As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

Barely reading between Christmas and New Year (social life + skyrim). Felt deathly last night & realised that all I wanted was to be in bed with some easy books. Reread a chunk of Brideshead Revisited - goes down quickly, plus wanted to see if I still had the usual probs with it.

Important question: should I press on with David Copperfield or no? Kinda lost momentum a while back and started/finished other books.

How far did you get? One of his greatest till the last third, then becomes rotten iirc.

i feel like there were two outstanding stories here and a bunch of not great stories...

I forgot the title of the one about the two college-age friends who make up stories about townspeople. It had beautiful passages and was genuinely eerie.

midnight in dostoevsky, i loved that one so much. i've read a couple of these in print but have the book waiting on the shelf. i actually like the financial prison one someone mentioned above - not as much as MiD but still, it feels good, I believe it.

It had beautiful passages and was genuinely eerie.

a long while since i've read this but yes, the subtle romance of the two kids in class is so charged & quiet.

finished emerald city by egan. really liked the first few stories but became sort of tedious by the end.

reading munro's too much happiness. and once it gets here from the library, will be reading munro's hateship, friendship, etc book, which won the book club poll. i feel like there's a bit too much munro going on for me but i kind of like it too. i find that i can't read her stories straight through. usually after i finish one story, I have to sit and digest and think about it and usually go back and reread parts to see if I really understood what was going on...but it never feels like work or tedious.

They do all blur together, so much so that when I went on a Munro rereading binge last year I wrote terse tags ("the one about the crazy boy") next to each story title in the table of contents.

which stories did you enjoy? I slogged through the book waiting for a payoff that never arrived.

I liked pretty much all of it up to and including Midnight in Dostoevsky, which was the best--eerie/beautiful as Alfred says. The few after that dropped away sharply in quality. But as to the earlier stuff I'm a bit of a sucker for that air of nuclear dread that permeates some of them.

yeah 'midnight in dostoevski' was the best story but i thought 'hammer and sickle' was excellent as well: purposeful and funny

ray i think one of the best thing abt munro's stories is how all-consuming they tend to be

I do wonder if DeLillo's ever heard actual human beings have a conversation.

otm

I'm elated that I read the story collection first; when I trudged through Underworld two weeks ago I thought the novel, despite the Hoover-Tolson passages and the virtuoso opening a waste of time.

Re: early Wahloo books not part of the Beck series, above - the one titled 'A Necessary Action' or 'The Lorry' in English is worth reading, kind of aimless in its plot but I found it unique and poignant for some reason.

Conrad's Victory (gotta love the conrad)
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (this will go with me for the next few months probably)

Victory is such an odd novel.

i'm only at the beginning but why?

Its pace is unlike any novel I've read. Conrad asks the reader to idle with Heyst as he waits for the assault, then cuts to the three villains of Krypton. The novel's a triumph of pov -- maybe better than Under Western Eyes -- but I'm not sure the results were worth it.

By all means read it though! Conrad deserves it.

"then cuts to the three villains of Krypton"

those narrative cuts are one of his trademarks though..

No doubt, and it's the novel's most lasting virtue. I didn't find enough tension or interest in Heyst's dilemma imo.

The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse by Lonely Christopher

Hey, a good friend of mine has a novel out today called The Fallback Plan. Very nice blurbs from Gary Shteyngart and others. Could make her famous.

i posted in the sandbox thread but will post here too. goal for 2012 is to read a lot more.

finished last year with a run through dana spiotta's novels--starting with eat the document, then lightning field, and finally stone arabia the other day. now attempting isaac babel's collected stories.

Just finished Ten Thousand Saints; I liked it.

Just finished Ten Thousand Saints; I liked it.

I've been thinking about reading this.

I recently finished Disturbing the Peace by Vaclav Havel. It's still amazing to think that a guy like this could be president of a modern nation. The book is pretty engaging - even to someone like me who's never read any of Havel's other work - and kind of inspirational. There's a helpful glossary of Czech names at the back to help you keep track, though obviously a lot of the references went over my head.

Hey, a good friend of mine has a novel out today called The Fallback Plan

I won a copy of this by asking her for advice online! It hasn't arrived yet, but it looks promising.

About midway through Pale Fire. Damned peculiar so far.

i'm itching to read 'oblomov' by goncharov but from what i've gathered there are varying opinions on which translations are the pick of the litter. most folks seem to rep for the pearl one (top), but i've heard good things about the schwartz one (bottom) published by yale (and it claims to work from a heretofore untranslated version preferred by goncharov, iirc?) don't know if someone has read one or both and can suggest one over the other.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41nn1iFgVGL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41RV8NhJVvL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

yeah ive heard good things abt the schwartz one as well but the version i have is neither of those, sorry :/ from what i can remember the schwartz translation is supposed to be more 'contemporary'

I've only browsed those two translations in the bookstore. I opted for the Pearl, as it seemed to capture more of the wit and humor of the dialogue. For a book like this one, I decided that fidelity to the original text would consist in whatever was funnier. For me, that appeared to be Pearl, but my copy is still sitting unread as of today. (I bought it ~4 months ago.)

I am reading "Catface" by Clifford D. Simak...it's pretty silly, but I'm enjoying it.

I for-real clicked the img to LOOK INSIDE :(

still reading 'middlemarch' and enjoying it. why am i liking this but couldnt wait to finish the jane austen a month or so ago? elliot's got a bit more wit and a little more savage than austen i guess.

rong

Austen's very witty and can be very savage. The main difference is the size of the canvas they work on, I would have thought. Eliot much more interested in the wider political shenanigans, Austen in the close-up human interactions.

I finished the biography half of Kevin Avery's Paul Nelson book. Towards the end, it has to be the bleakest thing I've read related to pop music since Peter Guralnick's Charlie Rich chapters in Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway. This made me smile, though (Nelson's friend, Michael Seidenberg): "He couldn't stand later Scorsese films. I think it just comes down to Leonardo DiCaprio. It was like the end of life to him that Scorsese had chosen a new alter ego that was so unsuitable for Paul."

i'm like a quarter of the way into ten thousand saints and it's really good btw

I finished Pale Fire last night and I spent a bit of time thinking about its strengths and weaknesses. The greatest strength I could find was the virtuosity of its language. The biggest weakness was that, taken by itself, it made no coherent sense at all.

The narrator was worse than 'unreliable'. He was a pastiche of absurdities masquerading as a human being - and by that I do not mean that he was an absurd human being, but rather that he was an effigy set up by the author with so little internal consistency that under scrutiny he falls apart like wet tissue.

While I was showering this morning I lit on an image that captures this book for me - it is like my mother's button box when I was young. That item was a red tin box with scalloped edges on which was pasted a decal with an ornate wintery scene with a sleigh and a forest - no doubt its origins had to do with Christmas. Inside were several hundred buttons, from plain to fancy, of many shapes, sizes and colors, with few matching. They made an impressive display when you poured them out on a table. I spent many hours on rainy days sorting them into little piles.

They were fun. They abounded in textures and colors. They didn't have to make sense or meaning so long as they compelled attention. And they inspired daydreaming, so that to some extent they fished up some sort of sense out of whatever material lay dormant in one's mind. But they didn't embody any structure or sense of their own.

Don't mean to cross threads, but (based on one viewing many months ago) your last paragraph is a perfect description of The Tree of Life for me.

i don't understand people who assume some major piece of art has a huge flaw that no one else ever noticed before instead of just assuming that maybe they didn't totally get it

Me? I wasn't making any assumptions at all, for me or for anyone else. I was expressing (borrowing, actually) a reaction to something, and went out of my way ("one viewing," "for me") to make it non-contentious.

no, aimless specifically

xp

n/a, from its position in this thread, I'll assume that comment was directed at my critique of Pale Fire. Except I make no claim to have discovered "a huge flaw that no one else ever noticed before", so that comment makes little sense to me. I only record how it struck me, which seems like the purpose of this thread.

I suppose I could elaborate at much greater length on exactly why I thought the narrator failed as an instrument through which to convey anything greater than the author's fluency and playful sense of language, but this isn't a college course, and I'm paid to be a book critic, so the exercise would be more than I care to make without some assurance it would have some purpose.

Further, I don't say there could not be some magical key that unlocks a whole world of coherent meaning in that book, but if there is one, and you know what it is, it seems churlish of you not to share it. I did notice all manner of playful tidbits based around character's names, shoes and their reversals, misapprehensions, buried meanings and whatnot, but this apparatus, however clever and playful it was, was never strong enough to carry much weight of meaning and if it was intended to, then, yeah, I missed it. So, shoot me.

ahem, not paid to be a book critic

okie-dokie. I went to Wikipedia and it contained this quote from V. Nabokov:

"...the nasty commentator is not an ex-King of Zembla nor is he professor Kinbote. He is professor Botkin, or Botkine, a Russian and a madman."

That is pretty straightforward and plain enough for anyone to understand.

Seeing how this is the idea the author had in mind, I must say that Nabokov has created a completely nonsensical version of madness that has no connection to madness as real humans experience it, which is as a very sordid, muddled, and ugly state of mind. Instead, he has created a fairy-tale-castle version of madness, where madmen are capable of a gorgeous literary style such as few sane men are capable of encompassing. The same extremeties of cleverness he exhibits throughout the novel totally undermine its credibility as anything but a silly curio, a bauble, a fragile blown-glass toy.

Which is not to say that the whole thing is worthless. There are a great many ideas expressed or suggested there, but they don't cohere within the story. They are, as I already said, like buttons in an ornate button box.

i'm sorry for my tone above, it was kneejerk and ruder than intended. however, i don't know if i would believe nabokov on this topic either - he wasn't big on giving out explanations so i think that was probably a red herring.

your criticisms are pretty common for nabokov - all games and trickery and wordplay, no "heart" or depth. i have trouble believing these criticisms - i'm not saying i always understand what he's up to but having read most of his books and a lot of his letters and a lot about his life, i think there's usually something deeper going on under the surface of most of his books. however, the nabokov for people who get irritated by his tricks is "pnin" - it's a lot more straightforward and the compassion is more projected - it's also really funny.

the last bit sounds condescending but it really isn't - "pnin" is one of my favorites and probably his most underrated book

is 'pnin' really that underrated? i guess its not considered first tier but its v well regarded isnt it? its definitely a very good book

i do think 'incoherent' is not a... great criticism of 'pale fire' but i do agree thats its malleable and can be reassembled like that collection of buttons into a number of interesting patterns

i mean i think you could argue that a big part of the 'meaning' of 'pale fire' is the search for meaning

n/a: Sorry, misunderstood.

I liked Aimless's analogy to his mother's button box a lot (why I jumped in with the Malick comment). I haven't read Pale Fire, just Lolita, which I loved, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which I don't remember. I bought The Defense a while back, and hope to get to that. (Not sure if not being a chess player makes that a dubious venture.) Pale Fire always looked too daunting. If anything, Aimless's reaction made me more inclined to give it a try one day.

Fwiw I think Aimless's button box is an excellent analogy and perhaps not one that Nabokov would have disagreed with (particularly w/r/t the winter scene). As for Pale Fire more generally, again, I think I probably agree generally with Aimless with the only difference being the last time I read it, I enjoyed the things that he dislikes. It's been a while tho, and my feeling now is that personally I prefer the games being subsumed in traditional narrative. (Why should it be necessary to say 'personally I'? Because 'I prefer' might mistaken as a general critical judgment. I wanted to stress the personal preference without any critical recommendation).

xp

I used 'Search' (silly goose is me) and found a lengthy 150+ post thread on Pale Fire, from which I shall quote pinefox, who appears near the end of it to say:

I think we can leave aside RR's idea that we do take Kinbote at face value for long.

That is, we can assume that we soon realize he's a very wacky kind of character who claims to be a king. And I don't believe that we ever know for sure whether his claim is true or false.

I think it's true, then, that realizing that he thinks he's the king can't, as such, be the point. It must be a stage on the way to, or a part of, the whole experience of the book.

What does that whole experience include?

The sheer metatextual fun of having these massive notes that dwarf the poem; a play upon the idea of commentating, of misreading, of taking an object and misappropriating it - but then also the ambiguity that the misappropriation might be making a more interesting object than the poem was in the first place, so misreading could be a good thing

the parody of academia, of the age of the institutionalization of modernism (and the portrait of the university and the academics)

The artistry, the intricacy of the design: the thought that VN wrote that whole poem, which works straight-faced, and engineered it so that it could also work as prompt for the notes; the pleasure of the poem itself; the intricacy of the Index

VN's marvellous rendition of post-war USA as I suggested above

pure style, VN's nigh matchless gift with lean unlovely English

camp: daft dashing fun, a sort of gay Indiana Jones or John Buchan or Prisoner of Zembla, with people in drag parachuting out of flying boats - well, not quite that, but that sort of register

the ethical and affective dimension around Hazel: the pathos of her, and of her parents' well-meaning but perhaps (as Wood says) bad attitude here, and then of Kinbote's blindness to it, which Rorty thinks is the great moral rhetoric of the book.

I would more or less subscribe to all these comments, although sometimes less rather than more. But to me, all these various elements add up to something that doesn't affect me beyond a certain bemusement; it makes for me a whole that is less than the sum of its parts. As for the book having a "great moral rhetoric", I would call that wishful thinking.

As for "intricacy of design", I agree it is there, but that is also true of the machine for creating Twinkies, and oftentimes the parts of the book do not fit snugly, but rather grind against one another. To commend the book by saying that one is held in suspense whether any interpretation of the book is true, because all of them seem false in some light, is to make a virtue of something that has no value.

I wouldn't make such a fuss, except this novel is held up as a Great Book, a Wonder of the Age, a Marvel of Literature, and I was rather disppointed in it.

that is a good pinefox post

I'm like 2/3 of the way through the Patti Smith book while reading other stuff. I kind of enjoy her sincerity, and I think it's a nice portrait of an era in NYC's music and art scene that feels very remote from today's internet-turbocharged, high-rent-everywhere situation.

yeah i gave up after only like one or two chapters. i am actually interested in the subject matter, so i think i'll dive back in after a break. i think maybe the sincerity was too much for me??

It was the last book I bought, I might have a go at it this weekend.

Had a dozy read of Adelard of Bath's On the Same and the Different (De Eodem et Diverso) from the 12th Century, very much in the traditional of renunciation of worldly pleasures and material goods (in the female form of Philocosmia and her attendant handmaidens) and study, knowledge etc (in the female form of Philosophia).

Extremely dull in many ways of course unless you're making a study of such things, but for some reason it seemed just right to sit in an easy chair with early spring sunshine warming my bonce, idly flicking through the writings of a 12th century scholar. Especially when he was talking about leaving the clamour of the city to sit under a tree by the banks of the Loire, listening only to the rippling of the water and the song of the birds, while contemplating, idk, the quadrivium or w/e. At that point I very much wanted to be by the 12th century Loire contemplating the quadrivium/resting my eyelids. And if Philocosmia and Philosophia and their handmaidens want to come to me in a dream and have an argument about stuff, that's cool too.

ahh! i have given up on the pale king too. maybe i'm just not in a reading state of mind these days.

Harlot's Ghost at last. Thoughts?

Also: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.

So I'm getting the creme of the New York intellectuals.

yeah i gave up after only like one or two chapters. i am actually interested in the subject matter, so i think i'll dive back in after a break. i think maybe the sincerity was too much for me??

― rayuela, Thursday, March 22, 2012 10:01 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well the beginning is about her childhood, but it pretty quickly gets past that and into hanging out with Robert Mapplethorpe, seedy NYC life, the Chelsea Hotel, trying to get into the in crowd at Max's Kansas City, etc., but all still told sweetly. Which is maybe somehow better than childhood told sweetly.

yeah i gave up after only like one or two chapters. i am actually interested in the subject matter, so i think i'll dive back in after a break. i think maybe the sincerity was too much for me??

― rayuela, Thursday, March 22, 2012 10:01 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well the beginning is about her childhood, but it pretty quickly gets past that and into hanging out with Robert Mapplethorpe, seedy NYC life, the Chelsea Hotel, trying to get into the in crowd at Max's Kansas City, etc., but all still told sweetly. Which is maybe somehow better than childhood told sweetly.

The protagonist in the Patrick Melrose novels gives up on books a lot.

I'm on #3 (Some Hope). Really didn't like Bad News. It's actually quite ironic that, in becoming a junkie, Melrose becomes incredibly BORING, especially given all the talk about fear of being a bore in the first novel. Maybe that's the point. I still couldn't deal with the lengthy drug fiending descriptions.

The protagonist in the Patrick Melrose novels gives up on books a lot.

maybe i should try that one next...

reading yukio mishima's confessions of a mask & really enjoying it so far!

Its awesome, he's got such a vision that you'll always come back once you're hooked...been reading this interview from 1970, barmy and I love it, of course.

Reading "There Are Little Kingdoms", a short story collection by Kevin Barry who gets a lot of Flann O'Brien comparisons. Really good stuff, especially the dialogue which is where he's closest to Flann. That kind of imaginary Ireland where everyone's a storyteller. His novel, City of Bohane, got some good notices so i'm going to give that a go next.

Just picked up the Simon Reynolds book on Retro for €5 in town. been wanting to read that for a while. ALso the Barney Hoskins book on LA.

Justfinished the David Nobakht book on Suicide which was a great read. & makes me want to pick up the rest of their catlogue.

Also started the Greil Marcus book on the Doors. About 3 chapters in so far.

I am still reading the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary. It is beautifully written (and translated) and very visual and flaneuresque -- you can come and go and pick it up when you please and sink and float again.

keep meaning to get that

greil marcus wrote a book on the doors? o dear

Intrigued by the bitsd I've seen online of Demolishing Nisard by Eric Chevillard, a seemingly pointless attack on a stody 19th Centiru French lit critic

He is the slime at the bottom of every fountain. Irretrievably, there has been Nisard. How can we love benches, knowing that Nisard often pressed them into service? Gently stroking a cat’s silken fur, my hand inevitably reproduces a gesture once made by Nisard . . . Did Nisard ever make one move that we might want to follow or imitate? Did he ever incarnate anything other than the tedium of being Désiré Nisard, definitively, forever and ever?

bits! stodgy! can't type!

finished updike's "rabbit run". its the second time ive read it. the last time was '98. would still stan for it but theres problems. his attitude towards women is a bit dodgy and the sex-as-religion stuff can be a bit laughable. ive just started toni morrison's 'song of solomon' now.

Song of Solomon is incredible.

the perfect antidote to Morrison imo

?

i think he meant its a good book as oppose to her other works.

i don't agree - it is a great work, might be even her best, but she had several other good novels as well.

I've only read that and Sula and thought both of those were v v goo, though Solomon was much more satisfying

v v good

Holy shit! Just came here to post that I'm finishing up Sula, getting ready to (re-)start Song Of Solomon. If I knew you you were readin', I'd a' started a book club.

Philip K. Dick - We can Remember it for you Wholesale (short story collection)

Ben Marcus- The Flame Alphabet

Loved this book so much.

Wonderful, bleak and absurd.

We're far enough past the equinox, I suppose it is time for another thread. I mean, ile or ilm can have their 5000 post threads if they like, but they're just unwieldy imo. So, here goes nothin'...

2012: The northern days advance, the southern recede: What are you reading?