As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

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.

I noticed the title has changed, which was a good move I think.

very close to the end of murphy, by beckett, after a long hiatus in which i lost it and then another hiatus when my bag with second copy in it was robbed and held as evidence by the police. great book.

just bought and skimmed this http://www.amazon.co.uk/Night-Wraps-Sky-Vladimir-Mayakovsky/dp/0374281351/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331373337&sr=8-1

reading granta american short stories on the reg.

I finished the local writer's memoir.

Next I attempted A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch, that I picked up for 50 cents a while back, but I found her characters too difficult to live with. The combination of their Englishness, their upper classness, their occupations, their personalities, and the language through which they were presented to me, made them seem so ethereal, so attenuated, that even though I could believe in their existence, I wanted nothing to do with them.

I fled to Bouvard and Pecuchet / The Dictionary of Received Ideas, Gustave Flaubert, in the Penguin paperback edition. These characters, although they are reduced to their essentials and presented through a series of bare signs and gestures, seem more human to me than Murdoch's did.

The dog circled over the garment and lay down.

Finally, with utmost precaution, they ventured, one to come down off his scale, the other to climb out of the tub. And when Pécuchet was dressed, this exclamation escaped from his lips: "You, my dear fellow, will come in very handy for our experiments!"

What experiments?

They could inject the dog with phosphorus, then shut it in a cellar to see if it would breathe fire through its snout. But how would they inject it? And besides, no one would sell them phosphorus.

Wanted to read Bouvard and Pecuchet for some years. Not got round to it yet. Maybe Aimless reading it will prove the necessary spur.

couldn't get into patti smith's just kids. then a book about the economy of sushi was written in such an off-putting way that i put it down 10 pages in. now reading the pale king.

I'm like 2/3 of the way through the Patti Smith book while reading other stuff. I kind of enjoy her sincerity, and I think it's a nice portrait of an era in NYC's music and art scene that feels very remote from today's internet-turbocharged, high-rent-everywhere situation.

yeah i gave up after only like one or two chapters. i am actually interested in the subject matter, so i think i'll dive back in after a break. i think maybe the sincerity was too much for me??

It was the last book I bought, I might have a go at it this weekend.

Had a dozy read of Adelard of Bath's On the Same and the Different (De Eodem et Diverso) from the 12th Century, very much in the traditional of renunciation of worldly pleasures and material goods (in the female form of Philocosmia and her attendant handmaidens) and study, knowledge etc (in the female form of Philosophia).

Extremely dull in many ways of course unless you're making a study of such things, but for some reason it seemed just right to sit in an easy chair with early spring sunshine warming my bonce, idly flicking through the writings of a 12th century scholar. Especially when he was talking about leaving the clamour of the city to sit under a tree by the banks of the Loire, listening only to the rippling of the water and the song of the birds, while contemplating, idk, the quadrivium or w/e. At that point I very much wanted to be by the 12th century Loire contemplating the quadrivium/resting my eyelids. And if Philocosmia and Philosophia and their handmaidens want to come to me in a dream and have an argument about stuff, that's cool too.

ahh! i have given up on the pale king too. maybe i'm just not in a reading state of mind these days.

Harlot's Ghost at last. Thoughts?

Also: Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.

So I'm getting the creme of the New York intellectuals.

yeah i gave up after only like one or two chapters. i am actually interested in the subject matter, so i think i'll dive back in after a break. i think maybe the sincerity was too much for me??

― rayuela, Thursday, March 22, 2012 10:01 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well the beginning is about her childhood, but it pretty quickly gets past that and into hanging out with Robert Mapplethorpe, seedy NYC life, the Chelsea Hotel, trying to get into the in crowd at Max's Kansas City, etc., but all still told sweetly. Which is maybe somehow better than childhood told sweetly.

yeah i gave up after only like one or two chapters. i am actually interested in the subject matter, so i think i'll dive back in after a break. i think maybe the sincerity was too much for me??

― rayuela, Thursday, March 22, 2012 10:01 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well the beginning is about her childhood, but it pretty quickly gets past that and into hanging out with Robert Mapplethorpe, seedy NYC life, the Chelsea Hotel, trying to get into the in crowd at Max's Kansas City, etc., but all still told sweetly. Which is maybe somehow better than childhood told sweetly.

The protagonist in the Patrick Melrose novels gives up on books a lot.

I'm on #3 (Some Hope). Really didn't like Bad News. It's actually quite ironic that, in becoming a junkie, Melrose becomes incredibly BORING, especially given all the talk about fear of being a bore in the first novel. Maybe that's the point. I still couldn't deal with the lengthy drug fiending descriptions.

The protagonist in the Patrick Melrose novels gives up on books a lot.

maybe i should try that one next...

reading yukio mishima's confessions of a mask & really enjoying it so far!

Its awesome, he's got such a vision that you'll always come back once you're hooked...been reading this interview from 1970, barmy and I love it, of course.

Reading "There Are Little Kingdoms", a short story collection by Kevin Barry who gets a lot of Flann O'Brien comparisons. Really good stuff, especially the dialogue which is where he's closest to Flann. That kind of imaginary Ireland where everyone's a storyteller. His novel, City of Bohane, got some good notices so i'm going to give that a go next.

Just picked up the Simon Reynolds book on Retro for €5 in town. been wanting to read that for a while. ALso the Barney Hoskins book on LA.

Justfinished the David Nobakht book on Suicide which was a great read. & makes me want to pick up the rest of their catlogue.

Also started the Greil Marcus book on the Doors. About 3 chapters in so far.

I am still reading the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary. It is beautifully written (and translated) and very visual and flaneuresque -- you can come and go and pick it up when you please and sink and float again.

keep meaning to get that

greil marcus wrote a book on the doors? o dear

Intrigued by the bitsd I've seen online of Demolishing Nisard by Eric Chevillard, a seemingly pointless attack on a stody 19th Centiru French lit critic

He is the slime at the bottom of every fountain. Irretrievably, there has been Nisard. How can we love benches, knowing that Nisard often pressed them into service? Gently stroking a cat’s silken fur, my hand inevitably reproduces a gesture once made by Nisard . . . Did Nisard ever make one move that we might want to follow or imitate? Did he ever incarnate anything other than the tedium of being Désiré Nisard, definitively, forever and ever?

bits! stodgy! can't type!

finished updike's "rabbit run". its the second time ive read it. the last time was '98. would still stan for it but theres problems. his attitude towards women is a bit dodgy and the sex-as-religion stuff can be a bit laughable. ive just started toni morrison's 'song of solomon' now.

Song of Solomon is incredible.

the perfect antidote to Morrison imo

?

i think he meant its a good book as oppose to her other works.

i don't agree - it is a great work, might be even her best, but she had several other good novels as well.

I've only read that and Sula and thought both of those were v v goo, though Solomon was much more satisfying

v v good

Holy shit! Just came here to post that I'm finishing up Sula, getting ready to (re-)start Song Of Solomon. If I knew you you were readin', I'd a' started a book club.

Philip K. Dick - We can Remember it for you Wholesale (short story collection)

Ben Marcus- The Flame Alphabet

Loved this book so much.

Wonderful, bleak and absurd.

We're far enough past the equinox, I suppose it is time for another thread. I mean, ile or ilm can have their 5000 post threads if they like, but they're just unwieldy imo. So, here goes nothin'...

2012: The northern days advance, the southern recede: What are you reading?