. I can see exactly why Proust is so often disliked: stylistically he can seem wilfully opaque and I'm perhaps surprised I'm not more alienated than I am by his snobbery, ultra-romanticism, precious aestheticism or weird stories of masochistic, obsessive love."

A lot of these are dislikeables are likeable to me. With the snobbery I think he is in a love-hate thing, an awareness of how ridiculous a lot of his circle were.

Germaine Greer attacked Proust while talkng about Julian Barnes last week. That was funny.

Currently reading Therese by Francois Mauriac and Greer's remark got me to pull out Beckett's slim volume on Proust.

what was greer saying about julian barnes?

sorry, i mean

what was greer saying about booker prize winning author julian barnes?

I finished Peter Hessler's River Town. I thought it was pretty well-written and insightful. It avoids coming to any sweeping conclusions, faithfully captures the fish-out-of-water feeling of living in a foreign country, but also makes you feel like you've learned something about people's actual lives in a second-tier Chinese city circa mid-1990s.

thomp - sorry i should've actually said, something like: 'Proust is not that clever [about the whole time and memory deal], and this [Barnes' book] certainly isn't'

new hollinghurst book, didnt really like it very much but maybe i was too preoocupied with having the book 'mean something' or 'achieve something' to appreciate the things he does well which is string together sentences of lucid and painful beauty i guess

LRB review and other things made The Marriage Plot sound abysmal.

Fizzles, when is your Edinburgh trip?

December, pinefox. Looking forward to it already.

virginia woolf - "to the lighthouse"

new hollinghurst book, didnt really like it very much but maybe i was too preoocupied with having the book 'mean something' or 'achieve something' to appreciate the things he does well which is string together sentences of lucid and painful beauty i guess

It disappointed me too. Luckily the novel's predecessors have more moments of lucid, painful beauty.

I did like it, but it certainly deteriorated the further it got from its source. I wouldn't let him away with the idea that that's the whole point, which is a claim that will inevitably be made (if it hasn't been already). There's no reason why difficulty in knowing the subject has to be reflected in difficulty in writing about that difficulty.

Also, part of it is that I find reading about literary life almost always awful.

I think I'm going to abandon The Buenos Aires Quintet, which idea I hate and rarely do, but I can't get a handle on it at all. I'm fifty pages in, don't really know what's going on beyond the basics and am not sure there is anything else tbh. It's very lacking in concrete detail, which I'm finding extremely odd - I have no sense of place at all, nor really the characters' lives outside the story.

Bought 2 books of essays by Joseph Brodsky, without really knowing what to expect, but they're GREAT! Beautifully written, perceptive, funny (especially the autobiographical ones).... another of these bastards who writes better in his second language than almost anyone else does in their first

i read 'zone one'. it was the best novel about zombies i have read, i suppose

I've got that, but have overdosed on zombies recently by reading the YA Charlie Higson trilogy

Now reading Anna Funder's Stasiland, which is excellent. Cannot for the life of me figure out what the cover is on about, though.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_1IQN9Ef5wO0/SpyqpHYURbI/AAAAAAAAAIU/_PlsAvEBvi4/S660/stasiland2.jpg
Shirley Manson was an East German secret policeman, maybe?

That cover screams, "I am screaming at you!"

Is is playing to stereotypes of Eastern European sexy ladies? I think another edition's cover did that as well.

I remember liking Stasiland well enough, but I have got a bit tired of books about the author writing a book about something rather than just a book about that something.

Bought 2 books of essays by Joseph Brodsky, without really knowing what to expect, but they're GREAT! Beautifully written, perceptive, funny (especially the autobiographical ones).... another of these bastards who writes better in his second language than almost anyone else does in their first

― not bulimic, just a cat (James Morrison), Monday, 24 October 2011 Bookmark

What's the title of the other one?

I'm reading Raymond Durgnat's Essays on Film - just awesome, hitting all my buttons right now.

The Brodskys are 'Less Than One' and 'On Grief and Reason'

How Music Works by John Powell. It's an explanation of how instruments function, why notes are notes, harmonics, key, all that stuff. It's basic and informative a few times so far, but written in an exceptionally annoying style. It's the same style I employ, cringeingly, whenever I have to give an impromptu ad hoc speech. No gag is too lame to let pass. "A trumpet is a curious instrument. It's easy to annoy the neighbours with, but hard to play well. Just how hard I can find out when my asbo expires" - that sort of thing, every other paragraph.

It makes the book double the length it should be. I'll persevere because I want to know this stuff, but I really wish he'd cut it out. I went with the amazon reviews to choose this over Philip Ball's similar book - regretting that faith in humanity now.

It's easy to annoy the neighbours with, but hard to play well.

This is... every instrument ever.

Basic Teachings of the Buddha (Glenn Wallis trans., commentary)

Derek Raymond: The Devil's Home on Leave -- second of the grim, brutal, rather good Factory novels

Carol Shields: The Stone Diaries -- finding this oddly clotted and hard-going. I think I need to restart it.

Anon: Letters of Chion -- Ancient Greek novella-in-letters about philosophy student plotting a political assassination. Wow! Very good stuff

Barry Devola: Nineteen Seventysomething -- promising short story collection undermined by the fact that almost every story builds up to a really interesting situation, then just stops dead; I'm not asking for artificial conclusions or pat endings, but something other than the effect of suddenly ejecting a DVD 45 minutes into a movie would be nice

Plus some depressing essays about the state of Australian politics (the essays were good, it's the country that's depressing)

Muriel Spark - The Takeover. A delight, as usual.

I just bought her collected stories--I need to get into that

New Left Review: Fredric Jameson on DDR, Perry Anderson on Levi-Strauss.

I've been re-reading, rather than reading. This keeps me from posting much here atm.

I've just started No More Parades, second book in Ford's Parade's End tetralogy. I don't want to jinx the remaining books by premature gushing, but if I enjoy the rest of PE as much as I enjoyed the first book it'll be the best new (to me) novel I've read for a long time.

Also re-reading Summer Lightning (Wodehouse) and still desultorily re-reading bits of Ulysses when I'm in the mood to pick it up (not often, so far).

Derek Raymond: The Devil's Home on Leave -- second of the grim, brutal, rather good Factory novels

I thought that was the first one! I loved how as soon as the crime is outlined the Detective immediately knows who did it, instead having to focus on the why and how to prove it.

I myself am reading A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K Dick, and have crossed over into the sad bit of the narrative.

I loved how as soon as the crime is outlined the Detective immediately knows who did it, instead having to focus on the why and how to prove it.

Yes! It's a weird structure, but it really works

Sounds very Columbo.

work asked me to review Parallel Stories by Péter Nádas. Apparently no-one else can be arsed to read a 1,100pp Hungarian novel. BARBARIANS.

I have read 12% so far. It's very good.

Just started reading Dorian Lynskey's '33 Revolutions A Minute', which is excellent so far - extremely well written, easy to understand and interesting - but I'm only at the Woody Guthrie bit so far.

Fictionwise, I'm readinng Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - which is a joy to read and I'm tempted to say has F Scott levels of descriptive prose.

just hopping back to Derek Raymond, has anyone read any of his other Factory books? I gave "I Was Dora Suarez" a go, but it seemed a bit schlocky... the killer was a bit comedically evil and once the plot mentioned gerbilling I thought OFFS and threw the book away.

that's not to knock "The Devil's Home On Leave", which is amazing.

slightly belatedly: i loved stasiland. & for that follow-the-author angle as much as anything; thought it demonstrated the effectiveness of making the conversations seem more like conversations you were inhabiting, as well as anything. i have her new novel on reserve at the library (& heard her on the radio; as a takehome from stasiland i think i thought she'd be a lil more punk and bleary, she sounded v together).

did anyone read the marriage plot? i just read it, i want to talk about it some if anyone did

i have a copy but i am probably not going to crack it until i finish iq84 and right now i am reading richard morgan isntead of that, so

ah okay. i'll hang on in there. i forgot about iq84

finished Spark's The Only Problem – an odd, unsuccessful, but not unpleasant gloss on the Book of Job.

The great thing about Spark is that one can read five or six of her hundred-page novels in one week.

Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That -- very much enjoying this, and it's much more conversational and less austere than I had been, for some reason, expecting

another few pages of PARAPHERNALIA

I've been reading John Kenneth Galbraith's American Capitalism from the Library of America edition.

Bashed through How Music Works last night to get it out the way. I've ordered the Philip Ball one now to correct my original error.

This morning I started Joyce Carol Oates On Boxing. It's looking good so far - only a few pages in, but she's already turned a couple of things inside-out with some excellent insight.

I'm just starting to wade into the 940pp Lives of the Poets, Michael Schmidt.

Although it covers ground that has been well-trodden, it makes a point of not just re-chewing the conventional critical consensus. Because there is only a smallish amount of new or unconventional perspective to add to the consensus on poets like Chaucer, the author keeps his handling short and fresh. As of the first 80 pages, I like it.

I like Schmidt's bon mots.

Camara Laye - The Radiance of the King. NYRBs 'books that are sorta easily available reissued now in nice covers' gets boring, but when they bring out obscure-ish gems like this I can't say I mind. Halfway through, the 'Kafkaesque' often annoys me but its used really effectively here.

Great time to read this - Film4 are screening Sembene's classic film Xala. Both display v agressive and conflicted images (they don't invite pity) of Africa as a place and Africans as a people.

sitting in the pub (curious how the definite article is fine here - implies a state rather than location) and picked a random book off the shelves. Caravan to Maccarès by Alistair MacLean. Didn't he write bad spy stories?

Starts with some Hungarian gypsies in 'their traditional finery' and clad in other clichés. Uses the word 'greensward'. You don't see that used any more recently.

V weirdly written sentence in the second para -

A long journey. hot and stifling and endlessly, monotonously repetitive across the already baking plains of Central Europe or slow and difficult and exasperating and occasionally dangerous in the traversing of the great ranges of mountains that had lain in their way.

Sounds like a good ILB fap!

well admittedly my anecdotes do go on a bit...

brothers and I have gone to see our mum and let off some fireworks in her garden. hunting upstairs just now for a childhood book to read tonight. ummed and ahhed for a bit - there's Perec's A Void and The Secret Garden, as well as The Rattle Bag. But gone for Over Sea Under Stone by Susan Cooper. A childhood favourite (was it Laurel who loved this series?). Starts with the very Hamlet-like immediacy of 'Where is he?'. Extremely well written generally. Might read this a good way into the night. Already gone for a tramp round some. childhood country paths and am feeling sentimental.

sentimental return to home, childhood country paths ... what shall I read to sustain this mood?

I know - Perec's A VOID!

Gamaliel had a deprived childhood. The letter 'e' was only used on special occasions

Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase and Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. The opening 10% of the latter (lol kindle) was so good that I am getting enjoyment out of imagining the possible continuations, and I am putting off reading it for a few days.

Bashed through How Music Works last night to get it out the way. I've ordered the Philip Ball one now to correct my original error.

Loved HMW until about 2/3rds through and it started getting a bit boring about tuning. Think I'll give it another try as it's fairly interesting and quite amusingly written.

pinfox and Numb R Non, - Ah. It looks a bit odd now I scan it again. What I was trying to say was that among many childhood books in my room also lay A Void, which was a thing I was thinking of looking at. My decision not to pick that book was in part down to wanting a work that was of my youth, as my imagination had brought forth thoughts of my days growing up imagination throughout my visit.

balls

so clos

Oui clos.

Vry gd, Fzzls.

woof, you still reading Parallel Stories? Is it still very good? Brothers are asking what they should get me for Christmas and I was thinking of asking for it, down mainly to my unreasoning love of Hungarians as much as anything else.

tbh 3/4 finished & I've gone off it pretty hard. Brilliant sections, but too inconsistent to justify the time it wants. & I don't really trust its version of seriousness.

Nothing unreasoning about love for Hungarians. I'm also wanting it, despite its ludicrous length. Have zero interest in 1Q84 though--Murakami seems insanely overpraised to me

(for the benefit of Laurel) I ended up reading all of the Dark is Rising Sequence again. Greenwitch and The Grey King are particularly impressive. The books do get weirder and weirder, with Over Sea Under Stone almost 'Five Go To Cornwall', but the mystical darkness is fully coloured-in or articulated in later books and retrospectively gives substance to the hints in OSUS.

They are very well written, impeccably so generally - that clarity for children's books is an essential part of conveying strangeness I think, the Harry Potter books feel to me quite muddy stylistically compared to something like this and as a consequence are limited in the clarity of what mysticism or magic might be there, which feels quite conservative anyway.

There's something a little pompous about the Old Ones that I find a little tiring, and perhaps what is linked the seriousness of APOCALYPSE scenario can feel rather strained, but no, I'd definitely give it to any children of mine to read: the strangeness of many of the episodes shows the reader where the imagination can take you, a lesson worth learning young if not already known.

Will be starting Parallel Stories after unsuccessfully trying to lose it at the FAP last night.

for a few years when i was a child, i would re-read these at each solstice (lol)

oh yeah, The Dark is Rising was a regular Christmas read. Kind of hit that Box of Delights spot.

i disliked the cooper books. though i read all of this stuff at age twenty or so so have the wrong sort of hindsight on it.

i have just finished reading william carlos williams' 'spring and all' in the facsimile edition, an exercise i remain unsure of the point of

Thank you thank you!! I love Susan Cooper and I love to see her praised. I learned everything I know about Welsh and Welshness from The Grey King tbh. And there was a time when I had that poem memorized: "On the day of the dead / when the year, too, dies / must the youngest open the oldest hills"...blah blah something about birds and the silver something that sees the wind. They are quite wonderful, all of them, and introduce so many scattered bits of real myth and legend that there's a hint of more mystery everywhere, like with the Lady and her quartz ring and the scene Will sees of her being carried on a bier by pages through the woods...rituals and associations that come from so many other sources. It's a rich tapestry.

SC's book that is a collection of essays and speeches about writing is really wonder-full, too. Dreams and Wishes, I think it's called.

Percival Everett: Assumption -- never know what to expect with Everett; this one is 2 superior Elmore Leonard-style novellas, followed by a 3rd (all 3 about the same character) where everything goes batshit insane

Italo Calvino: Into the War

Erich Fried: Love Poems -- loves cunnilingus

A rather thick 1994 bio of Hugo Black and The Swimming Pool Library.

j safran foer's 'extremely loud and incredibly close', this evening, as a way to not-do-my-work that was better than playing monster minesweeper or staring at the ceiling. it was like a quirky indie flick, in the soft edges of the world, in its contrivance and setpieces, in its refusal to give the quest trope the ending it wanted, its tender focus on its characters faults and feelings (and in its little steals, the cut-price kundera of the grandparents' story). i was coming up out of a horrible day-long headache and i'm going to blame that for the stephen hawking letter, of all things, making me cry a moment's tears.

i wish the bit that was like a puzzle had actually been a puzzle - i started, held off on googling, tried, gave in to googling, and discovered some comment somewhere that said 'oh jsf himself has said it doesn't mean anything', felt annoyed to have been driven to cheating over something that wasn't even cheatable.

what i want to read is 'the sickness unto death' but my copy isn't here

Not finding much time to read just now but just finished "No More Parades", second of the "Parade's End" quartet. Having some difficulty in sorting out all my thoughts about PE, but it's mesmerising and often staggeringly good and original. Ford's eccentricity and snobbishness won't be to all tastes though.

reading rabbit run for book club. not really the target audience for this sort of thing and hated it for the first 100 pages, but kind of enjoying it despite myself. he's just got into the unitarian vs. episcopalian vs. anglo-catholicism stuff though, which is yawnsville for me.

I finished On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates. Loved it. It's like the distilled essence of the thing, packed with fact and insight and only 100 pages. She may have used not a single adjective, I don't know.

I want to read more boxing, but I didn't have anything else so I've decided to pursue the virtue of short books and've gone with DeLillo's Point Omega.

finished reamde -- it was ok, once the islamic terrorists appeared i decided to stop being annoyed by his always declarative and "insightful" statements & just enjoy the ride. from there on out, it was a one-dimensional, yet entertaining, techno-thriller.

A thousand times more fair: What Shakespeare's plays teach us about justice by Kenji Yoshino just arrived @ my library--really enjoyed his last book, Covering, & am looking forward to reading it.

rabbit run is a very accomplished book but it is also nauseating to read a lot of the time.

islamic terrorists

uh oh

guess i'll read anathem first after all, enh

rabbit run is a very accomplished book but it is also nauseating to read a lot of the time.

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

i mean, i think it's exquisitely written! being trapped in rabbit's head is excruciating sometimes is all.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

lol this kinda describes the entire updike corpus to me

totes

my sister once called rabbit, run her favorite novel and i think it was onevof the few times in my life where i did a legit cartoon double take.

she is made of stronger stuff than i

Trying to read some/any of the Rabbit books in college or shortly after, on the advice of my more literary friends, probably put me off "literary" fiction 4eva tbh.

^^^ I couldn't finish a single one, and I was so attracted by the paperback reissues too.

i mean, i think it's exquisitely written! being trapped in rabbit's head is excruciating sometimes is all.

― horseshoe, Thursday, November 10, 2011 5:37 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha. this has only piqued my curiosity!

Also a bit of Amis, also monumentally depressing w/r/t humanity apart from The Rachel Papers, also White Noise, and by the time I got through all that I retreated to back to Susan Cooper and all was well in my world again.

You're all wrong. They're probably the best books I've ever read.

they are very good! i think rabbit run is the best one. updike is *important* to me; it's just, yikes.

Except about Amis. You're right about Amis.

yeah fuck amis imo

I'm glad we can agree on something.

A friend of mine at the bookstore where I worked had just finished his PhD in Joycean studies iirc and was working for min wage in a Barnes & Noble in 1996, for chrissake, and as a pal, I asked him what I shd be reading to be, y'know, smart and to Know Stuff, and boy was that ever unhelpful.

amis is fucking hilarious

the information makes me laugh out loud on every page

The only M. Amis book I love is Experience, the memoir.

but The Rachel Papers is funny.

yeah i read the first few chapters of that, it was funny. i need to go back to that

They're all funny, the savor of the funniness just made me feel dirtier and more horrible about the dirt and horror.

I may only have read the one with the wealthy siblings and the adopted younger brother and the sister who committed suicide because of incest and just I don't have a way to end this sentence tbh.

yeah i don't remember that one.

Success

i love amis too, at least until he stopped being funny.

being trapped in rabbit's head is excruciating sometimes

I read this out of context and thought it was referring to Watership Down.

History suggests that I tend to gravitate toward people with the wryness and personal experience with darkness necessary to appreciate Amis, I just can't stand him myself.

i love a lot of "dude" writers i probably shouldnt, but usually only if theres a certain self-mocking something there.

Amis's best book is MONEY and while it involves some wryness, I don't think you need personal experience with darkness to get it -- just personal experience with the stoicism associated with hard drinking, with heavy drinking. Oh man I never meant me any harm.

"unless i specifically inform you otherwise, i am always smoking another cigarette."

All right, I'll put Money back on the list on pf's recommendation. Should get to it around...2014?

money really is one of my all-time faves.

SHGD quotes what I think is an outstandingly good comic line

indeed I was thinking earlier that Money might be one case where you can say 'good sentence', specifically re the comic sentences (though some of those might need a whole para or longer too, to build up and work)

it's nice to add something to Laurel's list though I'm not sure she would actually approve of the book. Laurel, if you ever do read it, your primary reaction may be to its picture of NYC (1981) which I find vivid and in some ways quite true to aspects of NYC still there later, but a resident might not.

I read Money last summer specifically because strongo and other ILXers recommended it.

I have the new Hollinghurst but I haven't started it.

Just finished 'The Rules of Civility' by Amor Towles, which was the first time in I can't remember how long that I've read a guy writing a believable and sympathetic female protagonist.

You can talk shit all day about Proust and I don't care but man is his French lovely to read.

I read the Susan Cooper books voraciously in Junior High and then didn't remember them for ages and somehow wondered if I'd imagined them. The first I heard about them again was here, actually.

I was reminded of Money recently while reading "Lucking Out" James Wolcott's 1970s memoir, specifically during the chapter on porno/times square. Amis rendered the handjob sub-economy more vividly & accurately IMO. take it w/salt cause I am a diehard Martin Amis stan.

Wolcott's book was true to life from what I can tell having moved to NYC about nine years after him. His reminiscences of CBGB and the Village Voice in the 70s were entertaining, evocative. in fact my experiences with a certain editor at the voice were so exactly parallel to his that I imagine the rest of it was spot-on. too much Pauline Kael worship, perhaps, but it all goes down easy.

i'm not sure precisely if "money" is a *great* novel, in the formal unities sense, butbits a pretty bravura performance, first-person narration wise. there's not a single lapse, that i can remember, out of that voice. and pinefox is right that every page there's one or more sentences that just kinda make you catch your breath with their audacity.

Campo Santo - Sebald. great, though not as good as his novels.
Margaret Atwood - Cat's Eye - so good.

Money, The Information and Experience are peak Amis, and really good. Night Train was the beginning of him losing it, and it's been rapidly downhill from there, with some qualified praise for House of Meetings. Yellow Dog was one of the worst books I've read.

Martin Amis, Will Self and Hanif Kureishi are the three writers of whom I've most dramatically gone from I MUST READ EVERYTHING THIS GUY WRITES to THIS IS A REAL TRUDGE WHY AM I DOING THIS

apart from the fact that I don't happen to agree with it, that doesn't make sense

Money 1984
Information 1995
Night Train 1997
Experience 2000

my own view is that all the long novels after Money are dire, except The Pregnant Widow which I haven't read (but those who have think it's dire)

he has always been good at non-fiction: virtually all the essays in Moronic Inferno and W vs Cliché are good, though the essay on Joyce is bad

I think Experience may have become overrated - by me and many others - as a counterweight to the poverty of the later fiction

never really made up my mind about Koba the Dread

ps I think Night Train is one of his best novels, probably his last good one, though sadly that isn't saying much.

If rabbit is a bit too much in any number of ways, folks might want to take a run at the collected Bech stories, which I find really fun.

i think london fields is still peak amis, but i've always supposed there's a divergence between americans and englanders on amis's worth.

man night train was awful

rabbit run is a very accomplished book but it is also nauseating to read a lot of the time.

yeah, i can't think of any other novel i reacted to quite so strongly -- i HATED rabbit's guts through the whole damn thing, and found his sexism (updike's, i think, not just rabbit's) repulsive in a visceral way, but the writing is so terrific that i managed to get through it. you can tell updike studied joyce and nabokov, but he did something really interesting and original with the internal monologue; that long opening scene in the car is incredibly vivid. i can't bring myself to try another updike, though.

yeah i think it's updike's sexism, too, at least in part. it's part of what i find fascinating about his work though; he's good at anatomizing it. i'm not really sure how to feel about that.

this thread has made me pick up my copy of white noise, which so far i'm enjoying. i think that i've always been put off delillo before by that sense of portentiousness that pinefox alludes to upthread - and yes, here there is already some of that, particularly in the way that characters converse in profoundities, in dialogue that is very much not 'realistic'. but the humour surprised me, he seems very brilliant at settings and scene-making, and the anger lurking beneath, and the weary engagement w/ 'modern life', reminded me a little of william gaddis, esp. carpenter's gothic, which is v high praise afaic.

updike, tho, ugh. always seems like such a windy, self-regarding bore, a strainer-after poetic effect, the master of unconvincing metaphor. give me hubert selby any day.

Just taking a break from work by popping into the British Museum and having a root around. Just looking at a folio of The Antiquities of Athens published by The Society of Dilettanti, "a dining club for gentlemen who had travelled to Italy".

You know the Dilettanti are still around?

I didn't! But they look like a bunch of fuckers - I was co-opting this into my Stevensonian fantasies of earnest young men in shabby surtouts hiring private rooms at Inns, dining on roasted fowl and hot wine.

Admittedly any society that could afford taste-making folio architectural surveys of Classical antiquities are unlikely to be cut from that cloth, but I would suggest some sort of ILB FAP guerilla gig at their next meeting, demand the name as our own and read out an enlightened manifesto dedicated sexual inclusivity, liberal discourse on all matters literary and DOWN WITH THE YOKING OF CAPITAL WEALTH TO ARBITRATION OF ARTISTIC TASTE. All to the banging of a big bass drum.

Started on Albertine by Jacqueline Rose. Her article on Rosa Luxembourg was perhaps the best thing I've read on the LRB all year - this is meant to give a voice to the poor girl - see how I get on..

Fizzles, I'm with you! Although, being as how in Australia, not in any actul physical, helpful way...

<3 the susan cooper talk upthread. as a kid i had a fetishistic love for those emblems will stanton finds in the dark is rising -- the circle quartered by a cross, made of wood or stone or bronze. great evocative detail throughout. the mundane stuff was usually just as interesting as the fantastical stuff.

getting the first of these from the library today...

Finished Point Omega. I liked it well enough, slightly to my surprise because I'd been expecting a burrowing too deep into DeLillo-theory, though I tend to think it's not a great sign when you immediately have to read a clutch of reviews afterwards so's you get it. The bookend gallery passages are pretty excellent, the bit in the middle fine. Not a great deal happens though - the wonder isn't that it's only 114 pages long, it's that he managed to pad it out to so many.

Now: the joys of picking a new book from an untapped library.

I finished Galbraith's American Capitalism. Not quite as readable as The Great Crash (it lacks that book's juicy narrative arc) but the central thesis, that the US brand of capitalism functions mainly as an oligopoly offset by interest-group politics, rather than as the unfettered competition of the classical model - is useful, I think.

James Franco's Palo Alto. Two stories in and I like it, it's got immediacy but he hasn't got the voice quite right, sometimes the kids describe things in the wrong way, like focusing on the patterns in which a mentor is going bald rather than the fact of baldness. Kids don't do that, I don't think.

I gather this dude is a mildly famous actor or somesuch. The mere fact of the book is quite impressive I think, that it seems promising even more so.

I feel like I have never not been reading Middlemarch, nor will I ever not be reading it. This is not necessarily a bad feeling.

One can never get enough of Mr. Brooke.

my colleagues are voting for the next book in our book club, and it's a tie with Eugenides's the marriage plot or after dark by Murakami. Which one is better? I know nothing about either book, although I'm familiar w/Muarkami's other work, and I can't imagine that discussing Murakami with my coworkers will be any fun at all.

Neither appeals to me but it sounds like you can be 'done' w/Murakami quicker, and then you can try to get 'em to read Mishima -- just be prepared to be called a 'weirdo' :-)

Finishing Albertine. I think its good, but then I now want to read The Prisoner just to figure what the point of the whole exercise is. So Marcel is pathetic and knew all her lies, and yes its her 'voice' - she comes across as intelligent and all the rest of it. Not sure whether we are meant to be shocked by this or not.

It is good tho' - Jacqueline Rose seldom does wrong.

i am ~50 pages into catch 22 (also for book club). does it get funnier? the humour seems terribly self-congratulatory and i'm not sure i can get through another 400pp.

I agree and don't think it improves much, but we are in a tiny minority round here iirc.

Radio 3's Night Waves did a special on Catch 22 due to the 50th anniversary of its publication and yes not a single bad word about it. I expected some kind of heated discussion there, at least.

Recent readings...

Amy Stewart: The Last Bookstore in America -- a guy inherits pretty much the last surviving bookshop in an e-reader devastated market, finds it's hugely successful, doesn't realise it's because it's a front for dealing very potent pot -- enjoyable tomfoolery

Quim Monzo: Guadalajara -- surreal short stories, very good, unfortunate first name of author

CS Forester: Payment Deferred - 1926 crime novel, surprisingly Patrick Hamiltonesque (though not as good, but still very enjoyable)

Manuel Muñoz: What You See in the Dark - low-key noiry thing set in Bakersfield during the filming of 'Psycho'

And the 33 1/3 books on 'Dummy' and 'Pink Moon', which were pretty good, though the latter had waaaaay too much about a VW ad featuring Nick Drake singing

Read The Melancholy of Resistance by laszlo krasznahorkai. Enjoyed it hugely. Going to read War and War soon.

Also Peter Hennessy's Secret State, history of end-of-the-world atomic bomb preparations in Cold War Britain. Spur of the moment purchase in Waterstones; got as far as looking at it on Amazon, on my phone, while standing there, then decided no, I'd buy it from them. It felt like making a charitable donation to the idea of the bookshop.

Xenophon's Anabasis. I know they're soldiers n all but the violence is disturbingly understated and ever-present - the carte-blanche they feel they have to forcibly obtain supplies and accommodation from any and all settlements they come across, often burning them down when thwarted. And when they finally reach the relative safety of the Black Sea: "Some of you, no doubt, will be going out to pillage. It will be best, I think, that whoever does so should in each case before starting inform us of his intent, and in what direction he means to go, so that we may know the exact number of those who are out and of those who stop behind."

Good old Xenophon. The one great thing about him is his easy prose style, which has made him beloved of anyone ever trying to learn classical Greek.

so true. Thank you for all those 'they marched x stathmous and y parasangs and came to a prosperous, inhabited city' sentences, Xenophon. They made me feel like I was getting somewhere.

Now I feel lame for just reading it in English. I only wanted to discover the real story behind The Warriors.

Still confused as to why it's not called Katabasis btw.

now i want to learn classical greek

go on

it's fun

Reading Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers on n/a's recommendation, and it is very funny, like Deadwood as a road + buddy movie.

Just finished Kenji Yoshino's book about Shakespeare and the law -- it was REALLY good. I like the way Yoshino writes -- has an understated element to it that can be very moving -- and he quotes Shakespeare at length, which helped me to remember why I used to love Shakespeare (haven't read since high school).

Dante - The New Life. This is brill, although at first it took me a while to re-tune to the concept of poem --> 'behind the scenes' crit on its construction (and I guess er, deconstruction of the meaning of love) --> another poem, etc. I think the mechanical bits ('its a poem composed of three parts...the third is subdivided into two sections') helped.

I like his theory that writing in the vernacular really took off when the women who was being written poems to by some random medieval lothario couldn't understand latin.

Dwight Macdonald - Masscult and Midcult. It's fun to see someone take the high/low distinction in art seriously and try to run with it. I guess it's a bit dated as an approach, but it's kind of refreshing to see someone reify aesthetic values instead of taking the de rigeur, mushy ultra-relativist approach of today.

It seems like Macdonald borrows a lot from Adorno's theory of pop music, but he writes like a curmudgeonly, wise-cracking uncle rather than a Frankfurt school philosopher.

read the latest benjamin black/banville thing this week. don't know why i keep picking them up -- he's good at mood/atmosphere, but he is really not a good mystery writer.