Winter 2007-8 - what are you reading ?!

Past week:
Italo Calvino - Why Read the Classics? (essays on literature, of rather varying interest to me, but generally quite good. I'm a bit disappointed that there's so much overlap with the collection "The Literature Machine") Shame most of the essays are so short, as the longer ones tend to be the best
David Lodge - Therapy (It's been nearly ten years since I last read Lodge, when I read and very much so enjoyed _Nice Work_. This too was an entertaining read, though not quite as funny. Does anyone have any tips on what else of his is worth picking up? I do own a copy of _How Far Can You Go?_, so that will be next no matter what)
James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson (Abridged Penguin paperback. I enjoyed this a great deal and will probably pick up the full thing some day. I can imagine it being a good book that one would dip into frequently for a long time after reading it through. Perhaps I should go read some of Johnson's work first, however. I read very few biographies, so I feel a bit odd to have read one about an author whose works I'm completely unfamiliar with.)

Now:
Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theater (Good lord!)

David Lodge fan thread

TS David Lodge vs. David Dodge

Thanks, looks like I can't go too wrong with Lodge then.

The only possible way to judge the winner of the great Dodge-Lodge war is by the covers.
So.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/84/Plundersun.jpg
VS
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n16/n82083.jpg

Well, Dodge has a packmule and a one-eyed goth-trannie; Lodge has a tilde-spewing factory and a cricket bat-shaped woman. Really, Lodge had no chance here, poor fellow.

Started Rilke's Book of Hours this morning - I bought it ages ago but never did more than dip into it. Reading it right through from the beginning is proving far more rewarding, but the hippy-dippy translators (one has "mystic" listed under her credentials) are pissing me off. When the notes casually mention "We ommitted four lines from the beginning of this stanza" with no further explanation, you can bet I'm taking their 'interpretation' with a grain of salt.

http://www.david-dodge.com/images/gato.jpg
vs.
http://www.agoravox.fr/IMG/veritnu2.jpg

Surly but cute cat eyeing exotic skull necklace vs. pale Sanka-drinking shoulder-tatooed animated statue goddess, modestly deployed within a changing screen in the shape of a book- a tie, I'd say.

I'll go with the cat every time.

I don't know who these people are. I really like the green on the one book but I'd never pick it up to read.

What am I reading. A few things. Starting in on Plautus, Captivi. Already far better than Vergil.

Just finished Not-Knowing, the D. Barthelme essay/interview collection, and am now re-reading much of Sixty Stories.

i'm reading a collection of 4 ivy compton-burnett novels at work (starts with a family and a fortune), and at home i'm reading a william trevor short story collection. good writing. good escapism. in both cases. and that's all i'm looking for right now.

http://www.libertyassociates.com/pages/images/TreeOfSmoke.gif

Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch just arrived in the mail and I am stoked for it. His earliest let's-hang-antlers-on-the-fire-hydrants experiments not so much, but once he got his feet under him he's a treat.

I put down Dog Soldiers after one hundred pages or so b/c it was too unremittingly sordid and bleak for the winter depression I was in, but I restarted it, am almost done, and man the second half is awesome.

L'élégance du hérisson - Muriel Barbery

hey everyone
A.J. Liebling, The Sweet Science and Between Meals
Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris and At Large and At Small
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Other Ball
John Crowley, Little, Big
Michael Thomas, Man Gone Down
Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up
Robert O'Brien, Z for Zachariah

too many, not finishing most of them. also recently bought Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital which is like 3000 pages long in paper. ugh.

Cheers, Scott, for the Compton-Burnett collection. I've never understood how she fell out of favour with the literary/academic world.

I just started The Virgin of Flames by Chris Abani today. Reading Desire and Its Shadow by Ana Clavel for LibraryThing's Early Review programme, and am still in the middle of Patrick McGuiness' Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre.

lehane - gone baby gone
thomas - deluxe

Brian Aldiss: A Science Fiction Omnibus (mostly great)
Saul Bellow: It All Adds Up (collected essays, surprisingly a bit dull)
Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (he was a wonderful, loyal, generous friend and an unfaithful, lying, self-absorbed lover, basically--also a great writer)
Stefan Zweig: The Burning Secret & Other Stories

Still reading The Great Mortality by John Kelly - a pretty interesting survey of the Black Death, esp. if you have any interest in medieval history.

Quick review of Argonautika of Apollonius Rhodius: it succeeds in meeting most all of the standard criteria for greek epics -- as well it should, since Apollonuius took Homer for his model and aped him strenuously. It has the whole apparatus, from Homeric similes to divine sponsors who underwrite the heroes. The poetry is more or less up to the mark for narrative poetry.

Argonautika's biggest problem is that Apollonius wasn't nearly as gifted a storyteller as Homer. The pacing is all awry. Unimportant scenes occupy too much space, and several important bits get the cursory treatment. Homer's pacing sometimes seems a bit odd, but on the whole it is very much otm. Argonautika seems too concerned with outflanking the critics and pedants and not concerned enough with the delighting an ordinary audience.

I just started the Bros. Karamazov (P&V transl.). What fun!!

i read Karamazov some monthes ago and it made me realize,again,that although Dostoevski was a genius thinker,he was less than that as a writer,and i prefer other classic russians (and others) upon him.
at least on this particular point,Nabokov was right imo.

though,of course,it is still a must read.

I've started Arsenals of Folly by Richard Rhodes, the guy who wrote The Making of the Atomic Bomb. This one's about the arms race. Not incindentally, it dishes the dirt on Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's unholy beginnings in the upper reaches of government and the harm they have done at every stop along the way.

Kenneth Koch pursued a friend of mine in college. He wasn't the only prof who did tho.

I am reading:
Robert Sullivan, Cross Country
Carl Bernstein, A Woman In Charge
Joseph Rykwert, The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City

Borges - Historia universal de la infamia.
Cortázar - Rayuela.

About to start the new Junot Diaz and Chomsky's At War with Asia

I was looking around for a new book on my shelves and wasn't interested in a couple things on my list, so I started reading PKD's Valis. Tonight I might try to find some Peter de Vries or something at a used bookstore.

Finished Ha Jin's Waiting, found it disheartening, though an interesting light on living in a repressive society. The homophobia in the novels by Chinese authors I've read recently (Ha Jin, Dai Sijie) makes me not want to read any others. Ripped through Making Money (Terry Pratchett) on Saturday/Sunday and leaped from there to Karen Armstrong's The Bible, which has an excellent, approachable history of the early tribes of Israel in the initial chapters.

Finished the Black Death book on Friday. It was not as good as Bishop's The Middle Ages by a long stretch - the structural scheme was too static and not conducive to narrative motion - but it contained enough interesting details about the period to keep me going.

Over the weekend, I read some shorter selections from a Lester Bangs anthology and from the Selected Essays of Samuel Johnson.

Brothers Grimm: Fairy Tales (original, unexpurgated versions - dipping into this)
Black Lizard Big Book of Pulp (also dipping)
Georges Simenon: The Window Over the Way
Rupert Brooke: Letters from America

Black Lizard Big Book of Pulp
There will be a reading of this at the Mysterious Bookshop in January, featuring some special guests- Pelecanos for lovebug, Geoffrey O'Brien for me.

It's a fun book. Lots of (thrilling) trash, and some genuine gems.

Over the last few days...
Eileen Chang: Lust, Caution
Imre Kertesz: Liquidation
Posy Simmonds: Tamara Drewe

I read Megan Abbott's Queenpin in a few hours and was blown away by its cool/hot noir stylings.

that sounds like i wouldn't hate it!

Maybe you guys should swap books at the next Digt0wn Strutters Ball.

haha

I keep seeing some Megan Abbott-edited anthology in the mystery bookstores and regular bookstores around town.

To Catch a Thief was on Turner Classic Movies last week. Nice Work was nowhere to be seen.

So, RIP Julien Gracq. I own two of his books, one in English, and one in French, but I got them somewhat randomly and I've never read either of them. Perhaps I should give them a try?

a review of some book by Gracq, written by some doofus: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/books/reviews/6756/reading-writing-by-julien-gracq/

Ha. While I was waiting for the link to load, I correctly surmised who the doofus was going to be.

Anyway, answer to the original question: Lawrence Block, various titles.

Sontag - On Photography
Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex
Foucault - The Archaeology of History
Doris Lessing - The Grass is Singing
Walter Benjamin - Illuminations.

Also going to reread Amy Hempel collected short stories.

My big project is to read Benjamin's Arcades Project

berlin,alexanderplz - doblin.(a bit dated but still awesome)

The Time of the Doves - merce rodoreda (
"The most beautiful novel published in Spain since the Civil War."—Gabriel García Márquez.OTM)

Just started The Barracks Thief (Tobias Wolff) which I bought a few months ago. Fab.

I just finished Trails of a Wilderness Wanderer by Andy Russell. I thought it was nicely done. A lot of well-told anecdotes about life on a frontier while he was growing up below the eastern slope of the Canadian Rockies in Alberta. The anecdotes centered on horses, trapping, fishing, hunting and cattle ranching. Because this was written in 1970, it also contained several pointed comments about environmental destruction and degradation, too.

I have only just begun reading Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. It promises to be good satirical fun.

Reading *What Was Literature - Class Culture & Mass Society* by Leslie Fiedler. Fiedler coming to grips with his past rockism. This book came out in the early 80's, and with every page I read, I can't help but see the looming interweb 'round every corner. Makes the whole book kind of quaint.

Finished Vile Bodies. It was good satirical fun.

I am now wading slowly into the first few pages of the book my wife gave me for Christmas. It is The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place, by Ian Baker.

It is a non-fiction book combining exploration of the extremely remote Tsangpo Gorges of Tibet with a large dose of Tibetan buddhism woven into it, since the author has spent twenty years in Kathmandu, is a practising buddhist, and made the explorations in search of certain spiritual places described in sacred texts. At 440 pp. it may take me a while.

I picked up Swann's Way at the library yesterday because I felt like I needed a big, dense difficult book and didn't feel ready for another Gaddis. I am a little scared.

shit!

I stalled out on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon at about 280pp. Then I wandered off and re-read some other stuff. I haven't wandered back, yet.

I found Ms. West to be a capable guide, well-informed, deeply interested in her subject, able to weave together diverse facts and observations into a reasonably fluid narrative, considering she throws in a vast amount of heterogenous stuff. But she doesn't know where to stop. Witness: 1150pp.

Also, everything, I do mean everything, is grist for her mill and everything is laden with meaning, and everythingis sodden with history, and everything is noble and tragic, and... well, it was a nice book to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

I'm reading Lytle Shaw's book on Frank O'Hara, the Poetics of Coterie, which is so far pretty amazing, mostly because I've failed to write any of the literature on this topic and it's totally central to my own poetics.

Also bpNichols and Steve McCaffery's Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine, the collected papers of the Toronto Research Group, which I'm also digging.

And a bunch more.

Last night I latched onto Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh. I am now reading it. I have no idea where he's going with this one.

If your interest in Rebecca West hasn't been killed off, a more manageable book in size terms is her one on treachery and (if memory serves me correctly) war crimes called 'The Meaning of Treason'. It's about 300p.

I got Beginner's Greek the other day and I am going to start it on or before my flight on Tuesday.

Greek is hella wonderful stuff. Have fun.

It is, but it is a smidge tricksy. Oh Greek verbs, why must you be so irregular?

youn, the NYT review of Beginner's Greek made it sound like perfect airplane reading - it's on my library list with 300+ people in line in front of me.

Been reading plays by Sophocles and Aristophanes (not liking him so much, I have to say) from the library (those Loeb classical editions where the left-hand page is all in the Greek).

Finished Ovid's 'Metamorphosis' as well.

Time has mostly reduced Aristophanes to an artifact and a curiosity. Most of the jokes rest on obscure references that can only sometimes be deduced from the context. The more you are steeped in obscure Athenian lore, the funnier he gets. This cuts down considerably on the hahas for anyone who doesn't seeks a PhD in classics.

He is a fabulous source for peeking deeper into the Athenian culture and mindset, though.

i'm desperately awaiting the arrival of 'denial of death' by ernest becker.

Time has mostly reduced Aristophanes to an artifact and a curiosity. Most of the jokes rest on obscure references that can only sometimes be deduced from the context. The more you are steeped in obscure Athenian lore, the funnier he gets. This cuts down considerably on the hahas for anyone who doesn't seeks a PhD in classics.

I'll probably never be able to read Aristophanes on this level, but it's always fun when you gain enough historical insight into a comedy from another era to realize that no, people weren't actually less funny back then.

Rorty: Truth & Progress

actually not scintillating, but more scintillating than most philosophy

Might give that one a go, I'm quite keen on pragmatic (small p, not so sure about big P) philosophy.

Its always work when appreciating the finer points. With comedy there are certain strands of it that need no work at all, thinking of something like "Phil Silvers Show" here.

Chaplin, otoh...

This week, taking a short break from the classics - read Duras splicing time and event in "The Lover" (just like in her script for "Hiroshima Mon Amour"). I could do with reading 3 or more bks from her right now. "The Lover" is too short, scarily neat at describing the emotional mess.

Finishing Alain Robbe-Grillet "Topology of a Phantom City". He really loves his angles doesn't he? Cubist sci-fi, maybe?

It looks like this between-term break is devoted to poetry. I'm reading through the new Jackson Mac Low selected, which obviously is very nice.

The Stephen Dunn poem in the New Yorker(!)

More poetry recommendations please.

The McCaffery/Rasula anthology "Imagining Language" is great. I am on a big Steve McCaffery kick after he read here a few weeks ago.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n07/letters.html#letter15

actually I have, and have read most of, Burt's study the Forms of Youth.

acrually never mind that link: I think this is the one that JtN once told me would yield the greatest ongoing poetry criticism of the author's generation:
http://www.accommodatingly.com/?cat=7

maybe this is good too? or maybe not:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/

Harriet is better than you'd expect from the Popo Foundation!

This made me not want to read Creeley, though.

Which, you know, maybe I don't want to, actually! I'm never sure.

Andrew O'Hagan "Be Near Me" - it's really terrible, almost as bad as Ishiguro. i think this exchange is the last straw:

"Aye, shut up Cammy" said Lisa "He's always dropping science about shit he knows nothing about. He does it in Modern Studies as well. Like, 'i love foreigners'"

"Stop Xeroxing me bitch" said Mark.

it's not the first time i cringed (only 40 pages in) but it is the last - i have set it down for good following that.

Yes. That exchange is decidedly cringeworthy.

so i finished beginner's greek in one go on the flight from hartford to newark and then on the john wayne, and it was very pleasurable. i could only imagine the ilxor smirks in the description of arthur beeche's party and the style scoring system (ah, when one's life is choreographed, by the age of 25 or 27, one should have accomplished something) associated with the description of the guests, but otherwise, i wouldd like to think they would have been indulgent. apparently there is a poem.

I finished Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake. It picked up a bit of steam in the second half, as it also morphed into more of a conventional adventure story (not a bad thing in my book). Now I'm reading Wall Street: Men and Money by Martin Mayer (perhaps the un-PC title reveals that it was written in the 1950s), which is a somewhat outdated, but nonetheless colorful and informative look at Wall Street in a rather different period of its history.

so Beginner's Greek is not actually a guide to the language, Greek?

I agree about Burt on Creeley: he fails to make him sound at all appealing. Odd how often with even good critics (like Burt) on poetry, you can see them struggling to make something sound good and interesting, and not really succeeding.

reading a Randall Jarrell essay on Romanticism --> Modernism.

the other day: Kundera, The Art of the Novel: readable, but arrogant and often unconvincing.

yesterday: FR Leavis, The Common Pursuit. His reply to Wellek, 'Criticism & Philosophy', is quite stimulating; and I was surprised to find out how much he disliked late Henry James.

Re-read: Gary Indiana's essay on Pasolini's 'Salo'. V otm on the film (while it might make certain points/have insights, it has some really crude, idiotic moments). I was thinking how I really dislike that this is the movie of Pasolini's that might get screened (its too notorius) while I never get to see 'Medea' or 'Oedipus Rex'.

Finished: Calvino's 'The Literature Machine', a set of critical essays -- noted about 5 gd recommendations.

Finishing: E.P.Thomposon's essays on Coleridge, Wordsworth and Thelwall ('The Rommantics'), w/Hazlitt as the elephant in the room.

Starting: William Empson on Shakespeare.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

Pretty fun, actually. The British 'Catcher in the Rye'? Ehh, I'll let you know.

no, it is not 'catcher in the rye' – it is much more kind-hearted and interesting

it's not much like The Catcher in the Rye - which is set over a very brief period, and has very little reference to school, and concerns a slightly older boy (among other differences).

rereading Pat Barker! also: read Brenton's The Romans In Britain - complex! powerful, I think!

Beginner's Greek is about romance but not about love. It is not about the Greek language, ancient or modern.

Walter Benjamin: One Way Street

BlackSwanGreen was actually pretty good, and I plan on reading 'Cloud Atlas' pretty soon, as that is well regarded. However, I am now reading Russell Brand's 'My Booky Wook', which will probably take at least a few days. Yes, it's not very literary and more a string of anecdotes, but it is funny and has occasionally clever wordplay and images akin to a nasty and transgressive wodehouse novel.

Done with Bukowski (for the book club tonight). It was better than I expected, at least until the main character grows up and it gets into the "I am a writer, therefore I drink, fuck, and fight" territory that I expected.

No idea what to read next! But at least my reader's block is over, I want to dig into something.

Maybe some David Mitchell would be good. I've only read Ghostwritten, but I loved it.

'My Booky Wook' ghosted by music/comedy journo Ben Thompson - can't see a thread about him. I remember liking one of his books, Ways of Hearing, probably (but maybe 7 Years of plenty); not a fan of Brand, and title makes me want to burn book & any bookshop containing it, but that made me think it might actually be okay.
Currently on:
Roughing It, by Mark Twain
Marvell's poems. Haven't in a while, and missed them.

Just finished Go Down, Moses for class; SO good, but hectically rushing through it to make a deadline means I know I'm missing out on some of the best stuff. There are parts when I'm being oddly blown away and at the same time am not quite sure what's even happening. I'll have to dig through it again this summer, in the blazing heat (as someone suggested in the Faulkner thread).

Up next: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Foucault's Pendulum .

Roughing It, by Mark Twain

This is great - as comedy, adventure, tall-tale and history.

Started David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. It's good so far but very British, like ILX in 2001 lol.

Alexander Nehamas - Only a Promise of Happiness
Martha Rosler - Decoys and Disruptions
Pierre Hadot - Philosophy as a Way of Life

trying to finish idoru by gibson

In a fit of longing for the hiking season, I've been reading The Last Season, by Eric Blehm. It's a non-fiction about a backcountry ranger in the Sequoia/King's Canyon national park in the California High Sierras who went missing in 1996 while on duty.

The book pretends to be about the dramatic search-and-rescue mission this touched off. In reality, it is a fairly conventional biography with a few chapters about the search interspersed. The ranger was a fairly interesting guy, but in a sort of conventional eco-infatuated way.

The writing is pretty humdrum, too. It's OK I suppose, if you are like me and a backcountry hiker, but it's nothing I would recommend broadly.

The Painted Bird by Kosinski. Such an upper.

I'm reading James Miller's Flowers in the Dustbin - pretty interesting - I like to stop after every chapter and try to download a few samples of the songs he's writing about.

Milton - Paradise Regained
E.P Thompson - 'The Romantics', essays on Coleridge, Thelwall, etc.
Georges Perec - Species of Spaces and other stories, might be the best thing I've read by the guy, but maybe a great piece and collected bits of stuff on one collection appeals more to me than a clinically constrcuted big novel

I'd hardly call any of Perec's novels "clinically" constructed. I mean, that seems to entirely miss the point. But yes, "Species of Spaces" is fantastic and one of the books I keep going back to.

I was thinking of 'Life: A User's Manual', which I read a few years back. Enjoyed it lots at the time...its just a feeling on reflection that many parts of it seem to act as fill in for its scheme.