As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

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 It's superseded now anyway.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

Sleeping Beauty - Elizabeth Taylor. One of her more poetic, less naturalistic ones. On the whole I tend to like these less but this is still very fine.

This new John Lanchester really isn't very good. It's fairly consistently off.

Of the contents of a newsagent:

the fridge full of soft drinks and the adjacent fridge of alcohol, and the bottles of Ribena and orange squash, and the credit card machine and the Transport for London card-charging device and the Lottery terminal

Yeah I'll just top up my Transport for London card on the Transport for London card-charging device? And it's an accumulation of minor things like, which constantly undermine my faith in his sense of the material furniture of his book. He handles this sort of thing quite well in his essays, but it's a bit of a bodge here.

It's also really really boring. Following characters with rather wobbly voices around the street they live on, all delivered in a lumpen and laborious prose. The info he wants to impart is getting through, but the tone, and the matter, is just... well, as I say, it's boring.

...of minor things like that

Finished West's The Return of the Soldier in record time. The definition of a good minor novel.

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

― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Tuesday, February 28, 2012 6:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

woah, i had not seen this! it's insane - thanks

Another new character! Another one! Laboriously hoving into view with the onset of another tediously quotidian chapter. Good Lord.

If pressed, on the basis of appearances, Petunia (ffs) would have put his age at about seventeen, though she supposed he must be thirty or so.

No. "17" is the frivolous response, "thirty or so" the that would be ellicited by pressing.

can someone explain 'a moment in the sun' to me

And wd it hurt to put the ł in for Polish words like kiełbasa & Michał? Maybe, don't know. Looks slightly odd without it. Problem verging on the lunatic edge of pickiness I realise, but something about this book makes me want to pick pick pick away. post.

It is the same urge that I get when I see a sweater covered with pills and bits of lint.

That's it! And when you spot one bit, well that's it. Every single speck needs attending to.

Don't know what that 'post' is doing there, oh right, xpost. Thought I'd expressed what was only supposed to be a mental command.

can someone explain 'a moment in the sun' to me

As in what it's about? In a nutshell, it's about the era when the US first decided to mess around on the international stage (war with Spain in Cuba, the Phillipines) at the same time as massive internal changes were going on (aftermath of abolition of slavery, gold rushes, technological developments) told through a whole bunch of different characters over 1000 pages

Reading some great Angela Carter short stories. I particularly like the stories of 4-year-old Lizzie Borden and the rewriting of Jacobean playwright John Ford's "'Tis Pity She's a Whore" as a western by film director John Ford

tbh fizzles I noticed you were reading it & wasn't quite sure why – don't think of solid middle-aged male british contemporary novelists (lanchester • hollinghurst • hensher) as up your alley. Was it Whoops! that turned your head? I really liked it, but was still sus of him as fiction writer, I guess.

The 'Transport for London card' thing is very strange. He *can't* have written that in the first place, so maybe an editor or early reader suggested that people outside London won't know what an Oyster Card is? But then 'travel card' if you have to give in on that. Want to know now, might try to get his email, pester him about it.

I think I agree on dark l… we're close to naturalising kielbasa maybe, but yeah with names, make the effort.

Reading the Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin. Really liked the first part (Bro), finding the second book (Ice) to be a lot less engaging. Got Babylon by Victor Pelevin lined up for afterwards.

Thomas M. Disch - The Genocides. Its my first by him...heavy going, as all bks are at the min.

yeah, I felt the desire to go into an area I wouldn't normally. + I saw a good review (sucker).

Also I read The Debt to Pleasure ages ago and thought it was good. (taste's prob changed tho & can't remember any details now - unreliable narrator? food?).

I was hoping at least it would be well written, but it's really not. It's just about laboriously competent. Just.

He does use Oyster later. I think he's just p bad at doing that sort of thing.

He's introduced another new character! Another! A sort of Banksy figure! This is dire. Sorokin was next on my list and I wish I'd skipped straight to it, although a perverse part of me is now enjoying how much this book is annoying me.

we're close to naturalising kielbasa maybe

i love this. for some reason.

I read Brian Glanville Goalkeepers Are Different, which I had as a nipper. It was very enjoyable, once I got used to it - the narrator's voice is very convincing, like how an ordinary blole from the period might have spoken, all 'you know' and 'if you see what I mean's. It's very unlike other styles that I've read of late, which are much tighter, and slightly unfairly makes the book drag 'til you get into it. I had similar with Orwell's Coming Up For Air a couple of years ago, which I had to set aside as a result.

It's a kids' book btw, the story of a young goalkeeper breaking into the first team at Borough and 'what it is really like to be a professional footballer'. It was published in 1971, so plenty of scope for irony there - young Ronnie earns as much in a couple of months as his postman dad takes home in a year, in fact so much so that after a run in the first team he can afford to move out of the family home and into shared digs with another first-teamer and a nice landlady. It's perfectly readable young adult material, as much a short novel as a kids' book really.

Anyway, into Ismaelinho's box it goes, for another layer of irony in a few years when he gets to read an actual, physical book.

Now Letting Go by Philip Roth. This was his debut novel supposedly, although written after Goodbye, Columbus. It's a lot longer though. There's no particular difference between this and any other Roth, except that he gets a lot dirtier. Basically he started out great and stayed great. I've got about half his novels to go, before I have to somehow start tracking down unpublished things. How does one even do that?

'ordinary bloke'. I don't know what an 'ordinary blole' is.

He's introduced another new character! Another! A sort of Banksy figure! This is dire. Sorokin was next on my list and I wish I'd skipped straight to it, although a perverse part of me is now enjoying how much this book is annoying me.

i certainly am, if that helps

'debt to pleasure' = would maybe have like to have been nabokov when it grew up, narrator has poisoned some dudes, envies his brother's career as chef, is self-described gourmand, presents memoir of dudes he has poisoned as a series of menus. it's aight i guess. i can now never read his new one (which btw how have you managed not to mention the title, because when i saw this in waterstones yesterday i had to suppress a groan) because i will spend the whole time waiting to get to the 'transport for london card-charging device'

i'm in a quandary over whether to get the paperback of 'a moment in the sun' or not.

IK i read 'goodbye, columbus' at the weekend and 'the plot against america' on monday and i would certainly disagree with the assertion that roth "started great and stayed great"

with both bits?

I'm enjoying Balkan Ghosts enough to wonder whether I should attempt Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon...

'plot against america' is structurally really broken, has some passages of truly awful prose -- the kind of praise it got is just a reminder that a lot of people can't read

i really like the stories in the back half of '...columbus' which aren't about a jewish guy trying to have sex. although the last one ('eli, the fanatic') could have productively ended two pages before or fifty pages after it does end, which isn't a very good place for it to end

it's interesting to think of them in relation to, like, ultra-slick MFA writing. because they share a lot of characteristics but are nicely rough-edged -- you're left in no doubt that this roth dude is a genuinely talented guy, i found myself thinking 'if he carries on writing stories that aren't about jewish dudes trying to get laid he's going to be so awesome'

i find roth pretty fascinating and compelling, mainly because he's deeply self-aware at the same time as he's deeply solipsistic, if that makes any kind of sense. but i'm pretty sure i 'dislike' him.

I'm meaning to give ... Against ... another go. I did like it, but it is definitely the least of the intense run he had going immediately beforehand. I always had the sense that the acclaim was purely for allegorical reasons, like Obama's peace prize, as if there was a collective seizure that Bush may actually be some kind of protoNazi and here was a riskfree way to stand against it.

There are definitely fantastic, intimate sections in there (is that the one with descriptions of fathers & sons playing baseball on Sunday mornings, then scalding hot showers, a real adult pleasure? I loved that) but the epic part of the narrative was more than they could perhaps bear. I'd like to read again, now that stopping America becoming actually Nazi is maybe a little less ... pressing.

You know what has some awful prose is The Human Stain. . .

isn't Letting Go is attempt at a Jamesian novel? It's the only novel of his besides the Nixon satire I haven't read.

I've never read Henry James so I don't know, but he has been mentioned more than once so far (I'm a hundred pages in). But then this is true of half the stuff I ever read these days, so I didn't think anything of it.

Heh, the Nixon satire is now the only one I don't own - the missus filled in the gaps for me for Christmas, and I couldn't bear to make her spend money on it.

yeah i think the reading of 'plot' as relating to the bush administration is actually really quite flattering to it? in that it takes what is otherwise a historical nonsense and gives it a plausible reality

i think the washington section has some v good writing, although it doesn't require any of the alternate-history apparatus of the book to be in place for it to actually work

I didn't know that anyone actually read Plot as a commentary on the Bush administration - seems like a major stretch to me, even if you dislike Bush a lot. Since the only other Roth I've read is Portnoy, I was disappointed that Plot wasn't funnier, but I guess that wasn't the point. It was fun to read as alternate-history, in the same vein as Dick's Man in the High Castle.

It was definitely received as such in the UK - Homeland Security, Guantanamo, wearing the flag, and what we heard about talk radio all that raised those echoes over here, and Bush himself never got anything approaching a fair hearing in our media. It seems a bit silly now, so I'd like to reread as pure alternate history. Plus I rather like Lindbergh, I'd quite like to test that again.

Roth, to his credit, has never gone near the idea that it's a Bush administration allegory. Things like that only diminish the work, I feel, unless you really are allegorising totalitarianism.

Edward St. Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels

cover is so hideous that I'm embarrassed to read on the subway

xp I'm trying to find contemporaneous reviews, and to be fair they're not as bad as I'd feared. It's plainly there in the background ("surely the novel is topical; isn’t that what the title says? Well, this is, perhaps, what people have taken the title to mean. Two current plots against America spring immediately to mind. There is the global plot of al-Qaida against the evils of capitalism, substantively and symbolically centred in the US – the war on terror is a war against the elusive authors of this plot. And there is, settling down now as a major fear of many Americans, the plot of the Bush administration to abolish many civil liberties and concentrate autocratic powers in the hands of the president ... But the plot in the novel is neither of these, although there are times when it looks like the second") but it's mostly taken at face value. Maybe it was other stuff I was reading.

Yeah, I can see how it would resonate with the climate of fear (both of terrorism and of the government overreach in response) at the time it came out. I remember reading reviews like that too, but I think it was more people reading into it.