As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

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)

doing some catching up on some classics:

halfway through lolita - i adore this
read "the lagoon" and about to start heart of darkness
started a portrait of the artist as a young man
attn alfred: trying to finish savage's takeover

After almost a year I finally finished Middlemarch! Feel quite bereft. Is Daniel Deronda worth attempting, does ILB think?

Over Christmas I read Alain Robbe-Grillet's Why I Love Barthes - not so much a slim volume, more an anorexic pamphlet - and JJ Sullivan's Pulphead, which I enjoyed parts of, but... I don't really get all the fuss.

Delphi have been putting out some thorough Complete Works ebooks of various authors fresh out of copyright. Have been browsing through the Virginia Woolf. Lots of essays I'd never seen before, most of them sensational.

Have been reading Paul Mason ahead of his new book. Live Working or Die Fighting - great, punchy history of worker's movements from Peterloo, through the Paris Commune up to Gramsci etc in the Italian car industry. Didn't know all the stuff about the Knights of Labor. And Meltdown, which made me think I almost understood the world financial fiasco. Also had a gander at a collection of David Graeber essays, including a pretty funny piece on Buffy.

Are you enjoying the Durgnat, Ward? Read one of his collections last year and want to chase some more down.

Really want a decent papk of Woolf's essays.

I really enjoyed Daniel Deronda. I think I wrote on the sandbox -

Daniel Deronda is a very strange book. Eliot is an extraordinary writer, such a control over the psychological motivations of her characters, and the bleakest most material ideas you can imagine all managed with great intellectual brilliance. You would fear her sympathy as being very little different in quality to her criticism .. I’ve never read a novel where it’s quite so clear that all the author is interested in is ideas. Eliot has absolutely no interest in the quotidian whatsoever – fashion is flippantly dismissed in a single short paragraph, and NO ONE EATS EVER. She mentions food once, and that dismissively (it’s a pet theory I have that realist writers aren’t interested in food, only genre and fantastic writers are – Eliot has given that rather wobbly idea a shot of amphetamines). Power and resistance, power and resistance, a vicious [wrong word] heath-robinson moral manufactory of a novel, with Deronda the most powerful of all – it takes a whole religion to take him down. And all so brilliantly done, too.

What's unusual about it I guess is the strong strain of mysticism competing and overwhelming what is otherwise an intensely cynical novel.

I really like that she writes a lot of her own chapter epigraphs:

Aspern. Pardon, my lord—I speak for Sigismund.
Fronsberg. For him? Oh, ay—for him I always hold
A pardon safe in bank, sure he will draw
Sooner or later on me. What his need?
Mad project broken? fine mechanic wings
That would not fly? durance, assault on watch,
Bill for Epernay, not a crust to eat?
Aspern. Oh, none of these, my lord; he has escaped
From Circe’s herd, and seeks to win the love
Of your fair ward Cecilia: but would win
First your consent. You frown.
Fronsberg. Distinguish words.
I said I held a pardon, not consent.

Love Sigismund!

But if you've just finished Middlemarch, you'll probably want a break. Eliot has such a tight leash on her characters' psychologies that I needed something a little breezier after.

Torrents of Spring - Ivan Turgenev

Interesting about the quotidian - the Pinefox should post up somewhere the essay he wrote about Sylvia Plath and food. (The missus is always horribly frustrated in films or tv [though oddly not fiction] where characters are obviously eating but you can't see what...)

Funnily enough, one of the things that most impressed me about Middlemarch was what I felt was Eliot's negative capability, how she did have some feel for the everyday, despite her obvious investment in Dorothea's high-mindedness - how a child plays with its cat, the way a lot of the time you can see Celia's point about Dodo's terrible seriousness, and at the end when the teasing relationship between Mary and Fred seems to be the truest of all the marriages, the real heart of the novel in a way.

I reread Daniel Deronda last May and was still impressed.

Not one of his best known essays, but one of his most penetrating.

Very impressed by Stevie's, as we used to call it ... book-learning.

I could possibly try to dig out that essay from the ghost of a draft of Papercuts 5, but not sure that anyone would make anything of it now, though it was the best I could do with Plath in 2000 and I could surely not do any better on that topic in this lifetime.

i think they eat in 'adam bede'!

austen -- emma (a writer i've never gotten with, but am enjoying this one. funny, exasperating.)
the presidency of james buchanan -- elbert smith (christ, what an awful president.)

just finished reading Positively George Street by Matthew Bannister. I liked it; I've wanted to read something about the Flying Nun 'Dunedin sound' scene for a while, and this--the slender memoir of the guitarist from the Sneaky Feelings--wasn't exactly what I had in mind. Sneaky Feelings is probably the one band that I was least interested in, but he had some interesting ground-zero insights in the whole NZ scene and though his pissy putdowns of the more punk/noise elements of the scene certainly grated, dude had an engagingly honest and cheerful voice. The exact opposite of vainglory. I can't imagine another rock autobiography where the writer talks about accidentally pissing on an electric fence, at least without turning it into some wild anecdote of endless, crazed partying (as opposed to showing it as the stoned and stupid mistake that Bannister sheepishly admits that it was).

well, stone arabia certainly petered to a halt. need something new now.

hey julio, the Durgnat is extremely entertaining, as you might expect, and makes you want to see a load of Boulting Brothers movies double-quick. The book is VERY scattershot, and of course some of Britain's political/historical circumstances have changed since it was written, but it's surprising how often he's clear-eyed and accurate about class, society, and so on. I'd like to know more about the class composition and sympathies of the people who actually made these films - was filmmaking in Britain really the utterly middle class and rigidly bound profession it seems in hindsight? - but that's probably the work of a different book, or books.

*checkes wiki* oh ok, Brighton Rock! I didn't know it was a (twin) brotherly team that made these.

Everyone claimed the remake shamed it but I wasn't fussed either way.

Thx for the comments - sounds like the book for me. I think I finally (finally!) made a breakthrough w/British film last year and so need to carry that on.

Juan Pablo Villalobos: Down the Rabbit Hole -- as good as everyone said it was (70-page novella told from the point of view of a spoiled, isolated kid living in his Mexican drug kingpin dad's compound)

Satyajit Ray: Indigo (Selected Stories) -- some good ones, but weirdly a lot like a collection of MOR Edwardian pulp/genre fiction (amateur detectives, giant carnivorous plants, time displacement in dreams, etc)

A D Miller: Snowdrops -- not bad, but plot hinges on main character not asking a really obvious question, and continuing to not ask over a period of time, in order for the plot to actually work (ie idiot/'Lost' plotting); given its Booker nom last year, I see what they mean about the nominations being very middlebrow

have to leave 'middlemarch' aside. reading 'the great gatsby' for class now. last time i read it was 17 years ago!

Joseph O'Neil's Neverland. At last.

J.D., how's the Buchanan bio?

marjorie perloff's memoir is the first thing i've finished since the beckett binge

hrm

read helen dewitt's 'lightning rods' - bleh, ultimately kinda pointless i thought

oh, almost totally pointless, but pretty hilarious, i thought.

I am currently reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons - big monster SF like momma used to make. I will also be reading a chapter a day of "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy. It is about people who go to soirrees a lot. I think the reference to war in the title may be ironic.

little sad about the dewitt, if that is the case

i just read 'absalom, absalom!'

having not read faulkner in a while i thought 'oh, a 300 page novel, i will get through that in an evening'

i did not get through it in an evening

alfred: it's enlightening and readable, tho a bit disappointingly short (it's part of a series -- planning to check out the one on john tyler next). the big revelation for me was his chapter on buchanan's foreign policy; he calls him "the most aggressive would-be imperialist in american history." there's something comic about the way every one of his attempts to set off a war fizzled out.

well, the DeWitt isn't really a follow-up to The Last Samurai in any way, it's a novel she wrote in 1999 when she couldn't get TLS published, and it's been sitting around on her hard drive for a decade. Apparently she has 4 or 5 other books in the same state. I still think it's worth reading, you just can't expect it to have the same impact.

Reading War and Peace too. The war part is coming don't worry. But tbh, thus far i think i prefer the soirées stuff to the war stuff. also since i'm reading it in short spurts i sometimes forget who some guys who show up once in a while are which always bothers me.

Reading "The Mind Thing" by Fred Brown, read "Mustaine: a life in metal" before that.

reading Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary before the Art of Fielding because the library had it

Just finished The Art of Fielding. It was really very good; well worth the hype I feel. It's not a romp exactly, but has the same thing of just being really fun to keep reading. I enjoyed very much.

Crash next, I guess. I'm a bit scared of going from warm-hearted characters, faintly comic yet totally sympathetic, to the kind of robotic cipher I'm expecting here.

Colby Buzzell, Lost in America
Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad
Matt Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

i have been reading 'self-portrait in a convex mirror'.

and it turns out ashbery is DOPE.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton (nearly put "by a sofa", just for fun)

I'm halfway through montano's malady by villa matas. It's pretty good I guess but I have a number of reservations about the dude, but I guess this is based off this one book so it's probably not fair

like this book is kind of unecessary if you've read the first chapter of the rings of saturn

it's something I'm wrestling with when reading, like especially based on a writer whose mo is playful biting or homage or whatever, like, I like the act of reading, so I'll just read whatever, but sometimes it just seems so unnecessary when they're in the shadow of sebald or borges or roussel

and maybe the most horrible thing of all is that this is how I feel about writers whose work I actually consider worth reading

no the most horrible thing of all is that the sebald/borges/roussel comparison means I'm probably gonna get sucked into reading whatever it is you're talking about even if you try to warn me against it

currently reading: Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion. first novel I've tackled in a hot minute, we'll see how it pans out.

Loved Bartleby & Co - was hoping the ILX Book Club would read it- and been meaning to read Montuno's Malady but haven't gotten round to it yet.

Reading 'Great Expectations' for class now. Another book I havent read since school.

The last volume of Taylor Branch's MLK bio. Damn.

Star Trek novelizations, specifically the Destiny Trilogy.

Shantaram autobio of an Aussie fugitive holed up in a Bombay slum. Very interesting book, has had me trying to work out who I knew recommended it to me some time ago. I got it as part of a regular haul of great books from one charity shop I used to pass last year. Started it on the bus back into town from that trip and then lost it into a mess on the farside of my bed.
Now refound, am 300+pp into a 900+p book and it's fascinating.

Just finished Patti Smith's Just Kids which I started some time last spring. That's pretty good and has me wanting to find some of her rock prose. Couldn't find a collection of that stuff before, so is there one around? Her writing for Creem etc?

need something new. if i'm going to read some salman rushdie for the first time, should i start with 'midnight's children'?

I liked Haroun and the Sea of Stories if you wanna go in easy.

Haroun is good.

I'm mired in the middle of foucault's discipline & punish. it's holding up the rest of my book reading because i feel like unless i power through, i'll never get through this book and the time i spent on the first half will have been a waste.

Rafael Honigstein's Englischer Fußball, which is a see-ourselves-as-others-see-us piece, and very entertaining too. Lots of stuff on the mystifying importance of the captain leading his troops into battle, which is all very timely.