What Are You Reading This Wet Hot (& Not Necessarily ) American Summer 2007?

I've been rereading some of "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which is seeming sort of dated to me. I came up with a term to describe his style -- "high informalism."

Fear and trenbling by Amelie Nothomb is quite great may i say.
you can read it in many levels, and one of them is like a version of Kafka's ideas.
simple and complicated at the same time.

trembling

"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which is seeming sort of dated to me.

the built-in fate of any journalism anthology/collection? as these doorstops tend to go, I thought DFW/s was amazingly successful*

*when I read it ten years ago...

Just started Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, who is a very good writer and whose collection of stories I might pick up sometime.

Am still picking through The Beauty Myth too, which is slow going because lately I don't feel like slogging through violent descriptions of liposuction. But obv it's great if a little dated.

"High informalism" is a great term.

I'm reading assorted Latin bits. Haven't really settled on a book in English yet.

I'm 1/2 way through Rabbit, Run, which is hmmmmmmmmm well bleak but with lots of hetero sex. So far, I don't get this guy, nor do I like him much.

the built-in fate of any journalism anthology/collection? as these doorstops tend to go, I thought DFW/s was amazingly successful*

*when I read it ten years ago...

Perhaps, although I mostly meant his style - like I remember being excited by his style when I first read it (maybe eight years ago?), but now I suppose so many people have followed his lead that the whole *casually exploding the conventions of magazine writing* thing doesn't seem very fresh.

I've recently read much collections of much older journalism/essays by Didion and Christgau, and neither bothered me as much. The prose itself didn't seem dated. Some of the ideas did at times, but I suppose the greater distance made that less of a problem.

Just finished "The Road" which I suspect will be looked back on as the most hysterically overpraised novel in years. But time will tell.

Also "Portnoy's Complaint", which I have mysteriously put off reading until now despite being a huge Roth fan. Superb.

Just started Siri Husvedt's "What I Loved". I had some reservations about starting this because I don't care for her husband's novels, and some reviewers seemed to think she would appeal to the same readers as him. A hundred pages in, I am really enjoying it so far.

Simultaneously reading Elizabeth Wilson's "Shostakovich: A Life Remembered", terrific if you're interested in Shostakovich probably of limited interest otherwise, although it is very good on life for artists and their families under Stalin.

Thank You For Arguing, a pop-culture savvy self-improvement through rhetoric thing. And Wimbledon Green.

"Portnoy's Complaint", which I have mysteriously put off reading until now despite being a huge Roth fan. Superb."

agreed.superb, mainly because the hysteric tone of roth's writing and characters fits with the genre (satire).

Over recent days...

PG Wodehouse: Psmith Journalist (great stuff - 'Cozy Moments cannot be muzzled!')
Nick Bertozzi: The Salon (a rather wonderful graphic novel)
Georges Simenon: The Door (pretty minor Simenon)
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature (cool, but I need to reread it to properly get to grips with it all)
Tove Jansson: Fair Play (excellent, and more of her adult stuff needs to be translated into English)

i just bought a huge stack of books, thanks to culling my current bookshelf and getting a large credit at my local second-hand book store. let's see if i can remember all of them:

richard ford - the sportswriter
grace paley - the little disturbances of man (?)
carson mccullers - reflections in a golden eye
- the ballad of the sad cafe
- the member of the wedding
john steinbeck - of mice and men
johy yau - hawaiian cowboys
- collected poems (forgotten the title)
bobbie ann mason - shiloh and other stories
fitzgerald - tender is the night
- the beautiful and the damned
o. henry - the four million
tobias wolf - hunter in the snow (?)

and i've also got celine's 'journey to the end of the night', maggie dubris' 'weep not, my wanton', and a collection of aubrey beardsley's writings - all sitting patiently beside my bed.

"and i've also got celine's 'journey to the end of the night'"

read this one first, if i may suggest

read this one first, if i may suggest

And the Tobias Wolff second.

that's funny... i actually (seriously) happen to be reading those two simultaneously :)

i'm loving both.

Currently library borrows:

Read an academic study on rap by Tricia Ross ("Black Noise" is a great title) - surely one of the first (?) to attempt such a thing (its from the early 90s). Very interesting how there is one chapter dedicated solely to the music, wish she knew the turns that classical took so it wouldn't provide her with such easy negotiations.

Currently finishing a comp of essays on 'world music' from the late 80s (ed. by Simon Firth). There is quite a lot I want to listen to (but will I ever get the time?)

Then I stopped bcz I got David Thomson's 'The Whole Equation'. Finish it tonight and its amazing but also getting prepared for its annoying conclusion, as I imagine it - its the end of cinema as the movies can't give him that communal feel that he had with others when he started going to the movies (just after WWII ended) anymore. Its a gd ol' follow the money history but plenty of judgement, biographical sketches, experiences and so on.

Uhg - somebody please change the title of this thread! I can't stand to look at that shit for the next three months.

Meanwhile - I'm rapidly turning the pages of Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank.

I'm at the beginning of Anthony Trollope's "He Knew He Was Right," which is excellent when I can be bothered to pick it up, despite its fusty classic veneer. Lunchtime reading is Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach," which doesn't contain much not covered in the New Yorker excerpt, as far as I can tell.

I'm in the middle of Andrei Codrescu's The Hole in the Flag, a good, if somewhat too breathless, account of the 89 Romanian Revolution.

Uhg - somebody please change the title of this thread! I can't stand to look at that shit for the next three months.

Start your own, then, and we'll battle for supremacy, or just surrender to my donning skills.

(it's not summer for 2 days yet...) /pedant

Tell Glen Beck.

I just returned two books to the library that I got about halfway through without finishing: Nicol Krauss's The History of Love and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came To The End. The Nicole Krauss book I think I'll recheck out or buy my own copy, the Joshua Ferris I'm not too sure.

What I read of the Ferris book was reasonably amusing but I was put off by his tendency to let wacky windbag characters go on about their obsessions for pages on end.

rereading yet again:

edith hamilton's mythology and gods and myths of northern europe by h.r. ellis davidson

i forgot to add 'desperate characters' by paula fox to that list. and the john yau poetry collection is called 'radiant silhouette'.

N Lee Wood: 'Faraday's Orphans' - good but not great post-apocalypse shenanigans
Jim Thompson: 'Now and On Earth' - his first book, and a rather good one
Roger McGough et al: 'The Mersey Sound' - 'classic' collection of work by 3 Liverpool poets from 1967 - very 1960s, with all the weaknesses you might imagine from that description; interesting for the light it shines on the concerns of that era, not so much for the middling quality of the poems

CALAMITIES OF EXILE: THREE NONFICTION NOVELLAS by Lawrence Weschler: The Breytenbach piece is astoundingly good, so much so that I imagine I'll be preoccupied with the subject's own work for the next month or so.

wouldn't let it keep you up at night not finishing the Josh Ferris book. I mean, I finished it but it never really got good in any unique way.

did anyone read wells tower's On The Show had in the may harpers? I've liked some of his past stuff and want to know if it's worth tracking down...or finding a subscription login i guess...

argh had

Danilo Kis, Encyclopedia of the Dead. As bloody good as anticipated, so far.

Encyclopedia of the Dead is great. I was turned off by it at first because it seemed so Borgesian, but I felt that by the end he'd staked out his own territory. Also check out his Garden, Ashes and books by Bruno Schulz if you haven't already.

During my camping trip last week I read The DaVinci Code. It was a pretty well-crafted suspense/adventure thingie, but after reading it I still have one burning question I cannot get out of my head: wtf kind of a character name is 'Fazu Beche'? I mean, Fazu Beche -- that is just a step too far for me to travel. Other than that, it was further proof, if any were still required, that esoteric symbology is the equivalent of seeing the face of an angel or the figure of a weasel when you look at the shape of clouds or at wallpaper stains in dim light.

Next, I read Beowulf in the Seamus Heaney translation. I liked that quite a bit. He gave it a sort of bouldery texture in the mouth and a punchy narrative drive that I found very satisfying.

After I finished it, I considered diving into Don Quixote, which I would like to read this summer, but I hesitated, since I am still midway through that Russian Revolution tome and didn't want to be midway through two huge books at once. So I read some of D.T. Suzuki's zen essays instead. Nice stuff, if you like that sort of stuff (as I do).

Now that I am back from camping, I think I'll go back and finish the revolution.

The only Fazu I can find is Фазу Алиева, who is from the Dagestan part of southwestern Russia. Beche is most popularly a French last name, perhaps. Весне seems to mean "spring", but of course is pronounced totally unlike "Beche". It could also be related maybe to Беч, which I guess is their way of spelling the Polish town of Biecz?

since last i posted (april? early may?)

between the river and the bridge -- craig ferguson
samuel johnson - selected essays
otis spofford - beverly cleary
eye of the wolf - daniel pennac
king of ireland's son - padraic somethingorother
his dark materials - philip pullma
crack in space - pkd
cosmic puppets - pkd
moby dick - melville (first time, it's really funny!)
moon and sixpence - somerset maugham
great shark hunt - hst

Judith Butler - Gender Trouble. (I'm having a very hard time reading this. Me not so smrat.)

maybe you need to look at an english translation ;-)

Also check out his Garden, Ashes and books by Bruno Schulz if you haven't already.

I loved 'Garden, Ashes' along with several of his others, and am fast becoming a gigantic Kis fan. But have not tried Bruno Schulz - thanks for the tip!

When did this thread get taken over by the Kis Army?

Three posts by two people is hardly 'taken over'.

I'm 300+ pages into Don Quixote and am not particularly looking forward to the rest. Paradise Lost, on the other hand, is nothing less than magnificent. I can't imagine any film adaptation doing justice to the work. Just finished The House at Pooh Corner with a tear or two (or three) in my eyes. Milne's Eeyore is so much more deliciously sarcastic and withering than the plain ol' gloomy Disney version. What fun. Kokoro by Natsume Soseki has thrown me for a quite a loop and I must now figure out how a story presented in such a seemingly simple, measured fashion holds such resonance.

Just started Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. "The Glass Coffin" was a bit underwhelming 'till near the end but "Gode's Story" was terrifying. *shudder*

Sorry, franny, I just wanted to make that Kis Army joke. Just a bit of fun, let's be cool.

Maybe I should just have posted an image of that coffee shop boot.

http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/5905/kisarmynj1.jpg

How far are you into Paradise Lost? I really liked it a lot yet didn't get much past Book 4.

Okay, now I feel stupid. I still don't think I get it, but at least I'm aware that there *was* a joke. As you were.

i hate, hate, hate reading milton. i can't wait for the movie to come out; then i'll know how the book ends.

today i bought:
marlene dietrich - higham
buddenbrooks - mann
Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay - wranovics
dr. futurity - pkd
his master's voice - lem

i am looking for a good (comprehensive) social history of hollywood in the '30s and '40s with an emphasis on anecdotes, gossip, and crime. it's for research purposes, so density doesn't matter -- suggestions?

Beckett's stuff was more Gallic than Gaelic, wunnit? And Joyce, in the end, just patted together polyglot mudpies to serve at his imaginary tea party. How sad. How very sad. [removes his cap and bows head in a dejected, hangdog manner]

Tom Drury: 'The End of Vandalism'
Celia Fremlin: 'The Hours Before Dawn'

I can't believe you're trying to make mudpie tea parties sound sad! And polyglot ones, at that.

The sadness of such tea parties is not only real, but it can be substantially enhanced by costuming all the participants as sad clowns, dressed as hobos, with drooping flowers in their battered hats. This has been proved by science.

I finished <i>The Exception</i> by Christian Jungersen last night. I may read some essays in <i>Reporting</i> by David Remnick before starting <i>Fortress of Solitude</i>. Before that I read Carl Bernstein's biography of Hillary Clinton.

Sad clowns, mudpies, imaginary tea party - giving me flashbacks to the creepy scene in Con Air

Captain James Cook: The Journals
Alan Weissman: The World Without Us

Swapping backwards and forwards between these two, both excellent. From the Cook I learned to my surprise that Australia does seem to be named after Austria--the explorer Pedro Fernandez De Quirós, in 1605, reached Vanuatu and thought he;d discovered the mythical Great Sothern Continent, and named it La Austrialia del Espíritu Santo after King Phillip III, Duke of Austria. So all those annoying Americans who can't tell Austria from Australia do at least have etymology on their side.

The Weissman is very interesting. The blurb says...

"On the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house – or houses, that is. Cleans them right off the face of the earth. They all go."

How would the world change if human beings vanished from the earth right now, for good? What would the planet be like in a day, a week, a month… a millennium? In the current age of anxiety about our impact on the earth’s climate and environment, this groundbreaking book offers an intriguing glimpse of what the real legacy of our time on the planet may be.

The World Without Us takes readers on a journey into the future, to a world without humans and asks how the natural world would respond if we all simply disappeared. Would the planet’s climate ever recover from the effects of human activity? How would nature destroy our huge cities? Could it ever reduce our myriad plastics and toxic synthetics back to benign, basic elements? And what about architecture and art? Will we have left any enduring mark on the universe; any sign that we were once here?

To discover the answers, Alan Weisman looks to areas of the world that are currently unoccupied to see how they have fared without us. He reveals how animals would react to our disappearance and how the planet’s flora would be affected, and uncovers just how long our greatest achievements and our biggest mistakes would last after we are gone. In doing so he wrestles with some of the key concerns of our time and reveals a picture of the future that is both captivating and terrifying.

I'm trying to squeeze in a few more books-for-fun before classes start again in September.

In the past few weeks I've finished
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (of course)
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill - pretty good first novel from Stephen King's son
Blaze by Richard Bachman - enjoyable book from King/Bachman's earlier writing days (although apparently re-written from whatever form he found the manuscript in)

Just started Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams by Alfred Lubrano

Still trying to get into Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs

Still meandering through Best Food Writing 2006

Aimless is no longer invited to my imaginary hobo tea parties. Me and Beckett and Emmett Kelly and Bizarro-Churchill will have "fun" without him.

Kathy Acker - Kathy Goes to Haiti
Richard Yates - 11 Kinds of Loneliness
Richard Yates - Revolutionary Road

I wish I had listened to Yates recommendations earlier!

Just finished a library book I checked out. It's full title is Feeding the Fire: The Lost History and Uncertain Future of Mankind's Energy Addiction. It had a few interesting tidbits, but on the whole it was woefully simplistic and underthought. My recommendation would be, don't bother yourself with it.

Apart from that I have been reading poetry. For a lark I started reading Stevie Smith side by side with Emily Dickinson. They both seem to have very a similar sense of poetic language, but in the service of rather different sensibilities.

Emily tires me out with all her sighing and pining away, and I think she must have tired herself, too, up there all alone in her room. Stevie was also reclusive and death-obsessed, but usually she seems in a better humor about the world and much healthier overall. If I weren't so tired myself, I would go post some representative poems on the poetry thread. They make an interesting contrast.

Updike - Rabbit Run

I'm not thrilled with the first 50 pages or so. I find the prose jerky and the dialogue unconvincing.

read it backwards from "rabbit in rest" to "run".

Is skully a real game?

I'm reading Consider the Lobster, but I might take a break and read that new Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach) 'cause someone lent it to me.

youn: skully is a real game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skully_%28game%29

I've just started on Don Delillo's "Falling Man". I was a bit put off that he did a 911 novel, but it's very good so far.

Thank you. I forget that you can Google everything. In gratitude: "Football was an arrangement of failures, a proving how unlikely most things were."

ok, I'm warming to the Updike

DH Lawrence: The Tresspasser - despite some reservations when I first started reading Lawrence (and Lady Chatterley is still dull), I'm actually enjoying him more and more. But he makes everything so explicit, and not in the way you'd normally mean with Lawrence. It's just that every thought, every subtle observation, every moment, is so thoroughly described that there's no room for the reader to add to it (if that makes sense). He's no follower of "show, don't tell".

Alan Garner: The Stone Book Quartet - wow, now this is the stuff!

W S Maugham: The Moon and Sixpence - fun, not terribly deep

My Recent Reading:

The Lost Estate - Henri Alain-Fournier
If On a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
Comfort of Strangers - Ian McEwan
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke
Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Giving Tree - Shel Silverstein

The first chapter of the Calvino is the best thing i've ever read although it is slightly creepy and i'm convinced that The Little Prince and The Giving Tree are the best children's books ever. I've got about eight other books to get through but i start my english degree in a couple of weeks and i don't think i'll get through them. Has anyone seen the film of Comfort of Strangers?

Rudolph Wurlitzer - Quake
George Konrad - The Case Worker

On my most recent hike I took a copy of Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars and read Julius, Augustus, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. I had read it first back in college and loved it then. In no other book can you find such lovely tidbits as (paraphrased):

"In the first years of his reign, Domitian would spend several hours each day closeted in a room by himself, catching flies, which he would then execute using a small pin that was razor sharp."

Hahaha! The Twelve Caesars is the perfect airplane book, imo - fascinating, absurd, literate, just enough actual history, and low commitment. And if I recall, some of the final caesars were dull enough to lull a person right to sleep.

I'm reading Miranda July's new collection. Is it just me or do her narrators all come across as wise, worldly five year olds? It's starting to bother me.

I'm now reading V.S. Naipul's Beyond Belief, his sequel to Among the Believers. It tells the stories of many Muslims he met and interviewed from four non-Arab Islamic countries: Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia.

Taken purely as reportage, it is fairly interesting, but it doesn't seem to rise very far above reportage. IOW, I haven't yet been able to detect any larger threads of continuity that run through the stories of the people he interviewed, aside from the obvious one of their Islamic beliefs - which sort of belies the title of the book. By the end these common threads may become more obvious than they are at the 1/3 mark I've reached in the book. At least he writes well.

Miranda July comes across as a wise, worldly, preachy five year old.

visual bookshelf has killed me for this thread : (

I'm reading Miranda July's new collection. Is it just me or do her narrators all come across as wise, worldly five year olds? It's starting to bother me

I wanted to like that book more than I did. Some of the stories were very good, but it didn't quite have the greatness promised by the inventive ad funny website (of all things).

I have recently read...
Hari Kunzru: My Revolutions
Elizabeth Jolley: The Well
Deborah Eisenberg: The Stories (So Far) of...

I wish Visual Bookshelf had dates! I can sort of triangulate based on my LT dates and figure out about when I read the things I don't own, though.

it files them in order added, i thought.

anyway i just looked at it to check which of the pile of books by my bed i was actually reading. oh dear.

I am finished with the Naipul book. I read the first 400 pages and elided the last 40, which is not a thing I normally do.

Last night I took a swing at Don Delillo's Mao II, but failed to make solid contact and grounded out. It goes back to the public library. It seemed to be written to conform to a thesis about crowds taking over society. Since crowds do not read, I wonder who he was writing for?

After laying aside DeLillo, I took up Joan Didion's Where I Came From, but only had time to make a bare beginning. I have, as yet, no idea where she came from or where she thinks she is going.

I finished James Burke's Lost Get-Back Boogie last week and started on Paul Clemen's memoir Made in Detroit. I think Christopher Hitchen's God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is up next. It's mostly rant, according to Mr. Jaq, so should go fairly quickly. All the books we own are now packed up in boxes! (except for 5 or 6 Mr. Jaq might've been reading so I left them out.)

Off sick for a week, so reads heaps of stuff (yay!). Most recently, finished 'Hindoo Holiday' by Ackerley, and am now reading the new Edmund White ('Hotel de Dream'), which is about Stephen Crane plus added the-usual-White-gay-sex shenanigans.

You're moving AGAIN, Jaq?

oh yes. Next Monday. We get the keys today. It's a loft space across from Elliott Bay Books, and has a great kitchen.

Small correction: it's Where I Was From, and not Where I Came From.

Jaq, a great kitchen and a great bookstore across the street? You must think you've died and gone to heaven, provided that heaven has an unusual number of packing cartons in every room.

Heh :) If the place had a view of the water (or anything really - the windows are on the alley), it would be beyond my wildest dreams. It used to be a gallery (it's a live/work space) - we are plotting some similar possibilities, once we get all our stuff in there. And you Portland people, it is right near the train station, so come visit!

I'm reading Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites - it's more of a collection of shorter pieces that originally appeared separately in various magazines than a coherent, book-length argument, and some of the pieces are more interesting than others - but there are some thought-provoking ideas in here that remain timely.

I finished Where I Was From last night. IT was a quick and easy read, but I am beginning to think that Ms. Didion is not an authorial voice I desire to spend time with.

Her style has its merits. It has sufficient precision and her word sense avoids the kind of extravagence that makes people weary, like the extravagence of gesture of mimes.

But from time to time, she grates on me, often by being falsely portentious. The effect on me as a reader is similar to being abruptly shoved over what Didion thinks is an emotional cliff edge, designed to elicit a taut moment of vertiginous reaction, but it turns out to be just the far side of a dune, where I stumble, get sand on my hands and knees and wonder why she was so rude.

Reading Comics
Felix Feneon - Novels in Three Lines

Oooh, I'm envious--I had that Fenon on order at my local bookshop, but they cancelled the order for some reason. and now I have to wait until they can get a new order in for me (possible translation: my order came in but someone working in the shop liked the book enough to buy it themselves before I could get it)

LOW LIFE by Luc Sante
Lists and lists of ridiculous-and-now-quaint names attached to various unpleasant folks. Plus: sailors revealed to be easy marks in ye olde New York. Fun stuff.

THE ONGOING MOMENT by Geoff Dyer
Overview of any number of tenuous/non-existent connections between photographs/photographers, filtered through Dyer's lovely prose-style. Features my favorite Whitman lines towards the end.

MEGILLAT ESTHER by J.T. Waldman
Gorgeous comic-bookization of The Book Of Esther. You could get drunk off it by merely staring. Featuring an introduction by a rabbi!

Just for the sake of simple pleasure, I read Thousand-Mile Summer by Colin Fletcher - a classic hiking book from 1964.

Now I am working on two books:

Byrne, by Anthony Burgess, and The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh, by David Damrosch. (By next decade I expect to see a book whose subtitles require four or five intakes of breath to read aloud.)

Byrne shows off Burgess's wit, style and erudition to good effect. It's a narrative poem written in the stanza and meter of Lord Byron's Don Juan or Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. It isn't quite so good as either of those, but is good enough. The plot moves along, but the real action is watching the nimble footwork of the poet as he satisfies the need to constantly pull rhymes out of his arse.

I'm not far enough along in the other book to say anything pertinent, yet. It promises fair.

That Felix Feneon book has been calling to me for a long time, but so far I haven't responded to the siren song.

I recommed checking it out from the library or even just flipping through it in the bookstore. The pieces certainly are astonishingly economical and impressive, which is the pitch I guess, but after flipping through it the day I bought it, I haven't felt the need to pick it up again. It's not the kind of I book I think you need to spend a whole lot of time with.

About 85 pages into <i>A Frolic of His Own</i>. It's my one allotted Gaddis for the year - any more than that and my brain will explode.

It's awesome, of course.

Yes, the Feneon I'm reading in bits and pieces, now that I've got it. It's a bleak kind of fun. Mr Baez might like to note that it's translated and introduced by Luc Sante.

HE CAN'T - HE'S OUT OF THE LOOP ON A GREAT MANY THINGS AND WAS UNAWARE OF THIS BIT OF INFO. WILL OUR BELEAGUERED PROTAGONIST EVER ACHIEVE THE COSMIC AWARENESS THE DEITIES FORETOLD UPON HIS BIRTH???

Otherwise - thanks!

Now I am reading Arabella Edge's "The Company", a historical novel. It is the 17th century and some people are heading off on a Dutch East India Company ship to Java. No doubt the voyage will prove uneventful and they will arrive and build successful careers for themselves.