2012 and the northern days advance, the southern recede: what are you reading?

It is now Aprille with his shoures sote. Time for a new 'What are you reading?' thread.

I have been reading The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, about the last Scott expedition to the South Pole, where Scott got to the pole, discovered Amundsen had got there first, then died on the return trip, along with the group that accompanied him.

musil - 'the man without qualities'
von rezzori - 'an ermine in czernopol'
fitzgerald - 'great gatsby', 'tender is the night'
austin - 'mansfield park'

i always get about twenty pages further in 'mansfield park' and fall asleep but i really enjoyed everything else

further interpretations of real life events - kevin moffett

^v excellent short stories, cant recommend more highly

also reading a sorta pulpy thing called 'sharon tate and the manson murders'

I finished Roth's Letting Go. It was really good, though heavy going at times which is unusual for him. It may have been me I suppose, I got to feeling reader's blocky latterly, yet there were certainly plenty of things happening to bowl the story along. One definite flaw in it is that it shifts perspective a bit, again unusually for him, but lands mostly on the least interesting of the major characters - and as he becomes increasingly distant towards the end, I found myself knowing not as much as I'd've liked to. Leave the reader wanting less, in this instance.

Now DeLillo's The Angel Esmerelda. No reader's block here, I've devoured five of the nine stories already. The title story is quite amazing - such a jolt to see it stand alone, with the metaphors and backstories shorn of the wider resonance they gain from Underworld. They work regardless; it speaks to the power of the long novel though, that the appearance of terror, discarded syringes, or a parade of death instantly brings that book back in vivid flashes.

Mansfield Park is Austen's gothic novel, right?

finished Elsa Morante's Aracoeli - amazing, great book with a flawed last few pages.

Harlot's Ghost, a real treasure.

this time, i am actually going to finish the power broker.

"finished Elsa Morante's Aracoeli - amazing, great book with a flawed last few pages."

did you read La Storia? - it's her masterpiece, subjectively and objectively:)

currently reading Delillo's Angel Esmeralda which is very very good.
and Tristran Shandy - an on going project i startet 2 weeks ago.

i keep hoping nyrb or someone will put out a collection of morantes short stories in english

On Photography by Susan Sontag.
V for Vendetta - Alan Moore / David Lloyd
And I'm about to start on Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos too.

did you read La Storia? - it's her masterpiece

no but I bought it (at a completely awesome used book store in Denton which not that most people ever get the chance to go to Denton but Jesus if you do, right downtown there's a place called Recycled Books that's completely make-a-point-of-coming-back-to-this-town-to-buy-more-books great) once I was about 1/3 of the way through Aracoeli - what a great writer

i keep hoping nyrb or someone will put out a collection of morantes short stories in english

dude if you dropped a note to Open Letter saying this it might actually have an effect, those guys are doing great work in bringing stuff into print. A little uneven, not every volume's a gem but I have them to thank for getting me into Merce Rodoreda who's now one of my favorite writers ever

anti-oedipus which i am really loving.
power / michel foucault so far so good.
aaand the return - roberto bolaño which i haven't really started yet

Please describe the writing of Morantes.

finished going through the viriconium books.

reading tolkien's 'the notion club papers' which is this weird proto-borgesian thing about the inklings collected in those horrid 'the history of middle-earth' volumes.

should probably read some proper books.

Wdn't bother - walked past Daunt's bookshop just now and they all look rubbish.

Geoffrey Kabaservice - Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party

just finished, best book on politics I've read since Nixonland. really insightful into the 60s struggle for republican party's 'soul' if you will. Mitt Romney's relationship to his father George (governor, CEO, failed presidential candidate) reminds of the Bushes. well written, not too wonky.

Saul Bellow - The Dean's December and More Die of Heartbreak

hey I'm a middle-aged guy who married into a family of smart talkative jews. late Bellow speaks to me (though I don't agree with the dean's politics).

Vladimir Nabakov - Bend Sinister

occasionally OTT prose but mostly compelling and complex evocation of life under dictatorship. lots of breathtaking prose too and LOLs of course.

taking on vacation next week: Saul Bellow - Collected Stories and John Julius Norwich - Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy

Morante is great! Its been a while but History is a must, kinda the equivalent to Germany: Year Zero

Barthes - Camera Lucida

is that germany year zero as in batman year zero

i started reading a charles williams book on the bus, as of 20 pages it is fantastic and i want to read all his novels. this feeling will not last

*googles* if there was a Batman type vigilante who was walking around a ruined Berlin in '45 saving German boys from paedo Nazis who escaped from the Red Army into the new post-war society then sign me up.

Wetherspoon News. Editorial. First sentence:

As we all know, a strong current of tribalism flows through the veins of humanity

haha

Geoffrey Kabaservice - Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party

just finished, best book on politics I've read since Nixonland. really insightful into the 60s struggle for republican party's 'soul' if you will. Mitt Romney's relationship to his father George (governor, CEO, failed presidential candidate) reminds of the Bushes. well written, not too wonky.

damn. have to read this.

picking up wodehouse's 'joy in the morning' before bed each night and getting through about 40 pages a day. it's swell.

Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind, which I just ordered, covers some of that terrain but begins with...Burke.

Been reading the Optical sound zines I got last week since getting them, discovering a load of new current psychedelic bands i hadn't been aware of before.

also I Need More the Iggy Pop autobio in the 2:13:61 version which is itself from 96 and reissued a book from about 14 years earlier. Wondering if there's any chance of an update or new autobio by him. Stress by him since I'm really enjoying his versions of things. Probably several tall tales and egocentric views in there but entertaining.

Just finishing Greil Marcus's book on the Doors which has been very interesting. Need to sit down and listen through the live recordings he talks about, those I've got anyway.

Simon Reynolds Retromania
Have enjoyed most of his books that I've read.

The Beatles The Anthology book

Journal Of the Dead
book about a couple of young guys getting in trouble in a desert region of Colorado or somewhere. Should be way too close to civilisation for what ensues but disaster or something still strikes. Cost me 50c in a library sale anyway.

also need to read more of the books I have out of the library Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, No Go The Bogeyman and a couple of others.

i read marcus's book on the doors a few weeks ago. it's really refreshing reading him on a band he's barely talked about; i'm a fan, but i'm pretty tired of reading him on his 8 or 9 pet subjects. would love to track down some of those live recordings he rhapsodizes about.

Lots of them have turned up on torrent sites over the last few years and others are on the Boot the Butts box set. Not sure if you can still get that though.

Some of the '70 live sets were appearing in FOPP for £5 a pop, so may be cheap elsewhere too.

Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind, which I just ordered, covers some of that terrain but begins with...Burke.

All I know of that book is that the author has this to say:

I treat the right as a unity, as a coherent body of theory and practice that transcends the divisions so often emphasized by scholars and pundits. I use the words conservative, reactionary, and counterrevolutionary interchangeably: not all counterrevolutionaries are conservative -- Walt Rostow immediately comes to mind -- but all conservatives are, in one way or another, counterrevolutionary. I seat philosophers, statesmen, slaveholders, scribblers, Catholics, fascists, evangelicals, businessmen, racists and hacks at the same table: Hobbes next to Hayek, Burke across from Palin, Nietzsche in between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia, with Adams, Calhoun, Oakeshott, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, and George W. Bush interspersed throughout.

He doesn't mention his parents?

tbh that makes it sound a bit like the mirror image of jonah goldberg's 'liberal fascism.'

Just reading Browning & about Browning for a while. Sort of an experiment, see what happens if I focus on something for a couple of months, rather than just flitting from topic to topic. Finished the Ring and the Book last night. Starting The Inn Album.

I have also acknowledged that there is a problem with books in my flat, and I am Building Billys.

shouldn't have been a capital on 'Building' in that final sentence. Makes no sense.

W/e, we all know you are Building Billys, can't take it back now

finished blue nights, book 1 of dune, and mishima's the mask. not sure what to tackle next--the man without qualities has been on my list for a while, and the recent discussion here prompted me to get it from the library--but it's so big to lug around.

i am still struggling with mansfield park but i bought a bunch of 99 cent fantasy books at the thrift store yesterday (and lol 'underworld') so i think i may just give up on it

did u give up on musil already

no i finished reading that

already? god that's depressing

tbrr reading musil at 18 was probably the most influential reading experience since aa milne some 14 yrs earlier

they were both born in 80-82, that fecund era that begot joyce, stravinsky picasso, bartok &c

In a pleasing bit of life/art unity, I finished The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James on the same day that I went to Snowshill Manor, a National Trust property devoted to one man's collection of wonderful objects...

Also read The Battle for Bond by Robert Sellers, a fascinating account of the legal wrangles surrounding the novel/script/movie of Thunderball, which made me want to read some Fleming. But first, Pat Long's History of the NME bk (mainly for the early chapters, rather than the Britpop years)

shirley jackson - we have always lived in the castle. kinda trying too hard southern gothic imo.

connie willis - the doomsday book. apparently in oxford in 2054 people still make trunk calls and use pound notes - (book was written in 1992, pound notes went out of circulation in the late 80s and not sure anyone has used the term "trunk call" since like 1950). Is it forgivable to not have seen the rise of mobile phones in 1992?

oh and an intro to heidegger. kinda hard to see his work as an ontology and not just a phenomenology tbh but i guess that's one for the philosophy thread.

xp alright northern gothic. american gothic.

Vide the Great English Reversion of 2036

There is a late 20th or early 21st century pandemic mentioned but this is no dystopia. They have video phones, just not personal ones, and a countrywide underground train network. There's just a quaint 1950s feel to her future, woollen goods and handbell ringing and overprotective provincial mothers straight out of enid blyton.

already? god that's depressing

idk i was really impressed/fascinated with it and just plowed through? haha i probably dont take my time enough i guess :/

Finally finished Midnight's Children, loved it. Then I read the challop-y Rushdie thread.

I have this advance of Tom B1ssell's new book of essays because a friend is reviewing it, but I don't know. I mostly know him from those video game pieces on Grantland that are alternately enjoyable and punchable.

The Unborn: The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei, 1622-1693, trans. Norman Wandell

A priest of the esoteric Shingon sect visited the master and said: "The principle of the Unborn in our school's meditation on the letter A contains the two gates of eliminating delusion and of actualizing fundamental reality. Wouldn't the teaching you expound fall into the latter category?"

"Come closer," Bankei said.

The priest moved forward.

Raising his voice, Bankei shouted, "What aspect is that!"

The priest was struck dumb.

A monk in the audience stuck out his tongue.

It's mostly plainspoken and quite funny, but that passage is kind of puzzling.

Makes great sense to me.

Here comes this Shingon priest lauding his school for its mumbo-jumbo "meditation on the letter A" as being superior and he lays down some jargon he doesn't actually understand, so Bankei throws him a corker of an impromptu koan that he fails miserably to 'solve'. The monk in the audience then 'solves' it.

Ah, maybe. I was trying to make literal sense of Bankei's question, since he's generally quite direct.

oh, Lamp, tender is the night is my fave! if you read it just before mansfield park, no wonder the latter is suffering.

i'm reading the rise and fall of the third reich. it's kind of a bummer.

Finished Harlot's Ghost on Monday after an intense effort this weekend. It goes without saying that it goes on for too long but please please please why couldn't Mailer have written a book's worth of transcripts between JFK and Modene/Exner.

Reading 'Secondhand Daylight' by DJ Taylor. This and his earlier 'At the Chime of a City Clock' are entertaining, if not especially deep, attempts at PatrickHamilton/Julian Maclaren-Ross-writes-crime.

Now I'm fantasizing about a whole subgenre of Nick Drake crime fiction.

Just read The Other City by Michal Ajvaz, lots of fun but sometimes a bit much, I often ended up reading passages multiple times just because I couldn't remember if I'd read them already or not.

Read Red Shift a few weeks ago, after reading The Owl Service, which didn't quite prepare me for the level of brutality in the former. Still thinking about the ending.

The child-friendly cover of my edition of Red SHift is a bit misleading. Great book, though.

I've just started reading Jude The Obscure

yeah jm, i think until the nyrb (o_o) ed i'd only ever seen it packaged as a kid's book

Jude the Obscure is a wonderful book. Throwing pig entrails!

I'm reading an edited (condensed to 1100 pages) version of the Life of Giacomo Casanova. It is so airy and delightful, I'm really glad I picked it up on a whim.

I'm also reading Ursula LeGuin's Rocannan's World, and a few other Hainish novels. She is such a powerfully intelligent person, and it is sometimes a little intimidating.

bernard cornwell - the last kingdom

Casanova's memoirs! I don't think I got any further than 300 pages into them (by the 20th seduction or so they got a bit too much for me), but I recall them fondly as a literary equivalent to champagne and caviar... for breakfast, luncheon and dinner. They do throw an interesting light on how the upper crust of society lived in his day.

- A few short stories from the PKD short collection ('The Father Thing').

- Chekhov's Letters.

Hardy's one of my top five novelists.

Also read The Battle for Bond by Robert Sellers, a fascinating account of the legal wrangles surrounding the novel/script/movie of Thunderball, which made me want to read some Fleming. But first, Pat Long's History of the NME bk (mainly for the early chapters, rather than the Britpop years)

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, April 11, 2012 12:32 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is this why it was filmed 3 times in various Bond incarnations? If I'm thinking right it was done with Connery as Thunderball, then about 0 years later with Moore as The Spy Who Loved Me then a few years later with Connery again as Never Say Never Again.

The satelite swallowing spacecraft in the original becomes a warship swallowing submarines in Spy Who Loved Me & Little Nelly goes from being an autogyro to a waterscooter thingy

Reading MArk Yarm's Everybody Loves Our Town the grunge/Seattle oral history. It's pretty engrossing. I think oral histories tend to be.

i bought Tess at christmas just because it was cheap and english lit (where we did Madding Crowd) was the only exam i've ever failed. so this might just be masochism on my part.

have just finished A Tale Of Two Cities (bought at the same time)

currently re-reading, Anne Tyler's A Slipping Down Life.

have just ordered JG Ballard short stories vol 1.

not sure about Anne Tyler (my ignorance) but otherwise: good haul imo.

I've read the first 5 vols of the full-length Casanova memoirs (there are 12 altogether): very much worth it, if you have the time!

Ellen Ullman: Close to the Machine--lovely book about early internet, being a female programmer in the 1970s-1990s, etc etc

Ahmed Khaled Towfik: Utopia--Egyptian dystopian SF. Really bad, gave up at p50

Is this why it was filmed 3 times in various Bond incarnations? If I'm thinking right it was done with Connery as Thunderball, then about 0 years later with Moore as The Spy Who Loved Me then a few years later with Connery again as Never Say Never Again.

The satelite swallowing spacecraft in the original becomes a warship swallowing submarines in Spy Who Loved Me & Little Nelly goes from being an autogyro to a waterscooter thingy

the swallowing spacecraft & little nelly come from you only live twice, although the spy who loved me does seem to borrow other elements from thunderball (the underwater aspect mainly).

That's a shame that Utopia is so dismal, bcz the 'Egyptian dystopian SF' genre has been mesmerizing me ever since I read that post

Enjoyed the A Slipping-Down Life's small-town rocker Drumstrings, esp. his seemingly random lyrics, which combined w looks got the sudiences going. Unusual to find a novelist w convincing lyrics, although entertained by the Iggy Dylan figure's terse verse in DeLillo's Great Jones Street, and Pynchon's not bad either. Insect Trust set "The Eyes of a New York Woman" to music and recorded it without asking permisssion, and TP said he was gonna sue, but liked the song too much.

Fun Atlantic piece about the triviality of The Art of Fielding (haven't read the novel).

That's a shame that Utopia is so dismal, bcz the 'Egyptian dystopian SF' genre has been mesmerizing me ever since I read that post

I know! That's why I bought it. But it's really shallow and super-cynical and nowhere near as clever as it think it is. Imagine the worst excesses of Warren Ellis and Richard Morgan combined, with none of the good aspects of either.

never quite got Drumstrings' speaking out thing (which are all overheard snatches of conversation) and there were no other lyrics mentioned (maybe one couplet), can't see how it would ever work. i sometimes think the whole think is an excuse for those last few lines. (which i am a chapter away from but can remember from 1994 when i read it last)

that said he's still more believable than the band in iain banks' Espedair Street. banks always seems to get the music references everso slightly wrong.

I finished Worst Journey in the World. In the final pages, Apsley Cherry-Garrard tries to sum up the experience and its meaning. You can tell that, even after ten years, he is hopping mad at Amundson for concealing his plans to attempt the South Pole until he was already halfway to Antarctica.

His public reasoning is that such behavior was ungentlemanly and not Fair Play. But he is clearly also very angry that Amundson made it all look so easy, while Scott's expedition was so obviously a horrific nightmarish struggle that left at least five men frozen dead and the rest marked for life.

This contrast between the two expeditions was too glaring to be missed and tends to cast Scott in a poor light. He feels this situation to be grossly unjust, but he knows that no amount of explanation can ever wipe it away.

"overheard snatches of conversation"--yes, Drumstrings talking to himself, and "come along if you can," as the Amboy Dukes put it. Also made me think of Murmur-era Stipe.

i read "a slipping down life" long ago but i remember that guy reminding me of patti smith in concert, blabbing away and jamming on her clarinet

Tim Weiner's Enemy, a history of the FBI, which, we learn, existed through various iterations as a gossip and dirty secret site. Illuminating but the prose is dreadful: two-sentence paragraphs, adverbs used twice in the same paragraph.

Is this why it was filmed 3 times in various Bond incarnations? If I'm thinking right it was done with Connery as Thunderball, then about 0 years later with Moore as The Spy Who Loved Me then a few years later with Connery again as Never Say Never Again.

The satelite swallowing spacecraft in the original becomes a warship swallowing submarines in Spy Who Loved Me & Little Nelly goes from being an autogyro to a waterscooter thingy

The story is, prior to the Doctor No adaptation, Fleming collaborated with a producer called Kevin McClory and a screenwriter called Jack Wittingham on an original Bond screenplay entitled Thunderball. The movie never got off the ground, so Fleming turned the screenplay into the Bond novel Thunderball, without in any way acknowledging the significant contributions of McClory and Wittingham. McClory sued for plagarism (he was represented by Peter Carter-Ruck!), and won, in the process winning the right to make a Bond film based on the Thunderball material. McClory was given the producer credit on Thunderball (even though it was by and large a Saltzman/Broccoli production) and then years later resold the material to United Artists so that they could make Never Say Never Again with Connery. The underwater stuff in Spy Who Loved Me is not 'officially' drawn from the Thunderball material, tho' McClory continually threatened legal action over various infringements of the material he owned (he claimed, for example, to own the rights to the name and 'concept' of SPECTRE).

Oh, and all post-court case editions of the Thunderball novel include an acknowledgement of McClory and Whittingham's involvement, tucked away on the copyright page.

i was reading and enjoying gregg bordowitz's book on general idea's imagevirus project, the rainbow stories by william t. vollmann, and lorrie moore's first collection of short stories (self help), but then my backpack got stolen

I finally finished rereading Madame Bovary. I think the love affairs eventually made the writing sloppy. The villages and farms and provincial country life were best. Finally moving on to The Art of Fielding.

Or love affairs are sloppy.

A couple of days ago I read Mountain City, Gregory Martin. It's a kind of intimate portrait of a very remote town, population 33, in northern Nevada, with a good 50 miles of lonesome road between this hamlet and the next little town.

People who live in that much isolation, set against that empty and bleak a landscape, become very obviously individual. This book was a portrait of those few, mostly old and crotchety folks, along with a smattering of local history, written by the young guy who moved east and got him an MFA.

About 1/3 of Oregon is exactly as remote and empty as the place this book describes, so it seems familiar. I enjoyed it.

aimless have you read the huntford dual bio of scott & amundsen? i've been meaning to for a while, i guess

nope. I've read Byrd's diary of an antarctic winter by himself in an isolated field station. he got carbon monoxide poisoning, but survived. barely.

the writing in 'madame bovary' is sloppy? yikes!

What I read on holiday:

• ILB favourite The Angel Esmerelda by Don DeLillo. I wrote about it a little upthread, thought it was excellent and especially enjoyed the Greek one, it intrigues me to maybe give The Names a go in due course (is that right?). But the later stories tail off a bit. The one with the daughters reading business reports is absurd, beyond parodic. I mean it flows fine and has a perfect ear for metre, but the whole premise is ridiculous. I'm left with the impression of a master who has run out of worthy subjects, the more so for its following the nuns story from Underworld, which is evidently what he was always building towards.
• another ILB favourite Just Kids by Patti Smith. This is lovely. It makes me regretful that I wasn't the type of youngster who'd hang around people and hustle them for what I wanted, and generally give things a go - it shows how far the attitude can take you. Anyway, it's a sweet portrait of the fringes of the 60s/70s NYC era, the more appealing for having a likeable, modest guide. The only flaw I'd note is the common one that she keeps the modesty going a little too long, so that she's still presenting herself as a gawky, naïve youth even at times when she's e.g. got a regular record review column somewhere and pitching to Rolling Stone. But still, loved it.
• My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes by Gary Imlach. I can't do justice to how much I loved this. It's the author's repieceing of his dad's past as a professional footballer, from memory, press cuttings and rooting around after his death. It's so fascinating to both the football geek and British nostalgic in me, the look at ordinaryish life in community in 50s-70s Britain. It reminds me most of Blake Morrison's As If, without a harrowing subject matter, being a kind of deeply personal and reflective investigative journalism that I rarely see but often love (thread idea there maybe?). At heart it's the story of a nice man and his nice family, making their way harmlessly in a world bigger than them, which is very much how I rationalise my grandparents' lives - but if you wish, and I do, there's so much to enrage too, especially the way he was treated by the Scottish authorities. I feel kind of personally embarrassed by the pointless petty disrespect shown, which I'm afraid doesn't fill me with optimism for the future of the place (though I'm projecting somewhat). Anyway, do give it a go if that sounds interesting and you come across it.
• I've started The Stones by Philip Norman, following on from the recent orgy on ILM. For fans obviously, but thus far it's a cracking read.

• musil
• the strugatsky bros.
• moody's pound bio
• various philosophy stuff i don't understand

Or love affairs are sloppy. But were they ever like Madame Bovary's? Why was her striving and living so empty? Why is she so unsympathetic?

i feel like you didn't 'get' madame bovary

Probably not. And it's the 2nd time! I think I get that she is not supposed to be sympathetic but I don't find what she is completely satisfying for what I think she's supposed to depict but can't think of the right way to express when I should be getting ready for work!

she made mistakes, paid for them

i am reading a bunch of 80s fantasy anthologies and dreaming of summer

Flaubert's one of the few writers who chokes me up. Sympathy and contempt have rarely been shown as coterminous with such skill. Sometimes I can't get past the mistress and maid sobbing in each other's arms in "Un Coeur Simple" or Emma watching the sun rise at the chateau.

Sentimantal Education>>Bobary imo

about Engel Esmaralda - the last stories are not as good as the older one's. the dry writing style, the lack of emotion..as if delillo became kinda lazy.

though it make perfect sense cause those stories were written from 2000 till 2011 - and he didnt write anything good whatsoever on that period

need to finish Tristram Shandy and Song of Solomon
about to start Stendhal's Charterhouse Of Parma. anyone read?

i am reading HOW TO WRITE by G. STEIN.

it is teaching me how to write. how to write paragraphs. and to write sentences. paragraphs are emotional, sentences are not.

I agree. White space is good. It is a bad sign when there are no line breaks.

about to start Stendhal's Charterhouse Of Parma. anyone read?
I liked it! I always have trouble retaining his plots after I'm done - so many machinations - but there's this queasy, hard-to-trace mix of sentimentality and cynicism in him that's pretty indelible.

Everything up until the hero missing Waterloo is about as much fun as you can want in a novel. I can't blame Stendhal for the rest waning a bit in intensity.

"trouble retaining his plots" so OTM. Far worse than Trollope but his main characters and ironic sense hold the strands together.

Yeah,I read somewhere the plot is complicated
The Red And The Black didn't have this characteristic as I remember though

A couple of Ballard short stories, then stopped to pick up One Man Biblie by Gao Xingjian. Lightly fictionalised non-fiction/autobiog covering the cultural revolution, his travels and encounters in the West, and a take on his own art (there is a three-page manifesto of sorts in the middle of this). Still thinking this through, but I think he takes a somewhat impressionistic turn when writing about women that kind of rubs against the political bits of the text.

That I stopped Ballard to pick this up is a sign of age, me thinks :-)

Ulysses, a book that I loved in 2011 and that I want to understand
Shakespearean Tragedy, by A. C. Bradley, basically my ideal critic

ha, my reading habits have been v spotty, but mostly when I read, I've been reading some Shakespeare criticism that's overdue at the various libraries I checked them out:

Shakespeare's Language by Frank Kermode
Shakespeare's Festive Comedy by C.L. Barber
The Great Feast of Language in Love's Labour's Lost by William C. Carroll

sorry if I already posted about these in another Reading thread...

A mother lode at the library: new books on the Lawrence v. Texas case and the Reagan-Thatcher "special relationship."

I have begun to read the Master of the Senate volume of Caro's bio of LBJ. 1040 pages. I have read the first 80 pp and Caro is still explaining everything that ever happened in the Senate from 1789 thru WWII. LBJ has not even started to run for senator, yet. He appeared briefly in the opening and hasn't been seen since.

those first one hundred twenty pages or so are the best -- a helluva history lesson.

Yes. He's still setting the table. I now expect to be served a feast.

definitely starting in the middle with those, i think

'the year of magical thinking' and 'underworld', still

reading updike bech: a book - lil weird cuz it doesnt read entirely like any updike ive ever read

also reading jg ballard - the atrocity exhibition & just got pulphead out of my lib*

*where, btw, i saw a woman return something called 'the guide to concealed handguns' on top of 3 childrens books lol

Later Bech stories are even odder, esp. the one where he's a critic-murdering serial killer

Rereading The Last Samurai. Lord Leighton has got to be Updike, right?

Just finished two excellent but very different English country house novels: The Go-Between and Crome Yellow. Picked up the latter on a whim and was dazzled by how funny and quotable it is, mixing social comedy with little disquisitions on various intellectual fads of the 20s.

Crome Yellow is excellent. I've always meant to read some more Huxley beyond that and Brave New World but i don't really know where to go next

'After Many a Summer' is a gd one - social satire that turns into a horror novel at the end

reading the new james brown bio which is pretty good but i wish it had more discussion of the music/writing process/recording process instead of focusing on his sociopolitical importance which i already know about

i've got "the vanishers" by heidi julavits (believer editor) lined up next, anyone else read it?

it's got a pretty sick cover at least

http://img2-1.timeinc.net/ew/i/2012/03/07/the-vanishers-2_320.jpg

I picked up A Naked Singularity, by Sergio de la Pava. I'm only 86/678 pages in, but enjoying it thoroughly. I guess it's kind of a postmodern legal thriller - very funny and sharp. I have no idea where it's going.

Yeah, it's very good. Was originally self-published.

xxp cover is gorg. read her 2nd book & remember liking it. have the 3rd one on my shelf i think

ive read a naked singularity too, def some good stuff in there. kinda less literary & almost a 'page-turner' imo

i got a copy of PLINY.

and a copy of the HIPPOCRATIC CORPUS (well, not all of it). so far it looks awesome. especially the case histories, the last stage of most of which is: 'patient died'.

Ha I was just reading about A Naked Singularity in ... Crain's Chicago today

i've got "the vanishers" by heidi julavits (believer editor) lined up next, anyone else read it?

i have a copy but have not read it. which i realize is p unhelpful

so far im not really loving Pulphead btw. it's just ok, dont really get the hype, etc

my friend who always tells me which books by women to read and for whom i am always arguing by proxy in gender + literature arguments really liked the vanishers. i need to read that.

Finished Doting, my first Henry Green novel in seven years, tonight. What dialogue.

j. is that PLINY the ELDER, or PLINY the YOUNGER?

elder, i think. natural history. the intro has a bit about his son, who i gathered was the younger.

The natural history stuff is def elder, the guy who died at Pompeii.

I'm now 400 pp into Master of the Senate. If you've read your Thuycidides, Gibbon, etc. it will greatly reduce the number of lessons about politics and power that you'll learn from this book, but it is very well and clearly told, with ample details, but without becoming excessively bogged in them. This is history and biography at a very high level indeed.

Caro is especially good at explaining how terribly fucked up the U.S. Senate is during about 98% of its existance, while being invaluable the other 2% of the time.

Covering some of the tame terrain, Two Americans, about the careers of Truman and Eisenhower is a real find. After a tentative start it analyzes their presidential legacies: responses to civil rights and liberties, Supreme Court appointments, stewardship of the embryonic national security state.

crikey Jude The Obscure is a bit bleak, innit?

'We are too many.'

Father Time!

Chehkov's letters - for his struggles w/what is coming out of Tolstoy's mind.

Celine - Journey to the End of the Night. Love how he is keeping back the rants and ellipses and exclamations, his sense of timing is so good when he is using a character to bomb drop rants, and how he alternates w/ normal writing and plotting.

Henry Green's Back, the oddest and least successful of his novels.

"the vanishers" was pretty crazy. i think i liked it.

have been put of action for a while - stil dipping into Lanchester for belligerent amusement. also Rewriting the Soul by Ian Hacking. Very good (as a layperson) analysis of the history and nature of multiple personality diagnosis.

Plus - SORDELLO!!!!! first book was like, "lol sordello haterz are lightweights".

p certain I understood less about book 2 than I understood. Browning's fault entirely btw.

Ive started reading <i>The Ginger Man</i> by JP Donleavy. I could do with something light-hearted and racy for a change.

Reading:

Technicolor Timemachine by Harry Harrison

Before this I read City by Simak.

I finished Philip Norman's The Stones. Compelling stuff, though it peters out rather oddly - everything after Altamont is taken at an increasingly speedy canter, which I suppose reflects that getting to the top is a lot more interesting than being there, but is also told with a journalistic shallowness, as if he filed copy at the time and saw no reason to go back and rewrite to match the first three-quarters of the book. And the epilogue is used solely to catch up with Wyman and Loog Oldham, which is an extremely strange way to end.

It was great fun though. He's excellent on Jones, and clearly fascinated by the phenomenon of Jagger. I'd've liked more on the music, on which there's little after Beggar's Banquet, but small complaints really.

Now started Graham Greene's The Power And The Glory. I'd wanted to try The Names by DeLillo, but this was the closest I had.

Ismael, have you tried Keith Richard's autobio? I've read most of it through the mid-60s--it's huge, and may well have too much on the later years--but so far, he's quite a good writer--reproduces an early postcard to his auntie, and it's so Keef,so pungent, fits in so well--no ghosting necessary, it seems,

Ah no, that's a thought! I did buy it when it came out, then gave it away as a Christmas present instead. I should borrow it back.

I think that postcard's in The Stones too, actually - he comes across as quite the loveable rogue, even as a delinquent fifteen-year-old or whatever.

finally finished my dune series reread and am now onto a book club book, atwood's blind assassin. it's OK so far and i'm not terribly engrossed but seems like it'll pick up soon.

i saw two people reading the blind assassin on the train yesterday, is it some kind of national/international book club?

what am i reading? i'm re-reading the steve jobs bio

the keith biog was ghostwritten by an English (non-rock) author named james fox, who is best known for writing the non-fiction bk 'White Mischief'. Fox gets a v clear credit in the bk itself.

i did LOL when jennifer egan turns up in the jobs bio

yes, it is. xp to n/a

Shogun. i liked the cover, like the King Rat film and have been having a japanese phase lately. struggling though. it reads like every criticism of dan brown i've seen and after 3 weeks i'm only 1/4 of the way through it, with 700+ pages left...

(it's also written with a 1975 audience in mind, explaining japanese things in tedious detail, how to pronounce samurai, tatami mats, taking your shoes off, bowing, all the stuff a 2012 audience probably knows. that said, it'll also launch into paragraphs of japanese political history from time to time, lots of long named people and places)

I finished that book of Tom Bissell book of essays, pretty enjoyable if slight. I liked some of the early ones where he's clearly insecure about his status/future as a writer, i.e. 'Writing About Writing About Writing', and the Herzog one. It inspired me to fill in some gaps in my Herzog-watching.

Now I'm reading Moby Dick, for real this time.

i finally read true grit, which was amazing and too short. now i'm reading this, not sure about it, doesn't seem like "my thing" but i don't have anything else lined up so i'm sticking with it for now:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r8Dl6ghRmNc/T3EVHfOHtBI/AAAAAAAAAKY/RCgbDswmw6U/s1600/Captain+Flint.JPG

oh before true grit i was reading that new book about the wrecking crew, which was not good - very light, anecdotal, scattershot

^^ I like the cover on that Dybek book. Very appealing, imo.

Beckett's trilogy - s'ok. 'Careful', as Kenner said. I kind of wanted to search any works of philosophy B was reading at the time he was writing it by the end. Just for the sake of it, you understand.

that cover is both very well executed and very much "that sort of thing"

beckett is not 'okay'

xpost should've noticed the James Fox co-credit, though it's def "Richards' voice filtered through Fox's brain...Fox encouraged Richard to let his mind 'dart about." No prob!
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/10/27/keith-richards-memoir-writer-james-fox-speaks.html

when I get home I expect to find the new Caro

Julian Barnes - Sense Of Ending.
quite good, but isnt it a bit overrated? or maybe i needed to lower my expectations.in the middle of it though

finished Tina Fey's Bossypants audiobook. audiobooks are decidedly not my thing.

now back to avoiding reading A House for Mr. Biswas (library copy, third renewal)

thomp - nah, it is ok. Felt like I've been here before, a familiar territory. I wanted more laughs really.

Thomas Bernhard - Correction.

Several things
Fug You by Ed Sanders, his 60s memoir. So far he's been mimeographing Fuck You a journal of the Arts and giving it away free. It's 1963 and he's living in the Village, think he's just stopped working the night shift in a cigar store and got a job in a more official role somewhere.
He's mentioned having met Tulli and Steve Weber while handing out copies of the zine.

Prophets and Sages Mark Powell's list of favourite prog/underground lps with varying length description. Interesting and obviously meaning that I'm going to have to buy a lot of cds.

Mountains Come Out of the Sky
american progfan's history of the genre. Wish the publishers hadn't taked him out of including a chapter on VDGG. Whjat's here is interesting, or at least maybe I've just got to the end of the sections I find interesting 2/3s of the way through the book.

Marina Warner No Go The Bogeyman
book on negative male stereotypes in folklore that I've had out of local library since around xmas. Just been getting heavily into it and hopefully have it finished soon then I can start on the other Marina Warner I have on female stereotypes.

Journal of The Dead
a book about the trial of a college age guy who kills his friend in the desert as an act of mercy because they've come stupidly unprepared with water and gotten hopelessly lost.

Selected Essays by John Berger: (Ber-Jer) - Don't always agree, but you gotta salute the man's rigor. All heavy lifting and sweat.

love the fact that berger gave his booker prize money to the black panthers

he wha

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5319/6950947296_8e92bf54a8_m.jpg

Berger's novel G., a romantic picaresque set in Europe in 1898, won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize in 1972. When accepting the Booker Berger made a point of donating half his cash prize to the Black Panther Party in Britain, and retaining half to support his work on the study of migrant workers that became A Seventh Man, insisting on both as necessary parts of his political struggle.

Reading Mrs Dalloway while ill. Reminds me of when I used to read stoned many years ago. The slippery, sensual prose and overlapping narratives are perfect for a slightly addled brain.

Tried Tropic of Cancer yet again but fuck Henry Miller basically.

Laurie Lee - Cider with Rosie -- wonderful; also reading while ill (besides this, have been bingeing on Donald Westlake books)

What's your favourite Westlake? He's perfect when you need something cruel and murderous.

My fourth attempt at Mann's Doctor Faustus. Wish me luck!

Good luck!

Westlake - a friend has convinced me to take on some of Westlake's Dortmunder, being, thus far, a strict Parker addict. Soon (I hope).

The Parker books are probably my favourite, but the Dortmunders are lots of fun (if very different--very quippy, full of puns and tomfoolery,more like Lawrence Block's "Burglar" books). I also really like a lot of the Westlake singletons, especially the ones Hard Case Crime have resurrected. 'Memory' is a great existentialist noir, barely a crime novel, and 'The Comedy is Finished' is a brutal bit of black humour.

i prefer westlake's non-dortmunder comic novels to most of the dortmunder novs, apart from maybe the first two (i think he wrote too many dortmunders, they became rather baggy and formulaic as the series progressed). these stand-alones are all terrific - the fugitive pigeon, help i am being held prisoner, dancing aztecs, too much, the busy body.

The Art of Fielding was much much better than I expected.

although there is also sweetness
in saying a name over and over again

It's not reinforcement just repetition (for some people)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=all

finally hitting the home stretch of lolita
some conrad
yeats
a stack of NYers
want to get around to the second half of charlie savage's takeover before life gets crazy again in june

reading 'final cut' the recounting of the heavens gate fiasco, it's great so far

almost done w/ the updike bech book, parts of it are fabulous imo

what the hell was bledsoe doing giving up on chasing conley btw?

also, wondering, would that be a clear path?

hm, wrong thread ha

Can't believe I hadn't got round to Doctor Faustus. It was The Magic Mountain's fault!

A few stories by Borges

Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet

alan bullock - hitler: a study in tyranny (abridged edition)

will hermes - love goes to building on fire

reading these simultaneously, which is unusual, I'm mostly a one-book guy. bullock is way better duh. the content in hermes is OK, form not so much

man i loved doctor faustus

why, this is hell, nor am i out of it

I made a significant dent in it but I've less patience with Mann's disquisitions on chords and Christianity than I did when I loved The Magic Mountain all those years ago.

oh i didn't realize we were talking about the novel! haven't read that

xp Oh I love Final Cut. Some people find it too long but I love the day-by-day pacing, the detail, the sense of slowly encroaching doom, the wider sense of what Hollywood was like in the late 70s. And for someone whose day job was a studio exec Bach was one hell of a writer. I think it might be my favourite movie book.

Am starting The Best Short Stories of Ring Lardner: its overdue already, so I don't know if I'll have time to read all the way through it. I've read a few of these anyways (Haircut, Alibi Ike, There are Smiles).

First story is 'The Maysville Minstrel' and it is astonishing. Easily one of the most cold-blooded things I've ever read.

xp yes, loving Bach, he reconstructs the landscape @ the time & the process v well. im only exactly up to where they green light the film so i srsly cant wait for it to continue (left it @ work to read on lunch breaks)

Lytton Strachey - Eminent Victorians
Peter Seibel - Coders at Work

infinite jest. the title is only just an exaggeration but I guess "very long but consistently funny" didn't scan as well?

'varamo' by césar aira. i felt mostly adrift i guess and it was sort of like idk these old tricks, this old debate, why arent i playing video games...

I've read four Aira novels, and I don't quite know if I like them or not. A positive sign is that I'm tempted to read more, and even reread a couple of them. But while I'm reading them, I'm not particularly excited about it.

He rather reminds me of A.E. van Vogt with his rather absurd stories that take sharp turns all over the place. I believe van Vogt's trick when writing was to have a new idea or plot twist every n-hundred words. All I know about Aira's writing is that he apparently doesn't rewrite, and just keeps going from where he last stopped; I imagine this is common for pulp writers.

The best books in my Westlake spree were definitely The Ax and an early Dortmunder, Jimmy the Kid, where Dortmunder's gang use a (non-existent) Parker novel as a blueprint for a supposedly perfect crime.

Also read Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt, which was OK but not the work of boggling greatness everyone seems to have thought it was, and The Crocodile by Dostevsky, which is entertaining but then just stops at an arbitrary point without any sort of finish.

Reading Mary Gaitskill for the first time! Her second story collection.

The Ax is really great. Tough, sophisticated satire. Ethan Iverson says in his guide that Donald wrote it in only three weeks.

Yesterday I read The Seventh, by Richard Stark. Absurd body count. The ending is like a nightmare.

swamplandia! by karen russell.not really loving it.bit whimsical,humour falls flat,maybe a bit boring.

didn't like the short stories

ed mcbain's 'ax' was one of his best also, i wonder if there's something in this

Otherwise, dabbling confusedly in Ezra Pound, which I may put aside in order to try to get better at reading in French. I'm finding volume three of Proust really rewarding at the moment.

A Man Asleep by Georges Perec - You know those private thoughts and sensations you have re: depression/inertia that never quite get a proper description anywhere? Perec seems to nail one of those per page.

i love mary gaitskill. this essay by her is what convinced me to pick up one of her books a few years ago.

i'm reading a collection of four novels by marguerite duras, which so far has been remarkable. the first one, the square, is a really great exploration of like, inactivity and perhaps fear of happiness that i found myself over-relating to (maybe same territory as the perec book?)

Claire Tomalin's bio of Katherine Mansfield -- pretty good

My reading, adapted to travel exigencies: Alice in Wonderland and Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass. This is a very heavily footnoted edition put out by Penguin, which has made me aware of the existance of Carroll's academic fanboys, who dissect his every phrase, competing to see who can unearth (or invent) the most clues and references. This has a certain amusement value.

My next book will almost certainly be Ten Days That Shook the World, but I also have Suetonius with me.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/09/Reed-tendays-1922.jpg

Ooh, I've quite fancied seeking that one out. Give us a decent review in time please, see if it's worth it. I love that cover btw, hope you have one like it.

Heh, Amazon lists a 1905 edition. If only someone had bought the Tsar a copy.

Italo Calvino - Six Memos for the Next Millennium

about to start - Gunter Grass - Dog Years

Mary Gaitskill's Because They Wanted To is so tough, so poetic, so unpretentiously ambitious and achieving, on her daily bike ride through the winds of empty lots, across the table and mountains of mortal soil (yeah, she might be listening to Mastodon). Just another Woody Guthrie, rolling by the femme tops, boondock implosives, collegetown conundrums and Big City topless salad bar dancers midway through their MFAs. Also like Edward P. Jones's first collection, Lost In The City.

That is, I like Edward ect. not saying it's like Gaitskill's collection.

violette leduc - la batarde

Dostoevsky, Demons. in the ubiquitous new translation, of course. been enjoying it so far (midway thru part I)

there's a new translation? i only just bought an old translation

I finished the Gaitskill collection in one gulp, which is not what I do often with books of short stories. I like the recurring tropes: drifters, lesbian, voyeurism, psychodrivel

I finished The Power And The Glory by Graham Greene just now. It was marvellous. It's the story of a fugitive priest, fleeing for his life in a Mexican state where atheism is imposed by the gun. It's all about suffering, and repentance, and fate and suchlike. The little human details he gives his characters, even when he isn't hardly sketching them out, is very moving, and nobody here is spared sympathy.

Somebody on one of these threads referred to slim, serious 200-page novels as being a peculiarly British thing to pull off (from memory they may even have been talking about Brighton Rock). I don't know if that's right, but it's certainly something to aspire to. The Power And The Glory may be the best of them.

Lytton Strachey - Eminent Victorians

I feel I should be reading him. His sister Dorothy wrote a beautiful novella, Olivia, about adolescent heartache.

Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino - Continuing ye olde school OULIPO members trend. Second story ("The King Listens") very good.

Ismael, I don't remember if Brighton Rock is 200 pages, but it's tight, and indeed a serious thriller--from before he tried to rope off his "entertainments" from his serious-serious (he might not have been serious about the distinction, just testing us). 21 Stories is excellent bedside/lunchbreak/whatevs

The Power and the Glory is a wonderful, wonderful book. But I'm a huge Greene fan in any case. I don't think any of his novels went over 300-odd pages at the longest.

The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Demons is the only translation under that title iirc? All the other ones were called 'The Possessed' or 'The Devils'

Whatever its name, on some days, its my favorite Dostoyevsky besides Crime and Punishment

finished blind assassin. it got interesting later on and reached a point where i did want to find out what was going to happen next, but it took way too long to get interesting -- only my commitment to the book club helped me get through the first part. without that motivation, i would have quit halfway through for a more interesting book.

started musil's man without qualities after all the discussion here. i like it so far, but every time i sit next to someone with an e-reader, i groan at the size of this book.

a woman across from me on my AM commute was reading Left Hand of Darkness! I wanted to say something to her but i was way too cranky and because i thought she might not welcoming being accosted by a stranger who likes the book she is reading.

Also reading Man Without Qualities, began at vol 3 this round (so no groaning from me as they are perfectly manageable on the train), together with a few poems by Pessoa and Antonio Tabucchi's Requiem. I expect Pessoa fans like him?

what i've been reading lately:
the language wars by henry hitchings - lots of interesting stuff in there but didn't finish it
modern baptists by james wilcox - pretty great - recommended on the charles portis thread and is definitely in the portis tradition

just started:
treasure island!!! by sara levine

alternate dostoevsky titles are great fun -- c.f. 'memoirs from a mousehole.'

Henry Green's memoir Pack My Bag. I could read this man's sentences for hours.

Pack My Bag! Modern Baptists! Alfred and n/a reading some great books.

Partway through 3-novella collection by Stanley Elkin -- Van Gogh's Room at Arles. Really liked the first one, about a wheelchair-bound professorwith degenerative disease whose wife leaves him just before he's meant to host a party for his grad students. Now reading the title novella, which features a Club of the Portraits of the Descendents of the People Painted by Vincent Van Gogh.

Until now, have for a long time been combining Stanley Elkin and Stanley Ellin my head.

man i read all of "treasure island!!!" today and i recommend it if you want something quick and very funny

n/a, you should read Plain and Normal if you liked Wilcox. He's one of the few modern writers who makes me laugh out loud.

The New Yorker published a long appreciation in its '94 fiction issue that did a lot to promote his books and assure his reputation.

I think I read an Elkin short story that I loved but damned if I can remember the name or what it was about :-/

maybe the Elkin story was "A Poetics for Bullies." That one's absolutely fantastic and has been anthologized a bunch.

I'm finishing up Robert Coover's "The Public Burning." Quite good but his maximalism can be hit-and-miss with me.

It was "I Look Out for Ed Wolfe" and I would have to re-read it before I endorse it on this thread. But I remember liking it lots.

Found a (copyright infringing) copy of "A Poetics for Bullies" online--will read now

http://fictiondaze.blogspot.com.au/2004/06/poetics-for-bullies.html

You know how you save one book or album by a favorite artist for when you come 'round to them again? Woolf's Night and Day is one of them. I know it's 'transitional' and so on. Is it still worth a read?

Cool. I'll have to check out "I look out for ed wolfe" (endorsement or no). I hope I can get around to finally reading Elkin's "The Magic Kingdom" this summer. I've had a copy of it forever.

"Tell My Horse" - Zora Neale Hurston
"The Secret of Evil" - Roverto Bolano

thanks for the tip, alfred, going to the library in search of more wilcox today

Just finished off "A Farewell to Arms" which was much better than I expected! Now I am going to get started on "The Line of Beauty", which will be my first ever attempt to read a book on an electronic device.

The last 100 pages of "The Public Burning" was mind-blowingly great.
I just started Ishmael Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo."

Derek Raymond 'How the Dead Live'
Dodie Smith 'I Capture the Castle'

Two books that are pretty much polar opposites

I've been reading lots of Pelecanos and early James Ellroy. With the weather starting to get soupy hot I just want to read about people being murdered.

Currently alternating between Patrick Hamilton's Slaves of Solitude, Sullivan's Pulphead and Howard Zinn depending on mood. I counted up the books next to my bed that I've either started or am eager to read: 32. They basically form another bedside table. Given that, if I'm not travelling anywhere, I have maybe an hour's reading a day the only solution is to break a limb or two. Does anyone else have this gluttony problem? It's not as if I feel duty-bound to read any of them - there's genuine enthusiasm for all over them but it's completely unfocussed and it puts me off reading longer books that will consume me for weeks.

xx post

i read several Derek Raymond novels earlier this year, still not sure what to make of him

Lethem plugs NYRB re-issues of Hamilton in current Rolling Stone. Visiting the thickets of Faulkner's "The Bear" again, dropping my compass several times.

But it's captivating (big ol' bear arms)

Was on a highly isolated vacation for the past week, read:

The Hesperides Tree, by Nicholas Mosley (oddly compelling, even though it doesn't really make any sense and the dialogue is unbelievable)
Ball Four, by Jim Bouton (lots of fun, far more melancholy than I remembered)
Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban (loved it, will probably be talking to people about it for weeks)

Currently reading The Collaborators by Pierre Siniac, which is highly entertaining, though the gruesome plot twist halfway through seems rather out of place.

The Names by DeLillo. An inauspicious opening: six people talking in a car driving around Athens. I'm underwhelmed by any conversation of his involving more than two people. It's a problem I have to an extent with most authors I guess (and in real life too!) but he gives you so little to go on by way of physical or relationship markers that I find it next-to-impossible to follow. No idea who is who other than that two are married, and a third is the narrator.

I'm within a few pages of finishing Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed excells at adding a pulsating excitement to his reportage which may in many ways falsely color the actions of the Russian October Revolution, but seems essentially true to the mental excitement, the tension, fears and utopian hopes felt by the participants.

If the actions were as mundane as driving a truck full of soldiers down the street or sending a courier to the print shop with an order to print a proclamation, Reed will have the truck careening, the soldiers gesticulating, and the courier shooting electric sparks from his eyes. But it probably felt like that.

The other real strength of the book is that Reed collected and includes extensive excerpts from the hundreds of flyers pasted up on walls and newspapers printed by all the rival factions. These ephemera of the revolution are full of high flown rhetoric, but very interesting and ultimately quite revealing. That, plus Reed was a good enough journalist that he reports rumors as being rumors, hearsay as hearsay and only things he witnessed or could verify as being facts.

Once you figure out the dozen or so fractious factions struggling with one another for supremacy, it is a fascinating book (for those who like this sort of thing).

Does anyone else have this gluttony problem?

jeez, "Spotted Horses": rambunctious action and cracking wise, with glancing rococo, all sliding into the sucker punch of sheer logic.

The Guermantes Way

just finished several of merimee's short stories - "carmen" is as good as its reputation suggests, and i enjoyed a good deal "the venus of ille" as well. i think i have some affinity for snobbish narrators, though

Brand new Ugly Things which dropped through the door today. Got covers tory interview with Johnny Echols of Love & review of the later Arthur Lee solo lp Black Beauty.
Also on cover is Group 1850 who have a band history inside.
Plus an article on the Electric Eels, Glam, History of The Craig of I Must Be Mad fame plus enough other stuff to keep you reading for 2 weeks or so.
Looks as good as usual, which is very.

also Hugh Cornwell's autobio which I picked up from the library. Pretty interesting so far, not fully chronological but he's got the band together and they've been playing on the punk scene so far.

REd Cross First aid manual to try to help me get through a 1st aid course i'm doing and didn't do overly well on a spot test last week then had to miss tonight for a work related do.

I started reading The Invention of Morel late last night and I wish I'd been able to finish it in one sitting. I knew it was on influence on Lost but I didn't realise it was so direct - strange island, lavish modern compound built by people who are no longer around, mysterious visitors. It also says on the back it inspired Last Year on Marienbad but the blurb is pleasingly vague about what it's actually about so I'm hyped to finish it tonight.

Well that was incredible.

Hoy, en esta isla, ha ocurrido un milagro. El verano se adelantó.

invention of morel is grebt.

http://ia700206.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/23/items/olcovers70/olcovers70-L.zip&file=708747-L.jpg

roberto bolano "the savage detectives"
baudelaire "les fleurs du mal"

i love summer reading

Turgenev: Rudin

It's lovely.

once i get into my summer reading groove it's so hard to do anything else

Finished 'Demons'. Not sure what I can say, except
..... dusty-dusty him sad =(

dusty-dusty him sad

What does this mean?

It's the ILB board description--I can't find the exact reference, but it was one ILX person's 3-year-old daughter's description of 'Notes from Underground' (I think), based on her fatehr's description of the plot: "Dusty-dusty all sad in him room."

FATHER's description

by far the sweetest ilx running joke of all time.

Very sweet. I've been puzzling over that board description for months.

i have that 'apocalypse culture' & dip into it occassionally. i cant really do crackpot anymore tho

finished phil roth - 'patrimony'

started reading 'the great gatsby'! & also richard ford 'wildlife'

Here's the dusty-dusty original:
The two year old's guide to Dostoevsky

Reading The Cantos, as noted elsewhere on ILB.
Rereading Mason & Dixon. Love it very much.
Some history on the side. 1688 by Steven Pincus, British Politics in the Age of Anne by Geoffrey Holmes. Getting my c18th head back on.

xpost reminds me I've been thinking about tracking down Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture, which I found fascinating in the 70s (memoir of/thoughts on 50s/60s bohemian arts [not only party, work]scenes, situations, subtexts, etc)Still reading the sec edition of The Portable Faulkner, engrossing, but now he's got me tuned up to his usual standards, and finally seeing "A Rose For Emily" as not meeting those; no flights or insights to adjust the awkwardly carpentered bits (so why is it his most anthologized and maybe taught)

Because it's a very accessible way to present a lot of his idiosyncratic techniques (jumbled narrative, Gothic atmosphere, town's eye view). I myself am more partial to "That Evening Sun", "Red Leaves", and "Dry September".

The Work Of Hipgnosis: Walk Away Rene
a 2nd handbook on Hipgnosis that i found in my local 2nd hand/remainder bookshop yesterday. Nice images.

Finished "Eminent Victorians" - Strachey's no doubt a masterful stylist, very suave and urbane. Not all the Victorian figures are of such interest these days though - probably the Arnold section was the least interesting to me, but even that had it's moments.

Now I'm reading the "Crazy Horse" bio by Larry McMurtry.

Thought about reading that McMurtry book, but feel like Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life, by Kingsley M. Bray, might be the way to go. Also have been reading The Killing of Crazy Horse, by Thomas Powers.

Well, it's less than 150 pages long, so if you don't end up liking it, you haven't wasted too much time. It started off a bit slow, but it seems to be picking up. If it has a weakness, I'd say it's a bit of uncertainty about the target audience - at times it reads like it's aimed at experts who are familiar with the literature, and other times it tries to be an introduction for general readers. (Clearly I fall much more into the general reader camp.)

Fair enough. There is also that Stephen Ambrose dual biography of Custer and Crazy Horse.

Finished Laurent Binet's HHhH, which was pretty gripping. The actual prose is nothing special (though that could be the translator, who is a bad writer of English novels), but the story and the telling of it are really amazing.

When I returned from France I had about 250 pp to go in Master of the Senate. I just finished that up and now I am midway through re-reading Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars, in the Robert Graves translation.

The Suetonius is amazingly rich in incidental details about Roman life and habits which appear only because of some minor anecdote about an emperor. More 'normal' histories always leave out much of normal life. It's like gleaning single grains that are fallen to the ground in a harvested field.

Dire couple of months has meant I've read near as nothing. I'm now reading or am about to read some things at the behest of others - Hyde Park Gate News - The Stephen Family Newspaper (Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell with Thoby Stephen). The newspaper produced by these children in their very early teens. Don't look like that, some of it is perfectly charming.

I've just finished that, then I will read Mrs Dalloway. I haven't read it before and apparently I must.

Also Wolf Hall - just bought my mum Bring Up the Bodies, and she kept on saying I must (again!) read Wolf Hall, so I said in a burst of filial affection that I would.

I'm on The Wings of the Dove, a book I'm finding difficult - not exactly obscure, but unintuitive. I have to think carefully about each sentence.

f. scott fitzgerald -- 'bernice bobs her hair and other stories'
john green -- 'the fault in our stars'
james mcpherson -- 'battle cry of freedom'

"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" is the perfect short story. Great teen fiction too.

Me:

Moby Dick
some Pink Floyd bio

john green -- 'the fault in our stars'

What IS this? it's everywhere.

guy who writes young-adult novels full of snarky dialogue, basically. a bunch of my friends are crazy about him. he's pretty good for what he is, though the too-perfect characters kind of get on my nerves.

Cracked. just sitting in my armchair reading The Best of Myles. The Dalkey Archive thread is getting me excited. Might just pretend I've read Mrs Dalloway and Wolf Hall.

swamplandia! (OK I guess)
super sad true love story (OK to p.good)
the fear-index (drivel)

Finished "Crazy Horse" - at only 140 short pages, it seemed perhaps a bit breezy, but it serves as a decent introduction and it has a nice annotated bibliography for further reading.

Now I'm reading Ian McEwan's "Atonement", part of my effort to read more fiction.

Reflections on the Name of the Rose Umberto Eco talking about influences etc on the writing of his medieval detective novel. Interesting and very short. 74pp.
I like reading Eco but hadn't come across the Prague Cemetery which is what I was looking for in the library when I found this. Had just seen it in my local 2d hand/remainder bookshop. Hope to get hold of it when it comes back into the library in a few days time, hopefully.

Simon Reynolds - Retromania
Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne - House of the Seven Gables
Marguerite Yourcenar - Memoirs of Hadrian
Iris Murdoch - The Bell

finished Bill Carter - The War for Late Night
The behind the scenes stuff is boring and about what you'd expect. Way too much space devoted to things that were seen on the air. Most interesting part was Leno's scheming with/against Kimmel when it looked like Leno was going to ABC.

now reading
Noam Scheiber - The Escape Artists
Lots of speculation and unnamed sources. I might bail on this one.

Lev Grossman - The Magicians
got bumped up in my reading list because of his Time article on genre fiction. no opinion yet.

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here.

I'd never read any Lewis before and was pleasantly surprised. Great page-turning thriller with a sharp, ironic tone and lots of ideas about the different factions of the 30s left, like the ongoing rows between the liberal, the socialist and the communist, who are all ostensibly on the same side. Striking how little populist rhetoric has changed since the 30s - the big difference being that the dictator (because of Huey Long) is a Democrat.

I'm surprised that (as far as I know) nobody's done a joint biography of the lions of the literary left 1900-40 - Lewis, Sinclair, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Steinbeck. So many points of overlap, so many fierce disagreements and splits.

Lardner deserves a spot. That lewis book sounds awesome. I'm definitely coming to a place where I should give him a go.

It was also impressively early - Hitler had only been Chancellor for two years and Fuhrer for one when Lewis wrote it. And it spawned everything from The Plot Against America to V -"the NBC executives rejected the initial version, claiming it was too "cerebral" for the average American viewer. To make the script more marketable, the American fascists were re-cast as man-eating extraterrestrials." (Wikipedia)

Would anyone recommend the likes of Main Street and Babbitt? I assumed they're taught in American high schools but Lewis has no profile in the UK really. My father-in-law saw me reading this and said, "I bet you're literally the only person in the country reading Sinclair Lewis right now."

I read Babbitt yeeeeeears ago and it's on my short list of books to revisit. I've read strong defenses of Lewis over the years.

dunno if he's still taught in high school (you're right: until the eighties it was one of those staples).

Lewis and Dorothy Thompson come off as the Couple From Hell in several literary memoirs--maybe worse than Scott and Zelda--with Red getting even more unbearable after becoming the first American novelist to win the Nobel. No doubt some of that's pot to kettle, unless no other writers are up-front egomaniacs. Anyway, although it's been decades, I was impressed, though not awestruck by Kingsblood Royal. A well-to-do Dad decides it's time finally to confirm the very reasonable suspiction that he and his progeny come from the finest stuff, so gets his son to rustle up the family tree. What Junior does discover stays undercover, while he consorts with Negroes. They tell him about a lot of things he and I had never, ever heard of--including, maybe, the Duluth lynchings eventually cited as possible references in "Desolation Row."

still soldiering through the leduc but i have out from the library:

james purdy - eustace chisholm and the works
denton welch - a voice through a cloud
lillian faderman - surpassing the love of men (already dipped into this a bit)
and a book on super 8mm filmmaking

Babbitt is lots of cynical fun

Now reading 'The Swap' by Antony moore, which is also fun but not brilliant -- a man's life goes to hell because of a copy of Superman #1 he traded away as a child

(irritatingly referred to throughout as 'Superman One', as though it was a movie or a boat something)

whoa i’m reading a voice through a cloud also! i actually just sent a longish email about it to a friend. i’m enjoying it a lot; the only other thing i’ve read of his is in youth is pleasure.

same (and the unfinished novella that accompanies the edition i have) - i loved it tho. i also own 'maiden voyage'

Back to Sinclair Lewis, just for a sec if u don't mind: is Arrowsmith (lol) the one that deals with the American-in-Paris theme?

'human, all too human'
'molloy'
'shakespeare the thinker'
la bruyere, 'characters'

Was thinking it was Sinclair Lewis that wrote the novel on Sacco and Vanzetti I read a few years back. I just realised that's Upton Sinclair.

Think I at least started Elmer Gantry years ago, not sure if I finished.

Lewis, Sinclair, Dreiser, Dos Passos,

i went thru a 20th century realism phase in my early/mid 20s with these guys. Dos Passos' trilogy blew me away. wondering how they all read now.

would include John O'Hara too though he was a generation or so younger. Not exactly a prose master but O'Hara wrote about class in the US v well.

richard powers, 'the echo maker'

Dos Passos' USA trilogy is grrrrrrrrreat!

reading swann's way, the lydia davis translation. am enjoying it way more than I thought I would! I had to return the ginormous musil to the library after being only like 100 pages in, so I think I'm giving up on that for now.

even though i was enjoying it

xps to self: *ccording to wiki, the Lewis novel I was asking about was not Arrowsmith, but Dodsworth.

I was intimidated by the size of USA for years, despite reading and loving Manhattan Transfer at university. Finally got around to it last year. There's so much going on, and the structure is so tight, that it has an incredible sense of pace for a book that long - some storylines were stronger than others but I was never bored.

I feel like 1916 (or w/e the middle one is called) is a black sheep candidate for Great American novel

Brushing up on Marxism. Am getting this soon:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21MCzG%2BZVzL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2567539/images/shining/All%20Work%20and%20No%20Play%20Paperback.jpg

^^That's a counterrevolutionary text. What you need is this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41dawC1iVYL._SL500_.jpg

Jan Morris: Hav

Dos Passos' USA trilogy is grrrrrrrrreat!

― freebroheem (loves laboured breathing), Tuesday, June 12, 2012 1:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Finally brought my omnibus edition of USA back to where I'm living after it's been sitting on a shelf at my mother's place for 20+ years. Now it's back sitting on a shelf. Will get aroun dto reading it at some point before tooo long.
Also got his Three Soldiers part read sitting in my bag. should try to finish that before I start too many other new things.

Did read USA when I was given it for Xmas/Birthday. That was late 80s though.

xp I've read one of Noebel's books - Rhythm, Riots and Revolution - which is as hilarious as you'd expect. Learned last year that he was a big influence on Michelle Bachmann.

I think USA fits my idea of the Great American Novel better than anything else - it really tries to encompass the entire country in a way that other contenders don't. Favourite bits are the beautifully written capsule bios of historical figures. You could compile those into a book on their own and it would be a miniature classic.

I was thinking we should read Swann's Way (in the glorious Lydia Davis translation, but it doesn't matter) for the summer ILX book club.

Reading the Tao. Strikes a diff knd of resonance for 'fans' of improv group AMM, a group that is not active anymore and yet it is always active, in a sense. Only about 100 people in the world will understand what I'm talking about, 2-3 of which might read this thread.

Man, I loved those little bios

I was thinking we should read Swann's Way (in the glorious Lydia Davis translation, but it doesn't matter) for the summer ILX book club.

i second this!

Richard Ford Canada. Really slow opening, hope it picks up.

I finished The Names by DeLillo. It was ... a disappointment? I'd had a brief interest in Greece and was hoping for a sense of place from it, but there was almost nothing evocative bar a passage driving around the peninsula surrounded by bare rock. Wrong author to pick maybe, though I know he can do it.

More problematic is the premise, these various professionals becoming interested in a tiny language cult to the extent of following them for thousands of miles, but for no discernible sensible reason. It's just really odd, to spend years there and that's what you come up with. It does lead to the only prolonged worthwhile passage: Brademas' trek across India on their trail, there's so much life there.

I can imagine people getting the same out of Underworld. Hitherto its negative appraisals have kinda annoyed me, because I did get so much from it, but I think I understand now. The Names feels like a shallower, less pointed rehearsal.

The post this week brought me the new Alan Furst, and Hemingway's Men Without Women. I'm tempted to give the latter a go first.

For a sense of Greece and where its culture came from in the near past, try Patrick Leigh Fermor's books, Mani and Roumeli. They are all about village culture in Greece circa the 1930s. Village culture changes slowly.

Thanks. I was looking for something urban I think.

Margaret Cheney -Tesla Man out of time: Biography of Tesla, did not really like the way it was written, felt the author lacked a certain critical distance wrt to her subject. Were I to believe her, Tesla basically invented everything that was invented in the 20th century, except he did it before and no one knew about it or understood his genius. Still on the whole it was an interesting read, more thanks to Tesla himself than the author

Laurent Binet - HHhH: an interesting read about the plot to murder Heydrich. The author goes about telling us this assassination story and guides us through his research and his refusal to write a novel/fiction. At some points he can be a bit tiresome when he really insists that he wants to get everything right and not have to invent stuff (like on 2-3 different occasions he goes on about whether Heydrich's car was black or dark green... once is ok, second time you're like "ok, we get it" by the third time it starts being annoying). Still, it made for a gripping read, especially since I was mostly ignorant about this episode. It kept me up late enough.

HhHh has had some hype here. I'd quite fancied it because the Heydrich story is a fascinating one, but I picked it up in a shop and it looked really confusing.

HhHh has had hype here, I should've said.

It's actually quite straight forward and easy to read, I breezed through the book in a couple of hours.. It's just like any novel except once in a while Binet breaks through and explains stuff about the research he's done etc.

looking for something urban

In Greece, urban is synonymous with Athens. Thessaloniki would also qualify, and imo it is underrated as a city, but finding anything about it that has been translated to english would probably be a chore.

I own a copy of a book by Peter Levi called The Hill of Kronos, which is a non-fic about life in Athens under the junta of the colonels (circa late 1960s). Not exactly what you're looking for, but def worth reading. You will come away from it with a deeper admiration for George Seferis.

In the same vein, though been a long time since I read Oriana Fallaci's A Man, found it very vivid perspective(and sufficiently lucid, at least for me--might be more journalistic fiction than anything else, but engrossing descriptions of urban Greece; here's good background from Fallaci's Wiki bio:
In the early 1970s Fallaci had an affair with the subject of one of her interviews, Alexandros Panagoulis, who had been a solitary figure in the Greek resistance against the 1967 dictatorship, having been captured, heavily tortured and imprisoned for his (unsuccessful) assassination attempt on dictator and ex-Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos. Panagoulis died in 1976, under controversial circumstances, in a road accident. Fallaci maintained that Panagoulis was assassinated by remnants of the Greek military junta and her book Un Uomo (A Man) was inspired by his life.

Yeah, HHhH is not hard to get to grips with at all: the underlying story is so fascinating it would be hard to fuck up, and Binet doesn't

Reading Evan S Connell's 'Mrs Bridge', which is sooooo good. And so I see that they're not republishing the companion novel, Mr Bridge, for another year. Fuck. I Will have to go library hunting.

reading 'beautiful ruins' by jess walter - super breezy, page-turner v good for summer

stendhal, 'love'

xxpost

yeah i loved Mr & Mrs Bridge as well. Connell is a singular talent. his novel Diary of a Rapist is noir, psychologically intense. Then there's his non-fiction. Deus Lo Volt is a history of the crusades written in a weird approximation of the language of that time. I didn't get too far in that one TBH.

Finished Faulkner's The Wild Palms, a minor work that crumbles in its last third and is barely coherent period but wow amazing writing.

Now reading Stephanie Vaughn's 'Sweet Talk', a really great book of short stories from 1990. Anyone who likes Lorrie Moore will like this, I would think.

Characteristic passage:

“Well, it just went poof,” she said once, explaining to my father and grandmother where the grocery money had gone and why we were having hot dogs once again for our Sunday dinner. “Like that,” she said, and her hands described baroque scrolls of smoke above her dinner plate. It seemed to me that with her hands she might produce, out of the imaginary smoke, an emerald bird, inside of which would be a golden egg, inside of which would be a lifetime supply of grocery money.
My father, ever mindful of my education, cast a meaningful eye my way and said, “Although a hot dog on a bun is not the feast we had all hoped for this afternoon, let us remember that it contains more protein than the average Chinese person eats in a week.”
“I am not a Chinese,” my grandmother said, looking sideways at my mother. “I am a Protestant.”

Elizabeth Drew's Showdown, about the '95 battles b/w Congress and Bill Clinton. Hell of a reporter with unexpected analytical skills.

Alfred, I haven't read all of The Wild Palms, but finally finished expanded edition of The Portable Faulkner, thought "Old Man" was pretty compelling (editor says it's by far the best section of The Wild Palms). A peak example of Faulkner's lucid sociopolitical detail times imaginative description. Three-four things in this collection I could do without, but otherwise good-to-great.

Wild Palms alternated chapters between Old Man and the depressing love story, correct?

yep

I haven't sated my appetite for minor Faulkner, so now I'm reading "Mountain Victory" after reading "Dry September" and "That Evening Sun" and wondering why we always get goddamn "A Rose for Emily" in anthologies.

Yeah I was wondering the same thing upthread, most of The Portable upstages "A Rose." Intriguing to imagine "Old Man" in alternating chapters, like a really well-done Saturday matinee cliffhanger serial--but alternating with a "depressing love story" doesn't sound so inviting. Cowley says Faulkner hit on the idea as counterpoint, and maybe to keep himself interested--maybe he found the love story depressing too.

John Grant: 'The City in These Pages' - metaphysical scifi tribute novella to Ed McBain 87th Precinct novels

I picked up a collection of non-fiction short pieces by Jonathan Lethem, the guy who wrote Fortress of Solitude and other stuff, from the public library. It is called The Ecstasy of Influence, which is fine, but they could just as easily titled it A Lot of Bits of Non-Fiction Writing We Put Into a Book. So far, it isn't boring me to tears, but it isn't knocking my sox off either.

The core problem is that Lethem doesn't seem to have many outside interests besides writing novels and reading comics and science fiction. He's no Jorge Borges. He's not even a Gore Vidal. But he does write readable prose and has ideas in his head, so I give him a somewhat shaky 'B'. I'm pretty sure I will finish it.

Man, I love "That Evening Sun". Another of my favorite stories is "Red Leaves", which I think is also in The Portable.

Alfred, have you read The Hamlet? It's the first of the Snopes trilogy.

The core problem is that Lethem doesn't seem to have many outside interests besides writing novels and reading comics and science fiction. He's no Jorge Borges. He's not even a Gore Vidal.

I don't get enough surprise from Lethem. His formative cultural influences were identical to those of numberless thousands of other nerdy American boys of a certain time. (I lived in his neighborhood for years so the local details were familiar too.)

"Always Crashing in the Same Car": I recognized one of Cortazar's stories in there. But why write it? This is Lethem's commentary it toto:

Or maybe I did want to spin some turntables, at least for a minute or two. My first fiction after "The Ecstacy of Influence" was this collage. Count it as one of several money-put-where-mouth-is gestures but also as a confession of the addictive qualities of the scissors and pastepot. After the bogus dissertation of "Ecstacy," this was a Rauchenberg collage, and it was a relief to let the torn paper and glue blobs be obvious.

There's a certain decisive note that I want to hear, but what's being performed is indecision in the face of possibilities and a lackadaisical indifference. He's making an aesthetic program out of his unwillingness to be decisive or in earnest.

Bowie's Low was famously built up by formal methods. But using a title of one of the songs, decades later, for an exercise in literary collage: what new step is taken? There is nothing as dependent on its sources as collage. Is Lethem going to be the eternal college freshman, name-checking and making projects out of his favorite books and records? Somebody prove me wrong, please.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzfeu52dFx1qhal0to1_500.jpg

Is Lethem going to be the eternal college freshman, name-checking and making projects out of his favorite books and records?

yep. unless something or someone shocks him out of complacency

The core problem is that Lethem doesn't seem to have many outside interests besides writing novels and reading comics and science fiction.

I had the same problem with the book. Not a crippling flaw in itself, but he's unable to be no more than fitfully compelling about his passions, which takes us back to not having read enough to toughen his statements with correspondences and allusions.

Alfred, have you read The Hamlet? It's the first of the Snopes trilogy.

yep – years ago and loved it. I may read the other two in the next week.

The core problem is that Lethem doesn't seem to have many outside interests besides writing novels and reading comics and science fiction

nothing wrong w/digging deep into your passions but there's a self-satisfied insularity and lack of curiosity to lethem that is typical of gen x/indie types. perhaps this is why he's been elevated to generational spokesman status. like aimless, i can read him but he really doesn't speak to my passions at all.

Margaret Cheney -Tesla Man out of time: Biography of Tesla, did not really like the way it was written, felt the author lacked a certain critical distance wrt to her subject...Still on the whole it was an interesting read, more thanks to Tesla himself than the author

I had more or less the same reaction. There is a strange cult around Tesla - die-hard defenders of his legacy who still feel that his genius was slighted - partisans who still hold a grudge against Edison. I'm not sure exactly how it got started. I guess he is a classic example of the misunderstood genius who dies forgotten. Also in his lifetime, he was a great promoter of his own genius and a dazzling showman, at times also a bit of a charlatan. He dropped enough mysterious hints and made enough grandiose claims to fuel the imagination of a gaggle of conspiracy theorists. Despite all that he is a fascinating figure, though perhaps difficult to discern through the mythologizing.

Seems like there are a bunch of Tesla bios out there. one recent one is written by is nephew, I think. I thought he seemed like an interesting character but I couldn't figure out which one to read, so thanks for helping by eliminating that one.

I finished Hemingway's Men Without Women. Exceptionally good. It's a collection of (mostly very) short stories featuring men doing things that men do - not all tough guy stuff either, there's plenty of weakness and vulnerability, but it is all very male in its way.

I feel like Hemingway has dropped out-of-fashion somewhat: I only ever see him parodied, or hear him discussed as a guide to technique. The content of the stories is something, though - especially where it's the absence of content, so you have to do the work to get to what the story's about. In a way it feels slightly cheaty as a way of drawing interest, but oof it's effective.

yeah it's a good idea to return to Hemingway after you've abandoned him for years. I had to teach "Indian Camp" in class a couple years ago and -- well, I'd been away from it for so long it was like reading it fresh.

Also helps to reread less anthologized pieces I've always enjoyed like "The Battler."

Prague Cemetery, only just started it. Looks interesting though.

i think i'm okay with hemingway having dropped out of fashion tbh

i just read the new volume of the robert caro johnson biog. he's actually kind of a really bad writer? which is part of why it's compelling? i guess?

and now i am reading libra and being like: huh. sentences.

Caro a bad writer? Wow. There's some slippage in the new volume. Its predecessors are what I want from American historical writing.

he is the george r.r. martin of american historical writing then

i don't know, i haven't read the first three. how many times total would you say he reminds you that LBJ grew up on a failed ranch, and felt the sting of poverty from an early age, and the taste of failure, and the smell of the other children's insults ringing in his eyes? and that he told them he would be president, and oh, how they laughed, but, oh, now he was a powerful man?

i got the impression that there's been a slight revival of interest in Hemingway, maybe because of woody allen lol, maybe because of the paul hendrickson bk:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/08/ernest-hemingway-boat-hendrickson-review

I suggest reading the first hundred fifty pages of MOTS -- a history of the Senate -- for an example of sustained concentration.

I don't remember so many instances of Caro sprinkling tics like this in the earlier volumes: "He thought, he plotted, he agonized, he consulted -- and then he acted."

the george martin thing came to mind when reading because that fellow has developed a tic of having significant phrases from the focalized character's past keep popping up as a sort of entry-level interior monologue.

and caro will use a tag of something johnson said once ("we'll bury him in arlington") as a kind of shorthand in a way that ends up being more and more meaningless. (although i think the story that led johnson to say "we'll bury him in arlington" is summarised at least three times.) maybe it needed an edit? i don't know. he does similar things with bobby kennedy and harry byrd.

a lot of the time the book's self-conception seems off; johnson's interior life an endlessly reiterated cartoon, but no larger analysis of the social to counterbalance it. i mean, johnson would probably be an endlessly dull person to psychoanalyse, but the book seems to periodically forget that it's about johnson as synecdoche for the stakes and confines of american political power midcentury -- maybe because there's quite so little to do with the vice-presidential years, i don't know.

Caro assumes that if you've gotten this far you know how he's depicted, as you write, the stakes and confines of American political power, hence the use of "motifs" like We'll bury him in Arlington.

The first and third volumes concentrate on exactly what you say: the accumulation and use of power into the hands of a man of extraordinary volatility.

and now i am reading libra and being like: huh. sentences.
You mean he's good at composing sentences, compared to Caro?

―

Libra is so easily De Lillo's greatest book. Unfortunately it's also the first one I read so nothing since, not even White Noise or Underworld, has matched it.

De Lillo only works when either you or he believe in the conspiracy kitsch he peddles.

Just about to finish Goodwin's "Team of Rivals.". Can anyone recommend a good history of the Reconstruction era?

Libra Underworld is so easily De Lillo's greatest book.

(but both Libra and Underworld tend to divide people, I think.)

I'm starting on If On a Winter Night .... by Calvino; finishing up Anita Loos' "But Gentleman Marry Brunettes" (the sequel to the superior, so far, "Gentleman Prefer Blondes"); and wondering if I should read the second half of Miriam Hansen's "Babel and Babylon" (great film theory stuff but I don't think I want to get into the case studies on Rudolph Valentino and DW Griffith's "Intolerance" at the moment).

Just about to finish Goodwin's "Team of Rivals.". Can anyone recommend a good history of the Reconstruction era?

eric foner's 'reconstruction' is the standard one, tho he also wrote a shorter one (not an abridged version, a completely different book IIRC). there's a newish book on andrew johnson that's probably worth reading too.

OK, according to wikipedia it actually is an abridged version.

just started caro

I read this Johnson bio last year. What it lacks in elegance it makes up for in facts.

It's startling to think that for years high schoolers (including me) were taught that the Radical Republicans were the enemies bent on the destruction of poor incompetent Andrew Johnson. It was an age of insufferable megalmaniacs but still.

Foner's book on slavery and Lincoln from a few years ago is in the top tier of Lincoln books, written with acuity. I just saw this is out. Anyone read it?

Cesar Vallejo - Spain, Take this Chalice away from Me (and Other Poems). So many solid quotes on that one. Possibly prefer Eshleman's re-writing but I suspect any translation of Vallejo would work for me on some level.

that Foner link is pretty intriguing, esp the timeline. Just discovered my local library has Bolano's 2626. Never read him, should I start with that or order--what?

Savage Detectives, then 2666

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace - Arthur C Danto
Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia - Francis Wheen (Wheen on the 70s - fairly typical - peerless collection of period clippings, quotes, anecdotes, but organising principles a bit lax and not really one for ideas, which I suppose oddly makes it resemble:)
Man and the Natural World - Keith Thomas

rushdie's "midnight's children" -- reading for book club, and only 100 pages in but already enjoying it far more than atwood's blind assassin (our last book club book...) -- interrupted swann's way to get this read in time for our book club meeting but also wondering if i no longer have the attention span to read a long, ponderous book like the proust series. even tho i was enjoying it, it was easy to put down and not pick back up.

Fatigue does set in, its inevitable, took me about about mid-way for that to happen.

Poems by Tsetaeva, and more by Vallejo - wanna type some bits but there is so much to choose from and I need to go.

Anyone read any of Eudora Welty's novels?

I'm reading Lawrence's Travels in Italy -- some of the most limpid prose I've ever read. Also: Conversations with Robert Penn Warren.

Parmy Olson's We are Anonymous: it's about the whole anonymous thing and lulz sec. even though most of the stories related in there are far from unknown, it was quite interesting to have someone who had access to the people on the inside recount the thing.

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: ok so same here it's about all the HFCS and stuff, so things that are far from being unknown (though not having checked the publication date, maybe he was one of the people who brought that topic up to public opinion). my main issue so far is that it feels like a book written for twelve year-old kids or something. i just really don't like the way he writes.

Reading Richard Price's Bloodbrothers--took some time to get into, but it's really getting good. Price is great at creating plausible and unique characters with depth.

I love Bloodbrothers. Price's early work seems a bit neglected these days but it's a lot more fun than the post-Clockers stuff (even though i do like those books for what they are)

Finally, a book I have a comment about! Bloodbrothers is devastating in a way that a lot of Price's other books aren't for me. When I finished it, I felt like I had been through the ringer.

I also think Richard Price is better at writing female characters than he thinks he is.

I actually kind of thought the mother was being unfairly maligned at first--that is, until chapter 7, which is where I stopped reading for a while. When I picked it back up to re-read it, it hit me really hard...

I just came back from a camping trip, during which I read The Crying of Lot 49. This is the second Pynchon I have attempted (the first was Gravity's Rainbow) and the first I have finished. While I found it diverting, I did not find it, as it so ardently wished itself to be found, an effective vehicle for the initiation of a train of profound thoughts.

The first 40 pp or so did have a few stylistic quirks based in odd US verbalisms, that I thought were amusing, in a jarring sort of way. However, Pynchon rather quickly ditched this avenue of play in favor of a different pursuit, upon themes I did not think were especially engaging, such as paranoia and degrees of reality granted to second or third hand reportage.

It was ok. I'm glad it wasn't as long as Moby Dick.

I didn't much like Lot 49 my first go-around either. I've heard it much improves on re-reading tho.

i love pynchon and i've read 'lot 49' like five times but i've never really been drawn to think about it.

(i think i have said so elsewhere on a pynchon thread.)

Read it twice, ditto. There's a very heavy baby-boomer feel to it which isn't particularly appealing to me.

Tsvetaeva, above, with the pynchonian V.

Gulcher - Richard Meltzer. I loved A Whore Like the Rest. There is a kind of uh Berthesian feel to this collection of bits and pieces on cultural blah: lots on sports (wrestling to boxing to baseball), cigarettes, and it looks like he'll move onto tits. I'll see what he'll say on that.

Reminded me of Vital Signs by Penman, but this is more unified, all written from a very partic POV and something about fandom and culture in general operating (but written in that beat fashion which I find rough going), whereas VS were pieces written over 20 years and for publication at different magazines, they feel a lot more apart (to the detriment of that collection).

When he throws a line on music I do perk up, he makes little connections on fandom or the way people respond to things (music or boxing) is similar: so the way a person will list their fave boxers of all time is hilarious as putting a Public Enemy album at no.9 etc.

Don't feel so bad, Aimless. Lot 49 and Inherent Vice are the only Pynchon I've loved.

xpost

fwiw I think Meltzer's best book far and away is LA Is The Capitol of Kansas, funnier and a bit less self-conscious than his other work. A Whore Like The Rest, despite its epic length, actually LEAVES OUT the best music stuff he wrote for the Village Voice. yeah we already knew he's perverse

I love those early Richard Price coming-of-age novels, more than his later sociological crime stories (which are good)

Thanks m coleman (thought you'd have something to say on Meltzer :-)) so I'll look for that.

Interesting a lot of the Voice stuff was left out - hopefully it will be collected/already has...will look.

here's my all-time favorite by Meltzer from the November 13 1978 Village Voice. p.68 "Buy A VTR and Rule The World" hilarious and so prescient.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=KEtq3P1Vf8oC&dat=19781113&printsec=frontpage&hl=en

check the cover story by Richard Price (synchronicity!) on The Wanderers movie set. this article inspired me to search out his books backintheday

i think you either like 'lot 49' and are indifferent to pynchon's other work, or vice-versa.

Aimless is still potentially the exception to that rule.

Not true for me. Regardless of a particular work's limitations, Pynchon's gifts have always appealed to me, ever since I read "The Secret Integration" in the 60s. I was about the same age as the kid characters, and Pynchon might say that's what it would take to like that story. judging by his restless introduction to Slow Learner, the collected apprentice fiction (some stories are still out there somewhere). He didn't want Lot 49 published as a stand-alone, and he says he'd misunderstood entrophy (should be thought of as "work energy," he says in the intro--like the breakdown of combustion, I take it). Also claims still not to know what "tendril" means; he just used words like that cos they sounded cool. But he can't believe how good some of it is, like it was done gnomes coming out of his typewriter or something like that--either way, he feels distanced from all this stuff, and would in several cases like to feel more. But how oh how to reconcile bright invention with some deep dark themes, how not to be just a talent bimbo or another savior of Western Civ? (See Luc Sante's NYRB review of Dylan's Chronicles, also in Sante's Kill All Your Darlings) V. is the breakthough, or at least the crucial warm-up for his running leap at Gravity's Rainbow.

Mind you, the opening pages of his latest, that hipster detective story or whatever, seemed to squirm with self-consciousness. But maybe I'll give it another shot.

i didn't say i didn't like it, j.d. i have just never thought anything about it, unlike his other books.

(having just written this rambling post feel shdn't be posting it here, other than it seems as decent a 'general chat about books' place as any.)

There shd be a long list of books here, because I just went to British Library exhibition Writing Britain.

It was a bit rubbish.

The organising principles, as represented by the groupings of works and the title they were grouped under, seemed by turns vague, unhelpful, misleading, and without any overall structure. With a subject as large as 'Writing Britain' there has to be some kind of argument, or underpinning set of principles. The section headings were occasionally a little weird - 'Dark Satanic Mills', fine, but in a section that didn't include ANY Blake, just mainly 19th C thru Victorian novels, bleeding into some stuff about the contemporary workplace (David Lodge's Nice Work in a glass box, with a catalogue entry by it, really?).

Also, if you're displaying books and manuscripts, you've really got to have a catalogue that situates them as objects. This object you are seeing before has this context, and this meaning for the subject in hand. Ok, so from time to time you'd have 'Wordsworth wrote Tintern Abbey when he yadda yadda', or 'Keats wrote this letter to his brother Tom while on a walking holiday in Scotland' (great! I enjoyed peering at Keats' massive letter with tiny writing). But there wasn't much more than that. Occasionally it would be as bad as 'Disraeli wrote a book about social divisions, called Sybil, here is an edition of Sybil'. Well, maybe never quite as bad as that, but I thought it shd have worked a lot harder at making the objects talk. These are garrulous, companionable and informative objects, but they go silent under a glass case. Lots of dodging your head about trying to nix the reflection, and squinting at your enforced distance, decoding handwriting from the neatly miniscule (19th century women writers + RLS) to the formally incomprehensible (yes, you, William Dunbar).

Good things!

Done Keats' letter - huge and with a sonnet in the top left-hand corner. Good letter.

Gerald of Wales' 12th Century Topographia Hibernica with a marginal illustration of a werewolf asking a priest to administer last rites to his werewolf friend. At least, the catalogue note said werewolf, and indeed said they were mentioned as such in the text, but thinking about it, the normal interpretation of animals in mariginal drawings would be via fables and exemplars, although strange creatures like the anthropophagi and ape-pygmies do also appear. Anyway, good picture.

Manuscript of Crash with Ballard's emendations.

Victorian board game, which was a map of Britain, where you had to progress from the Thames Estuary, round the country, with its various industries and back again. Looked incredibly not fun, but I don't like board games and anyway the map was good.

BEST bit of writing was a letter written to John Betjeman complaining that one of his Metroland poems was historically inaccurate, ended with this

I remember Willesden Green station when it was lit only by oil lamps, and one left it into unlighted lanes with hedges, which is my first recollection of Walm Lane. I remember walking to Cricklewood and being so frightened of the loneliness of it all that I turned tail and scuttled back home again as fast as I could!

I quite like Cricklewood - it's nothing like London - but for some reason that description seems to me strangely still pertinent somehow.

Most surprising thing I didn't know - John Galsworthy was a fuckin NOBEL LAUREATE?

Most unsurprising thing I knew already - typewriters really are the only tool for creative writing. The pen is too laborious, generally, the computer too much like writing in water if you're not careful, but the combination of permanence, clarity and immediacy of typewritten manuscripts puts them in first place for me.

Oh, couple of other things:

Wales shamefully under-represented (as was Cornwall). Conan-Doyle half mentioned as a decent suburban writer, but no mention of Arthur Machen, also an exceptional writer of London and suburbia. I know you're constrained by your exhibits, but not to have The Hill of Dreams anywhere is bizarre. (He was represented by a quote on a board, from his excellent autobiography Far Off Things. Also, no Jocelyn Brooke, scant mention of the Powys clan (they could have joined them thru John Ireland - they had soundscapes and Mai Dun would have fit in nicely), Chesterton, yes, but no Belloc. YES he's a cunt, YES he should have been in there.

This is why you need an argument, because without it, you become necessarily inclusive, and with such a large subject, it becomes patchy and somewhat incomprehensible.

They probably could have done more with the representation of words in the landscape. Especially considering their gates were designed by the wife of David Kindersley, who proposed an effective and attractive national design for roadsigns, was himself apprenticed to Eric Gill (font+literary sculpture of Prospero and a big-willied Ariel on the front of Broadcasting House), who was a student of Edward Johnston, designer of the font used on the tube. A bit more imagination, plus a bit more rigor might've produced a better exhibition.

Oh, and an entire section on London but NOTHING on Henry Mayhew (Neil Gaiman, by contrast, seems to have his grubby fingers everywhere).

Still, plenty of bits to enjoy here, just feel more could have been done with it. Wouldn't have minded something I'd disagreed with more - it all just felt a bit nebulous.

Greatly enjoying yr description, thanks. "Conan-Dyle half mentioned as a decent suburban writer"? half-decent when writing about suburbia (who cares) or half-decent period? Seems unfair, esp if they're that open to xpost Gaiman's grubby fingers. What typewriter would you recommend?

"Conan-Dyle half mentioned as a decent suburban writer"? half-decent when writing about suburbia (who cares) or half-decent period? Seems unfair

I care! Late Victorian interest in its suburbs has the flavour of a new landscape being explored. Take this description from Machen - often excellent on suburbia:

Before me was the long suburban street, its dreary distance marked by rows of twinkling lamps, and the air was poisoned by the faint, sickly smell of burning bricks; it was not a cheerful prospect by any means, and I had to walk through nine miles of such streets, deserted as those of Pompeii. I knew pretty well what direction to take, so I set out wearily, looking at the stretch of lamps vanishing in perspective: and as I walked street after street branched off to right and left, some far reaching, to distances that seemed endless, communicating with other systems of thoroughfare, and some mere protoplasmic streets, and ending suddenly in waste, and pits, and rubbish heaps, and fields whence the magic had departed. I have spoken of systems of thoroughfare,, and I assure you that walking alone through these silent places I felt fantasy growing on me, and some glamour of the infinite.

(that's from the otherwise crap Novel of the Iron Maid.)

Sherlock Holmes specifically is often scooting off to Streatham and other south London purlieus, and he and Machen have a similar flavour to them, of crime and horror existing in and feeding upon the recently manufactured mundane.

Conan Doyle isn't a great writer, I don't think, but he did have that one rare feather of greatness - creating a character more famous than himself.

Amazing passage, will def have to check more Machen.

Wow yeah, I love suburbia and I love that description.

oh and the last typewriter I bought new was an Olivetti manual. do they still do them?

I used to live near a typewriter shop on Green Lanes, which I kept meaning to go into but never did.

oh and the last typewriter I bought new was an Olivetti manual. do they still do them?

No.

Just finished the "Book of Ephraim" section of The Changing Light at Sandover. So many beautiful parts in this. Read very slowly so I'm sure I missed stuff, but highly enjoyable. Thanks "Great American Poems" thread!

Is The Changing Light... a book-length narrative, like Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, maybe?

Not sure honestly. I know each section was written and published separately but I can't say how connected they are.

Recentlyish:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0224090844.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
Lovely and slightly heartbreaking graphic novel

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/186207318X.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
Hungarian-Italian novel about 20th-Century Hungary and espionage, told via the main character's troublesome teeth--rather cool

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/B007MQZ9J2.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
Early Vonnegut novella, very enjoyable, but with a too-pat 1940s magazine-fiction conclusion

Plus I found a 2nd-hand copy of Connell's 'Mr Bridge', which was as brilliant as 'Mrs Bridge', and I loved both of them.

Just finished the "Book of Ephraim" section of The Changing Light at Sandover. So many beautiful parts in this. Read very slowly so I'm sure I missed stuff, but highly enjoyable. Thanks "Great American Poems" thread!

so happy you loved it -- discovering Merrill was one of those eye-opening moments in my lit life.

Sandover runs aground, perhaps fatally three quarters of the way through "Mirabell"

we have always lived in the castle. and a book of ghost stories set on a train, for children , which i bought with the intention of giving it to my nephew, who is obsessed with trains. and then the conclusion is boy who is the focal character wakes up and finds himself in the middle of a train wreck and everyone else has been dead the whole time and now i think maybe not.

Many xps, found a great Machen passage recently which really chimed with my current philosophical materialist doubts:

I began to dread, vainly proposing to myself the iterated dogmas of science that all life is material, and that in the system of things there is no undiscovered land, even beyond the remotest stars, where the supernatural can find a footing. Yet there struck in on this the thought that matter is as really awful and unknown as spirit, that science itself but dallies on the threshold, scarcely gaining more than a glimpse of the wonders of the inner place.

Now on The House of Mirth. Just past the half way point and Miss Bart is fast losing my sympathies.

watch her gain them after a bit.

I'm rereading The Custom of the Country, which has too many exclamations from Undine's POV for my taste.

fizzles i feel like whenever i've been to see a thing at the british library it's suffered from the problems you describe. at least the ones expressed by (David Lodge's Nice Work in a glass box, with a catalogue entry by it, really?) ... 'Disraeli wrote a book about social divisions, called Sybil, here is an edition of Sybil

sometimes they decorate the room very nicely, though. at the science fiction one they built an android for you to talk to, and had a tripod (wellesian, not johnchristopherian) looming over you on the way in -

Par Lindqvist: The DWARF -- who knew such a vicious, misanthropic book could be so fun!

just started cesar aira - 'how i became a nun'

I've been reading Piers Plowman for the past few nights, in prose I am sad to say, because I can't bring myself to wrestle with the middle english right now. Langland's variant seems thornier than Chaucer's to me.

It seems to be a very mixed bag in terms of the religious allegory, but it gets in a few nice digs at authority on the satirical side of things.

Miss Bart did indeed regain my sympathies. It's tough going though, in the middle, where none of her misfortunes are of her own making and yet she is somehow complicit in all of them. The worst you can say of her is she clings too long to her ambition, to her attachment to the monstrous set long after it's spat her out. But that's basically saying she should have given up her dreams, which is hardly the most positive of advice.

that's basically saying she should have given up her dreams

dreams that are untethered from reality cannot end well.

all Wharton's novels and stories are ghost stories.

is she haunting society or is it haunting her?

dreams that are untethered from reality cannot end well.

her dreams are achievable, albeit with the sacrifice of her integrity. that's the awful dilemma of the book, and why her descent seems both avoidable and inevitable at every turn.

will somebody point me towards the "Great American Poems" thread? i am interested in reading it, and cannot find it using the search.

I finished "Atonement". The twist ending, an Amisian jolt of po-mo sadism, was more unexpected after the dutiful period-historical realism of the preceding action. It whet my appetite for war literature, so now I'm reading "All Quiet on the Western Front" which somehow I'd managed to not read until now. So far it's easily exceeding my expectations - surprisingly "contemporary" in feel.

Read Pat Barker's Great War trilogy! Wilfred Owen, poison gas, psychoanalysis, and graphic pederasty!

Hmm- I'd never heard of it before but it looks interesting.

table:
Which huge american poem should I read?

siri hustvedt's the summer without men, did i mention this already

Got a Kindle for my birthday. Reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on it. Kindle suits Gibbon, he seems to like it. Note formatting is a bit dire tho (downloaded from Gutenberg).

Also In the Hand of Dante by Nick Tosches. It started out excellently. There's three main narrators: a gangster called Louis, Dante, and Nick Tosches (I know, I know, it's fine, seriously), and it's Louis who starts with a long repetitive misanthropic invective as he walks through the streets of New York. If I'd posted a few chapters earlier, I would have been a lot more tolerant towards Tosches' desire to show-off and his showmanship generally, even tho sometimes it doesn't hit the mark. However, I've just got through a loooonng chapter of Dante talking to a mystical which is basically second-rate cabbalah and very fifth rate hokey aesthetics and as a consequence I'm not feeling too well disposed towards the book right now. There were signs a bit earlier when he (as himself) went on a massive and often amusing rant against publishing. All this reminds me in a way of Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin, whose detective novels often seem like vehicles for his ultracynicism towards English stereotypes.

Its a book obsessed with love and death however, and that gives it a fair heft despite the showmanship and gaudy self indulgence (which elements make it v enjoyable to read most of the time). I dread to think what his book on Homer is like.

I got very very angry with Capitol for structural reasons, so its last chapters are waiting to be read when I'm in the correct mood of grim belligerence.

Oh, and picked up Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by Ioan Couliano. He's on the side of the magicians, which makes it my kind of book. Dipped into it before, but will finish this time. On suggested cures for extreme melancholic love, obsessed with an ideal unattainable woman:

Only "if there is no direct remedy," the doctor Bernard de Gordon, professor and practitioner, advises that there be recourse to the talents of an old and horrible shrew, to stage a dramatic scene. Under he clothes the old woman should wear a rag soaked in menstrual blood. In full view of thte patient she should first utter the worst invectives regarding the woman he loves and, if that proves useless, she should remove the rag from her bosom, wave it under the nose of the unhappy man, and shout in his fae: "Your friend, she is like this, she is like this!" suggesting that she is only - as the Malleus maleficarum is to say - "a bane of nature."

Exhausted, the doctor draws his conclusion: "If, after all that, he does not change his mind, then he is not a man but the devil incarnate."

Took a break from feeling gross while reading Malaparte's Kaputt, and read David Benioff's City of Thieves, which turns Kaputt's horrors into a rollicking buddy comedy/thriller. It's very entertaining, but it was a little off-putting to have details lifted directly from a book that from most accounts is at least in part also fiction.

I put Piers Plowman aside about halfway through. I knew it was a dalliance when I picked it up.

Next, I gave Pound for Pound by F.X. Toole a tryout, but it did not seem to me to be anything special. A jacket blurb invoked Hemingway, but the writing seemed to me more bald than lean and spare, and the characters suffered from a surplus of trivial activity and a lack of depth.

Last night I switched over to Dawn Powell's The Locusts Have No King. This is much meatier fare than Toole and Powell has a complete mastery over her material in a way that reminded me of Muriel Spark, although her handling of it is much less austere and her feeling for her characters is warmer, more intimate and more forgiving.

I'm really liking This Real Night, by Rebecca West, a sequel to The Fountain Overflows. Mrs. Aubrey is a gorgeous character - a natural aesthete without guile or affectation.

Oh, that's a lovely book.

Powell is so marvelous. I spent most of 2005 reading her stuff. Try A Time To Be Born next.

Jan Morris: Conundrum -- her memoir of changing sex (first published in 1974) -- only a little way in, but really good so far

I read Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker. It was marvellous, but other than knowing that Lewis really knows how to spin a yarn I'm not entirely sure why. It's partly an autobiography of his couple of years with a Wall St firm, part backstory of the guys at said firm, and part explanation of how the mortgage bond market exploded in the 80s. I'm mostly interested in these things anyway, but Lewis really makes you live it.

What's really fascinating is that even though it's undoubtedly been simplified, what's clear is that these highly-educated guys were being pumped out as little more than ultraconfident salesmen. I'd always assumed there was so much more to it than that. I'd love to have had a crack at it, actually, but no way on earth would I have had the personality to last even a week in the job.

Attempting to tackle Gaddis' JR for the second time. The premise seems like something I'd really enjoy, but it's tough so far working through his style. The book is in my laptop bag now and frankly intimidates me a little, like a giant hill I want to climb on my bike.

Raymond Durgnat - W.R - The Mysteries of the Organism. The movie itself (playing at the BFI in a one-off screening) is multi-layered to say the least, and requires a lot of time to be spent on reading and thinking about various aspects; a lot of time needed to contextualise Yugoslavia's place in cold war politics that feed into this.

The writing has a lot of work to do to be able to communicate those activities and processes and RD is more than up to the job, easily one of my favourities from the series, then again its one of the few films that probably warrants a BFI book. I suspect there are too many of them, although I've not read anywhere near like enough so there is a frustration there too.

Some poetry by Donne, re-read Barnes' Nightwood -- went on a date with someone that was a bit like this novel come to life, in a way.

Gave Cordwainer Smith's stories a once over -- the themes through the stories add up to something but there was not a single one that really stood out for me. Find short stories hard these days. Or so I thought, but now I'm getting through some of Ballard's for the first time and totally loving them: The Subliminal Man is amazing.

After spending the last cpl of months ploughing through a series of massive and popular fantasy novels and finally getting to the end last night, this morning i turned to the book at the top of the swaying unread stack - Up Above the World by Paul Bowles - as an antidote to dragons and olives. So far, it is really hitting the spot - full of that sense of hostile mystery that Bowles does so well.

fillum stuff for my disseration:

"Alan Clarke: The Television Series" - Dave Rolinson
"How to Read a Film" - James Monaco

started K.W. Jeter's The Glass Hammer a couple nights ago; haven't got too far into it yet, but it's p fascinating so far

Interesting that the James Monaco still gets studied. It's been around a long time - I think my copy is more than 30 years old. Presumably it's been updated but still.......

I've started reading the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn. I read Mother's Milk a few years back and thought it was good but not great. After reading the first in the sequence I now suspect it's beneficial to read these in order. I'd caution that these books are very dark, even misanthropic portraits of damaged people. But fantastically well written and compelling.

Im reading the 2009 edition, lots of stuff about cyberspace/multimedia/virtual reality in the closing chapters.

I finished The Locusts Have No King and would recommend it. The satire is very controlled and seldom goes ott. The whole book is filled with deftly flawed, but utterly believable characters, whose actions emerge from a wide variety of self-defeating urges.

read A Time to Be Born, Aim. This woman is a god.

there was a 2009 ed. of Glass Hammer? I'm reading an old used copy I picked up in Ann Arbor

(not that surprising considering I have the 2009 edition of Morlock Night, I suppose)

I finished "All Quiet on the Western Front". I thought it was pretty great (I guess that's not an unconventional opinion). It struck me as being very modern, from the earthy gallows humor to the brutally honest realism about the grim and relentless slaughter of the war, to the existential refusal of the soldiers to succumb to the absurdity and meaningless of their situation. Some beautiful poetic passages too, even though the translation seemed at times a bit dated.

gilbert sorrentino - imaginative qualities of actual things

I finished Alan Furst's Mission To Paris this morning. Excellent as always. There's less and less to distinguish his books, the more I read; I think I've said before, but they're getting like one long encyclopaedic novel in twelve volumes. I wonder how they'd read intercut, like Godfather II?

That said, there was one gaping hole that irked me in this volume, where the hero is in a tight spot and has to reach out for help, but goes to the Americans instead of a local guy who's helped him out of an even tighter spot less than half-a-dozen pages before. It eventually ties up the plot nicely, as it turned out, but screeching at a book for passing over an obvious motivation is generally something best avoided, I feel.

In keeping with the war theme but from a slightly different angle: now reading Walt Whitman's Specimen Days.

Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion is so good.

Edith Wharton's short stories not on a par with her novels imo. Judging from Men and Ghosts anyway.

hmmm....disagree, at least not when you've got "The Other Two," "Roman Fever," "omengranate Seed," "Autre Temps," "The Dilettante," and about seven or eight others. I'll say this: the flaws (didacticism, dull metaphors) plague her novels too.

I haven't read "The Eyes" in years but that one struck me as her best ghost story.

I fell into reading Melville's "The Confidence Man", I like it but it's also good for putting me to sleep at night.

Xp Well I'm just judging from one collection but they were all wrapped so neatly, ending an an obvious "aha! You see?" moment, and I saw, I just didn't care. These were not great life lessons. Felt the same about The Eyes pretty much tbh. Afterward otoh didn't try and teach me anything but it had a great slow-burn chilling (er... slow chilling?) denouement.

wrapped up so neatly, I mean.

I see that the northern days have actually been receding and the southern days advancing for almost a month now. Time for a new WAYR thread?

picked up 'great expectations' last night on a whim and wound up staying up an hour later than i intended to. weird that no one ever mentions how funny it is -- it's almost like reading roald dahl or something.

What larks!

Afterward otoh didn't try and teach me anything but it had a great slow-burn chilling (er... slow chilling?) denouement.

I don't look for lessons in stories so I guess there's a conflict.

Was Wharton's career concurrent with O. Henry's?

(Thinking 'yes' but can't remember with any kind of accuracy)

Dickens - Night Walks. Brill descriptions of old London, and my first by him (usually allergic to canonical English writers).

Philip Dick - The Penultimate Truth.

Thomas M. Disch - The Genocides. This was often great, more into descriptions of crops taking over and speculations as to whether this was a work of god rather than the inter-community fannydangle, that meant I was slipping in and out of it more than I should have been. More into how clearly out of their depth human being are when confronting catastophre.

Wonderful how anybody didn't make it.

I've read The Penultimate Truth which was one of my favorites of the PKD novels that I've read

crops taking over and speculations as to whether this was a work of god rather than the inter-community fannydangle
crops get inspired by humans taking liberties? Like the pedo-priest alibi?? Or what??

http://www.amazon.com/The-Genocides-Thomas-M-Disch/dp/0375705465/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342899430&sr=8-1&keywords=thomas+disch+the+genocides

The Penultimate Truth works the alternative WWII history angle so much better than Man in the High Castle.

Don't get someone not liking Wharton's short stories. They're great!

See the opening lines to "The Day of the Funeral":
“His wife had said: ‘If you don’t give her up I’ll throw myself from the roof.’ He had not given her up, and his wife had thrown herself from the roof.”

I wrote a story a few years ago using that approach

OK, reading vol 1 of Etienne Leroux's 'To a Dubious Salvation' trilogy. This is some mad shit. South African novel from 1962--a guy goes to a big farm in western South Africa to meet his future wife, one of a vast clan of Jewish utopian/sci-fi-style farmers/winemakers; is never certain which of the many young women at the house is actually his bride-to-be, keeps getting trapped in weird philosophical conversation with future in-laws who ignore what he actually says and argue fiercely with the view they've attributed to him.

Apparently later volumes add Hercules analogues and murder mystery plots to the mix.

I have no idea if it's actually GOOD but it's certainly keeping my interest.

Reading chunks of Calasso's The Ruin Of Kasch - Calasso turns from his typical amazingly written oblique aphorisms into the world's most brilliant crank for a most of the midsection. It's awesome.

Daniel Okrent's Last Call -- a fab read

As recommended by somebody on ILX, I'm reading Charles Portis's Dog of the South. Hilarious, quotable.

"Dog of the South" is fantastic!
― dylan (dylan), Wednesday, April 13, 2005 12:20 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Charles Portis's 'The Dog of the South' is definitively kick-ass.
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Wednesday, February 12, 2003 11:45 AM (9 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is there anywhere on ILE where JtN explains why 'The Dog of the South' is kickass? I'd be really interested in reading that.
― Cozen (Cozen), Wednesday, February 12, 2003 2:11 PM (9 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Better to sell your Yellow Dog and read Dog of the South by Charles Portis.
― Ken L (Ken L), Wednesday, April 13, 2005 9:57 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Actually, I'm starting to think that Glass Hammer has more in common with Penultimate Truth than Man in the High Castle does.

Attempting to tackle Gaddis' JR for the second time. The premise seems like something I'd really enjoy, but it's tough so far working through his style. The book is in my laptop bag now and frankly intimidates me a little, like a giant hill I want to climb on my bike.

― Spectrum, Saturday, July 14, 2012 4:05 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This book has a reputation for being difficult and inaccessible, but it's actually neither of those things. It's definitely unconventional, but Gaddis gets away with it because he is very, very good at dialogue; you'll pretty much always know who is talking because he captures the nuances of speech so well. If you read it without the preconception that you are about to read a difficult book, you shouldn't have any problems with it.

It is the funniest book I've ever read and there are so many great characters...I just wish everyone would read it and not be so afraid!

Feel like there are a lot of common uses of 'difficult' with regard to books that JR satisfies. Love it tho.

But that is good advice, go at a cracking pace and it really comes together, notemaking, pensucking approaches cripple it.

anyone read Kundera's Ignorance?

Feel like there are a lot of common uses of 'difficult' with regard to books that JR satisfies.

But I think what makes the book work so well is that he is working in a style that is superficially difficult but succeeding in making it extremely readable and comprehensible (which, imo, makes it not difficult).

But if this is about semantics, then yeah, you win. ;)

I've read Ignorance and I remember it as being good, though maybe a bit short of Identity and Immortality (I read a ton of his in a burst, years ago). But I can't remember any details, and a quick google isn't triggering anything at all.

xp

agree with that to an extent, but then even after you're over the style bump & got the rhythm + sound of the book, it's still got a lot of stuff going on that counts as 'difficult' - important actions flicker by in the background iirc, srious thoughts about capitalism art and entropy etc etc, v allusive. I mean I think it's a fucking delight, a pleasure to read and an all-time great novel, maybe 'difficult' is just in a messy place as a critical word at the moment - could function as 'interesting, serious, fair demands on the reader' but mostly implies 'not fun' (or features in a hardman cult of 'difficulty').

thanks, Ismael

A spree of one-nighters by Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Elmore Leonard and Richard Stark. PGW's Doctor Sally is a gem... how to win love by memorizing the kinds of milk bacteria.

John Ronson The Psychopath Test
Don't think I've ever read a book by him before, though I used to read his column regularly about 10 years ago in whichever of the Guardian Weekend or Observer it was.
Very interesting. Some really odd stuff so far like the rooms full of psychopaths on lsd curing each other & the guy who got into Broadmoor as a scam to avoid a gbh charge but can't get back out.
Now just got onto the chapter on meeting Robert Hare who I met myself in 2006 thanks to a progressive college Psychsoc getting him in for a talk at my old college.

Sea And Sardinia - my first Lawrence. It's weird - if I read in big chunks, I find it listless, overcaffeinated. Skipping around and reading bite-sized bits and pieces though, it's brilliant.

otm. I bought it Twilight in Italy a few weeks ago and was struck dumb by a couple of chapters, notably the one called "The Spinner and the Monks."

It's tremendously easy to just hop around as well, seeing as how its narrative is bound less by consequence than by circumstance ("...and then this happened and this happened and this happened") and every passage is practically self-contained.

I've had Sea and Sardinia for about a month now, and that's actually how I've been approaching it, too; it's sitting on the end table, and I pick it up every once in a while and flip to a random page, and it's been great that way.

I tried reading The Rainbow recently but couldn't make it through. Earlier this year I read Sons and Lovers and thought it was great, though, so I dunno...Lawrence overload? His shorter works that I've read (especially The Fox) were very good, too.

The Rainbow and WIL were essential to my development but I'm not sure I have the courage to reread them...

I keep telling myself I'll go back and finish it, but I have such a ridiculous backlog of unread books here that it's starting to look unlikely...

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. I see now why it's so highly regarded. The last page is a knockout.

just finished Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre and Time of The Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa. found both slightly confusing at first and then got way into intercutting structure and intricate plot/characters. esp Llosa, have two more lined up to read by him: The Green House and Conversations in the Cathedral. Le Carre I find vv inconsistent, his prose can be wooden but TTSS brings the intrigue/paranoia of spying.

Shah Of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski - suspect this may be the start of a Kapuscinski Kick. Kapuscinski Kick is also a good name for a band.

With Le Carre, I really like the ones that hit that perfect "Office Politics (but where people die if you make the wrong decision)" vibe

Is The Russia House a good one? I have it sitting here.

I just polished off a couple of short novels:

The Ballad fo Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark and The Guide, R.K. Narayan. Very different, of course, but equally brilliant in their embrace of a specific place, time and culture.

I finished Michael Lewis' Home Game, which is sundry mostly comic reflections on the early days of fatherhood. It's as slight as a collection of Slate columns, which I think it might literally be, but good fun and I'm glad I read it. Basically he writes so well that he could make html code entertaining.

xpost The Russia House was the first LeCarre I read and it was enjoyable. Other than that I've only read the Smiley trilogy so I don't really know where it ranks overall, but it was a pretty good read.

Old Mortality by Sir Walter Scott. This is fun!

DFW's - The Pale King. A rather bumpy start, but really enjoying it now.

Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination.
Ursula LeGuin - The Left hand of Darkness.

Now reading some Harlan Ellison short stories - although from the intro there is a piece of film crit so looking forward to seeing how that works out. Sounds like my favourite genre already.

The mini-series of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is out now on DVD--the intricacy just calmly, gradually merges and gathers momentum in the patient four-eyed gaze of pale Smiley, AKA Alec Guinness. Gary Oldham is prob good too, but can't imagine a single movie providing the same experience. Having to wait for each episode helped, of course, long before DVDs.

Back to reading Fug You by Ed Sanders after completing both Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco which I wasn't very satisfied with after having enjoyed pretty much everything else I read by him. & The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson which was pretty enjoyable and has me wanting to read more by him as well as the 2 books he mentions by Robert Hare.

Reading Rome 1960, by David Maraniss. Rich clarity of backstories, and still early on, but already well into the valor and many hazards, incl media,emerging evidence of trainers administering drugs,commercial exploitation of athletes, recruiting athletes to get other athletes to defect, Cold War and older considerations of gender, race--some theatre of the absurd ricocheting through it all, not overemphasized. Grand, acerbic and droll.

Also sweet but non-cloying consideration of individuals--incl Avery Brundage, who had no prob w '36 Olympics and is life-long paleo-concervative, but now gets branded Communist for wanting a certain island to enter as Taiwan or Formosa, no longer as China. ha

sweetly ironic, in this case

just began 'in the watches of the night' by peter baldwin, which examines how nocturnal life in the city began to change with the advent of streetlights and what not, whereas previously cities were basically pitch black at night and life was quite different.

in the queue is 'traveler of the century' by andres neuman.

That's a funny idea, it's kind of obvious but I've never thought about it. There was that other study recently too, about how people used to all wake up in the middle of the night and go out for a bit.

That sounds cool. I've often wondered whether electric and gas lighting have contributed significantly to, e.g., literacy rates, or science and the arts. Imagine how hard it must have been to do intellectual tasks after dark just by candle or torchlight.

thought i just posted this, but it seems to have gone awol:

Roman historian Ammianus wrote how in late antiquity in Rome the streets at night were so well lit that it was as easy to distinguish people as if it were day.

the book begins with an interesting novelistic approach, imagining a night on the dark, dark town by a revolutionary war-era sailor.

Imagine how hard it must have been to do intellectual tasks after dark just by candle or torchlight.

questions of cost too - candles a nasty expense for a poor scholar.

i'm about halfway through chris kraus' i love dick and it's kind of appalling.

I leave tomorrow for 15 days of camping and hiking. I am bringing with me many books, some of them mere featherweights and a few awesome ones. I'll report here when I return.

just began 'in the watches of the night' by peter baldwin, which examines how nocturnal life in the city began to change with the advent of streetlights and what not, whereas previously cities were basically pitch black at night and life was quite different.

in the queue is 'traveler of the century' by andres neuman.

― omar little, Saturday, 28 July 2012 19:54 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's a funny idea, it's kind of obvious but I've never thought about it. There was that other study recently too, about how people used to all wake up in the middle of the night and go out for a bit.

― Ismael Klata, Saturday, 28 July 2012 20:02 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what was that called, like three times i have told people about it and they haven't believed me and since i can't name it they think i'm making it up

i don't know of the study you are referring to, but i did a quick bit of googling and found this book:

At Day's Close: Night In Times Past

sounds fascinating!

there was also this BBC piece:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

that book indeed has an account of that phenomenon in it. i've read some of it, it was pretty interesting.

finished midnight's children -- started off really enjoying it, but overall i feel like it was missing something for me.

reading alice munro's runaway. it is completely fantastic. i'm just going to intersperse alice munro stories between all my other books until i finish everything she's written.

also making my way through the earthsea novels...

Sebald's The Rings of Saturn - I loved it. It seemed to have the scope and sublimity of tragedy, but without anything like a tragic plot. I love the narrator's Borgesian scholarly fussiness.

I'm almost finished 'The Voyage Out', Woolf's first novel. It's not got the brilliance of her other things but I've mostly enjoyed it anyway.

reading 'hiding man' the bio of don barthleme - have barely read his stuff beyond a story or 2 but i did something similar a few yrs back w/ richard yates, reading his bio cold & then his work & it went ok so we'll see..

also started 'the thousand autumns of jacob de zoet'

i'm just going to intersperse alice munro stories between all my other books until i finish everything she's written.

^^ ppl who've figured out how to live

seconded

i got Selected Stories recently so that sounds like a plan

Candace Savage: Crows -- nifty little book about corvid intelligence; I wish I had some crows or ravens as pets

Paula Fox: The Widow's Children -- amazingly good, but incredibly oppressive, spending such concentrated moment-by-moment time in the presence of such an awful person (Laura, the central character of the book)

Nabokov: The Tragedy of Mr Morn -- newly into English, sort of long-lost play, only just started

Finished The Voyage Out. Interesting ending that redeemed some of the flatness of the early bits.

I just started Moby Dick. Awesome. I started it once about 10 years ago and got about 4 chapters in before getting bored and quitting. That seems so weird now - I am hooked already after 1 chapter.

it's wonderful in a mental sort of 19th-C encyclopedia sort of way. i only read it last year for the first time and loved it. Lots of unintended homoerotic laughs, too.

Moby Dick is great in practically every way. I like how the distance of time and enshrinement as maybe the classic book in most every canon in no way reduces just how damn weird the thing can be.

I only read Moby Dick two months ago and was amazed by what an easy read it was.

I finished Michael Lewis' Home Game, which is sundry mostly comic reflections on the early days of fatherhood. It's as slight as a collection of Slate columns, which I think it might literally be, but good fun and I'm glad I read it. Basically he writes so well that he could make html code entertaining.

Agree this was pretty slight, though usually at least mildly amusing.

have the following books out from lib:

eileen myles - school of fish
adrienne rich - your native land, your life
susan howe - pierce-arrow
ludvik vaculik - the guinea pigs
laurie weeks - zipper mouth

John William's Stoner is so quiet and astonishing that I've had to put the book down every ten minutes and recover.

Stoner is great but the sections with his wife are over sentimental and annoying

I've had to put the book down every ten minutes and recover.
This happens to me all the time! Some things I can only tolerate in the smallest of portions. They have to digest before I can stomach more.

I am a lurker but I do read books btw.

John William's Stoner is so quiet and astonishing that I've had to put the book down every ten minutes and recover.

i did this with runaway. i had to stop in the middle of one of the stories and just put it down and recover, before i could continue with it. and i felt destroyed by each of the stories as they ended, and couldn't just jump to the next story. i think this is one of my favorite of munro's books thus far. "runaway" and "trespasses" were not that compelling for me, but every single other story was just completely fabulous, brilliant.

My summer of SF goes on:

Thomas M. Disch - Camp Concentration. In diary form but this is happily broken down for stretches of dialogue. But it serves the purpose - You never know quite what's going on outside of the camp, what is really what, and whether the whole thing is a fake anyway (at one point certain lines are crossed out). An experiment in engineered intelligence gone wrong, a juxtaposition with WWII, the works of Aquinas and the occult. A keeper.

Frank Herbert - The Eyes of Heisenberg. I've never read Dune (and could never stay with the film - must've been 12 or 22 when I saw it) but this is awesome and might make for a cracking film. This time its engineering immortality through genetics - loved the cobbled descriptions of the experiments - not sure though how Heinsenberg's theories are operating here though. And the ending is open-ended for a sequel.

Robert Silverberg - Hawksbill Station. Very 1984 (well its set in it), political prisoners sent back in time - politics are basically cold war and no twist, little play with that, unfortunately.

Philip Jose Farmer - Strange Relations. Seriously struggling with this but amazing from what I'm picking up. Would have turned my head upside down if i read this at 15. Need to re-read this back to back w/Schnitzler's Mother and Son.

Stoner is great but the sections with his wife are over sentimental and annoying

Not the early scenes, esp the one in which she realizes she must have sex with him

Intriguing xpost description of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. I'm nearing the home stretch of Rome 1960. Americentric, but as prev mentioned it's sympathetic to most athletes, shrewdly appraising officials and overall Olympics organization/process, incl propaganda. plus some CIA spooks here and there. Other countries' athletes, teams and individuals, at least provide very strong supporting cast, and sometimes leave Americanskis in the dust (not very often, in this account anyway). Coaches and correspondents (plus media back home) also spark: Red Smith A.J. Liebling, with several other on-the-scene voices new to me.

She’d thought it was touch. Mouths, tongues, skin, bodies, banging bone on bone. Inflammation. Passion. But that wasn’t what had been meant for them at all. That was child’s play, compared to how she knew him, how far she’d seen into him, now.

What she had seen was final. As if she was at the edge of a flat dark body of water that stretched on and on. Cold, level water. Looking out at such dark, cold, level water, and knowing it was all there was.

from the story "passion" in runaway. this story just killed me. i went back through it today to take down the quotes i had flagged and i was caught up in it all over again.

this afternoon I reread "Trespasses" from the same collection, rayuela. Each time she enters a story sideways (it takes a few minutes to find my bearings) she kills me.

Finally finished Rome 1960. Great description of the closing marathon in the deep dark, on the Appian Way. Great ending or collection of endings, incl rolling fwd to see how various issues and trends (oh yeah, and lives) developed a bit more in the past 52 years. Yall see this? Reminds me to check out The Making of Americans, having enjoyed Three Lives, Tender Buttons, and several other collections. Also need to dig up my McElroy books: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/tip-sheet/article/53409-the-top-10-most-difficult-books.html

Dublinesque - Mattas-Villa: why is this repetitive, almost pseudo intellectual novel got good reviews?

Dublinesque - Mattas-Villa: why is this repetitive, almost pseudo intellectual novel got good reviews?

Dublinesque - Mattas-Villa: why is this repetitive, almost pseudo intellectual novel got good reviews?

Olaf Stapleton - Sirius. Best shaggy dog story ever.
Frank Herbert - The Green Brain
Delany - The Einstein Intersection. So much flies by me, the bits of fantasy cross-mised with a 'postmodernism(s)'. The range of quotes that kick each of the chapters.

THEM by Jon Ronson
the book about meetings with extremists, currently been reading about Ronson having started hanging with the David Icke posse. Think he's just been at the book signing where an anti-racist group have thrown a pie at Icke. There was an understanding that '12" lizard' translated as 'jew', which couldn't be tolerated. So creating work for bookshop staff who needed to clear pie off the children's section was an ideal answer.

also Philip Pullman's Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ where Christ seems to have been put in place of the tempting devil while the recently baptised Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness. Thought Christ was the miracle performer, maybe he is. Well enjoyable read anyway

I finished "Specimen Days" (the Whitman one, not the one by Michael Cunningham). Feels pretty essential, if you're a Whitman fan. At first I was a bit skeptical of the second half, where he gives play-by-play descriptions of sitting under trees and watching birds and stuff, but it gets better.

I read the good man jesus and the scoundrel christ last year -- when I got near the end, I found that someone had ripped 3 pages out of the library book. :(

Those three pages were the most blasphemous ones I should think.

I just returned from my annual two week jaunt in the mountains. While away I read several books (and also hiked 120 miles).

Gun With Occasional Music, J. Lethem was ok for a first novel, I guess. I did finish it, which says something in its favor. But honestly, the sci-fi dystopian elements seemed like little more than gimmicks and the underlying murder mystery reminded me of the line in Maltese Falcon about 'the cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter'. Probably my last attempt at Lethem.

Laxdaela Saga in the Penguin translation by Magnussen was excellent. I've now read... (stops to count on his fingers)... five Icelandic sagas and this one ties with Njal's Saga as the second best of the lot. The saga of Egil Skalla-Grimmson is still easily the top of the heap for me.

The End and The Expelled, two very brief novellas by Samuel Beckett. These were my first dabbles in Beckett and I was curious to see what I made of him. His strengthes were obvious: his sentences were very sharp, very clear and reminiscent of broken glass. He was not into realism, but had more affinity with allegory. Although I could see what he was up to and could admire the clean strokes with which he achieved his effects, I was not touched and was not moved. Reading the the Icelandic saga just beforehand made a very effective counterpoint to him.

Spook with some such subtitle as 'When Science Looks at the Afterlife', by Mary Somebody (also the author of Stiff, as the cover proclaims). This was pure meringue.

Also several short stories by Kipling, late career ones, starting around 1914. By then, anything he wanted to write, he could sell, so the quality was predictably uneven, with a couple of self-indulgences he should have kept in the drawer.

Finally, about half of Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, which I've read before. The fact that I was re-reading it says enough about my opinion of it.

I'm glad you mentioned it, Aimless. How is Tuckman? I've wondered if her scholarship and points of view hold up.

reading short story collection by kelly link, 'stranger things have happened.' i'm enjoying it more with each passing story. reminds me a lot of russell hoban's linger awhile, even though i don't really remember that book. just a feeling i have as i read.

As someone who has no claim to scholarship of any sort, I cannot evaluate Tuchman's scholarship with any precision. I understand that she was conversant with large amounts of original source material for her books. She had a good eye for the telling detail and the striking quotation.

In regard to her points of view, I think she constructed them rather soundly and they have withstood the passage of time quite well. This isn't to say she is more right in her views than other historians, for there is no unit to measure this by.

Aimless, you might try Beckett's early novel Mercier et Camier, with influence of his taste in early film comedies, though it does get darker, duh. Start from his very first, even--blanking on the title--I liked it though!

Just found out that peter Brown of Cream/Battered Ornaments/PIblokto! put out an autobio in 2010 cos I found it in my local remainder bookshop.
Just been reading about his childhood, looking forward to reading about the 60s/early 70s.

also found a copy of Zeitz's book on the Flapper which I've heard might be considered a bit racist, totally concentrating on white females but I thought it looked like an interesting read. Thunk I'd missed it after not grabbing a copy a couple of weeks back but saw one on a pile above the shelves today. So grabbed it.

Also got an abridged version of Ibn Battuta's Travels started again. Cos I finished the Jon Ronson Them I had as my jacket pocket book.

& I'm a few pages away from the end of Ed Sander's FUg You which has been great. Hadn't realised that his outfit from the cover of It Crawled Into My hand, Honest was the same one a youthful Ronald Reagan had worn in one of his better known films. All the outfits came from the film company's wardrobe.

The Beckett novel I xpost blanked on is Murphy: first to be published, that is (1938),though as far as I know, the first to be finished was Dream of Fair to Middling Women, unpublished 'til the 90s, despite his becoming a culture star way before. Doesn't necessarily mean it was only fair to middling, he could be pretty hard on his early stuff.

that aimless hasn't read beckett yet seems odd

In spite of all appearances to the contrary, any well-read Oxbridge grad of callow years could probably outgun me in a comparison of our respective life lists of 'greats'. There are huge piles of literature and hundreds of canonical authors I have not read, yet. The holes in my reading life gape so hugely that one could pilot battleships through them. Nay, flotillas of battleships. I'm more a book lover than a book worm.

i've tried beckett and....haven't succeeded. i feel like if i started smoking meth it would sll come together. gertrude stein as the same effect on me. maybe i'm just a big baby.

i'm finishing *travels with my aunt* by graham greene and it is a HOOT. a hoot i tell you.

then i'm gonna finish up pulphead by john jeremiah sullivan. which may have been a mistake to read. oof. makes me want to throw out my computer and my pen and pencil set and anything in the house that might be used as a writing implement. so depressing. not like i'm really in any competitions with any writers - i'm only an occasional writer of occasionals - but still he makes you go damn that's good stuff and i wish i had thought of it. he is an accomplished journalist and i'm not...that. i should look at it as inspiration to try harder. but i hate trying! plus, he's even younger than me. i'll bet he doesn't have kids. kids are the death of any writer. unless you can afford a nanny. or a wife who will give up her life for you. its the least my wife could do! she always wants to "do stuff" that "she would enjoy". a pox on this house!

Aimless, have you read Watt or "Dante and the Lobster"?

there was a review in the sunday times of 'pulphead' a couple of weeks ago that really made me want to check it out

You can read the Christian rock piece that appears in the book here

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/200401/rock-music-jesus

Alfred, no.

pulphead is kinda better than anything. american. non-fiction-wise. since forever.

Just finished Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing, which makes an argument that appropriation/reuse/reconfiguration of existing texts is underutilized in writing, especially in comparison to other artforms that have been using similar methods for decades (like duchamp's fountain or sampling in music). pretty good book, although tbh the whole thing could have been boiled down to a single 20 page essay and it probably would have been just as good.

just before that i read the obscure book For Whom the Bell Tolls. i guess it's not too cool to dig hemingway these days, but i do. still, it would be nice if robert jordan was..i don't know.. more flawed?

i'm about 100 pages into arsula k. le guin's The Dispossessed, which was recommended for me by a friend, but after searching for discussion on it on ilx i noticed it did really well in lamp's recent speculative fiction poll. after that i'll either dive into The Origins of Totalitarianism, become baffled by Either/Or, or retreat back to roth (the plot against america).

arsulaursula

IN A SUMMER SEASON by Elizabeth Taylor. My first by her, v. much enjoying, w/ lots of quietly desperate comedy. Some of the writing reminded me a little of hENRY James, so i was p pleased w/ myself when THE SPOILS OF POYNTON turns up as a minor plot point.

E.T. rules!

i'm finishing *travels with my aunt* by graham greene and it is a HOOT. a hoot i tell you.

Seconded; that book is so much fun! I don't think I could ever pick a favorite Greene novel but that one's probably in the top tier.

yeah, seems like you can't go wrong with Greene, although I haven't read 'em all. Re Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness is also worth checking. About half-way through 2626. Often effective, the way Bolano escorts, marches rolls us through the enforced pacing x poignant moments, often deep, distanced and compelling, but the overall presentation of characters in society, the more "realistic" parts, at such length, are not so compelling--of course it's about the flattening extensions of time and perception and how (do) these relate to tiny revelatory convergences, I know that's the point, but also notice a mention of "dreams are semblances and also treading water." I *think* that's what the character Barry says, pertains anyway. Also anyway, I'll go with the flow and tread.

Elizabeth Taylor is great. I recently got her Complete Short Stories, which had some 16 stories that weren't in any of the various other short story volumes by her I had, so that was most excellent.

I've started reading "Try" by Dennis Cooper. Its powerful but very disturbing.

yeah, seems like you can't go wrong with Greene, although I haven't read 'em all.

imo It's a Battlefield, Doctor Fischer of Geneva, and The Captain and the Enemy are about as close to dud as he gets, but just save those for last; all of his stuff is at least worth reading.

finished kelly link, on to the 2nd book in the earthsea series

reading robert jay lifton 'destroying the world to save it' abt aum shinrikyo - it's a little dry tbh, but interesting

abandoning '..jacob de zoet' - i acknowledge it's p good, just too esoteric or too historical fiction-feel for my personal tastes

think im gonna start the keith richards bio & jennifer egan 'look at me'

"Elizabeth Taylor is great. I recently got her Complete Short Stories"

i doubt this will come out in the states? but maybe i can find a sympathetic book store. i don't like buying things online, but maybe i will make an exception...

retreat back to roth (the plot against america).

one of my favs fwiw, like i think of him as a comfort blanket too but this one's so good & is really interesting contextually & stylistically & stuff

Joanna Russ - Exra(Ordinary) People. Gave up then came back to 'finish'. I like the idea of her, hard to find a voice that I can listen to.

Philip Jose Farmer - The Gate of Time. Liked this but I want him to write about sex with aliens than fake WWII stuff. This one featured an SF fan for a hero so there was some hilarity.

Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You, Mr.Rosewater.

Frank Herbert - The Heaven Makers. Seriosuly love this guy. Gods are really just immortal aliens that make movies = your life, and then mess with it for their fun and pleasure. So they are of the Greek variety. Again explores the implications of immortality in a very basic way, you wouldn't think it cool had you thought about it for five fucking minutes.

Got a taste for the way its written. Character A says a bit of dialogue then has a think about what is behnd what A has said to B as well as what he might want t say next and then says it. All thoughts marked in Italics. Its just funny to me.

frank harris my life and loves as contrast to delany's new one

Aleksander Hemon - Question Of Bruno - love this stuff