As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

Recently read:

China Mieville, Kraken - Fun, but way more uneven and scattershot than the other two of his I've read (Embassytown and The City & the City. Which is exactly what I expected based on reviews, but those two were so focused and great I had to know for myself.

Ben Ehrenreich, Ether - Very quick, read it in two sittings, which was good because I felt pretty filthy after each one. Not sure if I could recommend to friends but I'm glad I read it.

Now reading Stone Arabia, love it so far.

Love Murphy.

but way more uneven and scattershot than the other two of his I've read

That has me reaching for the whisky with shaking hands.

i am reading kerr's 'a philosophical investigation'. and stephen mulhall's book on 'wittgenstein's private language'. and some rousseau. and rilke. i think next i will reread 'berlin noir' before reading kerr's next three bernie gunther books. i'm also reading nietzsche. still. again.

that one of mulhall's made a lot of the diehard philosophy-student types in the class very uneasy. to be fair i never finished it myself so maybe they were right. i meant to read his other book on the investigations first.

i mean, the sections on same in 'inheritance and originality', not that he has a whole other book. (maybe he has a whole other book i don't know about, i wouldn't know.)

Helen Dewitt's Lightning Rods. Enjoyed it a great deal, while marveling at each chapter that anyone would write a book like this. Perverse in many, many ways.

Currently reading PKD's The Divine Invasion, kinda love that much of it is set in Chevy Chase, of all places.

yes, t, it is a whole other (short) book - explicitly continuing the reading of 'inheritance' into the 'private language argument' sections of the 'investigations'. so far i don't see that it's anything unexpected for people familiar with his other stuff (or with cavell on other minds, which it's engaged with), but it is extremely good. o, the energy i've wasted trying to write my own versions of some of these paragraphs...

The Great War and Modern Memory - Paul Fussell

no j i meant a whole other other book

i should proofread my ilx posts more better

'watt'

picking up david graeber's "direct action: an ethnography" again--his account of the planning & execution of major protest actions outside the FTAA meeting in quebec city in 2001. eerie how so many of the conversations & arguments are near verbatim the same conversations i'm involved in today with occupy dc.

also cracking "ours to master and to own," a history of worker-owned workplaces.

thomp on an enviable Beckett binge

i think i'm stopping after this one tbh

skimming about 50% of all the procedural gags in watt, also i have other things i really should be getting around to

like not understanding 60% of the gags in murphy

i feel like i get at least two thirds of the gags in murphy

"and their nights were serenade, nocturne, and albada. yes, albada."

Ellen Willis - Out of the Vinyl Deeps

Nicholas Thompson - The Hawk and the Dove, a readable but facile study of George Kennan and Paul Nitze that, thanks to John Lewis Gaddis' new Kennan bio, is now obsolete.

Wodehouse - Right Ho, Jeeves!

Ben Ehrenreich, Ether - Very quick, read it in two sittings, which was good because I felt pretty filthy after each one. Not sure if I could recommend to friends but I'm glad I read it.

filthy? i really liked this and im... surprised, i guess, by this reaction?

Lem - Solaris (2011 Johnston translation)

Finally a non-audio version and they fuck it up by leaving out a bunch of spaces in the Kindle copy. I read the Polish->French->English translation last year but I couldn't tell you what the differences are, apart from the character names being changed. Turns out that the original, lousy translation got the gist across.

i liked it too lamp, i just mean the world he creates is so grime-encrusted, everyone is in destitute circumstances, lots of gross scenes involving small animals. not saying it was gratuitous, just that i don't know if i'd want to spend 500 pages in that world.

oh, is that in print or just e-text? xp.

Teenage by John Savage. Bought it when I was in London 2 Xmases back. was overweight for flying so it got left there til a few weeks ago when I started reading it again. Am now 4/5s of way through it. Very interesting.

Lemmy White Line Fever picked up very cheaply in an HMV recently. Makes interesting light reading while I'm on the bus etc. Not really followed too much of Motorhead's career. Have been aware of some of the earlier & more popular stuff though. Plus I love Hawkwind + Sam Gopal are pretty decent.
Guess this is the memoirs of a guy who's lived through a lot.

Also Patti Smith Just Kids again very interesting memoir this time of her early days with Robert Mapplethorpe. Will finish this finally when I get through the above 2.

No Go the Bogeyman by Marina WArner. Have this out the local library, started it before Xmas and it was too heavy to carry. Found what I read of it so far pretty fascinating. Mainly got this cos I couldn't afford to buy From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers when it appeared in the local 2nd hand/remaindered bookshop before Xmas.
Wanted to check out her writing though. Will hopefully get that in the future though.

One reason I couldn't afford to get another book was having pickled up Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian in the same bookshop. Found it on the recently arrived shelf and it seemed to call out to me. just the kind of book that needed to be in my possession. Seems really reminiscent of the time it came out, back in '71. Not that I'd be completely conscious of the time having been a toddler but having gone through things like the psychedelic revival and having been aware of music & alternative culture of the time in hindsight it seems very resonant.

Was back in the shop today browsing, trying to make sure i didn't miss anything else neccessary but I'm really broke after Xmas. I'm also aware that I have a lot of other stuff I've picked up in there over the years that I've yet to read.

I took two bags' worth to the charity shop today. It's barely made a dent in my library.

went to the library, got whatever NYRB Classics they had that looked interesting, ended up with "Fatale" by Jean-Patrick Manchette (really quick read, wasn't super-impressed) and "The Ice Trilogy" by Alexander Sorokin, which I'm enjoying so far.

sorry, Vladimir Sorokin

just finished munro's /too much happiness/

wasn't as blown away by it as i was with /open secrets/ but still...sentences like this one make it worthwhile

She should have understood, and at that moment, even if he himself was nowhere close to knowing. He was falling in love.

Falling. That suggests some time span, a slipping under. But you can think of it as a speeding up, a moment or a second when you fall. Now Jon is not in love with Edie. Tick. Now he is. No way this could be seen as probable or possible, unless you think of a blow between the eyes, a sudden calamity. The stroke of fate that leaves a man a cripple, the wicked joke that turns clear eyes into blind stones.

or this

The college library was a high beautiful space, designed and built and paid for by people who believed that those who sat at the long tables before open books–even those who were hungover, sleepy, resentful, and uncomprehending–should have space above them, panels of dark gleaming wood around them, high windows bordered with Latin admonitions, through which to look at the sky. For a few years before they went into schoolteaaching or business or began to rear children, they should have that. And now it was my turn and I should have it too.

yeah its not her best collection but a couple of stories, particularly the one about girls at a camp and 'deep-holes', which was grinding to read but powerful, have stayed with me

yeah, the camp one is child's play -- very very good. i also liked wenlock edge (the one with the weird old man who has girls read to him in the nude)

Finished Short Orders. Romney is terrific really, ws interesting to read about things I started digging at the time in naivety, like the terrific Vietnamese film Scent of Green Papaya or La Haine which at the time I liked but had no idea where it was coming from. Those first touches with diff mode of filmmaking that took root then and grew and now are stored in categories like 'neo realism' or 'new asian cinema' and so on, just names that are useful journalistically but have a potential to stop you thinking about their content.

There is a dense essay on CGI at the end. Those discussion - ws tackling a similarly dense essay on 3D in relation to dance films such as PIna - and outcomes are all up for grabs.

Now I'm reading a couple of short books from the BFI classics - one on Ichikawa's Actor's Revenge, the ohter on Ford's Stagecoach.

I'm reading 'Let the Great World Spin' which I'm liking very much. I think he's a good writer. The stuff about the greiving Vietnam mothers was particularly well done.

Some recent reading:

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
Palinurus - The Unquiet Grave
Robert Gittings - John Keats
Oscar Wilde - De Profundis

All of which I thoroughly enjoyed. My rather limited French somewhat hampered my reading of The Unquiet Grave, but I still thought it was marvellous. I also tried reading 'A Tale of Two Cities', which I found pretty unbearable. A big fan of 'Great Expectations' too.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Before that Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. Next up The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.

Another Muriel Spark novel, this time Memento Mori, which I am enjoying very much. I'm about 2/3 through it and I think it very clever of her to borrow a few tropes from Agatha Christie to tart up what is really a very un-Christie-like novel about old age and approaching death.

With my off hand I am also reading Six Records of a Floating Life, Shen Fu (Penguin Classics edition). It's a sketchy memoir written by a Chinese 'legal secretary' circa 1809. It is highly stylized by western standards, but by the Chinese literary standards of his time, it is unusually informal.

I took a brief run at Oblamov, but it felt like a too-heavy cake, so I'll try again later.

talented mr. ripley
ripley underground

Londoners was really good. Slightly too many of the folk interviewed were zany characters, anticapitalists and conspiracy theorists and so forth, and slightly not-enough were regular folk in mundane but essential jobs (no civil servants at all, from memory; and every financial type was balanced out by an antibanker, which annoyed me a little as they had interesting stories whereas the protectors appeared not to know very much about anything). But that's small complaint, it was an excellent read, and I raced through because the style was so conversational. Laetitia Sadier was one of the interviewees and hence has her own three or four pages, which would please some folks round here.

Now The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, which has had some hype. I bought on a whim after finishing the other book while out yesterday. No discount or anything, but it paid off, I'm enjoying it very much thus far. It's one of those generous, ever-so-slightly flabby American novels, like Franzen maybe, rather than the DeLillo it was trailed as in Waterstone's. It reminds me most of Bonfire of the Vanities, in that I feel they both needed one more edit before going out - there are a few clichés here & there, the odd groanworthy gag, and passages where nothing much happens and nothing needed to. But that's minor fare when you've got a good story, and thus far I'm hooked.

munro book club discussion is tonight!

finished hateship...liked it better than _too much happiness_, but after reading these two I'm starting to wonder if anything else of hers will top Open Secrets. Maybe it's just cuz the first story in open secrets was so freaking good that these other two books just haven't compared? Or was it b/c it was my first Munro? It would be sad to think that Munro will never be as great to me as when I read that first one...

talented mr. ripley
ripley underground

Read 'Ripley Under Water'!

I'm going sequentially. They're really great fun.

about 3/4 through stone arabia now. it's weird how the writing is very straight-forward and unadorned for the most part, when it's supposed to be the sister character's written journal. but when she's talking in front of a camera, out come the florid metaphors, which would be fine except they're totally unbelievable as speech. then again, it's her written account of the interview and the main theme of the book is revisionism and unreliable narration, so...

Esther Leslie and her bk on Walt Disney. And Walter Benjamin, of course, can't forget him.

The KCRW/Bookworm interview with Eugenidies leaves me wanting to read The Marriage Plot.

Good interview? I'll have to google it, be curious to hear him talk abt it...

3 to kill - jean-patrick manchette (brutal stuff, a swift read, would make a hell of a melville film if he was still around to make them.)
death of the adversary - hans keilson (second keilson i've read, contains probably the most devastating single chapter i've read in a novel in a very long time, and said chapter ends on a singularly emotionally brutal note.)
hell at the breech - tom franklin (well-written and vv good with the exception of a character i can only describe as a "francis wolcott in deadwood" equivalent, who seems to have zero purposes except to cause chaos, which is fine i suppose but he seems utterly out of place. otherwise good.)
he died with his eyes open - derek raymond (working through this one now. so far, so good.)

A Mirror for England - Raymond Durgnat

Finishing Martin Chuzzlewit.
Dipping into Selected Journalism 1850-1870, also by Charles Dickens.
Starting Ackroyd's Dickens biography. God this thing is huge.

I was just trying to ignore the Dickens bicentenary, and not to let it make me too contrary (and I was saving my reading energies for the Browning bicentenary in May, Camberwell represent), but then a friend commissioned a brief urgent bit of hackwork on him, and I have been sucked in. I forget how much I love him; I basically am a sucker for that London-visionary Dickens, and though god knows he has his faults, none of the other nineteenth century sorts move me or excite me as he does - strange tableaux, titanic descriptive passages of universe where everything seems alive, caricatures going sideways to truth. idk in a few months I'll maybe be back to thinking that he should have written less, but right now I am even delighting in jolly filler episodes and thinking I should hole up and read nothing but for 6 months.

Cyril Connolly's mildly amusing The Rock Pool and Kenneth Ackerman's uproarious Boss Tweed.

hans keilson -- those two books of his are wonderfully written, and spectacularly dark. pity he hasn't written more fiction. as far as I know he's still alive, over 100, but has only written the 2 short novels (and lots of psychology publications)