WHAT ARE YOU READING SUMMER 2013?

"Its gonna be 5-0"

Marilynne Robinson - Home.
Also started on Boer's Buru Quartet.

loved "bartleby" but am struggling through some of the shorter pieces, might just skip to "benito cereno" and "billy budd"

Mathias Enard - Zone: so far, great

Orhan Pamuk - Black Book: so far, very good

New Jincy Willett: Amy Falls Down -- enjoyably funny and ill-tempered

Maurice Riordan: The Water Stealer -- poetry collection which mostly seemed OK, except for one wonderful nostalgic poem about smoking which was so good it actually made me want to smoke

xp bartleby is my favorite short story. i haven't read any other melville because i am worried about losing my image of him as this incredibly prescient, proto-existentialist/absurdist writer

...

read more melville ffs

Asking you all here for some help!

My brother will be going to Nashville for 4 months to study with a Derrida prof for his postdoctoral. As a going-away present I would like to give him a 'Great Nashville/Tennessee' novel, if such a novel exists. A novel that is regarded as a classic American novel that is either situated in Nashville or TN, deals with its surroundings, nature etc.

I've shortlisted James Agee's 'A Death in the Family' and Peter Taylor's 'A Summon to Memphis'. The former sounds pretty good, I've not read any of them.

Anyone have any suggestions? It would be greatly appreciated. Bro likes a lot of different things, so don't let the above two force you into thinking into similar books.

Shiloh by Shelby Foote
The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy (not my favorite of McCarthy's but his first, and it is set in Tennessee)

ps. Faulkner would apply with several books, but he's read all of his books already.

xp

Thanks VG, awes! :-)

I've not read the Foote novel, but you could do worse than have Shelby Foote's voice in your head when you go to Tennessee :)

Wiki says: "The book owes much to William Faulkner in the slow, elegant cadence of its storytelling."

Which is a huge recommendation in my book (npi), so thanks, you awes! :-)

Suttree

It's in Knoxville though.

Nae mind, if it's in TN it counts, thanks!

The 1957 and 2008 editions of A Death In The Family are significantly different--maybe get him both? Here's a comparative study--non-clinical!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/books/review/Blythe-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Now aside from deciding if I get it or not, I have to decide between editions, thanks a lot man...

(seriously though, thanks!)

Give him a jar and in the jar put a handwritten copy of the Wallace Stevens poem Anecdote of the Jar, which begins... "I placed a jar in Tennessee".

Aimless you magnificent bastard! I might actually do that, too!

<3

Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan - Robin Wood

aimless that's total genius

xp bartleby is my favorite short story. i haven't read any other melville because i am worried about losing my image of him as this incredibly prescient, proto-existentialist/absurdist writer

there is a book, it is about a dude on a monomaniacal quest to kill a universal symbol, maybe you have heard of it

idly flicking thru John Aubrey's The Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme, basically a collection of regional calendar customs.

Still on Livro de Desassossego, enjoying it, trying to cultivate a touch of Soares-like aesthetic of detachment to my work. sure that will go down well at my next appraisal. (don't speak Portuguese btw, just like writing desassossego.)

Roundhead Reputations by Blair Worden, about Edmund Ludlow, Algernon Sidney, Cromwell and historiography.
Made a little pile of Civil Warrish stuff - Letters and Speeches of Cromwell, Lucy Hutchinson's Life of Colonel John Hutchinson, Richard Baxter's Autobiography. Picking at it, rather than reading through.
Finishing off Ian Donaldson's biography of Ben Jonson. This is good - v readable for something that's more academic than popular.

de sass ass soss ego

I'm now somewhat more than halfway through The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It is bogging down atm, due to Chabon having set so many plates aspin at once during the first 250pp that he now must rush from one to the other, reanimating each one individually, while leaving all the rest unattended. Still, it is a fun book so far.

apparently i am reading wittgenstein.

i tried to read other things, but they don't stick.

/xp bartleby is my favorite short story. i haven't read any other melville because i am worried about losing my image of him as this incredibly prescient, proto-existentialist/absurdist writer/

there is a book, it is about a dude on a monomaniacal quest to kill a universal symbol, maybe you have heard of it

God bless Captain Save-a-Melville.

I don't even want to think about when I started reading it, but I finally finished reading Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution. I liked the first third or so the best. After that it got a bit drier and almost perfunctory. Now I've started Jerry McGill's Dear Marcus, which is pretty great so far.

at my mum's, flicking through my dad's old socialist/leftist/communist books: The Left in Britain by David Widgery:

These literary delinquents had their parallel in the deviant working class. In the 1956 'Rock and Roll Riots' the kiss-curled middleweight Bill Haley was to unearth a new form of working-class revolt. Teds were a generation of moneyed juveniles who took the new prosperity seriously. Instead of trying to impress boss or parent or teacher, they impressed each other, with speed and noise and clothes and bikes. And rock, which George Melly, who ought to know, described as 'screw and smash music' and the 'Any Questions' panel described as 'the logical progression of jungle music'. Teds were a warning that the calm of Two-Way Family Favourites and Coronation tea caddies would not last for ever. But the dark gremlins who came out bopping in the cinemas got really rough treatment from the police. At the Elephant and Castle post-war kids found out how shallow the new freedom was, that Britain may have been 'Shakin' ALl Over' but there was to be no dancing in the aisles.

That usually clears the halls, thank you.

xpost from sci-fi thread:

Craig Harrison: The Quiet Earth -- 1981 NZ novel, basis for the rather great 1980s film
http://www.listal.com/viewimage/4015515
http://stuffpoint.com/apocalyptic-and-post-apocalyptic-fiction/image/215013-apocalyptic-and-post-apocalyptic-fiction-the-quiet-earth-screenshot.jpg

Man wakes up, finds out everyone else on earth has vanished, due to experiment he was working on and was attempting suicide to escape the effects of

http://i2.listal.com/image/4015515/600full-the-quiet-earth-screenshot.jpg

starring the one and only bruno lawrence! i remember seeing it on tv in the early nineties, probably its sole showing in nz post original release.

just finished perec's a void, and before that alasdair gray's 1982 janine. both excellent.

Been a while since I updated:

Barbara Tuchman - The Guns of August Very interesting and well-balanced account. Fascinating period in history, and I had/have an embarrassing gap of knowledge when it comes to WWI
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway My first Woolf. I really liked the structure and the characters, and though the writing style did start to grate on me, the book was short enough that I didn't really care.
David Rakoff - Fraud Unbearably pretentious. There's only so many stories about how above it all the author is that one can take in a single sitting.
China Mieville - The City & The City I loved how it started with a seemingly fantasy-ish premise and then slowly broke it down into normal. Just when I thought the story was taking off, it deliberately brought things in, in a way that made it so much better. I did not care for the ridiculous bilingual jargon, and the symbolism was a bit heavy handed, but the premise itself (and the slow reveal) was enough to sell it.

Current:
Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird This is my first foray into "lesser" Vonnegut, all I've read so far is the widely acknowledged classics.

I finished "Dear Marcus" a few days ago. So nice to read something that can be finished in a few sittings for a change. I recommend it to anyone who can stomach something plainly "inspirational" in intent.

Still on Victor Klemperer, now at July 1941 and here he is in prison. It's amazing that he survives at all, you'd think - but that's what's so interesting about the book, piecing together how the experience of living through Nazi Germany is not exactly congruent with your post-facto history-class understanding of how it would have been. In some ways it's better - nearly halfway through the war and he can still be outspoken and eat out and live an in-some-ways tolerable life - and in some ways worse - the continual low-level shittiness, tax demands, pointless curfews, are particularly dismal.

The year-or-so of internal debate about emigration, the irony was at first overwhelming - don't think twice about buying a slot on the last remaining evacuation ship in 1940, for goodness' sake! - but eventually you can understand. 'If we stay here the regime will end and we need never have left, or it will be the death of us and so at least an end will come; but in America I should be so lonely, and dependent on charity, and not knowing the language' - it doesn't seem like such a wrong choice, the way he puts it.

Baby I Don't Care Lee Server's Robert Mitchum biography which I picked up for 99c sometime last year in a large bunch of books taht I haven't really looked at since. Then I picked this up last week and I'm finding it really interesting. I knew some stuff about him but not everything.
Had seen photos of him in prison denims but didn't know the exact circumstances. Also think I'd hearda bout him hoboing in his youth but nt much beyond so now know a little about that.

Interesting book on an interesting guy.

Edith Pearlman: Binocular Vision

That Mitchum bio is amazing!

"Haut Rodric nodded through the smoke of his first lusty puffs."

I'm re-reading _Foundation_. Turns out I remember nothing about this book, except the few bits that anyone who hasn't read it knows. I enjoy how they frequently speak like Mr Burns. "Stop that infernal coin tossing!" etc. Wasn't sure I was going to finish it, but once I started annotating, it became quite amusing.

"Pirene stirred uneasily, as the muted buzzer upon his desk muttered peevishly."

PS: "'Science be dashed!' swore the other, via a bouncing soldierly oath that ionized the atmosphere."

reread the three foundation books a couple months ago -- i still love them even though the first book is a bit of a slog once you get past the opening and the dialogue is about as hilariously dreadful as you'd expect from a precocious 21-year-old who's trying to rewrite gibbon as science fiction. the stuff with the mule and the second foundation in the second and third books is still gripping, wonderful stuff imo.

Never did read the other two back in the days -- not sure if it's because I didn't like the first enough, or simply because I wasn't resourceful enough to get hold of copies when I was a teenager. In these days of easy interlibrary loan, I may have to consider looking into them.

read the hound of the baskervilles on the plane yesterday. breezy read

Lynne Olson - Those Angry Days, about FDR's trouble in 1940 with the Neutrality Act, Lindbergh, isolationists in Congress.

asimov was 21 when he wrote foundation? that is like woah

like i don't think whatever complex of ideas i had around asimov allowed for him ever being 21

i read his biography when i was a young lad, even vol. 1's photo did not suggest he had ever been 21

He remembered middle & high school pretty clearly though, esp. re the Mule.

and the whole idea of the Foundation really, for us Atom Age kids anyway (I sent off for info from the United World Federalists, via a coupon in Amazing Science Fiction Magazine, I think). This might've already been linked, but here's Krugman's kidspiration testimony http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/04/paul-krugman-asimov-economics

books i'm bringing to asia instead of my laptop:

- GRE study book
- a very short introduction to spinoza (this is actually a pretty great series).
- axel's castle by edmund wilson
- confessions of a mask by yukio mishima
- chilly scenes of winter by ann beattie
- short stories by jean rhys
- mean free path by ben lerner
- collected pushkin

.... i think this should be good. a part of me wants to really get into hobsbawm's age of ___ series but i am not really in the mood.

i have passed up so many opportunities to buy those cheaply and i think i feel okay about that

treeship what are you doing in asia, has this been covered elsewhere on ilx

my dad lives and works in singapore. i'm visiting him with my brother and afterward going to thailand. should be sweet, but i think there will also be downtime to read, especially because i'm not taking my computer

Is Singapore good? I was speaking to a girl whose mum's from there and she described it as 'like New York' which frankly I didn't believe.

never been before! politically, it's not at all good and they have the highest execution rate per capita. but it is a hyper modern asian capital... a good place to get lost in crowds and think about things. maybe i think i am going to bring emerson instead of one of those, actually.

(sorry for writing "maybe i think" that was a typo)

That Mitchum bio is amazing!

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, August 6, 2013 10:53 AM (3 days ago)

There was a BBC doc on him may years ago that ws great.

Lee Seung-U - The Reverse Side of Life was ultimately on the dull side. I seldom care about literary detective novels.

Some short stories by Pavese.
Thomas Bernhard - Old Masters. So many quotable passages - unfortunately they are chunky so I can't reproduce them here. I can see myself re-reading this, year upon year, around my birthday.
Actually flows into the The Man Without Qualities, that "Superman of Letters" part where you see the contempt for cultural-political whaddyawannacallit.

I re-read Vertigo by Sebald. While the walking around and finding and remembering can be great (no matter how trivial) there really is a vaccumm behind it. It doesn't need to be for anything, but what is really driving this. 'Meditation on memory' balls.

Tom Jones seems like it's going to be brilliant. I was fully won over when I got to the church lady brawl written as a Homeric pastiche.

Richard Popkin's History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (cheaped out on buying the later Savonarola to Bayle edition). Slightly dry, very typo-ridden, but something immensely soothing in its steady grind through the fine distinctions of early modern thought.

Tim Parks' astute overview/delving into Dickens and his sometimes over-extended family (incl. characters) and biographical efforts to deal with all this, incl Robert Gottlieb, trying to "direct emotional response" to the way D. treated offspring, wife, mistress, and parents-- with segments/incidents I hadn't focused on previously, but how can anybody keep up with all of 'em http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n15/tim-parks/how-does-he-come-to-be-mine?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3515b&hq_e=el&hq_m=2662998&hq_l=5&hq_v=ee633f022b

That's in the London Review of Books.

yeah, that was a good article. I started with a bit of heavy heart (not in a dickens or lit biography mood and it looked really long), but ended up enjoying it, it unfolded well.

you really missed out, woof! savaonarola and bayle's parts are both pretty dope iirc.

damn, yeah, it was a false economy in retrospect, Bayle's my scene & I am def intrigued by a Savonarola chapter. I'll find it in a library once I'm finished maybe.

David Rakoff - Fraud Unbearably pretentious. There's only so many stories about how above it all the author is that one can take in a single sitting.

Don't know Fraud, but Don't Get Too Comfortable struck me in much the same way, to the point that I eventually abandoned it. Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish (which I just posted about in the contempo fiction thread) is not like that at all, though, and I couldn't recommend it higher.

a friend of mine moved to singapore recently, she found it really depressing and the chief development of her first month there was befriending and taming a stray cat

popkin and parks look like things i might like to get involved in

Yeah. And on the left margin of Parks' Dickens, I'm starting to check out the links to More By This Contributor: the one on Vol. 2 of Beckett's letters I like maybe more than the Dickens, maybe because I relate more to Beckett, though not nec. in a good way--lots of tantalizing quotes & commenta: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n23/tim-parks/on-needing-to-be-looked-after

"maybe evenmore than the Dickens", I meant

Thomas Bernhard - Old Masters. So many quotable passages - unfortunately they are chunky so I can't reproduce them here

Hey, just reproduce the whole paragraph

beginning to re-read raise high/seymour

Just bask from a long camping trip, during which I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I have no new thoughts to add to what I've already said about it. It was competantly written and gave me sufficient pleasure.

I also read Stasiland. It was clear to me the author struggled with how to present all her material and tie it together into a book, rather than a mere grab bag, but her strategy of placing a superstructure of personal memoir around the gathering of her material did the trick and smoothed over all the seams where the stories were stitched together. I'd recommend it to others.

Additionally, I read Turgenev's First Love in Berlin's translation (Penguin). That is one remarkable book. The choice of subject allowed Turgenev to write in a purely romantic vein while paradixically staying very close to strict realism. He absolutely nails it.

Lastly, I read A Primate's Memoir, Robert Sapolsky. This was ok. It recounts various stories gathered during about 20 seasons of field research on baboons in the Serengetti of Kenya. It gives one a feel for the social life of baboons, and also for the chaotic hodgepodge that is post-colonial Africa.

One good thing about a two week camping trip is it gives me lots of undistracted time to read.

"first love" is probably my favorite thing i've read in the past couple of years. the scene where he's just fallen in love with zinaida and is watching the thunderstorm out his window..."as though i were afraid by an abrupt movement to disturb what filled my soul". and the ending!

i read the garnett translation though

Finally read Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger for the first time. Essential. Wish I'd read it as a kid.

have been meaning to reread 'raise high' for a while -- bought the JDS hardcover boxset cheap a while back.

Charles Moore's new Margaret Thatcher bio is what I've wanted for years and now think is too heavy a meal to ingest.

needs some wine

Good commentary on her and that new bio in recent New Yorker, by John Lanchester.
cryptosicko, the version of "The Mysterious Stranger" I read as a child, the only one available for a long, long time, turned out to be cribbed from frags and counterfeit bits by Albert Bigelow Payne and one of his stooges, although I still thought it was pretty cool (by my middle school standards anyway). Twain left several manuscripts; the last (only one he finished, I think) was published in the early 80s as a stand-alone, No. 44 The Mysterious Stranger(These University of California Press editions are fascinating; I really like the outtakes from Huckleberry Finn). They also have all the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts in one volume. This entry breaks it down (and goes off into the weeds re the No. 44 part of the title) http://www.twainquotes.com/Number44.html

Thanks, dow.

I had a vague idea of the story's complicated history, but read the Payne cause it was available as a free eBook. Did just check a Twain compilation out of the library that includes the No. 44 version, which might end up feeling redundant at this point, but I'm curious.

After that, gotta read The Scarlet Letter cause its being covered in the class I'm assisting with in the Fall and I've somehow never read it.

I thought No. 44 was better, though may have been influenced by the intriguing backstory.

It was eerie, like a lot of the later Twain (this was one of his last finished works); the Payne version wasn't as deft.

fuckin love bernhard!!!!

i'm reading "tyrant memory" by horacio castellanos moya. third thing i've read by him and the second last one that has been translated into english so far. so into this guy! if you like bolano or contemp latin american fiction he is so so good, crazy fast-paced dark humour

i read that love affairs of nathanial p book

it was p good idk

i cant get the ad pull quote from w/e wapo reviewer who said he wanted to require his daughter to read it to get him to pay off her student loans or something, seems otm yet nonsensical all @ once

http://i.imgur.com/yCt7yHT.jpg

markers about to be fucked up

dope cover

The book I am reading now is of local interest and otherwise pretty obscure: Bowerman and the Men of Oregon, by Kenny Moore. It's the bio of a track coach at the University of Oregon who also invented shoes and clothes for his runners, thus co-founding Nike Corporation in his spare time.

http://www.franklycollectible.com/images/revolution%2060.jpg

nothing amazing, its mostly interviews with the main french/english/eastern european directors of the time. so many movies i want to check out on the back of it tho.

that sounds like it'd be a helpful primer mb

so many movies i want to check out on the front of it, little help

the second seal by Dennis Wheatley. I'm ion a train.

this Dennis Wheatley is shit.

always liked this author photo of wheatley that appeared on the back of his paperbacks:

http://www.dast.nu/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Dennis-Wheatley-i-bibliotek.jpg

I used to have a copy of _The Monk_ that was from a paperback series called something like Denis Wheatley's Library of the Occult. Loved how totally trashy it looked.

I've been in a reading funk this week, not really alleviated by a lousy reread of _Foundation_. Had a great time with some stories from Barry Hannah's _Airships_ though. Loved how "Testimony of Pilot" felt like a tiny, wonderful novel, sorta like Alice Munro's do.
Think I'll grab myself a Wodehouse and go to the park now.

Here, as in all his books, Dennis Wheatley with telling effect interweaves his swiftly told story with true events and characters

is exactly what he doesn't do. a brief, mildly absurd society seduction scene conducted by the Duke de Richleau at the beginning is followed by about 40 pages of extraordinarily ponderous explanation of the balance of power before the First World War. It's actually probably not bad as a history primer, but swiftly told this isn't. That's then followed by a protracted dinner with a chorus girl, in itself quite fun, but with nothing to do with anything. It's stuff like this that makes you realise the excellence of Eric Ambler, say, whose narrative compression and ironic tone execute in a paragraph what it's taken Wheatley 70 pages to not get to yet. I mean, even allowing for the fact that he isn't Ambler, all he's achieved in this period has show you what a colossal prick the Duke is, the enormous unexamined self-satisfaction of the writer and the main male characters, a blue streak of misogyny a mile wide, plus an entire textbook on European politics 1890-1910.

Speaking of the latter there's a sort of stale, clumsy and regressive dramatic irony - the book having been published in 1950 - playing around the whole outbreak of WW1. Dennis Wheatley pretending to be Erskine Childers when in fact he's GMcD Fraser or something.

Thoroughly enjoying it of course, but that's another matter.

Robert Sellers Don't let The Bastards Grind You Down about the young generationoof British actors emerging in the 50s at the time of the Angry Young Men. Connery, Bates, Finney, O'Toole, Harris, Caine, Robert Shaw and a couple of others showing how some of them were interconnected pre-major recognition in ways I hadn't heard before. Didn't know there were connections between Connery and Victor Spinetti or Connery and Caine in the 50s. Only connection I'd really heard about the latter pair was The Man Who Would Be King or the fact taht they were playing 2 aspects of what being a memeber of teh Secret Servioce meant at pretty much the same thing. & Connery & spinetti emerged from the same production of South PAcific to become flatmates.

Interesting book, another one I picked up cheap in a sale in the local branch of Ireland's national newsagent chain. Find it pretty compelling so glad i got it, still need to work my way through a stack of other books picked up at right around the same time. Wonder if I ever will.

can anyone recommend a good biography of Descartes?

re-reading Pavese - Moon and the Bonfires. Such an incredible work, its description of the countryside is just about the best ever, bcz it acknowledges how vicious it is. otoh im sure Pavese borrowed that from all the English Lit he read, with added fascism to 'modernize' yer visions.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie -- thx ilb this is good
The Wizard of Oz -- because I've seen the movie enough times that I figure I should. first interesting thing I noticed: the transition from b&w to color is in the book.

so many movies i want to check out on the front of it, little help

Is that Loves of a Blonde?

Just read Bolano's 'The Third Reich': a bit like a Alain Robbe-Grillet in the mix of menacing-ness and oddly compelling evocation of tedium.

Things I did not expect to encounter in Bolano novel #1: The Judge Dredd role-playing game

It IS Loves of a Blonde. Cool: http://annleary.com/2008/08/milos-forman-in-house/

finally finished the executioner's song. now reading steve coll's ghost wars, slowly, as usual. also v-v-v-very slowly starting to read

http://img1.imagesbn.com/p/9781555970444_p0_v1_s260x420.JPG

not sure about this one . . .

can anyone recommend a good biography of Descartes?

gaukroger's is good so far as i've read it, esp. if you want to understand anything about descartes' other intellectual work. i assume clarke's would be fine but boring as most other c.u.p. biographies of philosophers tend to be (good for life data, at least). (in fact, i couldn't swear to you that i don't own a copy of the clarke, which would betray its boringness, but i seem not to.) i've consulted the rodis-lewis but as i recall it lacked the scope i wanted (tho it's shorter, and french, so not caught up in anglo-american philosophical culture). with no real knowledge of it, i would avoid the watson.

knew this wd be the place to ask. thanks j.!

descartes was an arsehole

sez so in most of those iirc

re: Wheatley, from the very little reading I've done ("The Devil Rides Out" and "To The Devil A Daughter", plus I watched a BBC documentary) he got progressively more hectoring and bitter as his career went along; "Devil Rides Out" is ideologically iffy, but so full of verve and adventure that you don't really notice, "To The Devil A Daughter" meanwhile is seriously embittered (food rationing! the nerve!) and actually quite gross, though still compelling. He was a bit of a fascist, is the thing.

with no real knowledge of it, i would avoid the watson.

I've read it. Informal to the point of chattiness. Enjoyable for a tourist like me, but not enough for the serious student.

He was a bit of a fascist, is the thing.

yes. in one way that feels a little harsh in that he's just presenting unexamined regressive male tory belligerence rather than actual fascism, otoh he was writing well into the 20th century and there's surely no excuse. I might even give him a bye on *some* of that, were it not for how laboured he is and how uninteresting the Duke de Richleau is. James Bond (with whom he has some strong parallels) is Alyosha Karamazov in comparison.

also bought THE SATANISTS for a quid. Might give that a go before giving him up as a dead loss. Was kind of interested to see if I could fit him into some sort of lineage of post James/Machen/le Fanu British and Irish 20th C horror, with its strong pastoral, Victorian-inflected manner and tendency to avoid actual horrific manifestations. At least that's my fairly rudimentary model.

From that angle he is in a sense interesting because difficult to characterise. There are elements of the sensational or US style of horror, tied to v regressive British sociopolitical tendencies and a suet prose style. Late Bulldog Drummond manner yoked to horrific lit, maybe?

This pile of shit I'm reading is a thriller tho and there he's just an aberration. Even Buchan is well in advance of this joker.

Was skimming Buchan's Greenmantle, incl. tasty trimmings (the World's Classics edition, done up right, it seems). Is it actually good? I'm not that picky, but if the title character is based on T.E. Lawrence...

re: wheatley - a lot of this is guesswork rather than the studied fact, but yes, i think in some ways he obv prefigures ppl in the american horror post-war tradition like ira levin and william peter blatty, who also used satanism as a vehicle for sensationalist tosh w/ a deeply catholic-onservative morality. i mean, wheatley's to the devil a daughter was written in 1953, and again you have sense of a 'wild' (satanic) female sexuality being opposed by flawed but heroic masculine rigidity. i guess wheatley's 'problem' (unreadability) is that he has the sensibility and technique (and churn rate) of prewar brit tosh-merchants like edgar wallace. i think it's in the ka of gifford hillary (a name even h. james wld've been happy w/) that there's a whole chapter of quasi-scientific speculation/explanation that wheatley advises the reader they can skip if it bores them, he wrote it for his own pleasure/amusement!

it seems impossible to imagine a situation where his books will ever be read much, anymore

I dunno, I thought "The Devil Rides Out" was quite readable; the group dynamic gave it more of a Boy's Own feel and made each character's charisma or lack thereof less of an issue. I like the part where they travel to Paris together and the Duke still has flowers sent up to his female companion's hotel room. Not because he is romantically interested in them but because he is a True Gentleman.

Sapper struck me as much uglier than Wheatley; with Buchan I've only read "The 39 Steps", which is grindingly repititive, but Jess Nevins has good words to spare for him so I might try "Greenmantle".

At any rate I don't think Wheatley fits into the lineage you mention, Fizzles, because his interest in the supernatural is much more about coming up with good villains for an adventure tale than exploring the Uncanny in any serious manner. Evil is there to be scary, yeah, but also mostly to be vanquished by our dashing heroes.

Sapper is definitely uglier (anyone done any analysis on the relative ugliness/styles/fascistic views of the various Sappers? Why on earth would they?). But 'he' is probably less boring.

Yeah, point taken about not really fitting the lineage, Daniel, but if you're looking at British horror, I think he needs to be there. I've got this really shitty template in my head, where the tentacle as utilised by MR James/Machen stretches across the Atlantic and proliferates in the hands of Lovecraft and inheritors, and later comics and films - all about the visibility and the horror, where the 'English' strand is all about the chiaroscuro of withheld images that's also in MR James, of the psychology of manifestation, pastoral and folk. British ghost stories retain a Victorian manner, setting, and psychology. (Really worth reading Elizabeth Jane Howard's early set of short stories 'We Are For the Dark' btw)

That's my hazy template, and DW doesn't really fit into it. For me the most interesting innovators in this area in the 20th C are Nigel Kneale and Mark E Smith - retaining strongly English settings as well as many of the supernatural entities of the late Victorian horror, but revenging themselves in very modern landscapes populated by modern types. Clive Barker I essentially see as American in this context, for instance.

Does this nonsense make any sense?

But yeah, Ward's analysis feels right to me. Edgar Wallace! That's what I was trying to get at with Sapper.

I like Buchan, though you need to swallow quite a lot of imperialistic crap. Things I like:

Transcontinental chases (Hannay in Greenmantle, but also the speed with which he hares round the England and Scotland in 39 steps)
Compression (Ambler was best at this, but Buchan's narratives really move)
Clearly enjoys villainy
Not unrelated, clearly enjoys what might be termed unEnglish behaviour - it's the colonialist fascination, but it's not boorishly repressed, it's indulged.
Loves disguises, costumes and concealment to a very improbable degree.
A clear eye for the picturesque and exciting (essential this!)
A large cast of well-formed minor characters, who have narrative agency and body.

S: 39 Steps and Greenmantle
D: Probably the other Hannays - Mr Standfast is... not great, The Isle of Sheep is p nauseating.

Anyone read his other Scottish clan stuff?

chiaroscuro of withheld images Yeah, I was just thinking about this while reading John Wyndham's From The Deeps. Thanks for the Buchan take; I'll check out that handily annotated edition of Greenmantle.

tangentially related to the Buchan stuff - one of the things I like in writing (as in life in fact) is movement between locations - it's a particular feature of the spy genre, for obvious reasons. Greenmantle is a good example, but it's also responsible for the slightly arbitrary tourism-porn of the Bond films (I seem to remember the last Bourne film suffered from meaningless scene changing). The Man Who Was Thursday is a great example a dream-like scenery shifts (with all four seasons occurring in one day in the flight from Britain into France).

Conversely one of the things that I found most tedious about the Harry Potter books were the limited set of locations. You've got the fantasy genre, proverbially good at maps, locations, wondrous scenes, and here they are, stuck in the dorms of this pokey school 90% of the time.

Reason this came to mind is I was reading an interview with Laura Poitras in the NYT:

“Geolocation is the thing,” she said. “I want to keep as much off the grid as I can. I’m not going to make it easy for them. If they want to follow me, they are going to have to do that. I am not going to ping into any G.P.S. My location matters to me. It matters to me in a new way that I didn’t feel before.”

One of the things that used to worry me when returning to my desultorarily worked-on novel, (an indulgent mess of influence-porous thriller/sci-fi/fantasy nonsense, more hobby than achievement) is how to justify the movement of characters in an age of instant global communication. in a sense it's the conundrum that William Gibson engaged with in Neuromancer (and Pattern Recognition is a cyber- thriller that makes excellent use of physical location I think, but with sometimes dubious necessity). But basically, yeah, what is the mechanical justification for moving characters about? I drew up a list somewhere - was something like: physical danger, desire (physical/spiritual), refugee status, exile, destruction of environment.

Considerations about the status of material presence, physical proximity apply (reminded of R Mitchum's laconic reply on being asked "What makes a woman good in bed?" "Proximity").

What I didn't consider was Laura Poitras' point - that this level of surveillance produces a geophysical map of virtual safety/risk. Location *matters*. It still matters, matters as much as ever, even with immediate movement of data and communication. in fact location becomes bound up with notions of encryption, code, the separate movement of data to physical movement. The traditional "Hannay on a train to Scotland accused of murder" dangers of transit.

i thought greenmantle was pretty amazing; i think i'd just given up on my first attempt at the seven pillars around then

i'm curious about arbuthnot's being 'based on' t.e. lawrence, like what exactly is the time scale here

Two books into Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy. She's great on the horrors of the war, the physical and psychological costs, and the ignorance or callousness of those not involved in the action, both the generals or the general public. Also enlightening on the stiff upper lip culture that gave questioning the war such pariah status even among those fighting it. I'm less keen on the heavy psychoanalysing which the second book in particular focuses on.

Been reading some John O'Hara stories. Quite enjoyed "Imagine Kissing Pete" (really a novella, I guess).

speaking of T.E., I'm listening to a Fresh Air interview with Scott Anderson, (brother of Jon Lee Anderson and) author of Lawrence In Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Middle East. Seems to explain a few things already: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/19/209573091/lawrence-of-arabia-from-archaeologist-to-war-hero

Making of the Modern Middle East, that is.

I'm with ledge: The first Regeneration book is wonderful, second had good bits but definitely didn't work as well. I have the third, but lost momentum a bit there.

O'Hara's novellas probably some of his best work: there's a Modern Library collection of them full of good stuff.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0679601678.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

I laid aside the bio of Bill Bowerman temporarily while I went on a camping trip with my wife. While camping I read the Eyrbyggja Saga. It suffered some from a lack of cohesiveness, in that the theme of the saga was a locality and not a single character or a tragic blood feud. Now I am back into the bio.

O'Hara's novellas probably some of his best work: there's a Modern Library collection of them full of good stuff.

The collection I'm reading has a couple of those, but that looks awesome.

wd like to read the ML O'Hara novellas as well - I'm completely ignorant of him. biggest problem is I used to work in a bookshop and the the modern library rep was a complete asshole, so the covers bring me out in hives cos all I see is her boorish face. think I shd probably try to overcome this.

i thought greenmantle was pretty amazing; i think i'd just given up on my first attempt at the seven pillars around then

i'm curious about arbuthnot's being 'based on' t.e. lawrence, like what exactly is the time scale here

think the timescale *just* works. Checking this I was astonished to find that Greenmantle was 1916 - a lot earlier than I realised. point being tho, both Buchan and Lawrence were alpha Oxford/political males. inconceivable given London "society" they wdnt have known of each other, by reputation at least, certainly Buchan wd hear of the glamourous, up and coming TEL. Buchan postgrad at Brasenose in 1895, TEL undergrad at Jesus 1907.

What's interesting about this is that the Hannay sequence almost starts to feel like a spy roman a clef - A Dance to the Crump of Big Guns if you like. That's a definite genre "thing", when you consider Tinker, Tailor for instance - pen name authors + documentary-fiction analysis of the politics of political/civ service bureaucracy.)

Buchan's speed of production here (one year between 39S and GM) makes it more likely that contemporary characters find a place.

As I say I didn't realise Greenmantle was so early. That makes his political clarity p impressive and brings him closer to Erskine Childers than I'd really previously considered. (ie political point-maker and narrative tactician).

This belongs in the spy fiction thread, right? But I wanted to talk about the mystifying Anthony Price on that. (a clef/feather name if ever I saw one).

feel like i read one of his. 'other paths to glory'?

so yeah, 1916! i'd remembered even earlier and thought it was eerie that he'd managed to predict lawrence's whole thing. but like i guess what arbuthnot and lawrence have in common in terms of project was an idea somewhat up in the air already. i don't know.

I finished the Bill Bowerman bio. I'm pretty sure no one else on ILB would ever consider it, but I'll do a short critique anyhoo.

The book was pointedly entitled Bowerman and the Men of Oregon and in turn it spent a fair amount of space discussing the individual races and tracking the careers of a few dozen world-class track and field athletes who attended the University of Oregon. However worthy this idea may have seemed at the outset, it resulted in a book designed like the Mississippi delta, a swamp with dozens of intertwined channels. All the information in it had a certain amount of interest, but too little sense of direction.

Last night picked up a 1993 book called The Runaway Brain by Christopher Wills. It tries to explain the main questions about why human brains evolved to be so incredibly complex compared to any other brains that evolved across the billions of years of evolution on earth. Happily, it is not very dumbed down, so it should be quite interesting despite being 20 years old.

Reading The Flamethrowers now, about 50+ pages in. At first I was having a hard time getting invested in the characters and most of the topics (motorcycles, art), but I think I'm into it now? Like, she's a really good writer, but I was getting a vibe that she's really into her own powers of description and that the prose is the focus. That's fine, but coming off of reading a few plot-heavy, minimally-written novels I feel like my attention span muscles are out of shape.

Recently finished Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's The Letter Killers Club, was was mental and mostly pretty amazing. Apparently NYRB have a third collection of his stuff coming out, and a pre-review I found mentions one startling-sounding story:

In “The Unbitten Elbow” a man's lifelong quest to bite his own elbow becomes a media sensation, spawning philosophical systems, lotteries and political machinations.

Just finished the Moncreith/Kilmartin translation of Swann's Way/In a Budding Grove - there is (surprisingly?) little chat abt Proust on ILX.

Taking a short breather to burn through Hotel California by Barney Hoskyns, which has made its way to the top of the pile after a number of recommendations on ILM.

The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky - Enjoying this quite a bit so far. A unique stew of cultural, culinary, and ecological history focusing on the greater NY area since colonial times.

Columbine by Dave Cullen, heart-wrenching as you'd expect

Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick, been sitting on this for a while, finally reading it, really interesting and entertaining

stopped midway thru daniel sada's almost never. it's taking me a while to appreciate his style, but i'll come around.

meanwhile picked up jeffrey eugenides' virgin suicides, which is compelling (and v sad).

Just finished the Moncreith/Kilmartin translation of Swann's Way/In a Budding Grove - there is (surprisingly?) little chat abt Proust on ILX.

Taking a short breather to burn through Hotel California by Barney Hoskyns, which has made its way to the top of the pile after a number of recommendations on ILM.

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, 28 August 2013 07:55 (15 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

am up for some proust chat. think he's fascinating, and more of an anomaly than an awful lot of 'proust' chat wd suggest. he's a gossip, nasty-minded (good), skilled, etc. sorry, Running Scared by the Big O has just come on the j-box). Is there any comparison with the woman playing the saint-saens equivalent?

Those Barker novels were eye-openers when I read them in 2007 (thanks, Hitchens). She was especially good on the homosexuality.

Speaking of O'Hara, here's an appealing review of The New York Stories, from Penguin Classics--also The Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324747104579025202520491112.html

After a sleepless night spent reading a big chunk of The Flamethrowers, I'm getting more involved. Just fyi y'all.

Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick, been sitting on this for a while, finally reading it, really interesting and entertaining

― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar...,

an essayist of near genius imo

Just finished the Moncreith/Kilmartin translation of Swann's Way/In a Budding Grove - there is (surprisingly?) little chat abt Proust on ILX.

I name drop him all the time! And I also tried to get him in the ILB book club. Alas, to no avail..

http://www.essentialvermeer.com/proust/images_proust/proust_seated.jpg

Missing thought bubble: "Those ILB unbelievers can go suck an egg."

Five finally back in print (didn't realize Myra Breckinridge isn't). Would like to read all, maybe starting w Bunuel (why did he "loathe" Borges?) Some other good ones mentioned in Comments, once you get past bickering http://www.npr.org/2013/08/29/195234263/lost-and-found-5-forgotten-classics-worth-revisiting

The Bunuel is a great book (its been in print in the UK for yonks as a Vintage Classic): can't remember anything about Borges in it, though

xyzzzz, i should've known you were on the case. the only ilx thread i cld find was this one - Proust v Joyce v Tolstoy - which isn't that great tbh.

am up for some proust chat. think he's fascinating, and more of an anomaly than an awful lot of 'proust' chat wd suggest. he's a gossip, nasty-minded (good), skilled, etc.

Excellent! I wld like to hear you expand on Proust's anomalous qualities, if you get the chance. So far, I've been really struck by the contrast between Proust's incredibly rigorous, serious-minded attitude to art and literature (and to people, too - he is not afraid of harsh judgment or withering contempt) and his own narrator-persona as highly-strung fop. I can see why Lost Time is called a 'river novel' - streams, ripples, constant rushing flow of words and ideas and feelings - but its just as much 'oceanic' - immersive, immense, dark and deep, baby, deep.

Anyone read Atwood's new one, Maddaddam? I don't have anything interesting to say about it, only that I enjoyed it very much.

Just finished Fever Pitch, really enjoyed it. My fourth book of the year, eeh. I'm going to keep a football book on the go as life support in these lean times. Not Red or Dead though, I can't face it.

making p good progress on 'the marriage plot' - i like it. leonard has many/all of dfws traits, i know this mustev been talked abt before

Finishing Ghosts Behind The Sun the Tav Falco book on Memphis which I started a couple of months back but got detoured into reading a couple of other things since. Very intereesting methinks, though I think I might need to improve the order in my room so I know where things are and subsequently don't wind up inn the middle of several books at the same time.

Also reading Mosquito:The Story of Man's Deadliest Foe by Michael D'Antonio and Dr Andrew Spielman which I picked up in a charity shop a couple of years back after a summer when I'd been bitten way too frequently. It's a book I meant to read soon after getting it but just kept getting put back while i read other things. NOw half way through it but reading it mainly on buses which doesn't help the speed I'm geting through it.

Also just started looking at A History Of tHe Arab Peoples which was another charity shop find from a while back

finished the virgin suicides. wish he devoted more on the parents. everything about them was interesting -- their relationship, the way they ran the house; how they were affected by it all -- but they didn't get much more than cursory attention. mostly, i wanted answers from them, since i blamed them for what happened (more one parent than the other, but still both of them).

About twenty pages from finishing The Way We Live Now, Trollope's longest (823 pages!) but by far best of the three I've read (Phineas Finn and Can You Forgive Her the other two). This is the great English novel about 19th century marriage: the rival of anything of Austen's. Love doesn't get you very far, not much farther than money and property, especially when money is tied up in investments and shell companies and poor American/global regulation of securities. The novel felt startlingly fresh.

Reading "candide" for the first time. s'ok, no "gullivers travels" though.

i am far from reading any trollope, but i did always wonder, how it is that we live now, in that

Probably it depended on who trollope identified as 'we'.

I'm reading Hume in an Italian restaurant. only using this as a spurious predicate to ask *once again* why Italian restaurants don't trust you with your own black pepper. no, it can only come from the giant's pepper mill. why. why.

I'm reading 2666, holding up as well as I expected 2nd time round.

Won't bother reading sequentially: 1st chapter then I think I'll skip to the last.

Not sure, looking at several things after finishing Ghosts Behind The Sun
I have The White Goddess which I started on New Year's Eve for about the 5th time and has been sitting around here unread since while I read other things.

Also eyes on bios of Dorothea lange, Edith Piaf, The Walker Brothers
& a couple fo things i picked up from a library sale a couple of weeks ago. One on surveillance in current culture.

The only way to read White Goddess is to go in from the start looking at it as a hugely imaginative and elaborate fantasia, that's FAR more sophisticated than, say, Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., but also less sexy.

The semester of non stop Austen begins today with "Sanditon."

seems an odd one to start with - any sort of reasoning?

May have now decided to read Mary Quant Autopbiography which seems to be very well written, quite compelling and currently inspiring me to hook up my sewing machine which is still so far unused.
Bought the book in an Eason's sale I think, some months ago anyway.
Odd that she seems to be saying that she started making hispters and mini-skirts in the mid-50s not 10 years later when they became fashionable. I guess it takes a while for things to catch on but I would have thought the mini-skirt relied on getting away from the conservative staidness that the 50s in the UK are normally stereotyped as before such an item became acceptable. & this acceptability being at least partially reliant on stylistic changes she herself made earlier in the 60s. So surprised to see her saying that she had it as an item early on when she set up Bazaar the shop she ran with her husband. Will have to look further into this.

For some reason my idiot-brain read that a Queen Mary, and it took me a lot longer than you would think it would for me to notice what was wrong.

What's she got to say about Goldsmiths, Stevolende?

I've literally just finished my MA in American Literature so I'm finally able to read for pleasure again. Starting with:

John Gregory Dunne - Monster
Dorothy Allison - Bastard out of Carolina

I've just finished the new Marisha Pessl book - which was preemptively (and justifiably) clowned on the lit fic thread. It's terribly written in parts - much more so than Special Topics In Calamity Physics. Passages where she introduces a patois-speaking, dreadlocked, rasta-hatted taxi driver and helpfully adds "he was black, possibly from Jamaica" or a deaf-mute gardener who is described two pages later as often being found 'in his shed, listening to The Beatles', combined with the absurd length, suggest it hasn't been anywhere near a competent editor. That said, there's a thread of old-school Ira Levin / Dennis Wheatley mystery that keeps it fairly readable until it cops out at the end.

I think she mainly says taht with her going to Goldsmiths instead of a normal fashion course of the time it meant that she had an expanded context for design. Standard of the day would be staid, creating a workforce for an existing market which dealt with conservative styles & fabrics for a smalltown middle class audience. Since she was at an art/design orientated educational institute she was introduced to a lot of new ideas and how to apply more abstract ideas practically.
At least taht's what I'm remembering of what she said, paraphrasing heavily.

Could have done with a bit of taht myself, wishing i'd done a fashion course when I applied for one. Though it would have been through a government education - dole related course so I don't know if it would have been as useful. Not sure whatever happened to taht, if i didn't get or didn't take the place and could see myself really messing up the application interview when I did it. & I was in a strange town after having just lost most of my clothes on the way up there. So probably didn't look very impressive. Had a lotof ideas for years before then & had been drawing them. Could really do with learning how to actually make clothing from patterns & make patterns from ideas. & still haven't found out how. Think it might be something I apply myself to over the next couple of months if I have free time. Do now have a sewing machine at least. Now to learn how to use it effectively.
Also need to work out best work area for it.

xp, Well, "deaf" doesn't necessarily mean profoundly deaf. There are certainly deaf people who enjoy music. Hell, even profoundly deaf people sometimes listen to music, though then I believe that's more about feeling the vibrations.

Here's a bit from Kathleen Ollerenshaw's autobiography (_To Talk of Many Things_, pp 21)

Music is a different problem -- but there are ways in which it can still be greatly enjoyed.
Ladybarn House School's link with Montessori and Switzerland brought us Dalzcroze eurythmics -- movement to music. I found I could excel at this -- and I was rewarded by being given a leading role in exhibitions and displays. I could sense the beat of the music and clearly understood somewhat mathematially how to combine or change from one time scale to another. I gained a lot of pleasure and satisfactio from this.

Then there's the help of hearing aids &c. I've browse∂ a deafness forum a couple of times and people have mentioned listening a bit to music after getting cochlear implants and the like.

Book looks crap though.

I just finished Jim Thompson's _The Killer Inside Me_. It's pretty compatible with Patrick McGrath's stuff, I think, though obv less gothic. _Dr Haggard's Disease_ has a lot of parallels (unreliable narror is a crazy-ass doctor's son with sexual issues; one loves speaking in platitudes, the other in poetic allusions; and there's a conflagration towards the end of both)
Preferred _Pop. 1280_ simply because it was a lot funnier.

No, I get that but I think profoundly deaf was implied in the context.

read two by simon raven, rereading the privileges

- Too Close To Call, Jeffrey Toobin's account of the 2000 election
- John Horne Burns' The Gallery (NYROB imprimatur)
- Gary May's Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy

I just finished a rather crappy book called The Philosopher and the Druids, purporting to be about the travels of Posidonius circa 100 bc, but really just sweeping up a few dozen scattered details about the Celts/Gauls derived from ancient literary sources and from archaeological finds and then padding them out like crazy to get up to 200pp so a publisher would buy it. It was written down to about a 9th grade reading level and for that audience it would be fine, but that's not me.

You got antsy waiting for Pompey's Quiff to arrive on the scene?

At the mere mention of Pompey's Quiff, wretched memories rise up to engulf me.

Please tellus what you think when you've finished The Gallery, Alfred.

right now it's gil amelio's memoir

on holiday, too skint to leave town, just going to fill my day forenoon to evening with reading. hope that by going down and in i can get out.

revisited Beckett's trilogy for the first time in years and was astonished by finding a more fecund, more densely populated world than I remembered.

Poetically haunting too:

I owe my existence to no one, these faint fires are not of those that illuminate or burn. Going nowhere, coming from nowhere, Malone passes. These notions of forbears, of houses where lamps are lit at night, and other such, where do they come to me from? And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric. These lights for instance, which I do not require to mean anything, what is there so strange about them, so wrong?

'These notions of forbears, of houses where lamps are lit at night' is incredible. Somehow manages to convey so much - of people within places that have held families for generations, so of memorialisation (the first clause being necessary for setting that up), but also being a thing external to that, so that the feeling is of walking down streets or rural roads at night, seeing these places from the outside, of lamps lit against the void, with the narrator inhabiting the void. The way these have been given a mystical or supernal freight of 'those faint fires' in the first sentence. That final question extends the notions of these lights even further - for what is the nature of something wrong or strange in The Unnameable's zone, a feeling of something wrong or strange even beyond the ultima thule of existence or non-existence which its words inhabit. It's so poetic - which is the feeling that surprised me. (that's from The Unnameable, as I say).

Or there was this from Molloy:

Dear bicycle, I shall not call you a bike, you were green, like so many of your generation. I don’t know why. It is a pleasure to meet it again. To describe it at length would be a pleasure. It had a little red horn instead of the bell fashionable in your days. To blow this horn was for me a real pleasure, almost a vice. I will go further and declare that if I were obliged to record, in a roll of honour, those activities which in the course of my interminable existence have given me only a mild pain in the balls, the blowing of a rubber horn - toot! - would figure among the first. And when I had to part from my bicycle I took off the horn and kept it about me. I believe I have it still, somewhere, and if I blow it no more it is because it has gone dumb. Even motor-cars have no horns nowadays, as I understand the thing, or rarely. When I see one, through the lowered window of a stationary car, I often stop and blow it. This should all be re-written in the pluperfect. What a rest to speak of bicycles and horns. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct.

This was considerable more knockabout than my recollection told me - I think I must have been extrapolating an extension from the drier parts of Watt or something.

genuine lolz at the mischievous ‘you were green, like so many of your generation’. Then there are the mournful expressions of slapstick exuberance - the ‘toot!’, or the bit where he sticks a bit of newspaper that he uses to wipe his arse under the nose of a policeman who has asked for his papers.

Or the wry authorial sadism of ‘To describe it at length would be a pleasure’. Molloy is a figure who never knowingly does not describe at length of course - he is or should be a first-rate bore, but his hermeneutically precarious existential state fascinates, there is a comedy to both the depth of his negation and its continual application, as well as to his prolongations - that bore’s habit of leaving nothing to chance in their descriptions - like those carefully described ambulations of A & C that start the book - which are extended to the point of philosophical or logical mania.

And throughout all is the continual unsentimental pathos, the presence of expressions that may also be taken as abstract and existential - ‘if I blow it no more it is because it has gone dumb’.

tempting to reread beckett some more

beckett is kind of a daring proposition re 'going down and in to get out', i mean you could just sit there and work through our mutual friend or smth

well was feeling that while reading, thomp, tbh. Actually picked it up because was interested in trying to trace the line of... well, I'm going to call it 'minimalist description', that abstract world drained of sentiment exemplified by Robbe-Grillet I guess. Felt the Ithaca episode of Ulysses was prob a good starting point, then thru to Beckett and Robbe-Grillet. Wanted to see how Tom McCarthy had adapted it/used it for his 'continental' style in Remainder, but what I found was that the Trilogy was less drained than I imagined, and that the line I had imagined wasn't necessarily a good one.

Our Mutal Friend is p dark as well of course, doppelgangers and ashes iirc.

SO have decided to mine the speculative fiction thread. embarrassing admission: when that thread was started after the poll, I thought, 'Great! Looking forward to going through this with a fine-tooth comb. And I kept bookmarking it and bookmarking it and then I stopped bookmarking it because the thread had so many interesting recommendations in it that i began to be frightened of it - and only posted once, about New Maps of Hell I think, which is daft because I read a metric fuckton of SF and fantasy between 13-16 instead of going to school. Remember none of it of course. have started going through the thread now tho, if not with a fine-tooth comb then at least doing a supermarket sweep of cnp'd recs into notational velocity.

Will probably start something from it today.

Tho i can see over the way in the library that a reader has left Slow Learner by Pynchon lying around with a reserved paper in it. Distracting.

The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe. Enjoying the hypervivid visual descriptions so far.

Man Booker shortlist--anybody read any of these yet? Sorry if I've missed comments.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24029748

Haven't, but the Toibin is second in line behind new Lethem for me in my non-school (read: whatever I can squeeze in over the Xmas break) pile.

I haven't either but now I'm interested in The Luminaries.

Finished The Flamethrowers, I ended up really enjoying it, just took awhile to get invested. The Italy sections were cool, but I thought it really shined during the '70s art scene chapters (the squabble-y dinner parties and openings etc).

have just started the eleanor catton, pretty fun so far, but its huge & hardcover so i may give up

The toibin is the only one I've read, and is very good

reading ursula le guin's the dispossessed and *really* enjoying it.

read it last year. the way she switches between soviet allegory and a more speculative world is great.

yeah, i was thinking about the cold war influence on SF while I was reading it earlier. her control of tone, philosophical, speculative and allegorical is superb.

I finally 'got' Le Guin over the past year or so! Burned through everything fast. Loved the Dispossessed so much. You know when you're at a party, dinner, what have you, and you're far from home and half-listening, and someone mentions your home town and it brings you to life and you are filled with relief and enthusiasm and all you want to do is talk to this person, drink in everything they have to say, whatever news. Le Guin is my home town now (or one of them at least) - I get so excited when I meet someone 'in real life' that is a fan, or even acquainted, that I can talk to about her. (even if they haven't and I can bore them proselyting for a while)

(Sorry if incoherent)

no! it's excellent. there is nothing like meeting people who share a not-universally-shared enthusiasm - it's one of the best things that can happen. You just both go 'NO WAY' and immediately start going 'the way she...' 'have you read...' 'i love the bit...'. Seriously one of the best things in life.

:) It's kinda of the enthusiasm of a new convert for me, because as an attempt to fill-in the holes of my reading I decided to read some sci-fi (and fantasy, and European drama etc. etc.) and while there was lots of good stuff I found, Le Guin really bowled me over (there were the odd books by other authors, and stuff I was vaguely familiar with like Bradbury) - and she did it twice! Because I encountered her in the fantasy stage with Earthsea, then was surprised (but delighted) to discover her again when reading sci-fi.

(weird way of reading, btw, not necessarily recommended, but I'd just never read any of that stuff, except for the obvious Tolkien and Asimov, I never had any interest, and didn't know how to go about negotiating an undiscovered genre)

In fact, Atwood (who I mentioned up page a bit) was someone I encountered after a embarassing 'all my books are by men' realisation inspired by reading Le Guin. (A problem that still persists; I guess it seems weirder to ask someone for recommendations of 'books by women' than to ask them for some good sci-fi)

what LeGuin shall I choose for a plane ride if I loved The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness?

I'd say the Dispossessed, though perhaps only because I remember describing the Left Hand of Darkness to people a lot ("and the race has no sex, so sex confuses them, and he says..." and so one) which might annoy people a lot on a plane (I know it annoyed them when they weren't). But yeah, I think the Dispossessed is better, plus it's a title I misspell every time so writing is is good practice.

well, I'm asking what should I read next!

Oh, sorry, totally misunderstanding! Um...Lathe of Heaven?

I mean, there are others in the 'Hainish' series which are good...

If you like the Hainish setting of those two and also like short stories (I tend to like them for travelling, though I don't know this is universally shared) then I would recommend 'A Fisherman of the Inland Sea'.

the first three earthsea books and then the fourth

fizzles let me know when you reach ~tao lin~

Boychild in the Promised Land since I just finished MOsquito which was the book I had to read on bus journeys. This seems pretty interesting a child growing up on the wrong side of the law in Harlem at a time I'm not 100% sure of . So far he's been shot sent to hospital and the the reform school . & is going back over learning to play hookey from about the 2nd day of school and eventually catting out for weeks on end.

I've also read the 1st 100+ pages of the White Goddess which is really interesting. Bought this about 3 years back after meaning to read it for longer. Think I might get I, Claudius for future reading since it';s by the same guy.
Also want to find my copy of the Golden Bough and read that since I've had it somewhere for years.

Lathe of Heaven is so good

finally have a night or two free, gonna finish "seymour" again

LeGuin is great. it's true I don't meet too many people who share this enthusiasm. my wife, for ex., who is into women-in-sci-fi in general (Anne McCaffrey especially) finds her too dry.

based off of the speculative fiction poll from a year or two ago, i also read Left Hand of Darkness and the Disssposssesssed last year! both outstanding, of course. i also read 7/9th of the Earthsea Trilogy (quit about a 1/3 of the way into the third entry). extreme minority opinion - i was underwhelmed. i suppose if i would have read them as an adolescent i'd be more enthusiastic. i understand that she was writing for a younger audience, but they feel a little sterile and dumbed down compared to her later stuff.

also based on ilx hivemind, i just finished Book of the New Sun. i need to put my meager thoughts on it in the appropriate thread, but my pared down reaction is that i thought it was pretty outstanding until the 4th and final book, when gene wolfe actually begins to reveal all these secrets that he's built up throughout the prior books. still very much worth reading, and for some reason i think it would make an excellent animated film (a thought that's never really occurred to me while reading anything, curiously).

currently reading the Genealogy of Morals

for some reason i think it would make an excellent animated film

strongly disagree here. details that are hinted at in the book would be sledgehammer obvious if presented visually. this is one of the things that's so great about Wolfe as a stylist, this accretion of contextual clues

i could never finish earthsea 3 either but weirdly i really really loved the second one which seems to be considered the slightest (i mean, it literally is). the terror + excitement of illumination. i've never read anything else cuz i can never choose between lathe and dispossessed and then i pick someone else up. one thing i liked about portland was leguin's status as patron saint, up in the hills.

i like the second earthsea best too, and i agree the third is a bit of a downer, but it's totally worth carrying on to the end of the series. the fourth one is incredibly bleak and basically a complete rejection of the patriarchal world she herself created, but then in the fifth one she manages to achieve a wonderful reconcilation. as a picture of an author struggling with her own creation, and then coming out the other side with something even richer than before, i can't think of an equal.

Just bought Escott's bio of Hank Williams in its '95 edition. So been wondering what got updated in the 2005 version.
Hadn't been aware of the book before I saw it yesterday so wasn't aware that it had various updated versions. Looks like it might be pretty good, just wondering what revelations i could be missing in not having the latest version. Anybody know?

I am re-reading Goodbye to All That, the memoir of Robert Graves (at age 33). I read it first about 35 years ago, so it seems pretty new to me.

Lot of juicy book reviews in September 14-15 WSJ. I'll prob get Professor Borges, edited from transcriptions of J.L.'s classroom ruminations: one fan's distinctively contoured canonverse of English Lit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323681904578641731894981070.html#mod=todays_us_

Also, Alan Massie describes five faves: Rebecca West's The New Meaning of Treason (didn't know about the 1981 edition--who did she add?), Sam Tanehaus's magneticWhittaker Chambers, Graham Greene's The Human Factor and the only one I'd never read or heard of, Eric Linklater's The Dark of Summer. Massie considers him one of the finest Scottish novelists. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324123004579056854022180782.html#mod=todays_us_

And I should mention Daniel Woodrell, since Sam Sacks' appealing review of The Maid's Version quotes Dennis LeHane: "Woodrell is the least known major writer in the country." Alas, Sacks also agrees with Scott Seward's take on Tom Perrotta) (haven't read this collection, but thought The Leftovers was compelling)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324549004579067120458059600.html#mod=todays_us_

and OMG, I've gotta get Alan Taylor's The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, and John Milton Cooper Jr.'s 2008 Woodrow Wilson bio, considering the WSJ reviewer's comparison of it to A. Scott Berg's new 'un--just go read all these reviews!

oops Massie xp also chooses A Perfect Spy, which I haven't read, though enjoyed the mini-series.

Latest stuff: http://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/she-had-no-ambition-to-write-a-good-book-but-was-painfully-anxious-to-write-a-book-that-the-critics-should-say-was-good/

Just finishing up Quicksand by Nella Larsen tonight. Perfectly readable, and probably of great historical import, but as a narrative it's awfully repetitive.

Reread Iain Sinclair's White Chappel Scarlet Tracings on a whim. Started off at an enjoyable canter but got thoroughly bogged down and bored by the end. Love his prose at the sentence level but really don't give a crap about what he has to say - all the highly cryptic magickal psychogeography mumbo-jumbo can shove it tbh, and the surface narrative is highly insular and entirely lacking in heart.

Might give Radon Daughters another go some day, was my introduction to IS and it blew me away at the time.

Yeah, I like sentence-level Sinclair very much, but get worn out over the course of a book. I'm not sure I've actually finished a book by him ever (apart from Lud Heat).

Been all over the shop recently, reading scattershot in big multi-author histories that I have on the iPad - Oxford History of English Lexicography, Oxford History of the Book in Britain, etc. Also Diarmaid Macculloch's History of Christianity, slowing on that now I've hit the reformation and more-or-less know the plot and characters.

And I read How Should a Person Be? and The Flamethrowers on holiday a couple of weeks ago. Both good, but liked the former more than the latter.

Starting new Pynchon. Will report in appropriate thread.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Kind of perfect in its way - rainy, claustrophobic, doom-laden Cold War vibes, relentless momentum and a suitably cynical conclusion. Hit genre novels had much better prose in 1963. I can see why Graham Greene dug it.

finished the first simon raven, debating purchase of second simon raven (e.g. next four novels)

maybe next i can read fucking strangers and brothers, ferchrissakes

just finished gil amelio's "on the firing line." gonna go for "the road" next, which i think i might've already read years ago

Picked up the Phillip Pullman book on the 2 Jesuses since it was lying unfinished on the bed near me when I woke up and started reading taht for a while. Pretty interesting but I keep winding up with more and more books on the go.
Disorder but eventually I may have half read more books than anybody else?

Harvey. The film is my go-to cheerer upper and the script is nice and breezy too. Only trouble is that when I read it on the bus I end up inviting everyone for some informal drinks...

Reread Iain Sinclair's White Chappel Scarlet Tracings on a whim

Only bits of this that are actually good are the book-runner bits. Sinclair is a pain in the arse.

finished the first simon raven, debating purchase of second simon raven (e.g. next four novels)

From memory, the second volume of 4 are the best ones

If you thought that the Savage Detectives was just okay is it worth the investment to read 2666? It's sitting on my shelf taking up room - perhaps I only bought it because I liked the cover, I don't know. I actually don't know anything about it, other than that Bolano can really write.

Finding it weirdly difficult to get into books at the moment. What do you guys do when this happens? Dip into an old favourite? Half-tempted to plough through an Adrian Mole in bed tonight and then pick up one of the dozen barely-started books on the floor.

White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings is one of my favourite novels. If you can't get with the 'magickal psychogeographic mumbo-jumbo', though, you're not going to like it at all. Calling it heartless misses the point; it is concerned with forces that feed on heart. Provided you accept that form is content amassed, his prose goes a long way to fulfilling the novel's aims.

If you thought that the Savage Detectives was just okay is it worth the investment to read 2666?

Definitely. I like SD but felt much more involved in 2666.

Speaking of which I watched that (terrible) movie Now You See Me last night, and lol at the random shot of Woody Harrelson chilling on the couch reading The Savage Detectives.

I just finished Good-bye to All That last night. It had a disarming sort of innocence about it, as if it were a very long letter from a school chum, that may partly explain its popularity when it was published. Among other things, it makes clear just how small and clubby the intellectual circle of Britain was at the time. Speaking as a dust mote from the far provinces of a vast country, I find this state of things nearly incomprehensible, like a serf trying to imagine St. Petersburg.

I should also mention that I finished The Runaway Brain a week or so ago. The writer assembled an impressive array of theories and the facts which underpin them, but failed to give the book enough structure to rise to an equally impressive height. I did learn some interesting stuff, though.

Finding it weirdly difficult to get into books at the moment. What do you guys do when this happens? Dip into an old favourite? Half-tempted to plough through an Adrian Mole in bed tonight and then pick up one of the dozen barely-started books on the floor.

That sounds like a good plan tbh. I'm on a proper dry spell - just four read so far this year - but I picked up Fever Pitch and breezed through it easily enough. It hasn't got me back into books right enough, but I've got enough going on atm that I'm not worrying (yet).

I go through those 'why don't I read this every day' periods more and more. Usually the pattern is 1. try to read big 'classic' book why I'm not mentally equipped for it, either by being to busy, tired or stupid. 2. God, I need something I don't have to think about. What did I do with my Clive Barkers (my favourite pop novelist) 3. Why do I read anything else. 4. Clever and pretty people make fun of me when I tell them what I've been reading recently. and then it's back to 1.

Easy solution: lie about what you've been reading lately. Make it so esoteric that it stops all further inquiry.

It's a close cousin to the 'good book epiphany' when something really grabs you and you wander if you actually liked all those other books you read.

I try that Aimless. "Did you like the end" "well, can a novel even have an end?" "Well, when the guy died..." "spiritually, you mean? I was thinking more of the achronological journey through western ideas" "don't tell me you're lying about having read John Waynes biography dowd..."

Maybe tell people you're reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Especially if they are Jehovah's Witnesses trying to give you a cartoon pamphlet about hell.

If the questions get prickly, tell them you only started reading it yesterday.

I do this in pubs. As a social defence in my (quiet, newspaper friendly local) I find that new-marxism, psychoanalysis or just plain old pornography works pretty well for projecting that "I'm here because I feel guilty drinking myself blind at home, and I'm reading something I hate so that I feel entitled to drink double whiskeys rather than shandy" facade.

Actually came around to liking Nella Larsen's Quicksand by the time I finished it. Class discussion yesterday really helped illuminate it.

Onto Northanger Abbey for the Austen course!

When I can't get into novels very easily and don't want to fall back on non-fiction or magazines I jumpstart my enthusiasm by revisiting a good book of essays — usually James Wood or Martin Amis's The War Against Cliche. It gets me excited about literature again, then I start with a short, accessible classic. I tend to think that if I can't even handle the nursery slopes of a novella I should hang my head.

How do you get over reader's block?

Picked up Patrick DeWitt's Ablutions for 20p on the way home from work...seems nice and breezy, going to give it a real go tonight. Though Adrian is still tempting me.

Ahhh, this is great: dirty realist kinda stuff set in a run down Hollywood bar. Essentially it's a set of vignettes in which the narrator - an alcoholic/aspirin/cocaine addict with hepatitis c and an unhappy wife - details the various lowlifes who frequent the bar. DeWitt's style is great; I mean you can obvious join the dots between him and the writers that came before him but his eye for detail is top notch. Great use of the second person as well. I know it's an obvious trick to use but it always works on me.

To selfishly return to Ursula La Guin, has anyone read 'Always Coming Home' (think that's what it's called) because I trying to read it in my local at the moment and I can't get past the first page. This could be becuase of the locale, but it's very quiet, or the fact that I'm a bit 'up' at the mo and find it hard to read then. Or it could be because it reads like a cut scene into to a JRPG, and I always skip those. Is it worth progressing with?

The only one of hers so far I haven't liked almost unreservedly, I found it preachy and joyless.

Last night I read about half of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn. It is kind of refreshing to read an extended essay that has been so thoroughly thought out and organized for maximum clarity. Its thesis is so well-argued that its conclusions seem incontrovertible. Yet, at the time, it was a new and original idea. Sweet writing, if you like that sort of thing.

When I can't get into novels very easily and don't want to fall back on non-fiction or magazines I jumpstart my enthusiasm by revisiting a good book of essays — usually James Wood or Martin Amis's The War Against Cliche. It gets me excited about literature again

Terrific strategy. I'm the same: an essay collection or poetry (this week it's Seamus Heaney's The Spirit Level).

picked up zola's 'therese raquin' on a whim last night -- i bought it (also on a whim) last year and promptly forgot about it. about halfway through now, it's a page-turner. kind of shockingly racy and explicit for a 19th century book. violent, too -- there's a harrowing description of a drowned corpse that could be right out of stephen king or something.

Just bought Escott's bio of Hank Williams in its '95 edition. So been wondering what got updated in the 2005 version.
Hadn't been aware of the book before I saw it yesterday so wasn't aware that it had various updated versions. Looks like it might be pretty good, just wondering what revelations i could be missing in not having the latest version. Anybody know?