Fall 2008 is on it's way so please be kind to tell us what you read

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda

supposed to be the italian equivalent to joyce/Proust, admired by Moravia,Pasolini and Calvino among others, and it's a detective story.
so far so good.

Mary Shelley: The Pilgrims - short story collection
Justin Cartwright: In a Secret Garden - love letter to Oxford
Charles Stross: Halting State - cunning near-future science-fiction IT thriller, very clever but with some stylistic annoyances
Wallace Stegner: Unheard Laughter - not bad, felt sort of like a remix of 'Ethan Frome'

I've been working the non-fiction side of the street.

I recently finished Fermat's Enigma, by Simon Singh, covering the history of Fermat's Last Theorem up to and including the proof of this theorem that was constructed in the mid-90s by Andrew Wiles (mainly). In this book I discovered the importance of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture (now proved at the same time as Fermat's conjecture).

The last several nights I've been reading Body of Secrets, a book about the NSA spy agency. It spends a huge amount of time rehashing the Cold War, so I've taken to skipping ahead somewhat. The craziest thing I've encountered in this book is a description of Operation Northwoods, a scheme to start a war with Cuba, by having the U.S. government kill Americans, blow up buildings, commit acts of terror and frame the Cubans for these atrocities, so the U.S. could invade and occupy Cuba.

Who would come up with such an outrageous (even treasonous) plan? The fucking Joint Chiefs of Staff, that's who. This was circa 1962. The author claimed to have the classified documents to prove this. I believe him.

The Strings are False - Louis MacNeice's (scrappy, unfinished) autobiography. So good. Sharp, clear prose (and able to break into a great image) and a fine watcher. Willing to come across badly - irresponsible, a snob at points, detached, egotistical - but very winning; same wordly attention and acuity as his poems.

Matt Taibbi: The Great Derangement - very funny, enraging, somewhat ethically dubious

That MacNiece autobiography sounds like something I should grab a copy of and read.

Body of Secrets

I enjoyed this.

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda

This has been on my wishlist for some time. Please let us know what you think when you're done, Zeno.

I'm reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls which is an interesting story but so far not the most engaging book. I'm reading it because a friend lent it to me and I feel obligated to do so. Next up is Tobias Wolff's latest collection (woo!).

http://media.tumblr.com/UmgbcxYFvdsr39otp98eT0Nlo1_400.jpg

cowzn, read the Highsmith book of stories about various animals killing people. Highly entertaining.

Yes, 'The Animal Lover's Beastly Book of Murder' - it's great. That Highsmith biography is good, too, though it seems odd to stick a nude portrait of an author on her biography's spine.

tales of natural and unnatural catastrophes is groovy too. i really dig her later weirdness.

reading madame bovary right now. never read it before.

before that i read *lightning on the sun* by robert bingham. kind of a literary thriller. i liked it a bunch. dude was one of the founders of the lit mag open city. he died in 1999.

also ended up really liking that book *triage* by scott anderson. the one they are making into a movie. not what i was expecting at all. yet another "literary" thriller. kinda. oh i don't know what to call it. but it was pretty cool.

Thomas Fleming's The New Dealers' War, a revisionist take on FDR's WWII domestic and foreign leadership; he fumbled a lot more than we're taught.

Finally finished All The King's Men: not impressed.

FDR was the kind of leader who liked to launch a lot of boats and didn't care if the majority of them sank, as long as some of them floated.

woofwoofwoof - there's a new MacNeice Collected Poems out last year in England.
cozwn - tasty.

James Branch Cabell and Richmond-in-Virgina. I value my time cheaply.

fdr was the kind of man who liked to miss boats, but he didn't miss them all too often

I remember loving 'Lightning on the Sun', and the short story collection Bingham did before it. Great grim stuff. Must re-read.

James Welch: Winter in the Blood

have started:

James Hogg - The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Ford Madox Ford - Some Do Not... (am I supposed to like the evil bitch wife as much as I do? Because she's awesome - like a grown-up Little My)

recently read:

Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Dorothy Sayers - Gaudy Night (interesting reading this after Whose Body?, where Lord Peter's really annoying and fucked-up)

just finished
"the roaches have no king", daniel e. weiss
"the dog of the south", charles portis
"i was told there'd be cake", sloane crosley

Right now reading :
"the sirens of titan", vonnegut
"nova swing", clive barker

Aimless - I do recommend the MacNeice thing. The regular 30s generation stuff is all there (prep school, public school, Oxford, Spain), so maybe slight caution if that leaves you cold.
Alimosina - yes - grabbed a copy shortly after release (am a UK person myself). Much nicer than the old PB Collected I have, which is cramped - but that one's easier to carry round, so I haven't read the new one too much. Love the cover photo:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41ApIxmuGOL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
I started City of Quartz by Mike Davis. Am meant to be going to LA next spring, so think I will put it aside till then. Going to finish Doctor Faustus (Mann) instead.

finished 'revolutionary road' by richard yates the other day. am now onto 'middlesex' by someone-eugenides (i don't have the book on me right now and can't remember his first name). just bought a bunch of books today:
'skels' by maggie dubris ($5 in near-fine condition, have been wanting this for a long time), a couple of douglas coupland novels and and the latest essay collection from jonathon franzen. also got 'old school' by tobias wolff and 'the square root of wonderful' by carson mccullers.

Body of Secrets was recommended by tombot on ASK TOMBOT. I have it in my Amazon cart.

I loved Madame Bovary, Scott. How are you finding it?

My list for the next year. I really did have Infinite Jest at the top of the stack, but I'm not sure I'll enjoy it now. I'm in the middle of the Saboteurs and only have a couple of interviews to go with Screenwriter's Masterclass

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/IMG_2915.jpg

That's Needle by Hal Clement above Gore Vidal.

I adore Hollywood. After Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson may be Vidal's most fully rendered American president.

haha was the orange box on top there before I posted my picture?

The scenes at dinners where Wilson so nonchalantly drapes a napkin over the face of his wife (who suffered from seizures)....
(xpost)

Alfred, I picked up Hollywood after you raved about it elsewhere (the Wilson thread?)

Orange Box should be at the top of every pile ; )

are you thinking of McKinley? It's a great scene. He attacks an omelette while his wife sits there having a seizure.

xpost to Jaq

Walter Abish - How German Is it? This is great but I need to know way way more about Germanic fascism and Baader-Meinhof gangs than I do for this to be greater.

Kawabata - The Master of Go. An account of a six month match between the 'Master' and his young challenger. Japan's imperial past giving way to...whatever comes next. What if Mishima wrote about sports...

Michel Butor - Portrait of an Artist as a Young Ape. I want to have those dreams.

Robert Pinget - Mahu or The material.

Claude Simon - Triptych. Very similar to Grillet but I don't mind that at all.

Kathy Acker - Don Quixote. Currently reading the Schonberg/Lulu section...

Thanks Alfred! R. read the whole series aloud to me a few years back - I keep meaning to send Vidal a fan note about his dialogue, it reads so wonderfully.

I'm nearing the end of Independent People, which is breaking my heart in so many ways. And the library has returned Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals back to me, so that is queued up next.

"I loved Madame Bovary, Scott. How are you finding it?"

i dig it. i really liked sentimental education a bunch. don't know yet whether i like this more or not yet...

Just finished "The Gone Away World" by Nick Harkaway.

If you immediately reject books with Zen Buddhist ninja pirates battling against groups of heavy drinking communal mimes, then this book is not for you, but, for the rest of us, this is a fun, light read.

People round here be reading great stuff at the moment--'Madame Bovary', Walter Abish, 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner', 'Revolutionary Road'

Am reading Sadeq Hedayat: The Blind Owl. Only just started it, but I think it's great.

Just started these:

"Every Force Evolves A Form" Davenport

"The Great Fire Of London" Roubaud

I think this is my favorite line from M. Bovary, about teaching a son to be tough:

"He sent him to bed without a fire, taught him to take great swigs of rum and to shout insults at religious processions. But, being naturally peaceful, the boy responded poorly to his efforts."

i'm still trying to get my brain around the description of young charles' hat! quite possibly the most elaborate, and yet most cryptic (to me anyway), description of headgear that i've ever read in my life:

"It was one of those hats of the Composite order, in which we find features of the military bear-skin, the Polish chapska, the bowler hat, the beaver and the cotton nightcap, one of those pathetic things, in fact, whose mute ugliness has a profundity of expression like the face of an imbecile. Ovoid and stiffened with whalebone, it began with three big circular sausages; then, separated by a red band, there alternated diamonds of velours and rabbit-fur; after that came a sort of bag terminating in a cardboard polygon, embroidered all over with complicated braid, and hanging down at the end of a long cord that was too thin, a little cluster of gold threads, like a tassel. It looked new; the peak was gleaming."

if someone would like to try and draw that hat and post a picture of it here, it would be most appreciated.

I did learn thru the footnotes that the Composite order is a type of Roman column that is a mixture of the Greek Ionic and Corinthian columns. which didn't help me a bit.

After all these years I'm still trying to understand how Flaubert makes us forget that the novel begins as a first-person narrative offered by a classmate of Charles', before moving outward to the famous free indirect with which we're all familiar.

warmsherry - isn't Nova Swing by Harrison? Just reread Centauri D.
woofwoofwoof - yes - the paperback is Faber I think, it's the only one I've got.
Forget Naples, see Torrance and die
caek - Asperger's, eh - I fell in love with an AS-er once, not knowing what it was...

yah, it is for a scifi screenplay I'm working on with a friend. Two out of three main characters are on the autistic spectrum. I have been reading a lot about it. That particular book sucks, by the way.

I finished Body of Secrets. It was informative, but had a kind of kitchen sink tendency to include everything, such as statistics on how much pizza is consumed daily by NSA employees and the fact that there is a gay employees organization. And it was written in 2001, so it misses all the fireworks from the Bush domestic spying initiatives.

Now reading the book of essays by Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends, alternating with some short stories by Stephan Zwieg.

Scott S: I believe that Georg Lukacs had some things to say about that improbable hat (I don't quite remember what now), and I also think that Vladimir Nabokov, of all people, tried to draw it for his students in a lecture - this may be replicated in his Lectures in Literature.

vs naipaul -- in a free state. as in both political and psychological freedom. four case studies. the centerpiece follows two decadent colonialists on a desperate mission driving through a uganda-like country in the throes of revolution. the section called "tell me who to kill" about an alienated immigrant driven to homicide kept me awake at night after reading.

vladimir nabokov -- pale fire. more academic satire, some of it over my head but I liked (though not quite as much as pnin.)

bob colacello - holy terror. memoir of 10+ years working for andy warhol. interesting dark-side companion to the diaries -- warhol is so manipulative & awful in this telling it's like colacello can't understand why he stayed with him for so long.

curtis sittenfield - american wife. just started and am really liking, the narrator's voice is riveting and real.

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda

:D i really liked this. i also reread Confessions of Zeno, while ilx was down. everyone is reading books i love: James Hogg, Flaubert, Pale Fire! currently reading/just finished Borges: The Aleph and Robinson: Home the latter being a disappointment.

also also a bunch of comic and things i cannot remember will post pic + orange box when i get home

almost done with george pelecanos' "the turnaround". wasn't convinced by the first part, but got hooked when it hit the present day section.

That description could describe the worst book ever or, in the right hands, pure genius. Unfortunately it seems to have been the first.

It's not really that bad. It's well written in lots of ways, but at the same time quiet hard to summon up the desire to continue reading. I'm curious to read more of his though, just because the two I've read have been so different. It's intriguing.

The opposite of de Polnay, in that it seems very badly written but has a curious force all its own is The Senior Commoner by Julian Hall. Like most people I'd imagine, I got to it through Larkin's recommendation.

As he says 'the narrative is laconic to the point of flatness, as if disclaiming concern or even interest. No one could write this badly without meaning to...'

It's the second time I've read it, and it is as strongly fascinating as the first time; soft, indistinct tones of humour, a foregrounding of the background so that distant sounds seem to have a strong importance to what is going on in some way, and also none at all, idle thoughts that seem like they must have meaning, and sudden spikes of raw feeling.

Kingsley Amis, presumably reading it on Larkin's recomendation called it, if I remember right, 'a strange, marsh light of a novel' and this sums it up quite well even if I can't explain why. It is a beautiful read and also slightly painful, with an intensity of longing that is more powerful for the flat and disinterested tone.

Susan Sontag: On Photography - great stuff, but has no pictures, and I'd love to be able to look at the photos she talks about as she does so

Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti - very sad, and made sadder by their somewhat broken English giving them an oddly childlike tone

Brian Aldiss: Dracula Unbound - what should have been a bit of fun, with time travel, vampires, Bram Stoker, etc, but deeply flawed and sporadically stupid (vampires as the descendents of pterodactyls?) to the point of not being enjoyable (and when you've both already travelled in time, AND have JUST unveiled your newly invented time machine, would you not suspect the fossilised 65-million-year-old human remains found by one of your employees were not some previously undiscovered lost race but, just maybe, time travellers?)

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's "The Shadow of the Wind"
Juan Gabriel Vasquez's "The Informers"

Oscar Wao, Mordecai Richler, Janet Frame.

I picked up a book at the library to read: The Age of Entanglement, Louisa Gilder. It isn't about the USA deep-sixing its isolationist heritage, or economic globalization, or a cutely titled novel about adultery. It is about the quantum phenomenon known as entanglement, or as Einstein described it, "spooky action at a distance."

It seems that atoms get entangled with one another and consequently seem to 'know' what the other is doing, no matter how far apart they are. Theoretically, the two atoms could be at the far ends of the universe and this entanglement would allow one atom to react to the other almost instantaneously. That is spooky enough right there.

It is also apparent that these effects can exceed the speed of light. IOW, if one of the two universe-apart atoms emitted a photon, it would take many, many thousands of years for it to reach the other atom. But entanglement would allow the one to sense the other one in a New York femtosecond. Super spooky!

I look forward to discovering what Miss Gilder can convey about this strange stuff to one who, like me, is not a trained particle physicist. It sounds incredibly interesting.

So interesting, in fact, that I am willing to go along with her choice of narrative style, which is extremely synthetic. She invents conversations between various physicists, by noting occasions when they met one another and are known to have conversed, and then transposing snippets quoted from their letters into bits of spoken conversation. The effect is somewhat strange and stilted at times, since few people write as they would speak, but you get the main gist of their thoughts and ideas in a somewhat informal manner, allowing the whole creaky machinery get where it needs to go.

"how are you finding the erickson, scott?"

it's pretty good. i don't love it or anything though. it reminds me of a lot of other stuff. kinda delillo + david lynch in some ways. i feel like the end of the universe/dystopia and fear/attraction of mass murder/chaos/etc stuff has been done better elsewhere. and some of the more outlandish stuff almost reminds me of chuck palahniuk (for instance: person who paints people's satellite dishes black with the ashes of the violent porn she made with her husband and nazi souvenirs so that they will somehow receive images of death and destruction??? i still don't know how this works, by the way.)

the endtimes "everyone is mad and guilty and even the innocent are asking for it" premise is just kinda moldy. maybe if i had read this in the 80's i would have loved it.

and the mass media insanity/chaos theory stuff was done way better in white noise and mao II. erickson even mentions the moon cult mass wedding several times.

i mention david lynch cuzza all the cosmic and completely implausible coincidences. random people end up being intimately connected. plus, just all the underground sex and psychic impairment. maybe some cronenberg thrown in for good measure.

parts of this book remind me of toby olsen's *The Woman Who Escaped From Shame*. (toby is bound to be the topic of one of those Believer articles on unsung writers some day, just like erickson was.)

it's entertaining enough though. it flows. i like when he's funny. he'll write something like: "She looked at her with deep sadness." and then a character will yell: "Stop looking at me with deep sadness!" there are some nice little touches like that. (i'm easily amused.)

also: don't start your book with a quote from bjork. (okay, you can if you want.)

also also: when i started this book i said to myself: "i hope none of the main characters are mute or have tourettes or amnesia or some other writerly physical tic or condition that seem to be all the rage with so many quirky modern writers and that i never actually believe is anything but an easy trick to hang your hat on." okay, i didn't say it exactly like that. anyway, the one main character can't dream, and the other main character was mute for seven years and suffers from blinding headaches. i learned to live with it.

actually, for amazing (and even transcendent and beautiful at times) writing (erickson is good, but he's no delillo) and suitable "we are all doomed/we all suck/life is cheap and shitty" thesis, the book i just finished by robert stone, *A Flag For Sunrise" beats most anything i've read in a while. (and it's not perfect either, but the good stuff is really really good.)

I really dug Stone's 'Children of Light', but haven't read anything else by him. It had a great deadpan style, including one character who "made the night horrible with his cries".

for a funnier take on the end of history/media overload/etc, there is this too:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ADBH7X6ZL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

the crazy end of the world novel i was reading in the 80's:

http://lopezbooks.com/articles/images/nuclear.jpg

(nobody bought it though and tim said whoops better get back to 'nam!)

James Morrison -- you should read Dog Soldiers if no other. There's a sequence near the end which is transcendent writing.

Currently reading Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout. Also been reading a bunch of Mr. Mulliner stories. "The Smile That Wins" and "Strychnine in the Soup" are gold.

"Susan Sontag: On Photography - great stuff, but has no pictures, and I'd love to be able to look at the photos she talks about as she does so"

How sad is this: I don't know if I have this or not. :-( I really need to rummage through my gazillion unread books. Did give a copy of the Barthes book to our friend (who does photography, but, har har, frowns upon most things "intellectual".)

i seriously can't recommend that steve erickson book to anyone. hoo boy, i'm just glad it's over. BUT, i will keep an open mind if i see something else by him. it's funny that the two books i had the most trouble reading/finishing this year were by an "heir to pynchon!" and an "heir to pk dick!".

gonna read bruce jay friedman's *A Mother's Kisses* next. which i already know i will like cuz bruce jay rules. so sue me. i am a big fan of comfort food.

duly noted. steve erickson is somebody whose reviews & blurbs make me think "should try" but reading his journalism (film criticism) puts me off, he's kinda boring in short form.

been reading a lot of relatively short books lately.

graham greene - a sort of life. childhood autobiography. he was suicidally depressed until he underwent psychoanalysis in the 1920s!

jorge luis borges - dr. brodie's report. autumnal short stories written for the popular press, entertaining and just twisted enough.

george pellecanos - the turnaround. overly familiar, and I'm a big fan. settled too deeply into his Wash DC formula, george needs to shake it up and find a new setting. or something.

vs naipaul - the suffrage of elvira. hilarious LOL satire of an early democratic election in trinidad's poorest district. hapless attempts to pander to various ethnic groups recall current US elections in a way I never would've expected.

vs naipaul - mr stone & the knights companion. so far the only naipaul I haven't liked, an odd and pointless novella about a middle-aged Englishman and his ambitious young wife.

vs naipaul - a flag on the island. short stories from the 50s and 60s including some real comedic gems, naipaul was quite the laugh-riot before he went all political in the 70s.

where do I start with borges?

Borges is really not hard to get into. I ended up buying all of the Penguin volumes and don't regret it in the least; but if you're just starting out, Labyrinths has most of his best (or at least, best-known) stories, plus some essays (dude is a wonderful essayist -- erudite, opinionated, sometimes even snobby and pedantic, but always a real pleasure to read).

"Labyrinths" is still the best start, but once you're started, you'll never get out! Might as well go straight for the Penguin "Collected Fictions".

Currently about 2/3 through John Crowley's "AEgypt" cycle, which I'm finding totally compulsive.

vs naipaul - the suffrage of elvira
I love this book. SO funny.

Am reading Helen Garner's 'Monkey Grip', which is a great 200-page novel unfortunately stretched to 400 pages.

naomi klein's the shock doctrine, which is surprisingly gripping and fast-paced, like a turn-of-the-century muckraking novel or somethin'.

read evelyn waugh's vile bodies a couple weeks ago and adored the hell out of it.

just finished Francois Mauriac's "The Knot of Vipers":
it's a nice surprise to find a masterpiece, a book that you would carry on with you for the rest of your life, just by accident.
a must read.
Mauriac is up there with Grahm Greene and Patrick White (but not with Tolstoy i guess): 3 masters of religious theme writing.

where do I start with borges?

I recommend picking up Collected Fictions, which collects all of his short stories in one volume. If you want just a taste, then go for Ficciones or Labyrinths. But both of those are included in Collected Fictions, so you may as well save yourself the time and money and go for that first!

Voltaire - Candide/Micromegas/Zadig
Carlos Fuentes - The Crystal Frontier
Mishima - Thirst for Love

James Morrison, thanks for your (September( mention of Mary Shelley's The Pilgrims--did you like it? Her The Last Man turns into an eco-gothic epic, or anti-epic (rec. to fans of Shearwater's Rooks for inst) Skot, I was very disappointed by A Flag For Sunrise, though no doubt influenced by reading it during Reagan's Central American atrocities--just seemed to emphasize the exhaustion of liberal response, and to such a familiar kind of atrocity, to anyone who knew even a little about America's screwing with Central America, long before Vietnam. (And could see the bits that seemed lifted from Greene, Conrad; Jason Robards as whiskey priest, etc)But maybe I'd like it now. Stone's Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers are wonderful though.

Hey, xyzzzz, I'm reading 'Thirst for Love' too! Just started it last night. Ah, that wacky bonkers nationalistic self-disembowelling Mishima.

Dow, I did like the Pilgrims, but it was probably pretty minor stuff. I did love 'The Last Man', though: I'm a sucker for end-of-the-world goings-on.

Zeno, Mauriac is ace, isn't he? Loved 'Knot of Vipers', 'Therese' and 'Desert of Love'. Have a couple of others by him not yet read.

Oh, anybody read Robert Stone's short fiction, collected or not? Used to come across it in New American Review etc, seems like a collection would be good.

i would read that collection! i will seek out dog soldiers someday.

a flag for sunrise had some problems, but i just dug the overall vibe. there were a couple of things/characters that made the book seem a little overstuffed. like, he would have a better book without them. but i could live with them. the only other book of his i have is damascus gate, which is also hefty and worldhistoricalweary. or so it seems from browsing through it.

Oh yeah, seems like that might be better than A Flag, judging by (dimly remembered) reviews.

Yeah, Stone was always good at "overall vibe"--esp low-rent thirtysomething working/bohemian couples, in margins of political creepiness (=realism)

I liked Flag, mostly because of the nun, the old spy, and the speed freak-- great characters, great triangle. (And that recurring nightmare of standing on top of the pile of bodies...) What I go to Stone for, I guess, is his creepiness, you're right, and his paranoia and cynicism. But I couldn't get into Damascus Gate, too crazy. I liked Children of Light and Outerbridge Reach (mostly, though both are too long), but Dog Soldiers is still my favorite.

There's a short story about three people on a sailboat full of coke that is especially bleak...
I didn't like his memoir much

Loved Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello – an experiment that worked.

I recommend picking up Collected Fictions, which collects all of his short stories in one volume. If you want just a taste, then go for Ficciones or Labyrinths. But both of those are included in Collected Fictions, so you may as well save yourself the time and money and go for that first!

― Z S, Thursday, December 11, 2008 1:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

fwiw imo the collected fictions volume kind of sucks... its nice to have all of them together but hurley is not a particularly good translator.

creepiness x poignance (re the right characters, not all of 'em: a sense of justice)

Labyrinths is a great collection. Maybe that's all you need.

xxpost: I hear this criticism a lot and I don't really get it. I haven't read any of Borges's fiction in the original Spanish, but he's always struck me as a writer who would be fairly easy to translate; his style seems very dry, literal, and academic, without any sort of wordplay or poetic elements that could be lost in translation. At any rate, I found Hurley's translations perfectly readable, understandable, and enjoyable, and the others I've compared them to don't seem any better or worse. (One trivial exception: my girlfriend got really annoyed that the translation of "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius" in the copy of Labyrinths that I lent her used "pale-orange-of-the-sky" in the section about the language composed entirely of adjectives, since "sky" is, of course, not an adjective; Hurley avoids this pitfall with the obvious choice of "celestial")

right now:
Federalist Papers
Juvenal
Thomas Disch "Fun With Your New Head"

recently finished:
KW Jeter "Noir" (ayiyiyi this book)
Letters of Pliny the Younger

Juvenal >> Younger Pliny

There's so much more bitterness, spite and gall to enjoy.

Right now I'm just reading The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (how thrilling), but for fiction I have The Boat by Nam Le to start. Yesterday I finished The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin, which was a lot of fun, but philosophically pretentious in a way that would really appeal to HS/college students and not so much to me right now. As far as nonfiction, I'm trying to decide whether to start The Varieties of Religious Experience or the Pope's Jesus of Nazareth next. I'm thinking Jesus because it's Advent.

It's only recently that I've been able to get a library card, it's hard to get used to obtaining and reading multiple books at a time again.

finished (and enjoyed!) To The Lighthouse; since then I've been working on Italo Calvino's Baron in the Trees, which my girlfriend got me for my birthday, and which is proving to be totally delightful escapism of the sort that I always forget books are capable of providing me.

For all the narrative advances of the later books, I love Baron in the Trees more than Calvino's other novels.

'Baron in the Trees' is lots of fun.

Shakey Mo, have you experienced KW Jeter's Dr. Adder--?

Been meaning to pop in and say that The Sea Came in at Midnight is a horrible place to start with Steve Erickson. If you're going to read his fiction, you should pretty much read it in order. The first handful are best, and to some extent, they're all interconnected. The Sea Came in at Midnight and the almost unreadable Our Ecstatic Days should both be skipped.

Oh - I'm currently reading Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld and having a hard time getting into it / connecting to the various (too many) characters 64 pages in. I've really liked the other Appelfeld books I've read though and it's short, so I'm sticking with it...

Le Clezio: Terra Amata
My first shot at the new Nobel chappie.

James Chace's 1912, a splendid account of the more exciting (and history-changing) elections in American history.

I think I will start Moby Dick after I finish William Trevor's latest New Yorker story.

I haven't read any of Borges's fiction in the original Spanish, but he's always struck me as a writer who would be fairly easy to translate; his style seems very dry, literal, and academic, without any sort of wordplay or poetic elements that could be lost in translation

ya 'wordplay' might be stretching it but borges in spanish (to my 'ears' at least) is a sort of fastidiously poetic writer deeply concerned w/ the rhythms of his phrases & the movement of his sentences (in the shorter works in partic.)... a lot of hurley's translations are good to fine but some are, as they say, woefully inadequate--this is arguably a personal preference but hurleys familiar/'american' style jars when youre used to borges's v. formal, urbane prose... to be totally fair i havent read borges in english or spanish in a few years now, so i may be misremembering one way or the other. ultimately tho i just have found other translators--di giovanni for example, who worked w/ borges on some of those translations--to be more enjoyable to read! hurley always leaves me lukewarm, 'fidelity' to the original aside.

I finished The Age of Entanglement. It left me a bit unsatisfied, probably because I felt less informed at the end than I had hoped to be. It's not a bad book, but it did a much better job of coming to grips with the personalitites of the physicists than with the underlying physics.

Last night I began The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, in the Peavar/Volokhonsky translation (Penguin edition). Seems good so far. The translation is readable, with only a few little awkwardnesses here and there.

Di Giovanni's the one to start with, at the very least. Didn't he write fiction too? Anybody read it?

In spite of the fact that I hold neither warrant nor authority to do so, I have just now started a new What Are You Reading? thread for winter 2008/2009.

It is my earnest desire that you, who have come to this thread seeking to share your reading wisdom, shall consider my humble new thread a proper repository for your ineffable commentary. I shall feel honored if you do.