All out of doors looked darkly in at... the belated winter 2013 'What Are You Reading' thread!

knock yrselves out, kiddos

Feeling cabbagey, read a chunk of Francis Wheen's biography of Tom Driberg (triggered by ILB - the novels/powell/class/hitchens chat before Christmas made me remember this article); exactly what I expected/wanted – very readable, poppy, heart in right place.

'heart in right place', god, brain clearly off, fingers just typing worse-than-cliches. I mean it's a portrait of Driberg that sympathetic to the best in him, and doesn't snipe – not shy of sex but not prurient, and not jumping on the contradictions of haute bohemia socialism.

I'm about halfway through 'The Instructions' at this point, and it's really, really good.

Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

the first half of the instructions is best first half of a debut novel in english in the past decade or two

i am reading 'language truth and logic', for my sins

Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

Anticipating ur review

Two hundred pages later, it's as nuanced as a Newsweek essay.

For easy future reference, here is the previous wayr thread from autumn 2012.

sheila fitzgerald -- the russian revolution
muriel spark -- the girls of slender means

fitzpatrick, not fitzgerald. it's a shortish but surprisingly dense and informative book.

Anna Kavan - Sleep Has His House

Stopped by library, came out with Langrishe, Go Down by Aidan Higgins.

the first half of the instructions is best first half of a debut novel in english in the past decade or two

...i hope the second half isn't the worst second half of a debut novel in english in the past decade or two.

I'm halfway through Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (now public domain in Canada!), a book I was supposed to read for English 101 a decade ago but never got past the Benjy chapter. Now that I can recall some of the class lectures, that part's not so bad. First half of the Quentin chapter has a lot of unreadable nonsense in it though.

Antonia White: Strangers - short fiction, mostly excellent and uneasy-making
Noémi Szécsi: The Finno-Ugrian Vampire - entertaining in a weird, affectless way, but could have easily been only half as long and got its point across. Not sure how the author's surname is pronounced, but I really hope it's "sexy"

Last night I picked up a copy of Riding Toward Everywhere by Wm. T. Vollmann that was sitting in one of my book piles. It presents itself as a book about hopping rides on freight trains, but so far it is mostly about Wm. T. Vollmann, who, even though I've only finished a couple dozen pages, I am guessing has some pronounced sexual issues centered on urine and urination. I could be wrong about that, but the hints in that direction are numerous.

It remains to be seen whether this book can be rescued from its current lack of interesting things to say.

^^ "SAY-chee," alas.

Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights? New year's resolution.

Just finished Gore Vidal's "Myra Breckenridge." Loved it. Hilarious.
Now I'm on to Barth--"The Sot-Weed Factor." I'm amazed by his skill as a writer but sometimes my eyes glaze over.

started santantango. opening pages excellent - mixture of mysticism, decay (of futures & pasts) and dostoevskyan rural cunning, in a symbolic almost beckettian-feeling environment (ie this is our existential position).

oh and v quickly skim read The Fellowship of the Ring (read it a lot as a child). It was like playing WoW - a lot of dull running/trudging between interesting locations.

Our Friends from Frolix 8 is great so far. Bizarre and entertaining.

Max Hastings' All Hell Let Loose, a single-volume history of the Second World War. It's very good. It leans much heavier towards snippets of personal anecdote, mostly sourced from the correspondence of ordinary people, than the Antony Beevor one I've just finished. As a consequence Beevor is stronger on the flow of events, and Hastings on feeling. Both have their merits, though it suits me to have read Beevor first.

started santantango

get to the chopper thread!

oh yeah, forgot about that. during my Internet purdah.

Now I'm on to Barth--"The Sot-Weed Factor." I'm amazed by his skill as a writer but sometimes my eyes glaze over.

― Romeo Jones, Wednesday, January 9, 2013 4:51 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

started santantango. opening pages excellent - mixture of mysticism, decay (of futures & pasts) and dostoevskyan rural cunning, in a symbolic almost beckettian-feeling environment (ie this is our existential position).

― Fizzles, Wednesday, January 9, 2013 8:16 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you've made me want to read this with just that one line. i'm currently reading alice munro's hateship, loveship... thanks to ilxors saying good things about it (and i'm really enjoying the stories i've read so far), so i guess ilx is becoming my one and only reading recommendation source.

I'm now about 2/3 of the way through Riding Toward Everywhere, WTV. I will probably finish it, just because it is short. It has improved slightly, but not much. My final comment on this book is that Vollmann reveals himself to be a wholly unreconstructed romantic idealist whose imagination tyrannically insists on its primacy over all evidence of his senses. Authors with this mindset should not write non-fiction, imo.

I'm reading David Byrne's "How Music Works" which has just about held my attention for the first third or so. I'm not enough of a fan of Byrne or his approach to music to be in the target audience for this so I didn't really expect it to be more than moderately interesting. He comes across well personally although with a slightly creepy over-confidence that seems basic to his character rather than a consequence of his success.

Also started reading "Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont" which I think is the only Elizabeth Taylor novel I haven't read. It's reputedly one of her best but I've put off reading it for years for fear I'd find the subject matter too gloomy. I'm about to find out!

Wm. T. Vollmann, who, even though I've only finished a couple dozen pages, I am guessing has some pronounced sexual issues centered on urine and urination

These are not his only pronounced sexual issues... He's got some weird prostitute thing going on too, from my very limited reading of some of his other non-fic

Reading Penelope Houston's short book on the 1942 Germans-invading-Britain movie 'Went the Day Well?', which is interesting but contaisn no major surprises

He's got some weird prostitute thing going on too

Well, he seems to like them, which I guess isn't all that weird. But he's not ashamed to write about it, which is.

Also started reading "Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont" which I think is the only Elizabeth Taylor novel I haven't read. It's reputedly one of her best but I've put off reading it for years for fear I'd find the subject matter too gloomy. I'm about to find out!

Mrs P at the C is great, frankiemachine. Yes, it's death and ageing treated in a fairly unwinking way, but the sympathetic depth of its humour and insight makes it v enjoyable to read, even if the subject matter can't help but mean that h&i is v bleak. (I am normally one who, if they saw the phrase "sympathetic depth of its humour and insight" in a review, wd react very angrily, but I can't think of a better way of putting it).

I think what I'm saying is that for it to be so bleak and funny without being mocking needs great sympathy. There's one particularly awful scene towards the end where the avoidance of mockery is impressive (a man behaves v foolishly so that you go "aaaargh" and squirm in embarrassment). You end up being aware of the awkwardness of individual incommunicable feeling, the acts of awkwardness that engenders - a v English thing made into an existential thing - without there being a sense of folly or malign knavery/wickedness of misguided action.

Istanbul - Pamuk
The Witness - Jose Saer

v much enjoying 'beyond a boundary' by clr james, cultural criticism & political history disguised as cricket memoir

Vollmann is behind me. Last night I started on Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz.

spent the last week or so slowly advancing through Under the Volcano -- can't tell if I'm savoring, or just not that into it

Helen Garner: Cosmo Cosmolino -- very much enjoying, but Garner always has these female characters who will put up with any amount of filthy shit from a man as long as he has long hair and can play guitar

finished the swimming-pool library by alan hollinghurst last night. in the end i found it... disagreeable

I read it last fall and enjoyed it, especially after the slog his last novel was -- his first real dud.

the prose was great, but i just really couldn't get into the upper-class white solipsism of the main character. maybe that was the point and i'm confusing narrative POV with authorial intent, but i dunno! there were so many gross things going on that just never really got resolved or examined. perhaps reading more hollinghurst will revise my opinion of this one.

Holinghurst is aware of it and his protagonist is rather dim at points, from what I remember

yes, the protagonist is plainly uncurious and self-involved. i guess part of my response to the book or the experience of reading it is also to its critical reception, which (from what i saw) seems to have been along the lines of: this is a fun, sexy, literary book about homophobia and the gay experience. maybe if i had approached it from the beginning as a dark, very dry satire. i guess that's not really the correct mode to read it in, either though.
i'm torn about this book, because it's definitely a well-written, honest portrayal of a loathsome but sometimes sympathetic character, but at the end it's like... well? and of course there's the implication that the protagonist might soon be dead or dying of HIV/AIDS, which... does that foreclose on any chance of redemption? just rambling here obv

Anyone want to recommend standout novels from 2012? I've tried a couple found on year-end lists.

I liked Shani Boianjiu's The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, about three girls in the Israeli Defense Forces. I also read Elliott Perlman's The Street Sweeper, which has some fatal plot problems, too many convenient "small world" connections between far-distant characters.

the prose was great, but i just really couldn't get into the upper-class white solipsism of the main character. maybe that was the point and i'm confusing narrative POV with authorial intent, but i dunno! there were so many gross things going on that just never really got resolved or examined. perhaps reading more hollinghurst will revise my opinion of this one.

It just seemed like Hollinghurst had created himself this character he was too in love with to bother making the rest of the book as interesting as he thought it was

I also liked Shani Boianjiu's The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, except for that disaster zone of a final chapter/story, which an editor should have cut out and binned.

Of the stuff making best-of-2012 lists, off the top of my head I'd also add 'A Naked Singularity' by Sergio De La Pava and 'At Last' by Edward St Aubyn (but read the earlier books in the series first). Kevin Powers's 'The Yellow Birds' was good but over-hyped, I thought.

I've read the Patrick Melrose anthology, not gotten to At Last yet. I liked the third volume, the most straightforwardly comedic. He's good when he's being funny. I'm not so interested when it's about trauma and family issues.

Isabel Allende The House of The Spirits. Maybe I disregarded obvious magical realism warning signs but finding these fantabulous people rather wearying. I'm guessing there's going to be no plot beyond birth/life/death unto many generations. Gruesome tragedies occur routinely and are forgotten about within a page. Sentences and paragraphs long outstay their welcome.

Darcy O'Brien's A Way of Life, Like Any Other. Very droll.

Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time - very entertaining stuff so far. Maybe I should be reading the Nabokov translation, but this one by Martin Parker and Neil Cornwell seems good enough.

The revival of chatter about Thornton Wilder got me reading that high school perennial The Bridge of San Luis Rey; now I'm looking at The Eighth Day and wondering whether I should bother.

Has anyone read Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin? Thinking about it.

cozy fireside read for the winter nights

xposts - A Hero of Our Time is great! I'm guessing that's the same translation I read (Penguin Classics edition?), and I had/have no complaints.

Magic Hours by Tom Bissell
The Mystic Masseur by V. S. Naipaul - My first Naipaul. Fun. Also a dollar at the Goodwill.

The Lermontov is a Oneworld classic and a different translation from the Penguin. But I doubt it makes a huge difference. Finished it, and it was great - about all you could want from a Romantic 19th Century Novel with a sneering, Byronic anti-hero. Just a shame it was only 140 pages or so.

i finished reading ben rogers' life of a j ayer. edward st aubyn shows up. so do e e cummings, mike tyson, and nigella lawson, among others. i had no idea.

bulgakov, a country doctor's notebook. you know, i have been aware of this book for years and it's not clicked in my head at any point that it's the same bulgakov; like, in my head there's a distinct nineteenth-century realist bulgakov who obviously doesn't exist. -- this might have something to do with deciding to read it the same week i decided to read stendhal, some week in 2010, though obviously i didn't read this, in 2010, or stendhal.

frankiemachine, How Music Works gets better, esp. when he gets into his personal musical odyssey, although he doesn't want it to be just another ageing white rock guy memoir, as he says toward the end. Here; the personal stuff has a lot to do with how he's seen the music biz change over the years--also, wait for "How To Make A Scene" and the final chapter, which is like a book withing the book: a sly, grand view of the Music of the Spheres, scientific rationalization of same (also a lot of entertaining stuff about early capabilities and views of "rotating objects", as John Philip Sousa tags them, with fear and loathing)

beckett - more pricks than kicks
carver - where i'm calling from
richard ford - independence day (this is brilliant imo, funny and incredibly smart.)

Stuart Evers: Ten Stories About Smoking, which I admit to buying mainly because I liked the cover/packaging (it comes in a sort of hardback cigarette pack), but so far is also really good/sad/funny

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-O5NrEl59eEM/UNJDUrgup2I/AAAAAAAAMP4/FSbpqLSacvg/s1600/101.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5fHd1Y0m_es/UNJDWO5KrZI/AAAAAAAAMP8/L2WdOK9-Z8I/s1600/102.jpg

only reading from the canon, but finished sentimental education yesterday and gilead before that

skim-reading a heartbreaking work of staggering genius (even at 4x speed, I cringe when I read this)

gonna start a farewell to arms tonight

just started witold gombrowicz - bacacay on the plane

I've been reading the parts of Frank Kogan's "Real Punks Don't Wear Black" (or "ILM: The Book" as some wag once dubbed it) that I hadn't already read.

Mrs P at the C is great, frankiemachine. Yes, it's death and ageing treated in a fairly unwinking way, but the sympathetic depth of its humour and insight makes it v enjoyable to read, even if the subject matter can't help but mean that h&i is v bleak. (I am normally one who, if they saw the phrase "sympathetic depth of its humour and insight" in a review, wd react very angrily, but I can't think of a better way of putting it).

I think what I'm saying is that for it to be so bleak and funny without being mocking needs great sympathy. There's one particularly awful scene towards the end where the avoidance of mockery is impressive (a man behaves v foolishly so that you go "aaaargh" and squirm in embarrassment). You end up being aware of the awkwardness of individual incommunicable feeling, the acts of awkwardness that engenders - a v English thing made into an existential thing - without there being a sense of folly or malign knavery/wickedness of misguided action.

Having now finished I pretty much agree with this. But I never had any doubt the novel would be very fine (although to be honest it's even better than I imagined): I'm too much of a fan.

My reservation is just that I knew it'd force me to spend too much time thinking about things - ageing, physical deterioration, loneliness, bereavement - that come to mind unbidden often enough to make me doubt the wisdom of forcing them into my consciousness. But you are right the bleakness wasn't harrowing. To be honest I thought Taylor shied away a bit from the really horrible stuff. If she hadn't we may have got an even better novel but one I wouldn't have particularly wanted to read.

john adlard's rochester and contemporaries anthology, the debt to pleasure, which was really pretty bad. way too much burnet. weirdly tends to make rochester a figure seemingly devoid of context than just reading the penguin poems of, bcz that ended up with me going 'huh, who is this elkanah settle' and then reading some dryden, whereas this makes it seem like rochester was the only poet writing during the entirety of the restoration and nothing else existed of it culturally except some kind of nimbus surrounding john wilmot earl rochester

djuna barnes, nightwood, which i have had this copy and intended it to read approximately as long as i have known who t.s. eliot was. first chapter i was really feeling, later chapters less so, i have been in a bad mood, certainly i will reread it. i don't know whether to discard this copy, though, i wound up with a barnes anthology with the whole text in the meantime. reminds me of carson mccullers and we have always lived in the castle in its larger-than-lifeness, i guess.

heh always found the first chapter of Nightwood so rich-like-a-cream-cake that i could never get beyond it.

Just finished Russell Hoban's Pilgermann, a bit rougher going than some of his others, tons of ideas and not much in the way of narrative, still worth reading though. Brave move starting your book with a castration.

Now starting Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter. Also have Cabrera-Infante's Three Trapped Tigers, the first 30 pages of which seemed incredible. I'm sure I'm missing massive amounts of it by not knowing Spanish, though he apparently helped translate the edition i have.

xp

I haven't read that Adlard anthology. I should take a look at least, I guess. Don't much like Burnet - the Life & Death of Rochester is ok, sort of, but cannot get on with the History of My Own Times (sympathy with Swift, who left a lot of furious arguing marginalia in his copy)

frankiemachine, How Music Works gets better, esp. when he gets into his personal musical odyssey, although he doesn't want it to be just another ageing white rock guy memoir, as he says toward the end. Here; the personal stuff has a lot to do with how he's seen the music biz change over the years--also, wait for "How To Make A Scene" and the final chapter, which is like a book withing the book: a sly, grand view of the Music of the Spheres, scientific rationalization of same (also a lot of entertaining stuff about early capabilities and views of "rotating objects", as John Philip Sousa tags them, with fear and loathing)

Thanks that's useful information. My reading of this has stalled a bit, about a third of the way in, not that I lost interest but I got distracted by other things. I'm still dipping into it and reading a couple of pages at a time. At this rate it will take me a long time to finish, but the likelier outcome is that some time over the next few week I'll either get back into it and read it properly or abandon it altogether.

It does seem dry at first, then he gets caught up in it.

Sometimes the lyrics of "Once In A Lifetime" don't seem too far away, though he works at maintaining his time machine tour guide cool.

You could prob start in the middle and ramble around; some of these chapters were stand-alones originally (I subscribe to his free email David Byrne Journal, which only gets updated when he's really into something----he announced the ebook edition, "with some little music files". and also, in the next sentence, his doubts about ebooks, esp. how long will we or our descendants find them accessible, esp. compared to print)

started to lose patience w/ Under the Volcano, but then I got to the chapter detailing Hugh's hilarious teenage rebellion & time at sea... should be required reading for every adolescent malcontent imho

xp

I haven't read that Adlard anthology. I should take a look at least, I guess. Don't much like Burnet - the Life & Death of Rochester is ok, sort of, but cannot get on with the History of My Own Times (sympathy with Swift, who left a lot of furious arguing marginalia in his copy)

― woof, Tuesday, 15 January 2013 12:38 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, is it published with swift's comments inline anywhere? that would be fun. -- adlard's not an anthology exactly, it's one of those 'in his voices and the voices of his contemporaries' type things. but it's just lots of fawning and lots of 'my god, he's a christian after all!!' and the same sources as seen everywhere else for being an italian mountebank, abducting his wife, etc. -- i look forward to finding a good book on rochester one day, i guess.

heh always found the first chapter of Nightwood so rich-like-a-cream-cake that i could never get beyond it.

― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 15 January 2013 11:19 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

mm well in the later chapters people start feeling things and talking about it more than doing things i guess. idno if that's accurate actually.

the structure is quite neat i guess it is something like

1 grand context-setting, introduces felix
2 introduces robin, whom felix marries
3 goes back and introduces nora, whom robin has left felix for
4 goes back and introduces jenny, whom robin has left nora for
5 felix or nora or jenny complains to the doctor about everyone else
6 felix or nora or jenny complains, etc
7 same again
8 coda

-

i am now reading the devils, though a persistent headache is making it slow going.

also i am having the usual russian novel problem viz. who the hell are all these people -- how is liza mrs drezhov's daughter but involved with mr drezhov!! that doesn't make any sense at all!!

--

this is awesome though:

“About a year before, I read an article of his in a periodical written with a most dreadful affectation of the crudest kind of poetry as well as psychology. He described the wreck of a steamer somewhere near the English coast, which he had witnessed himself, and how he had watched the drowning people being saved and the dead bodies brought ashore. The whole of this rather long and verbose article was written solely with the object of showing what a fine fellow he was. Between the lines one could actually read: ‘Look at me, see how bravely I behaved at those moments. What is the sea, the storm, the cliffs, the wreckage of the steamer to you? I have described it all sufficiently with my mighty pen. Why look at that drowned women with the dead child in her dead arms? You’d better look at me. See how I was unable to bear the sight, and turned away from it. Look, here I stood with my back to it; here I was horrified, and could not bring myself to look back; I closed my eyes — don’t you think it is very interesting?’”

dang y'all are makin' me want to re-read Nightwood... or maybe just go to Paris and booze it up for a few years, idk

Read it in college and it made no impression except for wonder at Eliot granting the rare favor of an introduction; but it's been long enough, and it's a short book.

boozing it up in Paris for a few years always worth a look, tho

I'm always picking at various short story collections. Today I read "The Mangler" in Stephen King's Nightshift. Holy shit! The concept pretty much sounds like what someone might make up to parody King, but it's damn good. For some reason I'm surprised at how occult some of the stories in here have been. Then again, I haven'
Then I read an IB Singer memoir thingy (in _In My Father's Court_) where lil' Isaac worries the war might've started cuz they moved to a nicer apartment. A real fancy one (apartment, not war) with no rats or garbage in the stairway.

Started Javier Marías' _The Infatuations_, which begins quite wonderfully -- but then my mood was off, so I've temporarily ditched it in favor of _The Pickwick Papers_ and the mathematician Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw's autobiography _To Talk of Many Things_. Here's an paragraph from the latter, from a chapter about getting her first hearing aid in 1949, when she was about 40.
"My first hearing aid was a crude contraption. A cable ran from the ear-piece to a bulky microphone worn strapped to my midriff beneath my clothes, causing appalling rubbing noises with every movement. From the microphone more wires led to heavy batteries for which I made a bag strapped to my thigh. The batteries lasted at most for a day, but it was wonderful. When I walked down our hard-wood stairs I heard my footsteps for the first time and nearly fell headlong. I heard birds sing. To hear cars in the road came as a shock. At last, I might begin to live a normal life."
[... then she goes a bit into some of the difficulties she's had, and how she's adjusted over the years]
"Apart from the actual lip-reading, Professor Ewing had taught me all manner of strategies. Although I was then only a child, they have been a keystone of my way of life ever since. For example: always to try to arrive early for any assembly of people and to choose a seat with its back to the light, so that those one needs to be able to hear will have the light on their faces. In order to avoid having to write from dictation, always to have a pencil and paper handy and ask others to write down their name, address, or a required telephone number. It is almost impossible for someone who is deaf, even with today's[2004's] modern aids and telephone amplifiers, to pick up numbers and letters of the alphabet said separately - we need to have them in some context and to be able to see a speaker's face. It is helpful when people talk clearly, perhaps louder than normal, but any exaggerated 'mouthing' or very slow speech is detrimental - the speech has to be natural to give the natural lip movements."

Euh, would anyone be interested in starting an ILB Commonplace Book thread? I guess we kinda-sorta have one in the favorite sentences thread, but not quite.

Never could get to grips with Nightwood--have tried and failed twice, but can't quite bring myself to give my copy away

Currently reading Joan Lindsay: Picnic at Hanging Rock

Javier Marías' _The Infatuations_

this is out??

In Norwegian, I'm afraid.

maybe i can learn norwegian before march 13th.

His Illegal Self by Peter Carey. I got it for xmas and it's pretty good so far, if you like Peter Carey

I finished Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz last night. It was a solid story of the slice-of-life-with-an-ensemble-cast variety. What made it epecially engaging for me were the culturally specific ideas and motives that drove the plot. This book could not have been written about any western society. I'm glad it was translated so i could read it.

I haven't yet chosen its successor.

Isn't it part of a trilogy? I used to have a QPB threefer, but he may not have intended them as an actual trilogy.

The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolano - 'Bout 30 pages in - so far, so noir. Waiting to see how beauty will betray the beast.

Finished The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin. Frustratingly meandering and elliptical but also hypnotic and playful with clever ideas that made me actually lol more than once. Some familiarity with the 1001 Arabian Nights would probably have improved the experience.

NW, Zadie Smith. I'm a big fan, probably more of her talent than her finished work. I keep expecting her to hit it out of the park with her next novel but based on the first quarter or so I don't think this is really going to play to her strengths. Still an enjoyable enough read so far.

i couldn't decide what made a lot of the choices about the structure and narratorial position of that novel not-arbitrary. i totally get what you mean about her talent vs the novels she has actually published. (though about two thirds of on beauty was pretty excellent imo)(though probably not ~the novel i'd want her to write~)

I agree with pretty much all of that. I really like On Beauty, her best by some distance and one of my favourite recent novels by anyone, but it still has enough clunky stuff to prevent it from being the novel I'd hoped she'd write. She has an obvious problem with form and of the various solutions she's tried I think channelling Forster has worked best. She's at her weakest when she feels the need get into the ring with the Po-Mo big boys. Her gifts - observation, empathy, an ear for dialogue, an astonishingly facility for creating fully rounded, credible characters - are of a more traditional, less cerebral (and IMO more valuable) kind.

See, that makes her sound great - and all the more puzzling that no browse has ever grabbed me.

heh i stopped agreeing with that like a third of the way through

finished a farewell to arms - not really a novel of ideas, is it?

now strating denis johnson's nobody move

Last night I picked up White Noise, Don DeLillo, and read about 35 pages into it. It's ok enough, but I'm getting this very strong vibe that reminds me of Little Miss Sunshine. Same exact tone. It is uncanny at times.

Uncanny.

At times.

A Farewell At Arms might be about the manipulation of ideas, about magical thinking. as experienced by the philosophical gentleman ambulance driver, clutching his damn code as he answers his cue and goes on and off stage in the spectacle of war:
"What cannot be broken down to simplicity under his clenched will must be cast out. Too much thinking, particularly on an abstract level, is dangerous. Abstract thoughts, like abstract words, seduce his mind away from essential experience, the true nature of things, and make him uncomfortably aware of the shadow world outside that sometimes haunts him in sleep. It is only when the weather is clear (the rain, too, is dangerous), the war is going well, and he can concern himself with the objects that arouse them, that he is entirely at ease. if at one time the emotions of war had excited him, increased his appetite for life, they now constituted the whole of life, and served him as drug against the thought of his possible death." Enter The Girl, who upsets his routines, with that L-O-V-E stuff. The quote is from After The Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the writers of Two Wars, by John W. Aldridge

Frederic Morton: A Nervous Splendor (Vienna 1888/1889) -- someone(s) recommended this ages ago in these parts, and I've finally got to it. Thank you, whoever you were, this is just what I want to be reading.

finished dostoyevsky, started on thackeray

Ismael I doubt you can get a proper feel for Smith from browsing her novels. She can write beautifully in patches but she's not a beautiful prose kind of writer, at least not consistently so. Her real talent is for character and inevitably that's cumulative.

I don't think she's for everyone so I'm not going to say "read On Beauty you'll love it". She has some pretty obvious flaws and whether you think her strengths outweigh them will be personal. But I do think you'd need to get properly to grips with the novel to know.

I really enjoyed her thoughts on joy in recent NYBR and the strange "OMG Joni Mitchell and the story of Isaac!" fractured vision in recent New Yorker; also the recent New Yorker story/novel prequel I hope (is it from NW?). And NW passes the random read test, so I'll prob read the whole thing. The skim brought a conversation into immediate focus: randomly compelling strangers in the city. But with this, I don't have to keep walking, for fear of being judged some staring weirdo male.

Halfway through White Noise now. Considered purely as satire, it seems like weak sauce. Making his narrator and main character a college professor and head of the of Hitler Studies department signalled his intent to shoot fish in a barrel. In a satirist, this is equivalent to an act of cowardice.

The only thing about this book that impresses me are the infrequent moments when DeLillo gives his narrator a respite from relentless coyness, irrelevance and confusion and allows him to make a cogent non-satirical observation based in something like reality. This seems to happen about once every six to ten pages.

Flicking between:

Laurent Binet - HHhH - WHICH IS REALLY REALLY GOOD
Daniel Clowes - David Boring - WHICH IS KINDA COOL
Issue 192 of the Paris Review (featuring interviews with Ray Bradbury and John McPhee) - WHICH IS QUITE INTERESTING

and stuff for an essay on racial passing/race as performance

I'm with you on WN, Aimless. It kept me away from DeLillo for years...until I found Libra and liked it.

A Farewell At Arms might be about the manipulation of ideas, about magical thinking. as experienced by the philosophical gentleman ambulance driver, clutching his damn code as he answers his cue and goes on and off stage in the spectacle of war:
"What cannot be broken down to simplicity under his clenched will must be cast out. Too much thinking, particularly on an abstract level, is dangerous. Abstract thoughts, like abstract words, seduce his mind away from essential experience, the true nature of things, and make him uncomfortably aware of the shadow world outside that sometimes haunts him in sleep. It is only when the weather is clear (the rain, too, is dangerous), the war is going well, and he can concern himself with the objects that arouse them, that he is entirely at ease. if at one time the emotions of war had excited him, increased his appetite for life, they now constituted the whole of life, and served him as drug against the thought of his possible death." Enter The Girl, who upsets his routines, with that L-O-V-E stuff. The quote is from After The Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the writers of Two Wars, by John W. Aldridge

― dow, Thursday, January 17, 2013 7:40 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

seems like a generous reading but I appreciate it

I agree re: DeLillo shooting fish in a barrel. Mao II is just rubbish, it pretends to discuss the individual vs the crowd, but the individual is a famous writer, and the crowds are cults or mobs. It's not an even playing field, and nothing of insight is gained. Falling Man is bad as well. And I haven't read anything else of his.

the last good kiss - james crumley

outstanding. reminiscent of the amazing arthur penn film 'night moves' in tone and murkiness and a specific sleazy '70s vibe.

Been a long time since I read them, but kind of enjoyed Americana, about a rising ad man who suddenly takes off with a movie camera. Delillo was an ad man too, so some entertaining stuff about that, and as an ad man he's got a good eye and ear, but the whole thing turns into a series of set pieces/motormouth monologues. Great Jones Street has an Iggy Dylan figure ditching his career too, laying low and meeting some interesting folks, like the ad man did. DeLillo comes up with some entertaining lyrics, and he gets the late 60s/earliest 70s burnt cusp of sketchy lives during wartime times garish rise of arena rock. But maybe you had to be there for to get how he gets it? Either way, the whole thing turns into a series of set pieces/motormouth monologues (one geezer's a good imitation of Wm. Burroughs, as he comes across on his records and in his interviews and book reviews). DeLillo: "The less I think about my early writing, the happier I am." Dunno which ones he's happy about.

I just looked Crumley up and it turns out I read one of his, Bordersnakes, years ago, before I started taking note of or even paying attention to what I was reading. I wish I could magic up a full list, so many half-memories. Lotta people voiding themselves in that one as I recall.

V late to the party, but - Moneyball by Michael Lewis. Two things have struck me - that the first baseball statistics were largely compiled by a cricket-obsessed Englishman; and I can't think of another sport where so many 'fans' have crossed-over to the professional side of the game. In the same charity shop I also picked up The Blind Side by Lewis, and a biography of Michael Jordan; American sports is a foreign country to me, they do things VERY differently there (the draft!)

Took a brief break from Nabokov's Glory, ten pages in, and have come back in a big way. Near the end and I've reached familiar that stage where I just wanna read N. unto eternity.

started to lose patience w/ Under the Volcano, but then I got to the chapter detailing Hugh's hilarious teenage rebellion & time at sea... should be required reading for every adolescent malcontent imho

Got about twenty pages into that before I glazed over into a stupor. I'm gonna give it another go soon, I imagine - it'll probably one of those cases where I'll discover I was just having an off day due to bad mojo/circadian rhythms or something.

john sutherland's notes to this edition of vanity fair are pretty annoying, and i think one of the reasons i'm going through it so slow. (the other being the usual thing of really noticing the fat that could be trimmed when you read a 19th-century serial novel in big chunks, i guess, but god he could have cut out at least two crawleys.) sutherland had written a book on thackeray's composition + work process and half of the notes are just annoying remarks on that vein viz. which sentences were three words longer in MS, and which notes of characterisation were changed. whereas he doesn't bother to gloss the facts about the waterloo campaign that thackeray assumes the reader knows.

xpost it's a very strange book, and even as I pass the halfway point, I'm still not sure how to feel about it... there's the sense of a timeless, stifling, inexorable fate at work, like something from Greek tragedy, but with just enough light coming through the cracks to make you (almost?) believe in the power of human will to escape that fate. I have underlined countless passages, especially those containing striking stylistic devices (two short lines of dialogue, followed by "Yvonne did not say either of these things.")

I have no idea what is going happen.

... in the meantime, I've started on Pere Goriot, the first Balzac I've read apart from a couple of short stories, and I'm loving it! he's everything Marx said, and more

everything Marx said, and more

all time blurb, imo

Reading Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard & Nottker the Stammerer, in a Penguin classic edition. The first bio is very staid, subdued and nearly hagiographic in its praise. The second one is all "So then Charlemagne walks into a bar and..." except with more bishops and popes.

Yvor Winters' selected poetry. I can't believe I ignored this arch-formalist; at least a dozen of these poems are marvels of shrewdness and epigrammatic concision. I bet Geoffrey Hill took a long look at these.

Also: Thomas Mann's The Story of a Novel, his uncharacteristically breezy acount of writing Doctor Faustus -- as much an account of being an emigre in L.A. during WWII, hanging out with Adorno and milking him for chordal knowledge, and delivering speeches for FDR during the '44 election.

My first Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman. An utter delight, so compassionate and insightful. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but I'm not sure how much I can actually come to love someone who mainly writes short fiction. Even the shorter ones have a remarkable depth and inventiveness but imo the utter immersion you can get from a novel is unbeatable.

partway through:

vanity fair (still)
anne carson's euripides, 'grief lessons'
simon reynolds' 'retromania'

valuable distractions:

g. legman's 'rationale of the dirty joke'
pdfs of old call of cthulhu and unknown armies sourcebooks

Alfred: Winters is great! I don't know that I've read any of his verse, but his critical writings (in which he bravely bucks the tide of modernist 'irrationalism') are at least partly responsible for putting me on to Paul Valery.

finished the plays in the carson volume; there's a rather peculiar-looking essay yet to read ('Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra, by Euripides)

compares well to my previous greek-tragedy experience, which is all v penguin classics heavy -- the carson book doesn't have any annotation but also doesn't feel like it needs it -- v different reading experience -- and when herakles refers to something he's done i don't know about you just kind of nod and move on

but also it's a less literal free verse rendering than the penguin model; i didn't notice quite how much work carson was making colloquialism do until the intro of the third play here, 'hippolytos', where carson states that she had to avoid a literal rendering of aphrodites' first line and that of the play, "Much among mortals I am ..." -- when you get to the play it's become "You know who I am." (!) she allows herself a somewhat free-er hand in 'alkestis' due to its not-quite-tragedy status, thus we get apollo responding to death's query about his bow with "i always carry a bow; it's my trademark." Or this splendid drunk speech from Herakles:

Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.
Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?
Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.
All mortals owe a debt to death.
There's no one alive
who can say if he will be tomorrow.
Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery.
No one can teach it, no one can grasp it.
Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!
But don't forget Aphrodite--that's one sweet goddess.
You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?
I think so. How about a drink.
Put on a garland. I'm sure
the happy splash of wine will cure your mood.
We're all mortal you know. Think mortal.
Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,
it's just catastrophe.

that's great.

I am all for such a radical recasting of the literal text, when it allows the characters more room in which to come alive. the vernacular is the way to go.

herakles otm

I just finished "Vanity Fair" thomp! Had mixed feelings about it.

I've also just finished Margery Allingham's "More Work for the Undertaker", I've been on a golden age of crime fiction spree recently.

can you diagram the relationships between the fucking Steynes for me

The Marquis is the one to bear in mind so far as all that goes and IIRC

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but I'm not sure how much I can actually come to love someone who mainly writes short fiction. Even the shorter ones have a remarkable depth and inventiveness but imo the utter immersion you can get from a novel is unbeatable.

She will change your mind as well as notions of space and time

I am hoping so.

... xp.

the marquis's fair enough but the chapter where you get a potted history of his family almost did me in, it's been a two day sticking block for me to go and make sense of it, particularly since

Lord George Gaunt, Marquis of Steyne (Lord Steyne)
Lady Steyne, his wife (née ... something beginning with C)
Lord Gaunt, his elder son (can't remember what happened to this one)
Lord George Gaunt, his younger son (the insane one)
Lady Gaunt, Lord Gaunt's wife (née Bareacres)
Lady George Gaunt, Lord George Gaunt's wife (née Jones)

but when Steyne's being a dick he likes to address people by their maiden names and sometimes Thackeray does too. Also T. uses 'Marquis' and 'Marquess' interchangeably and I thought the latter was maybe a filial title as 'Marchioness' is the maternal one. I think I have them straight now, but there was an hour or so of reading that felt like trying to memorise case endings.

marquis is the scottish title

I must admit that whenever things got a bit chewy (see also that interminable play) I just skipped it and picked up the thread later on.

yeah i skimmed the charades

it gets proper good again a little after that though

one thing about reading 19th c fiction in big blurts is you notice stuff like how thackeray is inordinately fond of the phrase "say Bo to a goose", which i think is probably less visible when you're reading him in twenty monthly instalments

also there's a bit where a whole page is printed out of sequence which the notes er note that it took more than a hundred years to get corrected from the first collected edition, which sutherland suggests is because the reader is at that point just too used to thackeray hopping around in time to credit it, but which i choose to believe is because it took a hundred years for anyone to reach page 700 without giving up and skimming a bunch of the time

yeah surely no one noticed.

well, actually, thinking about it a bit, I'm sure we've all done that thing where you turn two pages at once and though, 'Hmm, interesting juxtaposition for a writer not hitherto notable for such daring lacunae'. It's certainly happened to me from time to time. The shape of meaning of the incomplete sentence at the bottom of the recto blurs nicely across the brief gap before the start of next-but-one verso, so the inattentive or word-drunk reader can be forgiven, during that brief, unanchored moment, for relying more on momentum than meaning. Once the shore of comprehension is hit a fraction of a second later, the forms of the novel quickly reassembling after their near imperceptible absence, it's too late, and meaning will be imposed upon a mechanical fiction (that of your clumsy fingers courting the p61, say), sense imposed upon the chimeric sentence. It's a tiny enactment of Proust's waking moments, except rather than finally locating himself in his sick room, he is in fact back in one of the previously conjectured bedrooms, not the one he retired to the night before. this process, to go further, being a miniscule enactment of fiction itself, where a narrative of more or less unknown events (in the loosest term of forward progression) require the attentive interpretation of the reader, such that it diverts them from the material world of mechanical causation. The unexpectedness of events means we rely the authority of the author, yes, that's well documented, but also the authority of the book as mechanical object to function as expected. We tend to take our own correct functioning in small mechanical matters for granted I guess.

My kindle took me to the wrong page the other day and all hell broke loose. If I hadn't read the book before and therefore known something was awry, I'd still be in there.

Yes, I am feeling a little pretentious today, what of it.

cf. medievalists dorking out about "eye-skip"

this is new on me - what's the thing?

much feted source of transcription errors iirc

ah right, yes.

After palling around with Charlemagne, for some reason I have picked up a copy of Cicero's letters to Atticus that I had lying about, which I purchased for fifty cents a while back and have never read. Clocking in at 650 pp, I rather doubt I shall read it all, but it is where my bookmark currently lives. Cicero was rather a prat.

I really enjoyed Vanity Fair when I read it about 6 years back. Is Becky Sharpe one of the first sociopaths in western literature? I assume that's what she is but somebody might have a closer technical categorisation?

Think i read it pretty rapidly too, a few long bursts of reading. Possibly made easier cos my tv had broken at the time. Think I got through quite a few books at the time including a couple of Dickens who I always meant to get back to reading more of but so far haven't.

is she a sociopath though i don't know. how modulated our access to her inner life is is interesting but i am too tired to think that through.

i read it in ten days where i was in hospital with nothing to do, i think i would have read it in the same speed had i had ten crowded days and squeezing in reading time where i had it though. i always assume that 19th c novels really want this long spells of concentration but they don't, really.

reading the new michael chabon now.

started, on a whim, and am now almost finished with Israel Rabon - The Street. not sure when/where/why I picked this one up—I'm guessing it came up in a discussion of Yiddish-language literature—but it's totally amazing and I would recommend it to almost anyone

The Bird Artist by Howard Norman. Banville-esque, more eccentric characters, similarly mannered prose, less poetic but wonderfully elliptical dialogue.

some annoying proofing issues with the chabon, on top of everything else wrong with it.

margaret atwood's "the edible woman". looks like horrible chick lit from the front cover but its really good so far. fans of "mad men" would be into this.

paul auster -- new york trilogy (just finished first story -- pretty good)
wodehouse -- carry on jeeves (rereading, good for reading yourself to sleep)

cracking open Zizek for the first time tomorrow. In the meantime de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death.

finished the chabon. hm.

the newish a.m. homes seems like her most gonzo since music for torching.

Ethan Frome and, currently, House of Mirth. It seems to me she has a genius for putting her characters into hard problems and then tracing out how their moods, attitudes, and outlooks modulate in response to them. I guess all good novelists do this, but there's something particularly accurate, or at least personally identifiable, in how Ethan and Lily think and rethink their futures.

Finished Our Friends from Frolix 8 finally. Surprisingly well done. More thoughts later.

rereading Wharton in the last six years brought consistent pleasure

as noted elsewhere, reading concluding by henry green (1948). at first, it feels less 'experimental' than Loving or Living, or the later dialogue-heavy novels - the style is a bit - a bit - more straightforward, definite and indefinite articles are present, most of the time it's clear who is speaking, and what they're saying. there's lots of almost crude comedy, and almost-stock characters - two lesbian villainesses, a dotty grandfatherly type, a pair of young lovers, the local policeman. but then green's 'camera' will track away from the main 'action' and concentrate, in beautiful poetic language, on nature, landscape, colour, sound - the book is full of animal imagery, of people almost becoming animals (and green is the most crabwise of authors), and it's quite savage abt ppl, at times. i love the way green always seems to be observing his characters with a sense of wonder, sometimes with a sense of disgust - what people, how and why they act, is mysterious and veiled (but also sexual and alluring), even to themselves, even to the author.

christ he's gd.

This article, confirming that I didn't miss much by not reading any Brett Easton Ellis.

This article on Finnegans Wake in Chinese.

read one ellis, which was glamorama. i found it while reading it to be "not bad", but halfway through i realized i actually hated it, his writing, the characters, everything.

Finnegans Wake billboard.

http://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/news/world/2013/01/30/chinese_finnegans_wake_by_james_joyce_sells_out_in_china/finnegans_wake.jpg.size.xxlarge.letterbox.jpg

Beautifully put Ward. I'm only 33 pages in and I've been swept away - the wondrous, almost-slightly psychedelic or synaesthetic prose descriptions interspersed with curt, fragmentary dialogue and half-thoughts echoing unproductively around too-large rooms, not to mention the gently pointed authorial asides. I think the two moments that made me realise how much I'm going to love this were:

And all the while a line of girls fetched their breakfasts,
served themselves, the sleep from which they had just
come a rosy moss upon the lips, the heavy tide of dreams
on each in a flow of her eighteen summers, and which
would ebb now only with their first cup they were fetch-
ing, as his tea made his old blood run again, in this morn-
ing's second miracle for Mr Rock.

and then, accompanied with an audible snort,

"And yourself, Mrs Blain?" he asked, then subsided in
his place, mouth watering, glad.
"Me? I mentioned to my girl before you came. I'd
rather not refer to that once more," she said with finality.
Her stomach was upset. He nodded, old and solemn over
the plate, with no idea of what she meant.
He ate.
He was greedy.
They watched in approving silence.

my sentence above shld read

what people SAY, how and why they act, is mysterious and veiled (but also sexual and alluring), even to themselves, even to the author.

thanks imago, think synaesthetic is exactly the word i was groping for. Reading biographical snippets about Green, he was quite the boozer, and his writing does have a bleary, intoxicated quality at times, but then as you say, he can suddenly switch, in the space of a sentence, to being remarkably clear-eyed, sharp - really keeps you on yr toes, as a reader.

this should have arrived by the time I get in tonight:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_nXknRDZBs0E/ScrKvmOzdBI/AAAAAAAADmw/gxR_XTIaaKc/s400/sad_paper.png

Anyone read it?

Currently tearing through David Shields' wonderful Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

I actually prefer Concluding to the other Greens, in part because it unlocked the others. Several LOL moments.

the a.m. homes was bloody odd. it seemed like it was going to carry on like music for torching but sort of shifted down several gears and turned into this book will save your life redux, middle-aged man finds the possibility of kindness within himself via delilloish surreal vignettes of american life (though westchester, not LA, this time.) also delillo has a cameo and why not.

what's weird though: anhil the slightly comedic slightly profound immigrant donut shop owner in this book was okay, i never thought of his existence in the book's fictional world as being problematic. but in may we be forgiven homes brings in (to occupy similar functions in the narrative) an orphaned hispanic child, not one but two good-hearted and broken-englished chinese-american families, and then finally packs the novel's cast off to africa, where the protagonist is cured of his western existential dread via a preparation of tea leaves cooked by a fucking medicine man. i'm not sure how much a light touch and a gentle suggestion of ironic distance can really save this, you know?

also, i've picked up all the sad young literary men in the remainder store and put it down again so many times

My brother and my mother strongly recommended a novel to me, The Watch by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, then my mom loaned me a copy, so I was more or less obliged to read it. The novelist made certain to signal the reader many times over that the story was a variant on Sophocles' Antigone, although it was set in present-day Afghanistan and the majority of the characters were US soldiers.

What put me off liking the book was how contrived the author's approach was to telling the story. The apparatus strained and strove and clunked and emitted clouds of smoke, all in the service of being 'tragic' and literary (and don't you ever forget it).

For example, the dialogue mainly consisted of obscenities, terse military jargon, and the verbal equivalent of brothers-in-arms shoulder punches, an empty chatter delivered as relentlessly as a non-stop bout of the hiccoughs. But as soon as we switch to their reveries, delivered in the first person so we are to believe these are their personal thoughts and dreams, the language suddenly becomes highly literary, even faux poetic. It rankled me.

All in all this was not what I would call a badly written book, like Clan of the Cave Bear or Twilight. Rather it is a book that wholly embraces artifice, but never rises to become art. It loads itself with pretensions, then misses its mark by much too wide a margin. It's a failure on its own terms, but an OK yarn if you're stuck on an airplane and need a quick read.

Sorry for the tl;dr. I had to get that off my chest.

god help me I've picked up A Farewell to Arms for the first time since I was 12.

Notes from Sebald's fiction workshop: http://richardskinner.weebly.com/2/post/2013/01/max-sebalds-writing-tips.html

I like this one, whatever it means: "There has to be a libidinous delight in finding things and stuffing them in your pockets."

Alfred, I posted a quote from John Aldridge re Farewell upthread, which made me want to re-read it, but I haven't yet. Think I might start back with the Collected Stories, which are mostly in the order originally published; seemed like he peaked in the 20s and 30s, but it's been a long time since I read any of his stuff.

Elizabeth and Sebastian's walk and odd discovery about fifty pages in is some of the best prose I've ever seen, keep this up and I'll be beyond enraptured

I've read All the Sad Young Literary Men. It was more a collection of linked stories than a novel as such, IMO. Some work better than others. I wouldn't call it essential or anything, but I guess if you like tales of 20-something, grad-school ennui and have already read everything by Elif Batuman then it's probably worth picking up.

That was spectacularly good. Built to an orgiastic pitch of approaching catastrophe and incomprehension...and then let it dissipate, almost as if mishearing its own plot, letting it go with uneasy grace...

i really don't understand who the audience for tales of twenty-something grad-school ennui is

or are

i have been reading one and a half of bolano's short novels. i am coming to the conclusion that i really don't care much for bolano below 400 or so pages.

To have caused calamitous misunderstanding is pleasing enough for me; such a circumstance is greatly in the spirit of Concluding by Henry Green, for that was my reference.

A month into my first semester of grad school, so Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and a shitload of Shakespeare so far.

Lol imago you had me at 'synaesthetic'. I'm completely sold on Henry Green. xp

t thomp: which one and a half? I liked distant star, found the other one I read forgettable.

Grand, Mr Money!

Today I join the siblinghood of Remainder, yall best not be frontin'

i really don't understand who the audience for tales of twenty-something grad-school ennui is

― attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or (thomp), Monday, February 4, 2013 1:15 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am 3/4 of the way through my MA and am 22...so probably me? Not enjoying it hugely so far though. The prose feels weirdly self-concious.

self conscious no really

thomp what has happened, once so young, once so gleaming

is thomp...powerplaying? i thought ILB was all love.

there's an nrq-shaped vacuum in ilx, and thomp is badass enough

thomp I don't feel Bolano either, but I'm curious to know what 400 pages.

I haven't read anything in French except Sartre in high school and "Kamouraska" but I've started reading "La Sagouine" by Antonine Maillet, a gift from one of my many new Acadian friends

2666 still rules.

But I haven't tried any of the short novels yet.

"2666", that fourth book was balls, kind of a CSI + "Bouvard et Pécuchet" and I didn't like it at all, but I know a lot of people did

i really don't understand who the audience for tales of twenty-something grad-school ennui is

As someone who dropped out of grad school after one year to join the corporate rat race, it's sort of fun to vicariously experience that sense of intellectual freedom and bountiful unstructured time.

alfred, did you ever finish the jon meacham jefferson book? just ordered a copy.

Yep. It's steeped in Meacham's "Morning Joe" centrism. Never dull though.

I probably will always ride for 2666 and Savage Detectives, yeah but I haven't read anything shorter

I'm starting a Nancy Mitford anthology. I don't know what to expect from her. Apparently neither fascism nor communism.

Love in a Cold Climate is v good.

the end of Concluding was both inconclusive and beautifully circular, with the main character waking at the start of the book and falling asleep at the end, hinting at the dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish quality of Green's prose. one of the best novels i've ever read - and, if someone could somehow capture the book's precarious balance between hysteria, lust, cruelty and compassion, it would make a gd film.

now at that delicious stage of casting around for the next thing to read...

I've chosen Remainder, and I have some things to say about it. Need to finish it first, though. 100 or so pages, um, remain.

Then it'll be Moby-Dick.

Oh, and yes, spot on - Concluding is phenomenal, reading it after Pynchon felt curiously seamless. It would need to be filmed with the absolute lightest of touches - it's both surreal and evasive, lyrical and fragmented. I can't think of a single director currently working who'd do it justice with the possible exception of Kiarostami. Whit Stillman would get the tone right but not the intensity of attachment (or detachment)

imago, are you a new poster, or were you a different ilxor in a previous existence?

kiarostami is a...bold suggestion. i guess i was being more literal-minded and thinking it wld have to be a british director, someone alive to all the book's feeling of immediate post-war malaise - of people being lost in the fog, obsessed by food, working for 'the State' (capital s), being in a state - but also to the slight pre-John Wyndham/Nigel Kneale/Hammer creepiness that edges into the end of the book, when all the girls whose name start w/ M initiate 'the sage' into their secret society. (When I emailed a friend and told him I was reading Concluding, he told me that Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (which he'd never read) had always struck him as being a mash-up of Concluding and Logan's Run!)

think i'm going to try one of the travis mcgee detective novels by john d macdonald that i seem to have accumulated and never read any of - ppl like carl hiassen and stephen king seem to rep for them, and one might make a nice change of pace after the Henry Green.

and then i think it's the recent Oxford translation of The Idiot

A British director with that lightness of touch, that sense of people's gentle disconnections and bullish (and often self-contradicting or oblivious) determination in the face of the ever-so-slightly hostile, ever-so-slightly sad State of things? We'd all be so lucky.

I have posted before, yes, under a couple of other guises.

determination in the face of the ever-so-slightly hostile, ever-so-slightly sad State of things? = terence davies

never seen a terence davies movie, he any good?

yes

not 'great' or whatever, but noteworthy enough

what are his best works? you scored a 10/10 with your last movie recommendation, so

the last one 'the deep blue sea' is maybe better than the more ambitious & feted but somewhat precious early work

jonathan rosenbaum reps for the neon bible though i haven't seen that

rosenbaum is the best* critic, so that's cool

*the only one i pay even the scantest heed to

arite well i'll give that one a go, cheers. still need to see fish tank as well

lots of trustworthy* ppl calling Deep Blue Sea one of the best movies from last year

*well, I mean, I trust 'em. And now it's def on my to-see list

i meant to contextualise previous remarks but I've been halfway offline the past few days; someone please tell me who imago is

mainly i wanted to complain that 'ready player one' is an early contender for worst thing i will read this year

BAN IMAGO

(i think?)

Reading Cantos. Rereading Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style.

large parts of that were available on google books for a while - what i read was v enjoyable.

yeah, it's a great book I think - an amazing education the first time I read it, & I like coming back to it as a brilliant, slightly pompous mix of information + opinion/provocation + maths + nice illustrations of pages and letters. It is Renaissancey, now I think about it.

woof otm (afaict)

think i'm going to try one of the travis mcgee detective novels by john d macdonald that i seem to have accumulated and never read any of - ppl like carl hiassen and stephen king seem to rep for them

These are pretty fun. I've read about a third of the series so far; they're definitely a good come down after reading something heavier.

cool cwkii - should they be read in order (the oldest one i have is Darker Than Amber from 66)?

actually got sidetracked by a (so far) excellent new BFI collection of essays on Ealing film studio, called Forever Ealing and due back at the library soon. studying the filmography, it's astonishing how few 'Ealing Comedies' as we know them there actually are. bk is def a gd prompt to explore beyond the usual faves like Kind Hearts and Coronets, Ladykillers etc etc

coworker just hooked me up with 4 Jack Reacher novels - I dunno what order they're in but I'm kinda stoked to dip into them.

i've read a cpl of reachers - they are v easy reads, and the author is gd (as you wld expect) on the details of weaponry, uniforms, violence etc. he is never happier than when detailing someone's incredibly badass and top secret military/mercenary past (although reacher is always the one w/ the shadiest part and is of course ultimately the toughest of the tough). short paragraphs, sentences, chapters; minimal depth of feeling.

shadiest PAST

xxxp It's one of those series that you don't have to read in order but it's more enjoyable if you do; the first couple I read were from the middle of the series, and then I went back and started from the beginning. He likes to throw in references to previous books, and minor recurring characters will sometimes show up with little to no exposition, but they all work as standalone novels.

I got Die Trying (#2), Tripwire (#3), The Enemy (#8), and 61 Hours (#14)

I just finished One Shot (#9), that was a v good standalone story I thought. I intended to go see the movie but dragged my feet finishing the book and missed the boat.

His depictions of women's clothing/women in general are kinda facepalm, but I kinda like the short sharp style of the writing, and yeah I kinda dig the military stuff

I'm on a roll lately, just read 3 great & very different sets of short stories: vertical motion by can xue, very weird dreamlike stuff, recommended by robert coover; later the same day by grace paley, one of my favourites - this is as gorgeously written as her early stuff but a lifetime better; and lives of girls and women, my 1st alice munro, which is my fucking JAM. That was all a bit ~literary~, dunno where to go next. I'm on a high & don't want to lose the momentum I've gathered this year on a duff book. Oh and I have to read my friend's self-published novel, which I'm terrified will be shite :-(

Finished Pale Fire for the third time. Still trying to find clues leading to the crown jewels...

UP NEXT: Either Whitehead's Zone One or Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child. Will flip a coin - heads for Zone One (where else do you aim at on a zombie) or tails for TSC (which, judging by Hollinghurst's past work, may feature many a posterior prominently).

(!!!FLIPS!!!)

Heads!

Oh yeah--I've raved about Zone One on a couple of threads---not perfect, but he's got it, as George Romero and Mary Shelley would agree. You'll know what "it" is. Be prepared.

Last night I read about the first 60 pages of The Book of Ephraim in James Merrell's The Changing Light at Sandover. Engagingly written, both clever and subtle. I've yet to test my mettle against the mystic peacock, though. I am not predicting victory.

most recently finished Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, really loved it and am disappointed in myself for not having read it a long time ago. great, enormously funny portrait of growing up sheltered and precocious

Last night I read about the first 60 pages of The Book of Ephraim in James Merrell's The Changing Light at Sandover. Engagingly written, both clever and subtle. I've yet to test my mettle against the mystic peacock, though. I am not predicting victory.

― Aimless, Thursday, February 7, 2013 8:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i'm levelling up on some Wallace Stevens before I get there, but yeah, this is great.

xp Can recommend her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, which a lot of Oranges... is based on.

It's not based on her memoir. You know what I mean.

this ILB thing is still going?
I feel I have not seen it for a long, long time.
do you still have FAPs and things?

this the pinefox thing is still going?!

not a lot, no.

hey welcome back pinefox. yeah, we're still ticking along. Last FAP was the autumn, probably due another one soonish.

FIRST WARMTH

I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life,
As a questioner about reality,

A countryman of all the bones in the world?
Now, here, the warmth I had forgotten becomes

Part of the major reality, part of
An appreciation of a reality;

And thus an elevation, as if I lived
With something I could touch, touch every way.

"2666", that fourth book was balls, kind of a CSI + "Bouvard et Pécuchet" and I didn't like it at all, but I know a lot of people did

― flamboyant goon tie included, Monday, 4 February 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is there anything wrong with CSI now?!

I didn't care for Savage Detectives...

Of the < 400 page Bolano I'd say both Amulet (those hallucinations) and Nazi Literatures (the jokes come off) are amazing. Antwerp and By Night in Chile are good too. All four are written in different styles but if you like what he talks about (Latin American lit and politics of the 60 and 70s) he is able to pull you in. Content makes the form irrelevant, or not as important as you'd think.

He is probably the only really great writer who changed his style as often and got on with that. Succeded in translating what he was reading.

I actually love to read more of the poets he talks about. Tracked that Lezama Lima's Paradiso which was quite an insane trip at the time. Vallejo awesome too but many other about i think.

Finally getting round to: Karl Ove Knausgaard - A Death in the Family. Like, there are two pages of lit crit where this content vs form malarkey comes about unexpected, iirc how writers can be great stylists but are let down by form. Interesting how 2666 has come round this thread again because this thing is a real page turner like the Bolano but the difference is I don't feel like picking it up again v much once I put it down as I don't like what he talks about - ok its girls and Echo and the Bunnymen and Betty Blue, the usual 14 year old in '85 bullshit I know and do not care for.

Girls are eternal of course, not to be restricted to '85.

At times it aims at a 'readable Proust' (the first 5 pages) but Marcel was really fucking weird and carries on being this weird person, and an old and completely unhappy unfulfilled person who imprisoned himself in his room and in his mind, here it sounds like a mere mid-life crisis that looks like it will turn out ok in the end. Might change my mind but that's how its looking so far. Reckon I'll finish the first vol and track down the 2nd when the translation comes about. As I say, readable.

Last night I moved from Ephraim into Mirabell's Books of Numbers and all I can say is that either Merrill was crazy as a jaybird or filled with an audacity I can only describe as breathtaking. He is attempting to animate an entire mythos in much the same way Herr Frankenstein animated his lumps of lifestuff into a superhuman creature. I'm hardly convinced, but I am bemused.

He beaches himself in the third book, alas.

At the risk of turning this thread into a liveblog of my reading TCLaS, I'm midway through the Mirabell book now and have met the mystic peacock and swept onward unimpeded. The most important thing now is to resolve in my mind Merrill's purpose in all this craziness.

The cleverness is still there; it's implicit in how deeply and successfully he dissociates himself from his own inventions. However, I am coming to think that the purpose of the poem is to confront Merrill's sense of impending doom and disaster, based in the possibility of nuclear war and to construct an escape hatch for humanity, through the means of this new mythology. If this is so, he must necessarily fail and fail badly, no matter how he twists and turns from here forward.

The book is also an excuse to give Auden bitchy lines.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead - Not fautless (the construction is kind of haphazard, esp. around the mid-section; certain key post-apocalyptic bits become diffuse simply because, one imagines, Whitehead's lack of interest (everytime "bandits" get mentioned, they're more of a vague conception than a palpable presence)), but man, it really is a fucking zombie book, no qualifiers, a full-on love letter to Romero. There's this excellent sense of doom on every damn page, the sense that everything will fall apart, any stability, any relationship you manage is just a stall before the things fall apart even further - quite a performance.

intense month last month so had to take a break from leisure reading. i did read lots of primary infectious disease literature!

i'm heading to thailand for a few months this summer, and an old professor of mine gave me this book on the ethnic struggles in the region, called restless souls by phil thornton. very readable and gets better as it goes on; it seemed a little one-sided at the beginning. about 2/3 through with that

also just re-started fathers and sons last night, about 40 pages in. i think i'm smelling the beginnings of a love quadrangle

yes, Zone One is grand and deadpan, sharp-eyed and 0-eyed, impacted and hollow and urgent,post-traumatic with regular recharges: living and dying and zombie-ing (several flavors of each category), all alone together, walk on 'til you rise and fall (and vice versa, of course).

And seeing it all through the eyeholes of one character (with comments, attacks etc of others) makes it more involving than most zombie-involved stuff.

i'm a little less than halfway through Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin. don't have many organized thoughts abt it yet, but finding it enjoyable so far. definitely le guin in her more new agey mode, but dealing w/ some classic le guin themes. like in left hand of darkness and the dispossessed, she's describing an encounter w/ an alien culture, thinking abt the way fundamental differences in thinking, embedded in culture, complicate any meaningful exchange. of course in this book the culture is alien because it's so far in the future, and the outsider encountering it is le guin herself, acting as a sort of puzzled anthropologist studying an imaginary society (a situation she approaches with alternating humor and seriousness)

I'm trying to get through Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, but damn is it long. Pretty well written and never pointless, but still very slow going.

Yesterday I took a break from it and read The Little Prince all the way through. The suicide is very French, is it not? Very odd for a children's book.

'le petit prince' is definitely not anything like any other kids' book, and i wonder how much most kids get out of it these days. you could almost see the ending as saint-ex's premonition of his own death.

Second time through True Grit - really wish we could return to the days of yore, when quotation marks around turns of phrase were a "common thing".

(The book remains super, as expected.)

reading Sons and Lovers for the first time since 1996. Nothing's change: the Morel family drama is meticulously drawn and consistently moving, Paul's romances not a bit.

trying to read the third policeman again

It's not very hard!

I am still reading William Carlos Williams' IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN, very slowly, and I have about 60-70pp left

I am now reading Walter Benjamin's BERLIN CHILDHOOD AROUND 1900 and I can report that it is very fine, a book that anyone could read - no theory, Marxism, mysticism really, none of the stuff that would put some people off WB, just lyrical old-world Europe, completely the thing to buy for someone who likes Sebald or THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES or whatever, or can't be bothered to get through Proust (I don't blame them) and want a short Germanic version, or someone who likes the idea of the glamour of Berlin

you get the idea.

I need to reread MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN yet again for next week also

Reading the new Penguin edition of Brodsky's Watermark, cunningly padded out to 144 pages through the use of MASSIVE TEXT.

Some nice passages so far.

Berlin Childhood is great, yeah. I once wrote a pretty nifty essay on the notion of cultural memory in relation to that book and Pamuk's Istanbul.

Gave up on All The Sad Young Literary Men when I came across a section in which one of the characters is like "I had always read novels, but then I learned that there was something major happening, something amazing and exciting happening in the literary journals!"

FUQ DAT.

Every time I attempted to read ATSYLiteraryM, I found myself giving up. It was as though I was literally incapable of continuing. Painful.

But that writer is still less obnoxious than some of his chums.

xpost that Brodsky is lovely—the visit to Pound's widow(?) particularly sticks in my mind

finished maggie nelson's 'the art of cruelty' - sontag-style analysis of the uses of cruelty in (mostly 20th-century-and-onward) art/film/literature (she shuffles all over the place but pays special attention paid to artaud, bacon, and plath) - very sharp, accessible and enjoyable read

just started odon von horvath's 'the eternal philistine'

Last night I passed the 500 pp mark in The Changing Light at Sandover. I've been trying to keep up momentum as the only way to reach the end of this, still 50-some pages away. I'll make a fuller report when I finish it.

yesterday, finished Diderot - The Dream of D'Alembert (been into this scene lately, idk). found it really, really cool. it also has an interesting publication history: original was destroyed by Diderot when D'Alembert, irate, confronted him about it; but an (unauthorized) copy existed among the friends with whom Diderot had shared the original. years later, after trying (& failing) to recompose it, Diderot lucked into the one extant copy and went to press with it—unimpeded by concerns of propriety, as the young lady who forms (with D'Alembert) one central thread of the dialogue had, in the interim, passed away.

I finished tCLaS last night. My whole strategy was to resolutely ignore the fact that I could not swallow the premise of the poem or even parts of it. It was much kinder to presume that Merril knew he was peddling pure fabulae and expected me to understand this, too. I read it only to discover what he said and how he said it and to sweep up any value I could from that experience.

The main difficulties arose as the poem grew in length. It lost whatever stability it started with and began wobbling between rather flat and failed grandiloquence and lengthy gossip about the godlike UNIVERSAL IMPORTANCE of spirits who all just happened to be JM's dead buddies, interspersed with all-too-rare moments of elegant poetry.

When JM was not inserting his excellent bits of terza rima, the biggest strength of the poem was its overall fluency and his ability to personate the characters of various people and spirit creatures. There were just enough splashes of wit and humor to keep me going through the parched sections explaining how heaven works, the pecking order among spirits, and far more quasi-scientific mysticism than anyone needs to read.

I put it away with the feeling that the poet wrote this because he missed his dead friends and this was a way to commune with them, while also fiddling with a whole mess of ill-defined ideas that clearly fascinated him. It's unfortunate that he communed and fiddled at much too great a length for the good of his readers and the end result is mostly memorable as a gossipy hodgepodge of crackpot ideas. But a fairly well written gossipy hodgepodge.

So you agree The Book of Ephraim is the classic bit.

You should read Alison Lurie's shallow Familiar Spirits, her memoir about knowing Merill and his partner David Jackson in Key West in the seventies and eighties. According to her, Merrill genuinely believed spirits from beyond had made him translator.

lately: zukofsky, john mcdowell, cora diamond, pynchon, brecht, lipstick traces

Was DJ able to contact JM afterward? That would be the test.

Sad to say, there are other better tests available. The text of tCLaS includes many unmistakable predictions about the near future (as seen from circa 1980), stated as certainties by JM's spirit guides, whose times for fullfillment have come and gone without issue.

I'm sorry to hear JM believed all his self-generated nonsense. This does shed more light on why the godsplaining takes over the poem to the detriment of the poetry.

i'm reading italo calvino - if on a winter's night a traveler and i'm really enjoying but it really makes me want to read something else, yet somehow like in a good way... without spoiling too much (you get what he's up to after a certain point but the confusion is really fun while it lasts) the format involves a bunch of first-chapters of fake lost novels, and you're left wanting to finish each one. got recalled from the library so i have to finish it before monday

I don't mind JM believing nonsense - that would affect quite a few writers I like - but although I'm not very far through, I can easily see how it goes in the direction you describe, Aimless. At the moment, I don't mind the fantasy metaphysics, but even if I do, I can see it as an expression of cathected love between DJ and JM.

dipping into the prestige by c priest. this was a film right? think I half watched it once when v drunk.

past continuos writing evokes strongly awkward "what I did in the holidays" children's homework.

sentences like "As I drove through, the chill rain was drizzling through the valley, obscuring the rocky heights on each side" sound so mannered and silly, expressive in several ways:

the timecode of each element is wrong (a function of the grammar) - the as I drove through implying a temporary purpose to the chill rain, namely obscuring the rocky heights.

the need to insist on narrative presence - I know you're there already, plz separate the action from the description, or recast or rewrite or something.

a slight sense of false omniscience despite the insisted on location in a car driving through. so the rain is "chill", and though obscured he can see the rocky heights. This isn't fair - both can be inferred, obscure doesn't mean invisible and we can feel cold outside while inside. but it sets me on edge slightly.

rain doesn't really drizzle *through* places does it?

he has a general problem with prepositions tbh.

"When I next looked towards the gates I discovered they were opening silently from some remote command"

aside from reading slightly peculiarly, there's once again omniscience masquerading as inference, and that hackwork habit of unnecessary detail (he's already pressed a buzzer at the gates - feel the whole... "remote command" thing is too much). Take this bit on a train:

"After I had read the morning's edition of the Chronicle, and bought a sandwich and a cup of instant coffee from the refreshment trolley, I opened Dad's envelope."

the added detail here, which postpones the action and is therefore toilingly insisted upon, is surely suitable to the unexpected. think what would need to be true generslly for the details he fills in to be required: we'd need habitually to be reading yesterday morning's papers and "refreshment trolleys" wd need to be known for their freshly-brewed filter coffee.

Nothing egregiously wrong, just persistently notable. And as I say, smacks of longform hackwork, and although I'm fond of that genre, it reads weirdly in fiction.

enjoying the book tho. magic and mystery. fine by me.

refreshment trolleys. what are they tho? refreshment trolleys.

Vassily Grossman - Life and Fate. Giving it a qualified so so good because I keep dipping in and out of it. Even though its nearly 900 pages it reads very punchily due to shortness of chapters. More than that he gets to everything w/no waste, nothing seems superfluously added to give it extra juice (something you'd bet would be there in spades with writig on war), and I appreciae that.

Thinking of stopping just so I can start it again in six months but I would hate to read it on a holiday or some such (don't actually like the separation from reading on holiday to reading day-today, I'm always reading unless I have a block...implies I won't be able to read for pleasure at any time anymore arrgh)

I know what you mean xyzzzz__ but the expansiveness of daily leisure that a holiday provides is great for curling round and into a long book. + I find the dislocation from the mundane extra conducive to allowing oneself to be possessed by a book.

no, Christopher Priest, admittedly after a moment or two's thought, I am not going to accept that herring gulls "bray", let alone eloquently.

I am enjoying this book fine btw. even tho I've realised I find the details of conjuring fairly boring. also this is a book that has been RESEARCHED.

About 100 pages in to Sons and Lovers right now, don't really know how I feel about it yet. There's definitely been extended periods of boredom, but it's kinda lovely in its depiction of the vanished rural mining community. I'm getting an overwhelming sense that this is all going to end up horribly though. The frequent and passionate descriptions of the ferocity of Mrs Morel's love for all her children feels like the groundwork for impending death, disease and dishonour on all fronts.

I read it for the first time since lol high school a few weeks ago. None of the women are convincing, which I suppose is Lawrence's point. The rest of the novel doesn't surpass the loveliness of the first hundred pages; I was quite affected by Mr. Morel's relations with his children (e.g. young Arthur crying happily upon hearing his father's voice).

Yeah those have been some of my favourite moments so far, the passages where Morel is fixing things round the house and singing songs and telling stories about being 'down pit', where he actually becomes a proper part of the family and everyone enjoys his company. It's simple stuff and it's fulfilling a very basic desire for fulfilment on the part of the reader, but I've really found those flashes of the unified whole surprisingly affecting given Lawrence's rep (at least among those of my friends who've read him) for being quite dry and difficult to get involved in emotionally.

Joël Dicker's "La Vérité sur l'Affaire Harry Québert". Swiss novel that got a lot of buzz when it came out in France in september. It's a terrible piece of shit, poorly written (at times it reads like a bad translation of a book already poorly written in its original language), crappy story full of unexpected and oh-so-crazy twists that you can just feel the author punched in the air when he thought of them, all of this wrapped in a pseudo-meta package.

my kinda review.

Colm Toibin's "Brooklyn." It's still haunting me a week later.

The Prestige was good I thought. I admired his design in writing a novel of historical fiction that explored the imaginative possibilities of the age - what if electricity had been used to do *this*, as people in that early electrical age considered possible - not as part of people's beliefs but as the mechanics of the plot. I guess that might pose a question of the more common variety of historical fiction - how much do its mechanics imply a necessary fulfilment of the present day.

So that was good. It felt a bit generally toiling tho and unexciting to read.

ikwym about Priest's prose. I think maybe you're pressing him a bit harshly - I reckon rain can drizzle through a valley (because wind definitely blows through a valley and wind carries drizzle, but yeah it's an affected verb choice & the two throughs in the sentence are ugh) & I don't mind instant-coffee scene setting (and the morning's Chronicle is telling you it is the morning, which is hacky but fair – I get more distracted by wondering if it had an afternoon edition(*)) – but it is quite boring to read, quite ploddingly real. Part of me wants to say this is the point - in The Prestige it's the pledge, the assurance that this is an ordinary deck of cards, & in the The Affirmation the ploddy stuff locks in the figure/ground thing that's the book's backbone – but I can't really think of passages where he gets into a higher gear, I think that's just how he writes. I like him a lot, but find the opening of books a grind, getting over that flatness. Once he's got his machinery underway, I can't stop watching.

(*)Is the frame narrator a reporter for this chronicle? I can't remember. And is it a national or a local? Did any local papers have morning editions, even in the 90s? So it must be a national. Distracted by detail, as you say.

Frame narrator is a reporter for Chronicle. National newspaper.

Absolutely agree that the boring read felt like it might be the point - was by and large fine with it once we both got going. Liked the way he's free and easy with death and doppelgangers, and doesn't feel need to close mysteries off. Enjoyed it, read it in a day, lots of slightly uncommon or out of the way ideas there.

Finally finishing God's Fury, England's Fire: A new history of the English Civil Wars by Michael Braddick. It's fine, very good in places - not a lot of character, not a lot of momentum, but it seems like a solid synthesis of a lot of scholarship, and runs all over the country & up & down the classes trying to cover everything - social history, military history (unusually detailed accounts of battle for a survey history), print culture, etc. Like there's a few pages on the clubmen, that's cool, I always wondered about them beyond the paragraph you usually get.

Reading Adam Mars-Jones on Jim Crace tonight, thought once again: A M-J is a remarkable book reviewer.

Reading Fizzles on fiction just now has reminded me of this. He shares a bit of A M-J's doggedness, attention to detail and fascination with 'how fiction doesn't work'.

I was, as woof says, way too harsh, or at least wdnt want the large sledgehammer brought to bear on minor points of style detract from its merits.

there's a couple of questions about how much all novel writing (all writing?) is predicated on the assumption that the reader enters in good faith, as you can always question what's excluded or not detailed - as with film plot pedants I do just want to say "well because that's the way the action is advanced" - you half wonder whether these people want characters ever to do anything dangerous or ill-advised-upon-reflection.

but there probably also needs to be a self-sustaining tone that prevents the reader from asking too many questions of the authors' competence (it was where Capital failed so spectacularly, esp since the entire substance of the book comprised the bogus observations of Lanchester's prose.)

That's certainly not the case with Priest, and as woof says the subject of the book is in itself about some if these questions, so you are at least kept wondering.

Also wonder the extent to which ACTION and genre generally help ignore such questions, or at least where literariness is not insisted upon. never mind pulp's extravagant non-literariness of style, in fact welcome it - though the opening sentence of At the Mountains of Madness still completely baffles me.

Rambling and avoiding getting up.

Flicking through Ackroyd's London - it's a proof tho, so there's no index and all the pages are 000. Can someone who's got both a copy and time tell me any chapters where he talks about the rookeries, in particular when they were demolished for new Oxford st etc?

this might help, though it's the concise version.

thanks woof.

I'm halfway through Beulah Land by H.L. Davis, an obscure 1949 novel by an obscure novelist who doesn't entirely deserve this fate. I read his other novel, Honey in the Horn a couple of years ago. HitH was set in frontier Oregon; this one is set in an earlier frontier, ranging from North Carolina over to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi R. circa 1850. He excels at capturing the rawness and extremely unsettled quality of frontier life, especially the characters and psychology of pioneers, whom he neither flatters nor condescends to.

I have to read a bunch of Margaret Atwood books this semester. So far Ive read "The Edible Woman" (good) and "Lady Oracle" (boring shite tbh)

What other Atwood (if any) is on the syllabus? What's the course?

im doing new media and english. the module is "study of a major author". the other books are surfacing, cats eye, handmaids tale, alias grace and blind assassin

I finished Max Hastings' All Hell Let Loose last night. It was completely fabulous. Moreno, you were asking for recommendations of single-volume WWII histories - I'd unhesitatingly recommend this one.

Between this and the Beevor one (good but not as good; although it arguably gives a better panoramic view and has better maps, the weight of Hastings' ordinary-people sources adds up to something much more rewarding, emotionally) I've been reading WWII since the end of October. Having reached a conclusion last night my instinct was to go for something entirely different, but instead I'm giving Ian Kershaw's The End a shot, which seems to be about why German society held itself together in 1944-45, when it was obviously being led to complete ruin. We'll see how it goes. I bought HHhH last weekend, should I decide I want fiction instead.

xpost

Surfacing and Handmaids Tale both great. Let us know what you think when you get to em!

yeah we have about 14 books (between this module and an contemporary irish lit. one) in 14 weeks to read this semester and im not a fast reader (and hate speed-reading tbh) so its unlikely im going to get around to reading everything. already covered 'surfacing' in class ill start on 'handmaids tale' next week. 'oryx and crake' sounds good but we're not covering it.

Thanks Ismael! Xxp

Dogs at the Perimeter -
Madeleine Thien.

it's ok i guess, kinda generic

ismael have you read any of hastings' other works more specific to particular fronts (armageddon, retribution, overlord) and if so does this cover some of the same material? will read either way. the book is called 'inferno' over here in the states.

reading Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in a Castle

I haven't, but I will do - he's got a dozen or more on various bits of the war, I gather, and I'm going to get plugged in as bedtime reading. A big thick hardback makes for quite satisfying end of the day.

There are a few of these quasi-celebrity historians over here - Hastings, Beevor, Schama, Kershaw, probably others. I think they teach classes all year, then bang out a book each in summer vacation. That's knowing how to live imo.

http://i.imgur.com/dCRoKtx.jpg

Robert Bellah - Religion in Human Evolution

About 100 pages in so far. Draws together some interesting threads from sociology, anthropology, biology, physics, psychology, etc. He hasn't really gotten to religion yet. So far he's conjecturing about how humans (or their ancestors) first began to evolve capabilities that later expressed themselves through religion.

can't speak for hastings credentials as a historian but i do know he's also a horrible blustering high tory bully who churns out endless hack pieces for the mail etc

Yeah, Hastings def a hack, not an academic.

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse (amz link).

An exhaustively documented first real airing of the Pentagon's post My Lai Vietnam War Crimes Working Group record, and the closest I've seen to an American version of the Wehrmachtsausstellung exhibition. Bill Moyers did an interview with Turse a month ago.

almost done w/ Freud's Totem & Taboo. still trying to decide whether my totem animal is seagull or jellyfish. thinking of rereading Levi-Strauss on totemism too, but if I get bored with that and want more speculative Freud, Civilization & its Discontents is eyeing me from the shelf

a lovely essay. Freud could write!

Slouching towards Bethlehem. Did not enjoy.

u mad

i wonder if enjoyment of said book is inversely proportional to the distance from sacramento to where one was brought up.

haven't read those Freud texts since college, huh, would be interesting to reconsider after 30+ years of revision and rejection

National Book Awards and recent book news: http://www.apr.org/post/book-news-caro-wins-his-third-national-book-critics-circle-award

Reading an illicit electronic version of iris Murdoch's Under the Net. I don't know if it's strangely written or badly OCRd, I strongly suspect the latter but one never knows.

Her eyes were still and wide and her lips parted and for a moment she lay stiffly in my arms like a great doll. Then she began to Wight, and I laughed too, and we both laughed enormously with Measure and relief. I felt her sigh and relax, and her body became 'minded and pliant, and we looked into each other's faces and mailed a long smile of confidence and recognition.

Oh this is no good. The first three chapters were fine but now...

During the last part of our conversation she had laid her hand lip, in my shoulder so that her wrist watch was just in sight, and I could see her gaze passing lightly over it from time to time. I felt humus.

lol

finished "restless souls" and "checklist manifesto". going to see if i can get through "fathers and sons" before it's due back

Robert Remini's The Election of Andrew Jackson and Geoffrey Hill's Selected Poems.

Thomas Keneally - Schindler's Ark/List

I'm not sure how widely read this is now or if it's been eclipsed by the movie but it's a real achievement, executed with great care and subtlety.

in hospital, v long wait. just finished Kingsley Amis' Ending Up now back on Satantango.

Morbid.

Last night I read the first two books of the Elegies of Sextus Propertius as translated by Philip Katz (there are four books in all). A pretty decent translation in that it does give Propertius a human voice. Although it's not as vivid a voice as Ezra Pound gave him, Katz wasn't taking nearly so many liberties as Ezra, either.

I'm curious to see how the last books compare to the first two, as the poet ages and the frenzy of obsessive passion has to be more and more simulated.

Been a while since I read it, but Ending Up is p great, isn't it?

hannah arendt - eichmann in jerusalem

it's really good. she's really smart. "pithy" has a positive connotation right? if so, she's pithy. reminds of estela with these simple, brutal takedowns. it's pretty controversial, too, hard to imagine the nyorker publishing anything like this today

Been a while since I read it, but Ending Up is p great, isn't it?

― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, March 5, 2013 7:22 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

The reason I picked it up again was cos i was saying in the pub to a friend how good it was - 'one of his best.' But I found myself getting very irritated, almost angry with it. when I started reading this I felt repelled by the microscopic cynicism. No human motion or nuance of thought, no matter how small, is interpreted kindly, but as expressive of self-interest. As I read on, I remembered how this very claustrophobic and desperation-inducing effect is counterbalanced by examples of kindness. Kindness is very important in KA - it could to a certain extent be one of his main obsessions - and the centre of this particular novel - along with love. However, it's not very nice kindness. That's not to say that characters' examples of it aren't kind in themselves, but that it's tactical. Amis has said this himself, about getting unsympathetic or downright nasty characters to show kindness in order to preserve aesthetic balance (akin to the critic's requirement to find something to be kind about in a book they dislike). This tactical aesthetic balance deducts from an appreciation of the generosity of Amis' universe. You cannot fit a cigarette paper between unkindness and kindness - if there is not kindness, there is unkindness, or boredom, or indifference. This, as in other respects of Amis' universe, produces a claustrophobic effect. KA's direct predecessors - Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell - used Hemingway as a model. KA is the opposite of Hemingway. Exclusion is not the point. KA includes to the point of a pathology. I don't think that's unreasonable given his fear of solitude and the dark.

There's a couple of ways of thinking about this - the extreme of Amis' style is in its own way as extreme as more avant-garde authors, or a 'dead end' like Nabokov. It's hellishly bleak and shd be understood, in its own mannerist manner, as an examination of the soul. At the same time, his use of kindness as an aesthetic counterbalance is tactical, and at this time, feels like a conduit to his later non-fictional conservatism. imo this whole elizabeth jane howard is both v accomplished and v problematic. his tightness of detail and control is exactly what lets him down. Surprised by my dislike of this novel while i was reading it. But looking back at it, I'm impressed despite myself. It's v good, particularly inevitable attention to language and expression, at which KA did not have a peer. But it's nasty, and nastily nasty.

'this whole ejh *period*'

"attention to language and expression, at which KA did not have a peer"

can't really credit this

Ending Up was my gateway to Amis after loving Lucky Jim but being repelled by a couple other titles. It's a polished minor novel.

If you want a more, say, compassionate take on the aged, please read The Old Devils.

speaking of old, aged devils, somebody persuade me to finish Banville's The Sea. I can't handle much more of his finely calibrated exquisiteness.

"attention to language and expression, at which KA did not have a peer"

can't really credit this

perhaps I shd have said spoken language/ear for speech. perhaps it wouldn't have made any difference.

old devils is indeed v good, but I'd hitherto placed EU equal or above it. think I'm having a general anti KA phase.

currently reading the heart is a lonely hunter which feels a bit too much like homework, and who censored roger rabbit as lighter reading.

speaking of old, aged devils, somebody persuade me to finish Banville's The Sea. I can't handle much more of his finely calibrated exquisiteness.

you might legitimately complain about having too much champagane and caviar but it's nagl

well, caviar's gross and champagne is responsible for the worst hangovers.

My 88 year old mom loaned me another book, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, which I began to read last night. It is yet another Oprah-approved memoir, but only moderately overwritten. The fact that it centers on hiking the Pacific Crest Trail saves it for my own reading purposes, otherwise I would be struggling with it.

Almost finished Wolf Hall which I've really enjoyed. I've also started to re-read the Hobbit - the first time was in 1990 when, as a 10-year-old, I went on a North Island (nz) road trip with my family. My dad read it to us in nightly installments in the campgrounds and motels we stayed at. Picking it up again has been wickedly nostalgic.

busy but still reading ILB and actual books...

untouchable: the strange life & tragic death of michael jackson - randall sullivan

not sure why I hung on til the end, this was like the longest vanity fair article ever written, thoroughly reported in literally mind numbing detail about both his twisted life history and dissolute finances. two points: still have no idea whether he molested those kids or not. and don't understand why everybody who did business w/him during his long slide prefaces their description of his spendthrift pathology and inter-personal cluelessness by declaring "but michael was really savvy about business and finances even when he was going broke." the evidence they proceed to give contradicts. still waiting for an authoritative musical biography of michael jackson. cause that's why I read the whole thing. I'm a fan.

through the window: seventeen essays and one short story - julian barnes

as advertised and solid stuff if you like JB as I do. somewhat surprisingly some of the literary pieces read like the smartest undergraduate term papers ever written, more traditionally academic/structured than you might imagine.

trust - george v higgins

convoluted crime story from the master of deadend lowlife dialogue. a good one despite petering out at the very end.

passion on the vine - sergio esposito

didn't expect much from this memoir by a guy who owns a wine store in nyc but it's quite well written besides being informative about italian vino.

currently reading the collected patrick melrose novels by edward st aubyn and enjoying, will weigh in when done. after that: going clear: scientology, hollywood, and the prison of belief by lawrence wright and ike & dick: portrait of a strange political marriage by jeffrey frank await

George V Higgins dialogue is superb. Had a sudden urge to read some Elmore Leonard over the weekend, having not read any since caning through a load when I was 17/18.

er, but didn't have any to hand.

My 88 year old mom loaned me another book, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, which I began to read last night. It is yet another Oprah-approved memoir, but only moderately overwritten. The fact that it centers on hiking the Pacific Crest Trail saves it for my own reading purposes, otherwise I would be struggling with it.

― Aimless

i don't know anything about this book but her book of advice columns is pretty astounding in places

Almost as astounding, I just did a search for her name because I'm currently reading said book. And it really is next-level good.

what makes it so good? the idea of advice columns makes me feel unwell - the dark heart of otm-ness.

U*Nderstanding Architecture. Hoping that i might get some basics in the principles of building construction to give me better grounding for the CAD course I'm on so that it means more than the ability to draw lines. What kind of weight needs to be supported and where, how weight distributes throughout a structure etc. Not sure if this is the right book or if there is a likelihood that I'd get taht kind of understanding without taking a 4 year course but still , looking for some way of getting that info.

xpost The fact that most of the columns are beautifully-written and well-observed essays wrapped in advice column finery. And the fact that Cheryl Strayed seems like one of the most unaccountably well-adjusted people ever and actually gives really great and empathetic advice.

That sounds like if nabisco ever did an anthology.

Thanks, Lunch. I don't know whether this is linked to that thread about the faux-naif blogging voice, or how much I mind it (n's great obv), but 'great and empathetic advice' sounds fucking awful. I mean, clearly good in an advice column, but i'm not sure i get the mentality of wanting to read that sort of thing. 'That's why you are the way you are you c***' cries a Greek chorus composed of ilxors, friends and ex-g/fs. Well, yes, but even so. Even so, prefer a bit more fucked-up in my authors. Sick and tired of otm.

well, strayed draws a lot on her own fucked up life and the fucked up lives of people she has known.

Going strictly by her memoir, Strayed has most definitely paid her fucked-up dues.

That sounds like if nabisco ever did an anthology.

Oh my god, I was actually thinking pretty much exactly this when I wrote that. Astounding lucidity and massive OTM-ness.

And, yeah, Strayed's life seems like it was massively fucked up in a myriad of ways. I think that's a big part of why I'm loving her columns: her blunt honesty about those fucked up things gives her advice the weight of someone who's lived through some shit and come out the other side healthy and whole.

I'd just recommend a column or two online to see if it's your thing. I certainly wouldn't have imagined myself reading a collection of advice columns, let alone finding them by and large beautiful and really moving.

just read The Third Man, as potential warmup for more Greene—Power & the Glory seems best place to start, yes?

Try Brighton Rock.

I loooooved Brighton Rock. Also The End of the Affair is good too.

I've rec'd/described 21 Stories and Collected Essays (re-reading eccentric inspirations, vs. buzzkill of occasionally mentioned Gt. Depression and approaching Luftwaffe) on prev What Are You Reading threads. The collected film reviews are ace too, though mine lacks the one about Hollywood pimping Shirley Temple. And of course his autobio, A Sort of Life.

Booth Tarkington - The Magnificent Ambersons
Daniel Yergin - The Prize

Nabisco did not have astounding lucidity. He was verbose.

I am reading A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD for the 3rd time.

Putting those two posts together suggests you need to reevaluate your life.

Lol

I would add about Nabisco that he was verbose because he sought nuance. He often achieved it, but he paid a marginal cost in clarity.

Just started Wells Tower's Everything Burned, Everything Ravaged having read his piece on Burning Man. The first story was excellent so I've got high hopes for the rest of it.

Read Wildlife by Richard Ford this week. Not sure if I enjoyed the slightness of it or was annoyed by the narrator. Anyone else read it?

i cant remember it much now but acc'ding to this post of mine, i liked it

has anyone read the new Richard Ford?

Weird I thought I posted in this thread the other day. I finally finished my friend's crappy book & can get back to reading actual lit, thank god. 100 pages into sybille bedford's a legacy, loving it so far. Some of the prose is really beautiful.

I loved wildlife too fwiw.

put Graham Greene on hold for the time being while I read The Moonstone, which caught my eye at the used bookstore for several reasons

- on a bit of a mystery kick right now (obviously)
- blurb on the back from T.S. Eliot calling it "the first, longest, and best of modern detective novels"
- Wilkie Collins has an amazing name & equally amazing jacket photo

Have you ever read The Woman in White?! It's so good!!

... I think not! you forgot that I had never even heard of this bro until like 4 days ago.

America Over the Water arrived a couple of days back, been meaning to read that for years. Book Depository still has it in hardback but I think the paperback is rising in price where it's available.
I assume that means its OOP and BD still have copies they got earlier. THough to complicate things further I think they have it as usually sent in 48 rather than 24 hours.
In short if you want a copy grab it while stocks last & I think it's on something like 33% off.

Finally finished Shepperton Babylon which i started a few years ago but only got part of the way through before it disappeared into a pile on my floor or something. Which might mean it was in my shoulder bag when i decided to clean it and then got separated or something similar.
Anyway interesting history of the unsung history of British Cinema.

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick - second time's the charm.
The Baron In The Trees by Italo Calvino - 3/4ths of the way through. A blast.

For reasons which are not clear to me, one of my great uncles became a very close personal advisor to the first president of the Republic of South Korea, although he was not a Korean. Apparently, he even became a 'registered lobbyist for a foreign nation' in Washington D.C. on behalf of Korea. The past two nights I've been reading a book he wrote, "Why War Came in Korea".

It is a fact-heavy book, hurriedly put together. So hurriedly, in fact, that although the invasion of the south began on June 25, 1950, his introduction to the book is dated to August, 1950 and the publication date is also in 1950. Given how thoroughly ignored the Korean conflict has been in the USA it is quite interesting to read a step-by-step recounting of Korea's politics and an analysis that had not yet been obscured by official US propaganda.

I won't bother recommending it to ILB. It's hard to find and unlikely to align with anyone's interests. But it's cool to read an intelligent takedown of the colonial systems of Japan, Great Britain and France in asia, as well as a frank acknowledgement of US colonialism as being only slightly better and for accidental rather than noble reasons. He also has a lot to say about how incompetant the US policies were in postwar asia, outside of Japan.

that kind of is my interests tbh

not really my interests, but it sounds cool

sorta relatedly i finally bought former ilxor g00blars phil roth book, looks good~~

I liked Gooblar. When I talked to him about Roth and literature he was intelligent, well-read and nuanced. I was impressed when I saw that his book had come out. I wrote and congratulated him.

I bought it recently too. Would it be odd if we bookclubbed it?

Yes.

What's the title?

The Major Phases of Philip Roth

Black Swan Green (Mitchell). Re-read. Really enjoyable but very episodic and I'm not convinced it coheres as a novel.

House of Mirth (Wharton). Superficially this sort of thing should be right up my street but I didn't like it much at all. Beautifully written but I didn't sympathise with Lily Bart or have any patience with Wharton's social determinism or snobbishness.

I'm now about quarter way through Paul Kidea's bio of Britten which has been very good so far.

I mean Paul Kildea.

i just finished wharton's 'summer' -- 1st wharton ive read, i will def read more of hers

it's sexy!

Beautifully written but I didn't sympathise with Lily Bart or have any patience with Wharton's social determinism or snobbishness.

can you elaborate? Wharton as author makes assumptions about her class, but for me the beauty of THOM is the extent to which Wharton delineates the rules of the game. That's why her fiction isn't snobbish to me (and it still wouldn't dilute its impact if if she were!).

I'm struggling a bit to understand it myself. I like some writers who are snobs (although always despite their snobbery - I don't find it part of their charm). Waugh, Powell, Austen. So why does Wharton's snobbery bother me?

I have some tentative thoughts.

Writers like Waugh and Powell are partisans and know it. At some level they know their snobbery is unfair. It's not a simple failure of empathy or imagination. They feel their situation is precarious: there is real fear, so they go in to bat for the home side, whatever its faults.

Austen's narrowness I can just about accept as exigent. The social and economic penalties for slipping through the net seem real. The wrong sort of sympathy for the wrong sort of people might lead to your becoming one of them.

There's none of this with Wharton. Slip a couple of rungs from the place on the ladder she's perched on and what most people would regard as a good life is still on offer - reasonable financial comfort and intelligent companionship. And there is no sense that her snobbery is willed or unfair. She clearly thinks herself more generous in her judgement of her social inferiors than her peers. Her snobbishness therefore seems complacent, a failure of imagination rather than a response to fear.

The social determinism seems of a piece with this. If Lily's values are a product of her social situation then her sense of entitlement (as well as Wharton's) is substantially excused. It also gives the book a claustrophobic feel.

As I say these thoughts are tentative. Mainly I found myself really not enjoying a book that I'd have expected to be my sort of thing. I do find the snobberies of Waugh etc grating but there are obviously enough pleasures to compensate. It may simply be the case that in Wharton I didn't find enough pleasures to compensate - although I loved the clarity of her writing.

Going for 50 book challenge this year. There's so many classics I haven't read I need to start catching up. All of these are first time reads.

So far:

James F. Simon - FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: Very surface level and mediocre
Peter F. Hamilton - Judas Unchained: Mindlessly entertaining modern sci-fi, fine for a change of pace
David M. Potter - The Impending Crisis: Really well written and educational on a period of US history I know nothing about.
Graham Greene - The Power and the Glory: Really good, moving character study. One of the best novels I've read in a while
Lemony Snicket - Who Could That Be At This Hour?: Way too self-consciously eccentric. Disappointing.
John Quiggin - Zombie Economics: Awkwardly straddles the line between public policy and hard economics and as a result fails to satisfy on either front.
David Bayles & Ted Orland - Art and Fear: About 1/3 of a great book and 2/3 of filler
Mo Yan - Live and Death Are Wearing Me Out: This was a blast. Funny and original. Want to seek out this guy's other works right now.
Horace McCoy - They Shoot Horses, Don't They?: Pretty good, but man what a bummer. Basically the same as the movie except a little more sexist.
Isaac Bashevis Singer - The Seance: Really well written but most of the stories were pretty boring. Need to read an anthology because the good stories in here were some of the best I've ever read.

In progress:
Jane Austen - Sense and Sensibility: Basically the same as her other books, which I really enjoy
Stephen King - Night Shift: With all the King I read when I was younger somehow I missed out on this one.

That's impressive!

Slip a couple of rungs from the place on the ladder she's perched on and what most people would regard as a good life is still on offer - reasonable financial comfort and intelligent companionship.

Imagine what middle class readers of Wharton's time thought: is Lily's descent to stuffy hotels and being a companion to a vulgar mondaine so bad? But Wharton makes clear that this slippage offends Lily; she is trained to be much better than smelly hotels.

About to get into bed with Richard Yates' Disturbing the Peace with high expectations after having loved Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade to bits.

The Wells Tower book is REALLY really good isn't it!

Recently read:

DFW, Broom of the System (a little weird to read this after having read almost everything else he's written, but also fun)

Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods

Adam Levin, The Instructions (love this)

Christopher Priest, The Islanders (lots of semi-nerdy world-building and the writing is ehh in parts, dialogue especially, but the setting is great and I like all the recurring characters and unreliable narrators)

Now almost done with Teju Cole's Open City, which is great. For people who have read it, you know the part with the 'bootblack', who talks about his memories of Haiti and NYC but circa ~1800? Did I miss something, or is this just a one-off bit of surrealism? It seemed like it was presented as one of the narrator's real experiences, not a dream or reverie, but there's nothing else quite like it in the book.

Jordan we had a whole thread on Open City- one of our most successful book club effects, I think-where we discussed exactly that kind of thing. But you might want to wait until you are completely finished to read it. Teju Cole: Open City (ILX Book Club #3, starts 27 June)

Huge Christopher Priest fan, have a copy of The Islanders, although I haven't really got going on it , but really liked the other Dream Archipelago stuff of his I've read. Actually that reminds me, I just read the first few chapters of A Dream of Wessex a little while back, I need to finish that first.

effects=efforts

hey what did you think of the ending of the instructions jordan

the whole second half, even

I've almost nearly finally finished DFW's The Pale King. I've been reading it on and off for nearly a year now (!) and the long tedious bits were a total slog. There was a point halfway through the book where it felt like I just wasn't getting any more than a page further at a time; a temporally obfuscating read if ever there was one; but once I broke through those ghastly chapters I suddenly found myself racing through. Currently getting to the end of the excellent bar room conversation, which is making the whole thing feel a bit more worthwhile.

Meanwhile, my "to read" stack of fiction and non-fiction is growing. What should I delve into next?

Stuart Sutherland - Irrationality
Jeremy Paxman - Empire
Donna Tartt - A Secret History
Michael Chabon - Wonder Boys
Philip K Dick - The Man In The High Castle
Jonathan Lethem - Talking Heads: Fear Of Music
Rob Young/Various - No Regrets: Writing On Scott Walker

I should also go back to the chapters I skipped in David Byrne's 'How Music Works' which is very very good, but does tend to repeat itself a bit (necessary - his approach towards music becomes a sort of holistic mantra).

I can vouch for Wilkie Collins' 'Woman In White' mentioned upthread - such a great book.

Lanz and the Court of Enquiry: a writing group for anonymous authors and nonymous critics

I forgot to advertise this on here - a writing group that works by emailing submissions to me, and then me reposting without attribution, for criticism by all. Anybody fancies submitting, email me by 31 March. Address is at the top of the thread.

> Philip K Dick - The Man In The High Castle
> pssstttt, Hey you (dog latin), Tuesday, March 19, 2013 12:45 PM

i have also just read TMITHC and am currently reading Jude The Obscure where someone uses the phrase 'dog-latin'...

"A Secret History" is an easy read and p good fun. "The Man in the High Castle" is excellent. Not sure Paxo on Empire worth the bother, though coincidentally I picked up a copy of James/Jan Morrison's Pax Britannica trilogy the other day, so will be reading that soon.

Just finishing Moby-Dick and Fowler's End by Gerard Kersh, next up will be Simon Schama's "Citizens" I think. Anyone read that?

Jordan we had a whole thread on Open City

Oh thanks, I'll definitely read it when I've finished.

hey what did you think of the ending of the instructions jordan

Well, the coda felt like a cop-out and the book probably would have been better off without it, but I didn't dislike it as much as some of my friends. As for the second half, it could almost have been longer? Not the Damage Proper setpiece, but I wanted more out of his parents, Flowers, etc.

Re: the whole long climax, I was into it but I've had some long conversations with people who liked it less. So much of it is about how you see & feel about Gurion as a character, and the queasiness of the violence set against wanting him to succeed (whatever that means) and realizing how deeply fucked up he is worked for me.

I'm guessing you didn't like it as much?

so (this is getting kind of fuzzy in recollection now) but it seemed like the first half existed in a place where you couldn't straightforwardly resolve it to either, gurion (and his family) have powers, vs., gurion is batshit insane; whereas by the ending it seems like that's your option?

i could have done with more gore in the Damage Proper actually. maybe that was why it didn't quite work for me. hm. lol at philip roth obv. i think he still succeeded pretty admirably in managing gurion's bizarrely biased account of his 12yo emotions, and in maintaining forward motion through a book that progresses pretty at real time.

gurion (and his family) have powers, vs., gurion is batshit insane; whereas by the ending it seems like that's your option?

I think by the ending it's both! Or rather, there's still more to it. Just because some crazy shit goes down (or at least he's telling you it did in his scripture) doesn't quite mean he's the Messiah, or if he is, it doesn't he's a good one or that his actions are justified (see his father's Kabbalah story).

Yeah the Roth thing really put off one of my friends, but another one saw it as a response/parallel to "The Conversion of the Jews", which I hadn't read until after finishing The Instructions.

i could have done with more gore in the Damage Proper actually

Whoa. I was pretty tense all through this section, especially at the beginning when you're wondering how far things are going to go. Then the first death happens and it all felt visceral enough to me.

i think he still succeeded pretty admirably in managing gurion's bizarrely biased account of his 12yo emotions, and in maintaining forward motion through a book that progresses pretty at real time.

Agreed.

i mean tbf whenever i saw it in the remainder bookshop i thought "man, i should read that again" which how many 1,000-page debut novels does one say that about right

haven't read the story collection though

Just started Rebecca West's 'The Fountain Overflows' - pretty terrific so far. Also read this week Willa Cather's 'A Lost Lady', which was certainly good but not the masterpiece some seem to regard it as.