what? are you reading? autumn 2013

Marguerite Yourcenar-

Memoirs of Hadrian.

So good.

bleeding edge. at last an east coast vineland

Good?

I just finished The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn. I'm looking at several possibilities for my next book. Feel free to chime in with your pick of the bunch:

Willehalm, Wolfram von Eschenbach (Penguin ed., tr. Gibbs & Johnson).
A Short History of Byzantium, Norwich.
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles.
The Tale of the Heike, tr. Royall Tyler.
The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark.

Working through "interpreter of maladies" by Jhumpra Lahiri

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford. Way fun! Too bad she didn't kill Hitler.

Still on Klemperer's Diaries, just reached 1943.

http://www.boffinsbookshop.com.au/images/covers/300/9781846141492.jpg

Just gave up halfway through the third volume of Le Guin's _Earthsea_ books. I dunno how I made it that far, tbh, as I wasn't enjoying it much at all. Guess I'm too old and cranky for this stuff. I did enjoy parts, but I suspect this might have been more fun when I was thirteen.

Just started Jorge Amado's _Tereza Batista_
Found this at a local thrift shop right after reading an article about the new Penguin Classics editions of Amado. Felt I *had* to get it because of that. .This book isn't one of the reissued set, however.
The Norwegian translation is pretty great, thanks to the old-fashioned language and slang that you never hear anymore ("Flyfille"! "Rekel"! "Ranglefant!" "Flottenfeier"!) I've read other books by the same translator that didn't have this quality, so I'm gonna assume it's appropriate.

I launched into Girls of Slender Means last night. Apart from it being drily funny, it is nice to read a novel that isn't 800+ pp. long. I should finish it tonight.

Spark's a wonderful argument for a book of <200p being capable of perfection

"Why is he in love with Selina by the way?" Rudi said. "Why doesn't he find a woman of character or a French girl?"

^^ this has been ripped from its full context, but it made me laugh out loud. I finished The Girls of Slender Means last night, as predicted. It was a lovely brief excursion into Sparks's world.

Now I've picked up Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges in the fairly recent Penguin edition with Andrew Hurley as the translator. I will likely plow through as many stories as seem to fit my mood, possibly the whole collection. I dipped into The Tale of the Heike briefly and it wasn't doing anything for me, so I put it back down.

John Keenan - The First World War
Conrad - Nostromo (rereading)

Thomas Bernhard - President and On The Eve of Retirement. Why did I ever stop reading plays! The latter especially is brutal. Don't think either worked as well. And while I doubt there'll be a production soon enough I am trying to be convinced in the big corrupt societal symbolic character: a president or a judge. Too blank a shock effect, but for me its often the old guy railling against it all, or a friend of a friend who has committed suicide talking about lives wasted...those have that window into a dour private world that is perfect novelistic material (or carry with it a certain type of attraction). Now if he somehow converted that into drama for a stage...needs more investigation.

2666 so good. Just gorged (perhaps the wrong word here) on the mix of Boccaccio/Arabian Nights and Pedro Paramo, whose reference I missed the first time round but so fkn true.

Gonna re-read Rabelais - Thomas Urquhart trans., of course.

Picking up Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte on sat.

You might want to look into Bernhard's short play _Einfach Kompliziert_. There doesn't seem to be a published English translation, but I found this translation through google. I cannot vouch for its quality.
It's about a retired actor sitting in his room and being Bernhardy and old. tbh I don't remember it very well.

I'm in the middle of Richard Stark's _The Seventh_. I've been getting these one at a time, reading one every few months -- kinda tempted to order a bunch and gorge. To think I didn't think I liked crime fiction.

Thanks Oynstein its doing the trick:

walks over to the nail he has most recently hammered down and contemplates it

bernhard is such a badass, love that guy

i'm currently reading white teeth. it's so much fun!

I'm reading "Country Of My Skull" by Antjie Krog, a book about the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in post-Apartheid South Africa. Powerful stuff.

I read Desmond Tutu's book on them a while ago. Also very good, but included victim's recollections of torture that I wish I hadn't read.

i read 'leaving the atocha station'

i don't know if i didn't get it or if it was just ok

Blaise Cendrars - Moravagine

finished 'therese raquin' by zola and picked up 'stern' by bruce jay friedman.

Rereading "Nostromo" and picked up Keegan's history of WWI.

You told us yesterday but thanks

Another week, another Austen. This week: Sense and Sensibility

also reading David Byrne's How Music Works and making just as slow progress with that as everything else

Finished the deWitt - absolutely adored it, best thing book I've read in a while.

Made my first visit to my new local library (Peckham) and got on a whim got two easy reads out: Grow Up by Ben Brooks and Martin Amis' Lionel Asbo.

Read the Brooks in one sitting...coming of age stuff a la Skins about a few bored suburban drug taking/booze drinking/older woman shagging 17 year olds who are all knowingly fucked up in nice middle class ways. As my own teenhood was one of abstinence I couldn't connect to this kind of thing but it was a fun-ish romp around school trips and house parties. He was alt lit's UK hotshot for a bit so it's very Tao Lin tonally. I've got a soft spot for books about teenage boys so there was some pleasure to be had. Can't help but remind of me Joe Dunthorne's (far superior) Submarine.

About 20 pages into Lionel Asbo and am embarrassed/repulsed by it.

Lots of theory articles for college - Freud, Benjamin, reader-response theory (Fish, Iser, Jauss)

This was a terrific book and everyone should read it.

Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy

TCoP = sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down, so try not to get all het up about it, bcz it all comes out in the wash.

i got the new stephen king! maria and rufus got me a gift certificate to the local little book store otherwise i never would have got it. don't think i've read anything by him since insomnia! also got the ted chiang collection that i've been looking at in that store for three years. three years!

if you buy a book there you get to pick out a free old advance publisher's copy from a shelf. uncorrected proofs and all that. almost went for a nick tosches vampire book but took a bruce wagner novel instead.

http://www.gdprice.com/j/24488.JPG

oops hueg sorry, I just really like that cover

I'm now about halfway through A Short History of Byzantium, aka 1200 Years of Revolving Door Emperors in only 400pp.

Finished the new Atwood (not nearly as bad as some of the reviews made it out to be) and started The Orphan Master's Son, pretty great so far.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

A nice break from all of the Austen.

madame bovary

that boll reminds me of some publisher's old stanislaw lems

i read 'the virgin suicides' and h8d it

Curzio Malaparte - Kaputt. Exaggerated tales from the WWII told by Malaparte to generals, diplomats, women. Has some inspired imagery but I wasn't exactly fired up to finish it.

Platonov - The Foundation Pit. Gets better everytime, on a sentence by sentence level you're almost relieved by dialogue, so many of the descriptions and scenes and charactersation are overloaded with these dense oddities that are a lot of fun and are tempted to get drunk in. The dialogue has these various characters (cardboard cutouts but they are more than one dimensional if not quite the full 3D, you realise he revels in deforming their humanity) doing soviet-speak, which is fine for me as I know quite a lot of it. Merciless on Soviet 'logic', pushes it to extremes, investigates the implications.

Byzantium fell a couple of nights ago. It was an impoverished mess by then anyway. I filled in the now-empty place it occupied by reading some of Tolstoy's essays, which mainly revolve around his religious convictions. These seemed somewhat disordered and naive in their details, but his main thrust (practise non-violence, simplicity and compassion) seems worthy enough.

wins, let me know how the Bøll novel is. I've tried this man several times and failed.

Curzio Malaparte - Kaputt

me too..

and i love it.
especially the irony of it.

Yeah its good - I think I'm losing my ability to come to read new authors at all. I am at this re-read what I know 'phase', more than ever.

So I'm re-reading Rabelais, revelling in the density amongst the talk about wine. Not so weirdly wanting to go from that to Gravity's Rainbow again, but I sold my copy a while back.

reading the two new cesar aira translations from new directions, "the hare" and "shantytown." i really liked "the story of how i became a nun" but "the hare," so far, seems really different from that. the prose for one thing is on the dense side in the beginning: long paragraphs about a colonialist's confused, sleepy thought processes. anyone here a fan of aira?

I read 'Ghosts' and really enjoyed it. I wouldn't say the prose was dense at all, but lots of day-to-day life and sleepy thought processes, shot through with weirdness.

I'm reading The Orphan Master's Son and it's pretty great so far.

Seeing that title, the first thing I thought of was: Worn-out titular tropes.

i like aira, but he's really hit and miss, which i'm guessing is an effect of his process. the hare didn't do much for me (i read the old serpent's tail translation and i'm not sure if the new directions is different) but i loved nun and landscape painter.

how seriously do you take his explanation of his process? he says that he never goes back and edits work he's done on previous days, confining his editing to what he has written that day. it seems like his books would be more tonally inconsistent if this were the case. the story of how i became a nun holds together as a whole, not narratively, but thematically, and it really doesn't feel like a first draft to me.

he says that he never goes back and edits work he's done on previous days, confining his editing to what he has written that day.

I've never heard of this writer, and I'm afraid this does not make his work sound enticing.

There are many verified tales of writers who knocked out minor masterpieces in a very short time frame. The first that comes to mind is Samuel Johnson writing The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia in two weeks. In order to pull that off, a writer would need to have complete mastery of the material and a very high level of concentration. As one's normal writing process that would definitely require laying a very extensive and careful groundwork before writing the first word.

He defends it by saying his writing is an extension of his life, and as such must move forward even when he's gotten stuck. He's published something like 80 novels so clearly he is editing less than most writers. My suspicion is that his acclaimed books - landscape painter, nun, etc - are more heavily edited than the throwaway titles.

i don't take it at face value. i think that he's set up some obstructions for himself: introduce plot elements that are quirky, find a way to make them fit the story so that they don't seem entirely unbelievable, do not rewrite plot elements out of the work.

in this interview (http://bombsite.com/issues/106/articles/3224) he mentions hand-writing at a cafe and then typing at home: "That’s why I like writing in cafés. I’ll write a little there, a page or page and a half a day, look around, watch people, things. I need to have a mixture of concentration and distraction when I write. I have tried writing alone at home but it doesn’t work very well for me. There I’m looking at the wall, which I’m always looking at. I come back from the café, go to the computer, and throw out the handwritten page." to me that implies that he's fairly careful about his work when he writes on the computer, but that work isn't wholly improvised (or that it's improvised based on work he's already done).

he goes on to say: " It’s curious, now that you’ve made me think about it, I’d argue that in literary projects, or artistic projects in general, the process is what is valuable, not the result. And, nonetheless, I trouble myself with methodically erasing the traces of the process, making all notes and manuscripts disappear." so he's careful to erase all evidence of the process itself (which must include editing and forethought even though he denies it elsewhere.

i think sometimes he manages this process in such a way that it works really well, but other times it falls flat.

At loose ends here. To illustrate: last night I spent about 90 minutes reading The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa, but put it down to finish out the evening reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

haha that sounds about right. i don't think i could read pessoa for that long at one go.

Pessoa's narrator does seem to chase his own tail for paragraphs at a time.

i have taken a v short break from proust to dip into Inside Warner Bros 1935-1951, a collection of memos, letters, telegrams etc from the Warner Bros Archive, edited and annotated by Rudy Behlmer. for some reason i find this stuff hilarious, especially communications from the brusque, vulgar, nitpicky Hal Wallis. Sample:

We must put brassieres on Joan Blondell and make her cover up her breasts because, otherwise, we are going to have these pictures stopped in a lot of places. I believe in showing their forms but, for Lord's sake, don't let those bulbs stick out.

haha its bitchy - souns great

I never thought you could follow Pessoa w/Hitchiker's Guide..

I am taking a break from Rabelais - similarly just downright dense and obscure in places but so funny and grotesque (most realist fiction is so pointless really) (a reissue of Urquhart's trans with MA Screech's annotations is the ideal Rabelais ed that does not exist) - to read Canetti's three vol memoir (they are fairly short). Not an autobiog, all of it covers his time spent in Vienna. Skipped to his writing on Musil (whom I love) and Broch (whom I've cooled on), his meeting with Joyce...but its not name-dropping. Many minor characters with images that stick (his descriptions of a mother's tears at a funeral he attended is the kind of recorded perception you go to novels for), and makes that time vivid. I've lived with Central European fiction for a long time so it is useful to read something that ties this stuff together.

speaking of bitchy amusing movie stuff, am reading

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0571216013.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

I'll have to check that, thanks!
Ian Buruma chooses five novels about sex (his takes are vivid, succinct, and available online for ltd. time only, I think)http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303442004579121311245804686.html#mod=todays_us_

Picked up Renata Adler's Pitch Dark at the weekend, only 20 pages in, not sure if I get it?

Quiet Days in Clichy
By Henry Miller (1956)

Miller’s books are especially exciting when you are male and about 16 years old. But this novel, which excited me when I was 16, still bears rereading. Miller was obsessed not only with sex, often with hookers, but with the erotic atmosphere of Paris in the 1930s. In his prose every boulevard, every cafe, every cobblestone reeks of sex. He eroticized the city. “Quiet Days in Clichy” is quite a short book, shorn of Miller’s other obsession, metaphysics, which is a blessing. It is really a description of one of those “long hot summers,” which in retrospect seems as if every day was a party. Most people, if they are lucky, will have experienced one of those. But the last words of the book, after yet another scene of debauchery, are: “It doesn’t make sense.” Which is exactly the way Miller, rebelling against his German Protestant background, wanted it: Life doesn’t make sense.

Naomi
By Junichiro Tanizaki (1947)

Though not considered to be one of Tanizaki’s greatest books, “Naomi” is one of my favorites. Written in the Roaring Twenties, when Western trends bewitched fashionable urban Japanese, Naomi, a 15-year-old cafe waitress with exotic Eurasian looks, slowly becomes the embodiment of sexy Hollywood glamour in the eyes of Joji, an older Japanese man. His obsession with the girl, as so often in Tanizaki’s novels, is also his downfall. At first, he appears to be in charge, teaching her to speak English, dressing her up like Mary Pickford, making her behave in ways that excite his imagination. Gradually, however, she uses her erotic power to take charge of him. Banished to a separate room in the house he bought for her, Joji has to hear her entertaining other men. But such is his obsession with this typical Twenties (short for “modern girl”) that any humiliation at her hands simply offers another bout of ecstasy.

The Hidden Force
By Louis Couperus (1900)

Couperus, in my view the greatest Dutch novelist, wrote this novel in 1900, after a visit to the Dutch East Indies, where he had spent some of his childhood. The main character is a Dutch colonial official who prides himself on his European rationalism, a practical, unimaginative, decent man who turns out to understand nothing of the Asian people he rules. The hidden force of the title—rather like the mystery of what exactly happens to Mrs. Moore in E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India”—is something sensual and dangerous that defies the rationality of Europeans who think they can master “the East.” Couperus’s novel, remarkably for its time, is soaked in eroticism, some of it shockingly overt. But the moral of his story is not that Asians are beyond the understanding of Westerners or that sensuality, as opposed to self-control, is bad. Couperus was certainly a sharp critic of Dutch colonialism, but even that is not the main point of his book. Rather, the eroticized Orient reveals the depth of a common illusion—that we can ever completely master ourselves, let alone a colonial empire thousands of miles away from home.

Closely Observed Trains
By Bohumil Hrabal (1964)

Set in Czechoslovakia under Nazi occupation, the coming-of-age story of Milos, a young railway station worker, is full of cruelty: Milos tries to commit suicide after the sexual failure of his first night with his girlfriend, Germans and Czech collaborators are hovering over the story like malign birds of prey, and the boy dies in the end after dropping a bomb on a German army convoy. The adult world—and the sexual experience Milos longs for—turns out to be a dark and violent place full of malice. And yet, Bohumil Hrabal’s prose is so sensual and full of vitality that even the most banal details of provincial life can spark an atmosphere that is charged with eroticism. This was brilliantly dramatized in Jiří Menzel’s 1966 movie of the book. Both the book and the movie are among the masterpieces of the Prague Spring, snuffed out by the Soviet army in 1968.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses
By Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1782)

This is the best-known book on my list, not least because of the many movie versions. First published in 1782, Laclos’s epistolary novel concerns bored aristocrats playing at sexual conquests in the way gamblers play poker, upping the stakes by seducing the most virtuous targets. On the surface, it is a dark comedy of manners with a toxic aroma of perverse eroticism, in which the rake and his cynical female partner both come to sticky ends. But it is also a philosophical story about the limits of rationalism. The seducers are extreme products of the Enlightenment in their conviction that sexual pleasure and emotion can be ruthlessly kept apart. The worst sin, in their eyes, is to lose control over one’s feelings. But this is exactly what happens. By falling in love, they are tripped up by jealousy and other sentiments they cannot curb. And this proves to be their undoing.

I could only find an extended fragment of dow's list so I took the liberty of filling in the gaps.

I just finished "Black Dog of Fate" by Peter Balakian. Half autobio of his life growing up as a teen in 1950-1960s New Jersey and half memoirs of his descendents who fled to the US after the Armenian genocide by the Turkish in 1915. Great book.

As I mentioned in the 'what have you bought' thread, I recently picked up a copy of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End. Paradoxically, this inspired me to start reading The Good Soldier instead.

When I was in college (more than 35 years ago) I dutifully read TGS because of the aggressively positive notice given to it by Ezra Pound. I cannot recall much, if anything, about it, except that it was a drawing room novel full of wealthy people with incomprehensibly nuanced manners and opinions. This was far from the sort of novel I was ready to enjoy at the time. It seems more accessible now.

For this week's classes:

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama

Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, ed. Peter Wortsman. So far an incredible collection - Grimm, Kleist, Hoffmann all awesome, haven't reached Kafka, Walser, Musil, Celan yet; feels like the sort of anthology where the back-and-forth between the stories is transformative.

I picked that up quite recently. I'll have to move it up my list.

Currently reading Moravia's Contempt.

That Tales of the German Imagination is wonderful. From there I went on the a whole Pater Altenberg collecton, which was also pretty amazing. If you're looking for more, the Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/B00D5FOI6Y.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

..is also very cool (though it has a few more pulpy things as well as the literary stuff).

Also, Naomi is my favourite Tanizaki too! The fur coat scene has stayed in my memory very vividly.

PETER Altenberg. sigh.

It's sending me back to Hoffmann next/simultaneously but that may change as I get further in.

Henry James, The American. The first half's enjoyable comedy of manners takes too long to get to the crux, yet it's worth the wait. Is there a book of his that wouldn't happily take the title The Turn of the Screw? The last page, the last line, mon dieu!

Need to give James another shot one of these days. Methinks I was too young when I first tried to read him.

I finished The Good Soldier last night. It merits its reputation as being a well-written novel in terms of form. It builds up in layers very nicely, with new revelations off-handedly inserted by the narrator at well-measured intervals. However, I cannot endorse the view that it is flawlessly formed, because it has a couple of very fundamental formal flaws.

Ford casts the entire book as a retrospective narration by one of the characters, so that his narrator must infallibly know the entire story he is about to tell before writing the first word of the first sentence of the book, and yet, in order to achieve the best effects of the book, Ford's narrator must adopt a tone and perspective at the start of the book that don't fit at all with his having tasted the full bitterness of his situation already. Massively important facts remain for too long unmentioned or only vaguely hinted at, whereas a more realistic narrator could not have withheld them.

Although the narrator can only know of events he did not witness to the extent they have been described to him, in the later parts of the book especially he speaks with an incredible fullness of detail and nuance about scenes he didn't witness, right down to what went through everyone's mind from moment to moment, small hand gestures, tones of voice or hesitations. In one instance, we are required to believe he acquired all this detail, covering more than 15 years, in a single night's conversation with a distraught gentleman who's been drinking heavily.

iow, there's a massive amount of contrivance at work here, and the author relies on the momentum of the story to cover this up. What makes it a good book, is that Ford's artistry makes all this contrivance work for the reader. He hooks you and pulls you deeper and deeper into the tale, so you hardly notice the machinery, unless you are like me and you like seeing the gears at work, so you look for them.

I've always meant to read more Ford than that one -- he's a nice presence in all of Pound's storytelling about the era, and he was churning such an amount of stuff out ... I don't know how I want those claims to interrelate. Also I was reminded of him when I read A Moveable Feast and his awful cameo in that.

I am seven and a bit books into Simon Raven.

long time since i read a moveable feast, but didn't that cameo involve his mistaking hilaire belloc for aleister crowley? also something about horrendous breath. still came out of it better than wyndham lewis' appearance in same.

recently finished the secret agent, followed by the man who was thursday. now onto bely's petersburg.

I loved A Moveable Feast as a kid while loathing the portrait of an emasculated Scott Fitz.

I just finished Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus in two days: it's that good a read. I don't know if it's a successful novel though. Fortunately the allegory doesn't strangle the thing until the end.

ford is also described as having "the eyes of a disappointed rapist". i can remember FSF but i've forgotten lewis.

Just now seeing these latest mentions of A Moveable Feast, I rose and spied my high school copy straightaway! Haven't touched it in decades. Not finding the disappointed rapist bit yet, but think he was Lewis? What he says about Ford is worse in a way, a Hem's way exclusive--well, not even as much this:
"Oh here you are," he said.
It was Ford Madox Ford, as he called himself then, and he was breathing heavily through a heavy, stained mustache and holding himself as upright as an ambulatory, well-clothed, up-ended hogshead--as this (during the same sidewalk cafe encounter, after Ford "happily" cuts Belloc, and Hem doesn't approve, because in those days younger writers always respected older writers, unless they were Ford, Lewis, Gert Stein, Sherwood Anderson etc.):
I was trying to remember what Ezra Pound had told me about Ford, that I must never be roude to him that I must remember that he only lied when he was very tired, that he was really a good writer and that he had been through very bad domestic troubles. I tried had to think of these things but the heavy, wheezing, ignoble presence of Ford himself, only touching-distance away, made it difficult. But I tried. Of course, when I say "worse", I'm getting all moralistic, not deploring the prose (which influenced my high school zings, or should have).

My fave section (aside from his advising a bad writer to be a critic, so he'll always have something to write about) is the whole episode around, "Monsieur (Somebody) is on the roof and refuses categorically to come down!" Hell yeah!

Another Hell Yeah re this (read the whole thing, between the ads):
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/10/the-poem-that-made-sherman-alexie-want-to-drop-everything-and-be-a-poet/280586/?google_editors_picks=true

this is really good if you are into that whole crowd:

http://www.sanasavenue.com/images/prod_img/sanasavenue/books/small/0743232208.jpg

i should reread mf already. i think it's a pretty awful book despite its obvious pleasures tbh

his treatment of stein rankled. i mean, i thought his treatment of lewis or ford or fitzgerald unfair and unjust but his treatment of stein was ugly

M/F? By Antony Burgess?

yes! I read that Seymour book in college!

always thought a play or movie about the last days of stephen crane in his mansion in england with his bawdy house wife would be so great. uncomfortable dinners with henry james and joseph conrad. stephen coughing violently and writing furiously to get out of debt...there is drama there!

http://www.bookforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id00847/article00.jpg

or even a good biopic about his crazy short life.

has anyone done a good jack london movie? he died young too. 40. but sheesh such great material. oyster pirate! hobo! the klondike gold rush! socialism! from hobo to one of the wealthiest writers on earth. a movie just writes itself.

Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, ed. Peter Wortsman. So far an incredible collection - Grimm, Kleist, Hoffmann all awesome, haven't reached Kafka, Walser, Musil, Celan yet; feels like the sort of anthology where the back-and-forth between the stories is transformative.

― woof, Tuesday, 15 October 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How is the Bachmann? Been wanting to read Malina for a good couple of years..

Finished a couple of vols of Canetti's autobiog. He is so good at a sketch of a person (whether they acheved fame or not), he'll pick a quality or two that are startling and make you want to know them (whether for good or bad).

There are some nice portraits of Grosz (who has a show in London at the moment), Karl Kraus, that whole bitchy atmosphere of Vienna which Michael Hoffmann drew on for this review of the Kraus project. Kraus' writing does look pretty awful based on the excerpts quoted (my impression of him as an Austrian Hazlitt was wide wide off the mark) (and you can see why Franzen likes him). The whole thing is, in the end, no love letter to Vienna. To his credit its complicated, and a microcosm of that is his relationship with Kraus, in the process drawing that rollercoaster relationship most of us have with a writer and writing: from loving the voice and believing all the opinions straight away to then somehow snapping out of it years later is so so true...

Back to Rabelais..

love that miranda seymour bk. has the story (which i'm sure i've mentioned on ilx before) of crane leaning over to pet his dog and blood suddenly filling his mouth. henry james' house in rye is well worth a visit btw.

scott: there was a mediocre recent Edmund White novel about the James-Crane friendship.

Been dipping back into Kael's When the Lights Go Down on the occasion of (re)watching quite a bit of 70s stuff lately before I take a deep breath and plunge back into Austenland with Mansfield Park.

My follow-up to The Good Soldier is a re-reading of Code of the Woosters.

The rest of ILB is in a crowd watching you go by, Aimless.

Simply in the crowd.

i couldn't finish parade's end. plus, is Tietjens pronounced Tight-Yens?

it's "Teach-In". i just asked maria. nevermind.

or "Teach-Ins" in the book's case. most germans with that name don't have the S at the end.

Tight Jeans.

books I've read since I lasted posted over here:

Genesis: Interpretation, Walter Brueggemann
The New Novel: From Queneau to Pinget, Vivian Mercier
Scowler, Daniel Kraus
The Devils, Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Scanner Darkly, Philip K Dick (finally finished this for the third time a week ago)

right now I am reading The Ice People by Rene Barjavel, which is really short, and reminds me of a cheesy 1960s science fiction movie. It's great. Also reading Histoire by Claude Simon, but I tend to get lost in it really quickly so this might take a while...

xp thomp: what did you hate about The Virgin Suicides?

I don't know how you could anything other than get lost in a Claude Simon novel.

Now reading a heavy vol of Neruda's poetry - 'salt' is the word that sticks out the most. Liking the collection a lot, wish I could do justice to any of the poetry I enjoy reading. This is a multi-translator effort. Should be reissued (my copy is in falling apart hardback from the library).

"I don't know how you could anything other than get lost in a Claude Simon novel."

in a good way

Yeah!

been flying thru the namesake novel of one of ILB's favorite publishing imprints, The Dalkey Archive (in the Everyman's Library Collected Novels). can't remember the last time I lolled in public so often while reading. is this secretly O'Brien's best work?

also currently reading: Octavio Paz's Piedra del Sol, a long (584 lines iirc, inspired by the structure of some pre-Colombian calendar system) circular poem, from which I may eventually break out into Finnegans Wake; George Lensing's Wallace Stevens & The Seasons, a work of criticism every bit as ambitious as its title suggests

oh I also just finished a couple books of lectures: E.M. Forster's perennial classic Aspects of the Novel, which I perversely & willfully misread for help with my songwriting (hah!); and Umberto Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, which was a birthday present, and has made me want to read Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium (mentioned several times by Eco)

Dalkey Archive struggles valiantly against the shadow of Joyce, for which all praises are due; it also includes one of the best meta-jokes about Ireland/Irish lit that I've ever seen (Mick = unremarkable, slightly dense everyman character; De Selby = mad scientist into whose confidences he has unintentionally been taken):

Thus was the bargain arranged. But it was a least an hour later when Mick shook hands with De Selby at his door. His talk had suddenly veered into native politics and here at least was terrain where he was uncertain and sometimes lost, but where Mick was the very experienced guide.

(***CHAPTER ENDS***)

er that should read "at LAST", buggeritall

xp thomp: what did you hate about The Virgin Suicides?

it seemed dishonest in 2-3 different ways i would probably not be reading back into it if it weren't for the evidence of his later work. idk

i read jonathan dee's new one (hm) and now i am about to commence the ninth of the ten simon ravens. one thing i am thinking is that if at no point does someone die remembering the line from homer about dying someone remembers every book or so then that is a lot of possibility wasted.

so like eugenides is weird with ~gender~ and i thought TVS might be better because, right, there's this weird hiccuping prolepsic-analeptic first-person plural narration going and he's not going to make any claims about understanding the psyches of teenage women he has to really back up, right? but it seemed more and more like he was interested in the matter of his novel solely as a way to show off the technical virtuosity of the former, which wasn't even really all that virtuoso. and i mistrusted the novel's attempts to have me moved or emotionally invested, given that i had no evidence the author actually gave a shit about why teenagers might kill themselves, and all the clever distancing effects just seemed evasions of that. -- like if he was just going to show off i'd be fine with it! but the idea that i'm meant to care, nah.

" and has made me want to read Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium"

Soooo great. All time for me.

and now i am about to commence the ninth of the ten simon ravens. one thing i am thinking is that if at no point does someone die remembering the line from homer about dying someone remembers every book or so then that is a lot of possibility wasted
Intriguing: How are the first nine? Do you mean someone remembers it in each of them, or it's an overused line overall (like Googling "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." Too true, but). If so, I take it you're being sarcastic--but if not, not ( I take it). Also, which line from Homer? thx.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Was stuck at ~30% for a while, on the part where someone photocopies documents for a lengthy chapter -- was this high-tech at the time? It's moving along now.

dow: "dying, he remembers his sweet Argos." it's been remembered three or perhaps four times in eight books. the second time i thought it was accidental but now i'm fairly sure it's a ~device~

also the catullus about the quantity of kisses he has available for lesbia. in terms of classicism they both seem a bit greatest-hits you know

lol it's virgil isn't it. shows how much i know

no, the hypermultiplicity of kisses is catullian, not virgillian.

"Dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos", i meant

Currently reading:

Northanger Abbey: Not as bad as I have been led to believe! Just as good as the other Austens. If anything, the others lack a certain charm that this one has.
Invisible Cities: Still working my way through Calvino's works. Didn't think I would love this one but I have! Who needs characters or plot?

I started Marisha Pessl's Night Film. It's fine so far as a dark murder mystery, but the constant italics for emphasis are a bit much, it's like I'm reading a comic book.

Italics for emphasis really bug me in books for some reason.

Same. I'm assuming the point is to make it feel pulpy, but damn. Random sample sentences:

"I might be a little off my game, but I wasn't going home. Not yet."

"...often overlooking crucial details that told an entirely different story. That was the reason why I was here."

"So, he was a drug dealer..."

A couple of nights ago I did extensive reading in the collected poetry of Lorine Niedecker. The poems are all short, so this is not difficult. She started out straddling the Imagist and Surrealist approaches to poetry, but in middle age she moved decisively in the direction of folk rhyme, but with a broader base of sophistication than most folk poets. I enjoyed it.

Last night I started into Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval epic poem Willehalm, translated as prose, which makes for some awkwardness when the poetic diction doesn't come across smoothly. So far, lots of blood and guts, and dozens of very weird made-up names for the Saracen kings and princes being slaughtered. Even some of the horses get names.

has anyone read this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mucker_%28novel%29

No, but I'm intrigued to know how Burroughs contrives to have everyone be naked all the time in a non-underworld/Martian setting

Gravity's Rainbow. So much better this time round. I know more of what he talks about, and I love his writing of course, whereas before it was mostly some of the humour and the (knowingly bad) lyrics and a willingness to finish at all costs*.

*(which I don't have anymore, I've stopped reading more books than ever this year)

The new Coetzee was impressive in a low expectations way.

Okay The Ice People is insane

sogyal rinpoche - tibetan book of living and dying
heruka - life of milarepa
stifter - bergkristall

This made me laugh, from The Mill on the Floss:

Imagine a truly respectable and amiable hen, by some portentous anomaly, taking to reflection and inventing combinations by which she might prevail on Hodge not to wring her neck or send her and her chicks to market: the result could hardly be other than much cackling and fluttering.

_The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald_. Really enjoying it, especially "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," "May Day," and "The Diamond As Big as the Ritz."

oh i meant to buy that in a store recently, i've heard good things about his short stories

i mean, he's f scott fucking fitzgerald

He's a short story writer who wrote a good and great novel.

still can't believe i left my copy of tender is the night in my plane seat this summer ;_;

(i was halfway through and it was great)

Yeah, that short story collection ... I'd definitely recommend it based what I've read so far (about half). "May Day" is political and not just in the expected critique-of-the-American-Dream sense, more leftist-leaning. And he's really funny in a lot of places too. The edition I have has some interesting-looking commentary as well as essays by F Scott and Zelda.

Alfred--and others--any FSF short stories or collections you would recommend turning to next?

Good things about Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willehalm:

• His occasional asides to the audience where he pulls a face and says something funny.

• His sometimes homely, but excellent similes, for example in describing two large armies clashing on a battlefield he describes them as heaving up and down like the surface of the ocean.

• His desire to make his characters fully realized and complex, including the heathens, for whom he often shows much sympathy.

• His repetitiveness and his penchant for saying things many many times over with only tiny variations so they become like the pounding in your head when you have a certain kind of headache. After a time they become painful, the repetitions with small variations. They multiply their numbers and come like waves that pound a shore. Few are the men who would choose such a pounding and the pain it brings.

• His need to pile up exotic names by the dozens, but those names are attached to nothing of substance, just a formulaic epithet.

• His lazy habit of saying stuff like, 'if I could describe how rich and colorful his halberk was, you would be amazed, but take my word for it, it was the best halberk you could imagine, even better, if possible, than king xyz's halberk, and that was pretty hot stuff.'

• His characters declaim speeches far more often than they just talk to each other.

Alfred--and others--any FSF short stories or collections you would recommend turning to next?

Matthew Bruccoli's '89 selection.

Matthew Bruccoli's '89 selection.

Cool, thanks. Just ordered it.

The finale to The Mill on the Floss is so incredible and unexpected. It works thanks to the weave of symbolism around the mill and the river. Eliot is crafty as hell.

On to Romola. Nobody ever talks about this one. I have no idea what to expect.

It scares me!

reading chris kraus - i love dick. just craziness

I'm about halfway through The Man Who Was Thursday. Ripping yarn. It keeps the pace flying, so one cannot dwell on the unnaturalness of everything. Obviously, there will be a slam bang ending of some sort.

I loved the first half of 'The Man Who Was Thursday', but found it got sillier and sillier as it went on.

I've just read a couple of books that have coincidentally been reissued as NYRB Classics: Stephen Benatar's 'Wish Her Safe At Home' and J R Ackerley's 'We Think The World of You'. They're both great, but I found the Benatar in particular headswimmingly fantastic. A must read, I would say.

Enrique Vila-Matas — Dublinesque

pretty sure I was originally put on to Vila-Matas either by ILB or by fellow ilxor Ch!ngaMonkey? either way tho I'm enjoying the hell outta this

i was bored to death out of Dublinesque, reallu.

continuing the long onqoff Proust journey (vol. 4)

had to stop smoking again. hid in a house in Ireland on my own, talked to no-one, would lie on a couch and read finnegans wake, then sit at a desk and play xcom. joyce, xcom, joyce, xcom. No smoking. It was a great holiday, though it's put me in a slightly sideways state. I wish I was still there, rather than in an office with people asking me to do things.

Also read The Divine Invasion by pkd (start is slow and a bit dick-by-numbers, but gets somewhere good in the last third, after trip to zoo) & Our Band Could be Your Life (this was fine, exactly what I expected, I have nothing to say about it).

Sounds like the ideal vacation

Our Band Could be Your Life (this was fine, exactly what I expected, I have nothing to say about it).
Read this recently and this was my reaction exactly.

it got sillier and sillier as it went on.

I finished The Man Who Was Thursday last night. Chesterton subtitled it: A Nightmare, as if this tissue-thin disclaimer could obscure the fact that, considered purely as allegory it is a sloppy, disjointed mess, but it contains so many allegorical elements that one cannot seriously consider it as anything else. He could as easily and truthfully subtitled it: A Hodgepodge.

Yeah, guess I agree, though I love the book -- not sure I actually love the final part, but what the hell. In my head now it's basically big ol' balloon-elephant-man chasing some dudes through traffic, which is a lot more fun than, y'know, GOD or FATE or whatever. And some rub about a red-haired girl.
Loved the joke about the demasking of the anarchists -- I mean, after the second you basically know what the next bunch of pages will be like, but it's a lot of fun to watch Chesterton run through it.
I may have to reread it soon. For some reason I never got into the Father Brown stories -- but I've never been a fan of mysteries. Should try again some day.

Some recent reads:
Scott Smith - A Simple Plan (a pretty good thriller about some country folk finding lotsa stolen money and making a real hash of trying to get away with it)
Bennett Sims - A Questionable Shape (DFW-ish zombie novel about dudes trying to find one of their dads, who they believe has become a zombie. It mostly consists of philosophizing about zombies and death and memory and family &c &c. I liked it a lot, but I could see it irritating the hell out of people.)
Joshua Foer - Moonwalking With Einstein (Roughly a set of magazine articles about memory and memory athletes -- really quite entertaining. I'm glad he didn't spend too much time explaining the techniques &c, since I'd read a pretty damn boring book about that some years ago. We follow Foer getting to know these dudes and learning the ropes until he goes off to a big tournament and kicks ass. It's like Karate Kid, but without bullies or kicking or a love interest or, hrm, it's really nothing like Karate Kid.)

Nearing the end of Donald Antrim's _The Hundred Brothers_.

I'd read a pretty damn boring book about that some years ago.

Was it The Memory Palace of Mateo Rici? Because iirc that was a magazine article's worth of idea drawn out to book length.

Nah, a Norwegian one that I don't believe has been translated to any other language.

Had a copy of Memory Palace which I couldn't read.

Been reading some Steven Millhauser and Chekhov stories. This is a good one: http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/achekhov/bl-achek-champ.htm

Anonymous Writing Group II: criticism thread

Plenty reading material here. I'd encourage you all to take a look, and let us know what you think worked and what didn't.

I'm sort of between books atm, so I have been reading essays from Christopher Hitchens's final collection, Arguably. His polemics in it seem to be workmanlike, but nowhere near inspired and only tepidly persuasive, if that. The only thing I've been impressed by so far is the breadth of his reading.

Had a long train journey this morning so managed to polish off Fielding Gray, my fourth Raven novel in a week, inspired by the references upthread. Slightly wish I hadn't read his 1998 introduction to the next batch of four as it makes it rather more difficult to separate the questionable views of some of the series' characters with the questionable views of the author, but they've been thoroughly entertaining so far.

I'm sort of between books atm, so I have been reading essays from Christopher Hitchens's final collection, Arguably. His polemics in it seem to be workmanlike, but nowhere near inspired and only tepidly persuasive, if that. The only thing I've been impressed by so far is the breadth of his reading.

The Rebecca West essay send me to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

I took a run at Black Lamb and Grey Falcon about three years ago and dropped it about 250pp into it. The observations were sophisticated, even extraordinary, but the pacing was too glacial for me and I couldn't handle it. Another try and perhaps I could get through it.

Colson Whitehead: Apex Hides the Hurt

really enjoying this--was inspired to read it after getting hooked on his very funny twitter feed after someone somewhere on ILX linked to it

Nearly done with Romola. I thought it was great. A lively depiction of tumultuous 1490s Florence. Eliot's very confident in this setting. She provides enough historical context that the confusing parts are enjoyably confusing, as though you're a traveler listening in on the conversations on the street.

that's the only one of her novels I haven't read if I discount Felix Holt, started and abandoned.

reading Go Down, Moses -- haven't read Faulkner in years but it's great. I forgot how enjoyable his sentences can be, even when I may not understand really what's going on.

I still have Adam Bede and Felix Holt, and the seemingly minor Scenes of Clerical Life. I may try to plough through them over the next month. She is awesome, and so different from book to book.

suffering from terrible inability to concentrate on any one book, decided to reread Moominvalley in November, which remains brilliant and troubling. The subplot involving Toft, the surrogate for both author and reader, is so sad and strange, it's like Jansson felt the need to apologize for her own work. So many great little sentences:

The Hemulen woke up slowly and recognized himself and wished he had been someone he didn't know.

"Toft," Fillyjonk repeated. "A lovely name." She desperately searched for words and wished she knew a little more about children and liked them.

Now starting An Ermine in Czernopol, it's a little murky right now but hopefully it'll draw me in.

Sodom and Gomorrah. The Botanical analogies are so freakin' bizarre. Despite the shock of homosexuality not registering anymore things like that still leave their mark. The analogy and allusions overload, really not much like it at all. Maybe its a bit like Rabelais in the way he overloads with lists...don't know if MP was a fan although I'm sure he read it.

An Ermine in Czernopol is very good, but a slow starter

Moominvalley in November really freaked me out as a kid--the absence of the expected characters, the melancholy vibe, the ambiguous ending. Such a great book. There's an english translation of Tove Jansson's autobiog just out, "Sculptor's Daughter".
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1908745339.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Oh man, Sculptor's Daughter is amazing, everyone should buy that book, it used to go for $600 online. I found it in the library when I was in Dunedin. The first story in particular is wonderful.

Anthony Trollope - An Eye for an Eye
Ernest Freebug - Freedom's Prisoner

and A. Scott Berg's Wilson bio, reviewed here.

xp--wow, didn't realise it had been in english before! i have a copy coming from the uk

yikes, looking at some of those prices for the first edition!!! maybe i should let my father know what he has sitting with the rest of his jansson books (must be a few of them floating around dunedin, then).

finished bely's petersburg, now reading dostoyevsky's devils.

Just started Tobias Smollett's _Humphrey Clinker_. Wasn't entirely sure why I had it on my shelf, so I figured it was time to read it -- holy crap! I mean, really, only 20-30+ pages in and we have doctor challop talking about the highly underrated smell of shit -- it gets marvelously revolting. He also brags about how he bangs the syphilitic whores he has treated, y'know, to prove they've been cured.
It seems I've started rereading Stephen King's _The Shining_ as well.

man, woof's holiday sounds great

Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

Good shit so far.

I foolishly avoided The Ask for a while, under the mistaken impression it was some crappy hipster sub-George-Saunders thing, but I actually really enjoyed it.

Been avoiding that for same reason.

I laughed aloud several times.

Finished the second batch of four Alms For Oblivion novels by Simon Raven. The Judas Boy was fairly solid but by Places Where They Sing his reactionary politics and misogyny had become juvenile and crude to a degree that whatever diminishing wit was present couldn't leven. Still planning to plough on with the last two.

work is a disgusting imposition on reading and lounging time.

The Code of the Woosters
Bleeding Edge - Pynchon
The Taming of Chance - Ian Hacking

also been dipping selectively into The Image of a Drawn Sword by Jocelyn Brooke and also The Senior Commoner by Julian Hall again. Both of them feel perfect for this time of year.

read some Crawshaw in a desultory, unimproving way yesterday, then a more satisfactory drift through a volume of Donne (An Anatomie of the World the main one i snagged on - 'If man were anything, he's nothing now;').

read a bit of The New Arabian Nights by Stevenson again as a lethargic comfort (not that there's any lethargy about Stevenson).

Some wild folly is making me think I'll read some Tao Lin soon, and finally be in a position to get back to thomp on the matter.

how do you feel about bleeding edge, in the most general terms?

i have been reading about 10 pages a time in random bursts for the last week and don't want to venture onto the thread where everyone has doubtless finished the thing

I stopped my reread of Sodom and Gomorrah as I forgot this on the plane :-(

But I'll start on The Prisomer and the Fugitive soon.

I picked up Skylark by Deszo Kosztolanyi, its really great so I'll finish that first.

Had a fabulous time with Life A User's Manual - I could have easily taken another buildingful of it. Went from there to Cortazar's Hopscotch and eyerolled for 100 pages before giving it up.

in the most general terms - like much Pynchon it's a book that indulges its author. the extent to which you are happy with the book probably depends on the extent to which you allow indulgence in every level (the logic of its tonal and structural semantics). I like it so far - but I'm going v slowly and p much allowing it every latitude. it doesn't teem with content tho, and the subject matter (let's say "computer stuff") is more an essential metaphor or set of them than mechanically integral. not sure about all that tho, and it's kept my curiosity.

xpost to n.

man when did i ask you about tao lin? this summer of rereading tao lin seems so long ago to me now

i read the new stephen king, it was ok

i interrupted a reread of gr to read bleeding edge and oh boy his powers are so diminished, it's sad

finally got back to gr last week and i mean, come on

yeah i have virtually no tolerance for pynchon being pynchon and the bit about the pirate vhs maker being accosted by the nyu film professor made me think of the 90% unread hardback of vineland that i currently use as a doorstop but other than that it's tolerable verging on worthwhile

if i could ask anything of pynchon it would probably be that he could do with less teeming in his books

I picked up Skylark by Deszo Kosztolanyi, its really great so I'll finish that first.

so so so good

Reading Jim Thompson's 'The Nothing Man'; so far this is like an arch and bloody piss-take on Hemingway's main character is 'Fiesta', which is not a criticism

Seem to remember that being one of yr lesser Jim Thompsons.

James, can you just pause on saying things are good for half a year? my to-read list is only getting longer to the point that it's making me realise that time is only getting shorter.

Stopped trying to keep up with James M a long time back.

In my defence, I've slowed down since the baby was born.

I think it is lesser Thompson, but still a lot of fun. A bit like The Golden Gizmo, which had the psychic and the talking dog.

Never even bothered to try to read The Golden Gizmo, maybe now's the time. Lesser Thompson is still probably better than a lot of other stuff.

my to-read list is only getting longer to the point that it's making me realise that time is only getting shorter.

Wisdom comes with age. For me, the imperative is that I am always reading something I find worthwhile and enjoyable. I realized some time ago that I can't possibly read all the worthwhile, enjoyable books. One lifetime is nowhere near enough.

I'm 15% of the way into Moby Dick. One of those books I never got around to before.

gots da nyt best sellr list books from the beginning of this month

Found a copy of Electric Children an english translation of Jacques Vassal's 1971 history of folk music which originally came out as Folksong. This translation gives more time to the UK folkrock stuff that had comeout since the late 70s, including mention of the Trees.
Not sure how well known the book is and not got very far into it, just read the 1st chapter which is called Reds and talks about the Native American 'redman' and into the 2nd chapter called Blacks giving an overview of Black music and seeing jazz as an abstraction of the blues which I think a tad dubious. seems very eurocentric to say the least

Anyway interesting to see a book like this from 1974 since I've read the somewhat similar volumes from about 3 years ago Electric Eden and Seasons They Change.

& when I say I found, I really did chance on this since it was on a the shelf of a local charity shop in a generic sleeve like a proofreading copy. Not sure what made me pick it up but glad i did.

I made quite a bit of headway getting through Arguably before setting it aside. Being still in an essay mood, last night I opened up We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a collected edition of Joan Didion's essays. Being unimaginative, I just started at the beginning with Slouching Towards Bethleham.

oh man I envy you. Skip around! To me her best work is in Political Fictions.

and Miami is unfuckwithable.

The contrast in quality between Hitchens and Didion is stark and all in Didion's favor.

http://imageshack.com/a/img593/5504/tdpa.jpg

I'm on Awaydays by Kevin Sampson, which is a football hooliganism/post punk/coming of age thing. Pretty good as far as it goes, nice story, lots of sex/fashion/violence and gallus lads; presses all my buttons.

I also picked up Among The Thugs on my hooligan tip, partly on the strength of ^ this charming fellow. I open it up and the blurb quote is by Don DeLillo! "...we see the frenzy of nations in horrifying miniature. An important book about the shape the world is taking..." I feel this may prove a different type of work.

Mmm I love Hitchens for virtues that Didion doesn't possess.

used to love the hitch but he seems worse every time i try to revisit him. hard for me to read him now without seeing all his worst qualities. but i suspect the older work -- up to the kissinger book at least -- probably holds up a lot better.

'slouching towards bethlehem' would make any list of desert island books for me.

Didion is just pure pleasure isn't she? Just total and utter joy to read.

Nearly done with The Ask and I'm thoroughly enjoying it...potentially not as PISS YRSELF FUNNY as all the quotes on my copy suggest but I very rarely laugh during novels so I might be at fault here rather that Lipsyte. Would love to read more of his stuff, what else is worth checking out?

Also dipping in and out of Our Band Could Be Your Life and as someone upthread noted, it doesn't really make much of an impression does it? Its solid enough, you'd be happy if any of the chapters popped up with a snazzy layout in Mojo etc but its not exactly a thrill.

Will finally make a start on Jacob Bruckhardt's The State as a Work of Art soon to.

I picked up Skylark by Deszo Kosztolanyi, its really great so I'll finish that first.

so so so good

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Sunday, 10 November 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Just incredible.

Only other Lipsyte I've read is his recent collection of stories, The Fun Parts. Also very amusing.

I am reading a draft of my friend's second book

Be kind but firm. Most authors have difficulties with their second book, just like bands do with their second album.

I got out these out from the library this week

The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint (I read most of it while in the library and enjoyed it so I got out another of his)
Camera by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Chess by Stefan Zweig (a friend recommended me this one)
Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter

Wow--nice haul, will.i.an. Those are all really good books. Chess especially.

I've read a lot of Zweig's novellas this year - good, but his melodramatic tendencies often ruin things imo. It all gets a little too heated.

Currently reading Walter de la Mare's 'Stories, Poems & Essays'. Didn't much care for 'The Memoirs of a Midget', but these short stories are just fantastic. Very English, very peculiar and cobwebby, and sometimes very funny.

^hell yes. feeling that the earlier stories are better (at least i looked at vol 2 of the collected and was less consistently blown away by them than the ones in the first).

also this has reminded me there's a WdlM story very very like a Ballard story, will look it up when I get back.

finished dave eggers - the circle - felt like it turned into the hunger games or some young adult bs by the end, just not for me

reading 'provenance' - non fic abt art forgery case in the uk in the 90s; well told & captivating, im always sold on imposter stories tbh

didion - the white album -- sojourns portion, esp 'in hollywood' is great

Indecisive attention-deficit reading at the moment. Wondering whether I will finish any of them:

Isaac Babel Collected Stories
Bocaccio – Decameron, surprisingly lols
Dickens – Our Mutual Friend, nighttime re-read, both more mawkish and more bitingly bleak and amazing than I remembered
Faber Book of Utopias, ed. John Carey, full of great oddities I didn't know existed

^hell yes. feeling that the earlier stories are better

I've found that too - assuming the ones I've just read are in chronological order. 'Missing' is the masterpiece in this collection, and 'At First Sight' is beautifully bizarre aswell.

Toni Morrison - Jazz: My first Morrison (though I've had Beloved sitting on the pile for years). Absolutely lovely, even though my interest wanes a bit whenever she leaves The City. Still, the first book in a long time that I wanted to immediately start over again as soon as I finished it, both to pick up what I undoubtedly missed the first time around and to just soak in it a bit longer.

Feeling gloomy as the end of the year mark approaches.

I think I've read five books this year, which unless I pick up the pace is going to be by far my weakest performance in memory.

Speaking of Boccaccio's Decameron, I just read Joan Acocella on the author, his work, and a new translation; she also recommends the 1977 Norton Critical Edition, if you don't want all 100 stories (I do, but also want to check the '77 version's essays, which she rates highly). Most enticing. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2013/11/11/131111crbo_books_acocella

Thanks for this, v cool!

about 100 pages into 'judgment days' by nick kotz, about LBJ, MLK, and the passage of the civil rights act. really quite good so far -- less obsessive/detailed than caro's books, but probably more balanced and readable. lots of great LBJ anecdotes, as you'd expect.

Growing up on the west coast and having been old enough in 1968 to appreciate much of the madness around me, reading last night the eponymous essay from Didion's The White Album takes me back very strongly to the zeitgeist of that time.

My project to read books by obscure Nobel prize winners has officially started. I am reading some plays by Jacinto Benavente.

Also just started up The Sign of Four and Calvino's Italian Folktales, which are both a lot of fun.

I finished Awaydays, really enjoyed it. It's a terrific little novel - tight story, very little fat on it until you get down to individual-word level. Too many thug characters I suppose, there isn't enough time to do more than sketch them out, but the others are well-drawn and I've enjoyed spending the week in their company.

The set-pieces are really good when describing the fighting, but one flaw is a Trainspottingesque taking things too far. Not as much as Welsh does, but I felt the sex was a little too forward (though it's a teenage lad tbf), the girls a little too brazen, and it's a bit much to have cameos from both Stuart Hall and Tom Baker.

Minor issues though. It's an excellent yarn and captures its mood very well.

Poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins and D.H. Lawrence. For some reason...

about 100 pages into 'judgment days' by nick kotz, about LBJ, MLK, and the passage of the civil rights act. really quite good so far -- less obsessive/detailed than caro's books, but probably more balanced and readable. lots of great LBJ anecdotes, as you'd expect.

read Bending Towards Justice!

Inspired by recent talk, I finally started reading gravity's rainbow; only 60 pages in but loving it. Also saintsbury's a history of English prose rhythm, and dipping into boswell's London journals when I don't have the concentration for either of those. Feels good to be reading properly again after a bit of a drought, I think I only managed to read 2 story collections and the batshit new Stephen king novel in the last coupla months.

thanks, alfred -- on my list!

Colson Whitehhead: Sag Harbor
Tove Jansson: Sculptor's Daughter

Both about youth, both amazing in very different ways

Also saintsbury's a history of English prose rhythm

I love Saintsbury so much, he's the enduringly fascinatingly strange critic of his period – there's a formal rigour & certainty mixed up with wild idiosyncrasy that makes him way more likeable & fun to read (& more worth serious engagement really) than the other late victorian/edwardian 1st gen Eng lit guys (Q, Raleigh, Bradley even). Have not read that history of prose rhythm,, but will look now, just downloaded it from archive org. Hoping for at least one terrifying assumption about what I (as the average educated reader) will have read within the first 30 pages.

He's my blind spot; all my fave critics love him.

the knack to getting along with him imo is just rolling in straightfaced with a 'yes, i am entirely able to hold my own in a conversation about Lyly' attitude

huh. this looks interesting.

starting John Horne Burns' The Gallery

Irmgard Keun: Gilgi

Got to love a writer who, when the Nazis banned her, had the balls to sue them for loss of income (later she faked her suicide so she could keep living in Berlin undercover)

Update: The Benavente plays were pretty boring, Wilde-esque comedies of manners, but way worse than Wilde. Now moving on to The Gentleman from San Francisco by Ivan Bunin.

That's a good one, esp. the title story.

Louis Auchincloss - Fellow Passengers
Margaret MacMillan - The War That Ended Peacee:

Leonardo Sciascia:day of the owl+to each is own.
Great stuff.

very nearly bought a nice-looking copy fathers and sons that had a couple hundred pages of criticism, but realized i have too many books stacked up in my room already

never let that stop you

also it cost money

http://www.amazon.com/White-Out-Secret-Life-Heroin/dp/1616492082/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385324268&sr=1-1&keywords=white+out

everyone should read this book as soon as possible. the paris review said it is less an "addiction memoir" than a "phenomenology of heroin addiction" and i think that's right but the book is more than that as well. sentence by sentence, this book is written with incredible eloquence and power. the central metaphor of heroin as a "white screen" that slowly eats away at one's memories, placing itself at the center of everything, is chilling but also strangely beautiful. i've never done heroin but i felt i could clearly comprehend what it would be like to be caught in the grip of a force like that. also, the parts that have to do with the people the author spent time with in seedy late 90s baltimore are good as well, especially if you like tragic absurdism.

'the secret life of x' is one of the worst subtitle formations

agreed. the book is incredible though.

finished go down moses. thought it was fantastic, though i know i missed a bunch of stuff. its amazing how faulkner's prose can still move you, even when you are not exactly sure of what he is saying.

now reading galeano, 'the open veins of latin america', going slowly. but enjoying it.

does anyone here do that "goodreads book challenge" where you set yourself a # of books to read for the year? i did it because i am a big dork, and i am way behind and it's kind of getting to me!

I had my challenge at 50 books and it's been fun and is forcing me to read a ton but ultimately I am not happy with how it is forcing me to rush through books. Won't be doing it again.

I had a personal goal of 52 books last year and succeeded -- but I wasn't happy with how many low quality "page turners" I ended up reading, so I didn't do it again this year.

Now digging into Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. Never read any Stegner before, curious to see what he's like.

And the Ivan Bunin was excellent, by the way. I love the writing style.

spent the past week trying to have done with, once & for all, Pessoa's Book of Disquiet... can anyone who's finished confirm that I am missing nothing by reading the second half entirely out of sequence? or does it actually develop a linear narrative sequence at some point?

Its not a novel...you should never be 'done with' The Book of Disquiet

until it's done with you.

i just finished dostoevsky's the idiot which i didn't love like his other novels, but it still kept me enthralled once i'd made it about halfway through (300pp. in this translation). want to start on demons but i think i need to find some space before subjecting myself to him again.

It's my misfortune to be reading a book which is a massive compilation of 7 books in >1100 pages, so I am going to give myself credit for each sub-book I finish. In view of this, I have recently read The White Album, Political Fictions, Salvador, and Miami, by Joan Didion. I am currently reading After Henry by... yes... Joan Didion.

xposts I started it in high school, some 10 years ago... think I'm finally ready to get it "out of my system"

I mean I recognize that it is maybe better read as philosophy or 'wisdom literature' than a novel, but the philosophy it espouses is A. depressing and B. uncomfortably close to my own instinctive thought patterns (in high school and now), so I was hoping the author might eventually hazard a step beyond (dis)quietism

maguerite yourcenar - the abyss
santideva - a guide to the bodhisattva way of life

just finished portrait of a lady, blew me away. now rereading madame bovary. and meandering through rings of saturn, which seems appropriate.

Deep into The Prisoner: the phrase "Albertine is dead" (and variants) is such devastating punctuation second time around.

Had a train journey home/coach journey back this weekend so finished Lipsyte's The Ask which I thoroughly enjoyed, and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann and the Holocaust which was v. interesting.

Trundling through Paul Theroux's The Pillars of Hercules atm, nice enough stuff.

Gonna start Arnesto Sabato - The Tunnel

bought a copy of richard yates by tao lin at a church sale for a dollar and read it last weekend. reading it makes u feel gross but also it is undeniably pretty addictive. then i read the ilx thread about him and contemplated posting to on it. <- that's my impression of how tao lin writes. couldn't sleep so i read the first few pages of box man by kobo abé. liked it but something about it pissed me off (clear narrative is supposed to be a little obfuscatory/kooky but i kept getting confused and not liking the jokes) feel like i got off to a bad start so i'm gonna return to it another time. went to the bookstore today and bought astragal by albertine sarrazin. only read the first page (escaping from prison, she jumps out of a window and snaps her ankle in the process) store but it left me breathless. checkitout:

The sky had lifted at least thirty feet. I sat there, not moving. The shock must have cracked the pavement, my right hand fumbled in the rubble. As I breathed, the silence stilled the explosion of starts whose sparks still crackled in my head. The white lines in the pavement showed dimly in the darkness: my hadn left the ground, felt up my left arm, up to my shoulder, back down my ribs to my hips: nothing, I was intact, I could go on. I stood up Falling flat on my face, sprawled out like a cross, I remembered that I had forgotten to check over my legs as well. I sat back up and began exploring myself again. This time, near my ankle, I ran into a strange swelling which puffed and throbbed beneath my fingers...

so badass. true story that happened to the author, who, btw, is a badass who lived a life of crime, wrote the novel in prison, died before she turned 30, also was a serious babe http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSR_U6Ijxm-vTGaKh86VOayjzu9MOEJXu2k3I6cMf0amCZQ9daio9yhgmdoYQ

Currently into Peter Brown The Body and Society Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity right now.

waggish's year-end list is making me insanely book-hungry.

Nice! All good for material for this eve :)

Tsvetaeva's Phaedra: with New Year’s Letter and Other Long Poems, Leskov, the German short-stories book. The one thing I'd want to read this year that isn't listed is Leopardi's Zibaldone, or at least parts of it.

Last night I finished Slouching Toward Bethlehem, so I'm now finished with all of Didion's nonfiction books, as gathered in We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live. Whew! To fill in the remainder of the evening, I picked up Elaine Pagels's book on the Gospel of Thomas, titled Beyond Belief (another title like Palimpsest that has loads of books using it). I like Pagels's other work, but this one is starting very slowly.

I finished off Beyond Belief, Elaine Pagels. I was disappointed in it, in that the subtitle was The Secret Gospel of Thomas, which led me to think that the major subject matter she addressed would be the Gospel of Thomas, a text discovered in 1949 in Egypt. Instead, there was no close textual reading of Thomas, but rather a broad discussion of the early church which covered ground she's already covered in previous books, in almost the same way. She had nothing new to say, afaics, but published anyway. Boo.

'How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position' by Tabish Khair: very entertaining novel about three guys from India/Pakistan living in a share flat in Denmark.

I am now rereading (after a few decades) Xenophon's Anabasis, in translation, of course. My Attic Greek extends about as far as could cover up half a flea.

Looking for some nice essay collections for Christmas, anything good come out this year?

oh, also, my first book's just come out on Hato Press/Bronze Age:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ba5VauwCcAApNBF.jpg

Congrats!

Uh, I haven't read any recent essay collections, but the ones I want to get are _My 1980s & Other Essays_ by Wayne Koestenbaum and _The Hall of Uselessness_ by Simon Leys.

A lot of people have praised _This Is Running for Your Life_ by Michelle Orange. The opening essays looks like it might be an expanded version of this one FADE TO ORANGE: The Theory of Receptivity and Some Thoughts on Ethan Hawke’s Face

I reread _Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde_ this weekend and wanted more -- so I've started reading _Treasure Island_. I'm really enjoying it! I should have read this half a century ago.
Also digging Nabokov's _Pnin_ and kinda picking at a prose translation by W. R. J. Barron of _Sir Gawain & the Green Knight_. It's fun to recognize some Norwegian words in the original text.

RLS was a pretty smooth operator. When his imagination is fully engaged and he's in top form, he slides down as easily as oysters on the half shell.

Treasure Island is great infectious fun. I'm sure many thriller writers have learned from its pacing.

I am currently reading a philosophical work by Rudolf Christoph Eucken entitled "Can We Still Be Christians?". Mr. Eucken has the distinction of being the least read Nobel-laureate on Goodreads, with only 3 ratings (all 2 stars, poor guy). It's pretty damn tough to get through.

Problem word in that title: We.

really loved 'treasure island' when i finally read it a couple years ago on an otherwise miserable work trip. silver is a great character -- you really do kinda root for him to get away at the end.

Norman Mailer - The Executioner's Song. Man, I read sixty pages in one sitting. Far less daunting a task than its size led me to believe, said the man to his date.

Szerb's Journey by Moonlight

Good range here, a fair amount mentioned on What Are You Reading? threads (wish it was Rolling; hell with having to search the seasonals)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/12/best-books-of-2013-part-one.html?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_Daily%20%2877%29

Just finished the Philip Pullman The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which was interesting enough.

Wondering what fiction to start on now. Do I give Gravity's Rainbow another attempt? Moby Dick? Consider Phlebas? The Wonderboys? The Prince? THe Man In THe High Castle?

reading the secret life of plays by steve waters - kind of to help me with drama writing i'm doing but it's an interesting read nonetheless. also reading a lot of plays, recently got through translations and faith healer by brian friel, the first and most recent compilation of conor mcpherson plays (with rum an vodka, the weir etc) and am about to start on woyzeck, plus some martin crimp.

A close friend has a truly great story in the new issue of American Short Fiction, which makes me very happy: http://americanshortfiction.org/2013/11/03/annie-radcliffe-you-are-loved-playlist-2/

@dog latin: The Man In The High Castle is really good, I read it this summer.

this book is kicking my arse right now

http://fckvrso.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/aesthetics-and-politics.jpg

ilx book

Currently into Peter Brown /The Body and Society Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity / right now.

waggish's year-end list is making me insanely book-hungry.

god, had exactly the same response. catching up on yesterday's news here tho:

All Souls - Javier Marias

I'm not sure I made anything out of this. anyone make a case for it?

The Savage Detectives - Bolaño

This is really good!

Some Leskov. didn't enjoy when I was reading but turning it over in my mind think it was better than I thought it was, and I just wasn't in the mood.

Saintsbury is v amusing and otm generally.

started Skylark by Dezső Kosztanyi. enjoying so far.

Thought I'd read the Wizard of Oz since i never have before and I'd read something about it being an allegory for American financial change in terms of going to a banknote based system or something.
It was simplified to some degree for the film and various scenes cut out. Will hopefully finish it tomorrow then I can say that i've read it at least. It's interesting but it does seem to be a children's book
Also thinking about Mary Poppins after hearing some interesting stuff about esoteric thought that PL Travers included in an article which came out in the wake of Saving Mr Banks.

Also reading a book on the philosopher's Stone where the author tries to find out about alchmey in various cultures. He's visited China & India so far.

& H.P.Lovecraft the Classic Stories which is an annotated version compiling several of the core stories. Interesting stuff, shame he was a bit of a Nazi sympathiser type but that does seem to have triggered teh thought behind the stories.

The Save Detectives is the one book by Bolano that didn't hang together too well for me. Should revisit.

Like to get round to Leskov someday.

@Michael B - cheers, I read the first chapter in the summer and enjoyed it but got distracted and started something else for some reason. Have picked it up again and I'm glad for it.

Been reading volume 1 of Knausgaard's "My Struggle". One of the most realistic depictions of what it's like to be an adolescent boy that I can remember.

fizzles p much everything i enjoyed about 'all souls' was stuff i got out of reading it in retrospect of 'your face tomorrow' i think? that and a certain bitchyness of tone, i guess, that went into it. the weird spinoff 'dark back of time' also p good i think

I finished Xenophon's Anabasis last night. It obviously contains a bunch of special pleading on the author's own behalf, and it probably contains a multitude of inaccuracies concerning the details of the expedition because it was written perhaps 30 years after the fact, but regardless of these shortcomings it provides a fascinating window on that moment in greek and persian history. It's a ripping yarn.

Needing another book to fill in the remainder of the evening, I picked up a source book *slash* textbook on the slave wars of ancient Rome and started in on it. It gathers every snippet of ancient text mentioning the slave wars or throwing important light on the slave culture of Rome.

Well damn---title of that slave wars book please!

Spartacus and the Slave Wars: A Brief History with Documents.

Mixing Szerb w/the Third vol. of Man w/out Qualities

I finished Bill Buford's Among The Thugs, mostly on football hooliganism, which turned out terrific. I had been concerned at first when it started out as naive-foreigner-flounders-among-silly-brits, which wasn't quite what I wanted, but it snapped into focus and raised itself another level on at least three separate occasions, very impressively - once when silly gave way to actual violence; then in getting into crowd psychology; and finally, horribly, when talking about Hillsborough. I've read enough about Hillsborough this year and didn't really want any more, but thankfully he didn't take it on directly. There were other standouts too, a National Fr0n7 disco and a riot in Cagliari in particular - it was all good stuff, only a weak ending letting it down a touch at the last.

Have you read Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels? Now there's an ending, and not the one he could've planned. It's got the same pull as the Buford, and sharply, succinctly pre-"gonzo" (though def off the social map, or further than most book-length journo journeys went, even in the mid-60s).

I haven't. I went through a Thomson phase a few years back but eventually got gonzoed out. Though he's a great writer, and if the gonzo is in check that sounds interesting.

i read the intro to 'the decline of the west'

i must have read it years ago, sort of suspicious that spengler was some kind of nutjob

but it is surprisingly reasoned-sounding, considering that it is after all an attempt to discern the hidden secret of western history

quite eloquent, too

starting c.s. lewis's space trilogy

Now that I finished the book about Spartacus and the slave wars, I've begun to read The First Poets by Michael Schmidt, about the ancient greek poets, starting with Orpheus.

Anonymity is pretty essential if anyone's going to get any useful feedback I think, though it is good to know who wrote what afterwards so there can be a conversation. TBH as it's fragments we're posting it's not such a problem having a public board, but a private one would be useful for longer/complete pieces.

Not that I have anywhere near enough stuff at the moment but, where ever it happened, I would do this monthly if everyone else could be bothered – would be a good incentive to write and improve! Six month gap kills momentum a little bit...

wrong board – ignore , sorry !

Antonio Di Benedetto- Zama

So good

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned - Wells Tower. Very lucidly written, but each story was like picking a huge scab off your arm and watching blood bubble up.

Started - actually, was nearly finished - Miss Lonleyhearts but lost my copy in the first nightclub I've been to in more than a year.

Taking a book to a nightclub is excellent. My writing teacher used to grab a table, whip out his notebook and scrawl through the night's revelry.

Is that a criticism, re: Wells Tower?

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter which I'm a few chapters into. Found it in a charity shop last week. Not sure what other Pratchett collaborations I've read. Definitely read Good Omens.
Anyway, interesting idea, or reexamination of an existing trope, so far executed pretty well. Throws up several ideas and shows why they wouldn't work in this situation.
I'm enjoying it, good payback for €1. Hadn't realised it was from last year until just now though.

Still slowly reading the book on the Philosopher's Stone I've had on the go for a while.

Also the H.P.Lovecraft Great Horror Stories collection which I'm also going through slowly. Like the annotations.

Problem with The Long Earth is it doesn't really end up going anywhere, and not quite interesting enough to make you pick up the sequels to see if there's apay-off there instead. Has some good ideas though.

Any ilx0rzzz who want to buy my book for a loved one this xmas can do so here...

http://bronze-age.net/RNB-EDITS.html

Is that a criticism, re: Wells Tower?
Probably not, no! It's very good, but I was probably wanting to read Wodehouse or something else at the time I picked it up.

c.s. lewis - perelandra

george orwell - homage to catalonia
paul celan - glottal stop

The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard. Love this play. Saw it on first run, had been meaning to read it for a long time.

Picked it up because I'd been thinking about Wilde a bit (the play's about Housman; Wilde's like his shadow or complement throughout) - reread some of the prose & started the Ellmann biography. Was a bit hesitant, because I remember it taking me an age to read at 16, & I don't really like biographies, especially the early bits about family history. I forget whether we're talking about the grandfather or the father or some uncle or whatever. And addresses, not really interested in addresses. But it's great, it's burning through that stuff in a few pages, very readable. I think I might have tarred Ellmann with the Michael Holroyd brush. He is boring. Killed Shaw for a generation!

Jeremias Gotthelf 'The Black Spider' and James Hanley's 'Boy'. Both excellent, especially the Gotthelf.

Igor Vishnevetsky: Leningrad

Hanley's 'Boy' nearly killed me with sadness

It is indeed heartbreakingly sad. Just when you think things can't get much bleaker, it takes a turn for the worse.

Dashiell Hammett's _The Maltese Falcon_. I think my main pleasure in this one is the lingo:
“[T]hey got him once in New York for knocking over a row of studs-games – his twist turned him up – and he was in a year before Fallon got him sprung. A couple of years later he did a short hitch in Joliet for pistol-whipping another twist that had given him the needle […]” (page 500 in the Picador _The Four Great Novels_ omnibus)

Wish I could remember anything about that Wells Tower book. I think I liked it, but got sick of it towards the end -- then found some relief in the viking story, which felt very different from the rest of the book. I'm just awful at remembering short story collections. All I remember of this one was the vikings & carnies. And possibly one about a teenage girl meeting some skeezy dude in the woods and drinking pond-beer. Does he kill her? Hrmm, I might be mixing it up with Bergman's _Virgin Spring_.