As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

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)

ha i think thats right -- i did notice he does thank wikipedia in the acknowledgments

im enjoying it tho

Vonneguts. My favorites so far: Sirens of Titan and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. I think Rosewater is one of best satiric comedies I've ever read. Cat's Cradle was really good but I wasn't nearly as crazy about it this time around. It's definitely one of those best-read-in-high-school books. Mother Night was a rung down. And Player Piano is kinda turdy.

On to Slaughterhouse 5 now.

'mother night' is his masterpiece, imo. reread it a couple years ago and it holds up really well.

Yeah J.D., I see how you could say that. It just didn't do it for me as much. I suppose I look to Vonnegut for humor, that voice of his, bizarre plot contrivances / sci-fi play, and the later metafictional stuff and incorporation of autobiography (Vonnegut as a character). I shouldn't fault Mother Night for lacking those things ... but ...

Will start Victor Serge today.

I circled Mailer's Harlot's Ghost yesterday but...

Memoirs of a REvolutionary could be the book to get me over the block I have at the mo'!

re-reading Updike's "Rabbit, Run" atm. i also got a lend of a couple of books by a writer called maurice walsh. hes the guy that wrote 'the quiet man'. they look quite pulpy, tales of derring-do and so on but apparently he was one of hemingway's favourite writers! will definitely read them soon, im intrigued

Gave up on "Tau Zero" by Poul Anderson, too much description of space ships and late '60's boring people.

Reading, "Venus Plus X" by Theodore Sturgeon, liking it.

Also, found an old book at work called "English madness: ideas on insanity 1580-1890", it's interesting.

hai guys I'm going to read my first Ballard short story this afternoon.

Yeah, I used to collect appropriately moldy books about ideas on insanity,from about 1945-1960 (incl much later debunked, like Three Faces of Eve, and others that should have been). Speaking of writers' influences, you remind me of reading that Edmund Wilson supposedly got his college colleague Scott Fitzgerald past an attachment to the works of Booth Tarkington, whom I only know from his kid books, Penrod, Penrod and Sam etc, but he also wrote The Magnificent Ambersons. Can see from the movie how Fitzgerald might've been encouraged to focus on rich people struggling to adapt,which became the arc for all his main characters. Anybody read TMA?

Tarkington is much better than Wilson suggests. The Basil sequence – some of Fitz's best short fiction – bore heavy traces of Penrod.

It's been a while since I've read the Wilson-Fitzgerald letters but he doesn't dismiss Tarkington so much as want to steer "Scott" towards Adult Books.

Adult Books?! Wanted Scott to get his F. on/off?

he didn't understand
Thomas Mann

Hey Jude, why so Obscure? Alao thinking of Graham Greene writing that he wanted to try thrillers, but after WWI couldn't take the Imperial patriotism of Richard Buchan etc seriously. Then he discovered Michael Innes's absurdist holiday fiction. Holiday from being academic and mainstream novelist J.I.M. Stewart, as MI writing "entertainments", also of course GG's term and arrangement, though I don't know Innes/Stewart's books compare? (Pynchon mentioned Helen MacInnes as an influence, haven't read her either--can see how he was influenced by Oakley Hall's Warlock though)

( Hardy har har--I'd think he might've dug Buddenbrooks, if he did like The Magnificent Ambersons, but I guess Mann didn't have a Penrod)

Alex Preston, THE REVELATIONS

struggling through both the flame alphabet and daniel deronda now, the former because it's too dry and icky, the latter just because it's loooooong

Tarkington's Penrod and Penrod & Sam are great (and so is Seventeen, in some ways the ultimate book about being a nerdy teenaged boy with a hopeless crush on a beautiful but empty-headed girl), and must surely have been a huge influence on the William books I grew up on (they both even feature the disgusting "licorice water")

Oh yeah...now that you mention it, I remember at least seeing Seventeen, have to look into Tarkington again--who wrote the William books??

Daniel Deronda bogs down when Deronda searches for his heritage.

(also wonder about Edna Ferber, having long been hooked on the big screen version of Giant)

William books were by Richmal Crompton

in the middle of piero gleijeses's Shattered Hope about the guatemalan revolution. sought it out b/c i read this author for a class once & really liked his writing. this one is also very good.

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.

― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 12:38 PM (1 week ago)

I was interested by your description, so I tracked down a copy and finished it earlier today. I've never been to the former Yugoslavia (I want to go), so it's hard for me to judge the quality of the reporting. Sitting here in Canada, I get the sense that some of the attitudes in the book have changed whereas others haven't. Serbia's EU candidacy indicates much less paranoia towards the West. But I was reading earlier about reactions in Belgrade to Angelina Jolie's movie about Bosnia, from which it appears that many Serbs still feel that Serbia has been unjustly singled out for international condemnation. I'd be interested to know what Serb readers thought.

My favourite detail was that of the old farmer insisting that The Last Supper actually depicts Tsar Lazar.

That was very strange. But then it is just a picture of a dozen guys, whatever Leonardo titled it, so why not?! It is a fascinating hint at the layers of meaning in play there though.

I've been reading about the EU candidacy this week too. They don't seem to be very far on, though it is progress of sorts. I really want Serbia in, rather than staying the sore thumb of Europe. The madness has been festering too long.

(I sent you a mail btw, don't know if you picked it up. It's superseded now anyway. Not sure I'd've shipped to Canada anyway tbh)

I got your email but deleted it by accident. ;) I tried messaging you back via ILX-mail, but that may not have worked. It was a generous idea, though! Thank you!

I'm reading something similar now, Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. Much of it is basically a highlight reel of the bloodiest moments in Eastern European history, but I'm impressed by the chapters dealing with Romania. Kaplan seems to have been one of the first Americans to visit the Danube delta after the 1989 revolution. He's also adding exorbitantly to my reading list: next is going to have to be John Reed's The War in Eastern Europe.

Still, it feels kind of like a diminished sequel to Rebecca West's book. She responded with a much fuller set of sensibilities.

I finished Frankenstein, harboring a secret conviction that on some level Mary Shelley was trying to talk about the French Revolution.

Now I have begun to read Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, in the Penguin edition translated by Hatto.

Ismael K sent me Englischer Fussball by Raphael Honigstein! Apart from it being nice to get a book through the post from an ILB-er, this was also very good. Honigstein plays up a sexualised understanding of English football via muscular Christianity, and although he over-eggs the pudding sometimes, milking relatively innocuous phrases for all they're worth, generally it's quite a well-held approach. He's excellent on the territorial nature of English football (corners being cheered for example)

As IK says, much of the book's appeal comes from it being a foreigner's view of the English. Sometimes he seems uncertain about whether the traits he's describing are good ones or bad ones (there's a glib bit where he says 'yes, it's good they're getting rid of racist & homophobic chanting, but if we overdo this then what about the atmosphere?'), and I could wish for a bit more pushing through with arguments sometimes.

A chapter Music, Fashion, Football is the worst in the book, I think, with some very trite cliches, and to my mind he's just wrong on Beckham, who always seemed to work incredibly hard for his teams (but yes, couldn't carry the expectations of a nation, obviously really). But chapters on the press, on bung culture, Jimmy Hill, German v England are all excellent ( of different understanding of the war and fans singing 'Ten German Bombers' - 'our visitors had still not grasped the true nature of post-war Germany: we are grateful that we lost the war').

You were asking, Ismael, whether there are any similar 'through a foreigner's eyes' using football as their lens? I don't know! There's probably a few cricket ones (or at least chapters of biographies maybe). But not sure would about football. Wd also be interested to hear of any.

So, thanks! Let me know how I can get it back to you.

Have started Capital by John Lanchester. I'm finding it quite annoying in lots of little mainly stylistic ways, which is making it hard to get into (there's a bit in the prologue where he repeats a bit about basement conversions and builders as if he hadn't said exactly the same thing just two pages earlier - really weird).

Glad you liked it. No need to send it back to me - you can pass it on to another ILBer if anyone expresses an interest, that'd be nice.

The Jimmy Hill chapter was amazing! I always thought of him as a kind of hateful buffoon, rather than this incredibly progressive (if now rather old-fashioned) character we learn about here.

I've read a few things recently about hooliganism & fashion, which I find fascinating and have even been considering for its own thread, because I still dress like that, basically. I quite appreciated the chapter for delving back a bit farther than the Tacchini-and-samba look, but agree it wasn't particularly convincing. The problem is, the sources themselves invite a bit of ridicule when you're quoting Robert Elms as gospel; and taking it back to the source, the original 1983 Face piece by Kevin Sampson is itself trite as anything. Though the companion London piece is better - just check out the '83 prices, I reckon you could kit yourself out in the same gear cheaper today, amazing.

how could anyone think Jimmy Hill was a hateful buffoon?

I never found him hateful, but he did start getting a little odd on Jimmy Hill's Sunday Supplement, although I found his oddness more appealing than some of the rather knowing hungover-looking hacks (Paul McCarthy!) that appear on there.

I knew about his minimum wage stuff, but not about some of the things that must have looked rather more eccentric at the time - like all-seater stadiums.

Just finished Huysmans' Against Nature (the Oxford Classics edition, trans. Margaret Mauldon), the first novel(la...) I've seen through to the end in I-can't-remember-how-long. Great stuff! Don't have anything to compare it against, but Mauldon's prose is lively and frequently hilarious—the opening of chapter 5 ("As his urge to sequester himself from a loathsome age of shameful duplicity intensified...") has become a permanent fixture of my internal monologue.

gave up on the flame alphabet (probably for good) and daniel deronda (might go back to it), now reading the john sayles novel moment in the sun, which is good so far.

jules renard's journal. it is great.

now reading the john sayles novel moment in the sun, which is good so far.

oh hey, this sounds good. hadn't heard of it until now.

i'm a quarter of the way through midnight's children and it's just starting to get rolling with the main plot, but i've been enjoying the unhurried setup (and it's funny how he's got the narrator's wife as the audience proxy, always requiring justifications for why the story is moving so slowly).

The Sayles is good. Not sure it needs to be as long as it is--it seems to start and later stop at reasonably arbitrary points, and could probably have ended just as easily 400 pages earlier or later than it does--but it's consistently entertaining along the way.

n/a, have you seen the massive online annotations McSweeney's have put up--millions of fascinating photos following the book's plot: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/books/amomentinthesun/bonus