As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

i think ade had an ascii butthole name already

i don't know, i remember going 'aw jeez' at the first sentence, like is this book going to be like that (smth like: one afternoon in swim class (kid name) and (kid name) and i decided to waterboard each other); there was some sweet spot it hit for me somewhere in the first half where the narrator's history-rewriting and probable psychosis and remembered damaged-little-kidness were tremendously affecting. i think too it's interesting how it has obvious lines of engagement with 'cutesy' or 'mfaish' or 'mcswys' modes of writing but manages to extend them incredibly far

i finished the new ben marcus and thought, god, has teaching ruined him or something

i am now on the second volume of 'your face tomorrow'

now reading* Speech and Phenomena. it's only like 100 pages. I can get thru this.

also recently started The Theological Origins of Modernity, a broad and fairly-accessible work by Michael Allen Gillespie, whose other books I dug (well, what I read of them). lotsa good stuff baout the medieval church, nominalism, Petrarch, and so on and so forth... one must be absolutely (obsessed with) modern(ity)

(*: well, y'know, not now-now, but—)

Just read first half of Sylvie & Bruno the Lewis Carroll book or that is to say first volume cos book was split on publication. Think its more of a children's book than the Alice ones but still has some pretty great nonsense poems and elements of surreal and dream logic.
Bruno's babyish speaking style is really annoying though.
Got this in an anthology of Lewis Carroll's work I picked up in a charity shop for a couple of Euro.

Started reading one of the Dr Dolittle books after reading about production on the '67 musical film being a nightmare. It's a bowdlerised copy, lacking Mr Lofting's deep racial insight(ha ha). Have looked online at what got cropped and it seems not to have been done the most rationally.
Still leaving in things like implying black people are cannibals while removing plot/character development?

Also just bought Pop a Warhol bio that was going cheap locally and looks like it has quite a bit on The Velvets in.

Åsne Seierstad - With Their Backs To The World. A portrait of Serbia in the first half of the last decade via interviews with various folk, some famous, others not. The level of paranoia is kind of shock, how everything is explained by the US seeking to colonise the place, steal its resources, monopolise control of this important trade route, etc. Do people still think this? Not much evidence for it latterly, to my knowledge.

The book's good. I don't know a great deal about the country, but I'm always interested.

I might follow that recommendation. I read Rebecca West's massive Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia last summer and have been itching to read more about Serbia's recent history. The wars of the 1990s and their aftermath are so impossibly complicated.

Further to earlier post:

Ending Up/One Fat Englishman/Green Man - Ending Up is very good Amis - sardonic, bleak, very funny, humane. The other two are patchier, passages of energetic brilliance mixed with others where KA seems to be going through the motions - these two probably only for hard core fans.

Sense of an Ending - Barnes. This books virtues are not very novelistic - more a meditation on some ideas about memory using somewhat contrived fictional illustration - it sounds awful, but somehow it works, partly because it's very short - what could have been a very tiresome idea over 400+ pages is a surprisingly enjoyable and pleasing read at this length.

The Strangers Child - Hollinghurst. Reread this because I couldn't make up my mind about it based on one reading, and because I liked TLOB so much I really wanted to give the follow up every chance. But it's a disappointment. Hollinghurst tries to break free of his usual obsessions and only reveals his limitations.

Towards the End of the Morning - Frayn - (apparently) cult 60s Fleet-Street- set comic novel in the Waugh/Amis tradition - goodish, not great, but worth reading for the setting alone if, like me, you're a British newspaperphile.

The Music Instinct - Philip Ball - a good and fair summary of the literature but Ball has nothing very interesting of his own to add. Irritatingly obviously pictures himself as a challenger of conventional wisdom despite not being able to acknowledge or challenge his own highly conventional mindset.

The Blue Moment - Richard Williams. Seduced into buying this by my Miles Davis obsession. Williams is good on Miles and Kind Of Blue but his thesis that KOB led to minimalism, the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno, prog, The Who etc just isn't a substantive enough basis for a book. It didn't help that I don't have much time for most of that music he claims KOB influenced. KOB is great because its great, not because it allegedly influenced some later music, a substantial percentage of which I regard as meretricious and pretentious crap.

All Roads Lead to France - as good a literary bio as I've read in ages (not that I read a huge amount of literary bios). I hadn't realised how close Thomas was to Robert Frost - the book would interest many Frost fans even if they know nothing about Thomas.

Big fan of both Ending Up and The Green Man. Found One Fat Englishman a bit tiresome.

Don't really see any going through the motions with The Green Man, wd put it in the top three/five Amis novels, I think. Great on alcoholism, the supernatural, health/mortality, funny too, although I'm not actually sure all those elements totally work together, and of the four of them, the mortality and alcoholism parts are the best achieved. His incredibly well-lit style possibly not entirely suited to a genre he found immensely congenial to read.

Yeah: best Amis for me would be Lucky Jim, Ending Up, The Alteration, The Green Man.

Another thumbs up for The Green Man -- it's the one that cracked open Amis for me, so to speak, despite loving Lucky Jim.

Also: Spark is the only writer I can imagine attempting what Amis brings off at the end of Ending Up.

I'm surprised by peoples' enthusiasm for The Green Man. I'm obviously rubbish at predicting what other people will like.

Now reading Alex Ross's collection Listen to This and re-reading The Human Stain (Roth).

A Soto otm about Ending Up, probably the best thing Amis wrote? (soft spot for On Drink.The Alteration and The Old Devils are dead certs.

sorry frankiemachine, casting another vote here in favour of the green man, love that collision between 'realist' amis-world and the supernatural (same reason why i love some of simon raven's novs).

No need to apologise, I'm a big Amis fan and feel pleased when other people like his stuff, even if the books they like best aren't the ones I like best.

finished birthday of the world. was not the greatest at first, but the penultimate and titular story was pretty good, and then the last story (paradises lost) was SO GOOD that it makes me love the whole collection in retrospect.

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. Loved it, sorry everyone who'd told to me to read it before & I'd ignored (I had started it before but decided I didn't really like it).
The Bachelors, Muriel Spark. I've started this before then dropped it for no very good reason. It's got problems, I think, but I'm fascinated by it, got that early Spark opacity & intensity.
The Dragon Masters, Jack Vance. Had never read any Vance, decided to change that. Enjoyed it a lot, more for texture than structure.
The Evolution of Language by Tecumseh Fitch. I wanted to know more about the topic, & it looked like a clear, substantial and very inclusive introduction.

Glad you liked Angel!

finished the flame alphabet & had nightmares last night; didnt really think it was a good book tho

How's that Alex Ross?

xp to rayuela, yeah paradises lost is so good, but i really enjoyed the rest of the stories too - really liked how the first one fleshed out more of the world of left hand of darkness. i'm really pleased there's so much more le guin out there, i've liked or loved everything i've read so far.

really really really.

yeah it's not that i thought they were bad, but they did feel a lot like thought experiments, rather than world creation, albeit with ideas i really liked, though this sense got less and less with each successive story.

(the sense that they were thought experiments, not the sense that i liked the ideas)

johnny what's the deal with the flame alphabet? i downloaded it but haven't started it yet. i think i tried to read notable american women like 7-8 years ago but couldn't get into it. my perception of ben marcus is that he's kind of humorless and i often have problems with humorless writers.

it is v humorless, for sure
idk, reminded me of saramago's blindness a lot or i guess what mccarthys 'the road' might be like (havent read it), also thomp compared it to 'the stand'

I'm not deep into the Alex Ross yet, but so far it's astonishingly good. The first piece (Listen to this) about the current status of classical music is a stone cold classic, although I already knew it - you used to be able to find it on his blog or the New Yorker site. Worth tracking down.

The piece on bass lines through history and the collection of short pieces on Kiki and Herb, Cecil Taylor, Sinatra, Sonic Youth and Cobain are fresh, perceptive and fine.

I still have a suspicion that any collection covering such a wide range of music will include some stuff that I won't be interested in personally, but I haven't found any so far.

i think 'cell' may be closer than the stand actually

i am actually reading blindness rn, basically anything really depressing translated by margaret jull costa is where i am at mentally

i don't know if i think marcus is 'humourless' insofar as i always think of that trait being accompanied by, i don't know, a certain kind of self-seriousness that i think he's lacking. i mean i don't know there's always the issue that one person thinks smth is 'humourless' and the next just thinks it is 'not funny', but in notable american women there's the whole first section where michael marcus informs you at length he regrets ever siring his son ben, who is a disappointment in every conceivable way, and you'd think at least he would stop copulating with the family dog, ben would, but apparently not

i have been looking at wire and string again lately, too, it always seems brilliant for ~ 20 minutes

ben marcus is hilarious and brilliant but he can be a bit much at times. haven't read the new one yet.

I just finished the Syndic by CM Kornbluth, pretty good! Alternate history, ended up liking the Syndic system as the Mob and the government are just terrible.

Going to read "Tower of Glass" by Robert Silverberg next.

the ways in which things pan out in 'blindness' is a lot like 'the flame alphabet', it turns out. i'm not sure i trust the ending of the former, to be honest

the whole bit with the writer was just like gehk gehghkgke ghkekge ekgh

Flaubert's Sentimental Education and Corey Robin's Fear: History of an Idea.

i'm almost done with War and Peace but i really can't seem to find the will to read those last 80pg. for some reason all the war parts of this have left me completely uninterested. i just can't seem to enjoy them. also, i'm somewhat annoyed by Tolstoy's constant remarks along the lines of "historians think this but they're wrong, also historians never mention this general but he's actually one of the guys who won the war almost single-handedly and btw have i told you about how historians try to rationalise napoléon's/the russian army's decisions but they're all fools because those armies just moved from one place to the other randomly without thinking about it".
it sounds like i disliked this book, but on the whole i had a good time reading it. it's just the military bits left me a bit cold even if it involved characters i liked.

i bought 'sentimental education' a while back; 'madame bovary' is one of my favorite books, but i've never read anything else of GF's.

i got bored with everything i'd been reading and picked up bruce catton's 'the coming fury.' it's swell, in that endearingly '50-ish non-academic way.

I read SE about twenty years ago so I'm due for another go. I don't have the strength to reread "Un Coeur Simple," a story that shatters me.

The last part of War & Peace was one of my favourite bits; except the passage about Nikolai dreamily seeing the Tsar, that's the best bit of all.

My god, reading the summary of the book in Wikipedia, it's as if I never read it all there's so much and so many people I simply don't remember. How discouraging, I'll need to read it again now.

Books you don't have the strength to re-read is an interesting personal sub-genre. Often they're my favourite books! But, revisit them, I dare not. Blood of the Lamb by Peter de Vries is the first one that springs to mind. The Lost Weekend by Charles R Jackson, too.

finished didion's play it as it lays last night. first ever didion -- quite liked it! although it was monumentally depressing...

i just took out 'blue nights' from my library after reading 'yr of magical thinking' a few months or so ago

also i started 'the instructions'

Only about 80 pages to go in William Vollmann's Imperial. It's not really all that amazing to justify it's 1000+ page length, but I keep reading it. It helps that I have some ex-ante curiosity about the region having once lived there.

viktor serge's conquered city. left me feeling a little queasy and uncertain tbh, although its p interesting to get such an unvarnished but ultimately sympathetic or at least hopeful take on the terror

also, i'm somewhat annoyed by Tolstoy's constant remarks along the lines of "historians think this but they're wrong, also historians never mention this general but he's actually one of the guys who won the war almost single-handedly and btw have i told you about how historians try to rationalise napoléon's/the russian army's decisions but they're all fools because those armies just moved from one place to the other randomly without thinking about it".

in college i took a class on tolstoy where we did nothing but read war and peace + supplemental materials. consequently i have a notebook somewhere that says essentially the same thing you just wrote, only in increasingly jagged axe-murderer-style handwriting. i thoroughly enjoyed the book otherwise but that shit was intolerable.

im reading nella larsen's 'quicksand'. not sure if i like it, the main character is a bit too whiny for my liking but its for my american lit. class so ive got to finish it either way. i was also handed a couple of books by maurice walsh which i intend to start. he's the guy that wrote 'the quiet man'. apparently hemingway said he was his favourite writer.

frankiemaichine, you like Sonic Youth but hate VU? Anyway, recently read Ross's The Rest Is Noise, one of those worthy epics which seem like they could well take as long to edit as to write (donkey's years), including the writer's own editing, and the editors' (very probably plural) encouragement and discreet direction of same. H'm-m, where are they for this post? The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and A Beautiful Mind are other good-to-great examples and reads.

Then Pylon--whoo-hoo, now I see what Paul Goodman meant: "Faulkner is beat, in a complicated way." Drawing off steam from the temporarily blocked Absolam, Absolam! (plus some feelings of guilt for his stunt pilot brother's death)? Only the beginning, he's quite a sleepless stunt pilot of baroque-as-bop prosody, also as southern gothic urban b-movie, but mostly in focus (he digs Shakespeare too). Set me up for the expanded edition of Cowley's career-reviving The Portable Faulkner (he ain't no delinquent, he's misunderstood). Cowley warns us about what was then (may still be) the longest sentence in the English language, but Faulkner sailed me right through it, barely noticed. It's his version of transparent prose.

But now! Just started Mitch Ryder's scary, scarry autobio, Devils & Blue Dresses. He tells us it's a product of wired times when only the computer keyboard gave him affordable relief. Powerful writing, invisible editing.

Er, Absalom, Absalom! too (might not be a comma). Sorry, I've never read the Bible.

i read that recently and i wish i hadn't heard about the fabled 1,200 word sentence because every time a sentence hit 400 or so i'd totally lose the thread of whatever i was reading to keep count of how many words were in it in case this was the one. i think i missed the one in question, too.

Reading super sad true love story for bookclub and I kind of hate this book. Part of me feels compelled to finish it so I can participate in the book club discussion and part of me wants to return it to the lib and never give it a second thought