Summer 2008 - Pray tell, what readest thou?

Just starting Knut Hamsun's Hunger. I also finished a couple of books by Tom Lloyd, which I think I mentioned in the spring thread.

Maggie Gee: The Ice People. Meh-ish.

Knut Hamsun's Hunger

I loved this book, though it's been a while since I read it.

I'm currently reading: "Minimalists" by K. Robert Schwarz, which is part of the Phaidon 20th Century Composers Series and is thus far a very readable and accessible account of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass predominantly and seems informative to me as a relative neophyte.

"Knut Hamsun's Hunger"

awesome book, but imho "growth of the soil" is even better, and Humson's best.

reading now:
the conformist - alberto moravia - kinda dated,and not moravia's best imo ("tht goes to "contempt" but still great.

jakob von gunten - Robert Walser. amazing. sort of a pre-Kafka style writer (Musil saw it before me, i must say), less focused than kafka, but full of great insights about life.

NABOKOV RUSSIAN TO ENGLISH PROJECT - PHASE ONE:

THE DEFENSE - I prefer Scammell's translations to those of Dmitri - the latter tend to be overwritten whilst the former, like the Baby Bear, tend to be just right.

NEXT: INVITATION TO A BEHEADING

I just finished reading this, which was really light and fun: http://www.amazon.com/Stupid-Contagious-Caprice-Crane/dp/0446695726

Now I'm reading the newest David Adams Richards book, as suggested by my housemate. It's pretty good so far - I hope it isn't as depressing as Mercy Among the Children was, though.

Leslie Marmon Silko: Almanac of the Dead. Anything but touchy-feel dream catcher stuff (though you could maybe argue that the portrayal of some elder/medicine women &/or witch types is a touch sentimental). Darkly funny at times.

TH White, The Once and Future King. great so far, but having trouble finding time to really get into it.

Helen Dewitt's Your Name Here
new Sonic Youth Bio

recently finished Paul Verhaeghen's Omega Minor, good stuff if a little heavy/dense for summer

Leslie Marmon Silko's 'Ceremony' was really good, though I think i need to read it again as I felt there were bits that I didn't fully get.

'Hunger' is really good, too, as is the other Hamsun I've read, but I've not yet tackled 'Growth of the Soil'. I remember really enjoying the TV drama 'The Book Group' about the really fucked-up Book Group, where they're reading Hunger and the Swedish girl is complaining about how stupid Norwegians are: 'Why doesn't he just go and get some food? So stupid!"

i loved growth of the soil. and mysteries. and hunger. haven't read him in years though. i'd like to read some of the books i missed. and i really want to read hamsun's book about his travels in america. i've never seen a copy anywhere.

hamsun was one of the writers that henry miller turned me on to when i was a kid. cuzza this book:

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/x2/x10444.jpg

read john cowper powys cuzza that book. and jean giono too. don't know if i ever got to any of miller's beloved blaise cendrars. that book also introduced me to krisnamurti and i am eternally grateful for that. i might not read henry miller books anymore, but i still read K.

Neil Powell "Amis & Son". Very strange book indeed. Powell is an odd mixture of competent biographer and loony tune (and I don't mean that in a good way).

I just started Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach" yesterday.

I read "Saturday" over New Year and didn't really like it at all, finding it horribly overblown and portentous (in the sense of pompous and pretentious), but thus far "On Chesil Beach" seems pretty good and is certainly a nice easy read.

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n52/n264374.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41J2rOsGzHL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet, but I need to get it back from my roommate. Afterwards, probably Zamyatin's We if I manage to get that one back from my roommate too.

I picked up a $1 used copy of a strange military biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. It's pretty interesting. The man was a total nutjob, but as I said, he's interesting.

The man was a total nutjob, but as I said, he's interesting.

Total nutjobs sometimes make for the best biographies.

just finished The Magus John Fowles. i don't know how i really feel about it - on the one hand, it was a certain kind of exciting read, but on the other i feel like it went over my head somewhat (the ending, that is). i just felt deflated. plus, it was a little too wordy for my liking.

now reading The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford. loved Independence Day. this one seems a little bit more... smug? know-it-all? i'm not sure. i'm enjoying it though. it's wordy too, but the more ponderous kind, which i like. but his sentences tend too much on the side of extremely lengthy, which can get kind of annoying.

think i might need to go on a carver spree soon, to counterbalance all this wordiness, since it's been awhile.

i think i also need to get hold of some richard yates very very soon.

'Selected Short Fiction' - Arthur Schnitzler

In other news, I adore saying 'Schnitzler' as much as Hobbes likes saying 'smock'.

just finished a re-read of The Name of the Rose, almost 20 years after my initial reading!

currently on Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt. really like this. a good easy read compared to the Eco but still has a lot of depth and interesting ideas.

In other news, I adore saying 'Schnitzler' as much as Hobbes likes saying 'smock'.

It's a great name, isn't it?. Whenever I read anything by him it still cracks my wife up. Cool name for a dog, I reckon--especially a schanuzer. (But then I'm a guy who has a dog named 'Boswell').

Had a chance to dip into the Collected Writings of Morton Feldman. Otherwise, I've read very little in the last month. Once I get to Toronto though, then, then I will read up a storm! And feel like myself again.

i love that feldman anthology. his writing is unique, to say the least.

It's not a patch on the Collected Writings of Marty Feldman.

PIERROT MON AMI by Raymond Queneau

the magus is deflating. i don't think it's over your head, i just think it descends into a kind of pretentious silliness.

i have finished the stephenson and the wrobleonski. next i will try to read some george pellicanos, because a friend is recommending him.

PIERROT MON AMI by Raymond Queneau
I loved this book but I really don't remember it very well at all. I guess I have to reread it.

The Last of the Menu Girls by Denise Chavez. Really tedious, self-indulgent, sometimes over-written something or other. (And if I had to grow up in southern New Mexico to really get it, maybe it doesn't work so well as literature?) I can't believe they assign this mess to high school kids.

(Started on Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and will probably borrow another novel or two from the library on my way out.)

reading moby dick for the first time. great!
picked up the first vol. of some beckett novels. currently reading 'murphy'. OK so far.

started today:

e.f. benson - an autumn sowing

(supposed to be one of his best. from 1917.)

I was recently reading some ghost stories by the other two Benson brothers (AC and RH)--not bad, but too many en masse were a bit same-ish.

Recently/now: Elmore Leonard "LaBrava"
JP Donleavy "The Saddest Summer of Samuel S"
Christopher Isherwood "Goodbye to Berlin"
Michael Moorcock "The Condition of Muzak"
Mervyn Peake "Mr Pye"

Mishima - Temple of Dawn (finished all four bks on his tetralogy)
Chekhov - The Steppe and other short stories penguin collection

Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman
Truman Capote - In Cold Blood (no 'decline of American dream' pattern here, its pure coincidence)

Solzenitsyn August 1914
Cormac McCarthy All the Pretty Horses
Carson McCullers The Member of the Wedding
Haruki Murakami The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Harold Rosenberg The de definition of Art
Sartre Imagination

See how that goes. It's good for me to have a nice pile and not feel to bound or anything. The world is so full of books. And good ones at that.

Gonna start Gravity's Rainbow tomorrow! Wish me luck everyone! :D

Read "Don't Cry" by Mary Gaitskill, in June double issue of New Yorker. Recently widowed woman goes to Ethiopia with an old friend, to secure an adoption under dubious circumstances (longshot and they get shot at). Removed from familiar shields, must learn new coping skills soonest, it's not Gaitskill's best but damn good.

PIERROT MON AMI by Raymond Queneau
I loved this book but I really don't remember it very well at all. I guess I have to reread it.

I agree with your initial response - semi-farcical slices of life with slivers of a genuine plot buried not too far below. Fun stuff, natch. Now onto EXERCISES IN STYLE or Nabokov's DESPAIR.

Beginner's Greek - light fluffy improbable sweet and funny perfect summer weekend book. Several books on knife skills (to support my new hobby of sharpening knives). Pat Barker's Life Class. Bleak House is being read aloud to me, which I'm happy about now that we are past the incredible tediousness of the first chapter or two.

Finally near the end of *Motherless Brooklyn*; only a dozen or twenty pages to go.

Finished David Rockefeller's Memoirs (pretty long, and decidedly short on juicy details, but it's possible to get a glimpse of interesting events behind the somewhat bland prose). Now started on Houllebecq's Elementary Particles, which looks like it's going to be a bit grim.

Tom Vanderbilt: Survival City--very interesting book about all the (mostly now decaying) structures built to "fight" the Cold War--weapons testing areas, bunkers, fallout shelters, secret headquarters, etc etc. Mostly very good, with only occasional lapses into academic jargon, and lots of cool pictures.

This after not getting very far with Robert Graves' Complete Short Stories. A few semi-precious gems, lots and lots of rough.

GRR, PROSE IS FOR DUMBASSES growls Graves

Daniel Pinchbeck - 2012 - The Return of Quetzelcoatl

I BELIEVE

but at the same time, no more, not after the last 30 pages or so. Crop circles, UFOs? His admiration of Carl Jung is apparent, but he relies on it way too heavily.

Nim Chimpsky. Most of those chimp researchers were such a bunch of shitheads.

jim thompson - roughneck. alleged autobiography, more like his novels boiled down to concentrate.

kingsley amis - one fat englishman. academic satire, funny haha.

vladimir nabokov - pnin. academic satire, russki expat. funny profound. i want to write sentences like his.

vs naipaul - a turn in the south. US travel. just started and am hooked. he's the opposite of nabakov in many respects, his prose is so direct. he nails descriptions w/a single detail and his ideas pierce my brain. genius.

"jim thompson - roughneck"

roughneck and bad boy are his two autobio efforts, but you should check out his first book *now and on earth* which is very cool semi-autobio fiction and one of his only non-genre books. if you haven't read it already, that is.

I loved 'Now and on earth'--I think it was Scott talking about it on another thread that got me to get it. And that Boll sounds well worth getting too. More for the list!

And Pnin is ace.

finally reading some richard yates "eleven kinds of loneliness"; really enjoying it. think i might find one of the novels next.

I loved Pnin - my first Nabokov ever. I finished Lolita a week ago - creepy, but so fantastic to read.

reading trailerpark by russell banks. i dig it. can't believe one of those sundance/indie directors never made it into a movie. or maybe they did.

i might read some mishima next! cuzza that thread. i have a copy of *after the banquet* in the stacks. we'll see. i might chicken out and grab some more kmart and/or dirty realism instead. i'm predictable like that. and parochial like that. and provincial like that. (truth is, i'm wiped out and russell banks is my equivalent of, i dunno, whatever people read at the beach. genre stuff. or in airports. harlan coben? my dad is always pushing james lee burke and dennis lehane and elmore on me and i appreciate it but i never get around to reading them. eventually, i'll get to them. today, someone at the hospital asked me if i had read any styron and i said NO! but i've been meaning to. and then he said that he had never read any john hersey and i said ME NEITHER! i will someday though. and then he said that he was reading youth by joseph conrad and i said I NEED TO READ MORE JOSEPH CONRAD! someday. if i live long enough.)

I might read some Jim Thompson next! Picked up a copy of Pop 1280, and its out of character for me not to drop everything to read any just found Thompson immediately.

Finished: Montaigne - Essays. Where have you been all my life?! I love how he meanders on, his unwillingness to make a central point on anything is a very endearing quality.

Charles Lamb - Essays of Elia. Which I'm thinking of giving up on, its so light and seemingly unsubstantial, or whether its my sudden fit of impatience I can't decide.

night of the gun
the terror (hi ned)
the likeness

Wanna throw my support in for the reading of Pnin - it's very, very ace.

just got raymond carver's poetry collection, 'ultramarine', and am really loving it, more than i expected to.

I've returned from hiking. While out there I finished The Goshawk (already mentioned above), then I read Egil's Saga in the penguin edition. I very much liked it.

I have also just about finished Krakatoa by Simon Winchester, which is quite excursive into many side subjects, such as Dutch colonialism and plate tectonics, but I'd have to give it a solid 'B' for workmanlike delivery of a lot of loosely allied factual material. He doesn't ever succeed in tying it together into a single, seamless story, but it muddles along bravely and is fairly engaging as it is.

Aw, Egilpaws!

A few things since last we met...

Tales from the Vienna Woods - Odon von Horvath : great play from 1931 or 1932, by Austro-Hungarian writer, about a group of connected people in Vienna with the distant rumblings of Nazism

Pharos - Alice Thompson - amazingly inept ghost story novella, with very good first 40 pages, not much good next 60 pages, laughable final 50 pages, full of plot holes, irritating magic realism, anachronistic language, general bullshit

Hothouse- Brian Aldiss - good vintage SF, but could have done with a bit of pruning

The Kraken Wakes - John Wyndham - a re-read, I love it

Reunion - Fred Uhlmann - a lovely little novella, again about rise of Nazism

Just started Danilo Kis's "Garden Ashes". Came to him through Hemon, so far, so good.
Anyone have any other suggestions or thoughts about Kis? I'm new to him.

The Encyclopedia of the Dead is better than "garden ashes" imo

Thanks

August list, so far:

Nova, Tales of Neveryon- Samuel R. Delaney (
Holy Fire- Bruce Sterling
Perdido Street Station- China Mieville
Invisible Cities- Italo Calvino

Dana Johnson: Break Any Woman Down - mostly pretty good shoirt stories, but she must be about the seventh US writer I've read in the last couple of months who is also a teacher of creative writing - I find this depressing, for some reason

Tom Stacey: The Man Who Knew Everything - rather excellent Graham Greene/Eric Ambler-ish (in atmosphere at least) political/journalism novel

Mexico: A Biography of Power by Enrique Krauze.

can't remember if i've already listed this: t.c. boyle's tooth and claw

he's a bit over the top with his descriptions/metaphors etc sometimes, but i really like these short stories; very sort of ordinary people/situations with bizarre and unusual twists. very inventive and surprising.

I've not been reading so much recently, but I did finish Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, which picked up nicely after a slow start. Very enjoyable but not as much as Jane and Prudence -- I'm not sure if it was less good, or if the social milieu it was set in appealed less (it was less sexy, if only in the same way as Mansfield Park is less sexy than Pride and Prejudice) or if the law of diminishing returns has already kicked in with the second Pym novel I've read. I'll be reading more Pym but will take a break first.

I did also finally get round to reading Michael Cunningham's The Hours, which I bought a couple of years ago but put off reading for fear it would oblige me to reread Mrs Dalloway. In the event I needn't have worried - I remembered Woolf well enough to get the parallels. A very strange book: phenomenally difficult to update Woolf and get the tone so beautifully right, but inevitably the reader is will be thinking, that's wonderful but why bother? Cunningham comes very close to a perfect answer: some of the writing is exquisite, and there was a point about a third of the way in when I thought it was going to be the best thing I'd read for a year or two. Ultimately, though, the stories themselves are too slight and portentous, and his view of the world too determinedly over-refined -- pretty much the same faults as one finds in Woolf. But it's a short novel full of lovely and insightful writing and I'd recommend anyone who hasn't read it to give it a try.

Best summary of what's good/bad about 'The Hours' ever.

Had a good day off work yesterday, did fuck-all but read...

Tobias Wolff: Our Story Begins - the man's a genius.
Marcel Proust: Days of Reading - charming essay about being young and spending all your time wrapped up in books
Eddie Campbell: The Amazing Mr Leotard - lightweight but very fun graphic novel
Read bits of Penelope Fitzgerald's Collected Letters - she's one of my favourite writers

Am now reading Emanuel Litvinoff's 'Journey through a small planet' - memoir about growing up in the Jewish East End of London in the 1920s - very well written and fascinating

i want to get that tobias wolff! i emailed him the other day to find out if he's giving any readings in my area: no, but he's doing a 'conversation' in september, when three of his stories are being performed in sf (sadly, i'll be in chicago that weekend).

i cannot find a cheap/fine first edition of his 'in the garden of north american martyrs', but i don't like the other covers, and i want a hardcover!

It (the new Wolff) is amazing. About 110 pages of the 370 pages are new stories, and the rest are (some) of the best of his earlier ones. Really, though, they should have done a huge volume printing everything, like that 1000-page William Trevor story collection.

Now reading Maria Edgeworth's 'The Absentee' - really good.

reading Sylvia by Leonard Michaels. found a nice copy at the dump. now if i could just find a nice copy of his collected stories at the dump...

oh, and i dug After The Banquet by Mishima.

As the summer draws to a close:

Herman Hesse - Steppenwolf.
W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn. Halfway through now and this refusal to make easy, grand points that are just implied could be a strength. I've no idea where any of this is going, if anywhere - it might be the best article ever that will never appear in the Guardian - even then I'm not sure whether its a good thing, but I keep turning the pages.

Partick White - Voss - where was this author hiding all my life? a masterpiece.

Netherland, which is knocking it outta the park. I don't want to reach the last page.

'Netherland' is great, isn't it?
Just read 'Inverted World' by Christopher Priest. Mind-bogglingly great in the best SF way.

Liked 'Netherland' a lot. My only critique would be that it felt over written in certain spots.

Booth Tarkington: Seventeen (pub 1916) - hilarious. Exactly nails what it's like to be a mildly pretentious unworldly 17-year-old with a mad crush on a girl who outside observers realise is a total drip.

i want to read 'housekeeping' so i can read 'gilead', but i want it in the bizarre battered paperback edition i saw in gothenburg that made it look like a mills and boon novel

i am in the middle of over a dozen books again. bugger

h.p. lovecraft, "selected"
p. highsmith, "talented mr. ripley"

I've got Dorothy Richardson's 'Pilgrimage' sequence waiting for me at the library. I don't know much about it, other than it's hard to get a hold of and it's a 13 book series. I wonder if anyone here has read it, and if they could give me a little preview... thanks.

Michael Power: Shadow Game (1972) - banned in Sth Africa at the time, about a white man and a black man falling ion love and secretly living togetehr, with the black guy posing as the white guy's servant. Very good, though spent half the book thinking a female character was a drag queen because Power referred a couple of times to her Adam's apple.

Summer's lease hath all too short a life.

I have been reading a non-fiction book called Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. Basic summer reading material. Shipwreck story from 1857 merged with the modern (1986?) story of searching for the wreck in order to salvage the cargo of gold bullion. Competantly written, with a tendency to goose up the drama a bit for the sake of keeping the reader excited. It's OK.

"i am in the middle of over a dozen books again. bugger"

make it more fun by listing them so we can see your logic ;-)

As for me:

Junichiro Tanizaki - Diary of a Mad Old Man and Some Prefer Nettles
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

mozart's letters
the stars and their courses - james jeans
baudelaire trans francis scarfe
moliere - the misanthrope

damn got to read some solzhenitsyn

Twerski & Henderson: Torts
Joshua Dressler: Criminal Law
Silberman, Stein & Wolf: Civil Procedure
Glannon: Civil Procedure Examples & Explanations
Shapo: Writing & Analysis in the Law

condolences

i'm reading "Filth" by Irvine Welsh; enjoying it.

i'm reading this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51E4QXNQQXL._SL210_.jpg

haven't really gotten into it yet.

now i know via googling that it's now a movie starring this guy:

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0ens9RDawo1zu/340x.jpg

all families are psychotic by douglas coupland. fast, entertaining, light read.

Song of the Wren - H E Bates: short stories
Hit and Run - Lawrence Block
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon

At the national library once again with the urbane librarian. I think my problem is that I find it difficult to devote the conscious deliberate attention to reading his stream of consciousness writing and rather than go with the flow, if one is meant to, I feel I must back track and try to figure things out. Sometimes I just have trouble remembering familiar sounding names... It's almost hopeless, but I feel I can read no other book, until I finish.

That chapter is unusually hard - not, I think, because of stream-of-consciousness material, mainly just cos Stephen D's superbly eloquent discourse, which dominates the episode, is very very hard to understand as a coherent argument.

I find almost all the other chapters save perhaps 3, 14, 15, maybe 18 easier to read than 9.