As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

ILB has returned in time for the new year, as the Sandbox Reconstruction Era recedes into the dim reaches of 2011.

As noted in the last throes of the sandbox thread, I am embarked upon Pale Fire, but not without misgivings. It seems suspiciously like a Chinese finger trap.

As mentioned on the sandbox - Either/Or, which I'm thoroughly enjoying... and I'll leave it at that for the moment.

Also reading Racing in the Dark by David Millar. Reading it very quickly is as often the way with sports books. It was a requested Christmas present from my brother and is excellent. A lot of sports biographies you look at and think 'You're only 12! This is at best a monotone narrative of success! Get thee hence!', but this is not the case with Racing in the Dark. For a start David Millar actually wrote it, with help, yes, but he put in the hard yards at the word processor. Does this matter? Well, in one sense no: I've read plenty of good sports biographies that were put together by professional writers from interviews. But you do seem to get a sense of him wrestling the demons out of his head at the typewriter, a certain writerliness in fact (sorry, horrible word). He can describe Biarritz, where he lived as 'Fur versus neoprene. I loved it.' That sentence alone might have alerted me to something I knew before I came to it, that Millar had wanted to use JG Ballard as a model. There's no sense in which it reaches JGB's artistic levels, but the worlds of expat Hong Kong, southern France, suburban schoolboy England are evocative purely on a level of place. Then there's the drugs, and the single-minded manias, reality and morality warping dive into the abyss, which is described very well. He's a ferocious character (and a bit of a hero of mine) and that ferocity comes out for much of this book as directed at himself. Anyway, it's excellent, and I can't recommend it enough.

Dipped in and out of A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380-1620 by Peter Mack (wonder if he's any relation to Maynard). Some of the names are familiar, big ones like Erasmus and Melancthon obviously, but also Lorenzo Valla and GeorgeTrapeszuntius (who I'd just read about before Christmas. Where? Thomas Browne?). The rest are not familiar and the detail of rhetorical textbooks and their development too detailed for me to want to go into as a part of casual reading, but it's informative and clearly good at what it's doing. Very useful list of rhetorical terms at the back as well.

Other brother got me The Elements of Typographical Style by Robert Bringhurst for Christmas as well, and am opening it at random pages and having a quick scan. Looking forward to getting down to reading it properly.

Back at work tomorrow though. (spits). Fun over.

To fulfill one of my resolutions to read more Wodehouse, I breezed through Joy in the Morning this weekend.

Also: The Brilliant Disaster, Jim Rasenberger's excellent account of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Just finished Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

finished the beckett trilogy, back to dickens. the canon! woo!

Finished the 1960-election book--JFK won--just about to start Kevin Avery's Paul Nelson bio. I figure I'm the only person in the world who got the Nelson book and a National Review subscription (from the same person) for Christmas.

which election book? not 'the making of the president'?

No--this one:

http://www.amazon.com/1960-LBJ-vs-JFK-Nixon-Presidencies/dp/1402761147

I have read the Theodore White book, many years ago.

I'm still working on Grossman's Life and Work. It's completely awesome, but reading slowed to a crawl after September. Made a huge dent in it last month & hope to finish it - realistically - next two weeks? Every week I think "if I bear down I can finish it up this week" but 1) baby in the house 2) Skyward Sword 3) work

xpost - that looks interesting. i tried reading the theodore white book but it was too close to hagiography to cope with, unfortunately. still keep meaning to work myself up to a dance with lyndon johnsons, maybe after school finishes

The Pietrusza book is very even-handed (which I guess is another way of saying it's even-handed towards Nixon). There's a great sequence near the end (obviously) where he describes a whole cast of characters going out to vote: Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Hannah Nixon, Richard Daley, Stevenson...Those days are gone forever, etc.

Important question: should I press on with David Copperfield or no? Kinda lost momentum a while back and started/finished other books.

I enjoyed what I read but it didn't exactly fly along, though that was reader error, not author error.

I mean Dickens is pretty awesome, gotta say.

Not much reading over Xmas but as I go back tomorrow I'll be cracking open some Plato I got for Xmas: Symposium

Also Short Orders by Jonathan Romney, since all I've done at Xmas is youtube a lot of films in between all the Turkey consumption.

Recently:

The first two Per Wahloo sci-fi/crime novels, 'Murder on the 31st Floor' and 'The Steel Spring'

Don DeLillo's story collection The Angel Esmerelda (some great stories, a couple of infuriating ones)

John Sayles 'A Moment in the Sun' (enjoyed this a lot, but it didn't actually need to be 1000 pages long)

Dubravka Ugresic's 'Karaoke Culture' essay collection -- never read her before, but will definitely read her again; great stuff, and funny too

The first two Per Wahloo sci-fi/crime novels, 'Murder on the 31st Floor' and 'The Steel Spring'

haha what? details, please -- i imagine in the future, too, the weather is always bad, the government is always no use, and everyone is always getting divorced

Pretty much: they're set in an unidentified European country, but it's very likely a Scandinavian one from incidental details, run by a government known as 'the Accord': a sort of capitalist-extremist conglomeration that mostly stifles opposition by buying it out and absorbing it.

the weather is always bad: the weather is basically a thick shroud of vehicular exhaust, so yep!

the government is always no use: or actively evil

and everyone is always getting divorced: certainly nobody's fucking--there are almost no kids, pretty much no romantic relationships, etc

Even more oddly, nobody is ever named, except the central character (Inspector Jensen), though it doesn't feel forced. And he's more a tool of the Accord (with occasional bloody-minded rebellions) than a hero fighting against it.

They're very good, in any case. There's at least one more (The Generals) that comes between these two, but it hasn't been translated into English to go with these two

Don DeLillo's story collection The Angel Esmerelda

i feel like there were two outstanding stories here and a bunch of not great stories...

I liked most of it a lot, but the one about the guy in prison whose kids do a financial analysis show was an incredible trudge to get through.

And I do wonder if DeLillo's ever heard actual human beings have a conversation.

which stories did you enjoy? I slogged through the book waiting for a payoff that never arrived.

Barely reading between Christmas and New Year (social life + skyrim). Felt deathly last night & realised that all I wanted was to be in bed with some easy books. Reread a chunk of Brideshead Revisited - goes down quickly, plus wanted to see if I still had the usual probs with it.

Important question: should I press on with David Copperfield or no? Kinda lost momentum a while back and started/finished other books.

How far did you get? One of his greatest till the last third, then becomes rotten iirc.

i feel like there were two outstanding stories here and a bunch of not great stories...

I forgot the title of the one about the two college-age friends who make up stories about townspeople. It had beautiful passages and was genuinely eerie.

midnight in dostoevsky, i loved that one so much. i've read a couple of these in print but have the book waiting on the shelf. i actually like the financial prison one someone mentioned above - not as much as MiD but still, it feels good, I believe it.

It had beautiful passages and was genuinely eerie.

a long while since i've read this but yes, the subtle romance of the two kids in class is so charged & quiet.

finished emerald city by egan. really liked the first few stories but became sort of tedious by the end.

reading munro's too much happiness. and once it gets here from the library, will be reading munro's hateship, friendship, etc book, which won the book club poll. i feel like there's a bit too much munro going on for me but i kind of like it too. i find that i can't read her stories straight through. usually after i finish one story, I have to sit and digest and think about it and usually go back and reread parts to see if I really understood what was going on...but it never feels like work or tedious.

They do all blur together, so much so that when I went on a Munro rereading binge last year I wrote terse tags ("the one about the crazy boy") next to each story title in the table of contents.

which stories did you enjoy? I slogged through the book waiting for a payoff that never arrived.

I liked pretty much all of it up to and including Midnight in Dostoevsky, which was the best--eerie/beautiful as Alfred says. The few after that dropped away sharply in quality. But as to the earlier stuff I'm a bit of a sucker for that air of nuclear dread that permeates some of them.

yeah 'midnight in dostoevski' was the best story but i thought 'hammer and sickle' was excellent as well: purposeful and funny

ray i think one of the best thing abt munro's stories is how all-consuming they tend to be

I do wonder if DeLillo's ever heard actual human beings have a conversation.

otm

I'm elated that I read the story collection first; when I trudged through Underworld two weeks ago I thought the novel, despite the Hoover-Tolson passages and the virtuoso opening a waste of time.

Re: early Wahloo books not part of the Beck series, above - the one titled 'A Necessary Action' or 'The Lorry' in English is worth reading, kind of aimless in its plot but I found it unique and poignant for some reason.

Conrad's Victory (gotta love the conrad)
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (this will go with me for the next few months probably)

Victory is such an odd novel.

i'm only at the beginning but why?

Its pace is unlike any novel I've read. Conrad asks the reader to idle with Heyst as he waits for the assault, then cuts to the three villains of Krypton. The novel's a triumph of pov -- maybe better than Under Western Eyes -- but I'm not sure the results were worth it.

By all means read it though! Conrad deserves it.

"then cuts to the three villains of Krypton"

those narrative cuts are one of his trademarks though..

No doubt, and it's the novel's most lasting virtue. I didn't find enough tension or interest in Heyst's dilemma imo.

The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse by Lonely Christopher

Hey, a good friend of mine has a novel out today called The Fallback Plan. Very nice blurbs from Gary Shteyngart and others. Could make her famous.

i posted in the sandbox thread but will post here too. goal for 2012 is to read a lot more.

finished last year with a run through dana spiotta's novels--starting with eat the document, then lightning field, and finally stone arabia the other day. now attempting isaac babel's collected stories.

Just finished Ten Thousand Saints; I liked it.

Just finished Ten Thousand Saints; I liked it.

I've been thinking about reading this.

I recently finished Disturbing the Peace by Vaclav Havel. It's still amazing to think that a guy like this could be president of a modern nation. The book is pretty engaging - even to someone like me who's never read any of Havel's other work - and kind of inspirational. There's a helpful glossary of Czech names at the back to help you keep track, though obviously a lot of the references went over my head.

Hey, a good friend of mine has a novel out today called The Fallback Plan

I won a copy of this by asking her for advice online! It hasn't arrived yet, but it looks promising.

About midway through Pale Fire. Damned peculiar so far.

i'm itching to read 'oblomov' by goncharov but from what i've gathered there are varying opinions on which translations are the pick of the litter. most folks seem to rep for the pearl one (top), but i've heard good things about the schwartz one (bottom) published by yale (and it claims to work from a heretofore untranslated version preferred by goncharov, iirc?) don't know if someone has read one or both and can suggest one over the other.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41nn1iFgVGL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41RV8NhJVvL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

yeah ive heard good things abt the schwartz one as well but the version i have is neither of those, sorry :/ from what i can remember the schwartz translation is supposed to be more 'contemporary'

I've only browsed those two translations in the bookstore. I opted for the Pearl, as it seemed to capture more of the wit and humor of the dialogue. For a book like this one, I decided that fidelity to the original text would consist in whatever was funnier. For me, that appeared to be Pearl, but my copy is still sitting unread as of today. (I bought it ~4 months ago.)

I am reading "Catface" by Clifford D. Simak...it's pretty silly, but I'm enjoying it.

I for-real clicked the img to LOOK INSIDE :(

still reading 'middlemarch' and enjoying it. why am i liking this but couldnt wait to finish the jane austen a month or so ago? elliot's got a bit more wit and a little more savage than austen i guess.

rong

Austen's very witty and can be very savage. The main difference is the size of the canvas they work on, I would have thought. Eliot much more interested in the wider political shenanigans, Austen in the close-up human interactions.

I finished the biography half of Kevin Avery's Paul Nelson book. Towards the end, it has to be the bleakest thing I've read related to pop music since Peter Guralnick's Charlie Rich chapters in Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway. This made me smile, though (Nelson's friend, Michael Seidenberg): "He couldn't stand later Scorsese films. I think it just comes down to Leonardo DiCaprio. It was like the end of life to him that Scorsese had chosen a new alter ego that was so unsuitable for Paul."

i'm like a quarter of the way into ten thousand saints and it's really good btw

I finished Pale Fire last night and I spent a bit of time thinking about its strengths and weaknesses. The greatest strength I could find was the virtuosity of its language. The biggest weakness was that, taken by itself, it made no coherent sense at all.

The narrator was worse than 'unreliable'. He was a pastiche of absurdities masquerading as a human being - and by that I do not mean that he was an absurd human being, but rather that he was an effigy set up by the author with so little internal consistency that under scrutiny he falls apart like wet tissue.

While I was showering this morning I lit on an image that captures this book for me - it is like my mother's button box when I was young. That item was a red tin box with scalloped edges on which was pasted a decal with an ornate wintery scene with a sleigh and a forest - no doubt its origins had to do with Christmas. Inside were several hundred buttons, from plain to fancy, of many shapes, sizes and colors, with few matching. They made an impressive display when you poured them out on a table. I spent many hours on rainy days sorting them into little piles.

They were fun. They abounded in textures and colors. They didn't have to make sense or meaning so long as they compelled attention. And they inspired daydreaming, so that to some extent they fished up some sort of sense out of whatever material lay dormant in one's mind. But they didn't embody any structure or sense of their own.

Don't mean to cross threads, but (based on one viewing many months ago) your last paragraph is a perfect description of The Tree of Life for me.

i don't understand people who assume some major piece of art has a huge flaw that no one else ever noticed before instead of just assuming that maybe they didn't totally get it

Me? I wasn't making any assumptions at all, for me or for anyone else. I was expressing (borrowing, actually) a reaction to something, and went out of my way ("one viewing," "for me") to make it non-contentious.

no, aimless specifically

xp

n/a, from its position in this thread, I'll assume that comment was directed at my critique of Pale Fire. Except I make no claim to have discovered "a huge flaw that no one else ever noticed before", so that comment makes little sense to me. I only record how it struck me, which seems like the purpose of this thread.

I suppose I could elaborate at much greater length on exactly why I thought the narrator failed as an instrument through which to convey anything greater than the author's fluency and playful sense of language, but this isn't a college course, and I'm paid to be a book critic, so the exercise would be more than I care to make without some assurance it would have some purpose.

Further, I don't say there could not be some magical key that unlocks a whole world of coherent meaning in that book, but if there is one, and you know what it is, it seems churlish of you not to share it. I did notice all manner of playful tidbits based around character's names, shoes and their reversals, misapprehensions, buried meanings and whatnot, but this apparatus, however clever and playful it was, was never strong enough to carry much weight of meaning and if it was intended to, then, yeah, I missed it. So, shoot me.

ahem, not paid to be a book critic

okie-dokie. I went to Wikipedia and it contained this quote from V. Nabokov:

"...the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman."

That is pretty straightforward and plain enough for anyone to understand.

Seeing how this is the idea the author had in mind, I must say that Nabokov has created a completely nonsensical version of madness that has no connection to madness as real humans experience it, which is as a very sordid, muddled, and ugly state of mind. Instead, he has created a fairy-tale-castle version of madness, where madmen are capable of a gorgeous literary style such as few sane men are capable of encompassing. The same extremeties of cleverness he exhibits throughout the novel totally undermine its credibility as anything but a silly curio, a bauble, a fragile blown-glass toy.

Which is not to say that the whole thing is worthless. There are a great many ideas expressed or suggested there, but they don't cohere within the story. They are, as I already said, like buttons in an ornate button box.

i'm sorry for my tone above, it was kneejerk and ruder than intended. however, i don't know if i would believe nabokov on this topic either - he wasn't big on giving out explanations so i think that was probably a red herring.

your criticisms are pretty common for nabokov - all games and trickery and wordplay, no "heart" or depth. i have trouble believing these criticisms - i'm not saying i always understand what he's up to but having read most of his books and a lot of his letters and a lot about his life, i think there's usually something deeper going on under the surface of most of his books. however, the nabokov for people who get irritated by his tricks is "pnin" - it's a lot more straightforward and the compassion is more projected - it's also really funny.

the last bit sounds condescending but it really isn't - "pnin" is one of my favorites and probably his most underrated book

is 'pnin' really that underrated? i guess its not considered first tier but its v well regarded isnt it? its definitely a very good book

i do think 'incoherent' is not a... great criticism of 'pale fire' but i do agree thats its malleable and can be reassembled like that collection of buttons into a number of interesting patterns

i mean i think you could argue that a big part of the 'meaning' of 'pale fire' is the search for meaning

n/a: Sorry, misunderstood.

I liked Aimless's analogy to his mother's button box a lot (why I jumped in with the Malick comment). I haven't read Pale Fire, just Lolita, which I loved, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which I don't remember. I bought The Defense a while back, and hope to get to that. (Not sure if not being a chess player makes that a dubious venture.) Pale Fire always looked too daunting. If anything, Aimless's reaction made me more inclined to give it a try one day.

Fwiw I think Aimless's button box is an excellent analogy and perhaps not one that Nabokov would have disagreed with (particularly w/r/t the winter scene). As for Pale Fire more generally, again, I think I probably agree generally with Aimless with the only difference being the last time I read it, I enjoyed the things that he dislikes. It's been a while tho, and my feeling now is that personally I prefer the games being subsumed in traditional narrative. (Why should it be necessary to say 'personally I'? Because 'I prefer' might mistaken as a general critical judgment. I wanted to stress the personal preference without any critical recommendation).

xp

I used 'Search' (silly goose is me) and found a lengthy 150+ post thread on Pale Fire, from which I shall quote pinefox, who appears near the end of it to say:

I think we can leave aside RR's idea that we do take Kinbote at face value for long.

That is, we can assume that we soon realize he's a very wacky kind of character who claims to be a king. And I don't believe that we ever know for sure whether his claim is true or false.

I think it's true, then, that realizing that he thinks he's the king can't, as such, be the point. It must be a stage on the way to, or a part of, the whole experience of the book.

What does that whole experience include?

The sheer metatextual fun of having these massive notes that dwarf the poem; a play upon the idea of commentating, of misreading, of taking an object and misappropriating it - but then also the ambiguity that the misappropriation might be making a more interesting object than the poem was in the first place, so misreading could be a good thing

the parody of academia, of the age of the institutionalization of modernism (and the portrait of the university and the academics)

The artistry, the intricacy of the design: the thought that VN wrote that whole poem, which works straight-faced, and engineered it so that it could also work as prompt for the notes; the pleasure of the poem itself; the intricacy of the Index

VN's marvellous rendition of post-war USA as I suggested above

pure style, VN's nigh matchless gift with lean unlovely English

camp: daft dashing fun, a sort of gay Indiana Jones or John Buchan or Prisoner of Zembla, with people in drag parachuting out of flying boats - well, not quite that, but that sort of register

the ethical and affective dimension around Hazel: the pathos of her, and of her parents' well-meaning but perhaps (as Wood says) bad attitude here, and then of Kinbote's blindness to it, which Rorty thinks is the great moral rhetoric of the book.

I would more or less subscribe to all these comments, although sometimes less rather than more. But to me, all these various elements add up to something that doesn't affect me beyond a certain bemusement; it makes for me a whole that is less than the sum of its parts. As for the book having a "great moral rhetoric", I would call that wishful thinking.

As for "intricacy of design", I agree it is there, but that is also true of the machine for creating Twinkies, and oftentimes the parts of the book do not fit snugly, but rather grind against one another. To commend the book by saying that one is held in suspense whether any interpretation of the book is true, because all of them seem false in some light, is to make a virtue of something that has no value.

I wouldn't make such a fuss, except this novel is held up as a Great Book, a Wonder of the Age, a Marvel of Literature, and I was rather disppointed in it.

that is a good pinefox post

As for the book having a "great moral rhetoric", I would call that wishful thinking.

why? i mean i can see finding the 'moral rhetoric' subsumed by the narrative/metatextual trickery but rorty's argument abt hazel's invisibility and the book's moral dimension seems p valid and its of a piece with much of nabokov's work. the idea that we minimize others, make them invisible in order to use and mistreat them is a p impt idea in a bunch of his books imo

But Hazel is far from invisible to her parents, the only characters in the book to whom her existance is important. She plays a leading role in the long poem her father wrote and to the degree we understand her at all, we understand her through her father's ability to address her personhood.

Moreover, her visibility within the novel, such as it is, is fully under the control of the author, so that it would be disingenuous of him to plunge her out of sight and then blame any other person for this fact, as if he were revealing a moral shortcoming anywhere but in his own conception of the story he wrote that included her.

Shit. This crud is obv enough to me. If she was "minimized", who did that if not N?

Bernard Cornwell - great! An author mentioned in passing in one of Nick Baker's books that I have finally gotten around to reading.

so that it would be disingenuous of him

I think this is a thing with Nabokov, perhaps by a more circuitous route than the word is usually used, and the extent to which you mind can affect your enjoyment of him, perhaps.

i quickly read Gil Scott Heron's murder mystery novel, The Vulture
http://www.amazon.com/Vulture-Gil-Scott-Heron/dp/1847678831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325964620&sr=8-1

When ilx went down I was reading James Franco's Palo Alto, which I liked. It's a collection of short stories where fairly well-off, bored teenagers do teenagey things, to varying degrees of unpleasantness and occasional horror. He writes well, there's a pleasing immediacy to his stuff.

Then I read Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, which was marvellous. The characters are great, very entertaining, and the portrayal of Berliners as largely passive subjects for whatever political fate decreed for them I found very interesting.

Then Fat City by Leonard Gardner, a story of midranking and below boxing folk from Stockton, California. Really gritty and accomplished, without going out looking for grand drama, just examining the everyday failures, mostly, and compromises in people's lives.

Then Nile Rodgers' autobiography, Le Freak, which is super-charming. Nile clearly doesn't see himself as a big star, because Chic is a relatively small part of the book, whereas he really gets gushing instead when he gets onto working with Diana Ross, David Bowie and Madonna. Loads of amusing anecdotes and interesting insights into the music. The pre-fame section is something else though, all this crazy stuff about his part-terrifying-part-amazing childhood and the ridiculous characters in it. He just comes across as the best guy ever, basically.

Now I'm reading Londoners by Craig Taylor, which is a collection of interviews with people about their Londons. Normally these quasi-journalistic things can be cliched and unrewarding through trying to cover too much ground, but this has mostly an unusual cast so far and is showing promise.

Just started Imperial by William Vollmann. One chapter in and it's pretty interesting so far, but I'd put my chances of finishing it at 50/50.

Jonathan Romney - Short Orders. Compilation of the S&S/Indy and various etc reviews of films, mostly from the 90s, most of which I've seen. Come across him on S&S when he is often reviewing something which happens to be all Brechtian and Marxist and auterist, and often from that period from the mid-60s to mid-70s so coming to this and seeing him review a lot of bullshit from the 90s like Reservoir Dogs and Schindler's List and actually coming out with the goods is great. Rare to find someone who cares. I guess he had little known gems like Quince Tree Sun to watch too (probably the best film about painting, which sounds gd until the moment you say its a 2hr flick about a man drawing a tree).

i like jonathan romney. think you can read him & kent jones discussing bresson in sync w/the current retro, somewhere online. you make quince tree sun sound good! i would put greenaway's edward munch up against it tho

& then there's that one of picasso, painting

& my kid could paint that

You mean Watkins' Edward Munch? That's great as well, yeah.

Guess when I said that about Quince Tree Sun I imagined talking about it ramdomly to someone. Making it sound more exciting might be a challenge.

that's what i meant yeah
no for sure ikwym. there's a funny lede in a sight & sound article about theo angelopoulos this week, about some joke people used to tell at festivals, that they said you start watching one of his movies at six o'clock and then three hours later you look at your watch and it's five past six

love Fat City so much

there's a funny lede in a sight & sound article about theo angelopoulos this week, about some joke people used to tell at festivals, that they said you start watching one of his movies at six o'clock and then three hours later you look at your watch and it's five past six

Poor, misunderstood Theo :-)

Read The Sisters Brothers, and was quite surprised and pleased to see it was as good as everyone had been saying

Now reading a collection of Arthur Machen novellas and short stories (currently on 'animals arise and destroy us' tale The Terror), while avoiding the introduction from super-hack Guillermo del Toro

Coriolanus
Griftopia

Anybody read Thomas Mallon? He specializes in Washington novels. I finished the pretty good Fellow Travelers, about two male lifetime civil servants who start a romance at the height of Senator McCarthy's power.

I like Mallon quite a lot, though I've only read a few of his novels ('Dewey defeats Truman' and 'Aurora 7' were especially good. His book on plagiarism, 'Stolen Words', is pretty great.

starting Babs Gonzalez's autobio

going to read steven levy's in the plex next

'murphy'

Recently read:

China Mieville, Kraken - Fun, but way more uneven and scattershot than the other two of his I've read (Embassytown and The City & the City. Which is exactly what I expected based on reviews, but those two were so focused and great I had to know for myself.

Ben Ehrenreich, Ether - Very quick, read it in two sittings, which was good because I felt pretty filthy after each one. Not sure if I could recommend to friends but I'm glad I read it.

Now reading Stone Arabia, love it so far.

Love Murphy.

but way more uneven and scattershot than the other two of his I've read

That has me reaching for the whisky with shaking hands.

i am reading kerr's 'a philosophical investigation'. and stephen mulhall's book on 'wittgenstein's private language'. and some rousseau. and rilke. i think next i will reread 'berlin noir' before reading kerr's next three bernie gunther books. i'm also reading nietzsche. still. again.

that one of mulhall's made a lot of the diehard philosophy-student types in the class very uneasy. to be fair i never finished it myself so maybe they were right. i meant to read his other book on the investigations first.

i mean, the sections on same in 'inheritance and originality', not that he has a whole other book. (maybe he has a whole other book i don't know about, i wouldn't know.)

Helen Dewitt's Lightning Rods. Enjoyed it a great deal, while marveling at each chapter that anyone would write a book like this. Perverse in many, many ways.

Currently reading PKD's The Divine Invasion, kinda love that much of it is set in Chevy Chase, of all places.

yes, t, it is a whole other (short) book - explicitly continuing the reading of 'inheritance' into the 'private language argument' sections of the 'investigations'. so far i don't see that it's anything unexpected for people familiar with his other stuff (or with cavell on other minds, which it's engaged with), but it is extremely good. o, the energy i've wasted trying to write my own versions of some of these paragraphs...

The Great War and Modern Memory - Paul Fussell

no j i meant a whole other other book

i should proofread my ilx posts more better

'watt'

picking up david graeber's "direct action: an ethnography" again--his account of the planning & execution of major protest actions outside the FTAA meeting in quebec city in 2001. eerie how so many of the conversations & arguments are near verbatim the same conversations i'm involved in today with occupy dc.

also cracking "ours to master and to own," a history of worker-owned workplaces.

thomp on an enviable Beckett binge

i think i'm stopping after this one tbh

skimming about 50% of all the procedural gags in watt, also i have other things i really should be getting around to

like not understanding 60% of the gags in murphy

i feel like i get at least two thirds of the gags in murphy

"and their nights were serenade, nocturne, and albada. yes, albada."

Ellen Willis - Out of the Vinyl Deeps

Nicholas Thompson - The Hawk and the Dove, a readable but facile study of George Kennan and Paul Nitze that, thanks to John Lewis Gaddis' new Kennan bio, is now obsolete.

Wodehouse - Right Ho, Jeeves!

Ben Ehrenreich, Ether - Very quick, read it in two sittings, which was good because I felt pretty filthy after each one. Not sure if I could recommend to friends but I'm glad I read it.

filthy? i really liked this and im... surprised, i guess, by this reaction?

Lem - Solaris (2011 Johnston translation)

Finally a non-audio version and they fuck it up by leaving out a bunch of spaces in the Kindle copy. I read the Polish->French->English translation last year but I couldn't tell you what the differences are, apart from the character names being changed. Turns out that the original, lousy translation got the gist across.

i liked it too lamp, i just mean the world he creates is so grime-encrusted, everyone is in destitute circumstances, lots of gross scenes involving small animals. not saying it was gratuitous, just that i don't know if i'd want to spend 500 pages in that world.

oh, is that in print or just e-text? xp.

Teenage by John Savage. Bought it when I was in London 2 Xmases back. was overweight for flying so it got left there til a few weeks ago when I started reading it again. Am now 4/5s of way through it. Very interesting.

Lemmy White Line Fever picked up very cheaply in an HMV recently. Makes interesting light reading while I'm on the bus etc. Not really followed too much of Motorhead's career. Have been aware of some of the earlier & more popular stuff though. Plus I love Hawkwind + Sam Gopal are pretty decent.
Guess this is the memoirs of a guy who's lived through a lot.

Also Patti Smith Just Kids again very interesting memoir this time of her early days with Robert Mapplethorpe. Will finish this finally when I get through the above 2.

No Go the Bogeyman by Marina WArner. Have this out the local library, started it before Xmas and it was too heavy to carry. Found what I read of it so far pretty fascinating. Mainly got this cos I couldn't afford to buy From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers when it appeared in the local 2nd hand/remaindered bookshop before Xmas.
Wanted to check out her writing though. Will hopefully get that in the future though.

One reason I couldn't afford to get another book was having pickled up Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian in the same bookshop. Found it on the recently arrived shelf and it seemed to call out to me. just the kind of book that needed to be in my possession. Seems really reminiscent of the time it came out, back in '71. Not that I'd be completely conscious of the time having been a toddler but having gone through things like the psychedelic revival and having been aware of music & alternative culture of the time in hindsight it seems very resonant.

Was back in the shop today browsing, trying to make sure i didn't miss anything else neccessary but I'm really broke after Xmas. I'm also aware that I have a lot of other stuff I've picked up in there over the years that I've yet to read.

I took two bags' worth to the charity shop today. It's barely made a dent in my library.

went to the library, got whatever NYRB Classics they had that looked interesting, ended up with "Fatale" by Jean-Patrick Manchette (really quick read, wasn't super-impressed) and "The Ice Trilogy" by Alexander Sorokin, which I'm enjoying so far.

sorry, Vladimir Sorokin

just finished munro's /too much happiness/

wasn't as blown away by it as i was with /open secrets/ but still...sentences like this one make it worthwhile

She should have understood, and at that moment, even if he himself was nowhere close to knowing. He was falling in love.

Falling. That suggests some time span, a slipping under. But you can think of it as a speeding up, a moment or a second when you fall. Now Jon is not in love with Edie. Tick. Now he is. No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.

or this

The college library was a high beautiful space, designed and built and paid for by people who believed that those who sat at the long tables before open books–even those who were hungover, sleepy, resentful, and uncomprehending–should have space above them, panels of dark gleaming wood around them, high windows bordered with Latin admonitions, through which to look at the sky. For a few years before they went into schoolteaaching or business or began to rear children, they should have that. And now it was my turn and I should have it too.

yeah its not her best collection but a couple of stories, particularly the one about girls at a camp and 'deep-holes', which was grinding to read but powerful, have stayed with me

yeah, the camp one is child's play -- very very good. i also liked wenlock edge (the one with the weird old man who has girls read to him in the nude)

Finished Short Orders. Romney is terrific really, ws interesting to read about things I started digging at the time in naivety, like the terrific Vietnamese film Scent of Green Papaya or La Haine which at the time I liked but had no idea where it was coming from. Those first touches with diff mode of filmmaking that took root then and grew and now are stored in categories like 'neo realism' or 'new asian cinema' and so on, just names that are useful journalistically but have a potential to stop you thinking about their content.

There is a dense essay on CGI at the end. Those discussion - ws tackling a similarly dense essay on 3D in relation to dance films such as PIna - and outcomes are all up for grabs.

Now I'm reading a couple of short books from the BFI classics - one on Ichikawa's Actor's Revenge, the ohter on Ford's Stagecoach.

I'm reading 'Let the Great World Spin' which I'm liking very much. I think he's a good writer. The stuff about the greiving Vietnam mothers was particularly well done.

Some recent reading:

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
Palinurus - The Unquiet Grave
Robert Gittings - John Keats
Oscar Wilde - De Profundis

All of which I thoroughly enjoyed. My rather limited French somewhat hampered my reading of The Unquiet Grave, but I still thought it was marvellous. I also tried reading 'A Tale of Two Cities', which I found pretty unbearable. A big fan of 'Great Expectations' too.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Before that Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. Next up The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.

Another Muriel Spark novel, this time Memento Mori, which I am enjoying very much. I'm about 2/3 through it and I think it very clever of her to borrow a few tropes from Agatha Christie to tart up what is really a very un-Christie-like novel about old age and approaching death.

With my off hand I am also reading Six Records of a Floating Life, Shen Fu (Penguin Classics edition). It's a sketchy memoir written by a Chinese 'legal secretary' circa 1809. It is highly stylized by western standards, but by the Chinese literary standards of his time, it is unusually informal.

I took a brief run at Oblamov, but it felt like a too-heavy cake, so I'll try again later.

talented mr. ripley
ripley underground

Londoners was really good. Slightly too many of the folk interviewed were zany characters, anticapitalists and conspiracy theorists and so forth, and slightly not-enough were regular folk in mundane but essential jobs (no civil servants at all, from memory; and every financial type was balanced out by an antibanker, which annoyed me a little as they had interesting stories whereas the protectors appeared not to know very much about anything). But that's small complaint, it was an excellent read, and I raced through because the style was so conversational. Laetitia Sadier was one of the interviewees and hence has her own three or four pages, which would please some folks round here.

Now The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, which has had some hype. I bought on a whim after finishing the other book while out yesterday. No discount or anything, but it paid off, I'm enjoying it very much thus far. It's one of those generous, ever-so-slightly flabby American novels, like Franzen maybe, rather than the DeLillo it was trailed as in Waterstone's. It reminds me most of Bonfire of the Vanities, in that I feel they both needed one more edit before going out - there are a few clichés here & there, the odd groanworthy gag, and passages where nothing much happens and nothing needed to. But that's minor fare when you've got a good story, and thus far I'm hooked.

munro book club discussion is tonight!

finished hateship...liked it better than _too much happiness_, but after reading these two I'm starting to wonder if anything else of hers will top Open Secrets. Maybe it's just cuz the first story in open secrets was so freaking good that these other two books just haven't compared? Or was it b/c it was my first Munro? It would be sad to think that Munro will never be as great to me as when I read that first one...

talented mr. ripley
ripley underground

Read 'Ripley Under Water'!

I'm going sequentially. They're really great fun.

about 3/4 through stone arabia now. it's weird how the writing is very straight-forward and unadorned for the most part, when it's supposed to be the sister character's written journal. but when she's talking in front of a camera, out come the florid metaphors, which would be fine except they're totally unbelievable as speech. then again, it's her written account of the interview and the main theme of the book is revisionism and unreliable narration, so...

Esther Leslie and her bk on Walt Disney. And Walter Benjamin, of course, can't forget him.

The KCRW/Bookworm interview with Eugenidies leaves me wanting to read The Marriage Plot.

Good interview? I'll have to google it, be curious to hear him talk abt it...

3 to kill - jean-patrick manchette (brutal stuff, a swift read, would make a hell of a melville film if he was still around to make them.)
death of the adversary - hans keilson (second keilson i've read, contains probably the most devastating single chapter i've read in a novel in a very long time, and said chapter ends on a singularly emotionally brutal note.)
hell at the breech - tom franklin (well-written and vv good with the exception of a character i can only describe as a "francis wolcott in deadwood" equivalent, who seems to have zero purposes except to cause chaos, which is fine i suppose but he seems utterly out of place. otherwise good.)
he died with his eyes open - derek raymond (working through this one now. so far, so good.)

A Mirror for England - Raymond Durgnat

Finishing Martin Chuzzlewit.
Dipping into Selected Journalism 1850-1870, also by Charles Dickens.
Starting Ackroyd's Dickens biography. God this thing is huge.

I was just trying to ignore the Dickens bicentenary, and not to let it make me too contrary (and I was saving my reading energies for the Browning bicentenary in May, Camberwell represent), but then a friend commissioned a brief urgent bit of hackwork on him, and I have been sucked in. I forget how much I love him; I basically am a sucker for that London-visionary Dickens, and though god knows he has his faults, none of the other nineteenth century sorts move me or excite me as he does - strange tableaux, titanic descriptive passages of universe where everything seems alive, caricatures going sideways to truth. idk in a few months I'll maybe be back to thinking that he should have written less, but right now I am even delighting in jolly filler episodes and thinking I should hole up and read nothing but for 6 months.

Cyril Connolly's mildly amusing The Rock Pool and Kenneth Ackerman's uproarious Boss Tweed.

hans keilson -- those two books of his are wonderfully written, and spectacularly dark. pity he hasn't written more fiction. as far as I know he's still alive, over 100, but has only written the 2 short novels (and lots of psychology publications)

doing some catching up on some classics:

halfway through lolita - i adore this
read "the lagoon" and about to start heart of darkness
started a portrait of the artist as a young man
attn alfred: trying to finish savage's takeover

After almost a year I finally finished Middlemarch! Feel quite bereft. Is Daniel Deronda worth attempting, does ILB think?

Over Christmas I read Alain Robbe-Grillet's Why I Love Barthes - not so much a slim volume, more an anorexic pamphlet - and JJ Sullivan's Pulphead, which I enjoyed parts of, but... I don't really get all the fuss.

Delphi have been putting out some thorough Complete Works ebooks of various authors fresh out of copyright. Have been browsing through the Virginia Woolf. Lots of essays I'd never seen before, most of them sensational.

Have been reading Paul Mason ahead of his new book. Live Working or Die Fighting - great, punchy history of worker's movements from Peterloo, through the Paris Commune up to Gramsci etc in the Italian car industry. Didn't know all the stuff about the Knights of Labor. And Meltdown, which made me think I almost understood the world financial fiasco. Also had a gander at a collection of David Graeber essays, including a pretty funny piece on Buffy.

Are you enjoying the Durgnat, Ward? Read one of his collections last year and want to chase some more down.

Really want a decent papk of Woolf's essays.

I really enjoyed Daniel Deronda. I think I wrote on the sandbox -

Daniel Deronda is a very strange book. Eliot is an extraordinary writer, such a control over the psychological motivations of her characters, and the bleakest most material ideas you can imagine all managed with great intellectual brilliance. You would fear her sympathy as being very little different in quality to her criticism .. I’ve never read a novel where it’s quite so clear that all the author is interested in is ideas. Eliot has absolutely no interest in the quotidian whatsoever – fashion is flippantly dismissed in a single short paragraph, and NO ONE EATS EVER. She mentions food once, and that dismissively (it’s a pet theory I have that realist writers aren’t interested in food, only genre and fantastic writers are – Eliot has given that rather wobbly idea a shot of amphetamines). Power and resistance, power and resistance, a vicious [wrong word] heath-robinson moral manufactory of a novel, with Deronda the most powerful of all – it takes a whole religion to take him down. And all so brilliantly done, too.

What's unusual about it I guess is the strong strain of mysticism competing and overwhelming what is otherwise an intensely cynical novel.

I really like that she writes a lot of her own chapter epigraphs:

Aspern. Pardon, my lord—I speak for Sigismund.
Fronsberg. For him? Oh, ay—for him I always hold
A pardon safe in bank, sure he will draw
Sooner or later on me. What his need?
Mad project broken? fine mechanic wings
That would not fly? durance, assault on watch,
Bill for Epernay, not a crust to eat?
Aspern. Oh, none of these, my lord; he has escaped
From Circe’s herd, and seeks to win the love
Of your fair ward Cecilia: but would win
First your consent. You frown.
Fronsberg. Distinguish words.
I said I held a pardon, not consent.

Love Sigismund!

But if you've just finished Middlemarch, you'll probably want a break. Eliot has such a tight leash on her characters' psychologies that I needed something a little breezier after.

Torrents of Spring - Ivan Turgenev

Interesting about the quotidian - the Pinefox should post up somewhere the essay he wrote about Sylvia Plath and food. (The missus is always horribly frustrated in films or tv [though oddly not fiction] where characters are obviously eating but you can't see what...)

Funnily enough, one of the things that most impressed me about Middlemarch was what I felt was Eliot's negative capability, how she did have some feel for the everyday, despite her obvious investment in Dorothea's high-mindedness - how a child plays with its cat, the way a lot of the time you can see Celia's point about Dodo's terrible seriousness, and at the end when the teasing relationship between Mary and Fred seems to be the truest of all the marriages, the real heart of the novel in a way.

I reread Daniel Deronda last May and was still impressed.

Not one of his best known essays, but one of his most penetrating.

Very impressed by Stevie's, as we used to call it ... book-learning.

I could possibly try to dig out that essay from the ghost of a draft of Papercuts 5, but not sure that anyone would make anything of it now, though it was the best I could do with Plath in 2000 and I could surely not do any better on that topic in this lifetime.

i think they eat in 'adam bede'!

austen -- emma (a writer i've never gotten with, but am enjoying this one. funny, exasperating.)
the presidency of james buchanan -- elbert smith (christ, what an awful president.)

just finished reading Positively George Street by Matthew Bannister. I liked it; I've wanted to read something about the Flying Nun 'Dunedin sound' scene for a while, and this--the slender memoir of the guitarist from the Sneaky Feelings--wasn't exactly what I had in mind. Sneaky Feelings is probably the one band that I was least interested in, but he had some interesting ground-zero insights in the whole NZ scene and though his pissy putdowns of the more punk/noise elements of the scene certainly grated, dude had an engagingly honest and cheerful voice. The exact opposite of vainglory. I can't imagine another rock autobiography where the writer talks about accidentally pissing on an electric fence, at least without turning it into some wild anecdote of endless, crazed partying (as opposed to showing it as the stoned and stupid mistake that Bannister sheepishly admits that it was).

well, stone arabia certainly petered to a halt. need something new now.

hey julio, the Durgnat is extremely entertaining, as you might expect, and makes you want to see a load of Boulting Brothers movies double-quick. The book is VERY scattershot, and of course some of Britain's political/historical circumstances have changed since it was written, but it's surprising how often he's clear-eyed and accurate about class, society, and so on. I'd like to know more about the class composition and sympathies of the people who actually made these films - was filmmaking in Britain really the utterly middle class and rigidly bound profession it seems in hindsight? - but that's probably the work of a different book, or books.

*checkes wiki* oh ok, Brighton Rock! I didn't know it was a (twin) brotherly team that made these.

Everyone claimed the remake shamed it but I wasn't fussed either way.

Thx for the comments - sounds like the book for me. I think I finally (finally!) made a breakthrough w/British film last year and so need to carry that on.

Juan Pablo Villalobos: Down the Rabbit Hole -- as good as everyone said it was (70-page novella told from the point of view of a spoiled, isolated kid living in his Mexican drug kingpin dad's compound)

Satyajit Ray: Indigo (Selected Stories) -- some good ones, but weirdly a lot like a collection of MOR Edwardian pulp/genre fiction (amateur detectives, giant carnivorous plants, time displacement in dreams, etc)

A D Miller: Snowdrops -- not bad, but plot hinges on main character not asking a really obvious question, and continuing to not ask over a period of time, in order for the plot to actually work (ie idiot/'Lost' plotting); given its Booker nom last year, I see what they mean about the nominations being very middlebrow

have to leave 'middlemarch' aside. reading 'the great gatsby' for class now. last time i read it was 17 years ago!

Joseph O'Neil's Neverland. At last.

J.D., how's the Buchanan bio?

marjorie perloff's memoir is the first thing i've finished since the beckett binge

hrm

read helen dewitt's 'lightning rods' - bleh, ultimately kinda pointless i thought

oh, almost totally pointless, but pretty hilarious, i thought.

I am currently reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons - big monster SF like momma used to make. I will also be reading a chapter a day of "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy. It is about people who go to soirrees a lot. I think the reference to war in the title may be ironic.

little sad about the dewitt, if that is the case

i just read 'absalom, absalom!'

having not read faulkner in a while i thought 'oh, a 300 page novel, i will get through that in an evening'

i did not get through it in an evening

alfred: it's enlightening and readable, tho a bit disappointingly short (it's part of a series -- planning to check out the one on john tyler next). the big revelation for me was his chapter on buchanan's foreign policy; he calls him "the most aggressive would-be imperialist in american history." there's something comic about the way every one of his attempts to set off a war fizzled out.

well, the DeWitt isn't really a follow-up to The Last Samurai in any way, it's a novel she wrote in 1999 when she couldn't get TLS published, and it's been sitting around on her hard drive for a decade. Apparently she has 4 or 5 other books in the same state. I still think it's worth reading, you just can't expect it to have the same impact.

Reading War and Peace too. The war part is coming don't worry. But tbh, thus far i think i prefer the soirées stuff to the war stuff. also since i'm reading it in short spurts i sometimes forget who some guys who show up once in a while are which always bothers me.

Reading "The Mind Thing" by Fred Brown, read "Mustaine: a life in metal" before that.

reading Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary before the Art of Fielding because the library had it

Just finished The Art of Fielding. It was really very good; well worth the hype I feel. It's not a romp exactly, but has the same thing of just being really fun to keep reading. I enjoyed very much.

Crash next, I guess. I'm a bit scared of going from warm-hearted characters, faintly comic yet totally sympathetic, to the kind of robotic cipher I'm expecting here.

Colby Buzzell, Lost in America
Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad
Matt Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

i have been reading 'self-portrait in a convex mirror'.

and it turns out ashbery is DOPE.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton (nearly put "by a sofa", just for fun)

I'm halfway through montano's malady by villa matas. It's pretty good I guess but I have a number of reservations about the dude, but I guess this is based off this one book so it's probably not fair

like this book is kind of unecessary if you've read the first chapter of the rings of saturn

it's something I'm wrestling with when reading, like especially based on a writer whose mo is playful biting or homage or whatever, like, I like the act of reading, so I'll just read whatever, but sometimes it just seems so unnecessary when they're in the shadow of sebald or borges or roussel

and maybe the most horrible thing of all is that this is how I feel about writers whose work I actually consider worth reading

no the most horrible thing of all is that the sebald/borges/roussel comparison means I'm probably gonna get sucked into reading whatever it is you're talking about even if you try to warn me against it

currently reading: Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion. first novel I've tackled in a hot minute, we'll see how it pans out.

Loved Bartleby & Co - was hoping the ILX Book Club would read it- and been meaning to read Montuno's Malady but haven't gotten round to it yet.

Reading 'Great Expectations' for class now. Another book I havent read since school.

The last volume of Taylor Branch's MLK bio. Damn.

Star Trek novelizations, specifically the Destiny Trilogy.

Shantaram autobio of an Aussie fugitive holed up in a Bombay slum. Very interesting book, has had me trying to work out who I knew recommended it to me some time ago. I got it as part of a regular haul of great books from one charity shop I used to pass last year. Started it on the bus back into town from that trip and then lost it into a mess on the farside of my bed.
Now refound, am 300+pp into a 900+p book and it's fascinating.

Just finished Patti Smith's Just Kids which I started some time last spring. That's pretty good and has me wanting to find some of her rock prose. Couldn't find a collection of that stuff before, so is there one around? Her writing for Creem etc?

need something new. if i'm going to read some salman rushdie for the first time, should i start with 'midnight's children'?

I liked Haroun and the Sea of Stories if you wanna go in easy.

Haroun is good.

I'm mired in the middle of foucault's discipline & punish. it's holding up the rest of my book reading because i feel like unless i power through, i'll never get through this book and the time i spent on the first half will have been a waste.

Rafael Honigstein's Englischer Fußball, which is a see-ourselves-as-others-see-us piece, and very entertaining too. Lots of stuff on the mystifying importance of the captain leading his troops into battle, which is all very timely.

god yes. quite fancy reading that, Ismael. Mystifying obsession with concept of footballing captain. the media-led set-up of figurehead/fallen figurehead doesn't quite get me to where this comes from.

cricket captain makes sense as a concept, and my inclination about how the Sky representation of football wd look for US/NFL. precedents, but that doesn't hold any water here afaik - captain not an important figure in US sports? also cricket captain too different from football captain for it to be meaningful.

Is this some post-Victorian hangover of popular reciter type values? (the boy stood on the burning deck/Macauley's lays/Kipling?). Or is there another strand I'm missing here?

Macaulay - iPhone typing in pub.

His take is really interesting - it's essentially that the historical class development of the game here means that a player can either be a 'loyal warrior' or a 'noble knight', but if he owes his prominence to effete qualities like flair or technique he will be ostracised:

Beckham broke down the old prejudices but he could not eliminate them entirely ... people said he lacked nerve or self-control. His quality was not in doubt, but his grit, his courage, his manliness. When Beckham relinquished the armband, John Terry, the humourless and guaranteed unfeminine enforcer in Chelsea's defence, took over.

There's a kind of religious undertone too, identification through self-control and suffering. It's quite a powerful image and quite persuasive, and I reckon there's no way JT will jack it in, in fact he'll be loving this extra layer of martyrdom even more.

It is time for my February dose of wilderness longing. I am reading Skywalker: Ups and Downs on the PCT, Bill Walker.

In 2009 he attempted to thru-hike the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, as do about 400 other people each year (the number keeps growing). I've read a clutch of these books over the years and they are all remarkably similar, and for the non-hiker-trash crowd, remarkably mediocre. This author seems to have a slightly better grasp of storytelling... so far. Knock on wood. I read these for certain non-literary pleasures connected to personal obsessions.

hope: a tragedy, shalom auslander

ben marcus - the flame alphabet - 50 pgs in - if i didnt know better, this feels on its way 2 being "if phil roth & raymond carver did a zombie book" or sum bs

yeah that does sound interesting (and yep, Terry a sucker for the whole badge-thumping captain thing). But most football fans I know, old and young, don't give a shit about captains. Yet the media keeps pushing it. I'm a part-time fan at best, so may be totally off beam. But it feels media created and I don't understand where from or why, and the only possible explanation I've got - it's a macguffin that just helps create more news - seems insufficient.

anyway there are better threads for these speculations. Will seek this book out! (er once I've read crash obv - that thread bookmark keeps reproving me for not having started yet).

Drop me a webmail if you want me to send it to you - I'll be finished in the next day or two.

ben marcus - the flame alphabet - 50 pgs in - if i didnt know better, this feels on its way 2 being "if phil roth & raymond carver did a zombie book" or sum bs

yeah i wd probably swap in a different two authors x and y there but did i spend a whole lot of time thinking of the stand. then i opened up the age of wire and string and wondered what had happened to the guy

i just started reading your face tomorrow

Reading Edmund White's City Boy (on the iPad--first digital book ever) and enjoying it a lot, more than the similar Just Kids, actually.

faulkner light in august.

Thanks Ismael, that's very kind of you! I'll take you up on that offer.

I'm in school, taking a Shakespeare class and a Vonnegut class. This week it's Othello, Titus, and Mother Night. Last week was Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and Sirens of Titan.

^^ Reading these will turn you into a well-rounded individual. Or, that is the hope.

It is time for my February dose of wilderness longing

Intrigued by that book about a year in the life of a wilderness fire spotter, the name/author of which I can't remember

id like to say 'critique of judgement' but im not so much reading it as carrying it around with me places

p pysched tho cuz i got 'birds of america', 'dance of the happy shades', a collection of keats, 'revenge of the baby-sat' and some p handsome penguin classics edition of descartes work in french

finished The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz, maybe influenced by finishing it while sitting outside on the nicest day in months but I loved it, started a bit slow but I was totally engaged in the ludicrous stories within stories within stories in the second half. Would be interested in his book on Borges.

Currently about 100 pages into Warlock.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143120743.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

i'm intrigued

great cover

I reread A GATE AT THE STAIRS and it seemed better second time around!

Recently: Ending Up, One Fat Englishman, The Green Man (all Kingsley Amis); The Ambassadors (reread, Henry James); The Strangers Child (reread, Hollinghurst); The Sense of An Ending (Barnes); Towards The End of the Morning (Frayn); The Music Instinct (Philip Ball); The Blue Moment (Richard Williams); All Roads Lead to France (bio of Edward Thomas, Hollis; Collected Poems, Edward Thomas. Not sure if I've forgotten some. Might try to cobble together some thoughts on some of these.

Ring Around the Sun - Clifford D. Simak. It's pretty good, the second best Simak I've read after Waystation.

A friend of mine got me The Instructions for my birthday. It was his copy that he couldn't finish. I wonder if anyone has?

i finished it

it's not "difficult reading," it's just long, so all it takes is time

Worth it?

i was ready for it to be done about 100 pages before it was done but it's a very good book. i'd definitely give it a shot. i also had the incentive that i had it from the library so i had to finish it within 3 weeks.

i'm reading daniel deronda thanks to this thread! it's good! i also took a break to read a pretty good action book called triple crossing and am also reading the extra 2 percent by jonah keri about the tampa bay (devil) rays which isn't very good

gave up on foucault and am now reading legin's birthday of the world short story collection, trying to finish it before it's got to go back to the library

Last night I started Everything and More, David Foster Wallace's book about the mathematics of infinity. So far, so good. It has his full authorial voice in place, complete with his idiosyncratic use of footnotes and high-powered mashup of high intellect and chatty informality. And it is informative.

Cather's O Pioneers! and Conversations With Tom Petty

i enjoy it when aimless describes david foster wallace books

jordan i read the instructions in like a week, i would have preferred to read it in like two days, it is very good

i think the second half sort of collapses in on itself, or fruitlessly resolves contradictions set up by the first half. the first half is the best first novel in the last ... anyway

youre making me think i didnt give that book the attention it deserved

did you read it, also why is your display name a butthole

yeah a little over a year ago. i just searched ilb to see what i thought about it at the time but my only mention of it was an offhand mention in a post about 'visit from the goon squad, 'richard yates' and 'the imperfectionists'. lol?

my only strong memory of the book was feeling weighted down by the idea of it and wondering if i felt that way because of the book itself is so heavy

my dname is a comment on the quality of my posts

i think ade had an ascii butthole name already

i don't know, i remember going 'aw jeez' at the first sentence, like is this book going to be like that (smth like: one afternoon in swim class (kid name) and (kid name) and i decided to waterboard each other); there was some sweet spot it hit for me somewhere in the first half where the narrator's history-rewriting and probable psychosis and remembered damaged-little-kidness were tremendously affecting. i think too it's interesting how it has obvious lines of engagement with 'cutesy' or 'mfaish' or 'mcswys' modes of writing but manages to extend them incredibly far

i finished the new ben marcus and thought, god, has teaching ruined him or something

i am now on the second volume of 'your face tomorrow'

now reading* Speech and Phenomena. it's only like 100 pages. I can get thru this.

also recently started The Theological Origins of Modernity, a broad and fairly-accessible work by Michael Allen Gillespie, whose other books I dug (well, what I read of them). lotsa good stuff baout the medieval church, nominalism, Petrarch, and so on and so forth... one must be absolutely (obsessed with) modern(ity)

(*: well, y'know, not now-now, but—)

Just read first half of Sylvie & Bruno the Lewis Carroll book or that is to say first volume cos book was split on publication. Think its more of a children's book than the Alice ones but still has some pretty great nonsense poems and elements of surreal and dream logic.
Bruno's babyish speaking style is really annoying though.
Got this in an anthology of Lewis Carroll's work I picked up in a charity shop for a couple of Euro.

Started reading one of the Dr Dolittle books after reading about production on the '67 musical film being a nightmare. It's a bowdlerised copy, lacking Mr Lofting's deep racial insight(ha ha). Have looked online at what got cropped and it seems not to have been done the most rationally.
Still leaving in things like implying black people are cannibals while removing plot/character development?

Also just bought Pop a Warhol bio that was going cheap locally and looks like it has quite a bit on The Velvets in.

Åsne Seierstad - With Their Backs To The World. A portrait of Serbia in the first half of the last decade via interviews with various folk, some famous, others not. The level of paranoia is kind of shock, how everything is explained by the US seeking to colonise the place, steal its resources, monopolise control of this important trade route, etc. Do people still think this? Not much evidence for it latterly, to my knowledge.

The book's good. I don't know a great deal about the country, but I'm always interested.

I might follow that recommendation. I read Rebecca West's massive Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia last summer and have been itching to read more about Serbia's recent history. The wars of the 1990s and their aftermath are so impossibly complicated.

Further to earlier post:

Ending Up/One Fat Englishman/Green Man - Ending Up is very good Amis - sardonic, bleak, very funny, humane. The other two are patchier, passages of energetic brilliance mixed with others where KA seems to be going through the motions - these two probably only for hard core fans.

Sense of an Ending - Barnes. This books virtues are not very novelistic - more a meditation on some ideas about memory using somewhat contrived fictional illustration - it sounds awful, but somehow it works, partly because it's very short - what could have been a very tiresome idea over 400+ pages is a surprisingly enjoyable and pleasing read at this length.

The Strangers Child - Hollinghurst. Reread this because I couldn't make up my mind about it based on one reading, and because I liked TLOB so much I really wanted to give the follow up every chance. But it's a disappointment. Hollinghurst tries to break free of his usual obsessions and only reveals his limitations.

Towards the End of the Morning - Frayn - (apparently) cult 60s Fleet-Street- set comic novel in the Waugh/Amis tradition - goodish, not great, but worth reading for the setting alone if, like me, you're a British newspaperphile.

The Music Instinct - Philip Ball - a good and fair summary of the literature but Ball has nothing very interesting of his own to add. Irritatingly obviously pictures himself as a challenger of conventional wisdom despite not being able to acknowledge or challenge his own highly conventional mindset.

The Blue Moment - Richard Williams. Seduced into buying this by my Miles Davis obsession. Williams is good on Miles and Kind Of Blue but his thesis that KOB led to minimalism, the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno, prog, The Who etc just isn't a substantive enough basis for a book. It didn't help that I don't have much time for most of that music he claims KOB influenced. KOB is great because its great, not because it allegedly influenced some later music, a substantial percentage of which I regard as meretricious and pretentious crap.

All Roads Lead to France - as good a literary bio as I've read in ages (not that I read a huge amount of literary bios). I hadn't realised how close Thomas was to Robert Frost - the book would interest many Frost fans even if they know nothing about Thomas.

Big fan of both Ending Up and The Green Man. Found One Fat Englishman a bit tiresome.

Don't really see any going through the motions with The Green Man, wd put it in the top three/five Amis novels, I think. Great on alcoholism, the supernatural, health/mortality, funny too, although I'm not actually sure all those elements totally work together, and of the four of them, the mortality and alcoholism parts are the best achieved. His incredibly well-lit style possibly not entirely suited to a genre he found immensely congenial to read.

Yeah: best Amis for me would be Lucky Jim, Ending Up, The Alteration, The Green Man.

Another thumbs up for The Green Man -- it's the one that cracked open Amis for me, so to speak, despite loving Lucky Jim.

Also: Spark is the only writer I can imagine attempting what Amis brings off at the end of Ending Up.

I'm surprised by peoples' enthusiasm for The Green Man. I'm obviously rubbish at predicting what other people will like.

Now reading Alex Ross's collection Listen to This and re-reading The Human Stain (Roth).

A Soto otm about Ending Up, probably the best thing Amis wrote? (soft spot for On Drink.The Alteration and The Old Devils are dead certs.

sorry frankiemachine, casting another vote here in favour of the green man, love that collision between 'realist' amis-world and the supernatural (same reason why i love some of simon raven's novs).

No need to apologise, I'm a big Amis fan and feel pleased when other people like his stuff, even if the books they like best aren't the ones I like best.

finished birthday of the world. was not the greatest at first, but the penultimate and titular story was pretty good, and then the last story (paradises lost) was SO GOOD that it makes me love the whole collection in retrospect.

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. Loved it, sorry everyone who'd told to me to read it before & I'd ignored (I had started it before but decided I didn't really like it).
The Bachelors, Muriel Spark. I've started this before then dropped it for no very good reason. It's got problems, I think, but I'm fascinated by it, got that early Spark opacity & intensity.
The Dragon Masters, Jack Vance. Had never read any Vance, decided to change that. Enjoyed it a lot, more for texture than structure.
The Evolution of Language by Tecumseh Fitch. I wanted to know more about the topic, & it looked like a clear, substantial and very inclusive introduction.

Glad you liked Angel!

finished the flame alphabet & had nightmares last night; didnt really think it was a good book tho

How's that Alex Ross?

xp to rayuela, yeah paradises lost is so good, but i really enjoyed the rest of the stories too - really liked how the first one fleshed out more of the world of left hand of darkness. i'm really pleased there's so much more le guin out there, i've liked or loved everything i've read so far.

really really really.

yeah it's not that i thought they were bad, but they did feel a lot like thought experiments, rather than world creation, albeit with ideas i really liked, though this sense got less and less with each successive story.

(the sense that they were thought experiments, not the sense that i liked the ideas)

johnny what's the deal with the flame alphabet? i downloaded it but haven't started it yet. i think i tried to read notable american women like 7-8 years ago but couldn't get into it. my perception of ben marcus is that he's kind of humorless and i often have problems with humorless writers.

it is v humorless, for sure
idk, reminded me of saramago's blindness a lot or i guess what mccarthys 'the road' might be like (havent read it), also thomp compared it to 'the stand'

I'm not deep into the Alex Ross yet, but so far it's astonishingly good. The first piece (Listen to this) about the current status of classical music is a stone cold classic, although I already knew it - you used to be able to find it on his blog or the New Yorker site. Worth tracking down.

The piece on bass lines through history and the collection of short pieces on Kiki and Herb, Cecil Taylor, Sinatra, Sonic Youth and Cobain are fresh, perceptive and fine.

I still have a suspicion that any collection covering such a wide range of music will include some stuff that I won't be interested in personally, but I haven't found any so far.

i think 'cell' may be closer than the stand actually

i am actually reading blindness rn, basically anything really depressing translated by margaret jull costa is where i am at mentally

i don't know if i think marcus is 'humourless' insofar as i always think of that trait being accompanied by, i don't know, a certain kind of self-seriousness that i think he's lacking. i mean i don't know there's always the issue that one person thinks smth is 'humourless' and the next just thinks it is 'not funny', but in notable american women there's the whole first section where michael marcus informs you at length he regrets ever siring his son ben, who is a disappointment in every conceivable way, and you'd think at least he would stop copulating with the family dog, ben would, but apparently not

i have been looking at wire and string again lately, too, it always seems brilliant for ~ 20 minutes

ben marcus is hilarious and brilliant but he can be a bit much at times. haven't read the new one yet.

I just finished the Syndic by CM Kornbluth, pretty good! Alternate history, ended up liking the Syndic system as the Mob and the government are just terrible.

Going to read "Tower of Glass" by Robert Silverberg next.

the ways in which things pan out in 'blindness' is a lot like 'the flame alphabet', it turns out. i'm not sure i trust the ending of the former, to be honest

the whole bit with the writer was just like gehk gehghkgke ghkekge ekgh

Flaubert's Sentimental Education and Corey Robin's Fear: History of an Idea.

i'm almost done with War and Peace but i really can't seem to find the will to read those last 80pg. for some reason all the war parts of this have left me completely uninterested. i just can't seem to enjoy them. also, i'm somewhat annoyed by Tolstoy's constant remarks along the lines of "historians think this but they're wrong, also historians never mention this general but he's actually one of the guys who won the war almost single-handedly and btw have i told you about how historians try to rationalise napoléon's/the russian army's decisions but they're all fools because those armies just moved from one place to the other randomly without thinking about it".
it sounds like i disliked this book, but on the whole i had a good time reading it. it's just the military bits left me a bit cold even if it involved characters i liked.

i bought 'sentimental education' a while back; 'madame bovary' is one of my favorite books, but i've never read anything else of GF's.

i got bored with everything i'd been reading and picked up bruce catton's 'the coming fury.' it's swell, in that endearingly '50-ish non-academic way.

I read SE about twenty years ago so I'm due for another go. I don't have the strength to reread "Un Coeur Simple," a story that shatters me.

The last part of War & Peace was one of my favourite bits; except the passage about Nikolai dreamily seeing the Tsar, that's the best bit of all.

My god, reading the summary of the book in Wikipedia, it's as if I never read it all there's so much and so many people I simply don't remember. How discouraging, I'll need to read it again now.

Books you don't have the strength to re-read is an interesting personal sub-genre. Often they're my favourite books! But, revisit them, I dare not. Blood of the Lamb by Peter de Vries is the first one that springs to mind. The Lost Weekend by Charles R Jackson, too.

finished didion's play it as it lays last night. first ever didion -- quite liked it! although it was monumentally depressing...

i just took out 'blue nights' from my library after reading 'yr of magical thinking' a few months or so ago

also i started 'the instructions'

Only about 80 pages to go in William Vollmann's Imperial. It's not really all that amazing to justify it's 1000+ page length, but I keep reading it. It helps that I have some ex-ante curiosity about the region having once lived there.

viktor serge's conquered city. left me feeling a little queasy and uncertain tbh, although its p interesting to get such an unvarnished but ultimately sympathetic or at least hopeful take on the terror

also, i'm somewhat annoyed by Tolstoy's constant remarks along the lines of "historians think this but they're wrong, also historians never mention this general but he's actually one of the guys who won the war almost single-handedly and btw have i told you about how historians try to rationalise napoléon's/the russian army's decisions but they're all fools because those armies just moved from one place to the other randomly without thinking about it".

in college i took a class on tolstoy where we did nothing but read war and peace + supplemental materials. consequently i have a notebook somewhere that says essentially the same thing you just wrote, only in increasingly jagged axe-murderer-style handwriting. i thoroughly enjoyed the book otherwise but that shit was intolerable.

im reading nella larsen's 'quicksand'. not sure if i like it, the main character is a bit too whiny for my liking but its for my american lit. class so ive got to finish it either way. i was also handed a couple of books by maurice walsh which i intend to start. he's the guy that wrote 'the quiet man'. apparently hemingway said he was his favourite writer.

frankiemaichine, you like Sonic Youth but hate VU? Anyway, recently read Ross's The Rest Is Noise, one of those worthy epics which seem like they could well take as long to edit as to write (donkey's years), including the writer's own editing, and the editors' (very probably plural) encouragement and discreet direction of same. H'm-m, where are they for this post? The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and A Beautiful Mind are other good-to-great examples and reads.

Then Pylon--whoo-hoo, now I see what Paul Goodman meant: "Faulkner is beat, in a complicated way." Drawing off steam from the temporarily blocked Absolam, Absolam! (plus some feelings of guilt for his stunt pilot brother's death)? Only the beginning, he's quite a sleepless stunt pilot of baroque-as-bop prosody, also as southern gothic urban b-movie, but mostly in focus (he digs Shakespeare too). Set me up for the expanded edition of Cowley's career-reviving The Portable Faulkner (he ain't no delinquent, he's misunderstood). Cowley warns us about what was then (may still be) the longest sentence in the English language, but Faulkner sailed me right through it, barely noticed. It's his version of transparent prose.

But now! Just started Mitch Ryder's scary, scarry autobio, Devils & Blue Dresses. He tells us it's a product of wired times when only the computer keyboard gave him affordable relief. Powerful writing, invisible editing.

Er, Absalom, Absalom! too (might not be a comma). Sorry, I've never read the Bible.

i read that recently and i wish i hadn't heard about the fabled 1,200 word sentence because every time a sentence hit 400 or so i'd totally lose the thread of whatever i was reading to keep count of how many words were in it in case this was the one. i think i missed the one in question, too.

Reading super sad true love story for bookclub and I kind of hate this book. Part of me feels compelled to finish it so I can participate in the book club discussion and part of me wants to return it to the lib and never give it a second thought

Dow I don't especially "like" Sonic Youth and certainly don't "hate" VU. I have a fairly low level of interest in either - or in that kind of self-consciously arty strand of rock music generally).

Ross's piece on SY is very short and well done: I didn't need to have much interest in the band to be impressed and entertained by it.

Yeah, that's certainly my favorite test of music writing, of any writing--never mind the subject, make me care, take me along.

btw lamp nyrb is reprinting Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary with extra material that was never in the original translation. I should read Conquered City.

Conquered City was pretty good, as I remember

Reading super sad true love story for bookclub and I kind of hate this book.

I was all enthused and bought this a few months ago,and then actually looked at the first couple of pages and my heart sank. Now wishing I'd shown restraint.

Just finished

Kay Boyle: Death of a Man
Javier Marias: While the Women are Sleeping

and enjoyed both, with small reservations

Picked up the 1818 version of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. I'm about 60 pp into it. Because she wrote it at age ~20, it seems very much the book of a precocious young person, a bit too high-romantic and overdone for my taste, but clearly developing its themes and worth sticking with.

O helles yesse--here's a brief discussion s from 2011 (would like to see this doc too)
I Picked up a lot of books on my trip to Margate, including Frankenstein - a book I think I remember reading while I was at school. What I hadn't known was about Mary Shelley's interesting history, outlined in a TV documentary not so long ago. I can't believe the book was written when she was just 19.
― Yo wait a minute man, you better think about the world (dog latin), Monday, September 12, 2011 6:46 AM

Do you have the original 1818 edition? Although some say her hubbie added ornamentation, it's a bit more compelling overall than the 1830-ish version, where she added characters' attacks of conscience etc to make it seem more socially acceptable. But both versions work, to put it mildly. Also, you might want to check The Mary Shelley Reader, which I think is out of print, but usually affordable copies on Amazon etc. And The Last Man, which has a unique effect, in my experience. Goes from a crowded, tumultuous, early 19th Century projection of the future, gradually becoming the perspective of, yep, The Last Man, walking through the beauty and desolation of Europe (does he meet The Last Woman? Read it and see).

― dow, Monday, September 12, 2011 1:19 PM

Also some cheapo Kindle editions of MS works, incl a combo w those of her worthy mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.

Finished Imperial and started on F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise.

Fast reader!

Well, I had some vacation plus about 10 hours of flying time in there, which helped.

i already gave up on the instructions; it might be good, i just can't

started the new houellebecq instead

Don't think I'll ever try to read another houellebecq. Is the new one the one that uses chunks of Wikipedia without attribution?

Reading:

Nicholson Baker: The Size of Thoughts (mostly very good, occasionally ridiculously self-indulgent)

Robert Walser: Berlin Stories (congenial fun)

ha i think thats right -- i did notice he does thank wikipedia in the acknowledgments

im enjoying it tho

Vonneguts. My favorites so far: Sirens of Titan and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. I think Rosewater is one of best satiric comedies I've ever read. Cat's Cradle was really good but I wasn't nearly as crazy about it this time around. It's definitely one of those best-read-in-high-school books. Mother Night was a rung down. And Player Piano is kinda turdy.

On to Slaughterhouse 5 now.

'mother night' is his masterpiece, imo. reread it a couple years ago and it holds up really well.

Yeah J.D., I see how you could say that. It just didn't do it for me as much. I suppose I look to Vonnegut for humor, that voice of his, bizarre plot contrivances / sci-fi play, and the later metafictional stuff and incorporation of autobiography (Vonnegut as a character). I shouldn't fault Mother Night for lacking those things ... but ...

Will start Victor Serge today.

I circled Mailer's Harlot's Ghost yesterday but...

Memoirs of a REvolutionary could be the book to get me over the block I have at the mo'!

re-reading Updike's "Rabbit, Run" atm. i also got a lend of a couple of books by a writer called maurice walsh. hes the guy that wrote 'the quiet man'. they look quite pulpy, tales of derring-do and so on but apparently he was one of hemingway's favourite writers! will definitely read them soon, im intrigued

Gave up on "Tau Zero" by Poul Anderson, too much description of space ships and late '60's boring people.

Reading, "Venus Plus X" by Theodore Sturgeon, liking it.

Also, found an old book at work called "English madness: ideas on insanity 1580-1890", it's interesting.

hai guys I'm going to read my first Ballard short story this afternoon.

Yeah, I used to collect appropriately moldy books about ideas on insanity,from about 1945-1960 (incl much later debunked, like Three Faces of Eve, and others that should have been). Speaking of writers' influences, you remind me of reading that Edmund Wilson supposedly got his college colleague Scott Fitzgerald past an attachment to the works of Booth Tarkington, whom I only know from his kid books, Penrod, Penrod and Sam etc, but he also wrote The Magnificent Ambersons. Can see from the movie how Fitzgerald might've been encouraged to focus on rich people struggling to adapt,which became the arc for all his main characters. Anybody read TMA?

Tarkington is much better than Wilson suggests. The Basil sequence – some of Fitz's best short fiction – bore heavy traces of Penrod.

It's been a while since I've read the Wilson-Fitzgerald letters but he doesn't dismiss Tarkington so much as want to steer "Scott" towards Adult Books.

Adult Books?! Wanted Scott to get his F. on/off?

he didn't understand
Thomas Mann

Hey Jude, why so Obscure? Alao thinking of Graham Greene writing that he wanted to try thrillers, but after WWI couldn't take the Imperial patriotism of Richard Buchan etc seriously. Then he discovered Michael Innes's absurdist holiday fiction. Holiday from being academic and mainstream novelist J.I.M. Stewart, as MI writing "entertainments", also of course GG's term and arrangement, though I don't know Innes/Stewart's books compare? (Pynchon mentioned Helen MacInnes as an influence, haven't read her either--can see how he was influenced by Oakley Hall's Warlock though)

( Hardy har har--I'd think he might've dug Buddenbrooks, if he did like The Magnificent Ambersons, but I guess Mann didn't have a Penrod)

Alex Preston, THE REVELATIONS

struggling through both the flame alphabet and daniel deronda now, the former because it's too dry and icky, the latter just because it's loooooong

Tarkington's Penrod and Penrod & Sam are great (and so is Seventeen, in some ways the ultimate book about being a nerdy teenaged boy with a hopeless crush on a beautiful but empty-headed girl), and must surely have been a huge influence on the William books I grew up on (they both even feature the disgusting "licorice water")

Oh yeah...now that you mention it, I remember at least seeing Seventeen, have to look into Tarkington again--who wrote the William books??

Daniel Deronda bogs down when Deronda searches for his heritage.

(also wonder about Edna Ferber, having long been hooked on the big screen version of Giant)

William books were by Richmal Crompton

in the middle of piero gleijeses's Shattered Hope about the guatemalan revolution. sought it out b/c i read this author for a class once & really liked his writing. this one is also very good.

Åsne Seierstad - With Their Backs To The World. A portrait of Serbia in the first half of the last decade via interviews with various folk, some famous, others not. The level of paranoia is kind of shock, how everything is explained by the US seeking to colonise the place, steal its resources, monopolise control of this important trade route, etc. Do people still think this? Not much evidence for it latterly, to my knowledge.

The book's good. I don't know a great deal about the country, but I'm always interested.

― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 12:38 PM (1 week ago)

I was interested by your description, so I tracked down a copy and finished it earlier today. I've never been to the former Yugoslavia (I want to go), so it's hard for me to judge the quality of the reporting. Sitting here in Canada, I get the sense that some of the attitudes in the book have changed whereas others haven't. Serbia's EU candidacy indicates much less paranoia towards the West. But I was reading earlier about reactions in Belgrade to Angelina Jolie's movie about Bosnia, from which it appears that many Serbs still feel that Serbia has been unjustly singled out for international condemnation. I'd be interested to know what Serb readers thought.

My favourite detail was that of the old farmer insisting that The Last Supper actually depicts Tsar Lazar.

That was very strange. But then it is just a picture of a dozen guys, whatever Leonardo titled it, so why not?! It is a fascinating hint at the layers of meaning in play there though.

I've been reading about the EU candidacy this week too. They don't seem to be very far on, though it is progress of sorts. I really want Serbia in, rather than staying the sore thumb of Europe. The madness has been festering too long.

(I sent you a mail btw, don't know if you picked it up. It's superseded now anyway. Not sure I'd've shipped to Canada anyway tbh)

I got your email but deleted it by accident. ;) I tried messaging you back via ILX-mail, but that may not have worked. It was a generous idea, though! Thank you!

I'm reading something similar now, Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. Much of it is basically a highlight reel of the bloodiest moments in Eastern European history, but I'm impressed by the chapters dealing with Romania. Kaplan seems to have been one of the first Americans to visit the Danube delta after the 1989 revolution. He's also adding exorbitantly to my reading list: next is going to have to be John Reed's The War in Eastern Europe.

Still, it feels kind of like a diminished sequel to Rebecca West's book. She responded with a much fuller set of sensibilities.

I finished Frankenstein, harboring a secret conviction that on some level Mary Shelley was trying to talk about the French Revolution.

Now I have begun to read Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, in the Penguin edition translated by Hatto.

Ismael K sent me Englischer Fussball by Raphael Honigstein! Apart from it being nice to get a book through the post from an ILB-er, this was also very good. Honigstein plays up a sexualised understanding of English football via muscular Christianity, and although he over-eggs the pudding sometimes, milking relatively innocuous phrases for all they're worth, generally it's quite a well-held approach. He's excellent on the territorial nature of English football (corners being cheered for example)

As IK says, much of the book's appeal comes from it being a foreigner's view of the English. Sometimes he seems uncertain about whether the traits he's describing are good ones or bad ones (there's a glib bit where he says 'yes, it's good they're getting rid of racist & homophobic chanting, but if we overdo this then what about the atmosphere?'), and I could wish for a bit more pushing through with arguments sometimes.

A chapter Music, Fashion, Football is the worst in the book, I think, with some very trite cliches, and to my mind he's just wrong on Beckham, who always seemed to work incredibly hard for his teams (but yes, couldn't carry the expectations of a nation, obviously really). But chapters on the press, on bung culture, Jimmy Hill, German v England are all excellent ( of different understanding of the war and fans singing 'Ten German Bombers' - 'our visitors had still not grasped the true nature of post-war Germany: we are grateful that we lost the war').

You were asking, Ismael, whether there are any similar 'through a foreigner's eyes' using football as their lens? I don't know! There's probably a few cricket ones (or at least chapters of biographies maybe). But not sure would about football. Wd also be interested to hear of any.

So, thanks! Let me know how I can get it back to you.

Have started Capital by John Lanchester. I'm finding it quite annoying in lots of little mainly stylistic ways, which is making it hard to get into (there's a bit in the prologue where he repeats a bit about basement conversions and builders as if he hadn't said exactly the same thing just two pages earlier - really weird).

Glad you liked it. No need to send it back to me - you can pass it on to another ILBer if anyone expresses an interest, that'd be nice.

The Jimmy Hill chapter was amazing! I always thought of him as a kind of hateful buffoon, rather than this incredibly progressive (if now rather old-fashioned) character we learn about here.

I've read a few things recently about hooliganism & fashion, which I find fascinating and have even been considering for its own thread, because I still dress like that, basically. I quite appreciated the chapter for delving back a bit farther than the Tacchini-and-samba look, but agree it wasn't particularly convincing. The problem is, the sources themselves invite a bit of ridicule when you're quoting Robert Elms as gospel; and taking it back to the source, the original 1983 Face piece by Kevin Sampson is itself trite as anything. Though the companion London piece is better - just check out the '83 prices, I reckon you could kit yourself out in the same gear cheaper today, amazing.

how could anyone think Jimmy Hill was a hateful buffoon?

I never found him hateful, but he did start getting a little odd on Jimmy Hill's Sunday Supplement, although I found his oddness more appealing than some of the rather knowing hungover-looking hacks (Paul McCarthy!) that appear on there.

I knew about his minimum wage stuff, but not about some of the things that must have looked rather more eccentric at the time - like all-seater stadiums.

Just finished Huysmans' Against Nature (the Oxford Classics edition, trans. Margaret Mauldon), the first novel(la...) I've seen through to the end in I-can't-remember-how-long. Great stuff! Don't have anything to compare it against, but Mauldon's prose is lively and frequently hilarious—the opening of chapter 5 ("As his urge to sequester himself from a loathsome age of shameful duplicity intensified...") has become a permanent fixture of my internal monologue.

gave up on the flame alphabet (probably for good) and daniel deronda (might go back to it), now reading the john sayles novel moment in the sun, which is good so far.

jules renard's journal. it is great.

now reading the john sayles novel moment in the sun, which is good so far.

oh hey, this sounds good. hadn't heard of it until now.

i'm a quarter of the way through midnight's children and it's just starting to get rolling with the main plot, but i've been enjoying the unhurried setup (and it's funny how he's got the narrator's wife as the audience proxy, always requiring justifications for why the story is moving so slowly).

The Sayles is good. Not sure it needs to be as long as it is--it seems to start and later stop at reasonably arbitrary points, and could probably have ended just as easily 400 pages earlier or later than it does--but it's consistently entertaining along the way.

n/a, have you seen the massive online annotations McSweeney's have put up--millions of fascinating photos following the book's plot: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/books/amomentinthesun/bonus

Sleeping Beauty - Elizabeth Taylor. One of her more poetic, less naturalistic ones. On the whole I tend to like these less but this is still very fine.

This new John Lanchester really isn't very good. It's fairly consistently off.

Of the contents of a newsagent:

the fridge full of soft drinks and the adjacent fridge of alcohol, and the bottles of Ribena and orange squash, and the credit card machine and the Transport for London card-charging device and the Lottery terminal

Yeah I'll just top up my Transport for London card on the Transport for London card-charging device? And it's an accumulation of minor things like, which constantly undermine my faith in his sense of the material furniture of his book. He handles this sort of thing quite well in his essays, but it's a bit of a bodge here.

It's also really really boring. Following characters with rather wobbly voices around the street they live on, all delivered in a lumpen and laborious prose. The info he wants to impart is getting through, but the tone, and the matter, is just... well, as I say, it's boring.

...of minor things like that

Finished West's The Return of the Soldier in record time. The definition of a good minor novel.

n/a, have you seen the massive online annotations McSweeney's have put up--millions of fascinating photos following the book's plot: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/books/amomentinthesun/bonus

― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Tuesday, February 28, 2012 6:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

woah, i had not seen this! it's insane - thanks

Another new character! Another one! Laboriously hoving into view with the onset of another tediously quotidian chapter. Good Lord.

If pressed, on the basis of appearances, Petunia (ffs) would have put his age at about seventeen, though she supposed he must be thirty or so.

No. "17" is the frivolous response, "thirty or so" the that would be ellicited by pressing.

can someone explain 'a moment in the sun' to me

And wd it hurt to put the ł in for Polish words like kiełbasa & Michał? Maybe, don't know. Looks slightly odd without it. Problem verging on the lunatic edge of pickiness I realise, but something about this book makes me want to pick pick pick away. post.

It is the same urge that I get when I see a sweater covered with pills and bits of lint.

That's it! And when you spot one bit, well that's it. Every single speck needs attending to.

Don't know what that 'post' is doing there, oh right, xpost. Thought I'd expressed what was only supposed to be a mental command.

can someone explain 'a moment in the sun' to me

As in what it's about? In a nutshell, it's about the era when the US first decided to mess around on the international stage (war with Spain in Cuba, the Phillipines) at the same time as massive internal changes were going on (aftermath of abolition of slavery, gold rushes, technological developments) told through a whole bunch of different characters over 1000 pages

Reading some great Angela Carter short stories. I particularly like the stories of 4-year-old Lizzie Borden and the rewriting of Jacobean playwright John Ford's "'Tis Pity She's a Whore" as a western by film director John Ford

tbh fizzles I noticed you were reading it & wasn't quite sure why – don't think of solid middle-aged male british contemporary novelists (lanchester • hollinghurst • hensher) as up your alley. Was it Whoops! that turned your head? I really liked it, but was still sus of him as fiction writer, I guess.

The 'Transport for London card' thing is very strange. He *can't* have written that in the first place, so maybe an editor or early reader suggested that people outside London won't know what an Oyster Card is? But then 'travel card' if you have to give in on that. Want to know now, might try to get his email, pester him about it.

I think I agree on dark l… we're close to naturalising kielbasa maybe, but yeah with names, make the effort.

Reading the Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin. Really liked the first part (Bro), finding the second book (Ice) to be a lot less engaging. Got Babylon by Victor Pelevin lined up for afterwards.

Thomas M. Disch - The Genocides. Its my first by him...heavy going, as all bks are at the min.

yeah, I felt the desire to go into an area I wouldn't normally. + I saw a good review (sucker).

Also I read The Debt to Pleasure ages ago and thought it was good. (taste's prob changed tho & can't remember any details now - unreliable narrator? food?).

I was hoping at least it would be well written, but it's really not. It's just about laboriously competent. Just.

He does use Oyster later. I think he's just p bad at doing that sort of thing.

He's introduced another new character! Another! A sort of Banksy figure! This is dire. Sorokin was next on my list and I wish I'd skipped straight to it, although a perverse part of me is now enjoying how much this book is annoying me.

we're close to naturalising kielbasa maybe

i love this. for some reason.

I read Brian Glanville Goalkeepers Are Different, which I had as a nipper. It was very enjoyable, once I got used to it - the narrator's voice is very convincing, like how an ordinary blole from the period might have spoken, all 'you know' and 'if you see what I mean's. It's very unlike other styles that I've read of late, which are much tighter, and slightly unfairly makes the book drag 'til you get into it. I had similar with Orwell's Coming Up For Air a couple of years ago, which I had to set aside as a result.

It's a kids' book btw, the story of a young goalkeeper breaking into the first team at Borough and 'what it is really like to be a professional footballer'. It was published in 1971, so plenty of scope for irony there - young Ronnie earns as much in a couple of months as his postman dad takes home in a year, in fact so much so that after a run in the first team he can afford to move out of the family home and into shared digs with another first-teamer and a nice landlady. It's perfectly readable young adult material, as much a short novel as a kids' book really.

Anyway, into Ismaelinho's box it goes, for another layer of irony in a few years when he gets to read an actual, physical book.

Now Letting Go by Philip Roth. This was his debut novel supposedly, although written after Goodbye, Columbus. It's a lot longer though. There's no particular difference between this and any other Roth, except that he gets a lot dirtier. Basically he started out great and stayed great. I've got about half his novels to go, before I have to somehow start tracking down unpublished things. How does one even do that?

'ordinary bloke'. I don't know what an 'ordinary blole' is.

He's introduced another new character! Another! A sort of Banksy figure! This is dire. Sorokin was next on my list and I wish I'd skipped straight to it, although a perverse part of me is now enjoying how much this book is annoying me.

i certainly am, if that helps

'debt to pleasure' = would maybe have like to have been nabokov when it grew up, narrator has poisoned some dudes, envies his brother's career as chef, is self-described gourmand, presents memoir of dudes he has poisoned as a series of menus. it's aight i guess. i can now never read his new one (which btw how have you managed not to mention the title, because when i saw this in waterstones yesterday i had to suppress a groan) because i will spend the whole time waiting to get to the 'transport for london card-charging device'

i'm in a quandary over whether to get the paperback of 'a moment in the sun' or not.

IK i read 'goodbye, columbus' at the weekend and 'the plot against america' on monday and i would certainly disagree with the assertion that roth "started great and stayed great"

with both bits?

I'm enjoying Balkan Ghosts enough to wonder whether I should attempt Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon...

'plot against america' is structurally really broken, has some passages of truly awful prose -- the kind of praise it got is just a reminder that a lot of people can't read

i really like the stories in the back half of '...columbus' which aren't about a jewish guy trying to have sex. although the last one ('eli, the fanatic') could have productively ended two pages before or fifty pages after it does end, which isn't a very good place for it to end

it's interesting to think of them in relation to, like, ultra-slick MFA writing. because they share a lot of characteristics but are nicely rough-edged -- you're left in no doubt that this roth dude is a genuinely talented guy, i found myself thinking 'if he carries on writing stories that aren't about jewish dudes trying to get laid he's going to be so awesome'

i find roth pretty fascinating and compelling, mainly because he's deeply self-aware at the same time as he's deeply solipsistic, if that makes any kind of sense. but i'm pretty sure i 'dislike' him.

I'm meaning to give ... Against ... another go. I did like it, but it is definitely the least of the intense run he had going immediately beforehand. I always had the sense that the acclaim was purely for allegorical reasons, like Obama's peace prize, as if there was a collective seizure that Bush may actually be some kind of protoNazi and here was a riskfree way to stand against it.

There are definitely fantastic, intimate sections in there (is that the one with descriptions of fathers & sons playing baseball on Sunday mornings, then scalding hot showers, a real adult pleasure? I loved that) but the epic part of the narrative was more than they could perhaps bear. I'd like to read again, now that stopping America becoming actually Nazi is maybe a little less ... pressing.

You know what has some awful prose is The Human Stain. . .

isn't Letting Go is attempt at a Jamesian novel? It's the only novel of his besides the Nixon satire I haven't read.

I've never read Henry James so I don't know, but he has been mentioned more than once so far (I'm a hundred pages in). But then this is true of half the stuff I ever read these days, so I didn't think anything of it.

Heh, the Nixon satire is now the only one I don't own - the missus filled in the gaps for me for Christmas, and I couldn't bear to make her spend money on it.

yeah i think the reading of 'plot' as relating to the bush administration is actually really quite flattering to it? in that it takes what is otherwise a historical nonsense and gives it a plausible reality

i think the washington section has some v good writing, although it doesn't require any of the alternate-history apparatus of the book to be in place for it to actually work

I didn't know that anyone actually read Plot as a commentary on the Bush administration - seems like a major stretch to me, even if you dislike Bush a lot. Since the only other Roth I've read is Portnoy, I was disappointed that Plot wasn't funnier, but I guess that wasn't the point. It was fun to read as alternate-history, in the same vein as Dick's Man in the High Castle.

It was definitely received as such in the UK - Homeland Security, Guantanamo, wearing the flag, and what we heard about talk radio all that raised those echoes over here, and Bush himself never got anything approaching a fair hearing in our media. It seems a bit silly now, so I'd like to reread as pure alternate history. Plus I rather like Lindbergh, I'd quite like to test that again.

Roth, to his credit, has never gone near the idea that it's a Bush administration allegory. Things like that only diminish the work, I feel, unless you really are allegorising totalitarianism.

Edward St. Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels

cover is so hideous that I'm embarrassed to read on the subway

xp I'm trying to find contemporaneous reviews, and to be fair they're not as bad as I'd feared. It's plainly there in the background ("surely the novel is topical; isn’t that what the title says? Well, this is, perhaps, what people have taken the title to mean. Two current plots against America spring immediately to mind. There is the global plot of al-Qaida against the evils of capitalism, substantively and symbolically centred in the US – the war on terror is a war against the elusive authors of this plot. And there is, settling down now as a major fear of many Americans, the plot of the Bush administration to abolish many civil liberties and concentrate autocratic powers in the hands of the president ... But the plot in the novel is neither of these, although there are times when it looks like the second") but it's mostly taken at face value. Maybe it was other stuff I was reading.

Yeah, I can see how it would resonate with the climate of fear (both of terrorism and of the government overreach in response) at the time it came out. I remember reading reviews like that too, but I think it was more people reading into it.

I just received my NYROB edition of Belchamber.

Alfred, re: Black Lamb,

You should! It's a big book, but not difficult. If you care about the subject-matter then it goes pretty quickly, and the subject-matter is some of the most interesting there is: the legacy of World War I, the rise of fascism... Mostly though I like her finicky obsessiveness with people, clothing, art, architecture, religion, food, and everything else. It's all grist for reflection.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7181/6945160803_bac14fe983.jpg This was sitting on my dad's desk when he died. It's about structural engineering, but as it's Russian it has lots of poetry quotations and stuff in it. It's a pretty easy read, will get to it when I have time. Am slowly learning Russian.

thanks, Träumerei!

The latest edition boasts a Hitchens intro, I see.

'the letter killers club', 'seeing', an anthology of comic SF (er), 'gender trouble'

i am tempted to start a rolling theory thread but i feel like it will just be me blogging things i don't understand

I think Lacan is the main reason why I dropped out of university.

― Nathalie (stevie nixed), Thursday, 13 April 2006 12:46 (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

St. Aubyn really knows how to write cruelty -- painful stuff to read even though the prose is near perfect.

I'm about 3/4 through Parzival, so I haven't reached the climax of the story, but I thought I'd put in a good word for the author, Wolfram von Eschenbach. If the translation is true to the original (and Hatto seems quite a good translator) Wolfram is the best of the epic poets I've read from that era.

He drops in the obligatory descriptions of clothing and other luxurious appurtenances that his audience obviously craved (the Niebelungenlied natters on at interminable length about fabrics, jewelry, and jousting paraphernalia), but von Eschenbach hurries past these details as quickly as he decently can and gets right back to describing people and their motives.

He keeps the fabulist elements well in check, too. He keeps the portion of malevolent dwarves, dragons, giants, enchanted trees, or enchanted castles, or enchanted whatsiwhosis to a minimum, so that while the story includes a few such elements, it never elevates them to much importance. Instead, he seems to be more interested in social mores and the sorts of moral double-binds inflicted by the demands of chivalry. He defends the ladies often and well, but not as a dewy-eyed romantic idealist, but rather the contrary. I like him. He even stops from time to time to complain about the meagreness of his love life, in a humorous, mock-serious tone.

I give Parzival the high mark among its peers - at least among the half dozen or so I've read so far.

Malevolent dwarves > meagre love life.

But maybe that's just me thinking the grass is always greener.

I am moving into a new place, and thinking that one of the only books I will bring with me (at least at first) is my recently-acquired and more-or-less-untouched copy of Elias Canetti's Auto da Fe... which is about an obsessive book collector, right? hoping to gain some 'self-knowledge'...

Do you have a bookshelf (or its equivalent as measured in heaps of books) in your bathroom? If so, seek help.

Edward St. Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels

cover is so hideous that I'm embarrassed to read on the subway

haha is it the glossy black and hot pink one? i bought that edition last weekend. i dont really like it honestly, and its less exacting and precisely written than i was expecting. there are a bunch of baggy sentences and cliches and the attempts to write from 5 yo patrick's pov are p limp. idk, there are some good zingers but its p ridiculous.

T.H.O.M.P. - what did u think of 'letter killers'???

I got over it and am reading it on the subway anyway. I do really like it, although I agree that his writing sometimes gets overly weighed down with simile -- curious to see if it gets a little tighter in the later novels. His prose passes my most important test, i.e. the writing basically *reads itself* to me.

lamp i read it in a terrible mood when i was reading because i didn't want to go to sleep so i can't really say, i sort of want to read it again -- it is definitely the only thing i have read that made me think both of stanislaus lem and jerome k. jerome if that helps? er

god, i suppose i finished 'gender trouble' today, that felt exhausting. and immediately i started reading gerard genette. lol grad school

also deborah eisenberg and alice monro, to stay sane

& bolano's 'amulet', which mainly just made me want to read his other stuff again

haha bolano and munro its like i mean ok

bought at the thrift store today: penguin classics 'road to wigan pier' a book about herbal remedies for cats called 'cats - naturally' 'the immoralist' by andré gide also in the grey penguin modern classics and a taschen book of illustrated vegetables

I'm attempting Seven Pillars of Wisdom, hoping it will be as far-out as reputed.

immediately i started reading gerard genette

YES

Dyer's Out Of Sheer Rage, which I'm finding really excellent piecemeal and tedious when attempted straight-ahead.

I never found The Seven Pillars of Wisdom "far-out" at all. 700 pages of tedious backward-and-forwarding over the desert blowing up railway lines. There's no way I'd be able to finish it if I was reading it now, but I was abroad at the time and had little else to read. Lawrence struck me as a fraud and a bore. Not that I want to put a dampener on your reading or anything, Traumerei.

http://ia700804.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/21/items/olcovers42/olcovers42-L.zip&file=428266-L.jpg

And, erm, looking at the Amazon reviews I certainly seem to be in a minority of one, or at best two or three. So maybe I'm clueless about literature.

I've only dipped Zuleika but p much everything I've heard and read about it, plus the small sections I idly went thru suggests you are otm.

the fraudulence & fragility of lawrence's endless self-construction is the most interesting thing about him (makes noise in throat, strokes incipient beard)

genette is, surprisingly, funny: this goes a long way

haha bolano and munro its like i mean ok

well the bolano was following on by the marias and the saramago (somehow)? i have developed this awful tic where if stuff i am reading falls into some made-up narrative or logical order i can't reshelve books x and y until i finish book z. i.e. i couldn't put 'twilight of the superheroes' back in its jacket and back on the shelf until i finished 'hateship, friendship'. but with the other pile-o'-stuff i had all of your face tomorrow and the two oxford books and blindness and seeing out and i couldn't allow myself to move them until i read amulet. mainly my feeling on finishing amulet was 'thank god, i can use my desk again'

Break from Capital (I think i did mention it up thread somewhere thomp, but yes, god, that fucking title - because it's both London, that's the CAPITAL of England, and AVAILABLE MONEY do you see? But do you see tho? That'd be a great title! Clever!). Read Game of Thrones instead. This is a much better book. It's better written, it has characters I was interested in, and who said or tried to say or think interesting things.

Back on Capital now. I might just use this thread to record where he gets his casual yet awkward inventory of quotdian modernity and general stuff subtly yet dreadfully RONG.

Sitting on Roger's desk were three computer screens, one of them tracking departmental activity in real time, another being Roger's own PC, given over to email and IM and video-conferencing and his diary, another tracking trades in the foreign exchange department over the year

IM! (Of course, once you start unraveling that the whole thing comes undone, as so often in this book, with his separate PCs and separate screens and just dedicated to email and IM and video-conferencing and his diary? What about his My Documents folder and his powerpoint presentation viewer and.... ah fuck it, right?)

Zbigniew and Piotr leaned against the wall of Uprising, their favourite bar..

No they didn't. Uprising!

The pub had no Polish beers so both men were drinking Budvar, in their view the only good thing to come out of the former Czechoslovakia

yah wdn't be Budvar that they'd select out of Czech beers imo, but willing to give him a pass on this one. Does also indicated JL's handy way with character cliche (Poles don't like Czechs? True enough much of the time, enough to make such things the template of a character's internal monologue? He does this all the time! See also JL's casually racist happy black African teenage footballer who watermelon smiles a lot and whose internal monologue consists of ever so slightly truncated sentences.)

Tomorrow would be a day off; (...) she would watch a movie on the DVD player

wtf is she an alien. why is she speaking like this?

This is how to liveblog a book imo. I was thumbing a copy in Waterstone's last week and not immediately put off - your review and the store blurb ('You'll be rooting for the little guy as the banker gets his comeuppance!') may have saved me from some unpleasantness I feel.

A mate of mine has been reading Sebastian Faulks' A Day In December (or something like that), over which Faulks made a similar tit of himself a couple of years back. Why does this happen? It seems a particular hazard of attempts at satirical zeitgeist.

Uprising!

Did I say nothing has happened yet? NOTHING. Third of the way in.

Oh, I tell a lie, the old woman, Petunia Howe *if that is your real name*, fainted in a corner shop run by Ahmed. This is the only event.

Bogdan the Builder!

Ouch. I'm writing something at the moment and I've become conscious of how it's incredibly difficult to make things happen. Nearly 20,000 words and there have been a few rows, some colour, incipient conflict with a few characters, and a setup for a course of events to take place - but no events as such. Someone's got a job, but we don't know what it is yet.

I might throw a gun into my next 500 words, just to see what it brings.

so it's called uprising, and poles drink there, but it isn't a polish bar with polish beer? Is it intended as a minor realistic incongruity?

I keep seeing roaring reviews. I guess it looks like what broadsheet journalism likes to believe novels are or should be.

Have there been many/any novels that have competently done modern London Polish life?

xp oh, I'm doing better than that at least

a minor realistic incongruity

does this all the time as well. makes his weird 'everyday experience acquired second-hand' descriptions more realistic. obv.

gun ftw, IK. Chandler style.

The roaring reviews I put down to reviewers being people similar to Lanchester, whose general experience of everyday life leads them to believe they know about it and are in touch with everyday people, but who in fact, aren't.

This doesn't matter of course unless it is the material of your novel, in which case your lack of easy familiarity makes the whole thing sound like a language course. 'Go into an English 'pub' and order a beer', 'What do you like? I like to watch movies on my DVD player, on Tuesdays I go to the local swimming pool. I swim for twenty minutes and then go to the cafe for a cup of tea.'

Also, the whole novel absolutely stinks of interview research.

And I don't know any books about modern London Polish life , but I'd very much like to read a good version of this (not just London really, but anywhere in this country). Kinda touches on IK's question about books similar to Englischer Fussball upthread.

Just got the new Thomas Mallon novel Watergate.

private eye gave captial a stinky review, fwiw

x-post

lol 'captial'

"When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand"

Thanks a ton for this! Lord knows when I read it - at a guess fifteen years ago - but it's obviously stuck. (I've been toying with trying to start an ILB writing group btw, and now I've got a name for it.)

http://www.faber.co.uk/site-media/onix-images/thumbs/4693_jpg_280x450_q85.jpg

xps

yeah, I'd definitely be interested too. suspect the book we want is going to be translated from the polish.

talented mr. ripley
ripley underground

Read 'Ripley Under Water'!

― Do you know what the secret of comity is? (Michael White), Wednesday, January 18, 2012 2:06 PM (1 month ago)

Ripley Under Water is properly creepy. I'm ever impressed with the ways that Highsmith completely, precisely details the peril Ripley faces, and how his chain of psychopathic logic/reasoning kind of ... makes perfect sense? His perspective so saturates and colors the narrative style that it's impossible not to sympathize with him, to realize the efficacy of premeditated murder as a solution to his (not exactly) quotidian woes. It's a real testament to his character, and the overall construction of Ripley Under Water that you (reader) really root for Tom to kill the Prichards, and grow increasingly frustrated when he stays his hand. Without spoilering, the final solution to their thread is ... basically perfect. It's vehemently anti-cathartic, and continues the line of tension even beyond the end of the book.

I also adore Tom's intellectual/cultural pretensions, and the way PH incorporates them so fluidly. In the last two books, Tom reads and reflects on Isherwood's diaries, Ellman's bio on Oscar Wilde, listens to Transformer, soothes himself with some Brahms, deadheads roses and make a bouquet of orange and pink dahlias (one orange, two pink).

fzzls: does capital really include a corner shop run by an ahmed? that's something. i'm piqued by the idea of yr reading george r.r. martin, though, that i did not expect to be a thing that happened.

It's been a long time since I read Seven Pillars of Wisdom and much a shorter time since my last viewing of Lawrence of Arabia with Peter O'Toole, which is a grebt movie, but has a very different pov than SPW. SPW is a curious and interesting book that just gets more interesting when you have more context from outside the book.

The apparent purpose of the book is to bestow upon the world a true history of the accomplishments of the arabs during WWI and promote a better understanding of arab culture in Britain. But Lawrence is working so many angles at once, and he has so many political and personal interests at play, that the book acquires a lot of tension from how all these strands interact, often at cross-purposes.

It's probably no exaggeration to say that the attempt to contain all these internal and external conflicts finally drove Lawrence to try to blow himself up and try to start over from scratch. He failed, but it is a pretty amazing, if painful story and SPW is at the center of it.

that's what i meant to say, honest

On this first read-through, I'm treating Seven Pillars as a deliberate attempt at epic romance. Lawrence writes in one of his letters:

Do you remember my telling you once that I collected a shelf of 'Titanic' books (those distinguished by greatness of spirit, 'sublimity' as Longinus would call it): and that they were The Karamazovs, Zarathustra, and Moby Dick. Well, my ambition was to make an English fourth.

I'm interested in the history and context, too, but I'll save those for later. Right now, I intend to enjoy it as literature.

I'm not far in yet, but my favourite passage so far is this vivid description:

The armament of the Turks made them so superior at long range that the Arabs never got to grips. For this reason most of the hand-to-hand fighting had taken place at night, when the guns were blinded. To my ears they sounded oddly primitive battles, with torrents of words on both sides in a preliminary match of wits. After the foulest insults of the languages they knew would come the climax, when the Turks in frenzy called the Arabs 'English', and the Arabs screamed back 'German' at them. There were, of course, no Germans in the Hejaz, and I was the first Englishman; but each party loved cursing, and any epithet would sting on the tongues of such artists.

LOL

About to start 'The Post-Office Girl' - Stefan Zweig

Träumerei: think I'm going to enjoy any excerpts you post of SPoW more than actually reading it.

thomp, I quite like fantasy! In fact I used to consume by the bucket-load as a child/teenager, to the extent that I feel permanently affected by fantasy's motifs and manner (a natural avenue of trees, or a grassy track, heavy slanting rain, a tower on a hill, all evoke a sense of unrealistic expectation, of the possibility of transformative magic) . When I first started more realistic works it was almost a test of how good I thought they were by how much they lacked things I liked or disappointed my desires. Even now, works which manage in some way to indicate that there are moments of complicated magic to be had in the course of life are appealing to me - NOT magic realism, but Borges, say, and I just bought Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb for a girl at work. I guess I'd been more put off by the sheer extent of George RR Martin's Fire and Ice novels. Also elves kinda irritate me these days, piously self-satisfied buggers, so it was probably watching the TV series that eventually sent me to the books: no elves! Enjoyed the series v much, but left with the inevitable irritation that I have coloured my discovery of the characters and how my imagination fills them by watching it.

Lanchester and I have entered an uneasy truce. He hasn't dropped any real bollocks for a while (some slightly wonky textspeak 'cn i cu?' 'ok bt hu r u?') and there's a slight sign that things might be about to happen. Although there's a massive change of tone at the end of Part 1 where he goes in for a very C- humorous set piece. It's very weak, but it's not actively bad, and the humour, such as it is, helps break up the dreadful toiling labour of his writing so far. But I don't want to let him off the hook, so I thought I'd collect the first lines of each chapter so far:

At first light on a late summer morning, a man in a hooded sweatshirt moved softly and slowly along an ordinary looking street in South London. He was doing something, though a bystander would have been hard put to guess what.

Hooded sweatshirt! Only a writer would use that phrase, or an unusually stilted police description. No one has ever moved softly and slowly down a street and if they did they would immediately be the most conspicuous thing on it. Even an ordinary looking street. (It turns out to be actually ordinary as well as ordinary looking despite the promise of a den of criminal masterminds, false fronts, a secret cave that the phrase 'ordinary looking'). A bystander! What would a bystander be doing on a street? Watching someone move softly and slowly? You don't get bystanders on streets unless there's been an accident or incident, John: wrong word/idea/image w/e.

On a rainy morning in early December, an 82-year-old woman sat in her front room at 42 Pepys Road, looking out at the street through a lace curtain. Her name was Petunia Howe...

Don't be absurd! Also, reader wonders whether she is distantly or even closely related to Geoffrey.

The proprietor of 51 Pepys Road, the house across the road from Petunia Howe's, was at work in the City of London. Roger Yount sat at his office desk at his bank, Pinker Lloyd, doing sums.

I hope you're already getting a sense of fatigue at the toiling rhythm and progress of his sentences, the way he leaves nothing to chance.

It was late afternoon. Roger sat on one of the sofas in his office,

Stop telling me the time of day.

Ahmed Kamal, who owned the shop (sorry thomp) at the end of Pepys Road, number 68, came awake 3.59 in the morning, one minute before his alarm was set to go off.

Please stop telling me the time of day. Also - came awake?

Shahid Kamal, who was due to work a shift at the family shop between eight o'clock in the morning and six o'clock in the evening, walked down the street at a brisk clip.

ffs

At number 51 Pepys Road, Mrs Arabella Yount...

At ten o'clock Shahid was stacking...

Two weeks before Christmas, Petunia sat...

I've reached Part 2. Things are going to start happening! I hope he doesn't do too much more humour.

It's very weak, but it's not actively bad, and the humour, such as it is,

This may be the faintest praise I have ever seen.

pepys rd, isn't that just gelid with something or other

nice of him to put the apology in though

Lanchester appears to believe that numbers and proper names lendan air of factual authenticity to his writing.

lol

First line of Part 2

Spring was coming. At number 42...

Ismael, it doesn't really deserve much else. A father not used to looking after his two children has to look after them... with hilarious consequences! The humour is v childish - one of the children shits on the cream carpet after accidentally hitting the father in the head: 'The shit was liquid and hot. It smelt very bad. Then the front door rang.' That sort of thing. 'it was found by trial and error that scrambled eggs were the ones Conrad would eat. The confusion came about because he had said he liked the one which was eggy.' Yup ok. Sub lukewarm dinner party but better than telling me it's late afternoon on an early winter's day at 5pm at 54 Pepys (ffs) Road.

Aimless otm, along with having very authentic characters that vary not at all from exactly what you'd expect them to be. I think he might actually try to be doing something with that time and place thing, something conscious I mean but you just greet each chapter with 'not again'. To emphasise the point I left a few first lines out, but I see now that they include:

On Friday the 21st at five o'clock, Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc picked up her pay cheque

and

Usman came into the shop at quarter past four on Friday, a little out of breath

But also, tbf, that one about Uprising(!), which doesn't tell you the time of day, and this one

Bogdan the buidler, whose name was not really Bogdan, sat at the kitchen table.

'Bogdan' turns out to be a nickname he acquired by being confused with someone else (Bogdan) at his first building job. Interesting nickname, no? Bogdan the Builder! Named after Bogdan the Builder! His actual name is Zbigniew and he's one of the Poles leaning against the bar in Uprising(!).

On Friday the 21st at five o'clock, Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc picked up her pay cheque

you are making this book up

i'm assuming the copies i saw in waterstones were some britain-wide conspiracy

i feel v lost rn

It's 1.32 am. You are sitting under a single, exposed bulb, posting to an internet computer message board called 'ilx'.

"It was 5:05 pm and I was getting tired. From over my left shoulder I could hear the screams and hoots of the monkeys. They were fifteen feet behind me, offset to the left by two and a half feet. They were in two cages. The older monkey was named Phillip Morris. That was his nickname actually. His real name was 26. The younger monkey was just known as 42, because he once ate a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. His real name was 43. I took a sip of my Sam Adams Boston Lager from an 12 oz. tallboy and then calmly shot 42 with my 45. He was getting on my nerves lately."

It's 1.32 am. You are sitting under a single, exposed bulb, posting to an internet computer message board called 'ilx'.

::visits gamefaqs.com, searches for ilx::

If you're worried about the length of Seven Pillars, Lawrence's 'The Mint' (only 200p) is a good starting point--fascinating and odd and perceptive (published posthumously after he died in the bike crash)

He went back into the armed forces under a fake name in order to avoid being a celebrity, and had various troubles as a result: The Mint's about that and other things. It's very good!

Finished the first of the Melrose novels, although it felt more like a single *book* within a larger novel rather than its own separate novel. I thought the dinner scene was really masterful -- witty dialogue and zingers are really only the first layer of it, because so much of what's going on in the scene is really about what each character's choice of zingers says about him/her, how each character reacts to the zingers, what each character picks up and does not pick up, etc.

David is set up as the character who mercilessly gets the upper hand on everyone, and yet the irony is that the narrator has the upper hand on him the whole time.

Noticed a little slip this morning -- St. Aubyn puts the construction "have got" in the mouth of an American where "have gotten" would clearly be used.

yeah i really liked how tense and eventful he made the dinner scene, he kept ratcheting up the suspense (now theres a knife!) in an p artful way even when it ended exactly the way its most likely to. i still think it was sorta flabby for such a short novel and his 'drug writing' in the next one is p cringe-y. idk there nice and short so im going to keep at it but the rich american on the plane for example is hardly n/l satire

Yes the "Earl" on the plane is a bit unsubtle -- his dialogue felt like a composite of every ridiculous thing an American has ever said to the author, and the statements lose their believability when crammed into a single person, even a fat one.

I enjoyed the exchange with the customs person though (paraphrasing from memory)
"Are you here for business or pleasure sir?"
"Neither."
"I'm sorry?"
"I'm here to collect my father's corpse."
"Have a nice day."

Your JL quotes remind me of a Neil Gaiman novel I wished I hadn't finished. (Another novel, the one he wrote with Terry Pratchett, might've worked for the 13-year-old me.) Did like some of his early short stories, haven't checked the Sandman. Re Poles in London, I liked this movie, was hoping it was from a novel, but the director wrote it, here's the Wiki (writtn by JL?)
Moonlighting is a 1982 British drama film written and directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. It is set in the early 1980s at the time of the Solidarity protests in Poland. It stars Jeremy Irons as Nowak, a Polish builder leading a team working illegally in London.
Yeah, he doesn't wanna tell the other workers about the Uprising back home.

Neil Gaiman's novels seriously disappointed me--I was one of those who loved Sandman when it was coming out, loved Good Omens, loved his short stories, but Anansi Boys was not good

like singles/albums: Lots of writers are better w short stories, but novels are the coin, whattayagonna do. Although--last time I looked up Philip K. Dick on Amazon, a lot of short stories popped up first, they were Kindle bait. I find short stories handy because they fit between freelance assignments. If I read a novel or book-length non-fiction, momentum/inertia takes over, really hard to tear myself away.

Also, reading whatever is better at bedtime than TV. TV's a little too hyper, even when boring.

Burning Fence: A Western Memoir of Fatherhood, Craig Lesley. The author is a local who's written many decent novels set in the Pacific NW. (I'd recommend his first, titled Winterkill, as his best to date.)

This is autobiographical and takes place in a lot of small eastern Oregon towns and hamlets. The strange thing is that I am familiar with all these places, including Monument, Hines, Prairie City and North Powder. This adds interest, but it is a queer feeling, because these places are truly obscure, even to Oregonians.

So how does his take on these places compare w yours?

It seems all very familiar. Oregon has gouged itself deep into my bone marrow, apparently. But that happens when you have relatives who live in towns like Fossil and Clatskanie, marry a woman who grew up in Lyons, and you spend much time in Oregon's back of beyond each summer, as I have done.

Lyons, Oregon, that is. Not Lyons, France. Her dad was a forestry graduate from Oregon State U. and worked as a saw filer in a lumber mill. We're both fourth gen Oregonians.

Rereading James' Roderick Hudson; also Howard Sturgis' Belchamber.

Really not enjoying the second Patrick Melrose novel (Bad News) much. Why is lengthy writing about drug experiences so inevitably awful? It's like hearing descriptions of someone else's dreams. The hallucinatory play sequence is especially skimmable.

started norwood by charles portis this morning and it's amazing. read masters of atlantis last year and loved it, not sure why i waited til now to read something else by him. so many great small details in his writing.

just finished didion's year of magical thinking. loved it.

anyone read any goncalo tavares? a friend of mine has a nice long review of his new one on the Millions today.

Suicide No Compromise the biography by David Nobakht.
Very interesting, has me wondering if any early tapes survive.
I have several from '77 & the Blast First reissue of Martin Rev/Alan Vega the 2nd lp has rehearsal tapes from '75.
But would love to get hold of something before the drum machine appeared. Were supposed to be pretty different

nick, I see you are saving the best for last, Dog of the South

Jordan, I enjoyed your friend's framing of the novel, especially the ending, which wouldn't surprise Tavares at all. But the novel, as described and quoted, seems pretty generic, schematic; imitative fallacy re theme of mechanical man,mechanical desires, blah-blah.

agreed, it sounds too didactic for my tastes. i guess it all comes down to the quality of the writing (and translation), but the review doesn't make it sound like the focus is on beautiful prose.

i think i'm going to read them in chronological order!

btw, in between Parzival and the local guy's memoir, I read a collection of Nick Hornby magazine essays called The Polysyllabic Spree, from circa 2005. Diverting shop talk about reading books, straddling the line between book reviews and epistolary chit-chat.

can't between if i want to read "the lifespan of a fact" or not

argh "can't decide if"

haha i finished that last night. its 'interesting' w/o really managing to illuminate the topic of editing or even really the subject of the original piece. its sort of gratuitously inside-baseball, i think, in a way that helps the forest get lost for the trees? idk i mean its really short

Lamp, did you read André Aciman's Eight White Nights? Yours were the only posts that came up when I searched his name on ILX. I loved it, and found it deeply immersive, but it seems to divide opinions.

It's taken me forever but I am about 10% away from finishing REAMDE. First half >>> second half.

Next is Hunger Games.

Feeling smug as have just scored a proof copy of the new Alan Furst 3 months before its release

Oh, well done! Spoilerfree review idc please.

I'm about halfway through, and it's great. Hero's an Austrian-born Hollywood actor who is in Paris in '38 to film a movie about the end of WW1 (he was given to Paramount France for 1 film so Warners could get Gary Cooper for a western), and he finds himself being used by various pro-German propoganda people.

I noticed the title has changed, which was a good move I think.

very close to the end of murphy, by beckett, after a long hiatus in which i lost it and then another hiatus when my bag with second copy in it was robbed and held as evidence by the police. great book.

just bought and skimmed this http://www.amazon.co.uk/Night-Wraps-Sky-Vladimir-Mayakovsky/dp/0374281351/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331373337&sr=8-1

reading granta american short stories on the reg.

I finished the local writer's memoir.

Next I attempted A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch, that I picked up for 50 cents a while back, but I found her characters too difficult to live with. The combination of their Englishness, their upper classness, their occupations, their personalities, and the language through which they were presented to me, made them seem so ethereal, so attenuated, that even though I could believe in their existence, I wanted nothing to do with them.

I fled to Bouvard and Pecuchet / The Dictionary of Received Ideas, Gustave Flaubert, in the Penguin paperback edition. These characters, although they are reduced to their essentials and presented through a series of bare signs and gestures, seem more human to me than Murdoch's did.

The dog circled over the garment and lay down.

Finally, with utmost precaution, they ventured, one to come down off his scale, the other to climb out of the tub. And when Pécuchet was dressed, this exclamation escaped from his lips: "You, my dear fellow, will come in very handy for our experiments!"

What experiments?

They could inject the dog with phosphorus, then shut it in a cellar to see if it would breathe fire through its snout. But how would they inject it? And besides, no one would sell them phosphorus.

Wanted to read Bouvard and Pecuchet for some years. Not got round to it yet. Maybe Aimless reading it will prove the necessary spur.

couldn't get into patti smith's just kids. then a book about the economy of sushi was written in such an off-putting way that i put it down 10 pages in. now reading the pale king.

I'm like 2/3 of the way through the Patti Smith book while reading other stuff. I kind of enjoy her sincerity, and I think it's a nice portrait of an era in NYC's music and art scene that feels very remote from today's internet-turbocharged, high-rent-everywhere situation.

yeah i gave up after only like one or two chapters. i am actually interested in the subject matter, so i think i'll dive back in after a break. i think maybe the sincerity was too much for me??

It was the last book I bought, I might have a go at it this weekend.

Had a dozy read of Adelard of Bath's On the Same and the Different (De Eodem et Diverso) from the 12th Century, very much in the traditional of renunciation of worldly pleasures and material goods (in the female form of Philocosmia and her attendant handmaidens) and study, knowledge etc (in the female form of Philosophia).

Extremely dull in many ways of course unless you're making a study of such things, but for some reason it seemed just right to sit in an easy chair with early spring sunshine warming my bonce, idly flicking through the writings of a 12th century scholar. Especially when he was talking about leaving the clamour of the city to sit under a tree by the banks of the Loire, listening only to the rippling of the water and the song of the birds, while contemplating, idk, the quadrivium or w/e. At that point I very much wanted to be by the 12th century Loire contemplating the quadrivium/resting my eyelids. And if Philocosmia and Philosophia and their handmaidens want to come to me in a dream and have an argument about stuff, that's cool too.

ahh! i have given up on the pale king too. maybe i'm just not in a reading state of mind these days.

Harlot's Ghost at last. Thoughts?

Also: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.

So I'm getting the creme of the New York intellectuals.

yeah i gave up after only like one or two chapters. i am actually interested in the subject matter, so i think i'll dive back in after a break. i think maybe the sincerity was too much for me??

― rayuela, Thursday, March 22, 2012 10:01 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well the beginning is about her childhood, but it pretty quickly gets past that and into hanging out with Robert Mapplethorpe, seedy NYC life, the Chelsea Hotel, trying to get into the in crowd at Max's Kansas City, etc., but all still told sweetly. Which is maybe somehow better than childhood told sweetly.

yeah i gave up after only like one or two chapters. i am actually interested in the subject matter, so i think i'll dive back in after a break. i think maybe the sincerity was too much for me??

― rayuela, Thursday, March 22, 2012 10:01 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well the beginning is about her childhood, but it pretty quickly gets past that and into hanging out with Robert Mapplethorpe, seedy NYC life, the Chelsea Hotel, trying to get into the in crowd at Max's Kansas City, etc., but all still told sweetly. Which is maybe somehow better than childhood told sweetly.

The protagonist in the Patrick Melrose novels gives up on books a lot.

I'm on #3 (Some Hope). Really didn't like Bad News. It's actually quite ironic that, in becoming a junkie, Melrose becomes incredibly BORING, especially given all the talk about fear of being a bore in the first novel. Maybe that's the point. I still couldn't deal with the lengthy drug fiending descriptions.

The protagonist in the Patrick Melrose novels gives up on books a lot.

maybe i should try that one next...

reading yukio mishima's confessions of a mask & really enjoying it so far!

Its awesome, he's got such a vision that you'll always come back once you're hooked...been reading this interview from 1970, barmy and I love it, of course.

Reading "There Are Little Kingdoms", a short story collection by Kevin Barry who gets a lot of Flann O'Brien comparisons. Really good stuff, especially the dialogue which is where he's closest to Flann. That kind of imaginary Ireland where everyone's a storyteller. His novel, City of Bohane, got some good notices so i'm going to give that a go next.

Just picked up the Simon Reynolds book on Retro for €5 in town. been wanting to read that for a while. ALso the Barney Hoskins book on LA.

Justfinished the David Nobakht book on Suicide which was a great read. & makes me want to pick up the rest of their catlogue.

Also started the Greil Marcus book on the Doors. About 3 chapters in so far.

I am still reading the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary. It is beautifully written (and translated) and very visual and flaneuresque -- you can come and go and pick it up when you please and sink and float again.

keep meaning to get that

greil marcus wrote a book on the doors? o dear

Intrigued by the bitsd I've seen online of Demolishing Nisard by Eric Chevillard, a seemingly pointless attack on a stody 19th Centiru French lit critic

He is the slime at the bottom of every fountain. Irretrievably, there has been Nisard. How can we love benches, knowing that Nisard often pressed them into service? Gently stroking a cat’s silken fur, my hand inevitably reproduces a gesture once made by Nisard . . . Did Nisard ever make one move that we might want to follow or imitate? Did he ever incarnate anything other than the tedium of being Désiré Nisard, definitively, forever and ever?

bits! stodgy! can't type!

finished updike's "rabbit run". its the second time ive read it. the last time was '98. would still stan for it but theres problems. his attitude towards women is a bit dodgy and the sex-as-religion stuff can be a bit laughable. ive just started toni morrison's 'song of solomon' now.

Song of Solomon is incredible.

the perfect antidote to Morrison imo

?

i think he meant its a good book as oppose to her other works.

i don't agree - it is a great work, might be even her best, but she had several other good novels as well.

I've only read that and Sula and thought both of those were v v goo, though Solomon was much more satisfying

v v good

Holy shit! Just came here to post that I'm finishing up Sula, getting ready to (re-)start Song Of Solomon. If I knew you you were readin', I'd a' started a book club.

Philip K. Dick - We can Remember it for you Wholesale (short story collection)

Ben Marcus- The Flame Alphabet

Loved this book so much.

Wonderful, bleak and absurd.

We're far enough past the equinox, I suppose it is time for another thread. I mean, ile or ilm can have their 5000 post threads if they like, but they're just unwieldy imo. So, here goes nothin'...

2012: The northern days advance, the southern recede: What are you reading?