As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

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

Dow I don't especially "like" Sonic Youth and certainly don't "hate" VU. I have a fairly low level of interest in either - or in that kind of self-consciously arty strand of rock music generally).

Ross's piece on SY is very short and well done: I didn't need to have much interest in the band to be impressed and entertained by it.

Yeah, that's certainly my favorite test of music writing, of any writing--never mind the subject, make me care, take me along.

btw lamp nyrb is reprinting Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary with extra material that was never in the original translation. I should read Conquered City.

Conquered City was pretty good, as I remember

Reading super sad true love story for bookclub and I kind of hate this book.

I was all enthused and bought this a few months ago,and then actually looked at the first couple of pages and my heart sank. Now wishing I'd shown restraint.

Just finished

Kay Boyle: Death of a Man
Javier Marias: While the Women are Sleeping

and enjoyed both, with small reservations

Picked up the 1818 version of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. I'm about 60 pp into it. Because she wrote it at age ~20, it seems very much the book of a precocious young person, a bit too high-romantic and overdone for my taste, but clearly developing its themes and worth sticking with.

O helles yesse--here's a brief discussion s from 2011 (would like to see this doc too)
I Picked up a lot of books on my trip to Margate, including Frankenstein - a book I think I remember reading while I was at school. What I hadn't known was about Mary Shelley's interesting history, outlined in a TV documentary not so long ago. I can't believe the book was written when she was just 19.
― Yo wait a minute man, you better think about the world (dog latin), Monday, September 12, 2011 6:46 AM

Do you have the original 1818 edition? Although some say her hubbie added ornamentation, it's a bit more compelling overall than the 1830-ish version, where she added characters' attacks of conscience etc to make it seem more socially acceptable. But both versions work, to put it mildly. Also, you might want to check The Mary Shelley Reader, which I think is out of print, but usually affordable copies on Amazon etc. And The Last Man, which has a unique effect, in my experience. Goes from a crowded, tumultuous, early 19th Century projection of the future, gradually becoming the perspective of, yep, The Last Man, walking through the beauty and desolation of Europe (does he meet The Last Woman? Read it and see).

― dow, Monday, September 12, 2011 1:19 PM

Also some cheapo Kindle editions of MS works, incl a combo w those of her worthy mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.

Finished Imperial and started on F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise.

Fast reader!

Well, I had some vacation plus about 10 hours of flying time in there, which helped.

i already gave up on the instructions; it might be good, i just can't

started the new houellebecq instead

Don't think I'll ever try to read another houellebecq. Is the new one the one that uses chunks of Wikipedia without attribution?

Reading:

Nicholson Baker: The Size of Thoughts (mostly very good, occasionally ridiculously self-indulgent)

Robert Walser: Berlin Stories (congenial fun)