April 2006: So, what are you reading?

Diana Wynne Jones - Castle In the Air
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
David Toop - Haunted Weather
My Japanese language course textbook

I'm still working on the prairie whores, the meandering life of Johnson, and assorted numbered ruminations.

I'm reading This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson. It's an enormous novel in the old-fashioned style, packed full of incident, spanning many years, mostly following the Beagle's famous voyage to the Americas and elsewhere.

It is very good.

the cook book (snarf) (sorry) is a really rather good semi-pamphlet thing from OUP, which makes me miss ILM when it was good. the murakami is more remarkable and a lot more horrific than when i read it first.

I'll probably now start Ali Smith's The Accidental, with a bit of George R.R. Martin on the side. What I'm really in the mood for, though is a bit of lad lit. I might sneak off with some Tony Parsons when no one is looking.

just got started on roth's american pastoral and look forward to eating it up, having loved his sex comedies.

I started Hemingay's Movable Feast but found the first story so horrifically awful--wow you went to the cafe and drank good rum and saw a pretty girl? That's great--done in the most insipid prose imaginable that I don't believe I'll be able to pick it up again. I keep on checking to see if Hemingway wrote it.

Now I'm trying Ander Monson's Other Electricities which I haven't quite settled into yet.

I'm still going through Those Feet for which I had low expectations and it's just exceeding them. Aside from newspapers and National Geographics, little else.

That's my cue for teabreak.

The Guardian's Monday architecture colummn in G2 is ace.

A gem: "Two weeks or so later I had to fill out what I wanted to be when I grew up and I thought of my dream about the man from another universe, so I wrote: I AM GOING TO BE A SCIENCE FICTION WRITER.
That made my family mad, but then, see, when they got mad I got stubborn, and anyhow my girlfriend, Ysabel Lomax, told me I'd never be any good at it and it didn't earn any money anyhow and science fiction was dumb and only people with pimples read it. So I decided for sure to write it, because people with pimples should have someone writing for them; it's unfair otherwise, just to write for people with clear complexions."

pkd, the eye of sibyl

The Ramayana
Huston Smith's "The World's Religions",
GRRM's "Storm of Swords",
CD Payne's "Youth in Revolt",

about to start

Sharon K. Penman's "Sunne in Splendour"

Then I read "A Spoonful of Jam" by Michele Magorian which is a heartwarming post-war tale aimed at adolescents and (I fear) not a very good one, but I bought it thinking my dear old Mum might like it, ad I thought I'd better read it first to check it wasn't inappropriate for her innocent mind. It isn't, but it's tat really. She might like it as a distraction for a few minutes.

Now I'm reading "The Scarperer" by Brendan ehan in honour of the Pinefox's trip to Dublin. I wish I was in Dublin.

The author just seemed to pull random people out of the past, issue a quote from them and treat it as the generally accepted view of history. A whole chapter on England's relationship with Italy. Why does it have to be Italy? I think so he can take his Italian Job analogy to its fizzly out conclusion.

The Roy Keene chapter was ambitious and silly. I mean if you're trying to fins the embodiment of Englishness throughout comic book history, don't use an Irishman as the pivot of your thinking.

I'm going to read a travel book next. Probably Wendell Stevenson's book on Georgia.

Natch.

i think i could not get myself to read slowly enough.

Not sure if it is fiction or non-fiction at the moment, but the premise of nowhere being remote anymore so you have to look in the unlikeliest of places is appealing. Perhaps the genre of travel writing needs a reaction to shake it up? I'm only just inside the door of the book, but am looking forward to getting back to it.

because Deus Lo Volt is written in a medieval-ish "period" voice. the intro is incredibly dense and daunting, but after just a few pages I got into it, all the ravaging and pillaging and freelance anarchy definitely holds your attention. author Evan S Connell has a good ear for speech rhythms, the total effect (so far) is evocative rather than archaic. still his non-fiction is so different than his novels that my head is spinning. why isn't he better-known?

hope you like the Goldman, I've hyped it up so much that a letdown could be inevitable. if nothing else, the pix are a trip, eh?

I also read Beryl Bainbridge's Watson's Apology, which I didn't like one bit. I think some comments I recently heard attributed to Bainbridge about women and rape have kind of put me off her and made me see her as anti-woman. This book was certainly full of the usual tight little lives and mean awfulness of everything, but it was hard to see the point, and it just went on and on and on.

Zipped through Mountains Of The Mind by Robert Macfarlane (some interesting facts for mountain-fans but not particularly great writing) and True Grit by Charles Portis (brilliant). Now enjoying some real-life adventure with The Conquest Of New Spain by Bernal Diaz. (Not so great for the Aztecs though.)

I LOVE the third policeman Matt, although now someone suggested to me that 'Lost' was based on it I feel wierd about both [an obsession with lost being a guilty secret, like looking at hilarious copies of Hello etc behind the cover of a London review of books in doctors waiting room -oh to splash about in dirty intellectual shallows ...]

And The Sword in the Stone - much of which seems to have gone over my head when I read it as a child. Startling digression via an ant colony on how communism = bad, feudalism = good...

I also have Prague by Arthur Phillips on standby if I get sick of Proust - the first chapter seemed a bit arch and the book will possibly be irritating. I mainly got it because i like Budapest...

Now I am going to start The World is Flat or something or other.

I'm so well-informed it hurts.

Also tried some Kipling, but he is difficult.

Noticed in Windsor yesterday that there is a plaque marking the draper's shop where HG Wells worked. Top one. Big up Mr Polly.

I was reading "Loitering With Intent" when I heard Muriel Spark had died and I think that was probably a good one to be reading, lots of vaguely melancholy musings on what it meant to be a novelist, bless.

I am now almost halfway through George P Pelecanos's DC quartet (which is to say I've read The Big Blowdown and am past halfway through King Suckerman). This is in preparation for my forthcoming trip to the States, about which I am trying not to excite myself too much, yet.

Any recommendations for surprisingly brilliant novels set in NYC, DC, or Lancaster, PA much apreciated.

This is the most absorbing book I've read since Dhalgren, for whatever that's worth.

Just started In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan. "In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar." A rererererererererread.

Middlemarch is part of my self-imposed reading project, wherein I am reading the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. So far, I have read two Woolf, two Bronte, and am currently working on Eliot's thickest one; everything that I have read has been fantastic up to this point.

It is very interesting and well-written, and brilliantly captures what a fairly ecstatic conversion to Catholicism - with a very mystical bias. When Merton speaks of God and the devil, you know he is speaking of things that are very, very real to him, but entirely metaphysical in their being. His enthusiasm and joy are unfeigned and refreshing. Already a classic.

I also took out books from the library about The Fantastiks, A Chorus Line, John Cassavetes, and all the Broadway theaters in Manhattan. And some "historical" murder mysteries that seem to be based on the Weather Underground, in part (One is called Days of Rage!!!)

FUN TIMES.

I read some of Exit Pursued By A Bear this morning, but it was a bit boring.