As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

that's what i meant to say, honest

On this first read-through, I'm treating Seven Pillars as a deliberate attempt at epic romance. Lawrence writes in one of his letters:

Do you remember my telling you once that I collected a shelf of 'Titanic' books (those distinguished by greatness of spirit, 'sublimity' as Longinus would call it): and that they were The Karamazovs, Zarathustra, and Moby Dick. Well, my ambition was to make an English fourth.

I'm interested in the history and context, too, but I'll save those for later. Right now, I intend to enjoy it as literature.

I'm not far in yet, but my favourite passage so far is this vivid description:

The armament of the Turks made them so superior at long range that the Arabs never got to grips. For this reason most of the hand-to-hand fighting had taken place at night, when the guns were blinded. To my ears they sounded oddly primitive battles, with torrents of words on both sides in a preliminary match of wits. After the foulest insults of the languages they knew would come the climax, when the Turks in frenzy called the Arabs 'English', and the Arabs screamed back 'German' at them. There were, of course, no Germans in the Hejaz, and I was the first Englishman; but each party loved cursing, and any epithet would sting on the tongues of such artists.

LOL

About to start 'The Post-Office Girl' - Stefan Zweig

Träumerei: think I'm going to enjoy any excerpts you post of SPoW more than actually reading it.

thomp, I quite like fantasy! In fact I used to consume by the bucket-load as a child/teenager, to the extent that I feel permanently affected by fantasy's motifs and manner (a natural avenue of trees, or a grassy track, heavy slanting rain, a tower on a hill, all evoke a sense of unrealistic expectation, of the possibility of transformative magic) . When I first started more realistic works it was almost a test of how good I thought they were by how much they lacked things I liked or disappointed my desires. Even now, works which manage in some way to indicate that there are moments of complicated magic to be had in the course of life are appealing to me - NOT magic realism, but Borges, say, and I just bought Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb for a girl at work. I guess I'd been more put off by the sheer extent of George RR Martin's Fire and Ice novels. Also elves kinda irritate me these days, piously self-satisfied buggers, so it was probably watching the TV series that eventually sent me to the books: no elves! Enjoyed the series v much, but left with the inevitable irritation that I have coloured my discovery of the characters and how my imagination fills them by watching it.

Lanchester and I have entered an uneasy truce. He hasn't dropped any real bollocks for a while (some slightly wonky textspeak 'cn i cu?' 'ok bt hu r u?') and there's a slight sign that things might be about to happen. Although there's a massive change of tone at the end of Part 1 where he goes in for a very C- humorous set piece. It's very weak, but it's not actively bad, and the humour, such as it is, helps break up the dreadful toiling labour of his writing so far. But I don't want to let him off the hook, so I thought I'd collect the first lines of each chapter so far:

At first light on a late summer morning, a man in a hooded sweatshirt moved softly and slowly along an ordinary looking street in South London. He was doing something, though a bystander would have been hard put to guess what.

Hooded sweatshirt! Only a writer would use that phrase, or an unusually stilted police description. No one has ever moved softly and slowly down a street and if they did they would immediately be the most conspicuous thing on it. Even an ordinary looking street. (It turns out to be actually ordinary as well as ordinary looking despite the promise of a den of criminal masterminds, false fronts, a secret cave that the phrase 'ordinary looking'). A bystander! What would a bystander be doing on a street? Watching someone move softly and slowly? You don't get bystanders on streets unless there's been an accident or incident, John: wrong word/idea/image w/e.

On a rainy morning in early December, an 82-year-old woman sat in her front room at 42 Pepys Road, looking out at the street through a lace curtain. Her name was Petunia Howe...

Don't be absurd! Also, reader wonders whether she is distantly or even closely related to Geoffrey.

The proprietor of 51 Pepys Road, the house across the road from Petunia Howe's, was at work in the City of London. Roger Yount sat at his office desk at his bank, Pinker Lloyd, doing sums.

I hope you're already getting a sense of fatigue at the toiling rhythm and progress of his sentences, the way he leaves nothing to chance.

It was late afternoon. Roger sat on one of the sofas in his office,

Stop telling me the time of day.

Ahmed Kamal, who owned the shop (sorry thomp) at the end of Pepys Road, number 68, came awake 3.59 in the morning, one minute before his alarm was set to go off.

Please stop telling me the time of day. Also - came awake?

Shahid Kamal, who was due to work a shift at the family shop between eight o'clock in the morning and six o'clock in the evening, walked down the street at a brisk clip.

ffs

At number 51 Pepys Road, Mrs Arabella Yount...

At ten o'clock Shahid was stacking...

Two weeks before Christmas, Petunia sat...

I've reached Part 2. Things are going to start happening! I hope he doesn't do too much more humour.

It's very weak, but it's not actively bad, and the humour, such as it is,

This may be the faintest praise I have ever seen.

pepys rd, isn't that just gelid with something or other

nice of him to put the apology in though

Lanchester appears to believe that numbers and proper names lendan air of factual authenticity to his writing.

lol

First line of Part 2

Spring was coming. At number 42...

Ismael, it doesn't really deserve much else. A father not used to looking after his two children has to look after them... with hilarious consequences! The humour is v childish - one of the children shits on the cream carpet after accidentally hitting the father in the head: 'The shit was liquid and hot. It smelt very bad. Then the front door rang.' That sort of thing. 'it was found by trial and error that scrambled eggs were the ones Conrad would eat. The confusion came about because he had said he liked the one which was eggy.' Yup ok. Sub lukewarm dinner party but better than telling me it's late afternoon on an early winter's day at 5pm at 54 Pepys (ffs) Road.

Aimless otm, along with having very authentic characters that vary not at all from exactly what you'd expect them to be. I think he might actually try to be doing something with that time and place thing, something conscious I mean but you just greet each chapter with 'not again'. To emphasise the point I left a few first lines out, but I see now that they include:

On Friday the 21st at five o'clock, Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc picked up her pay cheque

and

Usman came into the shop at quarter past four on Friday, a little out of breath

But also, tbf, that one about Uprising(!), which doesn't tell you the time of day, and this one

Bogdan the buidler, whose name was not really Bogdan, sat at the kitchen table.

'Bogdan' turns out to be a nickname he acquired by being confused with someone else (Bogdan) at his first building job. Interesting nickname, no? Bogdan the Builder! Named after Bogdan the Builder! His actual name is Zbigniew and he's one of the Poles leaning against the bar in Uprising(!).

On Friday the 21st at five o'clock, Quentina Mkfesi BSc MSc picked up her pay cheque

you are making this book up

i'm assuming the copies i saw in waterstones were some britain-wide conspiracy

i feel v lost rn

It's 1.32 am. You are sitting under a single, exposed bulb, posting to an internet computer message board called 'ilx'.

"It was 5:05 pm and I was getting tired. From over my left shoulder I could hear the screams and hoots of the monkeys. They were fifteen feet behind me, offset to the left by two and a half feet. They were in two cages. The older monkey was named Phillip Morris. That was his nickname actually. His real name was 26. The younger monkey was just known as 42, because he once ate a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. His real name was 43. I took a sip of my Sam Adams Boston Lager from an 12 oz. tallboy and then calmly shot 42 with my 45. He was getting on my nerves lately."

It's 1.32 am. You are sitting under a single, exposed bulb, posting to an internet computer message board called 'ilx'.

::visits gamefaqs.com, searches for ilx::

If you're worried about the length of Seven Pillars, Lawrence's 'The Mint' (only 200p) is a good starting point--fascinating and odd and perceptive (published posthumously after he died in the bike crash)

He went back into the armed forces under a fake name in order to avoid being a celebrity, and had various troubles as a result: The Mint's about that and other things. It's very good!

Finished the first of the Melrose novels, although it felt more like a single *book* within a larger novel rather than its own separate novel. I thought the dinner scene was really masterful -- witty dialogue and zingers are really only the first layer of it, because so much of what's going on in the scene is really about what each character's choice of zingers says about him/her, how each character reacts to the zingers, what each character picks up and does not pick up, etc.

David is set up as the character who mercilessly gets the upper hand on everyone, and yet the irony is that the narrator has the upper hand on him the whole time.

Noticed a little slip this morning -- St. Aubyn puts the construction "have got" in the mouth of an American where "have gotten" would clearly be used.

yeah i really liked how tense and eventful he made the dinner scene, he kept ratcheting up the suspense (now theres a knife!) in an p artful way even when it ended exactly the way its most likely to. i still think it was sorta flabby for such a short novel and his 'drug writing' in the next one is p cringe-y. idk there nice and short so im going to keep at it but the rich american on the plane for example is hardly n/l satire

Yes the "Earl" on the plane is a bit unsubtle -- his dialogue felt like a composite of every ridiculous thing an American has ever said to the author, and the statements lose their believability when crammed into a single person, even a fat one.

I enjoyed the exchange with the customs person though (paraphrasing from memory)
"Are you here for business or pleasure sir?"
"Neither."
"I'm sorry?"
"I'm here to collect my father's corpse."
"Have a nice day."

Your JL quotes remind me of a Neil Gaiman novel I wished I hadn't finished. (Another novel, the one he wrote with Terry Pratchett, might've worked for the 13-year-old me.) Did like some of his early short stories, haven't checked the Sandman. Re Poles in London, I liked this movie, was hoping it was from a novel, but the director wrote it, here's the Wiki (writtn by JL?)
Moonlighting is a 1982 British drama film written and directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. It is set in the early 1980s at the time of the Solidarity protests in Poland. It stars Jeremy Irons as Nowak, a Polish builder leading a team working illegally in London.
Yeah, he doesn't wanna tell the other workers about the Uprising back home.

Neil Gaiman's novels seriously disappointed me--I was one of those who loved Sandman when it was coming out, loved Good Omens, loved his short stories, but Anansi Boys was not good

like singles/albums: Lots of writers are better w short stories, but novels are the coin, whattayagonna do. Although--last time I looked up Philip K. Dick on Amazon, a lot of short stories popped up first, they were Kindle bait. I find short stories handy because they fit between freelance assignments. If I read a novel or book-length non-fiction, momentum/inertia takes over, really hard to tear myself away.

Also, reading whatever is better at bedtime than TV. TV's a little too hyper, even when boring.

Burning Fence: A Western Memoir of Fatherhood, Craig Lesley. The author is a local who's written many decent novels set in the Pacific NW. (I'd recommend his first, titled Winterkill, as his best to date.)

This is autobiographical and takes place in a lot of small eastern Oregon towns and hamlets. The strange thing is that I am familiar with all these places, including Monument, Hines, Prairie City and North Powder. This adds interest, but it is a queer feeling, because these places are truly obscure, even to Oregonians.

So how does his take on these places compare w yours?

It seems all very familiar. Oregon has gouged itself deep into my bone marrow, apparently. But that happens when you have relatives who live in towns like Fossil and Clatskanie, marry a woman who grew up in Lyons, and you spend much time in Oregon's back of beyond each summer, as I have done.

Lyons, Oregon, that is. Not Lyons, France. Her dad was a forestry graduate from Oregon State U. and worked as a saw filer in a lumber mill. We're both fourth gen Oregonians.

Rereading James' Roderick Hudson; also Howard Sturgis' Belchamber.

Really not enjoying the second Patrick Melrose novel (Bad News) much. Why is lengthy writing about drug experiences so inevitably awful? It's like hearing descriptions of someone else's dreams. The hallucinatory play sequence is especially skimmable.

started norwood by charles portis this morning and it's amazing. read masters of atlantis last year and loved it, not sure why i waited til now to read something else by him. so many great small details in his writing.

just finished didion's year of magical thinking. loved it.

anyone read any goncalo tavares? a friend of mine has a nice long review of his new one on the Millions today.

Suicide No Compromise the biography by David Nobakht.
Very interesting, has me wondering if any early tapes survive.
I have several from '77 & the Blast First reissue of Martin Rev/Alan Vega the 2nd lp has rehearsal tapes from '75.
But would love to get hold of something before the drum machine appeared. Were supposed to be pretty different

nick, I see you are saving the best for last, Dog of the South

Jordan, I enjoyed your friend's framing of the novel, especially the ending, which wouldn't surprise Tavares at all. But the novel, as described and quoted, seems pretty generic, schematic; imitative fallacy re theme of mechanical man,mechanical desires, blah-blah.

agreed, it sounds too didactic for my tastes. i guess it all comes down to the quality of the writing (and translation), but the review doesn't make it sound like the focus is on beautiful prose.

i think i'm going to read them in chronological order!

btw, in between Parzival and the local guy's memoir, I read a collection of Nick Hornby magazine essays called The Polysyllabic Spree, from circa 2005. Diverting shop talk about reading books, straddling the line between book reviews and epistolary chit-chat.

can't between if i want to read "the lifespan of a fact" or not

argh "can't decide if"

haha i finished that last night. its 'interesting' w/o really managing to illuminate the topic of editing or even really the subject of the original piece. its sort of gratuitously inside-baseball, i think, in a way that helps the forest get lost for the trees? idk i mean its really short

Lamp, did you read André Aciman's Eight White Nights? Yours were the only posts that came up when I searched his name on ILX. I loved it, and found it deeply immersive, but it seems to divide opinions.

It's taken me forever but I am about 10% away from finishing REAMDE. First half >>> second half.

Next is Hunger Games.

Feeling smug as have just scored a proof copy of the new Alan Furst 3 months before its release

Oh, well done! Spoilerfree review idc please.

I'm about halfway through, and it's great. Hero's an Austrian-born Hollywood actor who is in Paris in '38 to film a movie about the end of WW1 (he was given to Paramount France for 1 film so Warners could get Gary Cooper for a western), and he finds himself being used by various pro-German propoganda people.