2006: what are you reading now?

So, how are you going about reading those collected poems?

The whole thing at once?

I gave up on actually reading Morrissey and Marr by the time I got to the "Meat Is Murder" era and just skimmed to the end. I think I've recovered from the last semester and am ready to read something non-frivolous again. After I quickly go through Jean Smith's The Beginner's Guide to Zen Buddhism (because I'm thinking about going back to regular sitting practice), I'm going to tackle Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (because I'm thinking about sitting in on a Wittgenstein seminar next semester; I was skim-reading secondary material preparatory to doing this before the holidays).

yes, i am trying to read all of cerebus at once. although i'm trying to at least make a cup of tea between individual issues, which i think is where i went wrong the first time, making me not notice e.g. "hey that conversation was one whole issue and structured quite clevely", and these little micro pleasures in it are a larger part of the total pleasure to be gained from the thing, it having problems on the macro level that anyone familiar with even the idea of it knows about. (although i think there's a case to be made for the whole thing considering how the themes set up include 'masculine folly' and 'overweening ambition'.) i just finished church and state book one, the last half dozen issues of which are just remarkable. (although it does his annoying thing of hoping you'll remember a gag character from two years before - ) (which another thing i did my first attempt, read it out of order, really did not help with. i read the first half and bits of form and void and latter days, which means i have avoided the whole women-read-minds-guys spell - o, wait, i read guys)

i am reading empson's collected poems by opening it at random, but empson was one of those people smart enough not to write more than about eighty pages of poetry in his lifetime, to the eternal gratitude of uh of well me; - he did write about two hundred pages of notes to it, tho.

(i have some kind of fear of turning on that setting. what does it do if i have a thread with 51 new messages?)

It's bilingual. I don't have it (yet) though.

I know I've fallen prey to that a bit myself. I found some random single issues from the "Church and State" storyline in a used bookstore last summer, and as I was paging through them I got a much greater aesthetic charge from the individual pages as page compositions than I had gotten from reading the collections. (I've not actually read all of Cerebus-- I started skimming pretty heavily once I got up to browsing the "Going Home" days, and I only actually own the series up to Women.) Yeah, I think in some weird metaphorical way the male/female symbology holds up, but the caricatures of the Cirinists gets to be a little too much almost immediately after they're introduced. Sim's some kind of brilliant, but, yeah, by its nature Cerebus is lumpy as all hell and eventually I get to the point where I'm tired of his bullshit takes on everything, so I don't know if I'll ever expand my Cerebus library to encompass Reads and beyond. Sounds you're in for a fun project though.

Do you have that new translation?

No, I've got it out from the school library so I have the 3rd edition instead. I wonder what Anscombe changed-- I was reading some of the secondary stuff Jaakko Hintikka's done, and he makes all sorts of remarks about the inaccuracy of Anscombe's translations. Some people seem to think that she really didn't understand Wittgenstein at all, which is problematic for me since she's the primary English translator of his stuff.

It's a very readable interesting history, actually, but it seems hopelessly biased by the fact that, well, the West won -- so it becomes kind of circular, and it's all too easy to prove WHY the West won.

I also have a feeling that there's a flaw in the simplistic division of "Christendom" and "Islam," sort of implying that today's Arab states are nothing but outgrowths of the Ottoman Empire, and also that all European states, even the weakest ones, were successful by virtue of being part of Europe.

Did that make any sense?

trying to get to the end of "The Master and Margerita" after my initial enthusiasm died under the weight of slapstick. "A Supposedly Fun Thing To Do..." which i bought because of the recent DFWallace threads - i was surprised at how much i like his style and cleverness (!) so i picked up "Oblivion" with christmas book tokens as well. just about to start Knut hamsun's "Hunger" bought for me for christmas by my b/f (it's a key book for him). i'm also reading ILX waaaaaay too much.

some of them may have been made with the benefit of the genetic-critical german edition that came out in 2001. david stern sez in his 2004 book on the investigations that no english version to date has included the motto, which i suppose means that none had included the motto up to the fourth, bilingual, edition (since it does). so, there's one difference.

the literary executors have chopped 'part ii' off the end of the latest german edition; i reckon eventually they'll bring the english editions into line with that decision? i'll hafta get another one then. woo!

and I'm beginning to dip into the first volume of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, Palace Walk which is lovely but a bit intimidating. Should I keep it up?

I really enjoy Mahfouz's work - thought that Palace Walk was excellent, but kind of burned out by the final book (Sugar Street?).

Have you read any of his other works?

And to take me to the end of this hopelessly compromised four word December, I (like jed_) am reading "The Master And Margarita". I am enjoying it, but my enjoyment keeps threatening to turn into a raging kind of (literary) love, and never quite does. Or hasn't yet.

Recommendations for books entitled "The _____ of the ________" still gratefully received.

Too much punctutation, I'm still saying (note: '"You're An Animal, Viskovitz!"' has the speechmarks in the actual title, making it positively engorged with punctuation. This must be unacceptably decadent to civilsed folks like, er, us?).

Only Sebastian Barry to go after the Banville, although I may be tempted to give myself what I hope will be a treat by reading 20,000 Streets Under The Sky first.

what the upshot of that was, tom, is, read whatever version you can find.

PS Cheers, HNY'06!

And I've got about a hunderd pages of Don Quixote left to re-read.

aimless, i wonder if you could try alternative ways of reaching the text.

Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism; and
Slavery in New York, published in conjunction with the New-York Historical Society exhibit

I was looking this morning for The Crying of Lot 49 as something slim to take to the gym (when I go, I end up with 20 or so minutes to kill while RJM finishes pedaling to nowhere), but we straightened things up and I couldn't spot it. So, I am rereading The End of the Affair instead.

I am still reading Peel.

And the articles about The WHO in Mo-Jo.

I am starting off with "The Year of the Hare" by Arto Paasilinna. It has that dry Scando melancholy light-heartedness which I love so much. It's Finnish. I must admit to my shame that I don't know whether Finnish counts as Scandinavian, properly speaking.

(my source for this: the lecturers in a Scandinavian Cultural History course I studied at university)

-

I'm reading Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde and a collection of texts by Daniil Kharms (I'm sprinkling my reading of The Odyssey with short novels etc now)

I just stayed at a Skandic hotel in Finland. This may confuse things further.

Also: I love Kharms, I must get round to re-reading the Kharms book I have when this daft numbers of words per month business is all over.

re. that Proust sentence, remember what I once said about how Proust stacks up next to Paul Morley. I can't quite, but maybe you can. It was relevant.

Jaq's reading continues profoundly to impress.

I have finished the Peel bit of the Peel book. I was going to stop there, but Sheila's bit is good too.

I have finished "The Year of the Hare" which turns out to be a rather ace comic novel whose hint of melancholy largely blows over by the end. Well done it.

Next up: "The Day of the Owl" by Sciascia.

This book is well skill.

It is good how people read Joan Didion.

Mr Monkey is impressive.

I meant to give Hopkins some recommendations but they have all fallen away, somehow, or perhaps been made by others.

But my eye falls on a book: Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart.

The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Sign of Four.

The Last of the Mohicans

THOTB and TLOTM are books I have not read. There's an edition of the former with delightful illustrations by Edward Bawden, perhhaps that's the one for me.

I am interested in this Elizabeth Bowen business, she wrote at least two "The This of the That" novels ("Death / Heart" and "Heat / Day"). Bless her. Both of those titles would look impressive in Scrabble but would make distressingly low scores. All those Ts and Es and As, leavened only by the odd H and D. By which I mean to say, thank you.

Other GG works in the pattern:
The Name of Action
The Ministry of Fear
The Heart of the Matter
The End of the Party

My favorite, and 4 words though not in the pattern: Our Man in Havana

I read about half of The Heat of the Day once - c. 11 years ago, in fact.

TH, it would cheer me to think that you would read The Hound of the Baskervilles. It would make a change from all those Swedish books about foxes that you read, though clearly only a slight change.

For some concrete advice, you can find a good number of those stories at the following webpage: http://www.sevaj.dk/kharms/kharmseng.htm
I don't know how good the translations are, but I liked the few I read on there.

Oh, and Ken L is quite correct, I am indeed Norwegian. I'm rather pleased that someone here knew.

I'm reading Nathalie Sarraute's "Les Fruits d'or" now.

High-Rise, JG Ballard
How is this? I've only read some of Ballard's science fiction short stories, which were of varying quality, though some were truly great. Anyhoo, I know my library has High-Rise in storage, AND I own a copy of "Concrete Island", so I really ought to get around to the fellow.
High-Rise's cover always makes me think of Monty Python's pirate accountants sailing around in their buildings.

And I think that after Didion, Finland should be this year's reading theme (even though Mr. Øystein is Norwegian, and Tove Jansson wrote in Swedish). It's certainly been neglected in my collection. Apart from Paasalinna, can anyone recommend some good Finnish authors? (Perhaps this should be a separate thread...)

I guess I mean, I want very much to read it, and I would like to read it a lot; for I do usually reread such books repeatedly.

I had a dream involving Hattiefattiners last night. The Moomins are getting into my dreams.

Johanna Sinsalo: Not Before Sunrise (it's about trolls, how very Finnish, but in a kind of gritty realistic context. Oh! Does that make it magic realism? How unfashionable!)

Kjell Westö: Lang (noiry thriller in a media world)

Mikael Niemi: Popular Music (this is Swedish-Finnish rather than Finnish, but I'm sure we won't mind that, will we? It's a rites-of-passage-in-the-sixties thing, I remember thinking "My Life As A Dog" but a bit older and with pop not boxing).

I'm sure others know more.

Now I'm reading Ximenes 'On The Art of the Crossword', a stone cold classic in what is admittedly a very small genre.

But I don't think you ever weighed in on this thread.

I have no clue where to go next. Anybody know any good novels set in 18th C. Britain, preferably written relatively recently?

Yeah, it wasn't as much of an expose as I thought it would be going into it-- I was actually pretty disappointed.

Today I read The Man Who Fell to Earth (functional '60s SF, but not that great-- nowhere near as crazy as the movie version) before I really got up, and then Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes (more like 30 minutes, actually-- a total hatchet job and sort of depressing) in the bookstore whilst shopping for "graphic novels".

I had to read it in high school English class myself. Didn't think much of it, but did try attempting to identify the obscure Canadian location.

Anybody know any good novels set in 18th C. Britain, preferably written relatively recently?

There's Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, but it is fairly long.

I'm now reading 'Martin Eden' by Jack London. It's very good.

I am reading 'Borderliners' which is really disappointing after 'The History of Danish Dreams' but I am finishing because might as well get something achieved this week. Also, 'Who Was Queen Victoria?' which is utterly wonderful and interesting and delightful and aimed at dim nine-year olds and I want to read the whole series.

Yeah, this is a really good idea.

Psmith in the City (Wodehouse)
The Varieties of Religious Experience (Wm James)
On Food And Cooking (McGee)
Daily Life in Greece at the Time of Pericles (Robert Flacelière)

I'm forgetting one. But those, and a few poetry books and a few cookbooks, are all being "read", even though some are being read at a very slow rate, and some I have been reading for over a year.

I'm reading Sebastian Barry's A Long, Long Way, having just finished Patrick Hamilton's The Midnight Bell. Too early to get any feel for the Barry. The Hamilton was a bit of a disappointment given it's reputation, much rawer and more amateurish than I expected, although the book definitely exerts a weird fascination despite its clumsinesses.

Now I am reading Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye, on the suggestion of someone, possibly Mikey G. It's great. I've said it before of Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge, but less really is more with those gals.

Then I read "The Essence of the Thing" by Madeleine St John, which is, I suppose, high-end chicklit (haha if MstJ ever googles this she'll likely want to kill me), I imagine it aspires to have a blurb which says "a forensic dissection of the emotional trauma of a break-up" or similar, and it certainly achieves a sense of the blankness and confusion at the middle of that kind of pain. I liked it.

Now: "The Member of the Wedding" by Carson McCullers.

Currently I'm reading a Christmas present Everything Bad Is Good For You by Steven Johnson a sort of popularized social psychology theory of pop culture/human behavior relationship. Very much in the Malcolm Gladwell mode both good and bad: a couple interesting ideas streeeeetched out w/examples to pad a fairly brief 200 pages. Think I'm done w/this kind of book once I finish.

The Member of the Wedding?

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of my favourite books but I've never read any more McCullers after being told by a few people that nothing else she wrote was remotely as good. I'd be delighted to find out they were wrong.

Carson McCullers is ideal reading on a blistering day, relaxing in a hammock with a daquiri. Something I don't do too often in Hackney.

X-post, Stewart Downes, if you're still on this thread, you need 'Mason & Dixon' in your life. Although it's not all set in England, it's as much about England and Englishness as anything, I think.

I think I may go nonfiction, that Jacques Barzun book ("From Dawn to Decadence"?) has a chapter on London in 1815 which may satiate my need for early-modern Englishness.

I thought The Plot Against America was a major disappointment. There was a time lag between the book being published in the US and appearing in UK and it was getting terrific reviews, and as I'm a big Roth fan I was practically salivating. But for me, it was second or even third-rate Roth. The basic concept wasn't particularly original and the treatment was thin and underdeveloped. A long way short of the brilliance of An American Pastoral in particular.

On the other hand, I never think of Roth as a very subtle stylist, even at the top of his game. "Run on sentences" is what he does. Sometimes his prose seems functional, a workaday tool to get ideas from his brain onto the page. It's a flexible tool, especially in presenting ideas, conversational, nicely flavoured and idiosyncratic: every sentence tells you you're reading Roth and there's something oddly reassuring about that. But if someone told they disliked Roth because they thought his style lacked beauty or subtlety or rhythmic variety or whatever I'd have quite a bit of sympathy with that point of view.

On the other hand, even 3rd rate Roth is preferable to the annoying, overblown Augie March.

Right, I'll get me coat.

Even Carson McCullers blames Cozen.

Even as a fan, I often find Roth's style grates in the first few pages, but then the long, energetic sentences get a grip and start forcing me along at his pace. He conveys intellectual energy very well. I think it would be worth trying a better Roth than Plot before dismissing him.

er, x-post

Currently in progress are Contact Wounds (something about the education of a war surgeon etc etc), The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists, and Word Origins...And How We Know Them. The problem is that since all three are non-fic, I keep losing interest and putting them down to read YA novels like The Shining Company.

Hilariously, I was dying for a wee on Friday on my bus ride home. The only option was an O'Neills pub, whcih because of Friday binge drinking, had bouncers on the door. They searched me, took out my Moomin book and waved me through. Obviously, they thought someone with a Moomin book was unlikely to cause trouble. So I glassed the fucker.

One of my resolutions: Read less trashy thrillers.

Just finished Steve Martin's The Pleasure of My Company. I thought at first it was too much like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but it managed to differentiate itself in the end. It may have helped that I'd just read this essay by Martin about his father http://www.compleatsteve.com/essays/death.htm

man, i dislike descartes.

maybe with Freakonomics spread around during both, my presonal reading always takes a downturn when i go back to college sooo

Has anyone read "A Taxonomy of Barnacles" yet (about four sisters who reside on Manhattan's upper east side)? I can't decide if it is up my alley or merely masquerading as such. I want it to be J.D. Salinger but I fear it is more Wes Anderson. I picked it up in the bookstore today but put it back down. Something about the author's film backgroud dissuades me, somehow. I have it on order at my library, but processing takes really, really long. I am still waiting for the book "The Chosen" about historical discrimination of Jews at elite colleges that I ordered a few months ago.

yeah, I sometimes forget the title and/or author of a book I'm reading.

Now I have to read all this stuff in a week or give it back to the school library: Jaakko Hintikka, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths; P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy; Thomas Cleary, Classics of Buddhism and Zen I. Can I actually keep up with ILX, watch all the DVDs I've got out, find a job, socialize, drive to Iowa and back, and still read all this stuff in six and a half days? I dunno.

Where can I download this?

I am reading Fleshmarket Close by Rankin' Ian. I kinda like it.

I read the book on Tom Hunter's exhibition at the National Gallery in London (and went along). A fellow Hackneyite with an introduction by Tracey Chevalier due to, I guess, a shared Vermeer inspiration.

Plus Moominland Midwinter. A colder, lonelier Moomin story.

Next up, "The Queen of the Tambourine", Jane Gardam, after an Archel recommendation. So far, it's OK. you know, pretty good. I want to have alughed more than I have, but parhaps that will come, or perhaps the book will render that wish inappropriate. We'll see.

My love for the Moomin books stems from nostalgia. Comet in Moominland was a great adventure to me as an 8 year old. I based my early outlook on Snufkin's laid back sense of adventure! Still do, a little, although I now use Brautigan as my hippy referencing buoy.

Moominland Midwinter is a step forward in term of character development. It's less twee and the characters are more influenced by their natural environment (it's not one Moomintroll recognises because it's transformed by the winter he never sees). Plus Moomintroll develops an aching loneliness because he is awake while the family sleeps and there are more eyes in the trees, upping the sinister level.

Saying all that, it's still a kids book. It's the memory of my first read which still lends these books excitement and I see in them a simple degree of grace.

Funny enough, it's a similar bag of shite to Cecelia Ahern's Bag of Shite, in which the protagonist's lover dies and she has to learn to live again through her friends (and maybe one special friend! The tension!) who, similarly to the eejits populating Cecelia Ahern's book, fall around laughing at things that aren't funny.
Attention chick lit writers! Having your characters fall around laughing at things that aren't funny is not a good way to illustrate what great mates they all are! It just makes you seem like a lamebrain who couldn't come up with three funny lines in a row!

Funny enough, it's a similar bag of shite to Cecelia Ahern's PS, I've Written a Bag of Shite, in which the protagonist's lover dies and she has to learn to live again through her friends (and maybe one special friend! The tension!) who, similarly to the eejits populating Cecelia Ahern's book, fall around laughing at things that aren't funny.
Attention chick lit writers! Having your characters fall around laughing at things that aren't funny is not a good way to illustrate what great mates they all are! It just makes you seem like a lamebrain who couldn't come up with three funny lines in a row.

And I was given an almost complete set of Miss Marple for xmas so I'm starting on those too.

I leapt straight across to David Thomson's Beneath Mulholland, and in his descriptions of the Californian air I heard accidental echoes of Amis's relentless run of phrases. It interested me, that effect - the way that one book might bleed across to another, so you could imagine you're still reading the first - mishearing, or hearing something you wouldn't hear otherwise?

'Wandering Rocks' felt fairly ordinary by comparison.

Still reading Inspector Rebus. It is a tad grim.

O'Nate: if you haven't read it already, check out VS Naipaul's 1981 study of radical islam Among The Believers. It will lift the top of your head clean off.

Now, "The Death of the Heart" by Elizabeth Bowen. Elizabeth Bowen is what happened after Bloomsbury. This is her masterpiece. I know that because it says so on the back of the book.

Mark Bowen is what happened before Pat Van den Hauwe?

I have just been thinking about how TH could read only books with happy endings (as recommended by ILB) for a month; though he might object that some of the endings turned out to be not happy enough for him.

Jim Bowen is what happened after tea on a Sunday.

I have finished Pack Up the Moon. To give you some idea of the quality of book you're dealing with here, one of the characters is called Frank in the blurb on the back of the book, and Noel in the actual book. Sigh.

Foxy, I finally sent your book. I hope you did give me the right postcode, or you might never get it.

Anyhoo, wish me luck, I'm going to go and force my way through the last forty pages of "Kafka on the beach".

Goes well with cava and a Foundations compilation.

I would like to read only books with not only happy endings, but happy all the way through.

I finally found an old copy of Louis Bromfield's Pleasant Valley and I'm whizzing my way through it. My dad grew up in "the Valley," I spent several summers of my childhood wandering the area, and I recently visited Malabar Farm (http://www.malabarfarm.org), so it's really a treat to read the old stories tied to the area. Bromfield is an extremely affable writer; the Lost Generation's "Nice One."

Does anyone know of a good Johnny Appleseed biography that isn't a children's book?

Have you read 'Fup' by Jim Dodge?

And have just started The Lady in the Lake, my next to last Chandler, which I've been saving to read for a couple of years because I didn't want to run out of books of his to read. *sigh* If I absolutely love and adore Raymond Chandler, should I stay away from his last book, Playback? I've heard it's quite disillusioning.

I've gone back to Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad" which is so, so, so much fun! His robots beat the whopp out of Asimov's, anyways. The whole improbable dragons thing is just fantastic! This Michael Kandel fellow's translation is remarkable too.

you could bring it over to my science fiction thread.

frege is a jerk.

Difficult read? Or was he cocky like G.E. Moore?

I'm still reading whatever it is I was reading before. I managed to get everything else I had listed done and then more RL stuff got in the way, so I'm counting on the library's grace period to get the Wittgenstein stuff read this weekend. After that, my stack o' books includes a bunch of pop culture and science stuff (including something with an article by mark s!) and some Phil Dick, thanks to tom west's PKD thread.

Now I am starting For the Time Being by Annie Dillard, which is both well-written and self-indulgently written, and often makes me wish Annie would just be a bit less clever or a bit more so.

I'm reading Time after Time by Molly Keane. She was quite brilliant I think.

Plus Tales from Moominvalley and the West Ham vs Fulham programme.

I picked up two Bohumil Hrabel books, one especially for the title which I am now reading: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age. Interleaving short fiction and cookbooks with The Tale of Genji seems to be working for me.

I am also browsing through some Dover-facsimilies of William Blake's poetry, with the etched plates in the front half of the books; the campus bookstore is selling them half-off the sticker price.

I just finished reading Wuthering Heights a couple of days ago, and I am still unsure as to how I feel about it. Part of me thinks it bludgeoned me over the head with cheap sensationalism, while another thinks it was being sincere; I don't know.

I'm reading Cold Service and thinking that my love affair with Robert B Parker has finally got round to dying of natural causes.

(but I'm still on the introduction at the moment)

Major Brutt may be the Xander, though he may just be the Bez.

It's a wonderful novel, and one I wouldn't have read had it not been for all this foolishness with numbers of words and all that. It justifies the exercise on its own, I think.

I've never read any Holmes before, or any A Conan-Doyle for that matter, and I'm not really expecting to like this much. I bet there's something good about it, though. There must be, mustn't there?

You are right, of course; it was much more like a Gothic novel of its day with all of the "shocking" titilations and fantastical elements one would expect from that genre.

I was expecting something more like Jane Eyre, to be honest. A case of misguided expectations, I guess.

I thought of that sentence unselfconsciously, and only then did I see its absurd, cheerful circularity.

If you save letters or keep a diary and go back and read them, you can experience again what the words knew at the time that you didn't and to read them again is to experience those feelings again but to know something different.

This seems worth thinking about. But is it really the words that have the knowledge, or the later you? Not that I dislike Wood's strategy of personification. And perhaps it is somehow neither one nor the other... yes, there is something that the words seem to hold, even if they don't know it. The truth of our innocence and folly, perhaps.

Camera Lucida

Now I'm reading The Pirate Wars. Funny, I just can't get excited about pirates, really.

The first chapter was accompanied by a bowl of pasta in a tangy tomato sauce with dried chillis and Bach's Goldberg Variations.

Now I am on What A Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe. I am not yet fully gripped.

Also reading:

That's Not My Puppy
That's Not My Lion
That's Not My Robot

(3 for 2)

Slightly repetitive series, but I bet Inspector Rebus is as well.

I am quite pleased with myself for finsihing Rebus, hence the ambitious choice.

Ambitious for me, that is.

Is/was Vince Hilaire Crystal Palace, or am I getting muddled up?

(And Bromfield's book was just so beautiful. I want to move to the country and put my hands in the soil.)

I think the original post comparing Coe's book to Hilaire was terrific.

Vince in his prime

On the subject of formerly-swift England wingers, we had Mark Chamberlain a few years after that. His younger brother was called Neville, you know.

I've never read ay Joan Didion, and this thread is making me think perhaps I should. In her oeuvre are there any Alan Balls (only little but first on any self-respecting teamsheet), or any Gordon McQueens (enormous and best avoided)?

I also recently read Ballard's The Drowned World...I always love Ballard's work, and this was no exception. I'm pretty new to these forums but I haven't seen any threads on Ballard...what do you all think about him?

Finished The Chess Queen, a pleasant but awkward mix of the history of how the queen transformed from the slow-moving vizier to the modern all-powerful queen, mixed with minibios of medieval queens, whose stories didn't quite cohere. But it was interesting to consider this text as in the vein of Herodotus/Christine de Pizan schools of history.

Now I'm reading the God's Secretaries book that Jaq gave me, which is so far surprisingly great.

Is Jasper Fforde good? I saw a box set going cheap.

Carve Up update: the narrator has tidied his room.

I am reading Oldest Living Confederate Etc

Jasper Fforde, hmm. My wife was lent The Eyre Affair a year or so ago by her dad, a Fforde fan. I read a few pages, decided Fforde couldn't write for toffee, and abandoned it. After reading some enthusiastic posts about him on ILB I thought I should give him another chance. A hundred pages in, the jury is still out. His prose is not much better than I first thought; he has no ear, no sense of economy elegance, so much so that I kept wondering if it was meant to be part of the joke (*): a work of fiction by a bibliophile who saturates it with literary references but can't write?. He has a non-stop conveyor belt of clever little ideas but there isn't much evidence of quality control (although the bad puns and general awkwardness are probably part of his charm for his fans). But he doesn't take himself seriously and creates an entertaining little imaginative world, a bit like an episode of The Avengers.

He obviously works for some people but I'd hesitate about buying a box set before you read at least a couple of dozen pages because you could easily find him unreadable. But he must have something, because I haven't altogether given up on him yet.

((*)More or less randomly selected sample:

I wasn't a member of the ChronoGaurd. I never wanted to be. By all accounts it's not a huge barrel of laughs, although the pay is good and the service boasts a retirement plan that is second to none: a one-way ticket to anywhere and anywhen you want. No, that wasn't for me.)

(My emphasis of redundancy/cliche.)

X-post with Ray

I didn't like Jasper Fforde either. I tried to, I really did. Some of the ideas were nice and the whole thing looked like it was going to be jolly fun, but in the end all the devices and gimmicks couldn't distract from the fact that he just didn't have much of a story going on. It is a terrible thing, the punting out of editors. They are so important. Any good editor could have turned that into a good book. A book without an editor is like a Missy Elliott track without Timbaland. Or do I mean Timbalake? I don't know much about the young people's music. Maybe I should have said The Beatles without George Martin. Anyway, a good editor could have sorted that out for me.

"What do you care what other people think?"

(it consists of a few long pieces, rather than the shortish anecdotes of the first book. A large part of it is about his experiences of the Challenger enquiry; how one of the military men on the committee was tipped off about the cause of the explosion, but rather than expose it, dropped hints at Feynman so that he worked the cause out independently.

Mary, I forgot on which thread you're supposed to report back on ALA midwinter.

The copy I read was a hardback I found in the library with an old photo of a train and a snow bank on the cover - fabulous.

Just finished Jane Smiley's 'Good Faith' - has anyone else read it?

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0761134603.02._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Being a new mommy makes reading difficult. *sigh*

And now: "The End of the Affair", which I have to read by midnight tomorrow to finish off this whole number-of-words-in-the-title business, for which I failed to think of a name. For shame.

Then, freedom! Or individualist decadence and self-indulgence, if you prefer.

Just started She by H. Rider Haggard.

Just started She by H. Rider Haggard.

-- Jeff LeVine (jefflev

Yeah, I think so too now. I finally reached a point where I just kinda let it drift over me and it somehow makes sense now. In a way. I guess. It is definitely one of the strangest books I have ever read.

New 2006 paperback edition. Football, before Chris Kamara devalued the game by commentating on it.

PJM, I'm ignoring you.

I had no idea that "The End of the Affair" would be so unpleasant. The shoes on the front don't hint at it.

Mmm - I remember thinking that Silver On The Tree especially was *enormous* when I was little.

I watched a little of your Devonian boys last night. Is it two up automatically this year?

I found reading "The End of the Affair" far more painful than I had expected. I don't really want to talk about it.

Are you reading the tinily printed bits of GB84 or are you treating them as illustrations?

I'm still reading the Football Man. The Observer reckons it one of the top five sports books of all time. The author used to write for the Observer, though.

I'm on The Dark is Rising now. Only a few pages in and already it nearly made me miss my train station this morning.

I have been rereading books, including the Barthes mentioned above.

'Cyclops' was tremendous again.

Still need to finish Michael Wood's Kafka very soon.

I wish I had copies of The Dark Is Rising, I never remember to steal it when I'm at my mother's.

I've just finished The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Nabokov, pronounced NabORkov, apparently), I'm in the middle of The Truth about Sascha Knisch by Aris Fioretos (titular similarity a some kind of serendipitous event) and next on the list is Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing, which I have to read for uni. Looking forward to it though.

PF: I was avguely planning to read the timy bits as they coem along, and then read them again as a story at the end. I might not feel like doing that when it comes to the end, but that's a chance I'll have to take.

I just bought 'The Soccer War' by Ryszard Kapuscinski, because Geoff Dyer is always going on about him. The first chapter was good.

I've just started on Projection Privée by Kazushige Abe.

'The Ongoing Moment' - yes. There are good bits, but overall I found it a bit disappointing. It would have been improved if:

a) he could have got reproduction rights to all the photos he wanted; and
b) the standard of reproduction was a bit better.

As it is, the book falls too easily into a series of essays which get a bit formulaic: "Many photographers have taken pictures of gas stations. Take photographer A, for example. Photographer B, however, photographed gas stations a bit differently. And then photographer C came a long and looked at gas stations in a whole new way!". I enjoyed the biographical bits about the rivalries and friendships between the different photographers, I guess.

Now that this thread has exceeded 350 postings and it is likewise the start of February, 2006, would it be acceptable to start a new incarnation of the now-traditional "what are you reading" thread, rather than hammer the ILX server and frustrate our dial-up patrons by extending this thread to fantastic length?

Saul Bellow, "Humboldt's Gift"
Gary Shteyngart, "The Russian Debutante's Handbook"
David Foster Wallace "Oblivion" and "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men"
Chris Ware, "The Acme Novelty Library"

The Lost Continent, by Bill Bryson
Travels, by Hans Christian Andersen
Remarks on Colour, by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Shut Up And Eat Your Showshoes!, by Jack Douglas

That last one is my nth time rereading that book.

Now, I have to say, I don't normally read so voraciously, but it really was an ideal train ride. I attempted to finish the Iliad instead of reading the Douglas, but it so wasn't happening.

I haven't been to Union Station DC, but of the ones I've been to, I think Union Station LA is the nicest, well, assuming we don't include Grand Central of course.

Grand Central is magnificent!