It's November 2006! Quickly, what are you reading?

But rollicking, all the same, and the women are terrible instigators.

Do you get to know anything about Nokter the Stammerer himself? Because, what a great name!

Now I'm a little under helf way through "The Damned United" by David Peace. Certainly the best football novel I've ever read*, maybe the best football book. It's an oddly conflicting experience though, because the baddies in the book are my ultimate footballing heroes.

*Yes I'm including even Jimmy Greaves's series concerning the adventures of star striker Jackie Groves.

Now reading:
ZZ Packer - Drinking coffee elsewhere
Camilla Collett - Fortellinger i utvalg ("Selected stories")
Ivan Gontsjarov - Oblomov

Also dipping into semi-random parts of:
Whitney Balliett - Collected Works : A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000
R.S. Thomas - Collected Poems (thanks to ILB, actually, after someone posted his beautiful poem "The Moor")

Phew.

This morning I read the "Ask Fred" section of Mojo. Someone wants to know who the backing musicians were for the Banana Splits.

Anyhow, now reading Susan Sontags' Photography and The Devil Wears Prada. I have a tendency to read the book and watch the film. In the case I saw the film on sunday and started the book yesterday.

Only in the introduction; he was a monk and he stammered. We think. And he seems to have an endless supply of stories that start "So Charlemange was visiting this bishop, and the bishop says..."

Just started (within the past 1/2-hour) Josephine Tey's The Man in the Queue from the "Golden Age of British crime writing" (from the intro. to the text). Since I don't know/haven't read much about this so-called "Golden Age" I'm hoping to be enlightened.

Still thinking about Suite Francaise, though.

the second half (i.e. 1975 until he died) of robert creeley's collected poems came out so even though i already owned a number of them i caved (if that word is right to describe how little resistance i put up) and bought it in hardcover for an absurdly high price. so earlier this week i was reading 'hello'.

also started ellroy's 'american tabloid', and even though about 50 pages in i don't feel committed enough to it that i've absolutely gotta keep reading (which i expect him to be able to do given some more plot).

'the western intellectual tradition' by uh i forget. i'm up to the chapter on puritans. i certainly don't like puritans but i think a lot of us contemporary people would be well-served by learning some more about what their deal was. they seem a lot more interesting than the widely circulating equation of them with sexual prudes would have it.

'european literature and the latin middle ages' by e.r. curtius, very informative about social stuff and practices of reading, writing, etc., not just names of french dudes and latin texts.

'solitude' by anthony storr though i've dropped it for a couple of weeks.

'reading writing' by julien gracq; some of his formulations are a little - insular? not quite that - but even in the long chapter on stendahl/balzac/flaubert/proust he offers a number of interesting ideas despite my only knowing a little about flaubert and proust to help me follow along. the book is physically very attractive.

cavell, 'the claim of reason' still.

a bit of 'the bible for students of art and literature' here and there.

tonight i visited the new bookstore that garrison keillor just opened in the cathedral hill area of saint paul. it has clearly just started and is mostly stocked by the same kind of mass-distribution books you expect to find in most bookstores, which is not to its credit. but i'll give it some time. and it's by a coffeeshop i use anyway so i'm bound to drop some money there. tonight i for some reason bought a copy of 'the magic mountain' even though i obviously do not have the time to read it.

I suppose that most people run across this book at some point of their lives, or at least have it recommended to them. Anyway, I like it, and it occasionally makes some rather, to me, profound insights. But then, I am such a novice to philosophy, so it isn't all that surprising. It has really made me excited about reading Kant and Hume, though, so maybe that isn't a bad thing.

Josh probably hates this book, but then that is just a guess.

Please don't ask me to defend this reading of Zen in detail, it's years since I read the book, and there's no way I could cite chapter and verse in support of it without rereading the thing, which I have no plans to do. I'm just throwing up the thought for consideration -- if you think it's garbage, so be it.

Oh definitely!

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

I hated it. My friends said I probably didn't understand it. ROFL. I think I did and that was the reason why I hated it: it gave me nothing new.

That is an interesting reading of the text, and it does make sense to me. I think I like it, in the end, for more simple reasons -- such as his interesting ways of describing his previous life, his cross-country motorcycle trip (something that I've always wanted to do), etc. Occasionally his thinking makes sense to me, but it is usually not related to the main system -- and like Nathalie, I don't think it is really giving me anything new to work with. At least, not like my brief experiences with thinkers like Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard.

i have never read pirsig. i don't know that i've ever even considered it.

and franny, i'm not saying i would give up in that way. just in the default way of having a lot to do and not being very resolute about the books i start. i'm sure some day i'll finish it no matter what. though i think your opinion on 'the cold six thousand' puts you at variance with most of the people who mentioned it on the ellroy thread!

octavia butler, 'lilith's brood'
fredric jameson on postmodernism, oy vey
paul beatty, 'the white boy shuffle'

haven't opened wittgenstein in a couple days.

milan kundera-the book of laughter and forgetting

just finished
paul auster-the music of chance

I'm reading Lolita by Nabokov, Eugénie Grandet by Balzac, translated by Marion Ayton Crawford and Art as Experience by John Dewey.

I've also been reading bits and pieces of The Complete English Poems of John Donne and The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens after reading a great article on Donne by A.S. Byatt in the Times Literary Supplement some weeks ago.

You may be interested to know that some very interesting names are developing a film version.

I am reading Stephen King's new book Lisey's Story for work, and by christ it's annoying. I can't BEAR his stupid stupid stupid nonsense words and neologisms, and the structure is so wildly pretentious without even being interesting.

And yet... there is something that prevents me from just going on strike and burning the fucking thing. I guess when he actually tries to tell a tale rather than endlessly character-building and memory-remembering he's got a certain gift. But mainly, what an arse. D-

It was assigned to me for a class, actually, so I guess my prof liked it too.

g.o.b.'s grief

i'm about to start either Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet" or Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" but am not sure which to go for. advice?

I have a really excellent book written in semaphore code. But not Morse.

in trying to avoid the inevitability of studying for exams i scoured my bookshelves and came across Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter/Seymour: An Introduction; i bought it years ago but never read it - probably because it's a slim volume and it's easily hidden itself. i laughed out loud through much of it which prompted me to buy Franny & Zooey - which also made laugh, particularly the bathroom scene.

re-read Daylight by Elizabeth Knox and am now re-reading Billie's Kiss, also by Knox. she's an incredibly intelligent New Zealand writer (franny, i'm sure you have probably read her), who never fails to draw you into her world.

I stalled a bit and found an interesting book trying to trace the development of "sex magick" from pre-Victorian sources, as well as trying to explain its political and social appeal to us "modern" folk. A bit dry at times, but a good break from the dialogs. It has a fancy scholarly title, too: Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism.

I have also started Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, which is really great so far. I like his speechwriting abilities and the obsessive focus on power. I also didn't realize that the political situation in Greece was that complicated!

Franny - that Penguin Classics Russian Short Stories is a gem, even if it has hardly any Chekhov. I don't know why that bothered me, given I have all the other Penguin Chekhov collections anyway, but it did. Also, you have to get the (US Penguin Classics ) Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, which is like a volume 2, bringing it almost up to date (the early 1990s, at least).

I'm reading John Banville/Benjamin Black's 'Christine Falls'. I really like Banville, and I really like this, but if I hadn't been told there's no way I would have picked him as the man behind the pseudonym.

Tim was right, the ending is a bit of a damp squib (and I didn't know the half of it).

I look forward to the sequel, Them Ruddy Saudis Are A Rum Lot.

my tutor loaned me the comic book version of auster's city of glass.

joe david bellamy, 'the new fiction'
paul beatty, 'tuff'

i'm quite prepared to admit i'm wrong on this one since i didn't (couldn't!) finish it. my boyfriend hates it too, it's one of the things we bonded over when we first met :)

Also again, the caveat that it's been a long time since I've read it.

finnish guy on i love comics has gone on about him a bit.

And I loved 'Pale Fire', which was the first Nabokov I read after 'Lolita'. Casuistry's description of it seems just about perfect to me as to why I liked it.

Now I'm reading Muriel Spark's autobiography, 'Curriculum Vitae'.

The Importance of Being Earnest, and perhaps other Wilde plays in the coming week.

I WILL start Plato's "Republic" in the coming week, too.

Made me laugh like a twat on the tube.

I've started reading Sarah Waters's "Fingersmith" -- I'm about 80 pages in. I was looking forward to this tremendously after "Night Watch", but reading the first 50 or 60 pages I started to fear serious disappointment as it completely failed to engage. I've never much liked Dickens, and he seemed the major influence, on story and atmosphere if not on style. Fortunately, it's started to pick up in the last 20 pages or so, and I'm starting to get a good feeling about it now.

Am now reading Kobo Abe's 'The Woman in the Dunes', whcih I'm liking despite some reservations. It does, however, fall into the weird trap that I find with EVERY modern Japanese novel I've read, which is when the sex scenes begin, it quickly becomes deeply ludicrous. Does this stuff just not translate, or are the original Japanese sex scenes just as daft?

I was incredibly disappointed by FoS - it seemed like Lethem was all over the place and no thoughts were ever brought to completion - moments of insight and excellent writing and stuff that was just boring. But I thought much the same of Motherless Brooklyn, too.

I think I've now read most of his stuff (can't recall why I went on a Lethem kick, though) and the one that's stayed with me was Gun, With Occasional Music - creative, fun, complex, noirish - kinda reminded me of PKD's Do Androids Dream at the time I read it.

And As She Climbed Across the Table was interesting, though ultimately unsatifying (at least to me). Neither Amnesia Moon or Girl in Landscape have stayed with me.

I'm still working my way through Jospehine Tey's Alan Grant series. It's fun to be reading something that's a "series" where each book is so markedly different in plot and concept from the others. Of course, this means that some work better than others, but it's an enjoyable experience. To be honest, I'd probably be raving about her writing were I reading these books in something more than fits and stops, 'cause her language and characterizations deserve better attention from the reader than I'm according them at this point.

James, Wilkie Collins may be right, I didn't make the connection, and perhaps should have. It's a long time since I read Collins, although I do remember I didn't like him very much. I thought I could understand why he'd be popular in his day, and why he's still regarded as "important" nowadays as a pioneer and influence on subsequent writers, but I found his books shapeless and overlong. He did have gift for intruding numinous, almost symbolist elements into his stories, though, and I can sense that as an influence on Waters. Also the crime-thriller plot is more Collins than Dickens. Another 40 or 50 pages in, I'm now enthralled by Fingersmith -- if it stays this good until the end it's going to be one of the best books I've read in a long time.

Sorry - I didn't mean to trash him nearly as badly as I did.

Please keep up to appraisal of "Fingersmith" - all that I've read of her's was "Tipping the Velvet" and walked away from that feeling underwhelmed but I've had other folks tell me that I should try some of her other books.

The Sign of Four by Sherlock Holmes.

-- reddening (reddenin...), November 14th, 2006 1:50 PM. (reddening) (link)

Yup. Fuck a Stephen King. The last two books were obviously motivated by "fuck it let's just get it finished". I had to laugh though when he actually put "HERE COMES THE DEUX EX MACHINA" on a note to a character!

I'm now reading Don Delillo's 'Underworld'.

I finished A Study In Scarlet, but thought it was a bit rub.

Now reading Working On The Edge by Spike Walker, about crab fishing in Alaska - it's like a book version of The Deadliest Catch, not the best written but undeniably exciting.

Pete Baran said THS is annoying. I haven't been annoyed by it, yet. I'm rather enjoying it.

Anyone have any particular favourite books set in Madrid or Seville? I could re-read "Variable Cloud" by Carmen Maria Gaite, which I like, or "The Seville Communion" by Perez-Reverte, which is fine in its way, but I wonder whether I could do better, or at least different.